Daughters of Castle Deverill (48 page)

With only five days to go before docking in Cape Town, Celia must have been the only female in first class who hadn’t introduced herself to Rafael O’Rourke. It was no surprise,
therefore, when he found her on the deck one evening after dinner, and introduced himself to
her
. There is nothing as attractive for a celebrated, sought-after man like Rafael
O’Rourke as a woman who holds herself back. He leaned on the railings beside her and offered her a cigarette. She looked at him in surprise but smiled and took one. ‘Thank you,’
she said, placing it between her lips.

‘It’s nice and quiet out here,’ he said and his Irish brogue caught in her chest and made her suddenly long for home. Turning out of the wind he flicked his lighter. Celia had
to lean in close and cup her hands around the flame. It went out a couple of times so that on the third attempt Rafael opened his jacket wide to shield it from the gale. There was something very
intimate about the way she had to bend towards his body and she was relieved it was dark so that he couldn’t see her blush as she puffed on the flame. At last it lit and she stepped back and
rested her elbow on the railing.

‘You sing beautifully, Mr O’Rourke, but everyone must tell you that,’ she said, hoping her voice sounded confident. ‘But what they don’t tell you is that your voice
has become the tonic that heals me.’

‘I couldn’t help but notice that you’re on your own,’ he said.

‘I am,’ she replied.

His gaze fell softly on her face. ‘Might I ask why a beautiful woman like you is travelling alone?’

She laughed and wondered how many times he’d said that to strange women he met on his tours. ‘Because my husband is dead, Mr O’Rourke.’

He looked appalled. ‘I apologize. I shouldn’t have asked.’ He turned towards the sea and looked out into the darkness.

‘Please, don’t apologize. It’s perfectly fine. I’m getting used to being on my own.’

He glanced at her and grinned. ‘You won’t be alone for long.’

‘If Sir Leonard Akroyd had his way I wouldn’t have a moment to myself this entire voyage. He and his wife have rather taken me under their wing.’

‘But you escaped out here.’

‘I did. They’re a sweet, well-intentioned couple, but sometimes one needs a little time to oneself. I’m sure you know what I mean. From what I’ve noticed, you rarely have
a moment’s peace either.’

He smiled. ‘So you noticed me, did you?’ Before she could answer he added, ‘Because I noticed
you
, you see, the first day, and I’ve noticed you ever since. I
notice when you enter a room and when you leave it.’ Celia blew smoke into the wind and watched the night snatch it away. ‘Can I show you something?’ he asked.

‘That depends . . .’

He laughed a deep throaty laugh. ‘I’m a gentleman, Mrs—’

‘My name is Celia Deverill,’ she said and there was something reassuring about slipping into her former identity. She almost felt as if she was regaining a little of her old self.
‘I’m no longer Mrs Mayberry, you see. So you can call me Celia, if you like.’

‘And you can call me Rafi.’

‘Very well, Rafi. What is it you wish to show me?’

He walked with her along the promenade deck until they reached the end where deckchairs were lined up in rows. He stubbed out his cigarette beneath his shoe then settled himself into one and lay
back against the wood to stare up at the stars. ‘Aren’t they grand?’ he said.

Celia took the deckchair beside him and looked up at the sky. ‘They
are
grand,’ she agreed with a sigh. ‘They’re beautiful.’ She remembered those
stargazing evenings at Castle Deverill and the tension in her heart grew tighter.

‘You see, I’m a perfect gentleman,’ he laughed.

‘So you are,’ said Celia.

‘Where are you from, Celia?’

‘Ballinakelly in Co. Cork.’

‘I’m from Galway,’ he told her. ‘We’re a long way from home.’

‘We are,’ she said quietly.

‘And we have five days before we arrive in Cape Town.’

‘Are you married, Rafi?’ she asked.

‘I’ve been married since I was twenty-one. I have five children, all grown-up now. What would you say if I told you I’m a grandfather already?’

‘That you don’t look old enough. Is that what you want me to say?’

‘Of course.’

