The Dragon Lady Read online

  For Imogen, Adam and Alexandra, with all my love

  also by the author

  The Lodger

  Contents

  Part One

  1 Catherine, 1990s

  2 Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  3 Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  4 Stephen, Rhodesia, 1950s

  5 Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  6 Stephen, Rhodesia, 1950s

  Part Two

  7 The Courtaulds, Courmayeur, 1919

  8 Ginie, London, 1920s

  9 Ginie, London, 1920s

  10 Ginie, Italy, 1910s

  11 The Courtaulds, London, 1920s

  Part Three

  12 Stephen, Rhodesia, 1950s

  13 Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  14 Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  15 The Courtaulds, Rhodesia, 1950s

  16 Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  17 Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  18 Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  19 Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  Part Four

  20 The Courtaulds, London, 1930s

  21 The Courtaulds, Eltham, 1930s

  22 The Courtaulds, Eltham, 1940s

  23 Ginie, Scotland, 1940s

  Part Five

  24 The Courtaulds, Rhodesia, 1950s

  25 Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  26 Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  27 The Courtaulds, Rhodesia, 1950s

  28 Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  29 The Courtaulds, Rhodesia, 1950s

  30 Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  31 The Courtaulds, Rhodesia, 1950s

  32 The Courtaulds, Rhodesia, 1950s

  33 Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  34 Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  35 Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  36 Stephen, Rhodesia, 1950s

  37 Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  38 Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  39 Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  40 The Courtaulds, Rhodesia, 1950s

  41 Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  42 Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  43 The Courtaulds, Rhodesia, 1950s

  Epilogue: Catherine, England, 1990s

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  PART ONE

  1

  Catherine, 1990s

  I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget, yet the smallest thing takes me back to the time the Dragon Lady was shot. I was thirteen years old and living on a forest reserve near the Mozambique border. My father, a naturalist and forestry consultant, visited her regularly, but it was the first time he had taken me.

  Her house was long and low and painted white, with a turret on one side. It was like a castle in a storybook, unexpected and incongruous in a remote Rhodesian valley. The interior was all hushed, cool spaces and we had to wait a long time for the Dragon Lady to see us.

  At one point her husband, Stephen, came to talk to us. He had a stern face, but there was a glint in his eyes while he spoke to Dad about the new trees he had planted. I had a boys’ comic tucked under my arm and he wanted to know why.

  ‘Cathy doesn’t like girls’ things,’ Dad told him. ‘She plays with tin soldiers and a train set.’

  My father’s words caused a pang. I’d grown out of trains and soldiers a long time ago, but he hadn’t noticed. I was about to retort that I was too big for toys, but I saw Stephen was smiling; he found it funny. He left, saying that he had a meeting in town, but that his wife wouldn’t be much longer.

  We sat in silence. It was hard not to fidget, and soon Dad suggested I go outside and have a look around. I walked onto the veranda and down a flight of steps, and found myself in a never-ending garden.

  It was beautiful and eerie, not like a garden at all to me. My school friends had gardens with mowed lawns and tidy hedges. This was wilderness with paths and deep shade, dense with trees, ferns and flowering creepers. Under the spreading branches of an old cypress tree, I stumbled against a protruding object and nearly fell. Righting myself, I looked down and saw a moss-encrusted grave so small it could only have belonged to a young child. There was no headstone or inscription. The only decoration was a posy of white roses made out of porcelain.

  A cloud slid across the sun, shrouding everything in a gloomy light. The wind came up, making the tree branches writhe back and forth. The dry rustling of their leaves was like a whispered warning and a chill snaked up my spine. Turning away, I hurried back to the house in time to see Dad and the Dragon Lady exiting the back door.

  I stopped at the edge of the lawn to watch them. Her real name was Lady Virginia Courtauld – Dad called her Ginie. She was gesturing and calling to a gardener to show him something. Tall and thin, she wore a long-sleeved blue dress; her face was in shadow under a large hat.

