African Sky (20 page)

‘Scotch. Plenty of ice and water, please.'

‘Let's sit outside. The sun's glorious today.'

‘Lovely morning,' he agreed. ‘Believe me, Pip, I know how hard it is. I've been through the loss of people close to me.'

She handed him his drink and led him onto a sunny flagstoned verandah, which looked out over a neatly manicured garden.

Bryant looked around. ‘Nice place. Lots of antiques inside, I noticed.'

‘All his stuff. It's like living in a museum. Too many ghosts of long-dead Lovejoys. Too much England, not enough Rhodesia. Not enough . . . reality.'

He sipped his Scotch. It was nice taking a drink with someone else for a change, even if the circumstances were rotten. ‘People have different ways of coping with death, Pip. I reckon I've seen most of them.'

‘So, you're not surprised that I'm not wearing black or gone into purdah?'

He shook his head. ‘Do you want to talk about him?'

‘No.'

‘OK.'

‘Well, maybe later.'

‘Why am I here, Pip? Don't you have . . . friends?'

‘I told you before that I'm fairly new to this side of the country. Being stuck out here on a farm doesn't improve your social life much. You do meet a lot of other lonely farm wives, though.'

Lonely? There was more to it than that, he thought. He remembered the way she'd clammed up when he'd asked her about her husband in the car. ‘Friends usually try to say what they think you want to hear.'

‘Aha,' she said. She leaned back in her chair and took a long sip of her drink. ‘I hoped you were as smart as I thought you were. For a while there you had me thinking you were just another fly-boy trying
to break the squadron record for how many women you could bed per country.'

He frowned. He'd seen people drink too much when someone died. It usually ended in tears or a fight, frequently both.

‘Sorry,' she said. She put a hand to her eyes to shield them from the sun. ‘That must have been the gin talking.'

‘I can listen, if you want to talk,' he said.

‘I think that might be the answer to your question.'

Now he was confused, losing track, and he hadn't even finished his first drink. Then he saw the pleading in her eyes, the innocence belied by the tough talk. The same look he'd seen from Flick. ‘Oh, of course. That's why I'm here, to listen.'

‘Maybe. You're not a friend, Paul. Don't take that the wrong way.'

He put his hands up in a gesture of peace. ‘No offence taken.'

‘You've seen things, done things, I know.'

He shrugged.

‘You don't pretend, Paul, do you? Not when it comes to life and death.'

‘No,' he said instantly. ‘Never. The truth hurts, as they say, but you can't escape that kind of pain.'

‘Look at my eyes.'

‘What about them?' he asked. He'd been tempted to say, ‘very pretty', but not even he would flirt with a woman in mourning.

‘Not red-rimmed? Not puffy? Not tear-filled?'

‘Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it takes a very long while.'

‘It's not going to happen.'

‘Why?' he asked.

‘I'm not drinking to drown my sorrows, Paul. This is a celebration.'

He let the word hang there. He'd never celebrated a death. No, that wasn't true. His crew had got plastered during their second tour after Nigel, one of the gunners, had downed his first enemy night-fighter, not long before he was decapitated by a cannon shell. ‘What are you celebrating?'

‘Freedom.'

He looked hard into her eyes and saw no trace of irony. Her mouth
was set, awaiting his reaction, but her eyes were smiling. They were, indeed, free. ‘Did he hurt you, Pip?'

She nodded.

‘People knew him, here, in Bulawayo? He was a local boy?'

She nodded again.

‘So they're going to be crying for him, singing his praises. Expecting you to be the grieving widow.'

‘He's everywhere, all around me, Paul. The boys at the police camp played rugby with him, his mother pops around to visit at the worst possible times, even that bloody Susannah Beattie in your parachute hangar knew him.'

‘No ringing endorsement there,' he smiled. ‘But you knew the real Charlie, right?'

‘Yes. The real Charlie.'

‘People don't become heroes, don't become good people, simply by donning a uniform and going off to war, Pip. But a lot of civvies, a lot of family and friends don't see it that way.'

She returned his stare. ‘That's the hardest thing,' she said, her voice a little croaky now.

