by Wilbur Smith
Shasa stared at them. What they were suggesting was outrageous. He had grown up in the shadow of Jan Christiaan Smuts and had a natural and unshakeable allegiance to the party that Smuts, that great and good man, had founded. He opened his mouth to answer angrily, but Manfred De La Rey raised his hand to stop him.
‘Hear me out,’ he said. ‘The person chosen for this patriotic work would be immediately given a senior cabinet appointment which the Prime Minister would create specifically for him. He would become Minister of Mines and Industry.’
Shasa closed his mouth slowly. How carefully they must have studied him, and how accurately they had analysed him and arrived at his price. The very foundations of his political beliefs and principles were shaken, and the walls cracked through. They had led him up into a high place and shown him the prize that was his for the taking.
At twenty thousand feet Shasa levelled the Mosquito and trimmed for cruise. He increased the flow of oxygen into his mask to sharpen his brain. He had four hours’ flying time to Youngsfield, four hours to think it all out carefully, and he tried to divorce himself from the passions and emotions which still swept him along and attempt instead to reach his decision logically – but the excitement intruded upon his meditations. The prospect of wielding vast powers, building up an arsenal that would make his country supreme in Africa and a force in the world was awe-inspiring. That was power. The thought of it all made him slightly light-headed, for it was all there at last, everything he had ever dreamed of. He had only to reach out his hand and seize the moment. Yet what would be the cost in honour and pride – how would he explain to men who trusted him?
Then abruptly he thought of Blaine Malcomess, his mentor and adviser, the man who had stood in the place of his own father all these years. What would he think of this dreadful betrayal that Shasa was contemplating?
‘I can do more good by joining them, Blaine,’ he whispered into his mask. ‘I can help change and moderate them from within more effectively than in opposition, for now I will have the power—’ but he knew he was prevaricating, and all else was dross.
It all came down to that one thing in the end, the power – and he knew that although Blaine Malcomess would never condone what he would see as treachery, there was one person who would understand and give him support and encouragement. For after all it was Centaine Courtney-Malcomess who had so carefully schooled her son in the acquisition and use of wealth and power.
‘It could all come true, Mater. It could still happen, not exactly as we planned it, but it could still happen all the same.’ Then a thought struck him, and a shadow passed across the bright light of his triumph.
He glanced down at the red folder that Manfred De La Rey, Minister of Police, had given him at the airstrip, just as he was about to climb up into the Mosquito, and which now lay on the co-pilot’s seat beside him.
‘There is only one problem we will have to deal with, if you accept our offer,’ Manfred had said as he handed it over, ‘and it is a serious problem. This is it.’
The folder contained a police Special Branch security report, and the name on the cover was:
TARA ISABELLA COURTNEY née
MALCOMESS
Tara Courtney made her round of the children’s wing, calling in at each of the bedrooms. Nanny was just tucking Isabella under her pink satin eiderdown, and the child let out a cry of delight when she saw Tara.
‘Mummy, Mummy, teddy has been naughty. I’m going to make him sleep on the shelf with my other dolls.’
Tara sat on her daughter’s bed and hugged her while they discussed teddy’s misdemeanours. Isabella was pink and warm and smelled of soap. Her hair was silky against Tara’s cheek and it took an effort for Tara to kiss her and stand up.
‘Time to go to sleep, Bella baby.’
The moment the lights went out Isabella let out such a shriek that Tara was stricken with alarm.
‘What is it, baby?’ She snapped on the lights again and rushed back to the bed.
‘I’ve forgiven teddy. He can sleep with me after all.’
The teddy-bear was ceremoniously reinstated in Isabella’s favour and she took him in a loving half-nelson and stuck her other thumb in her mouth.
‘When is my daddy coming home?’ she demanded drowsily around the thumb, but her eyes were closed and she was asleep before Tara reached the door.
Sean was sitting on Garrick’s chest in the middle of the bedroom floor, tweaking the hair at his brother’s temples with sadistic finesse. Tara separated them.
