Just as Mary predicted, raw pain eventually gave way to dull misery. The rain stopped and Ginie allowed herself to be persuaded out of bed. She and Mary went to the veranda to breathe the fresh air.

As they made their way slowly outside, Ginie couldn’t help but listen for the patter of Jongy’s feet. Though Max and Sandra came to greet her with yelps of joy, she was struck by the lemur’s absence all over again. Her limbs had grown stiff and weak so she leaned heavily on Mary’s arm. She had always considered herself energetic – invincible even – physical frailty was a new state of being. Suddenly, she felt mortal. One day, they would put her in a box and bury her in the ground like Jongy. All the little lights and circuits that made up her consciousness, snuffed out.

It was a still, sombre morning, the sky was full of dull cloud. Not a leaf moved, even the birds did not sing. Mary draped a blanket over Ginie’s knees, as though she were an invalid. A feeling of not being herself, of having lost control came over Ginie. Her head felt thick and muffled. She looked at her garden with resentment. It was nothing but a tame piece of jungle in a dark continent that could do terrible things with no warning. During the weeks she spent in bed, the vast age and size of Africa had taken shape in Ginie’s mind. A monkey cried out and Ginie snapped to attention. She looked around watchfully, as though searching for some eerie, brooding spirit that meant to harm her. Her gaze fell on the trees in the Dell and she tried to picture the evil that had prowled there – that might still be prowling.

She turned around to check there was nothing behind her, looking toward the hills beyond the garden which seemed pulled subtly awry. Familiar markers like the stream that signalled the boundary of their property appeared to have changed course and acquired a strange tributary. She did not know where she was. She felt helpless, rudderless, afraid.

Stephen was in his study. With Ginie in this state, he too had lost his way. It is virtually impossible, he thought, to retain one’s reason and sanity while living among people who think differently. We are oddballs, outlaws, sympathisers.

Sighing, he picked up his pen and tried to anchor himself in the best way he knew – by writing. But he couldn’t concentrate on his history of the Courtaulds. He found himself writing another letter to his brother:

Sam,