Golden Fox

She stood in another queue to use a public telephone and finally got through to Ramsey at the number he had given her in Athens. He sounded as disappointed as she felt.

"I was looking forward to your arrival. I have lauded you to the skies to the people I want you to meet here." 'I'm not going to give up,' she declared. 'Even if I have to sit here all day." It was a day of discomfort and misery and frustration. When the flight was finally called at five o'clock that evening, she stood at the check-in counter praying for a seat on the waiting-list. However, there were half a dozen other hopefuls ahead of her. In the end, the booking clerk shook her head regretfully.

"I'm so sorry, Miss. Courtney." The next flight to Athens was scheduled for ten the following morning, but there would certainly be delays and another waiting-list. Finally Isabella gave up, and went dejectedly to place another call to Athens. Ramsey was not available, so she left a message for him with someone on the other end who spoke atrocious English. She hoped that Ramsey would understand that she was aborting the journey.

There were no taxis available: hundreds of other passengers like her had abandoned hope and were trying to get home. She lugged her bag down the pavement and queued for a bus to take her into town. It was after eight when she reached it and at last found a taxi to take her back to Cadogan Square.

Her back ached from the baby, and she was close to tears of frustration when at last she let herself into the flat. There was the delicious aroma of cooking, and she realized how hungry she was. She dumped her bag in the lobby, kicked off her shoes and went through to the kitchen. It was obvious that Michael had made himself dinner. The used dishes on the table in the breakfast-nook were still warm, and there were generous leftovers in the warmer. Like her, Michael was an excellent cook. She helped herself to the breasts of chicken Kiev and a slice of the cheesecake that remained. She noticed that there were two used wineglasses and an empty bottle of Pater's Nuits St. Georges on the draining-board of the sink. The significance of this did not really occur to her. She was too weary and dejected and she wanted Michael to cheer her up.

She heard music coming from his bedroom suite upstairs, the sentimental strains of Mantovani, one of Michael's favourites. She climbed the stairs on stockinged feet, went down the passage and pushed open the door to Michael's room.

For a long moment, she did not comprehend what she was seeing; it was too distant from her wildest expectations or ima * * ~ gmmgs.

Then she thought that Michael was being attacked, and a scream rushed up her throat. She had to cover her mouth iowith both hands to contain it. At last understanding flooded over her.

Naked, Michael knelt on hands and knees in the centre of the double bed.

The satin eiderdown and bed-sheets had spilled over on to the floor, and the bed was in disarray. She knew his body so well, lithe and elegantly muscled, tanned by the African sun to the colour of ripe tobacco leaf except where his bathing-trunks had left his skin pale and vulnerable-looking.

Also naked, Nelson Litalongi knelt beside him. In contrast his torso shone with sweat like newly mined coal, so bright that it seemed to have been freshly oiled.

Michael's dearly beloved features were contorted with a deep and particular anguish. His mouth was twisted into a savage rictus that struck her to the depth of her being. For a moment, he reminded her of a stricken animal on the very point of a dreadful death.

Then his vision cleared and focused and he saw her. Before her eyes, his face seemed to dissolve and run like molten wax, and re-form in an expression of terror and deadly shame. With a violent twist of his body, he broke the grip of the man who held him and rolled away from him, reaching for a crumpled pillow to cover his own groin.

Isabella whirled and rushed from the room.

Despite her exhaustion, she slept fitfully and with disjointed and confused dreams, in which she saw Michael struggling naked and terrified in the grip of some fearsome dark monster and once she shouted out in her sleep so wildly that she woke herself.

Before dawn, she abandoned all further attempts at resting and went down to the kitchen. She saw immediately that the dishes and cutlery of the previous evening's meal had been washed and packed away. The empty wine-glasses and bottle had disappeared, and the kitchen was spotless.

She switched on the coffee-percolator and went to check the letter-box. It was too early for the newspaper to have been delivered, so she went back and poured a cup of coffee. She knew the caffeine was bad for the baby, but this morning she needed fortification.

She had taken her first sip when she smelt cigarette smoke and looked up quickly. Michael stood in the doorway with the inevitable cigarette between his lips, slanting his eyes against the spiral of smoke.

"I say, the coffee smells good.' He was dressed in a silk dressing-gown.

His eyes were underscored with leaden smudges, and there were shadows, sickly with guilt, in the blue of his eyes. Uncertainty and diffidence puckered at the comers of his mouth as he said: 'I thought you were in Athens - I'm sorry." They stared at each other across the kitchen for only a few seconds, but which seemed like an age. Then Isabella stood up and crossed to him. She reached up on tiptoe to embrace him, and kissed him full on the mouth.

Then she held him close and pressed her cheek against his cheek that was raspy with new beard.

"I love you, Mickey. You are the dearest, sweetest person in my life. I love you without reservation or qualification." He sighed deeply. 'Thank you, Bella. I should have known that you would be generous and understanding, but I was afraid. You'll never know how terrified I've been that you might reject me." 'No, Mickey. You had no reason to worry." 'I was going to tell you. I've been waiting for the right moment." 'You don't have to tell me, or anybody. It's your business alone." 'No, I wanted you to know. We've never had any secrets between us. I knew you would find out sooner or later. I wanted - oh God, I would have given anything for you not to have found out the way you did. It must have been a terrible shock for you." She closed her eyes tightly and pressed her face harder to his, so that he could not see her expression. She tried to shut the image of what she had witnessed from her mind. However, Michael's face in that contorted rapture of log anguish still floated before her like a reel from a horror movie'.

"It doesn't matter, Mickey. It makes no difference to us or to anything." 'Yes, it does, Bella,' he contradicted her, and then gently held her away from him so that he could study her face. What he saw there made him sadder. With an arm around her shoulders he led her back to her seat at the table in the breakfast-nook, and sat beside her on the banquette.

"Strange,' he said. 'In a way it's a relief that you know. I still hate the way you found out, but at last there is one person in the world with whom I can be my true self; somebody for whom I no longer have to lie and dissemble." 'Why hide it, Mickey? This is nineteen sixty-nine. If that's the way you are, why not be open? Nobody cares any more." Michael fished a packet of Camels out of his dressinggown pocket and lit one. For a moment, he studied the burning tip, and then he said: 'That might be true for others, but not for me.' He shook his head. 'Not for me.

Like it or not, I'm a Courtney. There are Nana and Pater, Garry and Sean, the family, the name." She wanted to deny it, but then she saw that it was futile.

"Nana and Pater,' Michael repeated. 'It would destroy them. Don't think that I haven't considered it - coming out of the closet.' He grinned wryly.

"God, what an awful expression." She squeezed his hand hard, beginning at last to have some faint understanding of her brother's predicament. She knew he was right. He could never let Nana and Pater know. For them it would be as bad - no, it would be worse than Tara. Tara had been a foreigner; Michael was Courtney blood.

They would not survive it. It would destroy part of them, and Michael was too kind, too unselfish, too loyal ever to let that happen. 'How long have you known - about your nature?' she asked quietly.

"Since prep school,' he answered frankly. 'Since those first pre-pubescent gropings and explorations in the log showers and the bog shop...'He broke off. 'I've tried to deny myself I've tried not to let it happen. Sometimes for months, a year even - but it's like a beast inside me, Bella, a ravaging beast over which I have no control." She smiled softly, indulgently. 'As Nanny would say, it's the hot Courtney blood, Mickey. We all have it; none of us can control it very well, not Pater and Garry and Sean - nor you and V 'You don't mind talking about it?' he asked diffidently. 'I've kept it bottled up so long." 'You talk as much as you like. I'm here to listen." 'I've lived with it for fifteen years now and I suppose I'll have to live with it for another fifty. The strange thing -something that would make it even worse as far as the family is concerned - is that I am attracted by coloured men. That would aggravate my guilt and degradation in the eyes of Nana and Pater, in the eyes of our courts at home. God, the scandal if I were discovered and charged under that Immorality Act of our enlightened government!' He shuddered, and stubbed out the cigarette, and immediately lit another from the crumpled pack.

"I don't know why black men attract me so powerfully. I've thought about it a great deal. I suppose I'm like Tara, in a way. Perhaps it's a kind of racial guilt, a subconscious desire to appease and mollify their anger.' He chuckled sardonically. 'We've been screwing them for so long. Why not give them a chance to get their own back?" 'Don't!' Isabella said softly. 'Don't degrade and belittle yourself by talking like that, Mickey. You are a fine and decent person. We are, none of us, responsible for our instincts." Isabella remembered Michael as the gentle shy boy, self-effacing but with boundless affection and concern for every being around him, yet always with that wistful air of sadness about him. She understood now the source of that sadness. She realized what spiritual agony he must have been suffering, that he still suffered. Her heart went out to him as it never had before. The last vestiges of her physical repugnance faded. She knew she would never again hate what she had seen taking place in the room upstairs. She would think only of the agonies which stiff lay in wait for this dear person, and her instincts became fiercer and more protective.

"My poor darling Mickey,' she whispered.

"Poor no longer,' he denied it. 'Not with your love and understanding."

Two days later, while Michael was out on one of his interviews and Isabella's desk was a jumble of open books and scattered papers, the telephone rang. She reached for it distractedly and for a moment she did not recognize the husky voice, or understand the words.

"Ramsey? Is that you? Is something wrong? Where are you? Athens?" 'I'm at the flat..

"Here in London?" 'Yes. Can you come quickly? I need you." Isabella pushed the Mini through the lunch-hour traffic, and when she reached his flat went up the stairs two at a time and arrived on the landing flushed and breathless. She fumbled with the key and at last threw the door open.

"Ramsey!' There was no reply, and she ran through to the bedroom. His valise was open on the bed, and a crumpled shirt lay in the middle of the floor.

It was stained with blood - patches of old dried blood, almost mulberry black in colour, and also newer brighter blood.

"Ramsey! Oh God! Ramsey! Can you hear me?" She ran to the bathroom door. It was locked from inside. She stood back and kicked the lock with her heel. It was one of the judo kicks he had taught her, and the flimsy lock snapped and the door flew open.

Ramsey lay on the tiled floor beside the toilet. He must have grabbed at the shelf above the washbasin as he fell, and her cosmetics had cascaded down into the basin and III across the floor. He was naked from the waist up, but his chest was heavily strapped with bandages. She could tell at a glance that the bandages had been tied by a professional hand. Like his abandoned shirt, the white bandages were soaked'with concentric rings of blood, some dark and old, some fresh and wet.

She dropped on to her knees beside him, and turned his head. His skin was pale, almost opalescent, with a sheen of nauseous sweat upon it. She lifted his head into her lap. Then she snatched up the face-cloth that hung over the edge of the bath. She could just reach the cold-water tap from where she sat. She soaked the cloth and wiped his face and neck.

His eyelids quivered and opened, and he looked up at her.

"Ramsey." His eyes focused. 'I keeled over,' he murmured.

"My darling, what happened to you? You've been badly hurt." 'Help me to the bed,' he said.

Kneeling beside him, she propped him into a sitting position. She was almost as strong as a man, with arms and torso trained by riding and tennis. However, she knew that even she could not lift him unaided.

"Can you stand, if I steady you?" He grunted and made the effort, but halfway to his feet he winced and clutched at the blood-stained bandages as the pain knifed him.

"Take it easy,' she whispered, and for a minute he remained doubled over, then he straightened slowly.

"All right.' He gritted his teeth, and she led him through, taking most of his weight on her shoulder, and lowered him on to the bed.

"Did you come all the way from Athens in this condition?' she asked incredulously.

He nodded the lie. He had summoned Isabella to Athens to act as a courier.

The need had risen urgently and unexpectedly. There had been no other agent available immediately, and it was time for her to be blooded in the field. She was ripe for it. By now she had been conditioned to accept his orders without question, and it was an easy first assignment that he planned for her. She was the perfect innocent, an attractive and pregnant female who would instantly evoke sympathy. She was unmarked, unknown to any of the world's intelligence organizations, including Mossad. In the jargon of the trade, she was a virgin. In addition, she carried a South African passport, and Israel had cordial, indeed intimate, relations with that country.

The plan was for her to catch the flight from Athens to Tel Aviv, make the pick-up and leave by the same route. It would have been a day's work. The plan had foundered when she had not been able to make the flight to Athens.

The pick-up was crucial. It involved details of the co-operation between Israeli and South African scientists in the development of tactical nuclear weapons systems. Even though there was a high probability that he was marked by Mossad, Ramsey had been forced to make the pick-up in person.

He had disguised his appearance as best he was able, and of course he had gone unarmed. It was madness to attempt to carry a weapon through an Israeli security check. He had used his Mexican passport in an assumed name. However, they must have got on to him at Ben Gurion Airport and tailed him to the pick-up.

He had spotted the tail and taken emergency evading procedure, but they had cornered him. He had broken the neck of one Mossad agent and in return had taken this hit. Even severely wounded, he had made it to the PLO safe house in Tel Aviv. Within twelve hours they had smuggled him out on their pipeline to Syria.

However, London was his safe ground. Despite the risks and his injuries, he had too much in play to remain in Damascus. The local KGB head of station had escorted him on to the Aeroflot flight to London. He had made the call to Isabella as he staggered into the flat. Then he had just managed to reach the bathroom before he collapsed.

"I must call a doctor,' she said.

"No doctor!' Despite his weakness, his voice took on that cold sibilant tone which she was so conditioned to obey.

"What must I do?' she asked.

"Get me the telephone,' he ordered, and she hurried to bring the instrument through from its jack in the sitting room.

"Ramsey, you look awful. At least let me get you something - a bowl of soup, darling?" He nodded agreement, but did not look up from the telephone as he dialled.

She went through to the kitchen and heated up a can of thick vegetable soup. As she worked she could hear him speaking to somebody in Spanish on the telephone. However, her recent exercise with the Linguaphone course was insufficient to allow her to follow the conversation. She took the tray of soup and Pro-Vita biscuits through to him as he hung up.

"Darling, what has happened to you? Why won't you let me call the doctor?" He grimaced. If a British doctor saw that injury, he would be bound to report it. If the Cuban embassy doctor came to the flat, it would almost certainly compromise this address and Ramsey's cover. So he had made alternative arrangements. However, he did not answer her question directly.

"I want you to go out immediately. Go to the westbound platform of Sloane Square Underground station and walk the full length of it slowly. Somebody will put an envelope in your hand..." 'Who? How will I recognize him?" 'You won't,' he answered brusquely. 'He will recognize you. You will not speak nor acknowledge the messenger in any way. In the envelope will be a doctor's prescription and a detailed list of instructions to treat my injury. Take the prescription to the all-night chemist in Piccadilly Circus and bring the supplies back here." 'Yes, Ramsey, but you haven't told me how you hurt yourself."

"You must learn to do as you are told - without all those tiresome questions. Now, gov 'Yes, Ramsey.' She picked up her jacket and scarf and then stooped over the bed to kiss him.

"I love you,' she whispered. Halfway down the stairs, she stopped suddenly.

Nobody, with the possible exception of Nana, had ever spoken to her in such forceful terms since childhood. Even her father made requests; he did not give her orders. Yet here she was scampering breathlessly as a schoolgirl to obey. She pulled a face and ran on down into the street.

She had not reached the end of the Underground platform when, from behind, she felt a light touch on her wrist and an envelope was slipped into her hand. She glanced over her shoulder, but the messenger was already walking away. He wore a blue wool cap and dark overcoat, but she could not see his face.

At the chemist's the dispenser read the prescription and remarked: 'You have somebody badly injured?' But she shook her head.

"I'm just Doctor Alves' receptionist. I don't know." And he made up the package of medicines without further comment.

Ramsey seemed to be sleeping, but he opened his eyes immediately she entered the bedroom. All her previous fears for him returned in full force when she saw his face. His eyes seemed to have sunk into dark bruised cavities, and his skin had the pallor of a two-day corpse. However, she thrust aside her personal misgivings and steeled herself to act calmly.

While she was at university she had taken a course in first aid with the Red Cross. At Weltevreden she had often assisted the visiting doctor at his weekly clinic for the coloured employees. She had seen enough missing fingers and crushed feet and other injuries inflicted by farm machinery to have overcome any squeamishness.

She laid out the supplies from the chemist and read swiftly through the simple typed instructions from the envelope. She washed in the bathroom basin, adding half a cup of Dettol to the water; then sat Ramsey upright and began unwrapping the bandages.

The blood had dried, and the dressing stuck to the edges of the wound. He closed his eyes, and a light sweat dewed his forehead and chin as she worked it loose.

"I'm sorry,' she whispered. 'I'm trying not to hurt you." The dressing came away at last, and she suppressed an exclamation as she saw the wounds. There was a deep puncture low down in the side of his chest and a second corresponding ragged aperture in the smooth muscles of his back that was clogged with a black plug of clotted blood. The skin around the wounds was hot and inflamed, and there was the faint sickly smell of infection.

She knew instantly how those injuries had been inflicted. On her last visit to her brother Sean's hunting concession in the Zambezi valley, they had answered a call for assistance from a nearby Batonka village that had been attacked by terrorists. That was where she had first seen the distinctive entry puncture and enlarged exit of a through-andthrough bullet wound.

Ramsey was watching her face, so she made no comment and tried to keep her expression neutral as she cleaned the area around the wounds with disinfectant, and then strapped fresh dressings in place with crisp white bandages.

She knew that she had done a proficient job, and he murmured as she eased him back on the pillows: 'Good. You know what you are doing." 'Not finished yet. I have to give you a jab. Doctor's orders.' And then in an attempt at humour; 'Show me your gorgeous bum, chumv She stood at the foot of the bed and removed his shoes and socks, then took a grip on the turn-ups of his trousers and, while, he arched his back and lifted himself slightly, she pulled them off.

"Now your underpants.' She drew them down, and sighed with mock relief. "At least you didn't damage any of my special goodies. That would have made me really mad.' This time he smiled, and then rolled cautiously on to his side.

She filled the disposable syringe and injected an ampoule of broad-spectrum antibiotic into the smooth hard swell of his buttock. Then she covered him carefully with the down-filled duvet.

"Now,' she said firmly, 'two of these pills - and rest." He did not protest and when he had taken the sleeping pills she kissed him and switched out the bedside light.

"I'll be in the sitting-room if you need me."

In the morning his colour was much improved and obviously the antibiotic had done its work. His temperature was down, and his eyes were clear.

"How did you sleep?' she asked.

"Those pills are dynamite. It was like falling over a cliff, and now I could use a bath." She ran the bath and helped him through. Once he was seated waist-deep, she used the sponge to clean around the edges of the bandage, and then her attentions moved lower and she plied the soapy sponge with cunning.

"Ah, you may be damaged on top, but down below things are all working very satisfactorily, I am glad to report." 'Merely as a matter of interest, Nurse, is what you are doing at the moment business or pleasure?" 'A little of one and considerably more of the other,' she confessed.

Back on the bed, he protested half-heartedly when she filled the syringe with another measure of antibiotic, but she told him sternly: 'Why are men such cowards? Bottoms up!'And he rolled over obediently. 'Good boy,'she nodded as she withdrew the needle and swabbed the puncture mark with alcohol. 'Now you've earned your breakfast, and I've got you a kipper as a reward." She enjoyed nursing him. For once she was in a position to give him orders and have them obeyed. While she was busy in the kitchen, she heard him on the telephone, talking Spanish that was too rapid and complicated for her to follow. She listened, trying, despite her limitations, to make sense of it, and the misgivings that had troubled her most of the night returned in full force. To fend them off she slipped down the stairs and ran to the flower and fruit stall on the corner opposite the entrance to the Tube station.

