Free Rage by Wilbur Smith

over, ‘and it is a serious problem. This is it.’
    The folder contained a police Special Branch security report, and the name on the cover was:

    TARA ISABELLA COURTNEY née
MALCOMESS

T ara Courtney made her round of the children’s wing, calling in at each of the bedrooms. Nanny was just tucking Isabella under her pink satin eiderdown, and the child let out a cry of delight when she saw Tara.
    â€˜Mummy, Mummy, teddy has been naughty. I’m going to make him sleep on the shelf with my other dolls.’
    Tara sat on her daughter’s bed and hugged her while they discussed teddy’s misdemeanours. Isabella was pink and warm and smelled of soap. Her hair was silky against Tara’s cheek and it took an effort for Tara to kiss her and stand up.
    â€˜Time to go to sleep, Bella baby.’
    The moment the lights went out Isabella let out such a shriek that Tara was stricken with alarm.
    â€˜What is it, baby?’ She snapped on the lights again and rushed back to the bed.
    â€˜I’ve forgiven teddy. He can sleep with me after all.’
    The teddy-bear was ceremoniously reinstated in Isabella’s favour and she took him in a loving half-nelson and stuck her other thumb in her mouth.
    â€˜When is my daddy coming home?’ she demanded drowsily around the thumb, but her eyes were closed and she was asleep before Tara reached the door.
    Sean was sitting on Garrick’s chest in the middle of the bedroom floor, tweaking the hair at his brother’s temples with sadistic finesse. Tara separated them.
    â€˜Sean, you get back to your own room this instant, do you hear me? I have warned you a thousand times about bullying your brothers. Your father is going to hear all about this when he gets home.’
    Garrick snuffled up his tears and came wheezing to his elder brother’s defence.
    â€˜We were only playing, Mater. He wasn’t bullying me.’ But she could hear that he was on the verge of another asthma attack. She wavered. She really should not go out,
not with an attack threatening, but tonight was so important.
    â€˜I’ll prepare his inhaler and tell Nanny to look in on him every hour until I get back,’ she compromised.
    Michael was reading, and barely looked up to receive her kiss. ‘Lights out at nine o’clock. Promise me, darling.’ She tried never to let it show, but he was always her favourite.
    â€˜I promise, Mater,’ he murmured and under cover of the eiderdown carefully crossed his fingers.
    On the way down the stairs she glanced at her wristwatch. It was five minutes before eight. She was going to be late, and she stifled her maternal feelings of guilt and fled out to her old Packard.
    Shasa detested the Packard, taking its blotched sun-faded paintwork and its shabby stained upholstery as an affront to the family dignity. He had given her a new Aston Martin on her last birthday, but she left it in the garage. The Packard suited her spartan image of herself as a caring liberal, and it blew a streamer of dirty smoke as she accelerated down the long driveway, taking a perverse pleasure in sending a pall of fine dust over Shasa’s meticulously groomed vineyards. It was strange how even after all these years she felt herself a stranger at Weltevreden, and alien amongst its treasures and stuffy old-fashioned furnishings. If she lived here another fifty years it would never be her home, it was Centaine Courtney-Malcomess’ home, the other woman’s touch and memory lingered in every room that Shasa would never allow her to redecorate.
    She escaped through the great ostentatious Anreith gateway into the real world of suffering and injustice, where the oppressed masses wept and struggled and cried out for succour and where she felt useful and relevant, where in the company of other pilgrims she could march forward to meet a future full of challenge and change.
    The Broadhursts’ home was in the middle-class suburb
of