Spokes’s first impression of Mrs Tom Fortenoy had been correct: she was indeed poor, but she had not always been. He walked into a home made up of five rooms, all of them barely breathing. Scents from the kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms all mingled in the minuscule sitting room in which he found himself as soon as he stepped through the doorway. Five rooms were considered a luxury in the townships where he lived, and made a man like him appear to be a prince amongst paupers. But here, in the heart of the city, in the caretaker’s quarters at the bottom of a block of flats, five rooms made a man seem down and out. The rooms seemed inadequate – unable to contain everything they were expected to. True, the rooms were small and did not seem to allow for much life to be lived in them, but Spokes was used to living in such rooms. The trick was to arrange the furniture in such a way that the rooms appeared to be larger than they really were – and therefore able to contain all the joys and disappointments of life. This was something that the lovely Loveness knew how to do perfectly. Every room in their five-roomed home was filled with sunshine and more happiness than any one man deserved.

Mrs Tom Fortenoy had no such guiding principle in her home arrangements. She had taken all the many years of her life and stuffed them into the five rooms. Spokes could only see into the kitchen and the bathroom from where he was sitting, but he believed the bedrooms were equally crammed with bric-a-brac. There was evidence everywhere – in the wedding photos framed in sterling silver, in the leather-bound A–Z encyclopaedia collection, in the many incomplete sets of the finest china placed on lace doilies in the glass display cabinet, in the Persian rug under the coffee table – that showed that the Fortenoys had not always been poor. They had had a rather comfortable life, a life some might even have considered affluent, and Mrs Tom Fortenoy (who could have used the money from the sale of some of these items) wanted this to be something that was remembered.

‘He was not really a bad man, my husband,’ Mrs Tom Fortenoy said. ‘He was not even a disappointment. He was a brilliant man in a country that only understands mediocrity. He played Othello … Macbeth … Coriolanus: all the great heroes. They wrote about him in the paper. Rave reviews. And then he fell from grace, and we moved here so that we could have a place to live in in exchange for his being a caretaker. But he cannot take care of anything any more, and so I do. I take care.’ She ran her hands over her soiled apron and Spokes noticed how chapped and calloused they were.

‘Mum!’ a voice called out from one of the bedrooms.