by Wilbur Smith
‘What about your Shasaville shares – you are taking an awful chance?’
Garry looked puzzled. ‘I don’t have to explain it to you, Pater. You taught me. Shasaville is tied up. We can’t sell or develop aggressively until land values recover, so I’ve used my shares to take full advantage of the crash.’
‘What if land values never recover?’ Shasa demanded relentlessly.
‘If they don’t, it will mean the country is finished anyway. I will lose my share of nothing which is nothing. If they do recover, I will be in profit by twenty or thirty million.’
Shasa picked at that for a while and then changed his angle of attack. ‘Why didn’t you come to me to borrow the money, instead of going behind my back?’
Garry grinned at him and tried to smooth down the crest of wiry black hair that stuck up on his crown. ‘Because you would have given me a list of five hundred reasons why not, just as you are doing now. Besides, I wanted to do this one on my own. I wanted to prove to you that I’m not a kid any more.’
Shasa twiddled the gold pen on the pad in front of him and when he could think of no other criticism, he grumbled, ‘You don’t want to get too damned clever for your own good. There is a line between good business sense and outright gambling.’
‘How do you tell the difference?’ Garry asked. For a moment Shasa thought he was being facetious and then he realized that as usual Garry was deadly serious. He was leaning forward eagerly waiting for his father to explain, and he really wanted to know.
Shasa was saved by the entry of the other senior directors: Centaine on the arm of Dr Twentyman-Jones and David Abrahams arguing amiably but respectfully with his father, and thankfully he let the subject drop. Once or twice during the meeting he glanced down the table at Garry, who was following all the discussion with a rapt expression, the light from the picture window reflecting a miniature image of the crest of Table Mountain in the lenses of his spectacles. When all the business on the agenda had been completed and Centaine had started to rise to lead them through to the executive dining-room, Shasa arrested them.
‘Madame Courtney and gentlemen, one additional piece of business. Mr Garry Courtney and I have been discussing the general state of the property market. We both feel that property and equities are very much undervalued at the moment and that the company should take advantage of this fact, but I’d like him to tell you in his own words and to put forward certain proposals. Would you oblige us please, Mr Courtney?’
It was Shasa’s own way of giving the lad a jolt and cutting him back a little. In the six months since his elevation, Garry had never been called upon to address the full board and now Shasa dropped it on him without warning and sat back with vindictive relish in his wingbacked leather chairman’s throne and folded his arms.
At the bottom of the table Garry blushed furiously, and glanced longingly at the stinkwood door, his only escape, before giving the traditional salutation to his fellow directors.
‘Ma-Ma-dame Courtney and ge-ge-gentlemen.’ He stopped and threw his father a pitiful look of appeal, but when he received a stern uncompromising frown in return, he took a deep breath and launched into it. He stumbled once or twice, but when first Abe Abrahams and then Centaine shot cutting questions at him, he forgot about his stutter and talked for forty-five minutes.
At the end they were silent for a while, and then David Abrahams said, ‘I should like to propose that we appoint Mr Garrick Courtney to prepare a list of specific proposals to follow up the presentation that he has just made to this meeting, and to report back to us at an extraordinary meeting early next week, at a time convenient to all members of the board.’
Centaine seconded, and it was adopted unanimously, and then David Abrahams ended, ‘I should like the minutes to record the board’s gratitude to Mr Courtney for his lucid address and to thank him for bringing these considerations to the board’s attention.’
The glow of achievement and recognition lasted Garry all the way down in the elevator to the basement garage where his MG stood in his private parking bay beside Shasa’s Jaguar. It stayed with him all the way down Adderley Street to the lonely skyscraper of the Sanlam building which stood on the open ground of the foreshore that had been reclaimed from the sea. Even going up in the lift to the twentieth floor of the Sanlam building he still felt tall and important and decisive. Only when he entered the reception area of Gantry, Carmichael and Associates did the vital glow begin to fade, and his stiff van Heusen collar bit painfully into the corded muscles of his bull neck.
The two pretty young girls at the desk showed him the full amount of deference due to one of the partnership’s important clients, but by this time Garry was too nervous to take advantage of the chair he was offered and he wandered around the lobby pretending to admire the tall vases of proteas while surreptitiously checking his image in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors behind the floral display.
He had paid forty guineas off the peg for the double-breasted suit in his favourite Prince of Wales check, but the swell of his chest muscles made the lapels flare unevenly and the material rucked up around his biceps. He yanked at the cuffs in an attempt to smooth the sleeves, and then abandoned that effort and instead concentrated on trying to press his hair flat with the heel of his palm. He started guiltily as he saw in the mirror the door to the partners’ sanctum open and Holly Carmichael come striding into the reception lobby.
As Garry turned to face her, all his recent bravado and confidence collapsed around him and he gawked at her. It was impossible but she was even more poised and chic than the vivid image of her he had carried with him since their last meeting.
