A tiny girl skips like a skinny frog around a persimmon tree.

I miss seeing children, Jacob thinks, and looks away to Dejima.

‘On our first week at the villa, in a grove of agapanthus run amok, Gloria found me and told me to go and tell my uncle that she had flirted with me. Surely I’d misheard. She repeated her injunction: “If you are my friend, Melchior, as I pray God you are for I have no other in this wilderness, go to my husband and tell him that I confessed ‘inappropriate sentiments’! Use those very words, for they could be yours.” I protested that I couldn’t besmirch her honour or place her in danger of a beating. She assured me that if I didn’t do as she asked, or if I told my uncle about this conversation, then she would earn a beating. Well, the light in the grove was orange, and she squeezed my hand and said, “Do this for me, Melchior.” So I went.’

Fingers of smoke appear from the House of Wistaria’s chimney.

‘When Uncle Theo heard my false witness, he agreed with my charitable diagnosis of nerves damaged by the voyage. I went for a confused walk along the steep cliffs, afraid of what might befall Gloria back at the villa. But at lunch Uncle Theo made a speech about family, obedience and trust. After the blessing, he thanked God for sending him a wife and nephew in whom these Christian virtues blossomed. The Sisters den Otter chimed their brandy glasses with their apostle-spoons and said, “Hear hear!” Uncle Theo gave me a pouch of Guineas and invited me to go and enjoy all the pleasures the Tavern of the Two Seas could offer for two or three days…’

Below, a man leaves from a brothel’s side-door. He is me, Jacob thinks.

‘… but I’d rather have broken a bone than be separated from Gloria. I begged my donor leave to return his Guineas, asking only to keep the empty pouch to encourage me to fill it, and ten thousand more, with the fruits of my own acumen. All Cape Town’s tinsel and baubles, I claimed, were not worth an hour of my uncle’s company, and, time allowing, perhaps a game of chess? My uncle was silent, and I feared I’d over-sugared the tea, but then he declared that, whilst most young men were rascally popinjays who considered it their birthright to spend their fathers’ hard-won fortunes in dissipation, Heaven had sent him an exception for a nephew. He toasted the finest nephew in Christendom and, forgetting to conceal his clumsy test of marital fidelity, “a true little wife”. He enjoined Gloria to raise his future sons with my image in mind, and his true little wife said, “May they be in our nephew’s image, Husband.” Theo and I then played chess, and it taxed my ingenuity, de Zoet, to let the clod outmanoeuvre me.’

A bee hovers around Jacob’s face, and goes.

‘Gloria’s and my loyalties now proven, my uncle felt at liberty to enter Cape Town society himself. These pursuits took him out of the villa for most of the day, and sometimes he even slept down in the town. Me, he set to the task of copying paperwork in the library. “I’d invite you along,” he said, “but I want the Kaffirs hereabouts to know there’s a White man in the villa who can use a flintlock.” Gloria was left to her books, diary, the garden and the “improving stories” of the sisters: a spring that ran dry by three o’clock daily, when their lunchtime brandy plunged them into bottomless siestas…’

Van Cleef’s flagon rolls down the tiles, falls through the Wistaria frames, and smashes in the courtyard. ‘My uncle’s bridal suite lay down a windowless corridor from the library. Concentrating on correspondence, I’ll admit, was harder than usual that afternoon… The library clock, in my memory, is silent. Perhaps it is wound down. Orioles are singing like the choirs of Bedlam, and I hear the click of a key… that pregnant silence, when someone is waiting… and here she is in silhouette at the far end. She…’ Van Cleef rubs his sunburnt face ‘… I was afraid Aagje would find us, and she says, “Haven’t you noticed, Aagje’s in love with the eldest son of the next farm?” and it’s the most natural thing in the world to tell her I love her, and she kisses me, and she tells me she makes my uncle bearable by imagining he is me, and his is mine, and I ask, “What if there’s a child?” and she says Shush…’

Mud-brown dogs race up the mud-brown street.

‘Our unlucky number was four. The fourth time Gloria and I lay together, Uncle Theo’s horse threw him on his way down to Cape Town. He walked back to the villa so we didn’t hear the horse. One moment I was deep inside Gloria, as naked as silk. The next, I was still as naked as silk but lying amongst shards of the mirror my uncle had hurled me against. He told me he’d snap my neck and throw my carcass to the beasts. He told me to go to town, withdraw fifty guilders from his agent and make sure I was too ill to board the Enkhuizen when she sailed on to Batavia. Last, he swore that whatever I’d put inside that whore, his wife, he would be digging out with a spoon. To my shame – or not, I don’t know – I went away without saying goodbye to Gloria.’ Van Cleef rubs his beard. ‘Two weeks later I watched the Enkhuizen embark. Five weeks later I shipped on a maggoty brig, the Huis Marquette, whose pilot spoke with dead spirits and whose captain suspected even the ship’s dog of plotting mutiny. Well, you’ve crossed the Indian Ocean so I shan’t describe it: eternal, sinister, obsidian, mountainous, monotonous… After a seven-week crossing we weighed anchor in Batavia by the grace of God, with little thanks due to the pilot or the captain. I walked along the stinking canal, steeling myself for a thrashing from Father, a duel with Theo, lately arrived on the Enkhuizen, disinheritance. I saw no familiar faces and none saw me – ten years is a long time – and knocked on the shrunken door of my boyhood home. My old nurse, wrinkled, now, like a walnut, opened the door and screamed. I remember Mother hurrying through from the kitchen. She held a vase of orchids. Next thing I knew, the vase had turned into a thousand broken pieces, and Mother was slumped against the wall. I assumed that Uncle Theo had made a persona non grata of me… but then noticed that Mother was in mourning. I asked if my father was dead. She answered, “You are, Melchior: you drowned.” Then there was a sobbing embrace, and I learnt that the Enkhuizen had been wrecked on a reef just a mile from the Straits of Sunda, in a bright and savage sea, with all hands lost…’

‘I’m sorry, Chief,’ says Jacob.

‘The happiest ending is Aagje’s. She married that farmer’s boy and now owns three thousand head of cattle. Each time I’m in the Cape I mean to go and pay my compliments, but never do.’

Excited shouts ring out nearby. The two foreigners have been spotted by a gang of carpenters at work on a nearby building. ‘Gaijin-sama!’ calls one, with a grin wider than his face. He holds up a measuring-rule and offers a service that makes his colleagues howl with laughter. ‘I didn’t catch all of that,’ says van Cleef.

‘He volunteered to measure the length of your manhood, sir.’

‘Oh? Tell the rogue he’d need three of those rules.’

In the jaws of the bay Jacob sees a fluttering rectangle of red, white and blue.

No, thinks the head clerk. It’s a mirage… or a Chinese junk, or…

‘What’s wrong, de Zoet? You look like your breeches are beshatten.’

‘Sir – there’s a merchantman entering the bay or… a frigate?’

‘A frigate? Who’s sending a frigate? Whose flag is it, man?’

‘Ours, sir.’ Jacob grips the roof and blesses his far-sightedness. ‘It’s Dutch.’