by Wilbur Smith
The Ou Baas won't let me go, Blaine said bitterly, and Centaine ran to him across the bedroom of their cottage and stood on tiptoe to embrace him.
Oh thank God, Blaine my darling. I prayed and prayed and He answered me. I couldn't bear to lose you both. Not you and Shasa, I could never have survived it., I'm not proud that I will stay at home while others go., You have fought once, bravely, unselfishly, she told him.
You are a thousand times more valuable here than lying dead on a battlefield in a foreign land. The Ou Baas has convinced me of that, he sighed. With an arm around her waist he led her through to the sittingroom, and she knew that tonight for once they would not make love. His distress was too great. She knew that tonight he wanted only to talk, and it was her duty to listen to him while he poured out his doubts and fears and regrets.
They came out in a jumble, without logical sequence, and she sat close to him so he could touch her merely by stretching out a hand as she listened quietly.
Our position is so precarious, how can we wage a war when we command a majority of only thirteen votes in the House, while against us we have a solid opposition who hate the Ou Baas and what they call his English war? They will fight us every step of the way, while the people also are deeply divided against us, We have within our own borders an enemy as vicious as the Nazis, the Ossewa Brandwag and the Black Shirts and the Grey Shirts, the Deutsche Bund in South West Africa, enemies within and without. She poured him another whisky and soda and brought him the Stuart crystal tumbler. It was his second drink that evening and she had never before seen him take more than one.
Pirow has betrayed us. He is one of them now, but for all those years he has been in a position of trust. Oswald Pirow had been the Minister of Defence under the Hertzog govemtment. We gave him a defence budget of fifty-six million and a brief to built up an affective modern army, but instead he treacherously gave us a paper army. We believed his reports and his assurances, but now that he has gone we find ourselves without modern weapons, a handful of obsolete tanks and venerable aircraft and an army of fewer than fifteen hundred in the permanent force. Pirow refused to arm the nation for a war which he and Hertzog were determined we would never fight. The night wore on but both of them were too strung up to think of sleeping, and when he refused a third whisky she went through to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and he followed her. He stood behind her with his arms around her waist while they waited for the water to come to the boil.
General Smuts has given me the Interior Ministry in the new cabinet. One of the reasons he chose me was that I have already chaired the commission of enquiry into the Ossewa Brandwag and the other subversive organizations.
It will be one of my major concerns to suppress their efforts to disrupt our preparations for war. The Ou Baas himself has taken the Ministry of Defence, and he has already promised Britain an army of fifty thousand volunteers ready to fight anywhere in Africa. They took the coffee tray through to the sitting-room and as Centaine poured, the telephone rang, shrill and shocking in the silent cottage. She started and spilled steaming coffee over the tray.
What time is it, Blaine? Ten minutes to one. I won't answer it, let it ring, Centaine shook her head, staring at the insistent instrument, but he stood up.
Only Doris knows I'm here, he said. I had to let her know in case, He didn't have to explain further. Doris was his secretary, the only one in their confidence, and of course she had to know where to find him. Centaine picked up the telephone.
Mrs Courtney speaking. She listened for a moment. Yes, Doris, he is here. She handed the telephone to Blaine and turned away. He listened for a few moments, then said quietly, Thank you, Doris, I'll be there in twenty minutes. He hung up and looked up at Centaine.
I'm sorry, Centaine. I'll fetch your coat. She held it for him and he slipped his arms into the sleeves and turned to face her, buttoning it as he said, It's Isabella. He saw her surprise and went on, The doctor is with her.
They need me. Doris wouldn't say more, but it sounds serious. After Blaine had gone, she took the coffee pot and cups through to the kitchen, and rinsed them in the sink. Seldom had she felt so lonely. The cottage was silent and cold and she knew she could not sleep. She went back into the lounge and put a gramophone record on the turntable.
it was an aria from Verdi's Aida, always one of her favourites, and as she sat and listened to it the memories it aroused came stealing back out of the past, Michael and Mort Homme and the other long-ago war, and her melancholy swamped her.
