Storms Over Africa

by Beverley Harper

  Richard came back to the present with a start. As usual, thinking of that time brought back the lump of hurt in his throat. He had learned to hide his emotions from others, learned how to stop the tears which threatened, learned how to laugh it away. No-one ever knew the extent of his pain. He hid it because he had been taught by his father that emotion was unmanly. He hid it because he lived in a land of hard men and women who judged others by their competence and ability to cope. He did such a good job of hiding his hurt that even his children believed he had recovered remarkably well from their mother’s death. But the pain never went away and loneliness, despite his success with women, stalked his bedroom at night.

  Looking around, he realised that the first passengers were coming through. He searched the crowded Arrivals hall for a sign of Penny. He had asked if she intended to meet David’s flight but all she would say last night was, ‘If I can.’ He was fairly certain she would deliberately stay away to punish him for last night. Despite his annoyance he grinned at her defiance. It was an emotion he understood.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’ Unseen by Richard, David had walked up beside him. Hell’s teeth but the boy has grown in three months. Richard was five feet eleven. David was now topping six feet.

  ‘Christ, you look ill, son. We’ll have to get some tan onto that white skin.’ As soon as he said the words, Richard wished he could retract them. Criticism instead of praise—a hell of a start.

  David, however, simply smiled and said, ‘Sounds good,’ and Richard felt the old irritation rising at his son’s gentle placidness.

  ‘Is that all your luggage?’ As usual, David was travelling with nothing more than hand-baggage. The boy seemed to live in the same jeans and T-shirt, although Richard knew his cupboard at the farm was jammed with clothes. Judging from the bills, he presumed the lad had another full cupboard of clothes at school.

  ‘Yep.’ David swung the shoulder bag easily over his broad shoulder.

  The older he gets the more he looks like Kath. Richard resented that. Just looking at David reminded him of how Kathy looked when he first met her. The same clear blue eyes, the same unruly blonde curls, identical fine bones and high-bridged nose, the same wide smiling mouth. Pushing his feelings to one side he said, ‘We’re going straight home. Penny might be up at the weekend.’ He crossed his fingers as he said it.

  ‘That’s cool.’

  He hated the American idiom but he said nothing. ‘Anything you’d particularly like to do this holiday?’

  ‘Nope.’

  They were walking towards the car park. A young woman, around Penny’s age, was swinging towards them. The girl looked at David, then at Richard, then her eyes flicked back to David and lingered there. David appeared not to see her. Jesus Christ, the silly little sod doesn’t even know what he’s got. Richard’s exasperation was tinged with envy.

  ‘What are you planning to do with your time, then?’ Why did it sound like an inquisition?

  David gave him an unfathomable look before saying, ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘And that,’ thought Richard, ‘is all I’m likely to get out of the kid.’ He never realised until his wife died that he and his son spoke largely through her. They had very little in common. They reached the car, Richard unlocked it and both of them got in before he tried again. ‘How’s school?’

  ‘Fine.’

  He gave up. He used his concentration on driving as an excuse not to have to make further conversation. By the time they had crossed town and were on the road to the farm David was asleep, the hot afternoon breeze ruffling his hair through the open window of the car. Richard felt a stirring of sympathy for the boy. He must have been exhausted. All night on the train from Scotland to Euston, then the long flight from Heathrow to Harare, had taken its toll. If past holidays were anything to go by he knew David would sleep for most of the first few days at home.

  ‘God help me,’ he thought as he drove. ‘I have a daughter as spirited as any young man. She’s feisty and proud and would have made a fine son. And my son should have been my daughter. Perhaps sitting up there on your cloud you know why, Kath, but I’m damned if I can see it.’ And he shoved his foot down hard on the accelerator, in a hurry to get home to familiar surroundings. He had a Rhodesian ridgeback called Winston. Winston was neither possessive or indifferent, nor was he the wrong sex, having been neutered years ago. Right now Richard preferred the dog over both his children.

