Silas turned to look at Alec, to catch his eye. He was going to say, ‘Of course, Alec really wanted to get away from that Slamse chick who brought him koesisters on Sunday morning, syrupy Mona Gassiep, her lips oozing lipgloss …’ But at that moment he saw Michael instead, and his voice trailed away, his ostentatious bard's way of remembering things coming to a mumbled conclusion. A man suddenly aware of his own loudness, as if he had just heard himself speak for the first time, acknowledging with some shame that the showy voice, with its self-important tone, was his own. His audience, observing how Silas had lapsed into an embarrassed silence the moment his son Mikey walked onto the stoep, laughed politely, then drifted away to rejoin Jackson and Mam Agnes's party, which continued its subdued celebrations inside the house.

Michael stood there, next to Jackson and Mam Agnes, watching Silas, with the same sardonic smile he used to wear when he was sent to find his father in a township backyard, or on the island of grass in Berea that had become Silas's beer-and-manhood refuge of solitude.

A young woman was at Michael's side, tight black dress, shock of bright orange hair. That must be Vinu, Silas thought. She waved at someone, an elegant, youthful movement of her hand, laughed, whispered into Mikey's ear. She glowed. The colour of dirty honey, Silas thought, a bushie goddess. Beauty honed on the same bastard whetstone as I. We will make no more like her, or like Michael, for that matter. Our ambitions are too ordinary, a house, a car, a garden. We no longer dream of painful beauty when we make love.

Only Alec tried to hold onto that captivating moment, the promise of a past to be richly recalled, a mood of nostalgia that he had hoped to provoke, but his laughter was disagreeably harsh and earned him nothing but one of Grade's cold and scornful looks. He too fell quiet, shaking his head in one last gesture that said, ‘What great times those were!’ He was too preoccupied with his own disappointment to observe Silas's strange, excited expression. What others might have mistaken for misery, the self-conscious realization of his own foolishness, Alec would have recognized in Silas's beaming face: it was enthralment, blatantly sexual, an agitation not evoked in him by a woman in a long time.

Silas saw Lydia move instinctively towards Mikey, then stop when Vinu leaned close to whisper in his ear. Deterred by their laughter, by their youthful intimacy, she turned away, and, observing Silas's fascination, came up to him and said: ‘Silas, you're staring!’

The party quickly broke up. Michael seemed to start the process. He tugged quietly at Vinu's sleeve, helping her to escape from Silas, who had cornered her on the stoep. ‘You're Johan's daughter!’ Silas had exclaimed, when Michael introduced them. Silas kept up his half-drunken patter about Vinu's parents, about how they all went back a long way, his manner flirtatious, leaning up against a wall, legs crossed at the ankle, drink dangling from a limp wrist.