‘Your life is important too, isn’t it?’
Kim looked at Calder. ‘Yes,’ she said, steel in her voice. ‘Yes.’ She took another bite of her fish. ‘Everyone always laughs at management consultants, but I was bloody good at it. I earned good money and if I’d stuck at it I would have been a partner pretty soon. I didn’t need to marry a rich man.’
‘What about the hospital? Aren’t you doing some good there?’
‘Oh, yes. I’m sorting that place out: they don’t know what’s hit them. Of course working in a hospital is a worthwhile thing to do and everyone’s so damned nice all the time. Sometimes I find it unbearable. I get gripped by these insane ideas, like firing everyone on their birthday, or making a charitable contribution to the Association of Tobacco Manufacturers. I don’t think they’d notice. It would still be a big smile and a “how are you today, Kimmy?” from everyone.’
Calder winced. ‘You sound dangerous.’
‘I’ve kept myself under control so far. But it is frustrating. We’ve been trying for a baby. He wants one, so I have to produce it.’
‘Don’t you want a child?’
‘Yes. Yes, I do. Especially if we’re going to be stuck in Somerford. But the point is I don’t think Todd even notices what I want. He’s a nice guy, a really kind man, but he’s used to everyone doing everything for him, to being the centre of attention. He just assumes that I will do what’s best for him, that our marriage is a partnership whose aim is to do what makes him happy.’
‘You’ve obviously been thinking about it a lot.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry to moan at you, and it’s terrible when he’s lying there unconscious, but yes, I have been stewing over it more than is healthy. Do you remember Dom?’
‘Your boyfriend at Cambridge? The cricketer?’ Calder could recall a tall, dashing cricket blue that Kim had gone out with for a couple of terms in their second year.
‘Yes. Todd’s a bit like him. Totally self-centred.’
‘Didn’t you catch him having it off with Emma?’ Emma was one of the three other students who had shared a place with Kim and Calder.
‘Yes,’ muttered Kim. ‘The bitch. In our house too! At least Todd doesn’t do that kind of thing.’
‘He seems like a pretty straight guy.’
‘Oh, he is. God, I’d forgotten how awful Dom was at the end. But I do remember how head-over-heels in love with him I was. I was young and innocent then.’
‘Well, young.’ Calder smiled. Kim had looked delectable at nineteen. She still looked pretty attractive fifteen years later, he couldn’t help noticing.
‘Yes, young. You were very good to me after all that.’
‘Probably just trying to get you into bed,’ Calder said.
‘Alex! And I thought you were such a kind, sympathetic man.’ Kim smiled that smile that Calder remembered so clearly from all those years ago.
‘And so I was. A kind, sympathetic man who wanted to get you into bed. Didn’t work, though, did it? Should have gone for the selfish bastard approach.’
‘Nah,’ said Kim. ‘You would have been really bad at that. Trust me. I know a lot about that technique.’
The level of the wine slipped down the bottle.
‘What about you?’ she said. ‘When I asked you about the existence of a girlfriend you came over all grumpy. What’s up?’
Calder told her all about Sandy. Kim was generally sympathetic, although when Calder described the bust-up following his weekend alone in New York, she gently took Sandy’s side.
‘You know she probably felt just as badly about it as you did?’
‘If she did, she could have done something about it.’
‘Maybe she couldn’t.’
‘I know. But it’s still not going to work.’
‘What if you moved to New York?’
‘I’m not sure the relationship has progressed that far. Besides, the only job I could get over there would be in investment banking, and there’s no way I’m going back to that.’
‘Why not? I’d have thought you’d make a good trader. In fact I thought that was the perfect job for you after the RAF.’
‘I was a good trader,’ Calder admitted. ‘Very good. And I got a buzz out of it. But it’s not the real world. After a few years of flinging millions of dollars of other people’s money around you lose touch with reality. Everything has a monetary value. Your salary, obviously, your profit and loss, your bonus, your trading positions, your house, your car, before you know it, even your relationships. You begin to think that poor people are stupid people. Then you think that someone who won’t do what it takes to get a deal is a wimp. Not just a wimp, but a stupid wimp. It changes you.’
