Golden Fox

Wilbur Smith - C08 Golden Fox

This book is dedicated to Danielle Antoinette, who transformed my life into a joyous adventure

A cloud of butterflies rose into the sunlight, the breeze smeared them across the summer sky and a hundred thousand young faces shining with wonder turned upwards to watch them drift overhead.

In the forefront of that vast concourse sat a girl, the girl that he had been stalking for ten days now. A hunter studying his prey, he had come to know with a peculiar intimacy her every gesture and movement, the turn and lift of her head as something caught her attention, the way she cocked it to listen, or tossed it in annoyance or impatience. Now in a new attitude she lifted her face to the glorious cloud of winged insects, and even at this distance he could see the sparkle of her teeth, and her lips formed a soft pink '0' of wonder.

On the high stage above her the figure in the white satin shirt held up yet another box and, laughing, shook from it a fresh burst of fluttering wings.

Yellow and white and iridescent, they bore aloft, and the crowd gasped and 'oohed' afresh.

One of the butterflies toppled and dived; and, though a hundred hands were held out to catch it, it swerved and wobbled down to alight at last on the girl's upturned face. Even above the swelling murmur of the crowd, he heard the girl's happy cry of laughter, and he found himself smiling in sympathy with her.

She reached up to where it sat on her forehead and took it gently, almost reverently, in the cup of her hands. For a moment she held it close to her face, studying it with those indigo-blue eyes that he had come to know so well. Her expression was suddenly wistful, and her lips moved as she whispered to it, but he could not hear the words.

Her sadness was fleeting, and then those lovely lips smiled again and she leapt to her feet and held both hands high above her head, standing on tiptoe. The butterfly hesitated, perched on her outstretched fingertips, pulsing its wings softly on the point of flight, and he heard her voice.

"Fly! Fly for me!' And those around her took up the cry.

"Fly! Fly for peace!" For a moment she had usurped the limelight, and all eyes were fastened on her rather than on the flamboyant single figure in the centre of the stage.

She was tall and lithe, her bare limbs tanned and glowing with health. She wore her skirt so short, in the fashion of the day, that as she reached upwards the hem rose high above the circular creases where her cocky little buttocks joined her thighs in a froth of white lace.

For a moment, poised like that, she seemed to epitomize her generation, wild and free and fey, and he sensed the instant accord of spirit of all those who watched her. Even the man on the stage leant forward to see her better, and his lips, thick and livid as though stung by bees, split in a smile and he called out: 'Peace!' And his voice was magnified a thousand times by the great banks of amplifiers that rose high on each side of the stage.

The butterfly flew from her hands, and she pressed all her fingers to her lips and blew a wide kiss after it as it fluttered aloft and was lost in the swirling cloud of insects.

The girl sank down on to the grass, and those seated close to her reached out to touch and embrace her.

On the stage Mick Jagger held his arms wide, commanding silence. Once he had it, he spoke into the microphone. Distorted by the amplifiers, his voice was slurred and incoherent; his accent so thick that the watcher could barely understand the stumbling tribute he read out to the member of his band, who only days previously had drowned in a swimming-pool during a wild weekend party.

The whisper was that the victim had been almost comatose with drugs when he entered the water. It was a hero's death, for this was the age of drugs and sexual excess, of pot and Pill, of freedom and peace and overdosing.

Jagger ended his little speech. It had been so brief that it had not dulled the buoyant mood of the gathering. The 8 electric guitars struck a discord, and Jagger hurled himself into 'Honky Tonk Women' with every fibre of his being. Within seconds he had a hundred thousand hearts racing in time to his, a hundred thousand young bodies jerking and pulsing, and two hundred thousand arms held high, swaying like a field of wheat in a high wind.

The music was cosmic, brutal as an artillery bombardment; painful to the ear, it penetrated the skull and seemed to numb and crush the brain.

Swiftly it reduced the audience to a mindless frenzy, transformed the multitude into a single organism, like a gigantic amoeba that throbbed and undulated in the act of reproduction, fraught with a passion that was overtly sexual; and from it rose the stench of dust and sweat, the sickly odour of cannabis smoke and the heady overpowering musk of young bodies physically aroused.

The watcher was alone in the midst of the throng, isolated and detached, unmoved by the blasts of sound that swept over him. He studied the girl, awaiting his moment.

She swayed to the primeval rhythm, moved in time to the bodies that pressed close about her, but with a singular grace that set her apart. Her hair was glistening jet with highlights of ruby that glinted in the sun, piled on top of her head; but thick tresses of it had come down in smoky coils, enhancing the elegant line of her neck and the set of her head upon it, like a tulip on its stem.

Directly below the stage, an area had been cordoned off with a low picket fence, a tiny enclave for a privileged few. Marianne Faithfull, in a flowing caftan but with bare feet, sat here with the other wives and camp-followers. Her beauty was remote and ethereal. Her eyes seemed dreamy and sightless as those of a blind woman, and her movements slow and somnolent. Children crawled about her feet, and they were guarded and protected by a phalanx of Hell's Angels.

In black Wehrmacht steel helmets, hung with chains and Nazi iron crosses, chest hair curling out from under gilets of black leather studded with silver metal, steel-shod motor-cycle boots, arms covered with intricate tattoos, they struck menacing poses, arms akimbo, billy-clubs in their belts, and their clenched fists heavy with sharp-edged steel rings. They surveyed the crowd with brooding insolent stares, watching for trouble, hoping for trouble.

The music pounded on and on, an hour and then another, the heat built up, and the smell of humanity was like that of an animal-cage, for some of the audience, both men and women, hemmed in and reluctant to miss a moment of it, had urinated where they sat.

The watcher was disgusted by the decadence, by the wild abandon and the gross indulgence of it all. It offended everything that he believed in. His eyes felt gritty and sensitive, and his head ached, throbbing in time to the driving rhythm of the guitars. It was time to leave. Another day wasted, another day spent waiting for the opportunity that never came.

However, he was a hunter with all the patience of the predator. There would be other days; he was in no hurry. The moment must be exactly right for his purpose.

He began to move, working his way across the low knoll where he had stood through the dense throng of bodies, shouldering through them; they were in such a mesmeric trance that they seemed neither to see nor to feel him push past them.

He glanced back, and his eyes narrowed as he saw the girl speak to the boy beside her, smile and shake her head in response to his reply and rise to her feet. Then she also began to work her way through the crowd, stepping over the seated ranks, steadying herself with a hand on a shoulder, laughing an apology as she went. , The watcher changed direction, angling down the gentle slope to intercept her, the hunter's instinct warning him that unexpectedly the moment for which he had waited had arrived.

Behind the stage were the television-trucks, row upon row of them, each as tall as a double-decker bus, parked so close together that there were only inches between them.

The girl moved back, circling the low picket fence, working her way around the side of the stage trying to get clear of the throng; but it was so dense that it blocked her further progress, and her expression was desperate as she glanced around her, caught in the press of bodies.

Suddenly she turned directly towards the fence, pushed her way to it, and then with a swift athletic bound jumped over it and scuttled into the narrow space between two of the high television-trucks. One of the Hell's Angels saw her dart away into the forbidden area, and he shouted and followed her at a run, twisting his shoulders to squeeze into the narrow passage down which she had disappeared; and, ashe turned, the watcher had a flash of the grin on his face.

It took the watcher almost two minutes to force his way to the point on the fence where the girl had crossed. Somebody reached out to stop him, but he struck the hand away and went over it, and slipped into the space between the high steel sides of the parked trucks.

He moved sideways, the gap too narrow to accommodate the width of his shoulders, and he was level with the door of the driver's cab when he heard the muffled cries of protest just ahead of him. The sound spurred him, and as he came around the side of the bonnet, he checked for an instant as he took in what was happening just in front of him.

The Hell's Angel had caught the girl, and now he had her held against the front wing of the truck. He had one of her arms twisted up behind her back, at almost the level of her shoulder-blades. She was facing him, but he pressed her backwards against the steel wing with his hips and his pot belly. He bent over her, trying to reach her mouth with his. The girl's back was arched, and she rolled her head violently from side to side trying to avoid his mouth. He was laughing, his mouth wide open, flicking his tongue out at her, trying to force it into her mouth.

With his right hand he had hoisted the tiny skirt up to her waist, and his hairy fingers, stained with motor-cycle grease, were hooked into the waistband of her lace panties. The girl was striking and clawing at him with her free hand, but he hunched his shoulders so that she could not reach his face with her nails, and her blows fell on studded black leather and on thick shoulders padded with muscle and fat. The 11 Angel's laughter was thick and guttural, and the lace of her panties tore with a sharp crackling sound as he forced them over her hips and down the smooth tanned thighs.

The watcher stepped forward and touched the Angel's shoulder, and the man froze and twisted his head round. His eyes were glazed, but they cleared instantly and he flung the girl sideways so viciously that she sprawled on the torn muddy grass between the trucks. The Angel reached for the club in his belt.

The watcher reached out and touched him again, under the ear, just below the rim of his steel helmet. He pressed with two fingers, and the Angel froze and stiffened; all his limbs went rigid, and he made a glottal cawing sound deep in his throat, his entire body convulsed and he collapsed in a heap and, like an epileptic, lay twitching and jerking spasmodically. The girl was on her knees, pulling up her torn underclothes, and watching in fascinated horror. The watcher stepped over the sprawling Angel and lifted the girl to her feet without apparent effort.

"Come,' he said softly. 'Before his friends arrive." Swiftly he led her away by the hand, and she followed as trustingly as a child.

Beyond the parked trucks was a maze of narrow pathways through the rhododendron bushes. As they ran down one of these paths, she asked breathlessly: 'Did you kill him?" 'No.' He did not even glance round. "He'll be on his feet again in less than five minutes.' ' 'You flattened him. How did you do that? You hardly touched him." He did not answer, but round the next bend in the path he stopped and turned back to face her.

"Are you all right?' he asked, and she nodded jerkily without speaking.

He studied her, still holding her hand. He knew she was twenty-four years old, a young woman who had just experienced a violent attempted rape, but the gaze of her dark blue eyes was level and appraising. There were no tears, no hysterics, not even a tremor of those pink lips, and the hand in his was slim and firm and warm.

The psychiatrist's report on her which he had studied had been correct in at least this much: she was resilient and self-assured; already she was almost fully recovered from the attack. Then he saw the colour mount softly in her cheeks and at the base of her long elegant throat, and her breath quickened perceptibly. She was experiencing another strong emotion.

"What's your name?' she asked, her eyes fastened on his with an intensity which he recognized. Women, on first encounter, usually looked at him like that.

"Ramsey,' he replied.

"Ramsey,' she repeated softly, relishing the sound of it. God, he was beautiful. 'Ramsey who?" 'You won't believe it if I tell you.' His English was perfect, too perfect.

He must be foreign, but the voice matched his face, beautiful, deep and grave.

"Try me,' she invited, and heard the catch in her own voice.

"Ramsey de Santiago y Machado.' He made it sound like music; it was impossibly romantic. It was the most beautiful name she had ever heard, perfect for that face and voice.

"We must go,' he said, while she still stared at him.

"I can't run,' she said. 'Don't make me run." 'If you don't, you might end up as a mascot on the handlebars of a motor-cycle." She laughed, and then bit her lower lip to stop herself.

"Don't do that,' she protested. 'Don't make me laugh. I need a loo. My condition is critical." 'Ah, so that's where you were headed when Prince Charming fell in love with you." 'I warned you, don't do that.' With an effort she smothered her giggle, and he took pity on her.

"There is a public loo at the gate to the park. Can you make it that far?" 'I don't know." 'The alternative is the rhododendrons."

"No, thanks. No more public performances today." 'Let's go, then.' He took her arm.

They skirted the Serpentine, and Ramsey glanced back. 'Your boyfriend's ardour must have cooled,' he said. 'No sign of him. What a fickle fellow." 'Pity. I'd love to watch you do that trick of yours again. How much further is it?" 'Here it is.' They had reached the gate, and she dropped his arm and started for the small red-brick building that nestled discreetly in the shrubbery beside the path; but at the door she hesitated.

"My name is Isabella, Isabella Courtney, but my friends call me Bella," she said over her shoulder, and darted through the doorway.

"Yes,' he murmured softly, 'I know." Even while she was in the cubicle she could hear the music, barely muted by the distance and the brick walls, and then the clatter of a helicopter passing low over the roof, but it was unimportant. She was thinking about Ramsey.

At the washbasins she studied herself in the mirror. Her hair was a mess; she tidied it quickly. Ramsey's hair was thick and dark and wavy. He wore it long, but not too long. She wiped off her pale pink lipstick on a Kleenex and then repainted her mouth. Ramsey's mouth was full but masculine, soft but strong; she wondered how it would taste.

She dropped the lipstick back into her bag and leant close to the mirror to appraise her own eyes. They didn't need drops. The whites were so clear they had a bluish sheen, like those of a healthy baby. She knew her eyes were her best feature, that Courtney blue, something between cornflower and sapphire. Ramsey's eyes were green. They were the first thing that had struck her about him. That clear startling green, beautiful but - she searched for the adjective - beautiful but deadly. That was it exactly. She didn't need the demonstration that had felled the Hell's Angel. One look at those eyes and she had known he was a dangerous man. She felt the back of her neck prickle with a delicious thrill of fear and of anticipation. Perhaps this was the one, at last. Beside his image all the others seemed to pale and fade.

Perhaps this was the one she had searched for so long.

"Ramsey de Santiago y Machado.' She said it in a throaty purr, savouring the taste of it in her mouth, watching her own lips form the words. Then she straightened up and turned to the doorway. She prevented herself from hurrying. Slowly, languidly, on the tall stiletto heels that made her hips roll as she walked and her bottom swing like a metronome, lace flashing under the abbreviated skirt, she went to the door.

She pouted slightly and let her long thick eyelashes droop over the blue as she stepped out into the slanting golden sunlight and she stopped dead.

He was gone. She caught her breath and felt the cold quick slide of her stomach as though she had swallowed a stone. She looked around her in disbelief 'Ramsey,' she said uncertainly, and ran into the pathway. There were hundreds of others coming down the tarmac path towards her, the first escapees from the concert trying to avoid the human avalanche that would soon follow, but none of them was the elegant figure she sought.

"Ramsey,' she said, and hurried to the park gates. The traffic boomed down the Bayswater Road, and she looked frantically right and left. She was overcome with a sense of disbelief. He had gone and left her. It was beyond her experience. She had shown him that she wanted him - she couldn't possibly have made it plainer - and he had walked away.

Her next emotion was outrage. Nobody did that to Isabella Courtney, not ever. She felt slighted and insulted and very angry.

"Damn him,' she said. 'Damn the man." Her anger lasted only seconds, and then it slumped. She felt lost and bereft. It was an alien sensation for her.

"He can't just leave like that,' she said aloud, and recognized in her own voice the self-pitying whine of a spoilt child, so she said it again differently, trying to recapture her anger, but it was unconvincing.

Behind her, she heard a shout of raucous laughter and she glanced back. A bunch of Hell's Angels was swaggering down the pathway, still a hundred yards away but coming directly towards her. She couldn't remain here.

The concert was over, the crowds were breaking up. The helicopter she had heard must have come in to pick up Jagger and his Rolling Stones. There was little chance of her rejoining her friends now; they would be lost in the multitude. She looked around her just once more, swiftly but despairingly.

Still no sign of that dark wavy head of hair. She tossed her own head and lifted her chin.

"Who needs him anyway, damned dago? she muttered furiously, and struck out down the pavement.

Behind her there was a chorus of whistles and catcalls, and someone, one of the Angels, began calling the step for her. 'Left, right, left - shake, rattle and roll." She knew that, her high heels were making her bottom waggle furiously. She hopped on one foot and then the other as she pulled off her shoes and then fled barefoot down the pavement. She had left her car at the embassy car park in the Strand, so she had to take the Tube from Lancaster Gate station to reach it.

Her car was a brand-new Mini-Cooper, the very latest 1969 model. Daddy had given it to her for her birthday, and had had it customized for her by the same body shop that had done Antony Armstrong-Jones's Mini. They had souped up its engine, upholstered it in white Connolly leather like a Rolls and resprayed it the same glitter silver as Daddy's new Aston Martin with her initials in gold leaf on the door. All the swinging set were driving Minis; there were more of them than Rollses or Bentleys parked outside Annabel's on a Saturday night.

Bella threw her shoes into the tiny back seat and revved the engine until the needle went into the red; the tyres squealed and left black smears on the ramp of the car park.

As she glanced back at them in the rear-view mirror it gave her a dark satanic pleasure.

She drove with abandon, protected from the wrath of the Metropolitan Police by her diplomatic plates. She wasn't really entitled to them, but Daddy had wangled them for her.

She beat her own record back to Highveld, the ambassador's residence in Chelsea, and Daddy's official Bentley with its pennants on the wings was parked at the entrance and Klonkie, the chauffeur, grinned and saluted her.

Daddy had brought most of his own staff from Cape Town.

Bella controlled her mood long enough to give Klonkie her sweetest smile and toss him the keys. 'Put my car away for me, there's a dear, Klonkie." Daddy was tremendously strict about the way she treated the servants. She could take her moods out on anyone but them. 'They are part of the family, Bella.' And most of them had indeed been at Weltevreden, the family home at the Cape of Good Hope, since before she was born.

Daddy was at his desk in his study on the ground floor overlooking the garden. He had discarded his coat and tie, and the desk-top was piled with official documents, but he tossed down his pen and swivelled his chair towards her as she came in. His face lit up at the sight of her.

Bella dropped into his lap and kissed him. 'God,' she murmured, 'you are the most beautiful man in the world." 'Far be it from me to question your good judgement,' Shasa Courtney smiled, 'but may I ask what has brought this on?" 'Men are either boars or bores,' she said. 'All except you, of course." 'Ah! And what has young Roger done to arouse your are? To me, he seemed fairly inoffensive, if not actually insipid." Roger was the one who had escorted her to the concert. She had left him on the crowded lawn in front of the stage, but now it took her a moment to remember him.

"I'm off men for life,' Isabella declared. 'I shall probably hie me to a nunnery." 'Could you possibly eschew holy orders at least until tomorrow? I do need a hostess for dinner this evening, and we haven't yet arranged the seating." 'All done, long ago,' she said. 'Before I left for the concert." 'The menu?" 'Chef and I settled that last Friday. Don't panic, Papa. All your favourites: Coquilles St. Jacques and lamb from Camdeboo.' Shasa served only lamb reared on his own farms in the Karoo. The desert scrub gave the flesh a distinctive herby flavour. All the embassy beef came from his extensive ranches in Rhodesia, and the wines from the vineyards of Weltevreden where for the last twenty years Shasa's German winemaker had laboured with rare skill and dedication to raise the quality of the vintage to the point where now Shasa would back it against nearly any of the second crus of Burgundy.

His ambition was still to make a wine that would compare with some of the great and noble houses of the COte d'Or.

When it came to transporting this fare from the Cape of Good Hope to London, Courtney shipping lines ran a weekly refrigerated vessel on the Atlantic route.

,... and I picked up your dinner-jacket from the cleaner's this morning, and I had Budds in Piccadilly Arcade make you three more dress-shirts and a dozen new eye-patches. Your others were all getting so tatty. I've thrown them out." Still sitting in his lap, she adjusted his eye-patch. Shasa had lost his left eye flying Hurricanes against the Italians in Abyssinia during the Second World War. The black silk eye-patch gave him a dashing piratical air.

