Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  The castle had still not been sold, the tax men finding themselves in a quandary. In reality, the old pile of stones was a liability, the upkeep being greater than the value of the land. The taxman and the earl were at a standoff, but content with the status quo. Charles tried again to catch Sophia’s eye, without any success. He really was wasting his time.

  “You want a joint, old son?” asked Jonathan. “Good for the blues and I should know. Why suffer when pot can blow your mind away?”

  “Why not?” said Charles, taking the joint carefully, pulling in a drag and handing it back. They passed the joint back and forth until it was finished. “What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” Charles then asked Jonathan.

  “Get stoned . . . get beautifully, totally stoned. Old Ding-dong always believed in getting stoned. First time we met. Stoned. That was booze. Too expensive. Too much tax… And I hate hangovers. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “Very, old chap.”

  “I mean Raleen, not Sophia. You’re looking at the wrong woman… He can sing, I’ll give him that,” referring to the minstrel boy. “Best thing l ever did was coming to Port St Johns; cheapest place in the world to get stoned.” He lay back and smiled at the patterns in the thatch high above his head, flashed to him by the flickering flames of the fire.

  Two weeks after the storm, when September rode the first days of an African spring, the sea was calm and gentle, giving sanctuary to the battered seabirds who rode the gentle swells, feathers preened, letting the sun warm their exhausted bodies that had fought the winds and rain. It was the period of renewal.

  Carel van Tonder had launched their boat at first light, and stretched in the prow was Matthew Gray in his loin cloth, the salt crusting the lower part of his body from the time when they had pushed the boat out into the water from the beach. Charles Farquhar was watching his cousin, whose eyes were almost closed against the glare of the morning sun.

  The minstrel boy was perched on the back bench, behind the big fish box, his hair tied up neatly, his eight string guitar left behind in the small school they had all helped to build. Sophia was happier on her own and spent hours of her leisure time walking the cliffs and the beach, reliving the hopes in her mind. Black Martin was making a hand line with one of the sticks whittled by Carel during the storm. No one had spoken for half an hour while the small ski boat motored slowly to the reef, where the fish were big and the mountain from the bottom of the deep blue sea rose to within ten metres of the surface.

  Jonathan Holland had been left on shore under a wild banana tree, smoking his first joint of the day and talking quite happily to Ding-dong Bell as if his dead friend was alive and well; this morning they were collecting bottles to take down to the Salisbury industrial sites to exchange for money. A young African by the name of Jamba Sithole was recruiting the blacks to go out on the Street tricycles to collect empty beer bottles. Matt had written to Jonathan’s mother, saying the boy was fine and well, which in a way was true.

  They anchored over the subterranean mountain peak and let their lines down into the water, all except Charles, who pulled out of the empty fish box a picnic basket of gargantuan size. From the basket he took four bottles of excellent Cape white wine and a canvas bag to which was attached a long length of rope. Carefully, Charles let the wine filled bag down over the gunwale. When he felt it finally touch the bottom, he pulled it up a metre and firmly tied the end of the rope to a rowlock.

  Matt leant up and looked into the hamper. There were neat rows of wine glasses attached by leather thongs to one side, a corkscrew with an ivory handle emblazoned with the family crest, and a number of interesting plastic containers of varying sizes all tied down to stop them moving around. On the other side from the glasses were leather straps which held the picnic plates, and attached to the short sides were plastic tea cups and two large, red thermos flasks. Matt could see a wooden salad bowl with a long pronged fork, a fat wooden spoon and a small row of condiments. Each compartment was full of something.

  “There was a delightful character in a Howard Spring book I read as a youngster,” said Charles, by way of explanation. “His name was Septimus Pordage, and he firmly believed that no civilised person should go farther than fifty metres from his own front door without victuals, which always included a bottle of hock wrapped in a double damask dinner napkin as white as the driven snow. I could not find a suitable napkin nor the hock, but I did find a delightful bottle or two of Bellingham Premier Grand Cru (PGC to the initiated), which I hope will suffice. I mean, it was an emergency, old chap.

