I let him mould me, but what did I care? Hal was my poetry and my passion. He was the dreaming youth, the whisper of enchanted lands, the magician that transformed my life.

‘There’s nothing wrong?’ he asked me, a couple of days later.

‘No, no, nothing.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

The study was projected to take four months, and we agreed that I would join him for the first three weeks, then return to England to begin my job. We flew into Brazil and took a connecting flight up to the small town of Quetzl where we met the guide. We spent a week wrestling with the language problem, tying up details and a timetable, and working out the supply drops. After that, we loaded up a six-seater plane and took off over the rainforest.

Mile after mile unrolled underneath the plane in a world of unimaginable dimensions. The vegetation was so thick that it was impossible to see the forest floor but here and there a tributary glinted, muddy and sullen. In places, mist lay thickly over the trees.

The plane shuddered in the thin air and the pilot took frequent swigs from a Thermos. Hal made a face at me, and I managed a joke. ‘The Chinese have a curse: may your dreams come true.’

The plane lurched, and suddenly my stomach crawled with nausea. The words shrivelled on my lips and I bent over to retie a bootlace, knowing that I had lied to Hal. There was something wrong, and I had not dealt with it.

God knew how we managed to land on the rudimentary airstrip but we did. The forest rushed up to swallow us, the aircraft ricocheted over the uneven surface and we were there.

The following morning, we trekked up to base camp, which was a deserted Yanomami settlement. Hal went ahead with the guide, keeping up a cracking pace and making light of the obstacles on the path. Behind me, the porters were loaded so heavily I felt embarrassed, but they did not appear to mind.

The forest was like a cage, built of green interlapping plates, some of which did not fit well. After several hours of slogging, I began to miss the sky, as I might a good friend. It was damp underfoot and our feet were sucked into mud of varying consistency. Roots writhed in and out of it, and strange star-shaped bright-coloured flowers bloomed among the detritus. It was an alien habitat, whose heat pawed at the skin.

Every so often, Hal turned to wave encouragement. Once he plodded back and retied the bandanna round my neck to catch the sweat. ‘Good girl, Rose.’

‘Are you happy?’ I asked.

‘Very.’

Wrapped in mosquito nets, we spent the first night in hammocks strung between trees, and listened to the noises of the rainforest at night. At intervals, a porter got up to tend the fire and patrol our camp. My stomach full and temporarily quiescent, the magic, strangeness and noises of the forest worked on me.

‘Tarzan loves Jane,’ said Hal softly.

I did not reply. In this big, strange world, words were inadequate.

After a second day of hard trekking, we reached the Yanomami settlement, abandoned after a logging company had started operations a mile away. Their huts remained, doughnut-shaped and thatched with palm leaves. Each could accommodate a large number, sometimes as many as two hundred, but every family had a hearth to itself. The central area was set aside for communal activities, such as dancing and singing.

I chose a hearth, and dumped my rucksack on the floor, which was of beaten mud. It had dried unevenly, and its colours shaded from blood to dark crimson. It was alive with insects. Any minute now, the tropical night would descend with the swiftness that took my breath away.

Hal appeared with the rest of our stuff. ‘Light’s going.’

‘Let’s get things sorted.’

‘Here.’ He handed me a cotton sleeping bag. I ignored it, clapped my hand to my mouth, ran outside and retched into the undergrowth.

I sensed that Hal was behind me. I stood upright and wrapped my arms across my stomach. ‘Tell me the truth,’ he said. ‘Could you be pregnant?’

‘I’m not sure. It’s possible,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t know’.

‘How late?’

‘Over three weeks.’

His hand closed roughly on my shoulder. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Don’t you mean what are we going to do?’ I closed my eyes. It was a question of will, and I would will it not to be so. ‘It could be anything. It happens. The system goes haywire and then adjusts.’

‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘Jeez, I hope so.’

The first of the two scheduled expeditions from base camp was by boat up to Zaztelal where the logging company had also set up an outpost and where sightings of the Yanomami had been reported.

Hypnotized by the yellow-green mirror over which we paddled, I sat in the back of the boat. Hal was in the prow, taking notes and photographs. After each shot, he recorded the position from the map references. He snapped me too or, rather, the hat that shaded my face.

