Rage c-11

by Wilbur Smith

Seconds later she lay dazed, only semi-conscious, sprawled half off the bed, both her eyes rapidly closing with plum-coloured swellings, her lips broken against her teeth, and blood dripping from her nose.

  Sean stood over her. His face was white as ice, the knuckles of his clenched fists grazed raw, still shaking with fury. He caught her by the tresses of her dark hair and knelt over her while he forced her to take him through her split and bleeding lips. After that there was no question but that he was her master.

  Clare missed three days of school, while the worst of the swelling subsided and the bruises faded, and then wore dark sunglasses to her art class. When she passed Sean at his easel, she brushed herself against him like a cat, and he waited behind again after class.

  Sean had gone long enough without boasting of his conquest, but Snotty Arbuthnot refused to believe him.

  'You've got a screw loose if you think I swallow that,' he taunted.

  'You think I'm' as green as I'm cabbage-looking, man? You and Marsh Mallows - in your dreams you mean!" Sean had one alternative to beating him up. 'Okay then, I'll prove it to you." 'Boy, it had better be good." 'It will be,' Sean assured him grimly.

  The following Saturday afternoon he placed Snotty amongst the protea bushes at the head of the waterfall, and for good measure, lent him the binoculars that his grandmother had given him for his fourteenth birthday.

  'Let's take the cushions off the couch,' he suggested to Clare when she came into the summer-house. 'We'll put them on the lawn, there on the bank. It will be warmer in the sun." She agreed with alacrity.

  Snotty Arbuthnot was still almost inarticulate when they met at the school gates the next day.

  'Hell man, I never dreamed that people did that. I mean, unbelievable, man! When she - you know - when she actually - well, I thought I was going to die on the spot." 'Did I tell the truth?" Sean demanded. 'Or did I lie to you?" 'Man, it was super titanic. Boy, Sean, I was painting maps of Africa over my sheets all last night, I kid you not. Will you let me watch again - please, Sean, please?" 'Next time will cost you money,' Sean said. Even though performing to an audience had filled an exhibitionist need, Sean meant it as a refusal, but when Snotty asked without hesitation, 'How much, Sean? Just name your price!" Sean looked at him appraisingly.

  It was Shasa's policy to keep his sons on very modest pocketmoney, a policy that he had inherited from his own mother. 'They must learn the value of money,' was the family maxim.

  Even Snotty whose father was only a surgeon received four times the pittance that was Sean's allowance. The protection racket that Sean ran amongst the juniors, an idea he had picked up from a George Raft movie at the Odeon, more than doubled his income.

  However, he was always lamentably short of hard cash, and Snotty could afford to pay.

  'Two pounds,' Sean suggested. He knew that was exactly his weekly pocket money, but Snotty smiled radiantly. 'You're on, man!" However, it was only when Snotty actually placed the two crumpled notes in Sean's fist the following Saturday morning that.

  Sean realized the full financial potential.

  There was very little chance of Clare realizing that she was on stage. The protea bushes were dense, the noise of the waterfall covered the sound of any involuntary gasps or sniggers, and anyway once she was started, Clare was deaf and blind to all else. Sean appointed Snotty his ticket salesman and organizer. The commission he received ensured Snotty's free admission to each Saturday performance. Reluctantly they decided to restrict admission to ten spectators at any one session, but even that meant a take of eighteen pounds every single week. It lasted almost three months, which was in itself a miracle, for after the first sell-out matinee, the entire senior school was agog.

  The word-of-mouth publicity was so good that Snotty was able to demand cash with reservation, and even so his booking sheet was full as far ahead as the beginning of the hols and half the fellows were saving so frantically to try and come up with two pounds that sales at the school tuck shop fell off dramatically. Snotty was trying to get Sean to agree to a mid-week performance, or at least to an increase in the Saturday gate, when the first rumour reached the staff common room.

  While passing the windows of one of the change rooms, the history teacher had overheard two satisfied customers discussing the previous Saturday's performance. The headmaster was unable to bring himself to take the report seriously. The whole idea was patently preposterous. Nevertheless, he knew it was his duty to have a discreet word with Miss East, if only to warn her of the revolting little-tattle that was circulating.

