Then a Wind Blew , livre ebook
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120
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English
Ebook
2021
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Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
10 janvier 2021
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781779223845
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Publié par
Date de parution
10 janvier 2021
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781779223845
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Then a Wind Blew
Then a Wind Blew
Kay Powell
Published by Weaver Press, Box A1922, Avondale, Harare. Zimbabwe. 2021
< www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com >
© Kay Powell, 2021
Typeset by Weaver Press Cover Design: Lia Brazier
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organisations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without the express written permission of the publisher.
978-1-77922-383-8 (p/b) 978-1-77922-384-5 (ePub)
Kay Powell was born in Zambia and grew up in Rhodesia. In 1968 she went to university in the UK and became a social worker. She returned to Rhodesia for a few years in the 1970s, and her two daughters were born there. After a stint at Faber & Faber in London, she returned to Zimbabwe in 1981, first working for Macmillan, then co-founding Quest, a publisher of non-fiction titles. Emigrating to England in 1988, Kay set up an agency to provide publishing services to international development organisations. In 2008, her book on the use of English in the workplace, What Not To Write , was published by Talisman, Singapore, and became a bestseller. Then a Wind Blew is Kay’s first novel. She lives near Cambridge, UK, with her husband, who is also a novelist .
For Emma and Clare And for Jim
Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
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9
10
11
12
Prologue
Isakata mine; April 1980
S usan Haig ended her life on the night of 19 th April 1980, not long after midnight. She slipped out of the house and walked across the lawn to the swimming pool and went in, wearing her nightie.
“It was the gardenboy who found her,” said Hentie Prinsloo.
Susan must have walked through the rose garden first, and picked a rose there, then gone on to the swimming pool, because floating near her body were some petals. Red rose petals.
“Yes, Reg told me,” said the District Commissioner’s wife. “And about the petals.”
There was no-one standing in the rose garden. Or near the pool. The sun-loungers, the parasols, side tables, lilos, they’d been put away somewhere. It all looked a bit forsaken, that part of the Haigs’ garden. Hentie wondered whether Reg Haig was right to have chosen the garden for this gathering, with the pool being there and everything. It was hard trying not to look at it, she said.
The DC’s wife shook her head. “Oh, I think it’s the perfect setting! Susan loved her garden. She didn’t have a religious bone in her body and a church funeral service would have been the last thing she’d have wanted.”
Susan Haig’s body had been cremated at Mandura hospital and the ashes put into a silver urn. The urn was on the small folding table beneath the whitethorn tree at the far end of the garden. Some pods had fallen from the tree onto the table, by the urn. Thelma Warde was standing nearby, talking to Willem Prinsloo, and she brushed them off. Long flat woody pods.
Beyond the whitethorn tree loomed the big dome-like granite kopje that overlooked the European village, the brown and white lichens that covered it catching the late afternoon sun. Nyamhanza, they called it. ‘The bald-headed one’.
“How sad,” Thelma Warde said, “that she can’t see all this.”
Willem Prinsloo nodded. “Yah, a good turnout, isn’t it?”
“I meant the garden.”
She gestured towards the beds of primulas, a canvas now of reds, yellows, purples, and the mass of orange tulips nearby, just come into bloom. The lawn still green when everyone else’s was turning brown and the patches of bright scarlet along the verandah wall and down the driveway. The salvias were in flower.
But she agreed that, yes, it was a good turnout.
Around sixty or seventy people. Almost everyone from the village was here, as far as one could tell. Including some people one seldom saw except occasionally at a function at the Club. Even Molly from the store, who hardly set foot in the Club, was here. Molly wasn’t her real name. No-one knew what that was. Well, except her husband. But over the years Moleiro’s Store, down near the road to Mandura, had morphed into Molly’s Store, and everyone called its proprietor Molly. She didn’t seem to mind.
