A Sparrow Falls

  ‘Here?’ Mark asked. There was short rank grass and no sign of a cairn nor a mound. ‘I see nothing.’

  ‘They collected rocks from the cliff there and placed them in the hole on top of the body, so that the hyena would not dig it out. Then they covered the rocks with earth, and they smoothed it with a tree branch.’

  Mark went down on one knee and inspected the ground.

  ‘Yes,’ he exclaimed. There was a very shallow depression in the earth, as though it had subsided a little over an excavation.

  Mark drew his sheath-knife and blazed four of the nearest trees, making it easier to return to this place, and he built a small pyramid of rocks on the depressed saucer of earth.

  When he had finished, he asked Pungushe, ‘Why did you not tell anybody of this before? Why did you not go to the police in Ladyburg?’

  ‘Jamela, the madness of white men does not concern me. Also it is a very long journey to Ladyburg, to the policeman who would say, ‘Ho, kaffir, and what were you doing in the Bubezi Valley to see such strange events?’ Pungushe shook his head. ‘No, Jamela, sometimes it better for a man to be blind and deaf.’

  ‘Tell me truly, Pungushe. If you saw these men again, would you remember them?’

  ‘All white men have faces like boiled yams, red, lumpy and without shape.’ Then Pungushe remembered his manners. ‘Except you, Jamela, who are not so ugly as all that.’

  ‘Thank you, Pungushe. So you would not know them again?’

  ‘The old bald one and the young loud one I might know.’ Pungushe furrowed his brow in thought.

  ‘And the silent one?’ Mark asked.

  ‘Ho.’ Pungushe’s brow cleared. ‘Does one forget what a leopard looks like? Does one forget the killer of men? The silent one I would remember at any time and in any place.’

  ‘Good!’ Mark nodded. ‘Go back home now, Pungushe.’

  He waited until the big Zulu was out of sight among the trees, then Mark went down on his knees and removed his hat.

  ‘Well, Pops,’ he said, ‘I’m not very good at this. But I know you’d have liked to have the words said.’ His voice was so hoarse and low that he had to clear his throat loudly before he went on.

  The house on Lion Kop was shuttered, and the furniture all under white dust sheets, but the head servant met Mark in the kitchen yard.

  ‘Nkosi has gone to Tekweni. He left two weeks ago.’

  He gave Mark a breakfast of grilled bacon and fried eggs. Then Mark went out and mounted his motorcycle again. It was a long hard run down to the coast, and Mark had plenty of time to think as the dusty miles spun away under the wheels of the Ariel Square Four.

  He had left Chaka’s Gate within hours of finding the old man’s grave, going instinctively to one man for advice and guidance.

  He had wanted Marion to come with him, at least as far as Ladyburg where she could have stayed with her sister. However, Marion had refused to leave her home or her garden, and Mark had felt secure in the knowledge that Pungushe would be sleeping in the toolshed behind the stables to guard the homestead in Mark’s absence.

  Mark had waded the river and trudged up the slope below to the beginning of the track where he kept the motorcycle in its thatched shelter.

  It had been a slow, bumpy journey in the dark, and he had reached Lion Kop in the dawn to find Sean Courtney had moved his household to Durban.

  Mark rode through the gates of Emoyeni in the late afternoon, and it was like coming home again.

  Ruth Courtney was in the rose garden, but she dropped the basket of cut flowers and lifted her skirts to her knees as she ran to meet him, the wide-brimmed straw hat flying from her head and hanging by its ribbon around her throat and her delighted spontaneous laughter ringing like a young girl’s.

  ‘Oh Mark – we’ve missed you so.’ She took him in a motherly embrace, kissing both his cheeks. ‘How brown and hard you look, and you’ve filled out beautifully.’ She held him at arm’s length and felt his biceps in mock admiration before embracing him again. ‘The General will be delighted to see you.’ She took Mark’s arm and led him towards the house. ‘He hasn’t been well, Mark, but seeing you again will be a tonic to him.’

  Mark stopped involuntarily in the doorway and felt the shock dry the saliva under his tongue.