Celia caught her breath as he took her hand and caressed her skin with his thumb. She kept her eyes on the stars as the blood rushed to her temples. She hadn’t felt a man’s touch in
what seemed like eons. Her heart began to pound and a warm feeling crept softly over her, reawakening the dormant buds of her sexuality. When she turned to look at him he was staring at her, his
eyes shining in the moonlight. ‘Five days,’ she said, gazing back at him.

He smiled and put his hand to her face. He leaned over and pressed his lips to hers. His kiss was so tender, so sensual that it was easy to yield.
Five days,
she thought,
long
enough to enjoy a delicious fantasy, short enough to walk away at the end with my heart intact. As for my virtue, isn’t it time I had some fun? I’m a Deverill, after all.

The final five days on board
Carnarvon Castle
felt like another life for Celia, who threw herself into this heady adventure with the enthusiasm of someone who so badly
wants to forget the world beyond the bows of the ship. On her secluded island of cabins and decks she delighted in her brief affair. Rafael O’Rourke was a sensitive and tender lover, and
Celia found solace as well as a new vitality in the arms of this man who had no connection whatsoever with her family and the tragedies which had befallen it. She was able to detach from the person
she really was and be someone else entirely. Someone happier, more carefree; someone closer to the untroubled girl she had once been.

In public they put on a charade of being nothing more than acquaintances. They greeted one another formally as they passed in the corridor or when they found themselves seated at next-door
tables in the lounge. Rafael performed in the bar in the evenings and Celia sat at her usual table in the corner, sipping champagne and listening to the sad melodies that he sang in his rich and
touching voice, only for her. In public they were strangers, but their eyes met across the room and their gazes burned, and when they found themselves alone at last in Celia’s cabin they fell
on each other.

At night they escaped to the deckchairs and lay in the dark, watching the stars of the Southern Cross shining brightly above them and sharing the story of their lives. As the boat gently rocked
and the wind swept over the decks they lay entwined, warm from their bodies pressed together and the excitement of these stolen moments running through their veins. But five days was all they had
and soon the sight of Table Mountain emerged out of the dawn mist to herald the end of their voyage and the final moments of this short chapter of their story.

Celia, so sure that she would walk away with her heart intact, found herself clinging to Rafael with a rising sense of loss. She didn’t know whether her fear came from the uncertainty of
where she was going and what she was going to find when she got there, from the abrupt return to real life or from the shock of their parting and the fact that they might never see each other
again. He kissed her one last time, caressed her face with heavy, sorrowful eyes as if committing her features to memory and told her he would try with all his might to forget her, lest the rest of
his days be dogged by longing. Then he was gone.

Celia was left with the emptiness in her heart bigger and louder than before, because, for a blissful five days, Rafael had filled it. He had made her forget who she really was and what she
carried inside her. But now that she was alone again she had no alternative but to accept her position, step off the boat and face with fortitude whatever Fate threw at her. She had survived so
much already, she could survive this.

It was early autumn in Cape Town, but for Celia it could have been midsummer because the sun was hotter than it ever was in England. The sky gleamed a bright sapphire blue and
not a single cloud marred its breathtaking perfection. The light possessed a fluid quality which Celia found instantly uplifting and she turned her attention away from the shadows that preyed on
her fears and squinted in the sunshine.

The city itself was tidy and clean, a sprawling mass of pale-coloured, Dutch-style houses simmering at the foot of the flat-topped mountain which resembled a giant’s table. Having made a
game of hiding from Sir Leonard and Lady Akroyd on the boat Celia was now pathetically grateful for their company as they escorted her down the gangplank and through the throng of heaving people to
their chauffeur-driven car. They would deliver Celia to the Mount Nelson Hotel where she would stay for one night, and then make sure she arrived safely at the train station and wave her on her way
to Johannesburg the following morning.

Celia, who was not unacquainted with American jazz singers at her mother’s Salons in London, had never seen quite so many black people all in one place before. The noise was deafening as
they touted for hotels and offered to carry luggage, shouting in their eagerness to be hired in a language Celia didn’t recognize. Long-legged Zulus with ebony skin in flamboyant, brightly
coloured costumes with vast feather-and-bone headdresses offered rides in their rickshaws and small boys scampered among the weary travellers, selling newspapers, sweets and fruit. The place smelt
of humidity and dust and the salty flavour of the sea.

