The night before Loveness’s wedding day, her aunts had sat her down and, as was the custom of ukulaya, told her that marriage was not something one sent a rat to beforehand and then asked the rat what the future marriage held. Marriage was something that – for the lucky ones – started off well, and then presented issues that became predicaments which tested the bonds of marriage, predicaments which, if left unresolved, made marriage a sour thing in the mouth. Again, her aunts stressed, that was for the lucky ones. For the unlucky ones, marriage was a living hell through and through. Her aunts wished and hoped and prayed that she would be one of the lucky ones, but even if she was one of the unlucky ones, their advice to her was the same: she would have to endure whatever came her way because men were … well … men, and marriage was all about patience and fortitude for a woman.

Loveness had barely listened to her aunts give her this not-so-sanguine advice because she was too busy admiring her immaculately white organza-and-chiffon wedding dress with faux pearls along the high collar and imagining what a perfect couple she and Spokes would make as they stood at the altar.

It was true that she, like all the married women in the world who had come before her, had not been able to send a rat ahead of her, but if she had, it would have brought back only the best tidings. From the moment she married Spokes Moloi, Loveness was convinced that she was the happiest and luckiest of women. She had waited for something, and it had arrived.

Spokes was one of those extremely rare men of whom you get the measure as soon as you meet him, and she had known, as he stood looking lost in the twilight that day he had followed her from the City of Kings, that she would never have to worry about another woman or a raised hand or an inability to provide.

Even when the children she had so desperately wanted to give him when she saw him interacting with Dikeledi did not come – the children she had bought the five-piece Formica kitchen table for, the children she and Spokes had dreamed of the eight-roomed house by the river in Krum’s Place for, the children who would ensure that Spokes and Loveness Moloi carried on in many ways long after they were gone – Loveness knew herself to be the happiest and luckiest of women.