But Mireille's departure had had a terrible effect on Mikey. He had withdrawn from the family, suffered headaches and fevers, and seemed to be afflicted by an overwhelming lassitude. Tonight Silas had seen the same signs, except that Mikey no longer betrayed a childlike bewilderment, but the coldness of some terrible knowledge.

The arrival of Kate and Julian was indeed fortunate, he was just about to phone Kate anyway, he told his visitors. He had to go and see Lydia in hospital, but didn't want to leave Mikey on his own. The boy wasn't well at all. Kate readily offered to stay with Mikey, and Julian said he would keep her company.

‘You have no choice!’ she reminded him.

‘Oh God, the lesbian queen doesn't have her car with her!’ Julian said in answer. ‘What a demanding bitch she can be.’

Silas, grateful for the sense of easy familiarity that their biting jocularity brought, hugged them both once more. ‘You sure you can stay?’ he asked Julian.

Julian was going through a difficult period in his marriage. His wife Val was resentful that her family still had to make political sacrifices, now, when the struggle was over. A specialist in tropical diseases, Julian earned a meagre civil servant's salary, because the fledgling government needed his skills and could not afford to pay him what he would earn in private practice. Anyway, it was an honour to work for someone like Nelson Mandela, Julian said. And – he told Val – she was a banker and earned enough for both of them. What about their son, an ailing and sensitive boy, Val asked, did he, Julian Solomon, think he could simply sacrifice a boy's life in order to satisfy his own perverted sense of duty?

Repeating – verbatim – conversations that he had had with his wife, Julian reported to his close friends just how tense things were at home. Silas always responded sympathetically, saying in his mind that he understood, because he too lived with a person ‘whose whole sense of the future was made up of a series of anxieties’, but never dared to actually talk out loud about his relationship with Lydia. The two men ended up nodding to each other in silent solidarity, their sorrows no longer in need of articulation. Kate was more challenging. It had been rumoured that Julian was gay, and Kate said she had sensed it herself. She had confronted him about it. He should face the truth, and ‘tell it’, she urged Julian, for his sake as well as Val's.

Silas, who had been subjected to Kate's merciless brand of truthfulness, knew how difficult it was to live normally in the aftermath of having told an ‘enormous’ truth. But then, Kate had never lived a normal life, he rationalized. She would have made a great Catholic, finding as much pleasure in confessing a sin as in committing one.