  General Sean Courtney was an old man. He sat at the bay windows of the bedroom suite. He wore a plaid dressing-gown and a mohair rug was tucked around his legs. On the table beside him was a pile of files and reports, Parliamentary White Papers and a sheaf of letters, all the documentation of his life that Mark remembered so well, but the General had fallen asleep, and the metal-rimmed spectacles had slid down on to the tip of his nose. He snored softly, his lips fluttering at each breath. His face seemed to have wasted so that the bones of cheek and brow stood out gauntly. His eyes receded into deep plum purple cavities, and his skin had a greyish lifeless tinge to it.

  But the truly shocking thing was the colour of his beard and the once thick bush of his hair. On Sean Courtney the late snows were falling. His beard had turned into a silver cascade, and his hair was as white and as thin as the fine sun-bleached grasses of the Kalahari desert.

  Ruth crossed to his chair and lifted the spectacles off his nose, then gently, with a loving wife’s concern, she touched his shoulder.

  ‘Sean, darling. There is somebody here to see you.’

  He woke the way an old man wakes, blinking and mumbling, with small inconclusive movements of his hands. Then he saw Mark and his expression firmed, suddenly there was a little of the old sparkle in the dark eyes and the warmth in his smile.

  ‘My boy!’ he said, lifting his hands, and Mark stepped forward quite naturally. Then for the first time they embraced like father and son, and afterwards Sean beamed at him fondly.

  ‘I was beginning to believe we had lost you for ever to the ways of the wild.’ Then he looked up at Ruth beside his chair. ‘In celebration I think we can advance the hour a little, my dear. Won’t you have Joseph bring up the tray?’

  ‘Sean, you know what the doctor said yesterday.’ But Sean snorted with disgust.

  ‘For fifty years, man and boy, my stomach has got used to its evening dash of John Haig pinch bottle. Lack of it will kill me more swiftly and surely than Doctor Henderson and all his pills and potions and blatant quackeries.’ He placed one arm about her waist and squeezed her winningly. ‘There’s a bonnie girl!’

  When Ruth had gone, smiling and shaking her head disapprovingly, Sean waved Mark to the chair apposite him.

  ‘What does the doctor say is wrong with you, sir?’

  ‘Doctor!’ Sean blew through his lips. ‘The older I get, the less faith I have in the whole sorry bunch.’ He reached for the cigar box. ‘They even wanted me to stop these. What on earth is the use of living, if you have to give up all the processes of life—I ask you.’ He lit the cigar with a flourish and drew on it with relish.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me, son. Too many years of running hard, of fighting and riding and working. That’s all it is. Now I’m having a nice little rest, and in a week or so I’ll be chipper and fly as I ever was.’

  Ruth brought the silver tray and they sat until it was dark, talking and laughing. Mark told them of the life at Chaka’s Gate, about each little triumph, describing the cottage and the work done on the roads; he told them of the buffalo and the lioness and the cubs, and Sean told him of the progress made by their Wildlife Society.

  ‘It’s disappointing, Mark, nothing like I had hoped for. It’s extraordinary just how little people care about things that don’t affect their daily lives directly.’

  ‘I never expected instant success. How can people care about something they have never seen? Once we have made the wilderness accessible, once people can have the experience, like seeing these cubs, it will begin then.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sean agreed thoughtfully. ‘That’s what the true object of the Society is. To educate them.’

  They talked on while darkn
ess fell and Ruth closed the shutters and drew the curtains. Mark waited for an opportunity to speak of the true reason for his coming to Emoyeni, but he was uncertain of how it might affect a man who was already sick.

  At last he could wait no longer. He drew a deep breath, hoped for grace, and told it quickly and without trimmings, repeating Pungushe’s story exactly and describing what he had seen himself.

  When he finished, Sean was silent for a long time, staring into his glass. At last he roused himself and began asking questions, shrewd cutting questions that showed his mind was as quick and crisp as it had been before.

  ‘Have you opened the graver and Mark shook his head.

  ‘Good,’ said Sean and went on. ‘This Zulu, Pungushe, was the only witness. How reliable is he?’

