The chauffeur pointed to the grey Mercedes keeping discreetly behind them. ‘We’ll lose them,’ he promised.
The road ran for miles along the lakeside. The lower slopes of the mountain were thickly crammed with vines, every inch of land terraced to its very edges, the dense greenness tumbling down to the roadside, vine leaves stirring in the passing breeze their car made. Then on the other side of the road the vines continuing their downward plunge to the very water’s edge. Up ahead were larger mountains folding one into another and covered in a thick dark fur of vegetation. It amazed him, the roughness of this vegetation, its harsh contours. No doubt it was different in the winter when the snows softened and smoothed away the detail, but now, under the sun hot and high, under a light-blue sky, there was a rough, wiry, raw determination about the way these shrubs and trees clung to the mountain side, a lack of softness, an absence of prettiness that reminded him very strongly of Africa. After running some way along the lakeside they began climbing steeply. The driver pointed to the town of Montreux below and to a small tongue of land jutting out into the lake, that was the prison castle, Château Chillon, very famous. They climbed through the thick fuzz of bush and forest, the harsh unlovely vegetation. Here and there boulders broke through the dark green and nearer the summits were ridges of grey stone, mountain skulls, patched and balding. And even higher still was the snow, even in this June heat, last year’s snow, icy grey.
And here was a grand house, a castle within its own walls, but no rearing bulk of dull stones, more of a Schloss, a château, whitewashed, trim and solid. Then they were driving through the great wrought-iron gates with their chevrons and swans intricately worked, along a gravel drive up to great oaken doors.
Their host in his big solid house at the end of a long drive, behind high walls and wrought-iron gates, awaited them on the steps. With his hand outstretched, wearing the dark business suit, the well-shaped smile so familiar from a thousand press photographs and television, with his head cocked to one side, sparse grey hair neatly combed, the round intelligent face with bright eyes that gave him the look of an intelligent gun dog, the characteristic quick shrewd glance from behind thick lashes, the quiet, formidable air of authority. It was very difficult for them to suppress their astonishment.
‘What? Himmelfarber, you!’ Blanchaille said.
Kipsel said, ‘It really is another bloody exodus. It’s a diaspora. If Himmelfarber the mine-owner has left, then it’s all finished. Everyone will leave. You won’t be able to move anywhere overseas for fleeing South Africans.’
‘But I haven’t left,’ said the mine-owner. ‘This is merely my summer place. I spend the African winter here.’
Blanchaille turned on his heel. ‘Have a happy holiday,’ he said.
‘I have a proposition,’ said Himmelfarber.
‘We’re not open to any proposals,’ Blanchaille said very firmly.
‘We may as well hear what he has to say,’ said Kipsel, ‘now that we’re here.’
‘Let’s talk inside,’ Himmelfarber led them through the house into an enormous lounge furnished in white leather with thick pink carpets on the floor, a large generous room looking through french windows onto the lawn and large circular lily pond. Himmelfarber stood at the bar at the far end and poured them drinks. A little fruit punch, he said, of his own making, light and refreshing.
On the walls of this room were blow-ups of black and white photographs of miners working below ground, drilling the rock face, or loading the ore, coming off shift. Happy pictures of a classroom full of new recruits learning Fanagalo. Other photographs, far more disturbing, showed men terribly mutilated, crushed and bleeding; they also saw corpses lying on sheets in what must have been a morgue, rows of them, they stared at the ceiling wide-eyed and with quite terrible, unfrightened detachment. Why should Himmelfarber keep these reminders about him?
Blanchaille considered the entrepreneur. Curtis Christian Himmelfarber was the brilliant son of a brilliant family. The family had been established by the remarkable Julius Himmelfarber, a penniless Latvian emigrant to the South African goldfields who had founded a great mining empire. Old Julius had been an intimate of Cecil Rhodes and Milner, a drinking companion of Barney Barnato, a sworn enemy of Kruger who had called him ‘Daardie Joodse smous’… that Jewish pedlar… Julius Himmelfarber had bought Blydag, his first mine and one of the premier producers of all time, for a little more than was now paid for one single ounce of its gold, and the foundation of a great financial empire had been laid.
Frank Harris, the noted Irish philanderer on a visit to South Africa shortly before the Boer War began, had been favourably impressed.
Harris had met Julius Himmelfarber and liked him well enough to leave a portrait of him: ‘… cultured, urbane, very pointed in conversation, a gentle Croesus, a philosopher miner, a flower of the Semitic type, markedly superior to your Anglo-Saxon sportsmen.’ But then Harris, of course, had held a long-standing prejudice against the Anglo-Saxon sportsman, for, as he told Cecil Rhodes in a bizarre meeting which took place on top of Table Mountain while Rhodes presumably gazed from this fairest Cape in all the world towards distant Cairo, it was perfectly understandable that God in his youth should have chosen the Jews for his special people, for they were after all an attractive, lovable race. But that later he should have changed his mind in favour of the English, as Rhodes contended, showed that he must be in his dotage.
Curtis Christian Himmelfarber, who was now handing out drinks in the pink and white room to Blanchaille and Kipsel, would not have been described by Harris as the flower of the Semitic type. In any event, the Himmelfarbers had long since severed the connection. Curtis Christian was an Anglican and this faith, along with his mines, had been part of his inheritance. The change in faith had taken place when his fierce grandfather, Aaron, always a mercurial man, the ne’er-do-well of the family, had persuaded investors that a local mine under his control was capable of producing richer amounts than anyone had suspected, and displayed samples to prove it. Alas, a surveyor’s report revealed that the mine was likely to produce far less than promised and Aaron found himself in jail, awaiting trial. It was there that he underwent a spectacular conversion at the hands of a travelling Baptist minister. Naturally the entire family followed suit. They did not long stay with the Baptists but moved instead, down the years, by degrees, with a stately assurance that reminded one of a luxury liner heading for its home port, from the choppy seas of Baptist rhetoric into the calmer, shallower waters of the Church of England and in these pacific waters had floated ever since.
The Himmelfarbers were the closest thing to a Royal family the country had. Each member of this family received adulatory notice in the media. Everyone in the country was familiar with the little vagaries of the Himmelfarbers. There was Waverley, C.C.’s wife, tall, tanned and fit. She appeared often at fund-raising dinners, drove jeeps for famine relief, organised milk for the townships and free school books for the kids. There was Elspeth, the eldest daughter and the ‘serious one’, a lawyer. There was Cookie, the madcap gadabout youngest, with a taste for high living and drugs, a kind of painter, and reportedly a great strain on her parents. And then of course Timmo, the son and heir, dashing, eligible, often pictured behind the wheel of a racing car, or in his yacht off Cape Point. Photographers had accompanied him on his first day of military service. That service was later to be marred by a scandal when it was rumoured that Timmo, who had trained with a crack paratroop squadron ‘The Leopard’s Claw’, had been excused jumps over hostile territory. The chiefs of staff took the unusual step of refuting the rumour and reported that young Himmelfarber always jumped with his comrades and, what was more, he had one of the highest ‘score’ rates (the name given to the jump/kill ratios), in the entire regiment.