Rage

Though it's not too bad, they are good girls and they are all expecting this one to be a boy,' she patted her padded abdomen, 'and I know they are going to spoil him something terrible." Tara's baby was born in Molly Broadhurst's guest room. Doctor Chetty Abrahamji who delivered it was an old friend of Molly's and had been a secret member of the Communist Party, one of its few Hindu members.

As soon as Tara went into labour, Molly telephoned Miriam Afrika, and she arrived with bag and bulging tummy and went in directly to see Tara.

'I'm so glad we have started at last,' she cried. 'I must admit that although it was a difficult pregnancy, it will be my quickest and easiest delivery." She reached up under her own skirt and with a flourish produced the cushion. Tara laughed with her and then broke off as the next contraction seized her.

'Ouch!" she whispered. 'I wish mine was that easy. This one feels like a giant." Molly and Miriam took turns, sitting beside her and holding her hand when the contractions hit her, and the doctor stood at the foot of the bed exhorting her to, 'Push! Push!" By noon the following day Tara was exhausted, panting and racked, her hair sodden with sweat as though she had plunged into the sea.

'It's no good,' the doctor said softly. 'We'll have to move you into hospital and do a Caesar." 'No! No!" Tara struggled up on an elbow, fierce with determination. 'Give me one more chance." When the next contraction came she bore down on it with such force that every muscle in her body locked and she thought the sinews in her loins must snap like rubber bands. Nothing happened, it was jammed solid, and she could feel the blockage like a great log stuck inside her.

'More!" Molly whispered in her ear. 'Harder - once more for the baby,' Tara bore down again with the strength of desperation and then screamed as she felt her flesh tear like tissue paper. There was a hot slippery rush between her thighs and relief so intense that her scream changed to a long drawn-out cry of joy, that joined with her infant's birth cry.

'Is it a boy?" she gasped, trying to sit up. 'Tell me - tell me quickly." 'Yes,' Molly reassured her. 'It's a boy -just look at his whistle.

Long as my finger. There's no doubt about that - he's a boy all right,' and Tara laughed out aloud.

He weighed nine and a half pounds with a head that was covered with pitch black hair, thick and curly as the fleece of an Astrakhan lamb. He was the colour of hot toffee, and he had Moses Gama's fine Nilotic features. Tara had never seen anything so beautiful in all her life, none of her other babies had been anything like this.

'Let me hold him,' she croaked, hoarse with the terrible effort of his birth, and they placed the child still wet and slippery in her arms.

'I want to feed him,' she whispered. 'I must give him his first suck - then he will be mine for ever." She squeezed out her nipple and pressed it between his lips and he fastened on it, snuffling and kicking spasmodically with pleasure.

'What is his name, Tara?" Miriam Afrika asked.

'We'll call him Benjamin,' Tara said. 'Benjamin Afrika. I like that - he is' truly of Africa." Tara stayed with the infant five days. When finally she had to relinquish him, and Miriam drove away with him in her little Morris Minor, Tara felt as though part of her soul had been hacked away by the crudest surgery. If Molly had not been there to help her through, Tara knew she could not have borne it. As it was Molly had something for her.

'I've been saving it until now,' she told Tara. 'I knew how you would feel when you had to give up your baby. This will cheer you up a little." She handed Tara an envelope, and Tara examined the handwritten address. 'I don't recognize the writing." She looked mystified.

'I received it by a special courier - open it up. Go on!" Mo ordered impatiently, and Tara obeyed. There were four sheets cheap writing paper. Tara turned to the last sheet and as she re the signature her expression altered.

'Moses!" she cried. 'Oh I can't believe it - after all these months.

had given up hope. I didn't even recognize his handwriting." TaJ clutched the letter to her breast.

'He wasn't allowed to write, Tara dear. He has been in a vel strict training camp. He disobeyed orders and took a grave risk t get this note out to you." Molly went to the door. Tll leave you i peace to read it. I know it will make up a little for your loss." Even after Molly had left her alone, Tara was reluctant to begi reading. She wanted to savour the pleasure of anticipation, but a last she could deny herself no longer.

Tara, my dearest, I think of you every day in this place, where the work is very hard am demanding, and I wonder about you and our baby. Perhaps it has alread, been born, I do not know, and I wonder often if it is a boy or a little girl Although what I am doing is of the greatest importance for all of us for the people of Africa, as well as for you and me- yet I find roysell longing for you. The thought of you comes to me unexpectedly in the night and in the day and it is like a knife in my chest.

Tara could not read on, her eyes were awash with tears.

'Oh Moses,' she bit her lip to prevent herself blubbering, 'I never knew you could feel like that for me." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

When I left you, I did not know where I was going, nor what awaited me here. Now everything is clear, and I know what the difficult tasks are that lie ahead of us. I know also that I will need your help. You will not refuse me, my wife? I call you 'wife' because that is how I feel towards you, now that you are carrying our child.

x It was difficult for Tara to take it in. She had never expected him to give her this kind of recognition and now she felt humbled by it.

'There is nothing that I could ever refuse you,' she whispered aloud, and her eyes raced down the sheet. She turned it over quickly and Moses had written: Once before I told you how valuable it would be if you used your family connections to keep us informed of affairs of state. Since then this has become more imperative. Your husband, Shasa Courtney, is going over to the side of the neo-fascist oppressors. Although this fills you with hatred and contempt for him, yet it is a boon we could not have expected or prayed for. Our information is that he has been promised a place in least ten years junior to Tara, barely into her twenties, but with an unusual maturity for one so young.

'My name is Victoria Dinizulu,' she introduced herself. 'My friends call me Vicky. I know you are Mrs Courtney." 'Tara,' Tara corrected her quickly. Nobody had used her surname since she had left Cape Town and it sounded a jarring note in her own ears.

The girl smiled shyly in acknowledgement. She had the serene beauty of a black madonna, the classic moon face of the high-bred Zulu with huge almond eyes and full lips, her skin the colour of dark amber, her hair plaited into an intricate pattern of tiny curls over her skull.

'Are you related to the Courtneys of Zululand?" she asked Tara.

'Old General Sean Courtney and Sir Garrick Courtney of Theuniskraal, near Ladyburg?" 'Yes." Tara tried not to show the shock she felt at the mention of those names. 'Sir Garrick was my husband's grandfather. My own sons are named Sean and Garrick after them. Why do you ask, Vicky? Do you know the family well?" 'Oh yes, Mrs Courtney - Tara." When she smiled, the Zulu girl's face seemed to glow like a dark moon. 'Long ago, during the last century, my grandfather fought at General Sean Courtney's side in the Zulu wars against Cetewayo who stole the kingship of Zululand from my family. It was my grandfather, Mbejane, who should have been king. Instead he became General Courtney's servant.

'Mbejane!" Tara cried. 'Oh yes. Sir Garrick Courtney wrote about him in his History of Zululand. He was Sean Courtney's faithful retainer until his death. I remember they came up here to the gold-' fields of the reef together and later went on to what is now Rhodesia, hunting ivory." 'You know all about that!" Vicky laughed with pleasure.

'My father used to tell me the same stories when I was a little girl. My father still lives near Theuniskraal. After my grandfather, Mbejane Dinizulu, died my father took his place as the old general's body servant. He even went to France with the general in 1916 and worked for him until the general was murdered. In his will the general left him a section of Theuniskraal for his lifetime and a pension of a thousand pounds a year. They are a fine family, the Courtneys. My old father still weeps whenever he mentions the general's name --' Vicky broke off and shook her head, suddenly perplexed and saddened. 'Life must have been so simple in those days, my grandfather and my father were hereditary chieftains and yet they were satisfied to spend their lives subservient to a white man, and strangely they loved that man and he, in his way, seemed to love them. I wonder sometimes if theirs was not the better way --' 'Do not even think that,' Tara almost hissed at her. 'The Courtneys have always been heartless robber barons, plundering and exploiting your people. Right and justice are on the side of your struggle. Never entertain the slightest doubt of that." 'You are right,' Vicky agreed firmly. 'But sometimes it's nice to think of the friendship of the general and my grandfather. Perhaps one day we could be friends again, equal friends, both sides stronger for the friendship." 'With every new oppression, with every new law passed, the prospect fades,' Tara said grimly, 'and I become more ashamed of my race." 'I don't want to be sad and intense tonight, Tara. Let's talk about happy things. You said you have sons, Seen and Garrick, named after their ancestors. Tell me about them, please." However, the thought of the children and Shasa and Weltevreden made Tara feel guilty and uncomfortable, and as soon as she could she changed the subject again.

'Now tell me about yourself, Vicky,' she insisted. 'What are you doing in Johannesburg, so far from Zululand?" 'I work at Baragwanath Hospital,' Vicky told her.

Tara knew that was one of the largest hospitals in the world, certainly the largest in the southern hemisphere, with 2400 beds and over 2000 nurses and doctors, most of them black, for the hospital catered exclusively for black patients. All hospitals, like schools and transport and most other public facilities, were strictly segregated by law, true to the grand concept of apartheid.

Vicky Dinizulu was so modest about her own achievements that Tara had to draw out of her the fact that she was a qualified theatre sister.

'But you are so young, Vicky' she protested.

'There are others younger,' the Zulu girl laughed. Her laughter had a pleasing musical lilt.

'She really is a lovely child,' Tara thought, smiling in sympathy, and then corrected herself. 'No, not a child - a clever and competent young woman." So Tara told her about her clinic at Nyanga, and the problems of malnutrition and ignorance and poverty they encountered, and Vicky related some of her experiences and the solutions they had found to the terrible challenges that faced them in caring for the physical wellbeing of a peasant population trying to adapt to an urban existence.

'Oh, I have enjoyed talking to you,' Vicky blurted out at last. 'I don't know when I have ever spoken to a white woman like this the cabinet of that barbarous regime. If you were in his confidence, it would afford us a direct inside view and knowledge of all their plans and intentions. This would be so valuable that it would be impossible to put a price upon it.

'No,' she whispered, shaking her head, sensing what was coming, and it took courage for her to read on.

I ask you, for the sake of our land and our love, that when the child has been born and you are recovered from the birth, that you return to your husband's home at Weltevreden, ask his forgiveness for your absence, tell him that you cannot live without him and his children, and do all in your power to ingratiate yourself with him and to earn his confidence once more.

'I cannot do it,' Tara whispered, and then she thought of the children, and especially of Michael, and she felt herself wavering.

'Oh Moses, you don't know what you are asking of me." She covered her eyes with her hand. 'Please don't make me do it. I have only just won my freedom - don't force me to give it up again." But the letter went on remorselessly: Every one of us will be called upon to make sacrifice in the struggle that lies ahead. Some of us may be required to lay down our very lives and I could well be one of those 'No, not you, my darling, please not you!'

However, for the loyal and true comrades there will be rewards, immediate rewards in addition to the ultimate victory of the struggle and the final liberation. If you can bring yourself to do as I ask you, then my friends here will arrange for you and me to be together - not where we have to hide our love, but in a free and foreign land where, for a happy interlude, we can enjoy our love to the utmost. Can you imagine that, my darling?

Being able to spend the days and nights together, to walk in the streets hand in hand, to dine together in public and laugh openly together, to stand up unafraid and say what we think aloud, to kiss and do all the silly adorable things that lovers do, and to hold the child of our love between usIt was too painful, she could not go on. When Molly found her weeping bitterly, she sat on the bed beside her and took her in her arms.

'What is it, Tara dear, tell me, tell old Molly." 'I have to go back to Weltevreden,' she sobbed. 'Oh God, Molly, I thought I was rid of that place for ever, and now I have to go back." Tara's request for a formal meeting to discuss their matrimonial aJ rangements threw Shasa into a state of utmost consternation. H had been well enough satisfied by the informal understanding b tween them, by which he had complete freedom of action and contrr of the children, together with the respectability and protection of th marriage form. He had been happy to pay without comment the bill that Tara forwarded to him, and to see that her generous allowanc was paid into her bank account promptly on the first of each month He had even made good the occasional shortfall when the bani manager telephoned him to report that Tara had overdrawn. On on, occasion there was a cheque made out to a second-hand mota dealer, for almost a thousand pounds. Shasa did not query it. What ever it was, it was a bargain as far as he was concerned.

Now it looked as if all this was coming to an end, and Shas immediately called a meeting of his principal advisors in the board.

room of Centaine House. Centaine herself was in the chair ant Abraham Abrahams had flown down from Johannesburg, bringin with him the senior partner of a firm of renowned but very expensive divorce lawyers.

Centaine took over immediately. 'Let us consider the worst possible case,' she told them crisply. 'Tara will want the children and she'll want a settlement, plus a living allowance for herself and each of the children." She glanced at Abe who nodded his silver head, which set the rest of the legal counsel nodding like mandarin dolls, looking grave and learned, and secretly counting their fees, Shasa thought wryly.

'Damn it, the woman deserted me! I'll go to hell before I give her my children." 'She will claim that you made it impossible for her to remain in the conjugal home,' Abe said, and then when he saw Shasa's thunderous expression, tried to soothe him. 'You must remember, Shasa, that she will probably be taking the best available legal advice herselfi' 'Damned shyster lawyers!" said Shasa bitterly, and his counsel looked pained, but Shasa did not apologize nor qualify. 'I've already warned her I won't give her a divorce. My political career is at a very delicate stage. I cannot afford the scandal. Very soon I'll be contesting a general election." 'You may not be able to refuse,' Abe murmured. 'Not if she has good grounds." 'She hasn't any,' said Shasa virtuously. Tve always been the considerate and generous husband." 'Your generosity is famous,' Abe murmured drily. 'There is many an attractive young lady who could give you a testimonial on that score."

'Really Abe,' Centaine intervened. 'Shasa has always kept out of trouble with women --' 'Centaine, my dear. We are dealing with facts here - not maternal illusions. I am not a private detective and Shasa's private life is none of my concern. However, completely disinterested as I am, I am able to cite you at least six occasions in the last few years when Shasa has given Tara ample grounds --' Shasa was making frantic signals down the table to shut Abe up, but Centaine leaned forward with an interested expression. 'Go ahead, Abe,' she ordered. 'Start citing!" 'In January two years ago the leading lady in the touring production of the musical Oklahoma,' Abe began, and Shasa sank down in his chair and covered his eyes as though in prayer. 'A few weeks later the left-winger, ironically, in the visiting British women's hockey team." So far Abe was avoiding mentioning names, but now he went on. 'Then there was the female TV producer from North American Broadcasting Studios, pert little vixen with a name like a fish - no a dolphin, that's it, Kitty Godolphin.

Do you want me to go on? There are a few more, but as I have said already, I'm not a private investigator. You can be sure that Tara will get herself a good one, and Shasa makes very little effort to cover his tracks." 'That will do, Abe,' Centaine stopped him, and considered her son with disapproval and a certain grudging admiration.

'It's the de Thiry blood,' she thought. 'The family curse. Poor Shasa." But she said sternly, 'It looks as though we do have a problem after all,' and she turned to the divorce lawyer.

'Let us accept that Tara has grounds of infidelity. What is the worst judgement we might expect against us?" 'It's very difficult, Mrs Courtney--' 'I'm not going to hold you to it,' Centaine told him brusquely.

'You don't have to equivocate. Just give me the worst case." 'She could get custody, especially of the two younger children, and a large settlement." 'How much?" Shasa demanded.

'Considering your circumstances, it could be --' the lawyer hesitated delicately '-- a million pounds, plus the trimmings, a house and allowance and a few other lesser items." Shasa sat up very straight in his chair. He whistled softly and then murmured 'That is really taking seriously something that was merely poked in fun,' he said, and nobody laughed.

So Shasa took pains preparing for the reunion with Tara. He studied the written advice which Abe and the other lawyers had drawn up for him, and had his tactics firmly established. He knew what to say and what to avoid. He was to make no admissions an no promises, particularly regarding the children.

For the venue he chose the pool at the foot of the Constanti Berg, hoping that Tara would associate it with the happy hours the had spent there. He had his chef prepare an exquisite picnic hampe which contained all Tara's favourite delicacies, and he chose half dozen bottles of his best wines from the cellar.

He took especial care with his appearance. He had his hair trimme and picked out a new black silk eye-patch from the drawer that hid, kept full of them. He wore the after-shave she had given him am the cream-coloured wild silk suit which she had once remarked ai favourably, with his airforce scarf in the open neck of his blue shirt All the children were packed off to Rhodes Hill, into Centaine' care for the weekend, and he sent the chauffeur in the Rolls to fetc Tara from Molly Broadhurst's home where she was staying. Th chauffeur brought her directly up to the pool and Shasa opened the door for her, and was surprised when she offered him her cheek fol his kiss.

'You look so well, my dear,' he told her, and it was not entirely untrue. She had lost a lot of weight, her waist was once again wasped in and her bosom was magnificent. Despite the gravity of the moment Shasa felt his loins stir as he looked down that cleavage.

'Down boy!" he admonished himself silently and looked away, concentrating on her face. Her skin had cleared, the rings below her eyes were barely discernible and her hair had been washed and set. Obviously she had taken the same pains with her appearance as he had.

'Where are the children?" she demanded immediately.

'Mater has them - so we could talk without interruption." 'How are they, Shasa?" 'They are all just fine. Couldn't be better." He wanted there to be no special pleading on that score.

'I do miss them terribly,' she said. The remark was ominous, and he did not reply. Instead he led her to the summer-house and settled her on the couch facing the waterfall.

'It's so beautiful here." She looked around her. 'It is my favourite spot on all of Weltevreden." She took the wineglass he handed her.

'Better days!" He gave her the toast. They clinked glasses and drank.

Then she set her glass down on the marble table-top and Shasa steeled himself to receive the opening shot of the engagement.

'I want to come back home,' she said, and he spilled white wine down the front of his silk suit, and then dabbed at it with the handkerchief from his breast pocket to give himself time to recover his balance.

In a perverse way he had been looking forward to the bargaining.

He was a businessman, supremely confident in his ability to get the best trade. Furthermore, he had already adjusted to the idea of becoming a bachelor once more, and was beginning to look forward to the delights of that state, even if it cost him a million pounds. He felt the prickle of disappointment.

'I don't understand,' he said carefully.

'I miss the children. I want to be with them - and yet I don't want to take them away from you. They need a father as much as a mother." It was too easy. There had to be more than that, Shasa's bargaining instincts were sure.

I have tried living alone,' she went on. 'And I don't like it. I want to come back." 'So we just pick it up again where we dropped it?" he asked carefully, but she shook her head.

'That's impossible, we both know that." She prevented further questions with a raised hand. 'Let me tell you what I want. I want to have all the benefits of my old life, access to my children, the prestige that goes with the name Courtney and the money not to have to stint -' 'You were always scornful of the position and the money before." He could not prevent the jibe, but she took no offence.

'I had never had to do without it before,' she said simply. 'However, I want to be able to go away for a while when it becomes too much for me here - but I will not embarrass you politically or in any other way." She paused. 'That's all of it." 'And what do I get in return?" he asked.

'A mother for your children, and a public wife. I will preside at your dinner-parties, and make myself agreeable to your associates, I will even help you with your political electioneering, I used to be very good at that." 'I thought that my politics disgusted you." 'They do - but I will never let it show." 'What about my conjugal rights, as they are delicately referred to by the lawyers?" 'No." She shook her head. 'That will only complicate our relationship." She thought of Moses. She could never be unfaithful to him, even if he had ordered it. 'No, but I have no objection to you going elsewhere. You have always been reasonably discreet. I know you will continue to be." He looked at her bosom and felt a twinge of regret, but the bargain she was offering amazed him. He had everything he wanted, and had saved himself a million pounds into the bargain.

