Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  I finally arrived at the waterfall around seven o’clock. The sun had risen sufficiently to send its light into the dark kloof to reach the old tree where my darling Tinker lay sleeping. Tinky was laid to rest beside the little lioness, to become a great black-maned lion to partner her in their celestial life together. The circle was complete, the two of them, Tinker and Tinky, safely in the happy hunting grounds of eternity where she would teach her city partner the good, clean ways of the country, where no brutal concrete towers bruised the perfect blueness of the African sky.

  It took me nearly two weeks to gain the courage to inform Pirrou of my resolve to leave Johannesburg, and therefore remove the handbag from her shoulder. My decision to leave was made all the more difficult because, while I had never loved her in the infatuated way of first love, I had most certainly loved her and would always do so. I mean this in a quite separate way to being grateful to her. In my mind, my gratitude for what she’d done for me was more than offset by her demanding nature, fiery temper and mood swings. I had paid back, in patience, calmness and loyalty, the debt I owed her for all her generous instruction. I’d learned how to calm her sudden anger, and I think I’d even gotten rid of the foot-stamping, tantrum-throwing little brat that I could clearly see would eventually cut short her career. La Pirouette was no Margot Fonteyn and, prima ballerina or not, there was only so much the directors of a ballet company would tolerate. But Pirrou was still someone who insisted on getting her own way, and the idea of me walking away from our association would not be the way she saw things happening.

  She’d often laughingly said to me, ‘Tom, the time will eventually come when you’ll be too old for me, when you’ll take me for granted as all men eventually do when they come to believe they own a woman. When that time comes I’ll throw you out without the slightest compunction and find myself another young lover.’

  ‘Sure, like in some of your songs,’ I said, not believing her, then added, ‘but then you’d have to train a brand-new handbag.’

  She grinned. ‘No woman can have too many new handbags, darling,’ she’d replied, one eyebrow slightly arched.

  I was to have dinner with Pirrou the Saturday night after returning from burying Tinky and so I’d purchased a bottle of Bollinger, wincing at the cost. I arrived at Pirrou’s place with my heart more or less in my mouth. I’d much rather say I arrived with a firm resolve to end things as nicely as possible. But tame endings were simply not a part of her nature and I knew my farewell, or rather confrontation, would be made to La Pirouette and not to Pirrou. I’d once met her erstwhile doctor husband who’d seemed a really nice guy. He’d wished me luck with La Pirouette. ‘Tom, you will one day appreciate, as I have, that you were fortunate in your youth to have experienced one of the most exciting women in this country.’ He’d paused, thinking, then added, ‘However, you should be aware that you are sitting on top of a barrel of dynamite watching the fuse burning. My advice is not to become fascinated with its sparkle and fizz until it becomes too late to jump.’ So this was the Saturday night I proposed to jump from the barrel and, quite frankly, I was pretty scared.

  Pirrou called from the bedroom as I entered the flat. ‘Hello, darling, I won’t be long, will you turn the oven down to 150 degrees and open a bottle of wine? Oh, turn off the wireless, the SABC keeps playing Strauss waltzes until I want to scream!’ What all this meant was that I had plenty of time, as Pirrou’s ‘won’t-be-longs’ were a minimum of twenty minutes. I did as she asked, noticed that the dining-room table had been set for a formal dinner and I was relieved to find it was only for two. I found a damask napkin and a champagne bucket and emptied into it three trays of ice cubes from the freezer, set the champagne into the bucket, surrounding it with ice just as I’d been taught to do as a good little handbag. Then I settled down to read the evening paper.

  Saturday nights, if she didn’t have a performance or we weren’t going out, were relaxed affairs, as often as not with cold chicken or a leg of ham, a salad and a couple of glasses of wine. We might listen to records or read a book, or she’d play the guitar and then, quite early, we would go to bed and make love, and I’d stay over for Sunday breakfast. Except for tonight, when I was going to do the dreaded ‘farewell, my love’, these were among the nicest times we shared.

