‘Oh yes,’ said my mother. ‘There she is. Waiting for us. She’s always waiting. Like the sphinx.’

‘Mom,’ I said.

She came forward to welcome us. Diminutive, dour, she was wearing the same soiled apron I remembered from every previous visit. It was two years since I’d last been here.

She came to me first. ‘Patrick,’ she said. She held me by the shoulders.

‘Hello, Ouma,’ I said.

Then she went to my mother. They embraced cautiously, with tender hostility, in the wash of light from the car. The engine was still running.

I unpacked my clothes, though it wasn’t necessary to do so: we were leaving again the next day. But for some reason the orderly routine, as well as the friction of fingers on cloth, was comforting to me. I sorted and stashed my clothes into drawers and pushed them carefully closed. Then I sat on the bed, staring out the window, to where the last of the sunlight was fading. It gave me a small shock when I turned to see my mother watching me from the doorway, her arms folded across her chest. I didn’t know how long she’d been there.

‘You gave me a fright,’ I told her.

‘Sorry. I thought you knew I was here. Do you want a pill?’

‘No. Thank you.’

‘Supper’s almost ready.’

‘I’ll be there,’ I said. ‘I’m coming now.’

But she didn’t go. She stayed there, watching me.

Ouma sat at the head of the table, in the place she’d occupied ever since her husband had died a couple of years ago. Whenever she needed anything she would lean forward and ring a heavy metal bell with a shake of her wrist; the surprisingly delicate note it gave off summoned a black woman, who came in from the kitchen on bare feet.

‘Anna,’ my mother said the first time she saw her, ‘how are you?’

Anna gave a little curtsy and a shy smile, but she didn’t answer. I had no memory of Anna from before, but the servants were moved around from job to job on the farm at my grandmother’s whim, so she may have been hidden behind the scenes somewhere. Ouma disapproved of friendly connections with her underlings, and frowned almost imperceptibly now through the deep silence that set in the cold room, in which the only audible sound was the scraping of Anna’s feet on the floor.

After supper, we moved out to the back stoep. We sat in a row on three wooden chairs, looking out towards the mountains. The moon was up and in its light bats were flying and flickering over the orchard.

‘When are you leaving? You don’t want to stay an extra day?’

‘No, no,’ my mother said. ‘We have to go in the morning, after breakfast. We have a schedule to keep to.’

‘Ah,’ Ouma said with ironic awe. ‘A schedule.’ She sucked on her teeth and said to me, ‘Your father called, Patrick.’

‘Howard called here?’ my mother said, incredulous.

‘He wants you to phone him tonight.’

‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘Okay. Sure.’

‘It’s a power trip,’ my mother said. ‘He’s trying to get at me. Don’t call him, Patrick.’

Anna came in on her flat, calloused feet, bringing coffee on a tray.

‘Hoe voel jy, Patrick?’ Ouma said.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m much better, actually.’

‘Heeltemal gesond?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That will take a long time.’

She made a sound in her throat that could have been sympathy or disapproval and slurped her coffee. My mother looked sideways at me and winked.

My mother, though it was hard to believe, had grown up here on the farm. In my younger years my visits here had been filled with wonder at this fact. I had walked about the dusty veld, trying to work out how it had given rise to her. There was no trace of her rural beginnings in my mother’s face. No evidence of this other, earlier self in the woman who had brought me up.

There was an old photograph of her – small and sepia – hanging next to the phone and I studied it now as I held the receiver and turned the handle to get the operator. It showed a little girl in a dark dress, standing against a backdrop of trees, her hair in pigtails, grinning for the camera with a square, exact gap where one of her front teeth was missing.

‘Hello?’

‘Cape Town,’ I said and gave the number. There was a sibilant pause before it began to ring. My father’s voice was loud. ‘Howard,’ he said, speaking it like an accusation.

‘Dad?’

Another pause. ‘Patrick?’

‘Yup.’

‘How are you?’

