The Angels Weep (75 page)

He had transferred some of his most potent and cherished
Claymore mines across from the King’s Lynn defences and
added them to the decorations in the Queen’s Lynn
gardens.

‘You can never be too careful,’ he explained
darkly, when taxed with it. ‘If there is a terr attack
during the ceremony—’ He made the motion of pressing
a button, and the entire family shuddered at the thought of a
mushroom-shaped cloud hanging over Queen’s Lynn. It had
taken all their combined powers of persuasion to get him to
remove his pets.

He had then sneaked into the kitchens and added an extra six
bottles of brandy to the mix for the wedding cake. Fortunately
Valerie had made a final tasting and when she got her breath
back, ordered the chef to bury it and start a new batch. From
then on Bawu was banned from the kitchens in disgrace, and
Douglas had drawn up a roster of family members to keep him under
surveillance during the great day.

Craig had the first shift from nine in the morning when the
two thousand invited guests started arriving until eleven when
Craig would hand over to a cousin and assume his other duties as
Roland’s best man. Craig had helped the old man dress in
his uniform from the Kaiser’s war. A local tailor had been
brought out to King’s Lynn to make the alterations, and the
results were surprising. Bawu looked dapper and spry with his Sam
Browne belt and swagger-stick, and the double row of coloured
ribbons on his chest.

Craig was proud of him as he took up his position on the front
veranda, and looked over the crowded lawns, lifting his
swagger-stick in acknowledgement of the affectionate cries of
‘Hello, Uncle Bawu’, brushing out his gleaming silver
moustaches and tipping the peak of his cap at a more debonair
angle over one eye.

‘Damn me, boy,’ he told Craig. ‘This whole
business makes me feel quite romantic again. I haven’t been
married myself for nearly twenty years. I have a good mind to
give it one last whirl!’

‘There is always the widow Angus,’ Craig
suggested, and his grandfather was outraged.

‘That old crow!’

‘Bawu, she is rich and only fifty.’

‘That’s old, boy. Catch ‘em young and train
‘em well. That’s my motto.’ Bawu winked at him.
‘Now how about that one?’

His choice was twenty-five years old, twice divorced already,
wearing an unfashionable mini-skirt and casting a bold eye about
her.

‘You can introduce me.’ Bawu gave his magnanimous
permission.

‘I think the prime minister wants to see you,
Bawu.’ Craig searched desperately for a distraction, before
the pert little bottom under the mini-skirt was soundly pinched.
Craig had seen the old man flirting before. He left Bawu, gin and
tonic in hand, giving Ian Smith a few tips on international
diplomacy.

‘You have to remember that these fellows, Callaghan and
his friends, are working class, Ian, my boy, you cannot treat
them like gentlemen. They wouldn’t understand
that—’

And the prime minister, worn and tired and wan with his
responsibilities, one eyelid drooping, his curly sandy hair
receding, tried to hide his smile as he nodded.

‘Quite right, Uncle Bawu, I’ll remember
that.’

Craig felt safe to leave him for ten minutes, sure that the
old man’s opinions of the British Labour government were
good for at least that long, and he made his way swiftly through
the crowds to where Janine’s parents stood with a small
group at the end of the veranda.

He insinuated himself unobtrusively into the circle, and
studied Janine’s mother out of the corner of his eye. It
gave him a hollow aching feeling to recognize the same features,
the jawline and deep forehead blurred only marginally by the
passage of time. She had the same slanted eyes with the same
appealing cat-like cast to them. She caught his gaze and smiled
at him.

‘Mrs Carpenter, I’m a good friend of
Janine’s. My name is Craig Mellow.’

‘Oh yes, Jan wrote about you in her letters.’ Her
smile was warm, and her voice had haunting echoes of her
daughter’s. Craig found himself babbling away to her, and
could not prevent it – until softly and compassionately she
said:

‘She told me you were such a nice person. I am sorry, I
truly am.’

‘I don’t understand?’ Craig stiffened.

‘You love her very much, don’t you?’

He stared at her miserably, unable to reply, and she touched
his arm in understanding.

‘Excuse me,’ he blurted. ‘Roland will be
ready to dress, I must go.’ He stumbled and almost fell on
the veranda steps.

