by John Harris
The Tiger shook his head, still unable to speak, and Pansy gazed at him with admiration because she had no idea of his ignominious part in the operation. ‘Fifteen thousand quid apiece,’ she said in awed tones. ‘Give or take a bit.’
The Tiger nodded.
‘That’s a lot of money.’ Her admiration by this time knew no bounds. She glanced about her. Fifteen thousand pounds loot was better any day than fifty pounds reward and the Tiger suddenly looked a far better proposition than the corporal of the Lancers or the private of the City of London Volunteers despite his father’s pub.
‘Under the bed,’ she said briskly.
The Tiger seemed petrified so she gave him a shove and disappeared like a mouse diving for its hole. The boater, snatched up from the table, flew after him, the edge of the brim giving him a smart clip over the eye, then Pansy began to arrange the long white lace spread.
Crouching in the semi-darkness, his heart in his mouth, the Tiger saw intimate garments that he didn’t normally have the opportunity to see drop across the end of the bed, and it dawned on him that Pansy was undressing. Then he realised they were being draped with careful haphazardness so that, with each side of the bed fringed by the counterpane and the head to the wall, he could only see into the room through the frilled legs of Pansy’s linen drawers.
The edge of yellow light disappeared as the candles were snuffed and he was in darkness.
‘Where was Moses when the light went out,’ Pansy giggled and he heard the bedsprings squeak, then the bed above him slammed down against the back of his head so that he bumped his nose on the hard brim of the straw boater with such force it brought tears to his eyes. After a while he realised it had made his nose bleed and he fought to sniffle quietly as he struggled to get at his handkerchief.
A shadow appeared over the side of the bed. It was Pansy’s head.
‘Dose’s bleedig,’ he whispered.
As he extricated his handkerchief and clapped it to his face, the sandy lashes blinking faster than ever, the door opened. Between the legs of Pansy’s drawers he saw a man’s boots and spurs. Behind him there were other male boots and a dress he recognised from its colour as Poll’s.
‘Who’s in here?’ he heard. The voice sounded educated like Willie’s and harsh with authority.
‘My niece.’ Poll’s voice came and he saw light appear under the bedspread as a candle was carried into the room. ‘You awake, Panse?’
‘Yes, Aunt Poll.’
The man’s voice came. ‘She alone?’
‘Of course she is,’ Poll said stiffly.
‘I didn’t mean that, Madame.’ The voice sounded confused. ‘I thought she might have had a companion – er – a female companion, of course.’ The speaker gave up the struggle and concentrated on getting down to facts. ‘Nobody been in here, Madame?’ he asked.
The bedsprings squeaked and the Tiger, his head up like a startled buck, had to put his hand over his mouth to stop himself crying out in alarm.
‘No there hasn’t,’ Pansy retorted. ‘And I’m a ‘miss’, not a “madame”.’
The Tiger almost fainted with relief.
‘Right. Sorry to trouble you, Miss, I’m sure. They were here, though’ – the voice seemed to be retreating towards the corridor – ‘and that girl down there was screaming like a witch.’
‘One of the maids,’ Poll said calmly. ‘Always was a highly strung girl.’
The door slammed.
For a long time there was silence, then the bed springs squeaked. The edge of the counterpane was lifted and the Tiger found himself gazing at Pansy’s face which hung upside-down from the bed.
‘You can come out now,’ she said.
As the Tiger climbed from under the bed, stumbling over his thanks, Pansy stared at him with a warm affection. Having reached the advanced age of eighteen, she had come to the conclusion it was time she settled down. She was looking for a husband and the Tiger suddenly looked a distinct possibility.
Her small warm hand touched his and he felt himself being pulled towards the bed. Then, as though she sensed his reluctance, she gave him a tremendous yank and he fell across her. Naked flesh was against his cheek and realised that now she wasn’t fighting him, he was fighting her, and it was different being on the receiving end. She had her arms round him, grabbing as hard as she could go, and her mouth was soft and moist against his.
‘Here, I say…’ he said.
