Men of Men Page 31

  Zouga chuckled, for the first time in weeks, and in an unusual display of affection he put one arm around Jan Cheroot’s shoulders.

  ‘Now that you have something to hate again – just think how happy it will make you,’ he said.

  ‘You have been drinking,’ Zouga said, and Ralph tossed his hat into the corner and agreed.

  ‘Yes, I have had a beer or two.’ He went to the black iron stove and warmed his hands. ‘I would have had more – if I had had the money.’

  ‘I have been waiting for you,’ Zouga went on, and Ralph turned back to him truculently.

  ‘I give you every hour of my day. Papa – let me have a little time at the end of it.’

  ‘I have something of great importance to tell you,’ Zouga nodded to the deal chair facing him. ‘Sit down, Ralph.’

  Zouga rubbed his eyes with forefinger and thumb as he collected his words. He had tried so often in the last days to find an easy way to tell Ralph that it was over, that they were destitute, that all that toil and heartbreak had been in vain – but there was no easy way. There were only the stark hard words of reality.

  He dropped his hand, and looked at his son, and then slowly and carefully he told him, and when he had finished he waited for Ralph to speak. Ralph had not moved during the long recital, and now he stared at Zouga stonily.

  Zouga was forced to speak again. ‘We shall leave in the morning. Jan Cheroot and I have loaded the No. 2 wagon and we shall need all the mules, double team – it’s a long haul.’

  Again he waited, but there was still no reaction.

  ‘You will be wondering where we are going and what we shall do. Well, once we get back to the Cape we still have the Harkness cottage.’

  ‘You gambled it all.’ Ralph spoke at last. ‘Without telling me. You – you, who are always preaching to me about gambling, and honesty.’

  ‘Ralph!’

  ‘It wasn’t yours, it belonged to all of us.’

  ‘You are drunk,’ Zouga said flatly.

  ‘All these years I have listened to your promises. We shall go north, Ralph.’ He mimicked Zouga with a sudden savagery in his tone. ‘It’s for all of us, Ralph. It’s yours to share. There is a land waiting for us, Ralph. It will be yours as well as mine, Ralph.’

  ‘It’s not over – I still have the concession. When we get back to Cape Town—’

  ‘You, not me.’ Ralph’s voice was flat, angry. ‘You go back to Cape Town. Go dream your old man’s dreams. I am sick of them.’

  ‘You dare to use that tone to me?’

  ‘Yes, I dare. And by God, I’ll dare more than that. I’ll dare what you are too weak or afraid to dare—’

  ‘You insolent and stupid puppy!’

  ‘You toothless old dog!’

  Zouga threw himself half across the table, and his right arm lashed out. He caught Ralph open-handed across the face, and the crack of palm on flesh was stunning as a pistol shot.

  Ralph’s head snapped back, and then slowly he brought it upright again. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the last time you will strike me, ever.’ He stood up and strode towards the door, and there he turned. ‘Go dream your dreams – I will go live mine out.’

  ‘Go then,’ said Zouga, and the scar on his cheek was glassy and white as ice. ‘Go and be damned to you.’

  ‘Remember I took nothing with me. Papa, not even your blessing,’ said Ralph, and stepped out into the night.

  Bazo woke instantly at the touch on his cheek, and reached for the assegai at his side, his eyes wide in the faint glow of the ashes. A hand closed on his wrist, holding his spear hand from the weapon, and a voice spoke softly above him.

  ‘Do you remember the road to Matabeleland, O Prince of Kumalo?’

  It took Bazo a moment to gather his wits from where sleep had scattered them.

  ‘I remember every running ford and every green hill, every sweet watering place along the way,’ he whispered back, ‘as clearly as I remember my father’s voice and my mother’s laughter.’

  ‘Roll up your sleeping-mat, Bazo, the Axe, and show me the road,’ said Ralph.

  Diamond Lil did not smile so readily these days, not since the tooth that held the diamond had turned a dingy grey as the root died, and began to ache until Lil wept with the little explosion of agony against the top of her skull. The travelling dentist from the Cape had pulled the tooth and drained the virulent abscess beneath it.

  Relief had been immediate, but it left a black gap in her smile.

