by Wilbur Smith
‘I find this difficult to accept.’ Shasa was grim-faced.
‘To be blunt, Mr Courtney: Sean seems to have a vindictive and vicious streak in him. I am, of course, looking for an improvement in him. However, if that is not soon forthcoming, I will have to make a serious decision over Sean’s future at Bishops.’
‘I had set my heart on him being head boy, as I was,’ Shasa admitted, and the headmaster shook his head.
‘Far from becoming head boy, Mr Courtney, unless Sean has pulled up his socks by the end of the year, I am, with the greatest reluctance, going to have to ask you to remove him from Bishops altogether.’
‘My God!’ Shasa breathed. ‘You don’t really mean that?’
‘I’m sorry to say that I do.’
It was quite remarkable that Clare East had ever been employed by the headmaster of Bishops. The explanation was that the appointment was a temporary one, a mere six-month contract, to fill in after the unexpected resignation of the previous art master on the grounds of ill-health. The salary offered was such that it had attracted only two other applications, both patently unsuitable.
Clare had come to the interview with the headmaster dressed in clothes she had not worn for six years, not since she was twenty-one years of age. She had exhumed them from a forgotten cabin trunk for the occasion, a high-buttoned dress in drab green that conformed closely to the head’s own ideas of suitable apparel for a school-mistress. Her long black hair she had plaited and twisted up severely behind her head, and the portfolio of her painting she had chosen to show him was composed of landscapes and seascapes and still lifes, subjects which had interested her at about the same time as she had bought the chaste woollen dress. At Bishops, art was not one of the mainstream subjects, but merely a catch-all for the pupils who showed little aptitude for the sciences.
Once Clare had charge of the art school, which was situated far enough from the main buildings as to offer her a certain freedom of behaviour, she reverted to her usual style of dress: wide loose skirts in vivid colours and flamboyant patterns, worn with Mexican-style blouses like those that Jane Russell had worn in The Outlaw. She had seen the movie five times while she was attending the London School of Arts, and modelled herself on Jane Russell, though of course Clare knew her own breasts were better than Russell’s, just as big but higher and more pointed.
Her long hair she wore in a different style every day, and when she was teaching she always kicked off her sandals and strode around the art room barefooted, smoking thin black Portuguese cigarettes which one of her lovers brought her in packs of a thousand.
Sean had absolutely no interest in art. He had filtered down to this class by a process of natural rejection. Physics and chemistry demanded too much effort, and geography, the next lowest subject, was an even greater bore than paintbrushes.
Sean fell in love with Clare East the very moment that she walked into the art room. The first time she had paused at his easel to inspect the mess of colour he had smeared on his sheet of art paper, he realized that she was an inch shorter than he was, and when she reached up to correct one of his shaky outlines, he saw that she had not shaved her armpit. That bush of dark coarse hair, glistening with sweat, induced the hardest and most painful erection he had ever experienced.
He tried to impress her with manly strutting behaviour, and when that failed, he used an oath in her presence that he usually reserved for one of his polo ponies. Clare East sent him to the head with a note and the head gave him four strokes of his heavy Malacca cane, accompanying the beating with a few words of counsel.
‘You will have to learn, young man, WHACK, that I will not allow you to compound atrocious behaviour, WHACK, with foul language, WHACK, especially in the presence of a lady, WHACK.’
‘Thank you very much, Headmaster.’ It was traditional to express gratitude for these ministrations, and to refrain from rubbing the injured area in the great man’s presence. When Sean returned to the art room, his ardour, far from being cooled by the Malacca cane, was rather inflamed to unbearable proportions, but he realized he had to change tactics.
He discussed it with his henchman, Snotty Arbuthnot, and was only mildly discouraged by Snotty’s advice. ‘Forget it, man. Every fellow in school is whacking away thinking about Marsh Mallows—’ the nickname was a reference to Clare East’s bosom – ‘but Tug saw her at the movies with some chap of at least thirty, with a moustache and his own car. They were smooching away like mad dogs in the back row. Why don’t you go and see Poodle instead?’
Poodle was a sixteen-year-old from Rustenberg Girls’ School, just across the railway line from Bishops. She was a young lady with a mission in life, to see as many boys across the borders of manhood as she could fit into her busy afternoons. Though Sean had never spoken to her, she had been a spectator at every one of his recent cricket matches and she had sent a message to him through a mutual friend suggesting a meeting in the pine forest on Rondebosch Common.
‘She looks like a poodle,’ Sean dismissed the suggestion scornfully, and resigned himself to distant adoration of Clare East, until one day he was searching her desk for those black Portuguese cigarettes for which he had developed a taste. Love did not mean he could not steal from her. In a locked drawer which he picked with a paper clip, he came across a stiff cardboard folder tied with green ribbons. The folder contained over twenty pencil drawings of nude male models, all of them signed and dated by Clare East, and after the first jealous shock, Sean realized that each drawing was of a different subject with only one common feature. While the models’ faces had been roughed in, their genitals had been depicted in minute and loving detail, and all of them were fully tumescent.