Now Shasa smiled complacently. When he had first invited Bella to come to London with him, she had only. recently turned twenty-one years of age, and he had thought long and hard before foisting the onerous task of official embassy hostess on to one so young. He need not have worried. After all, she had been trained by her grandmother. Added to which they had brought the chef and butler and half the staff from the Cape with them, so she started with her own highly trained team.

In three years, Isabella had built up. a reputation in the diplomatic circle, and her invitations were sought after, except by those embassies whose countries no longer maintained relations with South Africa.

"Do you want me to cover for you while you sneak off with your Israeli pal for half an hour after dinner to build an atom bomb?" 'Bella!' Shasa frowned quickly. 'You know I don't like remarks like that." 'Joke, Daddy. There is nobody to hear us." 'Even in private and in fun, Bella." Shasa shook his head severely. That had been uncomfortably close to the truth. The Israeli military attache and Shasa had been involved in a courtship dance for almost a year now, and they had gone far beyond the stage of ffirtation already.

She kissed him, and his expression softened. 'I must go and bath.' She stood up from his lap. 'The invitations are for eight-thirty. I'll come and do your tie for you at ten past.' Shasa had tied his own bow for forty years, until Isabella had decided that he was incapable of doing so.

Shasa's eyes dropped to her legs. 'If your skirts get any shorter, mademoiselle, your belly-button will be winking at the moon." You really must try not to be an old fogey. It's most unbecoming in one of the swingingest papas of the twentieth century.' She headed for the door, deliberately accentuating the movement of her lower body under the offending article of clothing, and Shasa sighed as the door closed.

"That's a load of dynamite with a very short fuse,' he murmured. "Perhaps, in a way, it's a good thing that we are going home." In September, Shasa's three-year ambassadorial stint would be up. Isabella would once more go under the control and discipline of Centaine Courtney-Malcomess, her grandmother. Shasa realized that his own. efforts in that direction had been less than totally successful, and he would hand over the responsibility with relief.

Thinking of their imminent return to Cape Town, Shasa glanced back at the papers on his desk. The years in the London embassy had been a political penance for him. When the prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, had been assassinated in 19ee, Shasa had made a serious miscalculation and backed the wrong man to succeed to the premiership. The result of that mistake had been that once John Vorster had become prime minister, Shasa had been shunted into this political backwater; but, as so many times before, he had turned disaster into triumph.

Using all his gifts and natural abilities, his shrewd business acumen, his presence and good looks, his charm and powers of persuasion, he had done much to deflect from his homeland the building wrath and contempt of the world, particularly that of Britain's Labour government and her Commonwealth, most of whose members were nations headed by black or Asian premiers. John Vorster had taken these achievements into account. Before leaving South Africa, Shasa had been intimately concerned with Armscor, and Vorster had offered him the job of chairman of Armscor on his return home.

Armscor was, put simply, the largest industrial undertaking that had ever existed on the African continent. It was the country's answer to the arms boycott, begun by America's President Dwight Eisenhower and now being extended rapidly by other nations in an attempt to leave South Africa defenceless and vulnerable. Armscor - Armaments Development and Production Company - was the entire defence industry of the country under single management, statesponsored to the extent of billions upon billions of dollars.

It was an enormous and exciting challenge, especially since the multifarious companies that made up the Courtney financial and business empire were being well managed. During the three years of his ambassadorial duties, Shasa had allowed the management and control to pass gradually, in an orderly fashion, into the hands of his son Garry Courtney. Garry was making an amazing success of it for one so young; but, then, Shasa had not been much older when he had become chairman of Courtney Enterprises.

Then, again, Garry had the day-to-day backing of his grandmother, Centaine Courtney-Malcomess, the founder and dowager empress of the empire. He also had, working under him, the management team of experts that Centaine and Shasa between them had meticulously assembled over the previous forty years.

This in no way detracted from Garry's achievements, not least of which was the fashion in which he had steered them all through the recent collapse of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange which had stripped up to sixty percent of the value off some share prices. In some remarkable fashion that would have done credit to either Shasa or Centaine, Garry had anticipated the end of the wild bull run that had preceded the collapse. Far from being damaged or destroyed, Courtney Enterprises had come through the ordeal even more powerful and cash-liquid, and in a better position to take advantage of the bargains that the market was now offering.

No - Shasa smiled and shook his head - Garry was doing great things, and it would be bitterly unfair to come in above him again. However, Shasa was still a young man, not much over fifty years of age. When he got home he would need something to keep his wits sharp and his juices flowing. The Armscor job was perfect.

Of course, he would keep his seat on the Courtney board, but he could devote most of his time and energy to Armscor. Many of the subcontracts could be steered in the direction of the Courtney companies. Both enterprises might benefit enormously from this mutual association, and Shasa would have the additional pleasure and comfort of warming his patriotic ardour at the fire of capitalistic rewards.

Isabella's remark that he had objected to earlier was directly related to his new appointment. He had used his diplomatic connections with the Israeli embassy to initiate and then pursue the idea of a joint nuclear project between the two states.

Tonight he would be handing over another batch of documents to the Israeli attache to be forwarded in the diplomatic bag to Tel Aviv.

He glanced at his wristwatch. He still had twenty minutes before he must go up to change for dinner, and he switched all his concentration back to the papers in front of him.

Nanny had laid out the Zandra Rhodes couture model and run Isabella's bath.

"You are late, Miss. Bella. And I still have to do your hair.' She was a Cape Coloured, her Hottentot blood mixed with that of most of the world's seafaring nations.

"Don't fuss so, Nanny,' Isabella protested, but Nanny swept her off to the bathroom with as little ceremony as she had when Isabella was five years old.

While Isabella sank with a luxurious sigh chin-deep into the steaming foam, Nanny gathered up her discarded clothes.

"Your dress is stained with grass, child, and your new panties are torn.

What you been up to?' Nanny washed all Isabella's underclothes by hand; she would trust no laundry with them.

"I've been playing touch-rugby with a Hell's Angel, Nanny. Our team won thirty-love." 'You'll get yourself in bad trouble. All the Courtneys got hot blood." Nanny held up the torn panties and examined them with heavy disapproval.

"Long past time you were safely married." 'You've got a dirty mind. Now tell me what's been happening today. What about Klonkie's new girl-friend?' Isabella knew how to distract her.

Nanny was an inveterate gossip, and this was the time of day when she brought Isabella up to date on the doings and undoings of the entire household. While she chattered, Isabella made little murmurs of encouragement, but she was listening with only half her attention, and when she stood up to soap herself she examined her body in the steamy full-length mirror across the room.

"Do you think I'm getting fat, Nanny)' 'You are so skinny, that's why no boy married you yet,' Nanny sniffed, and went through to the bedroom.

Isabella tried to be completely objective as she studied herself. Was there any way in which her body could be improved? Should her bosom be a little bigger? And did the tips point outwards at too acute an angle? Were her hips too wide or should her bottom be smaller? After critical reflection, she shook her head. It all looked just about perfect from where she stood.

"Ramsey de Santiago y Machado,' she whispered, 'you will never know what you missed.' And why did that make her feel so miserable?

"You are talking to yourself again, child.'Nanny came back with a bath-towel the size of a bed-sheet and held it open for her. 'Out you get now. We are running out of time.' She enveloped Isabella in the towel as she stepped out of the bath, and vigorously began to rub her back dry. It was no good trying to convince Nanny that she could dry herself.

"Don't be so rough.' Isabella had been making the same protest for twenty years, and Nanny ignored it.

"How many times have you been married, Nanny?" 'You know well that I been married four times, but I only been churched just once.' Nanny checked and looked at her with new attention. 'Why you ask about marrying? Did you find something interesting, that's why the torn panties?" 'You vulgar old woman!' Isabella avoided her eyes and snatched up her Thai-silk gown on the way to the bedroom.

She picked up the hairbrush and made one stroke through her hair before Nanny took it away from her.

"That's my job, child,' she said firmly; and Isabella sat down and closed her eyes giving herself up to the familiar comfort of having Nanny brush out her hair for her.

"Do you know, I think I'll have a baby, just so you'll have someone else to fuss over, and get you off my back." Nanny missed a stroke, taken by the attractions of that proposal, and then she said sternly, "You get yourself married first before we talk babies." The Zandra Rhodes creation was an ethereal cloud of subtle colour, spangled with sequins and seed pearls. Even Nanny nodded and looked complacent as Isabella pirouetted in front of her.

Isabella was halfway down the staircase on her way to a last-minute conference with Chef when a thought occurre& to her and she stopped abruptly. The Spanish chargi d'affaires was one of tonight's dinner-guests, and it took only a second for her to rearrange the table-seating in her mind.

"Yes, of course.'The Spanish chargi nodded immediately she mentioned the name. 'An old Andalusian family. As I recall, the Marques de Santiago y Machado left Spain and went to Cuba after the Civil War. He had considerable sugar and tobacco interests on the island at one time, but I imagine Castro changed all that." A marquds - the reply silenced Isabella for a moment. Her knowledge of Spanish nobility was less than elementary, but she imagined that a marquds ranked just below a duke.

"The Marquesa Isabella de Santiago y Machado.' With awe she allowed herself to consider the prospect, and she saw again in her mind's eye those deadly green eyes and for a moment she had difficulty breathing. Her voice was still ragged as she asked: 'How old is the marques?" 'Oh, he would be getting on a little now. That is, if he is still alive. He must be in his late sixties or early seventies." 'He had a son perhaps?" "That I don't know.' The chargg shook his head. 'But it would be easy to find out. If you wish, I will make some enquiries for you." 'Oh, that would be so kind of you.' Isabella laid her hand on his arm and gave him her most brilliant smile.

Marques or not, you don't get away from Isabella Courtney that easily, she thought smugly.

"It took you almost two weeks to make contact, and then when you had at last done so you immediately allowed the subject to escape.' The man seated at the head of the table stubbed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray in front of him and immediately lit another. The first two fingertips of his right hand were stained dark yellow, and the smoke from the oval Turkish cigarettes that he smoked incessantly had already tarred the air in the small room to a blue fog. 'Was that in accordance with your orders?' he asked.

Ramsey Machado shrugged lightly. 'It was the only certain way of getting and holding her attention. You must realize that this woman is accustomed to male adulation. She has only to lift a finger and men come swarming about her. I think you must trust my judgement in this matter." "You allowed her to get away.' The older man knew he was repeating himself, but this fellow needled him.

He did not like him, and did not know him well enough yet to trust him. Not that he ever fully trusted any one of his operatives. However, this one was too self-assured, too disrespectful. He had turned aside the rebuke with a shrug, where another might have cringed. He had blatantly set his own judgement above that of a superior officer.

Joe Cicero hooded his eyes. They were as opaque as puddles of old engine oil, startlingly black against the pallor of his skin and the silver-white hair that hung limply over his ears and forehead.

"Your orders were to make contact and to maintain it." 'With respect, Comrade Director, my orders were to inveigle myself into the woman's confidence, not to rush at her barking like a mad dog." No, Joe Cicero did not like him. His attitude was offensive, but that was not the only reason. He was a foreigner.

Joe Cicero considered any fton-Russian a foreigner. No matter what the concept of international socialism dictated, East Germans, Yugoslavs, Hungarians, Cubans and Poles - they were all foreigners to him. It infuriated him to have to pass on responsibility for so much of the section that he had headed for almost thirty years to others. Especially people like this.

Not only was Machado a foreigner, but also his very roots and origins were corrupt. He was no scion of the proletariat, not even of the despised bourgeoisie, but was a full member of that hated and outdated system of class and privilege, an aristocrat.

True, Machado disparaged and despised his origins, and used his tide now only to achieve his goals, but to Joe Cicero his blood-lines were tainted and his aristocratic manners and affectations were an insult to all he, Cicero, believed in.

Furthermore he had been born in Spain, a fascist country historically ruled by a Catholic monarchy which was the enemy of the people, even more so now under the monstrous Franco who had put down the communist revolution. He might call himself a Cuban socialist, but to Joe Cicero he stank of Spanish fascism and aristocracy.

"You let her get away,' he persisted. 'After all this time and money wasted.' He realized that he was being ponderous and heavy-handed, and he knew that his powers were failing. The sickness was already slowing his wits.

Ramsey smiled, that condescending smile that Joe Cicero hated so well. "She is on the line, like a fish; she may swim and dive only until I am ready to reel her in." Again he had contradicted his superior, and Joe Cicero considered the last but the- most poignant reason for his dislike of the man. His youth and comeliness and health. It made him painfully aware of his own mortality, for Joe Cicero was dying.

Since childhood he had chain-smoked these rank Turkish cigarettes, and on his last visit to Moscow the doctors had at last diagnosed the cancer in his lungs and offered him treatment in one of the sanatoria reserved for officers of his seniority. Instead Joe Cicero had elected to continue in service, to see his department securely handed over to his successor. He had not then known that this Spaniard was to be that successor. If he had known, perhaps he might have chosen the sanatorium.

He felt tired now and discouraged. His store of energy and enthusiasm was all used up, just as only a few years ago his hair had been jet black and dense, and now was white, tinged only with yellow like sun-dried seaweed, and he could not walk a dozen paces without wheezing and coughing like an asthmatic.

Recently he had been waking in the night, drenched with those terrible night-sweats, and when he fought for his breath he lay awake in the darkness and was assailed with terrible doubts. Had it been worth it, a lifetime of dedicated painstaking work? What did he have to show for it?

What little solid success had he achieved?

For almost thirty years he had served in the African department of the fourth directorate of the KGB. For the last ten of those years, he had been head of station South, the division responsible for the African continent below the equator, and quite naturally most of his attention and that of his department had been devoted to the most developed and richest country in his region, the Republic of South Africa.

The other man at the table was a South African. Up until this time, he had remained silent, but now he said softly: 'I do not understand why We are spending so much time discussing this woman. Explain it to me.' Both the white men at the table diverted their attention to him. When Raleigh Tabaka spoke, other men usually listened. He had about him a peculiar intensity, a charged air of purpose that held the attention of others.

All his life, Joe Cicero had worked with black Africans, the nationalist leaders of the forces of liberation and the socialist struggle. He had known them all, Jomo Kenyatta and Kenneth Kaunda, Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere.

Some of them he had come to know intimately: men like Moses Gama, who had been sent to a martyr's death, and Nelson Mandela, who was still languishing in the prison of white racism.

Cicero placed Raleigh Tabaka in the forefront of that illustrious company.

In fact Raleigh had been Moses Gama's nephew, and Raleigh had been present the night the South African police murdered his uncle. He seemed to have inherited Moses Gama's tremendous personality and force of character, and he had stepped squarely into the wide gap left by Gama. He was thirty years old, but already he was deputy director of Umkhonto we Sizwe, 'The Spear of the Nation', the military wing of the South African National Congress, and Joe Cicero knew that he had proved himself time and again in the field and in the councils of the ANC. He had the talent, the guts and the verve to rise as high as any other man in Africa.

Joe Cicero preferred him to the white Spanish aristocrat, but he recognized that despite their difference in colour and lineage they were men cast in the same mould. Hard and dangerous men, well versed in death and violence, adepts in the subtle shifting world of political power and intrigue. These were the men to whom Joe Cicero must hand over the reins, and he resented them and hated them for it.

"The woman,' he said heavily, 'could be of extraordinary value, if she is controlled and developed to her full potential, but I will let the marquds explain that to you. It is his case, and he has studied the subject fully." Abruptly Ramsey Machado's smile thinned, and his eyes turned flat and hostile.

"I would prefer the Comrade Director not to use that title,' he said coldly. 'Even in jest." Joe Cicero had learnt that it was probably the only way he could penetrate the Spaniard's slick armour-plating.

"I beg your pardon, comrade.' Joe inclined his head in mock contrition.

"But please do not let my little lapse interrupt your recitation." Ramsey Machado opened the loose-leaf binder that lay on the table in front of him, but he did not even glance at it. He knew every word it contained by heart.

"We have assigned the woman the case-name "Red Rose", and we have had our psychiatrists develop a detailed profile of her. The evaluation is that she is highly susceptible to skilful recruitment. She is uniquely placed to become an extremely valuable field-operative." Raleigh Tabaka leant forward attentively. Ramsey noted that he did not interject question or comment at this stage, and he approved of that restraint. They had not yet worked together extensively, this was only their third meeting, and both of them were still evaluating each other.

"Red Rose can be placed in an emotional dilemma. On her father's side she is a member of the white ruling class in South Africa. Her father is just finishing a term as his country's ambassador to Britain, and he returns now to take up an appointment as the chairman of the national armaments in dustry. He has enormous holdings in mining, land and finance; after the Oppenheimers and their Anglo-American Company, the family is probably the most wealthy and influential in southern Africa. In addition, the father has conduits to the very highest levels of the ruling racist regime. Most important, however, is the fact that the father dotes on Red Rose. She is able to obtain from him, with little effort, anything she sets her heart upon. This would include an etw& to any level of government and any information of whatever classification, even that relating to his new appointment on the armaments corporation." Raleigh Tabaka nodded. He knew the Courtney family, and could find no fault with this assessment. 'I have met Red Rose's mother, but she is on our side of the political fence,' he murmured, and Ramsey nodded.

"Precisely. Shasa Courtney has been divorced from his wife Tara for seven years. She was an accomplice of your uncle, Moses Gama, in his bomb attack on the white racist parliament, for which he was imprisoned and subsequently murdered. She was also Gama's mistress and bore his bastard son. Tara Courtney fled from South Africa with Gama's child 29 after the failure of the bomb plot. She lives now in London where she is very active in the anti-apartheid movement. She is also a member of the ANC, but she is not considered sufficiently competent or emotionally stable for any but junior rank and routine assignments. At present she operates a safe house for ANC personnel here in London and occasionally undertakes courier work or assists in the organization of rallies and demonstrations. Her real potential value lies in her influence over Red Rose." 'Yes,' Raleigh agreed impatiently. 'I know all about this, especially about her relationship to my uncle, but does she in fact have any influence over her daughter? It appears that Red Rose's sympathies lie heavily on her father's side?" Again Ramsey nodded. 'At present this is the case. But, apart from her mother, there is another member of the family who holds radical views: her brother Michael, who has a much greater influence on her. And there are other ways of turning her." "What are those?' Tabaka asked.

"One of them is the honey trap,' Joe Cicero said. 'The marquds - forgive me - Comrade Machado has made the initial contact to that end. The honey trap is one of his many specialities." 'You will keep me informed of progress.' Raleigh made a statement, and neither of them replied immediately. Although Raleigh Tabaka was an executive of the ANC and a member of the Communist Party, he was not, unlike the other two, an officer of the Russian KGB. Joe Cicero was, on the other hand, a KGB officer first and foremost, although his promotion from colonel to colonel-general had been confirmed only a month previously, at the same time that the Moscow clinic had diagnosed carcinoma of both his lungs. Joe Cicero suspected that the promotion had been given to him merely to allow him to retire at the higher pension, after a lifetime of loyal service to the department. Nevertheless, he was an officer in the ANC only after his loyalty to Mother Russia, his lines of allegiance were not diluted, and the ANC would receive only what information it was necessary for them to have. Ramsey Machado's lines of allegiance were also clear-cut. He had been born in Spain, and his title of nobility was Spanish, but his mother had been a Cuban woman, sloeeyed and raven-haired. She had met Ramsey's father when she was a young housekeeper on the Machado estates near Havana in Cuba. After the marriage, the marques had taken his beautiful commoner bride back to Spain.

