‘Party seems to be going with a bang,’ he heard the fat man tell Major Bloxham from the terrace where the two men were urinating intermittently onto a bed of begonias. Els took the hint and stubbed his cigarette out but the remark had given him a new idea. He crept out of the harness room and presently was carrying buckets of kerosene from the fuel store across the yard and pouring them into the Colonel’s wine cellar where they splashed unnoticed over the Australian burgundy. To add to the inflammatory mixture Els then fetched several bundles of gelignite and tossed them into the cellar. Finally, to prevent anyone leaving the house without giving some indication where they had gone, he poured a solution of aniseed on the doormats before climbing into the van and driving down to the main gate to wait for the police convoy. When there was no sign of it after ten minutes, Els decided to go back and see how the party was getting on.
‘Got to kill time,’ he muttered as he strolled up through the orchard. Ahead of him White Ladies, brilliantly illuminated for the occasion, exuded an atmosphere of discreet abandon. The Tango had been replaced by the Black Bottom and the Colonel was sitting this one out with La Marquise while Major Bloxham and the fat man were debating what to put into a cocktail called a Monkey Gland. With a fine disregard for the Colonel’s herbaceous border Els groped his way round the house and found a window which gave him an excellent view of the proceedings and he was studying An English Rose with an appreciative eye when La Marquise looked up and spotted him.
*
In the second armoured car Kommandant van Heerden was having second thoughts about giving Els three hundred pounds of gelignite to plant. He was the only person to know the layout and besides I’d have heard it if it had gone off, he thought and consoled himself with the realization that it might not be such a bad thing if Els did bungle the part he had been given to play. No arrests, no trouble with confessions and no Els, and once again wondered if he had been wise to listen to Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon. All in all, he decided, he had very little choice in the matter. If she was foolish enough to let her husband know that he had been cuckolded and the Colonel threatened to shoot a member of the South African Police and a senior member at that, he had only himself to blame for what followed. The Kommandant couldn’t remember if Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon had actually said that her husband had threatened to shoot him but in any case the suspicion that he might was enough. More to the point was the appeal the Colonel would make to the Bureau of State Security. If there was one sort of suspect BOSS really liked after Jewish millionaires whose parents had emigrated from Petrograd, it was Englishmen of the old school with links with the Anglican Church. The Colonel’s outspoken contempt for Afrikaners would silence any suspicion that he might be entirely innocent while his wartime experience in the underground and his training in explosives made him precisely the sort of man BOSS had been looking for over the years. The Kommandant remembered the Union Jack flying in front of White Ladies. In the eyes of BOSS that alone would damn the Colonel and his Club as traitors.
Finally, to salve what little remained of his conscience, the Kommandant recalled the fate of his grandfather who had been shot after the Battle of Paardeburg by the British.
Tit for tat, he thought and ordered the driver to stop at the police station in Weezen. There he insisted on seeing the Sergeant in charge.
‘Colonel Heathcote-Kilkoon a Communist?’ asked the Sergeant who finally made his appearance in a pair of pyjamas. ‘There must be some mistake.’
‘Our information is that he’s a saboteur trained by British intelligence,’ said the Kommandant. ‘Have you checked his wartime career in your security reports?’
‘What sec …’ the Sergeant began before realizing his mistake. ‘No.’
‘I always keep a file copy in case Security HQ lose the one I send them,’ said the Kommandant. ‘Amazing how many times they have mislaid things I’ve sent them.’ He looked round the police station approvingly. ‘Like the way things are done here, Sergeant. About time you had some promotion. The main thing is to keep copies of your security reports.’
He went outside and the Sergeant was amazed at the size of the task force required to arrest Colonel Heathcote-Kilkoon. As if to provide final proof that the Colonel was indeed the Communist saboteur trained by British intelligence, a sudden burst of firing came from the direction of White Ladies. Kommandant van Heerden dived into the Saracen and the Sergeant returned to his office and sat down at his typewriter to draft a report on the Colonel. It was much easier than he had expected, thanks to the forgetfulness of the Kommandant, who had left a specimen of his own report on the desk.
As the convoy moved off again the Sergeant typed out his suspicions. They were dated six months earlier.
‘Better late than never,’ he thought as he typed.
*
His view of things was shared by Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon’s taxi-driver.
‘There’s ice on the road,’ he told her when she asked him to step on it.
‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon, ‘it’s a hot night.’
‘There’s been a hailstorm, lady and if it isn’t ice it’s a thin coating of mud and as slippery as hell,’ and to prove his point put the car into a slight skid on the next corner.
‘You don’t want to end up over a cliff,’ he went on, righting the car, ‘that wouldn’t do you no good at all.’
In the back seat Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon couldn’t imagine that anything was going to do her much good. What had started out with less than the emotional force involved in her monthly choice of hairstyle had turned into a paroxysm of uncertainty. Melodramatic mock confessions were one thing. They added spice to the boredom of existence. But armoured cars and convoys of policemen armed with rifles and accompanied by snarling guard dogs were something else again. ‘One can have too much of a good thing,’ she thought recalling the logistics of her lover’s concern. They argued a quite disproportionate devotion, not to mention a terrifying lack of sense of humour.
