Irene Leuchars carried her shoes in one hand and the feather boa hung over her other arm and trailed on the floor behind her. Her hair stood out in a soft pale halo around her head, and her eyes were underlined by dark blue smudges of sleeplessness, while the outline of her mouth was smudged and blurred, her lips puffed and inflamed.
‘God.’ she whispered, ‘I’m still tiddly,’ and she giggled, and lurched unsteadily to the roll of the ship. Then she pulled up the strap which had slipped from her shoulder.
Behind her in the long passageway, there was a clatter of china and she glanced back, startled. One of the white-jacketed stewards was pushing a trolley of cups and pots towards her. The morning ritual of tea and biscuits was beginning and she had not realized the hour.
Irene hurried away, turning the corner from the steward’s sly and knowing grin, and she reached the door of Storm Courtney’s cabin without another encounter.
She hammered on the door with the heel of one shoe, but it was a full five minutes before the door swung open and Storm looked out at her, a gown wrapped around her shoulders and her big dark eyes owlish from sleep.
‘Irene, are you crazy?’ she asked. ‘It’s still night!’ Then she saw Irene’s attire and smelled the rich perfume of her breath. ‘Where on earth have you been?’
Irene pushed the door open and almost tripped over the threshold.
‘You’re drunk!’ accused Storm resignedly, closing the door behind her.
‘No.’ Irene shook her head. ‘It isn’t liquor — it’s ecstasy.’
‘Where have you been?’ Storm asked again. ‘I thought you were in bed hours ago.’
‘I have flown to the moon,’ intoned Irene dramatically. ‘I have run barefooted through the stars, I have soared on eagles’ wings above the mountain peaks.’
Storm laughed, coming fully awake now, as beautiful even in déshabillé as Irene would never be, so graceful and lovely that Irene hated her again. She savoured the moment, drawing out the pleasure of anticipation.
‘Where have you been, you mad bad woman?’ Storm started to catch the spirit of the moment. ‘Tell all!’
‘Through the gates of paradise, to the land of never-never on the continent of always—’ Irene’s smile became sharp, spiteful and venomous, ‘in short, darling, Mark Anders has been bouncing me like a rubber ball!’
And the expression on Storm Courtney’s face gave her the most intense satisfaction she had known in her life.
‘On the third day of January, the Chamber of Mines deliberately tore up the Agreement that it had come to with your Union to maintain the status quo. It tore that agreement to a thousand pieces and flung them in the faces of the workers.’ Fergus MacDonald spoke with a controlled icy fury that carried to every corner of the great hall, and it stilled even the rowdies in the back seats who had brought their bottles in brown paper packets. Now they listened with intensity. Big Harry Fisher, sitting beside him on the dais, turned his head slowly to assess the man, peering at him under beetling eyebrows and with the bulldog folds of his face hanging mournfully. He marvelled again at how Fergus MacDonald changed when he stood to speak.
Usually he cut a nondescript figure with the small bulge of a paunch beginning to distort the spare frame, the cheap and ill-fitting suit shiny at the elbows and seat with wear, the collar of the frayed shirt darned, and grease spots on the drab necktie. His hair was thinning, starting up in wispy spikes around the neck, pushing back from the brow and with a pink bare patch in the crown. His face had that grey tone from the embedded filth of the machine shops, but when he stood under the red flag and the emblem of the Amalgamated Mineworkers Union on the raised dais facing the packed hall, he grew in stature, a physical phenomenon that was quite extraordinary. He seemed younger and there was a fierce and smouldering passion which stripped away his shoddy dress and armoured him with presence.
‘Brothers!’ He raised his voice now. ‘When the mines reopened after the Christmas recess, two thousand of our members were discharged, thrown out into the street, discarded like worn-out pairs of old boots—’
The hall hummed, the warning sound of a beehive on a hot summer’s day, but the stillness of thousands of bodies pressed closely together was more menacing than any movement.
‘Brothers!’ Fergus moved his hands in a slow hypnotic movement. ‘Brothers! Beginning at the end of this month, and for every month after that, another six hundred men will be,’ he paused again and then spat the official word at them, ‘retrenched.’
