Riotous Assembly (15 page)

“You mean to say you don’t believe in apartheid?” the Kommandant asked in
astonishment.

“Really, Kommandant, what a silly question,” Miss Hazelstone replied. “Do I behave
as though I believed in it?”

Kommandant van Heerden had to admit that she didn’t.

“You can’t live with a Zulu for eight years and still believe in segregation,” Miss
Hazelstone went on. “As a matter of fact, the films I have just been looking at are ones I
took of Fivepence. I wonder if you would care to see one.”

Kommandant van Heerden hesitated. What he had already seen of the cook didn’t dispose
him to want to see any more.

“I admire your delicacy of feeling,” Miss Hazelstone said, “but you need not hesitate.
I don’t in the least mind sharing my memories with you,” and she started the
projector.

A moment later the Kommandant saw on a screen at the far end of the room, the object of
Miss Hazelstone’s passion, moving about the garden of Jacaranda House as it had been in
the summer some years before. The film had been shot from the same angle and in the same
corner of the garden as had its actor nearly a decade later. At first sight the
Kommandant had the illusion that there had been no murder and that he had dreamt the
events of the preceding days. It was an illusion that did not last. As the image of
Fivepence grew larger on the screen, the Kommandant decided that he preferred the
reality he had known to the fantastic scene he was now witnessing. There had, he noted,
been something almost healthy about the corpse of Fivepence. Living, the Zulu cook had
quite clearly been diseased.

Tall and heavily built, he cavorted about the lawn like some appalling black nymph, and
paused a moment to caress the bust of Sir Theophilus before kissing it passionately
upon its unresponding mouth. Then he was off again, flitting about the garden and
displaying his repulsive charms in a series of swirls and flounces designed to show off
his garments to their very worst advantage. He was wearing a very short crimson frock
trimmed with violet; as the Kommandant might have anticipated, it was made of rubber. As
Fivepence executed his last pirouette and ended his performance with a curtsy, the
Kommandant understood why Miss Hazelstone had murdered him. If the film was anything to
go by, he had asked for it.

The film ended and Miss Hazelstone switched off the projector. “Well?” she said.

“I can see why you shot him,” said the Kommandant.

“You can see nothing,” Miss Hazelstone snapped. “What you have just seen appears to your
crude mind to be quite horrible. To me it is beautiful.” She paused. “That is life, a black
man pretending to be a white woman, dancing steps of a ballet he has never seen, dressed
in clothes made of a material totally unsuited to a hot climate on a lawn which was
imported from England, and kissing the stone face of a man who destroyed his nation,
filmed by a woman who is widely regarded as the arbiter of good taste. Nothing could
better express the quality of life in South Africa.”

Kommandant van Heerden was about to say that he didn’t think she was very patriotic,
when Miss Hazelstone stood up.

“I’ll get my suitcase. I have one packed ready,” she said, and was moving towards the
door when a dark shape hurtled through the french windows and threw her to the ground.

 It had taken Konstabel Els some time to locate the body of the Dobermann in the
darkness, and in the end he had been guided more by smell than sight to the rubbish dump
behind the house where Miss Hazelstone had deposited the dog. Carrying it carefully Els
went back to the car and put the body in the boot. He climbed in and started the engine, and
drove slowly off thankful that the Kommandant had not woken. It wasn’t until he had got
halfway down the hill into town that the absence of snores from the back led him to realize
that he had been mistaken.

With a curse he turned the car and headed back to the Park. He stopped in the drive and
looked about. Kommandant van Heerden was nowhere to be seen. Els left the car and walked
round the house and found himself looking into the lighted drawing-room where the
Kommandant and Miss Hazelstone were talking. In the darkness Els wondered what the hell
was going on. “The sly old devil,” he thought to himself at last. “No wonder he wouldn’t
give me permission to come up here,” and Els began to think he understood how it was that
the Kommandant should be sitting chatting in a very friendly way with a woman who had a
reward on her head. He knew now why the Kommandant had been so eager to pin the murder of
Fivepence on Jonathan Hazelstone.

“The old sod’s courting her,” he thought, and a new respect for the Kommandant grew in
Konstabel Els’ mind. His own courtships were always accompanied by threats of violence
or blackmail and it seemed obvious that the Kommandant, whose own lack of charm almost
equalled that of Els, would have to employ pretty drastic methods to make himself at all
attractive to a woman of Miss Hazelstone’s wealth and social standing.