Celia was relieved to reach the calm seclusion of the Akroyds’ plush Mercedes and sat by the window gazing out onto this famous city which, Sir Leonard told her importantly, was ‘the
gateway to British South Africa’. She imagined her father arriving here as a boy of only seventeen and wondered at his courage and readiness for adventure. She remembered Sir Leonard’s
anecdote about the shirt and was confident that she would find evidence very soon to disprove Aurelius Dupree’s outrageous story. She didn’t doubt that the man was a liar; she simply
had to prove it.

Cape Town was bustling with activity as the city awoke, stretched and set off to work. Cars weaved in and out of the double-decker trams while men in jackets and hats rode bicycles or hurried
along the pavements on foot. Flower-sellers set up their stalls on street corners and shopkeepers opened for business. Horses and carts carried goods to sell, plodding slowly over the asphalt, and
in the background Table Mountain shimmered in the morning sunshine like a large step to Heaven. As the Mercedes motored slowly up Adderley Street Sir Leonard gave Celia a brief history of the city
in which he was clearly very proud to live and Celia opened her window wide and looked out onto the main thoroughfare of grand buildings, shops and restaurants and tried to imagine what sort of
place it had been when her father had first seen it.

They delivered Celia to the very British Mount Nelson Hotel, which was positioned directly beneath Table Mountain, where she stayed for one night. The following morning Sir Leonard and Lady
Akroyd saw her onto the train and insisted that she come and stay for a few days at the end of her trip. ‘There’s so much more for you to see,’ said Edwina. ‘You can’t
come all this way and not see a single animal. I’m sure Leonard could persuade you to come out into the bush.’ Celia thought of the lion which had torn Tiberius Dupree apart and decided
that she’d rather stay in the city than venture out into the bush.

The whistle blew and the Akroyds were enveloped in a cloud of steam. The train pulled out of the station and Celia set off for Johannesburg.

Celia gazed out of the window in wonder at the vast landscape. Never before had she felt so small beneath such a colossal sky. The train puffed its way through the flat and
verdant plains of rich farmland where occasional dwellings stood, bathed in sunshine. A little boy tending a herd of oxen waved as she passed, his naked torso gleaming like ebony in the early
autumn light. Far away in the distance, bordering the veldt, an arresting range of mountains seemed to rise out of the earth like gigantic waves of grey rock, quivering on the horizon in the heat.
Soon the veldt rose into craggy hills of low scrub and the train meandered along the valley which eventually gave way to a wide-open landscape of dry grassland. The mountains retreated and only the
sky falling softly onto the horizon shimmered in their place.

That night Celia slept fitfully in her compartment. She missed Rafael O’Rourke and wondered whether he missed her too, or whether, as she suspected, affairs were an unavoidable part of
being a famous musician – a way of avoiding loneliness, which was undoubtedly also part and parcel of being on tour. Celia feared being alone. She feared the strange rhythmic noise of the
train and the unsettling sound of other passengers walking in the corridor outside her room and talking in muffled voices the other side of her wall. Yet, in spite of her fears, the movement
finally rocked her into a reluctant sleep.

At last she arrived at Park Station in Johannesburg, a little stiff due to the hard mattress and raw from having slept a shallow, fretful sleep. This station was very different from the stately
and immaculate station in Cape Town. It was very large and noisy and teeming with people jostling past each other impolitely. Her father’s old Afrikaner foreman, Mr Botha, was on the platform
to meet her as she had arranged and because he was so tall she saw him a head above the masses, wading his way through the crowd, waving his hand in greeting. He was a large, woolly-haired man in a
pair of voluminous khaki shorts with long white socks pulled up over bulging calves and scuffed brown lace-up boots on his feet. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt tucked in beneath a swollen,
spherical belly and a white bush hat placed squarely above big fleshy ears. Celia imagined he must surely be in his sixties, but the thick layer of fat that covered him, as well as his bushy white
beard, made him look a great deal younger. ‘You must be Mrs Mayberry,’ he said cheerfully in a strong Afrikaans accent and extended a large, doughy hand. ‘It’s a
murra
of a
leka dag
,’ he said. ‘A lovely day,’ he translated.