‘She’ll be right as rain soon,’ his father promised. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

Cambridge was like a dream, and Vic never quite got over the feeling that he’d somehow landed there by mistake. How could a boy like him end up walking through neatly trimmed gardens bordering the punt-filled river with those gloriously white college towers glimmering in the sunshine on the far bank, or walk into a laboratory filled with all the latest equipment and be invited to work alongside some of the most eminent physicists of the day?

Halfway into the Michaelmas term, a telegram arrived:

MOTHER DIED PEACEFULLY IN HER SLEEP YESTERDAY STOP FUNERAL TODAY STOP FATHER

The shock of it seemed to blind him; he reached for the wall to stop himself falling, and crept his way along it until he reached a chair. He felt physically sick, as though he’d been thumped in the stomach by a flying rugby ball. After an hour or so this receded and he simply felt numb. He just couldn’t take it in, and read the terrible words over again and again. Why had Pa not told him how ill his mother was, so that he could have travelled back to see her before she died?

As he sat there, her presence seemed to fill the room: her long black hair, unwound from its usual bun and headscarf, hanging down like a waterfall as she leaned to kiss him in his cot, her soft voice and her dark brown eyes always quietly observing, ready to listen with gentle patience, her slim, elegant fingers stroking his head, soothing him to sleep.

But no, all that was gone; he would never see her again.

He sat there, barely moving, until the light faded and the bedder knocked on the door, asking to turn down the sheets and whether he wanted cocoa before turning in. Much later, shivering in his bed, he determined to book the first available passage to India in the morning.

‘This is certainly very distressing news, Mackensie,’ his tutor said, pouring minuscule glasses of pale sherry. ‘I can understand that you would want to be with your family. But let’s think this plan through. How long does it take, the voyage?’

‘Three weeks.’ Alcohol had never been part of Vic’s life, and this was the first he’d taken since the single glass of port at his matriculation dinner. But now the burning of it in his throat felt good and he had to resist the urge to grab the bottle from its silver tray and swig the rest of it.

‘Three weeks there, three weeks back, and several weeks in India. You’d miss more than a term’s work, old fellow,’ his tutor went on. ‘I’m afraid we’d probably have to ask you to defer.’

‘You mean I’d have to take a year out and start all over again?’

His tutor nodded.