Today she was wearing a blue and white striped Chanel suit with a pleated skirt that swirled around her calves, allowing just a flash of her perfect rounded knees as she came towards him. Her lightly tanned legs in sheer nylon had the patina of polished ivory, and her ankles and her wrists in the cuffs of the Chanel suit were elegantly turned, her feet and hands narrow and yet perfectly proportioned to her long willowy limbs.
She was smiling and Garry felt the same sensual vertigo that he sometimes experienced after bench-pressing five times his own bodyweight of iron. Her teeth were opalescent, and as her mouth formed his name and smiled he watched it with breathless fascination.
She was as tall as he was, but he knew he could lift her with one hand and he quivered at the almost sacrilegious thought of taking this divine creature in his hands.
‘Mr Courtney, I hope we haven’t kept you waiting.’ She took his arm, and led him towards her office. He felt like a performing bear on a chain beside her grace and lightness. The light touch of her fingers on his arm burned like a branding iron.
Her hair was streaked with a shading of all the colours of blonde from platinum to dark burnt honey, and it fell in a lustrous cascade to just above the padded shoulders of the Chanel suit, and every time she moved her head he caught the perfume of those shining tresses and his stomach muscles contracted.
Her fingers were still on his biceps and she was talking directly into his face, still smiling. Her breath smelled like a flower and her mouth was so beautiful and soft and red that he felt guilty looking at it, as though he were spying on some secret and intimate part of her body. He tore his eyes from her mouth and raised them to her eyes. His heart jumped against his ribs like a maniac in a padded cell for one eye was sky blue and the other violet flecked with gold. It gave her face a striking asymmetry, not exactly a squint but a disconcerting myopic imbalance and Garry’s legs felt as weak as if he had run ten miles.
‘I have something for you at last,’ Holly Carmichael said, and led him into her office.
The long room reflected her own extraordinary style, which had attracted Garry to her work long before he had met her. He had first seen an example of it in the Institute of Architects Yearbook. Holly Carmichael had won the 1961 Award of the Institute for a beach house on the dunes overlooking Plettenburg Bay that she had designed as a holiday home for one of the W
itwatersrand insurance magnates. She used wood and stone and material in a blend that was at the same time modern and classical, that married space and shape in a natural harmony that excited the eye and yet gave solace to the soul.
Her office was decorated in soft mulberry and ethereal blue, functional and yet both restful and unmistakably feminine. The delicate pastel drawings on all four walls were her own work.
In the centre of the floor on a low table stood a miniature-scale reproduction of the Shasaville estate, as she visualized it after development was complete. Holly led Garry to it and stood back while he circled it slowly, studying it from every angle.
She watched the change come over him.
All the gawkiness was gone. Even the shape of his body seemed to change. It was imbued with the same kind of massive grace as that of the bull in the arena tensing for the charge.
Holly researched the background of all her clients, in order to better anticipate their requirements. With this one she had taken special care. The word in the marketplace was that, despite appearances, Garrick Courtney was a formidable presence and had already demonstrated his acumen and courage by procuring the Shasaville title and a controlling interest in Alpha Centauri Estates.
Her accountant had drawn up an approximate list of his assets which included, along with his property interests, considerable equity in blue-chip gold companies and the Courtney mining shares which he had acquired from his family when he was appointed to the board of that company.
More significant was the prevailing view that both Centaine and Shasa Courtney had given up on his brothers, and decided that Garrick Courtney was their hope for the future. He was the heir apparent to the Courtney millions and nobody knew the sum total of those – two hundred million, five hundred million – not inconceivably a billion rand. Holly Carmichael shivered slightly at the thought.
As she watched him now she saw not a large bumbling young man in steel-rimmed spectacles, who made an expensive suit of fine wool look like a bag of laundry, and whose hair stood up in a startled tuft at the crown. She saw power.
Power fascinated Holly Carmichael, power in all its forms – wealth, reputation, influence and physical power. She shivered slightly as she recalled the feel of the muscle under his sleeve.
Holly was thirty-two years of age, almost ten years senior to him, and her divorce would count heavily against her. Both Centaine and Shasa Courtney were conservative and old-fashioned.
‘They’ll have to be good to stop me,’ she told herself. ‘I get what I want – and this is what I want, but it’s not going to be a push-over.’
Then she considered the effect she had on Garry Courtney. She knew he was besotted with her. The first part would be easy. Without any effort at all she had already enmeshed him, she could enslave him as readily. After that would come the difficult part. She thought of Centaine Courtney and all she had heard about her, and she shivered again, this time with neither pleasure nor excitement.
Garry stopped in front of her. Although their eyes were on a level, he now seemed to tower over her as he glowered at her. A moment before she had felt herself perfectly in control, now suddenly she was uncertain.
‘I’ve seen what you can do when you really try,’ he said. ‘I want you to try for me. I don’t want second best. I don’t want this.’
Holly stared at him in amazement. She had not even contemplated his rejection, certainly not in such brutal terms. Her shock persisted a moment longer and then was replaced with anger.
‘If that is your estimate of my work, Mr Courtney, I suggest you find yourself another architect,’ she told him in a cold fury and he didn’t even flinch.
