PERHAPS WHEN one is old one feels that each word must be the truth.

I’m too old to hold on to this story any more. So I’m going to tell it to you. That’s all. I will tell it. I never told that journalist, and I’ve never told anyone at all. I’ve never told it.

I STARTED MY PAINTING in 1972. I had a studio where I painted at the end of my garden, in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.

I’d been painting for years. I was thirty-two.

In 1972 we also hired a new maid. We hired her, a Black maid, she joined Emily to help with the house and children. Josias, looking after the garden, had been with us for a while. So there we were: I, Howard, the two children, and the three domestic workers, who had rooms off the stone yard at the back of the house.

After my coffee and grapefruit, which I had on the patio, and a brief glance through the newspaper, I would go down into my studio. The children were at school, Howard at work, so I had, in the mornings, peace and solitude. You, you would know how I loved that. My studio was invisible from the house, it was hidden and shaded by the deepest trees, you could hear them rustle, like beings. A stone step. A push on the wooden door. A musty smell. And I was in. My canvases stacked against the whitewashed walls. Some light coming through the two windows, but not too much light. It was quite dim. Wooden frames of many sizes, how many possibilities these held! I would settle at once.

Sometimes I would hear one of the dogs barking, but that’s all.

In the afternoons the children came home, and my peace was done. I was usually in my room resting by the time they were home. And then later I would go out onto the lawn, lie on my pool-chair, and watch them swim. How happy, how carefree they were. Their bright bathing suits flashed, and the sun glinted on the water, its blueness and white crests in the children’s wake. Otherwise the afternoons were still, sometimes the dogs came down and barked at the splashing, and once Chester our white Labrador jumped into the water too. He never did it again after that, but it remained a vivid image in all of our minds I think, the day and the moment Chester went swimming.

Helena said to me last month, remember when Chester went swimming? She laughed. We were sitting in my living room, soft light, a winter night. Why did he never go swimming again after that, she said. Perhaps he didn’t like it, I said, after he’d tried it. Poor Chester, Helena said then. Why did she think of Chester that evening, that quiet evening in New York?

LATER, those afternoons at the pool, the children lay on the stones alongside and talked, or argued with each other, about this or that. I’d have to intervene, stop fighting, I’d say, stop! Then they’d run off, to the end of the garden, into their tree-house, hidden by other, taller trees, and shrubs. I’d hear them talking softly then, playing their pretend games I suppose. I’d read. My book, any book that I had with me. It would have been fiction, in those days I read mostly fiction. Nadine Gordimer’s new story collection was out, I had a hardcover copy. I would lend it to my mother after, I thought. I pictured her: on her red-polished porch, overlooking her garden, dry in the Free State sun, a buzz of cicadas by.