She chose a dark red Papa Meillon rosebud and a perfect golden peach, and ran all the way back. Ramsey was still speaking on the telephone when she let herself in.

She arranged the rose and the peach on the breakfasttray. When she took them through to him he looked up from the telephone and rewarded her with one of his rare and treasured smiles.

She sat on the edge of the bed and carefully forked the succulent flesh off the kipper bone and fed it to him, a mouthful at a time, while he continued his telephone conversation. When he had finished, she took the tray back to the kitchen, and while she was washing up she heard him hang up the telephone receiver.

Quickly she returned to the bedroom and settled down on her own side of the bed with her legs curled up sideways under her in that feminine double-jointed fashion impossible for a man to emulate.

"Ramsey,' she said quietly and seriously, 'that is a bullet wound." His eyes went cold and deadly green, and he stared back at her without expression.

"How did it happen?' she asked, and he was silent, watching her. She felt her resolution fade, but she steeled herself to continue.

"You are not a banker, are you?" 'I am a banker most of the time,' he said softly.

"And at other times, what are you then?" 'I am a patriot. I serve my country." She felt a hot rush of relief. During the night she had imagined a hundred horrid possibilities: that he was a n8 drug-smuggler, or a bank-robber, or a member of some criminal syndicate involved in a gang war.

"Spain,' she said. 'You are a member of the Spanish secret service, is that it?" He was silent again, watching her with careful calculation. He was the master of progressive revelation. She must be drawn in gradually, a little at a time, so that she was neither unwilling nor resistant, an insect being entrapped and slowly engulfed in a puddle of honey.

"You must realize, Bella, that if that were indeed the case I would not be able to tell you." 'Of course.' She nodded happily. She had known another man from this dangerous and exciting world of espionage and intrigue. He was the only man before Ramsey with whom she had believed herself to be in love. He had been a brigadier in the South African security police, another powerful ruthless one who could match her spirit and control her wilder emotional excesses.

She had lived as man and wife with Lothar De La Rey in the Johannesburg flat for six marvellously stormy months. When he had ended it suddenly and without warning, she had been shattered. Now she realized that it had been shallow infatuation, nothing to compare even remotely with what she had found in Ramsey Machado. 'I understand completely, Ramsey darling, and you can trust me. I won't ask any more silly questions." 'I have trusted you with my life already,' he said. 'You were the first person I called upon for help." 'I'm proud of that. Because you are Spanish and because you are my lover and the father of my baby, I feel myself to be in a large part Spanish as well. I want to help you any way I am able." "Yes,' he nodded. 'I understand that. I have thought about the baby.' He reached out and touched her stomach, and his hand felt cool and hard. 'I want my son to be born in Spain, so that he, too, will be a Spaniard and his claim to the title will be secured." She was startled. She had taken it for granted that she would have her baby here in London. The gynaecologist had already made a tentative reservation at the maternity home.

"Will you do that for me, Bella? Will you make my son a full Spaniard? he asked, and she hesitated not a moment longer.

"Yes, of course, my darling. I will do whatever you wish.' She leant over him and kissed him. Then she snuggled down on the pillow beside him, careful not to jostle his injuries. 'If that is -what you want, then we will have to start making arrangements,' she suggested.

"I have already done so,' he confessed. 'There is an excellent private clinic just outside Mdlaga. I have a friend at the bank's head office in MAlaga who will find us a flat and a maid. I have arranged a transfer to the head office, so that I will be with you when the baby is born." 'It sounds so exciting,' she agreed. 'And if you get to choose where the baby is to be born, then I choose where we marry when we eventually can.

That's fair, isn't it?" He smiled. 'Yes, that is fair." 'I want to be married at Weltevreden. There is an old slave church on the estate, built a hundred and fifty years ago. My grandmother, Nana, had it completely restored and renovated for my brother Garry's wedding. It's exquisite, and Nana filled it with flowers for Garry and Holly. I will have arurn lilies. Some people believe that they are unlucky, but they are my favourite flowers and I'm not superstitious, or not much anyway..." Patiently he let her ramble on, occasionally murmuring encouragement, awaiting the precise moment for his next revelation, and she gave him the opening.

"But we are cutting things a little fine, Ramsey darling. Nana will want at least six weeks to make all the arrangements, and by then I am going to be the size of a house. They'll play the "Baby Elephant Walk" as I come down the aisle." 'No, Bella,' he contradicted her. 'At your wedding, you will be slim and beautiful - because you will no longer be pregnant." She sat bolt upright on the bed. 'What are you trying to tell me, Ramsey.

Something has happened, hasn't it?" 'Yes. You are right. There is bad news, I'm afraid. I have heard from Natalie. She's still in Florida. She is being obstinate, and there are legal delays." 'Oh, Ramsey!" 'I am as unhappy as you are about it. If there was anything I could do, believe me, I would do it." 'I hate her,' she whispered.

"Yes, sometimes I feel that way. But truly it is not a disaster, only an inconvenience at the most. We will still be married, and you will still have your little slave church and your arum lilies. It is just that our son will be born before that happens." 'Promise me, Ramsey, swear it to me - that we will be married as soon as you are free." 'I swear it to you." She settled down beside him, cradling her head on his good shoulder, hiding her face so that he could not guess how disappointed she truly was.

"I hate her, but I love you,' she said, and Ramsey gave a grim little smile of satisfaction that she could not see.

He was confined to the flat by his wound for another week, and there was time to talk. She told Ramsey about Michael, and was flattered by the interest he showed in her brother.

She expanded on Michael's virtues, and on their special relationship. Ramsey listened and drew her out gently. He was so easy to talk to. She looked upon him as an extension of herself. She found herself going on to tell him about the rest of her family, about what lay behind the public mask that they as a group presented to the world; about their secrets and their weaknesses and their scandals, about Shasa and Tara's divorce. She even told him about the dark suspicion that Nana had once given birth to a bastard son in the wild southern deserts of Africa.

"Of course, nobody has ever proved it. I don't think anybody would dare.

Nana is a formidable force.' She laughed. 'And that is understating the fact. However, there was definitely some very fishy business back there in the nineteen twenties." In the end, Ramsey brought the conversation back to Michael. 'If he's here in London, why haven't you introduced us? Arc you ashamed of me?" 'Oh, may I? May I bring him round here, Ramsey? rve told him a little about you, about us. I know he'd love to meet you, and I'm sure you will like him. He's the only truly sweet and good Courtney. The rest of us... P She rolled her eyes comically.

Michael arrived with a bottle of his father's burgundy under his arm. 'I thought of bringing flowers,' he explained, 'but then I decided to get something useful instead." He and Ramsey scrutinized each other carefully as they shook hands. Isabella watched them anxiously, willing them to like each other.

"How are your ribs?' Michael asked. Isabella had told him that Ramsey had taken a toss from his horse and broken three ribs.

"Your sister is holding me prisoner. There is nothing wrong with me nothing that a glass of that excellent burgundy won't cure.' Ramsey displayed that rare warmth and special charm of his which were irresistible. Isabella felt quite giddy with relief. Her two most favourite and important people were going to like each other.

She took the burgundy through to the kitchen to find a corkscrew. When she returned with the open bottle and two glasses, Michael was settled in the chair beside the bed and they were already engrossed in conversation. 'We get the airmail edition of your paper, the Golden City Mail, at the bank," Ramsey was telling him. 'I particularly like your financial and economic coverage."

"Ah, you are in banking,' Michael nodded. 'Bella didn't tell me that." 'Merchant banking. We specialize in sub-Saharan Africa.'And they were away at a conversational gallop. Bella kicked off her flat shoes, rolled up the bottoms of her blue jeans and perched up on the bed beside Ramsey. Although she took no part in the conversation, she listened avidly.

She had no idea that Ramsey had such a grasp of African facts and realities, such a deep knowledge of the personalities and places and events which made up the rich and fascinating mosaic of her native land. Compared to this discussion, all her previous conversations with him had been shallow and trivial. Listening to the two of them, she learnt new facts and heard ideas expressed that were totally fresh to her.

Michael was obviously as impressed as she was. His pleasure at finding a challenging and stirhulating intellect on which to try out his own interpretations and beliefs was evident.

It was after midnight; the original bottle of wine and another that Isabella had dug out of her tiny stock in the kitchen were empty. The bedroom was thick with the smoke of Michael's Camels before she looked at her watch and exclaimed: 'You were invited for one drink, Mickey, and Ramsey is an invalid. Away with you, now.' She went to fetch his overcoat.

While she helped him into it, Ramsey said softly from the bed: 'If you are doing a series on the political exiles, it wouldn't be complete without one on Raleigh Tabaka." Mickey laughed ruefully. 'I'd give my chance of salvation for a crack at Tabaka, the mystery man. It just ain't possible, as old Rudyard put it, "if you know the track of the morning mist, then you know where his pickets are"." 'I've met him in the line of duty at the bank. We keep tabs on all the players. I might be able to arrange for you to meet him,' Ramsey told him, and Michael froze and stared at him with one arm in the sleeve of his coat.

-

"I've been trying to get hold of him for five years,' he said. 'If you could..." 'Call me tomorrow, around lunchtime,'Ramsey told him. "I'll see what I can do." At the door Michael kissed Isabella. 'I take it that you are not coming home tonight?" 'This is home.' She hugged him. 'My temporary residence at Cadogan Square was just to impress you, but I don't have to do that any longer." 'He's a knockout, your Ramsey," Michael said, and she felt a sudden shocking stab of jealousy, as though another woman had challenged her for Ramsey's affection. She tried to suppress it. It was the only ugly feeling she had ever harboured towards Mickey, but the pain persisted as she went back to the bedroom and deepened again as Ramsey said: 'I like him. Your brother is one of the superior beings - they are rare enough." She felt ashamed of her unkind feelings towards Mickey. How could she harbour the slightest doubt that Ramsey was a man, a natural man. She knew that he liked Michael only for his charm and fine intellect, and because he was her brother - and yet, and yet that dirty sneaking feeling persisted.

She stooped over the bed and kissed Ramsey with a passion that surprised even her. After the first moment of shock, his mouth opened and their tongues slithered and rolled around each other, slippery as mating eels.

She broke away at last and looked up at him. 'You swan around Europe for weeks on end, leaving me pining, and when you do come home you lie around in bed, hogging food and sleeping,' she accused him in a husky voice, tight with her need of him. 'And never a thought for the maid or the nurse. Well, Master Ramsey, I'm here to tell you it's pay-day, and I've come to collect." 'I'll need some help,' he warned her.

"You just lie still. Don't do a thing. Nurse's orders. We'll take care of the details." -She drew back the bed-sheets and reached down under them, and her voice was a languorous coo. 'We'll take care of things, he and I. You keep out of it." She straddled him gently, taking care not to touch his bandaged chest. As she sank down on top of him, she saw her own deep need reflected in the green mirror of his eyes, and felt all her doubts evaporate. He belonged to her and to her alone.

Afterwards she lay at his good side, close and secure and happy, and they talked drowsily, hovering on the edge of sleep in the darkness. When he mentioned Michael again, she felt a twinge of remorse at her earlier doubts. She was so relaxed, so much off-guard, and she trusted Ramsey as she did herself She wanted to explain and share it with him.

"Poor Mickey, I never suspected the agony he has had to endure all these years. I am closer to him than any person in the world, and yet even I did not know about it. A few days ago, I found out, quite by accident, that he is a practising homosexual.

The words were out before she could stop them, and suddenly she was appalled by what she had done. Mickey had trusted her, and she shivered, waiting for some reaction from Ramsey. However, it was not what she had expected.

"Yes,' he agreed calmly. 'I knew that. There are some indications which are unmistakable. I knew it within the first half-hour." She felt a rush of relief. Ramsey had known, so there was no betrayal on her part.

"You are not repelled by it?" 'No, not at all,' Ramsey answered. 'Many of them are creative and intelligent and productive people." 'Yes, Mickey is like that,' she agreed eagerly. 'I was shocked at first, but now it means little to me. He is still my darling brother. However, I do worry about him being caught up in a criminal prosecution." 'I don't think there is much chance of that. Society has accepted-"

"You don't understand, Ramsey. Michael likes black boys and he lives in South Africa." 'Yes,' Rarnen agreed thoughtfully. 'That could present some problems."

Michael phoned the flat from a pay-booth in Fleet Street a little before noon, and Ramsey answered on the second ring.

"The news is good,' Ramsey assured him. 'Raleigh Tabaka is in London and he knows of you. Did you write a series of newspaper articles back in nineteen sixty under the title "Rage"?" 'Yes, a series of six for the Mail; it got the paper banned by the security police." 'Tabaka read them and liked them. He has agreed to meet you." 'My God, Ramsey. I can't tell you how grateful I am. This is the most marvelous break-" Ramsey cut short his thanks. 'He'll meet you this evening, but he has laid down some conditions." 'Anything,' Michael agreed quickly.

"You are to come to the meeting alone. No weapons, of course, and no tape-recorder or camera. He does not want his voice or appearance on record. There is a pub in Shepherd's Bush.' He gave Michael the address.

"Be there at seven this evening. Carry a bunch of flowers - carnations.

Someone will meet and take you to the rendezvous." 'Right, I've got that." 'One other condition. Tabaka wants to read all your copy on the interview before you print it." Michael was silent for a slow count of five. The request contravened all his journalistic principles. It amounted to a form of censorship and cast a slur on his professional ethics. However, the price was an interview with one of the most wanted men in Africa.

"All right,' he agreed heavily. 'I'll give him first read."

And then his tone brightened. 'I owe you a favour, Ramsey. I'll come around and tell you all about it tomorrow evening." 'Don't forget the bottle of wine." Michael rushed back to Cadogan Square. As soon as he reached the telephone he cancelled all the rest of the day's appointments, and then settled down to plan his strategy for the interview. His questions had to be searching, but not so barbed as to cool Tabaka's co-operative mood. He had to be sincere and sympathetic, and yet at the same time, severe, for he was dealing with a man who had deliberately chosen the path of violence and bloodshed. To achieve credibility his questions must be balanced and neutral, and at the same time designed to draw the out. In particular he did not want a mere recital of all the radical slogans and revolutionary jargon.

"The term "terrorist" is generally applied to a person who for reasons of political coercion commits an act of violence on a target of a non-military nature during which there is a high probability of injury or death being inflicted on innocent bystanders. Do you accept that definition and, if so, does the label "terrorist" apply to Umkhonto we Sizwe?

He worked that out as his first question, and lit another Camel as he studied it.

"Good.' That was what you called jumping straight in with both feet, but perhaps it needed a little honing and polishing. He worked on steadily, and by five-thirty he had prepared twenty questions that satisfied him. He made himself a smoked-salmon sandwich and drank a bottle of Guinness while he reviewed and rehearsed his script.

Then he shrugged on his overcoat, armed himself with the bunch of carnations which he had bought at the comer stall. It was drizzling rain.

He flagged down a taxi in Sloane Street.

The pub was steamy with body heat. The condensation ran down the stained-glass windows in rainbow rivulets. Michael displayed the carnations ostentatiously and peered through the soft blue mist of tobacco smoke.

Almost immediately a neatly dressed Indian in a three-piece blue wool suit left the bar-counter and made his way down the crowded room.

"Mr. Courtney, my name is Govan." 'From Natal.' Michael recognized the accent.

"From Stanger.' The man smiled. 'But that was six years ago.' He glanced at the shoulders of Michael's coat. 'Has it stopped raining? Good, we can walk. It's not far." His guide struck out down the main thoroughfare. Within a hundred yards he turned abruptly into a. narrow alleyway and increased his pace. Michael had to trot to match him. He was wheezing when they reached the exit to the alley.

"Damned fags - I must cut down." Govan turned out of the alley, and stopped abruptly round the corner.

Michael was about to speak, but Govan gripped his arm to silence him. They waited for five minutes. Only when it was certain that they. were not being followed did he relax his grip.

"You don't trust me,' Michael smiled, and dumped the carnations in the rubbish-bin that bore a warning of the penalties for littering.

"We do not trust anybody.' Govan led him away. 'Especially not the Boers.

They are learning new kinds of nastiness each day." Ten minutes later they stopped again outside a modem block of flats, in a broad well-lit street. There was a rank of Mercedes and jaguars parked at the kerb. The lawn and small garden in front of the apartment-block was carefully groomed. It was clearly an expensive residential enclave. 'I will leave you here,' said Govan. 'Go in. There is a porter in the lobby. Tell him that you are a guest of Mr. Kendrick, Flat 505." The lobby was in keeping with the facade of the building, Italian marble floor, wood-panelled walls and gilded doors to the lift. The uniformed porter saluted him. 'Yes, Mr. Courtney, Mr. Kendrick is expecting you. Please go up to the fifth floor."

. When the lift doors opened, there were two unsmiling young coloured men waiting for him.

"Come this way, Mr. Courtney." They led him down the carpeted passage to number 505 and let him into the flat.

As the door closed, they stepped in on each side of him and swiftly but thoroughly patted him down. Michael lifted his arms and spread his legs co-operatively. As they searched him, he looked around him with the journalist's eye. The flat had been decorated with flair and taste, and money.

His escorts stepped back satisfied, and one of them opened the double doors ahead of him.

"Please,' he said, and Michael went through into a spacious and beautifully decorated room. The sofas and easy chairs were covered with cream-coloured Connolly leather. The thick pile of the wall-to-wall carpet was a soft cocoa. The tables and the cocktail-bar were in crystal and chrome. On the walls hung four large Hockney paintings, from his swimming-pool series.

Fifty thousand quid each, Michael estimated, and then his eyes flicked to the figure who stood in the centre of the room.

There had been no recent photograph of this man, but Michael recognized him instantly from a blurred press picture in the Mairs archives which dated back years to the Sharpeville era and the subsequent enquiries.

"Mr. Tabaka,'he said. He was as tall as Michael, probably six foot one, but broader in the shoulder and narrower in the waist.

"Mr. Courtney.' Raleigh Tabaka came forward to offer his hand. He moved like a boxer, fluidly in balance, poised and aggressive.

"You live in style?' Michael put a question in his voice, and Raleigh Tabaka frowned slightly.

"This is the apartment of a sympathizer. I have no call for such frippery." His voice was firm and deep, melodious with the unmistakable echoes of Africa. Despite the denial, his suit was of pure new wool and draped elegantly over his warrior's frame.

There were the tiny stirrups of the Gucci motif on his silk tie. He was an impressive man.

"I am grateful for this opportunity to meet you,' Michael said.

"I read your "Rage" series,' Raleigh told him, studying Michael with those black onyx eyes. 'You understand my people. You examined their aspirations with a fair and impartial eye." 'Not everybody would agree with you - especially those in authority in South Africa." Raleigh smiled. His teeth were even and white. 'I have very little to tell you that will comfort them now. But first may I offer you a drink?" 'A gin and tonic." 'Ah, yes, the fuel on which the journalistic mind functions.' Raleigh's tone was scornful. He went to the bar and poured the clear liquid from a crystal decanter, and squirted the tonic from a hand-held nozzle connected to the bar by a chrome-sheathed hose.

"You don't drink?' Michael asked, and Raleigh frowned again.