During the Spanish Civil War, the marquds had opposed General Francisco Franco's Nationalists. Despite his noble background and inherited wealth, Ramsey's father had been an enlightened and liberal man. He joined the Republican army and commanded a battalion at the siege of Madrid where he was severely wounded. After the war, the Machado family found oppression and discrimination under the Franco regime intolerable. The marquesa prevailed on her husband to take her and her young son back to her native island in the Caribbean. Although they had been stripped of most of their Spanish property and possessions, the family still owned the Cuban estates.

However, the Machado family found that life under the dictatorship of Batista was no great improvement on that under Francisco Franco.

Ramsey's mother was an aunt of the young left-win$ student firebrand Fidel Castro and one of his avid admirers. She became active in the campaign of agitation and intrigue against the Batista regime, and young Ramsey gleaned his own first political convictions from her and from her celebrated nephew.

After Fidel Castro was imprisoned for leading the gallant but abortive attack on the Santiago barracks on 2e July 1953, both Ramsey's father and mother were arrested along with the rebels.

Ramsey's mother died under interrogation in a police cell in Havana, and his father died in the same prison only a few weeks later of ill-treatment and a broken heart. Once again the family estates were confiscated, and Ramsey's only inheritance was the derelict title of marques, void of all property or fortune. At the time he was fourteen years old. The Castro family took him in and cared for him.

When Fidel Castro was released from prison under amnesty, Ramsey went with him to Mexico, and at sixteen years of age was one of the first recruits to the Cuban army of liberation in exile.

It was in Mexico that he first learnt how to exploit his extraordinary good looks and to develop his natural winning ways with women. By the age of seventeen his companions had nicknamed him El Zorro Dorado,'The Golden Fox', and his reputation as an irresistible lover was established.

Up to the time of his father's arrest and death in Batista's prison, Ramsey had been given the benefit of the finest education available to the only son of a wealthy aristocratic family. He had attended an exclusive preparatory school in England, and spent two years at Harrow, so he spoke English like a native, as well as his own Spanish. During his schooldays, he had demonstrated superior academic ability and had become proficient in the manners and pastimes of a young gentleman. He had a good seat on a horse, learnt to keep a straight bat and cast a salmon fly. He was also a phenomenal shot at Spanish red-legged partridge or Mexican white-winged dove. He could shoot and ride and dance and sing, and he was beautiful, and when he returned to Cuba with Fidel Castro and the eighty-two heroes on 2 December 1956, he proved his valour in the fighting which left most of the valiant band dead on the beaches.

He was with the survivors that escaped with Castro into the mountains.

During the years of the guerrilla warfare that followed El Zorro was sent down into the towns and villages to practise his arts on scores of women, young and not so young, beautiful and plain. In Ramsey's arms they became enthusiastic daughters of the revolution. With every conquest he became more skilled and confident until his band of female recruits contributed significantly to the eventual triumph of the revolution and the overthrow of the Batista regime.

By this time, Castro was fully aware of the potential value of his young relative and protdge, and once in power he rewarded him by sending him to further his education on the American mainland. While he studied political history and social anthropology at the University of Florida, Ramsey used his amatory skills to infiltrate the band of Cuban exiles who, with the collusion of the American CIA, were planning the counter-revolution and the invasion of the island.

It was largely Ramsey's intelligence that pinpointed the time and place of the Bay of Pigs landing, and resulted in the annihilation of the traitors.

By this time, his extraordinary gifts had been recognized not only by his own countrymen but also by their allies.

When he graduated cum laude from the University of Florida and returned to Havana, the head of the KGB in Cuba prevailed upon Castro and the director of the DGA to send Ramsey to Moscow for further training. While in Russia, Ramsey exceeded the estimates that the KGB had made of his capabilities and his potential value. He was one of those remarkable creatures who could pass easily in any stratum of society, from the crude guerrilla-camps of the jungle to the drawing-rooms and private clubs of the most sophisticated capitals of the world.

With the knowledge and blessing of Fidel Castro, he was recruited into the KGB. Given his connections, it was only natural that he should be appointed director of the joint committee co-ordinating Russian and Cuban interests in Africa.

In this job, Ramsey made a special study of the African socialist liberation movements and he was responsible for selecting those organizations that were to receive full Russian and Cuban backing. He initiated the policy under which Cuba came to act as a surrogate for Mother Russia in southern Africa, and he was soon responsible for the supply of arms and the training of African resistance groups. In that capacity, he became a member of the ANC.

In a very short time, he had visited all of the African countries under his jurisdiction, using his Spanish passport and his title, posing as a capitalist investor and merchant banker with credentials supplied by the fourth directorate. He was accepted without reservation by the white colonial administrations, and was received cordially and entertained by everyone from the governors of Portuguese Angola and Mozambique to the British Governor-general of Rhodesia. He even dined with that notorious architect of apartheid, the South African leader, Hendrik Verwoerd.

When it became necessary to appoint a new station head for the African division to replace the ailing General Cicero, Ramsey's qualifications and experience made him the natural choice.

So as he sat now in the back room of the Russian consulate in Bayswater Road, with the man he was about to replace and this black African guerrilla leader, his loyalties were as clear-cut as those of his superior.

When Raleigh Tabaka said, 'You will keep me informed of progress,' he was being naive. He would be informed only on a "need to know" basis. In Ramsey's view and that of his government, the installation of this man and the organization which he represented as the ruling elite in South Africa was merely a single step along the road to the eventual goal of universal socialism throughout the length and breadth of the African continent.

"Naturally, you will be kept right up to date with this as with all other matters of joint interest,' Ramsey assured him in a tone of such total sincerity that the black man settled more comfortably in his chair and returned Ramsey's smile. Very few persons, male or female, were immune to his charms. It gave Ramsey a solid sense of satisfactien to see the magic work on even such a tough and uncompromising subject as this one.

Raleigh Tabaka was fully aware of the white man's smug self-satisfaction, although no sign of it showed on his face. There had been that flat spot in the Cuban's otherwise clear green gaze. Only someone with Raleigh's developed powers of observation would have noticed that. Raleigh had worked with these whites from Russia and Cuba for many years now, and he had come. to understand that in dealing with them only one principle was fixed and certain. They were never to be trusted, not in any circumstances or in even the smallest detail.

He had learnt to fake his acceptance, to give them false signals of compliance, such as the deliberate physical relaxation and the frank trusting smile. However, he never forgot for one instant that they were white. Like most Africans, Raleigh was a natural racist and a tribalist. He hated these white men who patronized and condescended to him across the conference-table with the same passion as he hated the white policemen who had fired the bullets at Sharpeville.

He had never forgotten for a single waking minute that dreadful day when under a blue African sky he had held in his arms the girl he loved, the lovely black maiden who was to be his wife. He had held her and watched her die, and then before her flesh cooled he had thrust his fingers deep into the bullet wounds in her chest and made his vow of vengeance.

The vow had been made not only against the assassins but against them all, every white face and every bloody white hand that had forced slavery and subjugation upon his tribe down the centuries. Hatred was the fuel on which Raleigh Tabaka's life ran.

He watched the white faces across the table and smiled and drew strength and resolve from his hatred. 'So,' he said, 'you will take care of the woman, it is agreed. Now let us move on..." 'A moment.' Ramsey lifted his hand to restrain him and turned back to Joe Cicero. 'If I am to proceed with Red Rose, then there is the matter of the budget for the operation." 'We have already allocated two thousand British sterling-" General Cicero protested.

"Just sufficient for the preliminary stage. The budget will have to be upgraded. Red Rose is the daughter of a wealthy capitalist, and to impress her I will have to maintain my rele as a Spanish grandee."

They argued for a few minutes more, while Raleigh Tabaka tapped his pencil impatiently on the table-top. The African division was the Cinderella of the fourth directorate, and every rouble had to be counted.

It was degrading, Raleigh thought, as he listened to them haggle. They were more like a pair of old women selling pumpkins beside a dusty African road than two men planning the overthrow of an evil empire and the liberation of fifteen million oppressed black souls.

At last they agreed, and Raleigh found it difficult to conceal his disgust as he repeated: 'Can we move on to discuss my itinerary for the African tour?' He had believed that this was the reason for today's meeting. 'Has the authorization been received from Moscow?" The discussions went on into the afternoon. They ate a frugal lunch sent up from the consulate canteen as they worked, and the fog of Joe Cicero's cigarette smoke dulled the shaft of sunlight through the single high window. The room was a high-security unit on the top floor, regularly swept for electronic listening devices and safe from outside surveillance.

At last Joe Cicero closed the file in front of him and looked up. His dark eyes were bloodshot from the smoke and the strain. 'I think that covers all points for discussion, unless there is anything new?" They shook their heads.

"As usual Comrade Machado will leave first,' said Joe Cicero. It was an elementaxy rule of procedure that they should never be seen in public in each other's company.

Ramsey left the consulate by the entrance to the visa section, the busiest part of the building where he would be less noticeable in the crowd of students and others applying for travel documents to the Soviet Union.

There was a bus-stop directly outside the walled consulate. He took a number 88 bus but left it at the next stop and hurried through the Lancaster Gate entrance to Kensington Gardens. He lingered in the rose garden until he was certain he was not being followed, and then crossed the park.

His flat was in a narrow side-street off Kensington High Street. It had been rented specifically for the Red Rose operation and, although it contained only a single bedroom, the living-room was spacious and the locality was fashionable.

During the two weeks that he had been in residence, Ramsey had managed to create an air of permanence. His personal chests had come from Cuba in the diplomatic bag. They had contained the few good pictures his father had left him and other small items of furnishing, including family photographs in silver frames of his parents and the family castle and estates in Andalusia when these had been in their heyday. The glassware and porcelain were incomplete sets, but they bore the Machado coat of arms: the stag and the boar rampant on either side of the quartered shield. His golf-clubs were displayed casually in the corner of the tiny entrance-hall, the plain leather Herm~s bag well used, the discreetly embossed coat of arms almost obscured by wear. From what he had learnt about Red Rose, he knew that she would have an eye for such detail.

He glanced at the venerable gold Cartier, another family heirloom, that felt unfamiliar on his wrist. He would have to hurry. His growth of beard was heavy and dark. He shaved it off quickly but carefully and then showered and washed the stink of Joe Cicero's Turkish cigarettes out of his hair.

He checked himself automatically in the mirror as he went thfough to the bedroom. He had been in peak physical condition when he had returned from Russia three weeks previously. The refresher course for senior officers at the KGB training college on the shores of the Black Sea had honed his body and, although he had managed to take little physical exercise since then, the lack was not yet apparent. His body was still sleek and hard, his belly flat and his body hair crisp and curly black. The scrutiny he directed at his image was completely without vanity. Face and body were simply implements, tools to be used to accomplish the tasks that he was set. He had no illusions about the fleeting nature of his physical attributes, but he worked to prolong it in the same way that a warrior cared for his weapons.

"Gym tomorrow,' he promised himself. Ramsey had the use of a martial arts studio in Bloomsbury run by a Hungarian refugee. Two hours of hard work a couple of times a week would maintain him in fit condition for the Red Rose operation.

His riding-breeches were cavalry whipcord, and he wore a sage-coloured Trevira woollen shirt with a green tie under his tweed hacking-jacket. His riding-boots fitted him like a second skin, with a supple gloss of dubbined leather that flexed into perfect creases over his ankles as he moved. No amount of craftsmanship or money, only years of loving attention, could achieve that effect.

He knew that Red Rose was a horsewoman; in her world horses were a major part of existence. She would recognize those boots as a badge of membership of the same exclusive and e1ite group to which she belonged.

He checked his watch again; he had timed it nicely.

He locked the flat and went down into the street. The rain-clouds that had threatened earlier in the afternoon had dispersed, and it had turned into a glorious summer evening. Even the elements seemed to conspire to assist him.

The riding-stables were in a narrow mews behind the Guards barracks. The stable-manager recognized him. As Ramsey signed the register he ran his eye down the immediately preceding entries, and saw that his good fortune was persisting. Red Rose had signed for her mount twenty minutes previously.

He went down to the stalls, and the groom had the saddle on his mount. She was a bay filly that Ramsey had chosen with care and for which he had paid five hundred pounds from his expense budget. However, she had been a bargain, and he knew that he would recoup the cost and probably make some profit whenever he chose to sell her on. He checked the girth and harness, speaking softly to the filly, soothing her with hands and voice, and then thanked the groom with a nod and went up into the saddle.

On an evening like this there were fifty or so other riders out in Rotten Row. Ramsey walked the filly under the oaks, while groups of horsemen cantered past him in both directions. The girl was not amongst them.

As soon as she had warmed a little, he pressed the filly with his toes and she moved up into a trot. She had an elegant action, and he rode her like a centaur, his superior horsemanship obvious even in that expert company.

They made a striking pair, and more than a few of the women they passed turned in the saddle to look back after them.

At the Park Lane end of the Row, Ramsey turned and moved the filly up into an easy canter; galloping was forbidden. A hundred yards ahead, a group of four riders were coming towards him, two couples, young people well mounted and turned out, but the girl stood out amongst them like a sunbird in a flock of sparrows.

From under her riding-hat her hair undulated like the wing of a bird in flight, and glistened in the buttery sunshine. When she laughed her teeth were very white, and her colour was vivid from the exercise and the wind in her face.

Ramsey recognized the man riding beside her. He had been her companion on most occasions that he had observed Red Rose over the previous two weeks.

Ramsey had requested information on him from records. He was the second son of an extremely wealthy family of brewers, an effete upper-class playboy of the type known in London society as a 'Deb's Delight' or "Hooray Henry', and he had been with her at the Rolling Stones concert four days ago. Since then Red Rose had spent two evenings in his company, party-hopping around Knightsbridge and Chelsea. Ramsey had noticed that she treated him with a type of amused condescension, as though he were an over-affectionate St. Bernard puppy, and that on no occasion that he had followed them had she been alone in his c. ompany except when he drove her in his MG from one party to the next. Ramsey was almost certain that they were not sleeping with each other, which was unusual in this summer of 1969 when sexual licence was a raging epidemic.

He knew also that Isabella Courtney was not a simpering virgin. In the three years that she had been living at Highveld, it was documented that she had indulged in at least three explosive, if short-lived, liaisons.

As the gap between them closed, Ramsey transferred his attention to the horse under him and leant forward to pat her neck. 'There, my darling." He spoke to her in Spanish, while from the corner of his eye he was watching the girl. It was a trick that he had of deflecting his gaze so that he seemed not to be looking while he missed not the smallest detail.

They were almost past each other when he saw the girl's chin snap up and her eyes fly wide open, but he ignored her and rode on.

"Ramedp Her cry was high and imperative. 'Wait!" He checked the filly, and glanced back with a little frown of annoyance.

She had wheeled her own mount and was riding after him, and he let his expression remain reserved and slightly frosty as though he resented her scraping acquaintance.

She drew up beside him, reining her horse down to a walk. 'Don't you remember me? Isabella Courtney. You were my saviour.' Her smile was uncertain and awkward. Men always recognized her, no matter how fleeting or distant their last meeting. 'At the concert in the park,' she ended lamely.

"Ahp Ramsey allowed his smile to bloom at last. 'The motorcycle mascot.

Forgive me. You were dressed rather differently then." 'You didn't wait for me to thank you,' she accused him. She suppressed the urge to laugh out loud with relief that he had recognized her at last.

"No thanks were necessary. Besides which you had rather urgent business elsewhere, as I recall."

"Are you on your own?' She changed the subject quickly. 'Why don't you join us? Let me introduce you to my friends." 'Oh, I don't want to impose myself." 'Please,' she insisted. 'You'll enjoy them; they are good fun.' And Ramsey bowed slightly in the saddle.

"How can I refuse such a kind invitation from such a lovely lady?' he agreed, and Isabella felt as though her chest was in a vice. She had difficulty breathing as she looked into those green eyes in the face of a dark angel.

The other three had reined in and were waiting for them. Even before she came up to him, she saw that Roger was already sulking, and it gave her a vindictive little pleasure to say: 'Roger, may I introduce the Marques de Santiago y Machado? Ramsey, this is Roger Coates-Grainger." She noticed Ramsey glance at her quizzically and only then realized that she had made a gaffe by using his title; he had not mentioned it at their first meeting.

However, her momentary discomfort was forgotten when she introduced Ramsey to Harriet Beauchamp and saw how Harriet reacted to him. She actually licked her lips like the cat in the television advertisement for pet food.

Harriet was Isabella's best friend in London, more out of symbiotic consideration than out of genuine mutual affection. Lady Harriet was Isabella's entrance-ticket to the inner circles of London society. As the daughter of a belted earl, she was welcome where Isabella despite her looks and family wealth would have been considered a nouveau riche interloper with a funny accent. Harriet on the other hand had found that wherever Isabella Courtney was there swiftly assembled a superabundance of males.

Beneath Harriet's plump, bland and colourless blonde exterior flourished a ravenously amorous nature, and Isabella was happy to pass on her rejects to her.

Usually the arrangement worked perfectly, but Ramsey was definitely no reject, not yet anyway, and smoothly Isabella interposed her horse between them and flashed a silent warning at Harriet. Harriet was enormously flattered.

She knew that she could never aspire to become Isabella's rival, but it was gratifying to be treated like one.

"Marquds?' Ramsey murmured as they rode on. 'You know considerably more about me than I do about you." 'Oh, I must have seen your photo in one of the slosh columns,' Isabella suggested airily as she thought: God, don't let him think I have been that interested.

"Ah, the Tatler of course...' Ramsey nodded. His photograph had never appeared anywhere, except possibly in the files of the CIA and a few other intelligence agencies around the world.

"Yes, the Tatler, that's it.' Gratefully Isabella jumped at the escape he offered her, and then set herself out to captivate him, without making her interest too obvious or oppressive. It was easier than she had anticipated.

Ramsey had a relaxed charm, a savoir-faire that fitted in with their group.

Soon all of them, except Roger who was still sulking monumentally, were chatting and laughing together as though they were old chums.

As the dusk gathered and they turned back towards the stables, Isabella kneed her mount closer to Harriet's and hissed at her: 'Invite him to the party tonightv 'Who?' Harriet opened her vacuous pansy eyes in feigned incomprehension.

"You know damned well who, you randy little witch. You've been rolling your eyes and ovaries at him for the last hourv Lady Harriet Beauchamp had the run of the family house in Belgravia during the week when her parents were in the country. She put together some of the best bashes in town.

Tonight most of the cast of Hair, the current musical hit, pitched up after the show. They were still in costume and stage make-up, and the four-piece Jamaican band that Harriet had hired burst into a calypso version of 'Aquarius' to welcome them.

It bode fair to becoming one of Harriet's more memorable parties. It was so crowded that those couples with serious business in mind took up to twenty minutes to get from the ballroom up the staircase to the bedrooms; even there they were forced to wait their turn. Isabella wondered sourly what Harriet's papa, the tenth Earl, would think if he knew of the flow of traffic through his four-poster bed.

In the midst of all the gaiety and laughter, Isabella was determinedly insular. She had found a perch halfway up the sweeping marble staircase from which she could keep an eye on all arrivals at the front door, as well as on the action in the ballroom and the front drawing-room into which the dancing had overflowed.

She steadfastly refused to dance herself, despite an incessant string of invitations to do so. She had been so icily dismissive of Roger Coates-Grainger's ponderous attention and callow humour that, discouraged, he had wandered away to the champagne-bar on the terrace. By now he was probably pissed out of his gourd, she thought with gloomy relish.

