She pointed, but nobody looked. No one was interested in the cows or the crying people but somebody asked where her mummy was, and then someone else stopped to see what was happening. Bea started to cry as well, hating it, because these people were worried about the wrong thing. Kathryn always left her on her own, and she always came back.

Bea had known what news was, and that there were other countries, away from Britain, where people went on holiday and foreigners lived. She’d been to some of them. In the weeks and months that followed she nurtured complicated fantasies involving Griff’s plane, and money, and packed lunches. She was astounded to learn that even Griff wasn’t rich enough to save Peru. But her fantasies persisted. Like any well-fed child, seeing poverty around them, in people on the pavements, on the way to school, she would imagine what a hundred pounds might do to help. Or a thousand. In her dreams, money transformed misery to joy. But she grew up and realised that it was embarrassing to scatter largesse, like the heroine of a Victorian book; it stank of elitism. She learned that generosity must appear detached if it wasn’t to be judged phoney or sentimental, and saw the instinct to give, that was in almost everyone, when consistently condemned, faded. She had often thought how it was expedient to those on the winning side to characterise kindness as humiliating.