  She walked through the dining room and noticed the champagne. ‘Oh, lovely bubbly, you’ve remembered, Tom! How wonderful!’ she called out. She entered the kitchen, looking absolutely stunning in a little black dress, high heels and pearls. Except for her astonishing green eyes she could easily have been mistaken for Audrey Hepburn. She embraced me warmly, glanced up at the clock on the kitchen wall and said, ‘It was about this time two years ago exactly when we were seated beside the stream and you brought me a bottle of Bollinger.’

  My heart sank. I’d entirely forgotten. How was I possibly going to end our affair on this night of all nights? On the other hand, perhaps this was how it should be done, the anniversary of two years of loving her during which I’d grown up and she’d possessed me longer even than she’d managed to remain married. She put her arms around me, seated at the kitchen table. ‘Tom, my beautiful, beautiful boy,’ she said softly, ‘I do love you so very much.’

  ‘Pirrou, it’s been a lovely two years, how could I have been so lucky?’

  Pirrou threw back her head and laughed, her sentimental mood suddenly changed. ‘Darling, luck had absolutely nothing to do with it. As I told you once, when my grandfather told me about you I became immediately interested, nearly eighteen-year-old boys don’t sell three Steinways for cash. Then when your name cropped up in an entirely different context I knew that unless you had two heads and a long tail I wanted to get to know you. I watched you at the Musicians’ Garden Party as you separated from the crowd and went to sit by the stream. I’d approached close enough on two separate occasions during the afternoon to discover that you were a beautiful-looking boy. My eyes have always been my glory, I knew this even as a small child, but it was your eyes, more than anything else, that made me fall in love with you. They were so intensely, so absurdly blue that they lacked a metaphor, and so innocent that I felt it was a meeting of two kinds of eyes. Mine so spoilt from attention, so cynical in outlook, so self-indulgent and yours so steady and . . . well, clean. Your eyes had no ego, they seemed to look out on a world that was still innocent as if they’d lived in the Garden of Eden before the serpent came along and fucked things up.’

  I laughed, embarrassed as usual by her extravagant tone. ‘It just goes to show eyes don’t tell one very much, The Boys Farm was no Garden of Eden, I assure you,’ I said, attempting to cover my underlying anxiety. ‘Shall I get you a glass of champagne, darling Pirrou?’

  ‘Lovely!’ She kissed me. ‘We’re having roast lamb, do you know why?’

  ‘Because it’s my favourite?’

  ‘It’s in honour of Tinky. The morning we first made love he had what was left of a leg of lamb.’

  My heart sank. Things were rapidly becoming more and more difficult, she’d made an anniversary dinner and dedicated it to Tinky and taken the trouble to look absolutely ravishing. I poured two glasses of champagne and handed her one, saying, ‘You make a toast, darling.’

  Pirrou looked at me steadily, holding my gaze, then reached forward and clinked. ‘Blue and green should never be seen,’ she said, smiling, taking a tiny sip of champagne. Then reaching out she took my hand and led me silently into the living room and sat me on the lounge. I opened my mouth to say something and she immediately brought a finger to her lips, ‘Shush!’ She placed her champagne glass on the coffee table and left the room, moments later returning carrying her guitar. She sat on the corner of the coffee table so that she looked directly up at me and began to play and sing.

  Where the Green Meets the Blue

  You entered my life so wondrously bright

  By a stream where the green meets the blue

  If you count the stars on a summer’s night

  Darling,
those are the ways I’ll miss you!

  Farewell, sweet Tom, my beautiful,

  beautiful boy

  Clouds tumble and turn to scurry away

  While as Earth I must stay still to wonder

  Will my heart’s love return to me some day

  Or was he only a sharp clap of thunder?

  Farewell, sweet Tom, my beautiful,

  beautiful boy

  May you reach for the sky, my beautiful boy

  And may your life find love and perfection

  I’ll remember forever your laughter and joy

  But oh, how I’ll miss your erection!

  Farewell, sweet Tom, my beautiful

  beautiful boy.

  And so Pirrou had the last laugh and the last say, and we sat down to dinner and drank champagne and she was bright and vivacious and seemingly quite relaxed. So much so that I began to feel that the ‘Farewell, sweet Tom’ wasn’t as imminent as it had seemed, perhaps only her prescience that the time to part was approaching. Besides, I felt a familiar stirring and I moved to kiss this gorgeous woman who had so generously, humorously and lovingly sent me on my way, if not tonight, then at some time in the future. Perhaps it was the confidence the champagne gave me because I foolishly thought one last loving would be appropriate and then I would be able to take the initiative and end our affair.

