by Wilbur Smith
‘Good evening, Papa,’ he said, and Shasa put an arm around his shoulders and hugged him.
‘Hello, sport. How did it go today?’
They drove down past the winery and the stables and Shasa parked in the converted barn where he kept his collection of a dozen vintage cars. The Jaguar had been a gift from Centaine and he favoured it even over the 1928 Phantom I Rolls-Royce with Hooper coachwork beside which he parked it.
The other children had witnessed his arrival from the nursery windows and came pelting down across the lawns to meet him. Michael, the youngest boy, was leading, with Garrick, his middle son, a good five lengths back. Less than a year separated each of the boys. Michael was the dreamer of the family, a fey child who at nine years of age could lose himself for hours in Treasure Island or spend an afternoon with his box of water-colours, lost to all else in the world. Shasa embraced him as affectionately as he had his eldest, and then Garrick came up, wheezing with asthma, pale-faced and skinny, with wispy hair that stuck up in spikes.
‘Good afternoon, Papa,’ he stuttered. He really was an ugly little brat, Shasa thought, and where the hell did he get them from, the asthma and the stutter?
‘Hello, Garrick.’ Shasa never called him ‘son’ or ‘my boy’ or ‘sport’ as he did the other two. It was always simply ‘Garrick’ and he patted the top of his head lightly. It never occurred to him to embrace the child, the little beggar still peed his bed and he was ten years old.
Shasa turned with relief to meet his daughter.
‘Come on, my angel, come to your daddy!’ And she flew into his arms and shrieked with rapture as he swung her high, then wrapped both arms around his neck and showered warm wet kisses on his face.
‘What does my angel want to do now?’ Shasa asked, without lowering her to earth.
‘I wanna wide,’ Isabella declared, and she was already wearing her new jodhpurs.
‘Then wide we shall,’ Shasa agreed. Whenever Tara accused him of encouraging her lisp, he protested, ‘She’s only a baby.’
‘She’s a calculating little vixen who knows exactly how to twist you around her little finger — and you let her do it.’
Now he swung her up on to his shoulders, and she sat astride his neck and took a handful of his hair to steady herself while she bounced up and down chanting, ‘I love my daddy.’
‘Come on, everybody,’ Shasa ordered. ‘We are going for a wide before dinner.’
Sean was too big and grown up to hold hands, but he kept jealously close to Shasa’s right side; Michael was on his left clinging unashamedly to Shasa’s hand, while Garrick trailed five paces behind looking up adoringly at his father.
‘I came first in arithmetic today, Daddy,’ Garrick said softly, but in all the shouting and laughter Shasa didn’t hear him.
The grooms had the horses saddled up already, for the evening ride was a family ritual. In the saddle room Shasa slipped off his city shoes and changed them for old well-polished riding boots before he lifted Isabella onto the back of her plump little piebald Shetland. Then he went up into the saddle of his own stallion and took Isabella’s lead rein from the groom.
‘Company, forward – walk, march, trot!’ He gave the cavalry command and pumped his hand over his head, a gesture which always reduced Isabella to squeals of delight, and they clattered out of the stableyard.
They made the familiar circuit of the estate, stopping to talk with any of the coloured boss-boys they met, and exchanging shouted greetings with the gangs of labourers trudging home from the vineyards. Sean discussed the harvest with his father in adult terms, sitting straight and important in the saddle, until Isabella, feeling left out, intervened and immediately Shasa leaned over to listen deferentially to what she had to tell him.
The boys ended the ride as always with a mad gallop across the polo fields and up the hill to the stables. Sean, riding like a centaur, was far ahead of the rest of them, Michael was too gentle to use the whip and Garrick bounced awkwardly in the saddle. Despite Shasa’s drilling, his seat was atrocious with toes and elbows sticking out at odd angles.
‘He rides like a sack of potatoes,’ Shasa thought with irritation, following them at the sedate pace set by Isabella’s portly Shetland on the lead rein. Shasa was an international polo player, and he took his middle son’s maladroit seat as a personal affront.
