by Wilbur Smith
Isabella cut the tip of the cigar with the gold cutter from her father’s desk. She lit the cedarwood taper from the fire and held it for him until the cigar was drawing evenly. Then she extinguished the taper and went to dribble a little Cognac into the crystal balloon glass.
‘Professor Symmonds read the latest section of my thesis this morning.’
‘Ah, you are still gracing the University with your presence, are you?’ Shasa studied his daughter’s bare shoulders in the soft light of the fire. She had inherited that skin from her mother, as lustrous and unblemished as ivory.
‘He thinks it is good.’ Isabella ignored the jibe.
‘If it is up to the same standard as the first hundred pages that you let me read, then Symmonds is probably correct.’
‘He wants me to stay on here to finish it.’ She was not looking at him. Shasa felt the sick little slide of dread in his chest.
‘Here in London, on your own?’ His response was instantaneous.
‘On my own? With five hundred friends, the staff of Courtney Enterprises’ London office, my mother . . . !’ She brought the brandy balloon to him. ‘Not really abandoned completely in a strange city, Papa.’
Shasa made a noncommittal noise in his throat and tasted the Cognac, searching desperately for some better reason why she should accompany him back to the Cape.
‘Where would you stay?’ he grumped.
‘That wasn’t even a good try,’ she laughed at him openly, and took the cigar from his hand. She drew upon it with pursed red lips, and then blew a feather of smoke into his face. ‘In Cadogan Square there is a flat which cost you almost a million pounds. It is standing empty.’ She gave him back the cigar.
She was right of course. Since the official ambassadorial residence went with the job, the family flat had been unused. He was silent, driven to the ropes, and Isabella gathered herself for the coup de grâce.
‘You are the one who was so frightfully keen on my doctorate, Pater. You won’t deprive me of it now, will you?’
Shasa rallied gamely. ‘Since you have obviously thought this all out so carefully, you must already have spoken to your grandmother.’
Isabella stooped over him as he sat in the armchair and kissed the top of his head.
‘I was hoping that you would speak to Nana for me, my darling Daddy.’
Shasa sighed. ‘Witch,’ he murmured. ‘You make me a party to my own undoing.’
She could rely on her father to take care of Nana, but there was still Nanny to consider. However, Isabella softened her up for a day or two beforehand by reciting the names and virtues of all seventeen of the grandchildren who so eagerly awaited her return to Weltevreden. Nanny had been away from home for three years, and three long English winters.
‘Just think of it, Nanny. It will be spring at the Cape when the boat docks, and Johannes will be waiting on the pier.’ Johannes was the head groom at Weltevreden and Nanny’s favourite son. The old woman’s eyes shone. So when Isabella finally broke the news Nanny threw her hands around and wailed about ingratitude and the decay of the modern generation’s sense of duty. Then she sulked for two days but without real venom.
Isabella went down to Southampton to see them all off. Shasa’s new Aston Martin was hoisted on board the Union Castle liner by one of the giraffe-necked cranes, and then the servants lined up on the pier for their farewells. She embraced them all, from the Malay chef to Klonkie the chauffeur. Nanny burst into tears when Isabella kissed her.
‘You’ll probably never see this old woman again. You’ll miss me when I’ve gone. Think of how I nursed you when you was a baby . . .’
‘Go on with you, Nanny. You’ll be there to nurse all my babies for me.’ It was a dangerous subject to broach, but Nanny’s perceptions were dulled. The promise drove off the shadow of her imminent demise, and she cheered noticeably.
‘You come home soon now, child, you hear, where old Nanny can keep an eye on you. All that hot Courtney blood – we’ll find you a good clean South African boy.’
When Isabella came to say goodbye to Shasa, unexpectedly she found herself also dissolving into a salty wash of tears. Shasa handed her the crisp white handkerchief from the pocket of his double-breasted blazer. When she had dried up and given it back to him, he blew his own nose loudly and then dabbed at his single eye.
‘Damned wind!’ he explained. ‘Got a bit of grit in it.’
