by Peter Rimmer
“I say, aren’t you Jack Merryweather? Must be years, old boy. Ernest Gilchrist. Don’t you remember? I’ve been away. Ceylon. Colombo more precise. For the old company. We are in tea, lots of tea.” And he laughed.
Jack looked at his watch on its chain, snapped it shut and looked again at the newly prosperous Ernest Gilchrist.
“Do you have time for a drink?” he asked Ernest Gilchrist.
“I’ve always had time for a drink.”
“Good,” he said. “We’ll go back to my club. There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you, for about five years.”
“Sounds serious.”
“Not really, old chap. Just curiosity. I like my ends to be tied up.”
Just before they reached the entrance to the club, a short sharp April shower made them both wet before they could put up their brollies in the gusting wind. Inside the club, a fire was burning, as it did most of the year. They stood in front of the fire waiting for their drinks. There was no one else in the room, with its big, black leather chairs. The hot fire was gently steaming out the rainwater from their suits, giving off a musty sweet smell.
Jack looked at the man who had introduced him to Sallie Barker and her abominable mother. The eyes were somehow too close together. The man was sharp rather than intelligent.
“Do you have a club in London?” asked Jack, having decided to have a drink before assuaging his curiosity.
“No,” said Ernest Gilchrist too quickly. “We only get home leave once every two years. Doesn’t seem worth it.”
“What you do in tea?”
“I’m a buyer.”
The steward brought in the drinks and saved the foundering conversation. Jack decided the appearance of wealth only went as far as the suit and the bowler hat. The man was probably a big shot in the colonies but not very big in London. They both drank deeply from the drinks, having turned their backs on the fire to steam the other side.
“Do you ever hear from Sallie Barker, your cousin, I think?” asked Jack.
“Didn’t you hear?”
“No I didn’t or I would not be asking you… Would you like another drink? That rain made us rather wet. Another ten minutes of this fire and we’ll be dry. Steward! Be a good chap. Same as last time. Thank you.”
Jack waited for the new drinks and when the steward had left the room he smiled at an agitated Ernest Gilchrist. “Now, Ernest. What didn’t I hear?”
“My cousin, Mrs Flugelhorne of Cape Town, was hanged for a murderess.”
“Good God, Ernest. What does that have to do with the beautiful Sallie?”
“Everything, Jack.”
“Did your cousin kill Sallie? Why?”
“No. She killed her husband, Mr Flugelhorne. Sallie ran away from Constantia Manor, that’s my cousin’s home near Cape Town, soon after they arrived off the SS King Emperor. But you, of course, were on the boat. She had told her mother Mr Flugelhorne had raped her but her mother didn’t want to believe her daughter. After days of searching Cape Town for Sallie, Mrs Barker told my cousin Mrs Flugelhorne what had happened. Next time her husband was drunk, she shot him with an old gun that hung over the fireplace. It was one of those guns you had to load with gunpowder. She was such a small little woman. Devoted to her husband. But you never can tell. She filled up the barrel of the old gun with small nails she found in the winery that was used to close the wooden cases of wine. She fired at just below his belly. Emasculated him. Took Flugelhorne four days to die in terrible pain. I had to scrape up the money to bring Mrs Barker back to England third class. She was destitute.”
“But what happened to Sallie? She must have seen the newspapers.”
“Not a word. She just disappeared. After her mother left South Africa no one bothered to inquire. She is an orphan in a kind of way. Sallie, I don’t think, ever came back to England. Before I went to Ceylon on my first tour, I found Mrs Barker a job in the country as a housekeeper. I believe she periodically put advertisements in the London papers. She has promised to tell me if Sallie sends her a reply. Then I will ask Sallie to marry me. She’ll have a good life in Colombo. Poor, poor Sallie. It’s all her father’s fault.”
“I doubt it, Ernest… She’s probably dead, poor girl. She would have run away to England. Contacted you.”
“Yes, she would, if she came home.”
“Why don’t you go and look for her in Africa?” asked Jack Merryweather.
