Golden Fox

by Wilbur Smith

  Nanny was waiting in Isabella’s suite.

  ‘It’s after one o’clock,’ Isabella exclaimed. ‘I’ve told you not to wait up for me, you silly old woman.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting up for you twenty-five years.’ Nanny came to unhook the back of her dress.

  ‘It makes me feel terrible,’ Isabella protested.

  ‘It makes me feel good,’ Nanny grunted. ‘I don’t feel happy ’less I know what you been up to, missy. I’ll run your bath – didn’t do it before, didn’t want it to turn cold.’

  ‘A bath at one o’clock in the morning!’ Isabella dismissed the idea strenuously. She had not allowed Nanny to see her naked since her return. The old woman’s eyes were much too sharp. She would pick up the tiny changes that childbirth had wrought on Isabella’s body: the darkening and enlarging of her nipples, the faint stria where the skin had stretched across her hips and lower belly.

  She sensed that Nanny was becoming suspicious at this change of behaviour, and to divert her she said: ‘Off with you now, Nanny. Go and warm Bossie’s bed for him.’

  Nanny looked shocked. ‘Who’s been telling you scandal stories?’ she demanded.

  ‘You’re not the only one who knows what’s going on at Weltevreden,’ Isabella informed her gleefully. ‘Old Bossie has been after you for years. About time you took pity on him. He’s a good man.’ Bossie was the estate blacksmith who had come to work for Centaine as an apprentice thirty-five years ago. ‘You go off and hammer his anvil for him.’

  ‘That’s dirty talk,’ Nanny sniffed. ‘A real lady don’t talk dirty.’ Nanny tried to hide her confusion behind a prim expression, but backed off towards the door, and Isabella sighed with relief as it closed behind her.

  She went through to her bathroom and swiftly removed her make-up, tossed her evening dress over the back of the sofa for Nanny to deal with in the morning, and slipped into a silk bathrobe. As she belted the robe, she crossed her bedroom and then paused with her fingers on the doorhandle.

  ‘What am I going to tell Mickey?’ If she had asked herself that question only three days ago, the answer would have been obvious, but since then circumstances had changed. The packet had arrived.

  The last communication she had received from Joe Cicero had been on the day before she left London to return to the Cape of Good Hope. He had telephoned her at Cadogan Square while she was in the process of packing.

  ‘Red Rose.’ She had recognized the husky wheeze of his voice instantly, and as always it had frozen her with dread and loathing. ‘I am going to give you your contact address. Use it only in an emergency. It is an answering service, so do not waste time and energy checking it. A telegram or letter addressed to Hoffman, care of Mason’s Agency, 10 Blushing Lane, Soho, will find me. Memorize that address. Do not write it down.’

  ‘I have it,’ Isabella whispered.

  ‘On your return home, you will hire a post-office box at a location not associated with Weltevreden. Use a fictitious name and inform me at the Blushing Lane address when it is established. Is that clear?’

  Within days of arriving back at Weltevreden, Isabella had driven over the Constantiaberg Pass to the sprawling suburb of Camps Bay on the Atlantic seaboard of the Cape peninsula. The post office there was far enough removed from Weltevreden for none of the postal staff to recognize her. She hired the box in the name of Mrs Rose Cohen, and sent a registered letter to Blushing Lane with this box number.

  She checked the box for a letter each evening as she returned from her office in Centaine House in central Cape Town, driving the Mini over the neck between Signal Hill and the mountain, the more circuitous route around the back of Table Mountain to reach Weltevreden. Even though the box remained empty day after day and week after week, she never varied her routine.

  The lack of news of Nicky ate away at the fabric of her soul. The day-to-day events of her life seemed all a sham and a pretence. Although she channelled all her energy into her work as Shasa’s assistant, the effort was not the opiate for her pain that she had hoped it might be.

  She smiled and laughed, she rode with Nana and at the weekends played tennis or sailed with her old friends. She worked and played as though everything was the same, but it was all acting.