'Is that all?" he asked. 'Are you sure?" 'Unless you can think of anything else we should discuss." He shook his head. 'Shall we shake hands on it - and open a bottle of the Widow?" She smiled at him over the rim of her glass to conceal what she truly felt for him and his world, and She made a vow as she sipped the tingling yellow wine.

'You will pay, Shasa Courtney, you will pay for your bargain much more than you ever dreamed." For over a decade Tara had been the mistress of Weltevreden, so there was nothing difficult or alien in taking up that role again, except that now more than ever she felt that she was acting a part in a tedious and unconvincing play.

There were some differences, however. The guest list had altered subtly, and now included most of the top Nationalist politicians and party organizers, and more often than before the conversation at the dinner-table was in Afrikaans rather than English. Tara's knowledge of Afrikaans was adequate, it was after all a very simple language with a grammar so uncomplicated that the verbs were not even conjugated and much of the vocabulary was taken directly from English. However, she had some difficulty with the guttural inflections, and most of the time smiled sweetly and remained silent. She found that by doing so her presence was soon overlooked and she heard much more than she would have had she joined in the conversation.

A frequent visitor to Weltevreden now was the minister of police, Manfred De La Rey, and Tara found it ironical that she was expected to feed and entertain the one man who to her epitomized all that was evil and cruel in the oppressive regime that she hated with all her being. It was like sitting down to a meal with a man-eating leopard, even his eyes were pale and cruel as those of a great predatory cat.

Strangely, she found that despite her loathing, the man fascinated her. It surprised her to find, once she had got over the initial shock of his presence, that he had a fine brain. Of course it was common knowledge that he had been a brilliant student in the law faculty of Stellenbosch University, and before standing for parliament, he had built up a highly successful law practice in his own right. She knew also that no man who was not essentially brilliant was included in the Nationalist cabinet, yet his intelligence was sinister and ominous.

She found herself listening to the most heinous concepts expressed with such logic and eloquent conviction that she had to shake herself out of his mesmeric influence, like a bird trying to break the spell of the cobra's swaying dance.

Manfred De La Rey's relationship to the Courtney family was another enigma to her. It was part of family lore how his father had robbed the H'am Mine of a million pounds of diamonds, and how Blaine, her own father, and Centaine, before she was Blaine's wife, had pursued him into the desert and after a fierce battle captured him. Manfred's father had served fifteen years of a life sentence before being released under the amnesty that the Nationalists had granted to so many Afrikaner prisoners when they came to power in 1948.

The two families should have been bitter enemies, and indeed Tara detected definite traces of that hatred in the occasional tone of a remark and unguarded look that Manfred De La Rey and Shasa directed at each other, and there was a peculiarly brittle and artificial quality to the overtly friendly facade they showed, as though at any moment it might be stripped away and they would fly at each other's throats like fighting dogs.

On the other hand, Tara knew that Manfred was the one who had enticed Shasa into forsaking the ailing United Party and joining the Nationalists with the promise of ministerial rank, and that Shasa had made the De La Reys, father and son, major shareholders and directors in the new fish canning company at Walvis Bay, a company which looked set to turn half a million pounds of profit in its very first year of operation.

The mystery of their relationship was made even more intriguing by Centaine. On the second occasion that Shasa invited Manfred De La Rey and his wife to dine at Weltevreden, Centaine had telephoned her a few days beforehand, and asked her bluntly if she and Blaine might join the party.

Although Tara had determined to see as little of Centaine as possible, and to do all in her power to reduce Centaine's influence over the children and the general running of the estate, Tara had been so taken aback by the direct request that she had not been able to think of an excuse.

'Of course, Mater,' she had agreed with false enthusiasm. 'I would have invited you and Daddy anyway, but I thought you might have found the evening tedious, and I know Daddy cannot abide De La Rey --' 'Whatever gave you that idea, Tara?" Centaine asked tartly. 'They are on opposite sides of the house, but Blaine has a healthy respect for De La Rey, and he concedes that De La Rey certainly handled the troubles firmly enough. His police did a magnificent job in clamping down on the ringleaders and preventing serious disruptions and further loss of life." Furious words filled Tara's mouth and she wanted to hurl them her mother-in-law, but she gritted her teeth and took a deep breatl before she said sweetly, 'Well then, Mater, both Shasa and I will 1: looking forward to Friday night. Half past seven for eight, an naturally the men will be wearing black tie." 'Naturally,' said Centaine.

It had been a surprisingly mellow evening, when the explosiv elements seated around the same table were considered, but it was strict rule of Shasa's that shop party politics were never discussed i] Weltevreden's palatial dining-room. The men's conversation range from the projected All Blacks rugby tour to the recent anglin capture of a six hundred pound blue fin tunny in False Bay, the firs of its kind. Manfred De La Rey and Blaine were both keen angler and were excited by the prospect of such a magnificent prize.

Centaine was unusually quiet during the meal. Tara had placed he: beside Manfred, but she listened attentively to everything that hid said and when they went through to the blue drawing-room at th end of the meal, she stayed close to Manfred, and the two of then were soon oblivious of everyone else, lost in rapt but low-voicec discussion.

Manfred's statuesque blond German wife, Heidi, had failed to enthral Tara with a long-winded complaint about the laziness and dishonesty of her coloured servants, and Tara escaped as soon as she could and took another cognac to her father on the long blue velvet sofa, and then settled beside him.

'Centaine says that you admire De La Rey,' she said quietly, and they both looked across at the other couple on the far side of the room.

'He's a formidable piece of work,' Blaine grunted. 'Hard as iron and sharp as an axe. Do you know even his own colleagues call him "Panga Man"?" 'Why does he fascinate Centaine so much? She rang me and demanded an invitation when she knew he would be here. She seems to have some sort of obsession with him. Why is that, Daddy, do you know?" Blaine dropped his eyes and considered the firm grey ash on his cigar. What could he tell her? he wondered. He was one of probably only four people in the world who knew Manfred De La Rey was Centaine's bastard son. He remembered his own shock and horror when she had told him. Not even Shasa knew that he and Manfred were half-brothers, though Manfred knew, of course. Centaine had told him, when she used it as blackmail to prevent Manfred destroying Shasa's political career back in 1948.

It was all so complicated, and Blaine found himself disturbed as he had been so oen over the years by the echoes of Centaine's follies and indiscretions before he had met her. Then he smiled ruefully. She was still a fiery and impetuous woman, and he wouldn't have had it any other way.

'I think she is interested in anything that affects Shasa's career.

It's only natural she should be, De La Rey is Shasa's sponsor. It's as simple as that, my dear." 'Yes, De La Rey is his sponsor,' Tara agreed. 'But what do you think, Daddy, about Shasa's turn of political coats?" Despite her resolution to remain calm, she had raised her voice in agitation, and Shasa, who was in intimate conversation with the French ambassador's chic and bold-eyed young second wife, heard his name across the room and glanced up in her direction. Tara dropped her voice quickly.

'What do you think of it, Daddy? Weren't you simply appalled?" 'I was at first,' Blaine admitted. 'But then I discussed it with Centaine and Shasa came to see me. We thrashed it out between us, and I had my say - but in the end I came to see his point of view. I don't agree with it, but I respect it. He believes that he can do the greatest good --' Tara heard her own father repeating all Shasa's trite and glib justifications and the sense of outrage overwhelmed her all over again.

She found herself trembling with suppressed passion, and she wanted to scream out at them, Shasa and Centaine and her own father, but then she thought of Moses and the struggle and with an effort she was able to retain her self-control.

'I must remember everything,' she told herself. 'Everything that they say or do. Even the smallest detail might be of inestimable value to the struggle." So, faithfully she reported it all to Molly Broadhurst. She slipped away from Weltevreden at least once a week on the pretence of visiting her dressmaker or her hairdresser. She and Molly met only after Tara had taken elaborate precautions to make sure she was not followed. Her instructions were to cut all her left-wing connections and to refrain at all times from political or socialistic comments in the presence of others. Molly was her only contact with the real world of the struggle, and she treasured every minute of their time together.

Miriam Afrika was always able to bring the baby to be with her during these interludes, and Tara held him in her arms and fed him his bottle as she made her report to Molly. Everything about little Benjamin fascinated her from the tight curls of crisp black hair that covered his scalp, through the exquisite softness and colour shading of his skin - honey and old ivory - down to the soles of his tiny feet which were the palest, clearest, coral pink.

Then on one of her visits Molly had another letter for her froJ Moses, and even the joy of holding baby Benjamin paled beside th of those written words.

The letter had been written in Addis Ababa, the capital Ethiopia. Moses was there to address a meeting of the heads of tl black African states at the express invitation of the Emperor Hail Selassie, and he described to her the warm welcome that he had bee given, and the offers of support, moral, financial and military, the had been pledged to the struggle in Anzania - that was the new nam for South Africa. It was the first time she had heard it, and when sh repeated it aloud, the sound of it stirred a deep patriotic response i: her that she had never felt before. She read the rest of Moses' lettel From here I will travel on to Algeria, where I will meet with Colone Boumedienne, who is at this moment struggling against French imperialisrr and whose great valour will surely bring freedom and happiness to hi tragically oppressed land.

After that I will fly to New York, and it seems certain that I will b allowed to put our case to the General Assembly of the United Nations. AI this is exciting, but I have even better news that affects you and our hah' Benjamin.

If you continue the important work you are doing for the cause, ou powerful friends are determined to give you a special reward. Some day th, three of us - you and me and Benjamin - will be together in London.

Z cannot tell you how greatly I look forward to holding my son and to greetinl you again.

! will write to you as soon as I have more definite news. In the meantime I entreat you to continue your valuable work for the cause, in particulal you should make every effort to see that your husband is elected to the government front benches at the elections next month. This will make youl position and value to the struggle unique.

For days after receiving this letter Tara's mood was so light and gay that both Shasa and Centaine remarked on it, and took it as a sign that she had finally accepted'her responsibilities as the mistress of Weltevreden, and was prepared to honour the agreement that she had made with Shasa.

When the prime minister announced the date of the general election, the country was immediately seized by the peculiar frenzy of excitement and intrigue which accompanies all major political activity in South Africa and the newspapers began their strident and partisan pronouncements.

Shasa's resignation from the United Party and his nomination as the Nationalist candidate for the-constituency of South Boland was one of the highlights of the campaign. The English press castigated him, branding him a coward and a traitor, while the Burger and the Transvalet, those stalwarts of the Nationalist cause, hailed him as a far-seeing man of the future and looked forward to the day when all white South Africans, albeit under the firm hand of the National Party, marched shoulder to shoulder towards the golden republic which was the dream of all true South African patriots.

Kitty Godolphin had flown back from New York to cover the elections and to up-date her famous 'Focus on Africa' series that had won her another Emmy and had made her one of the highest paid of the new generation of young, pretty and waspish television commentators.

Shasa's political defection was the headline story when she landed at Jan Smuts airport, and she telephoned him from the airport on his private line and got him in his office just as the board meeting he had been chairing broke up, and he was about to leave Centaine House to fly up to the H'am Mine for his monthly inspection. 'Hi!" she said gaily.

'It's me." 'You bitch." He recognized her voice instantly. 'After what you did to me, I should kick your bottom, wearing hobnailed boots and taking a full swing, at that." 'Oh, did you see it? Wasn't it good? I thought I captured you perfectly." 'Yes, I saw it last month on BBC while I was in London. You made me look like a cross between Captain Bligh and Simon Legree, although more pompous than either and a lot less lovable." 'That's what I said - I got you perfectly." 'I don't know why I am talking to you,' he chuckled despite himself.

'Because you are lusting after my miraculously beautiful body,' she suggested.

'I'd be wiser to make advances to a nest of hornets." 'We aren't talking wisdom here, buddy boy, we are talking lust.

The two are not compatible." And Shasa had a poignant vision of her slim body and her perfect little breasts, and he felt slightly breathless.

'Where are you?" he asked.

'Johannesburg airport." .

What are you doing this evening? He made a qmck calculation.

He could postpone the H'am Mine inspection, and it was four hours' flying time to Johannesburg in the Mosquito.

'I'm open to suggestions,' she told him, 'as long as the suggestions include an exclusive interview for NABS on yofir change of political status and your view of the up-coming elections and what they mean to the ordinary people of this country." 'I should know better,' he said. 'But I'll be there in five hours.

Don't go away." Shasa placed the receiver back on its cradle and stood for a moment wondering at himself. His change of plans would throw the entire company into consternation, for he had a tight schedule laid out for the weeks ahead, including the opening of his election campaign, but the woman had woven some sort of spell around him.

Like a malignant sprite her memory had danced at the edge of his mind all these months, and now the thought of being with her filled him with that quivering expectation he had not known since he was a lad embarking on his very first sexual explorations.

The Mosquito was fuelled and parked on the hardstand ready for the flight to H'am Mine. It took him ten minutes to calculate his new flight plan and file it with air traffic control and then he climbed up into the cockpit and, grinning like a schoolboy playing hookey, he cranked the Rolls Royce Merlin engines.

It was dusk when he landed, but a company car was waiting for him and he drove directly to the Carlton Hotel in the centre of Johannesburg. Kitty was in the lobby as he came in through the revolving doors. She was fresh-faced as a teenager, long-legged and narrow-hipped in blue jeans, and she came to him with childlike enthusiasm and wrapped both arms around his neck to kiss him. Strangers in the lobby must have imagined Shasa was a father greeting his ú schoolgirl daughter, and they smiled indulgently.

'They let us into your suite,' she told him as she led him towards the elevator, skipping beside him to keep pace and hugging his arm in a pantomime of adoration. 'Hank had got his camera and lights set up already." 'You aren't even giving me time to visit the heads,' Shasa protested, and she pulled a wry face.

'Let's get it over and done. Tfien we'll have more time for whatever you want to do afterwards." She gave him a devilish grin, and he wagged his head in reluctant acquiescence.

It was deliberate, of course. Kitty was too professional to give him time to pull himself together and concentrate his mind. It was part of her technique to get her subject off-balance, while on the other hand, she had been carefully preparing her own notes and questions during the five hours since they had spoken on the telephone.

She had rearranged the furniture in his suite, making one corner into an intimate nook and Hank had lit it and was standing by with his A rriflex. Shasa shook hands with him and exchanged a friendly greeting while Kitty poured him a massive whisky from the liquor cabinet.

'Take your jacket off,' she instructed as she handed it to him. 'I want you relaxed and casual. 'She led him to the two facing chairs and while he sipped his whisky she lulled him with an amusing account of the flight out which had been delayed by bad weather in London for eight hours. Then Hank gave her the signal and she said sweetly: 'Shasa Courtney, since the turn of this century your family has been a traditional ally of General Smuts. He was a personal friend of your grandfather, and your mother. He was a frequent guest in your house, and sponsored your own entry into the political arena. Now you have turned your back on the United Party which he led, and have deserted the fundamental principles of decency and fair play towards the coloured citizens of this country which were so much a part of General Smuts' philosophy. You have been called a deserter and a turncoat - and worse. Do you think that is a fair description, and if not, why not?" The attack was so swift and savage that for a moment it checked him, but he had known what to expect, and he grinned. He knew he was going to enjoy this.

'General Smuts was a great man, but not quite as saintly towards the natives as you suppose. In all the time he was in power, their political status remained unchanged, and when they stepped out of line, he did not hesitate before sending in the troops and giving them a whiff of grape. Have you ever heard of the Bondelswart rebellion and the Bulhoek massacre?" 'You are suggesting that Smuts also oppressed the native people of this country?" 'No more than a strict headmaster oppresses his children. In the main, he never seriously addressed himself to the coloured question.

He left that for a future generation to settle. We are that future generation." 'All right, so what are you going to do about the black people of this country who outnumber you nearly four to one and have no political rights whatsoever in the land of their birth?" 'Firstly, we will try to avoid the trap of simplistic thinking." 'Can you explain that?" Kitty frowned. She didn't want him to wriggle out of her grip by using vague terminology. 'Give us a concrete example of simplistic thinking." He nodded. 'You glibly use the terms black people and white people, dividing this population into two separate, if unequal, portions. That is dangerous. It might work in America. If all the American blacks were given white faces they would be simply Americans and think of themselves as that--' 'You are suggesting that this is not the case in Africa?" 'I am indeed,' Shasa agreed. 'If all the blacks in this country were given white faces, they would still think of themselves as Zulus and Xhosas and Vendas, and we would still be English and Afrikaners very little would have altered." Kitty didn't like that, it was not what she wanted to tell her audiences.

'So, of course, you are ruling out the idea of a democracy in this country. You will never accept the policy of one man one vote, but will always aspire to white domination--' Shasa cut in on her quickly. 'One man one vote would lead not to the black government you seem to foresee, but to a Zulu government, for the Zulus outnumber any other group. We would have a Zulu dictator, like good old King Chaka, and that would be a thrilling experience." 'So what is your solution?" she demanded, hiding her irritation behind that little-girl smile. 'Is it white baasskap, white domination and savage oppression backed by an all-white army and police force --9." 'I don't know the solution,' he cut her off. 'It's something we have to work towards, but I expect it will be a system in which every tribal group, whether it be black, brown or white, can maintain its identity and its territorial integrity." 'What a noble concept,' she agreed. 'But tell me when, in the history of mankind, any group who enjoyed supreme political power over all others ever gave up that power without an armed struggle.

Do you truly believe the white South Africans will be the first?" 'We'll have to make our own history,' Shasa matched her honeyed smile. 'But in the meantime theanaterial existence of the black people in this country is five or six times better than any other on the African continent. More is spent on black education, black hospitals and black housing, per capita, than in any other African country." 'How does the expenditure per capita on black education compare with expenditure on white education?" Kitty shot back at him. 'My information is that five times more is spent on the education of a white child, than on a black." 'We will strive to correct that imbalance, as we build up the wealth of our nation, as the black peasant becomes more productive and makes more of a contribution to the taxation that pays for that education. At the moment the white section of the population pays ninety-five percent of the taxes --' That wasn't the way the interview was meant to go and Kitty headed him off smoothly.

'And just how and when will the black people be consulted in these changes? Is it fair to say that nearly all blacks, and certainly all the educated and skilled blacks who are the natural leaders, totally reject the present political system which allows one sixth of the population to decide the fate of the rest?" They were still sparring when Hank lifted his head from the camera lens, and rolled his eyes.

'Out of film, Kitty, you told me twenty minutes tops. We have forty-five minutes in the can." 'Okay, Hank. My fault. I didn't realize we had such a garrulous bigot on the show." She smiled at Shasa acidly. 'You can wrap it up, Hank, and I'll see you in the morning. Nine o'clock at the studio." She turned back to Shasa and they didn't even look up as Hank left the suite. 'So what did we decide?" she asked Shasa.

'That the problem is more complex than anybody, perhaps even we in government, realize." 'Insoluble?" Kitty asked.

'Certainly - without delicacy and the utmost good will of everybody in the country, and our friends abroad." 'Russia?" she teased him, and he shuddered.

'Britain,' he said.

'What about America?" 'No. Britain understands. America is too wrapped up in her own racial problems. They aren't interested in the dissolution of the British Empire. However, we have always stood by Britain - and now Britain will stand by us." 'Your confidence in the gratitude of great nations is refreshing.

However, I think you will find that in the next decade there will be an enormous rip-tide of concern over human rights emanating from the United States. At least I hope so - and North American _.Broadcasting -Studios- -will -be--doing all-in its-power to- build it up into a tidal wave." 'Your job is to report reality, not to attempt to re-structure it,' Shasa told her. 'You are a reporter, not the God of judgement." 'If you believe that, you are naive,' she smiled. 'We make and destroy kings." Shasa stared at her, as though he were seeing her for the first time.

