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with the women, but he said, ‘They don’t know what you are saying.’ I could see from their faces this was not true. I said to him, ‘I am back in this country after twenty-five years. I was brought up in Lomagundi.’ He did not reply, and I was stupidly disappointed. What did I expect? My intelligence expected one thing, and my emotions another. About ten miles further on he commanded, ‘Stop here.’ I stopped. I could not see a building or road or even a path, only bush. He got out and went off, leaving his women to follow. They could not manage the door handle, and wrenched at it, irritated and angry, meaning these emotions to show. I opened the door for them. They got out and followed their man. Husband? Father? He wore long khaki trousers and a good thick jersey. They wore short colourful dresses and cardigans. Even thirty years ago, in country districts, this group could easily have been a man with an animal skin over his shoulders–monkey, leopard, or buck–and a loincloth, and he would be carrying a bunch of spears. Behind him women in the traditional blue-patterned cloth balanced pots on their heads. The man would have to go first to protect them from enemies or wild animals. These women still walked behind, when all three disappeared into the bush.
    There was little traffic. The pipeline bringing oil from Beira to Mutare had just been cut again in Mozambique by Renamo, the South African-backed rebel army, and petrol was hard to get. The newspapers were full of exhortations to save petrol. I did not stop to give a lift again on that stretch of road, because I was soon to see my brother, after so many years, and this needed all my attention.
    Going to see my brother was by no means as simple a thing as it might seem to people with normal family relationships. Normal? While the British Empire lasted (a short-lived empire, as empires go) it was common for families to be split, a son or brother somewhere in the army, female relatives working as missionaries (my mother’s best friend’s sister was in Japan) or (my uncle) being rubber planters in Malaya. When I was growing up in the bush, my parents so woefully in exile, the family was in England: step-grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins. Since I have lived in London, the family has been in various parts of Southern Africa.
    I can say that my brother and I have never got on and, with equal truth, that we always have. We have never agreed about anything, but when we have met (there have been stretches of years when we have not met at all) a mysterious understanding starts to work. It is the genes, so I’ve read: one shares a ground of genes. Similarly, when one falls in love apparently without rhyme or reason, in fact one yearns for one’s own recessive genes incarnate and flourishing in another person. Deep calls to deep. Just as well we cannot hear this conversation, the ultimate in narcissism.
    When he came out of the navy and before he married we did see quite a bit of each other, and this was the only time we did, as grown-ups. A year? Not much more. Not long. If I had left the state of being a True Believer behind I was still full of passionate principles, but at least I had learned it was a waste of time arguing about them. He knew that everything I thought was rubbish. In any case discussion, even ordinary talk, was difficult: gunfire in the War had deafened him, and he faced the world with a stubborn, slow, sweet smile, full of a readiness for goodwill. Our father was very ill, and we used to meet in a house where a man was slowly dying. Looking back at then, I see everything slowed, in slow motion, we hung about, we sat for hours on either side of a sickbed, we smiled a lot. When he was conscious my father talked, still talked, talked even now, about ‘his’ war, and always with grief, with rage. My brother did not talk about his war.
    For the thirty years, almost, since we met–briefly–in 1956, we had kept in touch, with letters, at long