Descent into Chaos

Sparring Session

As we came upon Devon Cottage, which was what Alister had pointedly named his typically British colonial-designed, rambling stuccoed bungalow, with broad verandas all around to fight off the African sun, I sucked in my breath and marveled yet again at another reflection of the Rhodesian dichotomy. We were driving out of the dusty range, where the only color and animation was in the Hereford cattle of the Cullingworth holdings—even the leaves of eucalyptus trees were a dull brown from a thick coating of summer dust—to an eye-assaulting riot of color, still rampant in the building early-afternoon heat. The full-blooming orange-red hibiscus hedges bordering the bungalow’s verandas, rising to scarlet bougainvillea vines on the columns, encircled and the colorful flower garden, swarming with the miraculous flitting of butterflies, placed strategically, if somewhat forlornly, between the vehicle circle and the crumbling stone veranda steps.

Alister was standing at the top of the veranda steps—and sneering, the pose in which I could most clearly remembered him.

“So, ugly as always, Kennelly, I see,” he said, that mischievous, superior sparkle still in his eyes. The rigors of the African veld had not beaten that out of him. “And my favorite policeman, Gavin Coetzer too. How very lucky we are.”

He turned then and spoke back into the dark interior of the veranda. “Come greet our long-lost friend and our very good friend, Pamela. Come all the way from London and Salisbury, respectively, just to pay their respects to us.” This was nowhere near kindly said.

The same old Alister Cullingworth. I could tell this was going to be three unpleasant days. I couldn’t say I was surprised that it would be, though. Alister stuck his hand out for a handshake and withdrew it as soon as I lifted my hand—but then he laughed his familiar laugh and grasped my hand in a painful grip that purposely, I’m sure, went on for longer than it needed to before he repeated the process with Coetzer.

Then I saw Pamela, as she slowly emerged from the shadows, her eyes looking down, not at me. Her countenance was shocking. She was still as blondely beautiful as ever, but the rosy complexion she’d had in England had turned to a china-white pallor, incongruously so after these years of living under the African sun, and she was so thin and delicate-looking that I couldn’t see how Alister had failed to break her in two with his sharp tongue ere now. She once dominated all men just with the uncertainty of what she might say—and the certainty that what she would say could cut a man to the quick. There was no evidence of that now.

She muttered something in the way of a greeting, and Alister, who also was thinner than I remembered, but in the sunburned, wiry muscled way of a hardscrabble farmer, placed his hand on Pamela’s arm and guided her back into the shadows. He lifted his other hand toward us in a halfhearted invitation to join them on the veranda.

When I reached the top of the stoep, I realized that there was another, as yet unheard from, party hunched on the far side of the round, rough-wood table that was surrounded by six leather-seated African barrel chairs.

“Brian, this is Doctor Nicholls, our local witch doctor,” Alister said in what seemed an almost grudging introduction. “Angus . . . hello, Angus. Want to put that glass down and greet our guests? Angus, this is my old school chum and current British spy, Brian Kennelly, out to drive London’s last nail in our collective coffin here in Rhodesia. Gavin, I’m sure you know. Although perhaps not as well as you want to know. Or that our long-lost friend Brian might want to know either.”

Gavin, who I focused on at the corner of my vision, looked embarrassed at this comment. For myself, I had every idea what Alister meant, and I assumed at some point he would use those words to try to hurt and attempt to control me. Well, do your worst, I thought. Out in this isolated corner of the world, amidst people I would only see this once, I cared not whatever venom Alister wanted to dispense. In that brief, acidic introduction, I felt all sorts of innuendo flying around. But everyone else was ignoring whatever elephant was lurking in the shadows, so I did so as well.

I leaned over and shook Doctor Nicholls’ sweaty palm, having a little difficulty disengaging from his surprisingly strong and lingering grip—in its way as intimate as Alister’s had been—and stepped back, as Alister and Gavin played a little game of musical chairs on who was going to sit on the near side of Pamela. She had sunk into the chair next to the doctor and seemed to keep withdrawing in upon herself even after she was seated. I instantaneously found myself wondering if she was on drugs. Her eyes seemed to be continents away, if not altogether dead. Not at all the mischievous and havoc-rending Pamela I’d once known.

