by Peter Rimmer
“Why do you wish to change your name, young man?” asked his house tutor.
“My mother changed my name. My father is Luke Mbeki and he’s going to be president of South Africa”
“We have no record of your father from when you won our scholarship.”
“Would you please phone him, sir, and tell him his son John is at Cranleigh,” requested the boy. “He’ll confirm who I am. Just phone the ANC office in London. Everyone knows Luke Mbeki.”
“The name is familiar.” The master shook his head. “What next is going to happen to England?” he asked himself but, being aware of the political implications, he made the call and confirmed the boy’s story.
When the boy was told his father was coming down to the school on the first exeat weekend, John knew he was eventually going back to Africa, that he was going to be an African despite whatever his mother wanted him to be. When they showed him the music room, the first thing he played was jazz, much to the consternation of the music master who had heard the recording of Chopin’s nocturnes played by the boy for his scholarship application.
Peace Gray was as wild as the sea, and she had grown up with the pounding and whispering in her ears. She could read and write and play the flute, but any attempt to extend her formal education was met with dedicated resistance, as it would take her away from her mother and father and the colony.
She had watched her father grow stronger over the eighteen months since he had returned in the ambulance and she was sure that any week now he would pick up his paintbrush and begin to paint once more. The palsy in his hands had almost gone, and Peace watched him look covetously at the paintings her mother had carefully left in the best places on the walls of the rondavel where the sun came in each day to fire the canvases to life. When she held his hand and looked out to sea, to the gulls and the shoals of pilchards, he said he was almost back on earth, that soon he would stop flying high with eagles and hawks, and she had understood.
“To stop the pain, I took my mind out of my body, darling, and it was difficult to bring it down again.”
Matt was lying back with his eyes shut, speaking in little more than a whisper, but the peace was gradually returning to his face. “You’re going to be a very beautiful woman, like your mother. My mother was beautiful too. Now, let me sit in the sun and you go and swim,” and, as she left, she saw him leave the earth and go and fly with the eagles again. She had grown used to the sudden change and her mother had told her to be patient.
Peace was long in the leg and her skin was golden-brown, kissed by the sun and the salty sea air, and her hair was almost white. For hours she sat on Carel’s surfboard, coming in with the waves, balanced perfectly, her supple body moving with the curl of the wave. She knew all the colours of the sea and all its moods and, angry or gentle, she loved whatever it gave, singing with wild abandon when the wind whipped up the wild waters into crashing waves that hurtled at the shore. When it was gentle and lapped the sun-drenched shore, she sang a lullaby she had learnt from the minstrel boy, and then she played the flute he had made and taught her how to play.
She often wondered where he was, and whether he thought of the colony. She was going to marry a minstrel boy with long lank hair and eyes full of sadness, then laughter, then all the bursting power of joy and happiness leaping from his face… Poor Raleen. So sad for her love to go away, which was why there was no way she could let them send her to that horrid Johannesburg to go to school. What for? She was going to live all her life in the colony where people loved each other, did things for each other and rarely quarrelled. Peace Gray hated quarrels that upset the harmony of the day.
Looking back at her father with a brief glance from the bottom of the path, she ran out on to the sand and into the sea, her young firm breasts giving only the slightest movement as she plunged headlong into the oncoming waves. It gave her intense pleasure to know that Matt was watching.
The scream was terrible and rent the still night air, waking the dogs and people. Lorna tried to wake him, but the scream grew worse, high-pitched and terrified, a tormented scream. The colony came running, but Matt lay on the mattress on the floor screaming at the night. Shaking would not stop the screams or bring him out of his nightmare, and Lorna feared for his life.
Below the heaven where he sailed, the thermal air was Africa in all its details, and Matt soared down to visit with the hawks and eagles circling in the wind, turning, changing with the wind, but always circling closer to the great plain and forests of Africa. It was a sight of great beauty, with so many birds circling in the wind, graceful, high above the verdant land where the rains were good and the rivers full. With his eyes of great vision, Matt was able to see the elephant herds, the teeming numbers of rhinoceros, the vast herds of buck, impala, springbok and kudu in the thorn thickets, a pride of lion, villages of people, the smoke of the cooking fires curling to the sky, and there was peace on earth. The great birds circled in the wind. Matt flew down to join them, circling lower, moving down the thermals, ever reaching for the earth and the great embrace of Africa and the circling birds.
As he came closer, the birds looked up, but the faces did not show the majesty of eagles or the pride of hawks, but the avarice of vultures. As he joined the birds, they were all the same: vultures in the wind, circling downward to take the pickings of the earth. Down they flew, where Matt now saw that the rhinoceros were dead, their horns torn from the bodies; the tusk-less elephant were dead, and the cooking fires of the villagers were the burning huts of the people. The rains had not fallen, the rivers were dry and, as the vultures circled lower in the wind, Matt had begun to scream.