She wrenched his collar and tie free and, as he tried to sit up, pulled him down again. From being the aggressor, he was suddenly fighting for his life.
‘Hey! Whoa!’
‘No need to shout,’ she said.
He didn’t argue. He couldn’t. He was too busy defending himself as she dragged his shirt from his trousers.
‘Lets have them pants off,’ she said, wrenching at his braces. A button flew off and rattled to the floor.
‘Here, I say,’ he said again. ‘Steady on. I – oh!’
There was a sudden halt in the struggles. ‘There!’ Pansy said. ‘How’s that?’
It was a moment before he answered. ‘You leave go of me,’ he said at last, but his voice was suddenly uncertain.
‘My!’ she breathed. ‘You are tall for a little feller.’ She giggled and flung an arm round his neck and, as she flopped back on the pillows, her legs waving whitely in the light that came through the window from the stoep, he sprawled on top of her. With all the uncovered flesh about he was beginning to get ideas again and Pansy was more skilled than she’d led him to believe. He lifted his head.
‘Panse…’ he began, but his voice came out in a croak and he had to clear his throat. ‘Panse…’
She put a hand over his mouth and pulled his head down once more. He suddenly felt suffocated and as though about to burst.
‘Panse…’ he bleated.
Beneath him, Pansy gave a little wriggle and ran her fingernails up and down his back so that he shuddered ecstatically.
‘Come on then,’ she whispered. ‘What are you waiting for?’
The Tiger was still having doubts, however – faint now, but doubts, nevertheless. ‘I thought you said you didn’t go in for this sort of thing,’ he said.
‘That was ten minutes ago,’ Pansy said, her mind firmly fixed on the Tiger’s fifteen thousand pounds. ‘I do now.’
When the Tiger appeared the following morning, Dolly Fish and Willie had spent an uncomfortable night on the veldt trying to scratch holes to fit their hips in the stony ground. It had been so freezing cold, their breath had hung in clouds before their faces and the last of the winter rains had chilled them, hissing and streaming about them until they’d felt that if they’d opened their mouths they’d have drowned. They had only crept back into Winifred after Fish had scouted the place and discovered that Mace and his little troop had moved on after a false trail to Mimosa Grove.
‘There’s one thing for sure,’ he said. ‘They sure as hell haven’t let up.’
From Poll’s Cape Coloured head waiter, Josiah, who was clearing bottles off the stoep, they discovered that the Tiger was still inside, and they sat on a box outside Nell’s Emporium and Clothing Store across the road, staring at the shirts, socks, braces, studs, spectacles – even false teeth – in the window as they waited for him to appear. When he did, Pansy was with him and he had the look of a cat that had been at the cream.
‘Who’s that?’ Fish demanded as she disappeared.
‘Poll’s niece,’ the Tiger announced smugly. ‘She’s up here from Cape Town looking for work.’
‘With Poll?’
‘Oh, no.’ The Tiger’s face was all innocence and he was clearly unperturbed by the disaster hanging over them. ‘She’s not that kind. She never has been. Not ever.’
Fish was staring back at Poll’s place, bewildered. Most of the women he’d met in South Africa were either hard-faced creatures who looked as though they’d practised every trick of love in their time and in doing so had lost their own immortal femininit
y, or rock-hard housewives, burnt by the sun, who’d probably never known much of love but had probably never had much femininity either. He hadn’t believed there were any other types and he continued to stare at Poll’s place in a daze.
‘Good-looker,’ he said; he sounded as though he were having difficulty speaking.
‘Yes,’ the Tiger agreed. ‘She is a bit.’ He was still trying to work out why novelists should consider what he’d been up to a fate was worse than death. Certainly Pansy didn’t appear to think it was.
‘Enjoy yourself?’ she’d asked him as the first butter-yellow beams of sunlight had filled her room.
‘Terrible,’ he had said, reaching for her. ‘Let’s do it again.’
Fish had turned from his baffled study of the façade of Poll’s hotel and he stared once more at the Tiger. ‘Where’d you get to?’ he asked. ‘When the police arrived.’
