As she grew up and began to make up her own mind about what was happening in South Africa, Lindi couldn’t stop herself thinking that her parents had taken the easy option. She knew there were South African-born teenagers like her in London, whose parents really were a part of ‘the struggle’. She remembered the memorial service for the father of one of her friends. Afterwards the congregation had taken over the upstairs room in a pub. There had been plenty of talk about what he’d been like, how he’d always been the guy who would go the extra mile. Nobody said how he’d actually died, except that he’d been on a mission in one of the camps run by the African National Congress, in those days spearheading the liberation movement. It was always that way with the real activists. It had seemed to her that the less you knew about them, the more important their role in ‘the movement’. Not like her parents and their friends, who were constantly talking about the struggle as if it were a club anyone could join.

And there was the whole business of her name. Lindi was the diminutive of Lindiwe, ‘the awaited one’. It wasn’t that she didn’t like being called Lindi (though she got bored with explaining its meaning) but that she suspected it was a part of her parents’ image of themselves. How contrived to give your child a Zulu name, even if the only Zulu person you knew really well was the woman who washed the dishes and ironed the clothes. She was a part of their myth: that’s what Lindi thought when her mind took an uncharitable bent.

Lindi did what she always did when these thoughts came to the surface: she gave herself a gentle ticking off and willed them away. Self-control had always seemed a strength to her but it invariably felt like a dowdy little virtue against the expansive mood that was her family’s natural state. She’d spent so many years being the practical child, the one who injected a note of realism into a conversation, that she could no longer tell whether that was the way she was wired or whether it was merely a reaction to her family. She preferred the latter explanation, but worried the former was more accurate. What if she was always going to be the serious little girl in the photograph, the one who wanted to be spontaneous and free, like her brother, but so often retreated into studied reliability?

A clinking of bottles down in the cellar ended this train of thought.