  They discussed it for another half hour, before Sean asked the one question he had obviously been avoiding.

  ‘You think Dirk Courtney is responsible for this?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mark nodded.

  ‘What proof is there?’

  ‘He is the only one who could have profited by my grandfather’s murder, and the style is his.’

  ‘I asked what proof there is, Mark.’

  ‘There is none,’ he admitted, and Sean was silent again while he weighed it all.

  ‘Mark, I understand just how you feel — and I think you know how I feel. However, there is nothing we can do now that will have any effect, beyond alerting the murderer, whoever he is.’ He leaned forward in his chair and stretched out a hand to grip Mark’s forearm in a gesture of comfort. ‘All we have now is the unsupported testimony of a Zulu poacher who speaks no English. A good lawyer would eat him without spitting out the bones, and Dirk Courtney would have the best lawyer, even if we could trace this mysterious “Silent One” to him and get him into court. We need more than this, Mark.’

  ‘I know,’ Mark nodded. ‘But I thought we might be able to trace the Greyling father and son. They went to Rhodesia, I believe. The foreman at Ladyburg railway station told me that.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll get somebody on to that. My lawyers will know a good investigator.’ He made a note on the pad at his side. ‘But in the meantime, we can only wait.’

  They talked on, but it was clear that the discussion had tired Sean Courtney, and grey and blue shadows etched the lines and wrinkles on his face. He settled down a little deeper in his chair, his beard lowered on to his chest, and suddenly he had fallen asleep again. He sagged slowly sideways, the crystal glass fell from his hand to the carpet with a soft thud and splattered a few drops of whisky, and he snored a soft single snort.

  Ruth picked up the glass, arranged the rug carefully around his shoulders and signalled Mark to follow her.

  In the passage she chatted brightly. ‘I have told Joseph to make up your bed in the blue room, and there is a good hot bath waiting. There will be only the two of us for dinner, Mark. The General will have a tray in his room.’

  They had reached the door of the library and Mark could be silent no longer. He caught Ruth’s arm.

  ‘Mrs Courtney,’ he pleaded. ‘What is it? What is wrong with him?’

  The bright smile faded slowly, and she swayed slightly on her feet. Now for the first time he noticed how the few strands of white had turned to deep iron grey wings at her temples. He saw also the little lines and creases around her eyes, and the deeper furrows of worry across her brow.

  ‘His heart is broken,’ she said simply, and then she was weeping. No hysterical sobs or wild cries of grief, but a slow deep welling up of tears that was more harrowing, more poignant than any theatrical display.

  ‘They have broken his heart,’ she repeated, and swayed again, so that Mark caught and steadied her.

  She clung to him, her face pressed to his shoulder.

  ‘First the estrangement from Dirk and then Michael’s death,’ she whispered. ‘He never let it show, but they destroyed some part of him. Now the whole world has turned against him. The people to whom he has devoted his life in peace and war. The newspapers call him the Butcher of Fordsburg, Dirk Courtney has whipped them upon him like a pack of wild dogs.’

  He led her into the library and made her sit on the low buttoned sofa while he knelt beside her and found a crumpled handkerchief in his jacket pocket.

  ‘On top of it all, there is Storm. The way she ran off and married that man. He was a horrible man, Mark. He even came here asking for money, and there was a terrible scene. That’s when Sean had his first attack, that night. Then finally there was further shame, further heartbreak when Storm was divorced. It was all too much, even for a man like Sean.’

  Mark stared at her. ‘Storm is divorced?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Yes,’ Ruth nodded, and then her expression lightened. ‘Oh Mark, I know you and Storm were becoming such good friends. I am sure she is fond of you. Can’t you go to her? It might be the cure for which we all pray.’

  Umhlanga Rocks was one of those little seaside villages that were scattered along the sandy coast line on each side of the main port of Durban. Mark crossed the low bridge over the Umgeni River, and headed north.

  The road cut through the thick jungly coastal bush, dense as an equatorial forest, and hung with ropes of lianas from which the little blue vervet monkeys swung and chattered.

  The road ran parallel with the white beaches, but at the twelfth milestone Mark reached the turn-off and went directly down to the coast.

