They fell silent, each overtaken by his own preoccupations. Perhaps they wanted to offer support, advice, think back to the days when their companionship would have allowed them the freedom to confide in each other more fully. Silas smiled ruefully, raised his hand and summoned the waitress.

‘No, not the same. Pastis, you know, tastes of liquorice,’ he said, explaining to the waitress that it was a French drink, that it went white when you added water, only they didn't want water in it.

‘Something to celebrate?’ Alec asked.

‘Commiserate. My failure to get the post of Ambassador to France.’

‘What?’

‘My Minister refused to support my candidacy.’

‘Mean bastard. But why do you want to go to France?’

‘Well, because I need a change, the post is available – or was – and I thought I'd explore life a little, you know, meet new people.’

‘Christ, about time!’

An uncomfortable silence fell between them once more. Alec wanted to tell Silas something important. Silas sensed it, and was ready to listen. Fuck! He hoped he wasn't going to tell him that he was HIV-positive, or something truly dreadful like that. Not good enough just to have a disastrous affair these days.

Both raised their hands to get the waitress's attention, and in the midst of all these familiar gestures, this ingrained intimacy, Alec began to speak. His voice was low and gruff, a tone that Silas had never heard him use before. Although it sounded practised, as if he had tried it out when he was alone, looking at himself in the mirror or staring out of a window at the mirage of a mirrored world, Alec seemed astonished by the strangeness of his own voice, and by its painfulness.

‘Si, you know that I worked for them, the cops, years ago. I couldn't help it, I could not stand pain, not like you.’

Suddenly, the voice Silas had heard on the night Lydia was raped came back to him. Exaggeratedly low, someone trying to disguise his normal timbre, reducing it to something almost guttural. Yet it had attracted his attention, a turn of phrase, a slurred ‘r’, a mispronounced ‘g’ – at times, Alec still uses a hard, Afrikaans ‘g’ in words like ‘gesture’ – despite his pain. Three cracked ribs, he recalled, made him feel heroic afterwards.

Alec had been there! A traitor. Silas stopped himself. What a crude word. Who knows what goes on in the hearts of people who are confronted with such stark choices: work for us, betray your friends and comrades, or endure unending pain. Curiously, no one had ever subjected him to such physical and psychological torture. What would he have done if Du Boise had offered him Lydia's safety in return for his allegiance?

‘Gladly, I would have given it gladly,’ he muttered to himself.