For all the twenty years of her married life up to that day, Kuki had thought that her husband, Emil Coetzee, regardless of whatever he did with other women, did not love them. She believed that what had happened to him at the Selous School for Boys had left him too broken to love anything. She had taken a sad kind of refuge in that belief. But as she watched him hold Marion Hartley, she discovered and knew another truth.

As Kuki had walked away from the Stockleys’ sun room, many responses had presented themselves to her, and out of all of them, she had chosen anger because she liked its multitude of dangerous, pointy edges, and she liked how, if need be, she could use it both as a weapon and as a shield.

Now, sitting in front of the mirror on her forty-third birthday, Kuki realised that instead of pointing that anger towards Emil, she had used it solely as a weapon against herself and had long become a festering and always weeping wound.

B stuck her head through the doorway. ‘I come successful in my quest,’ she exclaimed. She held up a Gordon’s plastic bag. ‘The cocoa powder has been purchased. It is Independence Day and all businesses are closed, but I suppose I am not Beatrice Beit-Beauford for nothing. I’m off to make your chocolate cake myself,’ she declared, and left the room.

Kuki looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her face was made up. Her body was dressed up. Ready for the party. The party just for her. Her Independence Day party. She looked good – very good – for forty-three. How had that happened? she wondered as she contemplated going to help B with the baking of the chocolate cake. She started to stand, and then stopped. Today was her birthday: her day. She did not have to do anything else but be happy in it. She practised a smile in front of the mirror, and tears immediately welled up in her eyes. Kuki clapped her hands. ‘That’s it! No more pretending at happiness, Kicks,’ she said. ‘Any happiness you feel from today onwards will be the genuine article.’

The party that was just for her was, of course, filled with people Kuki did not quite know. They were members of B’s set, intentionally so. ‘All the people you know are mothers and housewives,’ B had said, explaining her reasoning. ‘You need to know and experience other ways of being a woman.’ What other ways of being a woman were there? Kuki had wondered.