Such was the success of the evening that none of the guests could tear themselves away to move on to any other venue. All the traffic through the teak double front doors from the square was one-way, and the noise and crush increased with every passing minute.

Another group arrived squealing and shouting tipsy greetings, and Isabella felt a fleeting lift of her spirits as she saw amongst them a head of dark wavy hair, but almost immediately she realized that the man was too short, and when he turned so she could see his face, he was sallow and jowly. She actively hated him, whoever he was.

As a kind of masochistic penance she had made her single glass of champagne last all evening, and now the wine was flat and warm from her fingers on the stem. She looked around to find Roger and send him for another glass but saw that he was dancing with a tall thin girl with false eyelashes and a high penetrating giggle that carried even to where Isabella sat.

God, she's awful, Isabella thought. And Roger looks such a ponce, slobbering all over her like that.

She glanced at the ormolu and porcelain French clock above the door to the drawing-room. The time was twenty minutes to one, and she sighed.

At half-past noon today, Daddy was having an important lunch for a group of influential Conservative Members of Parliament and their wives. As usual Isabella was to be hostess. She should get some sleep to be at her best, but still she lingered.

Where the hell is he? she thought bitterly. He promised he'd come, damn him. (Actually, he had said that he would try to drop in later.) But we were getting on so well, it was as good as a promise.

She dismissed another invitation to dance without even looking up, and tasted the champagne. It was awful.

"I'm not going to wait a minute after one o'clock,' she promised herself firmly. 'And that is absolutely final." Then abruptly her pulse checked and then raced away again. In her ears the music took on a sweeter, more cheerful note, the oppressive crowds and the noise seemed to recede, her dark mood evaporated miraculously, and she was borne up on a wave of excitement and wild anticipation.

There he was, standing in the front doorway. He was so tall that he towered half a head above those around him. A single lock of hair had fallen like a question-mark on to his forehead, and his expression was remote, almost contemptuous.

She wanted to shout his name. 'Ramsey, here I amv But she restrained herself, and set aside her glass without looking. It toppled over, and the girl on the step below her exclaimed as lukewarm champagne cascaded down her bare back. Isabella did not even hear her protest. She came to her feet in one fluid movement, and instantly, Rarnen's cool green gaze was on her.

They looked at each other over the heads of the swirling, gyrating dancers, and it was as though the two of them were completely alone. Neither of them smiled. It seemed to Isabella that this was a solemn moment. He had come, and in some vague way she sensed the significance of what was happening. She was certain that in that instant her life had changed. Nothing would ever be the same again.

She began to descend, and she did not stumble over the sprawling, embracing couples that clogged the staircase. They seemed to open before her, and her feet found their own way between them.

She was watching Ramsey. He had not moved to meet her. He stood very still in the giddy throng. His stillness reminded her of one of the great predatory African cats, and she felt a tiny thrill of fear, an exhilaration of the blood as she went down to him.

When she stood before him, neither of them spoke, and after a moment she lifted her tanned bare arms towards him and as he took her to his chest she wound her arms around his neck. They danced, and she found every movement of his body transmitted to her own like a current of electricity.

The music was superfluous; they moved to a rhythm of their own. As she flattened her breasts against the hard rubbery muscle of his chest, she could feel his heart beating, and her own nipples swelled and hardened. She knew he could feel them pressing into him, for the beat of his heart quickened and the colour of green darkened in his eyes as she stared up into them.

She arched her back, a slow voluptuous movement that made the ridges of hard muscle stand proud along each side of her spine. His fingertips traced them down, moving lightly over the crests of her spine as though he were playing a musical instrument. She shivered under his touch, and pressed her hips forward instinctively, welding them against his, and she felt his flesh harden and swell just as hers had done.

For her he was a great tree and she was the vine that entwined it, he was a rock and she the current of a tropical ocean that washed about it, he was a mountain peak and she was the cloud that softly enfolded it. Her body was light and free, she seemed to float in his arms, and that was all of reality. They were alone in the universe, and transported far beyond all the natural laws of space and time; even gravity was suspended, and her feet no longer made contact with the earth.

He moved her towards the door, and she saw Roger mouthing something at her across the room. The tall girl was gone, and he was flushed with outrage, but she left him caught helplessly in the press of bodies like a fish in a net.

They went down the front steps, and she took the key of the Mini-Cooper from her sequinned evening bag and pressed it into Ramsey's hand.

He drove very fast through the deserted streets, and she leant as close to him as the bucket seats would allow and watched his face with such a fierce concentration that she did not see or care where he was taking her. She did not think she could endure another moment without touching him, without feeling his hands on her body again. She found that she was shivering once more.

Then, abruptly, he pulled into the kerb and parked the Mini. He came round to her side with long strides, and she knew his need was almost as great as her own. She clung to his arm, and she could not feel the ground beneath her feet as they crossed the pavement and went to the entrance of the red-brick house in a row of similar buildings. He led her up the stairs to the second floor.

As soon as he closed the door of the flat he turned to her, and for the first time she felt his mouth on hers. His face was as rough as shark-skin with new beard, but his lips were soft and hot, and sweet as ripe fruit, and his tongue was like a live thing deep in her mouth.

She felt something burst within her, and all reason and restraint were washed away on the flood. There was a sound in her ears like a gale-force wind over a turbulent sea, and a madness descended on her.

She twisted out of his embrace and tore at her own clothing in a frenzy of impatience, letting it fall around her feet on the polished wooden floor of the small hallway. He i stripped his own clothing as swiftly, facing her, and she stared hungrily as every exquisite detail of his body was revealed.

She had never dreamt that a man's body could be so beautiful. Where other men were gross and hairy, inflamed and knotted with veins, he. was smooth and perfect. She felt that she could stare at him forever, but at the same time she knew that if she did not instantly feel him against her she would scream aloud with frustration, and she flung herself naked against his naked chest.

She pressed hard to him, and his body was firm and sleek and hot. Yet the hair on his chest was unbearably harsh against the sensitive engorged tips of her breasts. She moaned and covered his lips with hers to prevent herself screaming out her desperate need.

He picked her up, and she felt herself weightless in his arms, and he carried her to the bed without breaking the clinging suction of their mouths, one upon the other.

As she came awake, Isabella was aware of an overwhelming sense of well-being. She felt as though she might burst with joy. Her body tingled as though every separate muscle and nerve had a life of its own.

For long moments, she could not understand what had happened to her. She lay with her eyes closed, clinging to the moment. She knew that such a magical sensation must be evanescent, but she did not want it ever to end.

Then slowly she was aware of the man musk in her nostrils and the taste of his mouth that still lingered on her tongue. She felt the ache where he had been deep in her body and the heat of the pink rash that his beard had raised on the sensitive skin around her lips. She savoured it all, small pain transmuted into deep and fulfilling pleasure.

Then, with a sense of fresh wonder, the thought imploded into her consciousness: I'm in love! And she came fully awake. Her joy was almost delirious.

She sat up quickly, and the sheet dropped to her waist. 'Ramsey,' she said, and the indentation of his head was impressed upon the pillow beside hers.

A single strand of dark body hair was coiled like a watch-spring on the white sheet. She reached for it and discovered that the sheet was cool, the heat of his body long since dissipated, and she felt her joy sink into despair.

"Ramsey.' She slipped from the bed and padded on bare feet to the bathroom.

he door was ajar, and the bathroom was empty. Once again he had gone, and she stood naked in the middle of the floor and looked around her with dismay.

He was like a cat. His stealth was eerie, and a rash of tiny goose-pimples arose around her nipples. She hugged herself and shivered.

Then she saw the note on the bedside table. It was a single sheet of expensive cream-coloured paper embossed with his family crest. He had weighted it down with her key-ring, the keys to her Mini. She snatched it up eagerly. There was no salutation.

You are an extraordinary woman, and yet when you sleep you look like a child, a beautiful innocent child. I could not bear to wake you. I could hardly bear to leave you, but I must.

If you can come to MAlaga with me for the weekend, meet me here at nine tomorrow morning. You will need your passport, but do not bother with pyjamas.

Ramsey She chuckled with delight and relief, all the lightness -of her waking mood recaptured. She reread the note; the paper was smooth and cool as marble and had a sensuous feel under her fingertips. His skin had been as smooth, and her eyes turned dreamy and reflective as tiny disjointed episodes from the night replayed in her mind.

He had been far beyond all her previous experience. With the others, even the most skilled and patient and perceptive of them, she had always been aware of their separate bodies, their divergent existences, of the deliberate attempts to please and to reciprocate. With Ramsey, there 48 had been no division. It was almost as though he had taken over her mind as well as her body. They had blended into each other in some semidivine osmotic process; their flesh and their minds had become one.

So many times during the night, she had believed that they had reached the pinnacle together, only to discover that they were still upon the foothills and before them towered an alp and then another and another. Each higher and more magnificent than the last. There had been no end to it, only at last the oblivion of sleep so deep that it had been like dying, and a resurrection into this new charmed and joyous existence.

"I'm in love,' she whispered in almost religious awe, and she looked down on her own body, amazed that such a frail vessel could contain so much happiness, such abundant emotion.

Then she noticed"her wristwatch lying beside her car keys on the bedside table.

"Oh my Godv she breathed. It was half-past ten. 'Daddy's lunch!' And she leapt to her feet and flew to the bathroom. On the washbasin, Ramsey had placed a brand-new toothbrush still in its sealed plastic container for her, and this small kindness touched her out of all proportion.

She hummed the lyric of 'Faraway Places' through a mouthful of foaming toothpaste.

She decided there was just time for a quick bath, and she lay in the hot water and thought about Ramsey and found there was a great void in her body aching for him to fill it.

"Enough of that, girl,' she laughed at herself. 'With a wave of his magic wand, he has transformed you into a shameless little raver." She jumped out of the bath and reached for the towel. It was still damp from his body, and she pressed a fold of it over her mouth and nose, and inhaled the faint but distinctive aroma of his skin. It excited her all over again.

"Stop itv she commanded herself in the steamy mirror. 'You have to be at Trafalgar Square in an hour."

She was just about to let herself out of the flat when she exclaimed again, and darted back into the bathroom. She rummaged in her sequinned handbag for the Ovanon pills in their calendar-marked pack and broke one out of its sealed compartment.

She placed the tiny white capsule on her tongue while she ran half a tooth-mug of water from the tap and then saluted her image in the mirror with the raised glass.

"To life, love and freedom,' she said, 'and to many happy returns.' And washed down the pill.

Blood sports did not revolt Isabella Courtney. Her father had always been a hunter, and the walls of Weltevreden, their home at the Cape of Good Hope, were decorated with trophies of the chase. Amongst the family assets was a safari company that owned a huge hunting concession in the Zambezi valley.

Only the previous year she had spent an idyllic fortnight in that enchanted wilderness with her elder brother, Sean Courtney, who was a licensed professional hunter and ran the outfit for Courtney Enterprises. On a number of occasions Isabella herself had ridden to hounds at Harriet Beauchamp's invitation. Isabella was a passable shot with the lovely little gold-engraved Holland & Holland 20-PUge shotgun that her father had givenher for her seventeenth birthday. With it she had shot snipe in the Okavango Delta, sand grouse in the Karoo, duck and geese on the great Zambezi, grouse on the highland moors, and pheasant, woodcock and partridge on some of the great English estates to which she and the ambassador had been invited.

She felt no offence at the sight of blood deliberately spilled, and in addition she had inherited her fair share of the family's gambling instinct, so the contest intrigued her.

This was the second day, and the original field of nearly three hundred contestants had been whittled down to two, for it was a 'one miss and out' and a 'winner take all' competition. The entrance fee was one thousand US dollars 5a head, so there was well over a quarter of a million in the pot, and the tension was as hot and thick as minestrone soup as the American went to the plate.

He and Ramsey Machado were the only two remaining contestants and they had shot level for the last twenty-three rounds. Finally, to break the deadlock and decide the winner, the Spanish judges had decreed that double birds must be taken from now on.

The American was a full-time professional. He followed the circuit in Spain and Portugal and Mexico and South America, and until last year in Monaco.

Now, however, the tournaments had been banned in that tiny principality, after a mortally wounded pigeon had escaped from the stadium and winged its way over the palace walls to crash at last on to Princess Grace's tea-table, spraying the lace table-cloth and the ladies'tea-gowns with its blood. Prince Rainier had heard the screams halfway across his tiny realm, and that was the end of live pigeon tournaments in Monaco.

The American was Isabella's age, not yet twenty-five years old, but his income was reputed to be well over a hundred thousand dollars a year. He was shooting a 12-gauge 'side by side' that had been made by that legendary gunsmith James Manton almost a century ago. Of course, the weapon had been rebarrelled and proofed to accommodate the longer modern cartridges and smokeless powders. However, the stock and action, complete with the engraved hammers, were original and retained the marvelous balance and pointability that old man James had built into it.

The young American took his stance on the plate, cocked the hammers, tucked the butt-stock under his right armpit, and pointed the double muzzles just over the centre of the semicircle of five woven wicker baskets that were placed thirty yards from where he stood.

Each basket contained a live pigeon. They were the feral birds of the type that live in flocks in the centre of most large cities. Big robust birds of variegated colours, bronze and blue and iridescent green, some of them with dark bands around their necks or patches of white in their wings. To ensure a supply of birds, the shooting club had built a feeding-shed on the premises, a structure containing trays that were replenished daily with crushed maize and enclosed by drop-sides that could be released by remote control and trap the feeding birds within. Often a pigeon that escaped untouched from the killing-ground would head straight back for the feeding-shed. Many birds had been shot at numerous times before, and these were wily creatures who had learnt subtle little tricks to disturb the aim of the marksmen. In addition the bird-handlers who loaded them into the baskets knew how to pluck a feather or two from wing or tail to make them fly an erratic unpredictable course.

The baskets were operated by a random mechanism, with a delay of up to five seconds after the shooter had called'Pull'for the release of a bird. Five seconds, for a man with sweaty palms, a racing heart and tens of thousands of dollars at stake, could seem like all eternity.

The baskets were thirty yards out, and the effective range of a 12-gauge shotgun was generally reckoned to be forty yards. Thus, the birds were released at almost extreme range, and in addition the retaining circle was a mere ten yards beyond the line of baskets.

The retaining circle was a low wooden wall, only eight inches high, painted white, which demarcated the boundary of the killing-ground. To qualify as a hit the carcass of the bird, or, in the event of the blast of pellets tearing a bird into more than one piece, the largest portion of the carcass, calculated by weight, had to fall inside the low wooden wall. In this way, the shooter had to kill his bird as it rose from the release-basket within the ten yards before it passed over the periphery of the killing-ground.

The baskets were fanned out over a semicircle of forty-five degrees in front of him, there was no indication as to which lid would fly open at the command 'Pull' and no way to predict which direction the bird would take once it was released. It could cross either left or right, bear directly away, or sometimes - the most disconcerting of all - race straight towards the gunner's face.

Added to all this, the pigeons were fast noisy fliers, that could jink and swerve in full flight, and now the judges had decided that instead of a single bird two pigeons would be released simultaneously.

The American braced himself at the plate, crouching a little, left foot leading slightly like a boxer, and Isabella reached for Ramsey's hand and squeezed it lightly. They sat in the front bottom row of the covered grandstand in the padded leather chairs reserved for contestants and club officials.

"Pull!' said the American, and his Texan twang rang in the silence like a hammer on a steel anvil.

"Miss.!' whispered Isabella. 'Please miss!" For a second and then another second, nothing happened. Then, with a crash, the lids of two of the baskets snapped open, numbers two and five, half left and full right from where the American stood, and both birds, hit by compressed-air jets from nozzles in the bottom of the baskets, launched into instant flight.

Number two went straight out, keeping low and going very fast. The American swung smoothly on to him, mounting the shotgun to his shoulder, and as it touched he fired. Five yards out from the basket, the silhouette of the pigeon was distorted by the rush of pellets. Its wingbeats froze in mid-stroke, and it died instantaneously in the air, and fen in a puff of feathers to hit well inside the ring and lie without further movement on the bright green turf.

The American swung on to the second bird. It had broken away towards his right, a glistening streak of burnished bronze, but at the sound of the first shot it jinked back inside the American's swing so swiftly that he could not correct his aim in time. The shot was left of centre, but only inches out. Instead of slicing into heart and brain, the blast of pellets from the fully choked barrel tore away the bird's right wing, and the horribly maimed creature tumbled and fluttered, streaming a trail of feathers through the air.

It struck only a foot inside the low white wooden wall, and a sigh went up from the watchers in the grandstand. Then, incredibly, the bird, one wing gone, pumped frantically with its remaining wing and found its feet. It tottered towards the wall, beating at the air ineffectually with one wing, uttering an agonized cawing sound in its puffed-out throat.

The spectators gasped and rose to their feet as one, and in the centre the American froze with the empty shotgun still mounted to his shoulder. He was allowed only two cartridges. If he reloaded now and killed the bird with a third shot, he would be instantly disqualified and would forfeit the prize money.

The pigeon reached the barricade and leapt weakly at it. It struck the wood with its chest only an inch from the top and fell back, leaving a splash of brilliant ruby blood on the white paint.

Half the spectators screamed, 'Diev while those who had bet against the American screamed: 'Go! Go for it, bird!" The pigeon gathered itself groggily, and leapt once more. at the barrier.

This time, it reached the top and balanced there uncertainly, swaying back and forth.

Isabella was on her feet howling wildly with the others. 'Jumpp she pleaded. 'Don't - oh, please don't die, pigeon! Get over, please!" Suddenly the dying bird stiffened into a convulsive rigor, its neck arched backwards and it flopped from the wall and lay still and dead on the green lawn.

"Thank youp Isabella breathed, and dropped back into the seat.

The pigeon had fallen forward and died outside the circle, and the loudspeakers above their heads boomed out the verdict in the Spanish phrases that Isabella had come to understand so well in the past two days.

"One kill. One miss." 'My heart won't stand the strain.' Isabella clutched her bosom in a theatrical gesture, and Ramsey smiled at her with those cool green eyes.

"Look at youp she cried.-'The onigmial ice man. Don't you even feel a thing?" 'Not outside your bed,' he murmured, and before she could find a suitable reply the loudspeakers interrupted her.

"Next gun up! Number one hundred and ten!" Ramsey stood up, and while he adjusted the protectors over his ears his expression was still cold and remote. He had taught Isabella not to wish him luck, so she said nothing more as he moved to the long rack at the gate on which his was the only weapon still standing. He took it down, and broke it open and placed it over the crook of his arm and walked out into the bright Iberian sunshine.

To Isabella he looked so beautiful and romantic. The sunlight sparkled in his hair, and the sleeveless shootingvest with suede leather shoulder-patches was tailored to his lean torso, fitting so smoothly that the butt of the shotgun could not catch on a fold or tuck of cloth as he swung it up to mount.

At the plate, he loaded the 'under an dover' barrels of the Perazzi 12-gauge and snapped the breeches closed. Only then he glanced back over his shoulder at Isabella as he had done every time he had shot over the past two days. She had anticipated it, and now she held up both hands, clutching her own thumbs hard, and showed him her clenched fists.

Ramsey turned back, and his whole body went still. Once again he reminded her of an African cat, that peculiar stillness of the wild leopard as it fixed on its prey. He did not crouch as the American had done, but stood tall and lean and graceful, and said softly, 'Pull!" Both birds bounded from the open baskets on wildly clattering wings, and Ramsey mounted the gun with such elegant economy of movement that he seemed casual and unhurried.

