'That is not a byway of history I am familiar with, Blanche – Britons and Zulus. I cannot dispute with you.'

'It is not just in Zululand that it happened. It happened in Australia too. It happened all over the colonized world, just not in so neat a form. Those young fellows from Oxford and Cambridge and St Cyr offered their new barbarian subjects a false ideal. Throw away your idols, they said. You can be as gods. Look at the Greeks, they said. And indeed, who can tell gods from men in Greece, the romantic Greece of those young men, heirs of the humanists? Come to our schools, they said, and we will teach you how. We will make you disciples of reason and the sciences that flow from reason; we will make you masters of nature. Through us you will overcome disease and all corruption of the flesh. You will live for ever.

'Well, the Zulus knew better.' She waves a hand towards the window, towards the hospital buildings baking under the sun, towards the dirt road winding up into the barren hills. 'This is reality: the reality of Zululand, the reality of Africa. It is the reality now and the reality of the future as far as we can see it. Which is why African people come to church to kneel before Jesus on the cross, African women above all, who have to bear the brunt of reality. Because they suffer and he suffers with them.'

'Not because he promises them another, better life after death?'

Blanche shakes her head. 'No. To the people who come to Marianhill I promise nothing except that we will help them bear their cross.'

Eight thirty on Sunday morning, but the sun is already fierce. At noon the driver will come to take her to Durban and the flight home.

Two young girls in gaudy dresses, barefoot, race to the bell rope and begin tugging it. Atop its post the bell jangles spasmodically.

'Will you be coming?' says Blanche.

'Yes, I will be there. Do I need to cover my head?'

'Come as you are. There are no formalities here. But be warned: we are having a visit from a television crew.'

'Television?'

'From Sweden. They are making a film about Aids in KwaZulu.'

'And the priest? Has the priest been told the service is being filmed? Who is the priest anyhow?'

'Father Msimungu from Dalehill will be taking Mass. He has no objection.'

Father Msimungu, when he arrives in a still quite smart Golf, is young, gangly, bespectacled. He goes off to the dispensary to be robed; she joins Blanche and the other half-dozen sisters of the Order at the front of the congregation. The camera lights are already in place and trained on them. In their cruel glare she cannot fail to see how old they all are. The Sisters of Mary: a dying breed, an exhausted vocation.

Under its metal roof the chapel is already stiflingly hot. She does not know how Blanche, in her heavy outfit, bears it.

The Mass Msimungu leads is in Zulu, though here and there she is able to pick out a word of English. It starts sedately enough; but by the time of the first collect there is already a humming among the flock. Launching into his homily, Msimungu has to raise his voice to make himself heard. A baritone voice, surprising in so young a man. It seems to come from effortlessly deep in the chest.

Msimungu turns, kneels before the altar. A silence falls. Above him looms the crowned head of the tortured Christ. Then he turns and holds up the Host. There is a joyous shout from the body of worshippers. A rhythmic stamping commences that makes the wooden floor vibrate.

She feels herself swaying. The air is thick with the smell of sweat. She clasps Blanche's arm. 'I must get out!' she whispers. Blanche casts an appraising glance. 'Just a little while longer,' she whispers back, and turns away.

She takes a deep breath, trying to clear her head, but it does not help. A wave of cold seems to ascend from her toes. It rises to her face, her scalp prickles with the chill, and she is gone.

She wakes flat on her back up in a bare room she does not recognize. Blanche is there, gazing down on her, and a young woman in a white uniform. 'I am so sorry' she mumbles, struggling to sit up. 'Did I faint?'

The young woman puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder. 'It is all right,' she says. 'But you must rest.'

She casts her eyes up at Blanche. 'I am so sorry,' she repeats. 'Too many continents.'

Blanche regards her quizzically

'Too many continents,' she repeats. 'Too many burdens.' Her voice sounds thin to her ears, far away. 'I haven't been eating properly,' she says. 'That must be the explanation.'

But is that the explanation? Is a two-day stomach upset enough to cause a faint? Blanche would know. Blanche must have experience of fasting, of fainting. For her own part, she suspects her indisposition is not just of a bodily order. If she were so disposed, she might be welcoming these experiences on a new continent, making something of them. But she is not so disposed. That is what her body is saying, in its own way All too strange and too much, her body is complaining: I want to be back in my old surroundings, in a life I am familiar with.

Withdrawal: that is what she is suffering from. Fainting: a withdrawal symptom. It reminds her of someone. Of whom? Of that pale English girl in A Passage to India, the one who cannot take it, who panics and shames everyone. Who cannot take the heat.

