The first people to call us were our cousins from Ma’s side, who I haven’t spoken to in decades. I had more fun with the calls than I should have.

“Oh, Cecile. You’re still alive? How wonderful! Yes, I’m very well, thank you! Delilah is marvelous too . . . What’s that? You heard I’m adopting a kaffir child? Oh no, you absolutely must have misheard . . . Yes, I can imagine how relieved you are to hear that . . . In point of fact, I’m fostering a black child . . .

“It’s the new South Africa, Cecile. You can’t say the word kaffir anymore. With the way you speak, I would almost be forgiven for thinking you’re one of those racist boers who still has the old apartheid flag up rather than embracing the new rainbow nation one . . . Oh? You do? Hello, Cecile? Are you there? Hello?”

That’s how most of those calls went, with only the slightest variations.

In between the ones I got from people I knew were the scary ones from anonymous callers, threatening to do harm to us or the baby. If I was willing to sell the farm before, I’m digging my heels in now just because I’m being bullied. The idiots have somehow made me side with Dee. I suppose there’s a first for everything.

Today, the town sends in the big guns in the form of a holy man.

“Good day, mevrou. I’m Dominee Johannes Oosthuizen from the Dutch Reformed Church,” he says when I open the door. “You won’t know me, but you may remember my father, Dominee Hendrick Oosthuizen? I took over from him thirty years ago when he retired.”

“Charmed, I’m sure. I’m Ruth Richardson, but then I think you already know that. Won’t you come in?”

“Thank you.” He steps over an ominous black bundle at the door’s threshold and into the house, seemingly filling up every corner of it with his huge frame. Despite his age, which looks to be in the late sixties, Johannes Oosthuizen is a formidable man. At six foot two, and broad-shouldered in the way of rugby players and wrestlers, he looks like someone who uses intimidation to get his own way.

I offer him a seat on the couch where Jezebel usually sits, knowing that he’ll leave with half of the fur she sheds on his clothes. It’s a pity she’s closed in with Dee in her room, as I’d like to subject him to the Jez test; I suspect she’d bare her teeth at him just like she did with the Coetzee brothers. She’s a good judge of character, that dog. “Can I get you some tea and a rusk?” I ask since that’s what Ma always served guests in the voorkamer.