African Sky

by Tony Park

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Paul said, shaking his head. ‘Don’t tell me . . .’

  ‘Afraid so. She telephoned this morning. She’d just found out. Charlie, that’s her husband, has been killed in action.’

  ‘Poor girl. When you see her, tell her I dropped in and I’ll follow up my request with Sergeant Hayes.’

  ‘No, sir . . .’

  ‘What do you mean, no?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘It’s a bit odd, but when she called in this morning to say she wasn’t coming in, she said that when you dropped by, to tell you that she still wanted to see you and, if you wouldn’t mind, perhaps you’d call around to her place.’

  ‘Really?’

  The constable looked at the airman in a new light, and wondered if there were something going on between Pip and the Australian.

  Paul caught the look and said: ‘I’m a bit surprised, frankly. I’d have thought she’d want friends or people close to her to be with her today.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ the constable said.

  ‘Well,’ he said, genuinely bemused, ‘you’d better tell me how to find her place.’

  He followed the signs out of town towards Plumtree, a small farming settlement near the Bechuanaland border, to the west of Bulawayo.

  He gave the bike full throttle on the open road, sticking to the narrow strip of tar on the left-hand side, and following the course of the railway line, which darted in and out of sight amidst small granite kopjes and stands of long, straw-like grass on his right. The speed helped clear his mind. His body became part of the machine, leaning into the corners, hunching low as he hit a downhill stretch and pushed her to maximum speed. He couldn’t decide how to feel about being invited to Pip’s place.

  He still couldn’t read her, although he knew she was passionately dedicated to her job, and to seeking the truth. She seemed far more intelligent, committed and diligent than the bag of wind she worked with.

  Given the investigation into Flick’s death seemed pretty well over now they had a man in custody, that only left his request for help with the cross-border search for them to discuss. He couldn’t accept that she would call him out to her home on the day she’d learned of her husband’s death to talk about a missing aeroplane.

  Bulawayo was set on a huge plateau and on a day like this it seemed he could see for miles in every direction. A baboon ran across the road in front of him. He followed its path and saw it was part of a large troop of thirty or forty. Several of the females had tiny, big-eared babies, either suckling or hitching a lift, riding jockey-style on their mothers’ backs.

  He thought about how close he had come to telling Pip everything about his relationship with Felicity and Catherine until, with superbly ironic timing, the wealthy widow had intruded.

  Catherine. Around her he was like a child watching a burning firework. He was drawn by her beauty, by her fire, by her danger. Touching her, trying to hold her, he had realised from the start, was a dangerous business. Impossible, as it had turned out. She’d been an experience, he decided. Like first-time fumbling sex. Exciting, new, unknown. Something he’d never forget, but not something he needed every day. He smiled at the crude analogy, but didn’t feel bad, as he sometimes had when he’d said his last goodbye to some young English girl he’d met on leave in a pub or dance hall. This time he had been cut loose, by her. He respected her honesty. Whatever judgement one could make of Catherine De Beers, she could never be called a liar. She was honest, to the point of brutality, about her emotions, or lack of them.

  Was Pip calling him to her so she could ask him more about Flick and Catherine? That, too, seemed unlikely, no matter how curious she was about the web that had been woven around him and the two women. It was still so utterly amazing that he wondered whether it had actually happened, or whether it had all been a dream.

  And Flick. Of the two of them, she and Catherine, she was the one he would have liked to have known better. He wondered if he’d been like every other man on base, if he had simply wanted her because she had that movie-star unattainability. She was the closest thing to a celebrity at Kumalo, probably in all of Bulawayo, but he had been invited into her world. She wore her worldliness like a new designer dress, something Catherine might have bought for her, or handed down. But even when she tried to shock him he had detected an innocence beneath her words, the gestures, the acts, as if she were indeed a film star playing a role designed to tease him, to please Catherine.

  He threw back his head and screamed into the rushing wind. ‘Aaaaaah!’ There was only one thing he was certain of right now. He was alive.

