by Wilbur Smith
"Are you training to have a sprog-bod, or for the next Olympics?' he asked with a grin.
"You smoke too much,' Isabella scoffed at him.
"My only vice." Tara Courtney, or Tara Gama as she now called herself, was the manageress of a small residential hotel off Cromwell Road, and her clientele was composed almost exclusively of expatriates and new immigrants from Africa and India and the Caribbean.
It always amazed Isabella that an area like this existed only twenty minutes' walk from the grandeur of Cadogan Square. The Lord Kitchener Hotel was as shabby and run-down as its manageress. Again it amazed Isabella that her mother was the same person who had once presided over the great chiteau of Weltevreden. Isabella's earliest memories were of her mother in a full-length ball-gown, with yellow diamonds from the Courtney mine at H'ani glittering at her smooth white throat and on her earlobes, her dark auburn hair piled high on her lovely head as she came down the sweep of the marble staircase. Isabella had never suspected the terrible dissatisfaction and misery that must have festered beneath that regal facade.
Now Tara's magnificent head of hair had greyed, and she had touched it up with a cheap home-dye job that came up in variegated tones of ginger and brazen plum. Her skin that Isabella had inherited in all its silken perfection had withered and bagged and wrinkled with neglect. There were little blackheads lodged in the enlarged pores around the creases between her nose and cheeks, and her false teeth were too large for her mouth, distorting the sweet line of her lips.
She rushed down the front steps of the hotel to embrace Isabella in a cloud of pungent Cologne. Isabella returned her hug with the strength of a guilty conscience.
"Let me look at my darling daughter.' She held Isabella at arm's length, and her eyes dropped immediately. 'You have grown more beautiful, Bella, if that were possible, but the reason is pretty obvious. I see you are carrying a little bundle of fun and joy." Isabella's smile crooked with annoyance, but she ignored the reference.
"You look well, Mummy - Tara, I mean.' Tara wore the self-conscious uniform of the militant left-winger: a shapeless grey cardigan over a full-length granny-print shift and men's open brown sandals.
"It's been months,' Tara complained, 'almost a year, and you live just down the road. How can you neglect your old Michael intervened smoothly, deflecting Tara's self-pity, embracing her with unfeigned warmth and enthusiasm. She turned to him with theatrical mother-love.
"Mickey, you were always the sweetest and most loving of all my children." And Isabella's smile began to hurt her lips. She wondered just how long she had to stay and when she could escape. She knew it wasn't going to be easy, and that for once she could expect little support from Michael. Tara linked her arms through theirs. Michael on one side of her and Isabella on the other, she led them into the hotel.
"I've got tea and biscuits ready for you. I've been in an absolute tizz ever since Michael called to say you were coming." On a Saturday morning the Lord Kitchener's public lounge was filled with Tara's guests. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and the cadences of Swahili and Gujarati and Xhosa. Tara introduced them to everybody in the room, even though Isabella had met many of them on her previous visits.
"My son and daughter from Cape Town in South Africa.' And she saw how some of the eyes flicked at the name of her country.
The hell with them, too, Isabella decided defiantly. Funny how at home she thought of herself as a liberal, but when she was abroad and encountered that reaction she thought of herself as a patriot.
At last Tara seated them in a corner of the lounge, and while she poured the tea, she asked in a bright and cheery tone that carried clearly to everybody in the large room: 'So now, Bella, tell me about the baby. When are you expecting it and who is the father?"
"This is hardly the time or the place, Tara.' Isabella paled with irritation, but Tara laughed.
"Oh, we are all just one big family here at the Lordy. You can talk freely." This time Michael murmured gently: 'Bella really doesn't want all the world to know her private business. We'll talk about it later, Tara." 'You funny old-fashioned thing.' Tara reached across and tried to hug Isabella again, but spilled some of her tea on her granny-print skirt and gave up the attempt. 'None of us here worries our head over bourgeois conventions." 'That's enough, Tara,' Michael said firmly, and then to divert her: 'Where is Benjamin and how is he doing?" 'Oh, Ben is my pride and joy.' Tara took the bait. 'He just popped out for a few minutes. He had to go down to the school to hand in an essay. He's such a clever boy, he's taking his A-levels this year, only sixteen and his headmaster says he is the most brilliant, the cleverest child he has had in Ryham Grammar for the last ten years. All the girls adore him. He's so good-looking.' Tara chattered on, and Isabella was relieved not to have to make conversation. Instead she listened to the recital of her halfbrother's virtues.
Benjamin Gama was one of the many reasons that Isabella felt uncomfortable in this other world in which her mother lived. So deep had been the disgrace and so poisonous the scandal that Tara had brought on the Courtney family that her name was never mentioned at Weltevreden. Nana had forbidden it.
Only Michael had ever discussed it with her, and then in the most general terms. 'I'm sorry, Bella. I'm not going to repeat cruel rumour and hearsay.
If you want that, you'll have to go elsewhere. I'll only tell you the facts, and those are that when Tara left South Africa after Moses Gama was arrested and imprisoned no charges were ever brought against her and no proof was ever offered to implicate her in any criminal activity."
