A Sparrow Falls
He said, ‘Ha!’ but not loudly, and touched Saladin with his heels. The big ugly roan stretched out his neck and extended, with Derek moving now to help him push.
They ran past the Argentinian as though he had indeed turned to stone, they left him floundering in their wake and picked up the ball beyond him. Tap! Tap! And tap again, he ran it down through the exact centre of the stubby goal-posts and then turned and trotted back to the pony lines.
Chuckling so that his belly bounced, Derek swung one leg forward over Saladin’s neck and slid down to the ground, letting him go free to the grooms.
‘I’ll take Satan for the next chukka,’ he shouted in that beery throaty voice.
Storm Courtney saw him coming, and knew what was going to happen. She tried to rise, but she was slow and clumsy, the child in her womb anchored her like a stone.
‘One for the poor, what!’ shouted Derek, and caught her with one long, ginger-fuzzed, boiled red arm.
The sweat on his face was icy cold and smeared down her own cheek, and he smelled of sour beer and horse. He kissed her with an open mouth, in front of Irene Leuchars and the four other girls, and their husbands, and all the grinning grooms, and the members on the veranda.
She thought desperately that she was going to be ill. The acid vomit rose into her throat, and she thought she was going to throw up in front of them all.
‘Derek, my condition!’ she whispered desperately, but he held her under his one arm as he took the bottle of beer that one of the white-jacketed club servants brought on a silver tray, and, scorning the glass, he drank straight from the bottle.
She struggled to be free, but he held her easily with immense and careless strength — and he belched, a ripping explosion of gas. ‘One for the poor,’ he shouted again, and they all laughed — like courtiers at the king’s jest. Good old Derek. Law unto himself, old Derek.
He dropped the empty bottle. ‘Keep it until I get back, wifey!’ he laughed, and took one of her swollen breasts in his huge raw-knuckled, red-boiled hand and squeezed it painfully. She felt cold and trembly and weak with humiliation and hatred.
She had missed a month many times before, so Storm did not begin to worry until the second blank came up on her pocket diary. She had been about to tell Mark then, but that had been the time they had parted. Still, she had expected it all to resolve itself, but as the weeks passed, the enormity of it all began to reach her in her gold and ivory castle. This sort of thing happened to other girls, common working girls, ordinary girls – it did not happen to Storm Courtney. There were special rules for young ladies like Storm.
When it was certain, beyond all doubt, the first person she thought of was Mark Anders. As the panic caught at her heart with fiery little barbs, she wanted to rush to him and throw her arms about his neck. Then that stubborn and completely uncontrollable pride of the Courtneys smothered the impulse. He must come to her. She had decided, he must come on her terms – and she could not bring herself to change the rules she had laid down. Though still, even in her distress, her chest felt tight and her legs shaky and weak, whenever she thought of Mark.
She had wept, silently in the night, when she had first left Mark – and now she wept again. She longed for him even more now, with his child growing in the secret depths of her body. But that perverse and distorted pride would not release its bulldog hold on her, would not allow her even to let him know of her predicament.
‘Don’t challenge me, Mark Anders,’ she had warned him, and he had done it. She hated him, and loved him for that. But now she could not bend.
The next person she thought of was her mother. She and Ruth Courtney had always been close, she had always been able to rely on her mother’s loyalty and shrewdly practical hard sense. Then she was stopped dead by the knowledge that if Ruth were told, then her father would know within hours. Ruth Courtney kept nothing from Sean, or he from her.
Storm’s soul quailed at the thought of what would happen once her father knew that she carried a bastard. The immense indulgent love he had for her would make his anger and retribution more terrible.
She knew also Mark would be destroyed by it. Her father was too strong, too persistent and single-minded for her to believe she would be able to keep Mark’s name from him. He would squeeze it out of her.
She knew of her father’s affection for Mark Anders, it had been apparent for anyone to see, but that affection would not have been sufficient to save either of them.