‘Oh, come on, Alex. Not everyone in investment banking is evil. There are plenty of ordinary decent people who work there.’
‘Yes, but there are fewer of them than there should be, and those few change. Look at Benton Davis! Martha said she trusted him: well maybe she could have done eighteen years ago, but she certainly wouldn’t now. The same thing was happening to me.
‘Remember I told you about my assistant, Jen, the one who everyone thought committed suicide? Her former boss had bullied her the whole time she was working for him, totally destroyed her self-esteem. That’s why she joined my group. Then in a bar after work one evening he suggested that she and I were sleeping together. Taken in isolation, that might not sound too bad, but for her it was the last straw. She decided to sue Bloomfield Weiss. Benton Davis and all the others made her life hell. And you know what I did? I tried to talk her out of it. I told her her career would benefit and she would make more money if she put up with those kinds of insults. Well, she was a brave woman, she stood up to them, stood up to them all. In the end she died. And only then did I really try to help her, when it was way to late.’
‘Wow,’ said Kim.
‘That’s why I’m here, tootling around with aeroplanes.’
‘Rather you than me,’ Kim said. She yawned. ‘It’s amazing how sitting around doing nothing all day can make you tired. I’m off to bed.’
‘Good night.’
As Kim disappeared inside, Calder sat alone in the garden, watching the night creep up around him.
Andries Visser pulled his Land Rover Discovery off the road and along the poplar-lined drive to his farm. The veld stretched brown and yellow in the distance to his left and right. He saw the large frame of his older brother Gideon sitting on an open tractor pulling winter feed for the cattle, a prize herd of Limousins. Gideon was a strong, hardworking, if unimaginative farmer. He lived in the cottage behind the main farmhouse, but he did most of the work. Andries and his family lived in the main house even though Andries’s physical contribution to the farm was negligible. He had provided the money to invest in the farm, and the ideas. If the place had been left to Gideon, the Vissers would still be scratching around in the dirt.
There was another reason Andries lived in the main house and his elder brother and his family in the cottage. Twenty years earlier, when their father was still alive and Gideon was in his late thirties, Gideon had got himself involved in a spot of legal trouble. Gideon and his wife and five children had gone to a braai at a neighbour’s farm. True to tradition it was an all-day affair, boerewors on the fire and Castle beer in the cool box. The weather was glorious, the kids were playing, the women were gossiping and Gideon and the neighbour were getting pleasantly drunk. Then there was a commotion from the sheds at the back. One of the farm hands had discovered a thief. He was a runt of a man, a black of course, and he had been caught stealing a can of red paint. Why he wanted to steal the paint wasn’t entirely clear, but Gideon and the neighbour were indignant, especially when Gideon, wrongly as it turned out, identified the man as a suspected thief of a cow from another neighbour’s farm the month before. The two Boers decided to teach the man a lesson, and in order not to scare the children they slung him in the rear of the bakkie and drove off. He was found the following day in a ditch, beaten to
death.
The law took its course and several months later Gideon and the neighbour found themselves in the dock accused of murder. The thief, whose name was Moses Nkose, was incontrovertibly dead, but hard evidence of murder was difficult to pin down. Andries discussed the matter with his father and with Gideon, and the three of them came to an arrangement. Andries had a word with the right people and Gideon ended up with only two years for manslaughter. Andries, the son who was happiest wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, inherited the farm. Over time Gideon’s resentment had faded, and the arrangement worked well.
Andries could easily have arranged his brother’s acquittal, but he had chosen not to. After all, he still walked with a slight limp from where his big brother had belted him with the flat of a pick axe when he was twelve.
