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the District Officer’s servant to go away and take the child to live with her and his wet-nurse in their family hut. And so the baby’s first years were in the Long House among brown skins, brown eyes, scraps of coloured clothes, the Malay language; often sleeping, sometimes making musical singing, dreamily passing the time against the roar of the river and the rain. At night the lamps swung from the rafters and the baby watched the flames with their haloes of moths, heard the baboons with pleasure, saw the silver lizards without fear—their questing, swinging heads—and the geckos hooked into the mesh of the walls puffing out their lurid throats. He listened to the racket of the rats in the thatch, once watched with rapture as a fat snake came sliding up from a post-hole. Observed it being killed. He was satisfied by the nourishment of the wetnurse but passionate in his love for the girl.
    Soon he stretched to pat her face, suck her chin, her ear. One day, at two months, gazing at her he gave a crow of laughter like a boy of two. Because of the memory of the child’s kind mother, the Long House respected him and accepted him, an ivory child in their warm dun dust, and he was passed about, rocked to sleep, talked to and sung to and understood only Malay. By the time he was one he rolled and tottered and waddled in the village compound with the other children. There were a number of pale-skinned half-caste children from the Raj’s peccadilloes. Sometimes this child’s father crossed the compound but seemed not to see him, not to notice his wife’s chestnut curls.
    The village observed the District Officer. Captain Feathers was a strong just governor, but nobody liked him. His child was given extra attention and, from Ada, intense, unswerving, obsessive adoration.
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    When the child was four and a half, Auntie May came back. Big and strong, off the boat and over the landing stage to the compound, she looked about her, at once spotting Edward with his orange hair, naked and sucking a mango, his feet and hands as pale with the mud of the compound as the other children’s. She made no move towards him—the women were watching from the dark openings of the huts—but nodded and smiled in his direction, to his surprise, for his mouth fell open—and went on to climb the steps of the verandah.
    She was expected: there had been correspondence for some time. But Captain Feathers had not been at the landing stage.
    She had not seen him for four and a half years but rumour had it that he was unchanged in his attitude to his son, that his shattered ankle was worse and that he was drinking heavily. It was said he had become eccentrically pedantically absorbed in his work and the management of his District. He was celibate.
    No girls were brought to him by their mothers as “extra servants,” though he was handsome still, his eyes bright with malaria. He turned away from the women’s beauty to the beauty of the whiskey in the glass. It did not seem to harm him. He had the Scottish immunity. He drank alone, for he had no friends. “Oh, Miss Neal. Auntie May. G-g-good evening.”
    He looks tired, she thought.
    She had come to take the child down to the Port, to be taught English for six months before the journey Home, where he would live with a Welsh family until he was eight. After that, he would go to his father’s old Prep school and then his father’s old Public school. Auntie May knew of the Welsh family with whom he was to be fostered. They were used to Raj Orphans. There would be home-cooked food, and it would be cheap (Alistair Feathers was a Scot). And there were two aunts about, his sisters, in Lancashire which was not really far away from North Wales.
    â€œAnd of course,” said Auntie May at dinner, watching the lowering of the whiskey in the glass at the other end of the lamp-lit table, “you will have to take him to Wales. In six months’