  She had put on flesh also, the consequence of good food and those little nips of gin which bolstered her day. Her breasts, always generous, had lost their individual definition and the cleavage that showed above the richly embroidered bodice was no longer a deeply sculptured crevasse but a thin line where abundant flesh packed against flesh.

  The hand that held the bone china teacup was pudgy and dimpled over the knuckles, the rings that adorned each plump little finger had sunk into the flesh, but the diamonds and rubies and emeralds sparkled in a royal show of Lil’s wealth.

  Her hair was still lustrous gold, and crimped into long dangling ringlets with the hot-iron. Her skin was still smooth and rich as Devon cream, except around the eyes where it was just beginning to crack into little spider-webs of lines.

  She sat at the corner of the verandah, on the second floor above the street, where the eaves of the roof were of intricate white wrought-iron mouldings, pretty as Madeira lace. Although there were other double-storeyed buildings in Kimberley these days, not even the offices of the Central Diamond Company across the wide unpaved street boasted such affluent adornment.

  Lil’s chair was high-backed, and magnificently carved in dark red teak by oriental craftsmen, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory and carried across the eastern oceans by the tall ships of the now long departed Dutch East India Company. It had cost her two hundred pounds, but from this throne she could watch every movement on the main thoroughfares that fed into Market Square, could sense the pulse of the diamond city, could check each coming and going, the scurry of a buyer with a good scent in his nostrils, the swagger of a digger who had turned up a bright one. She could watch the front of the four canteens around the square, all of which she now owned, and judge the volume of trade going through their doors.

  Similarly, she could glance to her left, down De Beers Road to the red-brick cottage behind its white picket fence and discreet sign, ‘French Dressmakers. Haute Couture. Six Continental Seamstresses. Specialities for individual tastes.’ Business was always brisk there – from noon to midnight. Her girls seldom lasted the pace for more than six months or so – before taking the coach southward again, exhausted but considerably richer.

  Lil herself worked her old trade only occasionally, perhaps once or twice a week with a favoured ‘regular’, just for old times’ sake, and because it got her blood going and made her sleep better at night. There was too much else that required her constant attention.

  Now she poured fresh tea from the rococo silver pot into the pretty bone china cups, hand-painted with pink roses and golden butterflies.

  ‘How many spoons?’ she asked.

  Ralph sat on the cane-back chair opposite her. He smelled of shaving soap and cheap eau-de-Cologne. His chin shone with a burnish given it by the cut-throat razor, and his shirt was so crisply ironed and starched that it crackled at each movement.

  Lil studied him speculatively over the rim of her tea cup.

  ‘Does the good major know your plans?’ she asked quietly, and Ralph shook his head. Lil thought on that a while and it gave her a ripple of pleasure to have the son of a foundation member of the Kimberley Club sitting on her verandah. Son of one of the Kimberley gentlemen who would not greet her on the street, who had returned her donation towards the new hospital, who had not even replied to her invitation to attend the stone-laying ceremony of her new building – oh, the list of humiliations was too long to recite now.

  ‘Why did you not go to your father?’ she asked instead.


  ‘My father is not a rich man.’ Ralph would not say any more, too loyal to explain that Zouga was destitute, that he would soon leave Kimberley with a cartload of his meagre possessions. He did not want Lil to know that he and his father had turned from each other with harsh words.

  Lil studied his face for a moment, then picked up the handwritten sheet of cheap notepaper from the tea tray and glanced down the list and the figures.

  ‘Nine hundred pounds for oxen?’

  ‘A full span of the biggest and best animals,’ Ralph explained. ‘The road to the Shashi river is sand veld, heavy going. I want to be able to haul a full load, eight thousand pounds weight.’

  ‘Trade goods – fifteen thousand.’ She looked up at him again.

  ‘Guns, powder, brandy, beads and limbo cloth.’

  ‘What type of guns?’

  ‘Tower muskets. Five pounds ten shillings each.’

  Lil shook her head. ‘They have seen the breech-loaders. Your muskets won’t have much pull.’

  ‘I can’t afford breech-loaders, and I wouldn’t know where to find a load.’

