by Wilbur Smith
She left the safe door ajar when she brought the gift to him. Sean had demonstrated his gratitude by pulling her skirts up and her peach-coloured satin bloomers down, then, sitting her on the edge of her husband’s desk, he lifted her knees and placed her feet on each corner of the leather-bound blotter. Then while he stood in front of her and made love to her, he evaluated the contents of the safe over her shoulders.
Sean had heard his father talk about Mark Weston’s collection of British and South African gold coins. It was apparently one of the ten most important in private hands anywhere in the world. In addition to the dozen thick leather-bound albums which contained the collection, the middle shelf of the safe held the ledgers and cash books for the running of the estate and household, and a small gentleman’s jewel box, while the top shelf was crammed with wads of pristine banknotes still in the bank wrappers and a large canvas bag stencilled ‘Standard Bank Ltd’ which obviously contained silver. There could not have been less than £5,000 in notes and coins in the safe.
Sean had explained to Rufus exactly where to look for the safe combination, how to open the false front of the bookcase and what to expect when he did.
The knowledge that Rufus was at work downstairs and the danger of possible discovery stimulated Sean so that at one point Marjorie blurted, ‘You aren’t human – you are a machine.’
He left her at last, lying in the big bed like a wax doll that had melted in the sun, her limbs soft and plastic, the thick mane of her hair darkened and sodden with her own sweat and her mouth smeared out of shape by exhausted passions. Her sleep was catatonic.
Sean was still pent up and excited. He looked into Mark Weston’s study on the way out. The front of the bookcase was open, the safe door wide, the ledgers and cash books tumbled untidily on the floor, and the excitement came on him again in a thick musky wave and he found he was once more fully tumescent.
It was dangerous to remain in the house another minute, and the knowledge made his arousal unbearable. He looked up the marble staircase again and only then did the idea come to him. Veronica’s room was the second door down the east wing passage. She might scream if he woke her suddenly, she might hate him so that she would scream when she recognized him, but on the other hand she might not. The risk was lunatic, and Sean grinned in the darkness and started back up the marble staircase.
A silver blade of moonlight pierced the curtains and fell on Veronica’s pale hair that swirled across the pillow. Sean leaned over her and covered her mouth with his hand. She came awake struggling and terrified.
‘It’s me,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t be afraid, Ronny. It’s me.’
Her struggles stilled, the fear faded from her huge mauve eyes, and she reached up for him with both arms. He lifted his hand off her mouth and she said, ‘Oh, Sean, deep down I knew it. I knew you still loved me.’
Rufus was furious. ‘I thought you had been caught,’ he whined. ‘What happened to you, man?’
‘I was doing the hard work.’ Sean kicked the Harley Davidson and it roared into life. As he turned back onto the road he felt the weight of the saddle bags pull the machine off balance, but he met her easily and straightened up.
‘Slow down, man,’ Rufus leaned forward from the pillion to caution him. ‘You’ll wake the whole valley.’ And Sean laughed in the wild rush of wind, drunk with excitement, and they went up over the crest at a hundred miles an hour.
Sean parked the Harley Davidson on the Kraaifontein road and they scrambled down the bank and squatted in the dry culvert beneath the road. By the light of an electric torch they shared the booty.
‘You said there would be five grand,’ Rufus whined accusingly. ‘Man, there isn’t more than a hundred.’
‘Old man Weston must have paid his slaves.’ Sean chuckled carelessly as he split the small bundle of bank notes, and pushed the larger pile towards Rufus. ‘You need it more than me, kid.’
The jewel box contained cuff-links and studs, a diamond tie-pin that Sean judged to be fully five carats in weight, Masonic medallions, Mark Weston’s miniature decorations on a bar – he had won an MC at El Alamein and a string of campaign medals – a Pathek Philippe dress watch in gold and a handful of other personal items.
Rufus ran over them with an experienced eye. ‘The watch is engraved, all the other stuff is too hot to move, too dangerous, man. We’ll have to dump it.’
