The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [37]
“I remember him now,” I said with feeling. “Thick as two short planks, got sozzled on gin and told smutty jokes all evening.”
My mother laughed. “Yes. He was worse after the boys were born. They inherited Geraldine’s brains, and he had trouble keeping up with them. It turned him to drink even more, because he thought alcohol made him witty.” She paused in reflection. “I always felt rather sorry for him. He’d have been much happier with a country bumpkin and two strapping sons who liked driving tractors.”
I wondered why she was telling me this story. “What happened to them? Are they still together? Still in Zimbabwe?”
“Reggie and Geraldine? They went to South Africa. The last I heard, Reggie wasn’t very well. I had a Christmas letter from Geraldine which said he’d been in and out of hospital most of last year. I wrote back but I haven’t had a reply yet.” She returned to the point. “The thing is, Geraldine drove me mad when she first arrived. She saw me and your father as the antidote to Reggie, and she plagued us with visits because she was so discontented. In the end, I had to be quite firm with her and tell her she wasn’t welcome. It was all rather difficult, and she took it very badly.”
“What did she do?”
“Nothing too shocking. I received an unsigned letter about a week later, telling me how cruel I was, and one or two strange phone calls. I didn’t see her again for two years…by which time her first baby had arrived and she’d managed to come to terms with her frustrations. Poor woman. We found ourselves at the same party in Bulawayo and she was terribly embarrassed…apologized profusely for being a nuisance and even owned up to the poison-pen letter and the phone calls.”
“What did you say to her?”
“That it was I who should apologize for being unkind. I felt far worse about rebuffing her attempts at friendship—even if they were annoying—than she could ever have felt about her letter. Geraldine was so thrilled to be back on speaking terms that she took to plaguing us again…and this time we had to put up with it. But you know, darling, she turned out to be the best friend we had. The Barretts and Fortescues—people we’d grown up with—wouldn’t come near us when your father was accused of profiteering, but Geraldine and Reggie drove over immediately and stayed throughout the siege. It was very brave of them.”
I was out of Zimbabwe when this happened, but I’d kept in close touch via telephone. It was in the early days of Mugabe’s push to evict white farmers, and a local Zanu-PF apparatchik laid trumped-up charges of tax evasion and profiteering against my father in a bid to stir up trouble. He had no chance of succeeding in the courts because my father kept scrupulous accounts, but the accusation was enough to incite anger among Mugabe’s war veterans. For a week, a gang of over fifty camped on our lawn and threatened to overrun the house, and it was only the courage of Dad’s own workers, who mounted a permanent picket in front of the veterans and refused to let them pass, that brought the siege to an end.
It was why my mother had been so keen to leave. She knew the intimidation would be worse a second time, and she didn’t want to ask the workforce to intervene again. For Zanu-PF it was tantamount to treason for blacks to support their white employers, and Mum wasn’t prepared to see anyone die for the sake of a few square miles of land. She and my father chose to overlook the Barretts’ and Fortescues’ refusal to help—“they were afraid”—and turned out to support them when their own farms were invaded. But, privately,