For as long as Lindi could remember she had fought the collective inclination to put people in their place, to give them a label. She had first come across it in secondary school, the way her classmates had instantly put her in a box marked ‘Posh’. It hadn’t helped that her parents, in a fit of political righteousness, had placed her in the local comprehensive where she was like some alien species. Her academic diligence prompted much curiosity but rarely any admiration. She hated being different but lacked the social guile to mask it. She blamed it on her parents, imploring them to be more like everybody else’s fathers and mothers. She used to make up prosaic weekend outings, imaginary trips to the shopping centres her mother loathed to replace the nights out in some crumbling community theatre where a travelling troupe of South African actors were putting on their latest experimental play.

She’d thought it would all end when she got to Oxford. But there it turned out she was not posh enough. One weekend house party at a fellow student’s country mansion had convinced her that she had no foothold in that world of privately schooled confidence and monied excess. ‘Your friend’s a bit serious,’ she’d heard someone say sotto voce to the friend with whom Lindi had travelled from Oxford. She knew enough about their type to understand that being accused of seriousness, like being a bore, was about as damning as it could get. And now this woman had decided that Lindi owed her presence in the BBC office to the amorous preferences of an ageing editor back in London. How different from the reaction of the airport porter just a couple of hours previously. He’d taken her at face value. Lindi clung to that thought.

That afternoon, Lindi checked into a guesthouse in Greenside.

She fought the temptation to lie down on the bed and forced herself to look at the list of calls she needed to make: there was an agricultural union representative, a Member of Parliament (an old friend of Anton’s), some journalists, a legal-aid charity, the bishop’s office in Mpumalanga. Hardly what you’d call the makings of a tourist itinerary.

The phone on the side table rang.

‘The taxi you ordered is waiting for you. Do you know how long you will be?’ asked the receptionist.

‘What taxi? I’ve only just arrived.’

‘We went out to check and he said he’s waiting for someone. We assumed it was you. None of the other guests has ordered a taxi.’

‘Well, there’s been a mistake. I’m not going anywhere.’