The Angels Weep (60 page)

They were both silent for a while, and then Jonathan
nodded.

‘All right, my boy, I accept your conditions. Both sets
will be yours one day, and until then you can read them whenever
you wish to.’

Jonathan had seldom been so pleased with a bargain. He had
completed his sets after thirty years, and if the boy was serious
about reading them, he had found a good home for them. The Lord
knew, neither Douglas nor Roland was interested, and in the
meantime perhaps the journals might draw Craig back to
King’s Lynn more often. He wrote out the cheque and signed
it with a flourish, while Craig went out to the Land-Rover and
dug the three leather-bound manuscripts from the bottom of his
kitbag.

‘I suppose you will spend it all on that boat,’
Jonathan accused as he came in from the veranda.

‘Some of it,’ Craig admitted. He placed the books
in front of the old man.

‘You are a dreamer.’ Jonathan slid the cheque
across the desk.

‘Sometimes I prefer dreams to reality.’ Craig
scrutinized the figures briefly, then buttoned the pink cheque
into his top pocket.

‘That’s your trouble,’ said Jonathan.

‘Bawu, if you start lecturing me, I’m going to
head straight back to town.’

Jonathan held up both hands in capitulation. ‘All
right,’ he chuckled. ‘Your old room is the way you
left it, if you want to use it.’

‘I have an appointment with the police recruiting
officer on Monday, but I’ll stay the weekend, if
that’s okay?’

‘I’ll ring Trevor this evening and fix the
interview.’

Trevor Pennington was the assistant commissioner of police.
Jonathan believed in starting at the top.

‘I wish you wouldn’t, Jon-Jon.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Jonathan snapped.
‘You must learn to use every advantage, my boy,
that’s the way life works.’

Jonathan picked up the first of the three volumes of
manuscript and gloatingly stroked it with his gnarled brown
fingers.

‘Now, you can leave me alone for a while,’ he
ordered, as he unfolded his wire-framed reading-glasses and
perched them on his nose. ‘They are playing tennis across
at Queen’s Lynn, I will see you back here for
sundowners.’

Craig glanced back from the doorway, but Jonathan Ballantyne
was hunched over the book, transported by the entries in yellow
faded ink back to his childhood.

A
lthough it
shared a common seven-mile boundary with King’s Lynn,
Queen’s Lynn was a separate ranch. Jonathan Ballantyne had
added it to his holdings during the great depression of the
1930s, paying five cents on the dollar of its real worth. Now it
formed the eastern spread of the Rholands Ranching Company.

It was the home of Jonathan’s only surviving son,
Douglas Ballantyne, and his wife Valerie. Douglas was the
managing director of both Rholands and the Harkness Mine. He was
also Minister of Agriculture in Ian Smith’s UDI government,
and with any luck he might be away on mysterious government or
company business.

Douglas Ballantyne had once given Craig his honest appraisal.
‘At heart you are a bloody hippie, Craig, you should get
your hair cut and start bracing up, you can’t go on
dawdling through life and expecting Bawu and the rest of the
family to carry you for ever.’

Craig pulled a sour face at the memory as he drove down past
the stockyards of Queen’s Lynn, and smelled the ammoniacal
tang of cow-dung.

The huge Afrikander beasts were a uniform deep chocolate red,
the bulls hump-backed and with swinging dewlaps that almost
brushed the earth. This breed had made Rhodesian beef almost as
renowned as the marbled beef of Kobe. As Minister of Agriculture
it was Douglas Ballantyne’s duty to see that, despite
sanctions, the world was not deprived of this delicacy. The route
that it took to the tables of the great restaurants of the world
was via Johannesburg and Cape Town, where it perforce changed its
name, but the connoisseurs recognized it and asked for it by its
nom de guerre
, their taste-buds probably piqued by the
knowledge that they were eating forbidden fruits. Rhodesian
tobacco and nickel and copper and gold all went out the same way,
while petrol and diesel oil made the return trip. The popular
bumper sticker said simply, ‘Thank you, South
Africa.’

Beyond the stock-pens and veterinary block, once again
protected by the diamond mesh and barbed-wire security fence, lay
the green lawns and banks of flowering shrubs and the blazing
Pride of India trees of the gardens of Queen’s Lynn. The
windows had been covered with grenade screens and the servants
would drop steel bullet-proof shutters into their slots before
sunset, but here the defences had not been built with the same
gusto as Bawu had shown at King’s Lynn. They fitted
unobtrusively into the gracious surroundings.