“He goes and arrests her brother for murder, and then puts a price on the old bag’s head.
What a way to get a dowry,” Els exclaimed, and immediately thought how he could forestall
the plan. With a rush he was across the lawn and into the room. As he hurled himself on the
Kommandant’s fiancée he yelled, “I claim the reward. I captured her,” and from the floor
looked up and wondered why the Kommandant was looking so relieved.

To Kommandant van Heerden the transition of Miss Hazelstone from the mistress of
Jacaranda House to the inmate of Fort Rapier Mental Hospital was a sad affair. As he
watched the stretcher on which the old lady lay carried for the last time past the
portraits of her ancestors in the fern-infested hall, he knew that an epoch was ending.
No longer would Jacaranda House stand supreme in the eyes of Zululand society, the symbol
of all that was best in the British occupation of Africa and an emblem of an
aristocratic way of life. No more garden parties, no more grand balls, no more of those
dinner parties for which Miss Hazelstone had such a reputation, nothing of importance
would happen within these walls. The house would stand empty and sepulchral until the
white ants or the demolition men cleared it away to make room for a new suburb. As
Kommandant van Heerden turned off the lights and the house stood dark under the moon, he
was filled with a great sense of loss. The old arrogance on which he had relied to sharpen
his servility was gone. He was a free man, and the architect of his own freedom. It was
the last thing that he wanted.

It was a cortège which passed up the drive and out the contorted gates, a funeral
cortège of motorcycles and police cars accompanying the ambulance in which Miss
Hazelstone slept the sleep of the heavily sedated. In the driver’s seat of the leading
car sat Konstabel Els, happy in the knowledge that he had earned his just reward, and
behind him in the darkness Kommandant van Heerden wondered at the strangeness of fate
which had made a creature like Els the instrument of the fall of the house of
Hazelstone.

It was not as if Els was clever, the Kommandant thought, as the procession wound its way
through the unlighted streets of Piemburg, nor was there anything vaguely intentional
about his activities which would explain their effect. Els was merely chance, random and
trivial in its ways.

“Entropy made man,” the Kommandant said to himself, and opened the window. The car had
begun to smell quite intolerable.

“Els,” said the Kommandant, “you need a bath.”

“Me, sir?” said Els.

“You, Els. You stink.”

“Not me, sir. That’s Toby.”

“Who the hell’s Toby?”

“The Dobermann, sir. He’s a bit high.”

“You mean you’ve got the carcase of a rotting dog in the car?” shouted the
Kommandant.

“Oh no, sir,” said Els. “He’s in the boot.”

The Kommandant was about to say that he wasn’t going to share his car with a
putrefying Dobermann, when they passed through the gates of Fort Rapier and drove up the
drive to the hospital.

In the moonlight the buildings of Fort Rapier looked much as they had done when the
garrison occupied the barracks. A few bars had been added here and there to convert an
establishment which had been designed to keep people out into one that served to keep
them in, but the atmosphere had not altered. Irrationality had kept its hold on the
place.

“Old traditions die hard,” the Kommandant thought as the car stopped at the edge of the
parade ground. He stepped out and patted a field gun that had once seen service at
Paardeberg where his grandfather had slept through its bombardment and which now stood
like an iron pensioner overlooking the lunacies of another generation.

While Miss Hazelstone was taken into a ward reserved for the criminally insane,
Kommandant van Heerden explained her case to the Superintendent, Dr Herzog, who had
been summoned from his bed to deal with the case.

“Couldn’t you have waited till morning?” he asked grumpily. “I didn’t get to bed until
one.”

“I haven’t been to bed at all,” said the Kommandant, “and in any case this is an
emergency. Miss Hazelstone is something of a celebrity and her committal may arouse
public comment.”

“She certainly is, and it certainly will,” said the doctor. “She happens to be the
chief benefactress of this hospital.”

“She has evidently been providing for her own future which will be to remain here
until she decides to die,” said the Kommandant.

“Who has diagnosed her?” asked Dr Herzog.

“I have,” said the Kommandant.