'My God, you are in the power game, just like everybody else." 'It's the only game in town, buddy boy." 'You are amoral." 'No more than you are." 'Oh yes you are. We are prepared to make our decisions and live with the consequences. You wreak your'destruction, then like a child with a broken toy, throw it aside and go on without a moment's remorse to some new cause that will sell more advertising time." He had made her angry. Her eyes slanted and narrowed into brigl arrowheads and the freckles on her nose and cheeks glowed ll specks of gold leaf. It roused him to see her come out from behm the screen, as hard and formidable as any adversary he had ev faced. He wanted to goad her further, to make her give way con pletely.

'You have made yourself the guru of southern Africa on US tek vision for one reason only. Not for concern over the fate of th black masses, but quite simply because you smell blood and violenc in the air. You have sensed that this is where the action will be the and you want to be the one who captures it on film--' 'You bastard,' she hissed at him. 'I want peace and justice." 'Peace and justice don't make good footage, Kitty my love. You or here to record the killing and the screaming - and if it doesn't happe] soon enough, well that is easily fixed - you'll give it a little shove." She was out of her chair now, facing him, and her lips were frost' with rage.

'For the last hour you have been spouting the most vicious racia poison, and now you accuse me of injustice. You call me an agen provocateur for the violence that is coming." He raised an eyebrow, giving her the taunting supercilious smih which had enraged his opponents across the floor of the House, an( it was too much for her to bear. She sprang at him, white-lipped ant shaking with fury, and she clawed for his single mocking eye wit both hands.

Shasa caught her wrists, and lifted her feet clear of the floor. She wa, shocked by his strength, but she lifted her knee sharply, driving fm his groin. He turned slightly and caught the knee on the hard muscle of his thigh.

'Where did a nice girl learn a trick like that?" he asked, and twisted her arms behind her, took both her wrists in his left hand and then bowed over her. She pressed ler lips together, and tried to turn her face away, but he found her mouth and while he kissed her, he opened her blouse and with his free hand took out her small breasts.

Her nipples were standing out like ripe mulberries, she was as aroused as he was, but kicking and spitting with fury.

He swung her round and threw her face down over the thick padded arm of the buttoned leather chair, pinning her with a hand between her shoulder blades, and her bottom in the air. That's how they had administered the cane at Shasa's school, and now while she screamed and kicked he jerked the leather belt out of the loops of her jeans, and pulled her trousers and panties down as far as her ankles and stepped in close behind her. Her buttocks were white and round and they maddened him.

Though she fought and struggled without let-up, at the same time she lifted her hips slightly and arched her back to make it easier for him, and only when it happened did she stop fighting and push back hard against him, sobbing with the effort of keeping pace with him.

It was over very quickly for both of them, and she rolled over and pulled him down on to the chair and whispered raggedly into his mouth, 'Well, that's one hell of a way to settle an argument, I'll give you that much." Shasa ordered dinner served in the suite, grilled crayfish with a sauce Mornay, followed by a Chateaubriand, baked baby potatoes and fresh young asparagus. He sent the waiter away and served it himself for Kitty was clad only in one of the hotel's long towelling dressing gowns.

As he drew the cork on the bottle of Chambertin, he told her, 'I've put four days aside for us. In the last few weeks I have been fortunate enough to get my hands on fifty thousand acres of land across the Sabi river from the Kruger National Park. I've been after it for fifteen years. It belonged to the widow of one of the old Randlords and I had to wait for the old biddy to cross the great divide before it came on the market. It's marvelous unspoilt bush country, teeming with wild game, perfect place for a lost weekend, we'll fly down after breakfast tomorrow - nobody will know where we are." She laughed at him. 'You are out of your little mind, lover. I'm a working girl. At eleven o'clock tomorrow I've got an interview with the leader of the opposition, De Villiers Graaff, and I'm certainly not breezing off into the boondocks with you to stare at lions and tigers." 'No tigers in Africa - you are the African expert, you should know that." He was angry again. 'It's a case of false pretences. You got me all the way up here for nothing,' he accused.

'Nothing?" she chuckled again. 'You call that nothing?" 'I expected four days of it." 'You overestimate the going price for an interview. All you get is the rest of the night, and then tomorrow it's back to work - for both of us." She was getting under his guard too often, Shasa realized. Last time he had proposed marriage to her, and the idea still had its appeal. She had moved him the way no woman had since he had first met Tara. It was partly her unattainability that made her so desirable. Shasa was accustomed to getting what he wanted, even if it was a hard and heartless little vixen with a childlike face and body.

He watched her eat the rare steak with the same sensual gusto as she made love. She was sitting cross-legged on the front edge of her chair and the hem of her dressing-gown had ridden up high on her thighs. She saw the direction of his gaze but made no effort to cover herself.

'Eat up,' she grinned at him. 'One thing at a time, lover." Shasa was chary of Tara's offer to assist his election campaign, and for the first two meetings left her at Weltevreden and drove out alone over Sir Lowry's Pass and the mountains.

South Boland, his new constituency, was an area of rich land, between the mountains and the sea, on the Cape's eastern littoral.

The voters were almost entirely of Afrikaner extraction, and their families had held the land for three hundred years. They were wealthy farmers of wheat and sheep, Calvinist and conservative, but not as rabidly republican and anti-English as their cousins of the interior, the Free Staters and the Transvalers.

They received Shasa's first speeches with caution, and applauded him politely at the end. His opponent, the United Party candidate, was a blood Smuts man, like Blaine, who had been the incumbent until 1948 when he lost it to the Nationalists. Yet he still had a base of support in the district amongst the men who had known Smuts and had gone 'up north' to fight the Axis.

After Shasa's second meeting, the local Nationalist organizers were looking worried and scared.

'We are losing ground,' one of them told Shasa. 'The wives are suspicious of a man who campaigns without his own wife. They want to have a look at her.?

'You see, Meener Courtney, you are a bit too good-looking. It's okay for the younger women who think you look like Errol Flynn, but the older women don't like it, and the men don't like the way the young women look at you. We have to show them you are a family man." Tll bring my wife,' Shasa promised, but his spirits sank. What kind of impression would Tara create in this dour God-fearing community where many of the women still wore the voortrekker bonnets and the men believed a woman's place was either in the bed or in the kitchen?

'Another thing,' the chief party organizer went on tactfully. 'We need one of the top men, one of the cabinet ministers to stand up on the platform with you. You see, Meneer Courtney, the people are having difficulty believing that you are a ware Nationalist. What with the English name and your family history." 'We need somebody to make me look respectable, you mean?" Shasa hid his smile, and they all looked relieved.

'Ja, man! That's it!" 'What if I could get Minister De La Rey to come out for the meeting on Friday - and my wife, of course?" 'Hell, man!" they enthused. 'Minister De La Rey is perfect. The people like the way he handled the trouble. He is a good strong man. If you get him to come to talk to them, we'll have no more problems." Tara accepted the invitation without comment, and by an exercise J--elfxest, raknt.-Shoe, a..r-ofr.ed.Cca giiag-lcr-advice On how to dress or to conduct herself, and was delighted and grateful when she came on to the platform in the town hall of the little town of Caledon, dressed in a sober dark blue dress with her thick auburn hair neatly gathered into a bun behind her head.

Though pretty and smiling she was the picture of the good wife.

Isabella sat up beside her with knee-length white socks and ribbons in her hair. A born actress, Isabella responded to the occasion by behaving like a candidate for holy orders. Shasa saw the organizers exchanging approving nods and relieved smiles.

Minister De La Rey, supported by his own blonde wife and large family, introduced Shasa with a fiery speech in which he made it very clear that the Nationalist government was not going to allow itself to be dictated to by foreign governments or communist agitators, especially not if these agitators were black as well as communist.

Manfred had a finely tuned style of oratory, and he thrust out his jaw and flashed those topaz-coloured eyes, he wagged his finger at them, and stood with arms defiantly akimbo when they stood up to applaud him at the end.

Shasa's style was different, relaxed and friendly, and when he tried his first joke, they responded with genuine amusement. He followed it with assurances that the government would increase the already generous subsidy for farm products, especially wool and wheat, and that they would at the same time foster local industry and explore new overseas markets for the country's raw materials, particularly wool and wheat. He ended by telling them that many English speakers were coming to realize that the salvation of the country lay in strong uncompromising government and predicted a substantial increase in the Nationalist majority.

This time there was no reservation in the tumultuous applause that followed his speech, and the votes of confidence in the government, the National Party and the Nationalist candidate for South Boland were all carried unanimously. The entire district, including the United Party supporters, turned up for the free barbecue on the local rugby grounds, to which Shasa invited them. Two whole oxen were roasted on the spit and were washed down with lakes of Castle beer and rivers of mampoer, the local peach brandy.

Tara sat with the women, looking meek and demure and speakiJ little, allowing the older women to develop pleasantly matern feelings towards her, while Shasa circulated amongst their husband talking knowledgeably about such momentous subjects as scale ( wheat and scab on sheep. The whole atmosphere was cosy and reassu ing, and for the first time Shasa was able to appreciate the depth planning by the party organizers, their dedication and commitmel to the Nationalist cause, which resulted in this degree of mobilizatio of all its resources. The United Party could never match it, for tk English speakers were complacent and lethargic when it came t politics. It was the old English fault of wanting never to appear t try too hard. Politics was a kind of sport and every gentleman kne that sport should be played only by amateurs.

'No wonder we lost control,' Shasa thought. 'These chaps or professionals, and we just couldn't match them' - and then he checke himself. These were his organizers now, no longer the enemy. H had become a part of this slick, highly tuned political machine, am the knowledge was a little daunting.

At last, with Tara at his side, Shasa made a round of goodnight: with a party organizer steering him tactfully to each of the enos important local dignitaries, making sure that none of these wa slighted, and everybody agreed that the family made a charmint group.

They stayed overnight with the most prosperous of the local farmers, and the following morning, which was Sunday, attended the Dutch Reformed Church in the village. Shasa had not been in a church since Isabella was christened. He was not looking forward to it. This was another grand show, for Manfred De La Rey had prevailed upon his uncle, the Reverend Tromp Bierman, moderator of the church, to deliver the sermon. Uncle Tromp's sermons were famous throughout the Cape, nd families thought nothing of travelling a hundred miles to listen to them.

'I never thought I would ever speak for a cursed rooinek,' he told Manfred. 'It is either advancing senility, or a sign of my great love for you, that I do so now." Then he climbed into the pulpit, and with his great silver beard flashing like the surf of a stormy sea, he lashed the congregation with such force and fury that they quivered and squirmed with delicious terror for their souls.

At the end of the sermon, Uncle Tromp reduced the volume to remind them that there was an election coming up, and that a vote for the United Party was a vote for Satan himself. No matter how some of them felt about Englishmen, they weren't voting for a man here, they were voting for the party upon which the Almighty had bestowed his blessing and into whose hands he had. delivered the destiny of the Volk. He stopped just short of closing the gates of Heaven in the face of any of them who did not put their cross opposite the name of Courthey, but when he glared at them threateningly, there were very few who felt inclined to take a chance on his continued forbearance.

'Well, my dear, I can't thank you enough for your help,' Shasa told Tara, as they drove home over the high mountain passes of the Hottentots Holland. 'From here on it looks like a cakewalk." 'It was interesting to watch our political system in action,' Tara murmured. 'All the other jockeys got down off their mounts and shooed you in." Polling day in South Boland was merely an endorsement of certain victory, and when the votes were counted it appeared that Shasa had wooed across at least five hundred erstwhile United Party voters, and, much to the delight of the Nationalist hierarchy, increased the majority most handsomely. As the results came in from around the rest of the country, it became apparent that the trend was universal.

For the first time ever, substantial numbers of English speakers were deserting Smuts' party. The Nationalists took 103 seats to the United Party's 53. The promise of strong uncompromising government was bearing good fruits.

At Rhodes Hill Centaine gave an elaborate dinner dance for 150 important guests to celebrate Shasa's appointment to the new cabinet.

As they swirled together around the dance floor to the strains of 'The Blue Danube', Centaine told Shasa, 'Once again we have done the right thing at the right time, chgri. It can still come true - all of it? And she sang softly the praise song that the old Bushman had composed at Shasa's birth: 'His arrows will fly to the stars And when men speak his name It will be heard as far And wherever he goes he will find good water?

The clicking sounds of the Bushman language, like snapping twigs and footsteps in mud, raised nostalgic memories from the distant time when they had been together in the' Kalahari.

Shasa enjoyed the Houses of Parliament. They were like an exclusive men's club. He liked the grandeur of white columns and lofty halls, the exotic tiles on the floors, the panelling and the green leathercovered benches. He often paused in the labyrinth of corridors to admire the paintings and the sculpted busts of famous men, Merriman and Louis Botha, Cecil Rhodes and Leander Starr Jameson.

heroes and rogues, statesmen and adventurers. They had made this country's history - and then he reminded himself: 'History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead,' and he imagined his own portrait hanging there with the others one day.

'I'll have it commissioned at once,' he thought. 'While I am still in my prime. For the time being I'll hang i at Weltevreden, but I'll put a clause in my will." As a minister, he now had his own office in the House, the sam suite of rooms that had been used by Cecil Rhodes when he wa prime minister of the old Cape parliament before the House hoc been enlarged and extended. Shasa redecorated and furnished it a his own expense. Thesens, the timber firm from Knysna, installec the panelling. It was indigenous wild olive, marvellously grained ant with a satiny lustre. He hung four of his finest Pierneef landscape on the panelling, with a Van Wouw bronze of a Bushman huntel standing on the table beneath them. Although he was determined to keep the artwork authentically African, the carpet was the choices' green Wilton and his desk Louis XIV.

It felt strange to enter the chamber for the first time to take hi place on the government front bench, a mirror image of his usua view. He ignored the hostile glances of his erstwhile colleagues smiling only at Blaine's expressionless wink and while the Speaker o: the House read the prayer, he measured the men to whom he hat transferred his allegiance.

His reflections were interrupted as the Speaker of the House endec the prayer, and across the floor De Villiers Graaff, the tai handsome leader of the opposition, rose to propose the traditiona vote of no confidence, while the government members, smug ant cocksure, still revelling in their heady election triumph, mocked bin noisily with cries of 'Skande! Scandal!" and 'Siestog, man! Shame or you, man!" Two days later Shasa rose to deliver his first speech from the government front benches and pandemonium seized the House. Hi,.

former comrades howled their contempt, and waved their order] papers at him, stamping their feet and whistling with outrage, whil his newly adopted party roared encouragement and support.

Tall and elegant, smiling with scorn, switching easily from Englis!

to Afrikaans, Shasa gradually quietened the benches opposite bin with his low key but riveting oratorical style, and once he had thei: attention he made them squirm uneasily as he dissected their part: with an insider's surgical skill, then held up their weaknesses ant blemishes for them to contemplate.

When he sat down he left them severely discomforted, and the prime minister leaned forward in his seat to nod at him, an unprecedented public accolade, while most of the other ministers, even those northerners most hostile to his appointment, passed him notes of congratulation. Manfred De La Rey's note invited him to join a party of senior ministers for lunch in the member's dining-room. It was an auspicious beginning.

Blaine Malcomess and Centaine came out to Weltevreden for the weekend. As usual the family spent all of Saturday afternoon at the polo field. Blaine had recently resigned as captain of the South African team.

'It's obscene for a man over sixty to still be playing,' he had explained his decision to Shasa.

'You are better than most of us youngsters of forty, Blaine, and you know it." 'Wouldn't it be pleasant to keep the captaincy in the family?" Blaine suggested.

'I've only got one eye." 'Oh tush, man. You hit the ball as sweetly as you ever did. It's simply a matter of practice and more practice." 'I don't have the time for that,' Shasa protested.

There is time for everything in life that you really want." So Blaine forced him to practise, but deep down he knew that Shasa had lost interest in ball games and would never captain the national team. Oh, certainly he still rode like a centaur, his arm was strong and true and he had the courage of a lion when he was roused, but these days it needed stronger medicine to get'his blood racing.

'It's a strange paradox that a man gifted with too many talents can fritter them all away without developing a single one to its full." At that thought Blaine looked from Shasa to his sons.

As always Sean and Garrick had joined in the practice uninvited, and though they could not come close to matching the furious pace and skill of their elders, they were acting as pick-up men and passers for them.

Sean rode as his father had at that age and it gave Blaine a nostalgic pang to watch.him. The horse was a part of him, the. accord between rider and mount was total, his stick work was natural and unforced, but he lost interest quickly and made sloppy little errors, was more interested in teasing his brother and showing off and making eyes at the young girls in the stand than in perfecting his style.

Garrick was the opposite of his elder brother. He rode with enough sunlight shining between the saddle-leather and his burn to dazzle a blind man. However, his concentration was absolute, and he scowled murderously at the ball through his spectacles, using his stick with all the grace of a labourer digging a trench, but it was surprisin how often he got a solid strike and how the bamboo root ball flew when he did. Then Blaine was amazed by the sudden change in his physique. From the skinny little runt he had been not long before, he was almost grotesquely overdeveloped in shoulder and chest and upper arms for a child of his age. Yet when they went in for tea and dismounted, his still skinny legs gave him an unfortunate anthropoid appearance. When he removed his riding cap, his hair stuck up in unruly dark spikes, and while Sean sauntered across to make the girls giggle and blush, Garrick stayed close to his father. Again Blaine was surprised at how often Shasa spoke directly to the child, even demonstrating a fine point of grip by rearranging his fingers on the handle of the stick, and when he perfected it, Shasa punched his arm lightly and told him: That's it, champ. We'll get you into a green and gold jersey one day." Garrick's glow of gratification was touching to watch, and Blaine exchanged a glance with Centaine. Not long before, they had discussed Shasa's total lack of interest in the child, and the detrimental effect that it might have on him. Their fears for Garrick seemed to have been unfounded, Blaine conceded, it was the other two they should have been worrying about.

Michael was not riding today. He had hurt his wrist, a mysterious injury which although excruciatingly painful, showed no bruising nor swelling. It was astonishing how often that wrist, or his ankle or his knee, plagued him whenever there was the prospect of hard physical exercise in the offing. Blaine frowned as he glanced at him now, sitting beside Tara at the tea table under the oaks, both their heads bowed over a book of poetry. Neither of them had looked up once during all the shouting and glloping, and ribald exchanges on the field. Blaine was a firm believer in the old adage that a young man should have a disciplined mind in a healthy body, and should be able to join robustly in the rough and tumble of life. He had spoken to Tara about him, but though she had promised to encourage Michael's participation in sport and games, Blaine had not noticed any evidence that she had done so.

There was a chorus of muted shrieks and giggles behind him, and Blaine glanced over his shoulder. Wherever Sean was these days there seemed always to be a flock of females. He attracted them the way a tree full of fruit brings a swarm of noisy mousebirds to it. Blaine had no idea who all these girls belonged to, some of them were the daughters of the estate managers and of Shasa's German wine-maker, the pretty blond child was the American consul's daughter and the two little dark ones were the French ambassador's, but the others were unknown - probably the offspring of the half dozen politicians and other members of the diplomatic corps who made up the usual guest-list for Saturday high tea at Weltevreden.

'Shouldn't really interfere,' Blaine grumbled to himself. 'But I think I'll have a word with Shasa. No good speaking to Tara. She's too soft by a long chalk." Blaine glanced around and saw that Shasa had left the group at the tea table under the oaks and had moved down the pony lines. He was squatting with one of the grooms to examine the fore hock of his favourite pony, a powerful stallion he had named Kenyatta, because he was black and dangerous.

'Good opportunity,' Blaine grunted and went to join Shasa. They discussed taping the pony's leg, his only weak point, and then stood up.

