Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗
He went down to the art room after school, late on Friday afternoon, a most inopportune moment. Clare had by this time abandoned all sense of discretion, for her it had become almost a self-destructive frenzy. She and Sean were in the paint store at the back of the art school, and it was some seconds before either of them realized that the headmaster was in the room with them: For Shasa everything seemed to happen at once. Sean's expulsion from Bishops was a bombshell that ripped through Weltevreden.
When it happened, Shasa was in Johannesburg, and they had to call him out of a meeting with the representatives of the Chamber of Mines to receive the headmaster's telephone call. On the open line the headmaster would give no details, and Shasa flew back to Cape Town immediately and drove directly from the airfield to the school.
Flabbergasted and seething with anger at the stark details the headmaster gave him, Shasa sent the Jaguar roaring around the lower slopes of Table Mountain towards Weltevreden.
From the first he had not approved of the woman who Tara had installed in the cottage. She was all the things he despised, with her great sloppy breasts and silly pretensions which she thought made her avant-garde and artistic. Her paintings were atrocious, daubed primary colours and childish perspectives, and she tried to conceal her lack of talent and taste behind Portuguese cigarettes, sandals and skirts of blindingly vivid designs. He decided to deal with her first.
However, she had fled, leaving the cottage in slovenly disarray.
Thwarted, Shasa took his anger unabated up to the big house and shouted at Tara as he stormed into the hall.
'Where is the little blighter - I'm going to skin his backside for him." The other children, all three of them, were peeking over the railing from the second-floor gallery, in a fine fever of vicarious terror.
Isabella's eyes were as enormous as one of Walt Disney's fawns.
Shasa saw them and roared up the stair well. 'Back to your own rooms, this instant. That goes for you as well, young lady." And they ducked and scampered. As an afterthought Shasa bellowed after them, 'And tell that brother of yours I want to see him in the gun room immediately." The three of them raced each other down the passage of the nursery wing, each of them determined to be the bearer of the dreaded summons. The gun room was the family equivalent of Tower Green where all executions took place.
Garrick got there first, and pounded on Sean's locked door.
'Pater wants you immediately,' he yelled.
'-- in the gun room --' Michael joined in, and Isabella who had been left far behind at the start, piped up breathlessly, 'He's going to skin your backside!" She was flushed and trembling with eagerness, and she hoped desperately that Sean would show her his bottom after Daddy had carried out his threat. She couldn't imagine what it would look like, and she wondered if Daddy would have the skin made into a floor mat like the skins of the zebras and lions in the gun room. It was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened in her life.
In the entrance hall Tara was attempting to calm Shasa. She had seen him in a comparable rage only two or three times during their marriage, always when he fancied the family honour or reputation had been compromised. Her efforts were in vain, for he turned on her with his single eye glittering.
'Damn you, woman. This is mostly your fault. It was you who insisted on bringing that whore to live on Weltevreden." As Shasa stormed off to the gun room, his voice carried clearly up the stairwell to where Sean was bracing himself to come down and face retribution. Up to that moment Sean had been so confused by the speed of events that he hadn't been thinking clearly. Now, as he descended the stairs, his mind was racing as he prepared his defence.
He passed his mother, still standing in the middle of the chessboard black and white marble squares of the entrance hall floor, and she gave him a strained smile of encouragement.
'I tried to help, darling,' she whispered. They had never been close, but now for once Shasa's rage made them allies. 'Thank you, Mater." He knocked on the gun-room door, and opened it cautiously when his father roared. He closed it carefull37 behind him and advanced to the centre of the lion skin where he halted and stood to attention.
Beatings at Weltevreden followed an established ritual. The riding crops were laid out on the baize gun table, five of them of various lengths, weights and stinging potential. He knew his father would make a show of selecting the correct one for the occasion, and that today it would almost certainly be the long whippy whalebone. Involuntarily he looked to the over-stuffed leather chair beside the fireplace over which he would be asked to drape himself, reaching over to grip the legs of the chair on the far side. His father was an international polo player with wrists like steel springs, his strokes made even the headmaster's seem like a powder puff.
Then deliberately Sean closed his mind against fear and lifted his chin to stare calmly at his father. Shasa was standing in front of the fireplace, hands clasped beside his back, rocking on the balls of his feet.
'You have been fired from Bishops,' he said.
Although the headmaster had not specifically mentioned this fact to Sean himself during his extended diatribe, the news did not come as a complete surprise. 'Yes, sir,' he said.
'I find it hard to believe what I have been told about you. It is true that you were making a spectacle of yourself with this - this woman?" 'Yes, sir." 'That you were letting your friends watch you?" 'Yes, sir." 'And charging them money for the privilege?" 'Yes, sir." 'A pound a head?" 'No, sir." 'What do you mean - no sir?" 'Two pounds a head, sir." 'You are a Courtney - what you do reflects directly on every member of this family. Do you realize that?" 'Yes, sir." 'Don't keep saying that. In the name of all that is holy, how could you do it?" 'She started it, sir. I would have never even thought of it without her." Shasa stared at him, and suddenly his rage evaporated. He remembered himself at almost exactly the same age, standing chastened before Centaine. She had not beaten him, but had sent him to a lysol bath and a humiliating medical examination. He remembered the girl, a saucy little harlot only a year or two older than he was, with a shock of sun bleached hair and a sly smile - and he almost smiled himself. She had teased and provoked him, leading him on into folly, and yet he felt a strange nostalgic glow. His first real woman - he might forget a hundred others but never that one.
Sean had seen the anger fade out of his father's eye, and sensed that now was the moment to exploit the change of mood.
'I realize that I have brought scandal on the family, and I know that I have to take my medicine --' His father would like that, it was one of his sayings, 'Take your medicine like a man." He saw the further softening of his father's regard. 'I know how stupid I have been, and before my punishment I would just like to say how sorry I am that I have made you ashamed of me." This was not exactly true, and Sean instinctively knew it. His father was angry with him for being caught out, but deep down he was rather proud of his eldest son's now proven virility.
'The only excuse I have was that I couldn't help myself. She just drove me mad, sir. I couldn't think of anything else but - well, but what she wanted me to do with her." Shasa understood entirely. He was still having the same sort of problems at nearly forty - what was it that Centaine said? 'It's the de Thiry blood, we all have to live with it." He coughed softly, moved by his son's honesty and openness. He was such a fine-looking boy, straight and tall and strong, so handsome and courageous, no wonder the woman had picked on him. He couldn't really be bad, Shasa thought, a bit of a devil perhaps, a little too cocksure, a little too eager for life - but not really bad. 'I mean, if boffing a pretty girl is mortal sin, there is no salvation for any of us,' he thought. I'm going to have to beat you, Sean,' he said aloud.
