The Angels Weep (70 page)

He obeyed, and it was she who broke the silence. Her voice was
shaky.

‘I hope you had enough forethought to make the bunk wide
enough for two.’

Still he said nothing, but lifted her up in his arms and took
her to see for herself.

‘Do you know, I didn’t realize it could be like
that.’ There was wonder in his voice, as he stared down at
her, leaning on one elbow. ‘It was so good and natural and
easy.’

She traced a fingertip over his bare chest, drawing little
circles around his nipples. ‘I like a hairy chest,’
she purred.

‘I mean – you know, I always felt it was such a
solemn thing to do – after vows and
declarations.’

‘The sound of organ music?’ she giggled. ‘If
you’ll excuse the expression.’

‘That’s another thing,’ he said. ‘The
only time I have ever heard you giggle is when you are doing it,
or when you have just done it.’

‘That’s the only time I ever feel like
giggling,’ she agreed, and giggled again. ‘Do be a
pet and get the wineglasses.’

‘Now what is so funny?’ he demanded from the
companion way.

‘Your bottom is white and baby smooth – no,
don’t cover it.’

While he hunted in the galley cupboard, she called from the
cabin, ‘Do you have a tape of the
“Pastoral”.’

‘I think so.’

‘Put it on, pet.’

‘Why?’

‘I will tell you when you come back to bed.’

She was sitting at the head of the bunk, stark naked in the
lotus position. He put one of the wineglasses in her hand, and
after a short struggle managed to twist his own long legs into
the lotus and sat facing her.

‘So tell me,’ he invited.

‘Don’t be dense, Craig – I mean isn’t
that just a perfect accompaniment?’

Another great storm of music and love swept over them, leaving
them clinging helplessly to each other, and in the aching silence
that followed, she tenderly stroked back the sweat-damp hair that
had fallen into his eyes.

It was too much for him. ‘I love you,’ he blurted
out. ‘Oh God, I love you so!’

Almost roughly she pushed him aside, and sat up.

‘You are a sweet funny boy, and a gentle considerate
lover, but you do have an ungodly talent for saying stupid things
at the wrong time.’

In the morning, she said, ‘You made dinner, so
I’ll make breakfast,’ and went to the galley wearing
only one of his old shirts. She had to roll the sleeves up and
the tails dangled below her knees.

‘You’ve got enough eggs and bacon to open your own
restaurant – were you expecting a visitor?’

‘Not expecting, but hoping,’ he called back from
the shower. ‘Make mine sunny side up!’

After breakfast she helped him install the big glittering
stainless-steel winches on the maindeck. It needed someone to
hold the gusset plates in position while he drilled and bolted
through from the other side.

‘You are very handy, aren’t you?’ she said.
They had to shout at each other, for he was working below deck
while she was perched on the edge of the cockpit.

‘It’s kind of you to notice.’

‘So I suppose you are a first-class armourer.’

‘I’m pretty good.’

‘Do you do what I suspect, fix up guns?’

‘One of my duties.’

‘How can you bring yourself to do it? Guns are so
evil.’

‘That is the typical prejudice of the ignorant and
uninformed layman.’ He turned her own words against her.
‘Firearms are on one level highly functional and useful
tools, and on another level they can be magnificent works of art.
Man has always lavished some of his most creative instincts on
his weapons.’

‘But the way men use them!’ she protested.

‘For instance, they were used to prevent Adolf Hitler
gassing the entire Jewish nation,’ he pointed out.

‘Oh come on, Craig. What are they being used for out
there in the bush at this very moment?’

‘Guns aren’t evil, but some of the men who use
them are. You could say the same about spanners.’

He tightened the bolts on the winch and stuck his head out of
the hatch. ‘That’s enough for today – on the
seventh day He rested – how about a beer?’

Craig had rigged a speaker in the cockpit and they lolled in
the sun and drank beer and listened to the music.

‘Look, Jan, I don’t know a tactful way to put
this, but I don’t want you seeing anyone else, do you know
what I mean?’

‘There you go again.’ Her eyes slanted and
crackled like blue ice. ‘Do shut up, Craig!’

