He knew why he had a mistress. His wife could make everything sound like an accusation. He had, indeed, called the president’s office the day before in a last-ditch attempt to have the march stopped or postponed on some legal technicality – at least until after this meeting in Dubai. That reminded him: he needed to get that little shit Mkobi sacked. How the prissy bastard had made it into the president’s office he didn’t know. Mkobi hadn’t put his call through. ‘The president is a bit tied up just now,’ he’d said, as if he were addressing some junior minister. Motlantshe could have called the president on his direct line, or on his private mobile phone, but that wasn’t the point. Who the hell was Mkobi to decide whether or not he could speak to the president?

His temper had not been improved by the fact that Mkobi, the presidential chief of staff, had been right: it was too late to do anything about the march, but Motlantshe liked to reach these conclusions for himself and not have some jumped-up bureaucrat treat him like he was a novice. After all, he’d done time in jail for ungrateful bastards like Mkobi. Besides, judging by that voice of his, he was probably one of those homos or something.

‘No, I remember, I’m just tired after the flight.’

‘Didn’t you sleep on the plane?’

There it was again: the accusatory tone. The needling suggestion that the reason he was tired was because he had failed to sleep, that it was his fault. Had it been the other woman, she would have whispered sweet nothings into his ear and told him she would wipe away all his tiredness just as soon as he was back in her arms.

‘Okay, I have to go,’ he said. ‘I’ll call after I meet these fellows from London.’

‘And don’t forget it’s Lesedi’s birthday this week,’ she threw in, for good measure. Lesedi was their only son, born in the days of struggle.

‘Of course I remember,’ he snapped back.

‘By the way, Jo, that minister, the Coloured fellow …’ Priscilla continued to use the old apartheid lexicon for ‘mixed race’.

‘You mean Jake, Jake Willemse?’

‘That’s him, yes. He called here.’

‘What’s he doing calling you?’

‘He said he couldn’t get hold of you. He was angry. He wants to know what Lesedi is doing in Mpumalanga. He says Lesedi is interfering. He says if you can’t stop him, he’ll deal with Lesedi himself.’

‘Who told Lesedi to go to Mpumalanga? What’s the boy doing over there?’

‘He says he wants to see things for himself, talk to local people to find out why they are so upset by this land thing. And, Jo, you have to stop calling him a boy. He’s a man now.’