would – or giving her a hiding and taking on a mistress for good measure – you’re a supplicant.’
Mahoney stared at him. ‘Me? A supplicant?’
‘Oh, you don’t walk around with a hang-dog expression begging her favours – in fact the opposite, you doggedly lay down the law – but mentally you’re trying to figure out how to get her love back, and you badly want to make love to her. Right? Tell me – how’s your sex life?’
Mahoney didn’t answer.
‘Exactly,’ the psychiatrist sighed. ‘How can you be a confident lover with all that? And remember the old rule-of-thumb: a woman who’s getting well laid will forgive her man anything. But if she isn’t …’
The summer went that way. Afterwards, he did not remember much about the days. They were all work work work, chasing cargo, juggling overdrafts, worrying about engines, schedules. It was the nights he would remember. Redcoat preferred to fly out at night because there was less time waiting on the runway for permission to take off, burning fuel, and it allowed Mahoney to do some office work during the day. You have plenty of time to think and feel, flying through the nights.
And he remembered the Africa at the other end. Redcoat always tried to arrive after sunrise, in case they had forgotten to switch on the runway lights, or they were off at a beer drink. They parked on the apron and let the warm, fertile air of Africa flood in, and the swarm of cargo handlers, and they broke out the beer while they talked to their agent, changed money at blackmarket rates, got the good news or the bad news about the cargo that had or had not shown up; then went bumping into town over broken roads to another run-down hotel. If Mahoney didn’t have to buy twenty-five tons of bananas or pineapples as his cargo, he usually walked downtown through the broken-down shops and chickens and derelict cars and children with flies around their nostrils, and went to a pub and drank beer which would have cost three pounds a bottle if he had changed money at the official rates but cost thirty pence at the blackmarket rates, and he watched Africa go by. And he loved these people, and he despaired. He thought: in ten years Rhodesia is going to be like this. And he thought: I wish Shelagh were here … Twelve hours later they took off again, into the African night.
And maybe it was because of the droning beauty of the night, flying home, home, home, but when he saw the desert begin to change down there, and then the coastal mountains of the Mediterranean begin, and then faraway lights, and just a few hours ahead was the Channel and England – every time it seemed that all the pain and anger had been purged by those two days away, that none of that was important, all that mattered was love and life, and in a few hours he would be bouncing up the track to his home, and he wanted to walk in the door and shout:
‘Hey, I love you! What’s all this nonsense? Life is beautiful and you’re beautiful and our daughter’s beautiful and this house is beautiful!’
And she was running down the stairs, her hair flying, and she flung her arms around him, and told him that she had come to terms with herself and she was going to live with him happily ever after.
She said: ‘Please sit down. I want to say something.’ She was standing at the kitchen window, her back to him.
He sat down slowly at the table. She took a breath.
‘While you were away, I made up my mind. About my life.’
He started to say, Your life is with me – then stopped himself.
She said: ‘I’m going back to Rhodesia, Joe. You know my reasons …’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t like England. I don’t like this business you’re into. I want my work – my real work, teaching Africans. My own money—’ She paused. ‘I’ve written to the Education Department and asked for my job back. They’ve agreed, though I forfeited all my seniority because I left. I’ve also written to the university, enrolling in a part-time arts course.’
His heart was knocking. It was unreal.
‘You’re not taking Cathy away.’
She said, ‘I am. I’ve taken legal advice. A court will always give custody of an infant to the mother. You obviously couldn’t look after her.’ She turned around and faced him.
His heart was hammering, but he also felt a numbed, deadly calm. He did not think she had seen a lawyer, but she was right about Cathy. Time, he still had time to work on this. He said, ‘Rhodesia is not a safe place for Catherine.’
‘Nonsense, people are having babies out there all the time. The war is not in Salisbury. It’ll be over long before the fighting gets near town, you said that yourself. And why should anybody hurt me, I’ll be teaching their people …’ She dismissed that, then added uncomfortably: ‘We have to discuss money.’
He stared at her.
‘You want to talk about money at a time like this?’
She said defiantly: ‘I’m sorry, but we must clear the air. We don’t want to go through this again tomorrow. Besides, you’re flying tomorrow.’ She took a breath. ‘I own twenty-five percent of the shares in Redcoat. Admittedly you gave them to me, but didn’t I work, even while I was eight months pregnant?’ She took a breath and looked at him squarely. ‘I want your assurance that you’re going to support us.’
He was incensed. It crossed his mind to say that he wanted those shares, he would buy them from her, but, oh, maybe they were a key to keeping her and Catherine with him. He said softly, ‘You’re leaving me. You’re taking my child away, and you want to talk about money in the same breath?’
‘I’ve got to be my own person, Joe!’ she cut in tensely. ‘I’ll bring Cathy back for holidays. Or you can come and see us. Listen, you needn’t even send money; you’ve got thousands frozen in the bank in Rhodesia. Or you could sell the farm, and the safari lodge, and the boat. I’ll supervise it all for you.’
He could hardly believe she was saying this. For a moment he almost despised her.
‘I didn’t sell the farm because I couldn’t get anything like what it’s worth. And the situation is worse, now, and the safari shares aren’t worth anything.’
‘Please yourself. But the market can only get worse.’ She waited, guiltily defiant.
He sat there, feeling sick in the guts. Not yet the grief, the final pain; what he needed was time – to figure out if there was one last card to play.
‘Please sit down,’ he said.
‘My mind’s made up, Joe.’
‘Sit down, please.’
She did so. She had never looked so beautiful. He took a deep breath.
‘Please don’t interrupt me.’ He looked at her. He felt gaunt. ‘This has been coming a long time, and I have also reached a decision.’
She waited, grimly. He said, ‘Give us one more year, Shelagh. In one year the airline will be on its feet, we’ll have a good income, in foreign currencies. Then we can go back to Rhodesia, and take our chances. We won’t be dependent on frozen Rhodesian assets. You can go back to work then – to university – anything. But …’ He shook his head. ‘If you leave me now, it is finished, Shelagh. You cannot come back. I will give you only enough money to support Cathy properly. No more, no less. I will not pay you to desert me.’
Her eyes flashed, but he held up a hand. ‘Let me finish.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘If you leave, you must take everything of yours with you. I will pay for its freight. Anything of Cathy’s can stay here. But I want absolutely nothing of yours to remind me of you, especially not any pretty clothes, not even a hairclip.’
She flashed, ‘You’re trying to make it difficult for me!’
He