by John Harris
It wasn’t that day’s paper because Winifred hadn’t yet got around to that kind of luxury. It was a badly printed four-sheet affair produced on an ancient flat-bed machine in Kemp Street. The type was set by hand by an elderly printer who didn’t see very well, spelled even worse and maliciously enjoyed making mistakes, but Willie sat down opposite Fish and opened it with pleasurable anticipation. After the down-pour the night before, the earth outside was muddy, but the air smelled fresh and sweet and devoid of dust. Even without money and with Fish’s mournful visage opposite, Willie couldn’t be downhearted.
‘Lovely morning,’ he said, waxing lyrical. ‘Sky’s as blue as an Englishman’s eye. And what’s more, the war’s almost over.’
Fish didn’t reply, so Willie turned to the man next to him on the table and smiled.
‘War’s almost over,’ he repeated. ‘Smuts and his commando are only twenty miles from Cape Town.’
The other man nodded and reached for his bacon and eggs. ‘Don’t sound like we’re winning,’ he said.
‘Didn’t think we were,’ Willie agreed. ‘Thought the Boers were.’
He turned to Fish. ‘Just fancy,’ he said. ‘If it ends, they’ll all go home. Even from Chichester Junction. That’ll be nice, won’t it?’
Fish said nothing. He was sitting with his elbows on the table, glowering at the crockery, his mind churning again with thoughts of Pansy and the Tiger.
The coffee and food arrived and Willie set about it. ‘Circus in Standerton,’ he said, perusing the advertisements in the newspaper. ‘Haven’t been to a circus since I was a kid. Quite a to-do. Let one of the lions loose.’ He paused, lowered the paper and glanced again at Fish. ‘Not eating, old boy?’
‘No.’ Fish was hunched against the corner of the partition now. His brains seemed to slop liquidly to and fro every time he moved his head and it felt as though there were someone kicking his way out of his skull.
‘Ah, well!’ Willie removed his plate and pushed its contents on to his own. ‘Waste not, want not, eh? That’s the motto. What’s the trouble?’
‘Nothin’.’
‘Joey not up to form?’
Fish didn’t answer and Willie studied him. The six-gun was prominent against his thigh. He contemplated it for a while.
‘Feller looks a bit warlike,’ he said.
Fish ignored him and Willie ate for a moment without speaking. ‘Feller looks under the weather,’ he observed eventually.
Fish didn’t answer, and Willie turned to the man next to him.
‘Broodin’,’ he said. Then to Fish: ‘Somethin’ troubling you, old chap? Flaming youth looks a bit like worn-out forty this morning. What’s wrong?’
‘Nothin’.’
‘Spent up, maybe?’
‘Nope.’
Willie stared at him with interest. ‘Going to share it round?’ he asked. ‘One for all and all for one, and all that?’
Fish continued to ignore him and Willie frowned. ‘You’re sure you’re all right?’ he asked. ‘Nothing on your mind?’
‘Yes,’ Fish said. ‘That bastard.’
Willie wiped the egg off his mouth. ‘Which bastard?’
‘That goddam Tiger.’
‘What’s Tiger done?’
‘Ruining a good girl.’
The man next to Willie grinned. ‘He deserves to be shot,’ he said.
‘Always a good idea to shoot people,’ Willie agreed blandly.
‘Not for that, though,’ the man next door said. ‘Not for a woman.’
Fish lifted his head. ‘Maybe I ought to shoot you instead, then,’ he suggested.
‘For a bit of fluff?’ The man next to Willie broke into laughter. At once he found himself grasped by the front of his jacket and hauled across the table, scattering crockery and bacon and egg. His jaw dropped and his face became ashen. He’d heard in Cape Town it was safe to head north, but now he wasn’t so sure.
‘You bastard!’ Fish reached for his gun. It needed a bit of a tug. He shoved it under the other man’s nose. ‘Know what this is, don’t you?’ he asked.
The man from Cape Town gulped loudly. ‘Gun,’ he croaked.
Willie smiled. ‘Bit rusty,’ he pointed out, still sitting unperturbedly in his place. ‘Probably blow up in your face, Poser. Better put it away. You’d never hit him.’
‘I would at this range.’
