The Blood of an Englishman (16 page)

Driven by his own curiosity, Zondi flicked away his cigarette and went down some steps into a sunken area to where the gardener was working, still with his back turned, in blue overalls and a huge, floppy straw hat. He was seated on his haunches, apparently weeding, and kept right on humming even when Zondi’s shadow had fallen over him.

“Greetings, my brother,” said Zondi.

The gardener turned and looked up. “Hello, Mr. African,” he said in English, quite unperturbed.

It was Zondi who felt mildly startled. The gardener was a white man with the face of a slanty-eyed, small-mouthed child, and he had a friendliness that was like a rush of oven air.

“Hau, sorry, my boss! I did not mean to disturb you!”

“Are you looking for work?”

“No, boss. Look, I—”

“I can ask Mummy to give you work if you’re hungry.”

Zondi smiled and squatted down a few feet away, alert now to the sort of simple, kindly mind he was dealing with. “Many thanks, sir, but I am not hungry for I have work already.”

“Is that car yours, Mr. African?” The heavy work glove pointed back over Zondi’s shoulder. “Mummy’s car isn’t like that.”

“What is Mummy’s car like?”

“Smaller, and it’s azalea color, not geranium.”

Zondi raised his brow. “But I was told,” he said, “that your mummy’s car was a big green one called a Rover.”

“Then you
are
silly.”

“Why, my boss?”

“Because the big green one is Uncle Bonzo’s.”

Mrs. Angela Elizabeth Westford,
née
Kendall, went to stand gazing out of the window overlooking her front garden. Against that background, and framed by the curtains and pleated pelmet, she reminded Kramer of an oil painting he had seen quite recently, during an enquiry at the National Heritage Museum in Oak Street. The painting had been done from inside an ox-wagon, and it had shown a pioneer mother looking out from beneath a tattered canvas tilt at new pastures green—so green, in fact, that they owed more to the fertility of an artist’s imagination than to anything else, and everyone knew what terrible buggers artists were for spreading bullshit. Mrs. Westford, despite her obvious English ancestry, seemed to be of the very same stock as that Voortrekker vrouw: she was sturdily built, plain in feature, proud in carriage, and gave an immediate impression of steadfastness, devotion and courage. Yet she could never be painted properly in oils, being nearer to a watercolor in the translucent quality of her skin, the washed-out blue of her eyes, and the runny splotches of red on her neck and chest and upper arms, while the shape of her head showed plainly beneath a thin swirl of prematurely white hair. She wore stout leather sandals, a mustard-colored smock, and had a man’s watch with a wide strap on her left wrist.

“I’ll be all right in a minute,” she said.

Trust me, thought Kramer, to come barging into a home, where they didn’t get newspapers and hadn’t a radio, and then to come straight out with a leading question which had rocked
Mrs. Westford on her feet. “That’s fine—I understand, hey? I’m in no hurry.”

“I see Timmy’s making a new friend,” she said, smiling. “He loves Africans. I think it’s their openness and joy at living—neither do they have some of the prejudices we go in for, which makes things so much easier for him.” She turned round and invited Kramer to sit down with a gesture of her hand. “My son’s a mongol, you see, Lieutenant Kramer, and a haemophiliac. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable on the sofa?”

“Honest, this chair is ideal, Mrs. Westford,” said Kramer, staying on the wooden upright at the table. “Like I say, you must forgive us for thinking you knew already about Mr. Hookham.”

“Nothing to forgive; you weren’t to know what an isolated life Timmy and I have chosen to live out here. Quite the worst part—which you couldn’t have known either—was that I’d half been expecting something awful to happen. Nothing something—well, quite as.…”

Kramer waited until she had stopped biting her lip and had looked back at him again. “Was this just a feeling you had, Mrs. Westford? Or was it something more specific?” With an intelligent witness, it was often possible to rely on their own analytical powers.

“Timmy started me off thinking like that. Last week some time, he came to me and said that Uncle Bonzo wasn’t so sad any more. I think it was on Wednesday, but I can’t be certain.”

“Not the day after he’d been to the flying club social?”

“Yes, now I come to—but how would you know that?”

“Tuesday,” said Kramer, making a note.

Mrs. Westford walked over and sat down on the edge of the sofa. “In fact, now I’ve had a chance to think, Lieutenant Kramer, how did you discover that Ted was visiting us?”

