by Peter Rimmer
“First, we have to get through the war.”
“There’s that.”
“You think we should go down into the cellar and look for a bottle of old Potts’s special brandy?”
“Why not? There’s a torch in the drawer of the kitchen table. First I’m going to pluck those two birds before they get stone cold and the feathers are difficult to pull. You want to help?”
“Of course. We have all night. By the bye. Thanks for being my brother.”
“Didn’t have any choice. But if I had, I wouldn’t have changed any of you.”
When they finished there were feathers all over the table and floor. The birds were naked from head to feet. Merlin gutted them in the sink and threw the unwanted entrails into the fire. The wet intestines sizzled. He cut open the gizzards and worked out the grit under the tap in the sink. He hung the birds by their heads from a hook next to the sink. Then he looked for the torch in the kitchen table.
“Are you coming?” he asked.
Robert had found the remains of the leg of pork from supper in the meat safe and was cutting himself slices of bread. Instead of butter, he used the dripping from the roast pork that Cook had scraped into a pot and left in the meat safe.
“The smell of that offal makes me hungry. I’m going to have a sandwich. And please use all your Merlin magic to find the brandy. Nothing better than a good pork sandwich and a balloon glass weeping up the inside with Napoleon brandy. Look in all the spots. Whatever you find we’ll drink. I’ll have the fire stoked up. Now off you go.”
“You’re impossible.”
“A man has to eat. And there’s only one torch. By the time we’ve had a few drinks, it will be breakfast time.”
From inside, the old house was completely silent. From outside, they could still hear the guns from France.
“Poor sods,” said Merlin as he left the kitchen.
4
January 1916
At first sight, Fishy Braithwaite’s resemblance to a codfish was uncanny. The same flattened pointed face with wet fishy eyes. He had been known as Fishy from prep school and very few ever found out his christened name was Mervyn. The second sight showed the cold, killer fury behind the wet eyes, with the blond invisible eyelashes. He was thirty-one years old, a major in the Royal Flying Corps, seventeen confirmed kills to his name, Military Cross and Bar, with a burning hatred for the whole human race that for so long had looked at his face and laughed. Now, no one laughed at him in France. They called him sir, kept the first smirk to themselves, and avoided his company even in the officers’ mess, a French farmhouse the British rented at exorbitant cost, along with the farmer’s field for the aircraft. The irony of paying rent to defend another man’s country was lost on the French, but not on Fishy Braithwaite. He hated them as much for their exploitation as the Germans for shooting down his pilots. Major Braithwaite was commanding officer of 33 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, and he ran the show efficiently, like a tyrant. The new pilots went from inner laughter at his facial appearance to bowel-melting fear in thirty seconds. But for all of his nastiness and discipline, he kept most of them alive, for which they were grateful. He told even his senior officers he was there to kill Germans and not to make friends.
Most of the hatred and malice stemmed from Sara Wentworth’s disdain. To love a woman for so long without reward had eaten away all the goodness in his soul. And when Harry Brigandshaw was posted to his squadron as a raw pilot out of flight training, the request for the transfer had come from Major Braithwaite. Fishy Braithwaite was going to have his rival killed. When the war was over and Brigandshaw dead, she would marry the war hero he now was, and he would take his revenge for all the years she scorned him, fifteen long years of ridicule. Even their engagement so many years ago had become a mockery of marriage.
And now, on his last leave, she had made excuses not to see him. He with two Military Crosses. He who was still officially her fiancé.
He, the eldest son of a family of great wealth. How dare she deny him what she had agreed to do? That their parents had wanted the marriage as much as Mervyn had nothing to do with her final agreement. All that running off to Africa, that had worried Sara’s father so much, should have brought her to her senses instead of making her wild. And now she was running around in a nurse’s uniform close to the reserve trenches instead of waiting for him at home when he came back on leave. She mocked him and he would not be mocked. Why did his face have to freeze her heart? They told him even in prep school it was impossible to judge a book by its cover. And he was not a wet fish. No, he was not, his mind screamed at him. And every time he shot down a German, he screamed out loud, ‘See, I’m not a wet fish! And you’re dead!’ The other pilots thought he was laughing at the kill and shunned him all the more.
Harry Brigandshaw had contacted the Wentworth home in Warminster at the end of his first week in England. A man had answered the telephone, demanded his name, and then gone off somewhere after Harry asked to speak to Jared. They had kept in contact by letter for years and Jared had given Harry the family phone number in one of his sporadic letters. The correspondence had been with Jared, though Sara’s name always appeared in the letters, with the throwaway line about her still not having got around to marrying Fishy Braithwaite. Harry had read nothing personal into the references.
He could hear voices talking some way away from the telephone and then the mouthpiece was picked up followed by a pause.
“Hello,” he said expecting Jared to come on the line.
“This is Mrs Wentworth, Jared’s mother. Are you the nice young man from Africa?”
“I live in Africa, yes, Mrs Wentworth. May I speak to Jared?”
“You could if he were here but he is not. My son joined the navy.”