Sean Courtney’s attitude to his daughter was bound by iron laws of conduct, the old-fashioned view of the father that left no latitude for manoeuvre. Mark Anders had contravened those iron laws and Sean would destroy him, despite the fact he had come to love him, and in doing so, he would destroy a part of himself. He would reject and drive out his own daughter, even though it left him ruined and broken with grief.
So, for her father’s sake and for Mark Anders’ sake, she could not go for comfort and help to her mother.
She went instead to Irene Leuchars, who listened to Storm’s hesitant explanations with rising glee and anticipation.
‘But you silly darling, didn’t you take precautions?’
Storm shook her head glumly, not quite certain what Irene meant by precautions, but certain only that she hadn’t taken them.
‘Who was it, darling?’ was the next question, and Storm shook her head again, this time fiercely.
‘Oh dear,’ Irene rolled her eyes. ‘That many candidates for the daddy? You are a dark horse, Storm darling.’
‘Can’t one — well, can’t one actually do something?’ Storm asked miserably.
‘You mean an abortion, darling?’ Irene asked brutally, and smiled a sly spiteful smile when Storm nodded.
He was a tall pale man, very grey and stooped, with a reedy voice and hands so white as to be almost transparent. Storm could see the blue veins and the fragile ivory bones through the skin. She tried not to think of those pale transparent hands as they pried and probed, but they were cold and cruelly painful.
Afterwards, he had washed those pale hands at the kitchen sink of his small grey apartment with such exaggerated care that Storm had felt her pain and embarrassment enhanced by a sense of affront. The cleansing seemed to be a personal insult.
‘I imagine you indulge in a great deal of physical activity - horse-riding, tennis?’ he asked primly, and when Storm nodded he made a little sucking and glucking sound of disapproval. ‘The female body was not designed for such endeavour. You are very narrow, and your musculature is highly developed. Furthermore, you are at least ten weeks pregnant.’ At last he had finished washing, and now he began to dry his hands on a threadbare, but clinically white towel.
‘Can you help me?’ Storm demanded irritably, and he shook his pale grey head slowly from side to side.
‘If you had come a little earlier—’ and he spread the white transparent hands in a helpless gesture.
They had drawn up a list of names, she and Irene, and each of the men on the list had two things in common. They were in love, or had professed to be in love with Storm, and they were all men of fortune.
There were six names on the list, and Storm had written cards to two of them and received vague replies, polite good wishes, and no definite suggestion for a meeting.
The third man on the list she had contrived to meet at the Umgeni Country Club. She could still wear tennis clothes, and the pregnancy had given her skin a new bloom and lustre, her breasts a fuller ripeness.
She had chatted lightly, flirtatiously, with him, confident and poised, giving him encouragement he had never received from her before. She had not noticed the sly, gloating look in his eyes, until he leaned close to her and asked confidentially, ‘Should you be playing tennis – now? ’
She had only been able to keep herself from breaking down until she reached the Cadillac parked in the lot behind the courts. She was weeping when she drove out through the gates, and she had to park in the dunes above the ocean.
After the
first storm of humiliation had passed, she could think clearly.
It had been Irene Leuchars, of course. She must have been blind and stupid not to realize it sooner. Everybody, every single person, would know by now, Irene would have seen to that.
Loneliness and desolation overwhelmed her.
Derek Hunt had not been on the list of six, not because he was not rich, not because he had never shown interest in Storm.
Derek Hunt had shown interest in most pretty girls. He had even married two of them, and both of them had divorced him in separate blazes of notoriety, not before they had, between them, presented him with seven offspring.
Derek Hunt’s reputation was every bit as vast and flamboyant as his fortune.
‘Look, old girl,’ he had told Storm reasonably. ‘You and I have both got a problem. I want you, have always wanted you. Can’t sleep at night, strewth!’ and his ginger whiskers twitched lasciviously. ‘And you need me. The word’s out about you, old girl. Mark of the beast, condemnation of society, and all that rot, I’m afraid.
‘Your loss, my gain. I’ve never given a stuff for the condemnation of society. I’ve got seven little bastards already. Another one won’t make any difference. What about it, then? One for the poor, what?’
