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‘WOULD YOU LIKE TO go for a drive this afternoon?’ John offers. ‘We could do a grand tour of the farm, just you and I.’

‘In what?’ she says. ‘In your Datsun?’

‘Yes, in my Datsun. It’s fixed.’

‘Fixed so that it won’t break down in the middle of nowhere?’

It is of course a joke. Voëlfontein is already the middle of nowhere. But it is not just a joke. She has no idea how big the farm is, measured in square miles, but she does know you cannot walk from one end of it to the other in a single day, not unless you take your walking seriously.

‘It won’t break down,’ he says. ‘But I’ll bring spare water along just in case.’

Voëlfontein lies in the Koup region, and in the Koup it has rained not a drop in the past two years. What on earth inspired Grandpa Coetzee to buy land here, where every last farmer is struggling to keep his stock alive?

‘What sort of word is Koup?’ she says. ‘Is it English? The place where no one can cope?’

‘It’s Khoi,’ he says. ‘Hottentot. Koup: dry place. It’s a noun, not a verb. You can tell by the final –p.’

‘Where did you learn that?’

‘From books. From grammars put together by missionaries in the old days. There are no speakers of Khoi languages left, not in South Africa. The languages are, for all practical purposes, dead. In South-West Africa there are still a handful of old people speaking Nama. That’s the sum of it. The sum of what is left.’

‘And Xhosa? Do you speak Xhosa?’

He shakes his head. ‘I am interested in the things we have lost, not the things we have kept. Why should I speak Xhosa? There are millions of people who can do that already. They don’t need me.’

‘I thought languages exist so that we can communicate with each other,’ she says. ‘What is the point of speaking Hottentot if no one else does?’

He presents her with what she is coming to think of as his secret little smile, betokening that he has an answer to her question, but since she will be too stupid to understand, he will not waste his breath revealing it. It is this Mister Know-All smile, above all, that sends Carol into a rage.

‘Once you have learned Hottentot out of your old grammar books, who can you speak to?’ she repeats.

‘Do you want me to tell you?’ he says. The little smile has turned into something else, something tight and not very nice.

‘Yes, tell me. Answer me.’

‘The dead. You can speak with the dead. Who otherwise’ – he hesitates, as if the words might be too much for her and even for him – ‘who otherwise are cast out into everlasting silence.’

She wanted an answer and now she has one. It is more than enough to shut her up.

They drive for half an hour, to the westernmost boundary of the farm. There, to her surprise, he opens the gate, drives through, closes the gate behind them, and without a word drives on along the rough dirt road. By four-thirty they have arrived at the town of Merweville, where she has not set foot in years.

Outside the Apollo Café he draws to a halt. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he says.

They enter the café with half a dozen barefoot children tagging along behind them, the youngest a mere toddler. Mevrou the proprietress has the radio on, playing Afrikaans pop tunes. They sit down, wave the flies away. The children cluster around their table, staring with unabashed curiosity. ‘Middag, jongens,’ says John. ‘Middag, meneer,’ says the eldest.

They order coffee and get a version of coffee: pale Nescafé with long-life milk. She takes a sip of hers and pushes it aside. He drinks his abstractedly.

A tiny hand reaches up and filches the cube of sugar from her saucer. ‘Toe, loop!’ she says: Run off! The child smiles merrily at her, unwraps the sugar, licks it.

It is by no means the first hint she has had of how far the old barriers between white and Coloured have come down. The signs are more obvious here than in Calvinia. Merweville is a smaller town and in decline, in such decline that it must be in danger of falling off the map. There can be no more than a few hundred people left. Half the houses they drove past seemed unoccupied. The building with the legend Volkskas