‘By God, Sonny, where have you been? I thought you were
going to let me go into contact on my own,’ Roland shouted
from the shower. ‘Have you got the ring?’

They waited side by side, under the bower of fresh flowers in
front of the makeshift altar which also was smothered with
flowers. Roland wore full-dress uniform: the maroon beret with
Bazo’s head cap-badge, the colonel’s crowns on his
shoulders, the silver cross for valour on his breast, white
gloves on his hands and the gilt and tasselled sword at his
waist.

In his simple police uniform, Craig felt gauche and drab, like
a sparrow beside a golden eagle, like a tabby cat beside a
leopard, and the waiting seemed to go on for ever. Through it
all, Craig clung to a hopeless notion that it was still not going
to happen – that was the only way he could hold his despair
at bay.

Then there was the triumphant swell of the bridal march, and
down both sides of the carpeted aisle from the house, the crowds
stirred and hummed with excitement and anticipation. Craig felt
his soul begin the final plunge into cold and darkness, he could
not bring himself to look around. He stared straight ahead at the
face of the priest. He had known him since childhood, but now he
seemed a stranger, his face swam and wavered in Craig’s
vision.

Then he smelled Janine; even over the scent of the altar
flowers he recognized her perfume, and he almost choked on the
memories it evoked. He felt the train of her dress brush against
his ankle, and he moved back slightly and turned so that he could
see her for the last time.

She was on her father’s arm. The veil covered her hair,
and misted her face, but beneath its soft folds, he could see her
eyes, those great slanted eyes, the dark indigo of a tropical
sea, shining softly as she looked up at Roland Ballantyne.

‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the
sight of God, and in the face of this church, to join together
this man and this woman in holy matrimony—’

Now Craig could not take his eyes from her face. She had never
looked so lovely. She wore a crown of fresh violets, the exact
colour of her eyes. He still hoped that it would not happen, that
something would prevent it.

‘Therefore if any man can show any just cause, why they
may not lawfully be joined together, let him now
speak—’

He wanted to call out, to stop it. He wanted to shout,
‘I love her, she is mine,’ but his throat was so dry
and painful that he could not draw breath enough through it.
Then, it was happening.

‘I, Roland Morris, take thee, Janine Elizabeth, to have
and to hold from this day forward—’ Roly’s
voice was clear and strong and it raked Craig’s soul to its
very depths. After that, nothing else mattered. Craig seemed to
be standing a little away from it all, as though all the laughter
and joy was on the other side of a glass partition, the voices
were strangely muted, even the light seemed dulled as though a
cloud had passed across the sun.

He watched from the back of the crowd, standing under the
jacaranda trees, while Janine came out onto the veranda still
carrying her bouquet of violets, dressed in her blue going-away
ensemble. She and Roland were still hand in hand, but now he
lifted her onto a table-top and there were feminine shrieks of
excitement as Janine poised to toss her bouquet.

In that moment, she looked over their heads, and saw Craig.
The smile stayed on her lovely wide mouth, but something moved in
her eyes, a dark shadow, perhaps of pity, perhaps even regret,
then she threw the bouquet, one of her bridesmaids caught it, and
Roland swept her down and away. Hand in hand, the two of them ran
down the lawns to where the helicopter waited with its rotor
already turning. They ran laughing, Janine clutching her
wide-brimmed straw hat, and Roland trying to shield her from the
storm of confetti that swirled around them.

Craig did not wait for the machine to bear them away. He
returned to where he had left the old Land-Rover at the back of
the stables. He drove back to the yacht. He stripped off his
uniform, threw it onto the bunk, and pulled on a pair of silk
jogging shorts. He went into the galley and from the refrigerator
hooked out a can of beer. Sipping the froth, he went back into
the saloon. A loner all his life, he had believed himself immune
to the tortures of loneliness, and now he knew he had been
mistaken.

By this time there was a stack of over fifty exercise books
upon the saloon table, each of them filled from cover to cover
with his pencilled scrawl. He sat down and selected a pencil from
the bunch stuck into an empty coffee mug like porcupine quills.
He began to write, and slowly the corrosive agony of loneliness
receded and became merely a slow dull ache.

