Storms Over Africa (3 page)

Kathy had done the same. She had friends in Harare who she saw whenever she went down to the capital. Friends who would talk about babies and recipes and clothes. She needed that outside contact too. But Kathy did not come home drunk from the bars at six in the morning. She did not consider herself to be fatally attractive to members of the opposite sex. She loved her husband wholly and deeply.

Richard had loved his wife wholly and deeply too, if a little haphazardly. Her death from cancer had been a desperately cruel blow. Typically, when he thought about his marriage, he remembered his thoughtlessness, selfishness—wishing he had been a better husband. He never stopped to consider how much he had helped her. Kathy had needed him badly. In the beginning, while she was undergoing radiotherapy and chemotherapy, she was often weak and tired, forever sick, sometimes depressed. He was there at her side, supporting, humouring and helping. When ulcers turned her mouth into ugly red sores, he would kiss her ears and tell her how much he loved her and supervise soft food she could swallow easily. When, after six months of treatment, she began to hold her own, he was there, encouraging her to be positive.

And when, after a year of remission, the cancer began to spread, he tried everything he knew to get her to agree to go back for more treatment.

‘No more,' she had begged him. ‘I can't go through it again.'

He had bullied, ranted and pleaded in return.

‘But it won't make any difference if I do or don't, the end result will be the same. Please stop shouting at me.'

Privately, her doctor agreed. ‘I'm sorry,
Richard. Kathy knows the truth. Just be there for her.'

And he had been. But he had forgotten.

It took her four years. Four years while the cancer played a stop-start game. But it never went backwards, only forwards. It never got better. At times Richard was impatient, had horrible and disloyal thoughts, felt sorry for himself, felt angry with Kathy.

At her funeral the doctor said to him, ‘Lose your guilt, Richard, you did everything you possibly could.'

‘How the hell would you know?' he had snarled back, angry, frightened, alone and feeling ill equipped to help his children. ‘There were times I wished she would hurry up and get on with it.'

‘That's only natural.'

But he did not believe the doctor and he constantly berated himself. He missed her more than he would have believed possible. He missed her gentle humour, her companionship and her unwavering love and loyalty. Her death forced him to acknowledge the depth of his own love for her, something he had taken for granted. And while he was sunk into bitter regret for not loving her better, while he thrashed around in loneliness and pain, his farm went steadily downhill.

His thoughts shifted back to the previous night. It had started well enough. He planned
to have dinner with his daughter at Henri's. He had telephoned her as soon as he checked into his room at Harare's best hotel. The sound of her crisp, self-assured voice filled him with a swelling of paternal pride which always surprised him.

‘Penny Dunn.'

‘Hello, baby.'

‘Daddy!' Her voice rose with pleasure. ‘Where are you?'

‘Meikles.'

‘Why don't you stay with me?'

It was an old question. He gave his usual answer. ‘I don't want to impose on you, baby.' In truth, the one occasion he had stayed with Penny the lumpy mattress of her spare bed gave him a backache, the modern art paintings that hung all over her flat depressed him, and watching her act as hostess filled him with the dreadful suspicion he was growing old.

‘What brings you down to the big city?'

‘David's arriving tomorrow.'

‘Oh.' Penny fell silent. She and her brother had practically nothing in common. Richard suspected they never corresponded while David was in his boarding school in Scotland.

‘Like to have dinner with an old man tonight?'

‘Daddy, I'd love to.'

‘Fine, I'll pick you up around 7.30.'

On his way through the hotel lobby he
heard his name called. Turning, he saw a tall redhead striding towards him. She looked vaguely familiar. ‘Hello,' he greeted her cautiously.

‘Richard, what a surprise. I'm overnighting here. Flying to Sydney tomorrow. How lovely to see you again.'

Richard's mind was in overdrive. Australian from the accent—air hostess most likely. He still could not remember her name. ‘Great to see you too,' he responded, getting a brief flashback of pale, finely freckled skin on limbs entangled enticingly in lime green sheets.
Now where in the name of God have I slept in lime green sheets?

