by Wilbur Smith
They passed the joint back and forth, and in the course of their lazy conversation Clare remarked, ‘I’ve been exploring. It’s so beautiful here. A little earthly paradise.’
‘Paradise can be an awful bore,’ Tara smiled.
‘I found a waterfall with a little summer house.’
‘That’s the picnic spot. None of the servants are allowed there, so if you want to swim in the buff, you don’t have to worry. Nobody is going to surprise you.’
Clare had not seen Sean on the estate since she moved into the cottage. She had expected him to come panting to the door on the very first day, and was slightly piqued when he did not. Then after a few more days she was amused by his restraint, he had an instinct far beyond his years, the touch of the born philanderer, and she waited with a rising sense of anticipation for him to approach her. Then the delay began to gall her. She was unaccustomed to extended periods of celibacy, and her sleep started to become fitful and disturbed by erotic dreams.
The spring evenings lengthened and became balmy, and Clare took up Tara’s suggestion to visit the pool below the waterfall. Each afternoon she hurried back to Weltevreden after school, and pulled a pair of shorts and a sleeveless blouse over her bikini before taking the short cut through the vineyards to the foot of the hills. Tara’s assurances were well founded. The pool was always deserted except for the sugar birds amongst the proteas on the bank, and soon she discarded the bikini.
On her third visit, as she was standing under the waterfall letting her long dark hair flow down her body, she was suddenly aware that she was being watched. She sank down quickly, the water up to her chin, and looked around her apprehensively.
Sean sat on one of the wet black rocks at the head of the pool, almost within touching distance. The roar of the waterfall had muffled any sound of his approach. He was regarding her solemnly, and the resemblance to the youthful Pan god was enhanced in this wild and beautiful place. He was barefoot and wore only shorts and a cotton shirt. His lips were slightly parted and his teeth were white and perfect, a lock of dark hair had fallen over one eye and he lifted his hand and brushed it aside.
Slowly she raised herself until the water dropped to her waist, the foam swirled around her, and her body shone with wetness. She saw his eyes go to her breasts, and his tongue flicked between his teeth and he winced as if in pain. Matching his solemn expression, she crooked her finger and beckoned him. The noise of the waterfall prevented all speech.
He stood up and began to unbutton his shirt, and then paused. She saw that at last he was uncertain, and his confusion amused and excited her. She nodded encouragement and beckoned again. His expression firmed and he stripped off his shirt and threw it aside, then he unbuckled his belt and let his shorts drop around his ankles.
She drew breath sharply and felt the muscles on the inside of her thighs tense. She was not sure what she had expected, but protruding from a smoky haze of pubic hair he was long and white and rigid. Here, as in so many other ways, he was almost fully matured, the lingering signs of childhood on his body were all the more titillating for this.
He stood naked for only an instant and then dived head first into the pool, to surface beside her, water streaming down his face, grinning like an imp. Immediately she ducked away, and he chased her. He was a stronger swimmer than she was, moving in the water like a young otter, and he caught her in the middle of the pool.
They struggled together playfully, giggling and gasping, treading water, going under and bobbing up again. She was surprised by the hardness and strength of his body, and though she extended herself, he began to get the better of her. She was tiring and she slowed her movements and let him rub himself against her. Cold water and exertion had softened him, but she felt him grow again, his hips slipping over her belly, probing instinctively at her. She hooked an arm around his neck and pulled his face down between her breasts. His entire body arched and convulsed and for a moment she thought he had gone too far, and she reached down and squeezed him hard and painfully to stop him.
Then as he broke away, shocked by her assault, she turned and swam swiftly to the bank, dragged herself from the pool and ran wet and naked to the summer house. She snatched up her towel, wiped her face dry and, holding the towel in front of her, turned back to face him as he reached the door of the summer house behind her. He stood flushed and angry in the doorway, and they stared at each other, both of them panting heavily.