She slept at last, sitting in the armchair with her legs curled up under her, and the telephone woke her with a start. She reached for it before she was properly awake.
Blaine! She recognized his voice instantly. What time is it? 'It's four o'clock, a few minutes after. Is something wrong, Blame? She came fully awake.
,Isabella, he said. She is asking for you. For me? Centaine was confused.
She wants you to come here. I can't, Blaine. That's not possible, you know that. She's dying, Centaine. The doctor says she won't last out the day. Oh God, Blaine, I'm so sorry. And with wonder at herself, she realized she truly was. Poor Isabella Will you come? Do you want me to, Blaine? It is her last request. If we refuse it, our guilt will be so much harder to bear. I'll come, she said and hung up.
She took only a few minutes to bathe her face and change and put on light make-up. She drove through the almost deserted streets, and Blaine's big gabled home was the only one in Newlands Avenue with lights burning.
He met her at the mahogany double front doors and he did not embrace her, but said simply, Thank you, Centaine. Only then she saw his daughter standing in the hall behind him.
Hello, Tara, she greeted her. The girl had been weeping.
Her big grey eyes were puffy and swollen and rimmed with red, and her face was so pale that her dark auburn hair seemed to burn like a bush fire. I'm so sorry to hear about your mother."
No, you aren't. Tara stared at her with a flat hostile expression which suddenly wavered and cracked. She sobbed and ran down the passageway. A door slammed in the back of the house.
She's very upset, Blaine said. I apologize for her., I understand, Centaine answered. I deserve at least part of that. He shook his head to deny it, but said simply, Please come with me. They climbed the circular staircase side by side and Centaine asked softly, 'What is it, Blaine? ,A degeneration of the spine and nervous system, a process that has been going on slowly over the years. Now there is pneumonia, and she can no longer resist. Pain? Centaine asked.
Yes, he replied. She has always had pain, more than the average person could bear. They went down the wide carpeted passageway and Blaine tapped on the door at the end and then opened it.
Come in, please. The room was large and furnished in cool restful greens and blues. The curtains were closed and a night lamp burned on the bedside table. The man standing beside the bed was clearly a doctor. Blaine led Centaine to the four-poster bed and though she had tried to prepare herself, still she started when she saw the figure that lay upon the banked pillows.
She remembered Isabella Malcomess serene and gentle beauty. Now a death's head stared at her from sunken eye-sockets, and the fixed grin of yellowish teeth, the rictus of shrunken lips, was somehow obscene. The effect was heightened by the contrast of thick auburn hair which formed a cloud about the ravaged head.
It was kind of you to come. Centaine had to lean closer to the bed to hear the thin voice.
I came as soon as I heard you wanted me., The doctor intervened quietly. You may stay only a few minutes, Mrs Malcomess must rest. But Isabella fluttered her hand impatiently, and Centaine saw that it was a bird's claw of fragile bones covered with skin the colour of tallow and a ropy network of blue veins.
I wish to speak in private, she whispered. Please leave us, Doctor. Blaine leaned over her to adjust the pillows under her head.
Please don't tire yourself, dear, he said, and his gentleness towards the dying woman gave Centaine a jealous pa
ng she could not suppress.
Blaine and the doctor left quietly, and closed the door with a click of the latch. They were alone together for the first time. Centaine was overcome by a sense of unreality. For so many years this woman had bulked large in her life, her very existence had meant that Centaine had to suffer all the vile emotions from guilt to jealousy, from anger to hatred.
But now that she stood beside her deathbed, they had all evaporated. All she felt was a vast sense of pity.
Come nearer, Centaine, Isabella whispered, beckoning her with another feeble flutter of her wasted hand. Talking is such an effort. Impulsively Centaine went down on her knees beside the bed so that their eyes were only inches apart. She felt a terrible need to repent for all the unhappiness she had caused and to ask for Isabella's forgiveness, but Isabella spoke first.
