Sudan enters the novel through the circumstances of Mark Darcy’s death: he was travelling in the Darfur region when the armoured vehicle carrying him struck a landmine. The country is not developed as a setting in its own right; instead, it is bound to Mark’s humanitarian work and to Bridget’s continuing effort to live with his absence.

The fatal journey

A newspaper cutting that Bridget reads five years after Mark’s death identifies the incident as occurring in Darfur, Sudan. Mark, a British human-rights lawyer and internationally recognized authority in cross-border litigation and conflict resolution, was killed alongside Anton Daviniere, a Swiss representative of the UN Human Rights Council. The report situates the journey within Mark’s public work: he advised international bodies, governments, opposition groups, and public figures, and supported Amnesty International.

The cutting also recounts a concrete achievement that preceded the fatal journey. Mark had helped secure the release of British aid workers Ian Thompson and Steven Young, who had been held hostage by a rebel regime for seven months and were believed to face imminent execution. His work in Sudan is thus linked to both a successful rescue and the danger that ended his life.

Sudan in Bridget’s account

Bridget’s understanding of the journey is personal as well as public. In a letter to Mark, she acknowledges that he had worked for a long time to free the hostages and had taken care to make the mission safe. She tells herself that he would not have gone if he had believed there was a risk. That reasoning does not undo the loss, but it shows her trying to reconcile the man she loved with the choice that took him away.

The cutting’s account and Bridget’s private letter offer contrasting views of the same place. The report records Mark’s professional standing and the circumstances of the landmine incident; Bridget’s words register the intimate cost of his absence, including the children growing up without knowing their father. Sudan is therefore present less as a landscape than as the point where public service and family bereavement meet.

A place held in memory

The story’s earlier recollections of Mark’s death include the shock of seeing his face on television beneath a caption giving his years of life, while Bridget remembers the policeman and the faces at the door. Five years later, she is still drawn into the past by photographs and newspaper cuttings. Sudan becomes part of that recurring return: a location named in the account of the death, and in Bridget’s attempt to affirm that Mark’s mission had meaning even as she grieves the life they could not share.