"With so much work to be done, why should I cloud my mind?' He glanced at his wristwatch. 'We have only an hour, then I must go." 'I mustn't waste a minute of it,' Michael agreed. As they settled facing each other in the cream Connolly-leather chairs, he said: 'I have all the background I need: your place and date of birth, your education at Waterford School in Swaziland, your relationship to Moses Gama, your pre sent position in the ANC. May I go on from there?' And Raleigh inclined his head in assent.

"The term "terrorist" is generally applied to.

Michael repeated his definition, and Raleigh's features tightened with anger as he listened.

"There are no innocent bystanders in South Africa,' he cut in brusquely.

"It is a war. Nobody can claim to be a neutral. We are all combatants."

"No matter how young, how old? No matter how sympathetic to your people's aspirations?" 'There are no bystanders,' Raleigh repeated. "From the cradle to the grave, we are all in the battlefield. We all fall into one of two camps, either the oppressed or the oppressors." 'No man or woman or child has a choice?'Michael asked.

"Yes, there is a choice - to take one or the other side. Neutrality is not an option." 'If a bomb explodes in a crowded supermarket, some of your own people, your own sympathizers may die or be maimed. Would you feel remorse?" 'Remorse is not a revolutionary emotion, just as it is not an emotion of the perpetrators of apartheid. Those who die are either enemy casualties or courageous and honourable sacrifices. In war both are unavoidable, even desirable." Michael's pen dashed across the sheets of his notepad as he attempted to capture these frightful pronouncements. He felt shaken and aroused, both excited and terrified by what he heard. He had the feeling that, like a moth that circled the flame too closely, he would be scarred by the white heat of this man's rage. He knew that he could faithfully record the words, but he could never reproduce the fierce spirit in which they were uttered.

The allotted hour sped away too fast, as Michael tried to use every second to the full, and when at last Raleigh glanced at his wristwatch and stood up he tried desperately to prolong it.

"You have spoken of your child warriors,' he said. 'What age, how young are they?" 'I will show you children of seven who will bear arms, and commanders of sections who are ten years old." 'You will show rne?" Michael asked. 'Is that possible -that you will show me?" Raleigh studied him for a long moment. The intelligence that Ramsey Machado had passed on to him seemed to be valid. Here was a useful tool. One that could be fitted to his hand and his purpose. He might be well worth the effort that would be needed to develop him fully. He was one of Lenin's 'useful idiots' who, to begin with, could be made to serve the cause unwittingly. Later, of course, it would be different. At first, he would be the spade and the ploughshare; only later, when the time was ripe, would he be forged into the sword of war.

"Michael Courtney,' he said softly, 'I am disposed to trust you. I think that you are a decent and enlightened man. If you keep my trust, I will open doors for you into places you have never dreamt existed. I will take you into the streets and hovels of Soweto. Into the hearts of my people and, yes, I will show you the children." 'When?' Michael demanded anxiously, aware that his time was running out.

"Soon,'Raleigh promised, and at that moment they heard the front door open.

"How will I find you?' Michael persisted.

"You won't. I will find you when I am ready." The double doors to the sitting-room swung open and a man stood at the threshold. Even in his preoccupation with Raleigh Tabaka's promise, Michael was struck, his attention was diverted. He recognized the newcomer instantly, even in his street clothes. The name Kendrick should have alerted him.

"This is our host who owns this apartment,' Raleigh Tabaka introduced them.

"Oliver Kendrick, this is Michael Courtney." 'I saw you dance Spartacus,' Michael said, his voice subdued with awe.

"Three times. Such virility and athleticism., Oliver Kendrick smiled and crossed the room with the springing gait of the ballet-dancer, and offered Michael his hand. It was surprisingly narrow and cool, and his bones felt light as those of a bird. It was appropriate, for they called him 'the Black Swan'. His neck was long and elegant, as that of the bird, and his eyes were as luminous as a mountain pool reflected in the moonlight. His skin had the same dark lustre.

Michael thought that close up he was more beautiful even than he had appeared in the romantic lighting of the stage set, and his breathing cramped. The dancer left his hand in Michael's grip, as he turned his head to Raleigh. 'Don't rush away, Raleigh,' he pleaded in that musical West Indian lilt.

"I must go.' Raleigh shook his head. 'I'm afraid that I have a plane to catch." Oliver Kendrick turned back to Michael, still holding his hand. "I have had a beastly day. I swear I could simply curl up and die. Don't leave me alone, Michael. Do stay and distract me. You can be entertaining and distracting, can't you, Michael?" Raleigh Tabaka left him and let himself out of the flat. One of his men was waiting for him outside the door, but they did not leave the building.

Instead the man led Raleigh only a short distance down the passageway to a less ostentatious doorway. This second flat, beyond it, was much smaller and starkly furnished. Raleigh went through to the inner room, and the second of his men made to stand up from the chair beside the lit window in the side-wall.

Raleigh gestured to him to remain seated and crossed to the window. It was of unusual shape, tall and narrow, like a full-length dressing-mirror. The glass was shaded with that slightly opaque tone that was characteristic of a twoway mirror viewed from the reverse side.

The room beyond was a bedroom, lavishly furnished like the rest of Oliver Kendrick's apartment. The colour theme was pale oyster and mushroom, and the satin bedspread matched exactly the shade of the deep pile of the carpet. Hidden lighting glimmered and glowed on the mirrored tiles of the ceiling. Set in an alcove facing the bed was an ancient phallic symbol, carved from amber-coloured obsidian, a precious antique from a Hindu temple.

The room was empty, and Raleigh turned his attention to the camera equipment that stood ready, aimed through the two-way mirror.

The apartment and the camera equipment belonged to Oliver Kendrick. He had loaned it to Raleigh on previous occasions. It was odd that a man of Kendrick's talent and fame would consent to take part in an arranged tableau such ag this. However, not only did he do so willingly, but he had also actually offered his equipment and his services to Raleigh.

He participated with such unfeigned enthusiasm and inventive delight that it was obvious that this was very much to his particular taste. His only stipulation was that Raleigh hand over to him a copy of the videotapes and photographs to add to his huge private collection. The video equipment was of the very finest professional standard. Raleigh had been impressed by the quality of reproduction even in this low-light environment.

Raleigh glanced at his wristwatch again. He could safely leave the rest of it to his two bodyguards. They had done this before. However, a perverse curiosity made him linger. It was almost half an hour before the door to the bedroom opened. Kendrick and Michael Courtney entered. Raleigh's two assistants moved quickly to their positions, one to the video-recorder and the other to the big black Hasselblad camera on its tripod. The still camera was loaded with monochrome theatrical film, rated at 3ooo ASA which rendered crisp prints in the poorest light conditions.

In the room beyond, the two men embraced, a long lingering kiss with open mouths, and the video-recorder emitted a faint electric hum. The sound of the shutter of the Hasselblad was much louder, almost explosive in the quiet dark room.

At one stage, as the white man lay expectantly in the centre of the oyster satin bedspread, Kendrick crossed naked to stand in front of the two-way mirror. He pretended to examine his own body, in reality flaunting it before the men who, he knew, were watching on the far side of the glass.

His musculature was extraordinarily developed by long hours at the practice barre. His calves and thighs were disproportionately massive.

He gazed arrogantly into the mirror, and the diamond ear-rings in his lobes glittered as he turned his head on its long swan's neck, striking a theatrical pose. He ran the tip of his tongue along the inside of his parted lips and stared through the darkling mirror into Raleigh Tabaka's eyes. It was the lewdest gesture he had ever witnessed, with a chill of evil to it that made even Raleigh shiver briefly.

Kendrick turned away and sauntered back towards the bed. His velvety black buttocks swayed in that stylized mincing gait, and the man on the bed raised both arms to greet him.

Raleigh turned away and left the apartment. He rode down in the lift and walked out into the chill of evening. He drew his overcoat tighter across his chest and took a slow breath of clean cold air. Then he gathered himself and walked away with the long determined stride of a with important work to do.

When Michael left London he took with him a little of the special joy that had filled Isabella's LIFE over these last weeks.

She drove him out to Heathrow. 'We always seem to be saying goodbye, Mickey,' she whispered. 'I shall miss you so, as I always do." 'I'll see you at the wedding." 'There will probably be a christening before that," she answered, and he held her at arm's length.

"You didn't tell me,' he accused.

"His wife,' she explained. 'We are moving to Spain at the end of January.

Ramsey wants the baby to be born there. He will adopt it under Spanish law." 'You must let me know where you are - at all times -and remember your promise." She nodded. 'You'll be the very first one that I'll call on for help, if I need it." At the doors to the departure-hall, he looked back and blew her a kiss.

When he disappeared she felt chilled with loneliness.

This was a feeling that evaporated swiftly in the Iberian sunlight.

The apartment that Ramsey found was in a tiny fishing village a few miles down the coast from Mdlaga. It occupied the top two floors, and had a wide paved terrace that looked out over the tops of the pines to the blue Mediterranean beyond. During the day, while Ramsey was at the bank, Isabella in her tiniest bikini lay out on a protected corner of the terrace where the cold wind could not reach her and the sun tanned her face and body to the colour of dark amber while she wrote the final section of her thesis.

Born in Africa, she was a child of the sun, and she had missed it desperately during the London years.

Ramsey was called upon by his bank to travel as frequently as when they had lived in London. She hated to see him go, but between his trips there were lyrical interludes spent together. While in Mdlaga his bank duties were light and he could slip away for the entire afternoon and take her to secret and unfrequented coves along the seashore, or to out-of-the-way restaurants that served the local seafood specialities and country wines.

His wound had healed cleanly. 'It was the expert nurse I had,' he told her.

It left a pair of dimpled scars on his chest and back that were glossy with a pink cicatrice. The sun tanned the rest of his body to a much darker tone than hers, like oiled mahogany. In contrast to the tan, his eyes seemed a lighter brighter green.

While Ramsey was away she had Adra for company. Where Ramsey had found her she was never able to ascertain. However, the choice was a master-stroke, for Adra Olivares was a marvelous substitute for Nanny. In some ways, she surpassed the original, for she was not as garrulous and prying and domineering as the old woman.

Adra was a slim but physically robust woman in her early forties. She had jet hair with just a few strands of dead white that she wore sleeked back into a bun the size of a cricket ball behind her head. Her face was dark and solemn, but at the same time kind and humorous. Her hands were brown and square and powerful when she performed the housework, but quick and light when she cooked or ironed Isabella's clothes to a crisp crackling perfection, or again they were gentle and infinitely comforting when she massaged Isabella's aching back or anointed her bulging sun-browned belly with olive oil to keep the muscles supple and the skin smooth and young and free of stretch-marks.

She took over Isabella's tuition in the Spanish language, and their progress was so rapid that it surprised Ramsey. Within a month, Isabella was reading the local newspapers with ease, and arguing fluently with the plumber and the television repair man, or supporting Adra as she haggled with the stall-holders in the local marketplace.

Although she loved to question Isabella about her family and Africa, Adra was not forthcoming about her own origins. Isabella presumed that she was a local woman, until one morning she noticed amongst the mail in their postbox an envelope addressed to her that was stamped and franked in Havana, Cuba.

When she remarked, 'Is it from your husband or family, Adra? Who is writing to you from Cuba?' the woman was brusque.

"It's only a friend, sefiora. My husband is dead.' And for the rest of the day she was withdrawn and taciturn. It took until the end of the week for her to return to normal, and Isabella was careful not to mention the Cuban letter again.

As the weeks passed, and the time of Isabella's parturition drew closer, so Adra's anticipation of the event increased. She took an intense interest in the layette that Isabella was assembling. Michael had made the original contribution. An airmail parcel arrived from Johannesburg with a set of six cot-sheets and pillow-slips in finest cotton piped with blue silk ribbon, and an exquisite pair of woollen baby-jackets. Each day Isabella added to the collection and Adra helped her with her selections. Together they scoured every possible source of babywear within a radius of an hour's drive in the Mini.

Whenever Ramsey returned from his business trips, he always brought a further contribution. Although the clothing was often large enough to fit a teenager, Isabella was so touched by his concern that she could not bring herself to point out the discrepancy. On one occasion, he returned with a pram whose capacity, suspension and glistening paintwork were worthy of the Rolls-Royce workshops in Crewe. Adra presented Isabella with a silk christening-robe that she had made herself with antique lace that she told Isabella came from her grandmother's wedding-dress. Isabella was so touched that she broke down and wept. Her tears seemed to come closer to the surface as her pregnancy progressed, and she thought often of Weltevreden.

When she telephoned her father and Nana, it was difficult to prevent herself blurting out something about Ramsey or the baby. They believed that she had merely gone into retreat in Spain to finish the thesis.

On several occasions before her pregnancy made it unwise for her to travel, Ramsey asked her to undertake errands for him during his absence. In each case, she had merely to fly to a foreign destination in Europe, North Africa or the Middle East, there to make a rendezvous, receive an envelope or small packet and return home. When she flew to Tel Aviv, she used her South African passport, but in Benghazi and Cairo she showed her British passport. All these trips lasted only a day and a night and were uneventful, but served to vary her lifestyle and give her a fine opportunity to shop for the baby. Only a week after her trip to Benghazi, the monarchy of King Idris I was overthrown by a military coup ditat led by Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Isabella was appalled when she realized how close she and her baby had come to being caught up in the revolution. Ramsey shared her concern and promised not to ask her to undertake another errand until after the baby was born. She never asked him if her journeys were in connection with bank business or the darker clandestine side of his life.

Once a week, she went for a check-up at the clinic that Ramsey had selected for her. Adra always accompanied her. The gynaecologist was a suave and cultured Spaniard with an austere aristocratic face and pale competent hands that felt cool against her skin as he examined her.

"Everything proceeds perfectly, sefiora. Nature is doing her work, and you are young and healthy and well formed for the task of childbirth." "Will it be a boy?" 'Of course, sehora. A beautiful healthy boy. I give you my personal guarantee." The clinic was a former Moorish palace, restored and renovated, and equipped with the most modern medical equipment. After the doctor had taken her on a tour of the facilities, Isabella realized the wisdom of Ramsey's choice. She was sure that it was the finest available.

During one of her visits, when the doctor had finished his examination and Isabella was dressing in the curtained cubicle, she overheard him discussing her condition with Adra in the waiting-room. Isabella's Spanish was by this time good enough for her to appreciate that the exchange was technical and specific, like that of two professionals. It surprised her.

On the drive home, she stopped at a sea-front restaurant and, as was their established custom, ordered ice-cream and chocolate sauce for both of them.

"I heard you talking to the doctor, Adra,' Isabella said, with a mouthful of ice-cream. 'You must once have been a nurse, you know so much about it - all those technical words." Once again, she encountered that strangely hostile reaction from the woman.

"I am too stupid for that. I am just a maid,' she said harshly, and retreated into a sullen silence from which Isabella could not dislodge her.

The doctor anticipated that the baby would arrive during the first week in April, and she made a spurt on her thesis to finish it before that time. She typed the final pages on the last day of March and sent it off to London. She was undecided whether it was arrant nonsense or sheer genius. After it had gone she agonized endlessly over fancied omissions and possible improvements which she could have made to the text.

However, within a week she had a reply from the university inviting her to defend her thesis during a viva with the examiners of the faculty.

"They like it,' she exulted, 'or they wouldn't bother." Despite her advanced pregnancy she flew to London for three days to attend the viva. It went better than she could have hoped but by the time she got back to Milaga she was exhausted.

"They promised to let me know as soon as possible!' she told Ramsey. 'But I think it's going to be all right - hold thumbs for me." She made Ramsey give his solemn promise not to leave her alone from now onwards. Thus, she was lying in his arms, both of them naked under the sheet in the moonlight, the doors to the terrace wide open to catch the faintest breeze off the sea, when the first pain woke her.

She lay quietly, not waking him, while she timed the intervals between contractions, feeling smug and accomplished as she entered the final stages of the long fascinating process. When at last, she shook Ramsey awake, he was most gratifyingly solicitous. He hurried away in his pyjamas to fetch Adra from the servant's room on the lower floor.

Isabella's suitcase was ready, and the three of them climbed into the Mini.

With Isabella seated in splendid isolation on the tiny rear seat, Ramsey drove them out to the clinic.

As her doctor had predicted, it all went forward naturally and rapidly.

Although the baby was large and Isabella's hips were relatively narrow, there were no complications. When the doctor called upon her from between her raised knees for a final effort, she thrust down with all her strength and then as she felt the enormous slippery rushing release within her she uttered a joyous and triumphant cry.

Anxiously she struggled up on one elbow and brushed the sweaty tangle of hair out of her eyes. 'What is it?' she demanded. 'Is it a boy?' And the doctor held the skinny glistening red body high, and they all laughed at the petulant birth-wail.

"There you are.' Still holding him dangling by the ankles, the doctor turned the infant so that Isabella could see him better.

The child's face was scarlet and creased, the eyelids swollen tightly closed. His hair was dense and jet black, plastered wetly over the skull.

His penis stuck out half as long as her forefinger in what seemed to be, to Isabella's partisan appraisal, a full and impressive erection.

"It's a boy!' she gasped, and then with a chuckle of wonderment: 'He's a boy and a Courtney!" Isabella was unprepared for the overwhelming strength of her maternal instincts as they laid her firstborn son at her breast and he took her engorged nipple between his rubbeo little gums and tugged at it with an animal strength that aroused sympathetic contractions in her distended womb and a deeper, more primeval pain in her heart.

He was the most beautiful creature she had ever touched, as beautiful as his father. In those first days, she could not take her eyes off him, often rising in the night to bend over 'his cot and examine his tiny face in the moonlight, or while he suckled, opening his pink fists and studying each perfect little finger with an almost religious awe.

"He's mine. He belongs to me,' she kept telling herself, not yet able to overcome the wonder of it.

Ramsey spent most of those first three days with them in the big sunny private room of the clinic. He seemed to share her fascination with the child. They discussed, as they had during the previous months, what names they would christen him. In the end, by a slow and painful 141 process of elimination, they struck out Shasa and Sean from her side of the family, and Huesca and Mahon from Ramsey's side. They settled for Nicholas Miguel Ramsey de Santiago y Machado. Miguel was a compromise for the Michael which Isabella had suggested.

On the fourth day, when Ramsey came to her room in the clinic, he was accompanied by three sober gentlemen in dark suits, all of them bearing important-looking briefcases. One was an attorney, another was an official from the State Registrar's office and the third was the local magistrate.

The magistrate bore witness as Isabella signed the order of adoption, relinquishing her guardianship of Nicholas to the Marques de Santiago y Machado, and he placed his official seal on the document. The birth certificate provided by the registrar showed Ramsey as the father.

After the officials had toasted the mother and child with a large glass of sherry and left, Ramsey took Isabella tenderly in his arms.

"Your son's claim to the title is secure,' he whispered.

"Our son,' she whispered in reply, and kissed him. 'My men, Nicky and Ramsey." When Ramsey fetched them from the clinic and brought them back to the flat, Isabella insisted on carrying Nicky up the stairs herself. Adra had filled bowls of flowers to welcome them.

She took the child out of Isabella's arms. 'He is wet. I will change him." And Isabella felt like a lioness deprived of her cub.

Over the days that followed an unspoken but nevertheless intense competition developed between the two women. Although Isabella acknowledged Adra's obvious expertise in dealing with the infant, she found herself resenting the intrusion. She wanted Nicky all to herself, and she tried to anticipate his needs and to get to him ahead of Adra.

The florid birth-tones of Nicky's face soon faded into a peachy perfection, and his thick dark hair curled. When he opened his eyes for the first time, they were that exact same shade of pale green as Ramsey's. Isabella considered this one of the great miracles of the universe.

