'All right,' he thought. 'I have to take it out on somebody and you will do." He inclined his head slightly, and Jill Anstey nodded and slipped out of the door behind her. Shasa murmured an apology to Centaine, then stood up and moved through the pounding music and semi-darkness towards the door through which Jill Anstey had disappeared.
Shasa got back to the Carlton Hotel at nine o'clock in the morning. Still in black tie and dinner jacket, he avoided the lobby and went up the back stairs from the underground garage. Centaine and Blaine were in the company suite, and Shasa had the smaller suite across the passage. He dreaded meeting either of them dressed as he was at this time in the morning, but he was lucky and got into his lounge uninterrupted.
Somebody had slipped an envelope under his door and he picked it up without particular interest, until he saw the Killarney Film Studios crest on the flap. Kitty Godolphin was working out of that studio and he grinned and split the flap with his thumbnail.
Dear Mr Courtney, The rushes are just great - you look better than Errol Flynn on film. If you want to see them, call me at the studio.
Kitty Godolphin His anger had cooled and he was amused by her cheek, and though he had a full day ahead - lunch with Lord Littleton and meetings all afternoon - he phoned the studio.
'You just caught me,' Kitty told him. 'I was on my way out. You want to see the rushes? Okay, can you get up here at six this evening?" She was smiling that sweet childlike smile and mocking him with a malicious green sparkle in her eyes as she came down to the reception desk of the studio to shake his hand and lead him to her hired projection room in the complex.
'I knew I could rely on your masculine vanity to get you up here,' she assured him.
Her film crew were sprawled untidily over the front row of seats in the projection room, smoking Camels and drinking Cokes, but Hank, the camera man, had the film clip in the projector ready to run, and they watched it through in silence.
When the lights went up again, Shasa turned to Kitty and conceded.
'You are good - you made me look a real prick most of the time.
And, of course, you can always lose the parts where I held my own on the cutting-room floor." 'You don't like it?" she grinned, wrinkling her small nose so the freckles on it gleamed like tiny gold coins.
'You are a bushwhacker, shooting from cover, and I'm out there with my back wide open." 'If you accuse me of faking it,' she challenged him, 'how about you taking me and showing me the way it really is. Show me the Courtney mines and factories and let me film them!" So that was why she had called him. He smiled to himself, but asked, 'Have you got ten days?" 'I've got as long as it takes,' she assured him.
'All right, let's start with dinner tonight." 'Great!" she enthused, and then turned to her crew. 'Mazeltov, boys, Mr Courtney is standing us all dinner." 'That's not exactly what I had in mind,' he murmured.
'Do tell?" She gave him her innocent little girl look.
Kitty Godolphin was a rewarding companion. Her interest in everything he said or showed her was flattering and unfeigned. She watched his eyes or his lips as he spoke, and often leaned so close to listen that he could feel her breath on his face, but she never actually touched him.
For Shasa her appeal was heightened by her personal cleanliness.
In the days they spent together, hot dusty days in the desert of the far west or in the eastern forests, tramping through pulp mills or fertilizer factories, watching the bulldozers strip the overburden from the coal deposits in billowing clouds of dust, or baking in the depths of the great excavation of the H'am Mine, Kitty was always freshfaced and cool-looking. Even in the dust her eyes were clear and her small even teeth sparkled. When or where she had an opportunity to rinse her clothes he could never decide, but they were always clean and crisp and her breath when she leaned close to him was always sweet.
She was a professional. That impressed Shasa also. She would go to any lengths to get the film footage she wanted, taking no account of fatigue or personal danger. He had to forbid her riding on the outside of the mine cage on the H'am main incline shaft to film the drop into the pit, but she went back later, while he was in a meeting with his mine manager, and got exactly the shot she wanted and then smiled away his fury when he found out. Her crew treated her with an ambivalence that amused Shasa. They held her in fond affection and were immensely protective of her, as though they were her elder brothers, and their pride in her achievements was unconcealed. However, at the same time they were much in awe of her ruthless search for excellence, to which they knew she would sacrifice them and anything else that got in her way. Her temper, although not often displayed, was merciless and vitriolic and when she gave an order, no matter how quietly or how sweet the smile that accompanied it, they jumped.
Shasa was also affected by the deep feelings which she had conceived for Africa, its land and its people.
'I thought America was the most beautiful country in all the world,' she said quietly one evening as they watched the sun set behind the great desolate mountains of the western deserts. 'But when I look at this, I have to wonder." Her curiosity took her into the compounds where the Courtney Company employees were housed, and she spent hours talking to the workers and their wives, filming it all, the questions and answers of black miners and white overseers and shift bosses, their homes and the food they ate, their recreations and their worship, and at the end Shasa asked her, 'So how do you like the way I oppress them9' 'They live well,' she conceded.
'And they are happy,' he pushed her. 'Admit it. I hid nothing from you. They are happy." 'They are happy like children,' she agreed.
'As long as they look up to you like big daddy. But just how long do you think you can keep fooling them? How long is, it going to be before they look at you in your beautiful airplane flying back to parliament to make a few more laws for them to obey and say to themselves, "Hey man!
I'd like to try that also"?" 'For three hundred years under white government the people of this land have woven a social fabric which has held us all together. It works, and I would hate to see it torn asunder without knowing what will replace it." 'How about democracy for a start?" she suggested. 'That's not a bad thing to replace it with - you know, the will of the majority must prevail!" 'You left out the best bit,' he flashed back at her. 'The interests of the minority must be safeguarded. That doesn't work in Africa. The African knows and understands one principle: winner takes all and let the minority go to the wall. That's what will happen to the white settlers in Kenya if the British capitulate to the Mau Mau killers." So they wrangled and sparred during the long hours of flying which took them over the enormous distances of the African continent. From one destination to the next, Shasa and Kitty went ahead in the Mosquito, and the helmet and oxygen mask were too large for her and made her appear even younger and more girlish. David Abrahams piloted the slower and more commodious company De Havilland Dove, the camera equipment and the crew flying with him, and even though most of Shasa's time on the ground was spent in meetings with his managers and administrative staff, there was still much time that he could devote to the seduction of Kitty Godolphin.
Shasa was not accustomed to prolonged resistance from any female who warranted his concentrated attention. There might be a token flight, but always with coy glances over the shoulder, and usually they chose to hide from him in the nearest bedroom, absentmindedly forgetting to turn the key in the lock, and he expected it to go very much the same way with Kitty Godolphin.
Getting into her blue jeans was his first priority; convincing her that Africa was different from America and that they were doing the best job they could came second by a long way. At the end of the ten days he had succeeded in neither endeavour. Both Kitty's political convictions and her virtue remained intact.