They talked only of small things. She had graduated last year and was now doing her one-year Youth Service with a bank in Victoria Island. He wanted to ask her who the man in the car was, whether she was married, or engaged, if she still remembered their night together. He did not.

He took to coming to the hospital every day after work, and earlier on weekends. They did not talk much. Alice’s face would light up visibly when she saw him. When her mother slept, they would retreat to the nim tree and smoke and listen to the crickets in the bush by the fence. Sometimes he’d bring her copies of The Dial and she would flip through the arts pages, making brief comments, asking questions. There was an air of waiting about their reunion, undefined, pendent, as if they were expecting a certain moment to arrive when everything would automatically fall into place.

One day she did something unexpected. They were seated side-by-side on the log when she suddenly reached out and took his hand in hers and pressed it to her chest.

He looked at her, surprised. ‘What?’

‘I am glad you reappeared when you did. Your coming gave me so much courage. I was so close to despair,’ she said and released his hand. They sat and watched the shadows lengthen on the ground and the lights begin to appear in the wards.

Sometimes she’d leave him under the tree and hasten to the room where the shadows daily grew even thicker round her mother. Alone under the tree, he’d imagine her in the room, and the women who would be standing round singing and praying, the incense in the corner and the cloying smell of rotting flesh making a mockery of the incense. He would imagine the despair on her face as she felt closed in and trapped. He often compared her state to that of the messenger in Kafka’s Great Wall of China: the Emperor, on his deathbed in his innermost chamber, has summoned the messenger and whispers a very important message in his ear, a message to be conveyed immediately to the remotest part of the empire. No one knows more than the messenger the absolute futility of his mission – first he has to get out of the innermost chamber with its thousands and thousands of courtiers impeding his progress, and after that there are a thousand outer chambers to traverse, still filled with courtiers; and though he is able to get out of these chambers (it will take him years), how can he manage to elbow his way past the millions of people waiting in the courtyard?