‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, and with that she picked up the cloth from my lap and dropped it into her big open bag and snapped it shut and left.

When the people came that morning I could hardly sit still while they filed past, laying their loaves of bread at my feet, their bottles of wine, their envelopes of cash, patiently queuing for their quick turn with my head. I found myself wriggling beneath the touch of their hands; all I could think about was Precious, and what might have happened to make her cry. I couldn’t stop thinking that it must have something to do with me – that in the course of all the silent time we’d spent together she had finally fallen in love with me but was too shy, or too constrained by the relationship between us, to be able to tell me.

I was a fool of course, but I expect you’ve gathered that already.

I expect, with all your experience of the world, that you can see how things were beginning to shape up; that you have a pretty good idea, by now, of what lay in store for me. But for the moment let me tell you that all I wanted to do then was to find Precious and tell her that I loved her too, and ask her to come with me somewhere else where we could forget about everything that had happened here, somewhere where we could both find some sort of fulfilling work and settle down and live quietly together and be happy.

When the last of the townspeople left my apartment that day, and the housekeeper had loaded the last of their offerings onto her trolley and wheeled it off to the big clanking service elevator at the back and taken it down to the storage rooms in the basement, I went to my dressing room to change: there was a wedding that evening and I had been booked to attend it; the bride, I knew, was a cousin of Precious; Precious would be there among the guests; I would find her and I would speak to her and it would, I felt sure, be the end of one life and the beginning of another.

It seems pointless now to tell you how elated I felt as I strode out that day through the tall gates of the mayor’s mansion and threaded my way through the narrow streets of the town. It seems pointless now to tell you anything other than what happened when I got to the wedding.

By the time I arrived the guests were all gathered in the yard of the bride’s house – one of those little houses that cling to the side of the hill behind the town, two tiny wrought-iron balconies on the windows of the upper floor filled with bright geraniums; a small courtyard behind with acacia trees.