The Tiger airily indicated Poll’s. ‘In there,’ he said as though this were a unique moment in his life.
‘They went through the place with a fine-tooth comb.’
The Tiger laughed out loud. He was convinced by this time that it had been he who had been making the running. He was a man. Signed, sealed and delivered, a victim of love. He had proved it. It was a new and heady sensation and he felt it was going to change his life.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I found a little place to sneak into.’
Five
Fish was brooding. It was obvious he was brooding because from time to time they found him standing like a god deep in contemplation of some minor holocaust.
‘That’s a great girl,’ he said. ‘A feller could settle down and work for her.’
The Tiger blinked and nodded. The idea had crossed his mind, too, but not too forcibly because he had come to the conclusion that he had just taken the first steps into a new and entrancing world and he wanted to explore it a little first.
‘A feller could set up home,’ Fish went on.
‘Yes.’
‘Start a family.’
The Tiger looked alarmed. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I’m too young to die. And, anyway, aren’t you making a lot of fuss about my girl?’
Fish stuffed his hands in his pockets, scowling. ‘Aw, hell,’ he growled.
They were sprawled across the counter of Pruffer’s Bar, a seedy establishment at the other side of Winifred from Poll’s. Poll had reacted in a very unhelpful manner to Mace’s visitation.
‘You keep away from me,’ she had said. ‘You nearly had the bloody place closed down. I had to get rid of that Joey. She showed herself up proper for what she was.’
With Polly hostile and Mace probably still around, there had been no alternative but to hide for a while and they had moved into a boarding house at Reinhart, a place as narrow and crowded as a rat’s nest. It stood near the river where the mosquitoes bit at night like mad dogs and they had had to place the legs of their beds in jam tins of paraffin because of the bugs.
They were silent for a while, playing what they called ‘The Fly Game’. It consisted of each of them placing a lump of sugar on a two-shilling piece and scooping the pool according to which one the flies settled on first. They were all faintly depressed. They hadn’t hesitated to spend on the cheerful assumption that it wouldn’t be long before they returned to Chichester Junction and now there was nothing left.
Fish peered at the calendar with narrowed eyes. ‘November 21st,’ he said. ‘Two months since we buried it. A week or two, you said at the time. With that feller after us it’ll be years.’
‘Stuff’s safe,’ Willie pointed out and Fish’s voice rose.
‘I got no money,’ he complained. ‘You said a hundred. It was you said just a hundred when we could have had a thousand. It was you said bury it and leave it. We got to dig it up.’
‘No!’ Willie’s voice grew harder.
‘It’s just lying there.’
‘It doesn’t go off. It’s like whisky. Age improves it.’
‘It isn’t,’ the Tiger said unexpectedly, ‘as if we had jobs.’
They gave him startled looks. What he said was right enough. Not having read Lord Roberts’ pronouncement, the Boers had not realised the war had ended and elusive bands of horsemen were still marauding across the countryside defeating the British in detail if not in bulk. Unable to catch them, the army had taken to stringing miles of barbed wire everywhere and erecting blockhouses in the hope of stopping them. But it wasn’t all that hard to cut barbed wire and the blockhouses seemed to spend most of their time shooting at each other. Consequently railways were still being blown up and bridges wrecked, and Big Business was being very hesitant to put into force those plans for expansion it had dreamed up when Lord Roberts went home. It made work hard to come by.
They had moved back eventually to Winifred, sharing a room in Mrs Dalgetty’s Superior Boarding Hotel in Barberton Street near the station.
‘Boarders taken in,’ Fish had growled, staring at the notice on the door. ‘You’re damn right they’re taken in.’
It had turned out to be even less comfortable than the place at Reinhart and the rats banged and clattered behind the walls at night as if they were having a circus, but at least it was nearer to Chichester Junction where they could keep a look-out for Mace.
The very name suggested something heavy and menacing. This man, whom none of them had ever met, had suddenly become an enemy. They had his name now and knew what he looked like, but the answers they got to the oblique questions they asked about him were never very reassuring.
‘Sworn to capture us,’ Willie said, his voice awed. ‘Even if it’s the last thing he does.’