"You are as beautiful as your father,' she told him as she suckled him. At least that was one service that Adra could not render him.

In the months that they had lived in the village, Isabella had become a local favourite. Her loveliness and her easy engaging manner, her pregnancy and her sincere efforts to master the language had delighted the tradespeople and the stall-holders in the market-place..

In response to their entreaties, when Nicky was barely ten days old, she laid him in the pram and paraded him through the village. It was a triumphant progress, and they returned to the flat laden with small gifts and with their ears ringing with praises.

When she phoned home on Easter Day her grandmother asked severely: 'What is so important in Spain that you cannot come home to Weltevreden?" 'Oh, Nana, I love you all, but it is just impossible. Please forgive me." 'If I know you, young lady, which I do, you are up to no good and it wears trousers." 'Nana, you are an absolute shocker. How can you believe that of me?" 'Twenty years of experience,' Centaine Courtneymalcomess told her drily.

"Just don't get into any more trouble, child." 'I won't, I promise," Isabella told her sweetly, and hugged the infant at her bosom. Oh, if you only knew, she thought. He doesn't wear trousers; not yet anyway.

"How is the thesis going?' her father asked, when he came on the line. She could not tell him that she had already submitted it, for that was her excuse for remaining in Spain.

"Almost done,' she compromised. She hadn't thought about it since Nicky had come along.

"Good luck with it.' And then Shasa was silent for a moment. 'Do you remember our talk, the promise you gave me?" 'VAiich one?' she procrastinated guiltily. She knew very well what he was referring to.

"You promised that if you were ever in any trouble, any trouble at all, you wouldn't try to go it alone, you would come to me." 'Yes, I remember." 'Are you all right, Bella baby?" 'I'm fine, wonderful, just marvelous, Daddy." He heard the ring of it in her voice and sighed with relief.

"Happy Easter, my bright and beautiful daughter." With Michael it was a relief to let it all out of her. They were on the telephone for forty-five minutes, Milaga to Johannesburg, and she tickled Nicky to make him gurgle for his distant uncle.

"When are you coming home, Bella?' Michael asked at last.

"Ramsey's divorce will be through by June, that's definite. We will have a civil marriage here in Spain and the church wedding at Weltevreden. I expect you to be at both functions." 'Try to stop me,' he challenged her.

They celebrated Easter dinner at their favourite seaside restaurant with Nicky's pram parked at the table. The patron's wife had knitted a jacket for the baby.

Adra was with them. She was part of their small family by now, and she wheeled the pram when they walked home to the flat. Isabella clung to Ramsey's arm. She felt very married and maternal, and as happy as she had ever been in her entire life.

When they arrived at the flat, Adra took Nicky away to change him. For once Isabella did not resent it.

In the front bedroom she lowered the shutters, and then came to Ramsey.

"It's three weeks since Nicky was born. I'm not made of glass, you know. I won't break." He was too gentle, too considerate for her mood. She had been without him for too long.

"I think you've forgotten how to do'this,' she said, and pushed him over on his back. 'Let me refresh your memory, sir." 'Don't hurt yourself," he cautioned anxiously.

"If anybody gets hurt around here, it is more likely to be you, my friend.

Now, fasten your seatbelt. We are ready for take-off." Afterwards, in the shuttered room, she lay against him in languorous exhaustion, their bodies sticking lightly together with the sweat of their loving and he said: 'I have to go away for four days next week." She sat up quickly. "Oh, Ramsey, so soon!' she protested, and then realized that she was being possessive and unreasonable.

"You'll phone me every day, won't you?' she demanded.

"I'll do better than that. I'll be in Paris and I'll try to arrange for you to join me there. We will have dinner at Laserre." 'That would be lovely, but what about Nicky?" 'Nicky has got Adra to look after him," Ramsey chuckled. 'Nicky will be all right, and Adra will love the opportunity to have him all to herself." 'I don't know...' she said dubiously. The thought of being parted from her wondrous achievement for even an hour appalled her.

"It will be for one night only, and you have really earned a little reward.

Besides, I need you, too, you know." 'Oh, my darling.' His appeal touched her. Her flow of milk was copious. She could express enough to cover the feeds that Nicky would need during such a short absence. 'Of course, I'd love to be with you. You are right. Nicky and Adra will survive a night without me. I'll come as soon as you call me."

"The woman gave birth to her brat almost a month ago,' General Joseph Cicero whispered hoarsely. 'What has been the delay? You should have terminated the operation immediately. The cost has been out of all proportion!" 'The general will recall that I am meeting the cost out of funds that I have provided, not out of the departmental budget,' Ramsey reminded him quietly.

Cicero coughed and rustled the copy of France Soir which he held before his face. They sat side by side in a second-class coach of the Paris Metro.

Cicero had entered the coach at the Concorde station and taken the seat beside Ramsey. Neither of them had shown any sign of recognition. The rush of the train through the underground tunnel would foil any eavesdropper.

Both of them used open newspapers to cover their face as they talked. This was one of their regular procedures for short meetings.

"I was not referring only to the cost in roubles,' Cicero wheezed. 'You have spent nearly a year on this project, an incalculable cost to the other work of the department." Ramsey was fascinated by the rapid course of the disease that was destroying his superior. It seemed that at every meeting Joseph Cicero had deteriorated visibly. It would not be much longer, months rather than years.

"These few months of work will pay us back enormous dividends over the years and, yes, over the decades ahead." 'Work,' snorted Cicero. "Stirring the honey-pot with your spoon. If that is work, how do you define pleasure, Marquds? And why are you prolonging termination month after month?" 'If the woman is to be of the utmost value to us, then it is absolutely necessary that she bond to the child before we proceed to the next step in the operation." 14e 'When will that be?' Cicero demanded.

"It has happened already. The fruit is ripe for picking.

Everything is in place. I need your co-operation in the final resolution. That is why I chose Paris for " this meeting." Cicero nodded. 'Go on,' he invited.

And Ramsey spoke quietly for another five minutes. Cicero listened without comment, but grudgingly he admitted to himself that the plan was airtight.

Once again, he acceded privately that his successor seemed to have been well chosen, despite the original prejudice he had fostered towards him.

"Very well,' he whispered at last. 'You have approval to proceed. And, as you request, I will monitor proceedings at this end.' Cicero folded his newspaper and stood up as the coach slid into the Mdtro station at Bastille on its silent rubber wheels.

As the doors opened, he stepped down on to the platform and walked away without looking back.

The notification from London University arrived the afternoon that Ramsey left. It took the form of an express letter with the University's coat of arms embossed on the flap of the envelope.

"The Chancellor and the faculty members of the University of London take pleasure in informing Isabella Courtney that she has been awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University." Isabella telephoned Weltevreden immediately. There was little time-difference between MAlaga and Cape Town, and Shasa had just returned from the polo-field. He was still in boots and breeches, and he took the call in the downstairs study whose french windows overlooked the field.

"Son of a gun!' he let out a whoop when she told him. Such an uncharacteristic display was proof to her of her father's deep delight.

"When will they cap you, darling?"

"Not till June or July. I'll have to stay until then.' It was the excuse she had been looking for.

"Of course,' Shasa agreed immediately. 'I'll come over." 'Oh, Daddy, it's such a long way." 'Nonsense, Doctor Courtney, I wouldn't miss it for the world. Your grandmother will probably want to come with me." Strangely the prospect did not alarm her as it might have. She realized that it was probably the ideal occasion for both her father and Nana to meet Ramsey, and Nicky. Centaine Courtney-Malcomess off her home ground was not such a daunting prospect as she was when installed in all the splendour and tradition of Weltevreden.

More than anything at that moment, Isabella wanted to share her joy in her achievement with Ramsey, but he did not telephone that night, nor even the following day. By Thursday morning, she was almost frantic with worry. It was so unlike Ramsey; usually he telephoned every day that they were apart.

When finally the telephone rang she was in the tiny kitchen in a heated argument with Adra as to how many cloves of garlic should go into the paella.

"You would inject the stuff into your veins if you were Oven the chance," she accused in her now fluent Spanish.

"We are making paella, not Irish stew.' Adra held her ground, and then the telephone rang and Isabella dropped the spoon with a clatter and knocked over the chair in the hall in her haste to reach it.

"Ramsey darling, I was so worried. I missed your call." 'I'm sorry, Bella.' The rich dark tones of his voice soothed her, so her own voice became a purr.

"Do you still love me?" 'Come to Paris, and I will prove it to you." "When?" 'Now. I have made a reservation for you on the Air France flight at eleven o'clock. They are holding your ticket at the airport. You'll be here by two o'clock." 'Where will I meet you?" 'At the Plaza Athdnee. We have a suite.' 'You spoil me, Ramsey darling." 'No less than you deserve." She left the flat immediately. However, the Air France take-off was delayed by forty minutes. In Paris the baggage-handlers were working to rule, so she stood fuming and fretting at the baggage-carousel for almost an hour before her overnight case made its leisurely appearance. It was after five o'clock in the evening before her taxi pulled up in the Avenue Montaigne before the elegant facade of the Plaza Athen&e with its scarlet awnings.

She half-expected Ramsey to be waiting for her in the marbled and mirrored foyer and looked about eagerly as she came in through the revolving glass doors. He was not there. She paid no heed to the gaunt figure who sat in one of the gilt and brocade armchairs opposite the reception7desk. The man lifted his head of lank white hair and for a moment regarded her with strangely lifeless tar-black eyes. Then he coughed harshly and returned his attention to the newspaper he was reading.

Isabella crossed quickly and expectantly to the concierge's counter.

"You have a guest, the Marques de Santiago y Machado. I am his wife." 'A moment, madame.' The uniformed concierge consulted the guest-list, and then shook his head and frowned as he started again at the head of the list.

"I'm sorry, Marquesa. The Marquds is not staying with us at the moment." "Perhaps he has registered as Monsieur Machado." 'I'm afraid not. We have nobody of that name." Isabella looked confused. 'I don't understand. I spoke to him this morning." 'I will make further enquiry." The concierge left her for a moment to consult the booking-clerk, and returned almost immediately. 'Your husband is not with us, and there is no reservation for him." 'He must have been delayed.' Isabella tried to look unconcerned. 'Do you have a room for me?"

"The hotel is fully booked.' The concierge spread his hands apologetically.

"It's spring, you understand. I am desolated, Marquesa. Paris is overflowing." 'He must be coming,' Isabella insisted brightly. 'Do you mind if I wait for my husband in the gallery?" 'Of course not, Marquesa. The waiter will bring you coffee and whatever refreshment you wish. The porter will guard your baggage in his store." As she moved towards the long gallery, which at the cocktail hour was the fashionable meeting-place for 'le tout Paris', the white-haired gentleman rose from his armchair. He moved stiffly with the gait of a frail and sick old man, but Isabella in her consternation did not even glance in his direction. Cicero went out into the street, and the doorman hailed a taxi for him and it dropped him in rue Grenelle. He walked the last block to the Soviet embassy, and the guard at the night-desk recognized him as he approached.

From the office of the military attachd on the second floor, Joe Cicero phoned a number in Mdlaga.

"The woman is waiting at the hotel,' he whispered huskily. 'She cannot return before noon tomorrow. You may proceed as planned." A little before seven o'clock, the concierge came and found Isabella in the gallery.

"There has been a cancellation, Marquesa. We have a room for you now. I have already sent your baggage up." She could have kissed him, but instead tipped him a hundred francs.

From the room, she rang the flat in Mdlaga. She hoped that Ramsey might have left a message with Adra, now that the arrangements had so obviously gone awry. Although she let the telephone ring for a counted one hundred peals, there was no reply. That truly alarmed her. Adra should have been there; the telephone was in the hallway just outside her bedroom door. Isabella telephoned again twice more during the night, each time without success.

"The telephone is out of order,' she told herself with conviction, but she hardly slept at all.

As soon as the airline reservations office opened, she booked a flight back to Mdlaga, and despite her distress she managed to sleep for an hour during the journey. It was after midday when they landed at MAlaga airport.

The taxi dropped her at the front door of the apartmentblock, and she dragged her bag to their front door. With fingers that shook with fatigue and agitation she finally got the key into the lock.

The apartment was strangely silent, and her voice rang through the open doorway.

"Adra, I'm back. Where are you?" She glanced into the kitchen as she hurried to Adra's room. The room was empty, and she started up the stairs at a run, and then stopped abruptly at the door to her bedroom. It was wide open.

Nicky's cot still stood in the alcove opposite the window. It was stripped of sheets and pillows and blankets, that exquisite layette that Michael had sent her from home. The table beside the cot, on which had stood Nicky's platoon of soft toys, the teddies and bunnies and Disney creatures which she had showered on him, was bare.

She stepped to the terrace door and glanced out. His pram was gone.

"Adra!' she cried, and heard the high thin tone of panic in her own voice.

"Where are you?" She raced through the other rooms. 'Nicky! My babyl Oh God, please. Where have you taken Nicky?" She found herself back in the main bedroom beside his empty cot.

"I don't understand,' she whispered. 'What has happened?" On a sudden impulse, she whirled and jerked open the drawers of Nicky's bureau. They were all empty. The nappies and vests and jackets were all of them gone.

"The hospital.' Her voice was a sob. 'Something has happened to my baby!" She rushed down the stairs and seized the telephone and then froze as she saw the envelope taped to the cradle of the instrument.

She dropped the telephone receiver and ripped open the envelope. Her hands shook so that she could barely read the words on the single sheet of note paper However, she recognized Ramsey's handwriting instantly and felt a treacherous rush of relief, which evaporated swiftly as she read the words:

Nicholas is with me. He is safe for the time being. If you wish to see him again, you must follow these instructions exactly. Do not speak to anybody in Mdlaga. I repeat do not speak to anybody. Leave the flat immediately and return to London. You will be contacted at Cadogan Square. Tell nobody what has happened, not even your brother Michael. Follow these instructions implicitly. Your disobedience will have dire consequences for Nicky. You may never see him again. Destroy this note.

Her legs went soft and boneless under her, and she sank down against the wall and sat on the tiled floor with them sprawled out loosely in front of her as though they were disjointed at the hips. She read the note again, and then again, but it didn't make sense.

"My baby,' she whispered. 'My little Nicky.' And then she read the terrible words aloud. ' "Your disobedience will have dire consequences for Nicky.

You may never see him again." I She let the hand holding the note drop into her lap and she stared at the wall opposite. She felt as though the world and her entire existence had been swept away. It left her as blank and meaningless as that empty expanse of brickwork in front of her.

She did not know how long she sat there, but at last with a supreme effort she roused herself. Using the wall as a support, she regained her feet.

Once more, she climbed the stairs to their bedroom and went directly to Ramsey's cupboard. She threw the doors open, and found that it also 152 was empty. Even the coat-hangers were gone. She moved listlessly to his chest of drawers, and opened each empty drawer. Ramsey had left nothing.

She wandered back to Nicky's alcove, moving like the survivor of a bomb blast, dazed and unco-ordinated, and knelt beside the empty cot.

"My baby,' she whispered. 'What have they done with you?" Then she saw that something had slipped down between the baby mattress and the wooden bars of the cot. She eased it free, and held it in both hands.

Kneeling at the cot as though it were the high altar, she held the sacrament in her hands. It was one of Nicky's bootees, a scrap of soft knitted wool with a blue satin ribbon as the drawstring for his chubby pink ankle. She lifted it to her face and inhaled the perfumed baby-smell of her son.

Only then she began to weep. She wept with a bitter ferocity that drained her strength and left her exhausted. By that time, the terrace and the bedroom were filled with the shades of evening and she had only the strength left to crawl to the double bed and curl up on it. As she fell asleep she held the woollen bootee pressed to her cheek.

It was still dark when she awoke. She lay for long seconds with the dark sense of doom overpowering her, uncertain of its origin or cause. Then suddenly it all came back to her and she struggled upright and looked about her with horror.

Ramsey's note lay on the table beside the bed. She took it up and reread it, still trying to make sense of it.

"Ramsey my darling, why are you doing this to us?' she whispered. Then, obedient to his instructions, she carried the note to the bathroom and standing over the toilet-bowl tore it into tiny scraps. She dropped these into the bowl and flushed them away. She knew that every word would be graven on her mind for ever; she had no need nor wish to conserve that dreadful sheet of paper.

She showered and dressed and made herself a slice of toast and a pot of coffee. They were without taste. Her mouth felt numb as though it had been scalded with boiling water.

Then she set herself to search the apartment thoroughly. She began in Adra's room. There was no trace left of Adra Olivares, not a shred of clothing, not a pot or a tube of ointment or cosmetics in her bathroom, not even a single hair from her head on the pillow of her bed.

Then she went over the living-room and kitchen; again there was nothing, except the hired furniture and crockery and the remains of food in the refrigerator.

She went up to the bedroom. There was a small wallsafe in the back of Ramsey's cupboard, but the steel door was ajar and all the documents were missing. Nicky's birth certificate and adoption papers were gone with them.

She sat down on the bed and tried to think clearly, attempting desperately to find a reason for this madness. She went round and round, trying to examine it from every possible angle.

She was driven remorselessly to a single conclusion. Ramsey was in deep trouble. It was some horror from his clandestine life which had overtaken them. She knew that under extreme duress he had been forced to leave with Nicky. She understood that she must do everything in her power to help them, Ramsey and Nicky, the two most important elements in her life. She knew that she must do as he ordered her. Their safety and possibly their lives depended upon it. Yet she could not leave it like that. She had to learn more; any morsel of knowledge might be of value.

She left the apartment and went downstairs. There was a small bakery shop across the street, an dover the months Isabella had become friendly with the baker's wife. The woman was opening the shutters over the shop window as -Isabella hurried across the road.

"Yes,' the baker's wife told her, 'after you left on Thursday, Adra went out with Nicholas in the pram. They went down towards the beach and returned just before I closed the shop. I saw them go up to your apartment, but I didn't see them again, not after that." Isabella went up the street, stopping to question all the tradespeople whose businesses were within sight of the apartment-block. Some of them had seen Adra and Nicky return on Thursday evening, but not one of them had seen them again since then. Her last resort was the shoe shine urchin on the comer of the park. Ramsey always allowed the lad to polish his shoes an dover-tipped him exorbitantly. He was one of Isabella's favourites on the street.

"Si, sehora,' he grinned at Isabella, as he squatted over his box. 'On Thursday night I work late, because of the cinema and the arcade. At ten o'clock I see the ma ques. He came in a big black car with two men. They park in the street and go upstairs." 'What did the other men look like, chico? Do you know them? Had you see them before?" 'Never. They two tough hambres - policemen, I think. Much trouble. I don't like police. They all go upstairs, and then soon they come down. They all carry suitcases, big suitcases. Adra come with them. She carry baby Nico; they get into the car, all of them, and they drive away. That is all. I don't see them again." The two tough hombres confirmed what Isabella had suspected: that Ramsey was acting under coercion. She realized that the only source of action open to her was to follow the instruction that Ramsey had given her in the note. She went back to the apartment and began to pack up. Her redundant maternity clothes she left lying on the bedroom floor, and her good clothes filled only two cases.

When she came to the drawer that contained her cosmetics she found that the fat album of snapshots that she had accumulated since Nicky's birth was missing, together with the envelopes of negatives. It came as a shock to realize that she had no record of her baby, no photograph or souvenir, apart from the single woollen bootee that she had retrieved from his cot.

She lugged her bulging cases downstairs and packed them into the back of the Mini. Then she crossed the street and spoke to the baker's wife.

