Dicky Lancome’s polished elastic-sided boots were propped on the desk in front of him and fastidiously crossed at the ankles. He looked up from his newspaper, a teacup held in the other hand with little finger extended delicately.
‘Hail the conquering hero comes, his weary weapon slung over his shoulder.’
‘Oh come on, Dicky!’
‘— weak at the knees, bloodshot eye and fevered brow—’
‘Any calls?’ Mark asked seriously.
‘Ah, the giant mind now turns to the more mundane aspects of life.’
‘Play the game, Dicky.’ Mark riffled quickly through a small pile of messages that awaited him.
‘A surfeit of love, a plethora of passion, an overdose of crumpet, a genital hangover.’
‘What’s this? I can’t read your scrawl.’ Mark averted his eyes, concentrating on his reading.
‘Mark my words, Mark, that young lady has got the brood lust. If you turn your back on her for ten minutes, she will be up the nearest tree building a nest.’
‘Cut it out, Dicky.’
‘That’s precisely what you should do, old boy, unless you can face the prospect of her dropping your whelps all over the scenery.’ Dicky shuddered theatrically. ‘Never ride in a saloon if you can drive a sports model, old chap, which reminds me,’ he dropped the newspaper, checked the watch from his waistcoat pocket, ‘I have this important client.’ He inspected his glossy boots a moment, flicked them lightly with the handkerchief from his breast pocket, stood up and adjusted the strawbasher on his head and winked at Mark. ‘Her husband’s gone up country for a week. Hold the fort, old boy, it’s my turn now.’
He disappeared through the office door into the showroom, and then reappeared instantly, an expression of horror on his face. ‘Oh God, customers! Get after them, Mark my boy, I’m taking the back door,’ and he was gone, leaving only the faint perfume of brilliantine lingering on the air.
Mark checked his tie in the sliver of broken mirror wedged in the frame of the window, and adjusted his welcoming smile as he hurried to the door — but at the threshold he stopped as though coming up at the end of a chain. He was listening with the stillness and concentration of a wild gazelle, listening with every fibre and every quivering nerve end to a sound of such aching and penetrating beauty that it seemed to freeze his heart. It lasted only a few seconds, but the sound of it shimmered and thrilled in the air for long seconds afterwards, and only then did Mark’s heart beat again, surging heavily against his rib cage.
The sound was the laughter of a girl. It was as though the air around Mark had thickened to honey, for it dragged heavily at his legs as he started forward, and it required a physical effort to draw it down into his lungs.
From the doorway he looked into the showroom. In the centre of the wide floor stood the latest demonstration model Cadillac, and beside it stood a couple.
The man had his back to Mark, and left only the impression of massive size, a towering figure dressed in dark cloth. Beside him, the girl was dainty, almost ethereal, she seemed to float, light and lovely as a hummingbird on invisible wings.
The earth tilted beneath Mark’s feet as he gazed at her.
Her head was thrown back to look up at the man. Her throat was long and smooth, balancing the small head with its huge dark eyes and the laughing mouth, small white regular teeth beyond pink lips, a fine bold brow, pale and wide above those haunting eyes – and all of it crowned by a heart-stopping tumble of thick lustrous hair, hair so black that its waves and falls seemed to be sculptured from freshly oiled ebony.
She laughed again, a lovely joyous ripple of sound, and she reached up to touch the man’s face. Her hand was narrow, with long tapered fingers, strong capable-looking hands – so that Mark realized that his first impression had been wrong.
The girl was small only in comparison to the man, and her poise heightened the illusion. However, Mark saw now that she was tall, but graceful as a papyrus stem in the wind, supple and slim, with tiny waist and long legs beneath the light floating material of her skirt.
With her fingertips, she traced the jawline of the man; tilting her head on its long swanlike neck, her beauty was almost unbearable, as her huge eyes shone now with love, and the line of the lips was soft with love.