‘Sean, you get back to your own room this instant, do you hear me? I have warned you a thousand times about bullying your brothers. Your father is going to hear all about this when he gets home.’
Garrick snuffled up his tears and came wheezing to his elder brother’s defence.
‘We were only playing, Mater. He wasn’t bullying me.’ But she could hear that he was on the verge of another asthma attack. She wavered. She really should not go out, not with an attack threatening, but tonight was so important.
‘I’ll prepare his inhaler and tell Nanny to look in on him every hour until I get back,’ she compromised.
Michael was reading, and barely looked up to receive her kiss. ‘Lights out at nine o’clock. Promise me, darling.’ She tried never to let it show, but he was always her favourite.
‘I promise, Mater,’ he murmured and under cover of the eiderdown carefully crossed his fingers.
On the way down the stairs she glanced at her wristwatch. It was five minutes before eight. She was going to be late, and she stifled her maternal feelings of guilt and fled out to her old Packard.
Shasa detested the Packard, taking its blotched sun-faded paintwork and its shabby stained upholstery as an affront to the family dignity. He had given her a new Aston Martin on her last birthday, but she left it in the garage. The Packard suited her spartan image of herself as a caring liberal, and it blew a streamer of dirty smoke as she accelerated down the long driveway, taking a perverse pleasure in sending a pall of fine dust over Shasa’s meticulously groomed vineyards. It was strange how even after all these years she felt herself a stranger at Weltevreden, and alien amongst its treasures and stuffy old-fashioned furnishings. If she lived here another fifty years it would never be her home, it was Centaine Courtney-Malcomess’ home, the other woman’s touch and memory lingered in every room that Shasa would never allow her to redecorate.
She escaped through the great ostentatious Anreith gateway into the real world of suffering and injustice, where the oppressed masses wept and struggled and cried out for succour and where she felt useful and relevant, where in the company of other pilgrims she could march forward to meet a future full of challenge and change.
The Broadhursts’ home was in the middle-class suburb of Pinelands, a modern ranch-type home with a flat roof and large picture windows, with ordinary functional mass-produced furniture and nylon wall-to-wall carpets. There were dog hairs on the chairs, well-thumbed intellectual books piled in odd corners or left open on the dining-room table, children’s toys abandoned in the passageways, and cheap reproductions of Picasso and Modigliani hanging askew on the walls marked with grubby little fingerprints. Tara felt comfortable and welcome here, mercifully released from the fastidious splendour of Weltevreden.
Molly Broadhurst rushed out to meet her as she parked the Packard. She was dressed in a marvellously flamboyant caftan.
‘You’re late!’ She kissed Tara heartily and dragged her through the disorder of the lounge to the music room at the rear.
The music room was an afterthought stuck on to the end of the house without any aesthetic considerations and was filled now with Molly’s guests who had been invited to hear Moses Gama. Tara’s spirits soared as she looked around her; they were all vibrant creative people, all of them spirited and articulate, filled with the excitment of living and a fine sense of justice and outrage and rebellion.
This was the type of gathering that Weltevreden would never see. Firstly, b
lack people were included, students from the black University of Fort Hare and the fledgling University of the Western Cape, teachers and lawyers and even a black doctor, all of them political activists who, although denied a voice or a vote in the white parliament, were beginning to cry out with a passion that must be heard. There was the editor of the black magazine Drum and the local correspondent of the Sowetan, named after that sprawling black township.
Just to mingle socially with blacks made her feel breathlessly daring.
The whites in the room were no less extraordinary. Some of them had been members of the Communist Party of South Africa before that organization had been disbanded a few years previously. There was a man called Harris whom she had met before at Molly’s house. He had fought with the Irgun in Israel against the British and the Arabs, a tall fierce man who inspired a delicious fear in Tara. Molly hinted that he was an expert in guerrilla warfare and sabotage, and certainly he was always travelling secretly around the country or slipping across the border into neighbouring states on mysterious business.
