‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘The FAO?’ (I had just been refused a grant for postgraduate work because I hadn’t done as well as I should in my History exams, and my research proposal wasn’t quite interesting enough to my university for them to take a risk on me. When I told my parents, my father, absent-minded as usual, had said, from behind the shelter of The Times: ‘Well, you could always join the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome. With your Italian. I could always call my old friend Zaid, he’ll get you an interview.’)

Riccarda looked hurt. In fact, she said, she’d spoken to a film producer who might have some part-time work for me. It was the kind of work – reading and editing scripts – I wanted to do for a while. But I had yet to hear from him. Jobs of the kind I wanted were not easily available for a twenty-six year old with a degree in oriental languages.

Riccarda’s son was seventeen now. She was emotionally separated from her husband, but for their son’s sake they were still a couple on skiing holidays at Christmas and summers in Tunisia or Lamu. And I felt that she was giving me a message: that to expect more from her than short, intense interludes of make-believe domesticity, or secret meetings from a bad old French film, followed by absences and distances, was foolish. That courteous formality that must always have been there between us in company became more and more evident to me each time we met in public, even when we were on our own. The only place where we still made sense to each other was behind the locked door of a bedroom.

My parents, too, had begun to show concern about my unconventional ‘relationship’. All the years Riccarda and I had been friends, with their tacit approval, seemed to have been forgotten.

‘Even close friendships have their span,’ my mother said at one of her Sunday breakfasts, looking into her gold-rimmed white teacup. (Her developing philosophy, based on one of her Persian adages, was that all relationships of love and beauty were best enjoyed from a slight distance.)

‘Just don’t let anyone hold you back,’ my father added, spooning more scrambled eggs onto his plate. ‘You need time to think. To plan your life.’

These gentle, vulnerable people, who had lived their lives according to a code of noblesse oblige and a set of impossibly high ideals, were trying to protect me from, and prepare me for, a world that had continued to baffle and hurt them. I knew that the trip to India was their way of separating me from her. Kindly. I was grateful to them for the reprieve.