“I don’t have the money. My salary gives me a good living in Colombo where everything is cheap and they give me a company house.”
“So no one’s been looking for her?”
“Only the London advertisements.”
“What a strange story… I think we are dried out now, Ernest. Nice seeing you again. When are you going back to Ceylon?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Have a good voyage. You go through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, I presume. Very nice.” The man looked crestfallen. “Don’t worry about something you can do nothing about.”
“I don’t think she’d have married me even if I’d asked,” said Ernest Gilchrist, and for a moment Jack thought he was going to cry.
Outside in the street, they went their separate ways.
“If she was in trouble, why didn’t she cable me in Rhodesia?” he asked himself out loud when he was back in 27 Baker Street.
“Did you say something, sir?” asked Cox, his manservant.
“Not really, Pringle.”
“My name is Cox, sir.”
“Of course, Cox.”
“Are you going out tonight, sir?”
“I’m not sure.”
Jack Merryweather, even the next morning, was unable to get Sallie Barker out of his mind. All he could see were the dark ringlets and dark brown eyes. He could see her quite clearly in Green Park all those years ago with a suffragist sign. Strangely, he was quite certain she was still alive. He remembered their dinner together, their unspoken understanding. The girl had been far too smart to get herself killed, even in darkest Africa.
At lunchtime, it came to him all of a rush. He would himself go to Africa and look for Sallie Barker. It would be a worthwhile venture. Only this time he would leave his manservant at 27 Baker Street.
Leaving the soup untouched he quit the dining room and walked quickly to the offices of Colonial Shipping. He was smiling broadly and his mind was rushing on a very fast track. They all knew each other, and they had all vanished from the face of the earth round about the same time. If you found Sallie Barker, he rather thought you would find Lily White and Albert Pringle. He could tie together two lots of loose ends at the same time.
Then he laughed out loud in the shipping office and smiled at the ticket clerk.
“Every time I meet Ernest Gilchrist I end up going off to Africa.”
“What was that, sir?”
“Nothing, dear boy.”
The elderly ticket clerk smiled back. He had not been called a dear boy for a very long time.
The same day Jack was finally interviewing the owner of the Strand Street townhouse he had hired six years earlier for Lily White, Harry Brigandshaw was reading another cable from Robert St Clair, his Oxford day’s friend who was fast becoming a burden. Without saying a word Harry gave the cable to his sister to read: Madge’s stomach had taken a sharp turn at the sight of the man on his bicycle from the faraway Salisbury post office, thinking Barend, at last, was sending her a word. Harry told the houseboy, Garth, to take the hungry-looking telegraph boy to the kitchen and give him some food. Harry also gave him sixpence for bicycling the twenty miles.
“Beats me how they don’t get eaten by lion on the way,” said Madge, handing back the cable. “How long do you think he will stay this time?”
“If you went to England he wouldn’t come here. You’d love Purbeck Manor. The family are delightful… And who is going to be eaten by a lion?”
“One of those telegraph boys one of these days. And what’s the surprise he’s bringing with hi
m? Dear old Robert. In many ways, I’m rather fond of him but he does go on a bit… It must be over twenty miles on a bicycle and the road is a cart track full of ruts.”
“I’m sorry it wasn’t Barend,” said Harry, sympathising with his sister.
“So am I. Where the hell is the damn man?”
“Don’t swear, sis, or Uncle Nat will come back from England to read one of his homilies. And that we can do without. Isn’t it funny how people are so much part of your life for such a long time and then they’re gone? All we have left is poor little Christo in the graveyard, all that’s left of the Oosthuizens.”
Madge Brigandshaw ran back into the house crying, leaving Harry with the cable from Robert St Clair.
“My poor sister,” he said, shaking his head.
Then he put the cable in the pocket of his khaki shorts and walked through the gate of the balustrade, meeting Garth back from his errand in the kitchen. The black man was grinning, showing rows of perfectly white teeth.
“That boy was hungry… You want your horse, baas?”
“Thank you, Garth. Mister Robert is coming to stay with us again.”