  The nights were long and lonely. In the midnight hours, she would resolve to go to Shasa and describe in detail the web in which she was enmeshed, but then in daylight she would ask herself: ‘What can Pater do? What can anybody do to help me?’ And she remembered Nicky’s swollen face and the silver bubbles streaming from his nose as he drowned, and she knew she could not risk that ever happening again. Strangely, the passage of time did not reduce the pain of her loss; instead it seemed to inflame her wounds, and the lack of news of Nicky aggravated them still further. Each day her suffering was harder to bear alone.

  Then she heard that Michael was coming down from Johannesburg to Weltevreden for the trials, and it seemed fortuitous. Michael was the perfect confidant. She would not expect him to do anything except share her suffering and lighten the terrible load which up until now she had carried alone.

  On the Friday before Michael’s arrival, she had driven over the neck to Camps Bay and parked the Mini in the street beyond the post office. She walked back slowly and glanced into the side-hall that housed the tiers of tiny steel post-boxes. It was almost six in the evening, and the main post office was long ago closed. There were a couple of teenagers necking in the corner of the postal hall, but they scurried away guiltily as she glared at them. Isabella took the precaution of never approaching or opening her box while a stranger was in the hall.

  She glanced back at the entrance to make sure she was alone, and then inserted her key in the lock of the tiny steel door in the fifth row of tiered boxes. The shock was greater for the fact that she was expecting the box to be empty. Adrenalin squirted into her bloodstream, and she felt her cheeks burn and her breathing choke.

  She snatched up the thick brown envelope and crammed it into her sling bag. Then, as guilty as a thief, she slammed and locked the box and ran back to where the Mini was parked. She was trembling so that she had difficulty fitting the key in the door-lock. She was breathing as hard as though she had played a long rally on the tennis court as she started the Mini and U-turned back across the road.

  She parked above the beach under the palms that line the drive. At this hour the beach was almost deserted. An elderly couple exercised an Irish setter at the edge of the water, and a single bather braved the south-easter and the icy green waters of the Benguela current.

  Isabella rolled up the windows and locked both doors of the Mini before she took the envelope out of her bag and held it in her lap.

  The address was typed, Mrs Rose Cohen, and the Queen’s-head postage-stamps had been franked at Trafalgar Square post office. She turned the envelope over, reluctant to open it, terrified of what it might contain. There was no return address on the reverse. Still delaying the moment, she searched for the gold lady’s penknife in her bag and carefully slit the flap of the envelope with its razor-edged blade.

  A coloured photograph slid out, and every nerve in her body tingled as she turned it face up and recognized her son.

  Nicky sat on a blue blanket on a garden lawn. He wore only a napkin. He was sitting up unsupported, and she reminded herself that he was nearly seven months old. He had grown, his cheeks were not so chubby, his limbs longer and sleeker. His hair was thicker and longer, curling darkly on to his forehead. His expression was quizzical, but there was a smile hovering at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes were bright and green as emeralds.

  ‘Oh God. He’s more beautiful!’ she gasped, holding the photograph up to the light to study every tiny detail of his face. ‘He’s grown so big already, and sitting up on his own. My clever little manikin.’ She touched the image and then saw with consternation that she had left a fingerprint on the glossy surface of the photograph. She wiped it off carefully with a Kleenex.

  ‘My baby,’ she whispered,
and felt her loss tear at her heart with renewed ferocity. ‘Oh, my baby!’

  The sun had sunk to touch the line of the horizon far out on the Atlantic before she could rouse herself. Only then, as she returned the photograph to the envelope, did she realize that she had overlooked the other items it contained.

  First, there was a photostat copy of a page from what was obviously a medical register at some children’s clinic, but the name and address of the clinic had been obliterated. It was written in Spanish.

  His name was at the head of the sheet, ‘Nicholas Miguel Ramón de Machado’, followed by his date of birth and a record of weekly visits to the clinic. Each dated entry was in a variety of handwritings and signed by the clinic’s doctors or sisters.

