ladder.
I haven't killed him? Manfred pleaded for assurance. He's not dead. it will be all right, won't it, Pa? No. Lothar shook his head grimly. It won't be all right, not ever. Carrying the unconscious boy, he climbed up onto the jetty.
The crowd opened silently for Lothar. Like Manfred, they were appalled and guilty, unable to meet his eyes as he shouldered past them.
Swart Hendrick, Lothar called over their heads to the tall black man. You should have known better. You should have stopped them. Lothar strode away up the jetty, and none of them followed him.
Halfway up the beach path to the factory Centaine Courtney waited for him. Lothar stopped in front of her with the boy hanging limply in his arms.
He's dead, Centaine whispered hopelessly.
No, Lothar denied with passion. It was too horrible to think about, and as though in response Shasa moaned and vomited from the corner of his mouth.
Quickly. Centaine stepped forward. Turn him over your shoulder before he chokes on his own vomit. with Shasa hanging limply over his shoulder like a haversack, Lothar ran the last few yards to the office and Centaine swept the desktop clear.
Lay him here, she ordered, but Shasa was struggling weakly and trying to sit up. Centaine supported his shoulders and wiped his mouth and nostrils with the fine cloth of her sleeve.
It was your bastard. She glared across the desk at Lothar.
He did this to my son, didn't he? And she saw the confirmation in his face before he looked away.
Shasa coughed and brought up another trickle of fish slime and yellow vomitus, and immediately he was stronger. His eyes focused and his breathing eased.
Get out of here. Centaine leaned protectively over Shasa's body.
I'll see you both in hell, you and your bastard. Now get out of my sight. The track from Walvis Bay ran through the convoluted valleys of the great orange dunes, thirty kilometres to the railhead at Swakopmund. The dunes towered three and four hundred feet on either side. Mountains of sand with knife-edge crests and smooth slip faces, they trapped the desert heat in the canyons between them.
The track was merely a set of deep ruts in the sand, marked on each side by the sparkling glass of broken beer bottles. No traveller took this thirsty road without adequate supplies for the journey. At intervals the tracks had been obliterated by the efforts of other drivers, unskilled in the art of desert travel, to extract their vehicles from the clinging sands, leaving gaping traps for those who followed.
Centaine drove hard and fast, never allowing her engine revolutions to drop, keeping her momentum even through the churned-up areas and holes where the other vehicles had bogged down, directing the big yellow car with deft little touches of the wheel so that the tyres ran straight and the sand did not pile and block them.
She held the wheel in a racing driver's grip, leaning back against the leather seat with straight arms ready for the kick of the wheel, watching the tracks far ahead and anticipating each contingency long before she reached it, sometimes snapping down through the gears and swinging out of the ruts to cut her own way around a bad stretch. She scorned even the elementary precaution of travelling with a pair of black servants in the back seat to push the Daimler out of a sand trap.
Shasa had never known his mother to bog down, not even on the worst sections of the track out to the mine.
He sat up beside her on the front seat. He wore a suit of old but freshly laundered canvas overalls from the stores of the canning factory. His soiled clothing stinking of fish and speckled with vomit was in the boot of the Daimler.
His mother hadn't spoken since they had driven away
from the factory. Shasa glanced surreptitiously at her, dreading her pent-up wrath, not wanting to draw attention to himself, yet despite himself unable to keep his eyes from her face.
She had removed the cloche hat and her thick dark cap of hair, cut fashionably into a short Eton crop, rippled in the wind and shone like washed anthracite.
,Who started it? she asked, without taking her eyes from the road.
Shasa thought about it. I'm not sure. I hit him first, but he paused. His throat was still painful.
Yes? she demanded.
It was as though it was arranged. We looked at each other and we knew we were going to fight. She said nothing and he finished lamely. 'He called me a name. What name? I can't tell you. It's rude. 'I asked what name? Her voice was level and low, but he recognized that husky warning quality.
He called me a Soutpiel, he replied hastily. He dropped his voice and looked away in shame at the dreadful insult, so he did not see Centaine struggle to stifle the smile and turn her head slightly to hide the sparkle of amusement in her eyes.
I told you it was rude, he apologized.
So you hit him, and he's younger than you. He had not known that he was the elder, but he was not surprised that she knew it. She knew everything.
He may be younger, but he's a big Afrikaner ox, at least two inches taller than I am, he defended himself quickly.
She wanted to ask Shasa what her other son looked like.
Was he blond and handsome as his father had been? What colour were his eyes? Instead she said, And so he thrashed you. I nearly won. Shasa protested stoutly. I closed his eyes and I bloodied him nicely. I nearly won. Nearly isn't good enough, she said. In our family we don't nearly win, we simply win!
