by Wilbur Smith
He sighed, his great muscular chest heaved in the circle of her arms and then he went to sleep. It was something to which she could never grow accustomed, the way he could sleep as though he had closed a door in his mind. She was left bereft and afraid, for she knew what lay ahead for her.
Joe Cicero came for Moses in the night. Moses had dressed like one of a thousand other contract workers from the goldmines in an Army-surplus greatcoat and woollen balaclava helmet that covered most of his face. He had no luggage, as Joe had instructed him, and when the ramshackle Ford pick-up parked across the road from them and flashed its lights once, Moses slipped out of the Cadillac and swiftly crossed to it. He did not say goodbye to Tara, they had taken their farewells long ago, and he did not look back to where she sat forlornly behind the wheel of the Cadillac.
As soon as Moses climbed into the rear of the Ford, it pulled away. The tail lights dwindled and were lost around the first curve of the road, and Tara was smothered by such a crushing load of despair that she did not believe she could survive it.
Francois Afrika was the headmaster of the Mannenberg coloured school on the Cape Flats. He was a little over forty years old, a plump and serious man with a café au lait complexion and thick very curly hair which he parted in the middle and plastered flat with Vaseline.
His wife Miriam was plump also, but much shorter and younger than he. She had taught history and English at the Mannenberg junior school until the headmaster had married her, and she had given him four children, all daughters. Miriam was president of the local chapter of the Women’s Institute which she used as a convenient cover for her political activities. She had been arrested during the defiance campaign, but when that petered out she had not been charged and had been released under a banning order. Three months later, when the furore had died away completely, her banning order had not been renewed.
Molly Broadhurst had known her since before she had married Francois, and the couple were frequent visitors at Molly’s home. Behind her thick spectacles Miriam wore a perpetual chubby smile. Her home in the grounds of the junior school was as clean as an operating theatre with crocheted antimacassars on the heavy maroon easy chairs, and a mirrorlike shine on the floors. Her daughters were always beautifully dressed with coloured ribbons in their pigtails and like Miriam were chubby and contented, a consequence of Miriam’s cookery rather than her genes.
Tara met Miriam for the first time at Molly’s home. Tara had come down by train from the expedition base at Sundi Caves two weeks before her baby was due. She had booked a private coupé compartment and kept the door locked throughout the entire journey to avoid being recognized. Molly had met her at Paarl station, for she had not wanted to risk being seen at the main Cape Town terminus. Shasa and her family still believed that she was working with Professor Hurst.
Miriam was all that Tara had hoped for, all that Molly had promised her, although she was not prepared for the maternity dress.
‘You are pregnant also?’ she demanded as they shook hands, and Miriam patted her stomach shyly.
‘It’s a cushion, Miss Tara, I couldn’t just pop a baby out of nowhere, could I? I started with just a small lump as soon as Molly told me, and I’ve built it up slowly.’
Tara realized what inconvenience she had put her to, and now she embraced her impulsively. ‘Oh, I can never tell you how grateful I am. Please don’t call me Miss Tara. I’m your friend and plain Tara will do very well.’
‘I’ll look after your baby like it’s my own, I promise you,’ Miriam told her, and then saw Tara’s expression and hastily qualified her assurance. ‘But he will always be yours, Tara. You can come and see him whenever, and one day if you are able to take him – well, Francois and I won’t stand in your way.’
‘You are even nicer than Molly told me!’ Tara hugged her. ‘Come, I want to show you the clothes I’ve brought for our baby.’
‘Oh, they are all blue,’ Miriam exclaimed. ‘You are so sure you are going to have a boy?’
‘No question about it – I’m sure.’
‘So was I,’ Miriam chuckled. ‘And look at me now – all girls! Though it’s not too bad, they are good girls and they are all expecting this one to be a boy,’ she patted her padded abdomen, ‘and I know they are going to spoil him something terrible.’