Then slowly she lowered the towel and tossed it over the couch. Swinging her hips deliberately she went to where he stood.
‘All right, Master Sean. We know you are worse than useless with a paint brush. Let’s see if there isn’t anything else we can teach you.’
He was like a blank canvas on which she could trace her own designs, no matter how bizarre. There were things from which her other lovers had recoiled, and other acts that she had only imagined and never had the courage to suggest to a partner. At last she felt free of all constraint. It was as though he could read her intentions. She had only to start some new experiment, guide him just part of the way, and he picked it up with a greedy relish that astonished her and carried it through to a conclusion that she had not always fully foreseen, and which sometimes left her stunned.
His strength and confidence increased with every one of their meetings. For the first time she had found something that did not swiftly pall. Gradually her existence seemed to centre around the summer house beside the pool, and she could not wait to reach it each evening. It required all her self-discipline to keep her hands off him in the art room. She could not trust herself to stand close to him, or to look at him directly during her classes.
Then he initiated a new series of dangerous games. He would remain behind after class, for just a few minutes. It had to be very quick, but risk of discovery enhanced the thrill for both of them.
Once the janitor came in as they were busy and it was so close, so exciting, that she thought she had experienced heart failure at the climax. Sean was standing erect behind her desk, and she was kneeling in front of him. He had taken a handful of her hair and twisted it, holding her face against his lower body.
‘I am looking for Miss East,’ the janitor said from the doorway. He was a pensioner, almost seventy years of age but out of vanity he refused to wear spectacles. ‘Is she here?’ he demanded, peering at Sean myopically.
‘Hello, Mr Brownlee. Miss East has gone up to the staff common room already,’ Sean told him coolly, holding Clare by her hair so she could not pull away from him. The janitor muttered unintelligibly and turned to leave the art room, when to Clare’s horror Sean called him back.
‘Oh, Mr Brownlee, can I give her a message for you?’ he asked, and he and the janitor talked for almost a minute that seemed like all the ages, while she, screened by the desk, was forced to continue.
She knew then, when she paused to think about it, that she was in over her head. She had seen glimpses of the cruelty and violence in him, and as the months passed his physical strength increased with all the sudden blooming of desert grass after rain. The last garlands of puppy fat around his torso were replaced by hard muscle and it seemed that before her eyes his chest broadened and took on a covering of springing dark curls.
Though sometimes she still challenged and fought him, each time he subdued her with greater ease, and then he would force her to perform one of the tricks to which she had originally introduced him, but which he had embroidered with little sadistic twists of his own.
She developed a taste for these humiliations, and she began deliberately to provoke him, until at last she succeeded beyond her expectations. It was in her cottage – the first time they had met there because there was always the danger that Tara would drop in unexpectedly, but by now both of them were reckless.
Clare waited until he was fully ripe, his eyes glazing and his lips pulled back in a rictus of ecstasy, then she twisted and bucked, throwing him off her and she knelt before him and jeered with laughter.
He was angry, but
she calmed him down. Then a few minutes later she did it again, and this time she squeezed him painfully, just as she had done that first evening at the pool.
Seconds later she lay dazed, only semi-conscious, sprawled half off the bed, both her eyes rapidly closing with plum-coloured swellings, her lips broken against her teeth, and blood dripping from her nose. Sean stood over her. His face was white as ice, the knuckles of his clenched fists grazed raw, still shaking with fury. He caught her by the tresses of her dark hair and knelt over her while he forced her to take him through her split and bleeding lips. After that there was no question but that he was her master.
Clare missed three days of school, while the worst of the swelling subsided and the bruises faded, and then wore dark sunglasses to her art class. When she passed Sean at his easel, she brushed herself against him like a cat, and he waited behind again after class.
Sean had gone long enough without boasting of his conquest, but Snotty Arbuthnot refused to believe him.