  “Now, if one of you fine gentlemen will put the bait on the end of my hook please? The picnic hamper was a present from Bernard Strover and the corkscrew was one of the heirlooms I salvaged from the department of inland revenue. In a manner of speaking, ‘tis all I have of the castle right now, but who would want more than a gentle sea and a ship and the deep blue sky of heaven? Thank you, dear boy,” he said, as Black Martin handed him a line with baited hooks. “Most kind. Should I be so bold as to catch a fish, you will have the honour of removing it as well. I was always squeamish, old boy. Do you think you could sing a fishing song, old chap?” He was smiling at the minstrel boy. “Something rather enticing. The wine should be chilled in an hour. If you don’t sing, old chap, I shall have a go at ‘A life on the ocean wave’, and my voice is even worse than my cousin’s.”

  “What food did you bring, man?” asked Carel.

  “All manner of things to delight the most discerning palate.”

  “Where did you get the money, man?”

  “That is for me to know and for you, if you wish to be a bore, to find out. No pun intended, good Carel van Tonder. No pun intended.”

  “Two blerrie lunatics,” muttered Black Martin. “One in the boat and one on the shore.”

  “When you have supped the cool wine and eaten the perfect crayfish mayonnaise, you will wish for a world full of lunatics.”

  Instead of singing, the minstrel boy took a harmonica from the deep pocket of his shirt and began to play, with the end of his fishing line hooked around the big toe of his right foot. When he had finished, he took up the line and looked out over the sea.

  “If there be a place called heaven, then this be it,” he said quietly.

  They came ashore ten minutes after the fiery sun had gone down, sending red shafts of light to the heavens. The fires had been lit on shore and the whole community of Second Beach had come down to watch the beaching of the fish. Using his great strength to its limit, Matt helped pull the laden boat from the gentle surf; and the hatch was opened for all to see. Everyone was waiting his turn to look over the side of the boat at the great catch that had almost filled the ski boat.

  Charles stepped off onto the sand carrying the picnic basket, light as a feather, full of empty flasks and bottles, with not a morsel of food uneaten. Matt hugged Lorna first, then Peace, then little Robert, and finally tossed the baby Sipho up on to his shoulders. All the fish had to be gutted and cleaned, the offal being thrown into the sea as food for the scavenging crayfish. Raleen kissed the minstrel boy, while Melissa took the hand of Black Martin. Charles looked for Sophia and Jonathan offered his help with the gutting of the fish.

  “Best bream gutter in the Zambezi Valley… Who wants a joint?” said Jonathan.

  A moonless darkness had gripped the beach by the time the last fish had been gutted and all who needed had taken a fish home to their huts. The Vuya restaurant bought seven copper steenbras, which paid for the petrol for the next seven trips. The fish were so large that even the smallest weighed nineteen kilograms. On each of the driftwood fires on the beach, they grilled a black steenbras, with all the people of Second Beach and its surrounds mingling around the great fish, children rushing between legs, skipping in the darkness and laughing with the joy of plenty. Many were hungry as, with the storm, nothing else had come out of the sea.

  The fishermen tried their best to carry on with the party after the first servi
ng of cooked fish but wearily, they climbed to their huts, washing the salt water from their tired bodies before falling face down on to their mattresses. Matt was still smiling as he fell asleep, and still holding Lorna’s hand.

  “Come, Peace,” she said. “Your daddy has earned his sleep,” and pulling a thin blanket over his long body, they tiptoed out of the big rondavel, leaving Sipho asleep in his cot next to Robert. Just far enough away from the hut, Peace squealed and ran down the path to join her friends on the beach.

  The stars had begun to appear, bright and clean. Lorna stopped at the bottom of the patch and looked up at the heavens. “Thank you,” she whispered, and, hugging herself, knowing her man was safe, she went out on the beach to join her friends.