Willie studied the distance. He probably would at that, he decided, and began to reach behind him for an empty champagne bottle that stood on the window-ledge, a relic of the previous night’s roistering. He’d just got his fingers on it when the Tiger himself appeared, bringing Pansy in for her day’s work.
Fish saw her at once over Willie’s shoulder and his mind, after a night’s brooding, was filled with worms. The sun from the doorway was behind her and she looked all pure shining gold and, with the Tiger alongside, smiling and smug after what Fish assumed was a night of ravishment, it was just too much. It was the very moment he had been waiting for all his life.
He slammed Willie’s neighbour back into his seat and, shoving the gun back in the holster, turned and pushed the table over with a crash. Josias, the waiter, just coming through the kitchen entrance with a tray, gaped and stood petrified. Fish rose and stood with his hand hovering over his thigh. He only had one cartridge, which the owner of the pawn shop had thrown in when he’d redeemed the gun, but he decided it ought to be enough.
‘Go for your gun, Tiger,’ he roared, and Willie decided enough was enough and swung the champagne bottle.
As Fish collapsed among the debris, Willie turned to Josias.
‘Better wipe up a bit,’ he suggested cheerfully.
The man next to him, who had dived for safety behind the door, emerged slowly as he realised the battle was over. He stared down at Fish.
‘He gone off his rocker?’ he asked.
Willie smiled. ‘Oh, my, no,’ he said. ‘All serene now.’
Pansy stared at Fish and then at the Tiger. Her loyalties had been dangerously insecure since she’d met Fish, and suffering always had first claim on her emotions.
‘You’ve killed him,’ she said.
‘Don’t think so,’ Willie said. ‘Headache, that’s all.’
Pansy sniffed and crossed to where Fish was lying in the ruins of the breakfast crockery. Josias had returned now and she took the greasy grey kitchen cloth from him and began to wipe Fish’s face with it. After a while he sat up. His head ached abominably but he had sobered up.
‘Better now?’ Willie asked brightly.
‘Why didn’t he go for his gun?’ Fish mourned.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Willie said. ‘He hadn’t got one. Nobody in his senses would go about weighted down with a monstrous thing like that.’
‘Some guy shoulda given him one.’
‘Poser, only Americans want to blow holes in each other at a range of six feet. At that range it’s much easier to poke him in the nose with your fist. And, anyway, anybody but a damn fool would wait till he’d turned his back and blast his head from between his ears.’
The Tiger interrupted. ‘Josias has gone to tell Poll, I think,’ he said and Willie sighed. It was becoming monotonous.
‘Kiss Pansy goodbye,’ he said. ‘We’d better be off.’
He reached down and yanked Fish to his feet. ‘Upsadaisy,’ he said. ‘Day out of town seems to be called for.’ He looked round. ‘Better get that trap of yours, Tiger,’ he said sadly. ‘Perhaps we ought to visit the circus at Standerton.’
Eleven
Captain Mace was in a bad temper. The cloudburst which had turned the single street of Sinai into a red muddy river the night before had flooded his tent and it wasn’t the best of mornings. The only gleam of sunshine was that not long before he had at last got rid of Wooden by having him posted to a provost unit in Cape Town whose duties consisted of picking up drunken recruits in Adderley Street and incarcerating them in the castle. He couldn’t think of anywhere further away.
&nb
sp; Under the circumstances, he might have felt light-hearted, but the heat of the previous night had lain on him like a load of wax; then the rain had washed him out of his bed and now he was having trouble with Instant.
Three of their mules had vanished and he had had to put it down to theft because, if the mules had merely escaped, it was odd that they hadn’t turned up somewhere else.
‘Write ’em off,’ he announced, a dagger in his honest heart at having to lie. ‘Put ’em down as dead of horse fever and indent for more. Six. In case any others go astray.’
‘Yessir.’ Instant coughed. ‘Also, sir, we’re losing four of our fellers.’
‘Four! God’s miserable teeth!’ It seemed too cruel. Mace felt sometimes he could have done with a regiment.
‘Posted to Bloemfontein, sir. We get three replacements. We was one over establishment.’