  TWO

  Richard had named his farm Pentland Park, for the formation of hills that reminded him of his native Scotland and the beautiful Pentland Hills which his family home overlooked. He had built the house on a plateau so he could see east across the valley towards the hills. An early riser, he loved nothing better than to sit on his verandah in the cool of the dawn and watch the silhouette of the hills turn from a pen and wash illustration of simple lines and delicate hues of yellow and pink, into a lush damask tapestry of blood-red rocks and vivid green bushes and trees and, here and there, the mysterious black depths of caves. Then, as the sun rose higher, the brilliant colours melted and diffused and turned pale tan and light olive green and the land returned to the khaki colours of unblemished African bush.

  Kathy had been a night person, so he usually witnessed the colourful symphony of the birth of each new day alone. However, most evenings she would join him on the verandah to watch the setting sun turn the hills red, then pink, then a cool and tranquil deep purple. As the dying rays of the sun faded into twilight, the birds fell silent and the night sounds took over. It was a magical time of day and the silent sharing of it bonded the two of them. Arguments and sulks, of which there were many, were put aside and, very often, forgotten as they sipped their sundowners and silently enjoyed the land they had come to love.

  When she died it had taken Richard two years before he would allow himself again to enjoy the spectacle of evening. Even now, after five years, sitting alone on the verandah filled him with a deep melancholy, an aching loneliness, and although he loved the sight, the magic of sunset was never quite the same.

  More often than not he used this time of day to remember. Somehow Kathy seemed closer to him then than at any other time. He believed he had been too selfish to be considered a particularly good husband. He had taken control of their destiny from the beginning and she had happily gone along with him. Richard ruled, Kathy complied. In a world of changing values and shifting status, he had never considered their marriage to be anything other than normal. A friend out from Scotland once accused him of being a hangover from the Stone Age. He had no idea what she meant. In a hard land, he was a hard man. He believed then, as now, that was as it should be.

  When Kathy died he remembered the Stone Age remark. Until her death he did not know that he needed her as much as she needed him. The impact of his loss had him reeling from the shock for two years. Sitting on the verandah in the evening he avoided remembering their latter years together. To do so ultimately forced him to think about her death, so he tended to concentrate on their early days, when they were fresh out from Scotland—just him and Kathy, their lives in front of them.

  It seemed he had a date with Africa from around the age of seven. That was when an uncle, his father’s brother, visited his parents in Scotland. The uncle farmed sugar in Zululand and filled young Richard’s head with tales of green mamba snakes who were swifter than a bullet and twice as deadly. He told him of blundering rhinoceroses with irascible tempers, of how crocodiles sometimes stuff their victims into crevices in the banks of rivers until they are ready to eat them (and how, on one miraculous occasion, an African labourer had escaped and lived to tell the tale). He delighted Richard with stories about mischievous monkeys, graceful springboks, stately elephants and ferocious lions. Richard learned exotic and unfamiliar-sounding words which he practised in the privacy of his bedroom, his tongue battling to get around the difficulty of placenames like Hluhluwe, Amatikulu and Umhlanga Rocks.

  After his uncle’s visit he read anything he could get his h
ands on about the continent of Africa. He devoured safari stories, tales of tall strong men who faced the wildness of Africa and conquered it. He read book after book about the habits and habitats of all of Africa’s wild animals. He decided that, when he grew up, he would farm in Africa like his uncle. He never wavered from his desire, despite the fact that his father wanted him to join the family hotel business once he had finished school. Indeed, this is what happened for a while. Richard needed money to go to Africa and so, displaying what was for him admirable patience, he worked hard for his father and saved his money. By the time he was twenty-four, however, Africa was as far away as ever. He had managed to save a few thousand pounds but he needed more. Entreaties to his father’s good nature fell on deaf ears—his parents wanted him to stay in Scotland.

  Richard’s father was a dedicated businessman who lived for his work and who had no time for the nonsense with which his brother had filled his son’s head. If he had a dream at all, it was to see his son’s name next to his one day . . . James Dunn and Son. As an only child, Richard was his father’s only hope of continuing the family business.