They seemed to reel with the word, the whole concourse stunned as though by a physical blow, and the silence drew out – until a voice at the back yelled wildly, ‘No, brothers. No!’
They roared then, a sound like the surf on a stormy day when it breaks upon a rocky shore.
Fergus let them roar, and he hooked his thumbs into his rumpled waistcoat and watched them, gloating in the feeling of exultation, the euphoria of power. He judged the strength of their reaction, and the moment it began to falter he raised both hands, and almost immediately the silence fell upon the hall again.
‘Brothers! Do you know that the wages of a black man are two shillings and two pence a day? Only a black man can live on that wage!’ He let it sink in a moment, but not too long before he went on, asking a reasonable question, ‘Who will take the place of two thousand of our brothers who are now out of work? Who will replace the six hundred that will join them at the end of this month, and the next - and the next? Who will take your job,’ he was picking out individuals, pointing at them with an accuser’s finger, ‘and yours, and yours? Who will take the food from your children’s mouths?’ He waited theatrically for an answer, cocking his head, smiling at them while his eyes smouldered.
‘Brothers! I tell you who it will be. Two and tuppenny black kaffirs — that’s who it will be!’
They came upon their feet, a bench here and there crashing over backwards and their voices were a blood-roar of anger, clenched fists thrust out in fury.
‘No, brothers. No!’ Their booted feet stamped in unison and they chanted, their fists punching into empty air.
Fergus MacDonald sat down abruptly and Harry Fisher congratulated him silently, squeezing his shoulder in a bear’s paw before lumbering to his feet.
‘Your executive has recommended that all members of our Union come out on general strike. I put it to you now, brothers, all those in favour—’ he bellowed, and his voice was drowned in a thousand others.
‘Out, brothers! We’re out! Out! Out!’
Fergus leaned forward in his seat and looked down the length of the trestle table.
Helena’s dark head was bowed over the minute book, but she sensed his gaze and looked up. Her expression glowed with a fanatic’s ecstasy, and there was open adoration in her eyes that he saw only at moments like this. Harry Fisher had told him once, ‘For all women, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. No matter how puny in body, no matter what he looks like – power makes a man irresistible.’
In the thunder of thousands of voices, the pounding feet and the heady roar of power, Fergus was on his feet again.
‘The mine-owner, the bosses have challenged us, they have scorned your executive, they have stated publicly that we are too faint-hearted to rally the workers and come out on general strike! Well, brothers, we are going to show them.’ The lion’s voice of the crowd rose again and he silenced it only after another minute. ‘First, we are going to drive on the scabs, there are going to be no strikebreakers.’ When the sound subsided he went on, ‘Slim Jannie Smuts has talked of force to beat a strike, he has an army, but we are going to have one also. I think the bosses have forgotten that we fought their bloody war for them in France and East Africa, at Tabora and Delville Wood.’ The names sobered them and they were listening again. ‘Last time we fought for them, but this time we are fighting for ourselves. Each one of you will report to his area commander – you will be formed into fighting commandos, each man will know his job, and each man will know what is at sta
ke. We will beat them, brothers, the bloody bosses and their greedy grasping minions. We will fight them and beat them!’
‘They are organized into military-style commandos,’ said the Prime Minister softly, breaking the crisp brown roll of bread with fingers that were surprisingly small, neat and capable as a woman’s. ‘Of course, we know that George Mason wanted to form labour commandos in 1914. It was the main reason I had him deported.’ The other guests at the luncheon table were silent. The deportation of Mason was not an episode that reflected credit on Jannie Smuts. ‘But this is a different animal we are dealing with now. Nearly all the younger members of the unions are trained veterans. Five hundred of them paraded outside the Trade Union Hall in Fordsburg last Saturday.’ He turned and smiled that impish, irresistible smile at his hostess. ‘My dear Ruth, you must forgive my bad manners. This talk detracts from the delicious meal you have provided.’
