The Angels Weep (61 page)

Something in his tone reached Craig at last, and for the first
time since they had begun playing, he really looked at
Roland’s face. It was a swollen ugly red. His jaw clenched
so that there were lumps of muscle below his ears. His eyes were
murderous green, and he was dangerous as a wounded leopard.

Craig looked away from him as they changed sides and he saw
that their game had fascinated everybody. Even the older women
had left the tea-tables and come down to the fence. He saw Aunty
Val, with a nervous little smile on her lips. From hard
experience, she recognized her son’s mood. Craig saw the
sniggering smiles on the faces of the men. Roland had won his
tennis half-blue at Oxford, and he had been Matabeleland singles
champion three years running. They were enjoying this as much as
Craig had been up until then.

Suddenly Craig felt appalled at his own success. He had never
beaten Roland at anything, not a single contest of any sort, not
even monopoly nor darts, not once in twenty-nine years. The
elasticity and strength went out of his legs, and he stood on the
baseline, just a long-legged gangling boy again, dressed in faded
khaki shorts and worn tennis shoes without socks. He gulped
miserably, pushed the hair out of his eyes, and crouched to
receive service.

Across the net Roland Ballantyne was a tall athletic figure.
He glared at Craig. Craig knew he was not seeing him, he was
seeing an adversary, something to be destroyed.

‘We Ballantynes are winners,’ Bawu had said.
‘We have got the instinct for the jugular.’

Roland seemed, impossibly, to grow even taller, and then he
served. Craig began to move left, saw it was the wrong side and
tried to change. His long legs tangled and he sprawled on the
yellow clay. He stood up, retrieved his racquet, and went across
to the other court. There was a bloody smear on his knee.
Roland’s next service crashed in, and he did not get a
touch of his racquet to it.

When his turn came, he hit one into the net, and the next one
off the wood. Roland broke his service three times in a row, and
it went on like that.

‘Match point,’ Roland said. He was smiling again,
gay and handsome and genial as he bounced the ball at his feet,
and lined up for his final service. Craig felt that old heavy
feeling in his limbs, the despair of the born loser.

He glanced off court. Janine Carpenter was looking directly at
him, and in the instant before she smiled encouragingly, Craig
saw the pity in those dark indigo eyes, and abruptly he was
angry.

He socked Roland’s service, double-handed, into the
corner, and had it come back as hard. He crossed with his
forehand, and Roland was grinning as he drove it back. Again
Craig caught it perfectly, and even Roland was forced to lob. It
came down from on high, floating helplessly, and Craig was under
it, poised and coldly angry, and he hit it with all his weight
and strength and despair. It was his best shot. After that he had
nothing to follow. Roland trapped it on the bounce, before it
could rise, and he punched it tantalizingly past Craig’s
right hip while he was twisted hopelessly off balance by the
power of his own stroke.

Roland laughed, and vaulted easily over the net.

‘Not bad, Sonny.’ He put his arm patronizingly
around Craig’s shoulders. ‘I’ll know not to
give you a start in future,’ he said and led Craig off the
court.

Those who had been gloatingly anticipating Roland’s
humiliation a few minutes before now crowded slavishly around
him.

‘Well played, Roly.’

‘Great stuff.’

And Craig slipped away from them. He picked a clean white
towel off the pile and wiped his neck and face. Trying not to
look as miserable as he felt, he went to the deserted bar, and
fished a beer out of the bath of crushed ice. He swallowed a
mouthful, and it was so tart that it made his eyes swim. Through
the tears he realized suddenly that Janine Carpenter was standing
beside him.

‘You could have done it,’ she said softly.
‘But you just gave up.’

‘Story of my life.’ He tried to sound gay and
witty, like Roland, but it came out flat, and self-pityingly.

She seemed about to speak again, then shook her head and
walked away.

C
raig used
Roland’s shower and when he came out with the towel around
his waist, Roland was in front of the full-length mirror
adjusting the angle of his beret.

The beret was dark maroon with a brass cap-badge above the
left ear. The badge was a brutish human head, with the forehead
of a gorilla and the same broad flattened nose. The eyes were
crossed grotesquely and the tongue protruded from between negroid
lips, like a Maori carving of a war idol.

