He hadn’t meant to scare the child. To make an amusing point, shock a little perhaps, but ultimately to illustrate that one mustn’t pick one’s nose, not at the table, not anywhere. So he’d folded his finger over and pretended, amid melodramatic shouts and flailing, to have it stuck, jammed, in his own nose. The little girl’s reaction had been to pale, crumple and run to her room. He felt ashamed to have made her so afraid, but surprised. He was also annoyed, irritated with the child’s mother, his stepdaughter, who was now haranguing him for the performance – another mark against him, another opportunity for narrow-eyed contempt. Why didn’t she police her own daughter’s repulsive habit? Possibly, as he recalled, because she had many of her own, not least a penchant for tantrums and vitriol. He wondered what the little one had seen of that, and recoiled inwardly, with icy realistion. Of course. The fear in the child’s eyes was something he recognised from deep memory, something his own face once carried at home and at school, on those dreadful occasions of humiliation and powerlessness. How unkind of him – a resilient dandelion this girl was not. Medical sense of humour gone too far, she wan’t one of his hardy juniors. He liked children, though he’d had none of his own. His wife said once how different the girl became when she stayed the weekend, how she blossomed, warmed, but he’d yet to see that. He looked up at the thin-lipped mother still scowling across the table, in the cramped room, and set his resolve. Maybe the next trip could be longer, and the little girl could come back with them to the villa. They could watch for lizards together in the sun, and pick golden plums from the tree by the back veranda. Maybe they could be friends.