by Wilbur Smith
‘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 régime!’
The meeting ended with a vote on the motion that John Vorster and his illegal régime 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 1940 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 free-market 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 Ramón’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.
‘I’ll wait until you get a confirmed reservation,’ he suggested.
‘No, Mickey, you’re a darling, but I won’t have any trouble at this time of year; the holiday season is over. You go off to your interview, and I’ll call you at the flat when Ramón and I are on our way home.’
As she walked into the terminal she realized that she had been over-optimistic. Hordes of dejected and weary travellers blocked the aisles with their luggage. When she finally got to the head of the queue at the information-desk, she was told that a wildcat strike by the French air-traffic controllers had delayed all flights by up to five hours, and that the Athens flight was fully booked. She would have to join the waiting list, even for a seat in first class.
She stood in another queue to use a public telephone and finally got through to Ramón at the number he had given her in Athens. He sounded as disappointed as she felt.
‘I was looking forward to your arrival. I have lauded you to the skies to the people I want you to meet here.’
‘I’m not going to give up,’ she declared. ‘Even if I have to sit here all day.’
It was a day of discomfort and misery and frustration. When the flight was finally called at five o’clock that evening, she stood at the check-in counter praying for a seat on the waiting-list. However, there were half a dozen other hopefuls ahead of her. In the end, the booking clerk shook her head regretfully.
‘I’m so sorry, Miss Courtney.’
The next flight to Athens was scheduled for ten the following morning, but there would certainly be delays and another waiting list. Finally Isabella gave up, and went dejectedly to place another call to Athens. Ramón was not available, so she left a message for him with someone on the other end who spoke atrocious English. She hoped that Ramón would understand that she was aborting the journey.
There were no taxis available: hundreds of other passengers like her had abandoned hope and were trying to get home. She lugged her bag down the pavement and queued for a bus to take her into town. It was after eight when she reached it and at last found a taxi to take her back to Cadogan Square.
Her back ached from the baby, and she was close to tears of frustration when at last she let herself i
nto the flat. There was the delicious aroma of cooking, and she realized how hungry she was. She dumped her bag in the lobby, kicked off her shoes and went through to the kitchen. It was obvious that Michael had made himself dinner. The used dishes on the table in the breakfast nook were still warm, and there were generous leftovers in the warmer. Like her, Michael was an excellent cook. She helped herself to the breasts of chicken Kiev and a slice of the cheesecake that remained. She noticed that there were two used wineglasses an empty bottle of Pater’s Nuits St Georges 1961 on the draining board of the sink. The significance of this did not really occur to her. She was too weary and dejected and she wanted Michael to cheer her up.
She heard music coming from his bedroom suite upstairs, the sentimental strains of Mantovani, one of Michael’s favourites. She climbed the stairs on stockinged feet, went down the passage and pushed open the door to Michael’s room.
For a long moment, she did not comprehend what she was seeing; it was too distant from her wildest expectations or imaginings.
Then she thought that Michael was being attacked, and a scream rushed up her throat. She had to cover her mouth with both hands to contain it. At last understanding flooded over her.
Naked, Michael knelt on hands and knees in the centre of the double bed. The satin eiderdown and bed-sheets had spilled over on to the floor, and the bed was in disarray. She knew his body so well, lithe and elegantly muscled, tanned by the African sun to the colour of ripe tobacco leaf except where his bathing trunks had left his skin pale and vulnerable-looking.
Also naked, Nelson Litalongi knelt beside him. In contrast his torso shone with sweat like newly mined coal, so bright that it seemed to have been freshly oiled.
Michael’s dearly beloved features were contorted with a deep and particular anguish. His mouth was twisted into a savage rictus that struck her to the depth of her being. For a moment, he reminded her of a stricken animal on the very point of a dreadful death.
Then his vision cleared and focused and he saw her. Before her eyes, his face seemed to dissolve and run like molten wax, and reform in an expression of terror and deadly shame. With a violent twist of his body, he broke the grip of the man who held him and rolled away from him, reaching for a crumpled pillow to cover his own groin.
Isabella whirled and rushed from the room.
Despite her exhaustion, she slept fitfully and with disjointed and confused dreams, in which she saw Michael struggling naked and terrified in the grip of some fearsome dark monster and once she shouted out in her sleep so wildly that she woke herself.
Before dawn, she abandoned all further attempts at resting and went down to the kitchen. She saw immediately that the dishes and cutlery of the previous evening’s meal had been washed and packed away. The empty wine-glasses and bottle had disappeared, and the kitchen was spotless.
She switched on the coffee-percolator and went to check the letter-box. It was too early for the newspaper to have been delivered, so she went back and poured a cup of coffee. She knew the caffeine was bad for the baby, but this morning she needed fortification.
She had taken her first sip when she smelt cigarette smoke and looked up quickly. Michael stood in the doorway with the inevitable cigarette between his lips, slanting his eyes against the spiral of smoke.
‘I say, the coffee smells good.’ He was dressed in a silk dressing gown. His eyes were underscored with leaden smudges, and there were shadows, sickly with guilt, in the blue of his eyes. Uncertainty and diffidence puckered at the corners of his mouth as he said: ‘I thought you were in Athens – I’m sorry.’
They stared at each other across the kitchen for only a few seconds, but which seemed like an age. Then Isabella stood up and crossed to him. She reached up on tiptoe to embrace him, and kissed him full on the mouth.
