Rage

by Wilbur Smith

  She thought he had fallen asleep, and she lay and listened to his quiet breathing, holding him in the circle of her arms, but he was awake and he spoke suddenly, startling her.

  ‘You were speaking to Victoria Dinizulu,’ he said, and it took an effort for her to cast her mind back to the early part of the evening. ‘What did you think of her?’ he persisted.

  ‘She is a lovely young woman. Intelligent and obviously dedicated. I like her very much.’ She tried to be objective, but the sick jealous feeling was there deep in her belly.

  ‘I had her invited,’ Moses said. ‘It was the first time I have met her.’

  Tara wanted to ask, ‘Why? Why did you invite her?’ But she remained silent, dreading the reply. She knew her instincts had been correct.

  ‘She is of the royal house of Zulu,’ he said softly.

  ‘Yes. She told me,’ Tara whispered.

  ‘She is well favoured, as I was told she was, and her mother had many sons. They breed many sons in the Dinizulu line. She will make a good wife.’

  ‘Wife?’ Tara breathed. She had not expected that.

  ‘I need the alliance with the Zulus, they are the largest and most powerful tribe. I will begin the negotiations with her family immediately. I will send Hendrick to Ladyburg to see her father and make the arrangements. It will be difficult, he is one of the old school, dead set against mixed tribal marriages. It must be a wedding that will impress the tribe, and Hendrick will convince the old man of the wisdom of it.’

  ‘But, but—’ Tara found she was stuttering. ‘You hardly know the girl. You spoke barely a dozen words to her all evening.’

  ‘What does that have to do with it?’ His tone was genuinely puzzled, and he rolled away from her and switched on the bedside light, dazzling her.

  ‘Look at me!’ he commanded, taking her by the chin and lifting her face to the light, studying it for a moment and then removing his fingers as though he had touched something loathsome. ‘I have misjudged you,’ he said scornfully. ‘I believed that you were an exceptional person. A true revolutionary, a dedicated friend of the black people of this land, ready to make any sacrifice. Instead I find a weak, jealous woman, riddled with bourgeois white prejudices.’

  The mattress tipped under her as Moses stood up. He towered over the bed.

  ‘I have been wasting my time,’ he said, gathered his clothing, and still naked turned towards the door.

  Tara threw herself across the room and clung to him, barring his way to the door.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Forgive me. Please forgive me,’ she pleaded with him, and he stood cold and aloof and silent. She began to weep, her tears muffling her voice, until she was no longer making sense.

  Slowly she slid down with her arms still encircling him, until she was on her knees hugging his legs.

  ‘Please,’ she sobbed. ‘I will do anything. Just don’t leave me. I will do anything, everything you tell me to do – only just don’t send me away like this.’

  ‘Get up,’ he said at last, and when she stood before him like a penitent, he said softly, ‘You have one more chance. Just one. Do you understand?’ and she nodded wildly, still choking on her sobs, unable to answer him. She reached out hesitantly and when he did not pull away, took his hand and led him back to the bed.

  As he mounted her again, he knew that at last she was ready, completely prepared. She would do anything and everything he commanded.

  In the dawn she came awake to find him leaning over her staring into her face and immediately she relived the night’s terror, the dreadful fear of his scorn and rejection. She felt weak and trembly, her tears very close, but he took her calmly and made love to her with a gentle consideration that reassured her and left her feeling whole and vital again. Then he spoke to her quietly.

  ‘I am going to put my trust in you,’ he told her, and her gratitude was so strong it left her breathless. ‘I am going to accept you as one of us, one of the inner circle.’

  She nodded, but could not speak, staring into his fierce black eyes.

  ‘You know how we have conducted the struggle thus far,’ he said, ‘we have played by the white man’s rules, but he made those rules, and he designed them so we could never win. Petitions and delegations, commissions of inquiry and representations — but in the end there are always more laws made against us, governing every facet of our lives, how we work, where we live, where we are allowed to travel, or eat or sleep or love—’ He broke off with an exclamation of scorn. ‘The time is coming when we will rewrite the rule book. First, the defiance campaign when we will deliberately flout the mass of laws which bind us, and after that—’ Now his expression was savage. ‘And after that the struggle will go on and become a great battle.’