  Beneath the swish of her dress I could make out the infamous tattoo. It was this that had earned her the nickname Dragon Lady, though the creature on her ankle was in fact a snake: a savage thing, heavily inked in black, its head rearing up, jaws open, ready to strike. People whispered that it went from her ankle right the way up her thigh and no one but Stephen knew where it ended.

  I had the vague impression that she was agitated or anxious, fidgeting and walking up and down; her voice was vivacious, fractured. I was used to observing my own mother’s unhappiness and I saw something there that reminded me of her.

  The monkeys in the treetops started up a tremendous disturbance; shrieking and chattering, flinging down gourds from the oyster nut vines that split open as they smacked the ground, scattering seeds over the grass.

  ‘What’s bothering them?’ asked the Dragon Lady, shading her eyes with her hand as she looked towards the trees.

  At that instant, a loud noise splintered the air. I only realised it was a gunshot when I saw the Dragon Lady’s body jolt violently and the garden boy screamed. She seemed to bow down and one hand went out as if she was reaching for something. She toppled over with a choked cry and I saw the wound in her side. Her body tensed and convulsed, her limbs sprawled gracelessly, blood spilled onto the ground.

  For a few moments, there was an unearthly stillness. Then things moved quickly: my father was bending over her, his ear by her chest. He stripped his shirt off and pressed it to the wound, trying to staunch the bleeding. Blood poured out regardless, soaking through the fabric, a scarlet rosette blossoming grotesquely on khaki.

  ‘We must get her to the hospital – quickly!’

  A servant came running with blankets and they lifted her, a limp shape wrapped in soiled blue wool, and hurried her away. Moments later, I heard the cough and rattle of our truck start up and speed off.

  I leaned against the rough bark of a tree and watched a pair of red and green lizards darting through the grass. High above, a company of hawks circled in a flawless blue sky. With my teeth, I took hold of a ragged piece of skin at the edge of my thumbnail and pulled. It came away in a long strip. A drop of bright blood welled up in the cuticle and ran down my thumb, though I felt no pain.

  I waited for my dad, but he did not come back. The light deepened and spread, staining the trees gold and casting stripes on the grass where it slipped between them. The glow lingered on the treetops, while the shadows of dusk began to creep over their lower branches. A bird called and crickets started up a low, persistent creaking. Two poodles appeared and made their way towards the house, agitated. They paused by the rust-coloured stain the Dragon Lady had left on the grass, sniffed at it and started to lick it. I realised that they were as forgotten as I was.

  2

  Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  Ginie woke to a room bathed in sunlight, with the feeling that La Rochelle, their brand-new Rhodesian house, already fit her like a second ski
n.

  She could hear the houseboy chopping wood on the woodpile; the slow sound of his axe a hypnotic accompaniment to the twittering birds that filled the garden every morning. She checked the mosquito net for spiders, scorpions and snakes, then got out of bed and went to the window. Her roses blazed on the lawn. In the distance, a line of hills rose up into an impossibly blue sky, tendrils of cloud dissolving around their summits.

  The bathroom glittered with sunlight; she turned on the taps and water gushed forth in sequins of light. After a short bath, Ginie sat on the edge of the tub and towelled her legs, pulling at the skin around her ankle, making the serpent rear up and open its jaws. The tattoo had been a mistake, indelible as sin. Initially she had regretted it, but then decided to play up to it, taking pleasure in inventing stories about why she’d had it done. It was a teenage dare, a coded message for a lover, a membership badge to a secret society. She changed the tale according to whoever was listening. No one need know the truth.

  She put on a cream, sleeveless shift dress that was printed with navy pen and ink drawings of Paris. The smooth cotton against her skin made her feel free and alive. Perhaps in Rhodesia, she would find peace at last.

  Her husband, Stephen, was already waiting for her in the breakfast room. Light fell in bright spears through the windows where a full English breakfast was laid out on the white tablecloth, alongside pawpaw, fruit salad and jugs of cream. Ginie kissed him on the cheek and sat down, noting his pallor.

  ‘Bad night, darling?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘I dreamt about Edward and Will again. They were pulling my leg about something. . . such good men.’

