Blood Stones (25 page)

She went straight to the point in the disconcerting way that women have when important issues are at stake.

‘Who's the lackey?'

‘James Hastings. He's been given the easy option in Paris. Andrews was sent out to do the impossible.'

‘My God,' she said. ‘Hastings – I never liked him. So that's why he's in Paris – why on earth didn't you tell me all this before?'

‘There was no point in worrying you. Really, my dear, it all boils down to this. We made a mistake, just pure bad luck, that's all, and we missed the mine in Moscow. That's what Julius is holding against me. Another complication has arisen which makes this Russian mine extremely dangerous to us. Put simply – if Andrews fails, it's going to be very awkward for me. If he fails and Hastings' operation succeeds, I shall be finished. Now, have I explained it?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Yes, you have.'

He looked very grey and tired; his gentleness had been the first thing that attracted her. She had been madly in love with him. But he had been too gentle, that was the trouble. He had tried so hard to please her and failed so often that she had ended up by hating him. Suddenly she felt afraid. Things were going wrong with him. It had never occurred to her that the
status quo
might change. She got up and shook out the skirts of the négligé; it was white and transparent like the nightdress underneath it.

‘Arthur,' she said. ‘We should be together in this. Come to bed now.'

At the tone in her voice, he looked up and saw her standing there, her body showing through the white folds. She reached up and undid the satin ribbons holding the négligé at the neck and it opened, showing her skin and the rise of her breasts. He felt the colour coming into his neck and creeping up, but there was no heat anywhere else in his body, no stirring at all. Suddenly, unbelievably, he felt nothing for her, neither desire nor hurt. At last, after all these years, he was free of her.

He gave his gentle, sad smile and shook his head.

‘Not just for the moment, Christa. You go back to bed. I'll come up later.'

She looked at him without answering, and slowly she fastened the négligé ribbons into a tight bow.

Her eyes filled up with tears. ‘You'll never get the chance to say no to me again.'

Arthur said gently, ‘I'm sorry, but it was never much of a success with us, anyway. I think it's best if we leave things as they are. Good night, my dear.'

He didn't watch her go out. The door didn't bang, which surprised him. She had been crying. He didn't feel anything, not even a sense of satisfaction that for once the roles had been reversed. He was free of her for ever. It was a strange sensation, as if a weight had been lifted that he didn't realize he carried.

The Russians wanted him to promise the impossible. To write a personal guarantee committing Diamond Enterprises to untold millions of expenditure. He got up, refilled the glass with another modest whisky and sipped it. If he did it he was finished. If he refused, the result was the same. So what had he got to lose? A signature could be repudiated, given the right circumstances … He smiled to himself. Always the grey man, the careful, calculating negotiator. Arthur Harris, the high-risk taker? He had defeated his wife after nearly thirty years, and it had been so easy. And so liberating. He would defeat her brother Julius Heyderman; he knew that now with a confidence that was euphoric. He would do whatever had to be done to achieve that.

The telephone was ringing. Stella Heyderman Yakumi sat within easy reach of it and listened. She knew who her caller was; she'd already hung up on him once that day and twice the day before. It was Reece, her father's personal, private creep. Come to sort out her problems. She didn't need him. The London solicitors were paid to do that. She didn't mind calling on them when things got out of control. They were a step removed from her family and her home. Her old life in South Africa. She was cut off from it all, and that was how she managed to survive. The flat was small and untidy, situated in an area of London with a large black population. She and Jacob had chosen it deliberately so that he could live and work among his own people while their exile lasted. They had been very active in local affairs, involved in social projects aimed at bettering the lives of the black community. Self help, Jacob called it, ironically echoing the philosophy of his hated enemy, Margaret Thatcher. The black people might be West Indian through the forced migration of slavery, but they were still Africans like himself; they needed self-respect and self-reliance to give them identity. Jacob believed his mission was to teach them these qualities and how to achieve them.

Then, and only then, did he try to educate them in his own political beliefs.