The driver is waiting. She is packed and ready, still feeling a little pale, a little wobbly.'Goodbye,' she says to Blanche.'Goodbye, Sister Blanche. I see what you meant. Nothing like St Patrick's on a Sunday morning. I hope they didn't capture me on film, keeling over like that.'

Blanche smiles. 'If they did, I'll ask them to chop it out.' There is a pause between the two of them. She thinks: Perhaps now she will say why she has brought me here.

' Elizabeth,' says Blanche (is there something new in her tone, something softer, or is she just imagining it?), 'remember it is their gospel, their Christ. It is what they have made of him, they, the ordinary people. What they have made of him and what he has let them make of him. Out of love. And not just in Africa. You will see scenes just like that repeated in Brazil, in the Philippines, even in Russia. Ordinary people do not want the Greeks. They do not want the realm of pure forms. They do not want marble statues. They want someone who suffers like them. Like them and for them.'

Jesus. The Greeks. It is not what she expected, not what she wanted, not at this last minute when they are saying goodbye for perhaps the last time. Something unrelenting about Blanche. Unto death. She should have learned her lesson. Sisters never let go of each other. Unlike men, who let go all too easily. Locked to the end in Blanche's embrace.

'So: Thou hast triumphed, O pale Galilean,' she says, not trying to hide the bitterness in her voice. 'Is that what you want to hear me say, Blanche?'

'More or less. You backed a loser, my dear. If you had put your money on a different Greek you might still have stood a chance. Orpheus instead of Apollo. The ecstatic instead of the rational. Someone who changes form, changes colour, according to his. surroundings. Someone who can die but then come back. A chameleon. A phoenix. Someone who appeals to women. Because it is women who live closest to the ground. Someone who moves among the people, whom they can touch – put their hand into the side of, feel the wound, smell the blood. But you didn't, and you lost. You went for the wrong Greeks, Elizabeth.'

A month has passed. She is at home, settled back into her own life, the African venture behind her. Of the reunion with Blanche she has made nothing yet, though the memory of their unsisterly parting nags at her.

'There is a story I want to tell you,' she writes, 'about Mother.'

She is writing to herself, that is, to whoever is with her in the

room when she is the only one there; but the words will not come,

she knows, unless she thinks of this writing as a letter to Blanche.

During her first year at Oakgrove, Mother made friends with a man named Phillips, who was also a resident there. I mentioned him to you, but you probably don't remember. He had a car; they used to go out together, to the theatre, to concerts; they were a couple, in a civilized kind of way. 'Mr Phillips', Mother called him from beginning to end, and I took that as a cue not to assume too much. Then Mr Phillips's health gave in, and that was the end of their gallivanting.

When I first met him, Mr P was still quite a spry old fellow, with his pipe and his blazer and cravat and his David Niven moustache. He had been a lawyer, quite a successful one. He took care of his appearance, had hobbies, read books; there was still life in him, as Mother put it.

One of his hobbies was painting in watercolours. I saw some of his work. His human figures were wooden, but he had a feel for landscape, for the bush, that was genuine, I thought. A feel for light and what distance did to light.

He did a painting of Mother in her blue organdie outfit, with a silk scarf floating behind her. Not wholly successful as a portrait, but I kept it, I still have it somewhere.

I sat for him too. This was after he had had surgery and was confined to his rooms, or at any rate chose not to come out. Sitting for him was Mother's idea. 'See if you can take him out of himself a bit,' she said. 'I can't. He spends all day alone, brooding.'

Mr Phillips kept to himself because he had had an operation, a laryngectomy. It left him with a hole through which he was supposed to speak, with the aid of a prosthesis. But he was ashamed of the unsightly, raw-looking hole in his throat, and therefore withdrew from public sight. He could not speak anyhow, not understandably – he never bothered to learn the correct breathing. At best he could produce a kind of croaking. It must have been deeply humiliating for such a ladies' man.

He and I negotiated by note, and the upshot was that on a series of Saturday afternoons I sat for him. His hand was a little trembly by then, he could only manage an hour at a time, the cancer was getting to him in more ways than one.

He had one of the better apartments at Oakgrove, on the ground floor, with French doors leading on to the garden. For my portrait I sat by the garden door in a stiff-backed, carved chair wearing a wrap I had picked up in Jakarta, hand-stencilled in ochre and maroon. I don't know that it flattered me particularly, but I thought as a painter he would enjoy the colours, they would give him something to play with.

One Saturday – patience, I am getting to the point – a lovely warm day with the pigeons purring in the trees, he put down his brush and shook his head and said something in his croak that I did not catch. 'Didn't hear that, Aidan,' I said. 'Not working,' he repeated. And then he wrote something on his pad and brought it over to me. 'Wish I could paint you in the nude,' he had written. And then, below: 'Would have loved that.'