“Was it such a secret?” asked Kramer, lightly.

“No, I shouldn’t have thought so, but for my sake he’d probably not want the Digby-Smiths to know, and you don’t seem to have spoken to anyone else we have in common.”

“For your sake, Mrs. Westford? What exactly—?”

Her smile had a kink in the middle. “It’s one of those silly private things that take an awful lot of explaining, and even then I’m not sure you’d understand. There are two things I detest in this world, Lieutenant: one is being patronized and the other is being pitied. Between them, Rupert and Lillian Digby-Smith are very good at doing both.”

“That I can believe,” murmured Kramer, with a kinked little smile of his own.

“Can you? Of course, you’re Afrikaans! How silly of me!”

They shared smiles then, and their rapport, which had been building up surprisingly quickly, was completed.

“Well, where does one start, Lieutenant? I don’t want to bore you with sordid details! Very simply, Ted and I were sweethearts when the war broke out—I’m not sure if we weren’t actually in love, but it’s so difficult to tell at that age. One feels everything so
passionately
as a teenager, doesn’t one?”

“Ted’s what you used to call him then?”

“I still—” She swallowed. “Yes, that’s right. Timmy calls him Uncle Bonzo, because Bonzo is—was—which is it?—a name he’s awfully proud of. The King actually said to him, ‘Well done, Bonzo Hookham!’ or something like that, when he went to Buckingham Palace to be decorated. But I was.…”

“Saying about passionate ideas, Mrs. Westford.”

“My undoing, when I look back on it. War came into them, of course, and I absolutely loathed the whole business. I couldn’t see any excuse for people killing each other and all the rest of it. Ted took the opposite view, told me all sorts of things about fascism which I didn’t understand then, and we ended up having a terrible row. I stopped seeing him and started going out, really to be spiteful, with Rupert Digby-Smith who was
a pacifist. Or claimed to be one, until social pressures made it time for him to enlist, and then he invented this story about black-outs which I’ve never quite believed. The point of all this, however, is that Ted was so hurt that he disappeared overnight, and the next thing I knew, he’d joined the RAF—this country wasn’t properly in the war then, and I’d not expected a move like that.”

“Hell, that was tough luck, hey?”

“I’ve only myself to blame,” replied Mrs. Westford, and wound up her watch. “I’ve always had myself to blame, one way or another. I got rid of Rupert immediately—although he made a tremendous fuss, and wanted to get engaged right away—and did what I could as a nurse to help the war effort here, not being able to leave a pair of aged parents and follow him to England. Oh, Rupert went on pestering me, and when news arrived that Ted had married some Alice or other, he was round like a shot with his final proposal. Out of sheer perversity again, I accepted another proposal I’d had from a Scottish doctor, a man very much older than myself, which is possibly why it was disastrous when Timmy arrived as his sole heir. Rupert told me I’d live to regret the day—he was perfectly right for once—and Lillian Hookham, a dreadful little social climber who had been hovering in the wings, sank her claws into him. They were married the very same week.”

“That was deliberate, hey?” wondered Kramer.

“Oh, I think one could be quite sure of it. And then, of course, when I became pregnant before she did, a mutual friend tells me there was a fearful to-do, with her blaming him and—”

“Vice versa?” Kramer cut in.

“Precisely—and you’re right to smile, that part of it was mildly hilarious. You can, however, imagine the I-told-you-so smugness I had to endure when my baby turned out to be—well, as I’ve described him. This reached new heights when
Hugh—Dr. Westford—found he couldn’t bear having Timmy anywhere near him, and decided to desert me.”

“He just ran off?”

“Not quite. He bought me this house and garden—it was a farm manager’s cottage going cheap, but I loved it from the first moment—and saw to things like providing proper protection for a woman living on her own in the country.”

“Ja, I noticed what good burglar guards you’ve got on the windows,” said Kramer, nodding at them. “Then what?”

“He went, went back to Scotland. Our divorce came through sixteen years ago, but I’ll say one thing for him, he’s always been very good with his maintenance payments. Timmy and I are very happy here, and we want our world just to stay the way it is. If Ted had told the Smiths that he’d been visiting us, that would have been a marvelous excuse for them to insist on having us over for a meal, just to see if Timmy eats with his hands, or to drop in unexpectedly with snippets of news about Ted when he’d gone home to England. That’s rather a long answer to a short question, I’m afraid, but I find living virtually on one’s own can make one appallingly talkative!”