The table was set under the oak trees on lawns so vivid green that Ruth always thought of them as ‘English green’. The house itself had the solid imposing bulk of Georgian England, so different from the frivolous fairy castle at Emoyeni; the illusion of old England was spoiled only by the soaring cliffs of grey rock that rose as a backdrop to the scene. The sheer slopes of Table Mountain were softened by the pine trees that clung precariously for footholds on each ledge and in each tiny pocket of soil.
Ruth smiled at him. ‘In this house, General, you may do as you wish.’
‘Thank you, my dear.’ The smile flickered off his face and the merry twinkle of the pale blue eyes changed to the glint of swords, as he turned back to his listeners. ‘They are seeking confrontation, gentlemen, it’s a blatant test of our power and resolution.’
Ruth caught Mark’s eye at the foot of the table and he rose to refill the glasses with cold pale wine tinged with a touch of green, dry and crisp and refreshing, but as he moved down the board, pausing beside each guest — three Cabinet ministers, a visiting British Earl, the Secretary of the Chamber of Mines – he was listening avidly.
‘We can only hope you put it too highly, Prime Minister,’ Sean Courtney intervened gruffly. ‘They have only broomsticks with which to drill, and bicycles on which to ride into battle …’
And while they laughed, Mark paused behind Sean’s chair with the bottle forgotten in his hand. He was remembering the cellars below the Trade Union Hall in Fordsburg, the racks of modern rifles, the gleaming P.14 reserved for him and the sinister squatting Vickers machine-gun. When he returned to the present, the conversation had moved on.
Sean Courtney was assuring the company that militant action by the unions was unlikely, and that in the worst circumstances, the army was geared to immediate call-up.
Mark had a small office adjoining the General’s study. It had previously been a linen room, but was just large enough to accommodate a desk and several shelves of files. The General had ordered a large window knocked through one wall to give it air and light, and now, with his ankles crossed and propped on the desk-top, Mark was staring thoughtfully out of the window. The view across lawns and through oaks encompassed a sweep of Rhodes Avenue, named after that asthmatic old adventurer who had seized an empire in land and diamonds, and ended up Prime Minister of the first Cape Parliament, before suffocating from his weak lungs and heavy conscience. The Cape home of the Courtneys was named Somerset Lodge after Lord Charles, the nineteenth-century governor, and the great houses on the opposite side of Rhodes Avenue perpetuated the colonial tradition, Newlands House and Hiddingh House, gracious edifices in spacious grounds.
Looking out at them through the new window, Mark was comparing them with the miners’ cottages in Fordsburg Dip. He had not thought of Fergus and Helena in many months, but the conversation at lunch had brought them back forcibly, and he felt himself torn by sharply contradictory loyalties.
He had lived in both worlds now, and seen how each opposed the other. He was trying to think without emotion, but always a single image intruded, the cruel shape of weapons in orderly racks, deep in a dark cellar, and the slick smell of gun oil in his throat.
He lit another cigarette, delaying the decision. Through the solid teak door, the sound of voices from the General’s study was muted, the higher clearer tones of the Prime Minister, bird-like almost, set against the rumbling of Sean’s replies.
The Prime Minister had stayed on after the other luncheon guests had left, as he often did, but Mark wished that he would leave now, thus deferring the decision with which he was wrestling.
He had been trusted by a comrade, somebody who had shared mortal danger with him, and then had unstintingly shared the hospitality of his home, had trusted him like a brother, had not hesitated to give him access to the direst knowledge, had not hesitated to leave him alone with his wife. Mark had betrayed half of that trust – and he stirred restlessly in his seat as he remembered those wicked stolen days and nights with Helena. Now must he betray the rest of the trust that Fergus MacDonald had placed in him?
Once more the image of racked weapons passed before his eyes; they faded only slowly to be replaced with a vivid shocking picture of a face.
It was the face of a marble angel, smooth and white and strangely beautiful, with blue eyes in pale blue sockets, a burst of pale golden curls escaping from under the rim of the steel helmet on to the smooth pale forehead —
Mark dropped his feet from the desk with a crash, fighting away the memory of the young German sniper, forcing it from his mind, and coming to his feet abruptly.