‘Let’s make it the last thing,’ Fish growled.
They tried the Fly Game again, but the flies seemed as depressed as they were and Fish was still preoccupied. He was busy with a girl in Steyn Street whose husband was doing a short spell on the breakwater in Cape Town for passing diamonds. She didn’t like being alone in the house at night and it got rid of a great deal of his money so that he’d had to go into business in a small way with a box of empty watch-cases from a travelling Jewish pedlar, which he sold among the easily gulled Boers.
‘So silent,’ his sales line went, ‘you can’t even hear ’em tick.’
It hadn’t brought in much, however, and Willie’s arrangement with the Dutchman at Sinai remained only a hit-and-miss affair that depended entirely on the dishonesty of soldiers.
The bar was heavy with the afternoon heat and the flies banged about as though they were blind. A Dutch-English freight-carrier from Sinai they knew called Prinsloo, who had come in to slake his thirst while his span of oxen were watered in the dusty road outside, was holding forth about Chichester Junction in a way that broke their hearts.
‘They have elected a Highways Committee and a Parks and Gardens Committee,’ he was saying, ‘and they say that one day it will be ass big ass Johannessburg. The place iss full of concrete, steel girders and railways lines, and there iss two new engine sheds up already. Ag, I left my waggon behind Coetzee’s Store two months ago and I had to dissmantle it and take it out through hiss front door.’ He took a vast swallow of beer. ‘They have plans,’ he went on, ‘to build a public garden even. With flowers and grass. All they need iss money and all the time they think how to raisse it.’
‘If anybody’s going to raise any goddam money,’ Fish growled, ‘it oughta be us.’
The decision was instantaneous and mutual and, pushing themselves from the bar, they borrowed a pony-and-trap and set off at once.
The day was hot, however, and the road dusty. The pony wasn’t very fast either, and the troops were on the move once more, trying to stop De Wet who was raiding round Bothaville and up near Kroonstad. They passed group after group of them, struggling through the heat loaded down with barbed wire and weapons. They were busy and hot and, as they trudged past, weren’t very interested in the three young men in the pony-and-trap.
‘Where are you from?’ Willie asked a sweat
ing corporal struggling with a stubborn mule.
‘Chichester Junction,’ the corporal said. ‘And it’s a pity we didn’t stay there and let some of the other buggers have a go.’
‘Are there many other buggers?’ the Tiger asked anxiously.
‘Thousands,’ the corporal said. ‘All sitting on their arses with nothing to do.’
Gloomily they sat in the trap and watched. The corporal kicked the mule in the stomach and it finally decided it wasn’t worth arguing and the column moved off again.
‘Perhaps he’s gone,’ the Tiger said hopefully.
‘Who?’
‘That feller – Mace. We haven’t seen him for some time.’
‘You’ve a hope.’
The Tiger’s voice was worried. ‘It’s nearly Christmas,’ he pointed out. Their celebrations looked like being a little threadbare. They were staring stark unexpected tragedy in the face.
‘It’s no good,’ Willie said. ‘We’ll have to leave it.’
‘Leave it?’ Fish fumed.
‘No alternative.’
‘How long, for Christ’s sake?’
‘How about six months?’
‘Six months!’ Fish had the sound of a man pushed to the limits of endurance. ‘Ain’t you got any better suggestion than that?’
‘Have you?’
Fish hadn’t.
‘What are we going to live off till then?’ he demanded heavily.
Willie smiled. He was never short of bright ideas.
‘The Tiger can always get a job,’ he said.
Six
‘A job!’ Pansy stared, startled. ‘What as?’
The Tiger blinked. ‘Hadn’t really thought.’
She gazed at him indignantly. ‘But six months!’ she said. ‘Six months! When I let you do me wrong, I didn’t think we were going to have to wait all this time.’ She studied him aggrievedly, knowing perfectly well she daren’t let go of him – not with fifteen thousand pounds somewhere in the offing. ‘It’s just wasting. It’ll go bad or something. Why don’t me and you go and get it?’