  A trio of big, curly-horned Kudu bulls that had been grazing on the side of the road took flight at the sound of his cry and the growl of the bike’s engine. The graceful antelope bounded high as they ran from him and he envied their freedom and the simplicity of their life. A Rhodesian farmer had told him there were plenty of leopard still stalking the rocky bushland around Bulawayo, and he wondered if there were still lion in the area. He loved Africa’s simple, natural rhythms of life. There were dangers everywhere in the bush, but nature had equipped both predator and prey with the skills they needed either to kill or to have some chance of survival. Nature had given the retreating antelope speed, agility, good hearing and horns to stab back at a cat.

  Paul Bryant, by contrast, was out of his element, in a foreign country, dealing with emotions and situations neither training nor nature could prepare him for. He felt utterly defenceless.

  The ranch was called Lala Panzi – a place to lie down. Under the words were the names of its owners, Charles and Philippa Lovejoy.

  Bryant turned off the strip road at the carved wooden sign swinging from a mopane pole on rusted chain links, onto a corrugated dirt road. On a low ridge to his left was what he took to be the staff compound, where the farm workers lived. A cluster of red-earthen huts with reed thatch roofs, garden-size plots of straggly maize, whippet-like yapping dogs, cooking fires. An Ndebele woman in a flowered smock looked up from her outdoor washing tub. A line of sheets hung limp in the air, the drying time slower by the day as the promise of summer wetted the air. A man sat in the shade of a kiah, his home, smoking. Four children, in ragged hand-me-downs, started running down the hill towards the track at the sight of the man on the motorcycle – rare excitement, indeed. Bryant waved at them. The children shrieked with joy. The woman lowered her head to the washing; the man closed his eyes.

  Fat cattle grazed on golden grass in an open paddock on his right. Tick birds rode shotgun on their spines and white egrets shadowed their movements on long, skinny legs. A teenage herd boy in patched overalls raised his stick in a wave. Bryant felt an odd contentment as he bounced along the half-mile track, taking in the simple, timeless rural scenes on either side of him. He’d chafed in the countryside back in Australia, eager to get away from his aunt and uncle and into the thick of city living. Out here, though, he soaked up an innocent peace and quiet that was missing from the constant drone of aero engines and barking warrant officers at Kumalo. He screwed his eyes tight for a couple of seconds, driving by instinct alone, as he tried to force the image of a burning Lancaster out of his mind.

  When he opened his eyes he was still in Africa, in front of a modest though well-kept whitewashed single-storey farmhouse with a steeply pitched thatched roof. The grass in the fenced yard in front of the dwelling was as green and clipped as any he’d seen in England’s home counties, the flowers bright and cheery Africa was all around, but inside the chicken wire fence was an ideal. A pretty good knock-off of a little piece of a England, re-engineered and built from memory.

  Pip pulled back the curtain at the rumbling sound of the motorcycle in her driveway. She’d imagined he would be in an air force car, if he came. The priest had been in a car. She’d only just got rid of him, after two interminable hours.

  She drained her gin and tonic. It was her third. Unusual for her, to be drinking before midday. Charlie would have approved. Would have told her she’d
finally loosened up. When the priest was around she’d had to quaff the second one fast – in one gulp in the kitchen, in fact – just to get through the second hour of patronising condolences and talk of what a good man her husband had been, and how he was now enjoying a better life.

  A better life. Was that an impossible concept to grasp? Maybe not. She’d ask Squadron Leader Paul Bryant his thoughts on that one. There was a knock on the door. Too soft, too tentative. He was scared, she thought, or reluctant.

  He looked at her when he opened the door, and couldn’t hide the surprise on his face.

  ‘Well, say something, Squadron Leader,’ she said.

