Jannie Smuts turned his attention back to the ducks, and they both watched them distractedly.
‘Come, Jannie,’ Sean said at last. ‘You mentioned other reasons. Those you have given me so far are good but not deadly urgent and I know you are politician enough to save the best until the end.’
Jannie laughed delightedly, almost a giggle, and leaned across to pat Sean’s arm. ‘We know each other too well.’
‘We should,’ Sean smiled back at him. ‘We fought each other hard enough. They both sobered at mention of those terrible days of the civil war. ‘And we had the same tutor, God bless him.’
‘God bless him,’ echoed Jan Smuts, and they remembered for a moment that colossus Louis Botha, warrior and statesman, architect of Union, and first Prime Minister of the new nation.
‘Come,’ Sean insisted. ‘What is your other reason?’
‘It is quite simple. We are about to decide who governs. The duly elected representatives of the people, or a small ruthless band of adventurers who call themselves trade union leaders, representatives of organized labour — or quite simply international communism.’
‘You put it hard.’
‘It is hard, Sean. It is very hard. I have intelligence facts that I shall lay before the first meeting of the Cabinet when Parliament reconvenes. However, I wanted to discuss these with you personally before that meeting. I need your support again, old Sean. I need you with me at that meeting.’
‘Tell me,’ invited Sean.
‘Firstly, we know that they are arming, with modern weapons, and that they are training and organizing the mineworkers into war commandos.’ Jan Smuts spoke quickly and urgently for nearly twenty minutes, and when he had finished he looked at Sean.
‘Well, old friend, are you behind me?’
Bleakly Sean looked out into the future, seeing with pain the land he loved once more torn by the hatred and misery of civil war. Then he sighed.
‘Yes,’ he nodded heavily, ‘I am with you, and my hand on it.’
‘You and your regiment?’ Jan Smuts took the big bony hand. ‘As a Minister of the Government and as a soldier?’
‘Both,’ Sean agreed. ‘All the way.’
Marion Littlejohn read Mark’s letter, sitting on the closed seat of the office toilet, with the door looked, but her love transcended her surroundings, discounted even the hiss and gurgle of water in the cistern suspended on its rusty downpipe above her head.
She read the letter through twice, with eyes misty and a tender smile tugging uncertainly at her lips, then she kissed his name on the final page and carefully folded it back into its envelope, opened her bodice and nestled the paper between her plump little breasts. It made a considerable lump there when she returned to the main office and the supervisor looked out from his glass cubicle and made a show of consulting his watch. It was an acknowledged, if unwritten, rule in the Registrar’s office that calls of nature should be answered expeditiously, and in no circumstances should the answer occupy more than four minutes of a person’s working day.
The rest of the day dragged painfully for Marion, and every few minutes, she touched the lump in her bodice and smiled secretively. When at last the hour of release came, she hurried down Main Street and arrived breathless just as Miss Lucy was closing the doors of her shop.
‘Oh, am I in time?’
‘Come in, Marion dear — and how is your young man?’
‘I had a letter from him today,’ she announced proudly, and Miss Lucy nodded her silver curls and beamed through the silver steel frames of her spectacles.
‘Yes, the postman told me.’ Ladyburg was not yet such a large town that it could not take an intimate interest in the affairs of all its sons and daughters. ‘How is he?’
Marion prattled on, flushing and shiny-eyed, as she inspected once again the four sets of Irish linen sheets that Miss Lucy was holding for her.
‘They are beautiful, dear, you can really be proud of them. You’ll have fine sons between them.’ Marion blushed again.
‘How much do I still owe you, Miss Lucy?’
‘Let’s see, dear – you’ve paid off two pounds and sixpence. That leaves thirty shillings balance.’
Marion opened her purse and counted its contents carefully, then after a mental struggle reached a decision and laid a shiny golden half sovereign on the counter.
‘That leaves only a pound.’ She hesitated, flushed again, then blurted out, ‘Do you think I might take one pair with me now? I would like to begin the embroidery work.’
‘Of course, child,’ Miss Lucy agreed immediately. ‘You have paid for three already. I’ll open the packet.’