"If my husband comes back and asks for me, tell him I have gone back to London." 'What about Nico? Are you all right, sefiora? The woman was sympathetic, and Isabella smiled brightly.

"Nico is with my husband. I'll meet them in London soon. Much as gracias por su ayuda, seflora. Adies."

The drive northwards seemed endless. Each episode of the last few days since last she had seen her son played over an dover in her mind until she felt that she was going slowly mad.

On the cross-Channel ferry, she forsook the loud bonhomie of the crowded saloon and went up on to the boatdeck. It was a cold grey day, with the north wind kicking the tops off the swells in dashing white spurts of spray. The wind and her despair chilled her through, until she was shivering uncontrollably even in her padded anorak. However, in the end it was the ache in her swollen breasts that drove her below. In the women's toilet she used the express pump to draw off the flow that should have been for her son.

"Oh, Nicky, Nicky!' she cried silently, as she discharged the rich creamy liquid into the toilet-bowl, and she imagined once again his hot little mouth on her nipples and the smell and the feel of him against her breast.

She found herself weeping, and with a huge effort controlled herself.

"You're losing your grip on reality,' she warned herself. 'You've got to be strong now. You can't let go. For Nicky's sake, you must be strong. No more crying and moping - no more." It was raining when she drove into Cadogan Square, and the flat seemed chilly and uninviting. While she unpacked she thought about the promise that she had made her 15e father. Suddenly she threw down the dress that she held and ran through to the drawing-room.

"International, I want to place a call to Cape Town, South Africa." At this time of night, the delay was less than ten minutes, and she heard the peals of the telephone at the other end. One of the servants answered it, and as she opened her mouth to ask for her father Ramsey's strict injunction came back to her with all its force and threat. 'Your disobedience will have dire consequences for Nicky." She replaced the receiver on its cradle without speaking, and resigned herself to wait for the promised contact.

Nothing happened for six days. She never left the flat, not daring to put herself beyond the reach of the telephone. She rang nobody, spoke to nobody except the housekeeper, and tried to keep herself occupied by reading and watching television. The uncertainty aggravated her despair, and she found that, although she stared at the pages of her book or at the small flickering screen of the television set, the printed words and the images were meaningless. Only her agony was real. Only her loss had poignant meaning. Only her pain abided.

She could barely bring herself to eat, and within three days her milk-flow had dried up. She lost weight dramatically. Her hair, which was one of the high points of her beauty, turned dull and dry. Her face in the mirror was gaunt, her eyes sank into bruised-looking cavities and her golden amber Mediterranean tan became sallow and yellow like the skin of a malaria sufferer.

She waited, and the waiting was torture. Each hour was an insupportable eternity. Then, on the sixth day, the telephone rang. She snatched it up with desperate haste, before the second peal.

"I have a message from Ramsey.' It was a woman's voice with an elusive accent, probably mid-European. 'Leave now, immediately. Take a taxi to the junction of Royal Hospital Road and the Embankment. Walk down the Embankment towards Westminster. Somebody will greet you with the name Red Rose. Follow their orders,' said the caller. 'Repeat these instructions, please." Breathlessly Isabella obeyed. 'Good,' said the woman, and broke the connection.

Isabella had not walked further than a hundred yards along the Embankment above the Thames when a small unmarked van passed her, travelling slowly in the same direction. It pulled into the kerb ahead of her, and as she drew level with it the rear door opened to reveal a middle-aged woman in grey overalls sitting on the sidebench of the body of the van.

"Red Rose,' she said and Isabella recognized her voice from their telephone conversation. 'Get in!" Quickly Isabella slipped into the van and sat on the bench opposite the woman. She slammed the door, and immediately the van pulled away.

The body of the van was without windows or any ope i g except for the ventilator in the roof above Isabella's head. She could not see out and, though she tried to track their course by the turns and stops, she was soon totally confused and abandoned the attempt.

"Where are you taking me?' she asked the woman opposite her.

"Silence, please.' And Isabella resigned herself She pulled her collar up around her ears, and thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her anorak.

They drove for twenty-three minutes by her wristwatch, and then the van stopped again and the rear door was opened from outside.

They were in a parking garage. She judged from the unpainted concrete pillars that supported the low roof and from the steep access-ramp at the far end of the long narrow chamber that it was an underground parking facility.

The woman in the grey overalls took her arm and helped her down from the van. The touch of her hand made Isabella aware of just how powerful she was. The hand felt like the paw of a gorilla, and she towered above Isabella with wide meaty shoulders under the grey cloth.

"This way,' she ordered. Still holding her arm, she led Isabella to the lift doors opposite the van. Despite the painful grip, Isabella glanced around her quickly. There were a dozen or so other vehicles parked in the bays alongside the van; at least two of them had diplomatic number-plates.

The doors of the lift opened, and the woman pushed Isabella into it. A glance at the control panel showed Isabella that her assumption had been correct. The lighted stage-indicator showed that they were at 'Basement Level W. The woman pushed the button for the third floor and they rode up in silence, until the lift stopped with the stage-indicator at 'Level III' and her escort urged her out into a bare corridor with cork flooring. They walked down it side by side, and still in silence. The corridor was empty and the doors on each side closed.

As they approached the end of the corridor, the facing door slid open.

Another large female with flat Slavic features, dressed also in grey overalls, ushered them into what appeared to be a small lecture-room or an intimate movie-theatre. A double row of easy chairs faced the raised dais and the screen that covered the far wall.

Isabella's escort led her to the chair in the front row centre.

"Sit down,' she said, and Isabella sank down on the smooth cold plastic padding. The two women moved around and took up their position, standing behind Isabella. For several minutes, there was silence. Then the small door to the right of the dais opened and a man came through' He moved slowly, stiffly, like a frail and sick old man. His hair was dead white, with a yellowish tinge, and hung over his forehead and ears. His features were very pale, lined and seamed with age and suffering, so that Isabella felt a twinge of sympathy for him, until the light caught his eyes.

With a small jolt of intense distaste she recognized those eyes. Once she had been with her father on a chartered fishing-boat out of Black River.

Shasa had been trolling a live bonito along the oceanic drop-off under the shadow of Le Morne Brabant on the island of Mauritius when he had hooked into a gigantic mako shark.

After a battle which lasted two hours, he had dragged the creature alongside. As its pointed snout broke through the surface, Isabella had been leaning over the rail and she had looked into its eyes. They were black and pitiless, without definite iris or pupil, two holes that seemed to reach down into hell itself. Those were the same eyes that studied her now.

She held her breath under their implacable scrutiny, until at last the man spoke. Then his voice came as a surprise. It was low and hoarse. She had to lean forward slightly to make sense of the words.

"Isabella Courtney, from now on we will never use that name again in any communication. You will be referred to and you will refer to yourself only as Red Rose. Do you understandf She nodded, not trusting her voice to reply. He lifted the cigarette that smouldered between his fingers and drew deeply upon it. He spoke again through a cloud of exhaled smoke.

"I have a message for you, in the form of a video-tape recording.' He stepped down from the dais and took the chair at the end of the row furthest from her.

As he settled into it, the overhead lights dimmed. She heard the faint hum of electronic equipment, and then the screen lit up. The scene it displayed was a bare white-tiled room - a laboratory or an operating-theatre, she decided.

There was a table in the centre of the room, and on it was a glass-sided tank much like one of the aquariums in which ornamental tropical fish were displayed in a pet shop. The tank was filled with water to within a few inches of the top. On the table-top beside the tank stood some sort of electronic cabinet and an array of instruments and medical paraphernalia.

She recognized a portable oxygencylinder and an oxygen-mask. The mask was a din-dnutive model suitable for infants and very small children.

A man was busy at the table. His back was towards the ieo camera and his features were hidden. He wore some type of white laboratory-coat. He turned to face the camera, and Isabella saw that he wore a cloth theatre-cap and surgical mask.

His voice was dispassionate as he began to speak, and his accent was foreign, east European. He seemed to be addressing Isabella directly out of the screen.

"Your orders were to speak to nobody, not in Malaga or elsewhere. You deliberately disobeyed those orders.' He was staring at her from the screen with disembodied eyes.

"I'm sorry,' she replied, as though he could hear her. 'I was so worried.

I couldn't-" 'Silence!' hissed one of the women behind her chair. A hand fell on her shoulder, fingers dug into her flesh with a strength that made her wince.

On the screen, the man was still speaking. 'You were warned that your disobedience would have dire consequences for your son. You chose to ignore that warning. What you are about to witness is a first demonstration of the seriousness of those instructions." He made a gesture to somebody off-camera and a figure entered from the side. It was impossible to tell whether it was male or female, for it also wore a cloth cap and surgical mask that covered all the face and head except for the narrow strip across the eyes. A full-length surgical gown fell to below the knees and was tucked into the tops of white rubber boots.

"This is a qualified doctor who will monitor all the proceedings,' he explained.

The figure carried a bundle in its arms. Only when it deposited the bundle on the table beside the glass-sided tank and a tiny bare leg kicked free of the swaddling cloth, Isabella realized that it was a child. With quick trained hands, the doctor unwrapped the infant, and the videocamera zoomed in on Nicky as he lay naked on the table-top kicking his legs in the air, and his gurgles sounded in the quiet room.

Isabella thrust the fingers of one hand into her mouth and bit down on them hard to prevent herself crying out again.

The doctor placed two small black suction cups on Nicky's bare chest. Thin wires dangled from them, and the doctor connected them to the electronic cabinet and switched it on. The digital figures in the panel lit with a green glow, and the narrator explained in a neutral voice: "The child's breathing and heartbeat will be recorded." The doctor looked up from his equipment and nodded. The narrator moved around behind the table and faced the camera.

"You are Red Rose,' he said with peculiar emphasis on the name. 'And in future you will obey all orders given to you by that name." He reached down and took both of Nicky's ankles in one hand and lifted him.

Nicky let out a squawk of surprise as he hung head-down like a small pink wingless bat.

"You are about to witness the consequences of disobedience." He swung the child and held him head-down over the glass-sided tank. Nicky arched his back and tried to lift his head, he waved his arms and clenched and unclenched his fists, making small noises of uncertainty and alarm.

Slowly the narrator lowered the child head-first into the water, and the sounds of his little voice were cut off abruptly. The video-camera zoomed in through the glass side of the tank and focused on his face below the surface of the water. The colour resolution of the film was true to life.

Isabella screamed wildly and tried to struggle out of her chair. The two women seized her from behind and forced her down again.

On the screen Nicky struggled in the narrator's grip. Underwater his face was contorted and silver bubbles streamed from his nostrils. His face seemed to swell and darken.

Isabella was still screaming and fighting when on the screen the masked doctor looked up quickly from the heart monitor and said sharply in Spanish: 'Stop! That is enough, comrade!" Immediately the man lifted the child clear of the tank. Water streamed from Nicky's nostrils and open mouth, and for long seconds he could not utter a sound, except for his tiny gasping breaths.

The narrator laid him down on the table, and the doctor clapped the oxygen-mask over his swollen face and pressed down on his chest with the palm of his hand to induce regular breathing. Within a minute the digital readout on the cabinet had settled back to normal and Nicky's movements were stronger. He howled into his mask with shock and outrage, his voice becoming louder and stronger with each cry.

The doctor removed the mask and stepped back from the table. He nodded at the narrator. Once again he seized Nicky's ankles and lifted him over the tank. Nicky seemed to realize what was con-dng. His cries of protest reached a higher terrified pitch, he kicked and writhed in the man's grip 'He's my sonv Isabella screamed. 'You can't - you mustn't do this to my baby!" The narrator lowered Nicky's head once again below the surface, and the child fought with all his strength. His frenzied exertions racked the tiny body, water splashed over the edge of the tank, and once again his face changed colour swiftly.

Isabella screamed at him. 'Stop it! I'll do anything you say, just stop torturing my baby! Please! Please!" Once again the doctor intervened with a sharp warning, and this time when Nicky was lifted clear of the water his movements were weaker. He made little choking, cawing sounds, and a mixture of water and vomit erupted from his open inverted mouth and silver strings of mucus slid down from his flared nostrils.

The doctor worked swiftly, his alarm apparent, and he said something to the other man. The narrator looked up at the camera, seeming to stare directly at Isabella.

"We almost miscalculated that time. We exceeded the limit of safety.' He and the doctor put their heads closer together and spoke so softly that Isabella could not catch the words, and then the narrator addressed her again. 'That concludes our demonstration for the time being. I sincerely hope that it will not be necessary for you to witness another like it. It would be harrowing for you to have to watch the amputation of the child's limbs without anaesthetic, or eventually his strangulation in front of the camera. Of course, it will depend on you, and the degree of co-operation that you are prepared to afford us." The image faded, and the screen went blank. There was no sound in the darkened theatre except Isabella's sobs. These lasted for a long time. When they finally quietened the lights were raised slowly and Joseph Cicero came to stand over Isabella.

"I assure you that none of us takes any particular pleasure in this sort of. thing. We will try -to avoid any repetition." 'How could he do itv Isabella whispered brokenly. She was huddled down in the large chair. "How could any human being do that to a child?" 'I repeat, we do not enjoy the necessity. You must blame yourself, Red Rose. It was your disobedience that caused your son's discomfort." 'Discomfort! Is that what you call the torture of an innocent... F 'Control yourself," Cicero warned her sharply. 'For your child's sake, control your insolence." 'I'm sorry.' Isabella dropped her voice. 'It won't happen again. Just don't hurt Nicky again, please." 'If you co-operate, your son will not have to suffer further. He is in the care of a highly trained - paediatric sister. He will receive the type of professional care that even you would not be able to give him. Later he will be given the best education that any boy or young man could hope for." Isabella stared up at him, her face twisted with misery.

"You speak as though he has been taken away from me for ever, as though I will never see my baby again." Cicero coughed and shook his head, struggled to regain his breath and then whispered hoarsely: 'This is not the case, Red Rose. You will be allowed to earn the privilege of access to your son. To beg-in with you will receive regular reports of his progress. You will be shown video recordings of how he develops, when he first sits up unaided, when he begins to crawl, to walk." 'Oh nov she whispered. 'You can't keep him from me that long. It will be months." Cicero went on as though she had not spoken. 'Later you will be allowed to spend some time with him each year. It is possible that some time in the future, if your conduct is satisfactory, you will be allowed to spend holidays together - days, even weeks in your son's company." "No.' Her voice was a pitiful sob. 'You can't be so cruel as to keep us apart." 'Who knows, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that one day we may remove all restrictions and allow you free access. For that to happen you would have to earn our complete trust and gratitude." 'Who are you?' Isabella asked in a small subdued voice. 'Who is Ramsey Machado? I thought I knew him so well and yet I did not know him at all.

Where is Ramsey? Is he part of all this monstrous. ?'Isabella's voice broke, and she could not continue.

"You must put aside all thoughts of that nature. You must not seek to find the answer to the question of who we are,' Cicero warned her. "Ramsey Machado is under our control. Do not expect help from him. The child is his also. He is under the same constraint as you are." 'What must I do? What do you want of me?' Isabella asked. And Cicero nodded with satisfaction. There had been a remote chance that the woman might prove headstrong and uncontrollable. The psychiatrist's report on her had mentioned that possibility, but Cicero had never placed much credence in it. The hook on which they had hung her was sharp and fiercely barbed. Even if the child died, they would find a replacement to act in the video games and keep her dangling on the hook.

No, he had expected her to be compliant, and those expectations had been vindicated.

"First, I must congratulate you, Red Rose, on your doctorate. It will make your work for us easier." Isabella stared at him. It was difficult for her to make the mental leap from this terrifying world of torture and espionage back to the prosaic consideration of her studies and academic honours. She had to concentrate to keep up with what he was saying.

"You will return as soon as possible to Cape Town and your family, after making arrangements at the University to receive your doctorate in absentia, do you understand?" Isabella nodded, not yet trusting herself to speak.

"On your return home, you will begin to take more interest in all the family activities. You will work to make yourself indispensable to your father. You will make yourself his assistant and confidante in all things, but especially in his new position as head of the armaments corporation.

What is more, you will begin to take an active interest in South African politics." 'My father is a self-contained man. He does not need me." "You are wrong, Red Rose. Your father is a very lonely and a basically unhappy man. He is incapable of a lasting relationship with any woman, except your grandmother, his mother, Centaine Courtney-Malcomess, and with you, his daughter. He needs that relationship very deeply - and you will give it to him.' I 'You want me to use my own father?' she whispered, horror blending with fresh horror in her eyes.

"For the survival of your son,' Cicero agreed softly. 'No harm will come to your father, but your son stands full in harm's way unless you co-operate." Isabella took a handkerchief from her handbag and blew 1ee her nose. Her voice was soggy. 'You want me to inveigle myself into my father's confidence to gain information on the national armaments programme and pass it on to you?" 'You learn quickly, Red Rose. However, that is not all. You will use your father's political contact within the South African Nationalist regime to foster your own political career within the party." She shook her head. 'I am not a political creature." "You are now,' Cicero contradicted her. 'You have a doctorate in political theory. Your father will introduce you to the corridors of power." Again she denied it. 'My father is in political eclipse. He backed the wrong horse when John Vorster came to power in South Africa. That was why he was shunted into the ambassadorial post here, into political oblivion." 'Your father has exonerated himself by the way he performed his duties here in London. His appointment to such a responsible position as head of Armscor is indication of that. We anticipate that soon he will be totally reinstated within the party. We deem it highly probable that within two years he will be once more a member of the Cabinet. You, Red Rose, will ride upon his back. In twenty years from now you yourself could be a minister of the Government." "Twenty years!' Isabella echoed in disbelief. 'Is that how long I must be your slave?" 'You still don't understand?' Cicero asked, shaking his head. 'Let me explain it to you. You belong to us, Red Rose, you, your lover Ramsey Machado, and your son, for ever." For many minutes Isabella stared sightlessly at the blank screen, contemplating the enormity of the vision that he had conjured up for her.

Joe Cicero broke the silence. His voice was almost gentle. 'You will be taken back now. They will leave you where they found you, on the Embankment. Follow your orders, Red Rose, and in the long run it will work out well for you and your son." ze7 The women attendants helped Isabella to her feet and led her to the door.

When she had gone, the side-door to the lecture-theatre opened and Ramsey Machado stepped through. 'You were watching?' Joe Cicero asked, and Ramsey nodded. J congratulate you,' Joe murmured reluctantly. 'It has been well run. We may reap much of value from this operation. How is the child?" 'He suffered no ill-effects. He and his nurse have arrived in Havana." Joe Cicero lit another cigarette and coughed and sat down heavily in one of the plastic chairs.

Perhaps... he thought, just perhaps I will be able to leave the department in capable hands.

Amber joy was about to 'fail to find'. They could all see it. A palpable air of tension and expectation hung over the entire field of the trial.

The South African retriever championship trial was being conducted over the foothills of the Kabonkel Berg along the western end of the Weltevreden estate. The terrain was testing, an dover the two days of the trials the field of dogs had been whittled down to these four still in the hunt.

The birds were mallard ducks, pen-reared on Weltevreden and placed in the field under the supervision of the judges prior to each retrieve. This would probably be the last occasion on which they would be allowed to use mallards, Shasa Courtney reflected. The conservationists were kicking up such a terrible stink about unshot mallards escaping into the wild. There these exotic birds were highly attractive to the indigenous yellow-billed ducks. Avian Don Juans, he smiled.

