The Angels Weep (62 page)

‘You don’t like him,’ she accused.

‘I love him,’ he said. ‘In a funny sort of
way.’

‘You don’t want to talk about him any
more?’

‘I’d rather talk about you.’

‘That suits me, what do you want to know?’

He wanted to make her smile again. ‘Start at the time
you were born and don’t miss anything out.’

‘I was born in a little village in Yorkshire, my daddy
is the local veterinarian.’

‘When? I said not to miss anything.’

She slanted her eyes mischievously. ‘What is the local
expression for an indeterminate date – some time before the
rinderpest?’

‘That was in the 1890s.’

‘Okay,’ she smiled again. ‘I was born some
time after the rinderpest.’

It was working, Craig realized. She liked him. She smiled more
readily, and their banter was light and easy. Perhaps it was just
wistful imagination, but he thought he detected the first sexual
awareness in her manner, the way she held her head and moved her
body, the way she – then abruptly he thought of Roland and
felt the cold slide of despair.

J
onathan
Ballantyne came out onto the veranda of King’s Lynn, took
one look at her, and went immediately into his role of the
lustful roué.

He kissed her hand. ‘You are the prettiest young lady
that Craig has ever come up with – by a street.’

Some perverse streak made Craig deny it. ‘Janine is
Roly’s friend, Bawu.’

‘Ah,’ the old man nodded. ‘I should have
known. Too much class for your taste, boy.’

Craig’s marriage had lasted a little longer than one of
his jobs, just over a year, but Bawu had not approved of
Craig’s choice, had said so before the wedding and after
it, before the divorce and after it – and at every
opportunity since then.

‘Thank you, Mr Ballantyne.’ Janine slanted her
eyes at Jonathan.

‘You may call me Bawu.’ Jonathan gave her his
ultimate accolade, made an arm for her and said, ‘Come and
see my Claymore mines, my dear.’

Craig watched them go off on a tour of the defences, another
sure sign of Bawu’s high favour.

‘He has three wives buried up on the kopje,’ Craig
muttered ruefully, ‘and is still as randy as an old
goat.’

C
raig woke to
his bedroom door cracking back on its hinges, and Jonathan
Ballantyne’s cry.

‘Are you going to sleep all day? It’s four-thirty
already.’

‘Just because you haven’t slept for twenty years,
Bawu.’

‘Enough of your lip, boy – today’s the big
day. Get that pretty little filly of Roland’s and
we’ll all go down to test my secret weapon.’

‘Before breakfast?’ Craig protested, but excited
as a child invited to a picnic, the old man had gone already.

It was parked at a prudent distance from the nearest building.
The cook had threatened to resign if there were any more
experiments conducted within blast range of his kitchen. It stood
on the edge of a field of ripening seed maize, and it was
surrounded by a small crowd of labourers and tractor drivers and
clerks.

‘What on earth is it?’ Janine puzzled, as they
crossed the ploughed land towards it, but before anyone could
reply, a figure in greasy blue overalls detached itself from the
crowd and hurried towards them.

‘Mister Craig, thank goodness you are here. You’ve
got to stop him.’

‘Don’t be a blithering old idiot, Okky,’
Jonathan ordered. Okky van Rensburg had been chief mechanic on
King’s Lynn for twenty years. Behind his back Jonathan
boasted that Okky could strip down a John Deere tractor, and
build up a Cadillac and two Rolls Royce Silver Clouds out of the
spare parts. He was a wiry grease-stained little monkey of a man.
He ignored Jonathan’s injunction to silence.

‘Bawu’s going to kill himself, unless somebody
stops him.’ He wrung his scarred blackened hands
pitifully.

But already Jonathan was donning his helmet and fastening the
strap under his chin. It was the same tin helmet that he had worn
on that day in 1916 that he won his Military Cross, and the dent
in the side had been made by a shard of German shrapnel. There
was an unholy gleam in his eyes as he advanced upon the monstrous
vehicle.

‘Okky has converted a three-ton Ford truck,’ he
explained to Janine, ‘lifted the chassis,’ as though
it were on stilts, the vehicle’s body stood high above the
huge lugged tyres, ‘put in deflectors here,’ he
pointed out the heavy steel vee-shaped plates under the cab that
would split the blast of a landmine, ‘armoured the
cab,’ the body looked like a tiger tank, with steel
hatches, a driver’s slit and gunports for a heavy Browning
machine-gun, ‘but look what we have got on top!’ At a
glance it could have been mistaken for the conning tower of a
nuclear submarine, and Okky was still wringing his hands.