While Gavin and Alister fought for the chair next to Pamela, with Alister finally taking the position, my attention was arrested by humming and clicking noises coming from the interior of the bungalow. The front door was just to the right of where I stood. The interior was dim, but I slowly focused on a handsome, well-built Shona youth of twenty or so, who, dressed incongruously in a colorful sarong-like skirt and a stiff white butler’s jacket, was skating around the wood-parqueted floor of the house’s main living room in his bare feet on rags. He was polishing the floor and had already brought it to a high sheen. His muscular brown body was beautiful, evoking that of a graceful dancer in his current endeavor. I felt a surge of want, and turned quickly from the sight.

I was shaking my head at the new impressions I was gathering of southern Africa as I plopped down in the seat between the doctor and Gavin. I had the impression that perhaps Gavin had a thing for Pamela and that Alister probably was fully aware of this and, like he once toyed with me, was both encouraging and fighting it. In a fair fight, the strapping blond Afrikaaner could take Alister, I knew. But I also knew that any fight Alister would be in would not be a fair fight.

“Shall we leave our visitors dry, Pamela?—no, not you, Angus; I’ve never seen you dry and you are hardly a visitor—or do you remember how to be a hostess?”

Pamela lifted her eyes for the first time since we had arrived, and I could see a brief flash of life in them. But then it evaporated and her head sank into her chest again. She was not rising to whatever bait Alister was laying before her. With a sneer and a grimace, Alister picked up a brass hand bell on the table and rang it with two quick flicks of his wrists.

The smiling white-jacketed Shona youth appeared in the doorway immediately.

“Tea and whiskey, Penny. Now . . . please,” Pamela blurted out, a preemptory and dismissive command, with a belated, and seemingly begrudged, perfunctory politeness at the tail end. I got the distinct impression the “please” was only because of the rare presence of guests. Still, it was the same husky, melodious voice that I had remembered from past night strolls on the banks of the Thames. And I’m afraid it stirred me, deep down inside, as it had then. I began to wonder. Had I come here wanting to see Alister . . . or Pamela . . . more?

I turned my eyes on Gavin Coetzer, as if seeking salvation from choosing between those I had already experienced so intimately.

His tease of humiliation complete, Alister turned his anything-but-genuine smile on those gathered there and lost all interest in the servant, who bustled around the table, quite efficiently filling our glasses and setting down a plate of digestive biscuits. Britannia forever, wherever the sun was setting over a yardarm, either seen or unseen.

The rest of the visit went generally the same way Rhodesia’s future was headed. Innocuous and seemingly endless small talk in a languid discussion matching the progressing afternoon heat relentlessly beating down on the bravely forlorn flower garden, innuendo that touched on reality and then skirted quickly away, and an underlying tension that everyone wanted to play with but no one wanted to ignite—at least among the three of us who talked.

The conversation was carried by Alister, Gavin, and me, with me trying to work in the threat that these people were living under, Gavin arguing like he was mostly unbelieving and unaccepting, and Alister being sarcastic about all that I was saying—and barely civil to either one of us. All the time Pamela sat there, hands in her lap, looking at her palms, and apparently pretending to be far, far away. You’d think she would have had something to say to or ask of me, her long-ago fiancé and lover. But I couldn’t now be sure she remembered me at all. She certainly wasn’t indicating she did.

Doctor Nicholls, for his part, three sheets to the wind and looking crumpled in his bush shorts and the khaki shirt that almost met across his sunken chest and the start of a pot belly, was paying more attention to me than he was to the conversation. His eyes were slitted as if he was reliving some miraculous operation in years past, but his knees and thighs were rubbing against mine, and at some point he placed a hand on my thigh. I simply took it and placed it back in his lap. I was used to his type. I’d been known as somewhat of a pretty boy at Oxford, and I had learned to fend off fellow students and tutors alike—until along came Alister, of course. I pitied the man, but this was mixed with a feeling of foreboding. Would this be me twenty years from now?

After an eternity of saying little and meaning much more, Alister abruptly cut into a friendly argument between Gavin and me on whether the British South African Police should be disbanded as a vestige of colonialism.

