Mona did not reply, and went on with Andrew. Rose did not recognise Sylvia, or rather only much later thought that boring little thing must have been Sylvia.

Abandoned, she said bitterly to the delegates who were streaming past, 'The bloody Lennoxes. They were my family.'

Sylvia was embraced by Andrew, kissed prettily by Mona and put into a taxi: they were off to a party.

Sister Molly's house was dark and locked. Sylvia had to ring and ring again. The snap of locks, the grind of chains, the click of keys, and Molly stood there in a blue baby-doll nightdress, the silver cross sliding over her breasts. ' Sorry, we all have to live in a fortress these days. '

Sylvia went to her room, carefully, as if she might spill about like a jelly. She felt she had eaten too much and knew wine didn't suit her. She was light-headed, and trembled. Sister Molly stood watching as she lowered herself to her bed and flopped.

'Better take that off,' and Molly pulled off an outer layer of linen and shoes and stockings. ' There. I thought so. When did you last have malaria?'

'Oh – a year ago – I think.'

Then you have it now. Lie still. You have the devil of a temperature.'

' It'll go. '

‘Not by itself, it won't. '

And so Sylvia went through her bout of malaria, which was not the bad kind, cerebral, which is so dangerous, but it was bad enough and she shivered and she shook, and swallowed her pills – back to the old-fashioned quinine, since the new ones were not working with her – and when she was finally herself, Sister Molly said, ' That was a go, if you like. But I see you are with us again. '

' Please telephone Father McGuire and tell him. '

‘Who do you take us for? Of course I rang him weeks ago. '

'Weeks?'

'You've had it bad. Mind you, I'd say it was malaria plus, a bit of a collapse generally. And you're anaemic, for a start. And you have to eat. '

‘What did Father McGuire say?'

‘Oh, don't you worry. Everything's going on as usual. '

In fact, Rebecca had died, and so had her sick boy Tenderai. The two children who stayed alive had been taken away by the sister-in-law whom Rebecca suspected of poisoning her. It was too early to tell Sylvia the bad news.

Sylvia ate, she drank what seemed to be gallons of water, and she went to the bath, where the sweats of the fever were finally swilled away. She was weak but clear-headed. She lay flat on her little iron bed and told herself that the fever had shaken foolishness out of her that she could well do without. One thing was Father McGuire: through difficult times she had been telling herself that Father McGuire was a saint, as if that justified everything, but now she was thinking, Who the hell am I, Sylvia Lennox, to go on and on about who is a saint and who isn't?

She said to Sister Molly, ‘I have understood that I am not a Catholic, not a real one, and I probably never was.'

‘Is that so? So you either are or you aren't. So it is a Protestant you are, after all? Well, I have to confess to you that in my view the good God has better things to do than worry about our little squabbles, but never tell them I said that, in Belfast – I don't want to find myself knee-capped when I go on leave next.'

‘I have been suffering from the sin of pride, I know that. '

‘I daresay. Aren't we all? But I'm surprised Kevin never mentioned it if you are. He's a great one for the sin of pride.'

‘I expect he did. '

‘Well, then, and now take it easy. When you are strong enough, give some thought to what you are going to do next. We have suggestions for you. '

And so Sylvia lay and took it in that she was not expected back at the Mission. And what was happening to Clever and Zebedee?

She telephoned. Their voices, so young, desperate: Help me, help us.

'When are you coming? Please come.'

'Soon, as soon as I can.'

'Now Rebecca's not here, things are so hard...'

'What?'

And so she heard the news. And lay on her bed and did not weep, it was too bad for that.

Sylvia lay propped up on her bed, absorbing nourishing potions while Sister Molly, hands on her hips, stood smiling, watching forcibly while Sylvia ate, and all day and as far into the night as was possible for Zimlia's early-rising citizens, came people of the kind Andrew Lennox, or the tourists or visiting relatives or people who under the white government had not been welcome, never met. And Sylvia had not met them either until now.

She was being made to reflect that while places like Kwadere existed in Zimlia, far too many of them, perhaps her experiences had been as narrow in their way as those of people who would not have believed that villages like St Luke's Mission could exist. After all, there were schools that actually taught their pupils, which had at least some exercise books and textbooks, hospitals that had equipment and surgeons and even research laboratories. It was her nature that had seen to it that she was in as poor a place as possible: she understood that as clearly as she did that fretting over her degrees of faith or lack of it was absurd.

On a level far from the embassies or the lounges of Butler's Hotel, or the trade fairs, or the corrupt bosses at the top (referred to by Sister Molly as ' chocolate cake' ) were people who ran organisations with small budgets, sometimes funded by single individuals, who accomplished more with their money than Caring International or Global Money could dream of, and who laboured in difficult places to achieve a library, a shelter for abused women, provision for a small business, or provided small loans of a size that ordinary banks must despise. They were black and they were white, Zimlian citizens or ex-pats, forming a layer of energetic optimism which spread up to embrace minor officials and lower civil servants, for there has never been a country that relied so much on its minor officials, who are competent, not corrupt, and hard-working. Unsung they are, and mostly unnoticed. But anyone who understood, would go for help to some comparatively lowly office run by a man or a woman who, if there were any justice, would be openly running the country, and who in fact were what everything depends on. Sister Molly's house and a dozen like it formed a layer or web of sane people. Politics were not discussed, not because of principle but because of the nature of the people involved: in some countries politics are the enemy of commonsense. If the Comrade Leader was mentioned at all, or his corrupt cronies, it was as one talks about the weather -something that had to be put up with. A great disappointment, the Comrade President, but what's new?

Sylvia was being presented with a dozen possibilities for her future. She was a doctor, people knew she had created a hospital in the bush where none had existed. She had fallen foul of the government, too bad, but Zimlia was not the only country in Africa.

A sentence in our textbooks goes something like this: 'In the latter part of the nineteenth century, and until the First World War, the Great Powers fought over Africa like dogs over a bone. ‘What we read less often is that Africa, considered as a bone, was not less fought over for the rest of the twentieth century, though the dog packs were not the same.

A youngish doctor, a native of Zimlia (white), had returned recently from the wars in Somalia. He sat on the hard upright chair in Sylvia's room and listened while she talked compulsively (Sister Molly said this was a self-cure) of the fate of the people at St Luke's Mission, dying of AIDS, and apparently invisible to the government. She talked for hours and he listened. And then he talked, as compulsively, and she listened.

Somalia had been part of the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, which set up its usual apparatus of prisons, torture chambers and death squads. Then by a smart little piece of international legerdemain, Somalia became American, swapped for another bit of Africa. Naive citizens hoped and expected that the Americans would dismantle the apparatus for Security and set them free, but they had not learned that lesson, so essential for our times, that there is nothing more stable than this apparatus. Marxists and communists of various persuasions who had flourished under the Russians, torturing and imprisoning and killing their enemies, now found themselves being tortured and imprisoned and killed. The once reasonable enough State of Somalia, was as if boiling water had been poured into an ants' nest. The structure of decent living was destroyed. Warlords and bandits, tribal chiefs and family bosses, criminals and thieves, now ruled. The international aid organisations, stretched to their limits, could not cope, particularly because large parts of the country were barred to them by war.