The lovely old house was very much as Craig remembered it from
before the war, rosy red brick and wide cool verandas. The
jacaranda trees that lined the long curved driveway were in full
flower, like a mist bank of pale ethereal blue, and there were at
least two dozen cars parked beneath them, Mercedes and Jaguars,
Cadillacs and BMWs, their paintwork hazed with the red dust of
Matabeleland. Craig concealed his venerable Land-Rover behind the
tumble of red and purple bougainvillaea creeper, so as not to
lower the tone of a Queen’s Lynn Saturday. From habit he
slung an FN rifle over his shoulder and wandered around the side
of the house.

F
rom ahead
there came the sound of children’s voices, gay as
songbirds, and the genial scolding of their black nannies,
punctuated by the sharp ‘Pock! Pock!’ of a long rally
from the tennis courts.

Craig paused at the head of the terraced lawns. Children
spilled and tumbled and chased each other in circles like puppies
over the green grass. Nearer the yellow clay courts, their
parents sprawled on spread rugs or sat at the shaded white
tea-tables, under the brightly coloured umbrellas. They were
bronzed young men and women in tennis whites, sipping tea or
drinking beer from tall frosted glasses, calling ribald comment
and advice to the players upon the courts. The only incongruous
note was the row of machine pistols and automatic rifles beside
the silver tea set and cream scones.

Someone recognized Craig and shouted, ‘Hi Craig, long
time no see,’ and others waved, but there was just that
faint edge of condescension in their manner reserved for the poor
relative. These were the families with great estates, a closed
club of the wealthy in which, for all their geniality, Craig
would never have full membership.

Valerie Ballantyne came to meet him, slim-hipped and girlishly
graceful in her short white tennis skirt. ‘Craig, you are
as thin as a bean pole.’ He always brought out the maternal
instincts in any female between eight and eighty.

‘Hello, Aunty Val.’

She offered him a smooth cheek that smelled of violets.
Despite her delicate air, Valerie was president of the
Women’s Institute, served on the committees of a dozen
schools, charities and hospitals, and was a gracious,
accomplished hostess.

‘Uncle Douglas is in Salisbury. Smithy sent for him
yesterday. He will be sorry to have missed you.’ She took
his arm. ‘How is the Game Department?’

‘It will probably survive without me.’

‘Oh, no, Craig, not again!’

‘‘Fraid so, Aunty Val.’ He didn’t
really feel up to a discussion of his career at that moment.
‘Do you mind if I get myself a beer?’

There was a group of men around the long trestle-table that
did service as a bar. The group opened to let him in, but the
conversation went straight back to a discussion of the latest
raid that the Rhodesian security forces had made into
Mozambique.

‘I tell you, when we hit the camp, there was food still
cooking on the fires, but they had run for it. We caught a few
stragglers, but the others had been warned.’

‘Bill is right, I had it from a colonel in intelligence,
no names, no pack drill, but there is a bad security leak. A
traitor near the top, the terrs are getting up to twelve
hours’ warning.’

‘We haven’t had a really good kill since last
August when we took six hundred.’

The eternal war talk bored Craig. He sipped his beer and
watched the play on the nearest court.

It was mixed doubles, and at that moment they changed
ends.

Roland Ballantyne came around the net with his arm around his
partner’s waist. He was laughing, and his teeth were
startlingly white and even in the deep tan of his face. His eyes
were that peculiar Ballantyne green, like crème de menthe
in a crystal glass, and although he wore his hair short, it was
thick and wavy, bleached to honey-gold by the sun.

He moved like a leopard, with a lazy gliding gait, and the
superb physical condition that was a prerequisite of any member
of the Scouts glossed the muscles of his forearms and bare legs.
He was only a year older than Craig, but his assurance always
made Craig feel gawky and callow in comparison. Craig had once
heard a girl he admired, a young lady usually blasée and
affectedly unimpressed, describe Roland Ballantyne as the most
magnificent stud on show.

