by Wilbur Smith
‘Excuse me, ladies.’ His audience gave little cries of disappointment, but he eased himself neatly out of their circle and began working his way towards the door. But before he reached it, the sirens started their booming thunder of warning and the cry went up, ‘Last call, ladies and gentlemen – all ashore, those who are going ashore,’ and he knew he had run out of time.
‘She was probably a dog – a backside like heaven and a face like hell – and she almost certainly isn’t sailing, anyway,’ he consoled himself. Then Dr Twentyman-Jones was shaking his hand and wishing him luck for the Games, and he tried to forget that bunch of auburn curls and concentrate on his social duties, but it wasn’t all that easy.
Out on deck he looked for an auburn head going down the gangway, or in the crowd on the quayside, but Centaine was tugging at his arm as the gap between ship and land opened below them.
‘Come, chéri, let’s go and check the dining-room seating.’
‘But you have been invited to the captain’s table, Mater,’ he protested. ‘There was an invitation in the—’
‘Yes, but you and David haven’t,’ she pointed out. ‘Come along, David, let’s go and find where they have put the two of you, and have it changed if it’s not suitable.’
She was up to something, Shasa realized. Normally she would take the seating for granted, secure in the knowledge that her name was all the guarantee of preference that was necessary, but now she was insistent, and she had that look in her eye which he knew so well, and which he called her ‘Machiavellian sparkle’.
‘Come along then,’ he agreed indulgently, and the three of them went down the walnut-panelled staircase to the first class dining-room on the deck below.
At the foot of the stairs a small group of seasoned travellers were being affable to the head waiter; five-pound notes were disappearing like magic into that urbane gentleman’s pocket, leaving no bulge, and names were being rubbed out and re-pencilled on the seating plan.
Standing a little apart from the group was a tall familiar figure that Shasa recognized instantly. Something about him, the expectant turn of his head towards the staircase, told Shasa he was waiting for someone, and his dazzling smile as he saw Centaine made it clear who that someone was.
‘Good Lord, Mater,’ Shasa exclaimed. ‘I didn’t realize Blaine was sailing today – I thought he would be going later with the others—’ he broke off. He had felt his mother’s grip on his forearm tighten and the quick catch of her breath as she saw Blaine.
‘They have arranged this,’ he realized with a flare of amazement. ‘That’s what her excitement was.’ And at last it dawned upon him. ‘You never think it of your own mother, but they are lovers. All these years, and I never saw it.’ The little things, insignificant at the time but now full of meaning, came crowding back. ‘Blaine and the mater, damn me blind! Who would have thought it—’ and conflicting emotions assailed him. ‘Of all men in the world, I would have chosen him—’ In that moment he realized how much Blaine Malcomess had come to stand in the place of the father he had never known, but the thought was followed instantly by a flush of jealous and moral indignation. ‘Blaine Malcomess, pillar of society and government, and Mater who is always frowning and shaking her head at me – the naughty little devils, they have been raving away for years without anybody suspecting!’
Blaine was coming towards them. ‘Centaine, this is a surprise!’
Mater was laughing and holding out her right hand to him. ‘Gracious me, Blaine Malcomess, I had no idea you were on board.’
Shasa thought wryly: ‘What marvellous acting! You have had me and everybody fooled for years. The two of you make Clark Gable and Ingrid Bergman look like a pair of beginners!’
Then suddenly it didn’t matter any more. The only thing that was important was that there were two girls following Blaine as he came towards Centaine.
‘Centaine, I’m sure you remember my two daughters. This is Tara and this is Mathilda Janine—’
‘Tara.’ Silently Shasa sang the name in his head. ‘Tara – what a lovely name.’ It was the girl he had glimpsed on the boat deck, and she was only one hundred times more stunning than he had hoped she might be.
Tara. She was tall, only a few inches below his own six foot, but her legs were like willow wands and her waist was like a reed.
Tara. She had the face of a madonna, a serene oval, and her complexion was a mixture of cream and flower petals, almost too perfect, yet redeemed from insipid vacuity by the smoking chestnut hair, her father’s wide strong mouth and her own eyes, resilient as grey steel and bright with intelligence and determination.
She greeted Centaine with the correct amount of deference and then turned to look directly at Shasa.
‘Shasa, you too remember Tara,’ Blaine told him. ‘She came out to Weltevreden four years ago.’
Was this the same noisy little pest? Shasa stared at her – the one in short skirts with scabs on her bony knees who had embarrassed him with her boisterous and childish capers? He could not believe it was, and his voice caught in his throat.
‘How good to see you again, Tara, after so long.’
‘Remember, Tara Malcomess,’ she cautioned herself. ‘Be controlled and aloof.’ She almost shivered with shame as she remembered how she had gambolled and fawned around him like a puppy begging to be patted. ‘What a callow little beast, I was.’ But she had been smitten by a crush so powerful at first sight of him that the pain of it still lingered even now.
However, she managed to display the right shade of indifference as she murmured, ‘Oh have we met? I must have forgotten, forgive me.’ She held out her hand. ‘Well, it’s pleasant to meet you again – Shasa?’
