“Why don’t you stay here?” she asked. “There’s no one else in the house. The servants have gone.”

I was embarrassed now. She saw this as she stood up.

“You are so strange sometimes,” she said.

I was going to ask how Donald would feel about me staying when he was away, but I did not want to sound too prissy. She went to her office and came back with a set of keys.

“Will you help me lock up for the night?” she asked. She stood on a chair in the middle of the dining room and pulled down a heavy metal grille which was folded into a narrow cut in the ceiling. I had never noticed it before. When it was halfway down she got off the chair and closed the doors to the garden, locked them, and turned on a switch beside the door. When we moved to the other side of the grille she pulled it right down and secured it to the floor. I discovered that most of the rooms had a thin metal grille installed in the ceiling. She moved around securing them to the floor and turning on switches. All the windows and doors had alarms attached to them, but even if an intruder made his way into the house, he would not be able to get from one room to another.

“This was here before we came, but we had it upgraded,” she said.

“Do you have this in America too?” I asked.

“They don’t kidnap Americans in America,” she said briskly and turned on another switch. We moved upstairs. At the top of the stairs she opened a box in the wall and turned on more switches.

“How does it feel to live in a fortress?” I asked.

“It feels safe,” she said.

I had never been in their bedroom before. The decoration was modern and bright: the walls and the duvet cover and the carpet were all white, but the fitted wardrobes were painted a bright yellow and the woodwork around the windows was painted yellow and the lampshades were yellow. There was an enormous vase full of fresh flowers on a table beside the bed. Two chairs made of cane were painted dark blue. There was a door leading to a bathroom almost as big as the bedroom; one wall was all mirrors. I tried to imagine Donald inspecting his hairy chest in that glass, but it was not easy. But I could visualize Susan looking at herself: the bathroom, like the bedroom, seemed naturally hers. She turned on one of the bedside lamps and turned off the main light.