Storms Over Africa (20 page)

‘You love Africa, don't you?' She reached over and touched his arm.

‘With my very heart and soul,' he told her truthfully.

‘Do you think I could learn to love it?'

‘You've already started if those pictures are anything to go by.'

‘Thank you,' she said simply. ‘I need some time to work on the words now. Can I do that at Pentland?'

‘Take all the time you need,' he said. ‘I hope it takes years.'

‘Don't say things like that in the car. It makes me horny.'

‘No problem.' He slowed the car and pulled to the side of the road.

‘Richard, don't you dare. We're on a main road.'

‘Into the back.' He was unbuttoning his shirt.

‘You're mad!' But she shot into the back seat with a kind of backflip movement and had her shirt off before he could join her. The thunderstorm they had just come through caught up with them, pelting the car with rain.

‘See, even God is on our side.' The windows had immediately fogged without the car's air-conditioning to prevent it. A BMW was a fairly spacious car but Richard was forced to admit, after they made love, that he was too old for canoodling in the back seat.

‘Didn't seem to hamper you.' She was shiny with perspiration and curled into him like a child.

‘You know something?' He was speaking without really considering his next words, full of honesty and feelings he thought had died in him.

‘What?'

‘I love you.' He was amazed at himself.

She leaned back and looked at him, a tiny smile on her lips. ‘Oh, goodie,' she said, cheeky and enigmatic.

‘Well?' he demanded gruffly, needing to hear her say it too.

She waggled her hand in a ‘so so' gesture. ‘You're not bad,' she finally conceded.

‘Steve!' he said sternly.

She snuggled back into him but he pushed her away and stared her down. ‘Stephanie,' he said finally.

‘Don't call me that,' she begged.

‘Stephanie!'

‘Okay, okay you win. I love you. I love you,' and when he smiled, added wickedly, ‘any-thing's better than Stephanie.'

A movement outside the car, blurred through the fogged windows, caught his attention. A remarkable phenomenon takes place in Africa whenever a car stops on what appears to be a deserted road in the middle of nowhere. Children appear. It never fails. One
minute the landscape is devoid of anything moving, the next, small black heads pop up from the tall grass, or from behind mounds or trees. Steve and Richard had an avid audience who were giggling and pointing and highly entertained at the antics in the car. All their young lives they had shared a hut with their parents. The car's rocking movements, coupled with enticingly obscured images of naked white bodies, told these young children exactly what was happening in the car. They approved heartily.

‘Get your clothes on.' He grabbed for their clothes which were scattered throughout the car's interior.

She was laughing so hard she could barely get dressed, especially when he wound the back window down a little and growled ‘Bugger off,' to the assembled throng. The children scattered, delighted.

‘Have you no shame, woman?' He thrust her blouse at her.

She giggled. The knot of hair at the top of her head had slipped sideways and was slowly unravelling. She looked like a little girl. He caught her in his arms and held her close, feeling her heart beating against his, loving her more than he thought possible.

‘Let's go home,' he said huskily, wanting her to feel at home at Pentland, wanting her to belong there, belong to him, belong to Africa.

When they arrived back at Pentland Park, Wellington was clearly delighted to see her again. ‘Welcome back, madam.' He normally maintained a dignified silence to the few women Richard had brought home since Kathy died.

‘Thank you, Wellington,' Steve replied, smiling. Her Australian heart was turning African. The Australian Steve would have shaken Wellington's hand. The African Steve was becoming a ‘madam'.

‘Put the madam's things in my room.'

Wellington bowed and said, ‘Of course, master.'

After he left them, Steve asked, ‘Won't he be offended?'

‘Too bad,' the old Richard said, but then relented when he saw she was serious. ‘He accepts you and approves. You have won his heart. That's quite a feat for a savage Australian like yourself.'

She dug him in the ribs. ‘What about your children?' she asked, worried.

‘Now that really
is
too bad,' he responded. ‘My children don't run my life.'

‘They're bound to resent me.'