‘Fine. I’m fine.’

‘You taking your medicine?’

‘Yup. What’s the matter?’

‘No, nothing. I wanted to find out how you are, that’s all. Do you mind?’

‘No.’

‘How’s your grandmother?’

This said with a slight scoff, which for some reason irritated me.

‘She’s fine.’

‘And your mother?’ This was the real reason for the conversation; both of us knew it. Although he and my mother had been divorced for some time now, he still felt anxiety whenever she left town, as though she might never come back.

‘She’s also fine. We’re all fine. Dad, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing, I told you. Just checking up. I’m your father, do you mind?’

‘No,’ I said lightly. Some lies are light.

‘What time are you going tomorrow?’

‘I don’t know. After breakfast, Mom said.’

‘Okay. What time do you get up to Windhoek?’

‘I don’t have a clue. I’ll call you from up there, when we arrive.’

‘Do that. And you take care of yourself.’

When I’d put the phone down the silence seemed to sizzle in my ear. I went back out to the stoep, where my mother and grandmother had drawn together into intimacy, holding hands and whispering. They went quiet as I arrived.

‘I’m going to bed,’ I told them.

‘What did he want? Did he ask about me?’

‘No.’

I kissed them both goodnight – my grandmother’s face rough and cool, my mother’s warm and smooth – and went up to the attic. From the window the moon seemed magnified, swelling toward fullness. I undressed and put out the lamp and rolled into bed. I lay there for a long time, my hands behind my head, listening to the sounds of the house. I heard my mother come up to the room underneath; heard her brush her teeth and mutter to herself as she got ready for bed. Then there was quiet. Perhaps another half hour passed before I realised why I hadn’t fallen asleep. So I got up and swallowed my pills. Prothiaden, Valium. In a little while I was sleepy. I rolled on my side.

I wasn’t disturbed by this fact. A numbness had crept into my life, so that no fact could hurt me again. My mother, since she had parted from my father, had given herself to much stranger things than this. Living with her in our little cottage in Cape Town, I had been witness to passions far more curious than men. So when my mother had come back from her stint of teaching in Windhoek with news of her lover, I wasn’t alarmed by his colour.

I had spoken to Godfrey many times on the telephone. He phoned her twice a week, late at night. In these calls, strangely, he never acknowledged that I was her son, and I didn’t refer to his relationship with her. We never called each other by name, though we were always carefully polite. He had a clear, deep, level voice. He called sometimes after midnight. According to my mother, this was his way of trying to catch her out. ‘He’s madly jealous,’ she said – and she fuelled his jealousy by going out when she was expecting him to call. Or she would make me answer the phone sometimes and pretend that she wasn’t there.

‘I want to talk to Ellen.’

‘I’m sorry, but she’s out.’

‘Out where?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. With friends.’

‘When is she getting back?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘Tell her Godfrey called. Godfrey. Be sure to give her the message.’

‘I’ll tell her.’

Afterwards she made me describe his tone, and repeat in exact detail what he had said. Although I was happy to play this game for her, I did feel sorry for him, this young man so very much in love. She was seventeen years older than him, and of course I wasn’t much younger than he was. She’d got married to my father when she was only twenty. She was still studying drama then, and he had just completed his degree in business science. They were an unlikely match, but my mother had fallen pregnant and one thing led to another. She dropped out of drama school at the end of the year and became a wife.

Although she did try her hand at a few acting jobs over the years, she had never really had a career of her own. Her big role was the one she played as a housewife, a mother, a maker of homes. She set about remoulding herself in the image my father desired. He was ashamed of her rustic Afrikaans beginnings, so she learned to speak English without an accent. She made it her duty to acquire cosmopolitan tastes and values, which she picked up from the people and homes that were the new backdrop to her social life. ‘I grew up in a hurry,’ she told me bitterly. In exchange, my father provided money and material consolations. We were raised in great style. I arrived in the world three years after my brother Malcolm. By then there was already no trace of that earlier, other woman: Elsa de Bruin had disappeared and in her place there was Ellen Winter, who might have been born in Constantia.