“I’m sure you’re tired, Gavin. And you have to make sure our friend sent from London to spy on us here gets the best bed in our luxurious little fleabag in Beatrice. So, run along now and use your formidable presence to get him checked into the best they have. I have something I want to show Brian. I’ll deliver him to you. And, Gavin, take Angus with you. And see that he gets bathed. I think he’ll quite enjoy that.” A hearty laugh and then Alister had turned and disappeared into the maw of the bungalow. “Penny. Penny! Where the fuck are you? Did you get petrol in the VW, you lazy bastard?”

This dismissal was much too—and most probably beyond—the point, but Gavin was ready to leave anyway. One last questioning look at me and Gavin hoisted Doctor Nicholls up with greater care than I’m sure Alister would ever have expended on the old gentleman, folded him into the Land Rover, and rolled out slowly in a great cloud of dust.

“I want a drink, and I don’t want it here,” Alister muttered when he had come back out of the bungalow, swinging a set of keys. Pamela was still sitting at the table, her hands in her lap, her head hanging low, just as if she was an inanimate object—or not there at all.

I turned to say something to her, although I had no idea what that might be, but Alister nudged me down the steps and along to the side of the house, where an ancient Volkswagen sedan was parked. “This is not a journey for Pamela,” he muttered as we moved. That statement only had full meaning for me later.

But that was fine with me. I needed to talk to Alister to see if he’d heard anything I was saying about Rhodesia’s future—and especially of the futures of the white farmers in Rhodesia—and I thought what I’d have to say would be something I couldn’t say around Pamela. I owed Lord Clarence the respect of being totally and brutally honest with his recalcitrant surviving son.

Anchored to Africa

We drove nearly all of the way back to Salisbury in the vintage VW. To my surprise, though, as we were running parallel to a shallow stream, where a line of trees was trying to grow, out where the veld was its most desolate, Alister pulled off the road and drove into the trees and turned the car off.

“Why have we stopped?” I asked.

“You know why,” he answered in a low, guttural voice.

“No, I don’t. I . . .” But then I looked into his face, and I knew exactly why we had stopped. And it was as if all the intervening years had evaporated—that we were back at Oxford and Alister was demanding and I was giving—that I was unable to deny him.

We fucked there in the front seat of the Volkswagen, Alister sitting in the passenger seat and me straddling his hips, facing the dash board, his arms encasing my chest, one hand digging into my nipple and the other clutching my dick, and my channel rising and falling on his hard cock. My hands were braced on the dash, and I was using the balls of my feet to fuck myself on him—Alister making the humiliation complete by forcing me to take all of the work upon myself, making it quite clear that it happened because I did it.

There had been no seduction involved; that had happened years before, and all Alister did other than reaching around and encasing my cock in his hand, for me to come at the friction of my own movement, was to sit there and make insulting remarks until his own need reduced him to harsh moans and groans. And then, only then, did he deign to contribute to the thrusting.

I had never thought I would let him that close to me ever again, and I believe I could have denied him now—something that I could never seem to do at Oxford. But I did it as much for me as because he commanded it. I needed to know. I needed to know if I had managed to break the bond of how he made me feel when he fucked me, whether I ever could be free of him when he beckoned. And now I felt sure. Now I told myself that he had no power over me any more, that this would be the last time I answered the call he had established back in Oxford.

I felt exhilarated in that belief. Coming to Africa to learn that made the trip worthwhile all by itself.

I think Alister knew something had happened in my attitude, before we had both ejaculated, making him doubt that he had the same power over me he once had. When he was finished with the fuck, ejaculating after I did so, we sat there for the longest time, not saying anything, and then he pushed me aside and left the car and went down to the stream. He wetted a handkerchief and cleaned himself and then, silently, handed the handkerchief to me when I joined him by the stream, so that I could do the same.

We reentered the car without saying a word and drove on again in the direction of Salisbury. Alister kept peering at me once we were on the road again with a secret little smile that unsettled me. I knew that smile from Oxford. That was his little “I have a secret” smile, the one he used when, after having performed one indignity, he had yet another one up his sleeve. The hint that there were other powers he could use to seduce and humiliate me.

In the southern outskirts of the city, Alister turned off toward the west.

“Been to Epworth during your spy mission here?” he asked.

“No. And I’m not a spy, Alister,” I answered with impatience. Alister was getting to me with his sneering heckling. He always knew how to get to me. “I’m here just to check on the atmosphere, just an independent check on reports received in London on the situation here.”

“And you are not here at the behest of my father?” Alister asked. “You needn’t lie. I know now that you didn’t come just because you couldn’t live without me.”