‘I was only joking,’ she murmured and was not consoled by the taxi-driver’s next remark.
‘Looks like the army’s been through here,’ he said as the car slewed through the mud churned up by the convoy. ‘Shouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t tanks.’
‘I should,’ said Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon more correctly and stared apprehensively into the darkness.
*
In the living-room at White Ladies her husband was doing the same and with even greater apprehension. La Marquise’s sudden scream at the sight of the face at the window had provided An English Rose with an opportunity for a display of chivalry calculated to restore the Colonel’s confidence in his rightful sex which La Marquise’s interest had somewhat undermined.
‘I’ll deal with the swine,’ he shouted and dashed into his study with all the speed his wife’s step-ins allowed, to emerge a moment later with a sporting rifle. ‘Only one way to deal with intruders,’ he said and fired into the garden.
To Konstabel Els flitting across the lawn the accuracy of the shot came as something of a surprise. Aimed at a neatly trimmed bush some twenty yards to his right which to the Colonel’s alcoholic eye had the look of an intruder, the bullet ricochetted off a rockery and sang unpleasantly past Konstabel Els’ head. Els took cover in a sunken garden and unfastened his holster. Outlined against the light in a window he could see the Colonel peering out. Els took careful aim over the Colonel’s shoulder and fired and was delighted by the consternation his deliberate near miss caused in the house. As the lights went out and the Colonel shouted orders to keep down, Els crawled away and was presently well hidden in a clump of azaleas, where he could keep an eye on the back door. The Battle of White Ladies had begun.
‘God Almighty,’ yelled An English Rose as a third bullet, this time from a different part of the garden, ruffled the night air and shattered a vase on the mantelpiece, ‘it’s a bloody uprising. The natives have risen.’ With a vindictiveness that came from the realization that the kaffirs were using more soph
isticated weapons than assegais and knobkerries he prepared to defend his corner of Western Civilization against the tide of barbarism he had always expected. Behind him the members of the Dornford Yates Club, sobered by the prospect of an imminent bloodbath, stumbled into the study where Major Bloxham was handing out rifles and ammunition. With a military authority he had never before exercised the Colonel deployed his forces.
‘Boy, take the front room. Toby, the kitchen,’ he ordered. ‘The rest of you spread out in the library and breakfast-room and keep firing.’
‘What shall I do?’ asked La Marquise.
‘Pass the ammunition and keep your powder dry,’ shouted the Colonel bitterly. La Marquise crawled into the study and began to undress. If the black hordes were coming, there was no point in maintaining the fiction that she was a man.
‘There’s no such thing as a fate worse than death,’ she muttered in the darkness.
‘What’s that?’ whispered Major Bloxham.
‘I said all cats are grey when the candles are out,’ said La Marquise.
‘You can say that again,’ said the Major busily trying to rid himself of his Incroyable costume.
In the azalea bushes Konstabel Els lay and listened to the hail of gunfire issuing from the house. It was going to be a good night. He had no doubt about that now.
*
In the second armoured car Kommandant van Heerden was less sanguine. The knowledge that he was moving into an area where Konstabel Els was involved in a private war brought back memories of previous holocausts initiated by Els.
‘The stupid bastard will probably shoot his own side,’ he thought when Sergeant Breitenbach came to ask for orders.
‘Open fire at long range,’ he told the Sergeant, ‘I don’t want anyone getting too close.’ Presently two hundred policemen had disembarked from the lorries and had crawled into the bushes that marked the boundary of White Ladies and were adding their concentrated fire to that of Els and the Dornford Yates Club.
‘Why not send in the armoured cars?’ Sergeant Breitenbach asked.
‘Certainly not,’ said the Kommandant, appalled at the idea that he should be driven into close proximity to Konstabel Els and three hundred pounds of gelignite, not to mention the obviously irate Colonel and whatever weapons he had in his arsenal. ‘We’ll wear them down first and then move in.’
‘Wear them down’s about right,’ said the Sergeant as the police fire cut a swathe through the ornamental hedges of the Colonel’s garden. In the background the hounds of the Dornford Yates pack were giving tongue and lending a new sense of urgency to the snarls of the police dogs in the rear lorries.
*
Inside the house the realization that they were surrounded and that the black hordes were armed with the very latest in automatic weapons had slowly dawned on most of the defenders. La Marquise was no longer interested. Deserting her post she crawled upstairs to put on some clean underwear in anticipation of her approaching ordeal when she was hit by a burst of machine-gun fire. She was the first casualty of the battle.
In the kitchen the Zulu butler, with greater presence of mind, left the house and made his way to a telephone box on the outskirts of Weezen and dialled the operator.
‘Get me the police station,’ he told her. The operator wasn’t to be told.
‘Don’t you speak to me like that, kaffir,’ she shouted. ‘You ask nicely.’
‘Yes, missus,’ said the butler relapsing into the required tone of servility. ‘Ambulance please, missus.’
‘Black or white ambulance?’ the operator enquired.
The butler considered the question.
‘White ambulance, missus,’ he said finally.
‘It’s not for you, is it?’ the girl enquired. ‘Kaffirs can’t ride in white ambulances. They have to be fumigated afterwards.’
