The Angels Weep (69 page)

C
raig
Ballantyne parked the Land-Rover and switched off the engine. He
twisted the rear-view mirror on its goose-neck and used it to
adjust the angle of his peaked uniform cap. Then he looked around
at the elegant new building that housed the museum. It stood in
the middle of the botanical gardens, surrounded by tall palms and
green lawns and bright beds of geraniums and sweet-peas.

Craig realized that he was putting off the moment and clenched
his jaw determinedly. He left the Land-Rover in the car park and
climbed the front steps of the museum.

‘Good morning, Sergeant.’ The girl at the
enquiries desk recognized the three stripes on the sleeve of his
khaki and navy blue police uniform. Craig still felt vaguely
ashamed of his rapid promotion.

‘Don’t be damned silly, boy,’ Bawu had
growled when he protested at the family influence.
‘It’s a technical appointment, Sergeant
Armourer.’

‘Hi!’ Craig gave the girl his boyish grin, and her
expression warmed instantly. ‘I’m looking for Miss
Carpenter.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know her.’ The
girl looked unhappy at having to disappoint him.

‘But she works here,’ Craig protested.
‘Janine Carpenter.’

‘Oh!’ she brightened. ‘You mean Doctor
Carpenter. Is she expecting you?’

‘Oh, I’m sure she knows I’m coming,’
Craig assured her.

‘She is in Room 211. Up the stairs, turn left, through
the door that says “Staff Only”, and it’s the
third door on the right.’

Craig pushed the door open at the invitation of
‘Enter!’ that greeted his knock. It was a long narrow
room with skylights and fluorescent tubes overhead and the walls
lined as high as the ceiling with shallow drawers, each with a
pair of bright brass handles.

Janine stood at the bench table which ran down the centre of
the room. She was dressed in blue jeans and a brightly checked
lumberjack’s woollen shirt.

‘I didn’t know you wore glasses,’ Craig
said. They gave her an air of owlish erudition, and she whipped
them off her face and hid them behind her back.

‘Well!’ she greeted him. ‘What do you
want?’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I just had to find out
what an entomologist does. I had this bizarre picture of you
wrestling with tsetse flies and beating locusts to death with a
club.’ He closed the door quietly behind him and kept
talking as he sidled up to the table beside her. ‘I say,
that looks interesting!’

She was like an affronted cat, back arched and every hair upon
it erect, but slowly she relaxed.

‘Slides,’ she explained reluctantly. ‘I am
setting up microscopic slides.’ And then with fresh
irritation in her voice, ‘You know, you show the typical
prejudice of the ignorant and uninformed layman. As soon as
anyone mentions insects, you immediately think of pests like
locusts and disease-carriers like tsetse flies.’

‘Is that wrong?’

‘
Hexapoda
is the largest class of the largest
animal phylum,
Arthropoda
. It has literally hundreds of
thousands of members, most of which are beneficial to man, and
the pests are in the vast minority.’

He wanted to take her up on the ‘vast minority’ as
a contradiction in terms, but his good sense for once prevailed.
Instead he said, ‘I never thought of that. How do you mean
beneficial to man?’

‘They pollinate plants, they scavenge and control pests,
and they serve as food—’ She was away, and after a
few minutes, Craig’s interest was no longer feigned. Like
any dedicated specialist, she was fascinating while talking in
her chosen field. Once she realized that he was a receptive and
sympathetic audience, she became even more articulate.

The banks of shallow drawers contained the collection which
she had boasted on their first meeting was the finest in the
world. She showed Craig microscopic feather-winged beetles of the
family
Ptiliidae
which were a mere one hundredth of an
inch long and compared them to the monstrous African Goliath
beetles. She showed him insects of exquisite jewelled beauty and
others of repulsive ugliness. She showed him insects that
imitated orchids and flowers and sticks and tree bark and snakes.
There was a wasp that used a pebble as a tool, and a fly that,
like a cuckoo, placed its eggs in the nest of another. There were
ants that kept aphids as milch cows and farmed crops of fungus.
She showed him insects that lived in glaciers and others that
lived in the depths of the Sahara, some that lived in seawater
and even larvae that existed in pools of crude petroleum where
they devoured other insects trapped in the glutinous liquid.