"But didn't Pater arrange it that way to protect the family reputation?" 'Why don't you ask Pater himself?' She had indeed tentatively broached the subject with her father; but Shasa, for once cold and aloof, had dismissed the enquiry. In an odd way Isabella had been relieved by his refusal to talk about it. Isabella was honest enough to recognize her own cowardice.
She didn't truly want to know the extent of her mother's guilt. Deep down, she didn't really want to know if her mother had indeed been a party to the notorious 'Guy Fawkes' plot of her lover, Moses Gama, to blow up the South African Houses of Parliament, the attempt which had resulted in the death of Isabella's grandfather, Tara's own father. Perhaps her mother was a traitor and a murderess guilty of patricide. At the very least she was certainly a blatant adulteress and a miscegenist, which was a crime under South African law, and once again Isabella wondered just what she was doing here.
Suddenly Tara's features brightened, and for an instant she recaptured a faint glimmer of her lost beauty.
"Ben!' she cried. 'Look who have come to see us, Benjamin. Your brother and sister. Isn't that nice?" Isabella swivelled in her chair, and her half-brother stood in the doorway of the hotel lounge behind her. He had grown again in the year since last she had seen him and obviously he had made that leap from puberty into man hood.
"Hello, Benjamin,' she cried too enthusiastically, and although he smiled she sensed the reserve in him, and saw the wariness in his dark eyes.
Tara had not been completely prejudiced by her maternal instincts. Benjamin was indeed a fine-looking lad. His natural African grace had combined well with his mother's more delicate features. His skin had a coppery tone, and his hair was a neat woolly cap of tight dark curls.
"Hello, Isabella.'The south London accent on the tongue of this son of Africa startled her. She made no move to embrace him. From their very first meeting there had been a tacit agreement between them: no displays of simulated affection. They shook hands quickly, and then both stepped back. Before Isabella could think of anything further to say, Benjamin had turned to Michael. Now his smile was a flash of perfect teeth and the sparkle of dark eyes.
"Mickey!' he said, and he took two quick light steps to meet his older brother. They clasped each other around the shoulders.
Isabella envied Michael that exceptional ability to evoke trust and liking in everybody around him. Benjamin seemed truly to accept him as a brother and a friend without any of
the reserve that he showed towards Isabella.
Soon all three of them, Tara, Ben and Mickey, were chatting away with animation. Isabella felt herself excluded from their intimate little circle.
At last one of the black South African students crossed the lounge and spoke to Tara. She looked up in consternation and then glanced at her watch.
"My goodness, thank you for reminding me, Nelson.' She smiled up at the student. 'We were having such a good natter that we completely forgot about the time.' Tara jumped to her feet. 'Come on, everybody! If we are going to Trafalgar Square, we had better leave now." There was a general exodus from the lounge, and Isabella edged across to Michael.
"What's this all about, Mickey? You seem to know what's going on. Fill me in." 'There is a rally in Trafalgar Square." 'Oh God, no! Not another one of those anti-apartheid jamborees. Why didn't you warn me?" 'It would have given you an excuse to duck out,' Michael grinned at her.
"Why don't you come along?" 'No, thanks. I've lived with that nonsense for the past three years, ever since Pater took over the embassy. What are you getting mixed up in that ridiculous business for?" 'It's my job, Bella my sweeting. That's what I came to London for, to write about this ridiculous business, as you call it. Come with us." 'Why should I bother?" 'See the world from the other side of the fence for a change - you might find it refreshing - and to be with me. We could have fun together.' She wavered uncertainly. Despite her disdain for the subject, she loved his company. They truly did have fun together, and with Ramsey away she was lonely.
"Only if we ride on the top of a bus, not on the Tube. You know I can never resist a bus ride." They were a party of twenty or so from the Lordy, including Nelson Litalongi, the South African student. Michael found a seat for her on the upper deck of the red bus, and then he and Nelson squeezed in beside her.
Tara and Benjamin were in the seat directly in front of them, but they faced around to join in the laughter and the joking. The mood was gay and carefree, and despite herself Isabella found she was indeed having fun.
Michael was the centre of everything, and he and Nelson began to sing. They both had fine voices, and the others joined in with the chorus of "This Is My Island in the Sun'. Nelson could mintic Harry Belafonte to the life and resembled him except that the tone of his skin was lustrous charcoal. He and Michael had hit it off together from the beginning.
When they climbed off the bus in front of the National Gallery, the demonstrators were already assembling on the open square beneath the tall column, and Michael made a joke about Nelson and Horatio. Everybody laughed, and they trooped across the road into the square, and the pigeons rose in fluttering clouds from around their feet.
There was a temporary platform erected at the end of the square, directly in front of South Africa House, and an area had been roped off, in which a few hundred demonstrators had already assembled. They joined the back ranks, and Tara produced a hand-drawn banner from her plastic shopping-bag and held it aloft.
"Apartheid is a crime against humanity."
Isabella edged away from her and tried to pretend they were not related.