‘When old Great-grandpa Ralph recruited the Scouts
during the rebellion,’ Roland had once explained to Craig,
‘one of his better-known exploits was to catch the leader
of the rebels, and to hang him from the top of an acacia tree. We
have taken that as our regimental emblem – Bazo’s
hanged head. How do you like it?’

‘Charming,’ Craig had given his opinion.
‘You always did have such exquisite taste, Roly.’

Roland had conceived the Scouts three years previously when
the sporadic warfare of the earlier days had begun to intensify
into the merciless internecine conflict of the present time. His
original idea had been to gather a force of young white
Rhodesians who could speak fluent Sindebele and reinforce them
with young Matabele who had been with their white employers since
childhood, men whose loyalty was unquestionable. He would train
black and white elements into an elite strike-force that could
move easily through the tribal trust areas amongst the peasant
farmers, speaking their language and understanding their ways,
able to impersonate innocent tribesmen or ZIPRA terrorists at
will, able to meet the enemy at the border or drop onto him from
the sky and take him on at the most favourable terms.

He had gone to General Peter Walls at Combined Services
Headquarters. Of course, Bawu had made the usual phone calls to
clear the way, and Uncle Douglas had put a word in Smithy’s
ear during a cabinet meeting. They had given Roland the go-ahead,
and so Ballantyne’s Scouts had been reborn, seventy years
after the original troop was disbanded.

In the three years since then, Ballantyne’s Scouts had
cut their way into legend. Six hundred men who had been
officially credited with two thousand kills, who had been five
hundred miles over the border into Zambia to hit a ZIPRA training
base; men who had sat at the village fires in the tribal trust
lands listening to the chatter of the women who had just returned
from carrying baskets of grain to the ZIPRA cadres in the hills,
men who laid their ambushes and maintained them for five straight
days, burying their own excrement beside them, waiting patiently
and as unmoving as a leopard beside the water-hole, waiting for
yet another good kill.

Roland turned from the mirror as Craig came into the bedroom.
The pips of a full colonel sparkled on his shoulders, and over
his heart the cluster of the silver cross was pinned below his
dog-tab on the crisply ironed khaki bush-shirt.

‘Help yourself to what you need, Sonny,’ he
invited, and Craig went to the built-in cupboard and selected a
pair of flannels and a white cricket sweater with the colours of
Oriel College around the neck. It seemed like coming home to be
wearing Roland’s cast-offs again, he had always been a year
behind him.

‘Mom tells me you’ve been fired again.’

‘That’s right.’ Craig’s voice was
muffled by the sweater over his head.

‘There’s a billet for you with the
Scouts.’

‘Roly, I don’t fancy the idea of putting piano
wire around somebody’s neck and plucking his head
off.’

‘We don’t do that every day,’ Roland
grinned. ‘Personally, I much prefer a knife, you can also
use it to slice biltong when you aren’t slitting throats.
But seriously, Sonny, we could use you. You talk the lingo like
one of them, and you are a real buff at blowing things up. We are
short of blast bunnies.’

‘When I left King’s Lynn I swore an oath that I
would never work for anyone in the family again.’

‘The Scouts aren’t family.’

‘You are the Scouts, Roly.’

‘I could have you seconded, you know that?’

‘That wouldn’t work.’

‘No,’ Roland agreed. ‘You always were a
stubborn blighter. Well, if you change your mind, let me
know.’ He knocked a cigarette half out of its soft pack and
then pulled it the rest of the way with his lips. ‘What do
you think of Bugsy?’ The cigarette waggled as he asked the
question, and he flicked his gold Ronson to it.

‘She’s all right,’ Craig said
cautiously.

‘Only all right?’ Roland protested. ‘Try
magnificent, try sensational, wonderful, super-great – wax
lyrical, for you’re talking about the woman I
love.’

‘Number one thousand and ten on the list of the women
you have loved,’ Craig corrected.

‘Steady, old son, this one I am going to
marry.’

Craig felt a coldness come over his soul, and he turned away
to comb his damp hair in the mirror.

‘Did you hear what I said? I’m going to marry
her.’

‘Does she know?’

‘I’m letting her ripen a little before I tell
her.’

‘Ask her, don’t you mean ask her?’