Book Six
1
On 2 February 1990, President F W de Klerk made a speech in Parliament which stood South Africa on its head. Apartheid was dead, the ANC and the South African communist party were unbanned, and Nelson Mandela was to be let out of jail after twenty-seven years’ incarceration.
The total onslaught had evaporated. The word with as many meanings as love, democracy, was mouthed by everyone, and the civil war in Natal took on a new intensity as the old forces of law and order were unable to understand which side they were fighting. The political military vacuum was to be paralysing.
The ANC camp in Angola exploded with joy at the news. They were going home. Amnesty had been declared. They had won their struggle, and Frikkie Swart in the wire cage of his prison watched them fire their guns in the air with the wry smile of cynicism. He was fifty-three years old, without an ounce of fat left on his body, a fully grey beard, and eyes that saw a distance far greater than his cage. Given a horse, a mauser rifle and an old felt hat, Frikkie would have looked like any Boer Bittereinder in 1902.
“Maybe they let you out, Boer,” shouted a guard.
Frikkie turned away from him to disguise the half smile and the flash of excitement in his eyes. His people had enough arms stashed away to let the true Boers fight for their land for three generations. What was one little speech in a nation’s history of three hundred and fifty years? They had fought the might of the British Empire, twenty thousand armed farmers against a million troops and, were it not for the concentration camps where the British herded women and children to die of disease, they would have chased the Brits into the sea. Africa had always been tough for the Boer. What had changed? The people, the volk, always stayed behind long after the politicians with their great new ideas were dead.
Frikkie did not believe that this was the end of all he stood for. Unlike his old enemy, Hector Fortescue-Smythe, Frikkie was sure his way of life would survive in one form or another, and that his faith would be vindicated. He already had some contingency plans in mind to prolong the present some distance into the future. And if not – well, he had prepared a comfortable refuge overseas.
Luke Mbeki heard the news in London and it made him feel older than his fifty-seven years. They had told him he would be one of the first exiles to go home, and the enormity of the task ahead was evident for the firs
t time. To change from a militant liberation movement to the government of the country and fulfil all the easily made promises was going to be more difficult than raising funds for the struggle. Luke made a silent prayer that they were good enough to govern a modern, sophisticated country that was immersed in a sea of Third World poverty.
Half an hour after speaking to the headmaster of Cranleigh School, the phone rang in Luke’s flat.
“I have your son in my study, Mister Mbeki.”
“Thank you… John. Have you heard? We’re going home,” he told his eldest son.
“And school?”
“You must meet your brothers. Go to school with them. You must become part of Africa.”
“Where are we going to live, dad?”
“Port St Johns. I said we were going home.” Luke was excited.
“And mother?”
“This time she will listen. We are not young, your mother and I. I will have a home. A place to offer. No more running away. She wants security, and now I can offer her all the security in the world. Chances are, John, I will be in the government. You will see. All our dreams we talked about are coming true. A free, democratic South Africa. All the sun and beauty, all the joy of belonging to a country. Pride. Future. Being able to do something that will really make a difference.”
“When are we leaving?” John was somewhat apprehensive. He had never known South Africa. It made him feel insecure.
“Once de Klerk has signed my amnesty.”
“Do you really think it will all happen?”
“Oh, yes, my son. It will all happen. For once in my life, I am going to find out what it feels like to be really happy.”
“Will Sipho be there?”
“Of course. He’s my son as much as you. Please thank the headmaster. I’m going to phone your mother right now.”
Peace Gray watched the incoming waves behind her with consummate care until she saw the one she was waiting for, and began to paddle with her hands. As the big wave swelled to carry up her surfboard, she caught its momentum and stretched up from her kneeling position to stand and ride the wave.
It was her thirteenth birthday and, so far as she was concerned, being a teenager made a lot of difference. Her body was tanned a rich copper and the curves that had been promising for months had taken shape. Her blonde hair was white from surfing and contrasted with the blue eyes inherited from her parents. Her skin was as smooth as silk, her face oval with high cheekbones and a strong nose. Peace was more striking than beautiful, but her best feature was her smile, the soft gentle smile of her father when he was relaxed and away from the troubles of the world.
When she came ashore, with the last of the sun burning the underbelly of the clouds a deep red, her brother Robert was waiting patiently on the beach. He was eight years old, and he and Sipho Mbeki shadowed Peace wherever she went,
“When will you teach me?” they both demanded at the same time.
“When Uncle Carel makes you a small board.”
“He says we’re too little”
“Then maybe you are.”
“Can we carry your board?”
Matthew Gray, a much improved Matthew Gray, watched his young family walk across the beach to the path that would lead up to their home.
“They must have smelt the cooking,” he said to his wife.
“She’s frightened of sharks at night,” said Lorna. “You think Luke coming back will change Sipho?”
“For us, you mean? Probably. We only had him to look after.”
“I’ve brought him up from a baby.”