“I wouldn’t have thought you were qualified to.”

“I know a criminal lunatic when I see one. The police surgeon and her own doctor will
be up in the morning, and committal papers will arrive in due course.”

“It seems rather irregular,” said the doctor.

“As a matter of fact, it is irregular,” said the Kommandant. “But if you really want
to know, we have pretty incontrovertible evidence that she has murdered someone. I
won’t go into details but I can assure you that we have enough evidence to have her tried
for murder. I think you understand that the trial of such a prominent person would not be
in the public interest.”

“Good God,” said the doctor, “what is Zululand coming to? First her brother and now
Miss Hazelstone.”

“Quite,” said the Kommandant. “It’s a reflection on our times.”

Having ensured that Miss Hazelstone would be allowed no visitors and that she would
have no access to the Press or to her lawyers, the Kommandant took his leave. Dawn had
broken when he crossed the great parade ground, and a few grey figures had emerged from the
wards and were shuffling about sadly in the early sunlight.

“To think it had to end like this,” the Kommandant thought and his mind dwelt not so much
on Miss Hazelstone as on the Imperial splendour that had once marched red-coated and
supreme across the square. He stood for a moment imagining the regiments that had passed
the saluting base on which Miss Hazelstone’s grandfather had stood before going to their
deaths on Majuba Hill and Spion Kop and then he turned away and climbed into his reeking
car.

 When Miss Hazelstone woke to find herself in bed in a ward, she had difficulty
understanding where she was. The decor and the row of beds brought back to her memories of
her boarding school but her companions were hardly the gay carefree girls of her youth.
Not that they were really gay, she thought lying back and studying the ceiling, merely
expectant, which passed for gaiety. There was nothing remotely gay or expectant about
the figures she could see now. Withdrawn into remote provinces of their own imaginations
the patients wandered listlessly among the obstacles presented by reality. Miss
Hazelstone looked at them and was tempted to follow their example. Only a sense of pride
prevented her. “Such lack of style,” she said to herself, and sitting on the edge of her
bed looked round for her clothes.

In the days that followed she clung grimly to her arrogance, firmly rejecting the
unreal worlds the other patients pressed on her.

“You may be,” she told a patient who introduced himself as Napoleon, “though I doubt it.
I am Miss Hazelstone of Jacaranda House,” and even the staff learnt that it was unwise to
address her simply as Hazelstone.

“Miss Hazelstone to you,” she snapped at a sister who made the mistake.

“One must keep up appearances,” she told Dr von Blimenstein, the psychiatrist who had
been assigned to deal with the new patient, and who was trying vainly to get Miss
Hazelstone to recognize the sexual origins of her illness. Dr von Blimenstein was so
wildly eclectic in her approach that it was difficult to tell which school of psychology
she most favoured. She was known to prescribe electric-shock therapy in unlimited doses
to the black patients, but with whites placed particular stress on sexual guilt as the
cause of psychoses. She was so successful in this approach that she had once even managed
to cure a keeper at the Durban Snake Park of his anxiety neurosis about snakes. His
phobia had, he claimed, been brought on by his having been bitten on forty-eight separate
occasions by snakes as venomous and varied as puff-adders, cobras, Gabon vipers,
ringhals and asps, each of which had brought him to the verge of death. Dr von Blimenstein
had convinced the poor man that his fears were purely sexual in origin and resulted from
a feeling of inadequacy brought on by the realization that his penis was neither so
long nor so potent as a mature python and had sent him back to work at the Snake Park where
three weeks later he had been bitten, this time with fatal results, by a black mamba whose
length he had been trying to measure by comparing it with his own erect member which he
knew to be six inches long. “Nine feet three inches,” he had just concluded, laying the
mamba’s head against his glans penis. It was practically the last thing he could
conclude, as the mamba with a ferocity fully justified by the absurd comparison
plunged its fangs into its symbolic counterpart. After that Dr von Blimenstein had
turned away from psychoanalysis and had favoured a more behaviourist approach.

With Miss Hazelstone she decided there was no danger of such tragic results and she
had encouraged the patient to record her dreams so that these could be examined for the
symbolic meaning which would explain all her problems. The trouble was that Miss
Hazelstone never dreamt and the concocted dreams that she supplied the doctor with were
down-to-earth in the extreme. They were for one thing punctuated with phalluses and
vaginas which no amount of symbolic interpretation could turn into anything else.