Kramer wished her laugh hadn’t been so embarrassed. “Ach, no, Mrs. Westford, the point is that I totally agree with you and Mr. Hookham in saying nothing about this. And you’re quite right, you know, they haven’t forgotten you. Your name appears nearly at the top of a list of friends and acquaintances they gave me, only I must quickly add that they themselves hadn’t worked anything out. After all, you and Mr. Hookham hadn’t parted on the best of terms, hey?”

“Then how did you work it out, Lieutenant?”

“From some initials in his diary,” replied Kramer. “I wonder if we can now turn to when you two met up again, and to anything you remember about Mr. Hookham after that flying club social?”

“Can I ask one more little question of my own first?” said Mrs. Westford, looking at him with a keen twinkle in her eye.

“Please! Go right ahead!”

“Since when, Lieutenant, have Ah bin required to prints my maiden name in a blerry income tex form? Do you know, I’d been puzzling over that all morning until you arrived with your bombshell.”

T
HE HEAT HAZE
held the garden in a shimmer, making Zondi and Timmy Westford, who were chatting away as they pulled up weeds together, look like wobbly projections against a corrugated backdrop of green. Kramer had a shrewd idea what was making the sly little bugger look so well contented: for once he was getting his next installment in the Bonzo Hookham saga ahead of time. It would be interesting to see how they compared.

“A penny for your thoughts, Lieutenant.”

He turned—and saw that Mrs. Westford had taken up some embroidery. “Ach, nothing specific—just like this weird feeling of anxiety you felt building up. I mean we’ve been through all the main points once already, and yet that remains unexplained.”

“Don’t you ever feel something
instinctively
?”

“Ja, but there’s usually some reason, some little thing that triggered it off,” he replied, quoting the Widow Fourie’s parting remark that morning. “Do you think we could go through it all once more, please? What you tell me could be very important.”

“I don’t really see how, but I don’t mind,” said Mrs. Westford, shrugging. “The only condition I make is that I must be free to start Timmy’s lunch at half past twelve. Not having servants is a blessing if one values one’s privacy, but at times
like these it can be a bit of a snag.” Her eyes welled up then, for the fact of Hookham’s death had broken through her self-protective layer, and she bent quickly over her sewing.

“Right, there’s no need to repeat the first part—the part, that is, before the flying club social. He heard your name mentioned at the Strongpieces’, as per diary, and—”

“Please—let’s not, if we don’t have to.”

Kramer sat down at the table and opened his notebook. “So we’ll start with the day after the party, when Timmy said he didn’t seem so sad any more. Why should that worry you? Wasn’t it good news?”

“It was—well, rather sudden. There were logical reasons for a change, I realized that. He had been lifted out of himself, put into company with people who spoke the same language—about aeroplanes anyway. And, of course, he loved teasing Rupert about supposedly being so taken by Archie Bradshaw.”

“Did you think there was some truth in that?”

“Heavens, no! Ted saw right through him.”

“Oh ja? This is new.”

“Not in certain circles, it isn’t!” said Mrs. Westford, almost managing a laugh. “Everyone knows how that vulture swept down from Johannesburg on the Ye Olde England pickings he could make among the innocent old dears of Trekkersburg. He even descended on us when our marriage broke up, and tried to convince me that the extremely valuable chair you’re sitting on wasn’t worth a penny. Only greedy, rather stupid people like Rupert are blind to that old rascal’s wiles—or the doddery, as I’ve said—and Ted’s view was that he wouldn’t trust him further than he could spit. We had a giggle about Rupert, and that was it—”

“Uh huh. The change was too sudden.”

“Or to put it another way,” said Mrs. Westford, “I suppose I was frightened he was on an ‘up’ that would have its ‘down’ soon enough. Grief is filled with these—what, hazards?”

“Ja, I know. Could it be your feelings were based on the fact that ‘down’ never came?”

“Where do you—?”

“I get that,” said Kramer, “from everything you say after that point.” And he checked with his notes. “You use words like ‘lively,’ ‘excited,’ ‘stimulated,’ et cetera.”

“How odd!”

“Let’s go on,” Kramer suggested. “Mr. Hookham didn’t come by this way again until the Saturday night, after the first story had appeared in the papers about Friday’s near-fatal shooting.”