  The air came alive with the ghosts of old soldiers.

  Ginie put her hand on his. It was not unusual for Stephen’s sleep to be disturbed by terrible dreams. She knew things shifted at night, tipping him back into places he would rather not revisit. His face had taken on a look she recognised, as if he were being eroded from within. Don’t shut me out, cried her heart. She opened her mouth to speak, but closed it again.

  Her pet lemur, Mah-Jongg, appeared and Ginie felt a comforting tug of love. Stephen had bought Jongy at Harrods for her. He was a curious creature; a mixture of monkey, cat and squirrel, with a long black-and-white striped tail.

  ‘Good morning, sweetheart,’ she said to him. In the light, his eyes were blazing amber. She lifted him onto her lap, where he nestled against her stomach, cheeping and chittering until she stroked him into stillness. She ate a pawpaw, feeling the bland, creamy flesh fill her belly. Jongy jumped down and lapped at a saucer of milk, making tiny sucking sounds as his pink tongue curled around the rich liquid. Occasionally he paused and gave a sigh like an old man.

  The Courtaulds’ nearest neighbours were the Thompsons. They farmed pigs and small-scale maize and their land bordered La Rochelle, though their house was three miles away. After breakfast, Ginie sent a boy across with a note in her favourite emerald green ink, asking if they would join her for afternoon tea.

  Jill Thompson arrived promptly at three thirty. She was a large, fair-haired woman, whose damp, pink face suggested that she found the heat a trial. They had tea in the parlour, a grand room that was built – as Ginie explained – to accommodate the carpet, one of the largest Persians in the world.

  Jill looked all around. It was crammed with objets d’art: pottery, china, jade, crystal, silver, gold, lapis lazuli, onyx and enamel. There were watercolours and oils, tapestries and sculptures of marble, teak and ivory. There was a huge fireplace and hanging above it, a portrait of the Courtaulds at Eltham Palace, their last English home. They were formal and unsmiling. Stephen was wearing a velvet dinner jacket and perching on the edge of a desk with paperwork in his hands. Ginie was dressed in a low-cut red gown with a fur stole draped over one shoulder. At the centre of the painting was Jongy on the arm of Ginie’s chair, his ringed tail flowing over her lap. The patterning on his tail mirrored the strands of pearls around her neck, but despite this congruence, the lemur cut a startling figure against the rich furnishings.

  The many windows of the parlour looked out over the garden and hills. The vast African sky arched over everything but they could hardly look at it, for it was blinding at that time of day. Two of the windows were covered by signatures, engraved using a diamond stylus: it was a glass visitors’ book.

  ‘We brought the panes with us from Eltham,’ said Ginie. ‘All our visitors wrote on them. Some of the names are a bit difficult to decipher. Look, there’s Moira Shearer and Rab Butler – and in the top corner over there is Stravinsky.’

  Jill was admiring and bemused. ‘It seems that everybody who’s anybody has come to call on you. I’ve never seen anything like your beautiful home.’

  Tea was served by Dixon, the houseboy. He was handsome, with skin like burnished metal. His hair was parted on the left side, shiny with oil and smoothly combed. His face was impassive above a starched, white linen uniform as he poured tea, handed out Spode china crockery and passed food around. There was a huge spread served on silver platters: crustless cucumber sandwiches, muffins, crumpets, and two kinds of cake.

  The poodles, Max and Sandra, lay with their noses pointing towards the food, too well-behaved to beg. Ginie drank her tea black and very strong. She had a tiny bottle of brandy on the table, which she splashed into their cups without asking for permission. She sipped her tea, enjoying the burn.

  ‘The weather makes you thirsty,’ Jill said, thoughtfully. ‘Had you been to Africa before you moved here?’

  Ginie nodded. ‘I suppose I was in my late teens when I first came; North Africa, you know, Egypt and so on. I think I must have read about Africa when I was very young. You can have a special feeling for a place and I always did for this one.’