‘You don't remember me, do you?' Her lovely full mouth pouted attractively.

To buy time he replied, ‘Of course I do. And I'll never forget those sheets.'

To his relief she threw back her head and laughed. ‘God, yes. Sue and her bloody awful sheets.'

Sue! Ah yes—Susie Stace, temporary Qantas representative in Harare, filling in for the regular manager who was recovering from recurring malaria.
‘Great night wasn't it?'
If only I could bloody-well remember it.
He adlibbed desperately, hoping his memory, which was two seconds ahead of his mouth, would come to his aid.
She's got a sugary name.
‘Candy . . . of course I remember you.'

‘Close.' She grinned at him. ‘Candice, actually.'

Suddenly he liked her. She had an openness which appealed to him. ‘I'm having dinner with my daughter. Care to join us?' As soon as the words were out he regretted them. Penny would not be pleased to share her evening with another woman. She was jealously possessive of private time with her father.

The evening was a disaster. Penny was moody and brittle, rude to Candice and sarcastic to Richard. Candice, sensing the tension between father and daughter, became embarrassed and silent. Richard overcompensated and tried to be funny. He knew this was a mistake, but was unable to stop himself. Eventually, over coffee, Penny excused herself, claiming she had an early start the next day and needed to get home. ‘I'll take a taxi,' she told Richard, ‘I don't want to spoil your evening.' She said a curt goodnight to Candice and left them.

‘I don't think your daughter likes me.'

‘My daughter,' Richard responded heavily, ‘doesn't like any woman in my company. What my daughter needs is a bloody good spanking.'

‘Bit late for that,' Candice said with brutal Australian honesty. Then she reached out for Richard's hand. ‘To hell with her. She's not going to spoil my evening.' And Richard,
feeling he was somehow betraying his daughter but too irritated with her to do anything about it, had agreed.

Leaning against the wall at the airport, Richard wondered about Penny's attitude. She had always been possessive and wilful. Spoiling her after her mother's death had only made her worse. He was not blind to her faults but he loved her with the myopia of a parent and he made allowances for her. It was hard not to; she was a feminine replica of her father, right down to thick black hair and dark, winged eyebrows. It had always charmed him to watch her, fascinated him to observe the way her personality developed so closely aligned with his that sometimes they could communicate without speaking.

His thoughts were interrupted by the announcement of the arrival of the London flight. The prospect of seeing David after three months gave Richard mixed feelings. Where Penny was wild and spoiled, competent and hard, David was soft, gentle, generous to a fault, sensitive and, to Richard's way of thinking, a bit girlish. The boy
was
seventeen, his voice had broken several years earlier, and he had the hard muscular body of a young man. Yet, last school holidays, David had cried like a baby over the death of his dog. Richard saw David's sensitivity as a sign of weakness, never connecting it to Kathy's gentle nature.

He knew that, more than Penny, David had suffered through the loss of their mother. Kathy had always been the buffer zone between David and the harder personalities of Richard and Penny. When she died, David had retreated into a silent and terrible mourning which no-one seemed able to penetrate. Although on the surface he appeared to be coping, Richard knew he was not, but was unable to help his son. David's grief made Richard feel guilty, which annoyed him. He took his irritation out on his son. He knew he was being irrational but David's gentle sensitivity acted like salt on a snail's tail—it had Richard fizzing with impatience.

He delved into his pocket and took out his cigarettes, shaking his head at the complexities of being a single parent. He knew he was ill equipped for the role. If Kathy were still alive he felt certain his two children would have turned out differently. Even if they hadn't, at least she would have been there to shoulder some of the responsibility. That was the rub. He believed himself to be too impatient to be a good father. He never acknowledged, even to himself, that the responsibility scared him. ‘Damn it, Kath,' he thought, not for the first time, ‘why the hell did you go and leave like that?'