Tara was in the kitchen overseeing the last-minute details for dinner when they came trooping in. She looked up and greeted Shasa casually.
‘Good day?’ She was wearing those appalling trousers in faded blue denim which Shasa detested. He liked feminine women.
‘Not bad,’ he answered, trying to divest himself of Isabella who was still wrapped around his neck. He dislodged her and handed her over to Nanny.
‘We are twelve for dinner.’ Tara turned her attention back to the Malay chef who was standing by dutifully.
‘Twelve?’ Shasa asked sharply.
‘I invited the Broadhursts at the last moment.’
‘Oh, God,’ Shasa groaned.
‘I wanted some stimulating conversation at the table for a change, not just horses and shooting and business.’
‘Last time she came to dinner your and Molly’s stimulating conversation broke the party up before nine o’clock.’ Shasa glanced at his wristwatch. ‘I’d better think about dressing.’
‘Daddy, will you feed me?’ Isabella called from the children’s dining-room beyond the kitchen.
‘You are a big girl, angel,’ he answered. ‘You must learn to feed yourself.’
‘I can feed myself – I just like it better when you do it. Please, Daddy, pretty please a trillion times.’
‘A trillion?’ Shasa asked. ‘I am bid one trillion – any advance on a trillion?’ but he went to her summons.
‘You spoil her,’ Tara said. ‘She’s becoming impossible.’
‘I know,’ said Shasa. ‘You keep telling me.’
Shasa shaved quickly while his coloured valet laid out his dinner-jacket in the dressing-room and put the platinum and sapphire studs into his dress shirt. Despite Tara’s vehement protests he always insisted on black tie for dinner.
‘It’s so stuffy and old-fashioned and snobby.’
‘It’s civilized,’ he contradicted her.
When he was dressed, he crossed the wide corridor strewn with oriental carpets, the walls hung with a gallery of Thomas Baines water-colours, tapped on Tara’s door and went in to her invitation.
Tara had moved into this suite while she was carrying Isabella, and had stayed here. Last year she had redecorated it, removing the velvet drapes and George II and Louis XIV furniture, the Qum silk carpets and the magnificent oils by De Jong and Naudé, stripping the flocked wallpaper and sanding the golden patina off the yellow-wood floor until it looked like plain deal.
Now the walls were stark white with only a single enormous painting facing the bed; it was a monstrosity of geometrical shapes in primary colours in the style of Mir6, but executed by an unknown art student at the Cape Town University Art School and of no value. To Shasa’s mind paintings should be pleasing decorations but at the same time good long-term investments. This thing was neither.
The furniture Tara had chosen for her boudoir was made of angular stainless steel and glass, and there was very little of it. The bed was almost flat on the bare boards of the floor.
‘It’s Swedish decor,’ she had explained.
‘Send it back to Sweden,’ he had advised her.
Now he perched on one of the steel chairs and lit a cigarette. She frowned at him in the mirror.
‘Forgive me.’ He stood up and went to flick the cigarette out of the window. ‘I’ll be working late after dinner,’ he turned back to her, ‘and I wanted to warn you before I forget that I’m flying up to Jo’burg tomorrow afternoon and I’ll be away for a few days, maybe five or six.’
‘Fine.’ She pursed her lips as she applied her lipstick, a pale mauve shade that he disliked intensely.
‘
One other thing, Tara. Lord Littleton’s bank is preparing to underwrite the share issue for our possible new development on the Orange Free State goldfields. I would take it as a personal favour if you and Molly could refrain from waving your black sashes in his face and from regaling him with merry tales of white injustice and bloody black revolution.’
‘I can’t speak for Molly, but I promise to be good.’
‘Why don’t you wear your diamonds tonight?’ he changed the subject. ‘They look so good on you.’
She hadn’t worn the suite of yellow diamonds from the H’ani Mine since she had joined the Sash movement. They made her feel like Marie Antoinette.
‘Not tonight,’ she said. ‘They are a little garish, it’s really just a family dinner party.’ She dusted her nose with the puff and looked at him in the mirror.
‘Why don’t you go down, dear. Your precious Lord Littleton will be arriving at any moment.’