  ‘Ralph dearie, I could hire a bunch of Whitechapel hags to run my dressmakers’ shop and I could get them cheap. But I don’t. I pick them young and fresh and pretty. If you think small, your profits are small. Don’t be cheap, Ralph darling, never be cheap.’ She poured a little gin from the silver flask into the empty teacup before she went on. ‘I can get Martini-Henry rifles but they will cost us fifteen hundred more.’ Lil reached across and dipped her pen in the ink-well, then scratched out and re-wrote the figure.

  ‘Brandy?’

  ‘Cape Smoke in twenty-gallon casks.’

  ‘I have heard that Lobengula likes Courvoisier cognac, and his sister Ningi drinks only Piper-Heidsieck champagne.’

  ‘Another five hundred pounds – at least,’ Ralph mourned.

  ‘Three hundred,’ Lil corrected the list. ‘I can get it at wholesale prices. Now, ammunition – ten thousand rounds?’

  ‘I’ll need at least a thousand for my own account, and the rest to trade with the rifles.’

  ‘If Lobengula gives you permission to hunt elephant,’ Lil corrected.

  ‘My grandfather is one of his oldest friends; my Aunty Robyn and her husband have been at Khami River Mission for almost twenty years.’

  ‘Yes, I know that you have friends at court.’ Lil pursed her lips approvingly. ‘But I have heard that the elephant have been shot out across the whole of Matabeleland.’

  ‘The herds have been driven into the fly belt on the Zambezi.’

  ‘You cannot take horses into the fly and hunting elephant on foot in the fly is not work for a white man.’

  ‘My father hunted on foot, and anyway I cannot afford a horse.’

  ‘All right,’ she agreed reluctantly, and made a tick on the sheet.

  They worked on for an hour longer, going down the list item by item – and then starting again at the head and going over it all once more, Lil ticking and scratching with the pen – fining it down by ten pounds here and a hundred there, until at last she tossed the pen onto the tea tray, and then poured a little more gin into her tea cup and sipped it with a genteel flourish, her little finger raised, the spirit slurping softly through the gap in the front of her teeth.

  ‘All right,’ she said again.

  ‘Does that mean you will lend me the money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ He leaned towards her, young and glowing and eager. ‘Lil, I just don’t—’

  ‘Then don’t say anything until you have heard my terms.’ She smiled thinly, without lifting her upper lip. ‘Twenty per cent per annum interest on the loan.’

  ‘Twenty per cent!’ he gasped. ‘In God’s name – that’s usury, Lily!’

  ‘Exactly,’ she told him primly. ‘But let me finish. Twenty per cent interest and half the profits.’

  ‘And half, Lil – that’s not usury, that’s highway robbery.’

  ‘Right again,’ she agreed. ‘At least you are bright enough to recognize it.’

  ‘Can’t we just—’ he started desperately.

  ‘No, we cannot. Those are my terms.’ And Ralph remembered Scipio, his falcon, with her beautiful pouting breast and fierce cold eyes.

  ‘I accept,’ he said, and though she did not smile with her lips, her eyes were suddenly soft and merry.

  ‘Partners,’ she murmured, and placed her plump white hand on his forearm. His muscles were lean and sinewy, the skin brick-coloured from the sun. She stroked it slowly, sensually.

  ‘It only remains to seal our bargain,’ she told Ralph. ‘Come!’ She slid her hand down his arm and twined her fingers into his.

  She led him through the stained-glass doors, and when she drew the velvet corded curtains it was cool and dark in the room. She turned back to him and reached up to unbutton his shirt at the throat. He stood still while she worked her way down slowly to his belt buckle, and then she placed one hand, palm down, upon his naked right breast.

  ‘Ralph,’ her voice was a husky tremor. ‘I want you to do something for me.’

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, and she stood on her tiptoes, placed her lips against his ear and told him in a whisper. She felt him begin to pull back from under her hand.

  ‘Partners?’ she asked, and he hesitated a moment longer and then stooped and picked her up, one arm behind her knees, and carried her to the wide brass bed with the patchwork quilt.

  ‘You will find it less arduous than hunting elephant on foot in the fly,’ she told him, and it was dark enough in the room for her not to worry about the missing tooth.

