into agreeing to allow him to write my biography and I will be working with him on the first draft. At the same time I will be conducting a series of secret meetings with Barry Hertzog It to agree the final details of the coalition. This is an ideal place for us to talk and I would be obliged if you could keep, yourself available. I will almost certainly be calling upon you!
of course. With an effort Blaine set his own emotions aside. I will be here as long as you need me. Do you want me to submit my resignation to the administrator's office? Draft the letter, Smuts agreed. I will explain your reasons to Hertzog and you can hand it to him in person. Blaine glanced at his watch and the old general said quickly, Yes, you will have to prepare for your match. This frivolity in the midst of such dire events is rather like fiddling while Rome burns, but one must keep up appearances.
I have even agreed to present the prizes. Centaine Courtney is a persuasive lady. So I hope we will meet later, at the prize-giving when I hand you the cup. It was a close thing, but the Cape A! team, led by Blaine Malcomess, held off the most determined efforts of the Transvaal A! in the final match of the tournament to win by three goals. Immediately afterwards all the teams gathered at the foot of the grandstand where the array of silver cups was set out on the prize table but there was an awkward pause in the proceedings. One team was missing: the junior champions.
Where is Shasa? Centaine demanded in a low but furious voice of Cyril Slaine, who was the tournament organizer.
He flapped his hands and looked helpless. He promised me he would be here. If this is his surprise, With an effort Centaine hid her anger behind a gracious smile for the benefit of her interested guests. Well, that is it. We begin without them. She took her place on the front tier of the stand beside the general and held up both hands for attention.
General Smuts, ladies and gentlemen, honoured guests and dear friends. She faltered and looked around uncertainly, her voice overlaid by the drone in the air, a sound that rose steadily in volume, becoming a roar, and every face in the crowd was lifted to the sky, searching, some puzzled, others amused or uneasy. Then suddenly over the oaks at the far end of the polo field flashed the wings of a low-flying aircraft.
Centaine recognized it as a Puss-Moth, a small single-engined machine. It banked steeply towards the grandstand and came straight at them, no more than head high as it raced across the field. Then, when it seemed it would fly straight into the crowded stand, the nose lifted sharply and it roared over their heads as half the spectators ducked instinctively and a woman screamed.
In the moment that it flashed over her, Centaine saw Shasa's laughing face in the side window of the aircraft's cabin, and the flicker of his hand as he waved, and instantly she was transported back over the years, through time and space.
The face was no longer Shasa's but that of Michael Courtney, his father. In her mind the machine was no longer blue and streamlined but had assumed the gaunt old-fashioned lines, the double deck of wings and wire riggings and the open cockpit and daubed yellow paintwork of a wartime scoutplane.
It banked around in a wide circle, appearing once more over the tops of the oaks, and she stood rigid with shock and her soul was riven by a silent scream of anguish as she watched again the shot-riddled yellow scoutplane trying to clear the great beech trees below the chateau of Mort Homme, its engine stuttering and missing.
Michael! She screamed his name in her head and it was like a blinding flash of agony as once again she watched his mortally wounded machine hit the top branches of the tall copper beech and cartwheel, wing over wing as it fell out of the air and struck the earth to collapse in a welter of broken struts and canvas. Again she saw the flames bloom like beautiful poisonous flowers and leap high from the shattered machine, and the dark smoke roll across the lawns towards her, and the body of the man in the open cockpit twist and writhe and blacken as the orange flames sucked upwards and the heat danced in glassy mirage and greasy black smoke and filled her ears with drumming thunder.
Michael! Her jaws were locked closed, her teeth aching at the pressure, and her lips were rimmed with the ice of horror so that the name could not escape from between them.
Then miraculously the image faded, and she saw instead the small blue machine settle sedately onto the green turf of the polo field, its tail dropping onto the skid, the engine beat dwindling to a polite burbling murmur as it swung around at the far end of the field and then taxied back towards the stand, the wings rocking slightly. It stopped below them and the engine cut out with a final hiccough of blue smoke from the exhausts.
The doors on each side of the cabin were flung open and out tumbled Shasa Courtney and his three grinning teammates. It amazed her that they had all crammed into that tiny cockpit.
,surprise, everybody! they howled. Surprise! Surprise! And there was laughter and applause and whistles and catcalls from the stand. An aircraft was still a marvelous novelty, able to attract the attention of even such a sophisticated gathering as this. Probably not more than one in five of them had ever flown in one, and this unexpected and noisy arrival had created an excited laughing mood so that the applause and comment was loud and raucous as Shasa led his team up to the prize table to accept the silver cup from General Smuts.
The pilot of the blue aircraft climbed out of the left-hand door, a stocky bald-headed figure, and Centaine glared at him venomously. She had not known that Jock Murphy included flying among his assorted accomplishments, but she determined that he would rue this prank. She had always done all she could to discourage Shasals interest in aircraft and flying, but it had been difficult. Shasa kept a photograph of his father in flying gear beside his bed and a replica of the SE5a fighter plane hung from the ceiling of his bedroom; over the last few years his questions about flying and his father's military feats had become more insistent and purposeful. She should have been warned by this, of course, but she had been so preoccupied, and it had never occurred to her that he might take to flying without consulting her.
Looking back, she realized that she had been deliberately ignoring the possibility, deliberately avoiding thinking about it, and now the shock was all the more unpleasant.
With the silver cup in his hands Shasa ended his short acceptance speech with the specific assurance: Finally, ladies and gentlemen, you might have thought that Jock Murphy was flying the Puss-Moth. He was not!
He wasn't even touching the controls, were you? He looked across at the bald-headed instructor, who shook his head in collaboration, 'There you are! Shasa gloated. You see, I have decided that I am going to be a flyer, just like my dad., Centaine did not join in the clapping and laughter.
As suddenly as they had arrived and transformed the life of Weltevreden the hundreds of guests had gone, leaving only the ruined turf of the polo ground, the litter and the mountains of empty champagne bottles and piles Of dirty linen in the laundry. Centaine was left also with a feeling of anticlimax. Her last flourish had been made, the last shot in her arsenal fired, and on the Saturday the mail ship docked in Table Bay and brought them an invited but unwelcome visitor.
Damn fellow reminds me of an undertaker standing in for a tax collector, Sir Garry buffed and took General