  It showed his weight and diet and dental records. She saw that on 15 July he had been treated for a rash that the doctor diagnosed as prickly heat and two weeks later for a mild oral thrush. Otherwise he was healthy and normal. With a rush of maternal pride, she read that his first two teeth had erupted at four months, and he weighed almost sixteen kilos.

  Isabella turned to the last folded sheet of paper that the envelope contained and immediately recognized the handwriting. It was in Spanish, in Adra’s firm restrained hand.

  Señorita Bella,

  Nicky grows every day stronger and cleverer. He has a temper like one of the bulls of the corrida. He can crawl on hands and knees almost as fast as I can run, and I expect that at any day now he will rise up on his back legs and walk.

  The first word he spoke was ‘Mamma’, and I tell him each day how beautiful you are and how one day you will come to him. He does not yet understand, but one day he will.

  I think of you often, señorita. You must believe that I will care for Nicky with my own life. Please do not do anything to endanger him.

  Respectfully,

  Adra Olivares

  The warning contained in the last line twisted like a knife between her ribs, and was more urgent and poignant for being so mildly expressed. She knew then that she could never risk telling anyone, not Pater or Nana or even Michael.

  She hesitated now with her hand on the handle of her bedroom door. ‘I have to lie to you, Mickey. I’m sorry. Perhaps, one day, I will tell you the truth.’ She listened for a moment, but the great house was silent, and she turned the handle and quietly swung the door open.

  The long gallery was deserted with only the night lights burning in their brackets on the wood-panelled walls. On bare feet, Isabella slipped silently over the Persian carpets scattered on the parquet floor. Since he was so seldom at Weltevreden, Michael kept his old room in the nursery wing.

  He was sitting up in bed reading. As soon as she pushed the door open, he dropped the book on the bedside table and lifted the bedclothes for her.

  As she climbed in beside him, he tucked the eiderdown around her shoulders and she clung to him, shivering with misery. They held each other for a long time in silence before Michael invited her gently.

  ‘Tell me, Bella.’ Even then she could not say it immediately. Her good intentions wavered, she felt the desperate temptation to ignore Adra’s warning. Mickey was the only one of the family who knew that Ramón and Nicky even existed. She wanted desperately to blurt it all out to him and have his gentle warming comfort to help fill the terrible void in her soul.

  Then the image of Nicky that she had watched on the video film flashed before her eyes once more. She drew a deep breath and pressed her face to Michael’s chest. ‘Nicky is dead,’ she whispered, and felt him flinch in her embrace. He did not reply at once.

  ‘It’s true,’ she consoled herself silently. ‘Nicky is dead to all of us now.’ And yet the words seemed a dreadful betrayal of Michael and of Nicky. She did not, dare not, trust him. She had denied the existence of her own son to him, and the falsehood seemed to increase her own misery and isolation, if that were possible.

  ‘How?’ Michael asked at last, and she had anticipated the question.

  ‘Cot death,’ she whispered. ‘I went to wake him for his feed, and he was cold and dead.’

  She felt Michael shiver against her. ‘Oh God! My poor Bella! How horrible! How cruel!’

  The reality was crueller and more horrible than he could imagine, but she could not share it with him.

  After a long minute, he asked: ‘Ramón? Where is Ramón? He should be here to comfort you.’

  ‘Ramón,’ she repeated the name, trying to keep fear out of her voice. ‘When Nicky was gone, Ramón changed completely. I think he blamed me. His love for me died with Nicky.’ She found herself weeping now, hard tearing sobs that expressed all the grief and terror and loneliness that had haunted her for so long. ‘Nicky is gone. Ramón is gone. I will never see either of them again, not as long as I live.’

  Michael hugged her tightly. His body was hard and warm and strong. Masculine strength that was completely devoid of sexuality was what she needed most. She felt it flowing into her like water filling the depleted dam of her courage and fortitude, and she clung to him silently.

  After a while, he began to talk. She lay and listened, her ear pressed to his chest so that his voice was a reverberating murmur. He talked of love and suffering, of loneliness and of hope, and at last, of death.

  ‘The true terror of death is its finality. The ending so abrupt, the void beyond so irrevocable. You cannot challenge death, or appeal against it. You only break your heart if you try.’