Mace looked bitterly at Instant. He felt sure it was Instant’s fault the mules had vanished. He never seemed to be around these days when he ought to be and, somehow, they never seemed to have all the stores they ought to have. He almost suspected Instant was flogging them for cash. He had become very cash-conscious since Christmas and more pleased with himself than Mace had ever noticed before.
Life was becoming increasingly difficult, he decided. The war was on the point of ending and they had been hearing rumours for some time that there had been a meeting between Boers and British at Vereeniging. But it didn’t make things easier because the swindles had started immediately, tins of meat disappearing by the dozen, and soldiers – even private soldiers – buying up the mangy skeletons of impounded cattle to sell them back to the Boers at a profit when peace came. To a man like Mace, honest and imbued with duty, it was heart-breaking.
He had no sooner got rid of Instant’s problem when a messenger arrived with the information that General Wickover wanted to see him. Back at Tobaccoberg and Corneliusdal after chasing De Wet all over the Transvaal with his columns, he was paying a visit to Chichester Junction, and his peremptory request for Mace was to demand why, so long after the event, he had not captured the men who had robbed Paymaster Southey.
‘It’s eight months now,’ he snapped. He was in a bad temper. He had been visited at Corneliusdal by Kitchener on his way to Vereeniging with the plans for the peace talks under his belt and though the general had forgotten Paymaster Southey, Kitchener hadn’t. He had never been known for exuding sweetness and he had delivered one or two opinions on Wickover’s arrangements that were not notable for their graciousness.
‘They’re very clever men,’ Mace defended himself spiritedly. ‘They’re always one jump ahead of me.’
‘Then dammit, they shouldn’t be!’ Wickover snapped. ‘You’re a British officer. Highly trained.’
To form square to receive cavalry, Mace thought sourly, and how to lead shoulder-to-shoulder charges, neither of which were any longer of much military value. The Boers were far too clever to mount cavalry charges and shoulder-to-shoulder advances only made bigger targets for their sharpshooters. Against a few thousand of them almost half a million British soldiers had been deployed – considerably more than could reasonably be accommodated in barracks, though the army had done its best to level the odds with carelessness, neglect and disease.
‘I have every hope of catching them, sir,’ he announced between his teeth. ‘I have twice been close on their heels.’
Wickover stared at him as if he suffered from follicular mange. ‘I suppose you know the bloody war’s about to end, don’t you?’ he said.
‘I have heard so, sir.’
‘Nobody else seems to have. The bloody engineers are still asking me for their blasted balloon unit.’ Wickover snorted. ‘Balloons! Good God, people’ll be wanting to fly through the air in machines soon.’ He glared at Mace. ‘You won’t find it any easier when it does finish,’ he went on. ‘There’ll be no martial law to help you and they’ll be free to move about. So you’d better get a move on, hadn’t you? You’re getting short of time.’
Actually, Mace had even less time than either of them thought. After seeing Wickover’s train off, he rode round to the Chichester Junction Provost Department to write out a report on a deserter he’d picked up in Sinai who’d been trying to sell a consignment of ipecacuanha he’d stolen from the hospital. It was a tedious chore because anybody who tried to sell purgatives in a country where flies provided a peculiarly nasty complaint known to the troops as the Free State Galop deserved to fail, and visits to the prosperous and growing community of Chichester Junction always served to remind Mace what a dump Sinai was.
Sacks of concrete, sheets of corrugated iron and planking, were everywhere as he left the town – even bricks, because the civic authorities had actually started putting up real buildings. New sheds had gone up by the railway line and the new links with Winburg and Kimberley were already under construction. It was obvious that Chichester Junction was on the threshold of a great future. There were even wooden blocks along Wonderkop Street and Nicholson Street now and a company of war graves officials, with the full support of General Wickover, were tidying up the cemeteries and memorials outside the town. Mace found it utterly depressing.
As he walked down dusty Diedrichs Street in Sinai to his hotel, an officer on a horse galloped towards him, reining in so hard he fell out of the saddle. It was Lieutenant Glover and he’d been celebrating with his Lancer friends on Rhynbende gin. Combined with the midday heat, it had been too much for him and he was singing as Mace helped him to his feet.
‘“And six of the Lancers will carry me, to the place where the best soldiers go.”’ He beamed at Mace. ‘To horses and women,’ he said. ‘And the men who ride ’em.’