‘Oh Daddy, you are an old-fashioned, grumpy old bear.’ She spun away from him, lightly as a ballerina, and struck an exaggerated pose beside the huge glistening machine, putting on a comic French accent. ‘Regarde! Mon cher papa, c’est très chic—’
The man growled. ‘I don’t trust these fancy new machines. Give me a Rolls.’
‘Rolls?’ cried the girl, pouting dramatically, ‘they’re so staid! So biblical! Darling Daddy, this is the twentieth century, remember?’ Then she drooped like a dying rose in a vase. ‘How could I hold my head up among my friends if you force me to ride in one of those great sombre coffins?’
At that instant she noticed Mark standing in the doorway of the sales office, and her entire mien changed, the carriage of head and body, the expression of mouth and eye flowing instantly from clown to lady.
‘Pater,’ she said softly, the voice cultivated and the eye cool as it flicked over Mark, a steady encompassing sweep from his head to his feet. ‘I think the sales person is here.’ She turned away, and Mark felt his heart convulse again at the way her hip swung and pushed beneath the skirt — and he saw for the first time the cheeky, challenging roll of her small rounded backside as she walked slowly around the Cadillac, calm and aloof, not glancing in his direction again.
Mark stared at her, with fascination, all his emotions in upheaval. He had never seen anything so beautiful, so completely captivating in all his life.
The man had turned and was glaring at him angrily. He seemed, as the girl had teased him, to be biblical. A gaunt and towering figure with shoulders wide as the gallows tree and the big fierce head exaggerated in size by the slightly twisted hooked nose and the dark thick bush of beard, shot through with grey.
‘I know you, dammit!’ he growled. The face had been burned almost black by twenty thousand suns, but there were deep white creases in the corners of his eyes and the skin in a line below the thick curls of his silvering hair was white also, protected by the band of a hunter’s hat – or a uniform cap.
Mark roused himself, tearing his eyes off the girl, for the fresh shock of recognition. At the time he could only believe it was some monstrous coincidence – but in the years that followed he would know differently. The threads of their lives were plaited, and intertwined. But in this instant the shock, coming so close on the other, unsettled him and his voice croaked.
‘Yes, General Courtney, I am—’
‘Don’t tell me, goddammit,’ the General cut in, his voice like the crack of a Mauser shooting from cover, and Mark felt his spirit quail before the expression on his face; it was the most formidable he had ever confronted.
‘I know — the name is right there!’ he glowered at Mark. ‘I never forget a face.’ The tremendous force and presence of the man threatened to swamp him.
‘It’s a sign of old age, Pater,’ said the girl coolly, glancing over her shoulder without smile or expression.
‘Don’t you say that, girl,’ the man rumbled like an active volcano. ‘Don’t you dare say that.’ He took a threatening step towards Mark, the dark brow corrugated and the blue eyes cutting into his soul like a surgeon’s knives. ‘It’s the eyes! Those eyes.’
Mark retreated a hurried step before the limping, mountainous advance, not quite sure what to expect, but ready to believe that Sean Courtney might at any moment lunge at him with the heavy ebony cane he carried, so murderous seemed his anger.
‘General—’
‘Yes!’ Sean Courtney snapped his fingers with a crack like a breaking oak branch, and the scowl smoothed away, the blue eyes crinkling into a smile of such charisma, of such infectious and conspiratorial glee, that Mark had to smile back at him.
‘Anders,’ he said. ‘Ander
s and MacDonald. Martin? Michael? No, Mark Anders!’ And he clenched his fist and struck his own thigh. ‘Old, is it? Girl — who said old?’
‘Pater, you are a marvel.’ She rolled her eyes, but Sean Courtney was advancing on Mark, seizing his hand in a grip that made the bones creak until he recovered himself and squeezed back, matching the big man’s grip.
‘It was the eyes,’ laughed Sean. ‘You’ve changed so much from that day, that night—’ and the laughter dried, as he remembered the boy in the stretcher, pale and moribund, smeared with mud and thick drying blood, and heard again his own voice, ‘He’s dead!’ He drove back the image.
‘How are you now, my boy?’
‘I’m fine, sir.’
