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with a substance guaranteed to inflict an unpleasant sore on any hand that touched it. But the effects of its depredations had been more demoralizing to the whole household than anything achieved by the Mau Mau during the years of the Emergency. The servants were frankly terrified, Eden was angry and on edge, and Em grim and stubborn.
    â€˜If someone thinks that they can frighten me into leaving, they’ll find they’re wrong,’ she said. ‘The Mau Mau thought they could frighten us into leaving our farms, but we are still here. I don’t know what anyone hopes to gain by destroying things I am fond of, but whatever it is, they won’t get it!’ And as if to emphasize her defiance she had sat down at the piano and played from memory Toroni’s ‘Rift Valley Concerto’: playing it furiously and loudly and not very accurately.
    That had been on the day that the recording of the concerto had been destroyed, and that same evening, looking tired and defeated and very old, she had told them that she had sent for Victoria.
    Victoria’s mother had died that spring and Victoria was at present sharing a small flat in London with two friends, and working as private secretary to the assistant manager of a firm of importers.
    â€˜I have asked her to come out here and work for me,’ said Em, not looking at Eden: looking at nothing but the candle flames on the dining-room table and, perhaps, the past. ‘I am getting too old to deal with half the work I do. I need someone who can be a confidential secretary, and whom I can work hard. And at this time I would rather it were someone who – who belongs. It will also mean that I am doing something for Helen’s child. Giving her a home as well as an adequate salary.’
    She had looked at Alice for the first time, her eyes blank and unfocused from the dazzle of the candle flames, and said gently: ‘You, who are an orphan too, will know what that must mean to her. But she shan’t come if you would rather she did not, my dear.’
    Perhaps Alice might have found it possible to protest if it had not suddenly seemed to offer a way of escape. She did not want to meet this girl whom Eden had once meant to marry and with whom he must once have been in love. And she did not want Eden to meet her again. But if Em’s niece came to live at Flamingo perhaps she, Alice, could persuade Eden to leave Kenya: to take her back to England. It would not be as though they were leaving Em alone. She would have Victoria …
    Alice looked down at the white roses that filled her hands, and letting them drop to the ground, sat down tiredly on the smooth trunk of the fallen tree and thought with affection and desperation and despair of Lady Emily DeBrett. Of Em and Eden. It was not going to be easy to tell Em that she could endure Kenya no longer. Em had a reputation for impatience, hard-headedness, shrewd business acumen, an iron nerve and a refusal to suffer fools gladly. Yet she had suffered Eden’s wife, who according to all her lights must have seemed a fool. She had mothered her, protected her, encouraged her, and stood between her and danger.
    Sitting in the dusk on the knoll at Flamingo, Alice recalled her first sight of Eden’s grandmother, and the shock it had given her. Eden had mentioned casually that his grandmother was inclined to be eccentric in the matter of dress, but he had not prepared her for the grotesque figure that had appeared on the porch steps when the car that had brought them the fifty-odd miles from Nairobi Airport drew up before the big thatch-roofed house on the shores of Lake Naivasha.
    The years had thickened Emily’s stately figure to more than ample proportions, but had not eradicated her antipathy to skirts. She had never willingly worn feminine attire, but she had a fondness for bright colours and a leaning towards eccentricity. Em’s scarlet dungarees and vivid blouses – both of which