‘It was me, not you, who sucked the poison out of Dad’s snakebite when he took us camping,’ Jeremy reminded his sister. ‘Let me take over—’

‘Why can’t I suck my own thumb?’ Bessie asked as he did so.

‘Because you might not suck hard enough,’ Janis patiently explained. ‘If you tell me where you keep your first aid box, Laura, I’ll fetch it.’

‘I’ll fetch it for you.’

Such was the family picture the threesome made, Laura had to get out of the room, lest her emotion was written on her face.

She hadn’t known that Jake had been bitten by a snake. Nor could she envisage him going camping. By no stretch of the imagination was he the outdoor type. But he was the sort of father who would do anything for his kids’ sake, the more so after their mum died. Though Jake had told Laura that his wife had suffered a lengthy illness, her mind had not then encompassed the full effects of that upon him and his children.

Now, she imagined Janis and Jeremy tiptoeing into their mother’s sickroom when they came home from school. And Jake’s taking them to visit her during her frequent spells in hospital, afterwards returning with them to a house that no longer resounded with Julia’s laughter.

The children had said that their mother had laughed a lot. And that their family was known among friends as the Four Jays, on account of their all having names beginning with that letter.

When Laura first met Jake, at a cocktail party in Johannesburg, there was about him a sadness no longer there. Would he have invited her to dine with him if she hadn’t remarked that his face was the kind she wouldn’t mind photographing?

Probably not, she thought now. It was as though he had needed prodding from a trough of despondency in order to return her smile. Also as if he hadn’t really looked at her until she made that remark.

‘I’m not chatting you up, I’m a professional photographer,’ she recalled saying.

‘Then I’ll make a bargain with you,’ he had replied. ‘I’ll let you take my picture if you’ll let me take you to dinner.’

Their relationship had proceeded from there. Blossomed described it better. But it had not included their sleeping together, and Laura would have been surprised if it had. She was aware from the first that Jake was a conventional man. Nor had she failed to see the irony of his kindling in her heart what her long list of bedmates had notably not kindled.