As the liner pulled away from the wharf and headed down-river, he was a tall and elegant figure at the ship’s rail, high above her; but he stood alone, slightly separated from the other passengers. He had never remarried since the divorce. She knew that since then he had been seeing literally dozens of women, all elegant and talented and nubile, but he always walked on alone.
‘Doesn’t he ever feel lonely?’ she wondered, and waved until he was an indistinguishable speck on the ship’s deck.
On the drive back to London, the road kept dissolving before her eyes in a glassy mirage of tears.
‘It’s the baby,’ she tried to excuse herself. ‘He’s making me all gooey and sentimental.’ And she clasped her belly and tried to find a lump, and was vaguely disappointed that her muscles were still flat and hard. ‘God, what if it’s all just a false alarm!’
The possibility heightened her melancholy, and she reached for the packet of Kleenex in the cubby-hole of the Mini.
However, when she climbed the stairs to the flat, the door opened before she touched it and Ramón reached out and drew her into his arms. Her tears were forgotten.
The family flat in Cadogan Square occupied the first two floors of a listed red-brick Victorian house. There were five double bedrooms, and the walls of the master suite were clad with powder-blue and antique silver panelling that had reputedly graced the boudoir of Madame de Pompadour. The plafond was decorated with dancing circles of naked wood-nymphs and leering satyrs. Much to Shasa’s chagrin, Isabella referred to the décor as ‘Louis Quinze bordello’.
She used it merely as an accommodation address, and called round on Fridays to pick up her mail and have tea with the full-time housekeeper in the ground-floor pantry. The housekeeper was an ally and fielded all the long distance telephone calls from Weltevreden and other parts afar.
Isabella made her true home in Ramón’s tiny flat. When the wardrobe that he allocated to her proved to be inadequate, she rotated her clothes between it and the cavernous storage at Cadogan Square. She found a dainty little lady’s writing-bureau in an antique shop in Kensington Church Street which just fitted into the corner beside the bed, and made that her study.
Like a married couple, they settled into a routine. They were up before dawn for gym or riding; Isabella’s gynaecologist had forbidden jogging. ‘It’s a foetus not a milk-shake that you are brewing, my dear.’ Then, when Ramón left for the bank, she settled down at her bureau and worked steadily on her thesis until lunchtime. They met at Justin de Blank or the health bar at Harrods, for Isabella had given up alcohol and put herself on a strict diet for the baby’s sake.
‘I refuse to let myself swell up like a toad. I don’t want to revolt you.’
‘You are the most desirable woman in existence, and pregnancy has brought you to full bloom,’ he contradicted her, and touched her bosom. It was magnificent.
‘I asked the gyney, and he said it’s quite OK; we don’t have to hold back at all,’ she giggled. ‘I do hope the ambulance that takes me to the maternity home has a comfortable double stretcher so that we can fit in a quickie on the way.’
After lunch she went on to visit her tutor or to spend the rest of the afternoon in the reading room of the British Museum. Finally there was a mad dash back to the flat in the Mini in time to start preparing Ramón’s dinner. Fortunately, Papa had arranged for her to retain her diplomatic plates, and she parked at the kerb right outside the front door and smiled winningly at the hovering traffic warden.
In the evenings they went out less and less frequently, apart from an occasional theatre
or an early dinner with Harriet and her latest beau. Usually they piled all the cushions on the floor and sprawled in front of the television, arguing and discussing and billing and cooing and ignoring the inane burble of Coronation Street and the game-shows.
When at last the taut flat plain of her belly began to bulge she opened the front of her silk dressing-gown and exhibited it proudly. ‘Feel it!’ she urged Ramón. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
He palpated it solemnly. ‘Yes,’ he nodded sagely. ‘Definitely a boy.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Here.’ He took her hand. ‘Can’t you feel it?’
‘Ah, it does stick out a bit. He must take after his papa. Funny how thinking about that makes me feel like bed.’
‘Sleepy?’ he asked.
‘Hardly,’ she replied.