‘Yes, Shasa,’ he agreed, and he took the hand as though it were a holy talisman. ‘Why haven’t we met again since then?’ he asked himself, and immediately he saw the answer. ‘It was deliberate. Blaine and Mater made damn sure that we never met again in case it complicated their own little arrangement. They did not want Tara reporting back to her mama.’ But he was too happy to be angry with them now.
‘Have you made your table reservations?’ he asked, without relinquishing her hand.
‘Daddy is sitting at the captain’s table,’ Tara pouted lovingly at her father. ‘And we are to be left all alone.’
‘The four of us could sit together,’ Shasa suggested quickly. ‘Let’s go and talk to the Maître.’ Blaine and Centaine exchanged relieved glances – it was all going exactly as they had planned, with one twist they had not foreseen.
Mathilda Janine had blushed as she shook hands with David Abrahams. Of the two sisters, she was the ugly duckling for she had inherited not only her father’s wide mouth but his large nose and prominent ears as well, and her hair was not auburn but ginger carrot.
‘But he’s got a big nose too,’ she thought defiantly, as she studied David, and then her thoughts went off on a tangent. ‘If Tara tells him I’m only sixteen I’ll just die!’
The voyage was a tempest of emotions, full of delights and surprises and frustrations and agonies for all of them. During the fourteen days of the passage to Southampton Blaine and Centaine saw very little of the four youngsters, meeting them for a cocktail beside the ship’s pool before lunch and for a duty dance after dinner, David and Shasa each taking a turn at whirling Centaine around the floor while Blaine did the same to his daughters. Then there would be a quick exchange of glances between the four young people and they would make their elaborate excuses before all disappearing down into the tourist class where the real fun was, leaving Blaine and Centaine to their staid pleasures on the upper decks.
Tara in a one-piece bathing costume of lime green was the most magnificent sight Shasa had ever laid eyes upon. Her breasts under the clinging material were the shape of unripe pears and when she came from the pool with water streaming down those long elegant limbs, he could make out the dimple of her navel through the cloth and the hard little marbles of her nipples, and it took all his control
to prevent himself groaning out loud.
Mathilda Janine and David discovered a mutual zany and irreverent sense of humour, and kept each other in convulsions of laughter most of the time. Mathilda Janine was up at four-thirty each morning, no matter how late they had got to bed, to give David raucous encouragement as he made his fifty circuits of the boat deck.
‘He moves like a panther,’ she told herself. ‘Long and smooth and graceful.’ And she had to think up fifty new witticisms each morning to shout at him as he went bounding past her. They chased each other around the pool and wrestled ecstatically below the surface; once they had managed to fall in locked in each other’s arms, but, apart from a furtive pecking kiss at the door of the cabin that Mathilda Janine shared with Tara, neither of them even considered carrying it any further. Although David had benefited from his brief relationship with the Camel, it never occurred to him to indulge in the same acrobatics with someone as special as Matty.
Shasa on the other hand suffered under no such inhibitions. He was vastly more sexually experienced than David, and once he had recovered from the initial awe of Tara’s beauty, he launched an insidious but determined assault on the fortress of her virginity. However, his rewards were even less spectacular than David’s.
It took him almost a week to work up to the stage of intimacy where Tara would allow him to spread suntan oil on her back and shoulders. In the small hours of the morning when the lights on the dance floor were dimmed for the last dance and the band played the sugary romantic ‘Poinciana’, she laid her velvet-soft cheek against his, but when he tried to press his lower body against hers, she allowed it for only moments before she arched her back, and when he tried to kiss her at the cabin door she held him off with both hands on his chest and gave him that low tantalizing laugh.
‘The silly little witch is totally frigid,’ Shasa told his reflection in the shaving mirror. ‘She probably has an iceberg in her knickers.’ Thought of those regions made him shiver with frustration, and he resolved to break off the chase. He thought of the five or six other females on board, not all of them young, who had looked at him with unmistakable invitation in their eyes. ‘I could have any or all of them instead of panting along behind Miss Tin Knickers—’ But an hour later he was partnering her in the mixed doubles deck quoit championships, or smoothing suntan oil on that flawless finely muscled back with fingers that trembled with agonized desire, or trying to keep level with her in a discussion of the merits and demerits of the government’s plans to disenfranchise the coloured voters of the Cape Province.
He had discovered with some dismay that Tara Malcomess had a highly developed political conscience, and that even though it was vaguely understood between him and Mater that Shasa would one day go into politics and parliament, his grasp of and interest in the complex problems of the country was not of the same calibre as Tara’s. She held views that were almost as disturbing to him as her physical attractions.
‘I believe, as Daddy does, that far from taking the vote away from the few black people who have it, we should be giving it to all of them.’
‘All of them!’ Shasa was appalled. ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’
‘Of course I do. Not all at once, but on a civilization basis, government by those who have proved fit to govern. Give the vote to all those who have the right standards of education and responsibility. In two generations every man and woman, black or white, could be on the roll.’
Shasa shuddered at the thought, his own aspirations to a seat in the house would not survive that – but this was probably the least radical of her opinions.
‘How can we prevent people from owning land in their own country or from selling their labour in the best market, or prohibit them from collective bargaining?’
