In his short story, The Return, Joseph Conrad writes about shame and misunderstanding (and marital strife), observing a particular kind of emotional distance that may well have mirrored the experience of many immigrants in service.

In one particularly poignant passage, he considers his protagonist’s “heart-probing, fiery sense of dangerous loneliness, which sometimes assails the courage of a solitary adventurer in an unexplored country”.

Conrad once described loneliness as naked terror. “To the lonely themselves,” he wrote, “it wears a mask”.