Shasa had left her with her Harrods charge-card, and she acquired most of her maternity clothes there, although Harriet kept discovering newly fashionable boutiques that specialized in clothes for the swinging young mother-to-be. Wearing one of her flowing new caftans, she enrolled in the ante-natal classes that her gynaecologist recommended. Suddenly the company and conversation of the other gravid classmates that would once have bored her to distraction was fun and fascination.
At least once a month, Ramón had to fly out of town on bank business, and each time he was away for a week or more. However, he telephoned her whenever he had an opportunity. Although she missed him more painfully than she would admit even to herself, when he returned her joy was enhanced a hundredfold.
After one such trip, she met him at Heathrow and drove him directly back to the flat. He dropped his travel-bag in the hall and threw his jacket over the back of the chair before he went into the bathroom.
His Spanish passport slipped from the inner pocket of his jacket and plopped on to the carpet. She picked it up and riffled through it until she found his photograph. It wasn’t bad, but no camera could do him full justice. She flipped the page and saw the date of birth. That reminded her that his birthday was only two weeks away. She had determined to make it a wonderful occasion. She had already seen a glass statuette in an antique-shop in Mayfair, an exquisite little glass nude by René Lalique. She recognized the body as so similar to her own, even to the exaggerated length of leg and tight boyish buttocks. But for the fact that it had been sculptured at the height of Lalique’s popularity during the 1920s, Isabella could easily have been the model. However, the price daunted even her, and she was still plucking up sufficient courage to buy it for him.
She flipped over a few pages more of his passport, and the visa caught her eye. It had been stamped in Moscow that morning, and she blinked with surprise.
‘Darling,’ she called through the bathroom door. ‘I thought you were in Rome. How did you end up in Moscow?’ Everything she had ever learnt, every facet of her South African upbringing, had always pointed to Russia as the great Antichrist. Even the symbol of hammer and sickle and the Cyrillic script stamped in his passport made the fine hairs on her forearms rise in repugnance.
There was silence for a full minute beyond the locked door, and then it was flung open abruptly, and Ramón strode out in his shirt-sleeves and snatched the booklet from her hand. His expression was one of cold fury, and his eyes terrified her.
‘Don’t ever pry into my affairs again,’ he said softly.
Although he never mentioned the incident later, it was almost a week before she felt that he had forgiven her. It had so intimidated her that thereafter she tried to put it completely out of her mind.
Then, in early November, when she called round at the Cadogan Square flat, the housekeeper handed her her mail. As always, there was a letter from her father, but under it was another envelope franked in Johannesburg, and with a lift of pleasure she recognized her brother Michael’s handwriting.
Each of her three brothers was so distinctly different in looks and character and personality that it was impossible for her to have a favourite.
Sean, the eldest, was the flamboyant adventurer. A wild spirit who, until she met Ramón, had been the most impossibly beautiful man she had ever known. Sean was the soldier and the hunter. He had already been decorated with the Silver Cross for valour in Rhodesia’s grim little bush war. When he wasn’t tracking down terrorists, he ran the vast hunting concession in the Zambezi valley for Courtney Enterprises. Isabella adored him.
Garrick was her second brother, the ugly duckling, the myopic asthmatic who during his unhappy childhood had always been referred to as ‘Poor Garry’. However, although born deficient in most physical areas, he had inherited his full measure of the Courtney spirit and determination and shrewdness. He had worked on his puny body until it was almost grotesquely muscular with such a barrel of a chest and powerful arms that all his clothes had to be tailored for him. With near-sighted eyes behind thick horn-rimmed spectacles, and no natural sporting ability, he had developed such powers of concentration that he made himself into a four-goal polo-player, a scratch golfer and an extraordinary shot with rifle and shotgun.
In addition he had succeeded his father as chairman and chief executive officer of Courtney Enterprises. Not yet thirty years of age, he ran a multi-billion-dollar complex of companies with the same formidable application to detail and insatiable appetite for hard work that he brought to all his other endeavours. Yet he never forgot her birthday, and responded instantly to any call that Isabella made on him no matter how onerous or how trivial. She called him ‘Teddy Bear’ because he was so big and hairy and cuddly, and she loved him dearly.