  She lifted her arms above her head, opened her mouth and chuckled in delicious anticipation.

  ‘The good thing about life, dearie, is that you can have whatever you want, just as long as you are willing to pay the price,’ she told him, still chuckling.

  ‘These are not bullocks,’ Bazo told Ralph. ‘Each one is the son of a snake mated with the ghost of a Mashona dog.’

  They were all strong oxen, big-boned, heavy in the shoulder, with wide straight horns for strength and even yellow teeth – hand-picked by Bazo, who was a Matabele and loved cattle, had lived with the great herds since he was old enough to toddle after the calves.

  However, Bazo was not a trek man. He had never worked an eighteen-foot wagon, with an eight-thousand-pound load aboard. He had never tried to put twenty-four trek oxen into the traces.

  The entire Matabele nation owned only a pair of wheeled vehicles, and those belonged to King Lobengula. To Bazo cattle were a store of wealth, a source of meat and milk – they were not draught animals. The closest that either he or Ralph had ever come to putting a team into the traces was working the little two-wheel gravel carts.

  Ralph had assumed that the oxen he had purchased were trained and amiable, but within minutes of his and Bazo’s first attempt to get them into span, the animals sensed their incompetence and became as spooky and wild as hunted buffalo.

  It took two hours of wild chasing across the bleak grasslands beyond the town limits, two hours of running and cursing and whip-cracking to bring the bullocks together and get the yokes upon their necks. Half of them were badly winded by then and promptly lay down, and the others backed out and turned their great horned heads towards the load, tangling the trek chain and plunging the entire span into chaos.

  The excitement had brought out most of the loafers and idlers from the canteens on Market Square, though they had enough forethought to bring their bottles with them. They formed an appreciative and jovial audience, greeting each new effort by Bazo and Ralph with delighted guffaws and facetious advice.

  Bazo wiped the sweat from his face and chest, and looked broodingly down the dusty road to town.

  ‘Soon Bakela will hear of this and come to see our disgrace,’ he said.

  Ralph had not seen his father since that stormy night, but he had visited Jordan in his tiny office next door to Mr Rhodes in
the magnificent new Central Diamond Company building on De Beers Street.

  Perhaps Zouga Ballantyne had not yet recovered from the shock of being deserted by both his sons, but Jordan said that he had not yet left for Cape Town.

  The thought of his father witnessing this humiliating scene brought dark blood to Ralph’s face, and he fired the long trek whip, at least that was one trick he had learned, and bellowed at the span.

  ‘Nkosana!’ There was a salutation at the level of Ralph’s elbow, the mild tone belied by the mocking title.

  ‘Nkosi’ was a chief, and ‘Nkosana’ was the condescending diminutive – usually reserved for a little white boy, an untried child.

  Ralph turned and glared at the speaker, who went on to explain in the same condescending tone. ‘Only one beast in ten will pull in front.’ He pointed out one of the oxen. ‘That one there is a lead ox. Any man who knows oxen can see that with both his eyes closed.’

  He was a little black gnome, not as tall as Ralph’s shoulder. His face was wrinkled and lined like that of a very old man, his eyes were mere slits in the merry smiling folds – but his cap of woolly hair and his little goatee beard were unmarred by a single strand of grey, and his teeth were even and white, the teeth of a man in his full flowering.

  On his head was the polished black ring of the induna, and about his waist was a kilt of wild cat tails. Over that he wore a threadbare military-type tunic from which all insignia and buttons had been stripped, leaving small punctures in the fabric, some of which had enlarged into rents from which the lining peaked coyly. In the pierced lobe of one ear, he carried an ivory snuff-box, and in the other lobe a snuff spoon of the same material and a toothpick of porcupine quill. The language he used was very close to Matabele, but it preserved the ancient intonation and classic word structures of Zululand.

  So when Ralph asked ‘Zulu?’ the question was redundant, and the little man shot a contemptuous glance at Bazo.

  ‘Pure Zulu, not the treacherous house of Kumalo, of the traitor Mzilikazi who denied a king and whose blood is now so watered by Venda and Tswana and Mashona that they can no longer tell you if an ox grows horns on its head or on its testicles.’