They had driven up to Swaziland, and Derek had been able to get a special licence, lying about her age.
There had been nobody she knew at the ceremony, only five of Derek’s cronies — and she had not told her father, nor her mother, nor Mark Anders.
She heard him coming home, like a Le Mans Grand Prix winner, a long cortege of motor cars roaring up the driveway, then the squeal of brakes, the cannonade of slamming doors, the loud comradely shouts and the snatches of wild song.
Derek’s voice, louder and hoarser than the rest. ‘Car-amba, me hearties! Whipped your pants off on the field, going to drink you blind now. This way, the pride of the Argentine—’ the stamping and shouting, as they trooped up the front staircase.
Storm lay flat on her back and stared at the plaster cupids on the ceiling. She wanted to run, this senseless panicky urge to get up and run. But there was no place to run to.
She had spoken to her mother three times since the wedding, and each time had been agony for both of them.
‘If only you had told us. Daddy might have been able to understand, to forgive—’
‘Oh darling, if you only knew the plans he used to make for your wedding. He was so proud of you – and then not to be at your wedding. Not even invited—’
‘Give him time, please, Storm. I am trying for you. Believe me darling, I think it might have been better, if it was anybody in the world but Derek Hunt. You know what Daddy thinks of him.’
There was nowhere to run, and she lay quietly, dreading, until at last the heavy unsteady boots came clumping up the staircase, and the door was thrown open.
He had not changed, and he still wore riding-boots. The backside of his breeches was brown with dubbin from the saddle, and the crotch drooped almost to his knees, like a baby’s soiled napkin; the sweat had dried in salty white circles on the cotton singlet.
‘Wake up, old girl. Time for every good man and true to perform his duty.’ He let his clothing lie where it fell.
His bulging belly was fish white, and fuzzed with ginger curls. The heavy shoulders were pitted and scarred purple with the old cicatrices of myriad carbuncles and small boils, and he was massively virile, thick and hard and callous as the branch of a pine tree.
‘One for the poor, what?’ he chuckled hoarsely, as he came to the bed.
Suddenly and clearly, she had an image of Mark Anders’ slim and graceful body, with the clean shape of young muscle, as he sat in the dappled sunlight of the glade.
She remembered with a terrible pang of loss the lovely head with the fine strong lines of mouth and brow, and the serene poet’s eyes.
As the bed dipped beneath the solid weight of her husband, she wanted to scream with despair and the knowledge of coming pain.
For breakfast, Derek Hunt liked a little Black Velvet, mixing the Guinness stout and champagne in a special crystal punch bowl. He always used a Bollinger Vintage 1911 and drank it out of a pewter tankard.
He believed in a substantial breakfast, and this morning it was scrambled eggs, Scotch kippers, devilled kidneys, mushrooms and a large well-done fillet steak – all of it on the same plate.
Although his eyes were watery and pink-rimmed with the previous night’s revelry, and his face blazed crimson as the rising sun, he was cheerful and loudly friendly, guffawing at his own jokes, and leaning across the table to prod her with a thick red thumb like a boiled langouste to emphasize a point.
She waited until he had picked up the bowl and tilted the last of the Black Velvet into his tankard, and then she said quietly, ‘Derek, I want a divorce.’
The grin did not leave his face, and he watched the last drops fall into the tankard.
‘Damn stuff evaporates – or the dish has got a hole in it,’ he wheezed, and then chuckled merrily. ‘Get it? A hole in it! Good, what?’
‘Did you hear what I said? Aren’t you going to answer?’
‘Needs no answer, old girl. Bargain is a bargain, you’ve got a name for your bastard – I’ve still got my share coming.’
‘You’ve had that, as many times as you could wish,’ Storm answered quietly, with a whole world of resignation in her voice. ‘Won’t you let me go now?’
‘Good God!’ Derek stared at her over the rim of his tankard, his moustache bristling and the pink eyes wide with genuine amazement. ‘You don’t think I was really interested in the crumpet, do you? Can get that anywhere, all of it looks the same in the dark.’ He snorted with real laughter now. ‘Good God, old girl — you didn’t really think I fancied your lily-white titties that much?’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Ten million good reasons, old girl.’ He gulped a mouthful of scrambled eggs and kidney, ‘and every single one of them in General Sean Courtney’s bank account.’
