Sarah summoned a watery smile. It would be impossible to put into words her feeling of dejection when she didn’t really understand it. She had made a fool of herself and tomorrow Hannah van der Beer would be feasting on her peculiarities. Maybe she should tell everyone about her humiliating mistake and try to laugh it off. In desperation she stared at Camilla and then she shrugged.

‘Thanks for the message. Better start on my homework.’

The grey Mercedes passed through the convent gates. Hannah van der Beer watched the playing fields and blue gum trees slide past the window in coloured stills of light and sky. She thought of Sarah Mackay who could sing and dance in front of people, who was good at drawing, who could mimic any animal she liked and make beautiful things with her hands.

‘And here am I, a big, brash, Afrikaans farm girl in size six shoes,’ Hannah thought. ‘I know they all call me a yaapie behind my back. No one ever thinks of me as Italian, like Ma.’

Carlotta van der Beer came from an Italian family in Johannesburg, but her husband was an Afrikaner who had always called her Lottie. Hannah turned to glance at her mother’s straight profile, at her dark hair twisted into a knot, at the tanned, roughened fingers curled on the steering wheel. Sarah Mackay’s mother was blonde and pretty. She wore lovely dresses and had smooth hands that did no housework.

‘Who was that girl?’ Lottie said

‘Someone in my class.’

‘Does she come from far away?’

‘Mombasa. They have a house by the sea,’ Hannah said. They could walk out of their garden on to a white beach with palm trees. The van der Beers had been to the coast on family holidays, and Hannah had never wanted to come home.

‘That’s far.’ Lottie’s tone was thoughtful. ‘It must be hard to be so far away from home. Wouldn’t it be nice to ask her out for lunch some weekend?’

‘What? Ask her to the farm, you mean? To have lunch with us at home?’ Hannah was a day pupil. An outsider really. Sarah was a boarder whose parents were English, or Irish maybe – from Europe, anyway. Different. The Afrikaans farmers did not mix much with the British colonial types or the English farming community. And her brother might tease Sarah and try some stupid horseplay, although he’d be impressed by her bird and animal imitations. Sarah had a brother of her own, though, so it would probably be all right. But if she found the farm too rough and ready she would tell everyone in their class, and Hannah would be more of an outsider than ever. She sighed. It was a difficult decision.

‘Well?’ Lottie was surprised at her daughter’s long silence. ‘What do you think?’

‘We could ask, I suppose. But I don’t know if she’d come.’