Richard sighed. ‘My children resent everything if it suits them,' he said finally. ‘Penny is twenty-two. She makes trouble because she considers it her duty to do so. David might be a problem, he was very close to Kathy,' he put
his arm around her and led her into the house. ‘Let's cross that bridge when we come to it. We've got two more weeks before David gets here. Let's enjoy them.'

Greg Yeomans arrived at Pentland Park around four the next afternoon. His approval of Steve was instant and total. He delighted Wellington and Elizabeth when he greeted them in perfect Shona and, during the ten-minute conversation, it was discovered that he knew Wellington's brother. Winston adored him immediately because of his willingness to throw the tennis ball and the puppy, Maxwell, showed his fondness by thoughtfully chewing one of his boots to shreds within the first hour.

After greeting him, Steve went back into Richard's study where she was working on the words for her article. Greg inclined his head after her and whistled softly. ‘You've still got it, you old dog.'

Richard grinned, inanely pleased. ‘She's something else, isn't she?' He felt extravagantly smug about Steve, a feeling he knew he should try to hide but, because it felt so good, made no attempt to do so.

Greg grinned back. ‘Only a pleasure, my man, only a pleasure.'

‘Want to go for a drive?' He was impatient to hear what Greg had to say.

They called out goodbye to Steve and set off in the Land Rover, past the farm workers' huts, down the escarpment to where the grass grew green and the cattle fat. The flatlands stretched into the distance, towards the game reserve, dotted by the dark shapes of his cattle, and were dominated by the hills, craggy and wild and beautiful. Richard stopped next to a large dam. He had planted pines on one side and they grew in a dense thatch, five hundred metres wide and stretching up the slopes to meet the hills. They gave this part of the farm an oddly European look.

Greg looked at the tranquil scene. The blue waters of the dam mirrored the pines closest to it, white fluffy clouds reflected in its perfectly still surface. A rustic old wooden wharf lurched crazily at one end, a small canoe tied to it, ready for fishing the brown trout Richard had introduced into the dam. ‘Little bit of ye olde England here,' he commented.

‘More like ye olde Scotland,' Richard corrected him.

‘Of course, I'd forgotten you were Scottish. You've lost your accent.'

‘It comes back now and then.'

‘Like when?'

‘When I'm pissed off.'

‘Or just plain pissed.'

‘That too.' Richard laughed as he remembered a night during the war when they had been dispatched to report on a situation developing in Chiredzi and, having submitted their report, had been at a loose end in the capital. Richard and Greg had tossed a coin to see if they should go home to their wives for the night or spend the evening on a binge. Such were the conditions under which they lived that both men were relieved when the coin came down heads . . . a binge. It was a means of relieving tension, of letting loose briefly. They could then return to the field, hungover but more relaxed.

They did not look for women. Richard experienced regular bouts of impotence during the war and, even with Kathy, was rarely inclined to put his masculinity to the test in case it let him down. From conversations he had heard, other men had the same problem. He presumed it had something to do with the constant danger and was confident the condition would go away at the end of the war, when life returned to normal. In fact, both he and Kathy looked on it as a blessing in disguise. It was a relief for her, knowing her husband was unable to function that way. She knew he sometimes went to Salisbury from the field and could only speculate as to what
he got up to. For Richard, it removed temptation, something he was reasonably sure he would have given in to considering the stressful circumstances under which he lived.

They embarked on a pub crawl with serious dedication to the task at hand. They were not drinking for pleasure, they were drinking to get completely, motherless, legless, spewing drunk. Regular customers at the hotels and bars gave them a wide berth. They were used to men from the field cutting loose like this, they understood why it happened but they didn't want to get involved. When men from the war got drunk this way it was better to leave them alone.

Halfway through the night they teamed up with a couple of Security Forces sergeants, themselves out on the town trying to drown their fear. There was great rivalry between the Selous Scouts and any of the other forces within Rhodesia but the four men buried their differences as they lurched from one bar to the next. Around two in the morning, having been thrown out of the last five bars, one of the sergeants suggested they find some women.

‘Don' wanna,' Richard said, swaying and blinking owlishly.

‘Wassamatta, you a sissy, man?'

