And the letters kept coming from home. They were soul-searching, longing letters and their loneliness and ignorance of the real nature of things, phrased awkwardly in Mr Mabusa’s stilted language, was as corrosive as acid to his peace of mind. We live in the hope of your return and pray for the future…Should your career bring you to near our humble world, please…My son, will my eyes behold my flesh and blood before I die…

Once in desperation he dragged off the best-looking member of the gang; they dressed neatly and had their photograph taken together by a street photographer. ‘Smile up, gents,’ he said. Boston sent it home. Dear Mother. I thought you might like to meet another teacher who is a friend of mine. His name is Butcher Songile and we are good friends, etc.

In his own world Boston was the man with the brain, but also a coward who got sick and then drank for days after a rough job. But he was a gentleman, Please, and Thank you, and May I, and Would you like me to? That counted for a lot in Marty’s eyes. Over a long time and almost unnoticed, they grew very close to each other. Other men came and went in her life, and after each departure he was still there in his corner with his drink and wry smile, with a word about this or that, ready to listen if she wanted to speak, talking on long after the others had gone, staying there into the early hours—until the day he did not leave at all. He evoked a deep, frustrated maternal impulse in her nature; his very clumsiness, his strange attempts at physical cruelty in the act, and the next morning remorse, those were the very things that held her.

It ended very abruptly, and a lot more started because of the first killing. The victim was the night watchman of the block of flats, and if they hadn’t killed him they would certainly have been caught, so there was that much to be said about it. But Boston got sick; it was the smell and feel of blood. And from his stomach the nausea went to his mind. Back in the shebeen he tried to vomit out his muck and misery of his past years in a torrent of words. One drink too many, too blinded to know what he was doing, he had turned on Marty and dragged her down as low as his words.

Marty had taught him all he was ever to know about love; it began as a friendship and ended as a strange, warm interlude that had no precedent and was to have no real sequel in his lonely life. But she became part of his degredation and he was sick—sick to his soul. She took it without flinching, and because there was so much between them she let it pass without taking any of the cruel or hard revenge she was capable of.