Sometimes I would talk to her about the political situation, it was a conversation of tremendous awkwardness.

It will change one day, I would say. Yes ma’am, I hope so, she’d answer. But she looked doubtful, and I’m sure I looked doubtful, and pained, and there was nothing else I felt able to say.

Once I thought I must say something more. You know . . . I said. Mandela? She looked at me, startled.

He will come out one day you know, I said. And he will lead this country.

I felt anguished as I said it. Emily was still looking at me, I couldn’t discern what she felt, what she intended with her look. She nodded. She said nothing.

As the months and years went on I tried to say a version of this every once in a while. It felt necessary. It felt necessary to say it. I felt like a terrible person, as I said it. And then I’d go to my bedroom and feel such rage at our situation, and shame.

JOSIAS SPOKE very little English. He had come only recently to Johannesburg from the Transkei, and he was a young man. I’ve mentioned the sound of the radio from his room, which I’d hear in the late afternoons. Voices in his language (which was Xhosa), and music. He wore the same tattered shorts every day, they hung on him, as he was so lean, and a loose shirt, dun-coloured. I knew nothing about him. He had a pass to work for us, that’s all I knew. On his day off he disappeared through the whitewashed back gate in the morning, dressed in long pants, and he returned in the evening, sometimes I’d see him walking up the street from the main road, where his bus would have been. I pictured a long bus ride, and slow. Crowded. Through the streets of Johannesburg, to . . . where? To Soweto perhaps, distant and dun, under the wide pale sky, where he might have friends. I don’t know, I didn’t know.

Stephen once asked me to explain to Maya, his younger daughter, how it was, how it was that I knew so little about Josias and his life. Maya was doing a school project on apartheid-era South Africa, something like that. Stephen suggested going out for tea and chatting, Maya would love that, he said. I pictured us at our favourite coffee shop, the black-and-white iced cookies she liked so much. But then I felt overwhelmed. I thought: where to begin? And where to end? So I told Stephen the girls were better off reading books, the many history books about it, I would not be able to have tea that day. I really said that, I did.

JOSIAS CLEANED the pool every day, sweeping, sweeping with the long pool brush. I had an idea it was a job of peace and calm, but now — now — I think it was me, just me, who felt that. I’d see him fiddling with the filter at the pool’s edge, and sometimes he’d have broken conversations with Howard about the chlorine levels; I knew nothing about that. One evening Howard took him in the car to the hardware shop, they must have had a problem, and I imagine them there, the two, talking and puzzling over the pool and its chlorine levels. There was laughing between them. Howard — I’ve said it before — was a kind man.