“One day we build him a house and have done with it.”
The one thing Robert St Clair had learnt in his life was to never spend money until it was necessary. Using the minimum number of words, he had sent his cable and watched a black man go off with it on a bicycle. It was nine o’clock in the morning. The man would rest four or five times but by Robert’s estimate, a man on a bicycle was likely to reach Elephant Walk in four hours and have time to cycle back to Salisbury before it was dark. There were some hills but the downhill bits compensated for the climb. Robert thought the post office would have been better off giving the man a horse but then again you did not have to feed a bicycle.
Before sending the cable, Robert had hired a horse and trap with a driver who would have to return that day, leaving Robert and his sister nicely stranded at Elephant Walk. At two o’clock that afternoon, having foregone the cost of a lunch in expectation of the Brigandshaw supper being the main meal of the day, Robert waved with great satisfaction at the telegraph boy pedalling furiously on his way home. He rather hoped the lad would reach Salisbury before dark as the surrounding bush was full of night-prowling predators.
By his calculation, they should arrive at the farm just in time for sundowners, a civilised habit which he fully approved of.
Lucinda had been given the trip to Africa by her maternal grandmother, Granny Forrester, a twenty-first birthday present, Robert having told the family he had once again been invited to stay with the Brigandshaws at Elephant Walk. With one lie in the bag, as Robert had a habit of saying, he had included Lucinda in the invitation, remembering Harry had once, when she was fifteen years old, extended her an invitation. After teaching snotty-nosed prep school boys the rudiments of history he had resigned his teacher’s job, having saved sufficient of his salary to buy a return ticket to Africa and not a single: Robert, being sensible, always had his bolthole if something went wrong with his schemes. It was not only Madge that drew him to Elephant Walk, he told himself, but the pleasant colonial style of living that suited his temperament down to the ground.
Lucinda, having watched only one of her sisters getting married, and Annabel’s marriage had taken place in a hurry, was desperate and if it took going out to Africa to find a husband, it was better than sinking back into spinsterhood and genteel poverty at Purbeck Manor where her father’s finances were nothing short of critical. Sir Willoughby Potts had died and with him his government pension. And anyway, like all the sisters, she had had a crush on Harry when he had stayed with them after coming down from Oxford, a crush she had told herself was love. Maybe girls were in short supply in Africa, which was why he had included her in his invitation. She knew for certain that at twenty-seven, Harry Brigandshaw was not yet married.
“How much further do we have to go?” she asked her brother. “This place is wild. Where does everyone live?”
“We’ll be there before the sun goes down.”
“Can the driver go back in the dark?”
“He’d have to. And there is something else I better tell you before we reach Elephant Walk. They don’t know you’re coming.”
“But I was invited!”
“Neither of us were.”
“Robert, you’re quite impossible.”
“Desperate situations require desperate solutions. There was no way I could have spent another term at that damn school.”
“How are you going to earn a living?”
“I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”
“What am I going to say to them?”
“I said in my cable I had a surprise for them. It’s too far to go back now,” said Robert, giving out a nervous giggle. Robert worked on the principle that people living in the sticks were pleased to see anyone, invited or otherwise. And even if he had to say so himself, Lucinda was certainly a sight for sore eyes… He was so hungry he could hear his own stomach rumbling over the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves on the dirt track; even though it had rained two days earlier, the track was as hard as nails.
The sunlight was yellow when the driver took the trap through the main gate of the balustrade into the Elephant Walk compound, where they were promptly met by a pack of excited, yapping dogs that set the tame wild geese into flight up and over the balustrade and down through the msasa trees to sanctuary on the water of the Mazoe River.
Emily, Harry’s mother, was the first to greet the uninvited guests as if they were long-lost and precious relatives. It was the way it was done in Rhodesia. It was the way it was done in Africa. Any traveller passing through a village was given food and a hut to sleep in, no matter who they were.
A week of polite animated conversation passed without any of them saying what they were thinking. They all looked to be having a good time.