“Nor will I lie,” I answered, although I had no intention in letting him know that I couldn’t say when I set out on my journey that I hadn’t come for him—that I was muddled on what I had come for. “Yes, part of my brief is straight from Lord Clarence. He wanted me to discern whether Rhodesia is reaching the breaking point for white residents. And if so, he wants me to try to convince you to return—for you and Pamela to come home to England. Is that so hard for you to understand and accept?”

I saw no reason to prevaricate about Lord Clarence’s concern and his assignment to me. Alister could take it or leave it.

“He hasn’t spoken to me for five years,” Alister muttered under his breath.

“Nor have you spoken to him, I’ll wager,” I shot back. “But he’s showing concern now. And there’s not just you, Alister. There’s Pamela to think of. I saw her today. Africa is eating her up.”

“Ah, sweet Pamela,” Alister muttered in his best sneering voice. “Your noble, disinterested concern for my wife is very touching.” He then stopped the VW abruptly in a flurry of rock and dust beside a weather-beaten wooden shack at the edge of a Shona kraal. The walled village the Rhodesians called a kraal consisted of a large number of round African buildings with thatched roofs that I’d been told were called rondavels, set haphazardly inside a low stone wall.

“Welcome to Epworth,” Alister threw over his shoulder, as he opened the driver’s door of the VW and rolled out. “Time to wet our whistles. And then what I had to show you.” Alister was already inside the door to the shack before I’d gotten out of the sedan and followed him.

The interior was dim; the room seeming larger on the inside than on the outside. There were three tables, but all of the men, Shona men of advanced age, inside the shack were gathered around the bar. They stopped talking when we entered, and they stared. But they were staring at me. I got the impression that Alister was a regular. He gave them a sweeping, sharp stare, and they went back to their talking in click-clacking musical sounds and drinking, which they did as any man would.

One of them sauntered over with two dusty bottles of chibuli, what passed for beer among the Shona, and Alister and I sat, in silence, and drank. After we’d drunk those, there was another round of beer, and then another, and still Alister didn’t speak. But I could tell he was building up to something. He had that little smile on his face that he’d flashed me on the journey here after we had fucked and that he had all those years ago at university before he played one of his noxious and humiliating—for someone else—pranks.

It was nearly an hour later when he stood up straight unexpectedly and said, “Come along. I want to show you something.”

I stumbled out of the shack into the blinding sunshine in his wake and followed him into the depths of the kraal on unsteady feet. After a while he stopped at the door of a rondavel and bellowed, “Abuto, it is I, your lord and master. Home.”

Two figures appeared at the entrance to the rondavel. Two small children. Boys, wearing nothing that would hide that fact. Cream and sugar brown; features not entirely Shona.

I knew before we entered the rondavel. A woman, a beautiful, nubile Shona woman, a sarong skirt wrapped around her waist, but her ample breasts bared, was quickly trying to put her hair up in plastic combs. She turned and did a double take when she saw me with Alister, but she made no move to cover herself.

She nodded to Alister and then to me and then she shooed the two children out of the rondavel. While she was doing this, Alister took two leather-seated African barrel chairs and set them facing each other, about ten feet apart, and motioned me to sit on one of the chairs, which I did.

Then Alister moved to behind the woman, turned her facing me, and nuzzled his chin into the hollow of her neck. He cupped one breast with one hand and moved the other one down and untied the knot in her sarong and let the material billow down to the dirt floor. His hand went to her triangle, and I saw him enter her with a finger. She began to mew and to rotate her hips back against his pelvis.

“Brian, my Shona wife, Abuto.” He pushed his finger inside her up to his knuckle.

“Alister,” I said in a strangled voice. “You don’t have to do this. I understand.”

“Oh, do you fully understand, Brian? When you return and report to my father, I want this image to be locked in your brain. I want you to tell him that I have no plans to return to English . . . that I have family roots here—that I am firmly anchored in Africa. Abuto has given me sons. Something my British wife hasn’t done.”

I saw Alister’s shorts fall to the ground, and he backed to the chair opposite me and sat down. I could see, for a brief moment, that he was in full arousal before he pulled Abuto down into his lap and started to fuck up into her ass channel in long strokes.