Greedy with love, I feasted on every tiny detail about him. His hair, already bleaching in the sun, his excitement, the long legs braced against the movement of the boat. Just as greedily, I feasted my eyes on a humming-bird, whose plumage was of so iridescent a blue that it almost hurt to look at it, on the strange blooms that hung from the trees and the silent fish shapes in the water. The heat wrapped us in a second skin. Every so often our passage disturbed a pocket of methane gas trapped in the water and the stench filled our nostrils as we glided onwards.

At Zaztelal, the villagers came out to meet us. Over a communal meal they told us tales of the Yanomami, who had a reputation for aggression. They also told us of the logging company’s riches, which had showered over them, of the strange disease that killed many children, of their shock when the conquistadores moved on after they had plundered the forest.

Hal wrote, ‘Measles?’ in his notebook.

The following morning, we made a preliminary reconnaissance of the logging area, which was roughly ten miles in diameter. Here, severed tree trunks wept sap, the undergrowth had been pulverized, the soil polluted with oil and chemicals, and the sky was all too visible. The guide explained that the forest was renewing itself but not quickly. Normally, if Yanomami were around they would have been cultivating their crops of plantain and cassava. Also, monkey, deer and armadillo would have been in the forest.

We returned via an alternative route, which looped to the north and took us past the northern spur of an oxbow lake. Apparently, otters often chose them to build their dens in and I lingered, fascinated, while Hal loped over the rope bridge to the other side.

‘Come on,’ he said.

Half-way across, I stopped: I had never been good at heights. Drenched in sweat, I clung to the rope. ‘Come back, Hal,’ I called.

He walked towards me and the motion of the bridge made me retch. I gazed down at the water. Hot, sluggish, muddy… alien. If a fish from it flopped into my lap I would not recognize it. A mistake to think of fish – I was sick.

Hal waited until I had finished, then smoothed my hair back from my wet face. ‘Oh, Rose,’ was all he said, impatient to get going.

I took his hand, looked down – and screamed.

Gummed up by debris, forced into pools alongside the bank, the water slowed and eddied. Floating on the surface of one of those pools was a human hand with stiff, splayed fingers.

I pointed. Hal pulled me over the bridge then he and the guide edged down to the water. The guide took his stick and poked hard. There was a hiss, an explosion of bubbles and gas, and a body wallowed to the surface.

The face was decayed, half eaten and terrible.

Together they hooked a rope around one of the legs and tethered it to a root. ‘We’ll return to camp and get help,’ said Hal, and wrote down the location on the map. ‘Body here,’ he wrote. ‘Time: 14.15.’

The next day, we went back to the base camp, and Hal radioed the police in Quetzl.

It was not such a big mystery. Six weeks ago one of the logging firm’s European supervisors had gone missing. Apparently he had failed to pay the wages owed to a couple of native employees. They had taken revenge in the manner appropriate to them.

After that I had nightmares. I dreamt of the dead face, of hostile eyes, of being hunted in the strange, dangerous forest… and over and over again of Ianthe and me, watching the men tip-tupping our furniture out of Medlars Cottage.

I grew heavy-eyed and lethargic, and dreaded the nights when I tossed and turned in the hammock, listening to the rustle of insects in the palm roof.

During his convalescence, Sam and I struggled to complete the battle of Marathon (a thousand pieces), only to discover the last two were missing.

‘I can’t get better, Mum, until we find them.’ Sam sent me a pale smile.

I believed him and searched the house from top to bottom, for Ianthe swore the jigsaw had been complete when she brought it over.

I discovered the missing pieces, all right. If I had had my wits about me, it would have been the first place to look. The breastplate of the youth who was about to run from the battlefield and into myth was tucked under Sam’s pillow, along with a section of the olive tree that grew in the background.

With a tray poised on his knee, Sam sat up in bed and made a small ceremony of dropping those two final bits into place. ‘I wish you could stay at home,’ he said.

Chapter Nineteen

I shall will it not to be so.

So I said, so I believed, with the hard confidence and ignorance of twenty-one. But it was wasted, for I had come up against something stronger than will. I had been beaten by biology.