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The beginning of the end. That’s what you felt all the time during that last feast, that last visit of Jakkie’s. The end that is always a repetition of the beginning. A charging-around in vehicles, a sightseeing tour, a dead sheep, a live sheep, a remembered sheep, a shepherd with staff, birds’ eggs in a bowl, an aeroplane, a fire, the blue birthday-mountains, the white arum lilies in the vlei, the mother, the father, the son, the dishes overflowing, the people, the coming and the going.

And Agaat.

This time it was Jakkie who tried to get at her.

You felt the eyes of the guest scrutinising him, scrutinising the commissions and omissions of all of you.

The food nauseated you.

You felt as if you were floating above the ground all the time. Your tongue felt too big for your mouth, your jaw was numb. You tried to pronounce the proper phrases as well as possible.

Such a run-up, such momentum, so much hope, so much effort, such a wager. To catch the butterfly. And then when it’s in your hand, it’s a fluttering against your palm, the gold dust disperses on your thumb, the rainbow fades, the antennae falter against your wrist.

Paradise is lost when its boundaries come into sight.

Compose your face, Jak said, don’t be such a drama queen.

But his own face was white. And Jakkie was pale under his threedays’ stubble.

It was the first time that he’d arrived home unshaven, in a wrinkled shirt, in a borrowed car full of mud splashes. His own was broken-down in the garage in Saldanha, he said.

You were used to his arriving as if out of a bandbox. To impress all of you, you used to think.

He always brought his case full of blue and white shirts and pants and caps and tunics. For Agaat’s sake, you thought, so that she could marvel at the epaulettes and the buttons and the military-style turn-ups of the trouser legs and the sleeves, so that she could revel in the neat piles of ironing that she created out of them, every pleat ironed to a knife’s edge, all spots and stains soaked out and bleached, the buttons and pins and stripes and belts buffed to a new gloss.

That weekend he had a suitcase with him that you didn’t know, full of ordinary clothes that seemed too big for him.

Never mind, he said to Agaat when she wanted to take it, it’s all clean. And many happy returns again for the birthday that’s passed, I have something for you, but I must wrap it first. And then he asked to be excused, he had to make a quick phone call about something or other, and he took out his diary to look up a number.

Was that when you remembered?

You fetched a sheet of gift-wrap from the cupboard in the passage and slid it under his door while he was changing. You thought: I’ll say nothing, later when Jakkie has left, I’ll tell her I’m sorry.

Did you ever? Was there time to worry about Agaat’s forgotten birthday after everything that followed on Jakkie’s visit?

You looked at them leaving, Jakkie dour, introverted, Agaat with the basket of biscuits and the flask of coffee that you’d packed as of old for their walking-tour of the farm. You went to inspect his room that she’d prepared for him.

There were flowers on the table as Jakkie liked it, as Agaat had taught him to like it, as you’d taught Agaat. Reeds and grasses and foliage and yellow seedheads of fennel squashed in amongst arum lilies. On his night-table there was a midnight-blue earthenware bowl with birds’ eggs, from the collection they’d built up when Jakkie was a lad. You couldn’t think how Agaat had kept the eggs unbroken all those years. But there they were, whole and sound, a brown-flecked plover’s egg, three white dove’s eggs, blue finch eggs, the stonechat’s green egg with russet specks around the big end. And the great prize, two salmon-coloured eggs, marbled with dark-pink and purple. The nightjar’s eggs. The one squatting in the dirt road calling: Oh-lord-oh-lord-deliver-us.

At the foot of the bed was the brown foot-rug that Agaat had knitted and that Jakkie had grown up with.