'How's Sean making out at Bishops?" Blaine asked casually, and Shasa looked surprised.

'Tara been talking to you?" he asked. Sean had gone up to the senior school at the beginning of the year, after ending as head boy and captain of sport at his preparatory school. 'Having trouble?" Blaine asked.

'Going through a phase,' Shasa shrugged. 'He'll be all right. He has too much talent not to make good in the end." 'What happened?" 'Nothing to worry about. He's become a bit of a rebel, and his grades have gone to hell. I gave him the sweet end of the riding-crop.

Only language he speaks fluently. He'll be all right, Blaine, don't worry." 'For some people it's all too easy,' Blaine remarked. 'They get into the habit of free-wheeling through life." He saw Shasa bridle slightly, and realized he was taking the remark personally. Good, he thought, let him - and he went on deliberately, 'You should know, Shasa.

You have the same weakness." 'I suppose you do have the right to speak to me like that. The only man in the world who does,' Shasa mused. 'But don't expect me to enjoy it, Blaine." 'I expect young Sean cannot accept criticism either,' Blaine said.

'He's the one I wanted to talk about, not you. How did we end up discussing you? However, since we are, let an old dog give a few words of caution to both of you. Firstly, don't dismiss Sean's behaviour too lightly, you may just find yourself with a serious problem one day, if you don't check it now. Some people have to have constant stimulation or else they get bored. I think Sean might be one of those. They become addicted to excitement and danger. Watch him, SMsa." 'Thank you, Blaine,' Shasa nodded, but he was not grateful.

'As for you, Shasa. You have been playing life like a game." 'That's all it is, surely,' Shasa agreed.

'If you truly believe that, then you have no right to take on the responsibility of cabinet rank,' Blaine said softly. 'No, Shasa. You have made yourself responsible for the welfare of sixteen million souls. It's no longer a game, but a sacred trust." They had stopped walking and turned to face each other.

'Think about that, Shasa,' Blaine said. 'I believe that there are dark and difficult days ahead, and you won't be playing for an increase in company dividends - you will be playing for the survival of a natioh, and if you fail, it will mean the end of the world you know.

You will not suffer alone-' Blaine turned to Isabella as she ran to him.

'Grandpapa! Grandpapa!" she cried. 'I want to show you the new pony daddy gave me,' and they both looked down at the beautiful child.

'No, Shasa, not you alone,' Blaine repeated, and took the child's hand.

'All right, Bella,' he said. 'Let's go down to the stables." Shasa had found that Blaine's words were like arrow-grass seeds.

They scratched when they first attached themselves to your clothing, and then gradually worked themselves deeper until they penetrated the skin to cause real pain. Those words were still with him when he went into the cabinet room on Monday morning and took his place at the foot of the table, as befitted the most junior member of the gathering.

Before Blaine had spoken to him, Shasa had considered these meetings no more important than, say, a full board meeting of Courtney Mining and Finance. Naturally, he prepared himself as thoroughly, not only were his own notes exhaustive and cogent, but he had assembled full portfolios on every other member of the cabinet.

Blaine had helped him with this work, and the results had been fed into the company computer and were kept up to the minute. After a lifetime in politics, Blaine was a skilled analyst and he had been able to trace in the tenuous and concealed lines of loyalty and commitment that bound this group of important men together.

At the broadest level every single one of them, apart from Shasa, was a member of the Broederbond- the Brotherhood - that invidious secret society of eminent Afrikaners whose single object was to advance the interest of the Afrikaner above all others at every possible turn and at every level from that of national politics through business and the economy, on down to the levels of education and the civil service. No outsider could ever hope to fathom its ramifications, for it was protected by a curtain of silence which no Afrikaner dared to break. It united them all, no matter whether they were members of the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church or of the even more extreme Dapper church, the Hervormde church which by Article No. 3 of its charter had ordained that heaven was reserved exclusively for members of the white race. The Broederbond united even the southerners, the Cape Nationalists, and those hard men from the north.

As Shasa rearranged his thick sheaf of notes, which he would not need since they were already committed to memory, he glanced down the table and saw how the two opposing forces in the cabinet had arranged themselves like the grouping of an army. Shasa was quite obviously arrayed with the southerners under Dr Theophilus D6nges, one of the most senior men, who had been a member of the cabinet since Dr Malan brought the party to power in 1948. He was leader of the party in the Cape, and Manfred De La Rey was one of his men. However, they were the smaller and least influential of the two groups. The northerners comprised both the Transvalers and the Orange Free Staters, and amongst them were the most formidable politicians in the land.

Strangely, in this assembly of impressive men. Shasa's attention went to a man who had been a member of the Senate as long as Shasa had himself been a member of the lower house. Before his appointment to the Senate in 1948, Verwoerd had been the editor of Die Transvalet, and before that he had been a Professor at Stellenbosch University. Shasa knew that he had lectured to Manfred De La Rey when he was a student, and had exerted enormous influence upon him. However, they were in different camps now, Verwoerd was of the north. Since 1950 he had been Minister of Bantu Affairs, with godlike powers over the black population and had made his name synonymous with the ideal of racial segregation at all levels of society.

For a man with such a monumental reputation for racial intolerance, the architect of the great edifice of apartheid which was being erected with intricate interlocking laws that dictated every aspect of the lives of the country's millions of black people, his appearance and manner were a pleasant surprise. His smile was kindly, almost benign, and he was quiet spoken but persuasive as he rose to address the cabinet and explain with the aid of a specially prepared map of South Africa his plans for the rearrangement of black population densities.

Tall and slightly round-shouldered, with his curly hair beginning to turn to silver, there could be little doubt of his utmost sincerity and belief in the absolute rightness of his conclusions. Shasa found himself being carried along on the plausible flood of his logic. Although his voice was pitched a little too high, and the tense note of his monologue grated on the ear, he carried them all on the strength, not only of his total conviction, but also of his personality. Even his opponents were filled with awe at his debating ability.

Only one small detail worried Shasa, Verwoerd's blue eyes were slitted, as though he were always looking into the sun, and though they were surrounded by a complex web of laughter lines, they were cold eyes, the eyes of a machine-gunner staring over the sights of his weapon.

Blaine's words came back to Shasa as he sat at the polished stinkwood table. 'No, Shasa, it's not a game. You have made yourself responsible for the welfare of sixteen million souls. It's no longer a game, but a sacred trust." But he remained expressionless as Verwoerd ended his presentation. 'Not one of us here today doubts that South Africa is a white man's country. My proposals will see to it that within the reserves the natives will have some measure of autonomy. However, as to the country as a whole, and the European areas in particular, we the white people, are and shall remain the masters." There was a general murmur of agreement and approbation, and two of the others asked for clarification on minor points. There was no call to vote or to make any joint decision, for Verwoerd's lecture had been in the form of a report back from his department.

'I think that Doctor Henk has covered this subject fully - unless anybody else has a question, we can go on to the next matter on the agenda." The prime minister looked down the table at Shasa. The agenda read: iTEM TWO; Projection by the Han. Minister for Mines and Industry on the capital requirements of the private industrial sector over the next ten years and the proposal of means to satisfy such requirements.

This morning would be the first time Shasa would address the full cabinet, and he hoped he would muster only a small portion of Verwoerd's aplomb and persuasion.

His nervousness faded as soon as he rose to speak, for he had prepared in depth and detail. He began with an assessment of the foreign capital needs of the economy over the next decade, 'to carry us through to the end of the 1960s,' and then set out to estimate the amounts available to them from their traditional markets within the British Commonwealth.

'As you see, this leaves us with a considerable shortfall, particularly in mining, the new oil from coal industry and the armaments sector.

This is how I propose that shortfall should be met: in the first instance we have to look to the United States of America. That country is a potential source of capital that has barely been tapped --' He held their attention completely as he described his department's plans to advertise the country as a prosperous market amongst the American business leaders, and to entice as many of them as he could to visit South Africa at the expense of his department. He also intended establishing associations with sympathetic and influential politicians and businessmen in the United States and the United Kingdom to promote the country's image, and to this end he had already contacted Lord Littleton, head of Littleton merchant banks, who had agreed to act as chairman of the British South Africa Club.

A similar association, the American South Africa Club, would be formed in the United States.

Shasa was encouraged by the obviously favourable reception of his presentation to continue with a matter he had not intended raising.

'We have just heard from Dr Verwoerd the proposal to build up self-governing black states within the country. I don't wish to tackle the political aspects of this scheme, but as a businessman I feel that I am competent to bring to your attention the final cost, in financial rather than human terms, of putting this into practice." Shasa went on swiftly to outline the massive obstacles in logistics and lost productivity that would result.

'We will have to duplicate a number of times the basic structures of the state in various parts of the country, and we must expect the bill for this to run into many billions of pounds. That money could more profitably be invested in wealth-producing undertakings --' Across the table he saw Verwoerd's great charm ice over with a crust of hostility. Shasa knew he was autocratic and contemptuous of criticism, and he sensed that he was taking a risk by antagonizing a man who might one day wield ultimate power, but he went on doggedly.

'The proposal has another flaw. By decentralizing industry we will make it less effective and competitive. In a modern age when all countries are economically in competition with each other, we will be placing a handicap on ourselves." When he sat down he saw that though he might have convinced nobody, he had given them much to think about seriously and soberly, and when the meeting ended, one or two of the other ministers, most of them southerners, stayed to exchange a few words with him. Shasa sensed that he had enhanced his reputation and consolidated his place in the cabinet with that afternoon's work, and he drove back to Weltevreden feeling well pleased with himself.

He dropped his briefcase on the desk in his study and, hearin: voices out on the terrace, went out into the late sunshine. The gues that Tara was entertaining was the headmaster of Bishops. Usuall' this worthy would summon the parents of recalcitrant pupils t appear before him as summarily as he did their offspring. This dk not apply to the Courtney family. Centaine Courtney-Malcomess hat been a governor of the school for almost thirty years, the only womal on the board. Her son had been head boy before the war and wa,.

now on the board with his mother, and both of them were majo] contributors to the College's coffers - amongst their gifts were th organ, the plate-glass windows in the new chapel, and the new kit.

chens to the main dining-hall. The headmaster had come to call upor Shasa, rather than the other way around. However, Tara was looking uneasy and stood up to greet Shasa with relief.

'Hello, Headmaster." Shasa shook hands, but was not encouraged by the head's lugubrious expression.

'Headmaster wants to talk to you about Sean,' Tara explained." I think a man-to-man chat will be appropriate, so I will leave the two of you alone while I go and get a fresh pot of tea." She slipped away, and Shasa asked genially, 'Sun's over the yard arm. May I offer you a whisky, Headmaster?" 'No thank you, Mr Courtney." That he had not used Shasa's Christian name was ominous, and Shasa adjusted his own expression to the correct degree of solemnity and took the chair beside him.

'Sean, hey? So what has that little hooligan been up to now?" Tara opened the door to the dining-room quietly and crossed the floor to stand behind the drapes. She waited until the voices on the terrace were so intense and serious that she could be certain that Shasa would be there for the next hour at the least. She turned quickly and left the dining-room, closing the door behind her, and went swiftly down the wide marble-tiled passageway, past the library and the gun room." The door to Shasa's study was unlocked, the only doors ever locked at Weltevreden were those to the wine cellar.

Shasa's briefcase stood in the middle of his desk. She opened it and saw the blue folder embossed with the coat of arms of the state which contained the typed minutes of that day's cabinet meeting.

She knew that numbered copies were made and distributed to each minister at the end of the weekly meetings, and she had expected to find it in his case.

She lifted it out, careful not to disarrange anything else in the crocodile-skin attach case, and carried it to the table beside the french doors. The light was better here, and in addit-ion, by glancing around the drapes, she could see down the terrace to where Shasa and the headmaster were still deep in conversation under the trellis of vines.

Quickly she arranged the blue sheets on the table, and then focused the tiny camera that she took from the pocket of her skirt. It was the size of a cigarette-lighter. She was still unaccustomed to the mechanism, and her hands were shaking with nervousness. It was the first time she had done this.

Molly had given her the camera at their last meeting, and explained that their friends were so pleased by the quality of the information she was providing that they wanted to make her job easier for her.

Her fingers felt like pork sausages as she manipulated the tiny knobs and snapped each of the sheets twice, to cover herself against possible mistakes of exposure or focus. Then she slipped the camera back into her pocket, before stacking the sheets in their folder and replacing it carefully in Shasa's briefcase in exactly the same way she had found it.

She was so nervous that her bladder felt as though it might burst and she had to run down the passage to the downstairs toilet. She only just reached it in time. Five minutes later she carried the silver Queen Anne teapot out on to the terrace. Usually this would have annoyed Shasa who did not like her to usurp the servants' work, especially in front of guests. However, he was too engrossed in his discussion with the headmaster to notice.

'I find it difficult to believe that it is anything more than robust boyish spirits, Headmaster." He was frowning as he sat forward in his chair, hands on his knees, to confront the schoolmaster.

'I have tried to look upon it that way." The headmaster shook his head regretfully. 'In view of the special relationship that your family has to the school, I have been as lenient as I can be. However,' he paused meaningfully, 'we are not dealing simply with an isolated instance. Not simply one or two boyish pranks, but a state of mind, an entire behaviour pattern which is most alarming." The headmaster broke off to accept the cup of tea that Tara passed across the table to him. 'Forgive me, Mrs Courtney, this is as painful to me as it must be to you." Tara said quietly, 'I can believe that. I know you look upon each of your boys as one of your own sons." And she glanced at Shasa.

'My husband has been reluctant to come to terms with the problem." She hid her smug satisfaction behind a sorrowful but brave little smile. Sean had always been Shasa's child, strong-willed and thoughtless of others. She had never understood nor accepted that cruel streak in him. She recalled his selfishness and lack of gratitude even before he could talk. As an infant when he had gorged himself at her breast, he would let her know he was satiated by biting her nipple with sufficient force to bruise her painfully. She had loved him, of course, but had found it hard to like him. As soon as he had learned to walk, he headed straight for his father, staggering after him like a puppy, and his first word had been 'Dada'. That hurt her, after she had carried him big and heavy in her belly and given him birth and suck, 'Dada'. Well, he was Shasa's child now and she sat back and watched him grapple with the problem, feeling a spiteful pleasure at his discomfort.

'He's a natural sportsman,' Shasa was saying, 'and a born leader.

He has a good mind - I am convinced that he will pull himself together. I gave him a good thrashing after his school report at the end of last term, and I'll give him another this evening to get him in the right frame of mind." 'With some boy. s the cane has-no effect, or rather it has the opposite to the desired effect. Your Sean looks upon corporal punishment the way a soldier looks on his battle wounds, as a mark of his courage and fortitude." 'I have always been against my husband beating the children,' Tara said, and Shasa flashed her a warning look, but the headmaster went on.

'I have also tried the cane on Sean, Mrs Courtney. He seems positively to welcome that punishment as though it affords him some special distinction." 'But he is a good athlete,' Shasa repeated rather lamely.

'I see you choose, as I would, the term "athlete" rather than "sportsman",' the headmaster nodded. 'Sean is precocious and mature for his age. He is stronger than the other boys in his group and has no qualms in using his strength to win, not always in accordance with the rules of the game." The headmaster looked at Shasa pointedly. 'He does have a good brain, but his school marks indicate that he is not prepared to use it in the classroom. Instead he applies his mind to less commendable enterprises." The headmaster paused, sensing that this was not the moment to give a doting father concrete examples. He went on: 'He is also, as you have noted, a born leader. Unfortunately, he gathers about him the least desirable elements in the school, which he has formed into a gang with which he terrorizes the other boys, even those senior to him are afraid of him." 'I find this difficult to accept." Shasa was grim-faced.

'To be blunt, Mr Courtney: Sean seems to have a vindictive and vicious streak in him. I am, of course, looking for an improvement in him. However, if that is not soon forthcoming, I will have to make a serious decision over Sean's future at Bishops." 'I had set my heart on him being head boy, as I was,' Shasa admitted, and the headmaster shook his head.

'Far from becoming head boy, Mr Courtney, unless Sean has pulled up his socks by the end of the year, I am, with the greatest reluctance, going to have to ask you to remove him from Bishops altogether." 'My God!" Shasa breathed. 'You don't really mean that?" 'I'm sorry to say that I do." It was quite remarkable that Clare East had ever been employed by the headmaster of Bishops. The explanation was that the appointment was a temporary one, a mere six-month contract, to fill in after the unexpected resignation of the previous art master on the grounds of ill-health. The salary offered was such that it had attracted only two other applications, both patently unsuitable.

Clare had come to the interview with the headmaster dressed in clothes she had not worn for six years, not since she was twenty-one years of age. She had exhumed them from a forgotten cabin trunk for the occasion, a high-buttoned dress in drab green that conformed closely to the head's own ideas of suitable apparel for a schoolmistress. Her long black hair she had plaited and twisted up severely behind her head, and the portfolio of her painting she had chosen to show him, was composed of landscapes and seascapes and still lifes, subjects which had interested her at about the same time as she had bought the chaste woollen dress. At Bishops, art was not one of the main-stream subjects, but merely a catch-all for the pupils who showed little aptitude for the sciences.

Once Clare had charge of the art school, which was situated far enough from the main buildings as to offer her a certain freedom of behaviour, she reverted to her usual style of dress: wide loose skirts in vivid colours and flamboyant patterns, worn with Mexican-style blouses like those that Jane Russell had worn in The Outlaw. She had seen the movie five times while she was attending the London School of Arts, and modelled herself on Jane Russell, though of course Clare knew her own breasts were better than Russell's, just as big but higher and more pointed.

Her long hair she wore in a different style every day, and when she was teaching she always kicked off her sandals and strode around the art room barefooted, smoking thin black Portuguese cigarettes which one of her lovers brought her in packs of a thousand.

Sean had absolutely no interest in art. He had filtered down to this class by a process of natural rejection. Physics and chemistry demanded too much effort, and geography, the next lowest subject, was an even greater bore than paint-brushes.

Sean fell in love with Clare East the very moment that she walked into the art room. The first time she had paused at his easel to inspect the mess of colour he had smeared on his sheet of art paper, he realized that she was an inch shorter than he was, and when she reached up to correct one of his shaky outlines, he saw that she had not shaved her armpit. That bush of dark coarse hair glistening with sweat, induced the hardest and most painful erection he had ever experienced.

He tried to impress her with manly strutting behaviour, and when that failed, he used an oath in her presence that he usually reserved for one of his polo ponies. Clare East sent him *o the head with a note and the head gave him four strokes of his heavy Malacca cane, accompanying the beating with a few words of counsel.

'You will have to learn, young man, WHACK, that I will not allow you to compound atrocious behaviour, WHACK, with foul language, WHACK, especially in the presence of a lady, WHACK." 'Thank you very much, Headmaster." It was traditional to express gratitude for these ministrations, and to refrain from rubbing the injured area in the great man's presence. When Sean returned to the art room, his ardour, far from being cooled by the Malacca cane, was rather inflamed to unbearable proportions, but he realized he had to change tactics.

He discussed it with his henchman, Snotty Arbuthnot, and was only mildly discouraged by Snotty's advice. 'Forget it, man. Every fellow in school is whacking away thinking about Marsh Mallows --' the nickname was a reference to Clare East's bosom, 'but Tug saw her at the movies with some chap at least thirty, with a mustache and his own car. They were smooching away like mad dogs in the back row. Why don't you go and see Poodle instead?" Poodle was a sixteen-year-old from Rustenberg Girls' School, just across the railway line from Bishops. She was a young lady with a mission in life, to see as many boys across the borders of manhood as she could fit into her busy afternoons. Though Sean had never spoken to her, she had been a spectator at every one of his recent cricket matches and she had sent a message to him through a mutual friend suggesting a meeting in the pine forest on Rondebosch Common.

