by Peter Rimmer
In London, the anti-apartheid movement met in crisis, having confined their work to stopping sporting ties with apartheid South Africa. Their conclusion was now to smash the South African economy with international trade sanctions. An impoverished black community would be more easily controlled by the ANC and its communist party ally.
Hector did not attend the meeting, preferring to orchestrate the hate campaign from an adjacent house, away from the eyes of the public. Revolutions were never started on full stomachs. The South African blacks would have to starve to gain their freedom… What was life without freedom? What was life under colonialism? What was life under apartheid?
The slogans were fed to the hungrily receptive media, and in America the shouts turned to screams as the politicians skilfully turned the wrath of the Negro away from his own slum to castigate the five million whites in South Africa who had created the only African economy after Rhodesia that worked. One-man dictatorships to the north of Rhodesia joined the battle of words, feeding the hatred and turning their own people away from their own decline into self-inflicted poverty. From the Arabs to New York, from Cairo to Lusaka, from Vietnam to Cuba, the politicians screamed at the last vestige of colonialism and Hector hugged himself with excitement.
Matt met Margaret Weeks at the launch of the first Lion Life product in South Africa. She was twenty-nine years old, with red hair, grey eyes touched with yellow streaks the colour of a male lion, and the walk of a dancer. The grey-yellow eyes had the look of a predator, coupled with the innocent smile of an angel. Her sexual attributes were not outstanding, but two other factors made her appear different to men. The first of these was her cunningly disguised desire to have whatever she wanted in life, which she generally accomplished with keen intelligence and the innocent smile which made her look as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. The second was the wealth of her father. The two were possibly not unconnected.
C B Weeks was one of three rand billionaires in South Africa, and he controlled a large mining and industrial empire founded by his father in the nineteenth century. Margaret’s grandfather Jack had been a personal friend of Cecil John Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia and the Rhodes scholarship. At the time of Rhodes’ premature death, grandpa Jack picked up the loose ends of the De Beers empire and made them his own, leaving his wealth and responsibilities to his only son in 1923. C B Weeks had avoided the pitfalls of the stock-market crash in 1929 and by the time Matt met his daughter and only child, had increased the family wealth considerably. C B Weeks and his mining conglomerate had only two problems in September 1971: the age of C B who had married late in life and his lack of a son to carry on the empire.
Margaret Weeks ran her own public relations company, using her family and social contacts to further the aims of clients lucky enough to secure her services. A company could not just approach Margaret to act as their PR, but had to be approached. Ever since Matthew Gray had come from nowhere, as it seemed to most people in South Africa, to take over the third largest insurance company in the country, C B Weeks had been following his fortunes. When Margaret made her approach to Security Lion Holdings, she did so, on her father’s instructions.
When she finally shook hands with Matt, she had already decided to be his wife and knew as much about him as he knew about himself. She gave him the angel smile, and began a carefully prepared conversation in subtle praise of Matt himself, his person and his achievements. She knew that men rarely fail to respond to charm and admiration and she tried hard to persuade Matt to talk about his career himself. But Matt, in such circumstances, portrayed the strong, silent type. He appeared relatively uninterested and taciturn, and she could elicit little response from him.
Margaret lay in bed that night wide awake and quite perplexed. She was either losing her touch, which she doubted, or there was something wrong with Matthew Gray. If it had only been her father’s wishes she might have sought ways to cut him off publicly, but in any case to find a man who did not respond to her charms was a challenge. A little boredom had crept into Margaret’s life, which Matthew was going to remove.
Later in the week, she phoned him and asked him to lunch. She arrived dressed exquisitely, in a long patterned dress; she knew well enough that revealing clothes did not suit her. Far better, she thought, for a girl who was not angelically formed to keep the man guessing rather than make it obvious that she was no Miss South Africa. Discreet covering was her policy.
“I really appreciate our relationship together, Matt,” she began, over lunch. “You’re the sort of man whose company I’d enjoy on social occasions.”
Matt smiled and shook his head. “Let me put your mind at rest,” he suggested. “I have a list of rules in my business, and Rule 7 says: no staff or business associates. We didn’t have the rule in London, and it worked out badly.”
“Then perhaps I had better resign your account.”
“Margaret, what’s this all about?” he asked, eyebrows slightly raised in surprise.
“I wouldn’t want business to stand in the way of us developing a better relationship,” she replied, letting a tinge of sadness come into her eyes.
“Running a business is rather a lonely life most of the time – don’t you find it that way? There are times when I’d just love to be able to relax and know my associates as more than just business people. I’ve met too many men at parties who are just out for a good time, and I really feel the need to bridge the gap sometimes. I like to find a middle-of-the-road course between strict business and high living. Don’t you ever get fed up with girls who are just after you for your money or your body, and then, when they’ve had enough, dump you and find somebody else?”
This touched a raw nerve in Matt, as it was meant to do. He had no idea that Margaret had uncovered some of his past history. He nodded
“I suppose you’re right,” he responded after a moment’s reflection.
