Rage

Shasa and Centaine had argued before appointing Garry to the boarA of Courtney Mining.

'You can ruin a pony by pushing him too hard too soon." 'We aren't talking about a polo pony,' Centaine had replied tartly.

'And it's not a case of pushing. He's got the bit between his teeth, to continue your chosen metaphor, Shasa, and if we try and hold him back we will either discourage him or drive him out on his own.

Now is the time to give him a bit of slack rein." 'But you made me wait much longer." 'You were a late-blooming rose, and the war and all that business held you up. At Garry's age you were still flying Hurricanes and chasing around Abyssinia." So Garry had gone on the board, and like everything else in his life he had taken it very seriously indeed. Now he looked up as his father confronted him down the length of the boardroom.

'I heard you have been borrowing money on your own bat,' Shasa accused.

Garry removed his spectacles, polished them diligently, held them up to the light and then replaced them on his large Courtney nose, all to gain time in which to compose his reply.

'Only one person knows about that. The manager of the Adderly Street branch of Standard Bank. He could lose his job if he blabbed about my personal business." 'You forget that both Nana and I are on the board of the Standard Bank. All loans of over a million pounds come up before us for approval." 1Rand,' Garry corrected his father pedantically. 'Two million rand - the pound is history." /'Thanks,' Shasa said grimly. 'I'll try to move with the times. Now how about this two million rand you have borrowed?" 'A straightforward transaction, Dad. I put up my shares in the Shasaville township as collateral, and the bank lent me two million rand." 'What are you going to do with it? That's a small fortune." Shasa was one of the few men in the country who would qualify that amount with that particular adjective, and Garry looked mildly relieved.

'As a matter of fact, I have used half a million to buy up fiftyone per ent of the issued shareholding of Alpha Centauri Estates, and loaned the company another half million to get it out of trouble." 'Alpha Centauri?" Shasa looked mystified.

The company owns some of the prime property on the Witwatersrand and here in the Cape Peninsula. It was worth almost twenty-six million before the crash at Sharpeville." 'And now it's worth zero,' Shasa suggested, and before Garry could protest. 'What have you done with the other million?" 'Gold shares - Anglos and Vaal Reefs. At the fire sale prices I paid for them they are returning almost twenty-six percent. The dividends will pay the interest on the entire bank loan." Shasa sat down in his seat at the head of the boardroom table and studiec his son carefully. He should have been conditioned by now, but Garry still managed to surprise Shasa. It was an imaginative but neatly logical coup, and if it had not been his own son, Shasa would have been impressed. As it was, he felt duty bound to find flaws in it.

'What about your Shasaville shares - you are taking an awful chance." Garry looked puzzled. 'I don't have to explain it to you, Pater.

You taught me. Shasaville is tied up. We can't sell or develop aggressively until land values recover, so I've used my shares to take full advantage of the crash." 'What if land values never recover?" Shasa demanded relentlessly.

'If they don't, it will mean the country is finished anyway. I will lose my share of nothing which is nothing. If they do recover, I will be in profit twenty or thirty million." Shasa picked at that for a while and then changed his angle of attack. 'Why didn't you come to me to borrow the money, instead of going behind my back?" Garry gri

Shasa was saved by the entry of the other senior directors: Centaine on the arm of Dr Twenty-man-Jones and David Abrahams arguing amiably but respectfully with his father, and thankfully he let the subject drop. Once or twice during the meeting he glanced down the table at Garry, who was following all the discussion with a rapt expression, the light from the picture window reflecting a miniature image of the crest of Table Mountain in the lenses of his spectacles.

When all the business on the agenda had been completed and Centaine had started to rise to lead them through to the executive diningroom, Shasa arrested them.

'Madame Courtney and gentlemen, one additional piece of business. Mr Garry Courtney and I have been discussing the general state of the property market. We both feel that property and equities are very much undervalued at the moment and that the company should take advantage of this fact, but I'd like him to tell you in his own words and to put forward certain proposals. Would you oblige us please, Mr Courtney?" It was Shasa's own way of giving the lad a jolt and cutting him back a little. In the six months since his elevation, Garry had never been called upon to address the full board and now Shasa dropped it on him without warning and sat back with vindictive relish in his wing-backed leather chairman's throne and folded his arms.

At the bottom of the table Garry blushed furiously, and glanced longingly at the stinkwood door, his only escape, before giving the traditional salutation to his fellow directors.

'MaMa-dame Courtney and ge-ge-gentlemen." He stopped and threw his father a pitiful look of appeal, but when he received a stern uncompromising frown in return, he took a deep breath and launched into it. He stumbled once or twice, but when first Abe Abrahams and then Centaine shot cutting questions at him, he forgot about his stutter and talked for forty-five minutes.

At the end they were silent for a while, and then David Abrahams said, 'I should like to propose that we appoint Mr Garrick Courtney to prepare a list of specific proposals to follow up the presentation that he has just made to this meeting, and to report back to us at an extraordinary meeting early next week, at a time convenient to all members of the board." Centaine seconded, and it was adopted unanimously, and then David Abrahams ended, 'I should like the minutes to record the board's gratitude to Mr Courtney for his lucid address and to thank him for bringing these considerations to the board's attention." The glow of achievement and recognition lasted Garry all the way down in the elevator to the basement garage where his MG stood in his private parking bay beside Shasa's Jaguar. It stayed with him all the way down Adderley Street to the lonely skyscraper of the Sanlam buildi g which stood on the open ground of the foreshore that had been reclaimed from the sea. Even going up in the lift to the twentieth floor of the Sanlam building he still felt tall and important and decisive. Only when he entered the reception area of Gantry, Carmichael and Associates did the vital glow begin to fade, and his stiff van Heusen collar bit painfully into the corded muscles of his bull neck.

The two pretty young girls at the desk showed him the full amount of deference due to one of the partnership's important clients, but by this time Garry was too nervous to take advantage of the chair he was offered and he wandered around the lobby pretending to admire the tall vases of proteas while surreptitiously checking his image in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors behind the floral display.