It hadn’t occurred to me to scream at the sight of the dead fortuneteller or even to step back aghast, my hand to my heart, as the girls in the books would have done. Murder was a solecism and it would have been ill-bred to draw attention to it. A gentlewoman shouldn’t make scenes, any more than she should read other people’s letters. It was incorrect to appear to mind too much about anything. I adhered to this code more rigorously than my mother did, for often the pupil takes the teachings more seriously than does the tutor.

Besides I didn’t care that Nour was a murderer. I didn’t care that the girl was dead, except that it seemed unnatural that she should be. I had a long time ago, somewhere, seen a dead kingfisher, and that had been incongruous too and disquieting.

Once Nour said that he had found her dead, once that she had killed herself. And once he wondered aloud whether Ahmed had killed her because she had trespassed in the garden. He was trying to regain his innocence. I could have told him it was impossible. I found his state no more regrettable than my own. Perhaps I was a moral idiot, or perhaps I was right and sin once committed has fewer degrees than we believe.

All I really cared about was that he didn’t love me. If ever he might have done—and I knew in those moments when I could bear to be honest that he never would have—he couldn’t now. No one can love a person who knows a secret about him that he would prefer not to know himself. Narcissus does not sit by his pool to see ruined and rusted detritus and the floating, bloated bodies of dead toads. And Nour could never be sure that I saw him as guiltless as he saw himself. The prince had blundered, to put it no higher. I had betrayed God for a blundering prince.

It was some days since I had been to the summerhouse.

‘Darling,’ said my mother, relaxed now that the wedding was so close and I hadn’t yet disgraced her completely, ‘go and see if the cactus is flowering. It will be so lovely if it comes out for the wedding.’

It was quite early in the morning or I should have suspected my mother of drinking. I stared at her.

‘Well?’ she said, turning from where she was making bread- crumbs at the kitchen table.

‘Why?’ I asked, and I sounded half-witted. I couldn’t see that it would make the slightest difference to the occasion whether the cactus flowered or not. My mother seldom called me ‘darling’, and while I thought her fondness for her cactuses slightly silly I hadn’t imagined her to be as sentimental as she was suddenly proving. Perhaps because I was so soon to be out of her care she was already growing careless, feeling free to express emotions that might previously have seemed like indulgence, might have spoiled me. She had a great detestation of a spoiled child.