“How about snakes, or steeples?” Miss Hazelstone inquired when the doctor explained how
difficult it was.

“I’ve never heard of people having dreams about penises before,” said the doctor.

“Probably wish-fulfilment dreams,” Miss Hazelstone said and went on to describe a
dream in which a creature called Els had struggled with a black dog on a lawn.

“Extraordinary,” said von Blimenstein, “absolutely archetypal,” and had begun to
talk about the Shadow struggling with Instinctual Libido.

“Yes, it struck me like that at the time,” said Miss Hazelstone cryptically. After
several weeks of these dreams the doctor had begun to think she would be able to write a
monograph on “The Policeman Archetype in South African Psychology” using this
material.

For Miss Hazelstone these interviews provided a break from the boredom of life in Fort
Rapier.

“Madness is so monotonous,” she told the doctor. “You would think that fantasies would be
more interesting, but really one has to conclude that insanity is a poor substitute
for reality.”

Then again, when she looked around her, there didn’t seem to be any significant
difference between life in the mental hospital and life in South Africa as a whole. Black
madmen did all the work, while white lunatics lounged about imagining they were God.

“I’m sure the Almighty has more dignity,” Miss Hazelstone said to herself, as she
watched the shuffling figures moving aimlessly about the grounds. “And I’m sure He hasn’t
delusions of grandeur.”

The news that his sister had finally been found and was now an inmate in Fort Rapier
Mental Hospital came as no surprise to the Bishop of Barotseland. “She was never very
sane,” he told the Kommandant who came to see him personally to break the news, and
demonstrated once more that lack of family loyalty the Kommandant found so deplorable
in one who belonged to such an illustrious line, by adding, “The best place for her. She
should have been certified years ago.” The Bishop was shedding all his illusions, it
seemed, and certainly he had ceased to feel kindly towards his sister and had stopped
thinking she was merely mildly eccentric.

“I have a great admiration for Miss Hazelstone,” said the Kommandant coldly. “She was
a remarkable woman and Zulu-land will be the poorer for her passing.”

“You speak of her as though she were already dead,” said the Bishop, whose thoughts about
mortality were markedly more frequent since he had moved into Bottom. “I suppose in a
way she has gone to a better life.”

“She won’t be leaving there until she is dead,” said the Kommandant grimly. “By the
way, your trial starts next week so if you have anything to say in your defence you had
better start thinking about it now,” and the Kommandant had gone away convinced that
Jonathan Hazelstone deserved his fate.

The Bishop, left alone in his cell, decided that there was really nothing he could do
to add to the confession he had made. It seemed to him a perfectly adequate defence in
itself. Nobody on earth could possibly believe he had committed the crimes he had
admitted to, and he doubted if any but an expert on High Church ritual could
disentangle criminal offences from ecclesiastical practices. No judge worth his salt
could ever condemn him for latitudinarianism. The Bishop lay down on the mat on the
floor of his cell which served as his bed and looked forward to the verdict he was sure would
free him.

“It probably won’t even come to that,” he thought cheerfully. “The judge will throw the
prosecution case out of court.”

As usual with the Bishop of Barotseland’s prognostications events were to prove him
entirely wrong. The Judge chosen to hear the case was Justice Schalkwyk, whose mother had
died in a British concentration camp and who was noted both for his deafness and his
loathing for all things British. The attorney for the defence, Mr Leopold Jackson, was
likewise handicapped physically by a cleft palate which made his speeches almost
inaudible, and who was in any case known for his tendency to defer to the authority of
judges. He had been chosen to conduct the defence by the accused man’s heirs, distant
cousins who lived in a poor section of Capetown and who hoped by speeding the course of
justice to avoid any further unwelcome publicity which would besmirch the family name.
Mr Jackson was only allowed to see his client a few days before the trial began, and then
only in the presence of Konstabel Els.

The interview took place in Bottom and was marked by an almost complete
misunderstanding from the start.

“You thay you’ve thigned a confethion. Motht unfortunate,” said Mr Jackson.

“It was made under duress,” said the Bishop.

“It wasn’t,” said Els. “It was made in here.”