Through the door's ornate glass pane, which depicted a flower of some sort held in place by leaden black roots – how had it survived for so long, being slammed in anger hundreds of times during fifty years of private wars waged by a succession of families? – he saw Kate Jessup and Julian Solomon. Suddenly happy and relieved, he hugged each one in turn, going beyond the brief and routine tactility that the exiles had brought home with them from cold and foreign cities, and that had now been adopted by all the comrades, as meaningless as the question, ‘How are you?’ No, they deserved a warm, almost passionate expression of gratitude. They were his friends, Kate in particular, and he needed their help. Not just because Lydia was in hospital, but because he would depend on their understanding when they learned the nature of her accident. And because of Mikey.

His calm and pleasant son had suddenly turned into a moody and reclusive stranger. Like that time, four years ago, when Lydia's family had taken to whispering among themselves and then abruptly sent their youngest girl, Mireille, away to Martha in Canada. This had aroused in Mikey a silent fury that Silas noticed and understood, because it was how he too reacted to the incomprehensible actions of others, allowing himself to be eaten away inside.

‘What's going on?’ Silas had asked Lydia then.

‘God, Silas, you walk around with your eyes in your arse,’ she had answered, despairing of her own vulgarity as much as his preoccupation with his work.

‘Oh, for shit's sake, you Oliphants are befok!’ Silas had said, when he realized that Lydia and her family thought there was something between Mireille and Mikey. Mireille had been born when Mam Agnes was in her forties, she was what Afrikaans people called a laatlam-metjie, ‘a late lamb’, and was only two years older than Mikey. The two had grown up together, like siblings, intimate and conspiratorial in the face of an indifferent adult world. Secretly, Silas had been intrigued by the idea that they had experimented sexually, as young people do all the time, even though the fatherly side of him revolted against the possibility that Mikey was having an incestuous relationship with his mother's sister.

He used to lie awake at night thinking that Mikey and Mireille had more life and laughter between them than the whole damn Oliphant family put together. They believed in instilling in children a forbidding, puritan innocence. How blind he had been not to have observed the exchange of black looks, the frantic, hissed conferences, the sad and brittle silences that enveloped them all, bright Lydia and forthright Gracie, avuncular Jackson and jolly Mam Agnes (the description ‘jolly’ suited the Oliphant matriarch, not only because of her rotund physique, but because she was especially cheerful in times of adversity), when they discovered the real or imagined sexual relationship between Mireille and Mikey.