When she had finished her tea, she placed the cup and saucer on the ground, then reached for her handbag, opened it, and retrieved a packet of Madison cigarettes.

‘Do you mind?’ she asked. He shook his head. She hit the pack against her left palm, several times, and he got the impression that she was playing for time. She pulled out a cigarette, scooped a silver lighter from her handbag, lit the cigarette, and then, in near disgust, threw the pack of cigarettes and the lighter back into her handbag before clasping it shut. She put the cigarette to her lips, inhaled deeply, and exhaled a cloud of smoke.

‘I did not smoke in over twenty years – and now look at me. And all because of him. When he comes back, he will have a lot to answer for.’ She tried to smile, failed, then took another drag of her cigarette and exhaled the words, ‘Here it goes, Marion,’ without looking at Spokes. ‘You have to understand that I did not know. I grew up on a farm, the Hartley farm. It belonged to my grandfather and would one day belong to my father. All I knew was that while my father lived in the farm house, my mother, my grandmother, my cousins and I did not. We lived in a series of rough brick-and-mortar structures at the periphery of the farmstead. This arrangement of affairs did not seem at all odd to me. It was all I knew.

‘I rarely saw my father, and when I did see him, he barely spoke to me. I did not mind. It never occurred to me to mind because I did not feel the need to be special to him in any way. He seemed to like my mother well enough, and she would sometimes be happy because of him and she would sometimes be sad because of him. Sometimes when he came to visit her, she would chase us children out of the house and tell us to go and play with the children in the neighbouring village – and that, I suppose, was her way of loving him. When he did come and visit her, he told her she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and brought her some very pretty things to prove it – and that, I suppose, was his way of loving her.

‘My memories of that time are very happy. My grandmother had had four daughters, my mother being her youngest, and by the time I came along, my three aunts had had two children each. There was so much laughter and adventure that sometimes we cousins would get into fights just to do something different. I suppose, now that I think back on it, we may very well have been poor, but my grandmother’s pride would not let us feel it. She was the granddaughter of Frederick Courteney Selous, you see, and she never let us forget it.’