Marion and her sister Lynette sat side by side on the sofa. Each of them had begun at one side of the sheet and their heads were bent together over it, the embroidery needles flicking in the lamplight as busily as their tongues.
‘Mark was most interested in the articles I sent him on Mr Dirk Courtney and he says that he feels Mr Courtney will have a prominent place in the book—’
Across the room, Lyn’s husband worked head down over a sheath of legal documents spread on the table before him.
He had lately affected a briar pipe, and it gurgled softly with each puff. His hair was brilliantined and brushed down to a polish with a ruler-straight parting of white scalp dividing it down the middle.
‘Oh, Peter,’ Marion exclaimed suddenly, her hands stilling and her face lighting. ‘I have just had a wonderful idea.’
Peter Botes looked up from his papers, a small frown of annoyance crinkling the serious white brow, a man interrupted at his labour by the silly chatter of woman.
‘You do so much work for Mr Courtney down at the bank. You’ve even been up to the big house, haven’t you? He even greets you on the streets – I’ve seen that.’
Peter nodded importantly, puffing at the pipe. ‘Yes; Mr Carter has often remarked that Mr Courtney seems to like me. I think I will be handling the account more and more in the future.’
‘Oh, darling, won’t you speak to Mr Courtney and tell him that Mark is doing all this work for his book on Ladyburg, and that he is ever so interested in Mr Courtney and his family—’
‘Oh, come now, Marion.’ Peter waved the pipe airily.
‘You can’t expect a man like Mr Courtney—’
‘You might find he is flattered to be in Mark’s book – please dear. I know Mr Courtney will listen to you. You might find he likes the idea – and it will reflect credit on you.’
Peter paused thoughtfully, weighing carefully the value of impressing the womenfolk with his importance and influence against the dread prospect of speaking on familiar terms with Mr Dirk Courtney. The thought appalled him. Dirk Courtney terrified him and in his presence he affected a fawning, self-effacing manner which was, he realized, part of the reason why Dirk Courtney liked to work with him; of course, he was also a painstaking meticulous lawyer, but the main reason was his respectful attitude. Mr Courtney liked respect from his underlings.
‘Please, Peter, Mark is going to so much trouble over this book. We must try and help him. I was just telling Lynette that Mark has taken a month’s leave from his job to go on an expedition up to Chaka’s Gate, just to gather facts for the book.’
‘He’s gone to Chaka’s Gate?’ Peter looked mystified, and removed the pipe from his mouth. ‘What on earth for? There is nothing up there but wilderness.’
‘I’m not sure,’ admitted Marion, and then quickly, ‘but it’s important for the book. We must try and help him.’
‘What exactly do you want me to ask Mr Courtney?’
‘Won’t you ask him to meet Mark, and sort of tell him his life story in his own words. Imagine how that would be in the book.’
Peter swallowed once. ‘Marion, Mr Courtney is a busy man, he can’t—’
‘Oh please.’ Marion jumped up and crossed the room to kneel beside his chair. ‘Pretty please, for my sake!’
‘Well,’ he mumbled, ‘I’ll mention it to h
im.’
Peter Botes stood like a guardsman beside the head seat of the long ormolu table, bending stiffly from the waist only when it was necessary to turn the page.
‘— and here please, Mr Courtney.’
The big man in the chair dashed a careless signature across the foot of the document, hardly glancing at it and without interrupting his conversation with the other fashionably dressed men further down the table.
There was a strong perfume hanging about Dirk Courtney; he wore it with the panache of a cavalry officer’s cloak, and Peter tried in vain to identify it. It must be terribly expensive, but it was the smell of success, and he made a resolution to acquire a bottle of whatever it was.
‘— and here again, please, sir.’
He noticed now at close range how Dirk Courtney’s hair was shining and cut longer at the temple, free of brilliantine and allowed to curl into the sideburns. Peter would wash the brilliantine from his own hair tonight, he decided, and let it grow out a little longer.
‘That is all, Mr Courtney. I’ll have copies delivered tomorrow.’