“I prefer parties to be a little different,” Margaret continued. “Good fun but a little more, well perhaps intellectual is the wrong word. I’m holding one this Saturday night, actually. Many young girls about my age will be there – secretaries, business people, models and so on. The Inanda set which Lucky Kuchinski has been trying to break into for months. Bring him along with Archie – that is, if I can persuade you to join us. You’ll all have a lot of fun, I’ll guarantee. How do they like being back in Africa?”
“We work well as a team,” replied Matt abstractedly, as he led himself to the conclusion that a party held by a business associate was a different matter from a private relationship.
“In more ways than one.” Margaret was folding her napkin and pushing back her chair. “Now I must be off. Lovely lunch Matt. We’ll be seeing you.” She gave him one last smile and walked away through the tables without turning back.
Matt wasn’t quite sure just how interested in him she really was, which was just as Margaret had intended. He gradually came to the conclusion that she really did fancy him but, as she had not imposed herself on him at all, it would be safe for him to proceed with caution. The attraction of meeting the Inanda set at Miss Weeks’ party was an incentive he could not bring himself to refuse.
“Can’t be after my money, though,” he said to himself as he signed the bill. “Not in her family. That’s for sure.”
It was a finely-tuned public relations exercise and, by the end of 1971, Margaret and Matt had been photographed at the polo in Inanda, the Nico Malan theatre in Cape Town and Beverly Hills Hotel at Umhlanga Rocks in Durban, along with the monotonous series of charity functions designed to prove the rich were caring. C B Weeks waited hopefully for a wedding announcement but was careful not even to suggest that Matt would be ideal to succeed him at Wits Mining, as he was aware of the touchiness of a self- made man, having suffered his father for years while he was learning the business.
Matt was comfortable with Margaret, in and out of bed, although she did not allow him to bed her until they were engaged, and only occasionally after t
hat. This was not because of any higher moral standards than any other girls who had had their dubious effect on Matt’s life, but simply because she dared not run the risk of satiating Matt before the marriage and having it possibly fall through.
Matt’s interest in her was, however, tinged with another reality. The fact that he was nearing the dreaded forties gave him the shudders. There was only one thing he did not wish to do, and that was to grow old. He was not in love with her in the way that he thought he had been in love with Sandy de Freitas; he did not love her as he had certainly loved Sunny Tupper; he was not even physically compatible with her as he had been with Chelsea de La Cruz; but he was comfortable, and it was comfort he prescribed for a man of thirty-nine on the brink, as he thought, of old age.
Christmas came and went, and business had never been better, the 1969 dip in the stock exchange having given way to a raging bull market. He needed a wife and children to complete his life and if, by the age of thirty-nine going on forty, he had not found his soul mate, what made him think he would find her in the future? The great love was not to be his, and he could not afford to wait any longer. In the whole affair he was the last to think of marriage but, when it was put to him by Margaret that she was turning thirty soon and wanted children, she struck the right chord of sympathy, and Matt agreed to a winter wedding when the midday weather on the highveld was invariably sunny and hopefully warm. In that way they would be able to go to Europe in the summer for their honeymoon, Matt fancying the Scottish Highlands when the whin was in full bloom.
Lucky and Archie were horrified, but agreed to toss a coin to see which one of them would be the best man. Finally, despite Matt thinking that Johannesburg would be the venue for the wedding, St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town was booked, and the dean of Cape Town, the Reverend Andrew Porterstone, was asked and agreed to marry the couple. Many of Margaret’s charities included the assistance of Andrew Porterstone, a man tipped shortly to return to England to be made a bishop in the Church of England.
Surprisingly, Andrew Porterstone was unable to recollect his journey by air with Matt as, when he had mentioned to Hector that he had met a Matthew Gray on the plane, Hector had told him to keep away from the man, refusing to give any kind of reason. Matt had started apologising for not following up on their conversation, saying he had still to be christened.
“Maybe you can join your first-born in the font,” Andrew said jovially, still feigning not to remember their long conversation in the aircraft.
The President Hotel was booked for the reception, C B Weeks not wanting five hundred guests ruining his lawn, and the invitations were sent all around the world. Very deliberately, Margaret warned her press contacts not to speculate on her future husband joining the mining industry. She would only have a real hold over Matt when she had born him his children.
Ben Munroe was now back in the United States, following popular trends as usual by producing virulent articles in violent opposition to the Vietnam war. The news of South Africa’s proposed ‘wedding of the year’ reached his office in New York.
Altogether, Ben had sold four articles on South Africa, but none of them had been about Matt after that first and most successful. Friends close to the civil rights movement asked him to drop the Gray-Mbeki connection, saying that Luke’s life could be in jeopardy from the bureau of state security still run by Minister Kloss with Germanic efficiency. But the big establishment society wedding was too much for Ben to resist, and he booked himself and his camera on a flight to Johannesburg, determined this time really to show up the wealth of the whites in contrast to the poverty of the blacks who, he considered, were slaves in everything but name, paid a pittance to work all day, travelled four hours to and from work to live in shacks that leaked and to eat pap and beans.