‘You’ve got a screw loose if you think I swallow that,’ he taunted. ‘You think I’m as green as I’m cabbage-looking, man? You and Marsh Mallows – in your dreams, you mean!’
Sean had one alternative to beating him up. ‘OK, then, I’ll prove it to you.’
‘Boy, it had better be good.’
‘It will be,’ Sean assured him grimly.
The following Saturday afternoon he placed Snotty amongst the protea bushes at the head of the waterfall, and for good measure, lent him the binoculars that his grandmother had given him for his fourteenth birthday.
‘Let’s take the cushions off the couch,’ he suggested to Clare when she came into the summer house. ‘We’ll put them on the lawn, there on the bank. It will be warmer in the sun.’ She agreed with alacrity.
Snotty Arbuthnot was still almost inarticulate when they met at the school gates the next day.
‘Hell, man, I never dreamed that people did that. I mean, unbelievable, man! When she – you know – when she actually – well, I thought I was going to die on the spot.’
‘Did I tell the truth?’ Sean demanded. ‘Or did I lie to you?’
‘Man, it was super titanic. Boy, Sean, I was painting maps of Africa over my sheets all last night, I kid you not. Will you let me watch again – please, Sean, please?’
‘Next time will cost you money,’ Sean said. Even though performing to an audience had filled an exhibitionist need, Sean meant it as a refusal, but when Snotty asked without hesitation, ‘How much, Sean? Just name your price!’ Sean looked at him appraisingly.
It was Shasa’s policy to keep his sons on very modest pocket-money, a policy that he had inherited from his own mother. ‘They must learn the value of money,’ was the family maxim.
Even Snotty whose father was only a surgeon received four times the pittance that was Sean’s allowance. The protection racket that Sean ran amongst the juniors, an idea he had picked up from a George Raft movie at the Odeon, more than doubled his income. However, he was always lamentably short of hard cash, and Snotty could afford to pay.
‘Two pounds,’ Sean suggested. He knew that was exactly his weekly pocket money, but Snotty smiled radiantly. ‘You’re on, man!’
However, it was only when Snotty actually placed the two crumpled notes in Sean’s fist the following Saturday morning that Sean realized the full financial potential.
There was very little chance of Clare realizing that she was on stage. The protea bushes were dense, the noise of the waterfall covered the sound of any involuntary gasps or sniggers, and anyway, once she was started, Clare was deaf and blind to all else. Sean appointed Snotty his ticket salesman and organizer. The commission he received ensured Snotty’s free admission to each Saturday performance. Reluctantly they decided to restrict admission to ten spectators at any one session, but even that meant a take of eighteen pounds every single week. It lasted almost three months, which was in itself a miracle, for after the first sellout matinée the entire senior school was agog.
The word-of-mouth publicity was so good that Snotty was able to demand cash with reservation, and even so his booking sheet was full as far ahead as the beginning of the hols and half the fellows were saving so frantically to try and come up with two pounds that sales at the school tuck shop fell off dramatically. Snotty was trying to get Sean to agree to a midweek performance, or at least to an increase in the Saturday gate, when the first rumour reached the staff common room.
While passing the windows of one of the change rooms the history teacher had overheard two satisfied customers discussing the previous Saturday’s performance. The headmaster was unable to bring himself to take the report seriously. The whole idea was patently preposterous. Nevertheless, he knew it was his duty to have a discreet word with Miss East, if only to warn her of the revolting tittle-tattle that was circulating.
He went down to the art room after school, late on Friday afternoon, a most inopportune moment. Clare had by this time abandoned all sense of discretion, for her it had become almost a self-destructive frenzy. She and Sean were in the paint store at the back of the art school, and it was some seconds before either of them realized that the headmaster was in the room with them.
For Shasa everything seemed to happen at once. Sean’s expulsion from Bishops was a bombshell that ripped through Weltevreden. When it happened, Shasa was in Johannesburg, and they had to call him out of a meeting with the representatives of the Chamber of Mines to receive the headmaster’s telephone call. On the open line the headmaster would give no details, and Shasa flew back to Cape Town immediately and drove directly from the airfield to the school.