Andries drove up to the house itself, surrounded by an inner fence of twelve-foot-high barbed wire, topped off with three electrified strands. Yellow signs warned of an armed response to intruders. Cattle rustlers these days carried guns. Inside the fence, a modern-day kraal, was an oasis of green irrigated wealth. There were tall trees, poplar and cypress, there was a lush green lawn, there was a swimming pool, and the house itself, a simple low white one-storey affair to which Andries had added two extensions. To one side stood the water tower, a windmill, the labourers’ shacks and, most importantly, the cow sheds. The fences were there to protect the cattle as much as the humans.
Andries was no farmer, but he was immensely proud of his farm. It had been in the family for 160 years. The Visser family had set off from Graaff-Reinet in the Karoo on the Great Trek in the 1830s, had crossed the Drakensberg mountains into Zululand, and then a few years later been ejected by the British and re-crossed the mountains to this spot, forty kilometres from Pretoria. Here they had scratched a living, a God-fearing, hard-working, honest family, struggling against the depredations of poor weather, poor soil and vindictive British colonial administrators. A small, physically weak man with a limp, Andries had found his talents more suited to the needs of government administration in Pretoria, but he never forgot the physical labour and suffering of his ancestors, and now he had retired from government service he was proud to be occupying the same land they had farmed through the generations.
He parked next to a car he recognized, an unprepossessing blue Toyota Corolla. He stubbed out his cigarette in the pot by the stoep. His wife, Hannah, had banned him from smoking indoors a couple of years before. He swung open the security gate guarding the front door and entered the house.
His wife was in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee with a big, square man with a thick neck, a moustache and close-cropped hair.
‘Kobus! Good to see you,’ Visser said in Afrikaans with a thin smile. ‘Why don’t you bring that through to my study? We need to talk.’
Colonel Kobus Moolman sat stiffly in the chair next to Visser’s desk and sipped his coffee. He was now in his early sixties but he still looked hard. Rock hard. His reputation in the security police had as much to do with his cunning as his ruthlessness. He had served his country in South West Africa, and had been a senior member of the notorious death squad that had tortured and killed dozens if not hundreds of people at Vlakplaas. Visser had had serious doubts when Freddie Steenkamp had suggested him for the Laagerbond, but Freddie had been right. There were times when the bond needed a man like Moolman.
Once away from his wife, Visser’s smile disappeared. ‘What went wrong?’ he said.
‘I must be getting rusty,’ Moolman answered. ‘It was a simple question of not enough explosive. It must have been a stronger aeroplane than I gave it credit for. But the guy’s in a coma, isn’t he? He’s stopped asking questions.’
‘He could snap out of it at any time.’
‘Do you want me to finish him off?’ Moolman asked.
‘In the hospital?’
‘It would be tricky, but if it was necessary …’
Visser stared out of the window, over the veld towards the ravine where the Elands River, almost dry now, wound its way towards the Limpopo and the Indian Ocean 500 kilometres away. His chest was wracked by a cough, and he felt a pain in his shoulder. The cough was getting worse, he really ought to see a doctor about it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not while he’s still unconscious. It might just stir up more trouble. The British police know it wasn’t an accident and they have started an investigation. I hope they won’t turn up anything. But I would like you to fly back to London to be on hand in case we need you.’
Moolman nodded. The truth was he much preferred operating on his home turf, even if these days the number of old friends in authority he could rely upon to provide him with assistance was dwindling. But he prided himself on his abilities, he had always been a loyal member of the Laagerbond and he was not about to let them down now.
‘Very well, Andries. You can count on me.’
10
July 18, 1988
I had lunch with George today in Greenmarket Square. It was raining. On the way I saw a copy of the Financial Times on a newsstand: the front-page story was blacked out. This country is pathetic.
George is really down about the Mail closing. He has been trying to find a buyer without any luck, its losses are just too big. I suggested he approach Graham Pelling to see if he will take the Mail along with the other newspapers. George said he will try, but he doesn’t hold out much hope.