'She looks like a poodle,' Sean dismissed the suggestion scornfully, and resigned himself to distant adoration of Clare East, until one day he was searching her desk for those black Portuguese cigarettes for which he had developed a taste. Love did not mean he could not steal from her. In a locked drawer which he picked with a paper clip, he came across a stiff cardboard folder tied with green ribbons. The folder contained over twenty pencil drawings of nude male models, all of them signed and dated by Clare East, and after the first jealous shock, Sean realized that each drawing was of a different subject with only one common feature. While the models' faces had been roughed in, their genitals had been depicted in minute and loving detail, and all of them were fully tumescent.

What Sean had discovered was Clare's collection of scalps, or an equivalent thereof. Clare East had strong tastes, but even more than garlic and red wine she needed men in her diet. This was so evident in the secret folder that all Sean's deflated hopes were once more revived, and that night he commissioned Michael, for the sum of five shillings, to paint a portrait of Clare East in Sean's art book.

Michael was in the junior art class and was able to make his studies for the portrait without the model's knowledge, and the completed work surpassed even Sean's expectations. He submitted the portrait and at the end of the following session Clare dismissed the class with a rider, ."Oh Sean, will you please remain behind?" When the art room was cleared, she opened his art book at the painting of herself.

'Did you do this, Sean?" she asked. 'It really is very good." The question was innocent enough, but the difference between the portrait and Sean's own murky compositions was so evident that even he saw the danger of claiming authorship.

'I was going to tell you I did it,' he admitted openly, 'but I can't lie to you, Miss East. I paid my brother to do it for me." 'Why, SeanT 'I suppose because I like you so much,' he mumbled, and to her surprise she saw that he was actually blushing. Clare was touched.

Up to that time she had actively disliked this boy. He was brash and cocky and a disruptive influence in her class. She was certain that it was he who was stealing her cigarettes.

This unsuspected sensitivity surprised her, and suddenly she realized that his bumptious behaviour had been to attract her attention. She relented towards him, and over the following days and weeks she showed Sean that she had forgiven him, by giving him small largesse - from a special smile to an extra few minutes of her time tidying up his creative efforts.

In return Sean began leaving gifts in her desk, thereby confirming her suspicion that he had been into it before. However, the theft of cigarettes stopped and she accepted the offerings of fruit and flowers without comment, just a smile and a nod as she passed his easel.

Then one Friday afternoon she opened her drawer and there lay a blue enamel box with 'Garrards' in gold lettering on the lid. She opened it with her back turned to the class, and she started uncontrollably and almost dropped the box as she realized that it contained a brooch of white gold. The centrepiece was a large star sapphire, and even Clare, who was no judge of gems, realized that it was an exquisite stone. It was surrounded by small diamonds set in a star pattern. Clare experienced a giddy rush of avarice. The brooch must certainly be worth many hundreds of pounds, more money than she had ever had in her hand at one time, more than a year's salary at her present parsimonious rate of pay.

Sean had taken the piece from his mother's dressing-table and hidden it in the thatch of the saddle room behind the stables until the furore had died down. All the house servants had been interrogated, first by Shasa, who was outraged by this breach of faith. Nothing, apart from liquor, had ever been stolen by his employees before. When his own investigations ran into a dead end, Shasa called in the police.

Fortunately for Sean, it transpired that one of the junior maids had previously served a six-month sentence for theft from an employer. She was obviously guilty and the Wynberg magistrate gave her eighteen months, her offence compounded by her obstinate refusal to return the stolen brooch. Since she was now over twenty-one years, the maid was sent to the Pollsmoor Women's Prison.

Sean had waited another ten days for the incident to be forgotten before presenting the gift to the object of his passion. Clare East was mightily tempted. She realized that the brooch must have been stolen, but on the other hand she was, as usual for her, in serious financial difficulty. This was the only reason she had taken on her present employment. She looked back with nostalgic regret on the idle days of eating and drinking and painting and making love which had led her into her present embarrassed circumstances. The brooch would solve it all'. She had no scruples of conscience, but a terror of being convicted of theft. She knew that her free and creative soul would wither behind the bars of a women's prison.

Surreptitiously she returned he brooch to her desk drawer and for the rest of that art period she was distracted and withdrawn. She chain-smoked cigarettes and kept well clear of the rear of the art room, where Sean made a fine picture of innocence as he applied himself with unusual industry to his easel. She did not have to tell him to remain behind when the bell rang at the end of the period.

He came to where she sat at her desk.

'Did you like it?" he asked softly, and she opened the drawer and placed the enamel box in the centre of the desk between them.

'I cannot accept it, Sean,' she said. 'You know that very well." She didn't want to ask him where he had obtained it. She didn't want to know, and involuntarily she reached out to touch the box for the last time. The enamel surface felt like a new-laid egg, smooth and warm to the touch.

'It's all right,' Sean said quietly. 'Nobody knows. They think somebody else took it. It's quite safe." Had the child seen through her so easily? She stared at him. Was it one amoral soul recognizing another? It made her angry to be found out, to have her greed so exposed. She took her hand off the box and placed it in her lap.

She drew a breath, and steeled herself to repeat her refusal, but Sean stilled her by opening his art book and taking out three loose leaves. He placed them beside the blue enamel box, and she drew a hissing breath. They were her own drawings from her fun folder, signed by herself.

'I took these - sort of fair exchange,' Sean said, and she looked at him and truly saw him for the very first time.

He was young in years only. In the museum in Athens she had been enchanted by a marble statue of the great god Pan in his manifestation as a young boy. A beautiful child, but about him an ancient evil as enthralling as sin itself. Clare East was not a teacher by vocation, she felt no innate revulsion at the corruption of the young. It was simply that she had not thought of it before. With her hearty sexual appetite she had experienced almost everything else, including partners of her own sex, although those had been unsuccessful experiments long ago put behind her. Men she had known, in the biblical sense, in every possible variation of size and shape and colour. She took and discarded them with a kind of compulsive fervour, seeking always an elusive fulfilment which seemed to dance for ever just beyond her grasp. Often she was afraid, truly terrified, that she had reached the point of satiety, when her pleasure was irreparably blunted and jaded.

Now she was presented with a new and titillating perversion, enough to reawaken the lusty response that she had thought lost for ever. This child's loveliness contained a wickedness that left her breathless as she discovered it.

She had never been paid before, and this mannikin was offering her a prostitute's fee that was princely enough for a royal courtesan.

She had never been blackmailed before, and he was threatening her with those unwise sketches. She knew what would happen if they ever fell into the hands of the school governors, and she did not doubt that he would carry out the unspoken threat. He had already hinted that he had placed blame for the theft of the sapphire brooch on an innocent party. Most tantalizing, she had never had a child before. She let her eyes run over him curiously. His skin was clear and firm, with the sweet gloss of youth on it. The hair on his forearms was silky, but his cheeks were bare. He was using a razor already, and he was taller than she was, a man's outline emerging from boyhood in his shoulders and narrow hips. His limbs were long and shapely, strange that she should never have noticed the muscle in his arms before. His eyes were green as emeralds, or-of crbme de menthe in a crystal glass and there were tiny flecks of brown and gold surrounding the pupils. She saw those pupils dilate sightly as she leaned forward, deliberately letting the top of her blouse gape open to expose the swell and cleavage of her breasts. Carefully she picked up the enamel box.

'Thank you, Sean,' she whispered hoarsely. 'It's a magnificent gift and I shall treasure it." Sean picked up the lewd sketches and slipped them into his art book, hostage to the unspoken pact between them.

'Thank you, Miss East." His voice was as rough as hers. 'I am so glad you like it." It was so exciting to see his agitation that her own loins melted and she felt the familiar pressure build up swiftly in her lower body.

With calculated cruelty she stood up, dismissing him to the exquisite torture of anticipation. Instinctively she knew that he had planned it all. No further effort would be required from her, the boy's genius would providd the means and the moment, and it was part of the excitement, waiting to see what he would do.

She did not have long to wait, and though she had expected something unusual, she was surprised by the note he left on her desk.

Dear Miss East, My son, Sean, tells me that you are having difficulty in procuring suitable lodgings. I do understand how difficult this can be, particularly in the summer when the whole world seems to descend upon our little peninsula.

As it happens, I have a furnished cottage on the estate, which at the present time is standing empty. If you find it suitable, you are welcome to the use of it. The rental would be nominal. I should say a guinea a week would satisfy the estate bookkeeper, and you would find the cottage secluded and quiet with a lovely view over the Constantia Berg and False Bay, which will appeal to the artist.

Sean speaks highly of your work, and I look forward to seeing examples of it.

Very sincerely, Tara Courtney Clare East was paying five guineas a week for a single squalid room beside the railway tracks at the back of Rondebosch station.

When she sold the sapphire brooch for three hundred pounds, which she suspected was a fraction of its real value, Clare had been determined to pay off her accumulated debts. However, as with so many of her good intentions, she closed her mind to the impulse, and instead blew most of the money on a secondhand Morris Minor.

She drove out to Weltevreden the following Saturday morning.

Some instinct warned her not to attempt to conceal her Bohemian inclinations, and she and Tara recognized kindred spirits at the very first meeting. Tara sent a driver and one of the estate lorries to fetch her few sticks of furniture and her pile of finished canvases, and personally helped her move into the cottage.

As they worked together, Clare showed Tara a few of the canvases, beginning with the landscapes and seascapes. Tara's response was noncommittal, so once again, following her instinct, Clare stripped the cover off one of her abstracts, a cubist arrangement of blues and fiery reds, and held it up for Tara.

'Oh God, it's magnificent!" Tara murmured. 'So fierce and uncompromising. I love it." A few evenings later Tara came down the path through the pines, carrying a small basket. Clare was on the stoep of the cottage, sitting bare-footed and cross-legged on a leather cushion with a sketch-pad on her lap.

She looked up and grinned, 'I hoped you'd come,' and Tara flopped down beside her and took a bottle of Shasa's best estate wine, the fifteen-year-old vintage, out of the basket.

They chatted easily while Clare sketched, drinking the wine and watching the sunset over the mountains.

'It's good to find a friend,' Tara said impulsively. 'You can't imagine how lonely it is here sometimes." '_With ark tJe_guesLs_a nd_v'mitor'_Cja.r, ewJ:u.to kled .as. hr 'Those aren't real people,' Tara said. 'They are just talking dolls, stuffed with money and their own importance,' and she took a flat silver cigarette case out of the pocket of her skirt, and opened it. It contained rice papers and shredded yellow leaf. 'Do you?" she asked shyly.

'Darling, you have probably saved my life,' Clare exclaimed. 'Roll one for us this instant. I can't wait." They passed the joint back and forth, and in the course of their lazy conversation Clare remarked, Tve been exploring. It's so beautiful here. A little earthly paradise." 'Paradise can be an awful bore,' Tara smiled.

'I found a waterfall with a little summer-house." 'That's the picnic spot. None of the servants are allowed there, so if you want to swim in the buff, you don't have to worry. Nobody is going to surprise you." Clare had not seen Sean on the estate since she moved into the cottage. She had expected him to come panting to the door on the very first day, and was slightly piqued when he did not. Then after a few more days she was amused by his restraint, he had an instinct far beyond his years, the touch of the born philanderer, and she waited with a rising sense of anticipation for him to approach her.

Then the delay began to gall her. She was unaccustomed to extended periods of celibacy, and her sleep started to become fitful and disturbed by erotic dreams.

The spring evenings lengthened and became balmy, and Clare took up Tara's suggestion to visit the pool below the waterfall. Each afternoon she hurried back to Weltevreden after school, and pulled a pair of shorts and a sleeveless blouse over her bikini before taking the short cut through the vineyards to the foot of the hills. Tara's assurances were well founded. The pool was always deserted except for the sugar birds amongst the proteas on the bank, and soon she discarded the bikini.

On her third visit, as she was standing under the waterfall letting her long dark hair flow down her body, she was suddenly aware that she was being watched. She sank down quickly, the water up to her chin, and looked around her apprehensively.

Sean sat on one of the wet black rocks at the head of the pool, almost within touching distance. The roar of the waterfall had muffled any sound of his approach. He was regarding her solemnly, and the resemblance to the youthful Pan god was enhanced in this wild and beautiful place. He was barefoot and wore only shorts and a cotton shirt. His lips were slightly parted and his teeth were white and perfect, a lock of dark hair had fallen over one eye and he lifted his hand and brushed it aside.

Slowly she raised herself until the water dropped to her waist, the foam swirled around her, and her body shone with wetness. She saw his eyes go to her breasts, and his tongue flicked between his teeth and he winced as if in pain. Matching his solemn expression, she crooked her finger and beckoned him. The noise of the waterfall prevented all speech.

x He stood up and began to unbutton his shirt, and then paused.

She saw that at last he was uncertain, and his confusion amused and excited her. She nodded encouragement and beckoned again. His expression firmed and he stripped off his shirt and threw it aside, then he unbuckled his belt and let his shorts drop around his ankles.

She drew breath sharply and felt the muscles on the inside of her thighs tense. She was not sure what she had expected, but protruding from a smoky haze of pubic hair he was long and white and rigid. Here, as in so many other ways, he was almost fully matured, the lingering signs of childhood on his body were all the more titillating foe this.

He stood naked for only an instant and then dived head first into the pool, to surface beside her, water streaming down his face, grinning like an imp. Immediately she ducked away, and he chased her. He was a stronger swimmer than she was, moving in the water like a young otter, and he caught her in the middle of the pool.

They struggled together playfully, giggling and gasping, treading water, going under and bobbing up again. She was surprised by the hardness and strength of his body, and though she extended herself, he began to get the better of her. She was tiring and she slowed her movements and let him rub himself against her. Cold water and exertion had softened him, but she felt him grow again, his hips slipping over her belly, probing instinctively at her. She hooked an arm around his neck and pulled his face down between her breasts.

His entire body arched and convulsed and for a moment she thought he had gone too far, and she reached down and squeezed him hard and painfully to stop him.

Then as he broke away, shocked by her assault, she turned and swam swiftly to the bank, dragged herself from the pool and ran wet and naked to the summer-house. She snatched up her towel, wiped her face dry and, holding the towel in front of her, turned back to face him as he reached the door of the summer-house behind her. He stood flushed and angry in the doorway, and they stared at each other, both of them panting heavily.

Then slowly she lowered the towel and tossed it over the couch.

Swinging her hips deliberately she went to where he stood.

'All right, Master Sean. We know you are worse than useless with a paint brush. Let's see if there isn't anything else we can teach you." He was like a blank canvas on which she could trace her own designs, no matter how bizarre.

There were things from which her other lovers had recoiled, and other acts that she had only imagined and never had the courage to suggest to a partner. At last she felt free of all constraint. It was as though he could read her intentions. She had only to start some new experiment, guide him just part of the way, and he picked it up with a greedy relish that astonished her and carried it through to a conclusion that she had not always fully foreseen, and which sometimes left her stunned.

His strength and confidence increased with every one of their meetings. For the first time she had found something that did not swiftly pall. Gradually her existence seemed to centre around the summer-house beside the pool, and she could not wait to reach it each evening. It required all her self-discipline to keep her hands off him in the art room. She could not trust herself to stand close 'to him, or to look at him directly during her classes.

Then he initiated a new series of dangerous games. He would remain behind after class, for just a few minutes. It had to be very quick, but risk of discovery enhanced the thrill for both of them.

Once the janitor came in as they were busy and it was so close, so exciting, that she thought she had experienced heart failure at the climax. Sean was standing erect behind her desk, and she was kneeling in front of him. He had taken a handful of her hair and twisted it, holding her face against his lower body.

'I am looking for Miss East,' the janitor said from the doorway.

He was a pensioner, almost seventy years of age but out of vanity he refused to wear spectacles. 'Is she here?" he demanded, peering at Sean myopically.

'Hello, Mr Brownlee. Miss East has gone up to the staff common room already,' Sean told him coolly, holding Clare by her hair so she could not pull away from him. The janitor muttered unintelligibly and turned to leave the art room, when to Clare's horror Sean called him back.

'Oh, Mr Brownlee, can I give her a message for you?" he asked, and he and the janitor talked for almost a minute that seemed like all the ages, while she, screened by the desk, was forced to continue.

She knew then, when she paused to think about it, that she was in over her head. She had seen glimpses of the cruelty and violence in him and as the months passed, his physical strength increased with all the sudden blooming of desert grass after rain. The last garlands of puppy fat around his torso were replaced by hard muscle and it seemed that before her eyes his chest broadened and took on a covering of springing dark curls.

Though sometimes she still challenged and fought him, each time he subdued her with greater ease, and then he would force her to perform one of the tricks to which she had originally introduced him, but which he had embroidered with little sadistic twists of his own.

She developed a taste for these humiliations, and she began deliberately to provoke him, until at last she succeeded beyond her expectations. It was in her cottage - the first time they had met there because there was always the danger that Tara would drop in unexpectedly, but by now both of them were reckless.

Clare waited until he was fully ripe, his eyes glazing and his lips pulled back in a rictus of ecstasy, then she twisted and bucked, throwing him off her and she knelt before him and jeered with laughter.

He was angry, but she calmed him down. Then a few minutes later she did it again, and this time she squeezed him painfully, just as she had done that first evening at the pool.

Seconds later she lay dazed, only semi-conscious, sprawled half off the bed, both her eyes rapidly closing with plum-coloured swellings, her lips broken against her teeth, and blood dripping from her nose.

Sean stood over her. His face was white as ice, the knuckles of his clenched fists grazed raw, still shaking with fury. He caught her by the tresses of her dark hair and knelt over her while he forced her to take him through her split and bleeding lips. After that there was no question but that he was her master.

Clare missed three days of school, while the worst of the swelling subsided and the bruises faded, and then wore dark sunglasses to her art class. When she passed Sean at his easel, she brushed herself against him like a cat, and he waited behind again after class.

Sean had gone long enough without boasting of his conquest, but Snotty Arbuthnot refused to believe him.

'You've got a screw loose if you think I swallow that,' he taunted.

'You think I'm' as green as I'm cabbage-looking, man? You and Marsh Mallows - in your dreams you mean!" Sean had one alternative to beating him up. 'Okay then, I'll prove it to you." 'Boy, it had better be good." 'It will be,' Sean assured him grimly.

The following Saturday afternoon he placed Snotty amongst the protea bushes at the head of the waterfall, and for good measure, lent him the binoculars that his grandmother had given him for his fourteenth birthday.

'Let's take the cushions off the couch,' he suggested to Clare when she came into the summer-house. 'We'll put them on the lawn, there on the bank. It will be warmer in the sun." She agreed with alacrity.

Snotty Arbuthnot was still almost inarticulate when they met at the school gates the next day.

'Hell man, I never dreamed that people did that. I mean, unbelievable, man! When she - you know - when she actually - well, I thought I was going to die on the spot." 'Did I tell the truth?" Sean demanded. 'Or did I lie to you?" 'Man, it was super titanic. Boy, Sean, I was painting maps of Africa over my sheets all last night, I kid you not. Will you let me watch again - please, Sean, please?" 'Next time will cost you money,' Sean said. Even though performing to an audience had filled an exhibitionist need, Sean meant it as a refusal, but when Snotty asked without hesitation, 'How much, Sean? Just name your price!" Sean looked at him appraisingly.

It was Shasa's policy to keep his sons on very modest pocketmoney, a policy that he had inherited from his own mother. 'They must learn the value of money,' was the family maxim.

Even Snotty whose father was only a surgeon received four times the pittance that was Sean's allowance. The protection racket that Sean ran amongst the juniors, an idea he had picked up from a George Raft movie at the Odeon, more than doubled his income.

