I thought of Joseph then. I thought of the charts, the maps, the work at night. I thought of the article I’d read just that week, about an explosion in a small mine, on the West Rand. Machinery damaged, no person injured; the mine disabled for four days.

I said nothing to Howard driving in the car, nothing about these thoughts. Perhaps he was thinking about similar things, but I don’t know. Maybe he was just concentrating on the road; perhaps he was worrying about a work problem. Perhaps that is true.

But the children were happy, first bantering, then arguing in the back seat. Chester and Teddy know we’re going away, Stephen said, did you see how they were jumping and barking when we left? Helena laughed. They’ll miss us, she said. No, they won’t miss you, Stephen said. Only me. And then Helena was upset and I had to intervene: a familiar scene, in our family.

There wasn’t much traffic. We drove.

And then: flat space. The veld, stretching yellow-brown into the distance, some shanties, and a lone figure walking along the side of the road. I’ve said before: I only saw beauty in that landscape later, other artists had seen beauty in it forever, but I, not I. A mangy dog, an abandoned dog. A long, straight road, to the Free State.

Free State. I didn’t think of the irony, then.

And the towns we passed: Vereeniging; Vanderbijlpark, Sasolburg. The sign for Kroonstad, then we knew we were close. And then: the bridge over the Vaal. My heart lifted. The river. How I loved that river. Its strange pale brownness; its power. I always imagined its long journey, so many miles more that we couldn’t see, through and across veld, that vast swath, passing small kopjes, and a solitary thorn tree, one of the thorn trees that I tried to draw. The beauty that I later saw.

WE REACHED VILLIERS, and I felt as though I’d come home. Of course, I had.

We arrived at the house, Maggie came out as she heard the car doors opening, slamming, and the children’s excited voices. Maggie, who looked more frail, more vague, than ever. Even diminished somehow, in size, and stature, her thin legs, the slippers she wore, inside and out. Or perhaps that’s because I’d known Maggie since she was a young woman, first come to work for my mother. A young woman whose English was non-existent at the beginning. My mother had been her first employer. My mother thought Maggie came from the country, some place, some place my mother didn’t know. Or perhaps, she said, she came from the Location, the sprawling shanty town on the road leading to Villiers. My mother didn’t really know. And the Location: a mysterious place to me, it always glinted in its flat, dull way in the sun, as we drove past.

Maggie had arrived one day at my mother’s garden gate. Job, she said. My mother was standing on her porch, in the shade of her porch. ‘Job’ was the only English word Maggie knew. And my mother hired her.