‘I just want to tuck Bella up first.’ He came to stand behind her.
They stared at each other in the mirror, seriously.
‘What happened to us, Tara?’ he asked softly.
‘I don’t know what you mean, dear,’ she replied, but she looked down and adjusted the front of her dress carefully.
‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ he said. ‘Don’t be too long, and do make a fuss of Littleton. He’s important, and he likes the girlies.’
After he had closed the door Tara stared at it for a moment, then she repeated his question aloud. ‘What happened to us, Shasa? It’s quite simple really. I just grew up and lost patience with the trivialities with which you fill your life.’
On the way down she looked in on the children. Isabella was asleep with teddy on top of her face. Tara saved her daughter from suffocation and went to the boys’ rooms. Only Michael was still awake. He was reading.
‘Lights out!’ she ordered.
‘Oh, Mater, just to the end of the chapter.’
‘Out!’
‘Just this page.’
‘Out, I said!’ And she kissed him lovingly.
At the head of the staircase she drew a deep breath like a diver on the high board, smiled brightly and went down into the blue drawing-room where the first guests were already sipping sherry.
Lord Littleton was much better value than she had expected – tall, silver-haired and benign.
‘Do you shoot?’ she asked at the first opportunity.
‘Can’t stand the sight of blood, me dear.’
‘Do you ride?’
‘Horses?’ he snorted. ‘Stupid bloody animals.’
‘I think you and I are going to be good friends,’ she said.
There were many rooms in Weltevreden that Tara disliked; the dining-room she actively hated with all those heads of long-dead animals that Shasa had massacred staring down from the walls with glass eyes. Tonight she took a chance and seated Molly on the other side of Littleton and within minutes Molly had him hooting with delighted laughter.
When they left the men with the port and Hauptmanns and went through to the ladies’ room, Molly pulled Tara aside, bubbling over with excitement.
‘I’ve been dying to get you alone all evening,’ she whispered. ‘You’ll never guess who is in the Cape at this very moment.’
‘Tell me.’
‘The Secretary of the African National Congress – that’s who. Moses Gama, that’s who.’
Tara went very still and pale and stared at her.
‘He’s coming to our home to talk to a small group of us, Tara. I invited him, and he especially asked for you to be present. I didn’t know you knew him.’
‘I met him only once—’ she corrected herself, ‘twice.’
‘Can you come?’ Molly insisted. ‘It’ll be best if Shasa does not know about it, you understand.’
‘When?’
‘Saturday evening, eight o’clock.’
‘Shasa will be away and I’ll be there,’ Tara said. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
Sean Courtney was the stalwart of the Western Province Preparatory School First XIV, or Wet Pups, as the school was known. Quick and strong, he ran in four tries against the Rondebosch juniors and converted them himself, while his father and two younger brothers stood on the touchline and yelled encouragement.
After the final whistle blew Shasa lingered just long enough to congratulate his son, with an effort restraining himself from hugging the sweaty grinning youngster with grass stains on his white shorts and a graze on one knee. A display like that in front of Sean’s peers would have mortified him horribly. Instead they shook hands.
‘Well played, sport. I’m proud of you,’ he said. ‘Sorry about this weekend, but I’ll make it up to you.’ And although the expression of regret was sincere, Shasa felt a buoyancy of his spirits as he drove out to the airfield at Youngsfield. Dicky, his erk, had the aircraft out of the hangar and ready for him on the hardstand.
Shasa climbed out of the Jaguar and stood with his hands in his pockets and the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, staring at the sleek machine with rapture.
It was a DH98 Mosquito fighter-bomber. Shasa had bought it at one of the RAF disposal sales at Biggin Hill and had it completely stripped and overhauled by De Havilland trained riggers. He had even had them re-glue the sandwich construction of the wooden bodywork with the new Araldite wonder glue. The original Rodux adhesives had proved unreliable under tropical conditions. Stripped of all armaments and military fittings, the Mosquito’s already formidable performance had been considerably enhanced. Not even Courtney Mining could afford one of the new civilian jet-engined aircraft, but this was the next best thing.