Flabbergasted and seething with anger at the stark details the headmaster gave him, Shasa sent the Jaguar roaring around the lower slopes of Table Mountain towards Weltevreden.
From the first he had not approved of the woman who Tara had installed in the cottage. She was all the things he despised, with her great sloppy breasts and silly pretensions which she thought made her avant-garde and artistic. Her paintings were atrocious, daubed primary colours and childish perspectives, and she tried to conceal her lack of talent and taste behind Portuguese cigarettes, sandals and skirts of blindingly vivid designs. He decided to deal with her first.
However, she had fled, leaving the cottage in slovenly disarray. Thwarted, Shasa took his anger unabated up to the big house and shouted at Tara as he stormed into the hall.
‘Where is the little blighter – I’m going to skin his backside for him.’
The other children, all three of them, were peeking over the railing from the second-floor gallery, in a fine fever of vicarious terror. Isabella’s eyes were as enormous as one of Walt Disney’s fawns.
Shasa saw them and roared up the stair well. ‘Back to your own rooms, this instant. That goes for you as well, young lady.’ And they ducked and scampered. As an afterthought Shasa bellowed after them, ‘And tell that brother of yours I want to see him in the gun room immediately.’
The three of them raced each other down the passage of the nursery wing, each of them determined to be the bearer of the dreaded summons. The gun room was the family equivalent of Tower Green where all executions took place.
Garrick got there first, and pounded on Sean’s locked door.
‘Pater wants you immediately,’ he yelled.
‘In the gun room—’ Michael joined in, and Isabella who had been left far behind at the start, piped up breathlessly, ‘He’s going to skin your backside!’ She was flushed and trembling with eagerness, and she hoped desperately that Sean would show her his bottom after Daddy had carried out his threat. She couldn’t imagine what it would look like, and she wondered if Daddy would have the skin made into a floor mat like the skins of the zebras and lions in the gun room. It was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened in her life.
In the entrance hall Tara was attempting to calm Shasa. She had seen him in a comparable rage only two or three times during their marriage, always when he fancied th
e family honour or reputation had been compromised. Her efforts were in vain, for he turned on her with his single eye glittering.
‘Damn you, woman. This is mostly your fault. It was you who insisted on bringing that whore to live on Weltevreden.’
As Shasa stormed off to the gun room, his voice carried clearly up the stairwell to where Sean was bracing himself to come down and face retribution. Up to that moment Sean had been so confused by the speed of events that he hadn’t been thinking clearly. Now, as he descended the stairs, his mind was racing as he prepared his defence. He passed his mother, still standing in the middle of the chessboard black and white marble squares of the entrance hall floor, and she gave him a strained smile of encouragement.
‘I tried to help, darling,’ she whispered. They had never been close, but now for once Shasa’s rage made them allies.
‘Thank you, Mater.’
He knocked on the gun-room door, and opened it cautiously when his father roared. He closed it carefully behind him and advanced to the centre of the lion skin where he halted and stood to attention.
Beatings at Weltevreden followed an established ritual. The riding crops were laid out on the baize gun table, five of them of various lengths, weights and stinging potential. He knew his father would make a show of selecting the correct one for the occasion, and that today it would almost certainly be the long whippy whalebone. Involuntarily he looked to the over-stuffed leather chair beside the fireplace over which he would be asked to drape himself, reaching over to grip the legs of the chair on the far side. His father was an international polo player with wrists like steel springs, his strokes made even the headmaster’s seem like a powder puff.
Then deliberately Sean closed his mind against fear and lifted his chin to stare calmly at his father. Shasa was standing in front of the fireplace, hands clasped beside his back, rocking on the balls of his feet.
‘You have been fired from Bishops,’ he said.