  She was silent beside him, studying his face.

  ‘I believe there comes a time when a man confronted by great evil must take up the spear and become a warrior. He must rise up and strike it down.’ He was watching her, waiting for a reply.

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘You are right.’

  ‘These are words, ideas, Tara,’ he told her. ‘But what of action? Are you ready for action?’

  She nodded. ‘I am ready.’

  ‘Blood, Tara, not words. Killing and maiming and burning. Tearing down and destroying. Can you face that, Tara?’

  She was appalled, facing the reality at last, not merely the dizzy rhetoric. In her imagination she saw the flames roaring up through the great roof of Weltevreden and blood splashed on the walls shining wetly in the sunlight, while in the courtyard lay the broken bodies of children, of her own children, and she was on the very point of rejecting the images when he spoke again.

  ‘Destroying what is evil, Tara, so that we may rebuild a good and just society.’ His voice was low and compelling, it thrilled like a drug through her veins and the cruel images faded, she looked beyond them to the paradise, the earthly paradise they would build together.

  ‘I am ready,’ she said, and there was not a trace of a quaver in her voice.

  There was an hour before Marcus would take her to the airport to catch the Viscount flight back to Cape Town. They sat at his table on the verandah, just the two of them, and Moses explained to her in detail what must be done.

  ‘Umkhonto we Sizwe,’ he told her. ‘The Spear of the Nation.’ The name shimmered and rang like polished steel in her brain.

  ‘Firstly, you must withdraw from all overt liberal activities. You must abandon your clinic—’

  ‘My clinic!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, Moses, my poor little ones, what will they do—’ She broke off as she saw his expression.

  ‘You care for the physical needs of a hundred,’ he said. ‘I’m concerned for the welfare of twenty million. Tell me which is more important.’

  ‘You are right,’ she whispered. ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘You will use the excuse of the defiance campaign to make a statement of your disillusion with the freedom movement and to announce your resignation from the Black Sash.’

  ‘Oh, dear, what will Molly say?’

  ‘Molly knows,’ he assured her. ‘Molly knows why you are doing it. She will help you in every way. Of course, the police Special Branch will continue to keep you under observation for a while, but when you give them nothing more for their files, they will lose interest and drop you.’

  She nodded. ‘I understand.’

  ‘You must take more interest in your husband’s political activities, cultivate his parliamentary associates. Your own father is the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, with access to the government ministers. You must become our eyes and our ears.’

  ‘Yes, I can do all that.’

  ‘Later, there will be other tasks for you. Many difficult and some even dangerous. Would you risk your life for the struggle, Tara?’

  ‘For you, Moses Gama, I would do more. I would willingly lay down that life for you,’ she replied, and when he saw that she meant it, he nodded with deep satisfaction.

  ‘We wil
l meet whenever we can,’ he promised her. ‘Whenever it is safe to do so.’ And then he gave her the salute which would become the rallying cry of the defiance campaign, ‘Mayibuye! Afrika!’

  And she replied, ‘Mayibuye! Afrika! Africa, let it persist!’

  ‘I am an adulteress,’ Tara thought, as she had each morning as she sat at the breakfast table during all the weeks that had passed since she had arrived back from Johannesburg. ‘I am an adulteress.’ And she thought it must show, like a brand upon her forehead for all the world to see. Yet Shasa had greeted her cheerfully on her return, apologizing for sending a driver to meet her at the airport and not coming in person, asking her if she had enjoyed her illicit interlude with Australopithecus. ‘Thought you might have gone for someone a little younger. I mean a million years old is just a little long in the tooth, isn’t it?’ And since then their relationship had continued unaltered.

