'Looking forward to tomorrow,' he told Littleton casually. 'I hear your Super Mac is going to give us some fireworks." 'Wherever did you hear that?" Littleton asked, but Shasa saw the sudden shift of his gaze and the guarded expression that froze his smile.
'Can we have a word?" Shasa asked quietly, and apologized to Tara.
'Excuse me, my dear." He took Littleton's elbow and chatting amicably steered him through the glass doors on to the paved stoep under the trellised vines.
'What is going on, Peter?" He lowered his voice. 'Isn't there anything you can, tell me?" Their relationship was intimate and of long standing; such a direct appeal could not be ignored.
'I will be frank with you, Shasa,' Littleton said. 'Mac has something up his sleeve. I don't know what it is, but he is planning on creating a sensation. The press at home have been put on the alert.
It's going to be a major policy statement, that is my best guess." 'Will it alter things between us - preferential trade, for instance?" Shasa demanded.
'Trade?" Littleton chuckled. 'Of course not, nothing alters trade.
More than that I can't tell you. We will all have to wait for tomorrow." Neither Tara nor Shasa spoke on the drive back to W.eltevreden until the Rolls passed beneath the Anreith gateway and then Tara asked, her voice strained and jerky, 'What time is Macmillan making his speech tomorrow?" 'The special session will begin at eleven o'clock,' Shasa replied,' but he was still thinking of what Littleton had told him.
'I wanted to be in the visitors' gallery. I asked Tricia to get me a ticket." 'Oh, the session isn't being held in the chamber - not enough seating. It will be in the dining-room and I don't think they will allow visitors --' he broke off and stared at her. In the reflected light of the headlamps she had gone deathly pale. 'What is it, Tara?" 'The dining-room,' she breathed. 'Are you sure?" 'Of course I am. Is something wrong, my dear?" 'Yes - no! Nothing is wrong. Just a little heartburn, the dinner--' 'Pretty awful,' he agreed, and returned his attention to the road.
'The dining-room,' she thought, in near panic. 'I have to warn Moses. I have to warn him it cannot be tomorrow - all his arrangements will have been made for the escape. I have to let him know." Shasa dropped her at the front doors of the chiteau and took the Rolls down to the garages. When he came back, she was in the blue drawing-room and the servants, who had as usual waited up for their return, were serving hot chocolate and biscuits. Shasa's valet helped him change into a maroon velvet smoking-jacket, and the housemaids hovered anxiously until Shasa dismissed them.
Tara had always opposed this custom. 'I could easily warm up the milk myself and you could put on a jacket without having another grown man to help you,' she complained when the servants had left the room. 'It's feudal and cruel to keep them up until all hours." 'Nonsense, my dear." Shasa poured himself a cognac to go with his chocolate. 'It's a tradition they value as much i3s we do - makes them feel indispensable and part of the family. Be'sides, chef would have a seizure if you were to mess with his kitchen." Then he slumped into his favourite armchair and became unusually serious. He began to talk to her as he had at the beginning of their marr4age when they had still been in accord.
'There is something afoot that I don't like. Here we stand at the opening of a new decade, the 1960s. We have had nearly twelve years of Nationalist rule and none of my direst predictions have come to pass, but I feel a sense of unease. I have the feeling that our tide has been at full flood, but the turn is coming. I think that tomorrow may be the day when the ebb sets in --' he broke off, and grinned shamefacedly. 'Forgive me. As you know, I don't usually indulge in fantasy,' he said and sipped his chocolate and his cognac in silence.
Tara felt not the least sympathy for him. There was so much she wanted to say, so many recriminations to lay upon him, but she could not trust herself to speak. Once she began, she might lose control and divulge too much. She might not be able to prevent herself gloating on the dreadful retribution that awaited him and all those like him, and she did not want to prolong this tte-a-tdte, she wanted to be free to go to Moses, to warn him that today was not the day he had planned for.
So she rose. 'You know how I feel, we don't have to discuss it. I'm going to bed. Excuse me." 'Yes, of course." He stood up courteously. 'I'll be working for the next few hours. I have to go over my notes for my meeting with Littleton and his team tomorrow afternoon, so don't worry about me." Tara checked that Isabella was in her room and asleep, before went to her suite and locked the door. She changed out of her lc dress and jewellery into jeans and a dark sweater, then she made cannabis cigarette and while she smoked it, she waited fifteen minu by her watch for Shasa to settle down to his work. Then she switch off her lights. She dropped the cigarette butt into the toilet a: flushed it away, before she let herself into the passage once ago locking her suite against the unlikely chance that Shasa might cot up to look for her. Then she went down the back stairs.
As she crossed the wide stoep, keeping against the wall, staying the shadows and moving silently, a telephone rang in the libra wing and she froze involuntarily, her heart jarring her ribs. Then s] realized that the telephone must be Shasa's private line, and she w, about to move on, when she heard his voice. Although the curtail were drawn› the windows of his study were open and she could s.
the shadow of his head against the drapes.
'Kitty!" he said. 'Kitty Godolphin, you little witch. I should ha guessed that you'd be here." The name startled Tara, and brought back harrowing memorie but she could not resist the temptation to creep closer to the curtaine window.
'You always follow the smell of blood, don't you?" Shasa said, an chuckled at her reply.
'Where are you? The Nellie." The Mount Nelson was simply th best hotel in Cape Town. 'And what are you doing now - I meal right this moment? Yes, I know it's two o'clock in the morning, bu any time is a good time - you told me that yourself a long time ago It will take me half an hour to get there. Whatever else you do, don' start without me." He hung up and she saw his shadow on the curtaiI as he stood up from his desk.
She ran to the end of the long stoep and jumped down into th hydrangea bed and crouched'in the bushes. Within a few minute, Shasa came out of the side door. He had a dark overcoat over his smoking-jacket. He went down to the garages and drove away in the Jaguar. Even in his haste he drove slowly through the vineyards so as not to blow dust on his precious grapes, and, watching the headlights disappear, Tara hated him as much as she ever had. She thought that she should have grown accustomed to his philandering, but he was like a torn cat in rut - no woman was safe from him, and his moral outrage against Sean, his own son, for the same behaviour, had been ludicrous.
Kitty Godolphin - she cast her mind back to their first meeting and the television reporter's reaction to the mention of Shasa's name and now the reason for it became clear.
'Oh God, I hate him so. He is totally without conscience or pity.
He deserves to die!" She said it aloud, and then clapped her hand over her mouth. 'I shouldn't have said it, but it is true! He deserves to die and I deserve to be free of him - free to go to Moses and my child." She rose out of the hydrangea bushes, brushed the clinging soil from her jeans and crossed the lawns quickly. The moon was in its first quarter, but bright enough to throw her shadow in front of her, and she entered the vineyard with relief and hurried down the rows of vines that were heavy with leaf and grape. She skirted the winery and the stables and reached the servants' cottages.
She had placed Moses in the room at the end of the second row of cottages and his window faced out on to the vineyard. She tapped on his window and his response was almost immediate; she knew he slept as lightly as a wild cat. 'It's me,' she whispered.