Tara’s baby was born in Molly Broadhurst’s guest room. Dr Chetty Abrahamji who delivered it was an old friend of Molly’s and had been a secret member of the Communist Party, one of its few Hindu members.
As soon as Tara went into labour, Molly telephoned Miriam Afrika, and she arrived with bag and bulging tummy and went in directly to see Tara.
‘I’m so glad we have started at last,’ she cried. ‘I must admit that although it was a difficult pregnancy, it will be my quickest and easiest delivery.’ She reached up under her own skirt and with a flourish produced the cushion. Tara laughed with her and then broke off as the next contraction seized her.
‘Ouch!’ she whispered. ‘I wish mine was that easy. This one feels like a giant.’
Molly and Miriam took turns, sitting beside her and holding her hand when the contractions hit her, and the doctor stood at the foot of the bed exhorting her to, ‘Push! Push!’ By noon the following day Tara was exhausted, panting and racked, her hair sodden with sweat as though she had plunged into the sea.
‘It’s no good,’ the doctor said softly. ‘We’ll have to move you into hospital and do a Caesar.’
‘No! No!’ Tara struggled up on an elbow, fierce with determination. ‘Give me one more chance.’
When the next contraction came she bore down on it with such force that every muscle in her body locked and she thought the sinews in her loins must snap like rubber bands. Nothing happened, it was jammed solid, and she could feel the blockage like a great log stuck inside her.
‘More!’ Molly whispered in her ear. ‘Harder – once more for the baby.’ Tara bore down again with the strength of desperation and then screamed as she felt her flesh tear like tissue paper. There was a hot slippery rush between her thighs and relief so intense that her scream changed to a long drawn-out cry of joy, that joined with her infant’s birth cry.
‘Is it a boy?’ she gasped, trying to sit up. ‘Tell me – tell me quickly.’
‘Yes,’ Molly reassured her. ‘It’s a boy – just look at his whistle. Long as my finger. There’s no doubt about that – he’s a boy all right,’ and Tara laughed out aloud.
He weighed nine and a half pounds with a head that was covered with pitch-black hair, thick and curly as the fleece of an Astrakhan lamb. He was the colour of hot toffee, and he had Moses Gama’s fine Nilotic features. Tara had never seen anything so beautiful in all her life, none of her other babies had been anything like this.
‘Let me hold him,’ she croaked, hoarse with the terrible effort of his birth, and they placed the child still wet and slippery in her arms.
‘I want to feed him,’ she whispered. ‘I must give him his first suck – then he will be mine for ever.’ She squeezed out her nipple and pressed it between his lips and he fastened on it, snuffling and kicking spasmodically with pleasure.
‘What is his name, Tara?’ Miriam Afrika asked.
‘We’ll call him Benjamin,’ Tara.said. ‘Benjamin Afrika. I like that – he is truly of Africa.’
Tara stayed with the infant five days. When finally she had to relinquish him, and Miriam drove away with him in her little Morris Minor, Tara felt as though part of her soul had been hacked away by the crudest surgery. If Molly had not been there to help her through, Tara knew she could not have borne it. As it was Molly had something for her.
‘I’ve been saving it until now,’ she told Tara. ‘I knew how you would feel when you had to give up your baby. This will cheer you up a little.’ She handed Tara an envelope, and Tara examined the handwritten address. ‘I don’t recognize the writing.’ She looked mystified.
‘I received it by a special courier – open it up. Go on!’ Molly ordered impat
iently, and Tara obeyed. There were four sheets of cheap writing paper. Tara turned to the last sheet and as she read the signature her expression altered.
‘Moses!’ she cried. ‘Oh I can’t believe it – after all these months. I had given up hope. I didn’t even recognize his handwriting.’ Tara clutched the letter to her breast.
‘He wasn’t allowed to write, Tara dear. He has been in a very strict training camp. He disobeyed orders and took a grave risk to get this note out to you.’ Molly went to the door. ‘I’ll leave you in peace to read it. I know it will make up a little for your loss.’
