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Well, let it not be said I did not warn you.

As I told you, those were great days for me, a second honeymoon, sweeter than the first and longer-lasting too. Why else do you think I remember them so well? Truly, I am coming into myself! I said to myself. This is what a woman can be; this is what a woman can do!

Do I shock you? Probably not. You belong to an unshockable generation. But it would shock my mother, what I am revealing to you, if she were alive to hear it. My mother would never have dreamed of speaking to a stranger as I am speaking now.

From one of his trips to Singapore Mark had come back with an early-model video camera. Now he set it up in the bedroom to film the two of us making love. As a record, he said. And as a turn-on. I didn’t mind. I let him go ahead. He probably still has the film; he may even watch it when he feels nostalgic about the old days. Or perhaps it is lying forgotten in a box in the attic, and will be found only after his death. The stuff we leave behind! Just imagine his grandchildren, eyes popping as they watch their youthful granddad frolicking in bed with his foreign wife.

Your husband …

Mark and I were divorced in 1988. He married again, on the rebound. I never met my successor. They live in the Bahamas, I think, or maybe Bermuda.

Shall we let it rest there? You have heard a lot, and it’s been a long day.

But that isn’t the end of the story, surely.

On the contrary, it is the end of the story. At least of the part that matters.

But you and Coetzee continued to see each other. For years you exchanged letters. So even if that is where the story ends, from your point of view – my apologies, even if that is the end of the part of the story that is of importance to you – there is still a long tail to follow, a long entailment. Can’t you give me some idea of the tail end?

A short tail, not a long one. I will tell you about it, but not today. I have things to attend to. Come back next week. Fix a date with my receptionist.

Next week I will be gone. Can’t we meet again tomorrow?

Tomorrow is out of the question. Thursday. I can give you half an hour on Thursday, after my last appointment.

YES, THE TAIL END. Where shall I begin? Let me start with John’s father. One morning, not long after that dreary barbecue, I was driving down Tokai Road when I noticed someone standing by himself at a bus stop. It was the elder Coetzee. I was in a hurry, but it would have been too rude to simply drive past, so I stopped and offered him a ride.

He asked how Chrissie was getting on. I said she was missing her father, who was away from home much of the time. I asked about John and the concreting. He gave some vague answer.

Neither of us was really in the mood for talk, but I forced myself. If he didn’t mind my asking, I asked, how long had it been since his wife passed away? He told me. Of his life with her, whether it had been happy or not, whether he missed her, he volunteered nothing.

‘And is John your only child?’ I asked.

‘No, no, he has a brother, a younger brother.’ He seemed surprised I did not know.

‘That’s curious,’ I said, ‘because John has the air of an only child.’ Which I meant critically. I meant that he was preoccupied with himself, did not seem to make allowances for people around him.

He gave no answer – did not inquire, for instance, what air it was that an only child might have.

I asked about his second son, about where he lived. In England, replied Mr C. He had quit South Africa years ago and never come back. ‘You must miss him,’ I said. He shrugged. That was his characteristic response: the wordless shrug.

I must tell you, from the very first I found something unbearably sorrowful about this man. Sitting next to me in the car in his dark business suit, giving off a smell of cheap deodorant, he may have seemed the personification of stiff rectitude, but if he had suddenly burst into tears I would not have been surprised, not in the slightest. All alone save for that cold fish his elder