She stared at him. ‘Daddy’s money?’
‘Right first time,’ he grinned. ‘Up you go to the head of the class.’
‘But — but —’ she made fluttery little gestures of incomprehension with both hands. ‘I don’t understand. You are so rich yourself.’
‘Was, old girl, used to be — past tense.’ And he let out another delighted guffaw. ‘Two loving wives, two unsympathetic divorce judges, seven brats, forty polo ponies, friends with big right hands, rocks that shouldn’t have been where the road was going, a mine with no diamonds, a building that fell down, a dam that burst, a reef that pinched out, cattle that got sick and myopic lawyers who don’t read the small print, that’s the way the money goes, pop goes the weasel!’
‘I don’t believe it.’ She was aghast.
‘Would never joke about that,’ he grinned. ‘Never joke about money, one of my principles. Probably my only principle.’ And he prodded her. ‘My only principle — get it? Skunked, absolutely flatters, I assure you. Daddy is the last resort, old girl — you’ll have to speak to him, I’m afraid. Last resort, what? One for the poor, don’t you know?’
There was no answer to the front door and Mark almost turned away and went back into the village, feeling a touch of relief and a lightening of heart that he recognized as cowardice. So instead, he jumped down off the veranda and went around the side of the house.
The stiff collar and tie chafed his throat and the jacket felt unnatural and constricting, so that he shrugged his shoulders and ran a finger around inside his collar as he came into the kitchen yard of the cottage. It was five months since last he had worn clothes or trodden on a paved sidewalk – even the sound of women’s voices was unfamiliar. He paused and listened to them.
Marion Littlejohn was in the kitchen with her sister, and their merry prattle had a lilt and cadence to which he listened with new ears and fresh pleasure.
The chatter ceased abruptly at his knock, and Marion came to the d
oor.
She wore a gaily striped apron, and her bare arms were floury to the elbows. She had her hair up in a ribbon but tendrils of it had come down in little wisps on to her neck and forehead.
The kitchen was filled with the smell of baking bread, and her cheeks were rosy from the heat of the oven.
‘Mark,’ she said calmly. ‘How nice,’ and tried to push the curl of hair off her forehead, leaving a smudge of white flour on the bridge of her nose. It was a strangely appealing gesture, and Mark felt his heart swell.
‘Come in.’ She stood aside, and held the door open for him.
Her sister greeted Mark frostily, much more aware of the jilting than Marion herself.
‘Doesn’t he look well?’ Marion asked, and they both looked Mark over carefully, as he stood in the centre of the kitchen floor.
‘He’s too thin,’ her sister judged him waspishly, and began untying her apron-strings.
‘Perhaps,’ Marion agreed comfortably, ‘he just needs the proper food.’ And she smiled and nodded as she saw how brown and lean he was, but she recognized also, with eyes as fond as a mother’s, the growing weight of maturity in his features. She saw also the sorrow and the loneliness, and she wanted to take him in her arms and hold his head against her bosom.
‘There is some lovely butter-milk,’ she said instead. ‘Sit down, here where I can see you.’
While she poured from the jug, her sister hung the apron behind the door and without looking at Mark said primly, ‘We need more eggs. I’ll go into the village.’
When they were alone, Marion picked up the roller, and stood over the table, leaning and dipping as the pastry spread and rolled out paper thin.
‘Tell me what you have been doing,’ she invited, and he began, hesitantly at first, but with blossoming sureness and enthusiasm, to tell her about Chaka’s Gate, about the work and the life he had found there.
‘That’s nice.’ She punctuated his glowing account every few minutes, her mind running busily ahead, already making lists and planning supplies, adapting pragmatically to the contingencies of a life lived far from the comforts of civilization, where even the small comforts become luxuries - a glass of fresh milk, a light in the night – all of it has to be planned for and carefully arranged.