They opened the coin albums. Five of them were filled with sovereigns. ‘OK,’ Rufus grunted. ‘I can move that small stuff, but not these. They are red hot, burn your fingers.’ With scorn he discarded the albums of heavy coins, the five-pound and five-guinea issues of Victoria and Elizabeth, Charles and the Georges.
After he dropped Rufus off at the illicit shebeen in the coloured District Six where Rufus had parked his own motorcycle, Sean rode out alone along the high winding road that skirts the sheer massif of Chapman’s Peak. He parked the Harley on the edge of the cliff. The green Atlantic crashed against the rock five hundred feet below where he stood. One at a time Sean hurled the heavy gold coins out over the edge. He flicked them underhanded, so that they caught the dawn’s uncertain light, and then were lost in the shadows of the cliff face as they fell, so he could not see them strike the surface of the water far below. When the last coin was gone, he tossed the empty albums after them and they fluttered as they caught the wind. Then he flung the gold wristwatch and the diamond pin out into the void. He kept the medals for last. It gave him a vindictive satisfaction to have screwed Mark Weston’s wife and daughter, and then to throw his medals into the sea.
When he mounted the Harley Davidson and turned it back down the steep winding road, he pushed the goggles up on to his forehead and let the wind beat into his face and rake his eyes so that the tears streamed back across his cheeks. He rode hard, putting the glistening machine over as he went into the turns so that the footrest struck a shower of sparks from the road surface.
‘Not much profit for a night’s work,’ he told himself, and the wind tore the words from his lips. ‘But the thrills, oh, the thrills!’
When all his best efforts to interest Sean and Michael in the planetary system of the Courtney companies had resulted in either lukewarm and deviously feigned enthusiasm or in outright uninterest, Shasa had gone through a series of emotions, beginning with puzzlement.
He tried hard to see how anyone, particularly a young man of superior intellect, and even more particularly a son of his, could find the whole complex interlinking of wealth and opportunity, of challenge and reward, less than fascinating. At first he thought that he was to blame, that he had not explained it sufficiently, that he had somehow taken their response for granted and had through his own omissions, failed to quicken their attention.
To Shasa it was the very stuff of life itself. His first waking thought each morning, and his last before sleep each night, was for the welfare and sustenance of the company. So he tried again, more patiently, more exhaustively. It was like trying to explain colour to a blind man, and from puzzlement Shasa found himself becoming angry.
‘Damn it, Mater,’ he exploded, when he and Centaine were alone at her favourite place on the hillside above the Atlantic. ‘They just don’t seem to care.’
‘What about Garry?’ Centaine asked quietly.
‘Oh, Garry!’ Shasa chuckled disparagingly. ‘Every time I turn around I trip over him. He is like a puppy.’
‘I see you have given him his own office on the third floor,’ Centaine observed mildly.
‘The old broom cupboard,’ Shasa said. ‘It was a joke really, but the little blighter took it seriously. I didn’t have the heart—’
‘He takes most things seriously, does young Garrick,’ Centaine observed. ‘He’s the only who does. He’s quite a deep one.’
‘Oh, come on, Mater! Garry?’
‘He and I had a long chat the other day. You should do the same, it might surprise you. Did you know that he’s in the top three in his year?’
‘Yes, of course
, I knew – but I mean, it’s only his first year of business administration. One doesn’t take that too seriously.’
‘Doesn’t one?’ Centaine asked innocently, and Shasa was unusually silent for the next few minutes.
The following Friday Shasa looked into the cubbyhole at the end of the passage which served as Garry’s office when he was temporarily employed by Courtney Mining during his college vacations. Garry leapt dutifully to his feet when he recognized his father and he pushed his spectacles up on the bridge of his nose.
‘Hello, champ, what are you up to?’ Shasa asked, glancing down at the forms that covered the desk.
‘It’s a control,’ Garry was caught in a cross-fire – awe at his father’s sudden interest in what he was doing and desperation to retain his attention and to obtain his approval.
‘Did you know that we spent over a hundred pounds on stationery last month alone?’ He was so anxious to impress his father that he stuttered again, something he only did when he was overexcited.