He was obviously getting a cavalry complex and Mace pulled him up sharply.
‘For God’s sake, man,’ he snapped. ‘Pull yourself together.’
Glover stared at him, trying to make his eyes focus. ‘War’s over,’ he said faintly as his knees gave way again.
During the afternoon, as though at a signal, the street filled with men and women. It had been a gentlemanly war, but no one was sorry to see it end and at the hotel that evening, as Mace ate his lonely meal, Boer and Briton began to buy each other drinks in a way that seemed to indicate that, despite their recent efforts to slaughter each other, there had been remarkably little animosity between them. A young cavalry officer, in fact, was laughing with a Boer farmer at their early attempts to wage war in the grand manner in 1899. ‘There we were,’ he was saying gaily, ‘with all the horses down and me with my sergeant’s spur up my nose.’ Mace went hot with shame. It had taken the whole resources of the British Empire to bring to heel a few untrained farmers led by lawyers and politicians.
The following day, General Wickover reappeared, in a bad temper because he’d only got as far as Venter’s Road when he’d been handed a message to go straight back to Chichester Junction and lay on a victory parade to impress the Boers. In the evening there was a concert at the hotel and to the British rendition of The Soldiers of the Queen the Boers responded with some of the more ribald Afrikaner ditties. One of the barmen recited Kipling’s Absent-minded Beggar and someone else the Poet Laureate’s appalling verses on the Jameson Raid. It made Mace want to puke.
The din increased and a sentimental British sergeant sang A Baby’s Prayer, falling on his knees at the end of each verse, then Mace spotted ex-Major Southey, a civilian now, being fanned with a newspaper by a girl he knew to be one of the CID informers who’d helped him with the names of deserters. He stared at him with loathing. His hatred had grown until he longed to kick the legs of his chair from under him.
The sergeant had finished by this time – in tears – and someone had started to make a speech.
‘It was British pluck won this war,’ he was saying.
It certainly hadn’t been British skill, Mace thought as he went outside to avoid being sick.
The final straw came the following morning when Instant appeared in his tent.
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br /> ‘Wooden’s back,’ he announced with a voice of doom.
Mace could have wept. As if his cup of happiness wasn’t soured by Wickover’s gall and Southey’s smugness, this had to happen. It was enough to poison the atmosphere of Eden. ‘How?’ he demanded. ‘For God’s sake, how? He was in Cape Town, which is about as far as he can get from here without falling in the sea.’
‘They got rid of him to Wynberg Hospital, sir, as an orderly.’ Instant also seemed oppressed by the long shadow of Wooden. ‘Only he slapped a red-’ot poultice on a staff colonel with a broken leg and shingles, and got hit over the boko with a crutch and posted to Stores. They sent him to Remounts, who sent him north again and he came back ’ere with them mules we indented for. He’s outside now, reporting for duty.’
When he’d gone, Mace sat staring at his fingers. Outside Wooden’s sullen voice was already rising over the roughrider’s infuriated commands. ‘’Orse-shit,’ he was saying. ‘That’s me. Always up to the elbows in ’orse-shit.’
Mace’s mind was full of bitterness. He would have to hurry before he was sent home or he’d never catch up with his quarry, and he’d sworn to catch up with them. He could remember his very words. ‘I’ll lay my hands on that man who lifted the money from Southey’s cart if it’s the last thing I do.’
While he was still brooding, Instant returned. ‘Visitor, sir,’ he announced.
Mace’s heart sank. Some half-witted emissary from the general, he decided, demanding his resignation or what was left of his company. It turned out to be nothing of the sort.
‘Lady, sir,’ Instant went on smugly.
Mace began to paw unhappily at his acne. ‘A lady?’
‘Yessir.’ Instant gave him a knowing smile. ‘Well, at least, she’s a – well – you know sir.’
Mace glowered. ‘Take that damned grin off your face, Instant,’ he said. ‘I don’t know any women of that sort.’
‘No, sir.’ Instant’s face became a blank. ‘Horrid lot. I remember in Cape Town when they used to drop brass discs with their names and addresses stamped on ’em. Got ’em a lot of custom, sir. The lads thought they were sovereigns.’