Joe put his hands on the balustrade and gazed down into the dark garden, breathing the teasing night-time scents. Scents to which, suddenly, there was a sharper focus. He spun about and Nancy was standing in the door. She was wearing a silvery grey silk dinner dress which managed, to Joe’s mystification, both to cling intriguingly to her top half and float flirtatiously around her knees. Slim and straight and eager, she had the grace and immediacy of a moonbeam, he thought fancifully. Forgetting the soft-footed servants, he held out his hands and when she approached he gathered her closer and kissed her cheek.

‘Mmm… I’m holding the spirit of the garden in my arms,’ he murmured, breathing deeply.

‘Nonsense!’ said Nancy, pulling away. ‘It’s as Parisian as you can get! Mademoiselle Chanel would be miffed if she could hear you describe her new scent as something out of an Eastern garden. It’s meant to revive memories of Paris in the springtime and all that!’

‘Well, I won’t say you look wonderful,’ said Joe, ‘because I assume you know that already but, all the same, you enchant me. I notice that Uncle has put us at extreme ends of the palace. Just as well, I believe.’

Nancy laughed. ‘If I’ve got it right, you went up a flight of stairs and turned right. You walked through an audience hall and turned left. Here you found your bedroom. What you don’t realise is that I was doing the same thing in reverse and although it appears that we are at opposite ends and miles apart our rooms are actually very close together.’

‘I’m overwhelmed!’ said Joe.

‘Well, get underwhelmed,’ said Nancy, ‘and let’s sample Uncle’s Niersteiner while we’re waiting for dinner. And look – wouldn’t you know – Uncle would never do anything so common as to serve wine in its bottle – the Niersteiner has been decanted as befits a gentleman’s dining-table. Very old-fashioned man, Uncle!’

The wine was excellent, the dinner that followed was outstanding, comprising tinned (but delicious) turtle soup from Lusty of Covent Garden, hilsa fish in tamarind sauce, chicken served with many vegetable dishes and a platter of rice, and a towering sugary model of the Taj Mahal accompanied by a mango water ice.

‘Say something appreciative on my behalf,’ said Joe as this fabulous meal drew to its conclusion and Nancy turned to the waiters and spoke at length. Her praise was received with beaming smiles and many salaams from all present.

‘God! I envy you,’ said, Joe. ‘What I miss by not being able to speak and understand. How long would it take me, do you think?’

‘I can’t tell. When I was a child – when I was a baby – my parents were busy most of the time and I spoke more to the servants than I did to them. I spoke more Hindustani than I did English for the first five years of my life. When I was in England at school and even more when I was in France in the war I found myself dreaming in Hindustani. And I think I could say that for the first seven years of my life I was entirely happy all the time and when I was cut off from it I had only one thought in my head – “When can I get back to India?” I used to whisper “ India ” to myself when things got bad. I swore an infantile vow that it was only a matter of time before I’d be home again.’

‘And they snatched you away from all that and sent you back to school in England? That’s terrible!’

‘Well, I certainly thought it was terrible. It happened to everybody. It never crossed anybody’s mind to complain. And it still goes on. I was lucky though. I was sent home eventually to school in Cheltenham. To a school that specialised in Anglo-Indian exiles like myself. I travelled with two friends in exactly the same situation. Minnie da Souza and Kate Bromhead. I don’t know where I’d have been in an English boarding school if it hadn’t been for them. We must have been a pain in the neck! We were all in our different ways exiled and bereft. We got over it by making a little enclave. We spoke Hindustani to each other and, to the limited extent that we could, we wrote notes to each other in Hindustani. Sometimes one of us would pretend we couldn’t understand what the teacher was saying and then another would translate it. It’s a wonder we had any friends at all!’

‘I should think they thought you were very exotic,’ said Joe. In his mind a picture had formed of three sallow little girls, spindly legs and big eyes, doing their best in alien surroundings to set themselves apart under an Indian flag.

Nancy resumed, as coffee was put on the table beside them, ‘I even made myself a tick-off calendar counting the months, weeks and days until I might be able to come home. But as the number of days to tick off diminished to manageable proportions a terrible blow struck us. The war. Everything suddenly was thrown into the melting pot. My parents were in England at the time on a year’s long leave. My father scuttled back to India where his regiment awaited him. We – the three witches as we called ourselves – had a serious conference, I remember it so well, in the box room at school. We decided to train as nurses. You can’t imagine the complications of that decision! But we persisted and we got our way and finally we became the three most innocent Red Cross nurses in the world.

‘We had heard that there were Indian troops in France. We thought if we were clever we could get to where they were so we could nurse them. We wrote a letter to the War Office saying nurses who could speak Hindustani must be in short supply – what about it? Some old India hand at the War Office picked up our letter, apparently, because – the wheels ground slowly – there came a day when we found ourselves on a troop ship en route for St Omer. The British Forward Hospital. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven! We loved our uniforms, loved the respect the chaps paid us and we didn’t mind the admiration of our fellow schoolgirls left behind. I had a letter from my father which said, “Jolly good show, old girl! Mummy and I are proud of you!” Poor old poppet! He didn’t have long to be proud. There was cholera in Srinagar where he was and before he could write again, he and Mum were dead.

‘I had never liked England, except when my parents were there. People had been very kind – to all three of us – and we were never short of invitations for the holidays but we welcomed France. It was the first station on the road back to India, you see. I thought of India as being white and gold. I thought of school as being red and brown and I came to see France as grey and grey and almost always raining. I suppose it wasn’t; there must have been hot days but I don’t remember them.

‘I remember when we arrived at the hospital in St Omer, lying in bed on the first night. I heard somebody muttering and wondered who it was and then I realised that it wasn’t a person at all – it was guns. Guns, always guns muttering. From then on for three more years.

‘You really can’t believe that anyone could be as ignorant or as innocent as we were. The training had been pretty perfunctory, you know – a few months in the Indian troops’ convalescent hospital in the Brighton Pavilion, if you can believe! And that was all. We didn’t really learn much more than how to tie a clean bandage out of a packet, how to carry a breakfast tray and how to stop the men getting too fresh! How to keep them at arm’s length. Arm’s length! How do you keep a man at arm’s length when half his stomach has been blown away? They were desperately short-handed so we were thrown in, virtually untrained, at the deep end. In my first week I saw five men die. Little Cheltenham schoolgirls don’t often see men die but there we were in the middle of it. I doubt if any of us schoolgirls had ever seen a naked man before – our only knowledge of male anatomy was derived from the statuary in the Louvre museum. But by the end of our first week we were conducting bed pan parade without turning a hair!’