If I may be permitted to offer a word of advice Sell them, she repeated. Sell all of them. And she hung up, staring out of the window as she tried to calculate her profits, but the telephone rang again before she reached a total, and one after another her other brokers triumphantly reported on the contracts she had made. Then there was a call from Windhoek.
Dr Twenty-man-Jones, it's so good to hear your voice. She had recognized him instantly.
Well, Mrs Courtney, this is a pretty pickle, Twenty-man-Jones told her glumly. The H'ani Mine will be back in profit again now, even with the parsimonious quota De Beers is allowing us. We've turned the corner, Centaine enthused. We are out of the woods. Many a slip 'twixt cup and lip. Gloomily Twenty-man-Jones capped cliche with cliche.
Best not to count our chickens, Mrs Courtney. Dr Twenty-man-Jones, I love you. Centaine laughed delightedly, and there was a shocked silence that echoed across a thousand miles of wire. I'll be there just as soon as I can get away from here. There is a lot for us to work on now., She hung up and went to look for Shasa. He was down at the stables chatting with his coloured grooms as they sat in the sun dubbining his polo harness and saddlery.
Cheri, I am driving into Cape Town. Will you come with me? 'What are you going all that way for, Mater? It's a surprise. That was the one certain way to gain Shasa's full attention and he tossed the harness he was working on to Abel and sprang to his feet.
Her ebullient mood was infectious and they were laughing together as they walked into Porters Motors showroom on Strand Street. The sales manager came from his cubicle on the run.
Mrs Courtney, we haven't seen you in far too long. May I wish you a happy and prosperous New Year. It's off to a good start on both counts, she smiled. Speaking of happiness, Mr Tims, how soon can you deliver my new Daimler? It will be yellow, naturally? With black piping, naturally! And the usual fittings, the vanity, the cocktail cabinet? All of them, Mr Tims. I will cable our London office immediately. Shall we say four months, Mrs Courtney? Let us rather say three months, Mr Tims. Shasa could barely contain himself until they were on the pavements in front of the showroom.
Mater, have you gone bonkers? We are paupers! Well, cheri, let's be paupers with a little class and style. Where are we going now? The post office. At the telegraph counter Centaine drafted a cable to Sotheby's in Bond Street: Sale no longer contemplated. Stop. Please cancel all preparations.
Then they went to lunch at the Mount Nelson Hotel.
Blaine had promised to meet her as early as he was able to escape from the meeting of the proposed new coalition cabinet. He was as good as his word, waiting for her in the pine forest, and when she saw his face her happiness shrivelled.
What is it, Blaine? Let's walk, Centaine. I've been indoors all day. They climbed the Karbonkelberg slopes behind the estate.
At the summit they sat on a fallen log to watch the sunset and it was magnificent.
This was the fairest Cape which we discovered in all our circumnavigation of the earth, she misquoted from Vasco da Garna's log, but Blaine did not correct her as she had hoped he might.
Tell me, Blaine. She took his arm and insisted, and he turned his face to her.
Isabella, he said sombrely.
You have heard from her? Her spirits sank deeper at the name.
The doctors can do nothing for her. She will be returning on the next mail ship from Southampton. in the silence the sun sank into the silver sea, taking the light from the world, and Centaine's soul was as dark.
How ironic it is, she whispered. Because of you I can have anything in this world except that which I most desire you, my love. The women pounded the fresh millet grain in the wooden mortars into a coarse fluffy white meal and filled one of the leather sacks.
Carrying the sack, Swart Hendrick, followed by Moses his brother, left the kraal after the rise of the new moon and crept silently up the ridge in the night. While Hendrick stood guard, Moses climbed to the old eagle owl nest in the leadwood tree and brought down the cartridge paper packets.
They moved along the ridge until they were beyond all possible chance of observation from the village, and even then they very carefully screened the small fire that they built amongst the ironstone boulders. Hendrick broke open the packets and poured the gleaming stones into a small calabash gourd while Moses prepared the millet meal in another gourd, mixing it with water until it was a soft porridge.
Meticulously Hendrick burned the cartridge paper wrappings in the fire and stirred the ashes to powder with a stick.
When it was done he nodded at his younger brother and Moses poured the dough over the coals. As it began to bubble Hendrick buried the diamonds in the unleavened dough.
Moses muttered ruefully as the millet cakes bubbled and hardened. It was almost an incantation. These are death stones. We will have no joy of them. The white men love them too dearly: they are the stones of death and madness. Hendrick ignored him and shaped the baking loaves, squinting his eyes against the smoke and smiling secretly to himself. When each round loaf was crisped brown on the underside he flipped it over and let it cook through until it was brick hard; then he lifted it off the fire and set it out to cool. Finally he repacked the crude thick loaves into the leather sack and they returned quietly to the sleeping village.
In the morning they left early and the women went with them the first mile of the journey, ululating mournfully and singing the song of farewell. When they fell behind neither of the men looked back. They trudged on towards the low brown horizon, carrying their bundles balanced on their heads. They did not think about it, but this little scene was acted out every single day in a thousand villages across the southern. sub-continent.
Days later the two men, still on foot, reached the recruitment station. It was a single-roomed general-dealer's store, standing alone at a remote crossroad on the edge of the desert. The white trader augmented his precarious business by buying cattle hides from the surrounding nomadic tribes and by recruiting for Wenela'.
Wenela was the acronym for the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, a ubiquitous sprawling enterprise which extended its tentacles into the vastness of the African wilderness. From the peaks of the Dragon Mountains in Basutoland to the swamps of the Zambezi and Chobe, from the thirstlands of the Kalahari to the rain forest of the high plateau of Nyasaland, it gathered up the trickle of black men and channelled them first into a stream and finally into a mighty river that ran endlessly to the fabulous goldfields of the Ridge of White Waters, the Witwatersrand of
