But what was he going to do with the information she had given him about Du Boise? God, nothing stupid, she hoped, like attacking the man. Did young Mikey know that Du Boise had raped his mother? Had he realized that she, Kate, would know about it? That Silas would have confided in her, inevitably, because they were friends and ‘comrades in arms’ ? How hackneyed, how unfashionably nostalgic that term had become in this sceptical age, when to believe in the beauty of comradeship and loyalty to a cause was seen as weak and sentimental.

She pulled the car up under a tree, squeezed Silas's hand. An unexpected gesture. Thank God you're not your son! But it brought Silas back to the question he wanted to ask.

‘Kate, just a minute.’

Another moment of dread.

‘Do you remember Du Boise?’

‘Oh, Silas, I thought that was behind you…’

‘You know he's dying of cancer?’

‘How did you find out? Never mind, I don't want to hear.’

‘Is that not poetic justice?’

‘What kind of cancer?’

‘The worst, skin cancer, visibly eats away the outsides, uncovers the rotting flesh.’

He spoke as if imagining a photograph he had mulled over, its shocking import absorbed in minute detail.

‘Oh, not before lunch!’

‘Well, I thought you might want to know.’

‘I've got a better one.’

‘What, who?’

‘Van Jaarsveld, the Captain Van Jaarsveld.’

‘Kaptein Duiwel?’

‘Ja! AIDS, the man is dying of AIDS.’

‘My God, that's poetic justice!’

‘Come on, let's go and find Julian, I need a drink.’

They found Julian seated at a table at the end of a stone terrace, his tie undone and his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest. But even his lazily outstretched legs could not hide his weariness, the posture of someone desperate to relax. From behind dark glasses too small, too fashionable for his rather craggy face (already it bore the signs of patriarchal ruin, to be described in the future as ‘distinguished’ rather than lovely, as he might have hoped), he stared out across the smooth lawn. A sprinkler shot sprays of water into the air, and his head moved from side to side, following its intermittent rotation, entranced by its precise mechanics, oblivious to the cloud of water drifting in on the breeze and steadily soaking the jacket he had flung over the cast-iron railing.

Julian sat up with a start when Kate and Silas approached, hugged each of them in turn, kissed them on their cheeks. He was filled with the exuberant rituals of his new-found freedom. He was openly gay now, no, blatantly and hungrily so, he always corrected himself. His breath had the lemony smell of alcohol.

‘Been here since breakfast?’ Kate joked.

‘Nothing like a gin with your eggs,’ he answered.

He had a bottle of wine chilling in an ice bucket, all ready for them.

‘Damn,’ Julian said, as Kate retrieved his soaked-through jacket and hung it over a spare chair.