‘Come here,’ he ordered. ‘Look at it from this angle. You’ve stuck that roof on the shopping centre without any regard to the view from the houses on this slope of the hill. And look here. You could have used the fairways of the golf course to enhance the aspect of these flagship properties instead of shutting them off the way you have.’
He had taken hold of her arm, and though she knew he was not expending even a small part of his strength, still the potential she could feel in his fingers frightened her a little. She no longer felt confident and patronizing as he pointed out the flaws in her design. While he spoke she knew that he was right. Instinctively she had been aware of the defects he was now exposing, but she had not taken the trouble to find the solutions to them. She had not expected somebody so young and inexperienced to be so discriminating – she had treated him like a doting boy who would accept anything she offered. Her anger was directed at herself as much as at him.
He finished his criticism at last and she said softly, ‘I’ll return your deposit and we can tear up the contract.’
‘You signed the contract and accepted the deposit, Mrs Carmichael. Now I want you to deliver. I want something beautiful and startling and right. I want something that only you can give me.’
She had no answer, and his manner changed, he became peculiarly gentle and solicitous.
‘I didn’t mean to insult you. I think at the least you are the very best, and I want you to prove me right – please.’
She turned away from him and went to her drawing-board at the end of the room, slipped out of her jacket and tossed it over the desk and picked up one of her pencils.
With the pencil poised over the blank sheet, she said, ‘It seems that I’ve got a lot of lost ground to make up. Here we go—’ and she drew the first bold, decisive line across the sheet. ‘At least we know now what we don’t want. Let’s find out what we do want. Let’s start with the shopping centre.’
He came to stand behind her and watched in silence for almost twenty minutes before she glanced back at him with the violet eye glinting through the veil of shining blonde hair. She didn’t have to ask the question.
‘Yes,’ he nodded.
‘Don’t go away,’ she said. ‘When you are near I can feel your mood and judge your response.’
He took off his jacket and threw it beside hers over the desk top, and he stood beside her in his shirtsleeves with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets and his shoulders hunched. He remained absolutely still, his concentration monumental, and yet his presence seemed to inspire her to tap the mystical springs of her talent. At last she saw in her mind how it should have been and she began to rough it out, her pencil flying and flicking over the sheet.
When the day faded, he went to close the curtains and switch on the overhead lights. It was after eight when she at last threw down her pencil and turned to him. ‘That’s the feeling I want to give it. You were right – the first attempt wasn’t worthy.’
‘Yes, I was right in one other respect. You are the very best.’ He picked up his jacket and shrugged it over his massive shoulders, and she felt a tingle of dismay. She didn’t want him to go yet, she knew when he did she would feel exhausted and spent. The effort of creation had drained her resources.
‘You can’t send me home to begin cooking at this hour,’ she said. ‘That would be the sadistic act of a truly cruel taskmaster.’
Suddenly all his confidence evaporated, and he blushed and mumbled something inaudible. She knew she would have to take charge from here.
‘The least you can do is feed the slave. How about offering me dinner, Mr Courtney?’
She created her usual stir of masculine interest as she preceded Garry into the restaurant, and she was glad he had noticed. She was surprised by the aplomb with which he discussed the wine list with the maître until she remembered that Weltevreden was one of the leading wineries of the Cape of Good Hope.
During dinner their conversation was serious, and she was relieved not to have to endure the usual banalities of a first date. They discussed the Sharpeville crisis and its implications, social and economic, and she was amazed at the depth of his political insight until she remembered that his father was a minister in Verwoerd’s cabinet. He had a ringside seat.
‘If it wasn’t for that Prince of Wales check suit and those
ghastly steel-framed spectacles,’ she thought, ‘and the crest of hair that makes him look like Woody Woodpecker—’
When he asked her to dance she had misgivings. They were the only couple on the tiny circular floor, and there were a dozen people in the room she knew. However, the moment he put his arm around her waist she relaxed. Despite his bulk he was agile and light on his feet with an excellent sense of timing, and she began to enjoy herself, until abruptly his dancing style changed and he held her differently. For a while she was puzzled. She attempted to maintain the close contact of hips which had enabled her to anticipate his moves, and only then she became aware of his arousal. She was at first amused and then despite herself intrigued. Like the rest of him it was massive and hard. She played a little game of brushing lightly against him and withdrawing, all the while chatting casually and feigning total ignorance of his predicament. Afterwards he drove her in the MG to where her own car was parked. She hadn’t ridden in an open sports car since her varsity days and the wind in her hair gave her a nostalgic thrill.
He insisted on following her Mercedes back to Bantry Bay to see her safely home and they said goodnight on the pavement outside her apartment block. She considered inviting him up for coffee, but her sure instinct warned her to protect the shining image of her that he so obviously had conceived.
Instead she told him, ‘I’ll have some more drawings for you to look at by the end of next week.’
This time she put everything of her talent into the preliminary sketches, and she knew they were good. He came to her office again and they worked over them until late and then dined together. It was Thursday night and the restaurant was half empty. They had the dance floor to themselves and this time she worked her hips lightly and cunningly against him as they moved.