Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  Raleen had been kind to him, thought Carel. That was good. He had listened to her tell about her children. That was good. He had heard about her husband. All dead. He was the listener, never could have been the lover.

  He rose from his haunches and walked down to the beach and along the shore. A sliver of moon came up and he watched from a rock as the tops of the distant curling waves frothed white in the light of the moon. A ship was due to flash its distant light in three days’ time, and that would be the last. If he stayed in the colony, fixing the motor of the fishing boat and doing odd jobs on tourists’ cars, he could live, and the money in America could stay and grow and be there for his winter’s day. The old man he would pension. Keep him in food and tobacco for the rest of his years.

  Carel’s last dreams of wealth, the life of the other world, had gone out with the boy’s guitar. He belonged in the colony, after so many years. He and the boy would surf the big waves. She had never really been for him.

  He looked up at the stars and, faint but visible, above the second layer of the stars, was the third, so precious a layer, and the night was clear and pure. Strange, he thought; I am happy, and happiness is worth all the jewels on earth.

  A week after the minstrel boy had made his bed in the lean-to next to the two-roomed brick house of Black Martin, a beautiful dark girl appeared on Second Beach and rented a small, thatched rondavel in the municipal campsite that bordered the colony. This was home to the tourists that gave the small living to the waifs and strays, the drifters who made up the ebb and flow of the colony. She was dark of complexion and her hair was long, shining with the same blue-black of a raven’s wing.

  She was Malay of ancient lineage, and the fifth generation of the flotsam left behind by the Dutch who had transported trouble-makers from their rich spice colony of Batavia to the Cape, the halfway station for sailing ships to replenish their stores with fresh fruit and vegetables for the onward voyage round the Cape from the Indies. She was pure Malay of aristocratic heritage, her great-great-grandfather having been a sheik of the island, and she was Muslim. Under the strange, cruel laws of apartheid, she and her family were classified as coloured.

  They lived in District Six in Cape Town, until the government tore the coloured from their homes and deposited them in the new suburb of Mitchells Plain, many kilometres from their work and in clean, sterile rows of neat houses that lacked the pulse and life of the Malay quarter. It was like throwing a fish above the high-water mark. The Malays were stranded and miserable and their old homes were torn down to make way for a new white suburb.

  Apartheid, separate development, had separated the races that little bit further at the whim of the autocrats in Pretoria. Sophia’s great-great-grandfather had taken a Dutch name, as he was not allowed to use his own, the Dutch not wishing to remind anyone he was a sheik in Batavia, but Sophia van Hock looked nothing like a Hollander.

  When she arrived, the people of the colony noticed that she was always smiling, laughing with herself, hugging herself with joy and what looked like a great expectation. After three days the smile began to fade, and at the end of a week she was dying, so Matt sent Lorna across to help and find out what could be so much the matter with so beautiful a girl. Lorna was gone all morning and most of the afternoon, Peace and the dog staying with Matt while he fished from the big rock down in front of their house.

  Somewhat like pulling teeth, Lorna dragged out the story and convinced the girl to move out of the thatched hut she was renting daily, ever thinking only a day was necessary, and moved her into the big rondavel above the sea. Matt heard the story that night when the girl was finally asleep, exhausted by emotion, on a mattress next to Peace.

  Sophia had committed the worst sin in apartheid South Africa. She had fallen in love with a boy who was not of her racial classification. Under the law she was only allowed to marry or bed a coloured, a person of mixed race. Forbidden were Asians, blacks and, above all, whites; the penalty, jail, the chances of circumvention in the Republic of South Africa nil. Their only chance was to leave the country or live in one of the strange homelands, such as Transkei, recognised by South Africa and no one else in the world as independent, where the laws of apartheid did not apply.

  Sophia and her young lover were to have fled together to Port St Johns, where they would marry and live happily ever after. They had left separately, but her white lover had not arrived. When, at the end of the week of waiting for him, she had phoned his house in the rich white suburb of Constantia, his mother had told her their boy had seen sense, that to throw away his career at the age of nineteen and not finish his degree at the University of Cape Town where they had met was senseless, and would Sophia please keep away from her son or she would call the police.

  Matt had listened in silence as they walked along the beach, and then he spoke quietly. “There are aspects of the human race I find so disgusting I am amazed we have survived so long. I am ashamed to be part of that race… Poor child. What are we to do?”

  “Look after her. Hearts can mend. The colony may be her salvation.”

  “Let her stay?”

  “She won’t go back to university. He is there… Maybe the boy?”

  “You’d better ask Raleen about that.” Matt gave a deep chuckle. “I thought good friends confided in each other.”

  “You think… She’s three years older than the boy… Maybe the sand, sea and sun will heal, thrown in with a little wisdom. She can’t even talk to her own mother. For a Malay to spoil her bloodline is a worse sin than for a white. Parents can be so silly… Peace wants to meet her grandparents. Everyone makes the simplest things so stupidly complicated.”

  “Your parents will come around in time,” Matt assured her. “Peace is nearly four years old.”

  “And absolutely gorgeous.”

