Wheel of Fortune: Volume One

By Humphrey Muller

When the diffident and ineffectual Derek Mann loses his teaching job in a girls grammar school and drifts from one temporary post to another, one of his precocious pupils gives him her grandfathers wartime diary with a mission to return to Apartheid South Africa and find the opal mine she believes to be her rightful inheritance. Intrigue and violence bedevil the quest, which ends in a desert under the Southern Cross. The wry, often laconic style gives full reign to the characters latent sexuality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 11, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469776415

Humphrey Muller

Humphrey Muller, once a professor of English in South Africa during the Apartheid years, moved to Scotland to devote more time to creative writing. He has since written a number of novels (A Twist in Time, the Cage and the Cross, Wheel of Fortune, Continental Drift), and with his wife Carolyn has co-authored two novels (Rapture at Sea and Spirit of Ecstasy by 'Carolyn Charles').

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All Rights Reserved © 2000 by Humphrey Muller

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Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Epigraph

Foreword

Volume 1

Chapter 1

In the hub of things

Chapter 2

The wheel turns

Chapter 3

Character is fate

Chapter 4

In general synod

Chapter 5

Southbound

Chapter 6

Orientation

Chapter 7

The centre cannot hold

Chapter 8

Twilight zone

Chapter 9

Merry-go-round

Chapter 10

The English circle

Chapter 11

The inner circle

Chapter 12

Sweet proposal

Chapter 13

Fermentation

Chapter 14

Hollow echo

Chapter 15

Northern echo

Chapter 16

A wasps’ nest

Chapter 17

A Wasp’s sting

Chapter 18

Thin ice

Chapter 19

Principalities and powers

Chapter 20

The last breakfast

Chapter 21

Running hot

Chapter 22

Sweet sorrow

Chapter 23

Northbound

Chapter 24

Yellow canary

Chapter 25

Cat-astrophic

Chapter 26

Arabian waste land

Chapter 27

Stingray

Chapter 28

Bite the bullet

Chapter 29

Westbound

Chapter 30

Under sail

Chapter 31

Into the pond

Chapter 32

More things in heaven and sea

Chapter 33

Albatross

Chapter 34

In dead earnest

Chapter 35

Mopping up

Chapter 36

Pain of choice

Chapter 37

Safe haven?

About the Author

Epigraph

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It’s that damn wheel anonymous with oil in its hub

that skewered loose to skewer

my soul that had fled anonymous violence in African heat.

C H Muller: ‘Wheel of Destiny’

Foreword

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Wheel of Fortune is a novel of intrigue, adventure and explicit sexuality. An English teacher flees the threat of death across the world in the company of his provocative pupil.

When the diffident and ineffectual Derek Mann loses his teaching job in a girls’ grammar school and drifts from one temporary post to another, one of his precocious pupils gives him her grandfather’s wartime diary with a mission to return to Apartheid South Africa and find the opal mine she believes to be her rightful inheritance. Intrigue and violence bedevil the quest which ends in a desert under the Southern Cross. The wry, often laconic style gives full reign to the characters’ latent sexuality.

Volume 1

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Southwards

Chapter 1

In the hub of things

It was horrendous. He knew, after ten minutes of trying to shout above the hubbub of voices, that he’d never get control. He felt distinctly panicky as he tried to expound the possible subtle implications of a poem called Mr Kartoffel, about a whimsical man given to drinking his beer from a watering-can and parting his hair with a knife and fork.

‘Would you say,’ he flung his question into the din of voices, ‘that Mr Kartoffel is a nonconformist, unconventional, or simply anti-social?’

‘Anti-wha…?’ queried a freckled-face girl with rippled brow and nose.

‘Quiet! Quiet! For heaven’s sake, be quiet!’

The din modulated to a hum, then took off again like a swarm of bees regaining the feverish pitch of spring-pollination.

Somehow Derek pressed on, eliciting a few half-hearted responses from girls whose eyes he was able to catch. Thankfully, the bell shrilled through the din and he sighed with relief as the boisterous girls surged out of the classroom. But the next lesson was equally disheartening.

It was the Lower Fourths, and being a ‘library’ period, merely required him to assist the girls in their choice of books.

