‘Because if we don’t help them, then who will?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Other people?’ suggested Beverley. ‘The Red Cross? Judah Ben-Hur?’

‘It’s out of the question,’ said George. ‘You’re not dragging our daughter halfway around the world so she can catch leprosy. What would happen when she came back? I can’t imagine the NHS have a lot of experience with that sort of thing, even if we didn’t go private.’

‘It’s important to us,’ insisted Wilkes.

‘Again—’

‘To us! To Elizabeth and me. Us. We. What is the point of life if we don’t do everything we can to help other people, people in need, people in depressed areas—’

‘Like Glasgow?’ asked George.

‘And then share all our work on social media. Do you know how many new followers we get every time we help out at the soup kitchen?’

‘But what does that matter?’

‘Oh my God,’ said Elizabeth, looking at her father as if he’d just sprouted horns. ‘It matters enormously. A few weeks ago, I took a selfie with a homeless man eating a ham sandwich and I got over a thousand likes.’

‘People are that interested in seeing pictures of a homeless man eating a ham sandwich?’ asked George, dumbfounded.

‘Well, no, I was the one eating the ham sandwich,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He was just in the frame. Although he did look a little hungry, now that you mention it.’

‘And how long would you intend on staying in this oasis of tranquillity?’ asked Beverley. ‘A week? A month? All the way to monsoon season?’

‘As long as they need us,’ said Wilkes.

‘You’ll fit in very well with the whole not-washing thing,’ remarked George. ‘And just for the record, I was using the word you in the plural form there, not the singular. You and your many personalities will all fit in very well.’

‘Wilkes,’ said Beverley in a calm voice, as if she was trying to reason with a four-year-old. ‘Let me ask you a question. In the unlikely event that a woman allowed you to impregnate her, and then you inflicted a daughter upon the world, would you agree to letting someone you barely knew take her to a leper colony? Is that the kind of parent you would be?’

‘We’d like to think that we would, yes.’

‘And you don’t think that Social Services would have anything to say about it?’

He frowned again, as if his brain, such as it was, was going into overdrive.

‘We can’t deal with hypotheticals,’ he said eventually. ‘We don’t have a daughter so we can’t answer that.’

‘Well, do you have a sister?’

‘We did,’ he replied in a sorrowful tone, looking down at the carpet.

‘You did?’

‘When we were growing up, yes,’ he said. ‘But not any more.’

‘Oh shit,’ said George, looking momentarily humbled.