It was true, all the troops had withdrawn from the Walled City, but the cry of ‘Peshawar has fallen’ which had sent everyone at the Club into such a panic the previous night seemed ridiculous as she walked through the wide-open gates and into the bustle of the Street of Storytellers. The smells of cooking meat, the calls of traders, the variety of turbans, it was all as before, but even so, something was off-kilter. It took a little while to decide that the difference was in her — in making her just another local woman, the burqa took away her very English right to be eccentric. Now she couldn’t stop and stare, point to things that struck her as unusual, ask questions, enter all-male domains, expect to be treated with a certain deference (she’d never known she’d expected this) simply by virtue of her race. So it’s me, she told herself. All that’s different is me. But she knew this wasn’t true.

She had left the Peshawar Club as soon as she was able to slip away from Remmick the previous night, returning to Dean’s to sit on the ledge of her bedroom window, smoking cigarettes and drinking gin from a bottle, listening to crickets and night-birds. If she closed her eyes she saw corpses laid on corpses, pale hands lifting the dead out of their own blood and throwing them like broken dolls into the back of a lorry. But what could she do about it? She was just a woman with no authority on either side of the city walls.

She held the gin bottle against her neck, the glass cool. There was a woman in the Walled City who would never have the chance to stand by the grave of someone she loved, or even to know where that grave was — if a tree grew above it, if children played near by, if a god no one believed in any more had left his mark just overhead. He was buried in Bodrum, beneath a cypress tree, and in 1917 I took his walking stick and Alice’s collar (she had died by then too) and interred them beneath the Split Rock of Zeus. Wilhelm had written this to Viv after the war, an act of kindness she’d never forget. There was nothing comparative she could offer the green-eyed woman — but she could give certainty where there might be doubt, knowledge where there might be confusion. Yes, there were lorries, a man named Caroe ordered it, and here is the reason why. Perhaps it would matter. After a loss every detail mattered, every acknowledgement of a wrong mattered. The War Office has nothing to do with that man’s death, Miss Spencer. I must ask you to stop sending those letters for the sake of your own reputation.

It was well after midnight when Remmick knocked on her door. He’d come to remind her all women and children were being evacuated next morning, and she must be ready to leave first thing. As he spoke he looked around her room in the manner of a man practised at finding anything out of place and, noticing the burqa slung over the back of a chair, walked up to it and stroked the white cotton.

— Put this on, he said.

— Why?

— Put it on and take your dress off.

— Get out or I’ll to scream the roof down.

He left, shrugging, but when he had gone Viv picked the burqa off the chair, and the fabric between her fingers felt like an answer.

But now she approached the carpet-seller’s house and the voice in her head grew louder — Stay out of it! And then this thought, these people are not your people. She looked down the long vista, and saw only Pathans. Despite the burqa she felt exposed, and turned sharply into a street so narrow the man walking in the other direction couldn’t pass her without contact. He flapped his hands at her as if she were a flock of pigeons, and she found herself reversing in rapid but tiny steps so she wouldn’t trip over the hem of her burqa. It was only when a doorway opened and she saw the woman standing there, garishly made up, that she realised what he feared wasn’t the contamination of her touch but a witness to what the men of the city did here. A street for everything in the Walled City. No map, only desire to steer you. The Street of Storytellers. The Street of Courtesans. The Street of Englishwomen. The Street of Inventive Guides. Her young Pactyike, her Herodotus of Peshawar, her Civilising Mission. He was the last person in the world she wanted to see.

Beneath the burqa she was sweating, and it was impossible to wipe the perspiration from her forehead. Back on the broad avenue she saw a woman in the bright clothes of a nomad call out to a man with a wide-brimmed basket on his head who squatted down and allowed her to pluck out the most appealing melons. A man walked along the pavement with a large cone of cloth beneath his arm; from the tapered base of the cone, green and blue iridescence emerged; from the wide mouth three beaked heads peered out. A hat of melons, a bouquet of peacocks. In another time she would have viewed these sights with delight at their Oriental colour. But the melon-seller was standing beneath the burnt remnants of a Union Jack; the peacock carrier was walking towards Kabuli Gate through which the armoured cars and troops had rushed in. This was the world she was now in. Or perhaps she’d been here all along, unseeing.

She looked down to the end of the street and there was Najeeb Gul’s brother, arms crossed, facing the gate leading into a police station.

Until the middle of the previous century river channels ran into the heart of Peshawar, willows and mulberry trees growing along their banks. Everywhere, headiness and shade, grown men of many nations cramming sweet purple fruit into their mouths as they walked along the Street of Storytellers. Now there was a masonry canal, carrying sewage and drain water, where the channels had once flowed. Why sigh over lost mulberries instead of giving thanks to the engineers who saved the city from floodwaters? said Qayyum and Najeeb threw his hands in the air in exasperation. Lala, why can’t you see that the past is beautiful?

Qayyum took a deep breath as he saw a man in khaddar walk out of the police station and come towards the gate. The past was not the beautiful place in which he still had a brother, he could not accept that. Any moment now Najeeb would be released from his cell, any moment now. But the Congresswalla merely took something out of the car parked inside the station grounds and turned and walked back in.

Qayyum had been standing outside the station ever since the Army withdrew the previous night, waiting for the policemen who had barricaded themselves inside to come out. For the first couple of hours he rattled the locked gate at regular intervals before it occurred to him that it would only terrify the policemen further. Through the night men he knew from Congress or Khilafat or the Khudai Khidmatgar urged him to join them in taking over policing duties for the city — there was a rumour the British had sent word to trans-border raiders to attack the Walled City so that the Peshawaris would beg the Army to return and save them — but he only said, I’ll join you when my brother comes out, and they left him alone. An hour or more ago a delegation of Congress and Khilafat men had arrived at the police-thana. One of them scaled the walls, and opened the gate from inside, picking the lock with ease.

— No, stay here, the lawyer Abdul Hakim who was part of the delegation had said. If your brother is there we’ll get him out.

The scent of melons caught Qayyum by surprise — it was a fruit-seller walking past — and he wished he were back in the orchards where he understood the world.

— Mr Gul?

He looked round, startled to hear an Englishwoman’s voice, and startled further to find it coming from beneath a burqa. The voice identified itself as Miss Spencer, and he gestured sharply to her to keep her voice down. A little distance away two men were leaning against a tree, reading the newspaper Sarhad which had published a list of over a hundred names of the dead this morning.