‘Sir!’ piped a pixie-faced girl, eyes a-giggle with bravado. ‘What’s pubescence mean?’ She held up a book, her finger latched onto a word from a scene of sordid lust. Derek tried to supply the ‘dictionary’ meanings of the words, ignoring the obvious intent of the questions.

‘Coltish?’ he said, responding to another question. ‘Well…er…it means young, and lively, like a colt or foal, doesn’t it?’ Who on earth, he wondered, put the pot-boilers of Wilbur Smith and Ian Flemming on the shelves? It was too much when a pug-faced girl, barely suppressing the heaving of illicit laughter from her ample bosom, came forward and asked him to explain the meaning of ‘this page—this page, here, Sir, where this bloke thing-um-a-bobs this girl…’

Derek sank into one of the stuffed chairs in the staffroom, taking refuge in his cup of coffee. He wished the coffee were laced with brandy. Dismay spread through his heart. How the hell was he going to get by, year after year, surviving as a teacher? His eyes rested on the first signs of a paunch. He had promised himself that before he reached thirty in the following year—1988—he would be securely settled in England. He felt much older than his twenty-nine years. A burnt-out case, he thought. He lifted tired eyes, surveying the women teachers around him. They gabbled in enthusiastic groups, of Oxbridge candidates and divorcing parents. Could he break into this alien world? He had been a lecturer in English at the University of Zululand in South Africa before the creeping menace of Apartheid made him move to England. He had unsuccessfully applied for all of the few academic posts he saw advertised. With the academic cutbacks, teaching now seemed the only option open to him.

‘Call for Mr Mann!’ shrilled Mrs Taylor, the Deputy Head, peering short-sightedly across the room through her owl-like spectacles. When she spotted Derek she beamed. ‘Girl to see you!’

Derek made his way to the door. Outside stood a slim sixth-form girl. She looked frail and vulnerable in her school gym, but her delicate features contrasted oddly with her penetrating dark eyes.

‘Jacquie,’ said Derek, surprised.

‘It’s the poem I promised you, Mr Mann,’ she said. She handed him a page of embossed paper.‘It’s my effort on South Africa.My homework for the next tutorial!’

‘Thank you, Jacquie.’ He smiled generously. ‘I’ll certainly read it!’

‘Thanks!’ Her eyes crinkled. ‘By the way…’

‘Yes?’

‘I was hoping you’d come to dinner next week.’ Seeing his surprise, she added quickly, ‘I’ve a friend who’s a priest. He would like to meet you. My Grannie too.’

Derek hardly thought the headmistress would approve. ‘That’s kind of you. I’ll let you know…’

‘…tomorrow, after the tutorial. Fine!’ She shot another of her electric smiles and swung round, swinging her chestnut-red pony tail. Her slight figure descended the stairs and was gone in seconds.

Derek returned to his seat in the staffroom. She was certainly very different from the other girls, he thought. Of course, she was sixth form. But her electric energy and candid sincerity set her apart from her peers. He avoided the obvious possibility that she had a crush on him.

He looked at the poem. It began:

Port Elizabeth, midnight, in a cell

You lay; skull beaten open by a man

Who laughed…

Another Steve Biko poem, he thought. She had cottoned onto some of the themes in his own poems he had read to the group.

He thought back to his black students in Zululand. He missed their dignity, their respectful silence when he explained the technicalities of a word in cultural context. The neatly dressed and well behaved girls in the sixth form at least shared something of the same dignity. He thought of his small, enthusiastic, appreciative third-year degree tutorial group, also neatly dressed, their eyes shining…And then he thought of the police, the army-occupied campus, the dogs, the unexplained bruises across the faces of students, and the students thronging in singing, seething masses of hatred, and his mind exploded: ‘No, I won’t go back there. I hate that bloody country!’

In the late afternoon Derek returned to his single bedsitting room. It was a seedy ground-floor room with a kitchenette. Here he sat up late, most nights, marking essays. Methodically his red pen filled the margins with fine lines of what he hoped were helpful notes. Next door in a similar bedsitter a young couple loved and fought like cat and dog. It was customary to hear the dapper young man’s voice raised, punctuated by bloodcurdling screams from Ruth, his beloved, who eventually locked herself in the bathroom Derek shared with them.

