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What I would like to do today, if you are agreeable, is to read through the new text with you. How does that sound?

All right.

One further point. Because the story you told was so long I dramatized it here and there, letting people speak in their own voices. You will see what I mean once we get going.

All right.

Here goes then.

In the old days, at Christmas-time, there would be huge gatherings on the family farm. From far and wide the sons and daughters of Gerrit and Lenie Coetzee would converge on Voëlfontein, bringing with them their spouses and offspring, more and more offspring each year, for a week of laughing and joking and reminiscing and, above all, eating. For the menfolk it was a time for hunting too: game-birds, antelope.

But by now, in the 1970s, those family gatherings are sadly diminished. Gerrit Coetzee is long in the grave, Lenie shuffles around a nursing home in The Strand. Of their twelve sons and daughters, the firstborn has already joined the multitudinous shades; in private moments –

Multitudinous shades?

Too grand-sounding? I'll change it. The firstborn has already departed this life. In private moments the survivors have intimations of their own end, and shudder.

I don't like that.

I'll cut it out. No problem. Has already departed this life. Among the survivors the joking has grown more subdued, the reminiscing sadder, the eating more temperate. As for hunting parties, there are no more of those: old bones are weary, and anyway, after year upon year of drought, there is nothing left in the veld that would count as game.

Of the third generation, the sons and daughters of the sons and daughters, most are by now too absorbed in their own affairs to attend, or too indifferent to the larger family. This year only four of the generation are present: her cousin Michiel, who has inherited the farm; her cousin John from Cape Town; her sister Carol; and herself, Margot. And of the four, she alone, she suspects, looks back to the old days with nostalgia.

I don't understand. Why do you call me she?

Of the four, Margot alone, she – Margot – suspects, looks back with nostalgia . . . You can hear how clumsy it is. It just doesn't work that way. The she I use is like I but is not I. Do you really dislike it so much?

I find it confusing. But go on.

John's presence on the farm is a source of unease. After years spent overseas – so many years it was concluded he was gone for good – he has suddenly reappeared among them under some cloud or other, some disgrace. One story being whispered about is that he has been in an American jail.

The family simply does not know how to behave toward him. Never yet have they had a criminal – if that is what he is, a criminal – in their midst. A bankrupt, yes: the man who married her aunt Marie, a braggart and heavy drinker of whom the family had disapproved from the start, declared himself bankrupt to avoid paying his debts and thereafter did not a stitch of work, loafing at home, living off his wife's earnings. But bankruptcy, while it may leave a bad taste in the mouth, is not a crime; whereas going to jail is going to jail.

Her own feeling is that the Coetzees ought to try harder to make the lost sheep feel welcome. She has a lingering soft spot for John. As children they used to talk quite openly of marrying each other when they grew up. They thought it was allowed – why should it not be? They did not understand why the adults smiled, smiled and would not say why.

Did I really tell you that?

You did. Do you want me to cut it out? I like it.

No, leave it in. [Laughs.] Go on.

Her sister Carol is of quite another mind. Carol is married to a German, an engineer, who has for years been trying to get the two of them out of South Africa and into the United States. Carol has made it plain she does not want it to appear in her dossier that she is related to a man who, whether or not he is technically a criminal, has in some way fallen foul of American law. But Carol's hostility