  Jill pursed her lips. ‘I’ve been here since we got married twenty years ago. Eric was lured out by the promise of government farming subsidies, but I’ll just say this, being a farmer in Rhodesia is not a bed of roses. Truthfully, the work is much harder than we ever imagined. . .’ She gave a tiny shrug and mopped her face with a clean, white handkerchief.

  ‘I raised my sons here, in the middle of nowhere. They’re at boarding school in Salisbury now. I’ve made the best of it, but at times I feel buried alive.’ She frowned, then tried to smile. ‘Tell me why you like it so much.’

  Ginie’s eyes were fixed on the line of hills beyond the garden: interminable, boundless, fading into a bluish haze.

  ‘I love the open spaces, the wildlife and the glorious climate. It’s good.’ She smiled, longing to be striding through the bush, inhaling its smells and feeling the sun on her skin. ‘I got fed up with Europe and all the bad things that were happening. There’s always this drive, you know, and it’s generally about power or money, and the things people do to get it. . . It’s nice to be away from all that.’

  ‘I hate to disillusion you, but I’m afraid Rhodesia is not as different as you might think. You’ll find the same preoccupations, albeit under a slightly different guise.’

  As Jill talked on, her gaze skittered to the snake tattoo. Clearly, she didn’t want to stare, but couldn’t help herself. Ginie’s lips curved into the ghost of a smile. Jill’s legs were sturdy and swollen, with fishnets of broken red veins running beneath the suntan. Her knobby, cracked feet were encased in soft brown sandals.

  ‘It’s just as hard to find good staff here,’ Jill was saying. ‘Are you happy with your boys?’

  ‘Why, yes.’

  ‘You must keep an eye on them. Mine won’t lift a finger unless they have to. I suggest you watch your larder too. Things have a tendency to wander, if you know what I mean.’

  This was said within earshot of Dixon, though he gave no sign of having heard. Ginie felt a flare of indignation.

  ‘Really?’ she replied, coolly. Jill raised her eyebrows, sensing the lack of complicity.

  ‘I’m telling you as a friend. You haven’t been here as long as I have.’

  Ginie could feel her anger building
, but worked to contain it.

  ‘They just don’t have the same values that we do,’ Jill concluded, rattling a teaspoon around in her cup. Ginie stared at her, wordlessly, until two scarlet spots flamed on Jill’s cheeks.

  ‘Well,’ Ginie said, her voice shaking slightly with the effort of her restraint. ‘They’re human beings just like us, and heaven knows there are enough untrustworthy white people. But if you feel like that, perhaps you shouldn’t employ them to look after you.’

  Their eyes met combatively, until Jill looked away with measured disdain.

  ‘You can’t choose your neighbours,’ Stephen said to Ginie at dinner that evening. ‘And you can’t afford to dislike one another; there has to be a bit of give and take.’

  ‘Really, Stephen. The fact is, she is just an odious woman. You should have seen her sitting there like she owns the whole country, spouting her poisonous views.’

  ‘Like it or not, she’s part of our life now. I’m afraid you’re going to have to try to get along.’

  Ginie sighed. ‘Oh, Lord. Next time, let’s have her round with other people. Diluted, she might be bearable.’

  After the meal, they tried to listen to BBC news. There was a rose beetle that lived in the tuning bar of the radio, which had to be pushed across while Stephen tried to find the station. He couldn’t get reception, just crackles and static, with the odd burst of Afrikaans or a few bars of music. After a while, he gave up and the beetle was left in peace. Ginie was secretly relieved. She wanted the outside world, ravaged by war, hate and political dissensions, kept out of their valley. She gazed at the sky, waiting for the young spotted eagle-owl that came every night and landed on the ledge outside their window. When she saw the beating of wings in the light from the parlour, she pushed a dead mouse onto the sill, through the mosquito netting. She paid the children of her staff a few pennies to collect food for the owl; there was always a bag of mice and rats in the fridge.

  The owl ate sumptuously for several minutes while Ginie talked to it quietly. It was a marvellous bird, with winged ears, light-and-dark barred feathers and golden, yellowing eyes. When it had finished, it flew back into the dark landscape.