Perhaps Zoë is thinking about the little boy in her mother’s belly, down at the bottom of the sea. Perhaps it is just the comfort of having another child beside her. But she reaches out again and takes his hand, which is hot and damp. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I’ll look after you.’

CHAPTER FOUR

Devon, England, 1923

‘I don’t want to go!’ Tom says this just loud enough for his mother to hear, though they both dart an anxious glance over to where Daddy is standing on the other side of the room. ‘I don’t want to, Mummy!’

‘Don’t be silly, Tommy. It will be fun. You’ll see.’ But Mummy’s face contradicts her words. Though it is just past nine o’clock on a May morning, it is gloomy in the kitchen. A thick drizzle is falling outside, and the clouds are hanging so low over the house that if one had a long enough ladder, Tom thinks, one could climb up and touch them. Not that one would want to. Though he has only lived here on Dartmoor for a few months – they are renting a small, damp cottage near Moretonhampstead while the house they are going to live in properly is mended – he is quite well acquainted with clouds and what they are made of. At home in Kerala, the monsoon had brought clouds and mist, and rain so heavy that Tom had barely been able to stand up in it, but in Kerala, one minute it was pouring, the next minute the sky was blue and the wet was steaming off the trees and roofs. Here in Devon the rain just sets in. It is like being sat on by a big, wet retriever dog. It is into this sort of day that Daddy intends to take Tom for his first riding lesson.