  He went down to the art room after school, late on Friday afternoon, a most inopportune moment. Clare had by this time abandoned all sense of discretion, for her it had become almost a self-destructive frenzy. She and Sean were in the paint store at the back of the art school, and it was some seconds before either of them realized that the headmaster was in the room with them: For Shasa everything seemed to happen at once. Sean's expulsion from Bishops was a bombshell that ripped through Weltevreden.

  When it happened, Shasa was in Johannesburg, and they had to call him out of a meeting with the representatives of the Chamber of Mines to receive the headmaster's telephone call. On the open line the headmaster would give no details, and Shasa flew back to Cape Town immediately and drove directly from the airfield to the school.

  Flabbergasted and seething with anger at the stark details the headmaster gave him, Shasa sent the Jaguar roaring around the lower slopes of Table Mountain towards Weltevreden.

  From the first he had not approved of the woman who Tara had installed in the cottage. She was all the things he despised, with her great sloppy breasts and silly pretensions which she thought made her avant-garde and artistic. Her paintings were atrocious, daubed primary colours and childish perspectives, and she tried to conceal her lack of talent and taste behind Portuguese cigarettes, sandals and skirts of blindingly vivid designs. He decided to deal with her first.

  However, she had fled, leaving the cottage in slovenly disarray.

  Thwarted, Shasa took his anger unabated up to the big house and shouted at Tara as he stormed into the hall.

  'Where is the little blighter - I'm going to skin his backside for him." The other children, all three of them, were peeking over the railing from the second-floor gallery, in a fine fever of vicarious terror.

  Isabella's eyes were as enormous as one of Walt Disney's fawns.

  Shasa saw them and roared up the stair well. 'Back to your own rooms, this instant. That goes for you as well, young lady." And they ducked and scampered. As an afterthought Shasa bellowed after them, 'And tell that brother of yours I want to see him in the gun room immediately." The three of them raced each other down the passage of the nursery wing, each of them determined to be the bearer of the dreaded summons. The gun room was the family equivalent of Tower Green where all executions took place.

  Garrick got there first, and pounded on Sean's locked door.

  'Pater wants you immediately,' he yelled.

  '-- in the gun room --' Michael joined in, and Isabella who had been left far behind at the start, piped up breathlessly, 'He's going to skin your backside!" She was flushed and trembling with eagerness, and she hoped desperately that Sean would show her his bottom after Daddy had carried out his threat. She couldn't imagine what it would look like, and she wondered if Daddy would have the skin made into a floor mat like the skins of the zebras and lions in the gun room. It was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened in her life.

  In the entrance hall Tara was attempting to calm Shasa. She had seen him in a comparable rage only two or three times during their marriage, always when he fancied the family honour or reputation had been compromised. Her efforts were in vain, for he turned on her with his single eye glittering.

  'Damn you, woman. This is mostly your fault. It was you who insisted on bringing that whore to live on Weltevreden." As Shasa stormed off to the gun room, his voice carried clearly up the stairwell to where Sean was braci
ng himself to come down and face retribution. Up to that moment Sean had been so confused by the speed of events that he hadn't been thinking clearly. Now, as he descended the stairs, his mind was racing as he prepared his defence.

  He passed his mother, still standing in the middle of the chessboard black and white marble squares of the entrance hall floor, and she gave him a strained smile of encouragement.

  'I tried to help, darling,' she whispered. They had never been close, but now for once Shasa's rage made them allies. 'Thank you, Mater." He knocked on the gun-room door, and opened it cautiously when his father roared. He closed it carefull37 behind him and advanced to the centre of the lion skin where he halted and stood to attention.

  Beatings at Weltevreden followed an established ritual. The riding crops were laid out on the baize gun table, five of them of various lengths, weights and stinging potential. He knew his father would make a show of selecting the correct one for the occasion, and that today it would almost certainly be the long whippy whalebone. Involuntarily he looked to the over-stuffed leather chair beside the fireplace over which he would be asked to drape himself, reaching over to grip the legs of the chair on the far side. His father was an international polo player with wrists like steel springs, his strokes made even the headmaster's seem like a powder puff.

