A Sailor's Honour Read Free Page A

is Zoë?’ he asked and hugged her from behind.
    â€˜Hello,’ Emma said. ‘And I love you too.’
    He pushed his hands into the front of her jeans. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Where is Zoë?’
    Her breathing quickened. ‘It’s Monday and they stay late at school on Mondays and don’t pretend that you don’t know that.’
    Kiwi kids are bred tough and play their sport in all weather. Zoë would come home soaked but happy, they knew.
    â€˜Let’s make love,’ he said.
    â€˜What, here?’ she teased. ‘In front of the dishwasher?’
    He led her upstairs. Outside, the rain pelted down on the pressed aluminium roof tiles and gushed out of the downpipes into the drains. The passing cars threw up sheets of spray. Scholars walked past the house, bent over into the wind, hugging their bags in front of them to protect their books. Upstairs, above their heads, De Villiers and his wife made love.
    Sex on a weekday afternoon. It lifts the gloom.
    They lay close together, all arms and legs.
    â€˜I have to go back to South Africa for a check-up,’ he said. De Villiers wondered whether he should tell her that the incontinence the oncologist had predicted would arrive in eleven months had already started. Perhaps she noticed his more frequent visits to the bathroom, or that he stayed there longer.
    Emma stirred against his chest. ‘As long as you don’t stay there for three months, like you did last year.’
    She stroked the wound where the surgeon had cut De Villiers. De Villiers suspected – no, he knew – that she had been more gentle in their lovemaking since the surgery, as if afraid of his fragility. She and Zoë treated him as if he were sick, and there was no way he could prove to them that he was still the man he had always been before his cancer.
    The radiation therapy a year earlier had taken nearly seven weeks, but on that occasion De Villiers also had a major investigation to complete, and a personal mission. In the three months he had spent in South Africa, he had finally put together the links that ultimately solved the prime minister’s case, but his personal mission was still incomplete. He waited for the opportunity that would provide closure. Last year, he had torn up his South African passport, more in anger than premeditation, but he had known in the back of his mind even then that he would have to return.
    And then there was the bleeding the oncologist had warned him about. It started dead on time, eleven months after the completion of the radiation therapy.
    But he didn’t tell Emma that. Better that she didn’t know. Instead he said, ‘No, this time I want you and Zoë to come with me. We can have a proper holiday and you can meet my family.’
    Emma lay still. He could feel the flutter of her eyelashes against his chest. It tickled and he shifted slightly. ‘Come on, let’s have a decent holiday for a change. I don’t know how often we will be able to go back there and do that.’
    â€˜My father’s not well,’ Emma said. ‘I would rather go home and spend some time with him now, before it’s too late.’
    De Villiers noted that, after twenty years away, Emma still spoke of Indonesia as home. He spoke of South Africa as home only in unguarded moments.
    â€˜Why don’t you and Zoë go?’ Emma suggested. ‘You can show her to your family and take her to the game parks and show her all those animals you always talk about.’
    They dozed off again.
    The phone rang. The one Pierre de Villiers always carries on a leather thong around his neck.
    Only three people had the number. His wife, his daughter and his brother-in-law. Emma, Zoë and Johann.
    But Emma was lying in bed next to him in post-coital slumber. Zoë was on the way from school and should arrive any minute. And Johann Weber was in Durban where it should now be – De Villiers did a