The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 129
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"Sorry, I can be a bore." "Never." She smiled her thanks, but changed the subject. "How long have you known Roland?" "Twenty-nine years."
"How old are you?" "Twenty-nine." "Tell me about him." "What's to tell about somebody who is perfect?" "Try to think of something," she encouraged him.
"Head boy at Michaelhouse. Captain of rugger and cricket. Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, Oriel scholar. Blues for rowing and cricket, half-blue for tennis, colonel in the Scouts, silver cross for valour, heir to twenty-million-plus dollars. You know, all the usual things."
Craig shrugged.
"You don't like him, "she accused.
"I love him, "he said. "In a funny sort of way." "You don't want to talk about him any more?" "I'd rather talk about you." "That suits me, what do you want to know?" He wanted to make her smile again.
"Start at the time you were born and don't. miss anything out." "I was born in a little village in Yorkshire, my daddy is the local veterinarian." "When? I said not to miss anything." She slanted her eyes mischievously. "What is the local expression for an indeterminate date some time before the rinderpest?" "that was in the 1890s."
"Okay," she smiled again. "I was born some time after the rinderpest."
It was working, Craig realized. She liked him. She smiled more readily, and their banter was light and easy. Perhaps it was just wistful imagination, but he thought he detected the first sexual awareness in her manner, the way she held her head and moved her body, the way she then abruptly he thought of Roland and felt the cold slide of despair.
Jonathan Ballantyne came out onto the veranda of King's Lynn, took one look at her, and went immediately into his role of the lustful rogue.
He kissed her hand. "You are the prettiest young lady that Craig has ever come up with by a street." Some perverse streak made Craig deny it. "Janine is Roly's friend, Bawu." "Ah," the old man nodded.
"I should have known. Too much class for your taste, boy." Craig's marriage had lasted a little longer than one of his jobs, just over a year, but Bawu had not approved of Craig's choice, had said so before the wedding and after it, before the divorce and after it and at every opportunity since then.
"Thank you, Mr. Ballantyne." Janine slanted her eyes at Jonathan.
"You may call me Bawu. "Jonathan gave her his ultimate accolade, made an arm for her and said, "Come and see my Claymore mines, my dear." Craig watched them go off on a tour of the de fences another sure sign of Bawu's high favour.
"He has three wives buried up on the kopje," Craig muttered ruefully, "and is still as randy as an old goat." Craig woke to his bedroom door cracking back on its hinges, and Jonathan Ballantyne's cry.
"Are you going to sleep all day? It's four-thirty already."
"Just because you haven't slept for twenty years, Bawu." "Enough of your lip, boy today's the big day. Get that pretty little filly of Roland's and we'll all go down to test my secret weapon." "Before breakfast?" Craig protested, but excited as a child invited to a picnic, the old man had gone already.
It was parked at a prudent distance from the nearest building.
The cook had threatened to resign if there were any more experiments conducted within blast range of his kitchen. It stood on the edge of a field of ripening seed maize, and it was surrounded by a small crowd of labourers and tractor drivers and clerks.
"What on earth is it?" Janine puzzled, as they crossed the ploughed land towards it, but before anyone could reply, a figure in greasy blue overalls detached itself from the crowd and hurried towards them.
"Mister Craig, thank goodness you are here. You've got to stop him." "Don't be a blithering old idiot, Okky,"Jonathan ordered. Okky van Rensburg had been chief mechanic on King's Lynn for twenty years.
Behind his back Jonathan boasted that Okky could strip down a John Deere tractor, and build up a Cadillac and two Rolls Royce Silver Clouds out of the spare parts. He was a wiry grease-stained little monkey of a man. He ignored Jonathan's injunction to silence.
"Bawu's going to kill himself, unless somebody stops him." He wrung his scarred blackened hands pitifidly.
But already Jonathan was donning his helmet and fastening the strap under his chin. It was the same tin helmet that he had worn on that day in 1916 that he won his Military Cross, and the dent in the side had been made by a shard of German shrapnel. There was an unholy gleam in his eyes as he advanced upon the monstrous vehicle.
"Okky has converted a three-ton Ford truck," he explained to Janine, "lifted the chassis," as though it were on stilts, the vehicle's body stood high above the huge lugged tyres, "put in deflectors here," he pointed out the heavy steel vee-shaped plates under the cab that would split the blast of a land mine "armoured the cab," the body looked like a tiger tank, with steel hatches, a driver's slit and gun ports for a heavy Browning machine-gun, "but look what we have got on top!" At a glance it could have been mistaken for the conning tower of a nuclear submarine, and Okky was still wringing his hands.
"He's got twenty galvanized steel pipes filled with plastic explosive and thirty pounds of ball-bearings each." "Good Lord, Bawu."
Even Craig was horrified. "The damn things will explode!" "He has set them in blocks of concrete," Okky moaned, "and aimed them out on each side just like the cannons on one of Nelson's ships of the line. Ten on each side." "A twenty-gun Ford," Craig breathed with awe.
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