Harry found Robert alone by the river. It had not rained and most likely would not rain again for six months. The cool morning was full of birdsong. The river ran smooth and dark. Robert was sitting on the dry bank with his legs pulled up, his arms hugging his knees. He had not heard Harry.
“Mind the crocodiles, old chap,” Harry said softly to announce his presence. He was standing ten yards behind Robert, higher up the bank.
“To hell with the bloody crocodiles,” said Robert without moving. “Do you really know why I came this time?”
“Robert, please, you don’t have to explain. We love to have you at Elephant Walk.”
“You don’t, so stop pretending. Even the first time I outstayed my welcome. I’m a parasite abusing your hospitality. The St Clairs are broke, Harry. All those years and now we are broke. I saved up a year’s puny salary to buy the ticket. Granny Forrester gave her last money to Lucinda thinking you had sent her an invitation. Granny doesn’t want anything now Potts is dead. I do hope they were lovers. To hell with grandfather. Good old Potts and his government pension. Stopped dead like someone had slammed the door shut when he died. Now, what kind of life was that? A governor, for God’s sake, and the door slammed in Granny Forrester’s face. Well, it’s going to slam in all our faces soon. I came out here to say goodbye… I was happy here.”
“You can always come back. You will always be welcome. You are good company.”
“Ah, there we have it. Sing for my supper… There’s going to be a war.”
“There are always people at war somewhere. Rather sadly, men seem to take to fighting with each other.”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Nothing much reaches Elephant Walk. The local Rhodesia Herald is four pages and thankfully local chatter.” They were silent for a while. “Madge is another story. You can’t compete with a man who is only in her mind.”
“Oh, I know Madge wouldn’t marry me in a fit. I’ve known that since the time we first met. With or without Barend, there would have been no difference in the end. You can tell… You’re not going to marry Cinda, are you?”
“She’s a very nice girl.”
“Don’t give me that, Harry. This is Robert.”
“No, Robert. I have no plans to marry your sister and even if I had, it would not be fair. You can’t bring someone from England and dump them in the bush. My father did just that to my mother but they were so in love they could have lived on the moon. There has to be that kind of love to compensate for the loneliness and lack of social life, any kind of life for that matter, other than farm life, the bush, the animals. Cinda would be bored to distraction inside a year and all the children in the world would not make her satisfied. I’ll find a local girl if I’m lucky. Or I’ll stay as I am. Being a bachelor is all right if you don’t think about it.”
Quietly, Harry sat down next to Robert on the riverbank, pulled up his knees, put his arms around his legs, his head on his knees and turned to look at Robert. A piece of dead tree floated by in midstream. A red cormorant was standing on the log, its black wings held out wide to the morning sun to dry. Harry watched the bird float by out of the corner of his eye.
“The one thing we St Clairs are good at, is wars,” said Robert, ignoring the bird. “We’ve been there for England for hundreds of years. All we are good at, probably. To fight for King and country. The only time we pay for our privilege. Might be the end of us this time. Evolution is wonderful. We were left behind unwarranted guardians of a now irrelevant piece of coast. Keep the peace and the enemy at bay no longer applies to Dorset… You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you Harry?”
“Not really.”
“Germany. There’s going to be a war with Germany. They’re building dreadnoughts bigger than ours. Battleships to challenge the Royal Navy and British trade.”
“Don’t be silly. The Kaiser’s Queen Victoria’s grandson.”
“They’re all Germans. They want to challenge the empire. It’s going to be a terrible war, Harry, and I’m going to die. We won’t be fighting each other like gentlemen with swords on horseback. We’ll kill each other with machine guns from one thousand yards. Not seeing who we kill. Aeroplanes will drop bombs on people. If it isn’t over quickly we’ll wipe each other out. We’re all going to die, Harry. They’ll even take poor Richard. Put him in an officer’s uniform. He won’t know what’s going on but that won’t matter. He thinks like a child you know, and he’s so beautiful! Barnaby, Frederick, Merlin. The lot of us. If it goes on long enough they’ll soon kill young Barnaby. Then the fact we don’t have any money won’t matter anymore.”