The progeny of these illicit unions were hybrids, and the Department of Nature Conservation had proclaimed a ban on the release of mallards which would become effective at the end of the month. Thereafter they would be forced to use ring-necked doves or guinea-fowl, which was a pity, they all agreed. These terrestrial birds did not float well on the water-retrieves.

Shasa Courtney switched his full attention back to the retrieve in progress. Amber joy was the main competition to Weltevreden's hopes of carrying off the cup for the first time. Amber joy was a splendid yellow Labrador. His sire had been American field-trial champion for three years in a row. Up until now every single retrieve that he had made during the last two days had been SOB, straight out and back. This time fortune had turned against him. The mallard had risen from its cage and flashed away along the edge of the dam. Garry Courtney and Shasa were the field-guns, chosen for the task because both of them were renowned shots. The mallard was flying left, Garry's side, and he had let it go to fifty yards before killing it so cleanly that it folded its wings and went in head-first like a kamikaze. It fell close in to the reed-beds, amongst the lily-pads and 'water blommetjies', the flowering aquatics that infested most dams in the Cape of Good Hope. The mallard's plunge drove it deep, and it had not re-emerged. Probably it was entangled with the plant stems below the surface-of the muddy brown water.

The judge had called Amber joy's number, and Bunty Charles, his owner and handler, had sent him away. While the spectators crowded the dam wall to watch, the dog had taken to the water and swum out towards the spot where the mallard had disappeared. However, he had deviated from the true line as he ' swam, going up above the bird where any blood would drift away from him on the faint current set up by the in-flowing river and the gusty southeaster which was sweeping across the open water.

Now Amber joy was paddling around amongst the reeds in erratic circles, occasionally ducking his head below the surface but each time coming up with empty jaws, and a little further from the spot where the duck had plunged.

His efforts were causing consternation on the bank.

Bunty Charles was dancing from one leg to the other in frustration. If he whistled and redirected Amber joy on to the fall of the bird he would lose points. There was still no guarantee that Amber joy would find even with this assistance. On the other hand, time was running out. The three judges were already consulting their stop-watches. Amber joy had been in the water for over three minutes.

Bunty Charles flashed an anxious glance at the next handler and dog in the line. Centaine Courtney-Malcomess and Dandy Lass of Weltevreden were his most bitter rivals. Up to now he and Amber joy had managed to hold them off, but only by ten points. If they failed to find, they would certainly forfeit their hard-won lead.

Centaine Courtney was also under intense strain. She did not have Bunty's thirty years of field-trial experience. She had taken to the sport only recently. Yet she had brought all her immense energy and powers of concentration to it. Dandy Lass was the progeny of champions, a leggy golden retriever. She was bred for speed as a working gun-dog, strong and wiry, unlike the heavier show-dogs with their classical points of breed but with their working instincts bred out of them. Dandy Lass had the heart and instinct to enter the heaviest cover or coldest water and work through it like a heroine. She had a fine nose to pick up the faintest scent of feather on the air, and her intelligence was uncanny. She and Centaine had developed an almost telepathic rapport.

Although she stood erect and utterly still, with her face calm and imperturbable, inwardly Centaine was seething with agitation, and Dandy Lass picked it up from her. The judges would notice any word or gesture of restraint between them and mark them down immediately. However, Dandy Lass was sitting on the live coals of her eagerness. Her fluffy golden bottom barely came in contact with the ground, and she switched from haunch to haunch with tiny excited movements, not quite sufficient to incur the judges' wrath and penalty points. Whining or barking were grounds for instant elimination. With huge effort, Dandy prevented herself from giving tongue as she watched Amber joy's frenzied efforts to find the bird. Yet her entire body shivered with eagerness, and the suppressed cries of excitement rumbled in her throat as she awaited her turn. Every few, seconds she glanced up at Centaine with imploring eyes, begging for the command to go.

Shasa Courtney watched his mother from his place in the gun-line. As always she evoked in him the most profound sense of admiration. Centaine Courtney-Malcomess had turned seventy years old last New Year's Day. She had been named for her birth on the first day of the twentieth century, and yet she was as slim and straight as a teenage boy. The outline of her legs and buttocks under fine woollen cloth was aristocratic and elegant.

Who else would wear Chanel slacks to a field-trial? he smiled, and her boots were of ostrich skin, hand-made by Herm~s of Paris.

Single-handed, she had raised Shasa from infancy when Shasa's father had been killed in action in France before his birth. Alone in the desert, she had discovered the first diamond that led to the establishment of the fabulous H'ani mine. For thirty years she had run the mine and built up the sprawling financial empire that was to become Courtney Enterprises. Even though the chairmanship had passed to Shasa and then to her grandson Garry Courtney, Centaine still regularly took her seat on the board. Every word she uttered from that seat, every thought she expressed was received with the utmost attention and respect. Every member of the family, from Shasa himself to Garry's brood of her great-grandchildren aged between four years and a few months stood in total awe of Centaine Courtney. She was the only one who could give orders to Bella Courtney and have them obeyed without argument or question.

She stood bare-headed in the bright sunshine of a golden day of Cape spring with the pedigree bitch squatting beside her, and the sunlight sparkled on her hair. Her hair was one of her finer points, dense and thick and curling still, cut into a short cap, the colour of gun-metal touched with bright inlays of pure platinum. She held her chin high and the set of her head alert.

I The years had not eroded her beauty but had transformed it into a dignified serenity. Time may have withered that flawless skin, but had been unable to affect the strong line of her jaw, the proud cheekbones and the high intelligent forehead. Nor had it dimmed those dark eyes; eyes that could one moment reflect the ferocity of a cruel predator and the next moment shine with humour and wisdom.

One hell of a lady, Shasa thought. just look at her, as hungry to win as she was fifty years ago.

One of the judges blew a single sharp blast on his whistle, and Bunty Charles's shoulders slumped with disappointment. Amber joy had failed and was being recalled. Bunty Charles reinforced the recall with a blast on his own whistle and a brusque hand-signal. Amber joy came in obediently to the bank and lunged up out of the water. He shook himself, throwing a crystal curtain of water droplets into the sunlight, and then to the horror of his owner and the amusement of the spectators lifted one leg and gave the nearest clump of reeds a contemptuous squirt, succinct expression of Amber joy's opinion of the duck, the dam and the judges.

Such an unbridled display while under judges' orders was considered very poor form, and would certainly attract penalty points. However, Amber joy was the picture of nonchalance as he trotted back to his owner, lolling his tongue and wagging his sodden tail.

By this stage, Dandy Lass was in a turmoil of eagerness. She was shivering wildly, rolling her eyes like a berserker. She knew she would be called next, and the effort of keeping her backside pressed to the ground and maintaining her seat was destroying her from within.

Without looking down at her, Centaine exerted all her powers of telepathic communication to hold the bitch under control. The judges were sadistically relishing the delay, making a pretence of consulting each other and writing up their notes, but in reality testing Dandy Lass to the outside limit of her endurance. If she broke now, she would be instantly eliminated; a whine or a bark would penalize her cruelly.

Bastards! Centaine thought bitterly. I hate every last man-jack of you. Let my darling go. Let her go!

A faint choking whine escaped through Dandy's lips, a sound as though a bullfrog was being attacked by a swarm of bees under a blanket, and without seeming to move Centaine extended her forefinger down the side-seam of her Chanel slacks and Dandy suppressed her next utterance.

The senior judge looked up from his notebook.

"Thank you, Number Three,' he called across the water, and Centaine said sharply: 'Fetch!' And Dandy Lass went away like a golden javelin launched from the sling.

As she came to the water, she folded her forelegs under her chest and went out from the bank in a stylish leap, like a thorough-bred steeplechaser, and hit the water three paces out, clear of the weeds. She came up swimming, and Centaine's chest swelled with pride - only a true champiox committed to water with such dash.

Dandy Lass swam like an otter, snaking through the water, leaving a broad V of ripples across the surface. Then the swelling in Centaine's chest turned to a cold weight of dread as she realized that Dandy was making the same mistake as Amber joy. Perhaps the long delay had unsighted her, but she was veering slightly across the wind and the current, up into the blind spot where the scent would be carried away from her.

For an instant, Centaine considered forfeiting points by redirecting her bitch. If Dandy found, even with assistance, she would still have wiped Amber joy's eye, but they needed every single point if they were to win, and Centaine could already taste the sweetness of victory on the back of her tongue. She stood motionless, her whistle dangling on the loop around her neck.

Dandy Lass judged the length of the retrieve to within feet, and she circled once on the edge of the far reed-bank, but she was too high by three yards. Where Amber joy had ploughed on, getting ever further from the bird, Dandy Lass stopped and, treading water, looked back to where Centaine stood on the far bank.

Deliberately Centaine thrust her left hand into the hip pocket of her slacks. Not even the strictest judge with the eyes of an eagle could have construed that tiny movement as a signal, but Shasa picked it up.

"The old girl hasn't changed.' He shook his head, grinning. 'Anything to win, any weapon in the arsenal, and the only sin is being caught out." In the water Dandy Lass immediately turned left, downcurrent, paddling hard, and two seconds later her nose went up as she acknowledged scent. She made one more circle, with the scent of blood rich and hot in her nostrils, as she placed the fallen mallard, then she ducked her head into the cold brown water.

A roar of approval went up from the bank as she lifted her head again, streaming water, ears flat against her skull, but the carcass of the mallard held in her jaws.

She left an arrow-head of ripples behind her as she headed back to the bank, the bird held neatly, wings' folded, keeping it high to avoid drag through the water. As her feet touched bottom, Dandy Lass flew up the bank.

She did not even pause to shake herself. Not wasting a second, she went in to make her delivery.

As she dropped to sit in front of her mistress, Shasa felt a choke in his throat and his vision misted over. It was beautiful, he thought, to see that kind of rapport between a woman and a dog. Centaine took the carcass from Dandy's mouth, and the iridescent patches in the wings burnt like sapphires in the sunlight.

She handed it to the judge, and he examined it carefully, parting the feathers to check for teeth-marks, for any sign of 'hard mouthing, and Centaine held her breath until the judge looked up again and nodded.

"Thank you, Number Three." Not only had Centaine Courtney-Malcomess provided the venue for the trials, but she was in addition the hostess for the prize-giving ceremony.

I The candy-striped marquee tent, able to accommodate five hundred guests, was set up on the main polo-field of the estate, and from Weltevreden's kitchens had come the gargantuan array of fine foods. The rock lobster had been caught by the fishing boats of Courtney Fishing and Canning Company at Lambert's Bay; the turkey had been raised on Weltevreden; the succulent Karoo lamb came from Dragon's Fountain, the Courtney sheep station on the Camdeboo plains of the Karoo; and the wines were from the vineyards that began at the edge of the polo-field outside the marquee tent.

The prime minister, John Vorster, had agreed to present the prizes. This was the fruit of Centaine's machinations over the years, a less than subtle hint to the world that the Courtneys were no longer a spent political force, that the days of their eclipse were ending.

Shasa Courtney had been a member of the faction within the Verwoerd cabinet that had opposed John Vorster's elevation to the premiership and in consequence he had been sent into political exile. But over the years that he had been in London Centaine had laboured with all her finesse and skill within the party to seek her son's rehabilitation. Of course, the fact that Shasa's term in London had been such an unequivocal triumph had reinforced her efforts. However, much of the credit for the Armscor appointment redounded directly to Centaine's tireless lobbying, her refusal to accept defeat and the blatant wielding of all her political and financial influence in her son's favour.

She would see to it that John Vorster's presence on the Weltevreden estate heralded a new golden era for the Courtneys. His round red face was the rising sun of their hopes and aspirations, Centaine thought comfortably as she looked around the crowded marquee. They were all gathered here at Weltevreden once again, all the power-brokers and the power-wielders. Although none of them had ever been so foolish or so reckless as to give Centaine Courtney-Malcomess direct offence or to write her off completely, there had been a period of cooling off while Shasa had been serving his term in London. Some had been cooler than others, Centaine reflected with a steely glint in her eye as she picked them out amongst the crowd, and she would remember them.

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer,' she thought with deep satisfaction, and almost as if to echo her sentiment the chairman of the South African Kennel Union rose to his feet and called for silence from the dais at the far endof the marquee. After welcoming the prime minister and spending a few minutes discussing the field-trial scene in general, the chairman began calling the prize-winners to the stand, and the line of glistening silver trophies dwindled until only one remained in the centre of the green baize-covered table, but it was the tallest and most ornate of them all with a statuette of a gun-dog on point surmounting the pinnacle.

"We come at last to the champion dog of trial.' The chairman beamed round the tent until he picked out Centaine standing at the back of the tent surrounded by her family. 'And it gives me much pleasure to call to the champion's berth for the first time a lady who in the few short years since she has taken to our sport has brought to it so much energy and enthusiasm that her contribution equals and in many cases surpasses those who have spent a lifetime working with gun-dogs. Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to welcome Mrs. Centaine Courtney-Malcomess and Dandy Lass of Weltevreden." Isabella had been waiting outside the tent with Dandy Lass on leash and now she came in with her, and while the crowd applauded Isabella handed the dog over to her grandmother.

Dandy Lass wore a fitted blanket in daffodil yellow, Centaine's racing colours, and with the Courtney insignia, a stylized silver diamond, embroidered in one comer. She 17e fell in beside her mistress, heeling perfectly as Centaine started up towards the dais. The crowd laughed and applauded. Woman and dog made an elegant pair of thoroughbreds, and Dandy Lass grinned and lolled her tongue and wagged her tail at the fun of it.

On the dais, Dandy Lass curtsied politely in front of the prime minister, and at a word from Centaine offered him her right paw. The crowd loved it when John Vorster stooped to shake the proffered paw.

As he handed Centaine the enormous silver trophy, the prime minister smiled at her. For a man with such a formidable reputation for ruthless strength and granite resolve, his smile was boyishly infectious and his blue eyes twinkled.

As he shook Centaine's hand, he leant a little closer, so that she alone could hear his words.

"Don't you and your family find that unbroken success in everything you do becomes monotonous, Centaine?' he asked. They had come to first-name terms only in the last year or so.

"We try to be brave about enduring it, Uncle John,' she assured him gravely.

The prime minister made a short and uncontroversial speech of congratulation, and then circulated around the marquee with the alacrity of an adroit political games man. Smiling and shaking hands and passing on, he reached the end of the tent where Centaine was holding court.

"Once again my congratulations, Centaine. I wish I could stay longer to help you celebrate your famous victory.' He glanced at his wristwatch.

"You have been generous with your time,' Centaine agreed. 'But, before you leave, may I introduce the only one of my grandchildren whom you have not met?' She beckoned to Isabella, who was hovering close by. "Isabella has been in London serving as hostess to Shasa during his term at South Africa House." As Isabella came forward, Centaine was watching the prime minister's craggy bulldog features attentively. She knew that Vorster was no philanderer; he could never have reached his position in the iron Calvinistic coils of his party if he had been. But despite the fact that for thirty years he had been happily and securely married he was still very much a man, and no man could remain unmoved when he looked at Isabella Courtney for the first time. Centaine saw the shift in his gaze, and the way he hid his quick flare of attention behind that formidable frown.

Centaine and Isabella had planned for this meeting with care, ever since Isabella had amazed both Centaine and Shasa by her sudden declared intention to enter the political arena.

"She'll get over it,' Shasa predicted, but Centaine had shaken her head.

"Bella has changed. Something has happened to her since she went to London with you. She went as a flighty spoiled little bitch-" 'Oh, come, Mater.' Predictably Shasa had risen to his precious daughter's defence, but Centaine went on without check.

"But she has returned a mature woman. However, there is more than that to it. She has steel now. She has a cutting edge, and there is something else.' Centaine had hesitated as she tried to define it. 'She has shed her romantic view of life; it is as though she has experienced a revelation, as though she has suffered and learnt to hate, as though she has come through some portentous crisis and armed herself for whatever lies ahead." 'It's not like you to make these fanciful flights of imagination,' Shasa had chaffed her, but Centaine had insisted.

"You mark my words, Bella has found her direction and she will prove herself as tough and ruthless as any of US. 'Surely not as tough and ruthless as you, Mater?

"Have your little joke, Shasa Courtney, but time will prove me right." Centaine's eyes had gone out of focus and squinted slightly. Shasa knew that expression so well, when his mother indulged in furious concentration. He called them her scheming eyes. Then her eyes came back into focus. 'She is going far, Shasa, probably further than even you and I could dream - and I am going to help her." And so, Centaine had arranged this meeting, and now she watched her grand-daughter acquit herself with all the aplomb that she had expected of her.

Vorster asked Isabella: 'So how did you enjoy the English winters?' And it was clear that he expected a trivial response, but Isabella said: 'It was worth putting up with them, if only to meet Harold Wilson and to have a first-hand account of the Labour government's attitude and intentions towards all of us who live in southern Africa." Vorster's expression changed as he realized that there was a brain behind that lovely young face. He dropped his voice, and they talked quietly for a few minutes longer before Centaine intervened again.

"Isabella has just received her doctorate in political theory from London University.' Artlessly she tossed out a little more ground bait.

"Oh so!' Vorster nodded. 'Do we have a budding Helen Suzman in our midst?" He was referring to the only we member of the South African parliament, the staunchest champion of human rights and the only really galling liberal thorn in the complacently thick hide of the Nationalist majority.

Isabella laughed, that husky sexual chuckle which she knew could stir even the most hidebound misogynist. 'Perhaps,' she agreed. 'A seat in the house might be my ultimate ambition, but that is still far ahead, and I don't think I would be as nayve as Mrs. Suzman, Prime Minister. My politics is very much in tune with that of my father and my grandmother.' Which of course made her a conservative, and now Vorster's regard was sharp blue and attentive as he studied her.

"The world is changing, Prime Minister.'Centaine seized the moment. "One day, there may even be a place in your cabinet for a woman, don't you think?" Vorster smiled and switched easily from English into Afrikaans.

"Even Doctor Courtney agrees that day is still far ahead. However, I do concede that such a pretty face would do much to lighten the deliberations of us ugly old men." The change of language was, of course, a test. Nobody in South Africa with political aspirations could survive without fluency in Afrikaans, the language of the politically dominant group.

Isabella switched as easily as he had done. Her vocabulary was wide, her grammar perfect and her accent rang sweetly, even in the ear of a born Afrikaner.

Vorster smiled again, this time with pleasure, and continued the conversation for a few minutes more before glancing pointedly at his wristwatch and speaking to Centaine.

"I must go now. I have another function to attend.' He turned back to Isabella. 'Totsiens, Doctor Courtney, until we meet again. I will be watching your progress with interest." Centaine and Shasa walked with him from the marquee to where his official car and driver waited on the edge of the polo-ground.

"Totsims, Centaine.'Vorster shook her hand. 'I congratulate you on the rearing of your grand-daughter. I recognize many traits which she can only have inherited from you." When Centaine returned to the marquee, she looked around quickly. Isabella was already the centre of a circle of eager males.

"She has them panting like puppy dogs.' Centaine suppressed a smile and caught her grand-daughter's eye. Isabella left her admirers and came to her immediately, and Centaine took her arm in a comfortable proprietorial gesture.

ISO 'Well done, missy. You behaved like a veteran. Uncle John likes you. I rather think that we are on our way."

That evening, only the family sat down to dinner at the long table in Weltevreden's main dining-room. However, Centaine had ordered the antique Limoges dinner service and the best silver. The table was resplendent in candlelight and a massed display of yellow roses. As was usual on these family evenings, the women wore long dresses and the men were in black tie.