  Then deliberately Sean closed his mind against fear and lifted his chin to stare calmly at his father. Shasa was standing in front of the fireplace, hands clasped beside his back, rocking on the balls of his feet.

  'You have been fired from Bishops,' he said.

  Although the headmaster had not specifically mentioned this fact to Sean himself during his extended diatribe, the news did not come as a complete surprise. 'Yes, sir,' he said.

  'I find it hard to believe what I have been told about you. It is true that you were making a spectacle of yourself with this - this woman?" 'Yes, sir." 'That you were letting your friends watch you?" 'Yes, sir." 'And charging them money for the privilege?" 'Yes, sir." 'A pound a head?" 'No, sir." 'What do you mean - no sir?" 'Two pounds a head, sir." 'You are a Courtney - what you do reflects directly on every member of this family. Do you realize that?" 'Yes, sir." 'Don't keep saying that. In the name of all that is holy, how could you do it?" 'She started it, sir. I would have never even thought of it without her." Shasa stared at him, and suddenly his rage evaporated. He remembered himself at almost exactly the same age, standing chastened before Centaine. She had not beaten him, but had sent him to a lysol bath and a humiliating medical examination. He remembered the girl, a saucy little harlot only a year or two older than he was, with a shock of sun bleached hair and a sly smile - and he almost smiled himself. She had teased and provoked him, leading him on into folly, and yet he felt a strange nostalgic glow. His first real woman - he might forget a hundred others but never that one.

  Sean had seen the anger fade out of his father's eye, and sensed that now was the moment to exploit the change of mood.

  'I realize that I have brought scandal on the family, and I know that I have to take my medicine --' His father would like that, it was one of his sayings, 'Take your medicine like a man." He saw the further softening of his father's regard. 'I know how stupid I have been, and before my punishment I would just like to say how sorry I am that I have made you ashamed of me." This was not exactly true, and Sean instinctively knew it. His father was angry with him for being caught out, but deep down he was rather proud of his eldest son's now proven virility.

  'The only excuse I have was that I couldn't help myself. She just drove me mad, sir. I couldn't think of anything else but - well, but what she wanted me to do with her." Shasa understood entirely. He was still having the same sort of problems at nearly forty - what was it that Centaine said? 'It's the de Thiry blood, we all have to live with it." He coughed softly, moved by his son's honesty and openness. He was such a fine-looking boy, straight and tall and strong, so handsome and courageous, no wonder the woman had picked on him. He couldn't really be bad, Shasa thought, a bit of a devil perhaps, a little too cocksure, a little too eager for life - but not really bad. 'I mean, if boffing a pretty girl is mortal sin, there is no salvation for any of us,' he thought. I'm going to have to beat you, Sean,' he said aloud.

  Yes, sir, I know that." Not a trace of fear, no whining. No, damn it, he was a good boy. A son to be proud of.

  Shasa went to the gun table and picked up the long whalebone crop, the most formidable weapon in his arsenal, and without being ordered to do so, Sean marched to the armchair and adopted the prescribed position. The first stroke hissed in the air and cracked against his flesh, then suddenly Shasa grunted with disgust and threw the crop on to the gun table.

  'The stick is for children - and you are no longer a child,' Shasa said. Stand up, man." Sean could hardly believe his luck. Although the single stroke had stung like a nest of scorpions, he kept an impassive face and made no effort to rub the seat of his pants.

  What are we going to do with you?" his father demanded, and Sean had the sense to remain silent.

  'You have to finish matric,' Shasa stated flatly. 'We'll just have to find someone else to take you on." This was not as easy as Shasa had anticipated. He tried SACS and Rondebosch Boys and then Wynberg Boys. The headmasters all knew about Sean Courtney. He was, for a short while, the best-known schoolboy in the Cape of Good Hope.