‘He’s got twenty galvanized steel pipes filled
with plastic explosive and thirty pounds of ball-bearings
each.’

‘Good Lord, Bawu.’ Even Craig was horrified.
‘The damn things will explode!’

‘He has set them in blocks of concrete,’ Okky
moaned, ‘and aimed them out on each side just like the
cannons on one of Nelson’s ships of the line. Ten on each
side.’

‘A twenty-gun Ford,’ Craig breathed with awe.

‘When I run into an ambush, I just press the button
– and boom, a broadside of three hundred pounds of
ballbearings into the bastards,’ Jonathan gloated openly.
‘A whiff of grape, as old Bonaparte said.’

‘He’s going to blow himself to hell,’ Okky
moaned.

‘Oh, do stop being an old woman,’ Jonathan told
him. ‘And give me a leg up.’

‘Bawu, this time I really do agree with Okky.’
Craig tried to stop him, but the old man went up the steel ladder
with the agility of a vervet monkey, and posed dramatically in
the hatchway, like the commander of a panzer division.

‘I’ll let off one broadside at a time, the
starboard side first.’ Then his eyes lit on Janine.
‘Would you like to be my co-pilot, my dear?’

‘That is astonishingly civil of you, Bawu, but I think
I’ll get a better view from the irrigation ditch over
there.’

‘Then stand back everyone.’ Jonathan made a wide
imperious gesture of dismissal, and the Matabele labourers and
drivers who had been witnesses to Jonathan’s previous test
took off like a brigade of Egyptian infantry departing from the
Six-day War. Some of them were still running as they crossed the
ridge of the kopje.

Okky reached the irrigation ditch half a dozen paces ahead of
Craig and Janine, and then the three of them cautiously lifted
their heads above the bank. Three hundred yards away, the
grotesque Ford stood in monumental isolation in the middle of the
ploughed land, and from the hatchway Jonathan gave them a cheery
wave, and then disappeared.

They covered their ears with both hands and waited. Nothing
happened.

‘He’s chickened out,’ Craig said hopefully,
and the hatch opened again. Jonathan’s helmeted head
reappeared, his face red with outrage.

‘Okky, you son of a bitch, you disconnected the
wiring,’ he roared. ‘You are fired, do you hear me?
Fired!’

‘Third time he has fired me this week,’ Okky
muttered morosely. ‘It was the only way I could think of to
stop him.’

‘Hold on, my dear,’ Jonathan addressed himself to
Janine. ‘I’ll have it connected up in a
jiffy.’

‘Don’t worry on my account, Bawu,’ she
yelled back, but he had disappeared again.

The minutes passed, each one a separate eternity, and their
hopes gradually rose again.

‘It’s not going to work.’

‘Let’s get him out of there.’

‘Bawu, we are coming to get you,’ Craig cupped his
hands and bellowed. ‘And you’d better come
quietly.’

He rose slowly out of the ditch, and at that moment the
armoured Ford disappeared in a huge boiling cloud of smoke and
dust. A sheet of white flame licked over the field of standing
maize, scything it flat as though some monstrous
combine-harvester had swept across it, and they were enveloped by
such an appalling blast of sound, that Craig lost his balance and
fell back into the ditch on top of the other two.

Frantically they scrambled to untangle themselves in the
bottom of the ditch, and then looked out fearfully again across
the ploughed field. The dreadful silence was broken only by the
singing in their own ears, and the dwindling yelps of the old
man’s pack of savage Rottweilers and Dobermann pinschers as
they fled in utter panic back up the road towards the homestead.
The field was obscured by a dense curtain of drifting blue smoke
and red-brown dust.

They climbed up out of the ditch and stared into the smoke and
dust, and the breeze blew it gently aside. The Ford lay upon its
back. All four of its massive lugged tyres were pointing to the
heavens as though in abject surrender.

‘Bawu!’ Craig cried and raced towards it. The
gaping mouths of the pipe cannons were still oozing oily wreaths
of smoke, but there was no other movement.

Craig wrestled the steel hatch open, and crawled into it on
his hands and knees. The dark interior stank of acrid plastic
explosive burn.