Greg took the comment personally. The ensuing fight took them back into the bar they had just been ejected from, via the window.
People scattered, women screamed. Most of the inhabitants in the bar at that hour were men on home leave who were nearly as drunk as Richard and Greg. They were more than happy to join the fun. An American western-style punch-up followed, which flattened the bar and put half a dozen people into hospital.

Richard had bleeding knuckles, a split lip and a black eye. Greg was bleeding from a cut on his head, the result of a chair being smashed over him. One of his eyes had completely closed and he had a nick on his cheek from crashing through the window. Both men were having the time of their lives. They went looking for more trouble.

They were indulging in a bit of boyish trash can kicking when they spied the police station with a police car parked outside. Giggling foolishly and whispering in thunderous tones, they stalked the offending vehicle. It was unlocked. Greg opened the driver's door, took the car out of gear and released the handbrake. Then, stumbling and falling and swearing a lot, they heaved the car until its momentum took over. Weaving against each other they watched in pure pleasure as the vehicle rolled down the hill, sideswiping five parked cars, until it crashed into a shop window. The crashing of glass and metal brought the policemen on duty into the street.

‘What happened, man?' one of them asked.
Richard and Greg were still leaning against each other, attempting to look innocent.

‘Car's run away,' Greg managed.

‘Naughty car,' Richard said, trying to look wise as well.

‘Naughty bad car,' Greg agreed.

Richard vomited suddenly, splashing the policeman's shoes.

‘Oops.'

The policeman looked at his shoes. He looked at Richard and Greg and saw the battle-weary desperation, the tension and the fear etched into their faces. Then he looked at the police car leaning drunkenly inside the shop window, festooned with ladies' underwear. ‘Come with me,' he said kindly.

They were slammed into a cell and the door firmly locked. ‘Try not to be sick again,' the policeman advised. ‘The cleaners don't like it.' Then he added mildly, ‘I'm not terribly fond of it, either.'

For the remainder of the night they had serenaded the other occupants of the police station with renditions of songs which ranged from ‘Charlotte The Harlot' to ‘My Old Man's A Dustman'. Richard thought he had done extremely well when he remembered all the words of ‘Will Ye Stop Your Tickling, Jock'. Entreaties to shut up were ignored. They finally fell into a drunken stupor around four in the morning.

They were shaken awake at 8.30, given strong cups of black coffee, and released with no fine. The policeman from the night before was still on duty. Richard tried to thank him.

‘It's okay, man,' the policeman said. ‘We know what you go through.' Then he added, ‘My CO is a bit put out about the car. I'd leave now if I were you.'

They were back with their unit in record time.

‘I've met that CO recently,' Greg brought Richard back to the present and knew he would realise who he meant. ‘He's still upset about the car.'

‘A couple of years ago I met the woman who owned the lingerie shop,' Richard grinned. ‘She's not upset any more.'

‘Can't appease the CO that way.'

‘Bugger the CO.'

‘Rather not, man, rather not. He's ugly as sin.'

They walked around the dam and stood on the grassy banks at one end. ‘What's the buzz?' Richard asked.

‘Don't take this personally,' Greg said, ‘but do you know exactly with whom your daughter is keeping company?'

‘That bloody munt.' Richard used the short form of
umuntu
, a collective word meaning ‘a people' but one which had lost its original meaning as it had taken on a more derogatory
definition. It was a word Mugabe had banned as soon as he had taken office.

‘He's a bit more than any old munt, old Didd.'

‘So he's got a jolly good job! Bully for him.'

‘That's his cover. Oh, he's qualified of course, but he has other interests.'

‘Like what?'

Greg folded his long legs and lowered himself in one fluid motion. ‘Take a seat and listen up.'

They sat on the grass and lit cigarettes. Greg blew smoke skywards then began to speak. ‘Joseph Tshuma is a very dangerous man. He was a Detachment Commander for ZANLA during the war and he was very loyal to Mugabe. After the war he went to South Africa to qualify.' He took a long drag at his cigarette. ‘I'll give him this, the man's got guts. He has a Bachelor of Science degree from Durban University, not an easy thing for a black man to do at that time. He came back here full of confidence and convinced that Zimbabwe was the land of opportunity. Incidentally, records show that you interrogated him during the war.'