  “Hey,” she called. “Is there any of that fish left?”

  “Plenty,” came back the chorus in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa.

  Being unable to leap in and out of the open cars without using the doors any more, Lucky Kuchinski had resorted to dyeing his hair the original dark brown and lying about his age. He frequented the most upmarket boutiques and wore clothes that would have suited a man of thirty. The gymnasiums did their best but a fifty-four year old body is still a fifty-four year old body, and a good chest had declined to around the waist, making belts or braces essential. Bending down and rising again most often produced a jerk in the action and a pain in the back.

  Lucky was hysterically determined not to fall prey to the beckoning hand of old age. Once his virility had gone, Lucky knew he was dead, and he pursued the company of young girls like a man in the desert pursues water. The cleft in his chin was still there, but no longer clean and square, having joined the crags and crevices that now made up the pattern of his face.

  Instead of showing his grandchildren how to fish or catch a ball, Lucky was still trying to be the man-about-town. The Aston Martin DB4 had given way to an imported Porsche, with the highest number in the catalogue that could travel up to two hundred and thirty kilometres an hour, but he now rarely drove outside the built-up area of Johannesburg. Lucky, to prove he was still the life and soul of the party, was permanently travelling somewhere, and always by aeroplane. If he met a new girl in Cape Town, he wanted to fly her to a party in Johannesburg, and a Johannesburg girl to a beach party at the Cape.

  Lucky was too terrified to stop for a moment and accept the truth that it was all over. He had never married, preferring to flit from one woman to the other, finding physical satisfaction in the chase rather than consummation. The only thing that kept the young girls from laughing at him was the money, and money in the quantities lavished on them by Lucky is the strongest aphrodisiac known to certain types in the world of women.

  Lucky was never short of the wrong kind of girl. They were the type of women who had a body and nothing else, and their years of cashing the chips were a lot shorter than Lucky Kuchinski’s. The idea of marrying, relaxing and living in luxury with an old rich man was highly attractive. Who wanted to work when one good effort could solve the biggest problem of life once and for all?

  But, like most opportunities in life that seem too good to be true, they rarely came true. Trapping Lucky in a church or even a registry office was quite impossible. The man was a butterfly and, when he saw what young Tilda was doing to his boss, he took off from his mighty pursuits to warn the younger man he was in danger. Lucky had known Tilda’s mother intimately many years before, and knew her for a first-class scheming bitch.

  “Have you met the mother?” Lucky inquired.

  “Not yet.”

  “Meet her. Always check the mothers. Remember one thing, Teddie: daughters always, without exception, end up like their mothers. Do you really want a whingeing wife and three whingeing kids to make you wish you never had to go home at night? You might get three girls just like their mother.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “With all your travelling, how do you know it’s yours?”

  “I trust the girl,” stated Teddie, with more conviction than he felt.

  “That’s the first mistake of life. Never trust anyone, and certainly not an unmarried girl who tells you she’s pregnant. Tell me something, Edward Botha. Would you take over another insurance company without checking every fact and weighing all the possibilities?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And yet you meet a young girl in the bar, let her move in with you, get her pregnant, and you’re thinking of marriage and you haven’t even had a glance at the balance sheet”

  “But, if the kid’s mine, he must have a father.”

  “Give the kid support, maybe, after a blood test, but don’t enter into a lifelong contract with a total stranger. You’ve only known her three months. When’s the baby due?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “Find out from someone you can trust” insisted Lucky. “Send her to your doctor.”

  “She has her own gynaecologist.”

  “Then have your doctor find out from him. Believe me. And if you don’t believe me, meet the mother. Theodora Blaze won’t have changed. Once a scheming bitch, always a scheming bitch. And I should know. I lived with her twenty years ago.”