‘Bawu!’ He found him crumpled in the bottom of the
cab, and he knew instantly that the old man was
in
extremis
. The whole shape of his face had altered, and his
voice was an unintelligible blur.

Craig caught him up in his arms and tried to drag him towards
the hatch, but the old man fought him off with desperate
strength, and at last Craig understood what he was saying.

‘My teeth, blown my bloody teeth out!’ He was back
on his hands and knees searching desperately.
‘Mustn’t let her see me, find them, boy, find
them.’

Craig found the missing plates under the driver’s seat,
and with them once more in place, Jonathan shot out of the
hatchway and confronted Okky van Rensburg furiously.

‘You made it top-heavy, you blithering old
idiot.’

‘You can’t talk to me like that, Bawu, I
don’t work for you any longer. You fired me.’

‘You’re hired,’ bellowed Jonathan.
‘Now get that thing right way up again.’

Twenty sweating, singing Matabele heaved the Ford slowly
upright and at last it flopped over onto its wheels again.

‘Looks like a banana,’ Okky remarked with obvious
satisfaction. ‘The recoil of your cannons has bent it
almost double. You’ll never get that chassis straight
again.’

‘There is only one way to straighten it,’ Jonathan
announced and began tightening the strap of his tin helmet
again.

‘What are you going to do, Jon-Jon?’ Craig
demanded anxiously.

‘Fire the other broadside, of course,’ said
Jonathan grimly. ‘That will knock it straight again.’
But Craig seized one of his arms, Okky the other, and Janine
murmured soothingly to him as they led him away to the waiting
Land-Rover.

‘C
an you
imagine Bawu reaching for the cigarette-lighter and hitting the
wrong button while driving down Main Street,’ Craig
chortled, ‘and letting that lot go through the front doors
of the City Hall?’

They giggled over it the whole way back to town, and as they
drove in past the lovely lawns of the municipal gardens, Craig
suggested easily, ‘Sunday evening in Bulawayo, you could
suffer a nervous breakdown from the mad gaiety of it. Let me cook
you one of my famous dinners on the yacht, and save you from
it.’

‘The yacht?’ Janine was instantly intrigued.
‘Here? Fifteen hundred miles from the nearest salt
water?’

‘I will say no more,’ Craig declared.
‘Either you come with me, or you will forever be consumed
by unsatisfied curiosity.’

‘A fate worse than death,’ she agreed. ‘And
I have always been a good sailor. Let’s go!’

Craig took the airport road but before they left the built-up
area, he turned into one of the older sections of the town.
Between two rundown cottages was an empty plot. It was screened
from the road by the dense greenery of a row of ancient mango
trees. Craig parked the Land-Rover under one of the mango trees,
and led her deeper into an unkempt jungle of bougainvillaea and
acacia trees, until she stopped abruptly and exclaimed:

‘You weren’t kidding. It’s a real
yacht.’

‘They don’t come any realer than that,’
Craig agreed proudly. ‘Livranos-designed, forty-five feet
overall length, and every plank laid by my own
lily-whites.’

‘Craig, she’s beautiful!’

‘She will be one day when I finish her.’

The vessel stood on a wooden cradle, with baulks of timber
chocking the sides. The deep keel and ocean-going hull lifted the
stainless steel deck-railings fifteen feet above Janine’s
head as she ran forward eagerly.

‘How do I get up?’

‘There is a ladder round the other side.’

She scrambled up onto the deck, and called down. ‘What
is her name?’

‘She hasn’t got one yet.’

He climbed up into the cockpit beside her. ‘When will
you launch her, Craig?’

‘The good Lord knows,’ he smiled. ‘There is
a mountain of work to be done on her yet, and every time I run
out of money, everything comes to a grinding halt.’

He was unlocking the hatch as he spoke, and the moment he
swung it open Janine ducked down the companionway.

‘It’s cosy down here.’

‘This is where I live.’ He climbed down into the
saloon after her and dropped his kitbag on the deck.
‘I’ve finished her off below decks, the galley is
through there. Two cabins each with double bunks, a shower and a
chemical toilet.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Janine repeated, running
her fingers over the varnished teak joinery, and then bouncing
experimentally on the couches.

‘Beats paying rent,’ he agreed.

‘What remains to be done?’

‘Not much – engine, winches, rigging, sails, only
about twenty thousand dollars’ worth. However, I have just
soaked Bawu for almost half of that.’ He lit the gas
refrigerator and then selected a tape and put it on the
player.