  The children, with the exception of Michael, seemed not to have missed her at all. Centaine had run the household in her absence with her usual iron fist in a candy-flavoured glove, and after they had greeted Tara with dutiful but offhand kisses the children were full of what Nana had done and said, and Tara was painfully aware that she had neglected to bring any presents for them.

  Only Michael was different. For the first few days he would not let her out of his sight, but traipsed around behind her, even insisting on spending his precious Saturday afternoon with her at the clinic while his two brothers went off to Newlands Rugby Ground with Shasa to watch Western Province playing the visiting All Blacks team from New Zealand.

  Michael’s company helped alleviate a little of the pain of making the first arrangements to close down the clinic. She had to ask her three black nursing sisters to start looking for other jobs. ‘Of course, you’ll be paid your salaries until you find other positions, and I will help you all I can—’ But still she had to suffer the reproach in their eyes.

  Now, almost a month later, she sat at Weltevreden’s laden breakfast table on a Sunday morning in the dappled shade beneath the trellised vines of the terrace, while the servants in crisp white uniform fussed about them. Shasa read aloud extracts from the Sunday Times to which none of them listened, Sean and Garrick wrangled acrimoniously over who was the best full-back in the world, and Isabella clamoured for her daddy’s attention. Michael was giving her a detailed account of the plot of the book he was reading, and she felt like an impostor, an actress playing a role for which she had not rehearsed her lines.

  Shasa finally crumpled his newspaper and dropped it beside his chair, acceding to Isabella’s request to ‘Take me on your lap, Daddy!’, ignoring Tara’s ritual protest, and demanded:

  ‘All right, everybody, this meeting will come to order and address the serious question of what we are all going to do with this Sunday.’ This precipitated a near riot which Isabella punctuated with shrill cries of ‘Picnic! Picnic!’ and finally picnic it was, after Shasa had used his casting vote in his daughter’s favour.

  Tara tried to excuse herelf, but Michael was so close to tears that she relented and they all rode out together, with the servants and the picnic baskets following them in the little two-wheeled dog cart. Of course they could have gone by car, but the ride was half the fun.

  Shasa had had the pool below the waterfall bricked out to make a natural swimming-pool and had built a thatched summer house on the bank. The great attraction was the long slide down the glassy-smooth rock of the waterfall on a red rubber inner tube, and the plunge over the final sheer drop into the green pool below, the entire journey accompanied by howls and shrieks of glee. It was sport that never palled and it kept the children busy all morning.

  Shasa and Tara, in their bathing-suits, lolled on the grassy bank, basking in the hot bright sunlight. They used to come here often in the first days of their marriage, even before the pool was bricked and the summer house built. In fact Tara was certain that more than one of the children had been conceived on this grassy bank. Some of the warm feelings from those days persisted. Shasa opened a bottle of Riesling, and they were both more relaxed and friendly towards each other than they had been for years.

  Shasa sensed his opportunity, fished the wine bottle out of the ice bucket and refilled Tara’s glass before he said, ‘My dear, I have something to tell you that is of great importance to both of us and may quite substantially change our lives.’

  ‘He has found another woman,’ she thought, half in dread, half in relief, so that she did not at first understand what he was telling her. Then suddenly the enormity of it crashed in upon her. Shasa was going to join them, he was going across to the Boers. He was throwing in his lot with the band of the most evil men that Africa had ever spawned. Those supreme architects of misery and suffering and oppression.

  ‘I believe that I am being offered the opportunity to use my talents and my financial gift for the greater good of this land and its people,’ he was saying, and she twirled the stem of the wineglass between her fingers and stared down into the pale golden liquid, not daring to lift her eyes and look at him in case he saw what she was thinking.

  ‘I have considered it from every angle, and I have discussed it with Mater. I think I have a duty to the country, to the family and to myself. I believe that I have to do it, Tara.’

  It was a terrible thing to feel the last blighted fruits of her love for him shrivel and fall away, and then almost instantly she felt free and light, the burden was gone and in its place came a rush of contrary emotion. It was so powerful that she could not put a name to it for a moment, and then she knew it was hatred.