I told Blaine that I wanted to make my peace with you, Centaine. I told him I understood that the two of you had not been able to help falling in love, and that I realized you had tried to spare me as much as possible. I told him I knew that you were never vindictive, that although you could have taken him away, you never inflicted that final humiliation upon me, that although I was no longer a woman, you allowed me to retain the last shreds of my dignity. Centaine felt the pity flood her soul and fill her eyes. She wanted to take this frail dying creature in her arms and hold her, but something in Isabella's eyes prevented her, it was a fierce proud light and Centaine simply bowed her head and remained silent.
I told Blaine that you had filled his life with the happiness I could not give him, but despite that and because of your generosity, I was still able to keep part of him for myself., Oh, Isabella, I don't know how to tell you, I Centaine's voice choked and Isabella gestured her to silence.
She seemed to be gathering herself for some enormous effort. A faint flush of colour came back into her cheeks and the fierce light in her eyes flared up. Her breath quickened and when she spoke again her voice was stronger, harsher.
I told him all these things to persuade him to bring you here. If he had guessed what I truly intended, he would not have allowed you to come. She raised her head from the pillow and her voice became a serpent's hiss.
Now I can tell you how deeply I have hated you every waking hour of every long year, how my hatred kept me alive this long so that I could prevent you from having him as your husband, and now that I am dying that hatred is magnified a hundred times, She broke off and panted for breath, as Centaine recoiled before her glare. She realized that Isabella was a woman driven to madness by the agony she had endured, by the long corrosion of hatred and jealousy.
If a dying woman's curse has any force, Isabella spoke again, 'then I curse you, Centaine Courtney, with my last breath. May you experience the same torture you have inflicted upon me, may you know pain as I have known it.
The day you stand before the altar with my husband I will reach out to you from beyond the grave, No! Centaine stumbled to her feet, and backed towards the door. Stop it! Please, stop it! Isabella laughed, a shrill and taunting sound. I curse you, and let my curse blight your adulterous passion. I curse every minute the two of you spend together when I have gone. I curse whatever seed he places in your womb, I curse each kiss and touch, I curse you and I curse your brat. I curse all your issue. An eye for an eye, Centaine Courtney.
Heed my words, an eye for an eye! Centaine ran across the room and flung herself against the door. Throwing it open, she ran down the passage. Blaine was coming up the staircase at a run. He tried to hold her, but she tore herself from his grasp and rushed out through the front doors to where the Daimler was parked.
She had been driving for many hours, driving fast with the accelerator pressed to the floorboards, keeping the great seven-litre engine at a long sustained bellow, sending a tall pale column of dust into the sky behind her, before she consciously realized she was going back into the desert, back to the dreaming mystical hills that the little Bushmen called The Place of all Life'.
it was two months before Centaine came back out of the Kalahari Desert. For all that time she had thwarted Blaine's efforts to contact her, refusing to reply to the letters he wrote or the telephone calls he made to both Abe Abrahams and Dr Twenty-man-jones.
She read the death notices for Isabella Malcomess in the obituary columns of the newspapers which reached the H'ani Mine only weeks after publication, but they served to increase her feeling of isolation and the brooding premonition of disaster and tragedy which Isabella's death curse had left with her.
She returned to Weltevreden in the end only at Shasa's insistence.
When she arrived her hair was floury with dust from the long journey and she was darkly tanned by the Kalahari sun, but tired and dispirited still.
Shasa must have received her telegram and been expecting her. He must have heard the Daimler's motor as she came up the avenue to the chateau, but he was not on the front steps to meet her, and she realized why when she went into her study. He turned from the window from where he had watched her arrival and now he crossed the room to meet her. He was in uniform.
She stopped in the doorway, and an icy stillness froze her.
She watched him come towards her, and in her memory she was carried back down the years and across space to another meeting with a tall and impossibly handsome young man in the same khaki tunic, with the polished belt and Sam Browne cross-strap, the peaked cap set at a jaunty angle, and the airman's wings on his chest.