“You . . . may . . . leave, Brian . . . when you’ve seen enough. You can take the sedan and just leave it at the hotel. I have friends and family here who will take me home in the morning. But I think we are largely finished now, you and I. You may tell my father what you like. And, yes, if you want to tell him that I have sons—heirs for the House of Devon—as unorthodox a means as I had to use, feel free to tell him that. That I’ve done my duty to the family. I’m sure he will be greatly relieved and impressed. Of course, if there is more, if we aren’t completely finished, if you want to stay and see how fully a Shona woman can fuck her man . . .”

I hesitated—a moment too long.

That smile covered Alister’s face, that secret smile, and I knew the greater part of what he had in mind to show me. It was something he wanted to show me about myself, showing that he knew me far better than I knew myself—that no, we weren’t finished. That losing one form of power over me didn’t necessarily mean losing all power.

“You do want her, don’t you, Brian? And you don’t just want her for yourself. You want to share her—with me. Don’t you?”

“No.” It was a strangled cry. And not even convincing to myself. All of my pretenses and lies to myself were being stripped away. Alister reverted to that calm, reassuring, convincing tone he had used with me in Oxford—the voice that was in such contrast to his hard persona that it grabbed and overpowered me.

“Stand up and come here, Brian.”

I did so. Abuto’s heavy, flared buttocks were rising and falling on Alister’s dick in a slow, rhythmic motion that had her full breasts shimmering. She was looking at me with fearless eyes that had no admonishment or challenge in them—nothing to help me turn away. Alister had subjected her to this before, I was sure—had shared her with other men—and she had not objected.

He was counting on me wanting this as well. And, as shamed as I was, I could not naysay him. I’d had no idea that this was what I sought, why all of my encounters, with women and men alike, where not fully satisfying. But, shockingly, Alister knew. My heavy breathing and the chills running through my body and the trembling in my limbs—and the rising of my cock—all told me that Alister had not misjudged my want. And that I was not beyond this last humiliation at his hands.

“You may touch her. She won’t object. She likes you. I can tell.”

I hesitated, hand partially extended, my eyes mesmerized by the movement of her massive breasts.

“Think of her as Pamela, Brian. You and me sharing Pamela. That’s what you’ve always wanted. That’s the real reason you came to Africa.”

I reached out and cupped a breast with one hand. And then the other. I placed thumbs on the nipples, and I felt the shudder that flowed through my body extend down my arms and hands and fingers and into Abuto. She looked at me and smiled. She was doing nothing to dissuade me.

“You are hard, aren’t you?” Alister murmured. “Show me. Show Abuto. Think of Pamela.”

I unzipped my shorts and let them drop and then pushed my briefs off my legs and stepped out of them.

“Ah, I knew it. Come closer.”

I moved in, my thighs on either side of Abuto’s, which, in turn, encased Alister’s. Alister took my cock in one of his hands, and I shuddered. And then I shuddered again when he began rubbing the head of it inside the folds at Abuto’s V, searching for and finding her clit. She moaned, and my answering moan merged with hers. Alister gave a little laugh. I looked into her eyes and knew that she wanted it, was willing to accept me.

She made this even clearer by reaching down and covering Alister’s hand with her own as it gripped my cock and the two of them, together, drew my cock into her channel.

There was no doubt now on what was going to happen, no honorable, disgusted retreat from the brink.

I fucked her with abandon, joining with Alister’s mining of her asshole. I could feel us working her together through the membrane that separated her two channels—our two cocks working in consort, making love to each other as they made love to her. I had never been aroused like this before. I sank my lips down onto her breasts and sucked like a baby as she groaned and moaned and sighed between us. Dark primeval. My pleasure magnified by the exotic, primitive setting and circumstance and by the shared sex—not just with anyone but with the man who had started it all—who had taken me that first time so long ago in the Oxford club room—and who had maintained a claim on me ever since.

But even as we fucked, I knew that this too was a release. That there was nothing left in Alister’s ability to seduce me. No secret of his ways denied me. I could despise him now—and choose to have nothing else to do with him.

I raised my head to his face, his chin leaning on Abuto’s shoulder, and we kissed a deep kiss, each of us seeing it as a victory of our own. His controlling joke on me, my knowledge that it was his last and that now, at last I could be free of him.