‘Ruth! Ruth! Don’t be a silly girl. Open the door!’ The young man’s pleading whispers would go on interminably. His tap-tap-tapping on the door drove Derek crazy: he didn’t know whether to attempt to rescue Ruth or leave well alone.

At other times Derek would awake to her screams of pure ecstasy. It usually went on for half an hour, stop abruptly for five or ten minutes, then start up for an encore: her voice would trill to a high operatic pitch, culminating in an intense rhythm of jiggling bedsprings. It wasn’t unusual for this performance to be followed, after another interval, by the screaming and bathroom ritual.

In the morning he might pass Ruth in the hall. She was thin, almost skeletal, but her warm smile never betrayed any depths of unhappiness.

The following morning Derek set out to work as usual. It was a very dark and cold winter’s morning in February and he negotiated his Rover carefully into the traffic. He lived on the outskirts of Bradford and had to follow a complex route to the school which required starting out early. He missed the bright crisp mornings of Zululand and the fast easy drive to the university. He pulled the car off the street halfway into the driveway of a garage in Shipley where he usually stopped to buy the Thursday edition of the Daily Telegraph—to check the educational posts. There was a petrol tanker half blocking the entrance so he couldn’t pull right into the forecourt. He climbed out and was half way to the shop when he was stunned by the sound of a shuddering crash behind him. It sounded like metal and a shower of glass. His heart sank, realising that something had hit his car. He ran back, expecting to see his car merged with the mangled remains of another vehicle. But the driver’s side was immaculate. When he rushed to the other side he gasped. The door was dented in and instead of a rear-side window shards of glass lay everywhere. There was no sign of a missile, until he noticed an isolated wheel lying on its side a few yards back from the car.

The wheel had come off some other vehicle. His car had stopped its random career down the hill.

Derek cursed. There was no sign of the other vehicle! He flung the offending wheel into his boot. His car (a near-new Rover, bought with South African funds already depleted by the collapse of the rand) was a shabby sight, but still drivable. He spent a miserable day at the school and drove home, that evening, with the cold wind whistling through the gaping hole that was a window. He’d have to wait until the following week before he could have the damage repaired. The next morning he stuck a piece of stiff cardboard over the gap to keep out the cold and the snow that began to blow horizontally

Once again, he joined the traffic crawling to Bradford. In the dark of pre-dawn, he was unable to see anything beyond the cardboard-patched window on his left as he gingerly crept across Wharfdale junction. He was craning forward to see to the left when, from the right, tearing brakes and rushing lights smashed his tail, spewing glass. He coasted to safety with a galloping heart, hardly believing this second blow to his once-immaculate car.

After waiting for the police and exchanging addresses with the other driver (who was furious at his intrusion into the junction), Derek drove his still drivable but now ultra-battered Rover to school. He suffered the onslaught of adolescent classroom misbehaviour with an even heavier heart, knowing that now his entire month’s salary of £500 wouldn’t even cover the costs to his uninsured car.

Driving back at the start of the weekend, he eyed the endless ridges of dull terraced redbrick houses that stretched over what must once have been rolling green hills and dales.

‘This is not the England I came to live in,’ he thought. But then surely, he argued, it was better than being in South Africa where innocent victims were being tortured. He thought sadly of another stanza from Jacquie’s poem:

The necklace you wore was a burning tyre.

No one stood round to watch or count the loss

Though they heard your screams melt into the fire.

Thankfully, he thought, the tyre that had hit him in Shipley came from a less malevolent fate. But the thought did nothing to dispel the gathering gloom in the life he was trying to establish in this sceptered isle, this England that had seemed a romantic escape from African violence, heat and dust.

The next month brought something of a relief to the nerve-racking routine of teaching. Mrs Taylor, the deputy head, asked him to join some of the teachers responsible for escorting a group of girls from the Lower Fourth as well as the more senior girls on a visit to Stratford. On the outward journey he sat next to Mrs Taylor on the coach. She was a compassionate woman who radiated calm and normality.

‘You heard the story of old McDonald, of the remote Glen Lockart?’

‘I can’t say I have,’ Derek replied.

‘Well,’ her eyes twinkled through her owl-like lenses. ‘He told his son to travel to faraway Jedburgh, or even to cross the border to the land of the Sasanachs, to find a wife.’

‘How so?’ Derek smiled.

