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Since leaving Calvinia she has had nothing to eat but a chocolate bar. She is famished. John offers her what he calls French toast, white bread soaked in egg and fried, of which she eats three slices. He also gives her tea with milk that turns out to be sour (she drinks it anyway).

Her uncle sidles into the kitchen, wearing a pyjama top over his trousers. ‘I’ll say goodnight, Margie,’ he says. ‘Sleep tight. Don’t let the fleas bite.’ He does not say goodnight to his son. Around his son he seems distinctly tentative. Have they been having a fight?

‘I’m restless,’ she says to John. ‘Shall we go for a walk? I’ve been cooped up in the back of an ambulance all day.’

He takes her on a ramble through the well-lit streets of suburban Tokai. The houses they pass are all bigger and better than his. ‘This used to be farmland not long ago,’ he explains. ‘Then it was subdivided and sold in lots. Our house used to be a farm-labourer’s cottage. That’s why it is so shoddily built. Everything leaks: roof, walls. I spend all my free time doing repairs. I’m like the boy with his finger in the dyke.’

‘Yes, I begin to see the attraction of Merweville. At least in Merweville it doesn’t rain. But why not buy a better house here in the Cape? Write a book. Write a best-seller. Make lots of money.’

It is only a joke, but he chooses to take it seriously. ‘I wouldn’t know how to write a best-seller,’ he says. ‘I don’t know enough about people and their fantasy lives. Anyway, I wasn’t destined for that fate.’

‘What fate?’

‘The fate of being a rich and successful writer.’

‘Then what is the fate you are destined for?’

‘For exactly the present one. For living with an ageing parent in a house in the white suburbs with a leaky roof.’

‘That’s just silly, slap talk. That’s the Coetzee in you speaking. You could change your fate tomorrow if you would just put your mind to it.’

The dogs of the neighbourhood do not take kindly to strangers roaming their streets by night, arguing. The chorus of barking grows clamorous.

‘I wish you could hear yourself, John,’ she plunges on. ‘You are so full of nonsense! If you don’t take hold of yourself you are going to turn into a sour old prune of a man who wants only to be left alone in his corner. Let’s go back. I have to get up early.’

SHE SLEEPS BADLY ON the uncomfortable, hard mattress. Before first light she is up, making coffee and toast for the three of them. By seven o’clock they are on their way to Groote Schuur Hospital, crammed together in the cab of the Datsun.

She leaves Jack and his son in the waiting room, but then cannot locate her mother. Her mother had an episode during the night, she is informed at the nurses’ station, and is back in intensive care. She, Margot, should return to the waiting room, where a doctor will speak to her.

She rejoins Jack and John. The waiting room is already filling up. A woman, a stranger, is slumped in a chair opposite them. Over her head, covering one eye, she has knotted a woollen pullover caked with blood. She wears a tiny skirt and rubber sandals; she smells of mouldy linen and sweet wine; she is moaning softly to herself.

She does her best not to stare, but the woman is itching for a fight. ‘Waarna loer jy?’ she glares: What are you staring at? ‘Jou moer!’

She casts her eyes down, withdraws into silence.

Her mother, if she lives, will be sixty-eight next month. Sixty-eight blameless years, blameless and contented. A good woman, all in all: a good mother, a good wife of the distracted, fluttering variety. The kind of woman men find it easy to love because she so clearly needs to be protected. And now cast into this hell-hole! Jou moer! – filthy talk. She must get her mother out as soon as she can, and into a private hospital, no matter what the cost.

My little bird, that is what her father used to call her: my tortelduifie, my little turtledove. The kind of little bird that prefers not to leave its cage. Growing up she, Margot, had felt big and ungainly beside