As the telephone rang, Stella looked at his photograph, a big enlargement specially done after his death. It smiled at her from a table where she could see it from any angle in the room. It was her talisman, as much as any animist sacred tree or rocky outcrop. He had been dead for two years now. She often talked to him aloud. It depended on how much she had had to drink. She was sober that afternoon. The couple she had been persuaded to give temporary accommodation to in the flat below had finally been bought off and gone, leaving a vindictive mess behind them. The solicitors had dealt with that, and they had contacted a cleaning firm to steam clean the basement. Her tenants had smeared their own excrement on the walls as a parting gesture to their benefactress. They were drug addicts, but then that was why Stella had taken them in. She was trying to do what she felt Jacob would have wanted. But the trouble was she wasn't Jacob; she was known to be a rich white woman with a drinking problem that made her a soft touch.

Their friends had rallied to her after Jacob's murder. Friends in the black and white communities who had worked with them and respected them. They had respected Stella, too. Only a very brave woman would have married a black South African and gone with him into exile. They might have reacted differently had they known she was Julius Heyderman's daughter. All that money and influence. No wonder they managed to get out, when others in the ANC went to Robben Island, and their families were put on restriction, renewed year after year. No-one knew who Stella was; that was the deal Reece had negotiated, and she had honoured it because it was their guarantee that one day they would be able to go home and Jacob would be safe. She trusted her father. He had never broken a promise to her. His name must be protected at all costs. No political capital must ever be made by Jacob or his political associates that his wife was born a Heyderman. So far as friends and family in South Africa knew, Stella had gone to South America and was working in a mission school in Peru. Her reputation supported this story, nobody questioned that she would be crazy enough to do such a thing. Jacob's family knew that he had escaped to London and married a white woman. His ANC contacts in England knew her as Suki, which happened to be her childhood nickname.

They had lived on her trust money, and what he earned by giving legal advice and writing articles for ethnic news sheets and magazines. He also gave private tuition to black youths studying for a career in law. They had been ideally happy in their new life.

At last the telephone stopped in mid ring. Stella looked at it. She hadn't eaten since the night before, just washed herself out with cups of strong black coffee. The hours stretched ahead, empty of purpose. She was lonely; the good friends had given her up after a decent interval of trying to help. Many of them despised her for escaping into alcohol abuse. Her husband had been such a fine, strong man. How could she be so weak, so insensitive to his memory? Idealists, as Stella recognized now, were often judgemental and unforgiving. She didn't care. She had never been loved, in her own cognizance, except by Jacob. Her father didn't love her, that's why as a child she had wished her mother's unborn baby dead. And from that sequence came insanity and misery. She knew all the reasons. A series of thoughtful, kindly therapists had explained it to her, and she had nodded, as if the revelation would loose the emotional knots inside. It didn't; she knew rationally that she shouldn't feel guilty or rejected, but the fact was that she did. Only the furies driving her to strike back by being different, by rejecting her father and her background, gave relief. Until she met Jacob.

She had loved the black people suffering under apartheid because they, too, had been rejected. She had hated herself and her own kind. That sense of anger made her bold and committed, ready to risk herself by political protest. But, inside, she knew it was a sham, a weapon used to wound herself and her father. And the stepmother who was trying to please him by winning her confidence. But Jacob Yakumi changed everything. She had suddenly discovered that love was stronger than hate, sweeter than anger. Love was warmth and security and a deep passion for a man who valued her and loved her for herself. A gentle, dedicated man, with unshakeable belief in the basic goodness of humanity.

Incredibly, there was no hate in Jacob Yakumi. He understood his enemies and he pitied them for their ignorance. Fear made them cruel. Stella had sat at his feet and worshipped. She had never expected him to love her. To use her, to accept her resources in the fight against oppression, but never to love her. When she accepted that love, she found a true sense of self-worth for the first time in her life. She must be of value for such a man to love her. He had refused her passionate plea to sleep with her, because he wouldn't put her at risk. And afterwards, when they were married, he had refused to have children. ‘One day something may happen to me. You couldn't go home with a coloured child. There's plenty of time. We'll wait and see how the world changes.' The world had changed, faster, more dramatically than they had dared to hope. South Africa changed direction; led by a brave and visionary government, the conflict between the black and white races was in the process of being resolved. Excesses, murderous tribal rivalries, and bloodshed on both sides couldn't halt the move forward to political equality and majority rule. That was when Jacob decided to go home. His place was with his people. With the men and women of Soweto where he was born.

