Happily for her, Lili had no such reservations and described the mess in the garden. I could visualize it. Mud and children’s toys and a lopsided swing. Even the memory was depressing. The children of Egypt played in the dust-laden sunlight, and as far as I could tell they were happy.

Happiness was not the first quality to come to my mind when I thought of Jennifer and Christopher. They looked as though they knew already that life was no laughing matter. I should have felt sorry for them, but I didn’t because I was really only sorry for myself and their problems weren’t mine. They might have belonged to a different species. I wondered briefly whether my father had a tendency to marry women who would make their children unhappy, but it seemed an unfair reflection. I couldn’t imagine myself making my children happy, having no conception of how to go about it. Oppression lay on me like a dead beast, not gaunt and stiff-legged like the animals which lay where they had dropped along the desert road, but soft and smothering like something from which the breath had only just gone. Once when I had thought Nour loved me I had delighted in a garden full of roses surrounding a villa where his aunts lived. The aunts had sat half-veiled in the evening, talking in Arabic and French and sometimes in English for me, but I hadn’t listened. I had been remembering another rose garden lit by shafts of lightning and somebody telling me not to be afraid and to go to sleep. I hadn’t been afraid. I had wanted to watch the roses lit by sudden light, but they wouldn’t let me. The roses in the garden of the aunts were covered by a thin, barely perceptible layer of dust. Spoiled gardens, dusty flowers, small animals cowering under wilting leaves. The convent garden harboured herbs and a yellow flowering vine flourishing over a falling wooden structure. I hadn’t been aware of the dust in the convent garden. The nuns got rid of it. They were endlessly busy when they weren’t praying and I remembered their surroundings as always faintly shining. They grew white lilies around a well and under the chapel wall for Our Lady who had sojourned once in Egypt. I wondered why I hadn’t had the wit to take the starveling cat to Mother Joseph as soon as I knew that Nour might kill it. It would have been safe there.

‘You’re very quiet,’ said my mother.

I thought with sudden exasperation that of course I was quiet. I always had been. Marie Claire had once commended me on this negative virtue. ‘You are no trouble,’ she had said, lying back against the satin cushions, smelling of rosewater and musk. I don’t know why it had occurred to her to make this observation. Perhaps Nour had burdened her with noisy, tearing girls who had shattered the afternoon calm with screams of merriment and wild gestures, or frenzied weeping. I moved so quietly I barely stirred the dust, yet now in the English winter I could hear a spectral echo of angry laughter and I thought it was my own.