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Your hat, madam? the little chap asked.

Jakkie gave him a look and he stepped back smartly and marched away with one arm pumping up and down and the bag and gloves on his flat hand in front of him like a cake on a tray.

Jak gave you a look. It was a hall full of furious eyes, you felt.

From the stainless steel trays you had pumpkin served for you, potatoes, cauliflower in white sauce, peas. You thought of Agaat in the hot car in the parking lot. In a flash you imagined a separate table, all seated with servants in black-and-white uniforms. Perhaps you’d have another chance at the table to give Jakkie her envelope.

Madam? the carver asked, pork, lamb, beef, or a bit of everything?

Come, Milla, said Jak, pushing his tray into your back, the queue is long.

Lamb, you said, just a small portion.

Jakkie ate nothing. I can’t fly on a full stomach, he said. He and the other two kept glancing at their watches. He was far from you. Why didn’t you get up and walk around the table and give him the envelope? You looked at his uniform. It didn’t have a pocket into which it would fit without a corner showing. You can’t have a piece of white paper sticking out of the neat blue uniform, can you?

Jak was in his element. He’d loosened his tie and taken off his jacket. He was showing off his knowledge of fighter planes. A third bottle of wine arrived. The other women didn’t drink and you were too shy to hold out your glass again. It would have helped, a bit more alcohol, you thought. How can I get out of here? you wondered.

You tried to grasp your opportunity when Jakkie excused himself.

I suppose I won’t see you again, he said. He shook Jak’s hand, squeezed your shoulder. You tried to get up. Are you coming home for your birthday? you wanted to ask, but you couldn’t. This wasn’t the place for it. He’d gone before you could pick up your handbag from the floor. You had an image of the white envelope there in the gloom of your bag. What could it contain?

Sit down, Milla, there’s dessert and coffee to come, said Jak. The smell of the coffee under the hot ceiling turned your stomach. You stirred striations of chocolate sauce through the ice cream.

He can see like an eagle, that boy of mine, Jak was bragging.

You could vaguely, above the hubbub in the hall, make out the sound of the jets warming up.

He can balance on a three-strand steel wire one foot before the other, not an ounce of fear in him. I taught him from early on, in the mountains, in the kloofs, in the waterfalls, hand over hand on a slack chain with a rucksack on his back. He could keep his head in a butter-churn, that lad.

Then you were outside again in the white heat. You saw the women putting on their hats again, this time to protect their faces against the sun. But Jak stopped you.

For heaven’s sake take that thing off, you know you can’t see a damn thing from under that brim!

The first rending din was upon you, seven Impalas squirting orange, white and blue plumes of smoke from their tails. A self-important voice on the public address system asked for applause. How silly, you thought, it’s not as if they can hear up there in their capsules? That’s the way things have been all day, you thought. The occasion wasn’t for the soldiers. But for whom was it? The women trailed after the men over the tarmac, stood around where they congregated in little groups around the elephant tanks, the rooikat helicopters, the bush pigs, the bushbuck. Armoured game reserve, you thought.

Jak said, tidy up your face, it’s in the national interest.

Up and down on the hot tarmac of the showgrounds Jak walked telling and retelling his little band of new-found friends, or rank strangers, or just anybody who would listen, that it was his son up there against the blue, ascending straight up to the sun. You could see that he’d drunk too much, that he was still furious. You screwed up your eyes trying to see, the flakes of steel, how they tumbled spinning downward in formation, the tiny shards on the horizon that sped