On Monday morning, when Craig walked into police headquarters,
on his way through to the armoury, the member-in-charge called
him into his office.

‘Craig, I’ve got movement papers for you. You are
being detached on special assignment.’

‘What is it?’

‘Hell, I don’t know. I just work here. Nobody
tells me anything, but you are ordered to report to the area
commander, Wankie, on twenty-eighth—’ The inspector
broke off and studied Craig’s face. ‘Are you feeling
okay, Craig?’

‘Yes, why do you ask?’

‘You are looking bloody awful.’ He considered for
a few moments. ‘I tell you what, if you sneak away from
here on the twenty-fifth, you could give yourself a couple of
days’ break before reporting to your new
assignment.’

‘You are the only star in my firmament, George.’
Craig grinned lopsidedly, and thought to himself,
‘That’s all I need, three days with nothing to do but
feel sorry for myself.’

T
he Victoria
Falls Hotel is one of those magnificent monuments to the great
days of Empire. Its walls are as thick as those of a castle, but
painted brilliant white. The floors are of marble, with sweeping
staircases and colonnaded porticos, the ceilings are
cathedral-high with fancy plaster-work and gently revolving fans.
The terraces and lawns stretch down to the very brink of the
abyss through which the Zambezi river boils in all its fury and
grandeur.

Spanning the gorge is the delicate steel tracery of the arched
bridge of which Cecil Rhodes ordered, ‘I want the spray
from the falls to wet my train as it passes on its way to the
north.’ The spray hangs in a perpetual snowy mantle over
the chasm, twisting and folding upon itself as the breeze picks
at it, and always there is the muted thunder of falling water
like the sound of storm surf heard from afar. When David
Livingstone, the missionary explorer, first stood on the edge of
the gorge and looked down into the sombre sunless depths, he
said, ‘Sights such as these must have been gazed upon by
angels in their flight.’ The Livingstone suite, which looks
out upon this view, was named after him.

One of the black porters who carried up their luggage told
Janine proudly, ‘King Georgey slept here – and Missy
Elizabeth, who is now the queen, with her sister Margaret when
they were little girls.’

Roly laughed. ‘Hell, what was good enough for King
Georgey!’ and he grossly overtipped the grinning porters
and fired the cork from the bottle of champagne that waited for
them in a silver ice-bucket.

They walked hand in hand along the enchanted path beside the
Zambezi river, while the timid little spotted bushbuck scuttled
away into the tropical undergrowth and the vervet monkeys scolded
them from the tree-tops. They ran laughing hand in hand through
the rain forests, under the torrential downpour of falling spray;
Janine’s hair melted down her face, and their sodden
clothing clung to their bodies. When they kissed, standing on the
edge of the high cliff, the rock trembled under their feet and
the turmoil of air displaced by the volume of tumbling water
buffeted them and flung the icy spray into their faces.

They cruised on the placid upper reaches of the river in the
sunset, and they chartered a light aircraft to fly over the
serpentine coiling and uncoiling gorge in the noon, and Janine
clung to Roland in delicious vertigo as they skimmed the rocky
lip of the gorge. They danced to the African steel band, under
the stars, and the other guests who recognized Roland’s
uniform watched them with pride and affection. ‘One of
Ballantyne’s Scouts,’ they told each other,
‘they are very special, the Scouts.’ And they sent
wine to their table in the manorial dining-room to mark their
appreciation.

Roland and Janine lay late in bed in the mornings and had
their breakfast sent up to them. They played tennis and Roland
lobbed his service and returned to her forehand. They lay in the
sunlight beside the Olympic-sized pool and anointed each other
with suncream. In their brief bathing-suits they were
magnificently healthy clean young animals, and so obviously in
love that they seemed charmed and set apart. In the evenings they
sat under the umbrella spread of the great trees on the terrace
and drank Pimms No. 1 cup, and experienced a marvellous sense of
defiance in flaunting themselves to the full view of their mortal
enemies on the far side of the gorge.

Then one day at dinner, the manager stopped at their
table.

‘I understand that you are leaving us tomorrow, Colonel
Ballantyne. We shall miss you both.’