‘You see, he told his son he had known many of the lassies in the Glen when he was younger; so it wouldn’t be wise to marry a lassie from the Glen lest perchance the one he chose were to be a half-sister!’

‘No indeed!’ Derek laughed.

‘But,’ Mrs Taylor went on. ‘His mother called him to her side in private. She said, My son, ye don’t have to gang far at all!’

‘Oh?’

‘Indeed no,’ she said. ‘His mother said: Before ye were born, I was away in London where I met a comely young man. He it is who is your real father…’

Derek roared with laughter. It was all the funnier that the deputy head told it.

Everyone enjoyed the production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. On the return journey the coach stopped at Warwick Castle where the girls were given a tour of the Castle and allowed to eat their packed lunches in the spacious grounds afterwards. The wayward weather of March had given way to an early outbreak of Spring. The air was crisp and even warm in the soft sunshine, like a promise of summer. A flurry of snowdrops shone white in the lush green of a bank.

‘Do flowers experience a sexual thrill, sir?’ asked a pert voice from behind.

Derek turned around. It was Jacquie, smiling mischievously. ‘I mean, when they’re pollinated?’

‘No,’ he said, in what was meant to be a stern reply. ‘They don’t have a nervous system.’

‘Oh yes, of course.’ Her sharp features, uplifted eyebrows and mouth touched by mirth made her look like a pixie. ‘I suppose you’d say the castle looks very grand. I think it’s an anachronism.’

Derek took up the challenge. ‘It stands for solid values. Look at its turrets. It suggests etiquette, stability, security—civilisation, in fact.’

‘But we’ve had the courage to move on from that,’ she insisted. ‘Now we have democracy—the British Museum, the BBC, the NatWest Tower. In New York, the Empire State Building…’

‘Civilisation is very fragile, as Kenneth Clark said…’

‘But you have to have change,’ she insisted. ‘Look at your students in Africa. The young have to change the bad old ways of the establishment…’

‘And never mind the consequences? The necklacing, the breakdown of law and order…?’ Derek spoke almost crossly, but her quick smile dispelled the momentary annoyance.

‘Like Walt Whitman,’ she said gently, ‘we have to become everything. Even the suffering.’

‘You’re too good a pupil,’ he smiled.

‘But not such a good girl,’ she whispered and touched his hand softly. She came closer, looking whimsically into his eyes. ‘What different worlds we come from! And yet we have this meeting of minds…’

He drew away, gently, and began to walk slowly along the path. ‘That’s what teaching is all about. Minds meeting. We’re just learning facilitators…’

‘Oh, don’t!’ She stopped, scowling in mock reprimand. ‘Stop being a teacher, for once.’

He looked at her. Her maturity sat awkwardly on her light frame. Yet he found her captivating with her bright eyes and quick intellect. She was fresh and crisp, like the morning. Her chestnut red hair glinted in the sun and traces of freckles peppered her face, giving her a school-girlish petulance. Her willowy body was oddly alluring in her brown uniform buckled tightly at the waist.

‘I’m just being conscious,’ he said, still trying to change the subject. ‘Life—especially civilised life—is a question of consciousness. You did a good job expressing your consciousness in your poem.’

‘Being aware of suffering,’ she said, biting into a chocolate-coated peppermint. ‘Being aware of everything. Being aware of the spring snowdrops, there. And the sun—and of you, and your aftershave.’ Her eyes crinkled again.

‘And me being aware of your petulance! And the way some chocolate has stuck to your nose.’

She wiped it off quickly. ‘Chocolate hardly proves you’re alive. I thought it had something to do with thinking…’

‘Because I think, I am. Yes, in fact consciousness only proves the person that experiences consciousness is alive! I have no proof that you’re alive—just of me.’

‘Here,’ she said, coming close to him and touching his cheek. ‘Can you feel that? Aren’t I alive?’

There was a hint of peppermint on her breath. He said: ‘I’m aware of you, but that only proves that I’m alive. You could be a dream, or an illusion. You see, consciousness is like an echo-chamber, a tableau of impressions and thoughts, and what actually constitutes reality…’

She lifted herself up on her toes and planted a kiss on his mouth. It was like an electric shock.

‘Jacquie!’ he said, ‘For goodness sake…’

But her subtle body had already insinuated itself against his. ‘I’m just your imagination…,’ she teased.

