It was during a mind-numbingly faithful production of The Boyfriend that Tom, performing while he was three sheets to the wind – which was the only way he could go through with the performance – had abruptly turned to the audience and told them that they were emotionally, morally, spiritually and intellectually bankrupt. Then he vomited all the gin and tonic that he had consumed that day down the front of the leading lady’s pastel-coloured drop-waist dress.

Needless to say, Tom was banned from acting in any production in the City of Kings after The Boyfriend incident. Luckily for him, by this time Emil Coetzee’s fortunes had changed for the better. He had conveniently married Kuki Sedgwick, the descendant of wealthy pioneer stock; he had fathered only one child, a son; and most ingeniously of all, he had somehow managed to turn his entry-level job at the Department of Native Affairs into the creation of an entirely new government department called The Organisation of Domestic Affairs. In a surprisingly short space of time, Emil Coetzee had become a man so well known and influential that Tom could make a living by impersonating him.

A recent performance at the Palace Hotel had proved so lucrative that Tom had felt Fortune smile on him once more. Feeling the full warmth of that smile, he had gone to Ascot and bet all the money on a horse called Lucky Strike. The horse had not lived up to its name. With his pockets empty, Tom had not even bothered to go home because he knew that Doreen, his wife, who had informed him that she was at the end of her tether, was now beyond grace.

What a simple but cruel twist of fate, Tom thought as he watched the beige bakkie continue its journey along Main Street. Tom’s stomach growled and he imagined that Emil Coetzee was going to have a wonderfully warm and scrumptious breakfast at the home of a woman who was still full of grace … a woman who did not even know that she had a tether to reach the end of.

Some guys have all the luck.

As Beatrice Beit-Beauford and Kuki Coetzee sat in the courtyard of the Pear Tree Inn having their breakfast, Beatrice was pleased that Kuki was sitting with her back to the road because that way she did not see Emil driving by in his beige bakkie. Probably on his way to another woman, Beatrice thought as she slathered butter onto two still-hot halves of a scone, and, with satisfaction, watched it melt before plopping on dollops of strawberry jam.

In Beatrice’s decided opinion, Emil Coetzee was as predictable as sunrise and sunset, but his presence did not soothe the way those two moments of the day did. Emil was the very opposite of a balm; he was the sharp thing that cuts deep and leaves indelible, ever-festering wounds. Beatrice was sitting opposite one such wound, her best friend, Kuki, whose eyes were now, after her separation from Emil, usually either damp with ready tears or veined red by fallen tears. It was obvious from the way he had driven past that Emil had not seen Kuki sitting in the courtyard, which was no surprise to Beatrice. He had not seen Kuki throughout their long marriage, so why would he see her now that they were finally divorced?