People from the farming community around Isakata had come in too. Including Hentie and Willem Prinsloo, of course. They’d become close to Susan and Reg Haig over the past year or so. Not a friendship that anyone would have predicted – Susan had been known to be a bit sniffy about Afrikaners – but grief had created a bond between them.
Willem nodded towards the Haigs’ son, Billy, who had appeared on the verandah. He’d flown back from the UK two days earlier, with someone from the mine’s Head Office in London. One of the directors.
The verandah was wide, with white pillars. One flight of steps led down to the lawn, the other to the driveway. There was gauze between the pillars and a purple bougainvillea creeper covered an end wall, trailing over the roof. The house itself was much the same as all the other houses in the European village, only larger. A large white-washed bungalow with a red roof, the citrus orchard and vegetable garden at the back, the lawn and flower beds at the front. And the swimming pool.
Billy walked down the steps onto the lawn. Behind him was a young policeman who’d come in from the Government station with the Police Superintendent and his wife. He and Billy had been quite friendly; they used to meet up sometimes at the Club to play billiards.
“That poor boy,” Willem said. “When you think of everything that our boys went through in the bloody war – Billy more than most – and now he has to go and face this… Jeez!”
Apparently, Susan hadn’t left a note. Which some people found odd. There was usually a note. Others said perhaps she’d thought it unnecessary because Reg would know, there was no need for her to write anything. Reg would know why she couldn’t go on, what had pushed her over the edge. But Reg hadn’t said anything. Neither had Billy.
Willem lit a cigarette and watched Billy walk across the lawn towards someone he didn’t recognise. Black, portly. Standing with the white nun from the mission.
“The Af, with Beth Lytton – who is he?”
“The doctor in charge at Nhika,” Thelma said. “Trained in London, at Guys hospital. Like Susan and me. He was there much later, of course. Pleasant enough, albeit a little arrogant.”
Sometimes, Thelma and Susan had taken patients from the mine clinic to Nhika, the hospital in the African Reserve north of Isakata, near the Inveraray hills. The more serious cases that the clinic couldn’t handle. TB, severe malnutrition, childbirth problems, life-threatening injuries. That sort of thing.
A Land Rover with white crosses painted on its doors came down the driveway and parked. It was one of the vehicles that the Commonwealth Monitoring Force had used during the ceasefire and in the run-up to last month’s general election. There were still a few of them around. Two people got out.
“Is that the nephew? That nun’s nephew?” Hentie Prinsloo asked.
“Yes,” said the DC’s wife.
“And the African?”
“No idea.”
The Police Superintendent overheard them. “The new Minister for Mines, if I’m not very much mistaken. On our most-wanted list in the war. He had a link with the mission, his sister was one of the nuns there. Weird, isn’t it, that he can just pitch up like this, when only a few months ago…”
They watched the Minister pause at the edge of the lawn, look around, then walk towards the verandah. Reg Haig was there. They shook hands.
Hentie remarked that there seemed to be quite a few Africans here. “Of course, you would expect to see the Haigs’ cookboy here,” she said, looking at the tall solemn figure, in his crisp white uniform, standing near the verandah steps. “And him,” she added, pointing to the barman from the Club. “But some of the others? Maybe they are from the mine office. Clerks or something. I expect Reg invited them.”
She said she wondered what Susan would have made of it, having quite a lot of Africans at her funeral.
***
“I think Mrs Haig she didn’t like Africa very much,” Molly said.
Around her, people looked a little surprised. Not at what she’d said, but because she’d spoken at all. Molly seldom spoke. Always civil, she would exchange a few words when you went into her store, but otherwise said very little.
“I’m not so sure,” Gil Aitchison said. “It’s complicated. You did get the impression sometimes, I grant you, that she would have liked to have gone home, back to England. On the other hand…”
“She told me,” Molly said. “She told me she was in Africa because of her husband. Like me. We had to stay here.”
“But she did love it in the early years, Molly. The ’5
