‘Art does that,’ Jericho says. ‘It keeps us awake.’

‘Like the old woman who climbs the mountain each morning, takes the sun from her string bag and hangs it in the sky. The light by which we all see. The mountain story. Do you remember?’

She looks at him, but he has turned, back to the dark ocean and the stars that glitter with the tears pooling in his eyes. Something has loosened in him, and right then, beside Bili, he does not want to cry. ‘Look at you,’ she says softly. ‘Mountain boy.’

‘Except that I’m not,’ he says.

‘No, you’re not. You’re English now.’

‘Not that either.’ He leans out. Far below, further round the beach, out of sight, are the low tin roofs that were once the international school and are now the NGO compound where Bili has her office.

‘Remember Miss Bentley?’ Bili says, following the line of his eyes along the cliff into the dark.

He nods, gives a small smile.

‘Even prettier than Rika, Laedi said, with a queue of fathers on parent nights, and half of them didn’t have a kid in her class!’

‘True?’ Jericho laughs and whatever it was that had risen in him – longing? fear? hope? – recedes, a tide washing out. Miss Bentley to the rescue. ‘I still dream of her sometimes,’ he says. ‘I thought she was an angel.’

‘She let me come into your class for reading, remember, and we sat like this.’ Bili brings her head close, and they lean there on the balcony rail, side by side, looking out to the stars, remembering the afternoon heat of the classroom and Bili leaping to her feet each time he got a new word, calling, ‘Miss Bentley! Look!’ And icecream on the way home – ‘Only if it was Martha’ – and the strange, wet lap of the beach that alarmed him more than the books on his desk, so unnatural was this great flat expanse of water for which his language had no word. Then the slow forgetting as the colour crayons that drew marks across the paper erased the language of his mother, and the saltwater was no longer so strange on his skin, on his tongue.

‘Mountain boy,’ Bili says again and he breathes the scent of her, as fresh as the lemons that grew behind Laedi’s house, remembering. He tells himself to enjoy the present of her presence, and he does, god alone knows, but everything about her comes swathed in memory, that long-ago classroom overlaid by Bili in London, the day he took her to the Courtauld, where he was studying, showed her the Gauguins, and she didn’t know how to pronounce the name, she’d never seen a Gauguin before; why should she, she was studying law. Environmental law. Could any of his smart curator friends name any of the forest trees in faraway, out-of-sight Oceania? She shouted at him in the bus on the way back to his flat.

That flat. He’d loved that flat, his first alone – his cupboard, he called it – until he saw it through her eyes, her dismay at the dark stairs, the damp smell of carpet, the room that never seemed light even when the blind was up. In the morning, when they woke in his bed, he followed her gaze out to a low, grey sky, to the weathered brick of the house next door, the peeling paint of a window that looked across to his, and on its sill a geranium in a pot, a bright splash of red. It was lying there, just days before she left, that she’d said, ‘Come back with me,’ and, turning, had read the answer in his eyes. Coward.