‘Well, they do,’ she said shortly. She said no more but left the room by gradual degrees, humming a little, straightening a cushion, pushing a silver snuff-box nearer to the centre of the table, until she reached the door and went out to the kitchen.

I wondered what I would have done if I had discovered Syl, redhanded, standing over a dying girl behind the summerhouse. It occurred to me that trysting places—summerhouses and ruined pigeon towers, hidden strips of tiled pavement—are by their very nature secret, and therefore perilous. Love and death happen in the unfrequented ways. A laugh at the wrong moment and a poor body, hoped-for vehicle of pleasure, would lie, wide-eyed, transfixed by steel with no one to know. My confessor had said I should have told the authorities, but he didn’t know Egypt. I knew that the authorities would not have pursued the son of the Pasha, and anyway the girl was gone without trace to the bottom of the crocodile pool. I hoped that Allah had washed away the fingerprints of the murderer, not for his sake, but for hers. It was hard to be born formed and distorted by the mother body, intolerable to enter eternity fumbled and bruised by the hands of a stranger.

I would have screamed if I had apprehended Syl the murderer because I cared nothing for his good opinion. I would have run, screaming, to the real house where the lights were on. I would have screamed ‘Mother’ and ‘Police’. I would have been glad. I would have been free.

I remember little about the night before the wedding. The house was full of people. Syl and his mother came for Martinis and she brought her little dog to show to Jennifer and Christopher. The dog didn’t like the children, nor the children the dog. That part was a failure. The gallery owner was there and, it seemed, was staying overnight. I found this most strange and asked Lili why it was so. She looked at me oddly.

‘Weren’t you listening?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Your mother invited him after the opening night,’ she explained. ‘They got on so well and had so much in common.’

‘Oh,’ I said. After a while it became clearer to me. My mother was unwontedly attentive to the gallery owner, especially when Cynthia was in the vicinity. My mother didn’t care to appear as a woman without a man on this occasion, loaded as it was with hints of lubricity. Lili had a man, Cynthia had my mother’s erstwhile man, I was about to have a man, and my mother had refused to be allied with Mrs Monro as a spare and unwanted female. This realization made me think less of her.