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power this young girl, younger even than she, seemed to wield over those around her.
     
    The three women sat, without speaking, and waited for their food. Over the murmurs of the other diners, they could hear from the kitchen the sound of Amina’s voice, and that of the cook, and the sizzle of hot oil, and then the bounce and scratch of a record being placed upon the old gramophone behind the counter. The straining strings started up, wavered and then righted themselves to form the opening bars of “Night and Day”. This was not a song Miriam had ever heard before. She listened to the radio often in the kitchen at home, and she knew many of Cole Porter’s and other American melodies by heart, though she could not really put a name to any of them. Miriam looked over at the record sleeve propped up on the counter. It was hard for her to make out the details from where she sat, but she could see the outline of a man’s face. The cover was lifted away as she peered at it, and she realised that it was being brought towards her, under the arm of Jacob Williams. He stopped at the table and deposited a bowl of steaming mutton stew, a platter of baked pumpkin, and a plate of bread yellow with corn grains. Then he removed the record sleeve from under his arm and offered it to Miriam.
     
    “Amina says you might be interested to see this, ma’am,” he said, and Miriam thanked him and took it. Farah stared and raised a questioning eyebrow.
     
    “Why did he bring this?” she asked, putting a piece of bread before Jehan, who ate hungrily.
     
    Miriam shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they saw I was looking at it.”
     
    “Maybe she likes you,” she said, but without any kindness, and with a laugh that Miriam could not read. She ignored Farah and looked down at the record cover. It was, as she had thought, a portrait of Cole Porter. Miriam listened to the record as it skipped along. “In the roaring traffic’s boom, in the silence of my lonely room, I think of you, night and day… ” Even that name, Cole Porter, seemed to be invested with such glamour, and such a sense of the debonair. The picture was black and white and grainy, but there he sat, hair slicked back with Brylcreem, leaning in towards his piano, eyebrows raised at the camera, a slightly sardonic expression on his face.
     
    When Miriam looked up, Farah was still watching her. But for once, Miriam did not care. Her ten days of counting, of watching for some sign of concern or pleasure or kindness, had finally been ended with the smile Amina Harjan had given her.
     
    Chapter Three

Delhof – November 1952
     
    T HE LAST DAY of each month was pay-day for the scores of Africans who worked on the farms that surrounded the shop, and the day that the overseers, or occasionally the owners themselves, would drive their workers to the shop, clutching their small amounts of tattered cash, so that they could buy whatever dry supplies and clothes they might need for the following month. They started to arrive early, usually just after Sam and Alisha had left on the bus for school in Springs, and it was always the busiest day of the month for the shop. As usual, they had all been preparing since very early that morning. There was plenty of fruit, enough bags of mealies , and the dark wooden counters were clear. Omar stood checking his stock and making the occasional scratch with his pencil on the pad of paper that lay next to the till. He looked up for his wife. Squinting through the sun that glanced off the window panes, he could see her outside, hanging washing out to dry.
     
    Everything she was clipping to the line was white. He could see Sam’s tiny vests and his own bright, white shirts, almost blue under the unrelenting light of the sun. He shut his eyes against the glow, and for a moment the shop ceased to exist. He was not here, out in the African wilderness; he was not the father of two small children; he was not a struggling shopkeeper; he was not married to