‘I didn’t think you were going to pull through.’ Sean peered closely at him. ‘I’ll grant you seem to have made it with all colours flying. How many did you collect, and where?’
‘Two, sir, high in the back.’
‘Honourable scars, my boy, we’ll compare notes one day.’ And then he scowled again, horrendously. ‘You got the gong, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good, you never know in this man’s army. I wrote the citation that night, but you never know. What did they give you?’ Sean smiled his relief.
‘The M.M., sir. I got it at the hospital in England.’
‘Excellent. That’s good!’ he nodded, and he let go of Mark’s hand, turning to the girl again.
‘Darling, this gentleman was with me in France.’
‘How nice.’ She touched the design on the radiator of the car with one finger, as she drifted past it, not glancing back at them. ‘Do you think we might have a drive now, Pater?’
Mark hurried to the back door to hold it open. ‘I’ll drive,’ she said, and waited for him to jump to the driver’s door.
‘The starter button is here—’ he explained.
‘Thank you, I know. Sit in the back, please.’
She drove like a man, very fast but skilfully, picking a tight line into the corners and using the gearbox to brake, double declutching with dancing feet on the pedals, and hitting the shift with a quick sure hand.
Beside her the General sat with the set to his shoulders of a younger man.
‘You drive too fast,’ he growled, the ferocious tone given the complete lie by the fond smile he turned on her.
‘And you’re an old fusspot, Daddy,’ she laughed again; the thrill of it sang in Mark’s ears as she hurled the big powerful machine into the next bend.
‘I didn’t beat you enough when you were young.’
‘Well, it’s too late now.’ She touched his cheek with her free hand.
‘Don’t bank on that, young lady – don’t ever take bets on that.’
Shaking his head in mock despair, but with the adoration still glowing in his eyes, the General heaved himself around in the seat and subjected Mark to another dark penetrating scrutiny.
‘You don’t turn out at the weekly parades.’
‘No, sir.’
‘It’s an hour on Friday evenings—half an hour square-bashing and then a lecture.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Good fun, really. Tremendous spirit, even though we have combined with the other peace-time regiments now.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m the Colonel-in-Chief,’ Sean chuckled. ‘They couldn’t get rid of me that easily.’
‘No, sir.’
‘We have a monthly shoot – good prizes, and a barbecue afterwards.’
‘Is that so, sir?’
‘We are sending a team to shoot for the Africa Cup this year, all expenses paid. Marvellous opportunity for the lucky lads who get chosen.’
‘I’m sure, General.’
Sean waited for more, but Mark was silent. He could not meet the big man’s fierce, unrelenting gaze, and he shifted his eyes – catching as he did so the girl’s face reflected in the rear-view mirror.
She was watching him intently, with an unfathomable expression – contempt perhaps, dry amusement, maybe, or something else – something much more intriguing or dangerous. For the split part of an instant, their eyes met, and then her head turned away on the tall graceful column of her neck. The dark shining hair was brushed away from the nape, and there at the juncture with pale skin, the hair was fine and silky, a tiny whorl of it like a question mark at the back of her small sculptured ear.
Mark had an almost insane desire to lean forward and press his lips to it. The thought struck like a physical blow in his groin, and he felt the nerves along his spine racked out cruelly. He realized suddenly then, with a shock that made his senses tilt again, that he was in love with her.
‘I want to win that cup,’ said the General softly, watching him. ‘The regiment has never won it before.’
‘I’ve rather had enough of uniform and war, General.’ Mark forced his eyes back to meet the General’s. ‘But I do wish you good luck.’
The chauffeur held the rear door of the Rolls Silver
Wraith open, and Sean Courtney lowered himself into the seat beside his daughter. He lifted his right hand in a brief, almost military, salute at the young man on the pavement and the car pulled smoothly away.
The instant they were alone, his daughter let out a girlish squeal of delight and threw both arms around his neck, ruffling his beard and his heart with her kisses.
‘Oh, Daddy, darling, you spoil me!’
‘Yes, I do — don’t I?’
‘Irene will turn bright green and curl up like an anchovy. I love you, my kind and beautiful Daddy. Her father has never bought her a Cadillac!’