Talking earnestly to Molly’s husband was another lawyer from Johannesburg, Bram Fischer, who specialized in defending black clients charged under the myriad laws that were designed to muzzle and disarm them and restrict their movements. Molly said that Bram was reorganizing the old Communist Party into underground cells, and Tara fantasized that she might one day be invited to join one of these cells.
In the same group was Marcus Archer, another ex-Communist and an industrial psychologist from the Witwatersrand. He was responsible for the training of thousands of black workers for the gold-mining industry, and Molly said that he had helped to organize the black mineworkers’ union. Molly had also whispered that he was a homosexual, and she had used an odd term for it that Tara had never heard before. ‘He’s gay, gay as a lark.’ And because it was totally unacceptable to polite society, Tara found it fascinating.
‘Oh, God, Molly,’ Tara whispered. ‘This is so exciting. These are all real people, they make me feel as though I am truly living at last.’
‘There he is.’ Molly smiled at this outburst and dragged Tara with her through the press of bodies.
Moses Gama leaned against the far wall faced by a half-circle of admirers, yet standing head and shoulders above them, and Molly pushed her way into the front row.
Tara found herself staring up at Moses Gama, and she thought that even in this brilliant company he stood out like a black panther in a pack of mangy alley cats. Though his head seemed carved from a block of black onyx, and his handsome Nilotic features were impassive, yet there was a force within him that seemed to fill all the room. It was like standing on the high slopes of a dark Vesuvius, knowing that at any instant it could boil over into cataclysmic eruption.
Moses Gama turned his head and looked at Tara. He did not smile, but a shadowy thing moved in the depths of his dark gaze.
‘Mrs Courtney – I asked Molly to invite you.’
‘Please don’t call me that. My name is Tara.’
‘We must talk later, Tara. Will you stay?’
She could not answer, she was too overcome at being singled out, but she nodded dumbly.
‘If you are ready, Moses, we can begin,’ Molly suggested, and taking him out of the group led him to the raised dais on which the piano stood.
‘People! People! Your attention; please!’ Molly clapped her hands, and the animated chatter died away. Everybody turned towards the dais. ‘Moses Gama is one of the most talented and revered of the new generation of young black African leaders. He has been a member of the African National Congress since before the war, and a prime mover in the formation of the African Mineworkers’ Union. Although the black trade unions are not officially recognized by the government of the day, yet the secret union of mineworkers is one of the most representative and powerful of all black associations, with more than a hundred thousand paid-up members. In 1950 Moses Gama was elected Secretary of the ANC, and he has worked tirelessly, selflessly and highly effectively in making the heart cry of our black citizens heard, even though they are denied a voice in their own destiny. For a short while Moses Gama was an appointed member of the government’s Natives’ Representative Council, that infamous attempt to appease black political aspirations, but it was he who resigned with the now celebrated remark, “I have been speaking into a toy telephone, with nobody listening at the other end.”’
There was a burst of laughter and applause from the room, and then Molly turned to Moses Gama.
‘I know that you have nothing to tell us that will comfort and soothe us – but, Moses Gama, in this room there are many hearts that beat with yours and are prepared to bleed with yours.’
Tara applauded until the palms of her hands were numb, and then leaned forward to listen eagerly as Moses Gama moved to the front of the dais.
He was dressed in a neat blue suit and a dark blue tie with a white shirt. Strangely, he was the most formally dressed man in a room full of baggy woollen sweaters and old tweed sports coats with leather patches on the elbows and gravy stains on the lapels. His suit was severely cut, draped elegantly from wide athletic shoulders, but he imparted to it a panache that made it seem that he wore the leopard-skin cloak of royalty and the blue heron feathers in his close-cropped mat of hair. His voice was deep and thrilling.