Dirk Courtney nodded without glancing up at him, and, pushing back his chair, he stood up.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ he addressed the others at the table, ‘we should not keep the ladies waiting,’ and they all laughed with that lustful, anticipatory laugh, their eyes gleaming like those of caged lions at feeding time.
Peter had heard in detail of those parties that Dirk Courtney held out at Great Longwood, his big house. There was gaming for high stakes, sometimes dog-fighting — two matched animals in a pit, ripping each other to ribbons of dangling skin and flesh — sometimes cock-fighting, always women — women brought in closed cars from Durban or Johannesburg. Big city women and Peter felt his body stir at the thought. Introductions to the parties were limited to men of importance or influence or wealth, and during the weekend that the revels continued, the grounds were guarded by Dirk Courtney’s bully boys.
Peter dreamed sometimes of being invited to one of those parties, of sitting across the green baize table from Dirk Courtney and casually drawing towards him the multi-coloured pile of ivory chips without removing the expensive cigar from his lips, or of sporting among the rustling silks and smooth white limbs – he had heard of the dancers, beautiful women who disrobed as they danced the Seven Veils, and ended mother-naked while the men roared and groped.
Peter roused himself almost too late. Dirk Courtney was across the room, ushering his guests ahead of him, laughing and charming, flashing white teeth from the swarthy handsome face, a servant standing ready with his overcoat, chauffeurs waiting with the limousines in the street below — about to depart into a realm about which Peter could only speculate in disturbing erotic detail.
He hurried after him, stammering nervously.
‘Mr Courtney, I have a personal request.’
‘Come, Charles,’ Dirk Courtney did not look at Peter, but smilingly laid a friendly arm across one of his guests’ shoulders. ‘I trust you are in better luck than last time, I hate to take a friend’s money.’
‘My wife’s sister has a fiancé, sir,’ Peter stumbled on desperately. ‘He’s writing a book about Ladyburg, and he would like to include an account of your personal experience—’
‘Alfred, will you ride with Charles in the first car.’ Dirk Courtney buttoned his coat, and adjusted his hat, beginning to turn towards the door, just a slight crease to his brow showing his annoyance at Peter’s importunity.
‘He is a local man,’ Peter was almost in tears of embarrassment, but he went on doggedly, ‘with a good war record, you might remember his grandfather John Anders—’
A peculiar expression came over Dirk Courtney’s face, and he turned slowly to look directly at Peter for the first time. The expression struck instant terror into him. Peter had never before seen such burning malevolence, such merciless cruelty on a man’s face before. It was only for an instant – and then the big man smiled. Such a smile of charm and good fellowship that Peter felt dizzy with relief.
‘A book about me?’ He took Peter’s arm in a friendly grip above the elbow. ‘Tell me more about this young man. I presume he is young?’
‘Oh yes, sir, quite young.’
‘Gentlemen.’ Dirk Courtney smiled apologetically at his guests. ‘Can I ask you to go ahead of me. I will follow shortly. Your rooms are prepared, and please do not feel you have to await my arrival before sampling the entertainment.’
Still holding Peter’s arm, he led him courteously back into the huge board room to a seat in one of the leather chairs by the fireplace. ‘Now, young Master Botes, how about a glass of brandy?’ and Peter watched bemused as he poured it with his own hands, big strong hands, covered with fine black hair across the back and with a diamond the size of a ripe pea on the little finger.
With each step northwards, it seemed to Mark that the great bastions of Chaka’s Gate changed their aspect gradually, from silhouettes smoked blue with distance until the details of the living rock came into focus.
The twin bluffs faced each other in almost mirror image, each towering a thousand sheer feet but deeply divided by the gorge through which the Bubezi River spilled out on to the coastal lowlands of Zululand and then meandered down a hundred and twenty miles into a maze of swamp and lagoon and mangrove forest, before finally escaping through the narrow mouth of the tidal estuary. The mouth sucked and breathed with the tide, and the ebb blew a stain of discoloured water far out into the electric blue of the Mozambique Current, a brown smear that contrasted sharply with the vivid white rind of sandy beaches that stretched for a thousand miles north and south.