“Yes, he told me so in a letter. So he’s not there?”
“No, he’s not.”
“When will he be home?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’m here in England you see.”
“Oh, Sara will be glad to hear you’re in England.”
“Well, then, is Sara there?”
“Then you wanted to speak to Sara?”
“Yes, if Jared is not there.”
“Then I’ll tell her. She’ll be very pleased.”
“But she’s not there?”
“No, Sara is in France. She is a volunteer nurse. FANY, that’s the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Won’t you come down to Birchdale still this weekend?”
“Will Jared be home?”
“No. But Sara will be home on leave. She wrote to me from France. You don’t have relations in England.”
“I do, actually. My grandmother and my uncle, Sir James Brigandshaw. He’s the managing director of Colonial Shipping.”
“How very nice for you. But I still think you should come down to Birchdale all the same. Sara often talks fondly of you, Mr Brigandshaw.”
“Hasn’t she married Mervyn Braithwaite?”
“No, she has not. How do you know of Mr Braithwaite?”
“Well, from Sara, really. But Fishy, I mean Mervyn, was up at Oxford at the same time as myself and Robert St Clair. Robert met Sara and Jared at Elephant Walk in ’07, I think it was. Might have been ’08.”
“Then you will come down this weekend. I insist.”
“Well, if you insist.”
“After so much hospitality Jared and Sara received in Africa, yes, indeed, I insist. Telephone when your train will arrive at Warminster station and I’ll have the chauffeur meet you. Goodbye, Mr Brigandshaw. I shall look forward to meeting you.”
Feeling guilty at not visiting Granny Brigandshaw in her London flat, Harry had taken the train to Warminster on the Friday afternoon and was met by a large motor car of a type he had never seen before. The chauffeur turned out to be Sara Wentworth in her civilian clothes. They had not seen each other for nearly ten years but Harry would have recognised the long brown-red hair anywhere. It was still down to her waist. The feet, as he remembered,
were surprisingly small. Harry thought she would now be in her early thirties. She was strikingly good-looking but what was most striking was the way she greeted Harry, as if her whole world centred on their meeting. It was only around about Saturday lunchtime that Harry realised the poor girl was head over heels in love with him. This made Harry very nervous. Explaining that Granny Brigandshaw was expecting him that night, he fled Birchdale for the railway station, this time with the chauffeur at the wheel of the car. It had all been very embarrassing, Sara convinced in her mind that after all the years alone in Africa he felt the same way as she did. In the end, he had to tell her in plain words and there had been a scene at the end of the rose garden next to the lily pond.
“Then who are you in love with?” she demanded.
“No one.”
“Then why not me?”
“Sara, we haven’t seen each other in almost ten years.”
“There’s another woman!”
“No there isn’t. Anyway, I thought you were engaged to Mervyn Braithwaite.”
“I hate him. His face looks like the face of a wet cod.”
“But you agreed to marry him.”
“Only after Mother and Father threatened to cut me off without a penny. Either you marry me and get me out of here, or I break the engagement and get thrown out onto the street. Or I marry Fishy. And I’d rather die than do that.”
“Doesn’t he love you?”
“Of course he does. Follows me around all day with those wet eyes. Gives me the creeps… You’ve got to help. You’re my hope. I love you, Harry. From the first, forever. Please!”
“Sara, we don’t really know each other. On the farm, there were always four of us together. I rather thought you were more interested in Robert St Clair.”
“He was just after my money.”
“Well, look, old girl, this really is a pickle. And I have to get back to London to see my grandmother.”
“You never before mentioned your grandmother.”
“I did on the phone to your mother. And my Uncle James. And he’s not the only one. There’s Uncle Nat. They just made him a bishop, so I should see him too, and then the Flying Corps want to see me in Farnham on Monday.”
“You’re making excuses.”
“Not really, Sara. Please, I had no idea you felt this way for so long.”
“It’s horrible, Harry. Horrible… And it hurts.”
Harry had told his grandmother later the same day he had never been more embarrassed in his life.
“Should ’ave married years ago, grandson.”
“There aren’t that many opportunities in Africa, Granny Brigandshaw.”
“Not by sound of it, lad. Not by sound of it.” Granny Brigandshaw had still not lost her north country accent that had come with the poverty of her birth. Harry thought she liked to put it on a bit now she was Lady Brigandshaw, widow of a baronet. He liked her better for it and for not living at Hastings Court, where his Uncle James was now ensconced with an entourage. He had heard the family say Granny Brigandshaw had always been on her own and preferred it that way.
He had left her reading a book, with a pair of spectacles lodged on the end of her nose. For a moment, Harry thought of asking her the truth about his birth, which was when she had picked up the book and the spectacles. How she always knew what he was trying to say, he never understood. After the war, he made up his mind to get the truth from his mother once and for all.
Ten days later he made his first solo flight in a trainer aircraft that had been built before the war. The small plane had an undercarriage made from parts first intended for bicycles. Harry’s lifelong friendship with aircraft had begun, even though his first landing nearly ripped off the bicycle wheels. To Harry, the rest of the aeroplane frame seemed to be made of painted cloth, string and wire struts. But it flew. Flew him up into the high blue heavens and the cotton wool clouds. He had never been so happy in his life and completely forgot about Sara Wentworth and her chronic obsession. And the war he was about to fight.