“This is a community. We all belong to each other. Anyway, no one’s going to separate those two boys, not even their fathers.”
“Why should they?… No, it’s a change, Matt. Change always does funny things.”
“Better get the food bowls out. Those kids are going to be hungry.”
“You really are better?”
“Yes, I am,” confirmed Matt, who was beginning to speak positively again. “Still the dreams, but I’m enjoying painting, and anyway those sods that did it to me are on their way out… You know something, I think this paella needs a little more chilli.”
“You think so? … Maybe you’re right. Isn’t that a beautiful sunset? … With all this change, I want you to promise me we’ll never leave Second Beach again.”
“Never, Lorna. I promise. We’re going to grow old gracefully in paradise without any interference from other people. Give me a kiss. You look absolutely delicious back dropped by that sunset.”
Chelsea de La Cruz looked around her small villa in Lisbon at all the small things she had bought to make a home, somewhere that was hers; a safe place, familiar, a place that left her content with her life after a rewarding day at her job.
When the men had been calling to take her out, there was a fullness to her life, but after she turned forty the flow of suitors came to a stop. In her mind she no longer felt attractive, could appreciate why men would no longer spend their money on a woman well past her prime. Her wide mouth was suddenly too wide, her big breasts were definitely sagging, and she no longer enjoyed the music with the same abandon. John’s being away at boarding school had introduced her to the clutch of loneliness which made her reflect on the futility of her life.
What had she done? What had she ever achieved? A son out of wedlock and a job in the insurance industry that had once even seemed exciting. All she had to look forward to was a pension in nineteen years’ time, and the four walls of her little villa with its pot plants and flowers and the peculiar sweet smell of Portugal, lush in its ancient history with more monuments to an ancient past than the last hundred years. And after her pension, how many years on her own?
And now he wanted her to go home; his home, not hers. Hers was long lost in African history, the country of her birth, Mozambique, torn to shreds by civil war and starvation. How could South Africa be any different to all the civil wars of Africa? The men plunged into their paths of glory. He was taking her son, and all the warnings of the more prudent woman were brushed aside.
Chelsea laughed out loud. He had promised her security and a home in a country with at least seventeen divergent factions, all armed. And all this they expected Mandela to weld into a homogeneous state! The best will in the world would not make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, an expression her mother, dead with her father in the Mozambique civil war, had quoted to make so many of her political points against Frelimo. But had Renamo, for whom her parents had gone back to Mozambique, been any different?
She had had her fill of African politics. For Chelsea, they were all greedy bloodsuckers with a terminal lust for power and a tendency to kill innocent people who got in their way. But she was lonely. Terribly lonely. They were all she had.
Lisbon or Luke? … She wondered if he still played in a band, and giggled. And Matt and Port St Johns and Sipho Mbeki, whom she had refused to bring up. Luke said the colony was one big family, and if there was anything she wanted more in the world it was a family, somewhere to belong.
Chelsea waited a week before picking up the phone and calling Luke’s flat in London. For the first time in many years, she was going to allow her heart to rule her head. A lonely slide into old age had become the most appalling thought in her life. She resigned her job and put her furniture into storage.
“Keep my pension contributions in the fund,” she told them, with her last shred of sanity.
Whilst Chelsea was booking her flight back to Africa, Antonio van Perreira dos Santos Cassero, the man who had destroyed Teddie Botha’s tank, was contemplating his year old coffee trees with satisfaction, the Angolan civil war the furthest thing from his mind.
Richard Williams, the old parish priest, looked at Hector Fortescue-Smythe with compassion. Hector had lost the thread of their game of chess some time ago and it was cold in the caravan parked at the bottom of the estate as far away from habitation as was possible.
Hector’s only visitor for many months had
been the village priest; the caretaker and his wife were forbidden to come anywhere near the caravan or to tell anyone the whereabouts of the millionaire recluse. The village bank manager held power of attorney to pay the household bills, and solicitors in London kept account of his considerable wealth. Smythe-Wilberforce Industries was run by professional managers and the family now had nothing to do with the running of the company.
The two men from the South African communist party, both white, had been watching the estate since ten o’clock in the morning, and had seen the vicar ride his bicycle down the rickety path and into the trees, where he had stayed longer than a winter’s day suggested. The trees were leafless and the ground sodden under foot, only the occasional pigeon bursting out of the barren trees to fly below the low, slate-grey sky that had hung over Surrey for most of February.
The vicar opened the caravan door in answer to the loud banging. Two spaniel dogs jumped down the steps and went off into the trees to relieve themselves.
“Mister Fortescue-Smythe?” The reverend gave them a queer look and pulled at the inside of his dog-collar with a finger.
“I don’t allow visitors,” bellowed Hector, “Call the prime minister. I told him quite plainly myself. No visitors.” He was huddled in his old cavalry overcoat from his early days of national service, which contrasted with the slippers and his dishevelled head of hair. There was a faint smell of stale urine permeating the caravan.