If a man followed the course of the Bubezi up through the portals of Chaka’s Gate, as Mark and the old man had done so often before, he came out into a wide basin of land below the main escarpment. Here, among the heavy forests, the Bubezi divided into its two tributaries, the White Bubezi that dropped in a series of cataracts and falls down the escarpment of the continental shield — and the Red Bubezi, which swung away northwards following the line of the escarpment up through more heavy forest and open grassy glades until at last it became the border with the Portuguese colony of Mozambique.
In the flood seasons of high summer, this tributary carried down with it the eroding laterite from deposits deep in Mozambique; turning to deep bloody red, it pulsed like a living artery, and well earned its name, the Red Bubezi.
Bubezi was the Zulu name for the lion, and indeed Mark had hunted and killed his first lion on its banks, half a mile below the confluence of the two tributaries.
It was almost noon, when at last Mark reached the river at the point where it emerged from the gorge between the gates. He reached for his watch to check the time and then arrested the gesture. Here time was not measured by metal hands, but by the majestic swing of the sun and the eternal round of the seasons.
He dropped his pack and propped the rifle against a tree trunk; the gesture seemed symbolic. With the weight from his shoulders, the dark weight on his heart seemed to slip away also.
He looked up at the rock cliffs that filled half the sky above him, and was lost in awe as he had been when he looked up at the arched stone lattice-work of the Henry VII chapel in Westminster Abbey.
The columns of rock, sculptured down the ages by wind and sun and water, had that same ethereal grace, yet a freedom of line that was not dictated by the strict rules of man’s vision of beauty. The cliffs were painted with lichen growth, brilliant smears of red and yellow and silvery grey.
In cracks and irregularities of rock grew stunted trees; hundreds of feet above their peers, they were deformed and crippled by the contingencies of nature as though by the careful skills of a host of Japanese Bonsai gardeners, and they twisted out at impossible angles from the face of the cliff, holding out their branches as if in supplication to the sun.
The rock below some narrow ledges was darkened by the stain of the urine and faeces of the hydrax, the fluffy rock rabbits, which swarmed fro
m every crack and hole in the cliff. Sitting in sleepy ranks, on the very edge of the drop, sunning their fat little bodies and blinking down at the tiny figure of the man in the depth of the gorge.
Following the floating wide-pinioned flight of a vulture, Mark watched it swing in steeply, planing and volleying its great brown wings to meet the eddy of the wind across the cliff face, reaching forward with its talons for a purchase as it pulled up and dropped on to its nesting ledge a hundred and fifty feet above the river, folding its wings neatly and then crouching in that grotesque vulturine attitude with the bald scaly head thrust forward, as it waddled sideways along the rim of its huge shaggy nest of sticks and small branches built into the rockface.
From this angle Mark could not see the chicks in the nest, but clearly he recognized the heaving motions of the bird as it began to regurgitate its cropful of rotten carrion for its young. Gradually a sense of peace settled like a mantle over Mark, and he sat down, his back against the rough bole of a fever tree, and slowly, without sense of urgency, he selected and lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke with an unhurried breath and then letting it trickle out through his nostrils, watching the pale blue tendrils rise and swirl on the lazy air.
He thought perhaps that the nearest human being was forty miles distant, the nearest white man almost a hundred - and the thought was strangely comforting.
He wondered at the way in which all man’s petty striving seemed insignificant in this place, in this vast primeval world — and suddenly he thought that if all men, even those who had known nothing but the crowded ratlike scrambling of the cities, could be set down in this place, even for a brief space of time, then they might return to their lives cleansed and refreshed, their subsequent strivings might become less vicious, more attuned to the eternal groundswell of nature.
Suddenly he grunted, his reverie shattered by the burning needle sting in the soft of his neck below the ear, and he slapped at it with open palm. The small flying insect was stunned, its carapace too tough to be crushed, even by a blow that heavy. It fell spinning and buzzing into Mark’s lap, and he picked it up between thumb and forefinger, examining it curiously, for it was many years since last he had seen one.