‘Take a deep breath, champ.’ Shasa eased into the tiny room. There was just room for the two of them. ‘Speak slowly, and tell me about it.’
One of Garry’s official duties was to order and issue the office stationery. The shelves behind his desk were filled with sheaves of typing paper and boxes of envelopes.
‘According to my estimates we should be able to cut that below eighty pounds. We could save twenty pounds a month.’
‘Show me.’ Shasa perched on the corner of the desk and applied, his mind to the problem. He treated it with as much respect as if they were discussing the development of a hew gold-mine.
‘You are quite right,’ Shasa approved his figures. ‘You have full authority to put your new control system into practice.’ Shasa stood up. ‘Well done,’ he said, and Garry glowed with gratification. Shasa turned to the door so the lad wouldn’t see his expression of amusement, and then he paused and looked back.
‘Oh, by the way, I’m flying up to Walvis Bay tomorrow. I’m meeting the architects and the engineers on site to discuss the extensions to the canning factory. Would you like to come along?’
Unable to trust his voice lest he stutter again, Garry nodded emphatically.
Shasa allowed Garry to fly. Garry had been granted his private pilot’s licence two months previously, but he still needed a few hours for his twin-engine endorsement. A year older than Garry, Sean had been given his licence immediately he was eligible. Sean flew the way he rode and shot, naturally, gracefully, but carelessly. He was one of those pilots who flew by the grace of God and the seat of his pants. In contrast, Garry was painstaking and meticulous and therefore, Shasa admitted grudgingly, the better pilot. Garry filed a flight plan as though he was submitting a thesis for his doctorate, and his pre-flight checks went on so long that Shasa squirmed in the right-hand seat and only just contained himself from crying out, ‘For God’s sake, Garry, let’s get on with it.’
Yet it was a mark of his trust that he allowed Garry to take the controls of the Mosquito at all. Shasa was prepared to take over at the first sign of trouble, but he was amply rewarded for his forbearance when he saw the sparkle of deep pleasure behind Garry’s spectacles as he handled the lovely machine, lifting her up through the silver wreaths of cloud into a blue African sky where Shasa could share with him a rare feeling of total accord.
Once they arrived at Walvis Bay Shasa tended to forget that Garry was with him. He had become accustomed to his middle son’s close attendance, and though he did not really think of it, it was becoming familiar and comforting to have him there. Garry seemed to anticipate his smallest need, whether it was a light for his cigarette or a piece of scrap paper and pencil on which to illustrate an idea to the architect. Yet Garry was quiet and unobtrusive, not given to inane questions and bumptious or facetious remarks.
The cannery was fast becoming one of the big winners in the Courtney stable of companies. For three seasons they had captured their full quota of pilchards, and then there had been an unusual development. In a private meeting Manfred De La Rey had suggested to Shasa that if the company were to issue a further ten thousand bonus shares in the name of a nominee in Pretoria, the consequences might be very much to everybody’s advantage. Taking Manfred on trust, Shasa had issued the shares as suggested, and within two months there had been a review of their quota by the government Department of Land and Fisheries and that quota had been almost doubled to the two hundred thousand tons of pilchard that they were now permitted to capture annually.
‘For three hundred years the Afrikaners have been left out of business,’ Shasa smiled cynically as he received the glad tidings. ‘But they are catching on fast. They are in the race now, and not too fussy about how they win. The Jews and the English had better look to their business laurels, here come the Nats.’ And he set about planning and financing the extension to the cannery.
It was late afternoon before Shasa finished with the architects, but at this season there were still a few hours of daylight remaining.
‘How about a swim at Pelican Point?’ Shasa suggested to Garry, and they took one of the cannery Land-Rovers and drove along the hard wet sand at the edge of the bay. The waters of the bay stank of sulphur and fish offal, but behind it the high golden dunes and arid mountains rose in desolate grandeur, while out over the protected and silken waters the flamingo flocks were such a brilliant pink as to seem improbable and theatrical. Shasa drove fast around the curve of the bay with the wind ruffling their hair.
‘So what, if anything, did you learn today?’