  What he wanted to say was certainly not appropriate. He’d taken in every detail in a single, brief glance, and captured the image of her in his mind, like a photograph. She stood in front of him wearing shorts hemmed at barely a third of the way down her thighs, which showed off a deliciously slender pair of legs, and a yellow short-sleeved summer shirt that was tied, rather than tucked in, at her waist. The narrowest sliver of pale skin was visible above the waistband of her pants. She’d made up her face and her blonde hair framed it perfectly. Her fingernails, like her toenails and lips, were painted blood red. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Pip.’

  ‘Thank you, Paul, and thanks for coming out to see me. Do come in, please.’ She smiled, turned and led him into the house.

  He tried hard not to look at her bum, but failed. Why, he wondered, had she dressed like this?

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked, looking back over her shoulder.

  He checked his watch.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m three gins ahead of you already.’

  ‘Hate to see a lady drinking alone.’

  ‘A lady wouldn’t. Scotch or gin?’

  ‘Scotch. Plenty of ice and water, please.’

  ‘Let’s sit outside. The sun’s glorious today.’

  ‘Lovely morning,’ he agreed. ‘Believe me, Pip, I know how hard it is. I’ve been through the loss of people close to me.’

  She handed him his drink and led him onto a sunny flagstoned verandah, which looked out over a neatly manicured garden.

  Bryant looked around. ‘Nice place. Lots of antiques inside, I noticed.’

  ‘All his stuff. It’s like living in a museum. Too many ghosts of long-dead Lovejoys. Too much England, not enough Rhodesia. Not enough . . . reality.’

  He sipped his Scotch. It was nice taking a drink with someone else for a change, even if the circumstances were rotten. ‘People have different ways of coping with death, Pip. I reckon I’ve seen most of them.’

  ‘So, you’re not surprised that I’m not wearing black or gone into purdah?’

  He shook his head. ‘Do you want to talk about him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Well, maybe later.’

  ‘Why am I here, Pip? Don’t you have . . . friends?’

  ‘I told you before that I’m fairly new to this side of the country. Being stuck out here on a farm doesn’t improve your social life much. You do meet a lot of other lonely farm wives, though.’

  Lonely? There was more to it than that, he thought. He remembered the way she’d clammed up when he’d asked her about her husband in the car. ‘Friends usually try to say what they think you want to hear.’

  ‘Aha,’ she said. She leaned back in her chair and took a long sip of her drink. ‘I hoped you were as smart as I thought you were. For a while there you had me thinking you were just another fly-boy trying to break the squadron record for how many women you could bed per country.’

  He frowned. He’d seen people drink too much when someone died. It usually ended in tears or a fight, frequently both.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. She put a hand to her eyes to shield them from the sun. ‘That must have been the gin talking.’

  ‘I can listen, if you want to talk,’ he said.

  ‘I think that might be the answer to your question.’

  Now he was confused, losing track, and he hadn’t even finished his first drink. Then he saw the pleading in her eyes, the innocence belied by the tough talk. The same look he’d seen from Flick. ‘Oh, of course. That’s why I’m here, to listen.’

  ‘Maybe. You’re not a friend, Paul. Don’t take that the wrong way.’

  He put his hands up in a gesture of peace. ‘No offence taken.’

  ‘You’ve seen things, done things, I know.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You don’t pretend, Paul, do you? Not when it comes to life and death.’

  ‘No,’ he said instantly. ‘Never. The truth hurts, as they say, but you can’t escape that kind of pain.’

  ‘Look at my eyes.’

  ‘What about them?’ he asked. He’d been tempted to say, ‘very pretty’, but not even he would flirt with a woman in mourning.

  ‘Not red-rimmed? Not puffy? Not tear-filled?’

  ‘Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it takes a very long while.’

  ‘It’s not going to happen.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not drinking to drown my sorrows, Paul. This is a celebration.’

  He let the word hang there. He’d never celebrated a death. No, that wasn’t true. His crew had got plastered during their second tour after Nigel, one of the gunners, had downed his first enemy night-fighter, not long before he was decapitated by a cannon shell. ‘What are you celebrating?’

  ‘Freedom.’

