Verkramp
had been right in his reports to Pretoria after all. He had shown astonishing
perspicacity. Miss Hazelstone and her Zulu bloody cook were indeed capable of ending
three hundred years of White Supremacy in Southern Africa. Worse still he, Kommandant van
Heerden, would be held responsible.
At last, after gazing long and prayerfully into the face of a moth-eaten hyena
which, in his distracted state of mind, he assumed to be a portrait of Sir Theophilus in
his younger days, the Kommandant mustered his last remaining faculties and turned back
to his tormentor. He would make one last attempt to make the old bitch see her duty as a
lady and a white woman and deny that she had ever entertained anything more lethal or
passionate than mildly critical thoughts towards her Zulu cook.
Miss Hazelstone had completed her catalogue of Fivepence’s virtues as a sentimental
and spiritual companion. She had begun to describe the cook’s attributes as a physical
and sensual lover, a sharer of her bed and satisfier of her sexual appetites which
were, the Kommandant was to discover to his disgust, prodigious and, in his view,
perverse to the point of enormity.
“Of course, we did have our little difficulties to begin with,” she was saying. “There
were little incompatibilities in our attitudes, not to mention our physical
attributes. A man of your experience, Kommandant, will naturally know what I mean.”
The Kommandant, whose experience of sex was limited to an annual visit to a
brothel in Lourenço Marques on his summer holiday, but whose experience of Zulus was
fairly extensive, thought that he knew what she meant and hoped to hell that he didn’t.
“To begin with Fivepence suffered from ejaculatio praecox,” Miss Hazelstone
continued clinically. For a brief, all too short moment the Kommandant’s lack of Latin
and his limited knowledge of medicine spared him the full implications of this remark.
Miss Hazelstone hastened to explain.
“He used to have emissions prematurely,” she said, and when the Kommandant ventured
to suggest incomprehendingly that, in his humble opinion, Fivepence could not have gone
to mission prematurely enough considering his filthy habits in later life, Miss
Hazelstone stooped to the level of the stable and explained in language the Kommandant
was forced, however unwillingly, to recognize as all too intelligible.
“He used to ejaculate almost as soon as I touched him,” she continued remorselessly,
and mistaking the Kommandant’s look of abject horror for an indication that he still
didn’t grasp her meaning, she administered the coup de grâce to his dumbfounded
sensibilities.
“He used to come before he could get his prick into me,” she said, and as she said it, the
Kommandant seemed to be aware, as in some ghastly nightmare, that the corners of Miss
Hazelstone’s mouth turned upwards in a slight smile of happy remembrance.
He knew now that Miss Hazelstone was clean out of her mind. He was about to say that she
had blown her top, but the phrase, being all too reminiscent of Fivepence’s disgusting
propensity, not to mention his ultimate fate, was throttled on the threshold of his
consciousness.
“In the end we got over the problem,” Miss Hazelstone went on. “First of all I got him to
wear three contraceptives, one on top of the other, to desensitize his glans penis and
that was quite satisfactory from my point of view though it tended to restrict his
circulation a teeny bit and he did complain that he couldn’t feel very much. After an
hour I would get him to take one off and that helped him a bit and finally he would take the
second off and we would have a simultaneous orgasm.” She paused and wagged a finger
mischievously at the stupefied Kommandant who was desperately trying to raise enough
energy to call a halt to these appalling disclosures. “But that wasn’t the end of it,” she
went
Richard Ellis Preston Jr.