Someone sniggered. Derek turned round to discover the incredulous eyes of a group of girls from the Lower Fourth and the shocked faces of their form mistress and the deputy head.

‘Jacquie, return to the coach at once! Mr Mann, please step this way.’ The deputy head looked oddly severe as she blinked through her large glasses.

‘Oh, Mrs Taylor, we were just…,’ stammered Jacquie.

‘Do as you’re told!’ said Mrs Taylor. Derek had forgotten how emphatic she could be. He felt hot and cold all over.

The next week there was a great deal of sniggering and furtive whispering in Derek’s classrooms. Mrs Taylor was sympathetic and clearly believed Derek that he had not tried to become too friendly with, or had made a pass at one of the Sixth Formers. Nevertheless, Derek felt the full weight of the head teacher’s velvet glove when she called him into her office.

‘I’m afraid,’ she announced, ‘that we will no longer need your services after Easter. You always knew, of course, that your position might be temporary. And Anthea Johnston, whom you were relieving, has now recovered from her hysterectomy.’ She smiled thinly. ‘We’ll have to let you go, I fear.’

‘Of course,’ Derek said softly. ‘I quite understand.’

The wheel of fortune turned another notch.

When Derek left the school for the last time, he was being given a lift by Cynthia Jackson, the Head of English. As the car turned out of the school drive, he saw Jacquie, sitting against the stone wall with a group of girls waiting for a bus. She sat on her haunches, her narrow knees drawn up under her brown school skirt. He waved to her, but she was lost in thought. How vulnerable she looked, he thought.

‘Troublemaker!’ snorted Mrs Jackson, swinging the car round the bend.

Chapter 2

The wheel turns

It was late at night when the phone rang.

‘Mr Mann? Derek?’

‘Yes?’ replied Derek, puzzled. He couldn’t quite place the clear sound of a young woman’s voice. She sounded anxious.

‘It’s Jacquie, Mr Mann. Jacquie Thomas. Are you all right?’

‘Oh, Jacquie!’ He was surprised. ‘Fancy hearing you!’

‘Had you forgotten? We were expecting you tonight.’

Memory rushed back. The dinner invitation with Jacquie and her priest friend!

‘Oh, Lord, Jacquie! I’m…I’m frightfully sorry,’ he stammered. ‘Was it tonight? I’m afraid…’

‘Oh, it’s all right!’ she said sweetly. ‘We were just awfully worried something had happened…you’re safe, at any rate.’

‘Oh, yes, but I do feel awful, forgetting…‘ She was entitled to some explanation, he thought. ‘The truth is, I had so much on my mind, looking for a new job. I was turned down by a language academy this morning.’

‘Oh, you poor darling!’ she exclaimed. ‘And after being fired from the school!’

‘Well, no…the school didn’t fire me.’

‘Admit it! It was on account of me!’ she said sympathetically. ‘That cow seeing us at Warwick…’

‘No, no!’ he insisted. ‘They understood that was nothing. I told you, I was no longer needed. I was only replacing…’

‘I never believed that,’ she said. ‘Oh Mr Mann. Derek…may I call you Derek? I’m so sorry.’

‘I’m sorry, too—about tonight. How stupid of me. Had you gone to a lot of trouble?’

‘Oh, we had Father O’Brien, anyway. You would have enjoyed his company. He’s really into metaphysics, like you. But we’ll have another dinner…’

‘Jacquie, I really am sorry. Perhaps I can invite Father O’Brien here—with you and any other guests? What about Saturday evening?’

‘That sounds wonderful. I’ll be in touch. In the meantime, you take care.’

He was surprised that someone so young—was she actually eighteen?—could be so confident and apparently in control. He had to admit he felt much better after her call. It was stupid of him to forget the invitation, but he never took it very seriously. With the demise of the school job, especially after the Warwick affair, he had presumed Jacquie an item of the past.

Later she phoned back to say just she and Father O’Brien would see him on Saturday. A light meal would do and she was going to bring the main course. She was really anxious about him, she said. There was also something she wanted to show him. A diary—her father’s (or grandfather’s?) diary. Something, she said, that could change his life.

