Authors: Judith Stephan
Her sister elbowed her disapprovingly.
They were shown to their rooms. Each had their own
rondawe¹l
next to each other. Once again Shilo was pleasantly surprised by the plush and luxurious interior. The room was D-shaped, due to the dividing wall which separated the bathroom from the bedroom. A gigantic oval bed stood against the curved wall with a quilt of animal prints. Mirrors adorned another wall above a wicker dressing table, which matched the headboard and cane and wicker armchairs. The floor was covered in a thick-piled tan carpet with a minute pattern of animal footprints over it, and this extended into the bathroom. This small semi-circular room had a Jacuzzi bath set in the same rugged stone with tropical plants looming behind it and the shower was through a small door. It was a bamboo enclosure with no roof. Shilo stared open-mouthed at this novel African experience. An open-air shower! It was a miniature paradise … and suddenly she felt almost at home.
There was a knock at the door, and when she opened it, there stood their ‘chauffeur’ almost completely filling the doorframe.
“Hi,” he said, without the respect that Shilo apparently demanded. “Here is your luggage.”
She stood back as he entered the room with a case in each hand and one under each arm, like some Conan figure, and dumped them at the foot of the bed.
“By the way,” he continued, “I’m Stratt. I didn’t really have the chance to introduce myself properly.”
He held out a massive hand and his green eyes flashed. Shilo looked at him and ignored the gesture. In fact she recoiled from him, but his green eyes held hers captive for an extended moment, until she forced them away.
“I’m Lady Shilo Delucci … and I don’t fraternise with the help. You are very impolite and disrespectful – and I am not used to being treated like that.”
“Excuse me?” said Stratt in disbelief; “did you say ‘the help’?”
But Shilo had already turned her back on him and started to open her suitcases and take out neat piles of expensive designer clothing and lay them on the bed. Stratt Ogilvy left the room fuming. What a woman! How was he supposed to get through the next few months with condescending attitude? He had never in all his days met such an arrogant, supercilious bitch, such a rude and abrasive woman. She “never fraternised with the help!” Who exactly did she think she was? The Queen of England? He strode across the neatly manicured lawn towards the main building and towards the office of Philip Ogilvy.
“Come in Stratt,” he said.
Philip was dressed in khaki bush clothes, and often reminded visitors of an English colonel with his upright posture and his tone of voice. He spoke in a very British way, compared to the average South African, like some remnant of the Empire, a last pillar of the colonies. He was a weathered brown and sported a very military moustache and always dressed in khaki bush clothes.
“I can’t believe these women, Dad. Especially that bloody redhead. Ever since I met them at the airport, she’s done nothing but bitch and complain, reprimand and talk down to me like I’m some sort of servant. Do you know she just referred to me as ‘the help’?”
Philip burst out laughing: “Remember, Stratt,” he said as he stretched in his chair, “they’re part of the so-called British aristocracy … probably hob-nobbing with the Queen. They’ve got servants at their beck and call. They are treated like royalty where ever they go.”
“Not here, they’re not,” chirped Stratt.
“Just remember they are our guests.”
“But I don’t have to take that attitude from anyone,” Stratt answered stubbornly.
“Carina and Henri Delucci have advanced me a great deal of money for their stay here. Just humour them. It’s a case of a little privacy for Michaela away from the prying eyes of the British media. She’s pregnant, you might have realised, and unmarried,” Philip said in low tones, as if it was a national secret. “It would be quite a scandal in her circles.”
“At least she knows how to be civil. And the aunt is wonderful. It’s just that Shilo woman – she’s, well, she has an air about her that I detest. Do you know that she introduced herself as ‘Lady Shilo Delucci’?
“Well, that’s her name. Like I said: Just humour her,” Philip repeated, “if you are always nice to her, she’ll come around. She’ll have to if she’s to survive here.”
Stratt shrugged and headed upstairs for a refreshing shower before dinner. By the time he had washed away the irritations of the long drive, Shilo was almost forgotten.
*
Philip had done a double take when Shilo had entered the foyer. It was Carina thirty odd years ago. He remembered when he had first seen her some years after their friendship at Oxford: It was in the bar at the Savoy in Paris. She was alone and exquisitely beautiful, her red hair swept up in a French roll and her eyes lowered at the bar counter in front of her. She was on honeymoon with Henri Delucci, but he was at a business meeting. They had chatted and she had allowed him to buy her a drink. She was devoted to Henri, but was a lonely bride. They had met several times over the following week … sometimes accidentally, sometimes he had sought her out: By the pool, on the Champs Elysees, in the hotel lounge …. There was a subtle yet unspoken attraction between them, but both fiercely guarded their loyalty to their respective spouse. Philip idolized and loved Catherine deeply, and Carina was smitten with Henri … but the attraction couldn’t be ignored. On the last evening in Paris, before Henri whisked her back to the high life in London, and Philip flew back to Johannesburg, she had stood closer than normal to him in the elevator. The electricity between them was all-consuming, and neither could restrain themselves any longer. He had clasped her in his arms, and kissed her long and deep. She had responded and groaned deeply for those few stolen seconds, and they then had wrenched themselves apart as the elevator doors opened on her floor. That was it. It was an unspoken, unfulfilled passion that even after all these years still aroused him. They had kept in contact via post for some time, the letters becoming fewer and further between until they had eventually stopped. Then she had called him out of the blue to arrange this sojourn to Africa for her girls … and those memories had come rushing back. And then there stood Shilo – her mother’s double and it was like being in Paris all over again.