Even after Molly had left her alone, Tara was reluctant to begin reading. She wanted to savour the pleasure of anticipation, but at last she could deny herself no longer.
Tara, my dearest,
I think of you every day in this place, where the work is very hard and demanding, and I wonder about you and our baby. Perhaps it has already been born, I do not know, and I wonder often if it is a boy or a little girl.
Although what I am doing is of the greatest importance for all of us – for the people of Africa, as well as for you and me – yet I find myself longing for you. The thought of you comes to me unexpectedly in the night and in the day and it is like a knife in my chest.
Tara could not read on, her eyes were awash with tears.
‘Oh, Moses,’ she bit her lip to prevent herself blubbering, ‘I never knew you could feel like that for me.’ She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
When I left you, I did not know where I was going, nor what awaited me here. Now everything is clear, and I know what the difficult tasks are that lie ahead of us. I know also that I will need your help. You will not refuse me, my wife? I call you ‘wife’ because that is how I feel towards you, now that you are carrying our child.
It was difficult for Tara to take it in. She had never expected him to give her this kind of recognition and now she felt humbled by it.
‘There is nothing that I could ever refuse you,’ she whispered aloud, and her eyes raced down the sheet. She turned it over quickly and Moses had written:
Once before I told you how valuable it would be if you used your family connections to keep us informed of affairs of state. Since then this has become more imperative. Your husband, Shasa Courtney, is going over to the side of the neo-Fascist oppressors. Although this fills you with hatred and contempt for him, yet it is a boon we could not have expected or prayed for. Our information is that he has been promised a place in the cabinet of that barbarous regime. If you were in his confidence, it would afford us a direct inside view and knowledge of all their plans and intentions. This would be so valuable that it would be impossible to put a price upon it.
‘No,’ she whispered, shaking her head, sensing what was coming, and it took courage for her to read on.
I ask you, for the sake of our land and our love, that when the child has been born and you are recovered from the birth, that you return to your husband’s home at Weltevreden, ask his forgiveness for your absence, tell him that you cannot live without him and his children, and do all in your power to ingratiate yourself with him and to earn his confidence once more.
‘I cannot do it,’ Tara whispered, and then she thought of the children, and especially of Michael, and she felt herself wavering. ‘Oh, Moses, you don’t know what you are asking of me.’ She covered her eyes with her hand. ‘Please don’t make me do it. I have only just won my freedom – don’ t force me to give it up again.’ But the letter went on remorselessly:
Every one of us will be called upon to make sacrifice in the struggle that lies ahead. Some of us may be required to lay down our very lives and I could well be one of those.
‘No, not you, my darling, please not you!’
However, for the loyal and true comrades there will be rewards, immediate rewards in addition to the ultimate victory of the struggle and the final liberation. If you can bring yourself to do as I ask you, then my friends here will arrange for you and me to be together – not where we have to hide our love, but in a free and foreign land where, for a happy interlude, we can enjoy our love to the utmost. Can you imagine that, my darling? Being able to spend the days and nights together, to walk in the streets hand in hand, to dine together in public and laugh openly together, to stand up unafraid and say what we think aloud, to kiss and do all the silly adorable things that lovers do, and to hold the child of our love between us—
It was too painful, she could not go on. When Molly found her weeping bitterly, she sat on the bed beside her and took her in her arms.
‘What is it, Tara dear, tell me, tell old Molly.’
‘I have to go back to Weltevreden,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, God, Molly, I thought I was rid of that place for ever, and now I have to go back.’
Tara’s request for a formal meeting to discuss their matrimonial arrangements threw Shasa into a state of utmost consternation. He had been well enough satisfied by the informal understanding between them, by which he had complete freedom of action and control of the children, together with the respectability and protection of the marriage form. He had been happy to pay without comment the bills that Tara forwarded to him, and to see that her generous allowance was paid into her bank account promptly on the first of each month. He had even made good the occasional shortfall when the bank manager telephoned him to report that Tara had overdrawn. On one occasion there was a cheque made out to a secondhand motor dealer, for almost a thousand pounds. Shasa did not query it. Whatever it was, it was a bargain as far as he was concerned.