"She really doesn't mind making a spectacle of herself, does she?' she whispered to Michael, and helaughed.
"That's the whole object of the exercise." Nevertheless, Isabella did find it interesting to be a part of this motley gathering. With distaste she had viewed many others like it from the high windows of the ambassador's office across the road, but this gave her a totally new perspective. The crowd was good-natured and well behaved. Four blue-uniformed bobbies stood by to see fair play, and smiled in avuncular fashion when one of the speakers referred to London as a police state every bit as bad as Pretoria. To show her support and to dissociate herself from the remark, Isabella blew the nicest-looking copper a kiss, and his indulgent smile stretched into a delighted grin.
The speeches from the platform droned on against the rumble of the traffic and the passing scarlet buses. Isabella had heard it all before, and so had the others in the crowd to judge by their phlegm and apathy. The best laugh of the day came when a pigeon wheeling high overhead ejected a spurt of whitewash which hit the speaker of the moment fairly on his shiny bald pate and Bella called out: 'Fascist bird, agent of the racist Pretoria regime!" The meeting ended with a vote on the motion that John Vorster and his illegal regime should immediately resign and hand over power to the Democratic People's Government of South Africa. The motion was declared carried unanimously and Michael remarked: 'Which should make John Vorster tremble in his boots.' The meeting broke up more peaceably than a crowd from a football match.
"Let's find a pub,' Michael suggested. 'All that toppling of fascist governments has made me thirsty." 'There is a good one in the Strand," Nelson Litalongi suggested.
"Lead the way,' Michael encouraged him. When they bellied up to the bar-counter, he bought the first round.
"Well,' Isabella gave her judgement as she sipped her ginger beer, that was a fair old waste of time. Two hundred little people spouting hot air aren't going to change anything." 'Don't be too sure of that." Michael wiped the froth off his upper lip with the back of his hand. "Maybe it's the first little ripple lapping at the foot of the dam wall - soon that ripple could become a wavelet, and then a rip-tide and finally a tidal wave." 'Oh, nonsense, Mickey,' Isabella dismissed the idea brusquely. 'South Africa is too strong, too rich. America and Britain have too much invested in her. They won't let us down; they can't expect us to hand over our birthright to a pack of Marxist savages.' She repeated the obvious truths that she had heard her father as ambassador voice so often over the last three years. She was discomfited by the acrimony and logic with which she was assailed by her mother and her half-brother, and by Nelson Litalongi and the twenty other coloured residents from the Lord Kitchener Hotel. It was not a happy experience. That evening when she and Michael returned to Cadogan Square, she was shaken and subdued.
"They are so bitter and angry, Mickey,' she lamented.
"It's the new wave, Bella. If we are to survive it, we should try to understand and come to terms with it." 'It's not as though they are badly treated. Just think about Nanny and Klonkie and Gamiet and all our people at Weltevreden. I mean, Mickey, they are a damned sight better off than most of the whites living in this country." 'I know how you feel, Bella. You can drive yourself mad pondering on the rights and wrongs, but you've got to come back to one thing in the end.
They are human beings, just like us. Some of them a hell of a lot better and nicer. By what right, divine or infernal, can we prevent them sharing all that the country of our birth has to offer?" 'That's very well in theory, but this afternoon they were talking about armed struggle. That means blowing women and children to pieces. That means blood and death, Mickey. just like the Irish. How do you feel about that?" 'I don't know what I feel about that, Bella. Sometimes I feel - No! Killing and maiming and burning are never justified. Then at other times I feel Sure, why not? Man has been killing his fellow-men for a million years to protect himself and his birthright. Pater, who rants and roars at the thought of an armed struggle in South Africa, is the same person who climbed into a Hurricane in ig4o and went off to machine-gun Ethiopians and Italians and Germans with gay old abandon in defence of what he saw as his freedom. Nana, that stalwart of the rule of law and the sanctity of private property, and defender of the freemarket system, was the one who nodded happily and murmured, "Quite right, too!" when she heard the news of the most appalling violence of all mankind's bloody and violent history, the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So how immoral and bloodthirsty are Tara and Benjamin and Nelson Litalongi compared to us and our own family? Who is right and who is wrong, Bella?" 'You've given me a terrible headache.' Bella stood up. "I'm going to bed."
The telephone woke her at six in the morning, and as she heard Ramsey's voice the dark shadow over her life evaporated.
"Darling, where are you')' 'Athens." 'Oh.' Her spirits plunged. 'I hoped you might be at Heathrow." 'I've been delayed
. I will be here for at least three more days. Why don't you come across and join me?" 'To Athens?' She was still half-asleep.
"Yes, why not? You can still catch the ten o'clock flight on BEA. We could steal three days together. How about the Acropolis in the moonlight? We can get out to the islands, and there are some important people I would like you to meet." 'Yes!' she cried. 'Why not! Give me your telephone number. I'll ring you back as soon as I have a seat on the plane.' All the lines to British European Airways reservations were busy, and she was running out of time, so Michael drove her out to Heathrow in the Mini and dropped her at the terminal entrance.