But he wouldn't allow Stella to come with him. It was far too dangerous; it meant breaking their agreement with her father, who would never consent to her return at such a time of racial tension and instability. It wouldn't be a long separation, Jacob had assured her. Stella had wept and pleaded but in the end he had won her over to his way, as he had always done. The murder squads were out, both black and neo-Nazi white.

Soweto was no place for a white woman, even if she was married to an ANC activist. And Soweto was where he must go.

Less than a month later he was dead.

Stella still woke, drenched in sweat, and crying out at the vision of him lying hacked to death outside his home. Her life, her future and her hope had been murdered with him. There was not enough pure idealism to sustain her; that was what their friends couldn't understand or forgive. It was the man, not his mission, that had held her together. Without Jacob, she had nothing to survive for, and she'd gone back to the drinking habits of her youth when it was the panacea for her pain. Her father had come over to see her. She didn't want to see him. He represented what had killed Jacob; it was irrational and unjust but she couldn't bear his sympathy because she didn't believe for a moment it was genuine. He wouldn't be sorry Jacob was dead. He'd be relieved. He'd want her to come home, to shed her past and Jacob's name and pretend to the world she'd been in South America. She refused to speak to him. She had opened the door to her stepmother Sylvia by mistake.

She thought of Sylvia then, in the silence of the room when the telephone stopped its insistent ringing. So elegant, so out of place in that environment, with her chauffeur-driven car parked outside. The expression of concern on her handsome face.

‘Oh, my poor Stella.'

She had pushed in before the door could be slammed on her and tried to embrace her. Stella held her off. She actually pushed her. But she knew Sylvia had got the pungent whiff of stale alcohol. In self-defence, in semi-drunken fury, she had screamed abuse at her. She had accused, without reason or thought, her father of not protecting Jacob … shrieking that he had friends, political influence … he could have done something … And then the final cry that sent Sylvia turning on her, all patience lost. ‘You're glad he's dead … You didn't want him home … you didn't want anyone to find out about us …' She liked to tell herself that the mask dropped then, that Sylvia Heyderman gave up pretending. It was much easier to ignore her stepmother's tears and to dwell on her reproach.

‘How could you, Stella …? How could you say such a wicked, filthy thing about your father? He saved Jacob from prison, he supported you both for years … How could you? But you're drunk. That's all you can do, that's all you're made of – that boy was worth ten of you!'

She had slammed the door after her. It was beyond Stella to rationalize why she would talk to Reece and reject her own father. Reece represented everything she hated in her father's world. The fixer for the big capitalist enterprise, the paid lackey. She fell into the out-dated Marxist terminology because she could hide behind it.

Hide from her own heartbreak and her self-destructive flight into alcohol abuse. She could despise Reece, while taking what was on offer. She couldn't have despised her father. She knew that as her genuine friends gave up, the parasites moved in, playing on her sympathy and her need for justification in her grief. She believed she was carrying on Jacob's noble work for the oppressed when she allowed herself to be exploited by people he would have dismissed with contempt. Then the lawyers had to be brought in, to pay off, threaten, sort out the problems she had brought on herself. Anything rather than the police or publicity. Reece had written to her asking for an interview. She'd torn the letter up. She put the phone down whenever she heard his voice. But she was going to see him, and she knew it. She was trying to be strong and resist as long as she could. She had gone through a lot of money, paying off debts for sponging friends, buying off a malicious couple who insisted she had promised them a loan. She couldn't deny it, because she couldn't remember, but they frightened her, so she wrote out the cheque. Her quarterly allowance was spent, and she needed money.