What Sean had discovered was Clare’s collection of scalps, or an equivalent thereof. Clare East had strong tastes, but even more than garlic and red wine she needed men in her diet. This was so evident in the secret folder that all Sean’s deflated hopes were once more revived, and that night he commissioned Michael, for the sum of five shillings, to paint a portrait of Clare East in Sean’s art book.
Michael was in the junior art class and was able to make his studies for the portrait without the model’s knowledge, and the completed work surpassed even Sean’s expectations. He submitted the portrait and at the end of the following session Clare dismissed the class with a rider, ‘Oh Sean, will you please remain behind?’
When the art room was cleared, she opened his art book at the painting of herself.
‘Did you do this, Sean?’ she asked. ‘It really is very good.’ The question was innocent enough, but the difference between the portrait and Sean’s own murky compositions was so evident that even he saw the danger of claiming authorship.
‘I was going to tell you I did it,’ he admitted openly, ‘but I can’t lie to you, Miss East. I paid my brother to do it for me.’
‘Why, Sean?’
‘I suppose because I like you so much,’ he mumbled, and to her surprise she saw that he was actually blushing. Clare was touched. Up to that time she had actively disliked this boy. He was brash and cocky and a disruptive influence in her class. She was certain that it was he who was stealing her cigarettes.
This unsuspected sensitivity surprised her, and suddenly she realized that his bumptious behaviour had been to attract her attention. She relented towards him, and over the following days and weeks she showed Sean that she had forgiven him, by giving him small largesse – from a special smile to an extra few minutes of her time tidying up his creative efforts.
In return Sean began leaving gifts in her desk, thereby confirming her suspicion that he had been into it before. However, the theft of cigarettes stopped and she accepted the offerings of fruit and flowers without comment, just a smile and a nod as she passed his easel.
Then one Friday afternoon she opened her drawer and there lay a blue enamel box with ‘Garrards’ in gold lettering on the lid. She opened it with her back turned to the class, and she started uncontrollably and almost dropped the box as s
he realized that it contained a brooch of white gold. The centrepiece was a large star sapphire, and even Clare, who was no judge of gems, realized that it was an exquisite stone. It was surrounded by small diamonds set in a star pattern. Clare experienced a giddy rush of avarice. The brooch must certainly be worth many hundreds of pounds, more money than she had ever had in her hand at one time, more than a year’s salary at her present parsimonious rate of pay.
Sean had taken the piece from his mother’s dressingtable and hidden it in the thatch of the saddle room behind the stables until the furore had died down. All the house servants had been interrogated, first by Shasa, who was outraged by this breach of faith. Nothing, apart from liquor, had ever been stolen by his employees before. When his own investigations ran into a dead end, Shasa called in the police. Fortunately for Sean, it transpired that one of the junior maids had previously served a six-month sentence for theft from an employer. She was obviously guilty and the Wynberg magistrate gave her eighteen months, her offence compounded by her obstinate refusal to return the stolen brooch. Since she was now over twenty-one years, the maid was sent to the Pollsmoor Women’s Prison.
Sean had waited another ten days for the incident to be forgotten before presenting the gift to the object of his passion. Clare East was mightily tempted. She realized that the brooch must have been stolen, but on the other hand she was, as usual for her, in serious financial difficulty. This was the only reason she had taken on her present employment. She looked back with nostalgic regret on the idle days of eating and drinking and painting and making love which had led her into her present embarrassed circumstances. The brooch would solve it all. She had no scruples of conscience, but a terror of being convicted of theft. She knew that her free and creative soul would wither behind the bars of a women’s prison.
Surreptitiously she returned the brooch to her desk drawer and for the rest of that art period she was distracted and withdrawn. She chain-smoked cigarettes and kept well clear of the rear of the art room, where Sean made a fine picture of innocence as he applied himself with unusual industry to his easel. She did not have to tell him to remain behind when the bell rang at the end of the period. He came to where she sat at her desk.
‘Did you like it?’ he asked softly, and she opened the drawer and placed the enamel box in the centre of the desk between them.
‘I cannot accept it, Sean,’ she said. ‘You know that very well.’ She didn’t want to ask him where he had obtained it. She didn’t want to know, and involuntarily she reached out to touch the box for the last time. The enamel surface felt like a new-laid egg, smooth and warm to the touch.
‘It’s all right,’ Sean said quietly. ‘Nobody knows. They think somebody else took it. It’s quite safe.’
Had the child seen through her so easily? She started at him. Was it one amoral soul recognizing another? It made her angry to be found out, to have her greed so exposed. She took her hand off the box and placed it in her lap.
She drew a breath, and steeled herself to repeat her refusal, but Sean stilled her by opening his art book and taking out three loose leaves. He placed them beside the blue enamel box, and she drew a hissing breath. They were her own drawings from her fun folder, signed by herself.
‘I took these – sort of fair exchange,’ Sean said, and she looked at him and truly saw him for the very first time.