As usual, thinking about Kathy reminded him of the night she died. He hated to remember
that night but the memories often came, unbidden, and because he had loved her more than he would ever love another woman, he never chased them away. Even bad memories brought her back, however briefly.

The doctor, on a regular visit, confirmed what Richard already knew. Kathy was losing the battle. ‘She should be in hospital.'

But he had promised her he wouldn't send her away. He had learned how to inject the morphine she needed, dealt personally with the soiled nightdresses and bedclothes because he knew she would be embarrassed to have a nurse do it, and supervised the cooking of her food and spent hours enticing her to eat. ‘She stays at home,' he told the doctor.

‘Then I'd send for the children if I were you, Richard. She's only got a few days.'

Penny and David arrived home from boarding school two weeks before term officially finished. Penny—coltish, skittish, a young woman one minute, a young girl the next—was tight-lipped and defiant, almost challenging God for the ownership of her mother. David, a quiet man in a child's body, was white-faced and frightened and terribly vulnerable. The day they arrived was a bad one for Kathy but the next day she saw her children one at a time. Each of them spent several hours with her. It was as though she had been hanging on to say goodbye. That night she
died while Richard held her frail body in his arms, the breath leaving her in one small sigh. Her last whispered words to her husband were, ‘Go and sit in the chair, darling. You're holding me back.' But Richard could not let her go and he held her desperately, willing her to stay, tears soaking her nightdress, sobs shaking his body as he faced the reality of her leaving him and he knew with absolute certainty how much he loved her.

After the funeral, feeling more alone than he had ever felt and hungry for anything of Kathy's which might bring her closer, he asked his children what they had spoken about with their mother on that last occasion. Penny carefully recounted the conversation, drawing strength from sharing with her father. David defied him. ‘That's between her and me, Dad.'

Richard's patience had been on a short leash. ‘Damn it, David, I need to know.' But David, twelve years old, deeply in shock and bereft beyond belief, took comfort his own way, by hugging the last few hours with his mother to himself.

Richard came back to the present with a start. As usual, thinking of that time brought back the lump of hurt in his throat. He had learned to hide his emotions from others, learned how to stop the tears which threatened, learned how to laugh it away. No-one ever knew the extent of his pain. He hid it
because he had been taught by his father that emotion was unmanly. He hid it because he lived in a land of hard men and women who judged others by their competence and ability to cope. He did such a good job of hiding his hurt that even his children believed he had recovered remarkably well from their mother's death. But the pain never went away and loneliness, despite his success with women, stalked his bedroom at night.

Looking around, he realised that the first passengers were coming through. He searched the crowded Arrivals hall for a sign of Penny. He had asked if she intended to meet David's flight but all she would say last night was, ‘If I can.' He was fairly certain she would deliberately stay away to punish him for last night. Despite his annoyance he grinned at her defiance. It was an emotion he understood.

‘Hello, Dad.' Unseen by Richard, David had walked up beside him.
Hell's teeth but the boy has grown in three months.
Richard was five feet eleven. David was now topping six feet.

‘Christ, you look ill, son. We'll have to get some tan onto that white skin.' As soon as he said the words, Richard wished he could retract them. Criticism instead of praise—a hell of a start.

David, however, simply smiled and said, ‘Sounds good,' and Richard felt the old irritation rising at his son's gentle placidness.

‘Is that all your luggage?' As usual, David was travelling with nothing more than hand-baggage. The boy seemed to live in the same jeans and T-shirt, although Richard knew his cupboard at the farm was jammed with clothes. Judging from the bills, he presumed the lad had another full cupboard of clothes at school.

‘Yep.' David swung the shoulder bag easily over his broad shoulder.

The older he gets the more he looks like Kath.
Richard resented that. Just looking at David reminded him of how Kathy looked when he first met her. The same clear blue eyes, the same unruly blonde curls, identical fine bones and high-bridged nose, the same wide smiling mouth. Pushing his feelings to one side he said, ‘We're going straight home. Penny might be up at the weekend.' He crossed his fingers as he said it.

‘That's cool.'