‘My friends, there is one single ideal to which I cling with all my heart, and which I will defend with my very life, and that is that every African has a primary, inherent and inalienable right to the Africa which is his continent and his only motherland,’ Moses Gama began, and Tara listened, enchanted, as he detailed how that inherent right had been denied the black man for three hundred years, and how in these last few years since the Nationalist government had come to power those denials were becoming formally entrenched in a monumental edifice of laws and ordinances and proclamations which was the policy of apartheid in practice.
‘We have all heard it said that the whole concept of apartheid is so grotesque, so obviously lunatic, that it can never work. But I warn you, my friends, that the men who have conceived this crazy scheme are so fanatical, so obdurate, so convinced of their divine guidance, that they will force it to work. Already they have created a vast army of petty civil servants to administer this madness, and they have behind them the full resources of a land rich in gold and minerals. I warn you that they will not hesitate to squander that wealth in building up this ideological Frankenstein’s monster of theirs. There is no price in material wealth and human suffering that is too high for them to contemplate.’
Moses Gama paused and looked down upon them, and it seemed to Tara that he personally felt every last agony of his people, and was filled with suffering beyond that which mortal men could bear.
‘Unless they are opposed, my friends, they will create of this lovely land a desolation and an abomination; a land devoid of compassion, of justice, a land materially and spiritually bankrupt.’
Moses Gama spread his arms. ‘These men call those of us who defy them traitors. Well, my friends, I call any man who does not oppose them a traitor – a traitor to Africa.’
He was silent then, glaring this accusation at them, and they were struck dumb for a moment, before they began to cheer him. Only Tara remained still in the uproar, staring up at him; she had no voice, and she was shivering as though there was malaria in her blood.
Moses’ head sank until his chin was on his chest, and they thought he had finished. Then he raised that magnificent head again and spread his arms.
‘Oppose them? How do we oppose them? I reply to you – we oppose them with all our strength and all our resolve and with all our hearts. If no price is too high for them to pay, then no price is too high for us. I tell you, my friends, there is nothing—’ he paused for emphasis – ‘nothing I would not do to further the struggle. I am prepared both to die and to kill for it.’
The room was silent in the face of such deadly resolve. For those of them who were practitioners of el
egant socialist dialectic, the effete intellectuals, such a declaration was menacing and disquieting, it had the sound of breaking bones in it and the stench of fresh-spilled blood.
‘We are ready to make a beginning, my friends, and already our plans are far advanced. Starting in a few months’ time we will conduct a nationwide campaign of defiance against these monstrous apartheid laws. We will burn the passes which we are ordered by act of parliament to carry, the hated dompas which is akin to the star that the Jews were forced to wear, the document that marks us as racial inferiors. We will make a bonfire of them and the smoke of their burning will sting and offend the nostrils of the civilized world. We will sit in the whites-only restaurants and cinemas, we will ride in the whites-only coaches of the railways, and swim from the whites-only beaches. We will cry out to the fascist police, “Come! Arrest us.” And in our thousands we will overflow the white man’s jails and block his law courts with our multitudes until the whole giant apparatus of apartheid breaks down under the strain.’
Tara lingered afterwards as he had asked her to, and when Molly had seen most of her guests leave, she came and took Tara’s arm. ‘Will you risk my spaghetti Bolognaise, Tara dear? As you know, I’m the worst cook in Africa, but you are a brave girl.’
Only a half-dozen of the guests had been invited to remain for a late dinner and they sat out on the patio. The mosquitoes whined around their heads and every once in a while a shift of the wind brought a sulphurous whiff from the sewerage works across the Black River. It did not seem to spoil their appetites and they tucked into Molly’s notorious spaghetti bolognaise and washed it down with tumblers of cheap red wine. Tara found it a relief from the elaborate meals that were served at Weltevreden, accompanied always by the quasi-religious ceremony of tasting wines that cost a working man’s monthly wage for the bottle. Here food and wine were merely fuel to power the mind and tongue, not for gloating over.