Her male secretaries were waiting for her. Centaine could not abide the continual presence of other females. Her secretaries were both handsome young men. The study was filled with flowers. Every day the vases were refilled from the gardens of Weltevreden. Today it was blue hydrangeas and yellow roses.
She seated herself at the long Louis XIV table she used as a desk.
The legs were in richly ornate ormolu and the top was expansive enough to hold the memorabilia she had assembled.
There were a dozen photographs of Shasa's father in separate silver frames covering his life from schoolboy to dashing young airman in the RFC. The last photograph depicted him with the other pilots of his squadron standing in front of their single-seater scout planes. Hands thrust into his pockets, cap on the back of his head, Michael Courtney grinned at her, seemingly as certain of his immortality as he had been on the day that he died in the pyre of his burning aircraft. As she settled into her leather wingbacked chair, she touched the photograph, rearranging it slightly.
The maid could never get it exactly right.
I've read through the contract, she told Cyril as he took the chair facing her. There are just two clauses I am not happy with. The first is clause twenty-six. He turned to it obediently, and with her secretaries standing attentively on each side of her chair she began the day's work.
Always it was the mine which occupied Centaine first.
The Hlani Mine was the source, the spring from which it all flowed, and as she worked she felt her soul yearning towards the vastness of the Kalahari, towards those mystic blue hills and the secret valley which had concealed the treasures of the H'ani for countless aeons before she had stumbled upon them, dressed in skins and a last tattered remnant of cloth, great with the child in her womb and living like an animal of the desert herself.
The desert had captured part of her soul, and she felt anticipation rising in her. Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow Shasa and I will be going back. The lush vineyards of the Constantia Valley and the chateau of Weltevreden filled with beautiful things were part of her also, but when they cloyed she had to go back to the desert and have her soul burned clean and bright once more by the white Kalahari sun. As she signed the last of the documents and handed them to her senior secretary for witnessing and sealing, she stood and crossed to the open french doors.
Down in the paddock beyond the old slave quarters Shasa, released from his mathematics, was schooling his pony under Jock Murphy's critical eye.
It was a big horse; the limitation on size had recently been dropped by the International Polo Association, but he moved well. Shasa turned him neatly at the end of the paddock and brought him back at a full gallop. Jock tossed a ball to his near-side and Shasa leaned out to take it on his backhand.
He had a firm seat and a strong arm for one so young. He swung in a good full arc and the crisp click of the bamboo-root ball carried to where Centaine stood and she saw the white flash of its trajectory in the sunlight.
Shasa reined the pony down and swung him back. As he passed again Jock Murphy tossed another ball to his offside forehand. Shasa topped the shot and it bounced away sloppily.
Shame on you, Master Shasa, Jock called. You are chopping again. Let the head of your stick take your shot through. Jock Murphy was one of Centaine's finds. He was a stocky, muscular man with a short neck and perfectly bald head.
He had done everything: Royal Marines, professional boxer, opium runner, master at arms to an Indian maharajah, racehorse trainer, bouncer in a Mayfair gambling club and now he was Shasa's physical instructor. He was a champion shot with rifle, shotgun and pistol, a ten-goal polo player, deadly on the snooker table. He had killed a man in the ring, ridden in the Grand National, and he treated Shasa like his own son.
Once in every three months or so he went on the whisky and turned into a devil incarnate. Then Centaine would send someone down to the police station to pay the damages and bail Jock out. He would stand in front of her desk, his Derby hat held in front of his chest, shaky and hung over, his bald head shiny with shame, and apologize humbly.
It won't happen again, missus. I don't know what came over me. Give me another chance, missus, I won't let you down. It was useful to know a man's weakness: a leash to hold him and a lever to move him.
There was no work for them in Windhoek. When they arrived, having walked and begged lifts on trucks and wagons all the way from the coast, they moved into the hobo encampment near the railway tracks on the outskirts of the town.
By tacit agreement the hundred or so down-and-outers and drifters and out-of-workers were allowed to camp here with their families, but the local police kept a wary eye on them.
The huts were of tarpaper and old corrugated iron sheets and rough thatch and in front of each squatted dejected clusters of men and women. Only the children, dusty and skinny and sun-browned, were noisy and almost defiantly rambunctious. The encampment smelled of wood smoke and the shallow pit latrines.
Somebody had erected a crudely lettered sign facing the railway tracks: Vaal Hartz? Hell No! Anyone who applied for unemployment benefits was immediately sent by the government labour department to work on the huge Vaal Hartz river irrigation project for two shillings a day.
Rumours of the conditions in the labour camps there had filtered back, and in the Transvaal there had been riots when the police had attempted forcibly to transport men to the scheme.
All the better spots in the encampment were already occupied, so they camped under a small camel-thorn bush and hung scraps of tarpaper in the branches for shade. Swart Hendrick was squatting beside the fire, slowly trickling handfuls of white maize meal into a soot-blackened billy of boiling water. He looked up as Lothar came back from another unsuccessful job hunt in the town. When Lothar shook his head, Hendrick returned to his cookery.
Where is Manfred? Hendrick pointed with his chin at another shack near by.
A dozen or so ragged men were sitting in a fascinated knot listening to a tall bearded man in their midst. He had the intense expression and fanatically dark eyes of a zealot.
Mal Willem, Hendrick muttered. Crazy William, and Lothar grunted as he searched for Manfred and then recognized his son's shining blond head amongst the others.
Satisfied that the boy was safe, Lothar took his pipe from his top pocket, blew through it and then filled it with Magaliesberg shag. The pipe stank, and the black tobacco was rank and harsh, but cheap. He longed for a cheroot as he lit the pipe with a twig from the fire. It tasted disgusting, but he felt the soothing effect almost immediately and he tossed the tobacco pouch to Hendrick and leaned back against the trunk of the thorn tree.
What did you find out? Hendrick had spent most of the night and morning in the coloured. shanty town across the other side of Windhoek. if you want to know a man's intimate secrets, ask the servants who wait at his table and make his bed.
I found out that you can't get a drink on credit, and the Windhoek maids don't do it for love alone. He grinned.
Lothar spat tobacco juice and glanced across at his son. It worried him a little that the boy avoided the camp urchins of his own age and sat with the men. Yet the men seemed to accept him.
What else? he asked Hendrick.
The man is called Fourie. He has been working at the mine for ten years. He comes in with four or five trucks every week and goes back loaded with stores. For a minute Hendrick concentrated on mixing the maize porridge, applying exactly the right heat from the fire.
Go on. Then, on the first Monday of every month, he comes in one small truck, the four other drivers with him riding in the back, all of them armed with shotguns and pistols. They go directly to the Standard Bank in Main Street. The manager and his staff come to the side door. Fourie and one of his drivers carry a small iron box from the truck into the bank.