Descent into Chaos

When I got to the hotel in Beatrice, I wasn't surprised to see Doctor Nicholls slumped in a stool at one of the tables, but I was quite surprised to see Pamela similarly slumped on a high stool at the bar. She was smoking and had a tumbler of what seemed to be hard liquor in front of her. She didn't look at me when I came in, but she took a long puff on a cigarette and then brutally crushed it out in a plastic ashtray on the bar top and rummaged around in a clutch purse lying on the bar and lit up another cigarette. I could see that her hands were trembling.

I started to move to her. I had no intention to telling her what I'd just seen, but we'd been lovers a long time ago, dammit, and I needed some sort of sign that she realized I existed. I had come all of this way. And I could tell myself that I came for the British Foreign Office or even at the behest of Lord Clarence, but at this moment in time, I knew I had come to see Pamela. That I'd never gotten past Pamela despite my own, ultimately barren and unhappy marriage.

But as I started across the room, Doctor Nicholls laid a hand on my sleeve and arrested my movement.

"Could you spare a moment for an old man, sir? I do want to apologize."

What could I do? I sat at the table beside the melancholy doctor.

"Can you forgive me for my behavior this afternoon?" he mumbled. His eyes were bloodshot and there were tears in them. "I don't know what came over me. I'd had too much to drink, of course. It's just so lonely out here, and I have . . . sometimes I have . . . these urges, you know."

"That's quite all right. Think nothing of it," I answered quietly, trying to put on my "understanding" face. Perhaps I was being too sophisticated London and not enough raw Rhodesia, though, because Nicholls took that as encouragement rather than a polite sendoff."

"It's that we don't get many fine looking visitors like you out here, Brian. Refined men. Men of brilliance and presence, if you know what I mean."

"Ummm, umm," I murmured, more focused on politely refusing the drink Nicholls was pushing toward me than in listening to what he was saying."

"I was thinking. Perhaps . . . Well, I was thinking. Perhaps you could come up to my rooms for a drink."

I was fully focused on Nicholls now.

"Umm, thanks for the offer, Doctor. Very flattering indeed, but I think not. I think I will go up and wash the dust of the road off me and take a nap."

"I have the best bathtub in the hotel in my suite of rooms," Nicholls babbled. "You could—"

"Again, thanks, but I'll manage. I'll just talk with Pamela for a moment and then I'll—"

But when I looked up, Pamela was no longer at the bar or anywhere else to be seen.

I went straight to the bathroom at the end of the hall my room was on and soaked in the tub for a good twenty minutes, trying to wash away much more of what I'd learned of Rhodesia than just that it was covered in dust.

Padding back to my room with a towel wrapped around my midsection, I discovered where Pamela had gone. She was in my bed, naked, smoking a cigarette, and still with half a tumbler of liquor to drink.

Perhaps if I hadn't had the double shock of seeing Alister and his Shona "wife" in coitus and then being propositioned by Doctor Nicholls, I would have had the resolve I needed to resist the situation. But this was remote Rhodesia in its death throes, and all of the frustration and inevitable sinking into oblivion that I had been experiencing for the past three weeks flowed over me.

We didn't speak, but, as I approached the bed, Pamela spread her legs and pulled the hem of her cotton sun dress up to her waist and I could see that she was completely naked to me underneath. I dropped my towel and went onto the bed between her knees and possessed her lips with mine while she unbuttoned the front of her dress down to her waist.

Then I buried my face between her thin breasts. She sighed and moaned, the first utterance I had heard from her since she directed the Shona house servant to serve tea and whiskey, and I could feel her heart thumping rapidly and strongly. Assurance. Assurance that she was alive, and that she was really here.

I knew I should honor the sanctity of her marriage. But I had just come from a cruel show of just how much sanctity was in that institution.

I wanted to take this slowly, to savor every moment of it, but Pamela had taken hold of my throbbing cock with both hands and was guiding me inside her. She arched her back and thrust her hips up into my pelvis, and I was saddled and riding her hard. Memories of our short, but fully satisfying affair before Alister entered the picture and took her away from me. Far, far away. To Rhodesia. But I had come to Rhodesia for her. And I was inside her now. Fucking Africa out of her. Fucking her for every ounce Africa was worth. Thrusting and listening to her moan. Assurances she was alive—that she knew I was here. That Africa hadn't made her a dried-up zombie. Thrusting, thrusting, thrusting. Saving her from the descent into chaos.

Or so I told myself, only half convincingly, even as I fucked her.

When I awoke, Pamela was gone. I drifted down to the bar for a drink before a late dinner. I was all alone in the bar. The doctor had beaten a defeated retreat.

But, no, I wasn't alone. I heard sounds from behind the bar, beyond a beaded curtain that covered a doorway behind the bar. I was drawn to the sounds, seeking the barman so that I could have that drink.

