Lindi saw her dress and underclothes on the floor. She thought the shower had cleansed her but she felt again the revulsion in her guts. She swallowed hard. She checked her rucksack, made sure the torch was working, topped up the half-empty bottle of water from the tap in the corner of the room and went into the kitchen. She’d declined the meal that was on offer and had asked, instead, for a light snack. Under a wire-mesh cloche she found several pieces of fried chicken, pumpkin fritters, a quadrangle of what looked like a custard pie and a saucer of honey – she found out later that it was a dip for the fritters. There wasn’t a salad leaf in sight.

Even at the best of times, Lindi was a rather mechanical eater. She ate because she needed to rather than because she enjoyed it. Going out for a meal was about the company, the food a sideshow. Left on her own of an evening, as she often was back in London, she was happy with a tub of hummus, sticks of carrot or celery and a boiled egg. Now she ate a piece of chicken, which she enjoyed more than she expected, and a couple of the fritters, but left the tart untouched.

‘Good homemade Afrikaner melktert,’ Mrs Venter had said. Lindi made a mental note to come up with an excuse for not trying it.

She went outside to the stoep again and was glad of the jumper she had put on. Even here in the low-lying east of the country the evening temperature had dipped. The sun, which had now slipped below the horizon, still managed to illuminate the sky with its purple-orange after-burn but its power was spent. She sat on the cane sofa again, the cushions still moulded to her shape.

She had a few minutes before Father Petro de Freitas was due to pick her up. The Catholic bishop in Nelspruit, whom she had met earlier in the day, had introduced her to Father Petro.

‘He’s the man you should be talking to,’ the bishop had said. ‘They flock to his masses because he speaks Shangaan, their language.’

Father Petro had said he would take her to meet some migrant families.

Lindi shut her eyes. She felt she hadn’t really dealt with the day’s events, just reacted to them. And that wasn’t enough: she couldn’t sleep or rest easy until she had properly absorbed the day. Even as a child, when the Seatons were on a family holiday and Lindi and Ralph had had to share a room, it had annoyed her, the way Ralph would simply turn over in bed and fall asleep even after the most exciting of days. Harry would invariably find her wide-eyed and exasperated when he did his lights-out check, so he’d taught her a trick to deal with it.