The beautiful machine crouched on the hardstand like a falcon at bate, the twin Rolls-Royce Merlin engines ready to roar into life and hurtle her into the blue. Blue was her colour, sky blue and silver; she shone in the bright Cape sunlight and on her fuselage where once the RAF roundel had been was now emblazoned the Courtney Company logo, a stylized silver diamond, its facets entwined with the Company’s initials.
‘How is the port number two magneto?’ Shasa demanded of Dicky as he sauntered across in his oily overalls. The little man bridled.
‘Ticking over like a sewing machine,’ he answered. He loved the machine even more than Shasa did, and any imperfection, no matter how minor, wounded him deeply. When Shasa reported one, he took it very badly. He helped Shasa load his briefcase, overnight bag and guncase into the bomb bay, which had been converted into a luggage compartment.
‘All tanks are full,’ he said, and stood aside looking superior as Shasa insisted on checking them visually, and then made a fuss of his walk-around inspection.
‘She’ll do,’ Shasa agreed at last and could not resist stroking the wing, as though it were the limb of a lovely woman.
Shasa switched to oxygen at eleven thousand feet and levelled out at Angels twenty, grinning into his oxygen mask at the old Air Force slang. He tuned her for cruise, carefully watching the exhaust gas temperatures and engine revs, and then settled back to enjoy it.
Enjoy was too mild a term for it. Flying was an exultation of spirit and a fever in his blood. The immense lion-tawny continent drifted by beneath him, washed by a million suns and burned by the hot herb-scented Karoo winds, its ancient hide riven and wrinkled and scarred with donga and canyon and dried riverbed. Only up here, high above it, did Shasa truly realize how much he was a part of it, how deep was his love for it. Yet it was a hard land and cruel, and it bred hard men, black and white, and he knew that he was one of them. There is no place for weaklings here, he thought, only the strong can flourish.
Perhaps it was the pure oxygen he breathed, enhanced by the ecstasy of flight, but his mind seemed clearer up here. Issues that had been obscure became lucid, uncertainties resolved, and the hours sped away as swiftly as the lovely machine streaked across the blue so that when he landed at Johannesburg’s civilian airport, he knew with certainty what had to be done. David Abrahams was waiting for hi
m, lanky and skinny as ever, but he was balding a little and he had taken to wearing gold-rimmed spectacles which gave him a perpetually startled expression. Shasa jumped down off the wing of the Mosquito and they embraced happily. They were closer than brothers. Then David patted the aircraft’s wing.
‘When do I get to fly her again?’ he asked wistfully. David had got a DFC in the Western Desert and a bar to it in Italy. He had been credited with nine kills and ended the war as a wing commander, while Shasa had been a mere squadron leader when he had lost his eye in Abyssinia and been invalided home.
‘She’s too good for you,’ Shasa told him and slung his luggage into the back seat of David’s Cadillac.
As David drove out through the airfield gates they exchanged family news. David was married to Mathilda Janine, Tara Courtney’s younger sister, so David and Shasa were brothers-in-law. Shasa boasted about Sean and Isabella without mentioning his other two sons and then they went on to the real objects of their meeting.
These, in order of importance, were, first, the decision whether or not to exercise the option on the new Silver River mining prospect in the Orange Free State. Then there was the trouble with the company’s chemical factory on the Natal coast. A local pressure group was kicking up a rumpus about poisoning the sea bed and reefs in the area where the factory was discharging effluent into the sea. And, finally, there was David’s crazy fixation, from which Shasa was finding it difficult to dislodge him, that they should spend something over a quarter of a million pounds on one of those new elephantine electric calculators.
‘The Yanks did all the calculations for the atomic bomb with one of them,’ David argued. ‘And they call them computers, not calculators,’ he corrected Shasa.
‘Come on, Davie, what are we going to blow up?’ Shasa protested. ‘I’m not designing an A-bomb.’
‘Anglo-American have one. It’s the wave of the future, Shasa. We’d better be on it.’
‘It’s a quarter-million-pound wave, old son,’ Shasa pointed out. ‘Just when we need every penny for Silver River.’