It all sounded quite intriguing, and no doubt Father O’Brien was to serve a double function—that of a sympathetic counsellor following the loss of his job and the more obvious one of chaperon.

The ground-floor bedsitter of a decaying Victorian building was hardly the place to entertain a priest and a young lady, but on Saturday evening Derek did his best to set a cosy table in a corner.

When he opened the door at 6 p.m. he was surprised at the sight of Jacquie in a soft contoured jacket with matching skirt. He was so used to seeing her in a dull school uniform. She beamed at him, clasping a bottle of wine.

‘Jacquie! You look terrific! Where’s Father O’Brien?’ He glanced to either side of her.

‘Couldn’t make it, I’m afraid! But I’ve baked a nice cottage pie. It’s in the car.’

‘Couldn’t make it?’ he asked bemused. ‘Car? Do you drive?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It’s the Metro here. Many of the Sixth Formers have their own cars, you know.’

Derek remembered the last sight of her, waiting for a bus. This was a new dimension to Jacquie.

He helped her take out the small basket covered with a cloth. ‘Should you be out all by yourself?’ he asked, awkwardly.

‘Oh yes,’she said brightly.‘The big wolf ’s away for the weekend.And grandmother’s quite self-sufficient.’ She giggled. ‘This is her car, actually.’

‘Well, let’s go inside,’ he said, shivering. ‘You’re not wearing a coat!’

She was at home immediately, as though used to taking control. ‘What a lovely little table,’ she said. ‘This will do nicely.’ She unpacked the cottage pie, napkins and wine glasses. It was like a schoolgirl’s picnic, yet she looked so dapper and grown-up in her matching terracotta suit. ‘We’ll just heat this in the oven,’ she said, clicking briskly into the kitchenette in her high heels. She was clearly enjoying herself. When she sat down on her haunches, opening the oven to slip in the pie, her short skirt pulled up to reveal delicately proportioned knees and soft thighs. Derek felt increasingly disturbed that he should be so aware of her femininity. She was a schoolgirl, but she was absolutely stunning.

Derek slid a CD into his small Hi-fi and they sat down to the effervescence of Mozart’s Horn Concerto. He decanted a little of Jacquie’s wine into the two glasses. ‘You’ll have to go easy on this,’ he said. ‘After all, you have to drive home.’ He smiled when he looked at the bottle, seeing it was South African Pinotage.

‘Derek,’ she leant forward, concern touching her eyes. ‘What happened at the Language Academy interview?’

‘Nothing, really.’ He shrugged. ‘They wanted someone—younger and more energetic, more adaptable, I think.’

‘Oh, never mind them. Look! I wanted to show you this.’ She stood up and in a neat movement removed her jacket. She sat down again and leant forward, fingering her brooch. It was a dark opal set in a delicate gold wagon-wheel. It was all the more magnificent because of the lace blouse she wore. Derek concentrated hard on the opal, trying not to notice the soft outline of the delicate round breasts that contoured the blouse.

‘My grandmother gave me this. She also gave me this!’ She dipped into her basket and brought out a small black notebook.

He picked it up. It was very old and the edge of the covers were worn. He opened it and it was filled with a fine slanting writing in faded blue ink. There were occasional smudges. It was clearly a diary since each entry followed a date—from 1940 to 1941.

‘It’s a diary,’ he said. ‘From the war years.’ He lifted it closer and a black and white photograph fell out. He picked it up. A young girl laughed back at him, waves foaming around her.

‘That’s my grandmother,’ Jacquie said. ‘There’s another picture of her—here.’ She turned to the back of the diary. The same carefree face smiled at him. She was exquisite—a plumper version of Jacquie but with an upturned nose.

‘Her name’s Daphne,’ said Jacquie. ‘She married my grandfather in secret. This is his diary. He was killed in 1941, in Egypt. Look,’ she leaned over, wafting her sweet perfume as she paged to the end of the diary. ‘It stops abruptly here, on the 26th of June, 1941. His plane was shot down the next day. He was a gunner.’

‘This is most interesting, Jacquie,’ said Derek.

‘The first part’s full of Daffy—he called her Daffy—about how he missed her while serving in Mombassa. He went back to Durban before sailing again for Egypt. He married my Gran during that visit, two months before being killed.’

‘In Durban!’ Derek exclaimed.

