He stares at the ceiling, thinks of all the flaws he has deciphered in its ornate patterns. He has switched on the CD player, exploits its capacity to load half a dozen discs at once, idly switches from one to the other, back and forth at random, filling the room with a babel of music. Segovia sonatas, the hypnotic roughness of township kwaito, Samuel Barber's siren-like sadness, all disconsolately woven together. Finally, he flings the remote-control device across the room, allows the music to follow its own, more predictable sequence.

Feverishly, he writes in his head a sarcastic analysis of the prose translation of Homer's Odyssey that Miss Anderson has set as ‘required reading’. He visualizes his words, their icy structure and sneering tone. Later he will type it up, word for word, copying from his mental text.

Still his anger at Mireille's response to his call will not soften. At first, her voice was as he had anticipated: innocent and unguarded, the phone answered precisely at the fourth ring, as if responding to a prearranged signal.

‘Mikey, Mikey? Is that you?’

Then she had asked, ‘What time is it?’ and answered herself, ‘My God, it's five fifty,’ her tone harsher, the time read to the precise minute, a bedside clock dimly raised.

Her initial, sleepy response had reminded him how gentle and childlike she was when just awoken, and he wanted to explore her surroundings, establish his disembodied place in them, imagine himself there in her room, standing at her bedside, feel her cloistered heat.

‘Describe your room, Mireille, tell me what you see…’

‘It's not even six o'clock, everyone's still asleep.’

His taken-aback silence, the sound of him fumbling with the phone, evoked a coarse, whispered response.

‘Mikey, let me call you back later.’

‘Okay.’

‘No, wait.’ She had decided there was no better time to say what was on her mind. ‘Perhaps we should not call each other, or write, or send e-mails. I would like you not to contact me, okay? Mikey, are you there?’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Well, perhaps what we did was wrong, we were so young, we didn't know what we were doing…’

‘It was innocent.’

‘Your mother doesn't think so … they made my life hell. I don't want to go through all that again … Mikey?’

He had quietly replaced the receiver and retreated to his bed, a slow, corrosive lassitude spreading through his limbs.

Mireille's betrayal – ‘What we did was wrong’ – is so easily explained, she has grown up, she has acquired an adult's sense of shame, the compulsion to confess, even if falsely, in order to obtain absolution. Is this how her memory will adapt, accommodating new realities, the need to get on with her life, disregarding the injustice of having been sent into exile by her own family, seeking no retribution? A man in her life perhaps, someone she loves, a clean-faced Canadian who has no need to know her ‘shame’, real or perceived. She has entered into a pact of silence with Martha and Lydia, made an accommodation with her past.