  In the end he was accepted by Costello's Academy, a cram school that operated out of a dilapidated Victorian mansion on the other side of Rondebosch common, and was not particular about its admissions. Sean arrived for th: first day and was gratified to find he was already a celebrity. Unlike the exclusive boys school which he had recently left, there were girls in the classrooms and academic excellence and moral rectitude were not prerequisites for entrance to Costello's Academy.

  Sean had found his spiritual home and he set about sorting out the most promising of his.fellov scholars and organizing them into a gang which within a year was virtually running the cram school. His final selection included a half dozen of the most comely and accommodating young ladies on the academy's roll. As both his father and erstwhile headmaster had noted, Sean was a born leader.

  Manfred De La Rey stood to attention on the reviewing stand. He wore a severe dark pinstripe suit and a black Homburg hat, with a small spray of carnations and green fern in his buttonhole. This was the uniform of a Nationalist cabinet minister.

  The police band was playing a traditional country air 'Die Kaapse Nooi'- 'The Cape Town girl', to a lively marching beat and the ranks of the police cadets stepped out vigorously, passing the stand with their FN rifles at the slope. As each platoon drew level with the dais, they gave Manfred the eyes right, and he returned the salute.

  They made a grand show with their smart blue uniforms and sparkling brasswork catching the white highveld sunlight. These athletic young men, proud and eager, their perfect drill formations, their transparent dedication and patriotism filled Manfred De La Rey with a vast sense of pride.

  Manfred stood to attention while the formations wheeled past him and then formed up in review order on the open parade ground facing the stand. The band played a final ruffle of drums and then fell silent. Resplendent in full dress uniform and decorations, the police general stepped to the microphone and in a few crisp sentences introduced the minister, then fell back relinquishing the microphone to Manfred.

  Manfred had taken especial care with the preparation of his speech, but before he began he could not prevent himself from glancing aside to where Heidi sat in the front row of honoured guests.

  This was her day also, and she looked like a blond Valkyrie, her handsome Teutonic features set off by the wide-brimmed hat and its tall decoration of artificial roses. Few women would have the presence and stature to wear it without looking ridiculous, but on Heidi it was magnificent. She caught his eye and smiled at Manfred.

  'What a woman,' he thought. 'She deserves to be First Lady in the land, and I will see that she is - one day. Perhaps sooner than
she imagines." He turned back to the microphone and composed himself. He knew that he was a compelling orator, and he enjoyed the fact that thousands of eyes were concentrated upon him. He felt at ease up here on the dais, relaxed and in total control of himself and those below him.

  'You have chosen a life of service to your Volk and to your country,' he began. He was speaking in Afrikaans and his reference to the Volk was quite natural. The intake of police recruits was almost exclusively from the Afrikaner section of the white community. Manfred De La Rey would not have had it any other way.

  It was desirable that control of the security forces should be vested solidly in the more responsible elements of the nation, those who understood most clearly the dangers and threats that faced them i the years ahead. Now he began to warn this dedicated body of younl men of those dangers.

  'It will require all our courage and fortitude to resist the dari forces which are arrayed against us. We must thank our Maker, th Lord God of our fathers, that in the covenant he made with ou ancestors on the battlefield of Blood river he has guaranteed us hi protection and guidance. It needs only that we remain constant and true, trusting him, worshipping him, for the way always to be mad smooth for our feet to follow." He ended his address with the act of faith that had lifted the Afrikaner out of poverty and oppression to his rightful place in the land: Believe in your God.

  Believe in your Volk.

  Believe in yourself.

  His voice, magnified a hundred times, boomed across the parade ground, and he truly felt the divine and benevolent presence very close to him as he looked out upon their shining faces.

  Now came the presentation. Out on the field there were shouted orders and the blue ranks came to attention. A pair of offic, e ste17pci forvard to flank Manfred and one of them carried a velvetlined tray on which were laid out the medals and awards.

  Reading from the list in his hands the second officer called the recipients forward. One at a time they left the ranks, marching briskly, to halt before the imposing figure of Manfred De La Rey.