Free Indecent Exposure by Tom Sharpe Page A

into Piemburg feeling strangely elated. That evening he took Berry & Co from the library and went home to draw fresh inspiration from its pages.
    “Where’ve you been?” Colonel Heathcote-Kilkoon asked when his wife arrived home.
    “You’ll never believe it but I’ve been talking with a real hairy-back. Not one of your slick ones but the genuine article. Absolutely out of the Ark. You’ll never believe this but he actually kissed my hand when we parted.”
    “How disgusting,” said the Colonel, and went off down the garden to look at his azaleas. If there was one thing he detested after white ants and cheeky kaffirs, it was Afrikaners. In the living-room Major Bloxham was reading Country Life.
    “I suppose they can’t all be swine,” he said graciously when Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon told him about the Kommandant, “though for the life of me I can’t remember meeting one who wasn’t. I knew a fellow called Botha once in Kenya. Never washed. Does your friend wash?”
    Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon snorted and went upstairs for a rest before dinner. Lying there in the still of the late afternoon listening to the gentle swirl of the lawn sprinkler, she felt a vague regret for the life she had once led. Born in Croydon, she had come from Selsdon Road via service in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force to Nairobi where her suburban background had served to earn her a commission and a husband with money. From those carefree days she had gradually descended the dark continent, swept southward on the ebb tide of Empire and acquiring with each new latitude those exquisite pretensions Kommandant van Heerden so much admired. Now she was tired. The affectations which had been so necessary in Nairobi for any sort of social life were wasted in Piemburg, whose atmosphere was by comparison wholly lower-middle-class. She was still depressed when she dressed for dinner that night.
    “What’s the use of going on pretending we are what we’re not when no one even cares that we aren’t?” she asked plaintively. Colonel Heathcote-Kilkoon looked at her with disapproval.
    “Got to keep up a good front,” he barked.
    “Stiff upper lip, old girl,” said Major Bloxham, whose grandmother had kept a winkle stand in Brighton. “Can’t let the side down.”
    But Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon no longer knew which side she was on. The world to which she had been born was gone and with it the social aspirations that made life bearable. The world she had made by dint of affectation was going. After scolding the Zulu waiter for serving the soup from the wrong side, Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon rose from the table and took her coffee into the garden. There, soundlessly pacing the lawn under the lucid night sky, she thought about the Kommandant. “There’s something so real about him,” she murmured to herself. Over their port Colonel Heathcote-Kilkoon and the Major were discussing the Battle for Normandy. There was nothing real about them. Even the port was Australian.

Chapter 5
    In the following days Kommandant van Heerden, oblivious of the interest that was being focused on him both by Luitenant Verkramp and Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon, continued his literary pilgrimage with increased fervour. Every morning, closely shadowed by the Security men detailed by Verkramp to watch him, he would visit the Piemburg Library for a fresh volume of Dornford Yates and every evening return to his bugged home to devote himself to its study. When finally he went to bed he would lie in the darkness repeating to himself his adaptation of Coue’s famous formula, “Every day and in every way, I am becoming Berrier and Berrier,” a form of auto-suggestion that had little observable effect on the Kommandant himself but drove the eavesdropping Verkramp frantic.
    “What the hell does it all mean?” he asked Sergeant Breitenbach as they listened to the tape-recording of these nocturnal efforts at self-improvement.
    “A berry is a sort of fruit,” said the Sergeant without much