However, he was always lamentably short of hard cash, and Snotty could afford to pay.

'Two pounds,' Sean suggested. He knew that was exactly his weekly pocket money, but Snotty smiled radiantly. 'You're on, man!" However, it was only when Snotty actually placed the two crumpled notes in Sean's fist the following Saturday morning that.

Sean realized the full financial potential.

There was very little chance of Clare realizing that she was on stage. The protea bushes were dense, the noise of the waterfall covered the sound of any involuntary gasps or sniggers, and anyway once she was started, Clare was deaf and blind to all else. Sean appointed Snotty his ticket salesman and organizer. The commission he received ensured Snotty's free admission to each Saturday performance. Reluctantly they decided to restrict admission to ten spectators at any one session, but even that meant a take of eighteen pounds every single week. It lasted almost three months, which was in itself a miracle, for after the first sell-out matinee, the entire senior school was agog.

The word-of-mouth publicity was so good that Snotty was able to demand cash with reservation, and even so his booking sheet was full as far ahead as the beginning of the hols and half the fellows were saving so frantically to try and come up with two pounds that sales at the school tuck shop fell off dramatically. Snotty was trying to get Sean to agree to a mid-week performance, or at least to an increase in the Saturday gate, when the first rumour reached the staff common room.

While passing the windows of one of the change rooms, the history teacher had overheard two satisfied customers discussing the previous Saturday's performance. The headmaster was unable to bring himself to take the report seriously. The whole idea was patently preposterous. Nevertheless, he knew it was his duty to have a discreet word with Miss East, if only to warn her of the revolting little-tattle that was circulating.

He went down to the art room after school, late on Friday afternoon, a most inopportune moment. Clare had by this time abandoned all sense of discretion, for her it had become almost a self-destructive frenzy. She and Sean were in the paint store at the back of the art school, and it was some seconds before either of them realized that the headmaster was in the room with them: For Shasa everything seemed to happen at once. Sean's expulsion from Bishops was a bombshell that ripped through Weltevreden.

When it happened, Shasa was in Johannesburg, and they had to call him out of a meeting with the representatives of the Chamber of Mines to receive the headmaster's telephone call. On the open line the headmaster would give no details, and Shasa flew back to Cape Town immediately and drove directly from the airfield to the school.

Flabbergasted and seething with anger at the stark details the headmaster gave him, Shasa sent the Jaguar roaring around the lower slopes of Table Mountain towards Weltevreden.

From the first he had not approved of the woman who Tara had installed in the cottage. She was all the things he despised, with her great sloppy breasts and silly pretensions which she thought made her avant-garde and artistic. Her paintings were atrocious, daubed primary colours and childish perspectives, and she tried to conceal her lack of talent and taste behind Portuguese cigarettes, sandals and skirts of blindingly vivid designs. He decided to deal with her first.

However, she had fled, leaving the cottage in slovenly disarray.

Thwarted, Shasa took his anger unabated up to the big house and shouted at Tara as he stormed into the hall.

'Where is the little blighter - I'm going to skin his backside for him." The other children, all three of them, were peeking over the railing from the second-floor gallery, in a fine fever of vicarious terror.

Isabella's eyes were as enormous as one of Walt Disney's fawns.

Shasa saw them and roared up the stair well. 'Back to your own rooms, this instant. That goes for you as well, young lady." And they ducked and scampered. As an afterthought Shasa bellowed after them, 'And tell that brother of yours I want to see him in the gun room immediately." The three of them raced each other down the passage of the nursery wing, each of them determined to be the bearer of the dreaded summons. The gun room was the family equivalent of Tower Green where all executions took place.

Garrick got there first, and pounded on Sean's locked door.

'Pater wants you immediately,' he yelled.

'-- in the gun room --' Michael joined in, and Isabella who had been left far behind at the start, piped up breathlessly, 'He's going to skin your backside!" She was flushed and trembling with eagerness, and she hoped desperately that Sean would show her his bottom after Daddy had carried out his threat. She couldn't imagine what it would look like, and she wondered if Daddy would have the skin made into a floor mat like the skins of the zebras and lions in the gun room. It was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened in her life.

In the entrance hall Tara was attempting to calm Shasa. She had seen him in a comparable rage only two or three times during their marriage, always when he fancied the family honour or reputation had been compromised. Her efforts were in vain, for he turned on her with his single eye glittering.

'Damn you, woman. This is mostly your fault. It was you who insisted on bringing that whore to live on Weltevreden." As Shasa stormed off to the gun room, his voice carried clearly up the stairwell to where Sean was bracing himself to come down and face retribution. Up to that moment Sean had been so confused by the speed of events that he hadn't been thinking clearly. Now, as he descended the stairs, his mind was racing as he prepared his defence.

He passed his mother, still standing in the middle of the chessboard black and white marble squares of the entrance hall floor, and she gave him a strained smile of encouragement.

'I tried to help, darling,' she whispered. They had never been close, but now for once Shasa's rage made them allies. 'Thank you, Mater." He knocked on the gun-room door, and opened it cautiously when his father roared. He closed it carefull37 behind him and advanced to the centre of the lion skin where he halted and stood to attention.

Beatings at Weltevreden followed an established ritual. The riding crops were laid out on the baize gun table, five of them of various lengths, weights and stinging potential. He knew his father would make a show of selecting the correct one for the occasion, and that today it would almost certainly be the long whippy whalebone. Involuntarily he looked to the over-stuffed leather chair beside the fireplace over which he would be asked to drape himself, reaching over to grip the legs of the chair on the far side. His father was an international polo player with wrists like steel springs, his strokes made even the headmaster's seem like a powder puff.

Then deliberately Sean closed his mind against fear and lifted his chin to stare calmly at his father. Shasa was standing in front of the fireplace, hands clasped beside his back, rocking on the balls of his feet.

'You have been fired from Bishops,' he said.

Although the headmaster had not specifically mentioned this fact to Sean himself during his extended diatribe, the news did not come as a complete surprise. 'Yes, sir,' he said.

'I find it hard to believe what I have been told about you. It is true that you were making a spectacle of yourself with this - this woman?" 'Yes, sir." 'That you were letting your friends watch you?" 'Yes, sir." 'And charging them money for the privilege?" 'Yes, sir." 'A pound a head?" 'No, sir." 'What do you mean - no sir?" 'Two pounds a head, sir." 'You are a Courtney - what you do reflects directly on every member of this family. Do you realize that?" 'Yes, sir." 'Don't keep saying that. In the name of all that is holy, how could you do it?" 'She started it, sir. I would have never even thought of it without her." Shasa stared at him, and suddenly his rage evaporated. He remembered himself at almost exactly the same age, standing chastened before Centaine. She had not beaten him, but had sent him to a lysol bath and a humiliating medical examination. He remembered the girl, a saucy little harlot only a year or two older than he was, with a shock of sun bleached hair and a sly smile - and he almost smiled himself. She had teased and provoked him, leading him on into folly, and yet he felt a strange nostalgic glow. His first real woman - he might forget a hundred others but never that one.

Sean had seen the anger fade out of his father's eye, and sensed that now was the moment to exploit the change of mood.

'I realize that I have brought scandal on the family, and I know that I have to take my medicine --' His father would like that, it was one of his sayings, 'Take your medicine like a man." He saw the further softening of his father's regard. 'I know how stupid I have been, and before my punishment I would just like to say how sorry I am that I have made you ashamed of me." This was not exactly true, and Sean instinctively knew it. His father was angry with him for being caught out, but deep down he was rather proud of his eldest son's now proven virility.

'The only excuse I have was that I couldn't help myself. She just drove me mad, sir. I couldn't think of anything else but - well, but what she wanted me to do with her." Shasa understood entirely. He was still having the same sort of problems at nearly forty - what was it that Centaine said? 'It's the de Thiry blood, we all have to live with it." He coughed softly, moved by his son's honesty and openness. He was such a fine-looking boy, straight and tall and strong, so handsome and courageous, no wonder the woman had picked on him. He couldn't really be bad, Shasa thought, a bit of a devil perhaps, a little too cocksure, a little too eager for life - but not really bad. 'I mean, if boffing a pretty girl is mortal sin, there is no salvation for any of us,' he thought. I'm going to have to beat you, Sean,' he said aloud.

Yes, sir, I know that." Not a trace of fear, no whining. No, damn it, he was a good boy. A son to be proud of.

Shasa went to the gun table and picked up the long whalebone crop, the most formidable weapon in his arsenal, and without being ordered to do so, Sean marched to the armchair and adopted the prescribed position. The first stroke hissed in the air and cracked against his flesh, then suddenly Shasa grunted with disgust and threw the crop on to the gun table.

'The stick is for children - and you are no longer a child,' Shasa said. Stand up, man." Sean could hardly believe his luck. Although the single stroke had stung like a nest of scorpions, he kept an impassive face and made no effort to rub the seat of his pants.

What are we going to do with you?" his father demanded, and Sean had the sense to remain silent.

'You have to finish matric,' Shasa stated flatly. 'We'll just have to find someone else to take you on." This was not as easy as Shasa had anticipated. He tried SACS and Rondebosch Boys and then Wynberg Boys. The headmasters all knew about Sean Courtney. He was, for a short while, the best-known schoolboy in the Cape of Good Hope.

In the end he was accepted by Costello's Academy, a cram school that operated out of a dilapidated Victorian mansion on the other side of Rondebosch common, and was not particular about its admissions. Sean arrived for th: first day and was gratified to find he was already a celebrity. Unlike the exclusive boys school which he had recently left, there were girls in the classrooms and academic excellence and moral rectitude were not prerequisites for entrance to Costello's Academy.

Sean had found his spiritual home and he set about sorting out the most promising of his.fellov scholars and organizing them into a gang which within a year was virtually running the cram school. His final selection included a half dozen of the most comely and accommodating young ladies on the academy's roll. As both his father and erstwhile headmaster had noted, Sean was a born leader.

Manfred De La Rey stood to attention on the reviewing stand. He wore a severe dark pinstripe suit and a black Homburg hat, with a small spray of carnations and green fern in his buttonhole. This was the uniform of a Nationalist cabinet minister.

The police band was playing a traditional country air 'Die Kaapse Nooi'- 'The Cape Town girl', to a lively marching beat and the ranks of the police cadets stepped out vigorously, passing the stand with their FN rifles at the slope. As each platoon drew level with the dais, they gave Manfred the eyes right, and he returned the salute.

They made a grand show with their smart blue uniforms and sparkling brasswork catching the white highveld sunlight. These athletic young men, proud and eager, their perfect drill formations, their transparent dedication and patriotism filled Manfred De La Rey with a vast sense of pride.

Manfred stood to attention while the formations wheeled past him and then formed up in review order on the open parade ground facing the stand. The band played a final ruffle of drums and then fell silent. Resplendent in full dress uniform and decorations, the police general stepped to the microphone and in a few crisp sentences introduced the minister, then fell back relinquishing the microphone to Manfred.

Manfred had taken especial care with the preparation of his speech, but before he began he could not prevent himself from glancing aside to where Heidi sat in the front row of honoured guests.

This was her day also, and she looked like a blond Valkyrie, her handsome Teutonic features set off by the wide-brimmed hat and its tall decoration of artificial roses. Few women would have the presence and stature to wear it without looking ridiculous, but on Heidi it was magnificent. She caught his eye and smiled at Manfred.

'What a woman,' he thought. 'She deserves to be First Lady in the land, and I will see that she is - one day. Perhaps sooner than she imagines." He turned back to the microphone and composed himself. He knew that he was a compelling orator, and he enjoyed the fact that thousands of eyes were concentrated upon him. He felt at ease up here on the dais, relaxed and in total control of himself and those below him.

'You have chosen a life of service to your Volk and to your country,' he began. He was speaking in Afrikaans and his reference to the Volk was quite natural. The intake of police recruits was almost exclusively from the Afrikaner section of the white community. Manfred De La Rey would not have had it any other way.

It was desirable that control of the security forces should be vested solidly in the more responsible elements of the nation, those who understood most clearly the dangers and threats that faced them i the years ahead. Now he began to warn this dedicated body of younl men of those dangers.

'It will require all our courage and fortitude to resist the dari forces which are arrayed against us. We must thank our Maker, th Lord God of our fathers, that in the covenant he made with ou ancestors on the battlefield of Blood river he has guaranteed us hi protection and guidance. It needs only that we remain constant and true, trusting him, worshipping him, for the way always to be mad smooth for our feet to follow." He ended his address with the act of faith that had lifted the Afrikaner out of poverty and oppression to his rightful place in the land: Believe in your God.

Believe in your Volk.

Believe in yourself.

His voice, magnified a hundred times, boomed across the parade ground, and he truly felt the divine and benevolent presence very close to him as he looked out upon their shining faces.

Now came the presentation. Out on the field there were shouted orders and the blue ranks came to attention. A pair of offic, e ste17pci forvard to flank Manfred and one of them carried a velvetlined tray on which were laid out the medals and awards.

Reading from the list in his hands the second officer called the recipients forward. One at a time they left the ranks, marching briskly, to halt before the imposing figure of Manfred De La Rey.

He shook hands with each of them, and then pinned the medals upon their chests.

Then came the moment, and Manfred felt his pride suffocating him. The last of the award-winners was marching towards him across the parade ground, and this dne was the tallest and smartest and straightest of them all. In the front rank of guests, Heidi was weeping silently with joy, and she dabbed unashamedly at her tears with a lace handkerchiefi Lothar De La Rey came to a halt in front of his father and stood to rigid attention. Neither of them smiled, their expressions were stern; they stared into each other's eyes, but between them flowed such a current of feeling that made words or smiles redundant.

With an effort Manfred broke that silent rapport, and turned to the police colonel beside him. He offered the sword to Manfred, and the engraved scabbard glistened in silver and gold as Manfred took it from him and turned back to his son.

'The sword of honour,' he said. 'May you wear it with distinction,' and he stepped up to Lothar and attached the beautiful weapon to the blanched belt at his son's waist. They shook hands, both of them solemn still, but the brief grip they exchanged expressed a lifetime of love and pride and filial duty.

They stood to attention, holding the salute, as the band played the national anthem: From the blue of our heavens From the depths of our seasAnd then the parade was breaking up, and young men were swarming forward to find their families in the throng, and there were excited female cries and laughter and long fervent embraces as they met.

Lothar De La Rey stood between his parents, with the sword hanging at his side, and while he shook the hands of an endless procession of well-wishers and made modest responses to their fulsome congratulations, neither Manfred nor Heidi could any longer contain their proud and happy smiles.

'Well done, Lothie!" One of Lothar's fellow cadets got through to him at last, and the two lads grinned as they shook hands. 'No doubt about who was the best man." 'I was lucky,' Lothat laughed self-deprecatingly, and changed the subject. 'Have you been told your posting yet, Hannes?" 'Ja, man. I'm being sent down to Natal, somewhere on the coast.

How about you, perhaps we'll be together?" 'No such luck,' Lothar shook his head. 'They are sending me to some little station in the black townships near Vereeniging - a place called Sharpeville." 'Sharpeville? Bad luck, man." Hannes shook his head with mock sympathy. 'I've never heard of it." 'Nor had I. Nobody has ever heard of it,' said Lothar with resignation. 'And nobody ever will." On 24 August 1958 the prime minister, Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom, 'Lion of the Waterberg', succumbed to heart disease. He had only been at the head of government for four years, but his passing left a wide gap in the granite cliffs of Afrikanerdom, and like termites whose nest has been damaged, they rushed to repair it.

Within hours of the announcement of the prime minister's death, Manfred De La Rey was in Shasa's office, accompanied by two of the senior Cape back-benchers of the National Party.

'We have to try and keep the northerners out,' he announced bluntly. 'We have to get our man in." Shasa nodded cautiously. He was still regarded by most of the party as an outsider in the cabinet. His influence in the coming election of a new leader would not be decisive, but he was ready to watch and learn as Manfred laid out their strategy for him.

'They have already made Verwoerd their candidate,' he said. 'All right, he has been in the Senate most of his career and has little experience as an MP, but his reputation is that of a strong man and a clever one. They like the way he has handled the blacks. He has made the name Verwoerd and the word apartheid mean the same thing. The people know that under him there will be no mixing of races, that South Africa will always belong to the white man." 'Ja,' agreed one of the others. 'But he is so brutal. There are ways of doing things, ways of saying things that don't offend people. Our own man is strong also. Dnges introduced the Group Areas Bill and the Separate Representation of Voters bill - nobody can accuse him of being a kafferboetie, a nigger-lover. But he's got more style, more finesse." 'The northerners don't want finesse. They don't want a genteel prime minister with sweet lips, they want a man of power, and Verwoerd is a talker, hell that man can talk and he's not afraid of work - and as we all know, anybody whom the English press hates so much can't be all bad." They laughed, watching Shasa, waiting to see how he would take it. He was still an outsider, their tame rooinek, and he would not give them the satisfaction of seeing their raillery score. He smiled easily.

'Verwoerd is canny as an old bull baboon, and quick as a mamba.

We'll have to work hard if we are to keep him out,' Shasa agreed.

They worked hard, all of them. Shasa was convinced that despite his record of introducing racially inspired legislation to the House, D6nges was the most moderate and altruistic of the three men who allowed themselves to be persuaded to stand as candidates for the highest office in the land.

As Dr Hendrik Verwoerd himself said, as he accepted nomination, 'When a man receives a desperate call from his people, he does not have the right to refuse." On 2 September 1958, the caucus of the National Party met to choose the new leader. The caucus was made up of 178 Nationalist members of parliament and Nationalist senators voting together, and Verwoerd's short term in parliament that had seemed at first to be a weakness, turned out to be an advantage. For years Hendrik Verwoerd had been the leader of the Senate, and had dominated the upper house by the strength of his personality and the powers of his oratory. The senators, docile and compliant, men whose ranks had been enlarged to enable the governing party to force through distasteful legislation, voted for Verwoerd as a block.

D6nges survived the first ballot in which 'Blackie' Swart, the Free State's candidate, was eliminated, but on the second ballot, a straight contest between Verwoerd and D6nges, the northerners closed their ranks and swept Verwoerd into the premiership by ninety-eight votes to seventy-five.

That evening when, as prime minister, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd broadcast to the nation, he did not try to conceal the fact that his election had been the will of Almighty God. 'He it is who has ordained that I should lead the people of South Africa in this new period of their lives." Blaine and Centaine had driven across from Rhodes Hill. It was a family tradition to gather in this room to listen to important broadcasts. Here they had heard speeches and announcements that had shifted the world they knew on its axis: declarations of war and peace, the news of the evil mushroom clouds planted in the skies above Japanese cities, the death of kings and beloved rulers, the accession of a queen, to all these and others they had listened together in the blue drawing-room of Weltevreden.

Now they sat quietly as the high-pitched, nervously strained but articulate voice of the new prime minister came to them, jarring when he repeated platitudes and well-worn themes.

'No one need doubt for a single moment that it will always be my aim to uphold the democratic instutitions of our country, for they are the most treasured possessions of western civilization,' Verwoerd told them, 'and the right of people with other convictions to express their views will be maintained." 'Just as long as those views are passed by the government board of censors, the synod of the Dutch Reformed Church and the caucus of the National Party,' Blaine murmured, a sarcastic qualification for him, and Centaine nudged him.

