‘I didn't mean to. I followed him out of the store, then suddenly found him sitting down, as if he was waiting for me.’

Lydia straightened her leaning body as the car straightened, peering into the side mirror as she entered the slow city traffic.

‘Christ, Lydia, it just happened, I just ran into him. A fucken accident.’

She pulled the car halfway up the drive, switched off the engine and got out. Silas sat for a moment, then followed her into the house. She was already in the bedroom, pulling off her clothes.

‘Lydia…’

‘I'm going to be late, Silas, I'm on theatre duty tonight.’

He sat on the bed, watching her change her clothes. The white, staff nurse's uniform soon gave her a new and formidable freshness. She cursed her own distraction, as her pantyhose caught in the skirt's zipper. She hitched the skirt up, freed the hose and smoothed them upwards, over her thighs and buttocks. Her legs acquired a contained kind of sensuality. Then she pulled down the skirt, pinned on the gold-embossed nameplate that had once been such a source of pride to her mother, grabbed her bag and the car keys. She said a hasty ‘Bye’, and left Silas sitting on the bed. He heard the door close, the customary quiet click of the latch. She was always quiet, so precise in everything she did. He heard the car start, the engine rev, heard it settle down to an idle.

He went to the kitchen and opened a beer, slowly poured it into a tall glass that he tilted towards the bottle, until it was nearly full. He held the glass upright, continuing to pour, slowly, until a delicate head of foam gathered at the mouth without spilling over. But the pleasure he felt at pouring his beer so artfully quickly disappeared.

Overcome by a sudden, bloated feeling, he abandoned the glass of beer and the empty bottle on the long, austere dining-room table and sat down in the old easy chair that he had salvaged from his mother's house in Doornfontein, when the place was declared ‘white’ and the family was evicted. That had been his mother's last nomadic stop in her journey from suburb to suburb, singled out for pursuit, she believed, by the grey-suited men who implemented the apartheid laws. In his eyes, taking that chair from the ruins of his mother's home and life was the only sentimental thing he had ever done. Now it creaked under his weight, deepening the silence in the house.