  He looked hard into her eyes and saw no trace of irony. Her mouth was set, awaiting his reaction, but her eyes were smiling. They were, indeed, free. ‘Did he hurt you, Pip?’

  She nodded.

  ‘People knew him, here, in Bulawayo? He was a local boy?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘So they’re going to be crying for him, singing his praises. Expecting you to be the grieving widow.’

  ‘He’s everywhere, all around me, Paul. The boys at the police camp played rugby with him, his mother pops around to visit at the worst possible times, even that bloody Susannah Beattie in your parachute hangar knew him.’

  ‘No ringing endorsement there,’ he smiled. ‘But you knew the real Charlie, right?’

  ‘Yes. The real Charlie.’

  ‘People don’t become heroes, don’t become good people, simply by donning a uniform and going off to war, Pip. But a lot of civvies, a lot of family and friends don’t see it that way.’

  She returned his stare. ‘That’s the hardest thing,’ she said, her voice a little croaky now.

  He thought he saw her eyes soften, moisten. Not from a sudden remorse for the loss of her husband, or guilt at her feelings. ‘You’re worried that now you’ll be denied justice, that no one will know what he was really like.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve seen cowards, thieves, bullies, thoroughgoing bastards each and every one of them, saved by the bullet.’

  ‘By death?’ she asked.

  ‘Blokes who should have been charged and sent to the cells, who probably would have ended up there, are now mourned as the ‘valiant dead’ because a piece of shrapnel or a night-fighter’s tracer carved them up before they got their just desserts.’

  ‘Better for their families, that they think their sons and husbands died heroes, than have them returned in handcuffs, I suppose,’ she said, turning her gaze to the garden.

  ‘Do you want to talk about him? About what he was really like?’

  She turned back and took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry, Paul. I’ve no reason to lump this all on you. I don’t even know why I left the message for you to come here.’

  ‘Yes you do. You know, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That it can help. Talking about what you went through.’

  ‘That’s rich coming from Mr Strong Silent Type.’

  ‘You were investigating a murder. I didn’t think my life story was part of that.’

  ‘He hit me.’

  He drained h
is drink but said nothing.

  ‘Let me get you another,’ she said.

  He put his hand over the tumbler. ‘No, thanks. I’m fine for the moment.’ He stayed silent, waiting for her to resume.

  ‘We were very much in love, you understand, at university,’ she said. ‘I was so blinded by that love, I gave up my studies – my future.’

  ‘He never hurt you then?’

  ‘Never. Of course we weren’t living together. We weren’t . . .’

  ‘But he was a different person when he drank?’ Bryant asked. He knew the type. He had an uncle like that, and a bruised aunty who was proof of the man’s darker side.

  ‘Yes. Whenever I saw him drinking it was at a university party, or around friends. He was funny, the life of the party. But as soon as we were married – on our honeymoon, in fact – I saw the other side of him. I saw him after he’d had a few too many, before he passed out.’

  ‘He hit you on your honeymoon?’

  Pip looked out over the garden. She nodded.

  ‘Bastard,’ he muttered, shaking his head.

  ‘Yes, he was. On the first night at the Falls Hotel we flattened two bottles of champagne over dinner, and he’d already had a few beers. He had a couple of brandies afterwards. When we went to bed, he was impotent. He became angry, blamed me.’

  He looked down at his shoes.

  ‘He hit me, several times. After that, whether it was the exercise, or a rush of some sort, he . . . well, he was ready again. I didn’t want him to touch me by that stage, so he forced me. From then on that was pretty much the script for our lovemaking, if you could call it that.’

  ‘Why did you stay with him?’ he asked.

  ‘God, I’ve asked myself the same thing over and over again. I don’t know. I was close to reporting him on a couple of occasions, but I’ve since learned that the easiest thing for policemen to do in these situations is to turn a blind eye. I suppose I kept hoping that he’d come around, that he’d go back to being the person I married. I cried with joy the day he went away to the army, and in pain the night before.’

  ‘Is it part of the reason why you volunteered for the police?’