To add insult to Fishy Braithwaite’s injury, his twin sisters were the toast of pre-war London society. When they came out, the twins were given a ball by their father in the family townhouse in Park Lane. The carriages and new motor cars had lined up right down Hyde Park as the girls were launched into society. Where Fishy was plain ugly his sisters were beautiful, one dark, one fair. They were not identical twins. Mervyn, the eldest, was seventeen months older than his twin sisters. Where his eyes were wet and fishy with no visible eyelashes, theirs were round, wet and seductive, with long soft brown lashes that they had learnt at finishing school in Switzerland to flutter like the wings of a butterfly. Where his face was squashed, theirs were round and in perfect proportion. Where his shortness on a man was unfortunate their smallness on a woman was petite and drew the desire of every man’s protection.
At the ball, in his boiled shirt and tails that exaggerated his long thin face, he danced every dance. With all his family wealth, the mothers of that year’s debutantes had placed his name on their daughters’ dance cards, but not one of the girls had ever looked him in the face or asked for a refreshment at the end of a dance while younger brother Hal, who had just turned eighteen, was followed by a small group of giggling girls wherever he went. And Sara had made an excuse and stayed at Birchdale with a cold.
By the end of the evening, Mervyn knew what was ahead of him for the rest of his life… And he hated them.
The war, when it came, was a godsend. With goggles and flying helmet, and seated in a small plane armed with a machine gun mounted in front of him on a swivel, he was an invincible killing machine. And for the first time in his life, people stopped laughing at him. And Sara, whether she liked it or not, was going to be his wife.
The leave, when they awarded him his first Military Cross, was to be the one when Sara would run into his arms. He went down to Birchdale in a new car and a new brown uniform, with his wings and the ribbon of the Military Cross stitched on his left breast. He had worn his flying helmet and goggles in the open car on the journey from London where he was staying in the family townhouse.
She had not even appeared at the front door. Mrs Wentworth had to coax her out of her bedroom. Instead of flying into his arms, she had stood halfway down the stairs, holding the wooden banister while she glared at him.
“How many did you kill this time?”
“Seven,” he said proudly.
“Don’t you feel ashamed of yourself?”
Then she had walked back up to her bedroom. Mervyn had driven back to London with his tail between his legs, feeling much the same as he had as a child when his father verbally put him down. He had learned later Sara had joined the FANY the next day. And ever since, she had refused to see him. There had been one letter, saying the big diamond ring was in a safety deposit box in a Cox & Kings bank in the Mall: enclosed was the key.
The key had reached him in France one morning just before the dawn patrol. The German he shot down that day might have landed his crippled plane behind British lines and been captured. Mervyn had followed the young, defenceless pilot almost to the ground. The boy had waved at him and smiled. Mervyn had swivelled his Vickers machine gun and shot the young German to death. Back at the temporary aerodrome none of his pilots had spoken to him. And he didn’t care. Killing was satisfying, like the sex he had never had. Not even with a whore.
Harry Brigandshaw had first saluted and then put out his hand. The wet eyes stared back at him without recognition. Unperturbed, Harry kept his hand out. It had been a long time.
“Harry Brigandshaw,” he said. “Oxford, ’04 to ’07, remember? My room-mate, Robert St Clair. You remember, Mervyn?” Harry only just choked back ‘Fishy’. The man in front of him was his CO. He deserved respect.
“It’s either Sir or Major Braithwaite, Brigandshaw.”
“Yes, sir.”
Calling a man his own age, who had been up at Oxford with him, sir, was about as absurd as calling his moth
er Mrs Brigandshaw. Harry waited for the stern face to crack and laughter to follow. Above everything, they were fellow pilots. His right hand was still out, now stared at pointedly by Fishy Braithwaite. Harry did know some of the British took themselves too seriously. He had read about Hal’s death in the Times. The paper had mentioned Captain Braithwaite’s brother, the flying ace. Hal had been killed on the Somme leading his company in an attack. He was going to say to Mervyn how sorry he was.
Instead, he pulled back, stood rigidly to attention and saluted. Then he turned and walked quickly across to the officers’ mess. They had been outside the CO’s office in uniform with their hats on, so it had been correct to salute. Harry had shrugged it off by the time he reached the small bar in the mess. He thought nothing of it. He was new to the military.
It was getting dark. There would be no more flying that day. He ordered himself a large whisky. Sundowner time!… He would first fly into action tomorrow… Africa seemed a long way away. When the other pilots trickled into the bar he was shocked at how young they were. Half of them didn’t even have to shave.
No one said a word to him. They all looked through him as if he was already dead. He asked the mess steward to give everyone a drink and put it on his card. It took Harry three rounds to get a smile out of anyone, which was wiped clean when the CO came into the bar. He looked at no one and no one looked at him.