He thought he saw her eyes soften, moisten. Not from a sudden remorse for the loss of her husband, or guilt at her feelings. ‘You're worried that now you'll be denied justice, that no one will know what he was really like.'

‘Yes.'

‘I've seen cowards, thieves, bullies, thoroughgoing bastards each and every one of them, saved by the bullet.'

‘By death?' she asked.

‘Blokes who should have been charged and sent to the cells, who probably would have ended up there, are now mourned as the ‘valiant dead' because a piece of shrapnel or a night-fighter's tracer carved them up before they got their just desserts.'

‘Better for their families, that they think their sons and husbands died heroes, than have them returned in handcuffs, I suppose,' she said, turning her gaze to the garden.

‘Do you want to talk about him? About what he was really like?'

She turned back and took a deep breath. ‘I'm sorry, Paul. I've no reason to lump this all on you. I don't even know why I left the message for you to come here.'

‘Yes you do. You know, don't you?'

‘What?'

‘That it can help. Talking about what you went through.'

‘That's rich coming from Mr Strong Silent Type.'

‘You were investigating a murder. I didn't think my life story was part of that.'

‘He hit me.'

He drained his drink but said nothing.

‘Let me get you another,' she said.

He put his hand over the tumbler. ‘No, thanks. I'm fine for the moment.' He stayed silent, waiting for her to resume.

‘We were very much in love, you understand, at university,' she said. ‘I was so blinded by that love, I gave up my studies – my future.'

‘He never hurt you then?'

‘Never. Of course we weren't living together. We weren't . . .'

‘But he was a different person when he drank?' Bryant asked. He knew the type. He had an uncle like that, and a bruised aunty who was proof of the man's darker side.

‘Yes. Whenever I saw him drinking it was at a university party, or around friends. He was funny, the life of the party. But as soon as we were married – on our honeymoon, in fact – I saw the other side of him. I saw him after he'd had a few too many, before he passed out.'

‘He hit you on your honeymoon?'

Pip looked out over the garden. She nodded.

‘Bastard,' he muttered, shaking his head.

‘Yes, he was. On the first night at the Falls Hotel we flattened two bottles of champagne over dinner, and he'd already had a few beers. He had a couple of brandies afterwards. When we went to bed, he was impotent. He became angry, blamed me.'

He looked down at his shoes.

‘He hit me, several times. After that, whether it was the exercise, or a rush of some sort, he . . . well, he was ready again. I didn't want him to touch me by that stage, so he forced me. From then on that was pretty much the script for our lovemaking, if you could call it that.'

‘Why did you stay with him?' he asked.

‘God, I've asked myself the same thing over and over again. I don't know. I was close to reporting him on a couple of occasions, but I've since learned that the easiest thing for policemen to do in these situations is to turn a blind eye. I suppose I kept hoping that he'd come around, that he'd go back to being the person I married. I cried with joy the day he went away to the army, and in pain the night before.'

‘Is it part of the reason why you volunteered for the police?'

‘Despite your crude Australian way of putting things, you're quite perceptive, you know.'

‘Were you going to arrest him when he came home?' he asked, trying not to sound flippant.

‘Right again. A small fantasy of mine, to see him in court, before a judge. However, I've also learned as a police volunteer that first-time offenders are often given lenient sentences – an admonishment or a fine. If I'd reported him – or even arrested him myself – and he hadn't gone to gaol, I'm sure he would have killed me.'

‘Really?'

‘He held a gun to my head once, when he was very drunk. He made me do things . . . But I don't want to talk about that.'

‘I understand.'

‘Do you, Paul?'

‘The evil that men are capable of? Yes. The way some men can't control their emotions, and how drink brings out the very worst in them? Yes. Do I understand that power and the abuse of it can be part of sex? Yes.'

‘Have you ever hit a woman, Paul?'

‘No.'

‘I believe you. Did you hurt Catherine De Beers the other night, at her ranch, when she crept into your room?'

‘I wouldn't say no to that second drink, Pip. A beer would be fine, though. I don't need hard spirits right now. And, for the record, no, I did not hit Catherine De Beers the other night, or on any other occasion.'