Thank God, you've come, Mater, Shasa greeted her. I had to see you before I left. When? she breathed the question, terrified to hear the answer. When do you go? Tomorrow. Where? Where are they sending you? First we go to Roberts Heights, that was the air-force training base in the Transvaal, for conversion to fighters, and after that wherever they send us. Wish me luck, Mater. She saw that he wore orange flashes on the epaulettes of his tunic, the insignia of those who had volunteered to fight beyond the country's borders.
Yes, my darling, I wish you luck,, she said, and knew that her heart would break to see him go.
The roar of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine filled his head even through the earphones of the radio telephone that Shasa wore over his leather flying helmet. The cockpit canopy of the Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft was open, so the slipstream buffeted his head, but it gave him an uninterrupted view of the blue African sky around him. The three fighters flew in a loose arrowhead formation. The dun-coloured desert camouflage could not disguise their beautiful deadly lines.
Shasa led the flight. His promotion had been rapid. Command came naturally to him, he had learned that lesson well from Centaine Courtney. It had taken only eighteen months for him to reach the rank of squadron leader.
He flew in a short-sleeved khaki tunic, khaki shorts and with velskoen on his bare feet, for the summer heat of Abyssinia was brutal.
Around his waist was belted a Webley service revolver, an archaic weapon for the pilot of a modern pursuit aircraft, but all of them had taken to wearing sidearms since the intelligence section had circulated those obscene photographs. one of the motorized recce units had overrun a village in the mountains and found the remains of two South African pilots who had been forced down and captured by the Abyssinian irregulars, the shufta, wild hill bandits. The pilots had been given to the women of the village. They had first been emasculated, then flayed with hot irons and disembowelled so skilfully that they were still living as their viscera was drawn from them. Finally, their jaws had been wedged open with Thorn branches and the women had urinated into their open mouths until they drowned. So all the pilots carried sidearms now, to defend themselves first, and then to make certain they were never captured alive.
Today the air was clear and bright under a cloudless azure sky, and visibility was unlimited. Below and ahead stretched the rugged Abyssinian highlands, precipitous Ambas, the huge table-topped mountains, the dark deep gorges between, desert and rock, dry and sun-bleached to the dun colour of an old lion's scarred hide.
The thre
e fighters bored upwards, striving for height. They had scrambled from the dusty forward airstrip at Yirga Alem only minutes before, in response to a faint but desperate appeal over the field radio from the advancing infantry, and Shasa wheeled the flight onto the northern heading and picked out the thin pate thread of the road winding through the mountains far below them.
immediately he resumed the fighter pilot's scan, his head pivoting and turning, eyes darting and flicking, never allowed to fix and focus short, up and around and down in a regular never ceasing motion and he saw them first.
They were tiny specks, a cloud of black midges against the aching blue.
Popeye flight, this is leader. Tally ho! he said into the microphone of his radio telephone. Eleven o'clock high! Ten plus, and they look like Capronis. Buster! Buster! Buster was the order to go to full throttle.
I have them! Dave Abrahams answered immediately. It was extraordinary that they had been able to keep together, from the training days at Roberts Heights through all the vagaries of the East African campaign, until now they were fighting with Dan Pienaar's South African Corps, driving the Duke of Aosta's Italians back through the mountains towards Addis Adaba.
Shasa glanced across at him. David had brought his Hurricane up on Shasa's starboard wingtip. He also had his canopy open, and they flashed a grin across at each other. David's large beaky nose had been burned raw and pink by the sun, and the straps of his helmet hung unbuckled under his chin.
It was a good feeling to have him on his wing. Then both of them closed their canopies in preparation for the attack and looked ahead. Shasa brought the flight around into a gentle turn, climbing up into the sun, the classic fighter tactics.
The distant midges resolved swiftly into the familiar silhouettes of three-engined Caproni bombers. Shasa counted twelve, four sticks of three. They were going for the crossroads at Kerene again, where the South African advance was bottled into the pass between the soaring walls of the high Ambas, and at that moment Shasa saw the bombs drop away from below the leading bombers.