Before giving her a candle to take to her room, he held his high to look into her face, and said, ' Sylvia, I know you very well, my child. I know you are blaming yourself for everything.'

'Yes.'

' It is a long time since you have asked me to confess you, but I do not need to hear what you have to say. In the state of mind you are in, when you are low from the illness, you must not trust what you are thinking about yourself. '

'The devil lurks in the absence of red corpuscles.'

'The devil lurks where there is bad health – I hope you are taking your iron pills.'

'And I am trusting you to take yours.'

They embraced, both needing to weep, and turned away to go to their rooms. He was leaving early, and said he probably wouldn't see her, meaning he didn't want to go through another parting. He was not going to say, like Sister Molly: See you around.

Next morning he was gone: Aaron had taken him to the turn-off where he would be picked up by the Old Mission's car.

Zebedee and Clever were waiting for Sylvia on the path to the village. Half the huts were empty. A starving dog was nosing about in the dust. The hut where Tenderai had looked after the books stood open, and the books had gone.

‘We tried to look after them, we tried. '

' Never mind. '

The village before she had left had been afflicted, it had been threatened, but it had been alive: now its spirit had gone. It was Rebecca who had gone. In institutions and villages, in hospitals and in schools, often it is one person who is the soul of the place, though he or she may be the janitor, a chairman, or a priest's servant. When Rebecca died, the village died.

The three went up through the bush to where the graves were, getting on for fifty of them now, Rebecca's and her son Tenderai's among the newest, two oblongs of red dust under a big tree. Sylvia stood, looking, and the lads, seeing her face, came to her and she held them close and now she did weep, their faces on her head: they were taller than she was.

‘And now you must see our father. '

‘Yes, I know. '

' Please do not be cross with us. The police came and took away the medicines and the bandages. We told them you paid for them, with your money. '

'It doesn't matter.'

'We told them it was stealing, they were your medicines.'

'Really, it doesn't matter.'

'And the grandmothers are using the hospital for the sick children.'

Everywhere in Zimlia old women and sometimes old men whose grown-up children had died were left trying to feed and keep young children.

‘How are they feeding them?'

'The new headmaster said he will give them food. '

‘But they are too many, how can he feed them all?'

They stood on a small rise, opposite the one where the priest's house stood, looking down into Sylvia's hospital. Three old women sat in the shade under the grass roofs, with about twenty small children. Old, that is, by third world standards: in luckier countries these fifty-year-old women would be dieting and finding lovers.

Under Joshua's big tree lay a heap of rags, or something like a big python, mottled with shadow. Sylvia knelt beside him and said, ' Joshua. ' He did not move. There are people who, before they die, look as they will after they are dead: the skeleton is so close under the skin. Joshua's face was all bone, with dry skin sunk into the hollows. He opened his eyes and licked scummy lips with a cracked tongue. ‘Is there water?' asked Sylvia, and Zebedee ran to the old women, who seemed to be protesting, why waste water on the nearly dead? But Zebedee scooped a plastic cup through water that stood in a plastic pail open to dust and any blown leaves, and brought it to his father, knelt, and held the cup to the cracked lips. Suddenly the ancient man (in late middle age by other standards) came alive and drank desperately, the cords of his throat working. Then he shot out a hand like a skeleton's and grasped Sylvia's wrist. It was like being held in a circlet of bone. He could not sit up, but he raised his head and began mumbling what she knew must be curses, imprecations, his deep-sunk eyes burning with hatred.

'He doesn't mean it,' said Clever. 'No, he doesn't,' pleaded Zebedee.

Then Joshua mumbled, 'You take my children. You must take them to England. '

Her wrist was aching because of the tight bone bracelet. ' Joshua, let me go, you' re hurting me. '

His grip tightened, ‘You must promise me, now-now, you must promise. ' His head was lifted up off his nearly-dead body as a snake lifts its head when its back is broken.

' Joshua, let my wrist go. '

‘You will promise me. You will...’And he mumbled his curses, his eyes hard on hers, and his head fell back. But his eyes did not close, nor did he stop his mumbled hatred.

' Very well, I promise, Joshua. Now let me go. ' His grip did not relax: she was wildly thinking that he would die and she would be handcuffed to a skeleton.

' Don't believe what he says, Doctor Sylvia, ' whispered Zebedee. ' He doesn't mean what he says,’ said Clever.

' Perhaps it is just as well I don't know what he's saying. '

The bone handcuff fell off her wrist. Her hand was numb. She squatted beside the near-corpse, shaking her hand.

‘Who is going to look after him?'

' The old women are looking after him. '

Sylvia went to the women and gave them money, nearly all she had, leaving enough to get back to Senga. It would keep these children fed for a month, perhaps.

‘And now get your things, we' re leaving. '

‘Now?' They fell back from her, with the shock of it; what they had longed for was here, was close – and it was a separation from everything they knew.

‘I’ll get you clothes, in Senga. '

They went running down to the village, and she walked up the hill between the oleanders and the plumbago to the house, where everything she was going to take was already in her little hold-all. To Rebecca's niece she said that if she wanted her books, she could take them. She could take anything she wanted. But what the girl asked for was the picture of the women on the wall. She liked those faces, she said.

The lads appeared, each with a carrier bag – their possessions.

'Have you had anything to eat?’No, clearly they had not. She sat them at the table, and cut bread and set the jam-jar between them. She and Rebecca's niece stood watching them fumble with the knives, spreading the jam. All that had to be learned. Sylvia's heart was as heavy with dismay as it was going to be: these two

orphans, for it was what they were – were going to have to take on London, learn everything, from how to use knives and forks, to how to be doctors.

Sylvia rang Edna Pyne, who said that Cedric was sick, she couldn't leave him – she thought bilharzia.

'Never mind, we'll take the bus into Senga.'

‘You can't go on those native buses, they' re lethal. '

' People do. '

' Rather you than me. '

‘I’m saying goodbye, Edna. '

' Okay. Don't fret. In this continent our deeds are writ in water. Oh dear, what am I saying, in sand then. That's what Cedric is saying, he's got the blues, he's got my black dog. ' ' Our deeds are writ in water, ' ' he says. He's getting religion. Well, that's all it needed. Goodbye, then. See you around. '

The three were where the road to the Pynes and the Mission joined one of the main roads north. It was a single belt of tarmac, much potholed, and as eaten away at the edges as the poster Rebecca's niece had taken off the wall that morning. The bus was due, but would be late: it always was. They stood waiting and then sat waiting, on stones placed there for that purpose under a tree.

Not much of a thing, you' d think, this road, curving away into the bush, its grey shine dimmed where sand had blown over it, but along it, a host of the smartest cars in the country had sped not long ago to the Comrade Leader's wedding to his new wife the Mother of the Country having died. All the leaders of the