When he had been in Mexico with his cousin Fidel Castro he had provided much of the funds of the embryo army of liberation's war-chest with his shotgun in the live pigeon rings of Guadalajara. So he also was a professional with the marvelous eye and reflexes needed for the job.

The first bird was going obliquely out, speeding on shining green wings for the wall, and he had to drop that one first. He took it cleanly with a charge of number six shot from the fully choked bottom barrel, and it exploded in a puff of feathers like a burst pillow.

He turned for the other bird, pirouetting like a dancer. This pigeon was a veteran; it had been shot at a dozen times before, and it kept low at basket-level. The handler had plucked its tail unevenly, and although it was going at sixty miles an hour it slid to one side and wobbled in flight.

Instead of going for the wall, it came straight at Ramsey's head, reducing the range to less than ten feet and, in doing so, making the shot many times more difficult. As it flashed towards his eyes, he had only a hundredth part of a second to react, and the extreme shortness of range would not give the charge of shot an opportunity to spread. It was as though he were firing a single ball, and an error of a mere fraction of a minute of angle would mean a miss.

He hit the pigeon squarely in the head with the full charge at point-blank range, and the bird disintegrated. Its body was blown away in a flurry of bloodied feathers, and only the two separate wings remained intact. They spiralled down and fell at Ramsey's feet.

Isabella screamed wildly and came to her feet; then, with a single bound, she vaulted the barrier. Although the range-master called sternly to her in unintelligible Spanish, she flouted range discipline and ran out on long denim-clad legs to throw her arms around Ramsey's neck.

The crowd was already excited and volatile from the tensions of the contest. Now they laughed and applauded as Ramsey and Isabella embraced in the centre of the stadium. They made a splendid couple, almost impossibly handsome, both tall and athletic, shining with health and youthful vigour, and that spontaneous display of affection touched a chord in those that watched them.

They drove into the city in the Mercedes that Isabella had hired at the airport. Ramsey opened an account at the Banco de Espaha in the main square and deposited the winner's cheque into it.

In a strange fashion, they shared a common attitude to money. Isabella seemed never even to consider price or value. Ramsey had noticed that if a frock or a trinket took her fancy she never even bothered to ask the price.

She merely flipped one of her vast collection of plastic credit cards on to the counter, then signed the slip and crumpled her copy into her handbag without as much as glancing at it. When she emptied her handbag in the hotel room, she screwed the accumulated receipts into a ball and, still without reading them, tossed them disdainfully into the waste-basket or dropped them into the nearest ashtray for the chambermaid to dispose of.

As a convenience, she also carried a fist-sized wad of banknotes, crammed into her large leather shoulder-bag. However, it was obvious that she had not concerned herself with the rate of exchange of sterling into Spanish pesetas. To pay for a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, she selected a banknote whose size and colour she deemed appropriate to the occasion and dropped it on to the table, often leaving a waiter staring after her in speechless astonishment.

Ramsey had a similiar contempt for money. At one level he abhorred it as the symbol and the foundation of the capitalist system. He hated to be dictated to by the laws of economics and wealth which he had dedicated his entire life to tearing down. He felt besmirched and demeaned when he had to wheedle and haggle with Moscow for the cash with which to perform his duties. Yet very early on in his career he had become aware of the particular approbation that he earned from his superiors when he personally provided funds to finance his own operations.

In Mexico he had shot live pigeon. While he was at the University of Florida he had imported drugs from South America and sold them. on campus.

In France he had run weapons for the Algerians. In. Italy he had smuggled currency and had arranged and executed four lucrative kidnappings. All the profits of these operations had meticulously been accounted for to Havana and Moscow. Their approval was reflected in the rapid promotion he had enjoyed, and the fact that a man of his age had been selected to replace General Cicero as head of a full section of the fourth directorate.

It had been quite obvious to Ramsey from the outset that the paltry operating expenses that General Cicero had allocated for the Red Rose project were totally inadequate. He had been obliged to make up the shortfall as expeditiously as possible, and of course this little jaunt to Spain also provided an ideal opportunity to begin the second phase of the operation.

That evening, to celebrate Ramsey's win, they dined at a tiny seafood restaurant, jealously concealed from the tourist hordes in one of the back alleys where Isabella was the only foreigner amongst the dinner-guests. The meal was an exquisite paella cooked in the classical tradition and accompanied by a wine from one of the estates that had once belonged to Ramsey's family, and whose tiny production was never sold outside Spain. It was crisp and perfumed, and had a pale green luminosity in the candlelight.

"What happened to your family estates?' Isabella asked, after she had tasted and exclaimed over the wine.

"My father lost them all after Franco came to power.' Ramsey lowered his voice as he said it. 'He was an antifascist from the very beginning." And Isabella nodded with approval and understanding. Her own father had fought against the fascists, and she subscribed to the comfortable and fashionable belief of her generation in the essential goodness of all mankind and the fervent if rather hazy ideal of universal peace of which she was aware that fascism was the antithesis. She carried a'Ban the Bomb' button in her handbag, although it would have been crassly non-U to wear it actually pinned on her clothing.

"Tell me about your father and your family,' she invited him. She realized that, although she had been with him almost a week, she actually knew very little about him, apart from what the Spanish chargi had told her over the dinner-table.

She listened with fascination as Ramsey recounted a little of the family history. One of his ancestors had received the title after he had sailed with Columbus to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492, and Isabella was vastly impressed by the antiquity of his lineage.

"We go back as far as Great-Grandfather Sean Courtney,' she deprecated her own ancestry. 'And he died sometime in the nineteen twenties.' As she said it, she realized for the first time that if Ramsey was the father, then her own son might one day be able to boast of such distinguished blood-lines.

Until that moment, she had been content simply to be with Ramsey, but now, as she leant close to him and watched his eyes in the candlelight, the horizons of her ambitions widened. She wanted him as she had never wanted anything in her life before.

"And so you see, Bella, despite all of this, I am not a rich man." 'Oh, yes you are. I saw you pay over two hundred thousand dollars into your bank this afternoon,' she told him gaily. 'You can afford to buy me another bottle of wine, at the very least." 'If you didn't have to fly back to London tomorrow morning, I would have used some of that money to take you up to Granada. I could have accompanied you to the bullfight, and shown you my family castle in the Sierra Nevada..." 'But you have to go back to London as well,' she protested, 'don't you?" 'A few days - I could have managed a few days. Any sacrifice to be with you." 'You know, Ramsey, I don't even know what you do. How do you earn your crust?" "Merchant banking,' he shrugged dismissively. 'I work for a private bank and I am responsible for African affairs.

We arrange loans for developing companies in central and southern Africa." By now Isabella's mind was accelerating up to racing slieed. Ramsey's lack of fortune was fully compensated for by his august origins, and he was a banker. There would certainly be a place for a merchant banker in the top ranks of Courtney Enterprises. It was all beginning to look marvellously exciting.

"I would like more than anything in this world to see your castle, Ramsey darling,' she whispered huskily, and she thought: I wonder how much a castle would cost, and if I could talk Garry into it. Her brother Garry was the chairman and financial head of Courtney Enterprises. He was no more proof to Isabella's charms and wiles than any of the other male members of the family. Like most of the family, he was also a terrible snob. A marquesa needed a castle - he might just fall for it.

"What about your father?' Ramsey asked. 'I thought that you promised you'd be back on Monday." 'You leave my father to me,' she said firm-dy.

"Bella, this is the most ridiculous hour to wake an old man,' Shasa protested as he answered her telephone call. 'What time is it, in the name of all that's holy?" 'It's after six, and we have already been for a swim, and you are not old.

You are young and beautiful, the most beautiful man I know,'Isabella cooed over the international line.

"This sounds ominous,' Shasa murmured. 'The more extravagant the compliment, the more outrageous the request. What do you want, young lady?

What are you up to now?" 'You really are an awful old cynic, Pater," said Isabella, and traced patterns in Ramsey's chest hair with her forefinger., He sprawled naked beside her on the double bed; his body was still sticky, damp and salty from their dip in eo the Mediterranean. "I just rang you to tell you how much I love you." Shasa chuckled. 'What a dutiful little mouse. I certainly trained you well.' He lay back on the pillows and slipped his free arm around the shoulders of the woman who lay beside him. She sighed sleepily and wriggled closer to him, nuzzling against his chest.

"How is Harriet?' Shasa asked. Harriet Beauchamp had agreed to provide cover for Isabella's expedition to Spain.

"She's fine,' Isabella assured him. 'She's right here now. We have been having a wonderful time." 'Give her my love,' Shasa ordered.

"Oh, I will,' she agreed and, covering the mouthpiece, she leant over and kissed Ramsey full on the lips. 'She sends her love back to you, Papa, but she refuses to catch the London plane this morning." 'Ah!" said Shasa. 'Now we come to the true reason for all this filial consideration." 'It's not me, Daddy, it's Harriet. She wants to go up to Granada. There is a bullfight. She wants me to go with her.' Isabella let her voice trail into silence.

"You and I are flying to Paris on Wednesday. Had you forgotten that? I am addressing the Club Dimanche." 'Daddy, you speak so well; the French ladies adore you. I'm sure you don't really need me." Shasa did not reply. He knew that silence was the one sure way in which he could disconcert his wayward daughter. He covered the mouthpiece and asked the woman cuddled against him: 'Kitty, can you come to Paris on Wednesday?" She opened her eyes. 'You know I am leaving for the OAU conference in Ethiopia on Saturday." 'I'll have you back by then." She raised herself on one elbow and looked down at him thoughtfully. 'Get thou behind me, Satan." 'Daddy, are you still there?' Isabella's voice floated between them.

"So my own flesh and blood are determined to desert me, are they?" Shasa asked in his most injured tones. 'All by myself in the least romantic city in the world?" 'I can't let Harriet down,' Isabella explained. 'I'll make it up to you, I promise." 'You'd better, young lady,' Shasa warned her. 'I shall, remind you of your indebtedness at a future date." 'Granada will probably be deadly dull - and I'll miss you awfully, dear Papa,' said Isabella contritely, and traced her forefinger down Ramsey's body, past his navel and into the thick bush of hair below it; she twirled a dark curl around her fingertip.

"And I will be desolated without you, Bella,' Shasa agreed, and dropped the handset of the telephone on to its cradle and pushed Kitty back gently on to the pillows.

"I said get thou behind me, Satan,' she protested huskily. 'Not get thou on top of me."

Isabella drove as fast and as well as any man he had known. Ramsey lay back in the leather bucket seat of the hired Mercedes and studied her openly. She basked in his attention and every few minutes, when a straight section of road allowed it, she glanced sideways at him or reached across to touch his hand or his thigh.

Unlike many of the assignments that he had been given over the years, Ramsey did not find it difficult to act out his part with this woman. He sensed a strength in her, an untapped reservoir of courage and determination that intrigued him.

He recognized that she was as yet unfulfilled and restless, dissatisfied with and rebellious against her easy undemanding existence, ripe for excitement and challenge, searching for something, some cause to which to dedicate herself.

Physically she was immensely attractive, and he had no difficulty faking that tender concern towards her that was the hallmark of the accomplished lover. When he looked at her like this, it was a deliberate device. He knew the appeal of his gaze, that cold green contemplation like the stare of the serpent that mesmerizes a wild bird, and yet he enjoyed looking at her as at an exquisite work of art. Although he knew from her file that she had been with other men, he had learnt in these last few days that the core of her being was still untouched and there was a strange virginal quality about her that aroused him.

As with so many legendary male lovers, Ramsey experienced that condition known as satyriasis. The name derived from those woodland godlings of Roman mythology which were half-man and half-goat and whose sexual appetite was insatiable. Although Ramsey Machado was quite abnormally responsive to any woman, whether she was attractive to him or otherwise, yet it was unusual for him to be able to achieve orgasm. He was in most cases simply indefatigable, able to outlast a partner with even the most tardy libido and to drive a normal woman on and on until she at last screamed for mercy.

Then he was able to continue at the very first indication that she wished to do so, and he was so sensitively attuned to feminine sexuality that he would usually recognize that indication before she did herself.

However, this woman was one of those rare creatures who was able to bring him on without too much difficulty. With her he had already achieved true orgasm a number of times and he knew he would again. It was, of course, essential to his plans that he did so.

Driving up from the coast on that sultry summer's day, Isabella was as happy and exhilarated as she had ever been. She was in love. Now there was not the least shadow of doubt in her mind that this was the grand passion of her life. There had never been, and there could not conceivably be again, anyone to match him. She would never experience any emotion to exceed what she felt for him now. His presence beside her and those green eyes upon her made the sunlight brighter and the high dry air of the Sierra taste sweeter on her lips.

The wide plains and the mountains beyond were so like her own beloved land.

They transported her back to the open horizons of the great Karoo, for there were the same lion-coloured earth and sepia rockscapes. Looking upon them, her mood was carried upwards even higher and she laughed aloud with joy and had to strive hard to prevent herself crying out: 'Oh, Ramsey my darling, I love you. I love you with all my heart and with all my soul for ever." Even in her giddy exhilaration, she was determined that he must say it first. That way she could be doubly certain that what she already knew was true - that he loved her as much as she loved him.

Ramsey knew these mountains and he directed her over dusty back-roads to vistas of grandeur and beauty hidden far from the usual tourist routes.

They stopped in one of the little villages, and he joked with the locals in their patois. He came away with a slab of the pink serrano ham cured in the snow, a loaf of rough peasant bread and a goatskin full of the sweet dark Malaga wine.

Beyond the village, they left the Mercedes parked beside an ancient stone bridge and followed the stream up through the olive groves into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

While a bearded billy-goat watched them in astonishment from the cliff above, they plunged naked into a secret pool of the river. Then, st ' ill naked, they ate their picnic lunch seated on the smooth black rocks above the water.

Ramsey demonstrated how to hold the wine-skin at arm's length and direct a hissing jet into the back of his open mouth. When she tried, the wine spurted over her cheeks and dribbled from her chin, and at her request he licked the ruby droplets from her face and from her taut white bosom. This was such fun that they forgot about the rest of their lunch and made love, Isabella still perched on her rock and Ramsey standing knee-deep in the pool facing her.

"You are incredible,' she whispered. 'My legs are jelly. You'll probably have to carry me back to the car." They spent so much of the afternoon beside the pool that the sun was on the tops of the mountains, turning the snows to incandescent gold, when they came in sight of the castle.

It was not as large or as grand as Isabella had expected it to be. It was simply a gaunt dark building high on the slopes above the higgledy-piggledy pink-tiled roofs of the village. As they approached, Isabella saw that part of the parapet had collapsed and that the grounds were overgrown and neglected.

"Who does it belong to now?' she asked.

"The State.' Ramsey shrugged. 'There was talk some years ago of turning it into a tourist hotel, but nothing came of it." The caretaker was an old man who remembered Ramsey's family, and he led them through the ground-floor rooms. They were empty; all the furniture had been sold to pay the family debts, and the chandeliers were thick with dust and cobwebs. The walls of the hall were stained with rain-water from the leaks in the roof 'Ies so sad to see something once so lovely ruined by neglect,' Isabella whispered. 'Doesn't it make you sad, too?" 'Do you want to go?' he asked.

`Yes, I don't want to be sad today." As they went down the hairpin track into the village, the last of the sunset was so splendid on the mountain-tops that Isabella recaptured her bubbling mood.

At the inn in the village, the innkeeper recognized the family name. He ordered his two daughters up to change the bed-linen in the front room, and sent his wife back to her kitchen to prepare one of the Andalusian specialities for their dinner, cocido Madrilefio, a stew of chicken and the spicy little chorizo sausages on a bed of cabello dedngel, noodles so fine that they deserved their name of Angel's Hair.

"In Spain, sherry is the drink of the people,' Ramsey explained to her as he filled her glass. It was cold enough here in the mountains to warrant a fire in the stone fireplace, and the light of the flames played over his features making him even more improbably handsome.

"We always seem to be doing one of three things' - she contemplated the golden wine in her glass - 'eating or drinking or. She sipped the wine.

"Are you complaining?' he asked.

"Gloating, actually.' She slanted her eyes at him. 'Eat your cocido and drink your sherry, sehor, you are going to need your strength." She awoke with the sunlight streaming in through the open window and experienced a moment's dread that he had gone again. However, he was there beside her in the wide soft bed, watching her with that cool enigmatic expression; she felt another moment's chill of doubt, but as she reached for him, almost diffidently, she found that he was already hard and swollen for her.

"Oh Godp she whispered joyously. 'You are incredible!' No man had ever wanted her as much as he did. He made her feel like the most desirable woman in the universe.

The innkeeper had laid a breakfast of purple figs and goat's cheese for them in the walled courtyard. They sat under the trellised vines, and Isabella peeled the figs with her long painted nails and placed the globules of succulent flesh between his lips. Her father was the only other man she had ever done that for.

When one of the daughters brought a pot of steaming coffee out to them, Ramsey excused himself and went up to their bedroom. Through the tiny bathroom window, he could see Isabella sitting in the courtyard below and heard her voice and her laughter as she tried to make herself understood in her newly acquired Spanish.

Earlier he had watched her swallow a birth-control pill as she stood beside him at the washbasin. She had made a silly little ritual of it, toasting him with the glass of water. 'Many happy returns!'However, the pack of remaining pills was no longer in her toilet-bag on the ledge above the basin.

He went back into the bedroom. The bed occupied almost the entire floor-space, and their luggage was crammed into the curtained alcove beside the door. Isabella's big squashy leather shoulder-bag was thrown carelessly on top of her suitcase.

He paused to listen again, and heard her voice faintly through the open window. He took the bag to the bed and began to unpack it swiftly, laying out the contents in careful sequence so that he could repack it in exactly the same order. He had searched her sequinned handbag and checked the brand of birth-control pills she was using on that first morning in the Kensington flat while she was still asleep.

Later he had discussed them with the doctor at the embassy.

"If the woman discontinues treatment before the tenth day of her cycle, she will almost certainly experience a fertility backlash effect and become considerably more susceptible to impregnation when she ovulates," he had assured Ramsey.

The slim pack of pills was in one of the compartments of her black crocodile-skin purse near the bottom of the bag. Once again, Ramsey straightened up to listen. There was no sound of voices from the courtyard, and he darted back to the window. He saw that Isabella still sat at the table and that the innkeeper's black cat now had all her attention. The supercilious creature had settled in her lap and was allowing her to tickle behind his ears.

Ramsey stepped back into the bedroom. There were seven pills missing from the separate date-marked compartments in the packet. From his inside pocket Ramsey slipped the identical Ovanon packet with which the embassy doctor had provided him. He removed the first seven pills from their compartments and dropped them into the toilet-bowl. Then he placed the two packages side by side and compared them. Now they were identical in every respect, except that the second package contained only aspirin tablets cunningly coated to resemble birth-control pills.

He slipped the packet of placebo tablets into Isabella's purse and replaced her shoulder-bag in the alcove. He pocketed the original package and flushed the toilet, making sure that the seven pills were gone before he washed his hands and went down the narrow staircase to where Isabella waited in the courtyard.

In Granada, Ramsey took her to the corrida de toros and exulted in their great good fortune that they were to be Able to watch El Cordobes work.

Had not Ramsey's father been a patron of this most famous of all matadors when he was a mere novillero, they would never have procured tickets to the performance at such short notice. As it was, two tickets were delivered to their hotel on the morning after their arrival. Not only were they seated at the ringside directly to the right of the president's box, but also before the spectacle they were invited to watch El Cordobes dress for the corrida.

