The Dragon Lady

by Louisa Treger

  No record of his deeds for the CID survive. As Robert Mugabe was getting ready to take power in Zimbabwe after the 1980 elections, Rhodesian Intelligence burned all its records. To speed things up, they requisitioned the hospital furnaces and even the crematoria. Convoys of trucks were loaded with files and sent off to be destroyed.

  Years later, after Dad died, I went through all his papers and found only one letter from De Quehen:

  I am sorry to learn of your decision to resign from the CID and your reasons for it. You served the government well. . .

  I never truly understood my father’s feelings for Ginie, but I understood the effect they had all too clearly. I didn’t understand the passion one person can experience for another, but Dad showed me, and he paid for it with the destruction of our family. After that, I decided passion and love weren’t for me. I live alone in a small seaside town and teach maths to primary school children. I like numbers; they are transparent, predictable. My life is quiet and that is how I like it.

  Sometimes, a nameless feeling comes over me, a feeling that is like hunger. But I have learnt to wait it out. I know that it will pass, in the end.

  After Ginie recovered from the shooting, the locals let the Courtaulds be. They never took them into their hearts, but there was an understanding that they had been through enough. They were made Umtali’s first Freemen in acknowledgement of their philanthropy and residents turned out in their hundreds for the ceremony.

  There were many other organisations that benefited from their generosity, including the Queen’s Hall and the multiracial Rhodes Club in Umtali, the Bulawayo Theatre, St Michael’s Church in Salisbury, the University College of Rhodesia and the National Museum.

  I never did find out what happened to Mary, whether she survived or not. She simply disappeared into the prison system.

  Stephen passed away first, aged eighty-three. He had to have a leg amputated above the knee because of blood circulation problems, stemming from untreated diabetes – a dreadful fate for a man who had loved to climb mountains. Not long afterwards, the other leg went and he lost the will to live, his heart simply stopped.

  His death left Ginie unmoored. She had a slight stroke, which destroyed her memory and the family moved her to Jersey, where she spent her remaining years. Her final request was to give La Rochelle to the National Trust of Rhodesia. By the early seventies, when Ginie had left Rhodesia, the Africans had realised that they wouldn’t achieve autonomy through peaceful negotiation with an unjust government. This led to the Liberation War in which thousands died.

  Farmhouses became forts, with sandbags piled up around the bedrooms, doors and windows bolted, high security fencing, alarm systems, guard dogs and a loaded gun always at hand. La Rochelle was left unscathed. The guerrillas coming over the border knew that it had belonged to sympathizers. They attacked farms in the area and Kukwanisa was burned to the ground.

  I heard that Jessica’s ghost was sighted on the property more than once during the war. It’s my belief that because the poor soul had been torn so violently from this earth, her spirit stayed behind. She was trapped at La Rochelle, tethered to it but not part of it. Whenever there were vibrations of fear and horror, she sensed them and they called her from her uneasy resting place.

  After the war there was an African government and a great deal of misplaced optimism, and then Mugabe. When I think of people’s hopes for independence, I want to weep for Zimbabwe. In the early 1990s, Mugabe wanted to take La Rochelle as his country residence. I don’t know why that fell through, but I can see why he hankered after it. He had got to know it quite well when he drew up the ZANU-PF party manifesto there years before, with Stephen’s help.

  Ginie had an orchid, a rose and a spider named after her. She was proud of this. The Virginia Courtauld orchid is a deep pink, with delicate white markings and a flamboyant purple bottom petal. The rose is a rich, dark red. The spider is black and silky – frightening to look at, but not poisonous.

  It probably bothers you that you will never learn the truth about the snake tattoo.

  You will just have to decide for yourself which story is true.

  Author’s Note

  This book began with a question from a friend: ‘Have you seen Zimbabwe’s secret Monet?’ The painting was allegedly hidden in the vaults of the Harare National Gallery, she explained, to keep it safe from Mugabe.

  My late mother was born in South Africa and on a trip to Harare, I managed to access the ‘secret’ paintings. There was no Monet, but I did see works by Rembrandt, Caravaggio and several others, donated to the Gallery by Stephen Courtauld. My curiosity was well and truly piqued and I began to research Stephen and Virginia. The more I found out, the more I became convinced that theirs was a fascinating untold story.

  The Courtaulds did so many extraordinary things, it was impossible to explore every aspect of their lives in depth in just one book. I decided to focus on their time in Rhodesia, partly because it’s the least mined part of their lives, and partly because Southern Africa is in my blood and marrow.

  The Dragon Lady is a work of fiction. It broadly follows the known biographical framework of the Courtaulds’ lives, but the skin and tissue is invention. In certain places, I took liberties with the facts and the time frame in order to fit the demands of the narrative.

