election, gives up the political aspirations that you have foisted on him and simply goes off to make himself another trillion pounds.' 'No,' Centaine shook her head. 'He won't give up. He is a fighter like I am.' 'He'll never be even a cabinet minister, let alone prime minister,' Tara stated flatly.
'If you believe that, then you are no wife for my son,' Centaine said.
Wou said it,' Tara said softly. 'You said it, not me.' Oh, Tara, my dear, i am sorry.' Centaine reached across the desk but it was too broad for her to touch Tara's hand. 'Forgive me. I lost my temper. All this is so desperately important to me. I feel it so deeply, but I did not mean to antagonize you. I want only to help you - I am so worried about you and Shasa. I want to help, Tara.
Won't you let me help you?' 'I don't see that we need help,' Tara lied sweetly. 'Shasa and I are perfectly happy. We have four lovely children--' Centaine made an impatient gesture. 'Tara, you and I haven't always seen eye to eye. But I am your friend, I truly am. I want the best for you and Shasa and the little ones. Won't you let me help you?' 'How, Mater? By giving us money - you have already given us ten or twenty million - or is it thirty million pounds? I lose track sometimes.' 'Won't you let me share my experience with you? Won't you listen to my advice?' 'Yes, Mater, I'll listen. I don't promise to take it, but I'll listen to it.' 'Firstly, Tara dear, you must give up these crazy left-wing activities. You bring the whole family into disrepute. You make a spectacle of yourself, and therefore of us, by dressing up and standing on street corners. Apart from that, it is positively dangerous. The Suppression of Communism Act is now law. You could be declared a communist, and placed under a banning order. Just consider that, you would become a non-person, deprived of all human rights and dignity. Then there is Shasa's political career. What you do reflects on him.' 'Mater, I promised to listen,' Tara said stonily. 'But now I withdraw that promise. I know what I am doing.' She stood up and moved to the door where she paused and looked back. 'Did you ever think, Centaine Courtney-Malcomess, that my mother died of a broken heart, and it was your blatant adultery with my father that broke it for her? Yet you can sit there smugly and advise me how to conduct my life, so as not to disgrace you and your precious son.' She went out and closed the heavy teak door softly behind her.
Shasa Courtney lolled on the opposition front bench with his hands pushed deeply into his pockets, his legs thrust out and crossed-at the ankles, and listened intently to the minister of police outlining the legislation which he intended bringing before the House during the current session.
The minister of police was the youngest member of the cabinet, a man of approximately the same age as Shasa, which was extraordinary. The Afrikaner revered age and mistrusted the inexperience and impetuosity of youth. The average age of the other members of the Nationalist cabinet could not be less than sixty-five years, Shasa reflected, and yet here was Manfred De La Rey standing before them, a mere stripling of less than forty years, setting out the general contents of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill which he would be proposing and shepherding through its various stages.
'He is asking for the right to declare a state of emergency which will put the police above the law, without appeal to the courts,' Blaine Malcomess grunted beside him, and Shasa nodded without looking at his father-in-law. Instead he was watching the man across the floor.
Manfred De La Rey was speaking in Afrikaans, as he usually did.
His English was heavily accented and laboured, and he spoke it unwillingly, making only the barest gesture towards the bilingualism of the House. On the other hand, when speaking in his mother tongue, he was eloquent and persuasive, his oratorial attitudes and devices were so skilled as to seem entirely natural and more than once he raised a chuckle of exasperated admiration from the opposition benches and a chorus of 'Haar, boot!' from his own party.
'The fellow has a damned cheek.' Blaine Malcomess shook his head. 'He is asking for the right to suspend the rule of law and impose a police state at the whim of the ruling party. We'll have to fight that tooth and nail.' 'My word!' Shasa agreed mildly, but he found himself envying the other man, and yet mysteriously drawn to him. It was strange how their two destinies seemed to be inexorably linked.
He had first met Manfred De La Rey twenty years ago, and for no apparent reason the two of them had flown at each other on the spot like young game cocks ,and fought a bloody bout of fisticuffs. Shasa grimaced at the way it had ended, the drubbing he had received still rankled even after all that time. Since then their paths had crossed and recrossed.
In 1936 they had both been on the national team that went to Adolf Hitler's Olympic Games in Berlin, but it had been Manfred De La Rey in the boxing ring who collected the only gold medal the team had won, while Shasa returned empty-handed. They had hotly and acrimoniously contested the same seat in the 1948 elections that had seen the National Party come sweeping to power, and again it was Manfred De La Rey who had won the seat and taken his place in parliament, while Shasa had to wait for a by-election in a safe United Party constituency to secure his own place on the opposition benches from which to confront his rival once again. Now Manfred was a minister, a position that Shasa coveted with all his heart, and with his undoubted brilliance and oratorical skills together with growing political acumen and a solid power base within the party, Manfred De La Rey's future must be unbounded.
Envy, admiration and furious antagonism - that was what Shasa Courthey felt as he listened to the man across the floor from him, and he studied him intently.
Manfred De La Rey still had a boxer's physique, wide shoulders and powerful neck, but he was thickening around the waist and his jawline was beginning to blur with flesh. He wasn't keeping himself in shape and hard muscle was turning flabby. Shasa glanced down at his own lean hips and greyhound belly with self-satisfaction and then concentrated again on his adversary.
Manfred De La Rey's nose was twisted and there was a gleaming white scar through one of his dark eyebrows, injuries he had received in the boxing ring. However, his eyes were a strange pale colour, like yellow topaz, implacable as the eyes of a cat and yet with the fire of' his fine intellect in their depths. Like all the Nationalist cabinet ministers, with the exception of the prime minister himself, he was a highly educated and brilliant man, devout and dedicated, totally convinced of the divine right of his party and his Volk.
'They truly believe they are God's instruments on earth. That's what makes them so damned dangerous.' Shasa smiled grimly as Manfred finished speaking and sat down to the roar of approval from his own side of the House. They were waving order papers, and the prime minister leaned across to pat Manfred's shoulder, while a dozen congratulatory notes were passed to him from the back benches.
Shasa used this distraction to murmur an excuse to his father-inlaw. 'You won't need me for the rest of the day, but if you do, you'll know where to find me.' Then he stood up, bowed to the Speaker and, as unobtrusively as possible, headed for the exit. However, Shasa was six foot one inch tall and with the black patch over one eye and his dark waving hair and good looks, he drew more than a few speculative glances from the younger women in the visitors' gallery, and a hostile appraisal from the government benches.
Manfred De La Rey glanced up from the note he was reading as Shasa passed, and the look they exchanged was intent but enigmatic.
Then Shasa was out of the chamber and he shrugged off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder, as he
