Kruger's Alp

And just as suddenly cast ashore. Someone who has invested so much reading time in such concepts as ‘ejaculation’ ca

‘Hell, Blanchie, you’re a born romantic,’ Kipsel said.

And then some time later, once again, in Blashford’s other, unofficial garden.

What could one say of Magdalena? Everybody’s girlfriend once, twice, and then she took off like a rocket into the political firmament, out of reach of mere altar servers, numbering among her lovers such heavy figures as Buffy Lestrade the Hegelian radical lecturer, and no more contact was made until Kipsel rediscovered her and carried her off to blow up pylons in the veld. Afterwards the trial, the betrayal, and the extraordinary escape. Magdalena, the saboteur turned demure nun in her audacious dash for freedom from beneath the very nose of the Regime, became a legend.

Once in London she came to be rated amongst the six most dangerous enemies beyond the borders. Co

Magdalena’s mother’s visit of redemption went badly wrong. She got on famously with Kaiser Zulu, who, she said, reminded her of her old cookboy, and she was pictured singing choruses of ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ in some tourist nightspot and told reporters, on her return, that her daughter wasn’t as black as she had been painted. Angry letters filled the newspapers from readers demanding their money back.

RED MAGDA’S MOTHER DUPED! the headlines yelled.

The sunshine lay shyly on the grey-green fields beside the motorway. Blanchaille’s first glimpse of England showed it to be small and tightly woven. The fields fenced everything within view. Nothing out of eyeshot, everywhere contained, ordered, bounded. The jumble of houses to left and right, three small factories, a smudge of development eating away the green and then the countryside spluttering out in a last fling of parks and trees as the houses began in earnest, but still, even to Blanchaille’s untrained eye, recognisably houses, double storeys, detached, heavily planted in muddy yards, in the strange green smallness of the countryside.

Magdalena drove well, fast, her small, pretty hands in speckled yellow gloves calm on the wheel. The road swept upwards and ran as an elevated motorway into the solid, metalled city with its row upon row of semi-detached dwellings. It struck the stranger, the sandy tongued foreigner, blinking with lack of sleep, this sudden mass of building. It asserted itself, this solid, glued immobility of London, everywhere packed, joined, touching, far fewer single houses now and these were bulge-fronted, pebble-dashed, red tiled roofs. And then blocks of them, stuck solid, identical, joined irretrievably and ru

‘You thin-blooded African creatures, travelling north without coats. You could freeze to death here. Even in summer.’

‘I brought nothing, nothing except what I stand up in.’

‘You’re unprepared then, in many ways. I’m glad to see you, Blanchie. But I have to tell you I really don’t know what you’re doing here. Your clerical career was both wild and original. You upset the Church, your friends, the Regime and you did it damn well. We all depended on you, watching from here. You were useful there. I’m afraid you may be at a bit of a loss here.’ She lit a cigarette, the grey smoke blurred and clung to the furry coat she wore. She smiled, perhaps to soften the force of her remarks and showed sharp white teeth, but when he protested he had not come ‘here’ in any sense but was merely passing through he was cut short by a growl of displeasure.

‘This place is hell. I can’t tell you what I’ve been through. People told me I was lucky to have missed the balance of payments crisis. They say that was worse. The English are a strange race, obsessed with economics and they seldom bath. You’ve no idea how I suffered when I first arrived. When I came the country was governed by a series of pressure groups who went around shrieking at one another about incomprehensible causes. The daily obsession of the country was the value of the pound. “Pound up a pe

She lived in Sealion Mansions off Old Marylebone Road. A squat, solid, peeling green-painted block smelling of wax, dust and the sea. From the fishmonger’s opposite there drifted an aroma, a cocktail of brine, shell and sand wafting across the street. A corridor of fragrance crossed the road between fishmonger’s and entrance foyer along which the sea tang drifted from the boxes of silver fish, wide-eyed in their beds of crushed ice.

Also staring up at the flat were two men in raincoats. The sky was clear.

Magdalena’s flat was luxurious but small. A little entrance hall, a sitting-room, a bathroom, bedroom and kitchen. The bedroom was done in apricot silk.

‘You’re looking for a shining city on a hill, a sort of heaven, but you won’t find it, Blanchie. Not here, at any rate.’

‘I’m not looking here.’

Then why stop over?’

‘I tell you, I don’t know.’

He admired her bedroom. She seemed pleased. It was her lair, she said. An odd term. Above the circular bed hung a large painting in which two opposing forces shaped like tattered kites clashed violently. Red and black, two antagonistic whirlpools, fighting cocks, shredded and bloody, whirling and tearing at each other. Or perhaps two circular saws meeting tooth-on and the very sounds of their grinding collision were reflected in the shards of green and yellow paint with which the outer edges of the canvas were pierced.