‘I mean after what has happened between us,’ he
ploughed on doggedly. ‘I think we should—’

‘Look, dear boy, you have a choice – make me mad
again, or make me giggle again, what’s it going to
be.’

At lunchtime on Monday, she came up to police headquarters,
and they ate his ham sandwiches while he showed her around the
armoury, and despite herself, she was intrigued by the exhibits
of captured weapons and explosives. He explained the operation of
the various types of mines and how they could be detected and
disarmed.

‘You have to hand it to the terrs,’ Craig
admitted. ‘The swine carry those things in on their backs,
two hundred miles or so through the bush. Just try and pick that
up, and you’ll see what I mean.’

At last he took her through to a small back room. ‘This
is my special project. It’s called T & I, trace and
identify.’ He gestured at the charts that covered the walls
and the big boxes of empty cartridge-cases piled beside the
workbench. ‘After each contact with terrs our armourers
sweep the area and pick up every used cartridge. Firstly they are
checked for fingerprints. So if the terr has a record, then we
can identify him immediately. If he has polished his rounds
before loading or if we have no record of his fingerprints
– we can still trace exactly which rifle fired the
cartridge.’

He led her to the bench, and let her look into the low-power
microscope that stood on it. ‘The firing-pin in each rifle
strikes an indentation into the cap of the cartridge which is as
individual as a fingerprint. We can follow the career of each
active terr in the field. We can make accurate estimates of how
many there are and which are the hot ones.’

‘The hot ones?’ She looked up from the
microscope.

‘Out of every hundred terrs in the field, ninety or so
of them hole up in good cover near a village which can supply
them with food and young girls, and they try to keep out of
danger and contact with our forces. But the hot ones are
different. They are the tigers, the fanatics, the killers, these
charts show their first team.’

He led her to the wall.

‘Look at this one. We call him Primrose because his
firing-pin leaves a mark like a flower. He has been in the bush
for three years, and been in contact ninety-six times. That is
almost once every ten days, he must be made of steel.’

Craig ran his finger down the chart.

‘Here is another, we call him Leopard Paw, you can see
why by the print of his rifle. He is a newcomer, his first time
across the river, but he hit four farms and ran an ambush, then
he went into contact with Roly’s Scouts. Not many of them
survive that, Roly’s boys are incredible. They wiped out
most of the cadre, but Leopard Paw fought like a veteran and got
away with a bunch of his men. Roly’s combat report says he
lost four men to AP mines that Leopard Paw put down as he ran,
and another six in the actual fighting – ten men.
That’s the heaviest casualties the Scouts have ever taken
in any one contact.’ Craig tapped the name on the chart.
‘He is the hot one. We are going to hear more of this
lad.’

Janine shuddered. ‘It’s awful – all this
death and suffering. When will it ever end?’

‘It started when man first stood up on his hind legs,
it’s not going to end tomorrow. Now let’s talk about
dinner tonight, I’ll pick you up at your flat at seven,
okay?’

She telephoned him at the armoury a little before five
o’clock.

‘Craig, don’t come for me this evening.’

‘Why not?’

‘I won’t be there.’

‘What has happened?’

‘Roly is back from the bush.’

Craig did a little work on the foredeck of the yacht, placing
the cleats for the jib sheets, but when it was too dark, he went
below, and wandered around disconsolately. She had left her dark
glasses on the table beside the bunk, and a lipstick on the edge
of the wash-basin. The saloon still smelled of her perfume, and
the two wineglasses stood together in the sink.

‘I think I will get drunk,’ he decided, but he had
no tonic, and gin with plain water tasted awful. He tipped it
into the sink, and put the ‘Pastoral’ on the tape,
but the images it conjured up were too painful. He hit the
‘stop’ button.

He picked Sir Ralph’s leather-bound journal off the
table, and flicked through it. He had read it twice; he should
have gone out to King’s Lynn at the weekend, Bawu would
have been expecting him to come for the next journal in the
series. He started to read it again, and it was an immediate
opiate for the loneliness.