'Do be quiet, Blaine, I want to listen." Verwoerd had moved on to another familiar subject, how the country's enemies had deliberately misconstrued his racial policies. It was not he who had coined the word apartheid, but other dedicated and brilliant minds had foreseen the necessity of allowing all the races of a complicated and fragmented society to develop towards their own separate potential. 'As the minister of Bantu affairs, since 1950 it has been my duty to give cohesion and substance to this policy, the only policy which will allow full opportunity for each and every group within its own racial community. In the years ahead, we will not deviate one inch from this course." Tara had been tapping her foot restlessly as she listened, but now she sprang to her feet. Tm sorry,' she blurted. 'I'm feeling a little queasy. I must get a breath of fresh air on the terrace --' and she hurried from the room. Centaine glanced sharply at Shasa, but he smiled and shrugged, was about to make a light comment, when the voice on the radio riveted them all once more.

'I come now to one of the most, if not the most sacred ideal of our people,' the high-pitched voice filled the room, 'and that is the formation of the Republic. I know how many of the English-speaking South Africans listening to me tonight are filled with a sense of loyalty to the British Crown. I know also that this divided loyalty has prevented them from always dealing with the real issues on their merits.

The ideal of monarchy has too often been a divisive factor in our midst, separating Afrikaners and English-speakers when they should have been united. In a decolonizing world, the black.man and his newly fledged nations are beginning to emerge as a threat to the South Africa we know and love. Afrikaner and Englishman can no longer afford to stand apart, but must now link arms as allies, secure and strong in the ideal of a new white republic." 'My God,' Blaine breathed, 'that's a new line. It used always to be the Afrikaner Republic exclusively, and nobody took it seriously, least of all the Afrikaners. But this time he is serious, and he has started something that is going to raise a stink. I remember all too well the controversy over the flag, back in the 1920s. That will seem like a love feast compared to the idea of a republic --' he broke off to listen as Verwoerd ended: 'Thus I give you my assurance that from now on the sacred ideal of Republic will be passionately pursued." When the prime minister finished speaking, Shasa crossed the room and switched off the radio; then he turned and stood with his hands thrust deeply into his pockets, and his shoulders hunched as he studied their faces. They were all of them subdued and shaken.

For one hundred and fifty years the country had been British, and there was a pride and a vast sense of security in that state. Now it was to change, and they were afraid. Even Shasa felt strangely bereft and uncertain.

'He doesn't mean it. It's just another sop for his own people. They are always ranting about the republic,' Centaine said hopefully, but Blaine shook his head.

'We don't know this man very well yet. We only know what he wrote when he was editor of Transvaler, and we know with what vigour and determination he has set about segregating our society.

There is one other thing we have learned about him. He is a man who means exactly what he says, and who will let nothing stand in his way." He reached across and took Centaine's hand. 'No, my heart. You are wrong. He means it." They both looked up at Shasa, and Centaine asked for both of them, 'What will you do, chbri?" 'I am not sure that I will have any choice. They say he brooks no opposition, and I opposed him. I lobbied for D6nges. I may not be on the list when he announces his cabinet on Monday." 'It will be hard to move to the back bench again,' Blaine remarked.

'Too hard,' Shasa nodded. 'And I will not do it." 'Oh chbri,' Centaine cried. 'You would not resign your seat - after all we have sacrificed, after all our hard work and hopes." 'We'll know on Monday,' Shasa shrugged, trying not to let them see how bitterly disappointed he was. He had held true power for too short a time, just long enough to learn to enjoy the taste of it.

He knew, furthermore, that there was so much he had to offer his country, so many of his efforts almost ready for harvesting. It would be hard to watch them wither and die with his own ambitions, before he had even tasted the first sweets, but Verwoerd would sack him from his cabinet. He could not doubt it for a moment.

'"If you can meet with triumph and disaster",' Centaine quoted, and then laughed gaily, with only the barest tremor in it. 'Now, chri, let's open a bottle of champagne. It's the only way to treat those two impostors of Kipling's." Shasa entered his office in the House, and looked around it regretfully. It had been his for five years, and now he would have to pack up his books and paintings and furniture; the panelling and carpeting he would leave as a gift to the nation. He had hoped to make a larger bequest than that, and he grimaced and went to sit behind his desk for the last time and try to assess where he had erred and what he could have done if he had been allowed. The telephone on his desk rang, and he picked it up before his secretary in the outer office could reach it.

'This is the prime minister's secretary,' the voice told him, and for a moment he thought of the dead man and not his successor.

'The prime minister would like to see you as soon as is convenient." 'I will come right away, of course,' Shasa replied, and as he replaced the receiver he thought, 'So he personally wants to have the pleasure of chopping me down." Verwoerd kept him waiting only ten minutes and then rose from behind his desk to apologize as Shasa entered his office. 'Forgive me. It has been a busy day,' and Shasa smiled at the understatement.

His smile was not forced, for Verwoerd was displaying all his enormous charm, his voice soft and lulling, unlike the higher harsher tone of his public utterances, and he actually came around the desk and took Shasa's arm in an avuncular grip. 'But, of course, I had to speak to you, as I have spoken to all the members of my new cabinet." Shasa started so that he pulled his arm out of the other man's grip, and the.

y turned to face each other.

'I am keeping the portfolio of Mines and Industry open, and of course there is no man better qualified for the job than you. I have liked your presentations to the old cabinet. You know what you are talking about." 'I cannot pretend not to be surprised, Prime Minister,' Shasa told him quietly, and Verwoerd chuckled.

'It is good to be unpredictable at times." 'Why?" Shasa asked. 'Why me?" Verwoerd cocked his head on the side, a characteristic gesture of interrogation, but Shasa insisted, 'I know you value straight talk, Prime Minister, so I will say it. You have no reason to like me or to consider me an ally." 'That is true,' Verwoerd agreed. 'But I don't need sycophants. I have enough of those already. What I have considered is that the job you are doing is vital to the eventual well-being of our land, and that there is no one who could do it better. I am sure we will learn to work together." 'Is that all, Prime Minister?" 'You have mentioned that I like to talk straight. Very well, that is not all. You probably heard me begin my premiership with an appeal for a drawing together of the two sections of our white population, an appeal to Boer and Briton to forget old worn-out antipathy and side by side to build the Republic. How would it look if with the next breath I fired the only Englishman in my government?" They both laughed, and then Shasa shook his head. 'On the matter of the Republic I will oppose you,' he warned, and for a moment saw through a chink the cold and monolithic ego of a man who would never bow to the contrary view, and then the chink was closed and Verwoerd chuckled.

'Then I will have to convince you that you are wrong. In the meantime you will be my conscience - what is the name of the character in the Disney story?" 'Which one?" 'The story of the puppet - Pinocchio, is it? What was the name of the cricket?" 'Jimmy Cricket,' Shasa told him.

'Yes, in the meantime you will be my Jimmy Cricket. Do you accept the task?" 'We both know it is my duty, Prime Minister." As Shasa said it, he thought cynically, 'Isn't it remarkable that once ambition has dictated, duty so readily concurs?" They were dining out that night, but Shasa went to Tara's room to tell her the news as soon as he had dressed.

She watched him in the mirror as he explained his reasons for accepting the appointment. Her expression was solemn but her voice had a brittle edge of contempt in it as she said, 'I am delighted for you. I know that is what you want, and I know that you will be so busy you will not even notice that I am gone." 'GoneT he demanded.

'Our bargain, Shasa. We agreed that I could go away for a while when I felt the need. Of course, I will return - that was also part of our bargain." He looked relieved. 'Where will you go - and for how long?" 'London,' she replied. 'And I should be away several months. I want to attend a course on archaeology at London University." She tried to hide it from him, but she was wildly, deliriously excited. She had only heard from Molly that afternoon, just after the new cabinet had been announced. Molly had a message. Moses had at last sent for her, and she had already booked passage for Benjamin, Miriam and herself on the Pendennis Castle to Southampton. She would take the child to meet his father.

The mailship sailing was an exciting event in which the citizens of the mother city, of whatever station in life, could join gaily. The deck was crowded and noisy. Paper streamers joined the tall ship to the quayside with a web of colour that fluttered in the south-easter.

A coon band on the dock vied with the ship's band high up on the promenade deck, and the old Cape favourite 'Alabama' was answered by 'God be with you till we meet again'.

Shasa was not there. He had flown up to Walvis Bay to deal with some unforeseen problem at the canning factory. Nor was Sean, he was writing exams at Costello's Academy, but Blaine and Centaine brought the other three children down to the docks to see Tara off on her voyage.

They stood in a small family group, surrounded by the crowd, each of them holding a paper streamer and waving up at Tara on the first class 'A' deck. As the gap between the quay and the ship's side opened, the foghorns boomed, and the paper streamers parted and floated down to settle on the dark waters of the inner harbour. The tugs pushed the great bows around, until they lined up with the harbour entrance and under the stern the gigantic propeller choppe, the water into foam and drove her out into Table Bay.

Tara ran lightly up the companionway to her stateroom. She had protested only mildly when Shasa had insisted that she cancel he original bookings in tourist and travel first class. 'My dear, there or, bound to be people we know on board. What would they think o my wife travelling steerage?" 'Not steerage, Shasa - tourist." 'Everything below "A" deck is steerage,' he had replied, and nov she was glad of his snobbery for the stateroom was a private place where she could have Ben all to herself. It would have excited curl.

osity if she had been seen with a coloured child on the public deck As Shasa had pointed out, there were watching eyes on board and the reports would have flown back to Shasa like homing pigeons.

However, Miriam Afrika had good-naturedly agreed to wear a servant's livery and to act out the subterfuge of being Tara's maid during the voyage. Her husband had reluctantly let her go with Tara to England, despite the disruption to his own household. Tara had compensated him generously and Miriam had come aboard with the child registered as her own.

Tara hardly left her stateroom during the entire voyage, declining the captain's offer to join his table and shunning the cocktail parties and fancy-dress dance. She never tired of being with Moses' son, her love was a hunger that could never be appeased and even when, exhausted by her attentions, Benjamin fell asleep in his cot, Tara hovered over him constantly. 'I love you,' she whispered to him, 'best in the world after your Daddy,' and she did not think of the other children, not even Michael. She ordered all their meals to be sent up to her suite, and ate with Benjamin, almost jealously taking over his care from Miriam. Only late at night with the greatest reluctance did she let her carry the child away to the tourist cabin on the deck below.

x The days sped by swiftly and, at last, holding Benjamin's hand she stepped off the gangplank to the'boat train in Southampton docks for the ride up to London.

Again at Shasa's insistence, she had taken the suite at the Dorchester overlooking the park that the family always used, with a single room at the back for Miriam and the baby for which she requested a separate bill and paid in cash out of her own pocket so that Shasa would have no record of it on her bank statement.

There was a message from Moses waiting for her at the porter's desk when she registered. She recognized the handwriting. She opened the envelope the moment she entered the suite, and felt the cold slide of disappointment. He wrote very formally: Dear Tara, I am sorry I was not able to meet you. However, it is necessary for me to attend important talks in Amsterdam with our friends. I will contact you immediately on my return.

Yours sincerely, Moses Gama.

She was thrown into black despair by the tone of the letter and the dashing of her expectations. Without Miriam and the child she would have despaired. However, they passed the waiting days in the parks and zoos, and in long walks along the river bank and through London's fascinating alleys and convoluted streets. She shopped for Benjamin at Marks & Spencer and C & A, avoiding Harrods and Self ridges, for those were Shasa's haunts.

Tara registered at the university for the course in African archaeology. She did not trust Shasa not to check that she had done so.

In accordance with Shasa's other expectations she even dressed in her most demure twin set and pearls and took a cab up to Trafalgar Square to make a courtesy call on the high commissioner at South Africa House. She could not avoid his invitation to lunch and had to show a bright face during a meal whose menu and wine-list and fellow guests could have been taken straight from a similar gathering at Weltevreden.

She listened to the editor of the Daily Telegraph, who sat beside her, but kept glancing out of the windows at Nelson's tall column, and longed to be free as the cloud of pigeons that circled it. Her duty done, she escaped at last, only just in time to get back to the Dorchester and give Ben his bath.

She had bought him a plastic tugboat at Hamley's toy shop which was a great success, and Ben sat in the bath and chuckled with delight as the tugboat circled him.

Tara was laughing and drying her hands when Miriam came through from the lounge to the bathroom. 'There is somebody to see you, Tara." 'Who is it?" Tara demanded without rising from where she knelt beside the bath.

'He wouldn't give his name? Miriam kept a straight face. 'I will finish bathing Ben." Tara hesitated, she did not want to waste a minute away from her son. 'Oh all right,' she agreed, and with the towel in her hand she went through to the lounge, and stopped abruptly in the doorway.

The shock was so intense that her face drained of blood and she swayed giddily and had to snatch at the door jamb to steady herself.

'Moses,' she whispered, staring at him.

He wore a long tan-coloured trenchcoat, and the epauletted shoulders were spattered with rain drops. The coat seemed to accentuate his height and the breadth of his shoulders. She had forgotten the grandeur of his presence. He did not smile, but regarded her with that steady heart-checking stare of his.

'Moses,' she said again, and took a faltering step towards him.

'Oh God, you'll never know how slowly the years have passed since last I saw you." 'Tara." His voice thrilled every fibre of her being. 'My wife,' and he held out his arms to her.

She flew to him and he enfolded her and held her close. She pressed her face to his chest and clung to him, inhaling the rich masculine smell of his body, as warm and exciting as the herby smell of the African noonday. For many seconds neither of them moved or spoke except for the involuntary tremors that shook Tara's body and the little moaning sound she made in her throat.

Then gently he held her off and took her face between his hands and lifted it to look into her eyes.

'I have thought about you every day,' he said, and suddenly she was weeping. The tears streamed down her cheeks, and into the corners of her mouth, so that when he kissed her, their metallic salt mingled with the slick taste of his saliva.

Miriam brought Benjamin out to them, clean and dry and dressed in his new blue pyjamas. He regarded his father solemnly.

'I greet you, my son,' Moses whispered. 'May you grow as strong and beautiful as the land of your birth,' and Tara thought that her heart might stop with the pride and sheer joy of seeing them together for the first time.

Though the colour of their skins differed, Benjamin was caramel and chocolate cream while Moses was amber and African bronze, Tara could see the resemblance in the shape of their heads and the set of jaw and brow. They had the same wide-spaced eyes, the same noses and lips, and to her they were the two most beautiful beings in her existence.

Tara kept the suite at the Dorchester, for she knew that Shasa would contact her there and that any invitations from South Africa House or correspondence from the university would be addressed to her at the hotel. But she moved into Moses' flat off the Bayswater Road.

The flat belonged to the Ethiopian emperor, and was kept for the use of his diplomatic staff. However, Haile Selassie had placed it at Moses Gama's disposal for as 10ng as he needed it. It was a large rambling apartment, with dark rooms and a strange mixture of furnishings, well-worn Western sofas and easy chairs, with handwoven woollen Ethiopian rugs and wall hangings. The ornaments were African artefacts, carved ebony statuettes, crossed two-handed broadswords, bronze Somali shields and Coptic Christian crosses and icons, in native silver studded with semi-precious stones.

They slept on the floor, in the African manner, on thin hard mattresses filled with coir. Moses even used a small wooden head stool as a pillow, though Tara could not accustom herself to it. Benjamin slept with Miriam in the bedroom at the end of the passage.

Love-making was as naturally part of Moses Gama's life as eating or drinking or sleeping, and yet his skills and his consideration of her needs were an endless source of wonder and delight to her. She wanted more than anything else in life to bear him another child.

She tried consciously to open the mouth of her womb, willing it to expand like a flower bud to accept his seed, and long after he had fallen asleep she lay with her thighs tightly crossed and her knees raised so as not to spill a precious drop, imagining herself a sponge for him, or a bellows to draw his substance up deeply into herselfi Yet the times they were alone were far too short for Tara, and it irked her that the flat seemed always filled with strangers. She hated to share Moses with them, wanting him all for herself. He understood this, and when she had been churlish and sulky in the presence of others, he reminded her sternly.

'I am the struggle, Tara. Nothing, nobody, comes ahead of that.

Not even my own longings, not my life itself can come before my duty to the cause. If you take me, then you make that same sacrifice." To moderate the severity of his words, he lifted her in his arms and carried her to the mattress, and made love to her until she sobbed and rolled her head from side to side, delirious with the power and wonder of it, and then he told her, 'You have as much of me as any person will ever have. Accept that without complaint, and be grateful for it, for we never know when one of us may be called to sacrifice it all. Live now, Tara, live for our love this day, for there may never be a tomorrow." 'Forgive me, Moses,' she whispered. 'I have been so small and petty. I will not disappoint you again." So she put aside her jealousy and joined in his work, and looked upon the men and women who came to the Bayswater Road no longer as strangers and interlopers, but as comrades - part of their life and the struggle. Then she could realize what a fascinating slice of humanity they represented. Most of them were Africans, tall Kikuyus from Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta's young men, the warriors of Mau Mau, once even the little man with a great heart and brain, Hastings Banda, spent an evening with them. There were Shonas and Shangaans from Rhodesia, Xhosas and Zulus from her own South Africa and even a few of Moses' own tribe from Ovamboland.

They had formed a fledgling freedom association which they called South West African Peoples' Organization, and they wanted Moses' patronage, which he gave them willingly. Tara found it difficult to think of Moses as belonging to a single tribe, all of Africa was his fief, he spoke most of their separate languages and understood their specific fears and aspirations. If ever the word 'African' described one man, that man was Moses Gama.

There were others who came to the flat in Bayswater Road; Hindus and Moslems and men of the north lands, from Ethiopia and Sudan and Mediterranean Africa, some of them still living under colonial tyranny, others newly liberated and eager to help their suffering fellow Africans.

There were white men and women also, speaking in the accents of Liverpool and the north country, of the coal mines or the mills; and other white men and women whose English was halting and laboured, but whose hearts were fierce, patriots from Poland and East Germany and the Soviet bloc, some from Mother Russia herselfi All had a common love of freedom and hatred of the oppressor.

From the unlimited letter of credit that Shasa had given her to his London bank, Tara filled the flat with good food and liquor, taking a vindictive pleasure in paying out Shasa's money for the very best fillet steak and choice lamb, for turbot and sole and lobster.

For the first time she derived pleasure from ordering Burgundies and clarets of the best vintages and noblest estates, about which she had listened to Shasa lecturing his dinner guests so pompously. She laughed delightedly when she watched the enemies of all Shasa stood for, the ones called the 'bringers of darkness', quaffing his wines as though they were Coca-Cola.

She had not prepared food fol- a long time, the chef at Weltevreden would have been mortified if she had attempted to do so, and now she enjoyed working with some of the other women in the kitchen.

The Hindu wives showed her how to make wondrous curries and the Arab women prepared lamb in a dozen exciting ways, so that every meal was a feast and an adventure. From the impecunious students to the heads of revolutionary governments and the leaders in exile of captive nations, they came to talk and plan, to eat and drink and exchange ideas even more heady than the wines that Tara poured for them.

Always Moses Gama was at the centre of the excitement. His vast brooding presence seemed to inspire and direct their energies, and Tara realized that he was making bonds, forging loyalties and friendships to carry the struggle onwards to the next plateau. She was immensely proud of him, and humbly proud of her own small part in the grand enterprise. For the very first time in her life she felt useful and important. Until the present time she had spent her life in trivial and meaningless activity. By making her a part of his work, Moses had made her a whole person at last. Impossible as it seemed, during those enchanted months her love for him was multiplied a hundredfold.

Sometimes they travelled together, when Moses was invited to speak to some important group, or to meet representatives of a foreign power.

They went to Sheffield and Oxford to address elements from opposite ends of the political spectrum, the British Communist Party and the association of Conservative students. One weekend they flew to Paris to meet with officials from the French directorate of foreign affairs and a month later they even went to Moscow together. Tara travelled on her British passport and spent the days sightseeing with her Russian Intourist guide while Moses was closeted in secret talks in the offices of the fourth directorate overlooking the Gorky Prospekt.