‘I learned that if you want other people to talk too freely, you keep quiet and look sceptical,’ Garry answered, and Shasa glanced at his son with a startled expression. That had always been a deliberate technique of his, but Shasa had never expected anyone so young and inexperienced to see through it. ‘Without saying anything, you made the architect admit that he really hasn’t worked out a solution to siting the boiler room yet,’ Garry went on. ‘And even I could see that his present proposal is an expensive compromise.’
‘Is that so?’ It had taken Shasa a full day of discussion to reach the same conclusion, but he wasn’t going to say so. ‘What would you do, then?’
‘I don’t know, Pater, not for sure,’ Garry said. He had a pedantic manner of delivering an opinion which had at first irritated Shasa, but which now amused him, particularly as the opinions were usually worth listening to. ‘But instead of simply sticking on another boiler, I would explore the possibility of installing the new Patterson process—’
‘What do you know about the Patterson process?’ Shasa demanded sharply. He had only heard about it himself very recently. Suddenly Shasa found himself arguing as though with an equal. Garry had read all the sales pamphlets and memorized the specifications and figures of the process, and had worked out for himself most of the advantages and disadvantages over the conventional method of preparation and canning.
They were still arguing as they rounded the sandy horn of the bay, and beyond the lighthouse the deserted beach, clean and white, stretched away in dwindling perspective to the horizon. Here the Atlantic waters were wild and green, cold and clean, foamy and effervescent with the rush of the surf.
They stripped off their clothes and, naked, swam out into the tumultuous seas, diving deep beneath each curling wave as it came hissing down upon them. At last they emerged, their bodies tinted blue with the cold, but laughing breathlessly with exhilaration.
As they stood beside the Land-Rover and towelled themselves, Shasa studied his son frankly. Even though sodden with salt water, Garry’s hair stuck up in disorderly spikes and without his spectacles he had a bemused myopic look. His torso was massively developed, his chest was like a pickle barrel and he had grown such a coat of dark body hair that it almost obscured the ridges of muscle that covered his belly like chain mail.
‘Looking at him, there is no way you would ever suspect that he was a Courtney. If I didn’t know better, I would think that T
ara had a little fling on the side.’ Shasa was certain that Tara might be capable of many things, but never infidelity or promiscuity. ‘There is nothing about him of his ancestry,’ he thought, and then looked further and grinned suddenly.
‘Well at least, Garry, you have inherited one of the Courtney gifts. You’ve got a wanger on you that would make old General Courtney himself turn in his grave with envy.’
Hurriedly Garry covered himself with his towel and reached into the Land-Rover for his underpants, but secretly he was pleased. Up until now he had always regarded that portion of his anatomy with suspicion. It seemed to be an alien creature with a will and existence of its own, determined to embarrass and humiliate him at the most unexpected or inappropriate moments, like that unforgettable occasion when he was standing in front of the commerce class at business school giving his dissertation and the girls in the front row started giggling, or when he was forced to retreat in confusion from the typing-pool at Centaine House because of the alien’s sudden but very apparent interest in the surroundings. However, if his father spoke respectfully of it, and the shade of the legendary general approved, then Garry was prepared to reconsider his own relationship with it and come to terms.
They flew on to the H‘ani Mine the next morning. All three of the boys had done their stint at the H’ani. As indeed had Shasa so many years before, they had been required to work their way through every part of the mine’s operation, from the drilling and blasting in the deep amphitheatre of the open pit, to the final separation rooms where at last the precious crystals were recovered from the crushed blue ground.
That forced labour had been more than sufficient for both Sean and Michael and neither of them had ever shown the least desire to return to the H’ani Mine again. Garry was the exception, he seemed to have developed the same love for these remote wild hills as both Shasa and Centaine shared. He asked to accompany his father here whenever Shasa’s regular inspection tours were scheduled. In a few short years he had built up an expert knowledge of the mine’s operation, and had at one time or another personally performed all of the tasks involved in the process of production. So on their last evening at the mine the two of them, Shasa and Garry, stood on the brink of the great pit and while the sun set over the desert behind them they stared down into its shadowy depths.
