‘Miss Tilbury isn’t a visitor.’ Or, wait . . . had they moved her? Rose had said something about having to leave Entuba, something about sending her home by plane. Last night, was it? A doctor had come up all the way from Nairobi and said she’d never fully recover in Entuba. She’d cried. Perhaps that was what had made her eyes so swollen and sore. If that were all, of course she could open them.

There was the narrow strip of daylight, some white bars – hospital bed, of course – and a glimpse of some complicated tubing and metal bars.

‘Is this England?’

‘Why, yes. This is Wandford Hospital. Don’t worry. You’re bound to be a little confused. You’ve had a slight concussion.’

‘The plane,’ she said knowingly. That was it. Rose had kept her promise to put her on a plane, and it had crashed.

Injuries? She lay without speaking, moving one limb after another, turning a little this way and that upon the bed. One arm felt odd – constricted and in a curious position, in some way connected with the contraption of rubber tubing and metal rods – and her forehead and face as well as her eyes were very painful. That was all. A wonderful escape – cuts and bruises, an arm broken and a slight concussion.

‘Were many other people hurt, or killed?’

‘Nobody but you.’

That was really miraculous. Something to thank God for.

To begin with, she was content to allow the things which puzzled her to remain unexplained. Concussion naturally left you a little muddled in your mind. But through the comfortable fog of not knowing much about anything, every now and then she’d catch a glimpse, as though the fog had lifted and she had found herself in a place where nothing, no landmark, was familiar.

She discovered that her real injury was not where she had imagined it to be, over her eyes and forehead. She had a scalp wound which even the cheerful nurse described as ‘quite nasty’; all her hair on the left side of her head was shorn away, and sixteen stitches had been put in.

Then she discovered that she was more ‘confused’ than she had realized. Waking, she was conscious of the scent of roses, and there indeed, near her bed, was a great sheaf of them, dark crimson, white and apricot-coloured. When the nurse entered next time, Miss Mayfield asked:

‘Did someone send me those lovely roses?’

‘Indeed they did.’

‘Who?’

There was a card propped against the vase. The nurse lifted it and read:

‘Get well soon. H.T.’ She turned it over. ‘Canon Thorby. The Rectory, Walwyk.’

‘Well, that is very kind of him,’ said Miss Mayfield, visualizing an old gentleman whose private charity was sending flowers to patients in hospitals where they were unknown. ‘Very kind indeed.’

‘Oh, he’s always most attentive when we have a patient from his village.’