‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am.’
‘You are what?’
‘Edward Lincoln.’
‘Oh yeah.’ She took a closer look. ‘Oh golly. Good heavens. So you are.’ Then doubtfully, afraid I was making a fool of her, ‘Are you really?’
Her father said, ‘Mr Lincoln is a friend of Mrs Cavesey...’
‘Aunt Nerissa! Oh yes. She told us once that she knew you well... She’s such a darling, isn’t she?’
‘She is,’ I agreed, sitting down again.
Jonathan looked at me steadily with a cold and unimpressed eye.
‘I never go to see your sort of film,’ he stated.
I smiled mildly and made no answer: it was typical of the putting-down brand of remark made to me with varying degrees of aggression almost every week of my life. Experience had long ago shown that the only unprovocative reply was silence.
‘Well, I do,’ Sally said. ‘I’ve seen quite a few of them. Was it really you riding that horse in Spy Across Country, like the posters said?’
I nodded. ‘Mm.’
She looked at me consideringly. ‘Wouldn’t you have found it easier in a hackamore?’
I laughed involuntarily. ‘Well, no. I know the script said the horse had a very light mouth, but the one they actually gave me to ride had a hard one.’
‘Sally is a great little horsewoman,’ her mother said unnecessarily. ‘She won the big pony class at the Rand Easter Show.’
‘On Rojedda Reef,’ Sally added.
The name meant nothing to me. But the others clearly thought it would. They looked at me expectantly, and in the end it was Jonathan who said with superiority, ‘It’s the name of our gold mine.’
‘Really? I didn’t know you had a gold mine.’ I half deliberately said it with the same inflection that father and son had said they didn’t see my films, and Quentin van Huren heard it. He turned his head quite sharply towards me, and I could feel the internal smile coming out of my eyes.
‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully, holding my gaze. ‘I see.’ His lips twitched. ‘Would you care to go down one? To see what goes on?’
From the surprised expressions on the rest of his family, I gathered that what he had offered was more or less the equivalent of my suggesting a press conference.
‘I’d like it enormously,’ I assured him. ‘I really would.’
‘I’m flying down to Welkom on Monday morning,’ he said. ‘That’s the town where Rojedda is... I’ll be there the whole week, but if you care to come down with me Monday, you can fly back again the same evening.’
I said that that would be great.
By the end of dinner the van Huren-Lincoln entente had progressed to the point where three of the family decided to go to Germiston that Saturday to watch Nerissa’s horses run. Jonathan said he had more important things to do.
‘Like what?’ Sally demanded.
Jonathan didn’t really know.
Chapter Seven
Friday turned out to be a meagre day for world news, which left a lot too much space for the perils of Katya. Seldom had the Press been invited in advance to such a spectacle, and in most papers it seemed to have made the front page.
One of them first unkindly suggested that it had all been a publicity stunt which had gone wrong, and then denied it most unconvincingly in the following paragraph.
I wondered, reading it, how many people would believe just that. I wondered, remembering that mischievous smile, whether Katya could possibly even have set it up herself. She and Roderick, between them.
But she wouldn’t have risked her life. Not unless she hadn’t realised she was risking it.
I picked up the Rand Daily Star, to see what they had made of Roderick’s information, and found that he had written the piece himself. ‘By our own Rand Daily Star eye-witness, Roderick Hodge’ it announced at the top. Considering his emotional involvement it was not too highly coloured, but it was he, more than any of the others, who stressed, as Conrad had done, that if Katya had not taken the microphone away from me, it would have been I who got the shock.
I wondered how much Roderick wished I had done. For one thing, it would have made a better story.
With a twisting smile I read on to the end. Katya, he reported finally, was being detained in hospital overnight, her condition described as ‘comfortable’.
I shoved the papers aside, and while I showered and shaved came to two conclusions. One was that what I had done was not particularly remarkable and certainly not worth the coverage, and the other was that after this I was going to have even more trouble explaining to Nerissa why all I could bring her were guesses, not proof.
Down at the reception desk I asked if they could get me a packed lunch and hire me a horse for the day out in some decent riding country. Certainly, they said, and waved a few magic wands: by mid-morning I was twenty-five miles north of Johannesburg setting out along a dirt road in brilliant sunshine on a pensioned off racehorse who had seen better days. I took a deep contented breath of the sweet smell of Africa and padded along with a great feeling of freedom. The people who owned the horse had gently insisted on sending their head boy along with me so that I shouldn’t get lost, but as he spoke little English and I no Bantu, I found him a most peaceful companion. George was small, rode well, and had a great line in banana-shaped smiles.
We passed a cross-roads where there was a large stall, all by itself, loaded with bright orange fruit and festooned with pineapples, with one man beaming beside them.
‘Naartjies,’ George said, pointing.
I made signs that I didn’t understand. One thing about being an actor, it occasionally came in useful.
‘Naartjies.’ George repeated, dismounting from his horse and leading it towards the stall. I grasped the fact that George wanted to buy, so I called to him and fished out a five rand note. George smiled, negotiated rapidly, and returned with a huge string bag of naartjies, two ripe pineapples, and most of the money.
In easy undemanding companionship we rode further, dismounted in some shade, ate a pineapple each, and cold chicken from the Iguana Rock, and drank some refreshing unsweet apple juice from tins George had been given to bring along. The naartjies turned out to be like large lumpy tangerines with green patches on the skin: they also tasted like tangerine, but better.
George ate his lunch thirty feet away from me. I beckoned to him to come closer, but he wouldn’t.
In the afternoon we trotted and cantered a long way over tough scrubby brown dried grass, and finally, walking to cool the horses, found ourselves approaching the home stables from the opposite direction to the way we set out.
They asked ten rand for the hire of the horse, though the day I had had was worth a thousand, and I gave George five rand for himself, which his employers whispered was too much. George with a last dazzling smile handed me the bag of naartjies and they all gave me friendly waves when I left. If only life were all so natural, so undemanding, so unfettered.
Five miles down the road I reflected that if it were, I would be bored to death.
Conrad was before me at the Iguana.
He met me as I came into the hall and surveyed me from head to foot, dust, sweat, naartjies and all.
‘What on earth have you been doing, dear boy?’
‘Riding.’
‘What a pity I haven’t an Arriflex with me,’ he exclaimed.
‘What a shot... you standing there looking like a gypsy with your back to the light... and those oranges... have to work it into our next film together, can’t waste a shot like that...’