by Peter Rimmer
“It rather looks that way,” said Harry. “Jared, you and Sara can stay as long as you like. Aunt Alison is not coming back to Elephant Walk. She is going to stay in Cape Town hoping Barend will contact friends he knew when they farmed in Franschhoek. No one has heard of him. Poor Aunt Alison. After three years and no trace, he’s likely dead. Running away from home at the age of fourteen to disappear into the African bush on your own is not the most sensible start to life. Hatred does terrible things to people, even young boys. Hatred and love. My poor sister. Madge has been set on spending her life with Barend since they could first talk to each other. Mother says the letter was terribly sad but there is nothing more she can do for Aunt Alison and Katinka. Katinka’s twelve. Well, there we are. Make yourself comfortable in their house.”
Part 2 – Journeys of Discovery
1
December 1912
After Madge had given up hope of receiving a letter, it had taken Barend Oosthuizen another five years to find what he wanted, and he had found it twice in one day.
With the consummate charm of a man who knows he is good-looking but doesn’t have to use it to get his own way, the eight-year odyssey since leaving Elephant Walk at fourteen had been surprisingly easy. Wherever he had found himself people had wanted to do him only good. They wanted to give him things. They liked him. And most of all they only wanted him to like them in return. And it did not matter whether they were old or young, male or female. Everyone wanted to do Barend a favour and many of them did.
Not long after crossing the Limpopo River into South Africa at the beginning of his journey, he had found a solitary farmhouse in the lonely scrub and ridden his horse for three hours before coming up on the homestead he had first seen from the hill that overlooked the flatland of the veld. No one, especially Marie Putter, who had been widowed in the Boer War when she was twenty-seven, childless, would have taken the good-looking man for fourteen years old. When they met in the chicken run at the back of the house he received from a woman the first carnal look of many to come. When he asked her for a job on the farm she was so excited she left the door to the hen house open along with the gate to the run. With squawking chickens running in all directions they were soon laughing happily together. That night, Barend lost his virginity.
That one had lasted a month. When they parted it was as friends, and the saddle bags of the packhorse he led on a long rein behind the one that he rode, was full of dried meat that would see him, if necessary, as far as Cape Town.
Long before he reached Cape Town, a journey of twelve interesting months, he had forgotten about his mother, sister, and Madge. The only thing that had travelled with him from Elephant Walk and stayed was his hatred of the English who had killed his father. And he always felt at home on the Boer farms as most of the farms nursed the same hatred of the British.
Even when in 1910 the two Boer republics and the two British colonies became the Union of South Africa under General Louis Botha, a Boer, some Boers were still looking for revenge.
At the age of seventeen, he stood on a kopje overlooking the battlefield at Paardeberg where many of his relations had fallen and swore his oath to the Brotherhood of Hate.
“I, Barend Oosthuizen, in the name of my father General Tinus Oosthuizen and the Oosthuizens that fell at Paardeberg, do hereby swear I will do all in my power for the rest of my life to revenge the Boer republics and restore the Boer nation to its rightful position in Africa, so help me God.”
On the same day Barend climbed down from the kopje to wash his face in the Modder River that seven years before had flowed with so much Boer blood, Harry Brigandshaw was setting out from Elephant Walk, hundreds of miles to the north, to be led a dance by Peregrine the Ninth in Harry’s abortive quest to find out what had happened to his childhood friend Tatenda.
When Barend turned eighteen a year later, in 1908, he was six feet tall and worked in a gold mine, chipping gold-bearing rock in a tunnel that made him lie on his side to swing his pick. The mineworkers union demanded the good jobs for whites and higher pay than the blacks, but they all died together when the tunnels collapsed. It was the hardest work he had ever endured in his life but the money was better than odd jobs on the farms. With very little education except what he had learned from his mother, Barend had few skills that would pay him money. His charm went only so far and the thought, at eighteen, of marrying a farmer’s daughter had never entered his mind. To work for twenty years waiting for an old man to die to inherit the farm was not his style. After months at the rock face his arms and shoulders were taut with muscles, his skin smooth, washed by the daily sweat and the fine dust from the bowels of the mother earth.
