You could understand it less benevolently. Perhaps my mother was simply lazy, and enjoyed her comfortable life, and wouldn’t have wanted to give it up. Worse, maybe she derived a perverse satisfaction from the uneven, unequal relationship she had with Maggie, and couldn’t imagine losing it. I don’t know which of these understandings or interpretations is true, or more true, and so I have to conclude that they may all be true.

BUT WE ALL RELAXED in Villiers, those closing days of 1972.

Joseph in the garden room receded from my mind. But then I’d remember him, with a start, and it was like remembering a distant nightmare. Once, in a dream, there was his white shirt, its ironed smell.

The children went swimming with Howard and my father in the river. They’d leave with whoops of joy, in their swimsuits and flip flops, their towels over their shoulders. My father didn’t swim, but Howard did. It gave me pleasure to imagine them, on the banks of the river, lying on that rock, amidst other children, the Afrikaans children, and under the glinting sun, splashing in the water, the willows overhanging alongside.

There were boats too, rowing boats, a slow row around the quieter shallows of the river, I can still hear the clunk of the heavy wooden oars against the side.

My mother and I were left at the house. I told her I wanted to read my book, and I took the blanket, spread it on my mother’s grass, near the rocks, a black lizard rustling as I lay down.

My mother pottered among her roses, wearing gardening gloves and carrying her scissors, she carefully cut, cut, she was pruning, or tidying, I suppose. Her heels, her low heels, sinking into the dry grass as I watched.

And later she would be in the kitchen supervising Maggie, who was getting dinner ready. A leg of lamb dinner, in the dining room. Potatoes. The children loved those dinners.

They loved the breakfasts too, not cereal and orange juice as Emily prepared them at home, but fried eggs, boerewors, fried tomatoes. They ate a lot, we all sat at the kitchen table for breakfast, noisy children, children on holiday, Howard relaxed and talking, I reading the paper. But my parents didn’t get the Rand Daily Mail, the paper we got at home. The newspaper my parents read was no good, it was almost certainly under the influence and control of state censors. It was also in Afrikaans. I’d forgotten they didn’t read the same newspaper as we did, and I put the paper aside, I wouldn’t read it.

Mom, you should get the Rand Daily Mail, I said. Dad’s happy with this newspaper, no reason to change newspapers, she said. There was no point arguing.

I slept well in my room, my old room, it still had its large heavy dresser, the dressing table with mirrors, like the one I had at home. And a large old wardrobe, filled with dresses, the dresses I had worn when seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old. Why did my mother keep them? They were on their hangers, nestled up against each other, so many of them. Their colours: pinks, and yellows, and blues and greens, rustling crinolines. A white one, tulle. And some silk patterned ones. In bell shapes, and cinched waists, the fashions of 1959. I wore them during the years I was at university, in Johannesburg.