I asked George about Muldergate. It’s ten years since it happened and I’m a bit fuzzy about the details. The Mail was one of the papers that broke the scandal, and George remembered it well. I asked him whether he has heard of the Laagerbond. He hasn’t. He was clearly curious about my questions, and I promised I would tell him more when I could. But not yet. Not until I’ve figured out what’s going on with Neels.
July 20
I am crying as I write this. I have just had a huge fight with Neels. It wasn’t about his woman, I chickened out of talking to him about that. It was about the Laagerbond.
All I did was ask him who they were and he exploded. He demanded to know how I had found out about them. When I told him I had looked in Daniel’s briefcase he was furious. He said I was the lowest of the low, I was scum for spying on him. He said I had no right to pry into his business, he said I wouldn’t understand it anyway, he said I had betrayed him, and I had been disloyal. I fell apart. I burst into tears and ran out of the room into the bedroom.
It’s all so wrong, he’s the one whose being disloyal, he’s carrying on an affair, he’s dealing with these weirdo Boers.
For the first time in our marriage I couldn’t stand up to him, I ran away.
He actually called me “scum.” His own wife. I can’t forgive him for that. Never.
July 21
Neels slept in Todd’s room last night. He got up early to go to work, I heard him. At least he didn’t sneak off in the middle of the night.
Zan and Caroline were very quiet at breakfast. They must have heard the shouting and the tears last night. Poor Caroline! It’s her second day back at school and it’s obvious she’s pleased to be out of the house.
July 22
Spoke to Todd on the phone this evening. I suggested that he come out here for a week at the end of his summer vacation and bring Francesca with him. He seemed to like the idea, but he said he’d have to check with her. I hope he does come.
Neels is working so hard on the Herald deal I scarcely see him. Thank God. He’s going to London tomorrow and then Philadelphia. He says he might be away for three weeks. My feelings toward him are so confused. I’m angry, so angry, about the way he treats me these days and about what he’s done with the Mail. And I’m still sure he’s got another woman hidden away somewhere. I haven’t seen any more signs of it, but I just know it.
But I’m also afraid. The violence that I have always known exists in this country seems to be closing in on me, stealing into my own family. First there was Hennie, then the SACP list, then there are these Laagerbond people. Men that high up in the A
frikaner establishment can only be dangerous. And then there’s Neels. He hasn’t threatened me again directly, but he always looks angry, as if he’s about to explode at any second. I fear that he has changed, but more than that I fear that it is this creeping, all-pervasive violence that is changing him.
July 23
I drove into Cape Town to have lunch with Libby Wiseman. She lives in Tamboerskloof in a blue-painted little house on the slopes of Signal Hill opposite Table Mountain. She lectures in English literature at the University of Cape Town, and her husband Dennis is an attorney who specializes in political prisoners. He does a good job too. Although he fails to keep most of them out of jail, he inflicts maximum embarrassment on the authorities every time, which is what his clients really want. It’s Saturday and Dennis was out playing golf. Libby suggested we go to a restaurant in the Bo-Kaap.
We walked down the hill and then along toward Bo-Kaap. I love the area with its steep cobbled streets, its rows of old brightly painted houses, car-repair shops, mosques with dainty cream-colored minarets, and the smells of Africa mixing with the Orient. It’s segregated: only coloreds live there. “Colored” is a typical South African euphemism: it means people of mixed ancestry, people who don’t fit into neat racial categories. Bo-Kaap is a wonderful celebration of what that word can represent: the genes of Malays, Indians, Europeans, slaves from Guinea and the East Indies, even the original Hottentot inhabitants of the Cape are all jumbled together in a melange of brown skin, high cheekbones and broad smiles. And the food is delicious.
Libby led me to an orange-and-yellow restaurant on the corner of Wale Street with a terrific view of the city and Table Mountain opposite. The morning fog had disappeared and the sun was out, illuminating the gray crenelated battlements of the mountain in a soft winter glow. We exchanged gossip about the other members of the Guguletu Project Committee and she told me a story about one of her first-year students who has somehow gotten George Eliot and Charles Dickens confused and is convinced that Dickens was a woman.
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