Rathwan and his father returned with the guests. I barely saw them before I was closeted away with the female visitors: a small old woman in black and her tall, severely black-clad daughter, Fatima. Fatima was very pale and clear-skinned, the way nuns from enclosed orders look, spared spots and wrinkles for their blessedness. Her black head scarf framed her face like a nun's veil but there was something shrill about her around the eyes that told you this was no sweet, twittering innocent from the chorus of The Sound of Music. The old woman was Umm Tahir's mother and Fatima was her sister. Afterwards, Rathwan quizzed me about the old woman, worried she might have been unfriendly and disapproving. But she was perfectly sweet to me, appreciative of any effort I made throughout the long afternoon to say a few words in Arabic; and when I stood up, she looked at my skirt, saw that it reached my ankles and nodded approvingly.

Fatima had been the trouble. All afternoon she'd shared whispered, smirking conversations with Umm Tahir, both of them looking right at me. There was nothing I could do except give them my toughest sneer, trying to indicate that if I weren't on my best behaviour I'd slap them. The sneer didn't seem to translate: they carried right on.