  The meetings with Mugabe and his colleagues happened in real life, and the little girl’s ghost has been seen and discussed. While staying at La Rochelle on a research trip, I discovered the unmarked grave and the intensely sad and eerie atmosphere that hangs around it, exactly as described in the novel. La Rochelle is now run as a hotel and several employees have reported sightings of the girl.

  While I was researching, I found references to how controversial the Courtaulds’ liberal views made them in Rhodesia, and how they were shunned by most of the white farming community. But there the trail went cold – either people didn’t know the details, or they felt that the truth was best left unsaid. And so, in the absence of detailed biographical information, I imagined what might have happened.

  Acknowledgements

  The Dragon Lady was informed by a number of sources. I have long admired and been influenced by Doris Lessing’s writing, and Jongy’s death scene was inspired by ‘A Sunrise on the Veld’. Other helpful sources include, but are not limited to, ‘An Oral History of Eltham Palace’ at the British Library, Virginia, Un Mondo Perduto by Bruno Ciliento and Caterina Olcese Spingardi, African Naturalist by David Happold, The Africa House by Christina Lamb and The Man on the Ice Cap by Nicholas Wollaston.

  A book is a collaboration, and without the dynamic team at Bloomsbury Publishing, there would be no The Dragon Lady. My heartfelt thanks go to Nigel Newton, whose vision and enthusiasm made everything possible, and to Maggie Traugott for her brilliant and insightful readings. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my publisher, Stephanie Duncan, editor, Miranda Vaughan Jones, and copy editor, Claire Browne, for their wise, inspiring, and patient input – it was a joy and privilege to work with you. I would like to thank Ros Ellis, Rachel Murphy, James Watson and everyone at Bloomsbury who helped bring the book to life. Also Kathleen Carter, publicist extraordinaire.

  Huge thanks to Toni Kirkpatrick for believing in my writing enough to publish The Lodger, and for her continued support and brilliant editorial input ever since.

  I am extremely grateful to George Courtauld for his generosity and kindness in sharing his memories of his cousins, Stephen and Ginie, with me, and for giving me access to family letters. My thanks go to Professor Debby Swallow at the Courtauld Institute, to Andrew Hann, Sarah Moulden, and Frances Parton at English Heritage, and to David Scott and Sharon Waterworth at the National Trust of Zimbabwe. I am grateful to Arthur Douie and his daughter, Claire, Bruce Mennell, the late Darrel Plowes, Nina Bauer, Roger Fairlie, Ange Gale Wright, Kevin Martin, Harvey Leared, and Mary Armour for sharing their recollections and/or knowledge of the Courtaulds.

  I owe more gratitude than I can expres
s to my friend Treena Maguire Jinnah for telling me about Zimbabwe’s secret art treasures, and thus planting the seed which grew into The Dragon Lady. Thank you also, Treena, for being the best research assistant in the world, for ongoing moral support, and for keeping me in coffee and wine while I wrote! And a thousand thanks to you and Jamille for making my visit to Zimbabwe so smooth and safe. Thank you, Gabe and Dan Latner, for sharing my Zimbabwean adventures, not forgetting caterpillar eating – you guys were the best! Special thanks to Luke Buchanan, Sophie Pretorius, Dr Matteo Moretti and Fiona T. Marondera for help and support with research.

  Love and thanks go to The Prime Writers and the Mount Nellie Tea Club for your incredible support and camaraderie. To my family and my friends: thank you for always being there for me, for keeping me sane through all the highs and lows, and for understanding when I periodically need to retreat from the world to write. Special thanks to Julian Treger, Simone Lehndorff and Suzanne Goodman – they know the hundreds of reasons why.

  Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank Adam, Imogen and Alexandra. You are the centre of everything.

  A Note on the Author

  LOUISA TREGER is a classical violinist, studied at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and worked as a freelance orchestral player and teacher. She subsequently turned to literature, earning a Ph.D. in English at University College London, where she focused on early-twentieth-century women’s writing and was awarded the West Scholarship and the Rosa Morison Scholarship ‘for distinguished work in the study of English Language and Literature’. Louisa’s first novel, The Lodger, was published by Macmillan in 2014. She lives in London.

  @louisatreger

  www.twitter.com/louisatreger

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  First published in Great Britain 2019

  This edition published 2019

  Copyright © Louisa Treger, 2019

  Louisa Treger has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

  This is a work of fiction, not a biography. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied

  ISBN: HB: 978-1-4482-1726-7; TPB: 978-1-4482-1745-8;

  eBook: 978-1-4482-1739-7

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