She showed him dragonflies with twenty thousand eyes and ants
that could lift a thousand times their own body weight; she
explained bizarre forms of nutrition and reproduction, and such
was her rapture that she forgot her vanity and put the
horn-rimmed spectacles back on her nose. She looked so cute that
Craig wanted to hug her.

At the end of two hours, she removed the spectacles and faced
him defiantly. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So I am
primarily the curator of the collection of
Hexapoda
, but
at the same time I am also a consultant to the Departments of
Agriculture, Wildlife and Nature Conservation and Public Health.
That’s what entomologists do, mister – now what the
hell do you do?’

‘What I do is I go around inviting entomologists to
lunch.’

‘Lunch?’ She looked vague. ‘What is the
time? My God, you’ve wasted my entire Saturday
morning!’

‘T-bone steaks,’ he wheedled. ‘I have just
been paid.’

‘Perhaps I am lunching with Roly,’ she told him
cruelly.

‘Roly is in the bush.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I phoned Aunty Val at Queen’s Lynn to
check.’

‘You crafty blighter.’ She laughed for the first
time. ‘Okay, I give up. Take me to lunch.’

The steaks were thick and juicy and the beer was icy cold,
with dew running down the glass. They laughed a lot and at the
end of the meal he asked, ‘What do entomologists do on
Saturday afternoons?’

‘What do police sergeants do?’ she countered.

‘They go sleuthing up their family antecedents in weird
and wonderful places – want to come along?’

She knew all about the Land-Rover by now, so she put a silk
scarf around her head and dark glasses over her eyes to protect
them from the wind, and Craig restocked the coolbox with crushed
ice and beer. They drove out into the Rhodes Matopos National
Park, into the enchanted hills where once the Umlimo had held
sway and the Matabele had come for succour and sanctuary in the
times of tribal disasters. The beauty of the place struck Janine
to the heart.

‘The hills look like those wonderful fairy castles along
the banks of the Rhine.’

In the valleys there were herds of wild antelope, sable and
kudu, as tame as sheep. They barely lifted their heads as the
Land-Rover passed and then returned to graze.

It seemed that they had the hills to themselves, for few
others would risk being alone on these dirt-surfaced roads in the
very stronghold of Matabele tradition, but when Craig parked the
Land-Rover in a shady grove beneath a massive bald dome of
granite, an old Matabele guardian in the suntans and slouch hat
of the Park Board came down to meet them and escort them as far
as the gates that bore the inscription: ‘Here are buried
men who deserve well of their country.’

They climbed to the summit of the hill and there, guarded by
stone sentinels of natural granite and covered by a heavy bronze
plaque, they found the grave of Cecil John Rhodes.

‘I know so little about him,’ Janine
confessed.

‘I don’t think anybody knew much about him,’
Craig said. ‘He was a very strange man, but when they
buried him, the Matabele gave him the royal salute. He had some
incredible power over other men.’

They went down the far side of the hill to the square
mausoleum of stone blocks with its bronze frieze of heroic
figures.

‘Allan Wilson and his men,’ Craig explained,
‘they exhumed their bodies from the battlefield on the
Shangani, and reburied them here.’

On the north wall of the memorial were the names of the dead
and Craig ran his finger down the graven roll of honour and
stopped at one name.

‘The Rev. Clinton Codrington,’ he read it aloud.
‘He was my great-great-grandfather, a strange man, and his
wife, my great-great-grandmother was a remarkable woman indeed.
The two of them, Clinton and Robyn, founded the Mission Station
at Khami. A few months after he was killed by the Matabele, she
married the commander of the column who had ordered Clinton to
his death, an American chap called St John. I bet there was some
interesting hanky-panky there! A bit of hithering and thithering,
a touch of to-ing and fro-ing.’

‘They used to do it even in those days?’ Janine
asked. ‘I thought it was a recent invention.’

They wandered on around the side of the hill and came to
another grave. Over the grave stood a misshapen and dwarfed msasa
tree that had taken precarious hold in a fault in the solid
granite. Like the one on the summit, this grave also was covered
by a heavy plate of weathered bronze, but the inscription
read:

‘Ballantyne,’ she said. ‘Must be an ancestor
of Roly’s.’