‘Not for me, missus,’ the butler told her. ‘For white boss.’
‘What address?’
‘White Ladies,’ said the butler.
‘Which white lady’s?’
‘White Ladies House,’ said the butler as a fresh outburst of firing lent urgency to his request.
‘I know that, kaffir,’ screamed the operator. ‘I know white ladies live in houses. I know she doesn’t live in a mud hut like you. What I want to know is which white lady’s.’
‘Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon,’ said the butler.
‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’ shouted the operator. The butler put down the receiver and went out into the inhospitable night where his white masters were killing one another with a ferocity he found incomprehensible.
‘No point in getting caught in the middle,’ he thought and began to walk carefully into Weezen. Occasionally a stray bullet whirred overhead. The butler kept his head down. In the main street he was stopped by a policeman and asked for his pass.
‘You’re under arrest,’ said the konstabel when the butler admitted he hadn’t got a pass on him. ‘Can’t have savages wandering about in the middle of the night without passes.’
‘Yes, baas,’ said the butler and climbed into the paddy-wagon.
*
To Konstabel Els the arrival of the police convoy was a mixed blessing. The fact that he was in some sort of no-man’s-land between two opposing forces each defending Western Civilization was something of a hazard. As the Colonel’s erratic fire swept through the leaves above him and was answered by the burst of machine-gun fire in his rear, Els began to think the time had come to make his presence felt. He crawled through the azaleas until he reached the corner of the house and then made a wild dash into the yard and was about to light a match to ignite the kerosene he had poured into the wine cellar when it occurred to him that he was endangering both the evidence he had planted so carefully in the harness room and his own life. He fetched a hose and took it into the harness room and presently was playing a sprinkler over the gelignite. He was so busy at his work that he was unaware of the figure that flitted heavily across the yard and into the darkness by the kennels. Assured that he had taken every sensible precaution Els shut the door of the harness room and slipped back across the yard.
This ought to flush the buggers out, he thought, striking a match and dropping it into the kerosene before dashing for cover. A moment later a sheet of flame lit the night sky and an explosion erupted in the basement of White Ladies. With considerable satisfaction Konstabel Els peered out of the azaleas and studied his handiwork while behind him the police ceased their fire. There was indeed no need to continue. Apart from the occasional report of an exploding bottle of Australian burgundy buried under tons of rubble the occupants of White Ladies had ended their resistance. Berry Puts Off His Manhood night had ended.
Colonel Heathcote-Kilkoon alone did not stop to watch his house burn. He was too busy stumbling across open ground in search of cover. As he went he cursed his wife for her absence. ‘Wouldn’t have happened if she’d been here,’ he gasped, a tribute less to her power of personality than to the constriction of her pantie girdle which was playing havoc with his innards. Spurred on by shouts that greeted the conflagration of his home and by the need to apprise those of his neighbours who had not been woken by the sound of battle that the natives had risen, An English Rose blundered into a wood and wrestled with his girdle.
‘Got to get it off before I burst,’ he muttered, only to decide ten minutes later that there was no question of bursting in spite of his vain efforts to get it off. In the end he decided that sleep might deflate him and crawling into the cover of a bush lay still.
*
From the turret of his armoured car Kommandant van Heerden surveyed what remained of White Ladies with a mixture of satisfaction and regret.
‘No doubt about their being the saboteurs now, Sergeant?’ he asked Sergeant Breitenbach.
‘None at all,’ said the Sergeant. ‘There’s enough gelignite in the stables to blow up half Piemburg.’
Kommandant van Heerden disappeared hurriedly into the armoured car.
His muffled voice could be heard urging the driver to get the hell out. Sergeant Breitenbach went round to the back door.
‘It’s all right,’ he told the Kommandant, ‘it won’t go off. Someone’s been playing a hose on it.’
‘You sure?’ asked the Kommandant. Sergeant Breitenbach said he wouldn’t be standing there if he wasn’t and the Kommandant finally emerged and stared at the smouldering building. ‘Better get the fire brigade here,’ he said. ‘We don’t want any more explosions and I want a body count as soon as possible.’
‘How many suspects do you expect?’ asked the Sergeant.
‘Eleven will do,’ said the Kommandant and clambered back into the Saracen to get some sleep.
*
At the entrance to what had once been her home Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon’s taxi was stopped by a Sergeant and several konstabels armed with machine-guns.
‘Sorry, lady,’ the Sergeant said, ‘but orders is orders and no one is allowed in.’
‘But I live here, officer,’ said Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon dredging a seductive smile from the depths of her despair.
‘Not any more you don’t,’ said the Sergeant. ‘This is one house you won’t be living in again.’
In the back of the taxi Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon clutched her coat to her and shivered. To add to her troubles the taxi-driver insisted on being paid before he drove her any further.
‘How can I pay?’ she pleaded. ‘All I ever had is in there,’ and she pointed to the smudge of smoke that darkened the night sky over the azaleas.
‘You said you’d pay me double fare when we got here,’ the driver insisted. ‘I didn’t come all this way for nothing.’
‘But I’ve nothing to give you,’ Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon said wearily.