  The village was clustered around the iron-roofed Oyster Box Hotel where Mark and Dicky Lancome had danced and dined with Marion and that other nameless girl so long ago.

  The only other buildings were twenty or thirty cottages set in large gardens, over-run by the rampant jungle, and overlooking the sea with its rowdy frothing surf and rocky points jutting out from the smooth white beaches.

  Ruth had given him accurate directions and Mark parked the motorcycle on the narrow dusty lane and followed the pathway that wound without apparent direction through a wild garden of purple bougainvillaea and brilliant poinsettia.

  The cottage was small, and the bougainvillaea had climbed up the pillars of the veranda and spread in brilliant, almost blinding display across the thatched roof.

  Mark knew at once that he had the right place, for Storm’s Cadillac was parked in the open under the trees. It looked neglected and in careless disrepair. The tread was worn from the tyres, there was a long deep scratch down one side. A side window was cracked, and the paintwork was dull with dust and splattered with the dung of the fruit bats hanging in the tree above.

  Mark stopped and stared at the Cadillac for a full minute. The Storm he had known would have stamped her foot and screamed for her father if anybody had tried to make her ride in that.

  Mark climbed the veranda steps, and paused to look about him. It was a peaceful and lovely spot, such as an artist might choose, but in its remoteness and its neglected and untrimmed profusion hardly suitable for one of the elegant young ornaments of society.

  Mark knocked on the front door, and heard somebody moving about inside for some minutes before the door was opened.

  Storm was more beautiful by far than he had remembered. Her hair was long and bleached at the ends by salt water and sun. Her feet were bare, her arms and legs were tanned and slim and supple as ever, but it was her face that had changed.

  Although she wore no cosmetics, the skin had the shine of vibrant youth like the lustre inside a sea shell, and her eyes were clear and bright with health, yet there were new depths to them, the petulant set of her mouth had softened, her arrogance had become dignity.

  In that moment as they stared at each other he knew that she had indeed grown from girl to woman in the time since he had last seen her. And he sensed that the process had been agonizing, but that from it all was emerging a new value, a new strength, and the love which had been in him all this time spread out to fill his soul.

  ‘Storm,’ he said, and her eyes opened wide as she stared at him.

  ‘You!’ Her voice
was a little cry of pain, and she tried to drag the door closed.

  Mark jumped forward and held it.

  ‘Storm, I must speak with you.’

  She tugged desperately at the door handle.

  ‘Go away, Mark. Please go away.’ All the new dignity and poise seemed to crumble and she looked at him with the wide frightened eyes of a child waking from nightmare. At last she knew that she could not force the door against his strength, and she turned away and walked slowly back into the house.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come,’ she said miserably, and the child seemed to sense the changed air. It squalled.

  ‘Oh hush, baby,’ Storm called softly, but her voice goaded it into a fresh outburst, and she crossed the room on bare feet with the long veil of hair hanging down her back.

  The room was starkly furnished, the cement floor bare and cool, no rugs to soften them, but along the walls were stacked her canvases, many of them blank, but others half-finished, or completed, and the familiar evocative smell of turpentine was heavy and pungent.

  The child lay belly down on a kaross of monkey skins laid out on the cement floor. Legs and arms were spread in that froglike baby attitude, and except for a towelling napkin around the hips, it was naked and sun-tanned. The head was thrown back angrily, and the face flushed with the force of its yells.

  Mark stepped into the room, and stared with sickly fascination at the child. He knew nothing of babies, but he could see that this was a sturdy and aggressively healthy small animal. The limbs were strong, kicking and working with a violent swimming motion, and the back was broad and robust.

  ‘Hush now, darling,’ cooed Storm, she knelt beside him, and lifted him under the armpits. The napkin slid down to the child’s knees and there was no doubting that he was a boy. His tiny penis stuck out at half mast, like a white finger with its little floppy chefs cap of loose wrinkled skin.

  Mark found himself hating this other man’s child, with a sudden frightening hatred. Yet he went forward involuntarily to where Storm knelt with the baby in her lap.