‘It’s interesting now,’ said Lili, ‘interesting to look back on, but I’m not sure it was much fun at the time. I remember being too hot. I don’t really feel the heat so much now, but I remember trying to sleep on the roof under a mosquito net and still being too hot...’

‘Do you remember the flowers?’ I asked. It was the flowers of childhood that I remembered—wild on the heath and along the lanes, cultivated in my aunts’ garden, and I never knew which I preferred. There was always a thrill in finding a growing flower: the thrill of coming across contraband with the harebells and heather, primroses, ragged robin, honeysuckle and the wild rose: the calmer but no less satisfying thrill of seeing purpose fulfilled in the tended borders of the garden—the lupins, the monkshood, the Solomon’s seal, the marigolds, sweet pea, and the roses.

I said, ‘I do love roses.’

Lili said, ‘I remember roses—and little bright snakes. Ugh.’

I remembered suddenly that I had been given brimstone-and-treacle as a child, and I wondered why and by whom. My aunts had never thought of giving me medicine. They had left all that sort of thing to the doctor. It must have been one of the servants. I wondered just how many people had died at the hand of poisoners before the long arm and prying fingers of the law had brought forensic science to even the outlying farms and, presumably, to the shaded alleys of the souks and the darkened rooms of Nilotic villas.

‘I was brought up by a lot of aunts,’ I said to Lili. ‘Just like you.’ We had been silent for some time while I thought of brimstone-and-treacle and Lili, perhaps, thought of roses and snakes. She was chain-smoking.

‘I think my aunts were crazy,’ said Lili. ‘Looking back, I think they managed to give the impression that it was my mother who was mad, because she was the only one, all by herself in a strange land—and of course that might have made her feel a bit deranged. But in actual fact, and not to put too fine a point on it, my father’s sisters were all as mad as hatters.’

‘Perhaps it was just that they seemed foreign to you,’ I offered politely. ‘The ways of foreigners frequently appear like a form of insanity to other people.’

‘But they didn’t,’ said Lili. ‘They couldn’t have seemed foreign to me because I’d never known anything else. I didn’t really think they were mad at the time, although…’ she added, ‘I do remember scuttling through the bazaars with the youngest one veiled up to the eyebrows, giggling her head off, and me wondering what was going on. She said she was buying henna and mud to put on her face, but now I wonder if it was some mild, medical form of poison she was looking for to upset another family member. They’d’ve killed an outsider who tried to harm one of them but they were always playing tricks on each other. I don’t suppose they’d’ve poisoned anyone to death—not on purpose anyhow—but some of them put aperients in the mint tea or I’m very much mistaken.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘They had ways of getting their own way,’ she said. ‘Nothing simple like asking for what they wanted or stamping their foot—although they could do that too—but just quietly, and without referring to anyone else, they would go about getting what they wanted.’