‘Old Roly tells ‘em, he doesn’t ask
‘em. You are supposed to say, “Congratulations, I
hope you will be very happy.”’

‘Congratulations, I hope you will be very
happy.’

‘That’s my boy. Come on, I’ll buy you a
drink.’

They went down the long central corridor that bisected the
house but before they reached the veranda, a telephone rang in
the lobby and they heard Aunty Val’s voice:

‘I’ll fetch him. Hold the line please,’ and
then louder, ‘Roland, darling, it’s Cheetah for
you.’

Cheetah was the call-sign of Scout base. ‘I’m
coming, Mom.’ Roland strode into the lobby and Craig heard
him say, ‘Ballantyne,’ and then after a short
silence, ‘are you sure it’s him? By Christ, this is
the chance we have been waiting for. How soon can you get a
chopper here? On its way? Good! Throw a net around the place, but
don’t go in until I get there. I want this baby
myself.’

When he came back into the corridor, he was transformed. It
was the same look as he had given Craig across the net, cold and
dangerous and without mercy.

‘Can you get Bugsy back to town for me, Sonny? We are
going into a contact.’

‘I’ll look after her.’

Roland strode out onto the veranda. The last of the tennis
guests were dispersing towards their vehicles, gathering up
nannies and children as they went, shouting farewells and
last-minute invitations for the coming week. There was a time
when a gathering like this would not have broken up until after
midnight, but now nobody drove the country roads after 4 p.m.,
the new witching hour.

Janine Carpenter was shaking hands and laughing with a couple
from the neighbouring ranch.

‘I’d love to come over,’ she said, and then
she looked up and saw Roland’s expression. She hurried to
him.

‘What is it?’

‘We are going in. Sonny will look after you. I’ll
call you.’ He was searching the sky, already remote and
detached, and then there was the whack, whack, whacking of
helicopter rotors in the air and the machine came bustling in low
over the kopje. She was painted in dull battle-brown, and there
were two Scouts standing in the open belly port, one white and
one black, both in bush camouflage and full webbing.

Roland ran down the lawns to meet her as she sank, and before
she touched he jumped to link arms with his Matabele sergeant,
and swung up into the cabin of the helicopter. As the machine
rose and beat away, nose low over the kopje, Craig caught a last
glimpse of Roland. He had already replaced the beret with a soft
bush hat, and his sergeant was helping him into his camouflage
battle-smock.

‘Roly said I was to see you home. I take it you live in
Bulawayo?’ Craig asked, as the helicopter disappeared and
the sound of its rotors dwindled. It seemed to take an effort for
her to bring her attention back to him.

‘Yes, Bulawayo. Thanks.’

‘We won’t make it this evening, not before ambush
hour. I was going to stay over at my grandpa’s
place.’

‘Bawu?’

‘You know him?’

‘No, but I’d love to. Roly has kept me in fits
with stories about him. Do you think there’d be a bed for
me also?’

‘There are twenty-two beds at King’s
Lynn.’

She perched on the seat of the old Land-Rover beside him, and
the wind made her hair shimmer and flutter.

‘Why does he call you Bugsy?’ Craig had to raise
his voice above the engine noise.

‘I’m an entomologist,’ she shouted back.
‘You know, bugs and things.’

‘Where do you work?’ The cool evening air
flattened her blouse against her chest, and she was very
obviously not wearing a bra. She had small finely shaped breasts
and the cold made her nipples stand out in little dark lumps
under the thin cloth. It was difficult not to gawk.

‘At the museum. Did you know that we have the finest
collection of tropical and sub-tropical insects in existence,
better than the Smithsonian or the Kensington Natural History
Museum?’

‘Bully for you.’

‘Sorry, I can be a bore.’

‘Never.’

She smiled her thanks, but changed the subject. ‘How
long have you known Roland?’

‘Twenty-nine years.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-nine.’

‘Tell me about him.’

‘What’s to tell about somebody who is
perfect?’

‘Try to think of something,’ she encouraged
him.

‘Head boy at Michaelhouse. Captain of rugger and
cricket. Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, Oriel scholar. Blues for
rowing and cricket, half-blue for tennis, colonel in the Scouts,
silver cross for valour, heir to twenty-million-plus dollars. You
know, all the usual things.’ Craig shrugged.