When they returned to London, Moses and some of his exiled fellow South Africans organized a protest rally in Trafalgar Square directly opposite the imposing edifice of South Africa House, with its frieze of animal head sculptures and colonnaded front entrance.

Tara could not join the demonstration, tFor Moses warned her that they would be photographed with telescopic lenses from the building, and forbade her to expose herself to the racist agents. She was far too valuable to the cause. Instead she struck upon a delightfully ironic twist, and telephoned the high commissioner. He invited her to lunch again. She watched from his own office, sitting in one of his easy chairs in the magnificent stinkwood-panelled room, while below her in the square Moses stood beneath a banner 'Apartheid is a crime against Humanity' and made a speech to five hundred demonstrators. Her only regret was that the wind and the traffic prevented her hearing his words. He repeated them to her that evening as they lay together on the hard mattress on the floor of their bedroom, and she thrilled to every single world.

One lovely English spring morning they walked arm in arm through Hyde Park, and Benjamin threw crumbs to the ducks in the Serpentine.

They watched the riders in Rotten Row, and admired the show of spring blooms in the gardens as they passed them on their way up to Speakers' Corner.

On the lawns the holiday crowds were taking advantage of the unseasonable sunshine, and many of the men were shirtless while the girls had pulled their skirts high on their thighs as they lolled on the grass. The lovers were entwined shamelessly, and Moses frowned.

Public displays of this kind offended his African morality.

As they arrived at Speakers' Corner, they passed the militant homosexuals and Irish Republicans on their upturned milk crates and went to join the group of black speakers. Moses was instantly recognized, he had become a well-known figure in these circles, and half a dozen men and women hurried to meet him, all of them were coloured South African expatriates, and all of them were eager to give him the news.

'They have acquitted them --' 'They have set them all free --' 'Nokwe, Makgatho, Nelson Mandela - they are all free!" 'Judge Rumpff found every one of them not guilty of treason --' Moses Gama stopped dead in his tracks and glowered at them as they surrounded him, dancing joyfully, and laughing in the pale English sunlight, these sons and daughters of Africa.

'I do not believe it,' Moses snarled angrily, and somebody shoved a crumpled copy of the Observer at him. 'Here! Read it! It's true." Moses snatched the newspaper from him. He read swiftly, scanning the front-page article. His face was set and bleak, and then abruptly he thrust the paper into his pocket and shouldered his way out of the group. He strode away down the tarmac pathway, a tall brooding figure and Tara had to run with Benjamin to catch up with him.

'Moses, wait for us." He did not even glance at her, but his fury was evident in the set of his shoulders and the fixed snarl on his lips.

'What is it, Moses, what has made you so angry? We should rejoice that our friends are free. Please speak to me, Moses." 'Don't you understand?" he demanded. 'Are you so witless that you do not see what has happened?" 'I don't - I'm sorry --' 'They have come out of this with enormous prestige, especially Mandela. I had thought that he would spend the rest of his life in prison, or better still, that they would have dropped him through the trap of the gallows." 'Moses!" Tara was shocked. 'How can you speak like that? Nelson Mandela is your comrade." 'Nelson Mandela is my rival to the death,' he told her flatly. 'There can only be one ruler in South Africa, either him or me." 'I did not understand." 'You understand very little, woman. It is not necessary that you should. All you must learn to do is obey me." She annoyed and irritated him with her perpetual moods and jealousies. He found it more difficult each day to accept her cloying adoration. Her soft pale flesh had begun to revolt him and each time it took more of an effort to feign passion. He longed for the day that he could be rid of her - but that day was not yet.

'I am sorry, Moses, if I have been stupid and made you angry." They walked on in silence, but when they came back to the Serpentine, Tara asked diffidently, 'What will you do now?" 'I have to lay claim to my rightful place as the leader of the people.

I cannot allow Mandela to have a clear field." 'What will you do?" she repeated.

'I must go back - back to South Africa." 'Oh, no!" she gasped. 'You cannot do that. It is too dangerous, Moses. They will seize you the minute you set foot on South African soil." 'No,' he shook his head. 'Not if I have your help. I will remain underground, but I will need you." 'Of course. Whatever you want - but, my darling, what will you hope to achieve by taking such a dreadful risk?" With an effort he put aside his anger, and looked down at her.

'Do you remember where we first met, the first time we spoke to each other?" 'In the corridors of the houses of parliament,' she answered promptly. 'I will never forget." He nodded. 'You asked me what I was doing there, and I replied that I would tell you one day. This is the day." He spoke for another hour, softly, persuasively, and as she listened her emotions rose and fell, alternating between a fierce joy and a pervading dread.

'Will you help me?" he asked at the end.

'Oh, I am so afraid for you." 'Will you do it?" 'There is nothing I can deny you,' she whispered. 'Nothing." A week later Tara telephoned Centaine at Rhodes Hill and was surprised by the clarity of the connection. She spoke to each of the children in turn. Sean was monosyllabic and seemed relieved to surrender the telephone to Garry, who was solemn and pedantic, in his first year at business school. It was like talking to a little old man, and Garry's single topic of original news was the fact that his father had at last allowed him to start work part-time, as an office boy at Courtney Mining and Finance. 'Pater is paying me two pounds ten shillings a day,' he announced proudly. 'And soon I an to have my own office with my name on the door." When his turn came to speak to her, Michael read her a poem o his own, about the sea and the gulls. It was really very good, so he enthusiasm was genuine. 'I love you so much,' he whispered. 'Pleas come home soon." Isabella was petulant. 'What present are you going to brin me?" she demanded. 'Daddy bought me a gold locket with a real diamond --' and Tara was guiltily relieved when her daughter passed the telephone back to Centaine.

'Don't worry about Bella,' Centaine soothed her. 'We've had a little confrontation and mademoiselle's feathers are a wee bit ruffled." 'I want to buy a coming-home present for Shasa,' Tara told her. 'I have found the most gorgeous medieval altar that has been converted into a chest. I thought it would be just perfect for his cabinet office at the House. Won't you measure the length of the wall on the right of his desk, under the Pierneef paintings - I want to be certain it will fit in there." Centaine sounded a little puzzled. It was unusual for Tara to show any interest in antique furniture. 'Of course, I will measure it for you,' she agreed dubiously. 'But remember Shasa has very conservative tastes - I wouldn't choose anything too - ah --' she hesitated delicately, not wanting to denigrate her daughter-in-law's taste, 'too obvious or flamboyant." Tll phone you tomorrow evening." Tara did not acknowledge the advice. 'You can read me the measurements then." Two days later Moses accompanied her when she returned to the antique dealer in Kensington High Street. Together they made meticulous measurements of both the exterior and interior of the altar. It was truly a splendid piece of work. The lid was inlaid with mosaic of semi-precious stones while effigies of the apostles guarded the four corners. They were carved in iyory and rare woods and decorated with gold leaf. The panels depicted scenes of Christ's agony, from the scourging to the crucifixion. Only after careful examination did Moses nod with satisfaction.

'Yes, it will do very well." Tara gave the dealer a bank draft for six thousand pounds.

'Price is Shasa's yardstick of artistic value,' she explained to Moses while they waited for his friends to come and collect the piece. 'At six thousand pounds he won't be able to refuse to have it in his office." The dealer was reluctant to hand the chest over to the three young black men who arrived in an old van in response to Moses' summons.

'It is a very agile piece of craftsmanship,' he protested. 'I would feel a lot happier if you entrusted the packing and shipping to a firm of experts. I can recommend --' 'Please don't worry,' Tara reassured him. 'I accept full responsibility from now on." 'It's such a beautiful thing,' the dealer said. 'I would simply curl up and die if it were even scratched." He wrung his hands piteously as they carried it out and loaded it into the back of the van. A week later Tara flew back to Cape Town.

The day after the crate cleared Customs in Cape Town docks, Tara held a small, but select, surprise party in Shasa's cabinet office to present him with her gift. The prime minister was unable to attend, but three cabinet ministers came and with Blaine and Centaine and a dozen others crowded into Shasa's suite to drink Bollinger champagne and admire the gift.

Tara had removed the rosewood Georgian sofa table that had previously stood against the panelled wall, and replaced it with the chest. Shasa had some idea of what was in store. Centaine had dropped a discreet hint, and of course the charge had appeared on his latest statement from Lloyds Bank.

'Six thousand pounds!" Shasa had been appalled. 'That's the price of a new Rolls." What on earth was the damned woman thinking of?

It was ridiculous buying him extravagant gifts for which he paid himself; knowing Tara's tastes, he dreaded his first view of it.

It was covered by a Venetian lace cloth when Shasa entered his office, and he eyed it apprehensively as Tara said a few pretty words about how much she owed him, what a fine and generous husband and what a good father he was to her children.

Ceremoniously Tara lifted the lace cloth off the chest and there was an involuntary gasp of admiration from everyone in the room.

The ivory figurines had mellowed to a soft buttery yellow and the gold leaf had the royal patina of age upon it. They crowded closer to examine it, and Shasa felt his unreasonable antipathy towards the gift cool swiftly. He would never have guessed that Tara could show such taste. Instead of the garish monstrosity he had expected, this was a truly great work of art, and if his instinct was correct, which it almost always was, it was also a first-class investment.

'I do hope you like it?" Tara asked him with unusual timidity.

'It's magnificent,' he told her heartily.

'You don't think it should be under the window?" 'I like it very well just where you put it,' he answered her, and then dropped his voice so nobody else could overhear. 'Sometimes you surprise me, my dear. I'm truly very touched by your thoughtfulness." 'You too were kind and thoughtful to let me go to London,' sl replied.

'I could skip the meeting this afternoon and get home early th evening,' he suggested, glancing down at her bosom.

'Oh, I wouldn't want you to do that,' she answered quickly, su prised by her own physical revulsion at the idea. 'I-am certain to t exhausted by this afternoon. It's such a strain --' 'So our bargain still stands - to the letter?" he asked.

'I think that it is wiser that way,' she told him. 'Don't you?" Moses flew from London directly to Delhi, and had a series c friendly meetings with Indira Gandhi, the president of the India Congress Party. She gave Moses the warmest encouragement an, promises of help and recognition.

At Bombay he went on board a Liberian-registered tramp steame with a Polish captain. Moses signed on as a deckhand for the voyag, to Loureno Marques in Portuguese Mozambique. The tramp caller in at Victoria in the Seychelles Islands to discharge a cargo of rict and then sailed direct for Africa.

In the harbour of Lourengo Marques Moses said goodbye to th jovial Polish skipper and slipped ashore in the company of fiv members of the crew who were bound for the notorious red-lighl area of the seaport. His contact was waiting for him in a dingy nighl club. The man was a senior member of the underground freedom organization which was just beginning its armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule.

They ate the huge juicy Mozambique prawns for which the club was famous, and drank the tart green wine of Portugal while they discussed the advancement of the struggle and promised each other the support and assistance of comrades.

When they had eaten, the agent nodded to one of the bar girls and she came to the table and after a few minutes of arch conversation took Moses' hand and led him through the rear door of the bar to her room at the end of the yard.

The agent joined them there after a few minutes and while the girl kept watch at the door, to warn them of a surprise raid by the colonial police, the man handed Moses the travel documents he had prepared for him, a small bundle of second-hand clothing, and sufficient escudos to see him across the border and as far as the Witwatersrand gold-mines.

The next afternoon Moses joined a group of a hundred or more labourers at the railway station. Mozambique was an important source of labour for the gold-mines, and the wages earned by her citizens made a large contribution to the economy. Authentically dressed and in possession of genuine papers, Moses was indistinguishable from any other in the shuffling line of workers and he went aboard the third-class railway coach without even a glance from the uninterested white Portuguese official.

They left the coast in the late afternoon, climbed out of the muggy tropical heat and entered the hilly forests of the lowveld to approach the border post of Komatipoort early the following morning. As the coach rumbled slowly over the low iron bridge, it seemed to Moses that they were crossing not a river but a great ocean. He was filled with a strange blend of dismay and joy, of dread and anticipation.

He was coming home - and yet home was a prison for him and his people.

It was strange to hear Afrikaans spoken again, guttural and harsh, but made even more ugly to Moses' ear because it was the language of oppression. The officials here were not the indolent and slovenly Portuguese. Dauntingly brisk and efficient, they examined his papers with sharp eyes, and questioned him brusquely in that hated language. However, Moses had already masked himself in the protective veneer of the African. His face was expressionless and his eyes blank, just a black face among millions of black faces, and they passed him through.

Swart Hendrick did not recognize him when he slouched into the general dealer's store in Drake's Farm township. He was dressed in ill-fitting hand-me-downs and wore an old golfing cap pulled down over his eyes. Only when he straightened up to his full height and lifted the cap did Swart Hendrick start and exclaim in amazement, then seized his arm and, casting nervous glances over his shoulder, hustled his brother through into the little cubicle at the back of the store that he used as an office.

'They are watching this place,' he whispered agitatedly 'Is your head full of fever, that you walk in here in plain daylight?" Only when they were safely in the locked office and he had recovered from the shock, did he embrace Moses. 'A part of my heart has been missing, but isnow restored." He shouted over the rhino board partition wall of his office, 'Raleigh, come here immediately, boy!" and his son came to peer in astonishment at his famous uncle and then kneel before him, lift one of Moses's feet and place it on his own head in the obeisance to a great chief. Smiling, Moses lifted him to his feet and embraced him, questioned him about his schooling and his studies and then let him respond to Swart Hendrick's order.

'Go to your mother. Tell her to prepare food. A whole chicken and plenty of maize meal porridge, and a gallon of strong tea will plenty of sugar. Your uncle is hungry." They stayed locked in Swart Hendrick's office until late that night for there was much to discuss. Swart Hendrick made a full report o all their business enterprises, the state of the secret mineworkers union, the organization of their Buffaloes, and then gave him all th news of their family and close friends.

When at last they left the office, and crossed to Swart Hendrick', house, he took Moses' arm and led him to the small bedroom whicl was always ready for his visits, and as he Opened the door, Victoria rose from the low bed on which she had been sitting patiently.

She came to him and, as the child had done, prostrated herself in fronl of him and placed his foot upon her head.

'You are my sun,' she whispered. 'Since you went away I have been in darkness." 'I sent one of the Buffaloes to fetch her from the hospital,' Swart Hendrick explained.

'You did the right thing." Moses stooped and lifted the Zulu girl to her feet, and she hung her head shyly.

"We will talk again in the morning." Swart Hendrick closed the door quietly and Moses placed his forefinger under Vicky's chin and lifted it so he could look at her face.

She was even more beautiful than he remembered, an African madonna with a face like a dark moon. For a moment he thought of the woman he had left in London, and his senses cringed as he compared her humid white flesh, soft as putty, to this girl's glossy hide, firm and cool as polished onyx. His nostrils flared to her spicy African musk, so different from the other woman's thin sour odour which she tried to disguise with flowery perfumes. When Vicky looked up at him and smiled, the whites of her eyes and her perfect 'teeth were luminous and ivory bright in her lovely dark face.

When they had purged their airst passion, they lay under the thick kaross of hyrax skins and talked the rest of the night away.

He listened to her boast of her exploits in his absence. She had marched to Pretoria with the other women to deliver a petition to the new minister of Bantu affairs, who had replaced Dr Verwoerd when he had become prime minister.

The march had never reached the Union Buildings. The police had intercepted it, and arrested the organizers. She had spent three days and nights in prison, and she related her humiliations with such humour, giggling as she repeated the Alice in Wonderland exchanges between the magistrate and herself, that Moses chuckled with her. In the end. the charges of attending an unlawful assembly and ' ' incitement to public violence had been dropped, and Vicky and the other women had been released.

'But I am a battle-trained warrior now,' she laughed. 'I have bloodied my spear, like the Zulus of old King Chaka." 'I am proud of you,' he told her. 'But the true battle is only just beginning --' and he told her a small part of what lay ahead for all of them, and in the yellow flickering light of the lantern, she watched his face avidly and her eyes shone.

Before they at last drifted off into sleep, the false dawn was framing the single small window, and Vicky murmured with her lips against his naked chest, 'How long will you stay this time, my lord?" 'Not as long as I wish I could." He stayed on three more days at Drake's Farm, and Vicky was with him every night.

Many visitors came when they heard that Moses Gama had returned and most of them were the fierce younger men of Urnkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, the warriors eager for action.

Some of the older men of the Congress who came to talk with Moses left disturbed by what they had heard and even Swart Hendrick was worried. His brother had changed. He could not readily tell in what way he had changed, but the difference was there. Moses was more impatient and restless. The mundane details of business, and the day-to-day running of the Buffaloes and the trade union committees no longer seemed to hold his attention.

'It is as though he has fastened his eyes upon a distant hilltop, and cannot see anything in between. He speaks only of strange men in distant lands and what do they think or say that concerns us here?" he grumbled to the twins' mother, his only real confidante. 'He is scornful of the money we have made and saved, and says that after the revolution money will have no value. That everything will belong to the people --' Swart Hendrick broke off to think for a moment of his stores and his shebeens, the bakeries and herds of cattle in the reservations which belonged to him, the money in the post office savings book and in the white man's bank, and the cash that he kept hidden in many secret places - some of it even buried under the floor upon which he now sat and drank the good beer brewed by his favourite wife. 'I am not sure that I wish all things to belong to the people,' he muttered thoughtfully.

'The people are cattle, lazy and stupid, what have they done to deserve the things for which I have worked so-long and hard?" 'Perhaps it is a fever. Perhaps your great brother has a worm in his bowel,' his favourite wife suggested. 'I will make a muti for him that will clear his guts and his skull." Swart Hendrick shook his head sadly. He was not at all certain that even one of his wife's devastating laxatives would drive the dark schemes from his brother's head.

!iiz Of course, long ago he had talked and dreamed strange and wi things with his brother. Moses had been young and that was the w of young men, but now the frosts of wisdom were upon Hendrick head, and his belly was round and full, and he had many sons or herds of cattle. He had not truly thought about it before, but he was a man contented. True he was not free - but then he was not su what free really meant. He loved and feared his brother very muc] but he was not sure that he wanted to risk all he had for a word uncertain meaning.

'We must burn down and destroy the whole monstrous system his brother said, but it occurred to Swart Hendrick that in tl: burning down might be included his stores and bakeries.

'We must goad the land, we must make it wild and ungovernabh like a great stallion, so that the oppressor is hurled to earth from il back,' his brother said, but Hendrick had an uncomfortable irnag of himself and his cosy existence taking that same painful toss.

'The rage of the people is a beautiful and sacred thing, we must le it run free,' Moses said, and Hendrick thought of the people runnin freely through his well-stocked premises. He had also witnessed th rage of the people in Durban during the Zulu rioting, and the vet first concern of every man had been to provide himself with a the suit of clothing and a radio from the looted Indian stores.

'The police are the enemies of the people, they too will perish i the flames,' Moses said, and Hendrick remembered that when the faction fighting between the Zulus and the Xhosas had swept throughout Drake's Farm the previous November, it was the police who hat separated them and prevented many more than forty dead. They hoc also saved his stores from being looted in the uproar. Now Hendrick wondered just who would prevent them killing each other after the police had been burned, and just what day-to-day existence would be like in the townships when each man made his own laws.

Iffowever, Swart Hendrick was ashamed of his treacherous reliet when three days later Moses left Drake's Farm, and moved to the house at Rivonia. Indeed it was Swart Hendrick who had gently pointed out to his brother the danger of remaining when almost everybody in the township knew he had returned, and all day long there was a crowd of idlers in the street hoping for a glimpse of Moses Gama, the beloved leader. It was only a matter of time before the police heard about it through their informers.