WHILE JOSIAS WAS AWAY Emily fed the dogs, and the neighbour’s gardener cleaned our pool. I made the arrangement with our neighbour, a nice enough woman, she didn’t mind. We paid the gardener for this directly, Howard gave him money every week. The pool wasn’t as clean as usual, leaves accumulated and the children complained. Ah Mom, I come out of the pool covered in leaves, Stephen said. He was swimming lengths then, practising for his galas, for his swim team. Some afternoons Helena refused to go into the pool, pulling a face at the leaves floating over the surface. She’d lie instead on her towel and talk to her brother, interrupting his lengths, and bothering him. Sometimes she’d just stay inside the house in her room, with a book.

Howard looked after the chlorine, I’d see him fiddling with the measure, then bending over the filter, frowning, in the evenings. I suppose you could say that we missed Josias.

WE DIDN’ T GO AWAY to the sea as we usually did, that year at Christmas. Howard was worried about work, he’d become so busy he had to go to his study after dinner and work, for a few more hours. We seldom sat at night any more, having coffee or tea on the patio. He had new clients, large steel companies, and another company affiliated with Anglo American, I think he became indispensable to some corporations, some executives, who relied on him exclusively. And there was now a government client, a major branch of a transportation portfolio (as he explained it to me). I didn’t really understand it all, or care, until later, later, when it became relevant. Relevant to everything.

But I think Howard also feared leaving the house for two weeks, with Joseph, Joseph alone at the house. Leaving Joseph undefended. What if something happened, a neighbour came by, or an intruder, and police were called, and . . . then what? I’d had vague thoughts about that myself. But Howard would never have said this to me, he knew how enraged I’d become. That we should miss our annual holiday because of the man Jack Benator had left here, for far too long? Howard felt some guilt I think, about the impact it was having on us all.

The children were disappointed about not going to the sea, the highlight of their year. I loved the sea, that place with its white beaches, its surf, its roar. I imagined my feet in the sand as we climbed the dune, rough scrub around us, a ragged wind. The smell, the sting of salt on my cheeks. And so wide, that beach, that sea. I always looked with wonder at the horizon, thinking, if I could see and see and see, I would see across the entire width of the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean stretched from our shore.

In the drawer of my dressing table I had the blue stone I’d found in a shop, I’d take it out in my room and hold it up to the light. In Johannesburg, the sea existed as a shimmering blue in my mind, not the blue of the sea, but the blue of a kind of peace. We didn’t feel at peace, that year.