The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 125

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"I wish you wouldn't, jon jon "Don't be daft, "Jonathan snapped.

"You must LeaRN to use every advantage, my boy, that's the way life works." Jonathan- picked up the first of the three volumes of manuscript and gloatingly stroked it with his gnarled brown fingers.

"Now, you can leave me alone for a while, "he ordered, as he unfolded his wire-framed reading-glasses and perched them on his nose.

"They are playing tennis across at Queen's Lynn, I will see you back here for sun downers Craig glanced back from the doorway, but Jonathan Ballantyne was hunched over the book, transported by the entries in yellow faded ink back to his childhood.

AltHough it shared a common seven-mile boundary with King's Lynn, Queen's Lynn was a separate ranch. Jonathan Ballantyne had added it to his holdings during the great depression of the 1930s, paying five cents on the dollar of its real worth. Now it formed the eastern spread of the Rholands Ranching Company.

It was the home of Jonathan's only surviving son, Douglas Ballantyne, and his wife Valerie. Douglas was the managing director of both Rholands and the Harkness Mine. He was also Minister of Agriculture in Ian Smith's UDI government, and with any luck he might be away on mysterious government or company business.

Douglas Ballantyne had once given Craig his honest appraisal. "At heart you are a bloody hippie, Craig, you should get your hair cut and start bracing up, you can't go on dawdling through life and expecting Bawu and the rest of the family to carry you for ever." Craig pulled a sour face at the memory as he drove down past the stockyards of Queen's Lynn, and smelled the ammonia cal tang of cow-dung.

The huge Afrikander beasts were a uniform deep chocolate red, the bulls hump-backed and with swinging dewlaps that almost brushed the earth. This breed had made Rhodesian beef almost as renowned as the marbled beef of Kobe. As Minister of Agriculture it was Douglas Ballantyne's. duty to see that, despite sanctions, the world was not deprived of this delicacy. The route that it took to the tables of the great restaurants of the world was via Johannesburg and Cape Town, where it perforce changed its name, but the connoisseurs recognized it and asked for it by its noyn de guerre, their taste-buds probably piqued by the knowledge that they were eating forbidden fruits.

Rhodesian tobacco and nickel and copper and gold all went out the same way, while petrol and diesel oil made the return trip. The popular bumper sticker said simply, "Thank you, South Africa." Beyond the stock-pens and veterinary block, once again protected by the diamond mesh and barbed-wire security fence, lay the green lawns and banks of flowering shrubs and the blazing Pride of India trees of the gardens of Queen's Lynn. The windows had been covered with grenade screens and the servants would drop steel bullet-proof shutters into their slots before sunset, but here the de fences had not been built with the same gusto as Bawu had shown at King's Lynn. They fitted unobtrusively into the gracious surroundings.

The lovely old house was very much as Craig remembered it from before the war, rosy red brick and wide cool verandas. The jacaranda trees that lined the long curved driveway were in full flower, like a mist bank of pale ethereal blue, and there were at least two dozen cars parked beneath them, Mercedes and jaguars, Cadillacs and BMWs, their paintwork hazed with the red dust of Matabeleland. Craig concealed his venerable Land-Rover behind the tumble of red and purple bougainvillaea creeper, so as not to lower the tone of a Queen's Lynn Saturday. From habit he slung an FN rifle over his shoulder and wandered around the side of the house. from ahead there came the sound of children's voices, gay as songbirds, and the genial scolding of their black nannies, punctuated by the sharp "Pock! Pock!" of a long rally from the tennis courts.

Craig paused at the head of the terraced lawns. Children spilled and tumbled and chased each other in circles like puppies over the green grass. Nearer the yellow clay courts, their parents sprawled on spread rugs or sat at the shaded white tea-tables, under the brightly coloured umbrellas. They were bronzed young men and women in tennis whites, sipping tea or drinking beer from tall frosted glasses, calling ribald comment and advice to the players upon the courts. The only incongruous note was the row of machine pistols and automatic rifles beside the silver tea set and cream scones.

Someone recognized Craig and shouted, "Hi Craig, long time no see," and others waved, but there was just that faint edge of condescension in their manner reserved for the poor relative. These were the families with great estates, a closed club of the wealthy in which, for all their geniality, Craig would never have full membership.

Valerie Ballantyne came to meet him, slim-hipped and girlishly graceful in her short white tennis skirt. "Craig, you are as thin as a bean pole." He always brought out the maternal instincts in any female between eight and eighty. "Hello, Aunty Val." She offered him a smooth cheek that smelled of violets. Despite her delicate air, Valerie was president of the Women's Institute,served on the committees of a dozen schools, charities and hospitals, and was a gracious, accomplished hostess.

"Uncle Douglas is in Salisbury. Smithy sent for him yesterday.

He will be sorry to have missed you." She took his arm. "How is the Game Department?" "It will probably survive without me." "Oh, no, Craig, not again!" "Fraid so, Aunty Val." He didn't really feel up to a discussion of his career at that moment. "Do you mind if I get myself a beer?" There was a group of men around the long trestle-table that did service as a bar. The group opened to let him in, but the conversation went straight back to a discussion of the latest raid that the Rhodesian security forces had made into Mozambique.

"I tell you, when we hit the camp, there was food still cooking on the fires, but they had run for it. We caught a few stragglers, but the others had been warned." "Bill is right, I had it from a colonel in intelligence, no names-no pack drill, but there is a bad security leak.

A traitor near the top, the terrs are getting up to twelve hours" warning." "We haven't had a really good kill since last August when we took six hundred." The eternal war talk bored Craig. He sipped his beer and watched the play on the nearest court.

It was mixed doubles, and at that moment they changed ends.

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