With all the right credentials from his friends in the American civil rights movement, after assuring them that Luke Mbeki would not come into his article, Ben and his camera were whisked round Soweto, Johannesburg’s ‘South-Western Township’, the worst parts; Guguletu, the worst parts; and the wastelands of the Transkei interior to where tens of thousands of blacks had been forcibly removed so they would lose their South African citizenship in the great apartheid plan of separate, independent homelands for the tribes of South Africa. He was, of course, not shown the better areas of the townships where the rich black people lived in palatial homes. Those were quite irrelevant. The emphasis was entirely on the squalor, the poverty and the inadequacy of the sewage, electricity and water supplies. Ben, rightly, was horrified, indignant and utterly disgusted, so that when he filmed Matt’s new palatial home-to-be in Sandhurst, the best suburb in Johannesburg, along with the bride’s father’s homes in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Zululand, all of which he was forced to photograph from the air, he was ready to write the most scathing article of his career. Newsweek, always happy to bash the whites in Africa, paid him a large sum for his trouble and featured on their front cover the jailed leader of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela, imprisoned on Robben Island, just across the water from the President Hotel where he was staying in Cape Town. When the magazine article was published a month before the wedding, it caused an indignant stir right across the world. Matthew Gray and C B Weeks were thought of by the world as examples of the twentieth-century’s worst kind of exploiters, worse than the cotton barons of nineteenth-century America, who were thought to have had at least some kind of charm.
When Matt finished reading the article, he felt sick to his stomach. Then, a week before the wedding, a newspaper owned by a mining house that constantly competed with C B Weeks broke what they claimed was the real story behind the wedding. Margaret, like all women, had had to confide in someone, gloating to her best friend about the prospect of fulfilling her father’s most ardent wish to find him a successor whom she could control, keeping Wits Mining in the Weeks family for a third and, hopefully, fourth generation. Her best friend was a very good friend of Helena Kloss, and the two always confided in each other, both being equally unfaithful to their husbands. Helena asked her friend to repeat the story all over again, this time making a recording her friend knew nothing about… Helena had a long memory, and men who spurned Helena Fortescue-Smythe, nee Kloss, invariably paid a bitter price.
Twice in a month, Matt felt utterly nauseated. The truth always rings clearly in the ears when it is stripped of the music. The following day, not to be left out and lose circulation, the rest of the press corps revealed that they had been asked not to publish the fact that C B Weeks had found himself a successor that his daughter would be able to control. With the prospect of a take-over of Security Lion and top management for Wits Mining, both sets of shares rocketed on the Johannesburg stock exchange… C B Weeks refused to comment, Margaret also refused to comment, but Matthew Gray was nowhere to be found by the press, by Archie or by Margaret. No one knew where he was.
The terrible possibility of being stood up four days before her wedding caused Margaret great anguish. The hours went by and no one, not even the police, could tell her what had happened to her fiancé. For three long days, there was silence. Margaret and C B Weeks did not know whether to cancel the wedding or wait for Matt to come out of hiding. They did not even know what the man was thinking, or whether he was hiding from them or the press.
When Matt finally called his press conference, he had the full, undivided attention of the world’s media. Four networks beamed the event live around the world. Amid the full splendour of the house that was no longer destined to be his family home, Matt sat stern-faced and uttered not a word.
His lawyer stood up and spoke into forty-three microphones, reading the statement that Matt had spent three days composing.
“My client, Matthew Gray, has today resigned from the boards of all his companies in South Africa, England, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong. My client has today broken his engagement with Margaret Weeks, and guests and friends are notified that the wedding will not take place tomorrow at St George�
��s Cathedral. He requests that the food be taken to Guguletu and given to the poor. Following is my client’s statement:
‘It is the right of labour to withhold their labour. It is the right of capital to go where it finds the best return. It is the right of the press to tell the truth. It is the right of man to choose his religion. It is the right of man to be free. It is also the right of management to withhold their management, and today I have exercised that right.
‘It appears that the world considers my creation of wealth to have been a sin against humanity; that I and my companies are parasites, feeding off the poverty of the people rather than giving them jobs and creating wealth to lift this country from the degradation of poverty. It was that which was my intention, but I am told that not only have I failed to give the others what I never had myself but that also, by inference from the press, I have achieved the opposite, adding to the misery of the mass of our people, I must consider my peers. Not everyone can be wrong and I the only one in the right.
‘I have therefore signed documents, irrevocable documents, that return my wealth to the people I am supposed to have injured. This includes all shares registered in my name, trusts controlled by me for my portions of those trusts, all property and material goods. As I sit before you now, my net worth stands at five thousand rand, which I intend to use to get me as far away as is physically possible from this life that is apparently so wrong. The proceeds of my wealth will be distributed equally and evenly to every man, woman and child in this country who does not have the legal vote. It will be paid out through a leading bank against presentation of the hated pass book. It will feed every family in South Africa and the homelands for one day, after distribution costs have been deducted by the bank. Bon appétit.’