  His mother was, as his grandmother once tartly remarked (much to Richard’s secret delight), ‘an empty-headed fluffy paws’. He probably loved his mother once but, by the time he was five, realised the only time she would show him affection was in the company of visitors.

  He was closer to his grandmother than his own mother. She understood the restlessness in her grandson and applauded the wildness in him as being a sign of strong character. She encouraged his interest in Africa. After all, her younger son lived there. There were many arguments whenever she came to the house. Richard’s father would rant and rave about keeping up the family tradition. Gran would reply that if family tradition was so important to him why didn’t he follow in his own father’s footsteps and go into banking. Loud discussions usually ensued with Richard’s mother keeping well out of the way while always managing to convey to her son that she blamed him for the disorder which had suddenly come into their home.

  Then, two things happened at once which set him back on course. His grandmother died, leaving him £20,000. And Kathy came into his life.

  One blustery autumn day she literally bumped into him as she tried to control her scarf, her umbrella and a number of packages. Looking into her fresh, innocent face and her clear blue eyes as he helped her, Richard knew he had found his mate. He never intended to take a wife to Africa but it suddenly seemed like a good idea. His dark good looks meant he could have any woman he wanted but suddenly that did not matter. Kathy clean-bowled him. As she breathlessly tried to thank him that day in the street she looked into his eyes and saw his soul and said, ‘Oh’ in a small voice as she made the same connection he had.

  She had all the attributes to please his mother, which was just as well because his mother could be hell on wheels if she worked at it. Kathy was beautiful. She was young. More importantly, she came from a good family. Not so acceptable was that she was adventurous and fell in instantly with his desire to go to Africa. Although Richard’s mother didn’t give a hoot whether her son lived in Scotland or Africa, James Dunn and Son had a solid ring to it and she had set her sights on the day when Richard would enter her husband’s business as an equal.

  Despite an education in a strict Presbyterian girls’ school, Kathy’s spirit was still free, and her laughter rang out as unrestricted and natural as a mountain waterfall. She teamed up with Richard against his parents. She informed his mother that, since the scandalous behaviour of the ‘Are you married or do you live in Kenya?’ set of the 1940s and ’50s, farming in Africa had become not only an acceptable but a desirable occupation which was being pursued by the wealthy. Later, giggling, she admitted to Richard she had read the comment somewhere in a novel. Richard’s father was easy. He was of the ‘stiff upper lip’ school and so concentrated hard on pretending he did not care. Kathy and Richard were aware of his feelings but, being young and keen to prove themselves away from the rigid set of rules laid down by his parents, ignored his disappointment.

  Kathy’s parents were different. Her mother cried, then wiped her eyes and set about helping her daughter get ready for her new life. Kathy’s father—a self-made millionaire from the north of England who, despite his wealth and his wife’s good family, always retained a dour rawness—clapped Richard on the shoulder heavily one night in a ‘let’s see what this young pup is made of’ piss-up in his local pub and declared, ‘If you hurt my little girl I’ll fookin’ kill you.’

  Richard, whose capacity for beer was equalled by his zest for life and belief in himself, grinned at his future father-in-law and replied, ‘If I hurt your little girl I’ll buy the fucking gun myself.’ Her father was mollified, but only slightly. However, he did offer to give the young couple £10,000 as a wedding present. When Richard refused, saying it was too much, her father told him in no uncertain terms that he could stick the money up his arse, or take out a trust fund for his daughter, but by Jove he would take the bloody money. Richard took the money.

  Kathy was a virgin when he met her and she stayed a virgin for a full two weeks after they met, but only because it took that long to engineer a time and place where they could be alone. Kathy was a virgin in the physical sense only. She met Richard on a sexual level as a practised equal. Her naturalness delighted him.