  “You mean Tilda is?…”

  “No, Tilda was two. And I’ll tell you something else. Theo was never sure who the father was, whatever story she has made up since. Believe me, please believe me. Those two women saw you coming from the other side of Johannesburg. I swear it on the grave of my Polish mother.”

  “She’s a lovely girl,” protested Teddie, weakly.

  “They all are at twenty-three.”

  Theodora Blaze knew the one weak link in her plan was Lucky Kuchinski. They had met in London soon after Lucky and Archie had walked out of the Congo with the few Kruger rands strapped to their waists. Theo had made up her mind to marry a rich man and, though Lucky swept her off her feet, showing her places most girls of modest means read about only in newspapers, she knew the source of his wealth was short-lived, if she had only known Matthew Gray was going to take him back into the jungle and bring him out richer than any man she had ever known, she would not have dropped Lucky for what she thought at the time was a better long-term proposition.

  A fact she did not know was that she had been to Lucky the only girl he would ever have married. They were the same type. Prospectors, predators, maybe. They liked to live off other people. They were both good at banging the drum for other people’s ideas and they made making friends a purpose in life. Knowing their own inadequacies, they were insecure. By the time Lucky had returned three years later and Lion Life had blossomed, it was too late. Deliberately, Lucky had started the relationship again, waited until she thought he was going to propose, and then dumped her the way she had dumped him. When he returned to South Africa, she had followed, hoping he would turn to her again, but by then the overflow of money had gone to his head.

  Theo had watched her daughter grow into the rarity that all men seemed to want and she had schooled the girl to wait until the real money came along. It was very much a case of like mother, like daughter. Tilda knew, as her mother had known, that a girl’s looks do not last and that a man’s great prize in life is possession of a woman that all other men want.

  She had first gone to bed with Teddie before she knew who he was, Teddie having borrowed a car from the garage while his was being serviced. On the first Friday night, they had met in the Balalaika along with the rest of the crowd, and he had given her a lift home, on the way buying her a steak at the Bonanza. They had spent the weekend in her bachelor flat, returning to the Balalaika at Saturday lunchtime to join the crowd and the rest of the hedonists. She would have left it as a pleasant but unproductive weekend had her mother not picked up the name in conversation.

  “Teddie Botha? What does he do?” asked Theo sharply. The combination of an Afrikaans surname and an English Christian name was rare. They were all known as Koos, Naas or Pik.

  “Something to do with insurance.”

  “Did he say
which insurance company?”

  “No, but someone in the pub on Saturday asked him how it was going at Security Lion. He’s a salesman. Sells life insurance. Ugh! Forget him. Nice enough guy, I suppose… How was your date?”

  “When you start going for the thirty year olds at my age, you know you’re reaching menopause. Now, young lady, just you come over here and sit down. Did you sleep with him?”

  “Mother, please!”

  “Good. Now, is this the man you met?” The magazine was the Financial Mail which Theo read as part of her job in the advertising agency.

  “That’s Teddie. Was he salesman of the year or something?” The face from that weekend was looking at her from the cover page of the magazine.

  “No. He’s chairman of Security Lion.”

  “Doesn’t drive much of a car.”

  “Very rich men don’t have to. You go and read the article on Teddie Botha, and when you’re finished we’ll make a plan.” Her one track mind had gone into overdrive; she had nurtured her daughter through the months that had led to the pregnancy.

  An hour after making the phone call, Teddie’s doctor phoned him back. The doctor had had his secretary phone all over Johannesburg to track down Tilda’s gynaecologist.

  “Miss Matilda Blaze is ten weeks pregnant, Teddie.”

  “She could not be over three months?”

  “Definitely not. I specifically asked him that question.”

  “I owe you one.” With the receiver back in its place, Teddie clasped his hands together on his desk and pressed the palms together. They were sweating with excitement. He was going to be a daddy and all the ancestors in his genes were tingling with joy. He rose and walked round the large office, hugging himself with happiness. Then he dashed back to his desk and dialled Lucky Kuchinski on the intercom.