Now Roland saw him, and waved his racquet. ‘Don’t
be vague, call for Craig!’ he greeted him across the court,
and then said something inaudible to the girl beside him. She
chuckled and looked at Craig.

Craig felt the shock begin in the pit of his stomach and
ripple outwards like a stone dropped into a still pool. He stared
at her, petrified, unable to drag his eyes off her face. She
stopped laughing, and for a moment longer returned his gaze, then
she broke out of the circle of Roland’s arm and went to the
baseline, bouncing the ball lightly off her racquet and Craig was
certain that her cheeks had flushed a shade pinker than the game
had previously rouged them.

Still he could not take his eyes off her. She was the most
perfect thing he had ever seen. She was tall, she reached almost
to Roland’s shoulder and he was six one. Her hair was
cropped into a glossy cap of curls, that changed colour as the
sunlight played upon it, from the burnished iridescence of
obsidian to the rich dark glow of a noble burgundy wine held to
the candlelight.

Her face was squarish, with a firm, perhaps stubborn, line to
the jaw, but her mouth was wide and tender and humorous. Her eyes
were wide-spaced and slanted to such a degree that they seemed
just a touch squint. It gave her a vulnerable appealing air, but
when she glanced at Roland, they took on a wicked taunting
glint.

‘Let’s blast them, pardner,’ she called, and
the lift of her voice raised little goose bumps on Craig’s
forearms.

The girl turned her shoulders and hips away, tossed the yellow
ball high as she went up on tiptoe and then swung back into the
overhead stroke. The racquet sprang sharply and the ball blurred
low across the net, and spurted white chalk from the centre
line.

She crossed the court with quick dainty steps, and caught the
return on the volley. She tucked it away in the corner, and then
glanced at Craig.

‘Shot!’ he called, his voice ringing hollowly in
his own ears, and a little satisfied smile puckered the corner of
her mouth.

She turned away and stooped to recover a loose ball. Her back
was turned towards Craig, her feet slightly apart and she did not
bend her knees. Her legs were long and shapely, and as her short
pleated skirt popped up, he had a fleeting glimpse of thin lacy
panties and the buttocks in them so neat and hard and symmetrical
that he was reminded of a pair of ostrich eggs gleaming in the
Kalahari sunlight.

Craig dropped his eyes guiltily as if he had played the
peeping Tom. He felt light-headed and strangely breathless. He
forced himself not to look back at the court, but his heart was
pounding as though he had just run a crosscountry, and the
conversation around him seemed to be in a foreign language,
relayed through a faulty transmitter. It did not make sense.

It seemed hours later that a hard muscular arm was thrown
around his shoulders, and Roland’s voice in his ear.

‘You’re looking well, old son.’ At last
Craig allowed himself to look around.

‘The terrs haven’t caught you yet,
Roly?’

‘No way, Sonny,’ Roland hugged him. ‘Let me
introduce you to a girl who loves me.’ Only Roland could
make a remark like that sound witty and sophisticated.
‘This is Bugsy. Bugsy, this is my favourite cousin, Craig,
the well-known sex maniac.’

‘Bugsy?’ Craig looked into those strangely tilted
eyes. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’ He realized that
they were not black, but a dark indigo blue.

‘Janine,’ she said. ‘Janine
Carpenter.’ She held out her hand. It was slim and warm and
moist from the game. He did not want to release it.

‘I warned you,’ Roland laughed. ‘Stop
molesting the girl and come and have a set with me,
Sonny.’

‘I haven’t got togs.’

‘All you need is shoes. We are the same size, I’ll
send a servant for a spare pair.’

C
raig
hadn’t played for over a year. The lay-off seemed to have
worked wonders. He had never played so well. The ball came off
the sweet spot of his racquet so fast and clean that it felt as
though he had clean missed it, and the top-spin pulled it down
onto the baseline as though it were a magnet.

Effortlessly, he passed Roland on either side, and then
dropped the ball so short that it left him stranded in mid-court.
He hit first-time serves that nicked the line, and returned shots
that usually he would not have bothered to chase, then he rushed
the net and slaughtered Roland’s best forehand.

He was loving it, so involved with the marvellous unaccustomed
sense of power and of his own invincibility, that he had not even
noticed that the stream of Roland Ballantyne’s easy banter
had long ago dried up – until he won another game and
Roland said, ‘Five games to love.’