  She wondered that she had ever felt guilty on his account, she wondered even that she could ever have loved him. His voice droned on, justifying himself, attempting to excuse the inexcusable, and still she knew she dared not look up at him lest he see it in her eyes. She felt an almost irresistible need to scream at him, ‘You are callous, selfish, evil, as they are!’ and physically to attack him, to claw at his single eye with her nails, and it took all her will-power to sit still and quiet. She remembered what Moses had told her, and she clung to his words. They seemed the only sane things in all this madness.

  Shasa finished the explanation that he had so carefully prepared for her, and then waited for her reply. She sat on the plaid rug in the sun with her legs curled up under her, staring into the glass in her hands, and he looked at her as he had not done for years and saw that she was still beautiful. Her body was smooth and lightly tanned, her hair sparkled with ruby lights in the sun, and her big breasts that had always enchanted him seemed to have filled out again. He found himself attracted by her and excited as he had not been for a long time and he reached out gently and touched her cheek.

  ‘Talk to me,’ he invited. ‘Tell me what you think about it.’ And she lifted her chin and stared at him. For an instant he was chilled by her gaze, for it was as inscrutable and merciless as the stare of a lioness, but then Tara smiled slightly and shrugged, and he thought that he had been mistaken, it was not hatred he had seen in her eyes.

  ‘You have decided already, Shasa. Why do you need my approval? I have never been able to prevent you doing anything you wanted to do before. Why would I presume to do that now?’

  He was amazed and relieved, he had anticipated a bitter battle.

  ‘I wanted you to know why,’ he said. ‘I want you to know that we both want the same thing – prosperity and dignity for everybody in this land. That we have different ways of trying to achieve it, and I believe that my way is more effective.’

  ‘I repeat, why do you need my approval?’

  ‘I need your cooperation,’ he corrected her. ‘For in a way this opportunity depends on you.’

  ‘How?’ she asked, and looked away from him to where the children were splashing and cavorting. Only Garrick was not in the water. Sean had ducked him, and now he sat shivering on the edge of the pool. His thin weedy body was blue with cold. He was fighting for breath, the rack of his ribs sticking out of his chest
as he coughed and wheezed.

  ‘Garry,’ she called sharply. ‘That’s enough. Dry yourself and put on your jersey.’

  ‘Oh, Ma,’ he gasped a protest, and she flared at him.

  ‘Do it this instant.’ And when he went reluctantly to the summer house she turned back to Shasa.

  ‘You want my cooperation?’ She felt totally in control of herself. She would not let him see how she felt towards him and his monstrous intention. ‘Tell me what you want me to do.’

  ‘It will come as no surprise to you to hear that BOSS, the Bureau of State Security, has quite an extensive file on you.’

  ‘In view of the fact that they have arrested me three times,’ Tara smiled again, a tight humourless grimace, ‘you are right, I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Well, my dear, what it boils down to is that it would be impossible for me to hold cabinet rank while you were still raising Cain and committing mayhem with your sisters in the Black Sash.’

  ‘You want me to give up my political work? But what about my record? I mean, I am an old hardened jailbird, you know.’

  ‘Fortunately the security police regard you with a certain amused indulgence. I have seen a copy of your file. The assessment is that you are a dilettante, naive and impressionable, and easily swayed by your more vicious associates.’

  That insult was difficult to bear. Tara jumped to her feet and strode around the edge of the pool, seized Isabella by the wrist and dragged her from the pool.

  ‘That’s enough for you also, young lady.’ She ignored Isabella’s howls of protest and stripped off her bathing costume.

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ Isabella wailed as Tara scrubbed her sodden hair with a rough dry towel and then wrapped her in it.

  Isabella ran to her father, still snivelling and tripping over the tails of the towel.

  ‘Mummy won’t let me swim.’ She crawled into his lap.

  ‘Life is full of injustice.’ Shasa hugged her, and she gave one last convulsive sob and then cuddled her damp curls against his shoulder.