After a while he searched in the drawer of the chart-table and
found the ruled exercise book which he had used for drawing the
layout of the cabins and galley. He tore out the used pages, and
there were still over a hundred unused sheets. He sat down at the
saloon table with an HB pencil from the navigation set, and
stared at the first empty sheet for almost five minutes. Then he
wrote:

‘Africa crouched low on the horizon, like a lion in
ambush, tawny and gold in the early sunlight, seared by the cold
of the Benguela Current.

‘Robyn Ballantyne stood by the ship’s rail and
stared towards it—’

Craig re-read what he had written, and felt a strange
excitement, something he had never experienced before. He could
actually see the young woman. He could see the way she stood with
her chin lifted eagerly and the wind snapping and tangling her
hair.

The pencil started to race across the empty page, and the
woman moved in his mind and spoke aloud in his ears. He turned
the page and wrote on, then, almost before he realized it, the
exercise book was filled with his pointed peaky handwriting and
outside the porthole by his head the day was lightening.

E
ver since
Janine Carpenter could remember, there had always been horses in
her father’s stables at the back of the veterinary
dispensary. When she was eight her father had taken her out for
the first time with the local hunt. Just after her twenty-second
birthday, a few months before she had left home for Africa, she
had been awarded her hunt buttons.

The mount that Roland Ballantyne had given her was a beautiful
chestnut filly without any other marking. She was curried to a
gloss so that she shone in the sunlight like wet red silk. Janine
had ridden her often before. She was fleet and strong, and there
was an accord between them.

Roland rode his stallion. It was an enormous black beast he
called ‘Mzilikazi’ after the old king. The veins
stood out under the skin of his shoulders and belly like living
serpents. The great black bunch of his testicles was crudely and
overpoweringly masculine. When he laid back his ears and bared
his teeth, the mucous membrane in the corner of his savage eyes
was the colour of blood. There was an arrogance and menace in him
that frightened Janine, and yet excited her also. Horses and
rider were of a pair.

Roland Ballantyne wore brown whipcord breeches and high boots
boned to glossy perfection. The short sleeves of the crisp white
shirt were stretched tightly across the hard smooth muscle of his
upper arms. Janine was certain that he always wore white to
contrast against the deep tan of his face and arms. She thought
he was impossibly handsome, and that cruel and ruthless streak in
him made him all the more attractive than mere good looks alone
could ever do.

Last night in the bed in her bachelor flat she had asked
him,

‘How many men have you killed?’

‘As many as necessary,’ he had replied, and though
she thought that she hated war and death and suffering, it
excited her in a way she could not control. Afterwards he had
laughed easily and said, ‘You are a kinky little bitch, did
you know that?’ She had hated him for understanding and she
had been desperately ashamed, and so angry that she had gone for
his eyes with her nails. He had held her down effortlessly, and
still chuckling he had whispered in her ear until she lost
control again.

Now when she looked up at him riding beside her, she felt the
lingering fear of him and the goose-flesh on her arms and the
hard ball of excitement in the pit of her stomach.

They rode up to the top of the hills, and he reined the
stallion down. It danced in a tight little circle, picking up its
hooves delicately and tried to nuzzle her filly, but Roland
pulled its head away and pointed at the horizons that fell away
into blue distances in every direction.

‘Everything you can see from here. Every blade of grass,
every grain of earth, all of it belongs to the Ballantynes. We
fought for it, we won it – it’s ours and anyone who
wants to take it away from us will have to kill me first.’
The idea of anyone or anything doing that was ludicrous. He was a
young god, one of the immortals.

He dismounted and led the horses to one of the tall msasa
trees. He tied them, and then reached up and lifted her down from
the saddle. He walked her to the edge of the precipice, and held
her against him, her back to his chest, so that she could look
out and see it all.

‘There it is!’ he said. ‘Just look at
it.’

It was beautiful, rich golden grasslands and graceful trees,
waters that flowed in the small clear streams or shone like
mirrors where the dam walls held them back, the tranquil herds of
big red cattle, as red as the rich earth beneath their hooves,
and arched above it all the high cloud-dappled blue of the
African sky.