Now it looked as if all this was coming to an end, and Shasa immediately called a meeting of his principal advisers in the boardroom of Centaine House. Centaine herself was in the chair and Abraham Abrahams had flown down from Johannesburg, bringing with him the senior partner of a firm of renowned but very expensive divorce lawyers.
Centaine took over immediately. ‘Let us consider the worst possible case,’ she told them crisply. ‘Tara will want the children and she’ll want a settlement, plus a living allowance for herself and each of the children.’ She glanced at Abe, who nodded his silver head, which set the rest of the legal counsel nodding like mandarin dolls, looking grave and learned, and secretly counting their fees, Shasa thought wryly.
‘Damn it, the woman deserted me! I’ll go to hell before I give her my children.’
‘She will claim that you made it impossible for her to remain in the conjugal home,’ Abe said, and then when he saw Shasa’s thunderous expression, tried to soothe him. ‘You must remember, Shasa, that she will probably be taking the best available legal advice herself.’
‘Damned shyster lawyers!’ said Shasa bitterly, and his counsel looked pained, but Shasa did not apologize nor qualify. ‘I’ve already warned her I won’t give her a divorce. My political career is at a very delicate stage. I cannot afford the scandal. Very soon I’ll be contesting a general election.’
‘You may not be able to refuse,’ Abe murmured. ‘Not if she has good grounds.’
‘She hasn’t any,’ said Shasa virtuously. ‘I’ve always been the considerate and generous husband.’
‘Your generosity is famous,’ Abe murmured drily. ‘There is many an attractive young lady who could give you a testimonial on that score.’
‘Really, Abe,’ Centaine intervened. ‘Shasa has always kept out of trouble with women—’
‘Centaine, my dear. We are dealing with facts here – not maternal illusions. I am not a private detective and Shasa’s private life is none of my concern. However, completely disinterested as I am, I am able to cite you at least six occasions in the last few years when Shasa has given Tara ample grounds—’
Shasa was making frantic signals down the table to shut Abe up, but Centaine leaned forward with an interested expression.
‘Go ahead, Abe,’ she ordered. ‘Start citing!’
‘In January two years ago the leading lady in the touring production of the musical Oklahoma!,’ Abe began, and Shasa sank down in his
chair and covered his eyes as though in prayer. ‘A few weeks later the left-winger, ironically, in the visiting British women’s hockey team.’ So far Abe was avoiding mentioning names, but now he went on. ‘Then there was the female TV producer from North American Broadcasting Studios, pert little vixen with a name like a fish – no, a dolphin, that’s it, Kitty Godolphin. Do you want me to go on? There are a few more, but as I have said already, I’m not a private investigator. You can be sure that Tara will get herself a good one, and Shasa makes very little effort to cover his tracks.’
That will do, Abe,’ Centaine stopped him, and considered her son with disapproval and a certain grudging admiration.
‘It’s the de Thiry blood,’ she thought. ‘The family curse. Poor Shasa.’ But she said sternly, ‘It looks as though we do have a problem after all,’ and she turned to the divorce lawyer.
‘Let us accept that Tara has grounds of infidelity. What is the worst judgement we might expect against us?’
‘It’s very difficult, Mrs Courtney—’
‘I’m not going to hold you to it,’ Centaine told him brusquely. ‘You don’t have to equivocate. Just give me the worst case.’
‘She could get custody, especially of the two younger children, and a large settlement.’
‘How muchr Shasa demanded.
‘Considering your circumstances, it could be—’ the lawyer hesitated delicately‘– a million pounds, plus the trimmings, a house and allowance and a few other lesser items.’
Shasa sat up very straight in his chair. He whistled softly and then murmured, ‘That is really taking seriously something that was merely poked in fun,’ he said, and nobody laughed.