They were in the shadows just beyond the beaded curtain, up against the wall. Pamela, her back rubbing up and down the wall, her bodice open to Gavin's hungry lips. Gavin standing, facing her, feet firmly on the floor, leveraging off the balls of his feet, his shorts down around his ankles and her dress gathered up around her waist. Gavin, young, virile, in superb shape. A cock that put mine to shame. Pamela's knees gathered up on Gavin's hips, and Gavin fucking up into her, pushing her thin shoulder blades up and down the wall with deep thrusts.

Pamela's face was lolled over in my direction, and she was staring at me, but not seeing me. A vacant look in her eyes. Just another fuck. Just as my stolen moments with her had been. Thrusting a finger salute to Africa and to all life as she knew it was descending to.

I retreated as quickly and quietly as I could and ate a morose and largely untasted meal in a scruffy dining room with faded brocade curtains and chipped chinaware celebrating the centennial of Queen Victoria. No other soul about me, other than the nearly invisible servants, to prevent my mind from racing about all that was being lost, all that made little sense, but just continued its swirl down into the vortex.

I spent a sleepless night struggling with myself and with the situation. I couldn't just abandon what I had come to realize brought me to Africa. It hadn't really been London that sent me here—and certainly not Lord Clarence. All along my subconscious had known I'd come for Pamela. I couldn't just abandon that realization now and return home meekly. She was crying out for help. She wanted me to save her. I told myself this, and I let it repeat intself in my mind until I believed it. She just didn't know how to tell me any other way than as she was acting out.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'd drive back to the cottage. I'd have her pack, and we'd be back in Salisbury and at the airport before Alister even returned from his tryst in Epworth. He had stolen her from me, and now I'd return the favor. He was making his choice. He didn't need her. He didn't want her. He could not have been clearer about his choice.

I was pulling quietly up to the cottage not long after the break of the next day. The landscape was magnificent at this time of day. I could see how Africa could get its talons in a person. I could understand why Alister had made the choice he had. This wouldn't really be hurting Alister. This would be releasing Alister. He could merge into the kraal life of the Shona in Epworth. He'd be all right through the hard times to come. He'd be one of Rhodesia's survivors.

All was quiet at the cottage. For some reason I had assumed that I'd hear Alister's booming voice, his acid tongue at work, if he had returned already. I quietly mounted the stairs to the veranda. I stood, ready to knock at the door, but then I heard the moaning. My heart went dead and it was on leaden feet that I pushed the screen door open and crossed the highly polished parquet floor and looked into the bedroom beyond.

They were stretched out in the middle of the massive stinkwood four-poster bed, covered in the brightest of white muslin. They were both naked. Pamela was lying on her back in the center of the bed, her knees wide, the heels of her feet planted on the bed, and rocking her pelvis up and down.

Penny, the young, muscular Shona house servant was crouched between Pamela's knees, his hips pushing in and out in rapid motion, the muscles of his bulbous butt cheeks contracting and releasing, fucking her hard and deep.

Pamela was moaning and sighing as she'd never done for me or, last evening, for Gavin either. She was murmuring to him in that click-clacky language of the Shona. She was writhing under her Shona lover as she had never done for me. She was crying out in a voice of passion that I had never heard before.

Gavin found me at the table in the hotel bar an hour later.

"About ready to return to Salisbury?" he asked. He was wearing that comfortable grin of his, no cares in the world, not having heard or absorbed anything I'd said on the cottage veranda the previous afternoon.

"Yes," I answered and took a long drag on my bottle of Lion lager. "All ready."

"Done everything here that needed to be done?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I hope you didn't mind the doctor much. He's a good doctor. Better than we could get out here otherwise. He just had to leave London. He's no harm really."

"No, there was no bother," I answered.

"He's the one I worry about most," Gavin said. "When the end comes here, he's really the only one with nowhere to go but also no prospect of staying. The Shona don't really appreciate his activities among their young men."

I looked hard at Gavin. So, he had been listening yesterday after all. He didn't have to be convinced of Rhodesia's descent into chaos. And now that I looked at him, I could tell he'd be all right. He'd trained hard and well for the British South Africa Police. He'd have options.

"You?" I asked.

"I've been looking at brochures on Australia," Gavin answered. And then he smiled. "A big country, a lot of space. Not so many people. Not that far off of what I grew up to. Before recent years."

"But the Cullingworths?" I then said.

"Oh, Alister and Pamela? They'll do whatever they'll do. They are inevitably part of this land now."

"But how can they . . . stay together? They hate—"

"What makes you think they don't love each other?" Gavin asked. And when I looked into his eyes, I suddenly realized that he was a far wiser man than I was. That he knew all there was to know. "They are Africa. They will stay here, together, to—and beyond—the end. Together."

Perhaps it was I who had not understood, I realized. My eyes lifted to the skies, looking for my plane to arrive. Ready to let go of Rhodesia and all it stood for.