  Pirrou allowed the kiss, then pushed me away. ‘No, Tom, if we made love that would mean you’d won and I couldn’t bear that, you know how I am about having my own way. I’ve packed your clothes and now I want you to leave.’ I could see she was on the verge of tears.

  I was tempted to say that the clothes she’d packed no longer belonged to me, but to Tom the handbag. I knew that would be unnecessarily hurtful and so I entered her bedroom and lifted a medium-sized suitcase from her bed. I imagine I looked a little hangdog as I returned to the dining room. Standing in front of her, holding the suitcase I said, ‘Pirrou, I owe you ever —’

  ‘Stop, Tom!’ she commanded, raising her arm. Then she rose and reached out for my hand and led me to the front door. Leaving the door open, she put her arms around my neck and kissed me tenderly. I placed the suitcase down and put my arms around her. ‘Tom, my beautiful, beautiful boy,’ she sighed, then she released me and I did the same to her, feeling her soft warmth for the last time. She stood on tiptoe and kissed me again, though this time lightly on the cheek. ‘That was from Pirrou,’ she said softly. Suddenly her right hand shot up and I felt the sting as her nails raked down the side of my face, piercing the skin. ‘And this is from La Pirouette, you bastard!’ Then she turned on her elegant heels, entered the flat and slammed the door damn near off the hinges.

  I stood with my left hand clamped against the side of my bleeding face, looking foolishly down at the suitcase. I shall give those to the Salvation Army, I decided, then smiled quietly to myself. I wonder what the Salvos will do with the dinner suit or will they realise the clothes come in a Louis Vuitton suitcase? I began to laugh, then cried out, ‘That’s it, Tom Fitzsaxby! That’s exactly it! You’ve learned too much stuff that’s totally irrelevant to your life!’ Then a curious thought occurred to me – while Pirrou had consciously acted to leave me, how the hell did La Pirouette know I intended to do the same to her?

  BOOK

  THREE

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A Place Where the Loving Arrives in a DC-4

  THE IDEA OF GETTING away from everything and everybody, and then from a distance trying to decide who the hell Tom Fitzsaxby really was seemed like a good idea. The mines, set deep in equatorial jungle in Central Africa, sounded just the place for such as me. It would be a purely physical environment away from Pirrou’s people. I’d told myself in a quietly superior way that I’d had my fill of the powermongers, gossiping socialites, pseudo-bohemians, covert communists, prancing dancers, artfully shabby artists and writers from upper-middle-class wealthy Jewish and gentile families.

  Of course, this made me just as bad as I’ve just painted them. Here I was making judgements about people who had helped me in a great many ways to grow up, and I knew that what I’d essentially learned from them was invaluable. This was the biggest joke of all, I’d been hiding all my life and never, ever getting away with it and now Pirrou’s people had given me the best camouflage there was and I was dissatisfied with the effect it was having on me.

  On paper, anyway, my credentials were pretty convincing. I had been educated at one of the country’s best private schools, was considered a brilliant student and I guess people found me likeable. I had been rewarded with the gifts of intelligent and sophisticated conversation and an inevitably modified accent. With my new, carefully tutored social manners and pleasant demeanour, I appeared to be a bright, well-bred young man on his way to Oxford. I spoke Afrikaans like an Afrikaner, which was yet another asset in a country gripped in the thrall of apartheid. This almost inevitably meant I was destined to find my rightful place among the very privileged in South African life, those who exercised the real power in society. And it was with this prospect that I began to have doubts. Power, I had long since learned, cannot be trusted, it will always abuse, it cannot understand the viewpoint of those who have no say or ability to change things, and it is always self-serving. I had never seen an exception to this, a situation where power justified its actions. Power is somehow never guilty in the present tense. When it is eventually exposed or terminated, the social, financial and emotional atrocities it has created can almost never be repaired. If, in fact, I allowed myself to be seduced by those in power to join the select few who inevitably end up exploiting the many, then I was on the verge of betraying something essentially important within me. If I couldn’t articulate, even to myself, what this precisely was I knew that it had something to do with natural justice. So I convinced myself that a complete withdrawal – spiritual, physical, emotional and intellectual – from everything I knew and from anyone who knew me was the way to go. Tom Fitzsaxby was taking a year off to discover his future direction.