Of course, Isabella had read Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, and she realized the honour of that invitation. Nevertheless, she was unprepared for the obvious depth of Ramsey's respect as he greeted Manuel Benitez, El Cordobes, or for the semi-religious solemnity of the ritual of dressing.

"You have to be Spanish to understand the bulls,' Ramsey told her ab. they took their reserved seats, and indeed she had never seen him so moved and emotional. His involvement was so powerful and infectious that she found herself as wrought-up as he was.

The trumpets of the entry parade sent thrills down her spine, and the spectacle was magnificent: the horses and the costumes encrusted with silver and gold and seed pearls, and the matadors strutting in their short embroidered jackets and skin-tight trousers that blatantly emphasized their buttocks and their bunched genitalia. Even the flaring coral pink and incarnadine satins of the capes glistened with the lubricious tones of intimate feminine flesh and served to underscore the essentially lascivious nature of the frenzy that descended upon the tiered ranks of spectators.

When the bull surged into the ring, horned head high, the great hump of his shoulders swollen with rage, white sand dashing from under his hoofs and his engorged scrotum swinging to the pounding rhythm of his charge, Isabella came to her feet and screamed with the crowd.

As El Cordobes performed the initial passes, Ramsey gripped her arm and leant close to her, describing and explaining the significance of each graceful evolution, from the pure elegance of the simple verenica to the more complicated quite. Through Ramsey's eyes, she came to see it as the beginning of some movingly beautiful ritual, steeped in ancient tradition, which did not attempt to disguise its cruel and darkly tragic essence.

When the trumpets saluted the entrance of the picadors, Isabella moaned aloud and pressed her knuckles against her teeth, for she had been dreading the horses. She had read of the horror of the disembowelled horses with their entrails tangled about their legs. To calm her fears, Ramsey pointed out to her the thick armour of compressed cotton and canvas and leather that protected them. In the end none of the horses was harmed even when the bull hooked viciously into their padded bodies and drove them up against the barriers.

The picador leant from the saddle and worked the steel into the bull's hump, and, the blood sprayed up in a roseate nimbus of light, and then slicked down over the bull's shoulders so that its hide gleamed like metal in the sun.

Isabella shuddered with awful fascination, and Ramsey murmured: 'The blood is real, everything you see here is real, as real as life. This is life, my darling, with all life's beauty and cruelty and passion." She understood it then, accepted it and allowed herself to be carried along on the flood.

El Cordobes took his own banderillas. He posed in the sunlight and held high the long darts wrapped in coloured paper streamers. He called to the bull, and when it came he ran to meet it with light dancing strides. As they came together, Isabella gasped, and then the master had planted the banderillas and pirouetted away. The bull dropped his head and bucked at the sting of the barbs high in his withers, but his momentum had carried him out of goring range.

The trumpets sounded the final tercio, the hour of truth, and a new mood descended upon the stadium. El Cordobes and the bull engaged each other in the stately intimate dance of death. With only the floating cape between them, the passes were so close and dangerous that the bright blood from the beast's shoulders smeared the matador's thighs as it swept by.

At last El Cordobes stood below the president's box and lifted his montera cap decorated with black silk pompons to ask permission to dedicate the bull. Isabella was overwhelmed when he came to where she sat and dedicated the bull to her beauty. He tossed his montera up to her and turned and went back to face the bull.

El Cordobes performed the final passes in the centre of the ring, each one more graceful and closer to the horns than the last. Every time the crowd erupted with one primeval voice, a great burst of sound that punctuated the aching silences in which each separate pass was performed.

In the end, he prepared for the kill directly below where Isabella sat. As he sighted the bull over the long silver blade, Ramsey gripped her arm hard and whispered to Isabella: 'Look! He will take it recibiendo, the most dangerous manner of all!' When the bull made its last desperate rush, instead of running to meet it, El Cordobes stood four-square and went in over the top of the horns. The bright point of the estoque severed the great artery of the heart, and the blood gushed up in a fountain.

On the return from the bull-ring to the hotel, neither of them spoke. They were entranced, caught up in a rapture which was mystic and semi-religious.

The cruelty and the blood, the tragic beauty of the spectacle had not wearied or jaded their emotions, but had enhanced them to the threshold of a kind of spiritual agony, which cried out for release. Isabella sensed that Ramsey's need was even greater and more uncontrollable than her own.

In their bedroom whose double doors and wrought-iron balcony overlooked the gardens of the old Moorish palace, Ramsey stood her in the centre of the floor. While the blades of the old-fashioned fan on the high ceiling revolved overhead, he undressed her. It seemed that in doing so, he 70 performed another ritual as ancient as that of the corrida. When she was naked, he knelt at her feet, clasped her around the hips and buried his face in the dense warm pillow of hair in the basin of her pelvis.

She caressed his head with a tenderness that she had never felt for another human being, yet it was tinged with a great sadness and humility. She felt that a love like this was divine, and that she was not worthy of it. It was too great for any mortal being to bear.

At last he rose and took her up like a child in his arms and carried her to the bed. It was as though it had never happened before, as though he had broken through to such secret depths of her physical and spiritual being that even she had not suspected their existence.

The laws of time and space were redefined while she was in his arms. It lasted an instant and a flaming eternity. Like a comet she was transported through the full circle of the heavens. When she looked up into his green eyes, she knew with a lambent joy that his spirit was locked into hers as deeply as his flesh was entrapped within her throughout all that incredible odyssey. When she believed that she could reach no higher, survive no longer, there was an outpouring within her, as hot and copious as a flood of volcanic lava.

As the last light of day faded and their room filled with shadows, she found that she was so devastated that she could no longer speak or move; she had only the strength left to weep, and while she wept with exhaustion and fulfilment sleep overcame her.

Her entire world was a brighter, more joyous place now that she had Ramsey.

London, that most fascinating and vital of cities, transcended itself and became for her an earthly paradise. She saw it all through a shimmering golden mist of excitement. Each minute spent in his company was like a precious jewel set in that gold.

When they had come to London three years earlier, Isabella had resumed her studies and gained her bachelor's degree. Surprised at her sudden studiousness, her father had encouraged her to enrol in the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, and she had embarked on her doctoral thesis. She had chosen as her subject 'A Dispensation for Post-Colonial Africa'. Her thesis was advancing well, and she had hoped to complete most of it before her father's term as ambassador ended and they returned to Cape Town.

However, all that had been before Ramsey entered her life. Since then she had become a shameless truant. In the weeks since they had returned from Spain, she had not visited her tutor once, and had barely had time to open a book.

Rather than labouring on her thesis, she rose before dawn and slipped away to ride with Ramefi in the park or to jog with him along the Embankment.

Sometimes they worked out together in the shabby little gym in Bloomsbury run by a Hungarian expatriate who had fled his own country after the abortive rising.

There Ramsey began to instruct her in the mysteries of judo and self-defence, arts in which he was frighteningly. adept. Sometimes they wandered hand-in-hand through the galleries and museums. They dreamt in front of the Turners in the Tate, or disparaged the new acceptances at the Royal Academy. Always they ended up in the bed in Ramsey's flat in Kensington. She didn't care to ask him how he was able to spend so much time with her instead of at his bank. She simply accepted it gratefully.

"You've turned me into a junkie,' she accused him. 'I have to have my regular fix." Indeed, when he left London for eight days on some mysterious business for his bank, she moped and pined and truly sickened, even to the point of throwing up when she rose in the morning.

She kept half a dozen changes of clothing and a full range of perfumes and cosmetics at his flat and made it her duty to arrange the flowers and replenish the refrigerator daily. She was a talented cook and she loved to prepare food for him.

She began to neglect her duties at the embassy. She wormed her way out of official invitations and often left the chef and his staff to work on their own. Her father taxed her with her changed behaviour.

"You are never at home any more, Bella. I can't rely on you for a single thing. Nanny says that you slept in your bed only twice last week." "Nanny is a little tell-tale - and a fibber." 'What's going on, young lady?" 'I'm over twenty-one years of age, Pater darling, and it was part of our agreement that I don't have to account to you for my private life." 'It was also part of our agreement that you show your face at my receptions once in a while." 'Cheer up, Papa.' She kissed him. 'We'll be going back to Cape Town in a few months' time. Then you won't have to fret about me any longer." However, that evening she asked Ramsey if he wouldn't come to a cocktail-party that Shasa was holding at the embassy in Trafalgar Square to welcome the celebrated South African author Alan Paton to London.

Ramsey thought about it carefully for a full minute before he shook his head. 'It is not the right time to meet your father yet." 'Why not, darling?' Up to that moment, it had not been important to her, but now his refusal piqued her.

"There are reasons.' He was often so damnably mysterious. She wanted to draw him out, but she knew she was wasting her time. He was the only man she had ever met who- could resist her. There was a lining of steel beneath that beautiful facade.

"Therein lies much of his appeal,' she laughed at herself ruefully. It was not that she wanted to share him with any other person, not even her father. She was more than content to be entirely alone with him; their love was so totally engrossing that they avoided other people.

True, they occasionally dined at Les A or the White Elephant with Harriet or some of the myriad other acquaintances that Isabella had made over the past three years. Once or twice they went on with the party to dance at Annabel's, but mostly they sneaked away from the others to be alone. Ramsey did not seem to have friends of his own or, if he did, he never invited her to meet them. It troubled her not at all.

On the weekends when she could wriggle out of the official ambassadorial arrangements, she and Ramsey threw their overnight bags and tennis-rackets into the back of the Mini-Cooper and escaped into the country. They were usually very late back to town on Sunday night.

At the beginning of August, they departed from their solitary habits and caught the train up to Scotland. On the opening day of the grouse season, they were Harriet Beauchamp's guests on the moors of the family estate. The earl was a stickler for correct form, and the ladies were not invited to shoot on the opening day. They were, however, allowed to pick up or join the line of beaters. The earl wasn't very keen on foreigners, either, especially those who shot 'under an dover' rather than 'side by side' and who favoured Italian guns over English.

On the first drive, he placed Ramsey out on the end of the line.

Unexpectedly three coveys came through on the right, sliding low over the tops of the heather, going like furies on a thirty-mile-an-hour tail-wind.

Isabella was loading for Ramsey. He killed four birds from each covey. He took a double out in front. Then as the covey swept overhead Isabella passed him the second gun. With it he took another double behind the line of butts. Twelve birds with twelve shots fired. Even the head keeper shook his grizzled old head. 'In thirty-three seasons, I've no' seen the likes," he told the earl lugubriously. 'He kills his bird like de Grey or Walsingham - dead in the air with nary a flutter.' High praise to be compared to the best shots in English history.

The earl promptly abrogated custom, and on the second drive, Ramsey found himself in one of the favoured butts in the centre of the line. At the long dinner-table that evening, he was elevated to within conversational range of the earl who addressed most of his remarks to him over the heads of the bishop and the baronet between them. The weekend was off to a great start. Harriet had arranged for Ramsey and Isabella to occupy adjoining rooms at the furthest end of the huge rambling old country house.

"Papa suffers from insomnia,' she explained. 'And you and Ramsey in action sound like the Berlin Philharmonic performing Ravel's "Bolero"." "You vulgar little slut,' Isabella protested.

"Talking of sluts, lovey. Have you sprung your little surprise on Ramsey yet?' Harriet asked sweetly.

"I'm waiting for the right moment.' Isabella was immediately defensive.

"In my vast experience, there ain't no right moment for that sort of news." Harriet was right for once. No opportunity presented itself that weekend.

They were halfway back to London when Isabella abandoned any further attempt at subtlety. Fortunately, they had the first-class compartment to themselves.

"Darling, I went to see a doctor last Wednesday - not the embassy doctor, but a new one that Harriet recommended. He did a test, and we got the result on Friday...' She paused and watched his expression. There was no change; he regarded her with that remote green gaze, and she felt a sudden illogical dread. Surely nothing could tarnish their feelings for each other, nothing could spoil the perfection of their love, and yet she sensed a wariness in him, a spiritual drawing away from her. She found herself blurting it out in a rush.

"I'm almost two months pregnant. It must have been in Spain, probably that day in Granada, after the bullfight...' She felt breathless and shaky, and she hurried on. 'I just can't explain it. I mean, I've been taking the Pill religiously, I swear it, you've seen me. She 75 realized that she was beginning to gabble out her explanations in an undignified and uncontrolled rush. 'I know I've been an awful chump, darling, but you don't have to worry. It's all in hand. Harriet also made a little slip last year. She went to see a doctor in Amsterdam; he took care of it with absolutely no muss and no fuss. She caught the evening flight on a Friday and was back in London on Sunday - as good as new. She's given me the address, and she's even offered to come with me to hold my hand-" 'Isabellap he cut in sharply. 'Stop it. Stop talking. Listen to mev And she broke off and stared at him fearfully.

"You don't know what you are saying.' His voice cut her cruelly. 'What you suggest is monstrous!" 'I'm sorry, Ramsey.' She was confused. 'I shouldn't have bothered you with it. Harriet and I could have..." "Harriet is a shallow asinine little tramp. When you place the life of my child in her hands, then you make yourself every bit as culpable as she is." Isabella stared at him. This was not what she had expected from him at all.

"This is a miracle, Isabella, the greatest miracle and mystery of the universe. You talk of destroying it. This is our child, Isabella. This is life, new beautiful life, that you and I have created in love. Don't you understand that?" He leant across and took her hands, and she saw the coldness of his eyes fade. 'This is something that we have made together, our own wondrous creation. It belongs to both of us, to our love." 'You aren't angry?' she asked hesitantly. 'I thought you would be angry." 'I am proud and humble,' he whispered. 'I love you. You are infinitely precious to me.' He turned her hands, holding them by the wrists, and laid them on her own stomach. 'I love what you have here; it also is infinitely precious to me.' He had said it at last. 'I love you,' he had said.

"Oh, Ramsey,' her vision blurred, 'you are so wonderful, so tender, so kind.

The true miracle is that I was ever able to meet somebody like you."

"You will give birth to our child, my darling Bella." 'Oh, yes! Oh, a thousand times yes, my darling. You have made me so proud, so happy." All her uncertainty was gone, replaced by an excitement and anticipation that seemed to drive all else into insignificance.

This euphoria buoyed her up over the days that followed. It laid a new rich texture on her love for Ramsey; something that up until that time had been engrossing but random now had direction and purpose. A dozen times she had been on the point of telling Nanny, and had only succeeded in preventing herself when she realized that the old woman's excitement would be so uncontained that the entire embassy, including her father, would know of the coming event within twenty-four hours. This brought her at last to sober consideration of the prosaic details that had to be arranged. She was already over two months, and Nanny had an eagle eye and an earthy instinct.

At home on the family estate of Weltevreden she called the shots on the maids and house-servants and field-girls with an uncanny accuracy. Nanny bathed her when she was at home, and the only surprise was that she hadn't already latched on to Isabella's change of condition.

That evening Ramsey had tickets for the Festival of Flamenco at Drury Lane, but she rang him at his private number at the bank.

"Ramsey darling, I don't feel like going out tonight. I just want to be alone with you. I'll cook dinner. I'll have it ready by the time you get back to the flat, and we can listen to the new von Karajan disc." She could hear the reluctance in his voice. He had been looking forward to the flamenco dancing all week. He was so aggressively Spanish at times. He had even insisted that she begin learning the language, and had given her a set of Linguaphone records. However, she wheedled him shamelessly, and finally he succumbed.

On the way from the embassy to the flat, Isabella doubleparked the Mini and picked up a bottle of Pol Roger and another of Montrachet from her father's private bin at Berry Brothers, the wine merchants in St. James's Street.

Then in the food-hall at Harrods she selected two dozen Whitstable oysters and a pair of perfect veal cutlets.

She was watching from the front window as Ramsey turned the comer and came striding down the pavement towards the front door. He looked so English in his threepiece suit. While in London, he even carried a rolled black brolly and sported a bowler, the epitome of the young merchant banker. It was a peculiar gift he had of fitting perfectly into any environment, no matter how diverse, as though he were born to it.

She opened the champagne and as soon as she heard his key in the front door she poured their glasses and placed them beside the silver tray of crushed ice on which she had arranged the open oysters. She restrained herself from rushing wildly through into the tiny hall and instead met him as he came into the living-room. Then her restraint faded and her kiss was long and melting.

"Special occasion?' he asked, with his arm still around her waist, as he saw the tray of oysters and the two longstemmed tulip glasses softly seething with the yellow wine. She went to fetch a glass and placed it in his hand, and then she looked at him over the rim of her own glass." "Welcome home, Ramsey. I wanted to give you just a little taste of what it's going to be like when you are married to me." She saw his eyes flinch; it was more poignant in that she had never seen it happen before. His gaze was always level and steady.

He did not taste the wine and set his glass aside, and she felt an awful premonition of disaster.

"Ramsey, what is it?' she asked.

Before she could drink, he took the champagne-glass from her hand and placed it upon the walnut table.

"Bella.' He turned back to face her, and took her hands in his. "Bella,' he said again, softly, with deep regret, and he turned her hands and kissed the open palms.

"What is it, Ramsey?' She could barely draw breath, so tight was her chest with dread.

"I can't marry you, my darling.' She stared at him, and felt her legs tremble and go weak with the shock. 'I can't marry you, at least not yet, my darling." She drew her hands out of his grasp and turned away from him. She went slowly to the armchair and sank into it.

Why?' she asked softly, without looking at him as he came and knelt in front of her. 'You want me to bear your child, then why can't you marry me?" 'Bella, there is nothing I want more in this life than to have you as my wife, and to be father of our child, but..

"Then, why?' she repeated almost listlessly.

"Please listen to me, my darling. Don't say anything more until you have heard me out." Now she lifted her eyes and looked at his face, but she was very pale.

"Nine years ago, I married a Cuban girl in Miami." Istibella shuddered, and closed her eyes.

"The marriage was a disaster from the very beginning. We spent only a few months together before we parted, but we are both Catholics...' He broke off, and touched her pale cheek. She pulled back from his caress, and he sighed softly.

"I'm still married to her,' he said simply.

"What is her name?' Isabella asked without opening her eyes.

"Why do you want to know that?" 'Tell me.' Her voice firmed.

"Natalie.' He shrugged.

"Children?'she asked. 'How many children do you have?" 'None,' he replied. 'You will be the mother of my firstborn.' And he watched the petals of rose return to her cheeks. After a moment she opened her eyes again, but they were shadowed with such despair that the blue had turned to black.

"Oh, Ramsey! What are we going to do?" 'I have already begun to do all I can,' he told her. 'When we returned from Spain, I knew then, even before you told me about the baby, I knew that above all else in my life I must have you as my wife." 'Oh, Ramsey.' She blinked hard, and tightened her grip on his hands.

"Natalie is still living in Miami, with her family. I was able to contact her. We spoke on the telephone, more than once. She is very devout. There is nothing, she said, that would persuade her to divorce me." Isabella was staring at him hard, and now she shook her head miserably.