After a shower above ground at the end of his night shift, he liked to wear a clean shirt every day and walk the new streets of Johannesburg. There were so many people, so many horses and noise from the motor cars of the rand barons, so many women dressed in expensive clothes, so many shop windows to look into, so many dreams of wealth and power to be dreamed about. His blond hair kept short and his face clean-shaven, the slate-green eyes smiled at everything he saw. Without the hatred that permanently knotted the pit of his stomach, he could have been a happy man.
On the surface, he looked like the man Madge had loved from the age of six, but hidden behind the good-looking man with the gorgeous smile was a man with a tormented soul. If there was ever a case for not judging a man by his appearance, Barend was the perfect example. Fortunately for them, no man or woman could look into the recesses of his mind, to what he was thinking in his head. Some of his brothers in the Brotherhood of Hate had some idea but even they would have run from the truth. If there was the devil in the form of a Greek god, Barend Oosthuizen was that devil, brooding, hating, planning revenge, and all the time smiling the outward smile of loving his neighbours more than he loved himself.
Over the years it had not once crossed his thoughts that his mother was in daily agony for not knowing where he was in the world. And only in his dreams did Madge come to him, and these brief dreams he put from his mind in the light of morning.
On the day the British had hanged his father they had warped the inside of his son’s brain.
Sallie Barker had seen the clean-shaven man with the short blond hair and slate-green eyes sitting alone at the bar, the smiling eyes watching her going about her business. She never spoke to him but every time the slate-green eyes smiled in her direction she felt a shiver run through her body.
The Mansion House, though it had another name at the time and several afterwards, had been built on the corner of Rissik Street and Plein Street by Barnet Isaacs, or Barney Barnato as he was better known by his stage and pugilist name, soon after he had merged his diamond interests with Cecil John Rhodes, for money but, more importantly, for a membership of the Kimberley Club, the first Jew to be accepted by the largely British institution. His grand house in Johannesburg, a monument to his foray into the goldfields of the Witwatersrand after enriching himself in Kimberley, had been placed on the market soon after Barney Barnato drowned from a ship taking him to England. To Sallie, whether Barney Barnato had jumped or was pushed made no difference, but the five owners after Barnato drowned were convinced the house was haunted.
By the time Lily White bought the great house she picked it up for a song, which is what she had in mind anyway.
Barney Barnato was an East End Jew from the slums of London, a situation close to the heart of what once had been Lily Ramsbottom, the bastard child born in the industrial north of England near Wigan. To honour the name of a man who had worked his way up from the slums to be one of the richest men in the empire, Lily had called her house of fun the Mansion House, after the home of the Lord Mayor of London. Whether this put away the ghost of Barney Barnato or not, from the day the house was grandly renamed after all the refurbishing paid for without his knowledge by Jack Merryweather, with Sallie and the girls who had come up from Cape Town looking on with a certain sense of pride, nary a ghost was ever seen again. A year after open
ing the best brothel in Johannesburg, Lily was rich. And with Sallie applying her new-found accounting skills, there was a pile of money in the bank. Good strong drinks and good-looking whores, women paid for handsomely, but only in the time of passion, was a combination that never failed to make money throughout the indulgent history of man.
There were four bars in the Mansion House and each charged a different price.
“You can’t just cater to the very rich or the poor sod with a quid to spend on a Saturday night,” Lily White had said during the grand refurbishing. “You have to cater for the lot but keep them apart, see. Man being so bloody conscious of his status, the rich will pay five times more for something to prove they’re rich. Even the poor bloody miners will save up for a whore they really fancy and meantime we take their quids for booze. The girls charge rich and poor the same, only the drinks change price. In the top-class lounge, we have an orchestra, in the cheapest a girl, if we can find her, on a piano. And you never know, a poor man today is a rich man tomorrow, isn’t that right, Albert Pringle?… You got to use your brains in business.”