  With my bumpy-road upbringing I should have known better and asked a few more questions before buying a second-class train ticket for the nearly four-day journey into the heart of Africa. Physically I was no Charles Atlas, and while I was thin and wiry and cycled everywhere I hadn’t done any really hard manual work since The Boys Farm, although I’d played rugby for the university, and so I suppose I was in reasonable shape. But underground miners are generally big men and if Lofty van der Merwe and the others in the park were any indication, then brawn seemed more important than brains and there was probably a good reason for this. It just went to show that in the difficult process of making the correct decisions in life, I still had a fair way to go. To voluntarily sign up as a miner working underground using high explosives wasn’t exactly a sign of maturity.

  To be absolutely fair and not quite as high-minded as I’m beginning to sound my decision, as I mentioned earlier, also had a lot to do with money. I’d never really had any in a single large amount with perhaps the exception of the commission on the three Steinways. Much of that had been spent caring for Frikkie and maintaining some small financial independence from Pirrou. I’d always had to scrimp and scrape, and I longed for a time when I might have enough to plan further than a week ahead. My scholarship to Oxford took care of my tuition and lodgings, but I would need to find the money for any add-ons. I also hoped to travel through Europe during university vacations, rather than having to work. I would be able to achieve all this if I saved most of what I made in the copper mines. The rent for my hut in the single men’s quarters and the meals at the mine mess that were subsidised came to three pounds a week, so I could save virtually all that I made. It all sounded too good to be true. I, above most people, should have known that there are very few neat solutions in life and that nobody pays you more than you rightfully earn. An underground ‘grizzly’ man in the mines in Northern Rhodesia could, together with his copper bonuses, make up to 100 pounds a week, fifteen times
more than I would earn as a salesman or a junior in a Johannesburg law firm.

  I rented my Smelly Jelly flat for two pounds ten shillings a week, and appointed Mr Naidoo as landlord, paying him ten shillings a week to collect the rent. The remaining two pounds he deposited at Solly Kramer’s, the bottle store near Joubert Park, as credit for Lofty van der Merwe and the boys when their disability pensions ran dry. Lofty may have been a drunk but he was once a mine captain and still carried authority among the men in the park. He was also a fair man and I knew he would distribute the brandy in an equitable manner among the derelicts.

  I’m going to skip telling you about the almost four-day train journey to the Copper Belt except to say that it was hot and slow. The country in Southern Rhodesia was much like that in the northern part of South Africa, but on the afternoon of the third day we crossed the bridge across the Zambezi into Northern Rhodesia with the Victoria Falls only a few hundred yards away on our right. The Africans call it ‘the smoke that thunders’ because the spray from the falls rises to 1000 feet and gives the appearance of smoke, while the roar of the tumbling water may be heard fifteen miles away. The two minutes crossing the bridge spanning the gorge immediately below the falls remains among the most spectacular things I have ever seen.

  Once within Northern Rhodesia we seemed to stop at every little tin-shed siding on the way to pick up half a dozen or so frightened blacks clustered together, each clutching the traditional recruiting gift: a new blanket and a brightly coloured tin suitcase. These were future mine workers garnered from the bush where drought had driven them from their villages to be trained to work in the copper mines. They were known as bush monkeys, raw recruits who, when confronted by their own face in a mirror for the first time, reeled back in terror. They had never climbed a ladder or seen a train – ‘the snake that runs on iron’. They would be brought to the mines and trained to do work they’d never imagined existed, and in order to communicate with their fellow mine workers, tribesmen recruited from all over Africa who spoke a dozen different languages would learn a new language, Kiswahili, the lingua franca of the mines. They’d be driven onto the train by a recruiting officer, jeered at by recruits gathered earlier who were by now accustomed to the rattle and the roar of the iron monster and considered themselves old hands at this sophisticated business of travelling without using your own legs.