‘Yes. That’s where he gave her this,’ she said, touching the opal brooch.

‘I see. But in Durban, you said?’

‘Didn’t you know I have a South African connection?’ she laughed. ‘Partly, anyway. After the war—after my grandfather died—Daffy married an Englishman employed by an oil company in South Africa. Eventually they settled here. We’ve a lot in common, you see!’ She tasted the wine. Her eyes crinkled in their characteristic fashion over the rim of the glass.

‘And your beautiful brooch?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes!’ she said, unclasping it from her blouse. ‘It’s a black opal—one of the most valuable kind. A friend of his—a funny name, Papenpuss, or something—gave it to him in Dar es Salaam or Mombassa.’

Derek smiled. ‘I imagine it would be Papenphus.’ It was a familiar South African name.

‘Right!’ she nodded, rushing on. ‘The whole story’s in the diary. Papenpuss—Papenphus?—found the stone in his own mine. In the Cape, in Africa. He and grandfather were going to mine it together after the war. They made a partnership agreement.’

Derek examined the brooch. The opal was almost black with flecks of green and mauve deep inside. It emanated a sense of mystery. He placed it gently on the table between them.

‘Where exactly is the mine?’ he asked. ‘Who owns it now.’

‘That’s just the point!’ Jacquie’s dark eyes were lit with animation. ‘No one knows. My grandfather, Hollie Thomas, was killed, of course.

And there’s no record of what happened to Papenpus. But wherever the mine is—half of it’s mine!’

Derek looked at her, amused. ‘Hang on a bit,’ he laughed. ‘Where do you come in? I mean…’ he paused. ‘How were…I mean, when were you—no, your grandmother, when did they…?’

‘Oh,when was my father conceived?’She smiled brightly. ‘In Durban, of course, during that last visit! My grandmother does have the marriage certificate, too!’ She drained her glass and refilled it, also topping up Derek’s glass.

‘Where’s your father now? What does he—and your mother—say about this?’

‘They’re both dead,’ she said simply. ‘Killed in two separate accidents. It happened before I was a year old, so I never knew them.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly.

‘Thanks. So dear old Daffy Grandmother’s all I’ve ever known, you see.’ She drank deeply from the red Pinotage. ‘The Englishman she mar-ried—well, he left her years ago. I think he died of a heart attack.’ She lifted her glass again.

‘I say, take it easy!’

‘Go on, you’re being left behind,’ she said, taking another sip. ‘Ooo! The pie!’ Her eyes widened. She jumped up and opened the oven. A rich aroma, slightly burnt, pervaded the room. ‘Just in time,’ she said. She came back with the steaming dish, her thin hands enveloped in large oven gloves.

‘Jacquie, you’re amazing,’ he said.

‘You obviously need looking after,’ she said, filling his plate generously with the pie that collapsed and oozed in a delicious mixture of hot mince and potato. ‘You’re such a fuddy-duddy. Now tuck in!’

‘It’s delicious, Jacquie!’ he said, munching. ‘But now, back to this diary and mine, why are you showing it to me?’

‘Well,’ she said, conspiratorially, sitting down and picking up a fork, ‘I think you need to turn your life upside down.’

‘Oh?’

‘Me too, for that matter. And I think you can do it, for both of us.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘Look at you!’ she said with a full mouth, indicating the room with a wave of her fork. ‘Jumping from job to job. Living like this.’

‘I do all right,’ he said, a little chagrined. ‘I’ve got some supply teaching lined up.’

‘Oh, big deal!’ She stuffed more mince into her mouth. The schoolgirl in her showed through her elegance and bravado. ‘You’re a mess! A little boy lost!’

‘I’m not!’

‘Oh dammit, Derek! Go and find my mine! I can’t do it. I’m only a bloody schoolgirl!’

Her sudden vigour took him aback.

She smiled. ‘Look at me, pretending to be grown up.’ She sipped her wine. ‘We’ll, I have to be. I’ve got to take care of Daffy. But you’re a man. A nice man. And I trust you.’

‘So?’

She leant forward. Her pixie face and freckles, her brilliant eyes, were close to him. She whispered: ‘Go to Africa. Go find my mine. It’s half mine, anyway.’

‘Um,’ he said, ‘You really shouldn’t drink anymore, you know.