She didn't move from the garden table. Instead, she looked hard at him, her gaze boring into him, searching for his soul. ‘I didn't ask you if you hit her. I asked you if you hurt her.'

‘No,
I
did not hurt her.'

Pip rose and walked back inside, taking his empty glass with her. He looked up into the cloudless African sky. Such perfect weather for flying. Such a clear, uncluttered, perfect blue. If only things on earth were as transparent, as simple, as liberating as flying.

‘What are you thinking now?' she asked as she sat a dewy bottle of Lion Lager down in front of him.

‘Thanks,' he said. ‘Oddly enough, I was thinking about flying. Something I haven't done for a long time. You asked about Catherine.'

‘Yes.'

‘It's a longish story.'

‘I've told you mine and you, as I recall, were going to tell me yours before the Widow De Beers interrupted us yesterday.'

‘A promise is a promise. Am I talking to Pip Lovejoy here, or Constable Lovejoy?'

‘We're one and the same.'

‘Fair enough,' he shrugged. He raised the bottle to his lips and took a long swig. ‘Hard to imagine it all only started a couple of weeks ago.'

Pip had fetched herself a glass of iced water. ‘I got the impression you two had, what's the word,
known
each other for longer?'

‘No. Not long at all. It was just after she'd crashed her plane, on the airstrip at Isilwane. She drove down to Bulawayo and came to an officers' mess dance at Kumalo. I only went because it was expected of me, as adjutant.'

‘She couldn't keep doing her aerial displays with Felicity, after her crash?'

‘That's right. She cornered me at the dance and asked me to let her fly a Harvard, and for Felicity to jump out of it. I said absolutely no
way on earth was I going to sign over a valuable trainer for her to joyride in. She was sulky, but she stayed with me for an hour or so. We danced, and we had a couple of drinks together, and, well, one thing led to another.' He looked at the floor.

Catherine had worn the blue dress, the silky one that slid over every curve the way the ocean caresses a golden sandy shore. When another pilot had twirled her on the floor, in a jitterbug, nearly every man at the dance had seen tantalising glimpses of bare flesh above the tops of her nylon stockings. She'd danced and flirted with several other men, he didn't recall them all, but she'd come to him for the last dance of the evening, to ‘Moonlight Serenade'.

‘I'd do anything to fly in one of your aircraft, Paul,' she whispered in his ears as he guided her across the concrete floor. The small of her back was damp with perspiration.

‘I can't change the rules, Catherine,' he replied.

‘I said, “anything”, Paul.'

He saw the look in her eyes and knew she meant it. He felt his body start to stir just as the dance ended and he shepherded her to a quieter corner of the hangar, behind the parked aircraft, grabbing fresh drinks on the way from a steward carrying a tray.

‘What would it take, Paul?' she pressed, sipping her brandy and dry, her free hand brushing a strand of hair from his forehead.

‘An act of parliament that allowed women to fly, and your enlistment in the air force, I suppose.'

She said, straight-faced: ‘I can't wait. You know there are women flying military aircraft in England and the United States. There was a picture of Pauline Gower, the commandant of the British Air Transport Auxiliary, in last Friday's
Chronicle.
The ATA fly bombers and fighters from factories to operational squadrons.'

‘True, but we don't have a branch of the ATA here in Rhodesia, and we don't have any aircraft factories.'

‘Flying excites me,' she said, moving closer to him.

He felt the touch of thigh against his leg. He looked around to make sure no one else saw. ‘I used to like it too,' he said.

‘It excites me a great deal. I do what I have to in order to fulfil my pleasures, Paul.'

‘How's your drink?' he asked.

‘Finished.' She crouched and placed her empty glass on the floor. She looked up, her dark eyes fixed on him. As she stood she ran a fingernail along the crease in the front of one leg of his uniform trousers. Her finger stopped at the belt of his tunic. The arc lights in the hangar roof were all on, illuminating the drunken partygoers, some of whom were in mid-kiss. ‘What are you going to do now?' she asked.