Immediately after ejaculating, I pulled myself away from the two and, reaching down and pulling on my briefs and shorts, turned and struggled out of door of the rondavel without a look back or a final comment. The two half-breed urchins were standing next to the VW when I got there, and I gave them each a few coins, the least I could do for the next generation of the House of Devon. But I also knew I wouldn’t be telling Lord Clarence he was the grandfather of boys.

Of all the messages I could take back to him, that’s the one Alister would want me to convey. I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.

Desperation Releases

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 of telling her what I’d just seen—and done—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—perhaps even more than I had come to see Alister. That I’d never gotten past either of them despite my own, ultimately barren and unhappy subsequent arrangement with lovers of both sexes.

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. And you are such a beautiful young man. Alister told me—”

“That’s quite all right. Think nothing of it,” I answered quietly, trying to put on my “understanding” face—and not wanting to hear what Alister had told the doctor about me. 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, free thinking, 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.” That was not all I had to wash off my body, but I had no intention of discussing that with the doctor.

“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—and much more of myself and my desires as well.

Padding back to my room with a towel wrapped around my midsection, I discovered where Pamela had gone. She was in my bed, wearing only a thin cotton smock, the hem of which was pulled up high on her spread thighs. She was smoking a cigarette, and still was holding half a tumbler of liquor to drink.

Perhaps if I hadn’t had the double shock of sharing 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. And I can’t say I’d ever gotten over Pamela.

We didn’t speak, but, as I approached the bed, Pamela spread her legs farther apart and pulled the hem of her cotton sun dress up to her waist. I couldn’t avoid seeing that she was completely naked to me underneath, the curly blonde hair of her triangle neatly trimmed, her labia looking like they’d been rouged and presenting as puffy petals beckoning me inside. 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—or at least attempting to. 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.

I came inside her quickly, having dreamed of this coupling often over the past few years, and fell off to the side of her. Pamela reached for her cigarette and liquor glass again. Neither of us saying anything as, exhausted, I was overtaken by sleep.

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, and I now was a bit sad about that. There was no reason for me to brush him off like that. I couldn’t help but think that I might be no better than he was when I was his age—still wanting, desperately wanting, but not wanted.

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—a means to forget, if only for a moment. 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 wanted them; I wanted them both. I wanted to fuck Pamela as Gavin was fucking me. In his last, cruel joke on me, Alister had taught me this—taught me what I really sought.

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 faded, chipped chinaware celebrating the jubilee 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.

Dr. Nicholls came in as I was drinking my coffee and forlornly sat at a table in the shadows as far away from me as he could get. I ordered a second cup and then a third as he silently ate his meal, head hung down, not looking at anything but his plate. With a sigh I stood and walked over to his table when he had been served his own after-dinner coffee.

“Mind if I join you?” I asked gently, as I sat down beside him.

His eyes lifted to mine. I could see the hopelessness in his face. And I knew I could do something to relieve that hopelessness at no cost, really, to myself. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t done before. In truth I was much—very much—beyond that in my own perverse desires and actions now.

“Perhaps more explicit, mind if I joined with you? I would like to see your rooms now, if you wish. You may fuck me if you like.”

I sat on the edge of his bed, legs spread, as he knelt between my thighs and feasted on my cock. From time to time he looked up adoringly, tears in his eyes, to let me know how much this meant to him. And I knew that I was doing the right thing. Not the moral thing, possibly, but the kind thing here in changing Africa, in the dark primeval, where everything was uncertain and dissolving and clutching at the last vestiges of the familiar and comforting.

When I was sufficiently aroused to perform the saving grace, I raised him up and gently laid him on his bed on his belly, straddled his hips, and rode his cock in waves like a ship of the desert loping over the endless shifting sand dunes. He cried openly and moaned and sighed and groaned. After I had ejaculated and continued to ride him until I’d gone soft, I rolled off him and held him in my arms until he drifted off into his dreams of never-ending fulfillment. I kissed him on the mouth in the dark, and heard him voice his half-awake thank-you. As I quietly left the room, I was thinking that this had been my one kind, selfless act since I had arrived on the dark continent—and was likely to be my last, as well.

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—and even deeper down I realized I had come for unfinished business with Alister. I believed I had accomplished what I needed to accomplish with Alister—which had nothing to do, really, with him abandoning Africa and returning to London society.

But I couldn’t just abandon Pamela 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 itself 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.