Then she held him close and pressed her cheek against his cheek that was raspy with new beard.
‘I love you, Mickey. You are the dearest, sweetest person in my life. I love you without reservation or qualification.’
He sighed deeply. ‘Thank you, Bella. I should have known that you would be generous and understanding, but I was afraid. You’ll never know how terrified I’ve been that you might reject me.’
‘No, Mickey. You had no reason to worry.’
‘I was going to tell you. I’ve been waiting for the right moment.’
‘You don’t have to tell me, or anybody. It’s your business alone.’
‘No, I wanted you to know. We’ve never had any secrets between us. I knew you would find out sooner or later. I wanted – oh God, I would have given anything for you not to have found out the way you did. It must have been a terrible shock for you.’
She closed her eyes tightly and pressed her face harder to his, so that he could not see her expression. She tried to shut the image of what she had witnessed from her mind. However, Michael’s face in that contorted rapture of anguish still floated before her like a reel from a horror movie.
‘It doesn’t matter, Mickey. It makes no difference to us or to anything.’
‘Yes, it does, Bella,’ he contradicted her, and then gently held her away from him so that he could study her face. What he saw there made him sadder. With an arm around her shoulders he led her back to her seat at the table in the breakfast-nook, and sat beside her on the banquette.
‘Strange,’ he said. ‘In a way it’s a relief that you know. I still hate the way you found out, but at last there is one person in the world with whom I can be my true self; somebody for whom I no longer have to lie and dissemble.’
‘Why hide it, Mickey? This is nineteen sixty-nine. If that’s the way you are, why not be open? Nobody cares any more.’
Michael fished a packet of Camels out of his dressing-gown pocket and lit one. For a moment, he studied the burning tip, and then he said: ‘That might be true for others, but not for me.’ He shook his head. ‘Not for me. Like it or not, I’m a Courtney. There are Nana and Pater, Garry and Sean, the family, the name.’
She wanted to deny it, but then she saw that it was futile.
‘Nana and Pater,’ Michael repeated. ‘It would destroy them. Don’t think that I haven’t considered it – coming out of the closet.’ He grinned wryly. ‘God, what an awful expression.’
She squeezed his hand hard, beginning at last to have some faint understanding of her brother’s predicament. She knew he was right. He could never let Nana and Pater know. For them it would be as bad – no, it would be worse than Tara. Tara had been a foreigner; Michael was Courtney blood. They would not survive it. It would destroy part of them, and Michael was too kind, too unselfish, too loyal ever to let that happen. ‘How long have you known – about your nature?’ she asked quietly.
‘Since prep school,’ he answered frankly. ‘Since those first prepubescent gropings and explorations in the showers and the bog shop . . .’ He broke off. ‘I’ve tried to deny myself. I’ve tried not to let it happen. Sometimes for months, a year even – but it’s like a beast inside me, Bella, a ravaging beast over which I have no control.’
She smiled softly, indulgently. ‘As Nanny would say, it’s the hot Courtney blood, Mickey. We all have it; none of us can control it very well, not Pater and Garry and Sean – nor you and I.’
‘You don’t mind talking about it?’ he asked diffidently. ‘I’ve kept it bottled up so long.’
‘You talk as much as you like. I’m here to listen.’
‘I’ve lived with it for fifteen years now and I suppose I’ll have to live with it for another fifty. The strange thing – something that would make it even worse as far as the family is concerned – is that I am attracted by coloured men. That would aggravate my guilt and degradation in the eyes of Nana and Pater, in the eyes of our courts at home. God, the scandal if I were discovered and charged under that Immorality Act of our enlightened government!’ He shuddered, and stubbed out the cigarette, and immediately lit another from the crumpled pack.
‘I don’t know why black men attract me
so powerfully. I’ve thought about it a great deal. I suppose I’m like Tara, in a way. Perhaps it’s a kind of racial guilt, a subconscious desire to appease and mollify their anger.’ He chuckled sardonically. ‘We’ve been screwing them for so long. Why not give them a chance to get their own back?’
‘Don’t!’ Isabella said softly. ‘Don’t degrade and belittle yourself by talking like that, Mickey. You are a fine and decent person. We are, none of us, responsible for our instincts.’
Isabella remembered Michael as the gentle shy boy, self-effacing but with boundless affection and concern for every being around him, yet always with that wistful air of sadness about him. She understood now the source of that sadness. She realized what spiritual agony he must have been suffering, that he still suffered. Her heart went out to him as it never had before. The last vestiges of her physical repugnance faded. She knew she would never again hate what she had seen taking place in the room upstairs. She would think only of the agonies which still lay in wait for this dear person, and her instincts became fiercer and more protective.
‘My poor darling Mickey,’ she whispered.
‘Poor no longer,’ he denied it. ‘Not with your love and understanding.’
Two days later, while Michael was out on one of his interviews and Isabella’s desk was a jumble of open books and scattered papers, the telephone rang. She reached for it distractedly and for a moment she did not recognize the husky voice, or understand the words.
‘Ramón? Is that you? Is something wrong? Where are you? Athens?’
‘I’m at the flat . . .’
‘Here in London?’
‘Yes. Can you come quickly? I need you.’
Isabella pushed the Mini through the lunch-hour traffic, and when she reached his flat went up the stairs two at a time and arrived on the landing flushed and breathless. She fumbled with the key and at last threw the door open.