In those years she didn’t smile much. I remember a composed, vacant, bloodless face, eyes wide and dark, with long lashes. And her hard mouth, with lips that were slightly too thin to be sensual. It could have been a cruel face, but there was no cruelty in her. Not even the deep grief she later claimed to be feeling – grief for her lost other life – showed up anywhere. Her moods were as level and blank as her face. She was very quiet. I would often come into the lounge, my father and brother out for the evening, to find her sitting alone in a chair, listening to the ticking of clocks which filled the house like a kind of music.

‘What are you doing?’ I would say, disturbed at this vision of solitary waiting.

‘I’m sitting,’ she would answer. ‘Just sitting.’

I looked for tears, but her face was always passive. Nevertheless, on some level below words, I could sense her pain. I would run at her, butting her with my head, trying to jostle her out of her frozen reverie. Sometimes I succeeded: she might get up with a faint smile and say, ‘Go and bath. We’re going out for dinner tonight.’ Then I would go and get myself ready and meet her downstairs half an hour later, both of us dressed up, as if involved in some old-fashioned courtship. And this strange, chaste illusion would continue through the evening: in half an hour we would be seated opposite each other at an intimate table, while waiters pressed menus into our hands, and a piano played softly in the background.

At times like these I was happy to be alone with my mother, brother and father elsewhere, all rivals for her affection removed. I believed I could make up for the lacks and absences in her life. I would whisper my wishes across the white table-top, the candle flame bending to my breath. ‘Let’s go for ice cream,’ I’d say, ‘when we’re finished here.’

‘All right,’ she’d whisper, dropping her voice in thrilling collaboration with my fantasy, ‘a big white ice cream, on a cone.’

‘And a movie after that.’

‘Yes, a movie,’ she’d say, falling into a contemplation that only just included me. Movies and ice cream were things that never occurred to my father; I suggested them for exactly that reason. And we walked along the beachfront together, arm in arm, licking our ice creams in a kind of dazed complicity. My mother was white and long and cold, like any ice cream cone.

When I was much younger she allowed me to sleep in her bed sometimes. These were extraordinary nights: half-waking, half-sleeping, I was stranded, it felt, in an acre of sheets. She lay at my side, elegant even in sleep, one arm stretched out next to her. She would let down her hair before she went to bed and it lay strewn across the pillow: a pattern in black, one of the shadows that the moon cast in through the window.

Once – only once – did she cry out in her sleep. A long and tangled moan that came out in pain: ‘Howard... Howie... what have you... done... ?’

The meaning of this remained unsolved; a secret buried beneath her white, moonlit face. She breathed softly as she slept. Too softly sometimes: I woke once in the night and thought that she had died. I called and clutched at her with greasy hands, and cried when she woke up and cradled me in her embrace. ‘Were you afraid I’d left you... ?’ I didn’t answer. I couldn’t find words to express what it would feel like to be alone in the house with Malcolm, and with Dad.

As I grew older she wouldn’t let me share the bed anymore. ‘You’re too big now,’ she said. ‘You’re not afraid of the dark anymore.’ It was never the dark that had driven me to her, but I didn’t say anything. In any event, she no longer shared a bed with my father and her new one, in the spare room downstairs, was too small by half. So I stayed in my own room above, emptiness all around, sensing her heat.

When my father was at home all trace of her affection went underground. She became formal and even polite with me. She would sit in the study at night, in one of the leather armchairs, keeping her hands busy with tapestry or sewing or writing a letter. She murmured very softly when she spoke. Only by tiny signs – the brushing of fingers at the table, or a glance toward me in front of the television – was I assured of her continuing love for me, expressed so wholly when we were both alone.

When I remember these scenes now it is a kind of emptiness I feel; and yet our lives were full. Full in the material sense, with objects an...