The four lounges were equally sumptuous, with soft plush leather couches that oozed sex by just sitting in them and feeling the squirm. In a corner of each was a well-stocked bar, and a barman to listen to anyone’s woes, dim chandeliers hung from the ceilings, red carpets, thick with pile, covered the floors. For summer there were overhead fans, for the ice-cold highveld winters there were two fires to each lounge, and a fire in each of the twelve bedrooms that led off the corridors on the first floor up the broad stairs from the ground-floor hall.
The old kitchen Barnato had designed to cook food to impress his new friends was put to good use in the downstairs dining room and the two private eating rooms for guests who did not wish to be seen. There was even a lift from the ground floor to the whores’ bedrooms, operated by a power plant imported from England by the previous owner, that only got stuck once in a while when the power plant failed. Most of the regulars preferred to walk up the stairs, some not even bothering with the bars and dining rooms, too impatient to get on with the job, remove their sexual frustration and get back to the more important job of making more and more obscene quantities of money.
Johannesburg, the most exciting mining town in the world, was booming for the rich. And so was the business of Lily White. As Albert Pringle was inclined to say when the three of them were alone after a busy day, “Landed with our bums in the butter, what we did. Bums in the butter.”
The fact that the operation was quite illegal had never crossed anyone’s minds.
There is a quirk in some good-looking men that makes them like to pay for their women. In the more lavish spenders, the dripping diamonds on their wives, mistresses and whores are often in direct proportion to their ability to satisfy a woman sexually. Albert Pringle thought of them as ‘wham-bam, thank you ma’am’ and there were many of them at the Mansion House who liked to pay out money after their failure, as if to say ‘I may be no good to you in your bed but I can still spit in your eye by paying for it.’
Others, like Barend Oosthuizen, liked whores for the simple reason there was no repercussion, nobody wanting your body and mind for the rest of your life after you had taken them to bed. It was probably a way of confronting his subconscious for running away from Madge, but this was so far back it never came into his conscious mind. One by one, when he managed to save his money, Barend had paid for every one of Lily White’s girls.
Sallie had watched the young man come and go through the months, had even seen the desolation in his eyes while he drank a pot of coffee in the corner of their cheapest lounge while he waited for the girl of his choice. Always the slate-green eyes tried to search for contact with her own, but always she slid hers away. Some men, she had learned, she just did not look at or it gave them ideas. Being naïve back in Cape Town she had not known that rule with Herr Flugelhorne. She had foolishly thought you could look straight in the eye with a smile at an elderly cousin by marriage.
The word had soon spread that Miss Sallie was part of the management, that she had no price. The word had gone out in the mining town with the psyche of a mining camp that one of the rand barons had offered Sallie Barker ten thousand pounds for one full night. The girl had politely laughed, so they said, patted the fat old bastard’s cheek, and asked him what he thought she was, putting a finger to her lips. The two had even laughed together. There were many such stories in Johannesburg of the rich and the poor but this one was true.
“You’re a fool,” Lily had told her. “He was drunk. Silly old fart would have given you twenty thousand.”
“Then I’d have been a whore,” Sallie had said sweetly.
“One day, Sallie Barker, you might just grow up to the facts of life, how women survive in a world full of nasty men. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, young lady. That kind of money don’t come around too often.”
The Mansion House had been in full swing for a year and ten days when the club, as they liked to call it, was visited by a group of young toffs from England, out of Daddy’s way and out to have a good time at anyone else’s expense. They spoke loudly in patrician accents. Not knowing their way around, they stumbled late at night into the miners’ lounge and proceeded to make fools of themselves. They were all drunk. One of them climbed up on the bar and crawled along on his hands and knees barking like a dog, with the barman moving the glasses in front of him to stop them being broken. To begin with, it was quite funny and everyone laughed. Being overbred and underworked, as none of them had ever had a job in their lives, they had no concern who they upset.
