After a huge dinner at the hotel my father made a short, rather slurred and emotional speech which embarrassed my mother and then sat down gratefully to get on with some serious brandy and coke. The rest of us caught up with family news.
Ansie and I were chatting to Frikkie, sitting alone while his new wife showed off their baby to her in-laws.
"Hey Frik, remember da Silva?" I said idly. "Was it you that set him free that night? Ma was so cross, remember?"
"No, not me," he grinned. "Didn't you guess? It was Pa.. I saw him go out in the middle of the night. He put him in the bakkie and drove him off to the veldt on the other side of the railway line."
"No! Did you ever say anything to him about it?"
"Ja, he told me the next day. He just said he thought it would get Ma off his back. He didn't want to kill da Silva any more than I did! He never really believed they'd find any uncut diamonds, and if they were there, he certainly didn't want to find them. It would have given him a heart attack just thinking about what to do with them."
"That's typical Pa," said Ansie lovingly. "Peace at any price. I suppose da Silva is still wandering around in the veldt somewhere. Tortoises live a long time, don't they?"
"He could live to be 60 years," said Frikkie. "He's a Leopard tortoise and they're pretty long lived. He's twice the size of the local tortoises around here. If someone found him they might have kept him too, although it's so illegal these days they might not want to risk the fine. I don't suppose we'll ever know."
But in the end, I did. Four years later I was visiting my mother in the council retirement home where she'd moved after my father died. Age hadn't softened her and she was one of the 'more difficult' residents, as the matron never failed to tell me. Now eighty- one and nearly blind, she missed the stimulation of married bickering and often sat for hours just staring out of the window, as prickly as ever with the other residents. Whenever I came, she demanded to be read to out of the Cape Town papers I brought with me, commenting crossly on everything she heard.