She could put up with all of that. She had no choice, except the one-way ticket to isolation that a divorce would trigger. Josiah had threatened her with that prospect more than once, pointing out that he had the power to make sure the girls would stay with him. She wasn’t going to give him that chance. And he knew it. So they lived their separate lives, an arrangement founded on a sort of truce that gave Josiah licence to do whatever he wanted outside the home but gave her the right to decide what went on inside it – and that included bringing up the children.

Any hope Priscilla had had that the death of their beloved Lesedi might, just for a while, draw the family together had evaporated at the end of the funeral ceremony, just a few hours earlier. Josiah had seen her and the two girls into the car and said he would join them later. As the chauffeur eased the car out of Regina Mundi’s gates, Priscilla had watched her husband climb into the back seat of Jake Willemse’s official limousine.

Priscilla and the girls had made the journey back to their Houghton mansion in silence. Her daughters had disappeared upstairs as soon as they arrived home. A couple of minutes later she’d heard the canned laughter of a TV show, another rerun to which her daughters could mime the script. She’d called one of the house-workers, a distant and destitute relative, and asked her to take two mugs of hot chocolate to the girls. She’d gone into the kitchen and seen that the cook had left a meal for them. When the maid came back downstairs, Priscilla had told the girl to put the food away and take the rest of the evening off.

It was eight in the evening. Priscilla had just buried her only son – and lost a companion. She was alone.

She made herself a cup of tea and sat down at the breakfast bar, the polished black granite reflecting a featureless outline of her head and shoulders. She stared at it. There were no distinguishing marks, not even enough to show she was a woman, let alone a mother. Just a shape. An empty, dark shape.

Lesedi had been a toddler when Josiah was jailed. His release years later was barely noticed, coinciding as it had with the release of such anti-apartheid luminaries as Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada. Priscilla remembered the years when Josiah was behind bars as among the happiest she had known. She never tired of telling people she was ready to wait for him, whether it was one year or a hundred.