Only Sean was missing.

Sean had been invited - or, rather, Centaine had summoned him - but he was hunting with one of his most valuable clients on the Rhodesian concession and had sent his humble apologies. Centaine had accepted them reluctantly.

She had wanted them all to celebrate her triumph with Dandy Lass, but she conceded that business came first.

The German industrialist that Sean was guiding paid for sixty-three days of hunting each year at five hundred dollars a day. Of course, his vast business commitments in Germany would not allow him to spend that much time in the hunting-veld. He was lucky if he could fit in two weeks in any one year. However, he paid for the additional days to secure the right to hunt three elephant instead of one. Sean had to be on call for him, even though he usually gave only a few days' notice of his intended arrival.

Centaine missed her eldest grandson. Sean was the handsomest and wildest of the three of them, but his presence was always stimulating. He seemed to charge the very air around him with the static electricity of danger and excitement. It had cost her and the family tens of thousand of dollars to bail him out of the various scrapes that his tempestuous nature led him into. Although she always expressed her outrage at these expenditures in the severest terms, secretly she did not grudge them. Her only fear was that one day Sean would go too far and get himself into real trouble from which even Centaine would be unable to extricate him. She dismissed that thought.

Tonight was not the night for morbid fancies.

The tall silver trophy glittered in the centre of the long table. It stood on a pyramid of yellow roses. It was strange what satisfaction that bauble gave her. It had cost her countless hours of hard work in the field, but the winning had made it all worthwhile. It had always been like that for her. The burning need to excel was in her blood. She had passed on that divine contagion to those she loved.

At the far end of the table Shasa tapped the crystal glass in front of him with a silver spoon and in the ensuing silence rose to his feet. He was tall and elegant in his impeccable dinner-jacket and black tie. He began one of those speeches for which he was renowned - easy and flowing, the wit and sentiment so cleverly timed and blended that he could at one moment raise a storm of laughter and at the next moisten every eye with a skilfully turned phrase.

Although he heaped her with praise and turned the attention of every person in the room full upon her, Centaine found her own mind wandering to her other grandchildren. They were all hanging on their father's lips, so engrossed by his words that they were unaware of Centaine's appraisal.

Garry sat at her right hand as befitted his importance in the family hierarchy. From the runt of the litter, myopic, weedy and asthmatic, he had transformed himself with little or no help from her or any of them into this bull of power and confidence. Now he was the helmsman of the family fortune, chairman of Courtney Enterprises. His bulk threatening the fragile legs of the genuine Chippendale chair, his thumbs were hooked into the pockets of his discreetly brocaded waistcoat. His dress shirt was a snowy expanse over the great chest, and the starched wing collar too tight for 2 neck swollen not with fat but with muscle and sinew. His dense black hair stood up in a cockscomb at the crown, and his thick horn-rimmed spectacles glittered in the candlelight. His laughter rocked the room; fun and unrestrained, it greeted each of Shasa's sallies and it was so infectious that it transformed even his father's mildest remarks into wild hilarity.

Centaine switched her gaze to Garry's wife. Holly sat beside Shasa at the far end of the table. She was almost ten years Garry's senior. Centaine had opposed the union with all her power and cunning. Of course, she had not succeeded in preventing the marriage. She admitted to herself now that it had been a serious error of judgement to attempt to do so. She would now have had more control and influence over Holly had she not made the attempt. Instead she had raised barricades of mistrust in Holly's mind that she might never be able to pull down.

She had been wrong about Holly. She had proved the perfect wife for Garry.

Holly had recognized those qualities in him that none of them, not even Ccntaine, had fully perceived. She had brought them to full flower and carefully nurtured his self-confidence. In large measure she was responsible for Garry's success. She had given him strength and unflagging support. She had given him love and happiness, and she had given him three sons and a daughter. Centaine smiled as she thought of those little scamps asleep in the nursery wing upstairs, and then sighed and frowned. The reserve that Holly still felt towards her was a barrier between her and her great-grandchildren. Garry and Holly lived in Johannesburg, the nation's financial centre, a thousand miles from Weltevreden.

The head office of Courtney Enterprises was in Johannesburg, as was the Stock Exchange. Garry was one of the main players; he had to be at the centre of the arena. Thus there was every reason for him and Holly to have left Weltevreden, but Centaine felt that Holly was keeping the children from her. Although it was only a three-hour flight in the company jet which Garry loved to pilot himself, yet these days Centaine very seldom saw them at Weltevreden. She wanted desperately to have the children close to her to guide and influence them, to protect and train them as she had their father, but Holly was the key. She would have to redouble her efforts to win her round. Now she deliberately caught her eye down the length of the long table, and smiled at her with all the warmth and affection she could convey.

Holly smiled back, blonde and serene, her beauty given an extraordinary dimension by those particoloured eyes, one blue, the other a startling violet.

"I'll make you like and trust me yet,' Centaine promised silently. "You'll not be able to hold out for ever, not against me. I'll have those children.

This family is mine, those children are mine. You'll not keep them from me much longer." Shasa had said something about her that she had missed in her preoccupation. Now every head at the table was turned towards Centaine, and they were all applauding with enthusiasm. She smiled and nodded her acknowledgement of whatever compliment Shasa had paid her, and as the applause faded Shasa continued.

"You may have thought to yourselves as you watched her handling Dandy Lass today that it was a remarkable accomplishment. For any other woman, it might have been so, but here we have the lady who faced down a man-eating lion with me as an infant strapped upon her back...' Shasa was reciting once again all the old stories about her that were the weft and the warp of the family legend. In itself this recitation at every important occasion had become tradition and, though they had all heard them a hundred times, their enjoyment was as fresh as ever.

Only one person at the table looked faintly embarrassed by the extravagance of Shasa's eulogy.

Centaine felt a chill little breeze of annoyance ruffle the silken surface of her self-satisfaction. Of all her grandchildren the one for whom she felt the least warmth and concern was Michael. He sat near the centre of the long table at the lowliest position, not simply because he was the youngest of her grandsons. Michael did not fit into Centaine's scheme of things. There were secret depths and hidden places in his nature that she had not yet fathomed, and which therefore annoyed her.

She had never been able to wean Michael away from his natural mother. Even the thought of Tara Courtney sent a scalding acidic rush of hatred through Centaine's bowels. Tara had outraged every principle and concept of decency and morality that Centaine held sacrosanct. She was a Marxist and a miscegenist, a traitor and a patricide. A portion of Centaine's feelings towards Tara were passed on to this one of her sons.

The force of her gaze must have been fierce enough for Michael to sense it.

He glanced up at her suddenly and paled under Centaine's dark eyes, then looked away again hurriedly, almost guiltily.

At Shasa's insistence, an dover her objections, the family had acquired a controlling interest in the media company which counted amongst its assets the Golden City Mail newspaper. Shasa's motive had been to secure a place for Michael at the top of his chosen profession. His idea had been to build up the Mail as a powerful and conservative voice of reason, and for Michael, once he had earned his spurs, to take over as publisher and editor. That day had not yet dawned, and Michael was still only a deputy editor. If it had been left to Shasa, he would have pushed Michael earlier.

However, both Garry and Centaine had kept his paternal indulgence in check.

The two of them had reasoned that Michael was not yet ready for the job.

His financial and administrative instincts were under-developed and his political judgement was naive, perhaps irreparably flawed. It was Michael's influence on editorial policy that continually nudged the Mail off the centre of the road, slanting it dangerously to the left, so that the newspaper had become distrusted not only by Government but also by the establishment of finance and mining and industry, those who paid for advertising space.

On three previous occasions the Mail had been banned by govcrnment decree, each time at a financial cost that infuriated Garry and with a loss of prestige and influence that made Centaine uneasy.

He's not a true Courtney, Centaine thought, as she studied Michael's pretty features. Even Bella has more steel in one of her little fingers than he has in his entire body. Michael is a waverer and a bleeder. His concern is for strangers and for the losers, not for the family. For Centaine that was the most heinous form of treachery. He doesn't take after any of us; he takes after his mother. And that was her most damning judgement. He has even tried to corrupt Bella. Centaine knew about the presence of her two grandchildren at the anti-apartheid rally in Trafalgar Square. They had been photographed by South African intelligence from the windows of South Africa House, and Centaine had received a warning call from one of her important contacts in the Government.

Fortunately, Centaine had been able to smooth things over. Bella had done some undercover work for South African intelligence during her passionate love-affair with Lothar De La Rey. Lothar had been a colonel in the police at the time, and he was now a Member of Parliament and a deputy minister in the Ministry of Law and Order.

Centaine had called upon Lothar personally. She had enormous influence over him; there were secrets that involved Lothar's father and other mysteries which Lothar could only guess at. In addition Lothar had been Bella's lover and, Centaine suspected, was still more than a little in love with her.

"I will include a full explanation of her presence at the rally in Isabella's file,' Lothar assured her. 'We know that she is a patriot, she has worked for us before, but I can't promise anything for Michael, Tantie.' Lothar used the respectful term of address which meant more than simply 'Aunt'. 'Michael has too many black marks on his file already, I'm afraid." Yes, thought Centaine grimly, Michael has accumulated black marks like a dog picks up fleas, and some of them hop off on to all of us.

18e At that moment Shasa finished his speech and all of them turned towards Centaine's end of the table expectantly. As a speaker she was every bit as good as her son, but there was often a little more of a sting in her words, and a little more directness in her views. They waited with anticipation for the customary fireworks as she began her reply, but tonight they were disappointed.

Centaine seemed in an unusually mild and benevolent mood. Rather than censure, she had praise and appreciation for all of them. Garry's financial results, Isabella's academic achievements, Holly's architectural plans for the new Courtney luxury hotel on the Zululand coast and her forthcoming birthday.

"So sorry you won't be able to stay over with us for the big day, Holly darling." Even Michael came in for praise, albeit much fainter praise, with the publication of his most recent book. 'One doesn't have to agree with your conclusions or with the solutions which you suggest, Mickey dear, to appreciate just how much thought and hard work went into the writing of it." When she asked them to rise and drink a toast to 'our family and every single person in it' they responded with gusto. Then Shasa came to the head of the table to take her arm and lead her through into the blue drawing-room where coffee and liqueurs and cigars were waiting. Centaine would never accede to the barbarous custom of leaving the men alone with their cigars after dinner. If there was anything worth talking about, then she wanted to be part of those discussions.

Quickly Michael crossed to Isabella as she rose from her seat at the table and took her arm.

"I've missed you, Bella. Why didn't you answer my letters? There is so much I want to know. Ramsey and Nicky-' He saw her expression change, and his alarm was quick.

"Is something wrong, Bella?" 'Not now, Mickey,' she warned him quickly. This was the first time they had spoken in almost six months, since Nicky had gone.

She had not telephoned him or answered his letters. Moreover, she had avoided being alone with him ever since he had arrived at Weltevreden that morning.

"There is something wrong,' Michael insisted.

"Smilev she ordered him, smiling herself. 'Don't make a fuss. I'll come to your room later. No questions now.' She squeezed his arm, and laughed gaily as they all trooped through to the blue drawing-room and clustered round attentively while Centaine settled herself in her customary place on the long sofa facing the roaring log fire in the Adam fireplace.

"Let me have my girls with me tonight,' she decided, and picked out Holly.

"Come and sit this side, my dear.' She patted the sofa beside her. "Bella, you on this side of me, please." Centaine seldom did anything without good reason, and as soon as the servants had given them coffee and Shasa had poured Cognac for the men she played her high card.

"I've been waiting for a chance to do this, Holly,' she said in a voice that commanded all their attention. 'And I suppose your birthday is the best excuse I'll ever have. You are my eldest grand-daughter, so I'm going to establish a little family tradition tonight." Centaine reached up behind her own neck and unclasped the necklace she wore and held it in her hands, a glittering treasure, over a thousand carats of perfect yellow diamonds. Each stone had personally been selected by Centaine Courtney from the production of her fabulous H'ani mine in the far north. It had taken ten years for her to accumulate them, and Garrards of London had designed and manufactured the setting in pure platinum.

"Something so lovely should only be worn by a beautiful woman,' Centaine whispered regretfully, and the tears that sparkled in her dark eyes were genuine. 'Alas, I no longer fulfill that requirement, so it is time for me to pass them on to somebody who does." She turned to Holly. 'Wear these with joy,' she said and hung them at her throat.

Holly sat as though stunned, and everybody in the room was silent with awe.

They all knew what that necklace meant to Centaine; they knew that she placed a far higher value on it than the mere two million sterling which the Lloyd's assessors had recently decided was its intrinsic worth.

Holly lifted her right hand and stroked the bright stars at her throat with a look of total disbelief on her delicate features, then she choked and sobbed and turned to Centaine and -embraced her. The two women clung together for a moment before Holly could find her voice. It was muffled and small, but all of them heard it clearly.

"Thank you, Nana.' Only close members of the family called Centaine that, and Holly had never done so before.

Centaine held her tightly, closing her eyes and pressing her face against Holly's golden head so that none of them would see the little smile of triumph on her lips and the satisfied gleam through the tears in her eyes.

Nanny was waiting in Isabella's suite.

"It's after one o'clock,' Isabella exclaimed. 'I've told you not to wait up for me, you silly old woman." 'I've been waiting up for you twenty-five years.' Nanny came to unhook the back of her dress.

"It makes me feel terrible,' Isabella protested.

"It makes me feel good,' Nanny grunted. 'I don't feel happy 'less I know what you been up to, missy. I'll run your bath - didn't do it before, didn't want it to turn cold." 'A bath at one o'clock in the morning!'Isabella dismissed the idea strenuously. She had not allowed Nanny to see her naked since her return.

The old woman's eyes were much too sharp. She would pick up the tiny changes that childbirth had wrought on Isabella's body: the darkening and enlarging of her nipples, the faint stria where the skin had stretched across her hips and lower belly.

She sensed that Nanny was becoming suspicious at this change of behaviour, and to divert her she said: 'Off with you now, Nanny. Go and warm Bossie's bed for him." Nanny looked shocked. 'Who's been telling you scandal stories?' she demanded.

"You're not the only one who knows what's going on at Weltevreden," Isabella informed her gleefully. 'Old Bossie has been after you for years.

About time you took pity on him. He's a good man.' Bossie was the estate blacksmith who had come to work for Centaine as an apprentice thirty-five years ago. 'You go off and hammer his anvil for him." "That's dirty talk,' Nanny sniffed. 'A real lady don't talk dirty." Nanny tried to hide her confusion behind a prim expression, but backed off towards the door, and Isabella sighed with relief as it closed behind her.

She went through to her bathroom and swiftly removed her make-up, tossed her evening-dress over the back of the sofa for Nanny to deal with in the morning, and slipped into a silk bathrobe. As she belted the robe, she crossed her bedroom and then paused with her fingers on the door-handle.

"What am I going to tell Mickey?' If she had asked herself that question only three days ago, the answer would have been obvious, but since then circumstances had changed. The packet had arrived.

The last communication she had received from Joe Cicero had been on the day before she left London to return to the Cape of Good Hope. He had telephoned her at Cadogan Square while she was in the process of packing.

"Red Rose.' She had recognized the husky wheeze of his voice instantly, and as always it had frozen her with dread and loathing. 'I am going to give you your contact address. Use it only in an emergency. It is an answering service, so do not waste time and energy checking it. A telegram or letter addressed to Hoffman, care of Mason's Agency, io Igo Blushing Lane, Soho, will find me. Memorize that address. Do not write it down." 'I have it,' Isabella whispered.

"On your return home, you will hire a post-office box at a location not associated with Weltevreden. Use a fictitious name and inform me at the Blushing Lane address when it is established. Is that clear?" Within days of arriving back at Weltevreden, Isabella had driven over the Constantiaberg Pass to the sprawling suburb of Camps Bay on the Atlantic seaboard of the Cape peninsula. The post office there was far enough removed from Weltevreden for none of the postal staff to recognize her. She hired the box in the name of Mrs. Rose Cohen, and sent a registered letter to Blushing Lane with this box number.

She checked the box for a letter each evening as she returned from her office in Centaine House in central Cape Town, driving the Mini over the neck between Signal Hill and the mountain, the more circuitous route around the back of Table Mountain to reach Weltevredcn. Even though the box remained empty day after day and week after week, she never varied her routine.

The lack of news of Nicky ate away at the fabric of her soul. The day-to-day events of her life seemed all a sham and a pretence. Although she channelled all her energy into her work as Shasa's assistant, the effort was not the opiate for her pain that she had hoped it might be.

She smiled and laughed, she rode with Nana and at the weekends played tennis or sailed with her old friends. She worked and played as though everything was the same, but it was all acting.

The nights were long and lonely. In the midnight hours, she would resolve to go to Shasa and describe in detail the web in which she was enmeshed, but then in daylight she would ask herself: 'What can Pater do? What can anybody do to help me?' And she remembered Nicky's swollen face and the silver bubbles streaming from his nose as he drowned, and she knew she could not risk that ever happening again. Strangely, the passage of time did not reduce the pain of her loss; instead it seemed to inflame her wounds, and the lack of news of Nicky aggravated them still further. Each day her suffering was harder to bear alone.

Then she heard that Michael was coming down from Johannesburg to Weltevreden for the trials, and it seemed fortuitous. Michael was the perfect confidant. She would not expect him to do anything except share her suffering and lighten the terrible load which up until now she had carried alone.

On the Friday before Michael's arrival, she had driven over the neck to Camps Bay and parked the Mini in the street beyond the post office. She walked back slowly and glanced into the side-hall that housed the tiers of tiny steel post-boxes. It was almost six in the evening, and the main post office was long ago closed. There were a couple of teenagers necking in the corner of the postal hall, but they scurried away guiltily as she glared at them. Isabella took the precaution of never approaching or opening her box while a stranger was in the hall.

She glanced back at the entrance to make sure she was alone, and then inserted her key in the lock of the tiny steel door in the fifth row of tiered boxes. The shock was greater for the fact that she was expecting the box to be empty. Adrenalin squirted into her bloodstream, and she felt her cheeks burn and her breathing choke.

She snatched up the thick brown envelope and crammed it into her sling bag.

Then, as guilty as a thief, she slammed and locked the box and ran back to where the Mini was parked. She was trembling so that she had difficulty fitting the key in the door-lock. She was breathing as hard as though she had played a long rally on the tennis-court as she started the Mini and U-turned back across the road.

She parked above the beach under the palms that line the drive. At this hour the beach was almost deserted. An elderly couple exercised an Irish setter at the edge of the water, and a single bather braved the south-easter and the icy green waters of the Benguela current.

Isabella rolled up the windows and locked both doors of the Mini before she took the envelope out of her bag and held it in her lap.

The address was typed, Mrs. Rose Cohen, and the Queen's-head postage-stamps had been franked at Trafalgar Square post office. She turned the envelope over, reluctant to open it, terrified of what it might contain. There was no return address on the reverse. Stidl delaying the moment, she searched for the gold lady's penknife in her bag and carefully slit the flap of the envelope with its razor-edged blade.

A coloured photograph slid out, and every nerve in her body tingled as she turned it face-up and recognized her son.

Nicky sat on a blue blanket on a garden lawn. He wore only a napkin. He was sitting up unsupported, and she reminded herself that he was nearly seven months old. He had grown, his cheeks were not so chubby, his limbs longer and sleeker. His hair was thicker and longer, curling darkly on to his forehead. His expression was quizzical, but there was a smile hovering at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes were bright and green as emeralds.