He was young in years only. In the museum in Athens she had been enchanted by a marble statue of the great god Pan in his manifestation as a young boy. A beautiful child, but about him an ancient evil as enthralling as sin itself. Clare East was not a teacher by vocation, she felt no innate revulsion at the corruption of the young. It was simply that she had not thought of it before. With her hearty sexual appetite she had experienced almost everything else, including partners of her own sex, although those had been unsuccessful experiments long ago put behind her. Men she had known, in the biblical sense, in every possible variation of size and shape and colour. She took and discarded them with a kind of compulsive fervour, seeking always an elusive fulfilment which seemed to dance for ever just beyond her grasp. Often she was afraid, truly terrified, that she had reached the point of satiety, when her pleasure was irreparably blunted and jaded.
Now she was presented with a new and titillating perversion, enough to reawaken the lusty response that she had thought lost for ever. This child’s loveliness contained a wickedness that left her breathless as she discovered it.
She had never been paid before, and this mannikin was offering her a prostitute’s fee that was princely enough for a royal courtesan. She had never been blackmailed before, and he was threatening her with those unwise sketches. She knew what would happen if they ever fell into the hands of the school governors, and she did not doubt that he would carry out the unspoken threat. He had already hinted that he had placed blame for the theft of the sapphire brooch on an innocent party. Most tantalizing, she had never had a child before. She let her eyes run over him curiously. His skin was clear and firm, with the sweet gloss of youth on it. The hair on his forearms was silky, but his cheeks were bare. He was using a razor already, and he was taller than she was, a man’s outline emerging from boyhood in his shoulders and narrow hips. His limbs were long and shapely, strange that she should never have noticed the muscle in his arms before. His eyes were green as emeralds, or of crème de menthe in a crystal glass, and there were tiny flecks of brown and gold surrounding the pupils. She saw those pupils dilate slightly as she leaned forward, deliberately letting the top of her blouse gape open to expose the swell and cleavage of her breasts. Carefully she picked up the enamel box.
‘Thank you, Sean,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘It’s a magnificent gift and I shall treasure it.’
Sean picked up the lewd sketches and slipped them into his art book, hostage to the unspoken pact between them.
‘Thank you, Miss East.’ His voice was as rough as hers. ‘I am so glad you like it.’
It was so exciting to see his agitation that her own loins melted and she felt the familiar pressure build up swiftly in her lower body. With calculated cruelty she stood up, dismissing him to the exquisite torture of anticipation. Instinctively she knew that he had planned it all. No further effort would be required from her, the boy’s genius would provide the means and the moment, and it was part of the excitement, waiting to see what he would do.
She did not have long to wait, and though she had expected something unusual, she was surprised by the note he left on her desk.
Dear Miss East,
My son, Sean, tells me that you are having difficulty in procuring suitable lodgings. I do understand how difficult this can be, particularly in the summer when the whole world seems to descend upon our little peninsula.
As it happens, I have a furnished cottage on the estate, which at the present time is standing empty. If you find it suitable, you are welcome to the use of it. The rental would be nominal. I should say a guinea a week would satisfy the estate bookkeeper, and you would find the cottage secluded and quiet with a lovely view over the Constantia Berg and False Bay, which will appeal to the artist.
Sean speaks highly of your work, and I look forward to seeing examples of it.
Very sincerely,
Tara Courtney
Clare East was paying five guineas a week for a single squalid room beside the railway tracks at the back of Rondebosch station. When she sold the sapphire brooch for three hundred pounds, which she suspected was a fraction of its real value, Clare had been determined to pay off her accumulated debts. However, as with so many of her good intentions, she closed her mind to the impulse, and instead blew most of the money on a secondhand Morris Minor.
She drove out to Weltevreden the following Saturday morning. Some instinct warned her not to attempt to conceal her Bohemian inclinations, and she and Tara recognized kindred spirits at the very first meeting. Tara sent a driver and one of the estate lorries to fetch her few sticks of furniture and her pile of finished canvases, and p
ersonally helped her move into the cottage.
As they worked together, Clare showed Tara a few of the canvases, beginning with the landscapes and seascapes. Tara’s response was noncommittal, so once again, following her instinct, Clare stripped the cover off one of her abstracts, a cubist arrangement of blues and fiery reds, and held it up for Tara.
‘Oh God, it’s magnificent!’ Tara murmured. ‘So fierce and uncompromising. I love it.’
A few evenings later Tara came down the path through the pines, carrying a small basket. Clare was on the stoep of the cottage, sitting bare-footed and cross-legged on a leather cushion with a sketch-pad on her lap.
She looked up and grinned, ‘I hoped you’d come,’ and Tara flopped down beside her and took a bottle of Shasa’s best estate wine, the fifteen-year-old vintage, out of the basket.
They chatted easily while Clare sketched, drinking the wine and watching the sunset over the mountains.
‘It’s good to find a friend,’ Tara said impulsively. ‘You can’t imagine how lonely it is here sometimes.’
‘With all the guests and visitors!’ Clare chuckled at her.
‘Those aren’t real people,’ Tara said. ‘They are just talking dolls, stuffed with money and their own importance,’ and she took a flat silver cigarette case out of the pocket of her skirt, and opened it. It contained rice papers and shredded yellow leaf.
‘Do you?’ she asked shyly.
‘Darling, you have probably saved my life,’ Clare exclaimed. ‘Roll one for us this instant. I can’t wait.’