Many were the stories they heard that night, terrible, heartrending. Consider the tragedy of Maisie van der Westhuizen, a singer synonymous with local opera, a well-loved soprano, ‘Our Maisie’, a familiar figure, somewhat bulky in flowing electric blues and acid greens, with elaborate black bangs and her huge sapphires, a wonderfully successful artist, best known of our singers abroad, making regular appearances with the Vienna State Opera. Fame and a soft heart and an excellent command of German; thereby hung her tale and her downfall. For Our Maisie was one of the chief supporters of the Benevolent Fund for Forgotten Germans, which, as everybody knew, was a front organisation for the support of elderly Nazis, a group of demanding old pensioners for whom, generally speaking, holidays were difficult to arrange. To this end Our Maisie had founded a group of sunshine homes on the South Coast to which these loyal old soldiers could be flown for a few weeks, to bask in the sun in the evening of their lives. Maisie told her story:

‘One day a party were turned back at the airport when they arrived. And the reason given? Because they were National Socialists. I couldn’t believe my ears! So were half his Government, I told Gus Kuiker, who had signed the exclusion order against my old gentlemen friends. It did no good, they were turned back, flown out, sobbing some of them, back to their little flats in Düsseldorf and Frankfurt, to die of disappointment. And if this wasn’t enough, when I returned to the country some while later to open the new opera house in the great University of Christian National Education I walked out onto the stage to discover all the front rows were crammed with Jews, wearing yarmulkas and carrying placards: SAY NO TO MAISIE’S NAZIS! My voice snapped like a pencil, I stormed off the stage, I walked to my dressing room, I fetched my car, I drove to the airport and here I am, as you see, finished…’

Then there was the pathetic little tale of Hans Breker, the long-service South African spy who had worked for years in London under cover of a stringer for Dutch and South African newspapers, passing back information, mostly pretty low-grade stuff, to Pretoria, without interruption for almost two decades. His material had been rather pedestrian, nothing in comparison to the jewels of information achieved by the likes of Magdalena. Breker had culled the newspapers for reviews and articles by South African exiles, photographed them secretly at political rallies, looked up information on suspect organisations, kept his eye on peripheral figures, supplied biographies, checked addresses, filed descriptions and generally carried on the boring everyday business of undercover surveillance. This loyal agent lived in a flat in Hackney and in the normal course of events could have expected to see out his time and return home and spend the rest of his life in a special settlement for retired spies on the South Coast, with his pension sufficient to keep him in gin and cigarettes. Alas, Breker had fallen in love with an artist. She taught him to paint. The results were fatal. He sold his large flat in Hackney and took a room in Chelsea. He began to be seen in art galleries. His shoes were hand-made. He entered paintings for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, he even began learning French. By this time the woman had left him, but the damage was done. Breker was seen around town frequenting the oyster bars, he even signed his name in a letter to The Times about the fate of the Turner paintings.

‘In short, I committed the worst sin of an agent — I became known. When the Government ordered me back I refused. I said I wasn’t going back to some holiday home for senile spies in Bronkhorstspruit. Well, that did it. I was as good as dead. I came here — where else?’

And many more were the stories they heard that night. Too many to be recounted here, though mention must be made of the odd little history of Bennie Craddock, C.C. Himmelfarber’s nephew, whom Blanchaille had last seen in a photograph weeping in Red Square. No wonder! He spoke briefly and movingly of his arrest in Moscow and of his eventual freedom which was achieved when Popov was exchanged for several agents who had been held in the Soviet Union, to wit a Briton, two Frenchmen, an American and a German. This young man, with his thin face and shaking hands, gave no indication that he had once been on the board of Consolidated Holdings, his uncle, Curtis Christian Himmelfarber’s right hand. He produced copies of the Regime’s propaganda magazine Southern Comfort (free to all foreign embassies, colleges, doctors’ waiting rooms worldwide), its cover-story the exchange of Popov in Berlin and he pointed to his uncle, Curtis Christian, among the smiling observers of what was widely regarded to be a sensational coup for the Western intelligence services and not least, of course, for the Regime.

It would be unfair not to mention also the appearance of the former opposition leader, Sir Glanville van Doren who didn’t in fact tell his story at all but instead gave a repeat performance of his farewell speech to Parliament, the one he made before he disappeared. The speech ran as follows: ‘With happy memories of a full and useful life, conscious of having fought the good fight, I leave this House now to return to my farm, Morsdood, near my hometown of Glanville, which those of you who know your history will remember was named for my grandfather — and there I plan to devote myself, as a good dairy farmer, to rebuilding my herd.’

Matron gave a little bow when she heard this. ‘Brave words, and absolute utter nonsense. What he was saying was that he was a shattered man. It was only a question of time before he left his cows and came to us.’

So it was, in the silence that followed the recounting of these cruel events that Blanchaille had time for reflection. He remembered what Kipsel had said about the plants and flowers growing in the garden; it was that most of them were found only in Africa and some were extinct. Was there something on this mountainside, in the quality of the air, or the soil, or some strange trick of climate that enabled them to survive here and only here? He found himself remembering the balcony of Uncle Paul’s other house in Clarens, his heart went out to the old prophet, sick and tired, sitting on his front veranda staring blindly at the blue mountains across the water, those mountains which looked so curiously African. How sharply they must have reminded him of home! And then he found himself studying the waiters, or stewards, or whatever they were (he didn’t really like to give them any other titles or descriptions). Waiters would do. Waiters sounded safe. They stood there against the wall in their white jackets and trousers, observing the diners. He knew there was nowhere else to go now, this was where the Last Trek ended, in this refurbished bathing establishment, this decrepit onetime spa on a Swiss mountainside attended by a matron and surrounded by Happies… They had indeed come home, they had all come home. They had come home with a vengeance.

Now let it be remembered that in this great dining-room there were many hundreds of people; that Blanchaille and Kipsel were excited, disturbed and that the alcohol had had some effect on them; and let it also be said that the stories they’d heard moved them very deeply and unsettled them more than they wished to admit. For one thing it was quite clear that they too would be expected to tell their stories, if not that night, then soon. It was in this unsettled, bewildered state that one must treat Kipsel’s extraordinary claim, made in a choked whisper to Blanchaille, that sitting in a small group of men near the door, a group who he had not noticed until they got up to leave the room, hadn’t wanted to notice, hadn’t looked at really, who were partly masked by the fountain anyway and had their backs turned… that in this group of men he had recognised Ferreira.