Then there was Michael, sweet, gentle Michael, the family peacemaker, the thoughtful, compassionate, poetic creature, and the only Courtney who, despite the encouragement and example of his father and his two brothers, had never killed a wild bird or animal in his life. Instead, he had written and published three successful books, one a collection of poems and the other two on South African history and politics. The last two had both been banned by South Africa’s industrious censors for their unseemly treatment of racial matters and their radical political flavour. He was also a highly considered journalist and the deputy editor of the Golden City Mail, a large-circulation English-language newspaper which was stubbornly and outspokenly opposed to the Nationalist Afrikaner government of John Vorster and its policy of apartheid. Of course, Courtney Enterprises owned eighty per cent of the Mail’s stock, otherwise he might not have achieved such a responsible position at such a tender age.
During all of Isabella’s childhood, Michael had been her protector and adviser and confidant, and after Nana her favourite story-teller. She trusted Michael more than anybody else in her life, and if Sean hadn’t been so wonderful and Garrick so lovable and cuddly, then Michael would definitely have been her favourite brother. It was a dead heat between the three of them for her affections, but she loved Michael as much as any of them, and now his handwriting on the envelope gave her a warm glow of pleasure and a prickle of guilt. She hadn’t written to him since she had met Ramón, almost six months ago.
The second paragraph of the first page caught her eye the instant she unfolded it, and she skipped the salutation and went straight to it.
Pater tells me that you are cosily ensconced in Cadogan Square and labouring mightily on your thesis. Good for you, Bella. However, I am sure that you are not presently occupying all five of the bedrooms, and I was hoping that you could fit me in somehow. I plan to be in London for three weeks from the fifteenth of the month. I will be out all day, every day. I have a full schedule of interviews and meetings, so I promise not to be a nuisance and interfere with your studies . . .
It was a complication in that she would be forced to take up physical residence at Cadogan Square for the period of Michael’s visit. However, most fortunately, it coincided with one of Ramón’s periodic travels abroad. She would have been alone anyway. Now at least she would have Michael’s company.
She sent him a cable addressed to the Mail’s offices in Johannesburg,
and set about making Cadogan Square look as though it was being permanently lived in. She had a week to prepare for Michael’s arrival.
‘There will have to be some explanations,’ she told Ramón, and clasped the neat little bulge of her tummy. ‘Luckily Michael is so understanding. I’m sure that the two of you would get on well together. I wish you could meet him.’
‘I will try to complete my business ahead of time and get back to London while your brother is still here.’
‘Oh, Ramón darling, I would love that. Please do try.’
She was waiting for Michael as he pushed his luggage-trolley through the international-arrivals barrier at Heathrow, and she let out a squeal of glee as she recognized him. He swung her off her feet, and then his expression changed as he felt her stomach against him, and he set her down again with exaggerated gentleness.
As she drove him into town in the Mini, she kept darting glances at him. He was tanned – when you lived in London you noticed that immediately – and he had grown his hair fashionably long. It curled over the collar of his bottle-green corduroy hacking-jacket. However, his smile was still boyish and frank, and the blue Courtney eyes lacked the hard acquisitive sparkle of all the other Courtneys, and were instead mild and thoughtful.
She pumped him for news of home, partly to satisfy her curiosity but mostly to keep the conversation away from her fecund belly. According to Michael, Pater had engrossed himself in his new duties as chairman of Armscor. Nana was growing more vigorous and more imperious every day, ruling Weltevreden with an iron fist. She had even taken up breeding retrievers and training them for gun dog trials. Sean was still killing platoons of guerrillas and droves of buffalo. He had recently been promoted to a reserve captain in the Ballantyne Scouts, one of the crack Rhodesian regiments. Garry had just presented his shareholders with record company profits, for the sixth year in succession. His wife, Holly, was about to produce another infant. Everybody was holding thumbs for a girl this time.