‘A mutual ancestor of both of ours,’ Craig agreed.
‘Our great-grandfather, Bawu’s papa. This is the real
reason why we have driven out here.’

‘What do you know about him?’

‘A great deal, actually. I have just finished reading
his personal journals. He was quite a lad. If they hadn’t
knighted him, they would probably have had to hang him. By his
own secret confessions, he was an unqualified rogue, but a
colourful one.’

‘So that is where you get it from,’ she laughed.
‘Tell me more.’

‘Funny thing, he was a sworn enemy of that other old
rogue up there.’ Craig pointed up the hill towards Cecil
Rhodes’ grave. ‘And here they are buried almost side
by side. Great-grandpa Ralph writes in his journal that he
discovered the Wankie coalfield, but Rhodes cheated him out of
it. He swore an oath to destroy Rhodes and his Company, he
actually wrote that down! I’ll show you! And he boasts that
he succeeded. In 1923 the rule of Rhodes’ British South
Africa Company came to an end. Southern Rhodesia became a British
colony, old Sir Ralph was its prime minister. He had made good
his threat.’

They sat down, side by side, on the curbstone of the grave and
he told her the funniest and most interesting of the stories that
he had read in the secret journals, and she listened with
fascination.

‘It’s strange to think that they are a part of us
and we a part of them,’ she whispered. ‘That
everything that is happening now had its roots in what they did
and said.’

‘Without a past there is no future,’ Craig
repeated the words of Samson Kumalo, then went on, ‘that
reminds me, I have something else I want to do before we go back
to town.’

This time Craig did not have to be warned of the hidden
turn-off, and he swung onto the track that led past the cemetery,
down the avenues of spathodea trees to the whitewashed staff
cottages of Khami Mission. The first cottage in the row was
deserted. There were no curtains in the windows and when Craig
climbed up onto the porch and peered in, he saw the rooms were
bare.

‘Who are you looking for?’ Janine asked, when he
came back to the Land-Rover.

‘A friend.’

‘A good friend?’

‘The best friend I ever had.’

He drove on down the hill to the hospital and parked again. He
left Janine in the Land-Rover and went into the lobby. A woman
came striding to meet him. She wore a white laboratory coat, and
her unnaturally pale face was set in a belligerent frown.

‘I hope you haven’t come here to harass and
frighten our people,’ she began. ‘Here police mean
trouble.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Craig glanced down at his
uniform. ‘It’s a private matter. I am looking for a
friend of mine. His family lived here. Samson
Kumalo—’

‘Oh,’ the woman nodded. ‘I recognize you
now. You were Sam’s employer. Well, he’s
gone.’

‘Gone? Do you know where?’

‘No,’ flatly, and unhelpfully.

‘His grandfather, Gideon—’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Dead?’ Craig was appalled. ‘How?’

‘He died of a broken heart – when your people
murdered someone who was dear to him. Now, if there is nothing
more you want to know, we don’t like uniforms
here.’

B
y the time
they reached town it was late afternoon. Craig drove directly to
his yacht without asking her permission, and when he parked under
the mango trees, Janine made no comment, but climbed out and
walked beside him to the ladderway.

Craig put a tape on the recorder and opened a bottle of wine,
then he brought down Sir Ralph’s leather-bound journal that
Bawu had loaned him, and they sat side by side on the bench in
the saloon and pored over it. The faded ink and pencil drawings
that decorated the margins delighted Janine, and when she came to
a description of the locust plagues of the 1890s, she was
captivated.

‘The old geezer had a good eye.’ She studied his
drawing of a locust. ‘He might have been a trained
naturalist, just look at the detail.’

She glanced up at him sitting close beside her. He looked like
a puppy, an adoring puppy. She deliberately closed the
leather-bound book without taking her eyes from his. He leaned
closer to her, and she made no effort to pull away. He covered
her lips with his own, and felt them soften and part. Her huge
slanted eyes closed, and the lashes were long and delicate as
butterflies’ wings.

After a long time she whispered huskily, ‘For
God’s sake, don’t say anything stupid. Just keep
right on doing what you are doing at the moment.’