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‘God knows.’ There was no answer.
    I am not enamoured of holding conversations with myself. I went out to shout to one of the boys to open the garage and get the car ready for my morning drive to town.
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    As I had expected, it turned out to be quite a business. I had to notify the police as well as the health authorities, and answer a lot of tedious questions: how was it I was ignorant of the boy’s presence? If I did not supervise my native quarters, how did I know that that sort of thing didn’t go on all the time? Etcetera, etcetera. And when I flared up and told them that so long as my natives did their work, I didn’t think it my right or concern to poke my nose into their private lives, I got from the coarse, dull-witted police sergeant one of those looks that come not from any thinking process going on in the brain but from that faculty common to all who are possessed by the master-race theory – a look of insanely inane certainty. He grinned at me with a mixture of scorn and delight at my stupidity.
    Then I had to explain to Petrus why the health authorities had to take away the body for a post-mortem – and, in fact, what a post-mortem was. When I telephoned the health department some days later to find out the result, I was told that the cause of death was, as we had thought, pneumonia, and that the body had been suitably disposed of. I went out to where Petrus was mixing a mash for the fowls and told him that it was all right, there would be no trouble; his brother had died from that pain in his chest. Petrus put down the paraffin tin and said, ‘When can we go to fetch him, baas?’
    â€˜To fetch him?’
    â€˜Will the baas please ask them when we must come?’
    I went back inside and called Lerice, all over the house. She came down the stairs from the spare bedrooms, and I said, ‘ Now what am I going to do? When I told Petrus, he just asked calmly when they could go and fetch the body. They think they’re going to bury him themselves.’
    â€˜Well, go back and tell him,’ said Lerice. ‘You must tell him. Why didn’t you tell him then?’
    When I found Petrus again, he looked up politely. ‘Look, Petrus,’ I said. ‘You can’t go to fetch your brother. They’ve done it already – they’ve buried him, you understand?’
    â€˜Where?’ he said slowly, dully, as if he thought that perhaps he was getting this wrong.
    â€˜You see, he was a stranger. They knew he wasn’t from here, and they didn’t know he had some of his people here so they thought they must bury him.’ It was difficult to make a pauper’s grave sound like a privilege.
    â€˜Please, baas, the baas must ask them.’ But he did not mean that he wanted to know the burial place. He simply ignored the incomprehensible machinery I told him had set to work on his dead brother; he wanted the brother back.
    â€˜But, Petrus,’ I said, ‘how can I? Your brother is buried already. I can’t ask them now.’
    â€˜Oh, baas!’ he said. He stood with his bran-smeared hands uncurled at his sides, one corner of his mouth twitching.
    â€˜Good God, Petrus, they won’t listen to me! They can’t, anyway. I’m sorry, but I can’t do it. You understand?’
    He just kept on looking at me, out of his knowledge that white men have everything, can do anything; if they don’t, it is because they won’t.
    And then, at dinner, Lerice started. ‘You could at least phone,’ she said.
    â€˜Christ, what d’you think I am? Am I supposed to bring the dead back to life?’
    But I could not exaggerate my way out of this ridiculous responsibility that had been thrust on me. ‘Phone them up,’ she went on. ‘And at least you’ll be able to tell him you’ve done it and they’ve explained that it’s impossible.’
    She disappeared somewhere into the kitchen