  “That she is.” They walked on in happy silence. “We’re very lucky, Matt.”

  “That we are.”

  The early morning sun pushing up from the sea found the minstrel boy astride Carel van Tonder’s surfboard out where the big waves formed, waiting for the swell to lift, watching each formation building out to sea. He had paddled out in the first light of dawn, having paddled in the previous night in the dusk. The sharks, the theory went, were well fed on the Wild Coast, the sea teeming in fish with only the colony’s old ski-boat to catch the occasional fish. He was alone on the water, his borrowed wetsuit keeping his body warm, and there was nowhere on earth he would rather have been.

  He had been at the colony a month, and today was Christmas Day. When they asked, he would sing them carols around the big fire on the beach. An ox was being cooked, had been started the previous day, and everyone on Second Beach had been invited for Christmas, including the paramount chief of the Ponda at Matt’s personal invitation.

  On shore, looking out to sea and the lone small figure waiting out there for the big wave and the hope of running the tube, Sophia watched the sun rise and the day begin. To her Muslim faith, a faith she believed in and loved, Christ was a prophet and, as some of the others at Second Beach were Muslim and all were invited, the bull had been specially butchered according to the Muslim religion. The colony, according to Matt, was for all people and no one should be precluded from a day of joy and celebration. Sophia smiled at the thought of the man’s constant consideration and, though the emptiness was deep in her stomach, a pit of hopelessness, she no longer cried.

  Out to sea, the minstrel boy paddled furiously with his hands, looking back, judging the building wave. As he caught the curling crest he stood up on his board and rode the wave rushing down the side of the green-blue water as it curled over his head, holding the water with one hand as he crouched and looked down the tunnel of sea, riding the tube. His moment of ecstasy seemed to be suspended in time as the great wave thundered in to the shore, throwing him out like a cork from a bottle.

  He was shouting his joy at the top of his voice as the board slipped over, landing him back on his feet. After a moment, sav
ouring the perfect wave, the minstrel boy began to paddle out to sea, to wait again for another few moments of pure exhilaration that left the South African army so far away that it might as well have never existed.

  Sophia drew up her knees and hugged them tight, happy for the boy but, on her own little seat on the sand, sad in comparison. The wave looked so big and strong, so very important to the boy. It was a tower of beauty that made petty her thoughts of loneliness and the aching void that would never be filled. That life was over, the promised land seen and lost, found so wondrously and lost so fast; gone forever that brief moment of a pure, beautiful life that made the rest a mundane worthlessness that was utterly futile.

  She sat for an hour watching the boy as he studied the waves astride his board, but the big one never came again. Then the sea calmed with the new day and the ski-boat went out to fish, dodging the diminishing breakers until it found a way to the open sea. It was expertly gunned by Carel van Tonder, who waved to the lonely boy out on the sea.

  The life of the colony picked up around her as the visitors came down to the beach and Matt took up his job as life-saver, warning the unwary swimmers. Always they called out, “Happy Christmas!” and she thanked them too.

  As the minstrel boy came into the shore, paddling along with the waves, she rose and walked away down the long white beach towards the Gap and the big rondavel. She waved to Matt on his perch atop the lifesaver’s stand, the megaphone next to his feet. The wind had changed, and the tang of the sea was strong and fresh. The big wave had gladdened her heart, and she looked around at the beach and the sea, the wild banana trees running riot on the hills, the wild fig higher than the fronds of the banana tree and the lush green of the milkwood down on the shore.

  The smell of roasting ox reached her from the small, private beach away from the crowd, and she knew the pain would leave her in the end. Lorna and Raleen were tending the giant spit, basting the carcass, and Peace and the dog were getting in the way. Two of the men were moving the hot coals from the secondary fire, and all of them waved as she walked through the small space between the giant boulders that guarded their private beach.

  “The minstrel boy caught the perfect wave,” she called, giving them the smallest of smiles.

  “There’s life after a broken heart,” whispered Lorna to Raleen.

  “Yes, there is. A different life. But life.” She was thinking of her dead family, and for a moment she saw the farm and heard the guns. Jonathan Holland was there in her mind, along with the wide sweep of land to the great escarpment. It was all so far away and gone forever. She turned, and through the passage between the boulders watched the boy stride along the beach carrying the surfboard under his arm, and she smiled.

  “It’s going to be a beautiful day,” said Lorna.

  “Mummy, can I have a piece of meat?”

  “Not yet, darling.”

  And the dog barked for the joy of it, and there was peace on a small part of earth and joy in the heavens.

  From his perch on the life-saver’s tower, Matt watched over them all. He was happier than at any other time in his life as the future unfolded around him, seemingly going on forever. He was home where he was born, and the spirits of his mother and father were close and they, too, were happy.

  “You would have loved my little girl,” he said aloud. “Happy Christmas,” he whispered to them. “Happy Christmas.”

