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'There's an emergency at his home,' I said. 'Could you contact Durban and leave a message? Ask him to give his wife a call as soon as he can, at the following number. Say it's urgent. 'And I gave the hotel number.

For hours I waited. No call.

Where was Chrissie? That was what I needed to know most of all. It seemed beyond belief that Mark could have taken the child to Durban. But if he hadn't, what had he done with her?

I telephoned Durban direct. No, said the secretary, Mark was not in Durban, was not expected this week. Had I tried the firm's Cape Town office?

Distraught by now, I telephoned John. 'My husband has taken the child and decamped, vanished into thin air,' I said. 'I have no money. I don't know what to do. Do you have any suggestions?'

There was an elderly couple in the lobby, guests, openly listening to me. But I had ceased to care who knew of my troubles. I wanted to cry, but I think I laughed instead. 'He has absconded with my child, and because of what?' I said. 'Is this' – I gestured toward my surroundings, that is, toward the interior of the Canterbury Hotel (Residential) – 'is this what I am being punished for?' Then I really began to cry.

Being miles away, John could not have seen my gesture, therefore (it occurred to me afterwards) must have attached a quite different meaning to the word this. I must have seemed to be referring to my affair with him – to have been dismissing it as unworthy of such a fuss.

'Do you want to go to the police?' he said.

'Don't be ridiculous,' I said. 'You can't run away from a man and then accuse him of stealing your child.'

'Would you like me to come over and fetch you?' I could hear the caution in his voice. And I could sympathize. I too would have been cautious in his position, with an hysterical female on the line. But I didn't want caution, I wanted my child back. 'No, I would not like to be fetched,' I snapped.

'Have you at least had something to eat?' he said.

'I don't want anything to eat,' I said. 'That's enough of this stupid conversation. I'm sorry, I don't know why I called. Goodbye.' And I put down the phone.

I didn't want anything to eat, though I wouldn't have minded something to drink: a stiff whisky, for instance, followed by a dead, dreamless sleep.

I had just slumped down in my room and covered my head with a pillow when there was a tapping at the French door. It was John. Words between us, which I won't repeat. To be brief, he took me back to Tokai and bedded me down in his room. He himself slept on the sofa in the living-room. I was half expecting him to come to me during the night, but he didn't.

I was woken by murmured talk. The sun was up. I heard the front door close. A long silence. I was alone in this strange house.

The bathroom was primitive, the toilet not clean. An unpleasant smell of male sweat and damp towels hung in the air. Where John had gone, when he would be back, I had no idea. I made myself coffee and did some exploring. From room to room the ceilings were so low I felt I would suffocate. It was only a farm cottage, I understood that, but why had it been built for midgets?

I peered into the elder Coetzee's room. The light had been left on, a single dim bulb without a shade in the centre of the ceiling. The bed was unmade. On a table by the bedside, a newspaper folded open to the crossword puzzle. On the wall a painting, amateurish, of a whitewashed Cape Dutch farmhouse, and a framed photograph of a severe-looking woman. The window, which was small and covered with a lattice of steel bars, looked out onto a stoep empty but for a pair of canvas deckchairs and a row of withered ferns in pots.

John's room, where I had slept, was larger and better lit. A bookshelf: dictionaries, phrasebooks, teach yourself this, teach yourself that. Beckett. Kafka. On the table, a mess of papers. A filing cabinet. Idly I searched through the drawers. In the bottom drawer, a box of photographs, which I burrowed amongst.