He found that his hands were shaking and he crushed out the cigarette and turned to the door. His knock was over-loud and demanding, and the voice from beyond was gruff with irritation.
‘Come in.’ He stepped through. ‘What do you want, Mark, you know I don’t—’ Sean Courtney cut himself short and the tone of his voice changed to concern as he saw Mark’s face. ‘What is it, my boy?’
‘I have to tell you something, sir,’ he blurted.
They listened with complete attention as he described his involvement with the executive of the Communist Party, and then broke off to steel himself for the final betrayal.
‘These men were my friends, sir, they treated me as a comrade. You must understand why I am telling you this, please.’
‘Go on, Mark,’ Sean Courtney nodded, and the Prime Minister had drawn back in his chair – still and quiet and unobtrusive, sensing the struggle of conscience in which the young man was involved.
‘I came to believe that much of what they were striving for was good and just — opportunity and a share of life for every man, but I could not accept the methods they had chosen to bring these about.’
‘What do you mean, Mark?’
‘They are planning war, a class war, sir.’
‘You have proof of that?’ Sean’s voice did not rise, and he asked the question carefully.
‘Yes. I have.’ Mark drew a deep breath before he went on. ‘I have seen the rifles and machine guns they have ready for the day.’
The Prime Minister shifted in his chair and then was still again, but now he was leaning forward to listen.
‘Go on,’ Sean nodded, and Mark told them in detail, stating the unadorned facts, reporting exactly what he had seen and where, accurately estimating the numbers and types of every weapon, and finally ending, ‘MacDonald led me to believe that this was only one arsenal, and that there were others, many others, on the Witwatersrand.’
Nobody spoke for many seconds, and then the Prime Minister stood up and went to the telephone on Sean’s desk. He wound the crank handle, and the whirr-whirr was loud and obtrusive in the silent room.
‘This is the Prime Minister, General Smuts, speaking. I want a maximum priority connection with Commissioner Truter, the Chief of the South African Police in Johannesburg,’ he said, and then listened, his expression bleak and his eyes sparkling angrily. ‘Get me the Exchange Supervisor,’ he snapped and then turned to Sean, still holding the earpiece. ‘The line is down. Floods in the Karroo,’
he explained, ‘indefinite delay.’ Then he turned his attention back to the telephone and spoke quietly for many minutes with the Supervisor, before cradling the earpiece. ‘They will make the connection as soon as possible.’
He returned to his seat by the window and spoke across the room. ‘You have done the right thing, young man.’
‘I hope so,’ Mark answered quietly, and the doubts were obvious, shadows in his eyes and the strains of misery in his voice.
‘I’m proud of you, Mark,’ Sean Courtney agreed. ‘Once again you have done your duty.’
‘Will you excuse me now, please gentlemen?’ Mark asked, and without waiting for a reply, crossed to the door of his own office.
The two men stared at the closed teak door long after it had closed, and it was the Prime Minister who spoke first.
‘A remarkable young man,’ he mused aloud. ‘Compassion and a sense of duty.’
‘He has qualities that could carry him to great heights, qualities for which one day we may be grateful,’ Sean nodded. ‘I sensed them at our first meeting, so strongly that I sought him out.’
‘We will need him – and others like him in the years ahead, old Sean,’ Jannie Smuts stated and then switched his attention. ‘Truter will have a search warrant issued immediately, and with God’s help we will crush the head of the snake before it has a chance to strike. We know about this man MacDonald, and of course we have been watching Fisher for years.’
Mark had walked for hours, escaping from the tiny box of his office. He had been driven by his conscience and his fears, striding out under the oaks, following narrow lanes, crossing the little stone bridge over the Liesbeeck stream, torturing himself with thoughts of Judas.
‘They hang traitors in Pretoria,’ he thought suddenly, and he imagined Fergus MacDonald standing on the trap in the barn-like room while the hangman pinioned his arms and ankles. He shuddered miserably and stopped walking, with his hands thrust deeply into his pockets and shoulders hunched, and he looked up to find himself standing outside the Post Office.