  At the end of January, when most of the tourists had returned to their cities, a young man appeared by the side of the road, dropped by one of the recent tourists who had given him a lift from First Beach, seven kilometres back down the coast. He looked bewildered, uncertain what to do. He carried a single suitcase instead of a backpack, wore long trousers instead of shorts, and was so white of complexion that it was doubtful he had ever seen the sun. Dumped at the side of an African road, he looked both ludicrous and a little bizarre.

  Carel saw him on his way back from the beach after an hour stolen from the boy on the surfboard. Carel looked, and then looked again when he saw the young man open up his walking stick so that the top formed a seat, and sit down. The suitcase was just off the main road, and the man’s perch was comfortably in the shade of the big wild fig at the entrance to the campsite. The young man seemed to have no intention of entering and booking himself a hut. He was tall, well-built with good shoulders, and his hair was sandy red. The soft blue eyes that watched Carel approaching him were somehow familiar.

  The young man sat on his stick and did not move, though the eyes watched Carel coming closer with a nod of satisfaction. It was as if the young man was used to people coming to him. The eyes were scarcely curious and gave the lie to the man’s appearance. However he might have looked, he was perfectly at home under the tree out of the sun, sitting on his shooting stick.

  Carel inclined his head as he passed, and received in return a quizzical smile and a look which revealed that Carel van Tonder amused the young man immensely.

  “What’s so funny?” demanded Carel in English, turning back. It was that obvious that the man was not an Afrikaner.

  “You won’t go far on that boat.”

  “It’s a surfboard, not a boat.” The man was still smiling at him. “You looking for someone?” Carel continued sarcastically. He had taken an instant dislike to the man.

  “Actually, yes, as a matter of fact.” His accent was plummy English. “Is it always so hot? Man called Gray… You know a man called Gray? Pater said he was very tall. Never met ’im myself.”

  “Matthew Gray?” The man probably belonged to Matt’s other life. “Big rondavel at the end of the beach, this side of the Gap.” Carel moved off again, and had walked on a few paces when the man continued the conversation.

  “Could you show me, old chap?”

  “No.” In reply, there was a deep chuckle from beneath the fig tree, and Carel stopped and turned again. The man was looking at him with apparent pleasure.

  “You must be one of the dreaded Boers… He’s a distant relation of mine. Maybe you could go and tell him the earl of Lothianmore is sitting under a big tree and requests the pleasure of his company.”

  “Are you serious?” Carel demanded rather than asked.

  “Quite. Absolutely. Tell Mister Gray that Charles Farquhar, twelfth earl of Lothianmore in the county of Lothian, requests the pleasure of his company under the big tree. Being unfamiliar with the types of trees you have here, I am unable to be more specific. There’s a good chap. I haven’t had my breakfast. You could mention that as well.”

  “I could, could I?”

  “Very kind of you, old chap.”

  Carel swore at him in Afrikaans and left him sitting under the tree where he remained all morning, until word reached Matt that someone wanted to see him under the big tree outside the entrance to the campsite.

  To Charles Farquhar, the apparition that confronted him just before noon bore no resemblance to the young man described by his late father, but then it had been a long time ago.

  “My name is Matthew Gray. I believe you are looking for me.” Charles had read the stories but still could not imagine how the freak in front of him was going to solve his problems.

  For the first time since his arrival, he rose from his shooting stick and extended his hand. “Hello, Gray. Charles Farquhar. When you visited the castle, I wasn’t born, I’m afraid. My father mentioned your grandmother. I need a little favour, old chap. Would you be a good fellow and buy the castle. Keep it in the family. Death duties. Pater died a year ago, and inland revenue say that, if I don’t come up with half a million pounds, they’ll take the castle. I mean, that’s quite ridiculous, as I barely had enough money to fly to Johannesburg. Do you think you could run to lunch? Jolly silly of me, but fact is I don’t have a bean in the world, as inland revenue have frozen the bank account. How they valued that old pile of stone beats me, but you can’t argue with the tax man. They won’t budge a penny from the half-million.”

  “Who’s the funny man?” asked P
eace, looking up at the whitest man she had ever seen.

  “This is my daughter, Peace,” Matt introduced her.

  “Then she must be some kind of relation to me.”

  “It would seem so. You’d better give me that case. You’ll be able to carry the shooting stick, I suppose?”

  “I should be able to manage if it isn’t too far.”

  They had gone halfway to the rondavel before the Scotsman spoke again. “Point is, my father said before he died that, if your ancestor had been a male and mine a female, I’d be you and I’d be carrying the suitcase, if you see what I mean. There was some other talk about charity beginning at home, but I won’t bore you with all that, if you know what I mean, old chap.”

  “Good.”

  “I say, who’s that positively gorgeous girl over there? She’s absolutely ravishing.”

  “Sophia van Hoek,”

  “Does she live here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’m going to like it after all.”

  “Are you staying long?” Matt looked at him quizzically.

  “I don’t have any money. Rather like your grandmother when she arrived at the castle. If you see what I mean, old chap.”

  “I think I get the drift.”

  “Jolly good. Could you make the introduction, old chap?”

  “Not just now, Charles. Not just now. We don’t allow people to chase young girls before they have had their breakfast.”