"I called her again, on three consecutive evenings. At last, we found something that was more important to her than her God and her confessor." 'What was that?" 'Money,' he said, with a shade of contempt in his voice. 'I still have most of the winnings from the pigeon shoot. For fifty thousand dollars, she finally agreed to move to Reno and file for divorce." 'Darling!' Isabella whispered, joy blooming in her eyes again. 'Oh, thank God! When? When will she go?" 'That is the catch. It takes time. I can't push her too hard. I know Natalie. If she found out about you, and guessed why I wanted the divorce, she would exploit her advantage to the utmost. She promised to leave for Reno at the beginning of next month. She says that she has her job and her family to consider. Her mother is not well." 'Yes, yes,' Isabella cut in impatiently. 'But how long will it take?" 'There is provision in the Nevada state laws for the period of residency in Reno. Three months before they will grant the divorce." 'I'll be six months gone by then.' Isabella bit her knuckles, then her expression changed. 'And Daddy and so I are booked to leave for Cape Town. Oh, Ramsey, what a mess!" 'You can't go back to Cape Town," Ramsey told her flatly. 'I couldn't live without you and, besides, your pregnancy will be obvious to all your family and friends." 'What do you want me to do?" 'Stay with me until my divorce is final. I love you too much to let you go.

I don't want to miss a day of my son's life." She smiled at last. 'So it's definitely a son, is it?" 'Of course.' He nodded with mock gravity. "We must have an heir to the title, must we not? You will stay with me, won't you, Bella?" 'What will I tell my father, and my grandmother? Papa is a pushover, but my grandmother... !' Isabella rolled her eyes. "Centaine Courtney-Malcomess is the family dragon. She actually breathes fire and crunches up the bones of her victims." 'I will tame your dragon,' he promised.

"I truly believe that you might.' Isabella felt gay and light-headed with relief. 'If anyone can charm Nana, it would be you, my darling."

The fact that Centaine Courtney-Malcomess was six thousand miles away did make the task a little easier. Isabella prepared the ground with great care.

She worked on her father first. Overnight she became once more the dutiful daughter and consummate hostess. She plunged headlong and with all her previous panache into organizing the final few weeks of social engagements that marked the end of Shasa Courtney's ambassadorial term.

"Welcome back from wherever it was you disappeared to,' Shasa told her drily at the end of one of her more successful dinner-parties. 'I missed you, you know." They were standing arm-in-arm on the front steps of 81 Highveld, watching the limousine pull away, bearing the last departing guest.

"One o'clock in the morning.' Shasa glanced at his wristwatch, but Isabella forestalled him.

"Too early for bed.' She squeezed his arm. 'Let me fix a nightcap and a final cigar for you. We haven't had a chance to talk all evening." That afternoon Davidoffs had delivered a dozen of his cigars from the stock they kept for him in their specially humidified storage in St. James's. She held one to her ear as she rolled it between her fingers.

"Perfect,' she murmured.

Shasa lolled in the buttoned-leather armchair across the room. Earlier the company had done full justice to the claret and the port, but his single eye was still clear and bright. The black silk patch over the other eye was as pristine as the perfectly constructed bow at the throat of his snowy shirt-front.

He watched her with undiluted pleasure, as though she were a blood filly from his stables or the gem of his art collection. She was the most beautiful of all the Courtneys, he arrived at that considered verdict.

In her youth his own mother had been a celebrated beauty. The years had dimmed Shasa's memory of the zenith of her beauty, but there was a portrait of her in her prime by Annigoni in the drawing-room of Weltevreden. Even allowing for the artist's kindly eye, she must have been an extraordinary woman. The force of her character shone out of the portrait's dark eyes.

She was still, at sixty-nine years of age, a magnificent woman, handsome and vigorous, but at no time in her life could she have equalled her grand-daughter who now stood in the bright noonday of her youth.

Isabella cut the tip of the cigar with the gold cutter from her father's desk. She lit the cedarwood taper from the fire and held it for him until the cigar was drawing evenly. Then she extinguished the taper and went to dribble a little Cognac into the crystal balloon glass.

"Professor Symmonds read the latest section of my thesis this morning." 'Ah, you are still gracing the University with your presence, are you?" Shasa studied his daughter's bare shoulders in the soft light of the fire.

She had inherited that skin from her mother, as lustrous and unblemished as ivory.

"He thinks it is good.' Isabella ignored the jibe.

"If it is up to the same standard as the first hundred pages that you let me read, then Symmonds is probably correct." 'He wants me to stay on here to finish it.' She was not looking at him.

Shasa felt the sick little slide of dread in his chest.

"Here in London, on your own?' His response was instantaneous.

"On my own? With five hundred friends, the staff of Courtney Enterprises' London office, my mother... !'She brought the brandy balloon to him.

"Not really abandoned completely in a strange city, Papa." Shasa made a noncommittal noise in his throat and tasted the Cognac, searching desperately for some better reason why she should accompany him back to the Cape.

"Where would you stay?' he grumped.

"That wasn't even a good try,' she laughed at him openly, and took the cigar from his hand. She drew upon it with pursed red lips, and then blew a feather of smoke into his face. 'In Cadogan Square there is a flat which cost you almost a million pounds. It is standing empty.' She gave him back the cigar.

She was right of course. Since the official ambassadorial residence went with the job, the family flat had been unused. He was silent, driven to the ropes, and Isabella gathered herself for the coup de grdce.

"You are the one who was so frightfully keen on my doctorate, Pater. You won't deprive me of it now, will you?" Shasa rallied gamely. 'Since you have obviously thought this all out so carefully, you must already have spoken to your grandmother." Isabella stooped over him as he sat in the armchair and kissed the top of his head.

"I was hoping that you would speak tonana for me, my darling Daddy." Shasa sighed. 'Witch,' he murmured. 'You make me a party to my own undoing." She could rely, on her father to take care of Nana, but there was still Nanny to consider. However, Isabella softened her up for a day or two beforehand by reciting the names and virtues of all seventeen of the grandchildren who so eagerly awaited her return to Weltevreden. Nanny had been away from home for three years, and three long English winters.

"Just think of it, Nanny. It will be spring at the Cape when the boat docks, and Johannes will be waiting on the pier.' Johannes was the head groom at Weltevreden and Nanny's favourite son. The old woman's eyes shone.

So when Isabella finally broke the news Nanny threw her hands around and wailed about ingratitude and the decay of the modern generation's sense of duty. Then she sulked for two days but without real venom.

Isabella went down to Southampton to see them all off. Shasa's new Aston Martin was hoisted on board the Union Castle liner by one of the giraffe-necked cranes, and then the servants lined up on the pier for their farewells. She embraced them all, from the Malay chef to Klonkie the chauffeur. Nanny burst into tears when Isabella kissed her.

"You'll probably never see this old woman again. You'll miss me when I've gone. Think of how I nursed you when you was a baby..." 'Go on with you, Nanny. You'll be there to nurse all my babies for me.' It was a dangerous subject to broach, but Nanny's perceptions were dulled. The promise drove off the shadow of her imminent demise, and she cheered noticeably.

"You come home soon now, child, you hear, where old Nanny can keep an eye on you. All that hot Courtney blood - we'll find you a good clean South African boy." When Isabella came to say goodbye to Shasa, unexpectedly she found herself also dissolving into a salty wash of tears. Shasa handed her the crisp white handkerchief from the pocket of his double-breasted blazer. When she had dried up and given it back to him, he blew his own nose loudly and then dabbed at his single eye.

"Damned wind!' he explained. 'Got a bit of grit in it." As the liner pulled away from the wharf and headed down-river, he was a tall and elegant figure at the ship's rail, high above her; but he stood alone, slightly separated from the other passengers. He had never remarried since the divorce. She knew that since then he had been seeing literally dozens of women, all elegant and talented and nubile, but he always walked on alone.

"Doesn't he ever feel lonely?' she wondered, and waved until he was an indistinguishable speck on the ship's deck.

On the drive back to London, the road kept dissolving before her eyes in a glassy mirage of tears.

"It's the baby,' she tried to excuse herself 'He's making me all gooey and sentimental.' And she clasped her belly and tried to find a lump, and was vaguely disappointed that her muscles were still flat and hard. "God, what if it's all just a false alarm!" The possibility heightened her melancholy, and she reached for the packet of Kleenex in the cubby-hole of the Mini.

However, when she climbed the stairs to the flat, the door opened before she touched it and Ramsey reached out and drew her into his arms. Her tears were forgotten.

The family flat in Cadogan Square occupied the first two floors of a listed red-brick Victorian house. There were five double bedrooms, and the walls of the master suite were clad with powder-blue and antique silver panelling that had reputedly graced the boudoir of Madame de Pompadour. The plafond was decorated with dancing circles of naked wood-nymphs and leering satyrs. Much to Shasa's chagrin, Isabella referred to the decor as 'Louis Quinze bordello'.

She used it merely as an accommodation address, and called round on Fridays to pick up her mail and have tea with the full-time housekeeper in the ground-floor pantry. The housekeeper was an ally and fielded all the long distance telephone calls from Weltevreden and other parts afar.

Isabella made her true home in Ramsey's tiny flat. When the wardrobe that he allocated to her proved to be inadequate, she rotated her clothes between it and the cavernous storage at Cadogan Square. She found a dainty little lady's writing-bureau in an antique shop in Kensington Church Street which just fitted into the comer beside the bed, and made that her study.

Like a married couple, they settled into a routine. They were up before dawn for gym or riding; Isabella's gynaecologist had forbidden jogging.

"It's a foetus not a milkshake that you are brewing, my dear.' Then, when Ramsey left for the bank, she settled down at her bureau and worked steadily on her thesis until lunchtime. They met at Justin de Blank or the health bar at Harrods, for Isabella had given up alcohol and put herself on a strict diet for the baby's sake.

"I refuse to let myself swell up like a toad. I don't want to revolt you." 'You are the most desirable woman in existence, and pregnancy has brought you to full bloom,' he contradicted her, and touched her bosom. It was magnificent.

"I asked the gyney, and he said it's quite OK; we don't have to hold back at all,' she giggled. 'I do hope the ambulance that takes me to the maternity home has a comfortable double stretcher so that we can fit in a quickie on the way." After lunch she went on to visit her tutor or to spend the rest of the afternoon in the reading-room of the British Museum. Finally there was a mad dash back to the flat in the Mini in time to start preparing Ramsey's dinner. Fortunately, Papa had arranged for her to retain her diplomatic plates, and she parked at the kerb right outside the front door and smiled winningly at the hovering traffic warden.

In the evenings they went out less and less frequently, apart from an occasional theatre or an early dinner with Harriet and her latest beau.

Usually they piled all the cushions on the floor and sprawled in front of the television, arguing and discussing and billing and cooing and ignoring the inane burble of 'Coronation Street' and the gameshows.

When at last the taut flat plain of her belly began to bulge she opened the front of her silk dressing-gown and exhibited it proudly. 'Feel id' she urged Ramsey. 'Isn't it wonderful?" He palpated it solemnly. 'Yes," he nodded sagely. 'Definitely a boy." 'How do you know?" 'Here.' He took her hand. 'Can't you feel it?" 'Ah, it does stick out a bit. He must take after his papa. Funny how thinking about that makes me feel like bed." 'Sleepy?' he asked.

"Hardly,' she replied.

Shasa had left her with her Harrods charge-card, and she acquired most of her maternity clothes there, although Harriet kept discovering newly fashionable boutiques that specialized in clothes for the swinging young mother-to-be. Wearing one of her flowing new caftans, she enrolled in the ante-natal classes that her gynaecologist recommended. Suddenly the company and conversation of the other gravid classmates that would once have bored her to distraction was fun and fascination.

At least once a month, Ramsey had to fly out of town on bank business, and each time he was away for a week or more. However, he telephoned her whenever he had an opportunity. Although she missed him more painfully than she would admit even to herself, when he returned her joy was enhanced a hundredfold.

After one such trip, she met him at Heathrow and drove him directly back to the flat. He dropped his travel-bag in the hall and threw his jacket over the back of the chair before he went into the bathroom.

His Spanish passport slipped from the inner pocket of his jacket and plopped on to the carpet. She picked it up and riffled through it until she found his photograph. It wasn't bad, but no camera could do him full justice. She flipped the page and saw the date of birth. That reminded her that his birthday was only two weeks away. She had determined to make it a wonderful occasion. She had already seen a glass statuette in an antique-shop in Mayfair, an exquisite little glass nude by Rend Lalique.

She recognized the body as so similar to her own, even to the exaggerated length of leg and tight boyish buttocks. But for the fact that it had been sculptured at the height of Lalique's popularity during the 1920S, Isabella could easily have been the model. However, the price daunted even her, and she was still plucking up sufficient courage to buy it for him.

She flipped over a few pages more of his passport, and the visa caught her eye. It had been stamped in Moscow that morning, and she blinked with surprise.

"Darling,' she called through the bathroom door. 'I thought you were in Rome. How did you end up in Moscow?' Everything she had ever learnt, every facet of her South African upbringing, had always pointed to Russia as the great Antichrist. Even the symbol of hammer and sickle and the Cyrillic script stamped in his passport made the fine hairs on her forearms rise in repugnance.

There was silence for a full minute beyond the locked door, and then it was flung open abruptly, and Ramsey strode out in his shirt-sleeves and snatched the booklet from her hand. His expression was one of cold fury, and his eyes terrified her.

"Don't ever pry into my affairs again,' he said softly.

Although he never mentioned the incident later, it was almost a week before she felt that he had forgiven her. It had so intimidated her that thereafter she tried to put it completely out of her mind.

Then, in early November, when she called round at the Cadogan Square flat, the housekeeper handed her her mail. As always, there was a letter from her father, but under it was another envelope franked in Johannesburg, and with a lift of pleasure she recognized her brother Michael's handwriting.

Each of her three brothers was so distinctly different in looks and character and personality that it was impossible for her to have a favourite.

Sean, the eldest, was the flamboyant adventurer. A wild spirit who, until she met Ramsey, had been the most impossibly beautiful man she had ever known. Sean was the soldier and the hunter. He had already been decorated with the Silver Cross for valour in Rhodesia's grim little bush war. When he wasn't tracking down terrorists, he ran the vast hunting concession in the Zambezi valley for Courtney Enterprises. Isabella adored him.

Garrick was her second brother, the ugly duckling, the myopic asthmatic who during his unhappy childhood had always been referred to as'Poor Garry'.

However, although born deficient in most physical areas, he had inherited his full measure of the Courtney spirit and determination and shrewdness.

He had worked on his puny body until it was almost grotesquely muscular with such a barrel of a chest and powerful arms that all his clothes had to be tailored for him. With near-sighted eyes behind thick horn-rimmed spectacles, and no natural sporting ability, he had developed such powers of concentration that he made himself into a four-goal polo-player, a scratch golfer and an extraordinary shot with rifle and shotgun.

In addition he had succeeded his father as chairman and chief executive officer of Courtney Enterprises. Not yet thirty years of age, he ran a multi-billion-dollar complex of companies with the same formidable application to detail and insatiable appetite for hard work that he brought to all his other endeavours. Yet he never forgot her birthday, and responded instantly to any call that Isabella made on him no matter how onerous or how trivial. She called him 'Teddy Bear' because he was so big and hairy and cuddly, and she loved him dearly.

Then there was Michael, sweet, gentle Michael, the family peacemaker, the thoughtful, compassionate, poetic creature, and the only Courtney who, despite the encouragement and example of his father and his two brothers, had never killed a wild bird or animal in his life. Instead, he had written and published three successful books, one a collection of poems and the other two on South African history and politics. The last two had both been banned by South Africa's industrious censors for their unseemly treatment of racial matters and their radical political flavour. He was also a highly considered journalist and the deputy editor of the Golden City Mail, a large-circulation English-language newspaper which was stubbornly and outspokenly opposed to the Nationalist Afrikaner government of John Vorster and its policy of apartheid. Of course, Courtney Enterprises owned eighty percent of the Mairs stock, otherwise he might not have achieved such a responsible position at such a tender age.

During all of Isabella's childhood, Michael had been her protector and adviser and confidant, and after Nana her favourite story-teller. She trusted Michael more than anybody else in her life, and if Sean hadn't been so wonderful and Garrick so lovable and cuddly, then Michael would definitely have been her favourite brother. It was a dead heat between the three of them for her affections, but she loved Michael as much as any of them, and now his handwriting on the envelope gave her a warm glow of pleasure and a prickle of guilt. She hadn't written to him since she had met Ramsey, almost six months ago.

The second paragraph of the first page caught her eye the instant she unfolded it, and she skipped the salutation and went straight to it.

Pater tells me that you are cosily ensconced in Cadogan Square and labouring mightily on your thesis. Good for you, Bella. However, I am sure that you are not presently occupying all five of the bedrooms, and I was hoping that you could fit me in somehow. I plan to be in London for three weeks from the fifteenth of the month. I will be out all day, every day. I have a full schedule of interviews and meetings, so I promise not to be a nuisance and interfere with your studies... It was a complication in that she would be forced to take up physical residence at Cadogan Square for the period of Michael's visit. However, most fortunately, it coincided with one of Ramsey's periodic travels abroad. She would have been alone anyway. Now at least she would have Michael's company.

She sent him a cable addressed to the Mairs offices in Johannesburg, and set about making Cadogan Square look as though it was being permanently lived in. She had a week to prepare for Michael's arrival.

"There will have to be some explanations,' she told Ramsey, and clasped the neat little bulge of her tummy. 'Luckily Michael is so understanding. I'm sure that the two of you would get on well together. I wish you could meet him." 'I will try to complete my business ahead of time and get back to London while your brother is still here." 'Oh, Ramsey darling, I would love that. Please do try.) She was waiting for Michael as he pushed his luggagetrolley through the international-arrivals barrier at Heathrow, and she let out a squeal of glee as she recognized him. He swung her off her feet, and then his expression changed as he felt her stomach against him, and he set her down again with exaggerated gentleness.

As she drove him into town in the Mini, she kept darting glances at him. He was tanned - when you lived in London you noticed that immediately - and he had grown his hair fashionably long. It curled over the collar of his bottle-green corduroy hacking-jacket. However, his smile was still boyish and frank, and the blue Courtney eyes lacked the hard acquisitive sparkle of all the other Courtneys, and were instead mild and thoughtful.

She pumped him for news of home, partly to satisfy her curiosity but mostly to keep the conversation away from her fecund belly. According to Michael, Pater had engrossed himself in his new duties as chairman of Armscor. Nana was growing more vigorous and more imperious every day, ruling Weltevreden with an iron fist. She had even taken up breeding retrievers and training them for gun dog trials. Sean was still killing platoons of guerrillas and droves of buffalo. He had recently been promoted to a reserve captain in the Ballantyne Scouts, one of the crack Rhodesian regiments. Garry had just presented his shareholders with record company profits, for the sixth year in succession. His wife, Holly, was about to produce another infant.

Everybody was holding thumbs for a girl this time.

As he said this, Michael glanced at her midriff significantly, but Isabella concentrated all her attention on the traffic to avoid an explanation and at last parked the Mini in the mews garage at the back of the square.

Michael was suffering from jet-lag, so she ran him a foam bath and brought him a whisky and soda. While he was soaking, she sat on the closed lid of the toilet-seat and chatted. She would never have contemplated sharing a bathroom with either Sean or Garry, but between Michael and herself nudity was natural and unremarked.

"Do you remember that silly little nonsense rhyme?' Michael asked at last.

"How did it go again?

"Dum de dum-dum, And her father said, 'Nelly, There is more in your belly Than ever went in through your mouth!"

Isabella chuckled unashamedly. 'Is that what they call "the trained journalistic eye"? You don't miss anything, do you, Mickey?"

"Miss. it?' he laughed with her. 'Your turnmy damn near knocked out my trained journalistic eye!" 'Pretty, isn't it?' Isabella pushed it out as far as it would go, and patted it proudly.

