He lay Todd down on the damp sand in the recovery position and examined his wound. Blood was seeping from the gash. Todd’s face was pale, a grey shade of white, but he was breathing shallowly. Calder felt for his pulse; it took him a few seconds of frantic fumbling to find it, but there it was. Faint, irregular, but beating.
There was nothing more Calder could do for him. He looked around. On all sides was the grey sea, calm in the faint breeze, breaking in small wavelets over the edge of the sand. At sea level the bar seemed further from the shore than he had thought, closer to a mile than half a mile. Along the coast was marsh and then a road which ran beside a couple of isolated houses. Black smoke was pouring out of the Yak, it would be easy to spot. Calder could probably swim the distance to the shore by himself, but not while encumbered with an unconscious Todd. Besides which a tidal current seemed to be moving rapidly from right to left. Swimming would be a struggle.
They would wait.
Calder had just decided this when he glanced again at Todd. What he saw made his blood run cold. Todd was still motionless, but whereas the sea had been several feet away from them a moment before, a wave was now lapping against the prone man’s feet. The tide was coming in!
Calder had flown over this stretch of coastline many times before. He knew that at high tide this spit of sand was under water. He also knew how rapidly the tide on the north Norfolk coast could cover the miles of exposed sand and mud.
He examined the sandbar, shrinking before his eyes. The Yak, still burning, now rested in a few inches of water. At the centre of the bar he noticed a hump of sand, perhaps a foot above the rest. That would have to do. He picked up Todd, slung him over his shoulder and staggered over towards it. Water began to lap at his feet. He reached the hump and lay Todd on the bare sand.
He looked about him. Where was the help? It had been a few minutes since he had crash landed the Yak so help should be on the way. Assuming Marham had received his Mayday call, or someone on the road had spotted the burning aeroplane and done something about it.
The water ate into the sandbar. A wave stole over the summit of the hump, seeping under Todd’s prone body. There was nothing for it. Calder picked up the dead weight of his passenger and slung it over his shoulder once again. He stood there, legs apart, water around his ankles, and waited.
Todd grew heavier. The water rose. Calder’s shoulder and back ached under their burden. His spine had suffered a compression fracture many years before when he had ejected from his Tornado after a mid-air collision, and it was complaining loudly. The water was up to his thighs and he could feel the pull of the current along the shoreline. It would be very hard to swim ashore in that. But he was going to have to try.
Up to his waist. It was still only May, and the sea was numbingly cold, especially once it passed his groin. Todd’s weight had become unbearable, and Calder slung him off his shoulder, lay his body in the water and cradled his head above the gentle waves. The man was still unconscious.
Up to his chest. This was hopeless. Perhaps he should strike out for the shore with Todd. Or without him. Without him, Calder would survive. It was pointless them both drowning. At some point it would be reasonable for Calder to abandon Todd and save himself, wouldn’t it? Calder looked down at Todd’s slack, pale features. He thought of Kim. He thought of what it would be like living with the knowledge that he had abandoned her husband to his death. He could never explain that away to her or to himself. When it came to the time, he would try to swim off with Todd and see what happened.
Then he heard it, a roar to the east. Within seconds a Tornado appeared, flying along the coastline. Calder could tell it was moving slowly, for a fast jet. Although Calder would be virtually invisible, the upended tail of the Yak was still just above the waves. The Tornado flew low overhead and waggled its wings. It had seen them. As the aircraft disappeared over the land to the south-east, Calder heard another sound, the rapid beat of a helicopter to the west. The Tornado would have called in their precise position.
The sea was up to his neck, and the current was tugging at him, but he managed to keep Todd’s face out of the water. Within a minute the yellow Sea King was overhead and a crewman was swinging down towards them.
4
June 20, 1988
Well, I’ll try again after that junk I wrote a couple of days ago. It did make me feel slightly better: I’m calmer now. Still angry, but definitely calmer.
They say that a diary shows a future you the person you used to be. I wish I had written one nearly twenty years ago when I first came to South Africa. Then I was an idealist prepared to be appalled by this country. Somehow I fell in love with it, and with Neels. Together I thought we could play our own part in changing it. Instead, it seems to have changed us.
So maybe writing this will help me figure out who I am. Why I’m here. What I’m going to do next.
It’s been three days since we had that fight. It was the worst of our marriage so far, shouting, screaming, swearing at each other: at one point I thought Neels was going to hit me. He’s seemed so much more violent recently, since Hennie was killed. It scares me. He got in a fistfight last week with a stranger in the street, some drunken Boer who recognized him and called him a Kaffir lover. Neels hit him so hard he knocked him out. Three months ago he would have smiled and walked away.
Somehow I think there are going to be many more arguments. He told me he plans to close down the Cape Daily Mail and sell the rest of his South African properties. By “properties” he means newspapers. Apparently American investors are uncomfortable dealing with someone who has South African business interests. So Cornelius van Zyl plans to reinvent himself as a non-South African so that he can buy companies in the States and Britain and all over the rest of the world.
I asked him why he couldn’t just sell the Mail to a friendly proprietor. There are more and more businessmen who are critical of the regime these days. He says the paper is losing money hand over fist and no one would buy it. Although the readership is high, an increasing number of those readers are blacks and the advertisers don’t like that. Blacks don’t have any money to spend. He says he can’t go on subsidizing it for ever.
He’s even selling the family paper, the Oudtshoorn Rekord, that his father started sixty years ago. However many English-language newspapers he bought in South Africa he always said he would hold on to that Afrikaans one, in memory of his father. He clearly didn’t mean it.
Actually, he did mean it then. The point is he doesn’t mean it now. Why? What has changed?
I can’t help thinking that if he abandons the Mail and the other papers, and if he abandons South Africa, then he is abandoning me. I know I’m American, but he’s running away from me, not toward me. He spends more and more time in Philadelphia at the Intelligencer’s offices. He never asks me to come with him. Why not?
I’m losing him.
June 21
It’s a wonderful morning. After I got back from taking Caroline to school I went out for a walk, up to the picnic spot above our house. That’s where I’m sitting now as I write this. Above me is the Hondekop, the craggy outcrop of rock in the shape of the head of a great hound that gave its name to our house. To the right I can see the white cluster of buildings that is the town of Stellenbosch, and beyond that, thirty miles away, is a corner of Table Mountain. The narrow valley stretches up to the left, into the Hottentots Holland mountains. It’s cold this morning, cold and clear, with no wind. The vines are heavy with dew, and the morning sun is touching the tops of the crags on the other side of the valley, turning the gray rock yellow and gold.