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.

She flushed when she saw my face, but it was with annoyance.

‘It means good luck,’ she said. ‘There should always be something flowering, even for a winter wedding.’

I thought Lili was amazing. She had sown seeds of superstition in my mother and made them grow. It was a feat far more remarkable than my mother’s cultivation of her cactus. I was sure that it had been Lili who had given my mother this idea. My mother’s only previous obeisances to fortune had been touching wood and throwing spilled salt over her left shoulder to blind the devil. There was something crafted about this flowering myth, something touchingly, repellently obvious—like the gift which the honey-curled innocent is deputed to hand to the rich and evil-tempered old relation. What, I asked myself, was Lili up to? I felt that now I had been betrayed. It seemed as though she had been trying to help my mother sweeten the occasion—garland it with pretty conceits, as people pile wreaths on corruption.

‘Who said so?’ I asked without subtlety.