"Oh God. He's more beautiful!' she gasped, holding the photograph up to the light to study every tiny detail of his face. 'He's grown so big already, and sitting up on his own. My clever little manikin.' She touched the image and then saw with consternation that she had left a fingerprint on the glossy surface of the photograph. She wiped it off carefully with a Kleenex.

"My baby,' she whispered, and felt her loss tear at her heart with renewed ferocity. 'Oh, my babyp The sun had sunk to touch the line of the horizon far out on the Atlantic before she could rouse herself. Only then, as she returned the photograph to the envelope, did she realize that she had overlooked the other items it contained.

First, there was a photostat copy of a page from what was obviously a medical register at some children's clinic, but the name and address of the clinic had been obliterated. It was written in Spanish.

His name was at the head of the sheet, 'Nicholas Miguel Ramsey de Machado', followed by his date of birth and a record of weekly visits to the clinic.

Each dated entry was in a variety of handwritings and signed by the clinic's doctors or sisters.

It showed his weight and diet and dental records. She saw that on 15 July he had been treated for a rash that the doctor diagnosed as prickly heat and two weeks later for a mild oral thrush. Otherwise he was healthy and normal. With a rush of maternal pride, she read that his first two teeth had erupted at four months, and he, weighed almost sixteen kilos.

Isabella turned to the last folded sheet of paper that the envelope contained and immediately recognized the handwriting. It was in Spanish, in Adra's firm restrained hand.

Sefiorita Bella, Nicky grows every day stronger and cleverer. He has a temper like one of the bulls of the corrida. He can crawl on hands and knees almost as fast as I can run, and I expect that at any day now he will rise up on his back legs and walk.

The first word he spoke was 'Mamma', and I tell him each day how beautiful you are and how one day you will come to him. He does not yet understand, but one day he will.

I think of you often, sefiorita. You must believe that I will care for Nicky with my own life. Please do not do anything to endanger him.

Respectfully, Adra Olivares The warning contained in the last line twisted like a knife between her ribs, and was more urgent and poignant for being so mildly expressed. She knew then that she could never risk telling anyone, not Pater or Nana' or even Michael.

She hesitated now with her hand on the handle of her bedroom door. 'I have to lie to you, Mickey. I'm sorry. Perhaps, one day, I will tell you the truth.' She listened for a moment, but the great house was silent, and she turned the handle and quietly swung the door open.

The long gallery was deserted with only the night lights burning in their brackets on the wood-panelled walls. On bare feet, Isabella slipped silently over the Persian carpets scattered on the parquet floor. Since he was so seldom at Weltevreden, Michael kept his old room in the nursery wing.

He was sitting up in bed reading. As soon as she pushed the door open, he dropped the book on the bedside table and lifted the bedclothes for her.

As she climbed in beside him, he tucked the eiderdown around her shoulders and she clung to him, shivering with misery. They held each other for a long time in silence before Michael invited her gently.

"Tell me, Bella.' Even then she could not say it immediately. Her good intentions wavered, she felt the desperate temptation to ignore Adra's warning. Mickey was the only one of the family who knew that Ramsey and Nicky even existed. She wanted desperately to blurt it all out to him and have his gentle warming comfort to help fill the terrible void in her soul.

Then the image of Nicky that she had watched on the video film flashed before her eyes once more. She drew a deep breath and pressed her face to Michael's chest. 'Nicky is dead,' she whispered, and felt him flinch in her embrace. He did not reply at once.

"It's true,' she consoled herself silently. 'Nicky is dead to all of us now.' And yet the words seemed a dreadful betrayal of Michael and of Nicky.

She did not, dare not, trust him. She had denied the existence of her own son to him, and the falsehood seemed to increase her own misery and isolation, if that were possible.

"How?' Michael asked at last, and she had anticipated the question.

"Cot death,' she whispered. 'I went to wake him for his feed, and he was cold and dead." She felt Michael shiver against her. 'Oh God! My poor Bella! How horrible!

How cruel!" The reality was crueller and more horrible than he could imagine, but she could not share it with him.

After a long minute, he asked: 'Ramsey? Where is Rarnen? He should be here to comfort you.'.

"Ramsey,' she repeated the name, trying to keep fear out of her voice. "When Nicky was gone, Ramsey changed completely. I think he blamed me. His love for me died with Nicky.' She found herself weeping now, hard tearing sobs that expressed all the grief and terror and loneliness that had haunted her for so long. 'Nicky is gone. Ramsey is gone. I will never see either of them again, not as long as I live." Michael hugged her tightly. His body was hard and warm and strong.

Masculine strength that was completely devoid of sexuality was what she needed most. She felt it flowing into her like water filling the depleted dam of her courage and fortitude, and she clung to him silently.

After a while, he began to talk. She lay and listened, her ear pressed to his chest so that his voice was a reverberating murmur. He talked of love and suffering, of loneliness and of hope, and at last, of death.

"The true terror of death is its finality. The ending so abrupt, the void beyond so irrevocable. You cannot challenge death, or appeal against it.

You only break your heart if you try." Platitudes, she thought, old clichds, the same ones with which man has tried to console himself for tens of thousands of years. Yet, like most cliches, they were true, and they were the only comfort that she had available to her. More important than the sense of the words, was the soft lulling music of Michael's voice, the warmth and strength of his body, and his love for her.

At last, she fell asleep. z9e She awoke before dawn and was immediately aware that he had lain all night without moving so as not to disturb her, and that he was awake also.

"Thank you, Mickey,'she whispered. 'You'll never know how alone I have been. I needed that badly." 'I do know, Bella. I know what loneliness is.' And she felt her heart go out to him, her own pain temporarily assuaged. She wanted to be there for him now. It was his turn.

"Tell me about your new book, Mickey. I haven't read it yet - I'm sorry." He had sent her a pre-publication copy, lovingly inscribed, but she had been totally engrossed with her own suffering. There had been no time for anybody else, not even Mickey. So this time, while she listened, he talked about the book and then about himself and his view of the world around them.

"I have spoken to Raleigh Tabaka again,' he said suddenly, and she was startled. She had not thought of that name since she left London.

"Where? Where did you meet him?" Michael shook his head. 'I did not meet him. We spoke on the telephone, very briefly. I think he was calling from another country, but he will be here soon. He is a will-o'-the-wisp, a Black Pimpernel. He comes and goes across borders like a shadow." 'You have arranged to meet him?' she asked.

"Yes. He is as good as his word." 'Be careful, Mickey. Please promise me you will be careful. He is a dangerous man." 'There is nothing for you to worry about,' he assured her. 'I'm no hero.

I'm not like Sean or Garry. I'll be careful, very careful, I promise you."

Michael Courtney parked his battered Valiant in the car park of a drive-in restaurant on an off-ramp of the main Johannesburg-to-Durban highway.

He switched off the ignition ' but the engine continued running on pre-ignition for a few unsteady beats. It had been missing badly all the way down from the offices of the Golden City Mail in central Johannesburg.

The car had clocked up over seventy thousand miles and should have been sold two years previously.

As deputy editor his contract stipulated that he was entitled to a new 'luxury' vehicle every twelve months. However, Michael had developed an affection for the old Valiant. All its scars and scrapes had been honourably acquired, while over the years the driver's seat had taken on the contours of his body.

He studied the other vehicles in the car park, but none of them answered the description he had been given. He glanced at his wristwatch, a Japanese digital for which he had paid five dollars on a trip to Tokyo for the newspaper the previous year. He was twenty minutes early at the rendezvous, so he lit a cigarette and slumped down in the comfortable shabby old seat.

Thinking about the car and the watch made him smile. He really was the odd man out in his family. From Nana down to Bella, they were all obsessed with material possessions. Nana had her daffodil-coloured Daimlers; the colour was always the same, although the model changed each year. Pater kept a garage filled with classic cars, mostly British sports-cars like the SS Jaguar and the big six-litre touring Bentley in racing green. Garry had his fancy Italian Maseratis and Ferraris. Sean bolstered his tough-guy image with elaborately outfitted four-wheel-drive hunting vehicles, and even Bella drove a souped-up little thing that cost twice as much as a new Valiant.

Not one of them would have worn a digital wristwatch, not Nana with her diamond Piaget nor Sean with his macho gold Rolex. 'Things.' Michael's smile turned down at the comers of his mouth. 'All they see are things, not people. It's the sickness of our country." There was a tap on the side-window of the Valiant and Michael started and looked round, expecting his contact.

There was nobody there.

He was startled. Then a small black hand with a pink palm came into view and diffidently tapped on the glass with one finger.

Michael rolled down the window and stuck his head out. A black urchin grinned up at him. He could not have been more than five or six years of age. He was barefoot, and his singlet and shorts were ragged. Although his nostrils were crusted with white flakes of dried snot, his smile was radiant.

"Please, Baas,' he piped, and cupped his hands in a beggar's gesture. "Me hungry. Please give one cent, Baas!" Michael opened the door, and the child backed away uncertainly. Michael picked up his cardigan which he had thrown on the seat beside him and slipped it over the child's head. It hung down almost to his ankles, and the sleeves drooped a foot beyond his fingertips. Michael rolled them up for hint and said in fluent Xhosa: 'Where do you live, little one?" The boy was obviously flabbergasted, not only by this attention but also to hear a white man speak Xhosa. Six years before, Michael had realized that it was impossible to understand a man unless you spoke his language. He had been studying and practising since then. Not one white in a thousand went to those lengths. All blacks were expected to learn either English or Afrikaans; otherwise they were virtually unemployable. Now Michael spoke both Xhosa and Zulu. These languages were closely related and between them covered the vast majority of the black population of southern Africa.

"I live at Drake's Farm, Nkosi." Drake's Farm was the sprawling black township which almost a million souls called home. From here it was out of view to the east of the highway, but the smoke from the thousands of cooking-fires hazed the sky to a dirty leaden grey. The wage-earners of Drake's Farm commuted daily by train or bus to their work-places in the homes and factories and businesses of the white areas of the Witwatersrand.

The huge commercial and mining complex of greater Johannesburg was surrounded by these dormitory townships, Drake's Farm and Soweto and Alexandria. Under the bizarre conditions of the Group Areas Act, the entire country was divided up into areas reserved for each of the racial groups.

"When did you last eat?' Michael asked the child gently.

"I ate yesterday, in the morning, great chief." Michael took a five-rand banknote from his wallet. The child's eyes seemed to expand into a pair of luminous pools as he stared at it. He had almost certainly never possessed so much money at one time in his short life.

Michael proffered the note. The child snatched it and turned and ran, tripping over the skirts of the dangling cardigan. He gave no thanks, and his expression was one of desperate terror lest the gift be taken back from him before he could escape.

Michael laughed with delight at his antics and then suddenly his amusement turned to outrage. Was there another country in the modern First World, he wondered, where little children were still forced to beg upon the streets?

Then mingled with his anger was a sense of utter hopelessness.

Was there any other country that embraced both the members of the First World, like his own family with its vast estates and stunning collection of treasures, and the desperate poverty of the Third World epitomized here in the townships? The contrast was all the crueller for being so closely juxtaposed.

"If only there was something I could do,' he lamented, and drew so hard on his cigarette that a full inch of ash glowed and a spark fell unnoticed on to his tie and scorched a spot the size of a pinhead. It did not make much difference to the general appearance of his attire.

A small blue delivery-van turned off the main highway into the car park. It was driven by a young black man in a peaked cap. The sign-writing on the body read: 'Phuza Muhle Butchery. I 2th Avenue, Drake's Farm.' The name promised 'good eating'.

Michael flashed his lights as he had been instructed to do. The van pulled into the parking-bay directly in front of him. Michael climbed out and locked the Valiant before he crossed to the blue van. The rear doors were unlocked. Michael climbed in and slammed them behind him. The body of the van was more than half-filled with baskets containing packages of raw meat, and the skinned carcasses of a number of sheep hung from hooks in the roof.

"Come this way,' the driver called to him in Zulu, and Michael crawled down the length of the body. The hanging carcasses brushed against him, and the drippings stained the knees of his corduroy bags. The driver had prepared a niche for him between two of the meat-baskets where he would be hidden from casual inspection.

"There will be no trouble,' the driver assured him in cheerful Zulu.

"Nobody ever stops this van." He pulled away, and Michael settled down on the grubby floor. These theatrical precautions were annoying but necessary. No white was allowed into the township without a permit issued by the local police station in consultation with the township management council.

In the ordinary course of events this permit was not difficult to obtain.

However, Michael Courtney was a marked man. He had three previous convictions for contravention of the Publications Control Act for which he and his newspaper had been heavily fined.

Under the Act, the government censors had been given almost unlimited powers of banning and suppression of any material or publication, and they were encouraged by the full caucus of the ruling National Party not to flinch from exercising those powers to uphold the Calvinistic moral views of the Dutch Reformed Church and to protect the political status quo.

What chance, then, did Michael's writings have against their vigilance? Michael's application for a permit to enter Drake's Farm township had been summarily rejected.

The blue van entered the main gates of the township without a check, and the indolent uniformed black guards did not even glance up from their game of African Ludo, played with Coca-Cola crown tops on a carved wooden board.

"You can come up front now,' the driver called, and Michael clambered over the meat-baskets to reach the passenger-seat in the cab.

The township always fascinated him. It was almost like visiting an alien planet.

It was back in igeo, almost eleven years ago, that he had last visited Drake's Farm. At that time, he had been a cub reporter for the Mail. That was the year in which he had written the "Rage' series of articles that were the foundation on which his journalistic reputation was built, and incidentally the grounds for his first conviction under the Publications Control Act.

He smiled at the memory and looked around him with interest as they drove through the old section of the town ship. This dated from the previous century, the Victorian era during which the fabulous golden reefs of the Witwatersrand had first been discovered close by.

The old section was a maze of lanes and alleys and higgledy-piggledy buildings, shacks and shanties of unburnt brick and cracked plaster, of corrugated-iron roofs painted all the shades of an artist's palette. Most of the original colours had faded and were running with the red leprosy of rust.

The narrow streets were rutted and studded with potholes and puddles of indeterminate liquid. Scrawny chickens scurried and scratched in the litter of rubbish. A huge sow with a pink hide that looked as though it had been parboiled wallowed in one of the puddles and grunted irritably as the van passed. The stink was wondrous. The sour stench of ripening garbage mingled with that of the 2W open drains and the earthen toilets that stood like sentryboxes behind each of the hovels.

The government health inspector had long ago abandoned all hope of ever regulating the old section of Drake's Farm. One day the bulldozers would arrive and the Mail would run front-page photographs of the distraught black families crouching on the pathetic piles of their worldly possessions, watching the brutal machines demolishing their homes. A white civil servant in a dark suit would make a statement on the state television network about 'this festering health hazard making way for comfortable modem bungalows'. The anticipation of that day made Michael angry all over again.

The blue van bumped and weaved over the rutted lanes, passing the dismal shebeens and whorehouses, and then crossed the invisible line from the old into the new section that the same civil servant would describe as comfortable modem bungalows. Thousands of identical brick boxes with grey corrugated-asbestos roofs stood in endless lines upon the treeless veld.

They reminded Michael of the rows of white wooden crosses that he had seen in the military cemeteries of France.

Yet, somehow, the black residents had managed to imprint their character and individuality upon this forbidding townscape. Here and there a house had been repainted a startling colour in the monotonous grubby white lines.

Pink or sky blue or vivid orange, they bore witness to the African love of bright colour. Michael noticed one that had been beautifully decorated in the traditional geometric designs of the Ndebele tribe from the north.

The tiny front gardens were a mirror of the personal style of the occupants. One was a square of dusty bare earth; another was planted with rows of maize plants and had a milking goat tethered at the front door; yet another boasted a garden of straggly geranium plants in old five-gallon paint-tins; while still another was fenced with high barbed wire and the weed-clogged yard was patrolled by a bony but ferocious mongrel guard-dog.

2.Some of the plots were separated from each other by ornamental walls of concrete breeze blocks or old truck tyres painted gaudy colours and half-buried in the brickhard earth. Most of the cottages had extraneous additions tacked on to them, usually a lean-to of salvaged lumber and rusty corrugated iron into which a family of the owners' relatives had overflowed. There were abandoned motorvehicles, sans engine or wheels, parked at the kerb. Hillocks of old mattresses, disintegrating cardboard boxes and other discarded rubbish which the refuse removal service had overlooked stood on the street-corners.

Across this stage moved the people of the townships. These were the people whom Michael loved more than his own race or class, the people with whom he empathized and for whom he agonized. They delighted him endlessly. They amazed him endlessly with their strength and fortitude and will to survive.

The children were everywhere he looked, the crawlers and totterers and squawkers who rolled and roistered in the streets like litters of glossy black Labrador puppies or rode high, strapped to their mothers' backs in the traditional style. The older children played their simple games with wire and empty beer-cans which they had fashioned into toy automobiles. The little girls played with skippingropes in the middle of the road, or imitated the games of hopscotch and catch that they had seen the white children play. They were tardy and reluctant to give way and clear the roadway when the driver of the blue van hooted at them.

When they saw Michael's white face they danced beside the slow-moving van with cries of 'Sweetie! Sweetiep Michael had come prepared and he tossed them the hard sugar candy with which he had stuffed his pockets.

Though most of the adult population had made the long daily journey to their work-place in the city, the mothers and the old people and the unemployed had been left behind.

Gangs of street-youths stared at him expressionlessly as 2,he passed, gathered in idle groups on the littered streetcomers. Though he knew that these teenagers were the jackals of the townships who preyed upon their own kind, Michael's sympathy went out to them. He understood their despair. He knew that even before they had fairly embarked on life's journey they were aware that it held nothing for them, no expectation or hope of better. things or kinder times.

Then there were the women at their chores, hanging the long lines of laundry to dry like prayer-flags on the breeze; or stooped over the black three-legged pots in the backyards, cooking the staple maize porridge of their diet over open fires in the traditional way, preferring that to the iron stoves in the tiny cottage kitchens. The smoke of the fires mingled with the blown dust to form the perpetual cloud that hung over the township.

The illegal hawkers or spouzas, who had eluded the Afrikaner government's passion for regulations and licensing, wheeled their barrows and shouted their wares in the busy streets. The housewives bartered with them for a single potato or cigarette or orange or slice of white bread, depending on their circumstances.

Despite these dreary surroundings and all the evidence of poverty and neglect, Michael heard in every street and at every corner they turned the sound of laughter and music. The laughter was spontaneous and merry. Their shouted greetings and repartee were carefree. Wherever he looked were those lovely African smiles that filled his heart and then squeezed it to the point of pain.

The music rang and echoed from the bleak little cottages and, in the streets, from the transistor radios that men and women carried in hand or balanced on their heads as they walked.,The children played their penny whistles and banjos made from paraffin-tins and wood and pieces of wire.

They danced and they sang in a spontaneous expression of the sheer joy of living, even in these most insalubrious circumstances.

For Michael the laughter and the music depicted the indomitable spirit of the black African in the face of all hardship. For him there could not be another race on earth quite like them. Michael loved them, every one of them, no matter what age or sex or tribe or condition. He was of Africa, and these were his people.

"What can I do for you, my brothers?' he whispered. 'What can I do to help you? I wish I knew. Everything I have attempted so far has failed. All my efforts have died like a hopeless shout upon the desert air. If only I could find the way." Then abruptly he was distracted. They topped a rise in the gently undulating veld and Michael straightened in his seat.