*
That evening around the rustic bar next to the illuminated swimming pool, Stratt sat and idly chatted to Michaela. A flickering lantern was between them. She was warm and had a wonderful personality, very unlike her sister. Her dark hair was loose, and although she was not quite as beautiful as her sister, she was certainly attractive and something about her made one hang on every word she spoke. She opened up to Stratt about her predicament, thinking it was better that way. Her physical condition could not be hidden any longer under layers of winter clothes… and it was really going to show sooner or later, so what was there to hide? But at least she still had a sense of humour. She was not going to let this baby get her down; in fact, she was quite looking forward to it even though she knew it would be whipped away immediately after it was born.
“It honestly wasn’t planned – It was a complete accident. It was a brief erotic encounter – an impulse. My parents are absolutely devastated, humiliated, as you can imagine. They cursed me and scolded me about ‘a girl of my calibre’ and what I was going to do to the precious family name.”
“They were not excited about the prospect of a grandchild?”
“No! My mother would sooner die than be a grandmother. And also it is all about appearances … about what people would say.”
“Tell me about the father,” said Stratt, looking into her big, brown, doleful eyes, “Does he know?”
“Oh no,” she replied with a smile, “he doesn’t know. It was no one really … just a guy I met at a club one night. We’d all had too much too drink and we’d popped a few pills… One thing led to another…”
“And your sister?” Why is she here?” Stratt asked.
“So it won’t appear odd – you know, me disappearing alone…?”
“I take it she does not really want to be here … “ Stratt mused.
“Not particularly,” Michaela answered, flicking her long, dark hair over her shoulders, “Shilo is a bit of a socialite. She loves parties and high society functions, shopping malls and the like.”
“Well, she is not going to find that here,” Stratt laughed, his green eyes sparkling, “in fact it is the complete opposite. We have the gift shop in reception and a dance every Saturday… and sometimes bingo and other games. That’s about as social as it gets. Here one can enjoy the isolation of the bushveld and of being at one with nature.”
Michaela smiled and shifted uncomfortably on the tall wooden barstool.
“I hope you don’t think I’m being rude, but how come you’re so dark and Shilo … well, you’re so unalike for sisters?” he continued, momentarily glancing at Shilo.
Shilo sat at the other end of the bar counter with her back to them, conversing with her aunt. Her hair was glowing in the artificial light of the lanterns that lay at intervals along the bar, and on a few tables around it. Why did he keep noticing that hair, he chided himself.
“My father is of Spanish decent and my mother is thoroughly English. She’s the English rose and I’m a bit more like my father.”
“Pretty thorny for a rose,” smirked Stratt; “She hasn’t said one civil word to anyone since she arrived.”
“That’s Shilo for you,” Michaela giggled, her hand absent-mindedly on her swollen belly. “Wait until she comes down from her high horse – she really is a lovely person. You’ll see. She just has this front that she puts on for strangers. I think it’s because of something that happened to her a long time ago.”
Outside the sounds of the African wild echoed around the lodge. Animals called to the golden orb of the moon suspended in the blackness and surrounded by the pepper of myriad stars … and the cicadas droned incessantly.
CHAPTER 2
He sped along the country lanes, flanked by walls of rough stone, towards the little village of Pennington-on-Dee. It had a quaint ring to it, and that is how he picked these villages. He scanned the map of England and looked for names that seemed alluring and mysterious and faintly medieval. That is how he had chosen Appletreewick and Shepherdshaven in the weeks before.
His black BMW swept through puddles from the ongoing drizzle and manipulated the winding roads in the gloomy, wintry landscape. Everything was black and white and a million shades of grey. He had put in a disc which belted out his favourite music: opera. It resonated in the confined interior and he sang shamelessly along with Paverotti and friends, while slowly massaging his crotch as he thought of what awaited him.
Soon the hamlet gleamed like a diamond in the valley before him. Small curls of wispy smoke emanated from a few of the rooftop chimneys, and the lights were already on in the late afternoon gloom. Four o’clock. There should already be a few patrons at the local pub.
As he swept into the village and searched for a drinking hole, he marveled at the quaintness of it all. The little houses, centuries old, with their lace-curtained windows right on the street, barns in the centre of the village, and the narrow Victorian cobbled lanes bearing ancient signs proclaiming a bakery, a butchery, a sweetshop and so on. No gigantic “buy-it-all-under-one-roof” malls or big box stores like in London. The butcher was probably also the postman and the chief constable, he thought to himself. It was anachronistic – it was like stepping back in time.
The Fox and Pheasant seemed a likely spot, and he pulled up a little way down the road from the entrance in the shadow of an old gargoyle covered Gothic church which loomed above him like a monster in the descending darkness. The warm air buffeted him as he walked in from the street, and he made his way to the counter.