Trade unions were the tools of Lenin and the devil. That was a fact Shasa had taken in with his mother’s milk.
‘She’s a bolshy – but, God, what a beautiful bolshy!’ he thought, and pulled her to her feet to break the unpalatable lecture. ‘Come on, let’s go for a swim.’
‘He’s an ignorant fascist,’ she thought furiously, but when she saw the way the other women looked at him from behind their sunglasses, she wanted to claw their eyes out of their faces, and at night in her bunk when she thought about the touch of his hands on her bare back, and the feel of him against her on the dance floor, she blushed in the darkness at the fantasies that filled her head.
‘If I just let it start – just the barest beginning, I know I won’t be able to stop him, I won’t even want to stop him—’ and she steeled herself against him. ‘Controlled and aloof,’ she repeated, like a charm against the treacherous wiles of her own body.
By some extraordinary coincidence it just so happened that Blaine Malcomess had shipped his Bentley in the hold, alongside Centaine’s Daimler.
‘We could drive to Berlin in convoy,’ Centaine exclaimed as though the idea had just occurred to her, and there was clamorous acceptance of the idea from the four younger members of the party, and immediate jockeying and lobbying for seats in the two vehicles. Centaine and Blaine, protesting mildly, allowed themselves to be allocated the Bentley while the others, driven by Shasa, would follow in the Daimler.
From Le Havre they drove the dusty roads of northwestern France, through the towns that still had the ring of terror in their names, Amiens and Arras. The green grass had covered the muddy battlefields where Blaine had fought, but the fields of white crosses were bright as daisies in the sunlight.
‘May God grant that mankind never has to live through that again,’ Blaine murmured, and Centaine reached across and took his hand.
In the little village of Mort Homme they parked in front of the auberge in the main street, and when Centaine walked in through the front door to enquire for lodgings, Madame behind the desk recognized her instantly and screeched with excitement.
‘Henri, viens vite! C’est Mademoiselle de Thiry du château—’ and she rushed to embrace Centaine and buss her on both cheeks.
A travelling salesman was ousted, and the best rooms put at their disposal; a little explanation was needed when Centaine and Blaine asked for separate accommodation, but the meal they were served that night was exquisitely nostalgic for Centaine, with all the specialities – terrines and truffles and tartes – with the wine of the region, while Madame stood beside the table and gave Centaine all the gossip, the deaths and births, the marriages and elopements and liaisons of the last nineteen years.
In the early morning Centaine and Shasa left the others sleeping, and drove up to the château. It was rubble and black scorched walls, pierced with empty windows and shell holes, overgrown and desolate, and Centaine stood in the ruins and wept for her father who had burned with the great house rather than abandon it to the advancing Germans.
After the war the estate had been sold off to pay the debts that the old man had accumulated over a lifetime of good living and hard drinking. It was now owned by Hennessy, the great cognac firm; the old man would have enjoyed that little irony, Centaine smiled at the thought.
Together they climbed the hillock beyond the ruined château and from the crest Centaine pointed out the orchard and plantation that marked the old wartime airfield.
‘That is where your father’s squadron was stationed, on the edge of the orchard. I waited here every morning for the squadron to take off, and I would wave them away to battle.’
‘They flew SE5a’s didn’t they?’
‘Only later. At first it was the old Sopwiths.’ She was looking up at the sky. ‘Your father’s machine was painted bright yellow. I called him le petit jaune, the little yellow one – I can see him now in his flying helmet. He used to lift the goggles so I could see his eyes as he flew past me. Oh Shasa, how noble and gay and young he was, a young eagle going up into the blue.’
They descended the hillock and drove slowly back between the vineyards. Centaine asked Shasa to stop beside a small stone-walled barn at the corner of North Field. He
watched her, puzzled, as she stood for a few minutes in the doorway of the thatched building and then came back to the Daimler with a faint smile on her lips and a soft glow in her eyes.
She saw his enquiring look and told him, ‘Your father and I used to meet here.’ In a clairvoyant insight Shasa realized that in this rickety old building in a foreign land he had been conceived. The strangeness of this knowledge remained with him as they drove back towards the auberge.
At the entrance to the village in front of the little church with its green copper spire, they stopped again and went into the cemetery. Michael Courtney’s grave was at the far end, beneath a yew tree. Centaine had ordered the headstone from Africa but had never seen it before. A marble eagle, perched on a tattered battle standard, was on the point of flight, with wings spread. Shasa thought it was a little too flamboyant for a memorial to the dead.
They stood side by side and read the inscription:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
CAPTAIN MICHAEL COURTNEY RFC
KILLED IN ACTION 19 APRIL I917.
GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN.
Weeds had grown up around the headstone, and they knelt together and tidied the grave. Then they stood at the foot of it, their heads bowed.
Shasa had expected to be profoundly moved by his father’s grave, but instead he felt remote and untouched. The man beneath the headstone had become clay long before he was born. He had felt closer to Michael Courtney six thousand miles from here when he had slept in his bed, worn his old thornproof tweed jacket, handled his Purdey shotgun and his fishing-rods, or used his gold-nibbed pen and his platinum and onyx dress studs.