At the head of the staircase she drew a deep breath like a diver on the high board, smiled brightly and went down into the blue drawingroom where the first guests were already sipping sherry.
Lord Littleton was much better value than she had expected - tall, silver-haired and benign.
'Do you shoot?' she asked at the first opportunity.
'Can't stand the sight of blood, me dear.' 'Do you ride?' 'Horses?' he snorted. 'Stupid bloody animals.' 'I think you and I are going to be good friends,' she said.
There were many rooms in Weltevreden that Tara disliked; the dining-room she actively hated with all those heads of long-dead animals that Shasa had massacred staring down from the walls with glass eyes. Tonight she took a chance and seated Molly on the other side of Littleton and within minutes Molly had him hooting with delighted laughter.
When they left the men with the port and Hauptmanns and went through to the ladies room, Molly pulled Tara aside, bubbling over with excitement.
'I've been dying to get you alone all ex/ening,' she whispered.
'You'll never guess who is in the Cape at this very moment.' 'Tell me.' 'The secretary of the African National Congress - that's who.
Moses Gama, that's who.' Tara went very still and pale and stared at her.
'He's coming to our home to talk to a small group of us, Tara. I invited him, and he especially asked for you to be present. I didn't know you knew him.' 'l met him only once --' she corrected herself, 'twice.' 'Can you come?' Molly insisted. 'It'll be best if Shasa does not know about it, you understand.' 'WhenT 'Saturday evening, eight o'clock.' 'Shasa will be away and I'll be there,' Tara said. 'I wouldn't miss it for the world.' Sean Courthey was the stalwart of the Western Province Preparatory School first fifteen, or Wet Pups, as the school was known. Quick and strong he ran in four tries against the Rondebosch juniors and converted them himself, while his father and two younger brothers stood on the touchline and yelled encouragement.
After the final whistle blew Shasa lingered just long enough to congratulate his son, with an effort restraining himself from hugging the sweaty grinning youngster with grass stains on his white shorts and a graze on one knee. A display like that in front of Sean's peers would have mortified him horribly. Instead they shook hands.
'Well played, sport. I'm proud of you,' he said. 'Sorry about this weekend, but I'll make it up to you.' And although the expression of regret was sincere, Shasa felt a buoyancy of his spirits as he drove out to the airfield at Y0ungsfield. Dicky, his erk, had the aircraft out of the hangar and ready for him on the hardstand.
Shasa climbed out of the Jaguar and stood with his hands in his pockets and the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, staring at the sleek machine with rapture.
It was a DH 98 Mosquito fighter bomber. Shasa had bought it at one of the RAF disposal sales at Biggin Hill and had it completely stripped and overhauled by D Havilland trained riggers. He had even had them re-glue the sandwich construction of the wooden bodywork with the new Araldite wonder glue. The original Rodux adhesives had proves unreliable under tropical conditions. Stripped of all armaments and military fittings, the Mosquito's already formidable performance had been considerably enhanced. Not even Courtney Mining could afford one of the new civilian jet-engined aircraft, but this was the next best thing.
The beautiful machine crouched on the hardstand like a falcon at hate, the twin Rolls Royce Merlin engines ready to roar into life and hurtle her into the blue. Blue was her colour, sky blue and silver; she shone in the bright Cape sunlight and on her fuselage where once the RAF roundel had been was now emblazoned the Courtney Company logo, a stylized silver diamond, its facets entwined with the Company's initials.
'How is the port number two magneto?' Shasa demanded of Dicky as he sauntered across in his oily overalls. The little man bridled.
'Ticking over like a sewing machine,' he answered. He loved the machine even more than Shasa did, and any imperfection, no matter how minor, wounded him deeply. When Shasa reported one, he took it very badly. He helped Shasa load his briefcase, overnight bag and guncase into the bomb bay which had been converted into a luggage compartment.
'All tanks are full,' he said, and stood aside looking superior as Shasa insisted on checking them visually, and then made a fuss of his walk-around inspection.
'She'll do,' Shasa agreed at last and could not resist stroking the wing, as though it were the limb of a lovely woman.
Shasa switched to oxygen at eleven thousand feet and levelled out at Angels twenty, grinning into his oxygen mask at the old airforce slang. He tuned her for cruise, carefully watching the exhaust gas temperatures and engine revs and then settled back to enjoy it.
Enjoy was too mild a term for it. Flying was an exultation of spirit and a fever in his blood. The immense lion- tawny continent drifted by beneath him, washed by a million suns and burned by the ..... hot. her. b-.see.nted- K-a- rooMnds ira-aeicvi'e-hide.-riven-a&-wrinkid and scarred with donga and canyon and dried riverbed. Only up here, high above it, did Shasa truly realize how much he was a part of it, how deep was his love for it. Yet it was a hard land and cruel, and it bred hard men, black and white, and he knew that he was one of them. There is no place for weaklings here, he thought, only the strong can flourish.
Perhaps it was the pure oxygen he breathed, enhanced by the ecstasy of flight, but his mind seemed clearer up here. Issues that had been obscure became lucid, uncertainties resolved, and the hours sped away as swiftly as the lovely machine streaked across the blue so that when he landed at Johannesburg's civilian airport, he knew with certainty what had to be done. David Abrahams was waiting for him, lanky and skinny as ever, but he was balding a little and he had taken to wearing gold-rimmed spectacles which gave him a perpetually startled expression. Shasa jumped down off the wing of the Mosquito and they embraced happily. They were closer than brothers. Then David patted the aircraft's wing.
'When do I get to fly her again?' he asked wistfully. David had got a DFC in the western desert and a bar to it in Italy. He had been credited with nine kills and ended the war as a wing commander, while Shasa had been a mere squadron leader when he had lost hi eye in Abyssinia and been invalided home.
'She's too good for you,' Shasa told him and slung his luggag( into the back seat of David's Cadillac.
As David drove out through the airfield gates they exchanger family news. David was married to Mathilda Janine, Tara Courtney': younger sister, so David and Shasa were brothers-in-law. Shas boasted about Sean and Isabella without mentioning his other twt sons and then they went on to the real objects of their meeting.