  The swiftness with which he convinced her to marry him and extricated himself from the family hotel business bordered on indecent. The legacy his grandmother left him was like a warm, soft breeze blowing in his face. They were married in all the grand style her family could muster, given the short notice, and they sailed for Cape Town immediately. On their wedding night he made her promise two things: that she give Africa a fair chance to win her heart; and she not get pregnant until they were settled and on their feet. She happily agreed.

  They could have flown to Africa but both of them wanted the time on the boat as a honeymoon, a chance to get to know each other better. While his love for, and delight with, his new bride never diminished, by the end of the first week Richard was bored. He was a man of action. He felt constricted by the confines of the ship. Kathy got her first taste of his impatience during that long trip. And something else. Something which stayed with her for the rest of her life. Doubt.

  Richard possessed sex appeal. He was aware of this, had used it often, and it amused him. He accepted it as naturally as he accepted his dark curly hair. He could not have said what it was, he simply knew it was there. Women found him irresistible. And indeed, until he met Kathy, he enjoyed the fact that others had to work harder at attracting members of the opposite sex. Kathy knew he was attractive. She found him attractive. But she had no idea how attractive until that sea voyage.

  The nineteen-year-old daughter of the ship’s captain was enjoying her first cruise with her father. She took one look at Richard’s handsome face and decided, honeymoon or not, she had to have him. She engineered a place at Richard and Kathy’s table and quickly learned that, while Kathy was perfectly happy to sit on deck and read for hours, Richard was not. She offered to show them around the parts of the ship normally off limits to passengers, hoping Kathy would refuse. She had hedged her bets in this regard, knowing that Kathy was due to take part in a bridge afternoon and would be unlikely to want to let her partner down.

  Richard was genuinely interested in the workings of such a large vessel. He lingered for more than an hour in the engine room and spent just as long up on the bridge. He was less interested in the crew’s quarters but the captain’s daughter seemed keen for him to see them so he went along good-naturedly.

  Kathy’s partner, in the meantime, gave up her battle against seasickness, excused herself and went to her cabin. Kathy went looking for Richard. One helpful steward guided her to the crew’s quarters where he had seen Richard heading a few minutes earlier.

  The captain’s daughter, a pampered only child who was used to getting her own way, wasted no time once she got Richard alone
in an empty cabin. When innuendo failed she flung herself at him and tried to kiss him. Richard, embarrassed, was trying to extricate himself when Kathy found them. She took one look at the situation and left.

  In their cabin, they had their first row, conducted in furious undertones so others would not hear.

  ‘It wasn’t how it looked.’

  ‘Bullshit!’

  This startled him so much he nearly lost the thread of his argument. It was the first time he had heard Kathy swear. ‘She jumped me.’

  ‘A big boy like you!’ Kathy was not trying to be funny, he could see that.

  ‘Yeah, well I can see you’re upset.’ He knew how it must have looked to her.

  ‘Do you blame me?’

  He was getting sick of being on the back foot. ‘Look, what is this? I’ve told you what happened. Believe me . . .’

  ‘No.’

  He waited, watching Kathy breathe. ‘Is that it? No?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They stared at each other over a space which appeared impossible to bridge. He tried another tack. ‘Do you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your Scottish accent gets thicker when you’re angry.’

  ‘Does not.’

  ‘Does too.’

  ‘Does not.’

  Nothing made him more irritable than the feeling he was getting nowhere. Suddenly he was fed up. ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, think what you like. There was nothing in it. Think what you bloody-well like, I’m going for a walk.’ He turned to go.

  ‘Richard.’ She sounded scared. ‘Was there really nothing in it?’

  He turned back and saw the tears and held out his arms. She tumbled into them, crying. ‘Kath, I swear on my life, darling, there was nothing in it.’

  She believed him because she wanted to but an embryonic doubt had been conceived. They made love for the rest of the afternoon, kissing and caressing away the misunderstanding. Later, curled up against him, Kathy said, ‘Looks like I’m going to have to keep you under lock and key.’ Richard growled back, ‘Just try it’ in a manner which told Kathy rather a lot about her new husband.