She leapt to her feet and found herself face to face with a man unlike any she’d ever encountered, so unusual that she instinctively lowered her gaze for fear he might think she was staring. He was dark-skinned and exotic-looking, like those eastern princes pictured in schoolbooks, and yet he did not sound in the slightest bit foreign and in all other respects appeared like any other young Englishman of a certain class.

He was slim, slight and bare-headed with an untamed mop of black hair, his face framed by heavy eyebrows and a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles, the reflections from which obscured his eyes so effectively that she could not tell whether he was actually smiling or whether that expression of slight amusement was just what he’d been born with.

This was clearly not a man who cared much about his appearance. His suit, although well cut and of quality fabric, was terribly old-fashioned and crumpled, as though he had been travelling for days. In one hand he carried a cheap cardboard suitcase, and in the other an ancient brolly fading green with age.

Kath began to babble, apologising for her inattention. ‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry. I must have been in a dream. How can I help you?’

‘I would like to know the best way of getting to Bawdsey Manor,’ he said.

2

The look of surprise on the girl’s face – or was it shock? – scarcely registered with Vic. He was perfectly used to that kind of reaction, and tried not to let himself get annoyed by it. He’d perfected an expression of detached amusement, calculating that if he looked friendly, people were less likely to take offence or feel threatened.

Ever since being dispatched to a British boarding school he’d nearly always been the only brown face in the crowd – the reversal of the situation at his school in India, where he was the palest. His mother explained: ‘You are a very special boy, Vikram, because you are part Indian, part British. Some people may call you a lesser person because of it but you can tell them you are actually better, because you have the best of both worlds.’

So Vikram had spent most of his twenty-one years feeling different, always the outsider trying to fit in. The horror of being ripped away from his parents in India at the age of ten had been devastating enough, but then to find himself surrounded by posh white boys in an enormous, cheerless school surrounded by acres of flat countryside in cold, grey England sent him into a miserable self-imposed muteness for several weeks.

After lights out he would curl up under the thin blanket, trying to imagine himself in the comfort of his mother’s arms, the tenderness of his ever-present ayah, the heat and colour of Kerala, the freedom of roaming the rolling hills of the tea estate, his friends, the animals, the call of the birds, the sunshine, tiffin on the veranda, the sunsets. He especially missed the food, and found most of the school meals bland and disgusting. But as the weeks went by the memories began to lose their intensity, and had it not been for his mother’s letters filled with news of his former life, he might have begun to believe it had existed only in his imagination.