  Platitudes, she thought, old clichés, the same ones with which man has tried to console himself for tens of thousands of years. Yet, like most clichés, they were true, and they were the only comfort that she had available to her. More important than the sense of the words, was the soft lulling music of Michael’s voice, the warmth and strength of his body, and his love for her.

  At last, she fell asleep.

  She awoke before dawn and was immediately aware that he had lain all night without moving so as not to disturb her, and that he was awake also.

  ‘Thank you, Mickey,’ she whispered. ‘You’ll never know how alone I have been. I needed that badly.’

  ‘I do know, Bella. I know what loneliness is.’ And she felt her heart go out to him, her own pain temporarily assuaged. She wanted to be there for him now. It was his turn.

  ‘Tell me about your new book, Mickey. I haven’t read it yet – I’m sorry.’ He had sent her a pre-publication copy, lovingly inscribed, but she had been totally engrossed with her own suffering. There had been no time for anybody else, not even Mickey. So this time, while she listened, he talked about the book and then about himself and his view of the world around them.

  ‘I have spoken to Raleigh Tabaka again,’ he said suddenly, and she was startled. She had not thought of that name since she left London.

  ‘Where? Where did you meet him?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘I did not meet him. We spoke on the telephone, very briefly. I think he was calling from another country, but he will be here soon. He is a will-o’-the-wisp, a Black Pimpernel. He comes and goes across borders like a shadow.’

  ‘You have arranged to meet him?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. He is as good as his word.’

  ‘Be careful, Mickey. Please promise me you will be careful. He is a dangerous man.’

  ‘There is nothing for you to worry about,’ he assured her. ‘I’m no hero. I’m not like Sean or Garry. I’ll be careful, very careful, I promise you.’

  Michael Courtney parked his battered Valiant in the carpark of a drive in restaurant on an off-ramp of the main Johannesburg-to-Durban highway.

  He switched off the ignition, but the engine continued running on pre-ignition for a few unsteady beats. It had been missing badly all the way down from the offices of the Golden City Mail in central Johannesburg. The car had clocked up over seventy thousand miles and should have been sold two years previously.

  As deputy editor his contract stipulated that he was entitled to a new ‘luxury’ vehicle every twelve months. However, Michael ha
d developed an affection for the old Valiant. All its scars and scrapes had been honourably acquired, while over the years the driver’s seat had taken on the contours of his body.

  He studied the other vehicles in the carpark, but none of them answered the description he had been given. He glanced at his wristwatch, a Japanese digital for which he had paid five dollars on a trip to Tokyo for the newspaper the previous year. He was twenty minutes early at the rendezvous, so he lit a cigarette and slumped down in the comfortable shabby old seat.

  Thinking about the car and the watch made him smile. He really was the odd man out in his family. From Nana down to Bella, they were all obsessed with material possessions. Nana had her daffodil-coloured Daimlers; the colour was always the same, although the model changed each year. Pater kept a garage filled with classic cars, mostly British sports cars like the SS Jaguar and the big six-litre touring Bentley in racing green. Garry had his fancy Italian Maseratis and Ferraris. Sean bolstered his tough-guy image with elaborately outfitted four-wheel-drive hunting vehicles, and even Bella drove a souped-up little thing that cost twice as much as a new Valiant.

  Not one of them would have worn a digital wristwatch, not Nana with her diamond Piaget nor Sean with his macho gold Rolex. ‘Things.’ Michael’s smile turned down at the corners of his mouth. ‘All they see are things, not people. It’s the sickness of our country.’

  There was a tap on the side-window of the Valiant and Michael started and looked round, expecting his contact.

  There was nobody there.

  He was startled. Then a small black hand with a pink palm came into view and diffidently tapped on the glass with one finger.

  Michael rolled down the window and stuck his head out. A black urchin grinned up at him. He could not have been more than five or six years of age. He was barefoot, and his singlet and shorts were ragged. Although his nostrils were crusted with white flakes of dried snot, his smile was radiant.