This had not prevented him from sending her a piece of wedding cake and a photograph of himself in his wedding suit, inscribed To my dear aunt, from your faithful nephew, Phuti. With a more forgiving woman, this might have resulted in a letter of thanks, or at least a message, but neither had been forthcoming. Phuti did not take offence—it was not in his nature to do so—and now, ignoring her previous bad behaviour, he called his aunt and asked her whether he could possibly come for dinner that evening. “Just me,” he said quickly. “I shall be alone.”

The aunt had been quick to agree to this self-invitation. She had been hoping to see him but had been unable to swallow her pride sufficiently to make the first move. And this reference to being on his own intrigued her: Was it too much to hope that he had tired of the whole business of being married to Mma Makutsi and was keen to revert to bachelor status, preferably living with her and occupying the bedroom in which he had stayed on his last visit? She could feed him up again—as she had done during his convalescence—and make him happy. It would be better, far better, for him to be away from that dreadful woman with her large round glasses and her Bobonong ways.

It was not without trepidation that Phuti parked his car at the aunt’s front gate that evening and began his way up the short path to her front door. The last time I was here, he thought, I was a single man. And now I am a married man with a talented and attractive wife. I was a boy back then; now I am a man.

He glanced at the garden in the fading light of evening. There were the paw-paw trees from which his aunt had picked the heavy yellow fruit she had served to him with lumpy custard. There was the tree that he had climbed when he visited his aunt as a twelve-year-old; the branch on which he had strung a swing that had broken at a crucial moment and sent another boy, a friend from school, sailing through the air to a broken leg and three days in hospital. And there, parked beside the house, in the position it had occupied for so many years, was the unfriendly brown car with its pinched windows and its sign that said Don’t Waste Water. That sign had always been there, although his aunt, as far as he could make out, had never been particularly abstemious when it came to water. The patch of grass outside her house was always liberally irrigated, and he had noticed that the baths she ran for herself almost reached the rim of the tub.