‘I like that lad, he’s one of the bright ones.’
‘The sales person? I hadn’t really noticed.’ She released her grip and and sat back in the seat.
‘He’s got heart.’ He was silent a moment then, remembering the snow falling silently across a shell-ravaged hill in France. ‘He’s got the guts and brightness for better things than selling motor cars.’ Then he grinned mischievously, looking young enough to be her brother. ‘And I’d love to see Hamilton’s face when we take the Africa Cup away from him.’
Beside him Storm Courtney was silent, her hand still in the crook of her father’s arm while she wondered what had disturbed her about Mark Anders. She decided it was his eyes – those serene yellow eyes, calm but watchful, floating like golden moons.
Involuntarily, Mark braked the big car almost to a standstill before the white gates. They were tall twin columns, plastered and white-washed with the Zulu name in raised letters on each: EMOYENI — it was a lovely haunting name, the place of the wind, and on the crest of the hills above Durban town, it would indeed receive the cool blessing of the sea breezes during the sweltering summer months. The swinging portion of the gate was two racks of heavy cast-iron spears, but they stood open now, and Mark crossed the iron grid which would prevent hooved animals entering or escaping and started up the gentle curve of the driveway, butter yellow flint pebbles carefully raked and freshly watered, set on each side with deep beds of cannas which were now in full bloom. They had been arranged in banks of solid colour, scarlet and yellow and white, dazzling in the bright sunshine, and beyond them were lush lawns of deep tropical green, mown carpet-smooth but studded with clumps of indigenous trees which had obviously been spared for their size or beauty or unusual shape. They were festooned with garlands of lianas, the ubiquitous monkey rope plants of Natal, and even as Mark watched, a small blue-grey vervet monkey dropped lithely down one of the living ropes, and, with its back arched like a cat and its long tail held high in mock alarm, bounded across an open stretch of lawn until it reached the next clump of trees where it shot to the highest branches and chattered insolently at the slowly passing car.
Mark knew from his investigation that this was merely the Courtney town house, the main family home was at Ladyburg, and he had not expected anything like this splendour. And yet why not, he grinned wryly; the man had everything in the world, this was a mere pied
-à-terre. He twisted his head to look back. The gates were out of sight behind him now, and there was still no sign of the house ahead. He was surrounded by a fantasy landscape, half wild and yet lovingly groomed and tended, and now he saw the reason for the animal grid at the main gates.
Small herds of semi-domesticated game cropped at the short grass of the lawn or stood and watched the passing car with mild curiosity. He saw graceful golden brown impala with snowy bellies and spindly back-curved horns, a dainty blue duiker as big as a fox terrier with pricked-up ears and bright button eyes; an eland bull with hanging dewlap, thick twisted horns arming the short heavy head, and a barrel body heavy as a pedigree Afrikander bull.
He crossed a low bridge over the narrow neck of an artificial lake. The blue water lotus blooms stood high above their huge round green leaves that floated flat on the surface. Their perfume was light and sweet and nostalgic on the bright warm air, and the dark torpedo shapes of bass hung suspended in the clear water below the sheltering lotus leaves.
On the edge of the lake, a black and white spur-winged goose spread its wings, as wide as the reach of a man’s arms, and pressed forward with snakelike neck and pink wattled head, threatening flight at the intrusion; then, thinking better of such effort, it furled the great wings again and waggled its tail, satisfied with a single harsh honk of protest as the Cadillac passed.
The roof of the house showed through the trees ahead now, and it was tiled in candy pink, towered and turreted and ridged, like a Spanish palace. The last curve of the driveway brought Mark out into full view of the building. Before it lay an open expanse of blazing flowerbeds. The colour was so vibrant and so concentrated that it daunted the eye, and was relieved only by the tall soft ostrich feathers of spray that poured high into the air from the fountains set in the centre of four round ponds, parapeted in stone. The breeze blew soft wisps of spray like smoke across the flowerbeds, wetting the blooms and enhancing the already dazzling colour.