‘And so I was. A kind, sympathetic man who wanted to get you into bed. Didn’t work, though, did it? Should have gone for the selfish bastard approach.’
‘Nah,’ said Kim. ‘You would have been really bad at that. Trust me. I know a lot about that technique.’
The level of the wine slipped down the bottle.
‘What about you?’ she said. ‘When I asked you about the existence of a girlfriend you came over all grumpy. What’s up?’
Calder told her all about Sandy. Kim was generally sympathetic, although when Calder described the bust-up following his weekend alone in New York, she gently took Sandy’s side.
‘You know she probably felt just as badly about it as you did?’
‘If she did, she could have done something about it.’
‘Maybe she couldn’t.’
‘I know. But it’s still not going to work.’
‘What if you moved to New York?’
‘I’m not sure the relationship has progressed that far. Besides, the only job I could get over there would be in investment banking, and there’s no way I’m going back to that.’
‘Why not? I’d have thought you’d make a good trader. In fact I thought that was the perfect job for you after the RAF.’
‘I was a good trader,’ Calder admitted. ‘Very good. And I got a buzz out of it. But it’s not the real world. After a few years of flinging millions of dollars of other people’s money around you lose touch with reality. Everything has a monetary value. Your salary, obviously, your profit and loss, your bonus, your trading positions, your house, your car, before you know it, even your relationships. You begin to think that poor people are stupid people. Then you think that someone who won’t do what it takes to get a deal is a wimp. Not just a wimp, but a stupid wimp. It changes you.’
‘Oh, come on, Alex. Not everyone in investment banking is evil. There are plenty of ordinary decent people who work there.’
‘Yes, but there are fewer of them than there should be, and those few change. Look at Benton Davis! Martha said she trusted him: well maybe she could have done eighteen years ago, but she certainly wouldn’t now. The same thing was happening to me.
‘Remember I told you about my assistant, Jen, the one who everyone thought committed suicide? Her former boss had bullied her the whole time she was working for him, totally destroyed her self-esteem. That’s why she joined my group. Then in a bar after work one evening he suggested that she and I were sleeping together. Taken in isolation, that might not sound too bad, but for her it was the last straw. She decided to sue Bloomfield Weiss. Benton Davis and all the others made her life hell. And you know what I did? I tried to talk her out of it. I told her her career would benefit and she would make more money if she put up with those kinds of insults. Well, she was a brave woman, she stood up to them, stood up to them all. In the end she died. And only then did I really try to help her, when it was way to late.’
‘Wow,’ said Kim.
‘That’s why I’m here, tootling around with aeroplanes.’
‘Rather you than me,’ Kim said. She yawned. ‘It’s amazing how sitting around doing nothing all day can make you tired. I’m off to bed.’
‘Good night.’
As Kim disappeared inside, Calder sat alone in the garden, watching the night creep up around him.
Andries Visser pulled his Land Rover Discovery off the road and along the poplar-lined drive to his farm. The veld stretched brown and yellow in the distance to his left and right. He saw the large frame of his older brother Gideon sitting on an open tractor pulling winter feed for the cattle, a prize herd of Limousins. Gideon was a strong, hardworking, if unimaginative farmer. He lived in the cottage behind the main farmhouse, but he did most of the work. Andries and his family lived in the main house even though Andries’s physical contribution to the farm was negligible. He had provided the money to invest in the farm, and the ideas. If the place had been left to Gideon, the Vissers would still be scratching around in the dirt.
There was another reason Andries lived in the main house and his elder brother and his family in the cottage. Twenty years earlier, when their father was still alive and Gideon was in his late thirties, Gideon had got himself involved in a spot of legal trouble. Gideon and his wife and five children had gone to a braai at a neighbour’s farm. True to tradition it was an all-day affair, boerewors on the fire and Castle beer in the cool box. The weather was glorious, the kids were playing, the women were gossiping and Gideon and the neighbour were getting pleasantly drunk. Then there was a commotion from the sheds at the back. One of the farm hands had discovered a thief. He was a runt of a man, a black of course, and he had been caught stealing a can of red paint. Why he wanted to steal the paint wasn’t entirely clear, but Gideon and the neighbour were indignant, especially when Gideon, wrongly as it turned out, identified the man as a suspected thief of a cow from another neighbour’s farm the month before. The two Boers decided to teach the man a lesson, and in order not to scare the children they slung him in the rear of the bakkie and drove off. He was found the following day in a ditch, beaten to death.
The law took its course and several months later Gideon and the neighbour found themselves in the dock accused of murder. The thief, whose name was Moses Nkose, was incontrovertibly dead, but hard evidence of murder was difficult to pin down. Andries discussed the matter with his father and with Gideon, and the three of them came to an arrangement. Andries had a word with the right people and Gideon ended up with only two years for manslaughter. Andries, the son who was happiest wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, inherited the farm. Over time Gideon’s resentment had faded, and the arrangement worked well.
Andries could easily have arranged his brother’s acquittal, but he had chosen not to. After all, he still walked with a slight limp from where his big brother had belted him with the flat of a pick axe when he was twelve.
Andries drove up to the house itself, surrounded by an inner fence of twelve-foot-high barbed wire, topped off with three electrified strands. Yellow signs warned of an armed response to intruders. Cattle rustlers these days carried guns. Inside the fence, a modern-day kraal, was an oasis of green irrigated wealth. There were tall trees, poplar and cypress, there was a lush green lawn, there was a swimming pool, and the house itself, a simple low white one-storey affair to which Andries had added two extensions. To one side stood the water tower, a windmill, the labourers’ shacks and, most importantly, the cow sheds. The fences were there to protect the cattle as much as the humans.
Andries was no farmer, but he was immensely proud of his farm. It had been in the family for 160 years. The Visser family had set off from Graaff-Reinet in the Karoo on the Great Trek in the 1830s, had crossed the Drakensberg mountains into Zululand, and then a few years later been ejected by the British and re-crossed the mountains to this spot, forty kilometres from Pretoria. Here they had scratched a living, a God-fearing, hard-working, honest family, struggling against the depredations of poor weather, poor soil and vindictive British colonial administrators. A small, physically weak man with a limp, Andries had found his talents more suited to the needs of government administration in Pretoria, but he never forgot the physical labour and suffering of his ancestors, and now he had retired from government service he was proud to be occupying the same land they had farmed through the generations.
He parked next to a car he recognized, an unprepossessing blue Toyota Corolla. He stubbed out his cigarette in the pot by the stoep. His wife, Hannah, had banned him from smoking indoors a couple of years before. He swung open the security gate guarding the front door and entered the house.