All might have been well if Barend Oosthuizen had not woken from a nightmare in the middle of the night. He had dreamed of Madge, a Madge floating away into the clouds of death calling him to join her in the afterlife. With the sweat of fear damp on his chest, he had got up from his bed in his cheap lodgings in search of a woman to overcome his pain.
The coffee had been put at his small table when the barking dog fell off the end of the bar, cracking his head so hard on the floor everyone in the room stopped talking to look. With everyone’s attention, the toffs wanted more drinks. Sallie, having made sure the one on the floor was all right even if his eyes were glazed, told the barman not to serve them any more drinks. Albert Pringle was out of the room and the barman unable to jump quickly enough over the bar. Whether it was the shock of being spoken to by an educated English woman in their own patrician accent or the thought that their upper-class accent was being mimicked, no one ever found out. The leader of the pack threw his full glass of wine in Sallie’s face.
“You’re a whore. Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” he slurred.
The speed with which Barend left his small table brought him up to the toff before the toff could haughtily turn and walk out of the club.
“You, sir, are a pig,” he said. Which were the first words in English anyone had heard Barend speak.
Sallie turned in surprise by the words spoken in upper-class English, the red wine dripping down her face, her dark brown eyes looking briefly into the slate-green eyes full of hatred.
The fight was no contest and neither was the repercussion. The next day the Mansion House was closed for business and Barend Oosthuizen left Johannesburg for good, feeling well pleased with himself. Smashing up five English faces had given him the best feeling of his life. It was the start of his revenge.
The closure lasted a week. Like anything in life that is popular, legality never had the last word. With the mollified toffs on the train down to Cape Town and the boat back to England where it was hoped they would behave themselves, the Mansion House re-opened for business. It turned out the rand baron had not been so drunk after all. He was proud of Sallie and not only for not taking his money. And if money cannot buy influence, whatever can, they said in the streets of Johannesburg.
On the re-opening night, the rand baron invited Sallie out to dinner as his formal guest, treating her like any oth
er woman of class. Sallie smiled sweetly and turned him down, memories of Herr Flugelhorne too vivid to trust any man.
Lily White heard the story of the invitation the following morning.
“Darling Sallie, you are beyond redemption. You will die poor but please remember another piece of my advice. Not every man is a horse’s arse.”
“But how do you tell one from the other?”
“That is the trick. Woman’s instinct.”
“But when he tried to buy me for ten thousand pounds you called him an old fart.”
“That was before he convinced the police we are a legitimate business.”
“Who was the man who saved my honour? He’d always spoken Afrikaans before so I never understood a word.”
“There’s a strange story there. The police did find out. His name is Barend Oosthuizen, the son of General Tinus Oosthuizen, who was hanged by the British during the war for leading a Boer rebellion out of the British Cape Colony.”
“Then how does he speak such good English?”
“His mother is English.”
“Where can I thank him?”
“You can’t, he left town.”
“Why? They let us re-open.”
“No one forced him to leave. They come and go in a mining town… My goodness, business is good tonight. There’s nothing like publicity. We’ll catch up on last week’s losses by the end of the night. I had to send out for more champagne. Albert really is a darling. I’ve hired him an assistant. A rather large young man with big hands. A bit stupid but very strong. And he has a friend if we need any more muscle.”
When Barend was twenty-two years old the odyssey had lasted five years and the fight in the Mansion House four years earlier was long forgotten. There had been many more fights after the English toffs had their faces bloodied, and fights being mostly the same for Barend, like getting drunk, they had the habit of blending in with each other, their individuality lost. In many of the bar fights, very largely fights with Englishmen that he picked whenever he found the smallest opportunity, Barend was drunk and remembered nothing of the details, except the feeling of satisfaction.