"Stunning!' Michael agreed. 'And I am sure that Pater and Nana would agree if they could see it." 'You won't tell, will you, Mickey?" 'We don't tell each other's secrets, you and me. Never have, never will.

But what are you going to do with the eventual, ah, result?" 'My son, your nephew - you call that a result? Shame on you, Mickey. Ramsey calls it the greatest miracle and mystery of the universe." 'Ramsey! So that is the culprit's name. I hope he's wearing bullet-proof knickers when Nana catches up with him toting her trusty old shotgun, loaded with buckshot." 'He's a marquds, Mickey. The Marquds de Santiago y Machado." "Ah, that might make a difference. Nana is enough of a snob to be impressed. She will probably reduce the charge from buckshot to birdshot." 'By the time Nana finds out about it, I'll be a marquesa." "So the nefarious Ramsey intends making an honest woman out of you, does he?

When?" 'Well, there is a little bit of a hitch,' she admitted.

"You mean he's married already." 'How did you know that, Mickey?' She gaped at him.

"And his wife won't give him a divorce?" 'Mickey!" 'My love, that's the hoariest old chestnut in the packet.' Michael stood up, cascading soapy bath water, and reached for the towel.

"You don't know him, Mickey. He's not like that." 'May I take that as an impartial and totally unbiased opinion?' Michael stepped out of the bath, and began to towel himself down.

"He loves me." 'So I see."

"Don't be flippant." 'Make me a promise, Bella. If anything goes wrong, come to me first. Will you promise me that?" She nodded. 'Yes, I promise. You are still my very best friend. I promise, but nothing is going to go wrong. You just wait and see." She took him to dinner at Ma Cuisine in Walton Street. The restaurant was so popular that they would never have got a table had not Isabella made the reservation the very day that she heard Michael was coming to London.

"I like escorting a pregger,' Michael remarked as they settled at the table. 'Everybody smiles at me, as though I am responsible." 'Nonsense. It's simply because you are so handsome.' They talked about their work. Isabella made him promise to read her thesis and make suggestions. Then Michael explained that the main reason he was in London was to write a series of articles on the anti-apartheid movement, and the South African political exiles living in Britain.

"I have arranged interviews with some of the leading lights: Oliver Tambo, Denis Brutus..." 'Do you think our censors will let you publish the article?' Isabella asked. 'They'll probably ban the entire edition again, and Garry will be furious. Anything that affects the profits makes Garry furious." Michael chuckled. 'Poor old Garry.' That title was habitual but no longer appropriate. 'Life is so simple for him -not the black and white of morality, but the black and red of the bank statement." With the dessert Michael asked suddenly, 'How is Mater? Have you seen her lately?" 'Not Mater, nor Mother, nor even Mummy,' Isabella corrected him tardy. 'You know that she thinks those terms terribly bourgeois. But to answer your question - no, I haven't seen Tara for some time." 'She is our mother, Bella." 'She might have thought of that when she deserted Pater and the rest of us and ran off with a black revolutionary and bore him a little brown bastard." 'And you might be a shade more charitable when it comes to bearing bastards,' Michael said mildly, and then saw the hurt in her eyes. 'I'm sorry, Bella, but as in your case there are reasons for all things. We shouldn't judge her too harshly. Pater can't be the easiest man in the world to be married to, and not everybody can play the game to the rules that Nana lays down. Some of us don't have the killer instincts finely enough developed. I don't think Tara fitted into the family at all, not from the very beginning. She never was an dlitist. Her sympathies were always with the underdog, and then Moses Gama came into her life... 'Mickey darling'- Isabella leant across the table and took his hand -'you are the most compassionate, understanding person in the world. You spend your life making excuses for us, protecting us from the Fates. I do love you so much. I don't even want to fight or argue with you." 'Good.' He squeezed her hand. 'Then, you'll come along to see Tara with me.

She writes to me regularly. She adores you, Isabella, and she misses you terribly. It hurts her when you avoid her." 'Oh, Mickey, you set a trap for me, you devil.' She thought furiously for a second. 'But what about my condition? I was hoping to be a little more discreet." 'Tara is your mother, she loves you, and they don't come any more broad-minded than our Tara. She's not going to do anything to hurt you, you know that." "To please you,' she sighed, and capitulated. 'Only to please you, Mickey." So on the following Saturday morning they walked down Bromptyn Road, and Michael had to stretch his long legs to match her flowing athletic stride.

"Are you training to have a sprog-bod, or for the next Olympics?' he asked with a grin.

"You smoke too much,' Isabella scoffed at him.

"My only vice." Tara Courtney, or Tara Gama as she now called herself, was the manageress of a small residential hotel off Cromwell Road, and her clientele was composed almost exclusively of expatriates and new immigrants from Africa and India and the Caribbean.

It always amazed Isabella that an area like this existed only twenty minutes' walk from the grandeur of Cadogan Square. The Lord Kitchener Hotel was as shabby and run-down as its manageress. Again it amazed Isabella that her mother was the same person who had once presided over the great chiteau of Weltevreden. Isabella's earliest memories were of her mother in a full-length ball-gown, with yellow diamonds from the Courtney mine at H'ani glittering at her smooth white throat and on her earlobes, her dark auburn hair piled high on her lovely head as she came down the sweep of the marble staircase. Isabella had never suspected the terrible dissatisfaction and misery that must have festered beneath that regal facade.

Now Tara's magnificent head of hair had greyed, and she had touched it up with a cheap home-dye job that came up in variegated tones of ginger and brazen plum. Her skin that Isabella had inherited in all its silken perfection had withered and bagged and wrinkled with neglect. There were little blackheads lodged in the enlarged pores around the creases between her nose and cheeks, and her false teeth were too large for her mouth, distorting the sweet line of her lips.

She rushed down the front steps of the hotel to embrace Isabella in a cloud of pungent Cologne. Isabella returned her hug with the strength of a guilty conscience.

"Let me look at my darling daughter.' She held Isabella at arm's length, and her eyes dropped immediately. 'You have grown more beautiful, Bella, if that were possible, but the reason is pretty obvious. I see you are carrying a little bundle of fun and joy." Isabella's smile crooked with annoyance, but she ignored the reference.

"You look well, Mummy - Tara, I mean.' Tara wore the self-conscious uniform of the militant left-winger: a shapeless grey cardigan over a full-length granny-print shift and men's open brown sandals.

"It's been months,' Tara complained, 'almost a year, and you live just down the road. How can you neglect your old Michael intervened smoothly, deflecting Tara's self-pity, embracing her with unfeigned warmth and enthusiasm. She turned to him with theatrical mother-love.

"Mickey, you were always the sweetest and most loving of all my children." And Isabella's smile began to hurt her lips. She wondered just how long she had to stay and when she could escape. She knew it wasn't going to be easy, and that for once she could expect little support from Michael. Tara linked her arms through theirs. Michael on one side of her and Isabella on the other, she led them into the hotel.

"I've got tea and biscuits ready for you. I've been in an absolute tizz ever since Michael called to say you were coming." On a Saturday morning the Lord Kitchener's public lounge was filled with Tara's guests. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and the cadences of Swahili and Gujarati and Xhosa. Tara introduced them to everybody in the room, even though Isabella had met many of them on her previous visits.

"My son and daughter from Cape Town in South Africa.' And she saw how some of the eyes flicked at the name of her country.

The hell with them, too, Isabella decided defiantly. Funny how at home she thought of herself as a liberal, but when she was abroad and encountered that reaction she thought of herself as a patriot.

At last Tara seated them in a corner of the lounge, and while she poured the tea, she asked in a bright and cheery tone that carried clearly to everybody in the large room: 'So now, Bella, tell me about the baby. When are you expecting it and who is the father?"

"This is hardly the time or the place, Tara.' Isabella paled with irritation, but Tara laughed.

"Oh, we are all just one big family here at the Lordy. You can talk freely." This time Michael murmured gently: 'Bella really doesn't want all the world to know her private business. We'll talk about it later, Tara." 'You funny old-fashioned thing.' Tara reached across and tried to hug Isabella again, but spilled some of her tea on her granny-print skirt and gave up the attempt. 'None of us here worries our head over bourgeois conventions." 'That's enough, Tara,' Michael said firmly, and then to divert her: 'Where is Benjamin and how is he doing?" 'Oh, Ben is my pride and joy.' Tara took the bait. 'He just popped out for a few minutes. He had to go down to the school to hand in an essay. He's such a clever boy, he's taking his A-levels this year, only sixteen and his headmaster says he is the most brilliant, the cleverest child he has had in Ryham Grammar for the last ten years. All the girls adore him. He's so good-looking.' Tara chattered on, and Isabella was relieved not to have to make conversation. Instead she listened to the recital of her halfbrother's virtues.

Benjamin Gama was one of the many reasons that Isabella felt uncomfortable in this other world in which her mother lived. So deep had been the disgrace and so poisonous the scandal that Tara had brought on the Courtney family that her name was never mentioned at Weltevreden. Nana had forbidden it.

Only Michael had ever discussed it with her, and then in the most general terms. 'I'm sorry, Bella. I'm not going to repeat cruel rumour and hearsay.

If you want that, you'll have to go elsewhere. I'll only tell you the facts, and those are that when Tara left South Africa after Moses Gama was arrested and imprisoned no charges were ever brought against her and no proof was ever offered to implicate her in any criminal activity."

"But didn't Pater arrange it that way to protect the family reputation?" 'Why don't you ask Pater himself?' She had indeed tentatively broached the subject with her father; but Shasa, for once cold and aloof, had dismissed the enquiry. In an odd way Isabella had been relieved by his refusal to talk about it. Isabella was honest enough to recognize her own cowardice.

She didn't truly want to know the extent of her mother's guilt. Deep down, she didn't really want to know if her mother had indeed been a party to the notorious 'Guy Fawkes' plot of her lover, Moses Gama, to blow up the South African Houses of Parliament, the attempt which had resulted in the death of Isabella's grandfather, Tara's own father. Perhaps her mother was a traitor and a murderess guilty of patricide. At the very least she was certainly a blatant adulteress and a miscegenist, which was a crime under South African law, and once again Isabella wondered just what she was doing here.

Suddenly Tara's features brightened, and for an instant she recaptured a faint glimmer of her lost beauty.

"Ben!' she cried. 'Look who have come to see us, Benjamin. Your brother and sister. Isn't that nice?" Isabella swivelled in her chair, and her half-brother stood in the doorway of the hotel lounge behind her. He had grown again in the year since last she had seen him and obviously he had made that leap from puberty into man hood.

"Hello, Benjamin,' she cried too enthusiastically, and although he smiled she sensed the reserve in him, and saw the wariness in his dark eyes.

Tara had not been completely prejudiced by her maternal instincts. Benjamin was indeed a fine-looking lad. His natural African grace had combined well with his mother's more delicate features. His skin had a coppery tone, and his hair was a neat woolly cap of tight dark curls.

"Hello, Isabella.'The south London accent on the tongue of this son of Africa startled her. She made no move to embrace him. From their very first meeting there had been a tacit agreement between them: no displays of simulated affection. They shook hands quickly, and then both stepped back. Before Isabella could think of anything further to say, Benjamin had turned to Michael. Now his smile was a flash of perfect teeth and the sparkle of dark eyes.

"Mickey!' he said, and he took two quick light steps to meet his older brother. They clasped each other around the shoulders.

Isabella envied Michael that exceptional ability to evoke trust and liking in everybody around him. Benjamin seemed truly to accept him as a brother and a friend without any of the reserve that he showed towards Isabella.

Soon all three of them, Tara, Ben and Mickey, were chatting away with animation. Isabella felt herself excluded from their intimate little circle.

At last one of the black South African students crossed the lounge and spoke to Tara. She looked up in consternation and then glanced at her watch.

"My goodness, thank you for reminding me, Nelson.' She smiled up at the student. 'We were having such a good natter that we completely forgot about the time.' Tara jumped to her feet. 'Come on, everybody! If we are going to Trafalgar Square, we had better leave now." There was a general exodus from the lounge, and Isabella edged across to Michael.

"What's this all about, Mickey? You seem to know what's going on. Fill me in." 'There is a rally in Trafalgar Square." 'Oh God, no! Not another one of those anti-apartheid jamborees. Why didn't you warn me?" 'It would have given you an excuse to duck out,' Michael grinned at her.

"Why don't you come along?" 'No, thanks. I've lived with that nonsense for the past three years, ever since Pater took over the embassy. What are you getting mixed up in that ridiculous business for?" 'It's my job, Bella my sweeting. That's what I came to London for, to write about this ridiculous business, as you call it. Come with us." 'Why should I bother?" 'See the world from the other side of the fence for a change - you might find it refreshing - and to be with me. We could have fun together.' She wavered uncertainly. Despite her disdain for the subject, she loved his company. They truly did have fun together, and with Ramsey away she was lonely.

"Only if we ride on the top of a bus, not on the Tube. You know I can never resist a bus ride." They were a party of twenty or so from the Lordy, including Nelson Litalongi, the South African student. Michael found a seat for her on the upper deck of the red bus, and then he and Nelson squeezed in beside her.

Tara and Benjamin were in the seat directly in front of them, but they faced around to join in the laughter and the joking. The mood was gay and carefree, and despite herself Isabella found she was indeed having fun.

Michael was the centre of everything, and he and Nelson began to sing. They both had fine voices, and the others joined in with the chorus of "This Is My Island in the Sun'. Nelson could mintic Harry Belafonte to the life and resembled him except that the tone of his skin was lustrous charcoal. He and Michael had hit it off together from the beginning.

When they climbed off the bus in front of the National Gallery, the demonstrators were already assembling on the open square beneath the tall column, and Michael made a joke about Nelson and Horatio. Everybody laughed, and they trooped across the road into the square, and the pigeons rose in fluttering clouds from around their feet.

There was a temporary platform erected at the end of the square, directly in front of South Africa House, and an area had been roped off, in which a few hundred demonstrators had already assembled. They joined the back ranks, and Tara produced a hand-drawn banner from her plastic shopping-bag and held it aloft.

"Apartheid is a crime against humanity."

Isabella edged away from her and tried to pretend they were not related.

"She really doesn't mind making a spectacle of herself, does she?' she whispered to Michael, and helaughed.

"That's the whole object of the exercise." Nevertheless, Isabella did find it interesting to be a part of this motley gathering. With distaste she had viewed many others like it from the high windows of the ambassador's office across the road, but this gave her a totally new perspective. The crowd was good-natured and well behaved. Four blue-uniformed bobbies stood by to see fair play, and smiled in avuncular fashion when one of the speakers referred to London as a police state every bit as bad as Pretoria. To show her support and to dissociate herself from the remark, Isabella blew the nicest-looking copper a kiss, and his indulgent smile stretched into a delighted grin.

The speeches from the platform droned on against the rumble of the traffic and the passing scarlet buses. Isabella had heard it all before, and so had the others in the crowd to judge by their phlegm and apathy. The best laugh of the day came when a pigeon wheeling high overhead ejected a spurt of whitewash which hit the speaker of the moment fairly on his shiny bald pate and Bella called out: 'Fascist bird, agent of the racist Pretoria regime!" The meeting ended with a vote on the motion that John Vorster and his illegal regime should immediately resign and hand over power to the Democratic People's Government of South Africa. The motion was declared carried unanimously and Michael remarked: 'Which should make John Vorster tremble in his boots.' The meeting broke up more peaceably than a crowd from a football match.

"Let's find a pub,' Michael suggested. 'All that toppling of fascist governments has made me thirsty." 'There is a good one in the Strand," Nelson Litalongi suggested.

"Lead the way,' Michael encouraged him. When they bellied up to the bar-counter, he bought the first round.

"Well,' Isabella gave her judgement as she sipped her ginger beer, that was a fair old waste of time. Two hundred little people spouting hot air aren't going to change anything." 'Don't be too sure of that." Michael wiped the froth off his upper lip with the back of his hand. "Maybe it's the first little ripple lapping at the foot of the dam wall - soon that ripple could become a wavelet, and then a rip-tide and finally a tidal wave." 'Oh, nonsense, Mickey,' Isabella dismissed the idea brusquely. 'South Africa is too strong, too rich. America and Britain have too much invested in her. They won't let us down; they can't expect us to hand over our birthright to a pack of Marxist savages.' She repeated the obvious truths that she had heard her father as ambassador voice so often over the last three years. She was discomfited by the acrimony and logic with which she was assailed by her mother and her half-brother, and by Nelson Litalongi and the twenty other coloured residents from the Lord Kitchener Hotel. It was not a happy experience. That evening when she and Michael returned to Cadogan Square, she was shaken and subdued.

"They are so bitter and angry, Mickey,' she lamented.

"It's the new wave, Bella. If we are to survive it, we should try to understand and come to terms with it." 'It's not as though they are badly treated. Just think about Nanny and Klonkie and Gamiet and all our people at Weltevreden. I mean, Mickey, they are a damned sight better off than most of the whites living in this country." 'I know how you feel, Bella. You can drive yourself mad pondering on the rights and wrongs, but you've got to come back to one thing in the end.

They are human beings, just like us. Some of them a hell of a lot better and nicer. By what right, divine or infernal, can we prevent them sharing all that the country of our birth has to offer?" 'That's very well in theory, but this afternoon they were talking about armed struggle. That means blowing women and children to pieces. That means blood and death, Mickey. just like the Irish. How do you feel about that?" 'I don't know what I feel about that, Bella. Sometimes I feel - No! Killing and maiming and burning are never justified. Then at other times I feel Sure, why not? Man has been killing his fellow-men for a million years to protect himself and his birthright. Pater, who rants and roars at the thought of an armed struggle in South Africa, is the same person who climbed into a Hurricane in ig4o and went off to machine-gun Ethiopians and Italians and Germans with gay old abandon in defence of what he saw as his freedom. Nana, that stalwart of the rule of law and the sanctity of private property, and defender of the freemarket system, was the one who nodded happily and murmured, "Quite right, too!" when she heard the news of the most appalling violence of all mankind's bloody and violent history, the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So how immoral and bloodthirsty are Tara and Benjamin and Nelson Litalongi compared to us and our own family? Who is right and who is wrong, Bella?" 'You've given me a terrible headache.' Bella stood up. "I'm going to bed."

The telephone woke her at six in the morning, and as she heard Ramsey's voice the dark shadow over her life evaporated.

"Darling, where are you')' 'Athens." 'Oh.' Her spirits plunged. 'I hoped you might be at Heathrow." 'I've been delayed. I will be here for at least three more days. Why don't you come across and join me?" 'To Athens?' She was still half-asleep.

"Yes, why not? You can still catch the ten o'clock flight on BEA. We could steal three days together. How about the Acropolis in the moonlight? We can get out to the islands, and there are some important people I would like you to meet." 'Yes!' she cried. 'Why not! Give me your telephone number. I'll ring you back as soon as I have a seat on the plane.' All the lines to British European Airways reservations were busy, and she was running out of time, so Michael drove her out to Heathrow in the Mini and dropped her at the terminal entrance.

"I'll wait until you get a confirmed reservation,' he suggested.

"No, Mickey, you're a darling, but I won't have any trouble at this time of year; the holiday season is over. You go off to your interview, and I'll call you at the flat when Ramsey and I are on our way home." As she walked into the terminal she realized that she had been over-optimistic. Hordes of dejected and weary travellers blocked the aisles with their luggage. When she finally got to the head of the queue at the information-desk, she'was told that a wildcat strike by the French air-traffic controllers had delayed all flights by up to five hours, and that the Athens flight was fully booked. She would have to join the waiting list, even for a seat in first class.