by Peter Rimmer
“My father was at Omdurman with Churchill.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Our Voss is an impostor. Mark you, I always thought our Voss was genuine. If you say your father was Colonel Voss, and he was killed in the Anglo-Boer War then it puts the lie to it. My word, what people do to get money. He even said he had a daughter in England about your age. I think he said her name was Justine. But he would if he was your father’s batman. If he had taken on your father’s name… He’s a nice old bird. Normally I would confront someone with a lie. But he is old. Harmless. Jim says he got far more out of old Voss than he gave. The Chinese have an expression. Never break another man’s rice bowl. His means of earning a living. There’s always more to any story than meets the eye.”
“Can you do something for me, Mr Brigandshaw? Please give me your address in Africa? I want to find my father’s grave. If this man knows all this about my father, including my name, he’ll know where they buried my father.”
“The Imperial War Graves Commission will tell you that.”
“I’ve tried. They say they have no record of my father being killed. If this man was my father’s batman as you say, he would know exactly where my father fell. He would have been with him. He would have seen the same action. I want to meet the man who was my father’s batman. I don’t even care if he took my father’s name. I know nothing about my father and that just isn’t fair.”
“Why don’t you ask your mother?”
“She won’t talk about him. Just bursts into tears. She was only nineteen when I was born, I did work that one out. She loved him so much, you see. My poor mother. She never so much as looked at another man.”
“How can your mother, a widow, let you dress so well?”
“Grandfather was rich. Barnaby says he was stinking rich.” The girl giggled. “My mother inherited all his money. Granny was dead by then.”
“And after your mother?”
“Oh, I’ll be rich all right. Probably as rich as you, Mr Brigandshaw, if that isn’t rude. I will write to you. You are going home? Or do you now have to stay in England? Now, can we dance? I usually find these parties such a bore.”
“May I have my supper first? I’m starving hungry. Nothing since breakfast. I didn’t want to favour any one of them in the office so I went without lunch. Let me order some food first and while it’s coming, we can dance. I must warn you, I’m very bad. I am more at home in the African bush than in a London supper club. Drink without food is a killer. What do you do, Miss Voss?”
“Please call me Justine. It turns out we have so much in common. I don’t do very much. Nothing at all, really. Mother encourages me to go out. I’m looking for a husband, you see. All girls in my class and age are looking and when they find one, they don’t have to think anymore… Oh dear, I’m sorry. Don’t think I’m trying to make you into a husband. I just want to find out about my father.”
Harry smiled. The waiter from his first table took his order.
“I want a steak an inch thick and a foot wide, red right through the middle. The rest on the plate doesn’t matter.”
“Where’re you from, sir?” asked the waiter politely.
“Africa. Can you do that for me, Thomas?” The man wore his name on his jacket collar.
“I’ll have a word myself with the chef.”
The waiter went off on his personal errand.
“Now we can dance. Don’t worry, Justine. I’m old. Much too old for you.”
“But Father was a lot older than Mother!… Oh, there I go again. I’m always putting my foot in it.”
They did not talk on the dance floor. Just swayed to the music. Harry watched for the waiter with the steak he wanted so badly. The rest of the party at the three joint tables were not eating, just drinking and dancing and hopping from table to table. Everyone, it seemed to Harry, knew each other. They were all trying so hard to have a good time.
Harry was glad to keep his mouth shut. He had invented the batman story off the top of his head. Over the years, Harry had met Colonel Voss on more than one occasion. If nothing else, the man who called himself Colonel Voss was a gentleman. If he had taken on a dead man’s identity, he had not been his batman. Surreptitiously, Harry had a good look at the girl on the dance floor swaying in front of him to the music. He could see no resemblance to the old man. Harry did not think it surprising. The man who had found the Valley of the Horses was an old man. Weathered by too many years in the African bush. What he looked like as a young man had long left his face.
There were two things Harry decided before going back to eat his steak at the table. He was not going to phone Primrose 101. He was not going to write back to Justine Voss and introduce her to the ‘batman’.
When Harry finished a very good steak with one small new potato on one side and a spoonful of peas on the other, Barnaby sat down next to him. There was an older man with him. Barnaby was exuding good humour. The hatred caused by jealousy had gone. Were it not for the family ties, Harry would have been less affable. He would just have to remember not to tread on Barnaby’s toes again.
“I want you to meet an old friend of mine, Harry. CE Porter this is my brother-in-law, Group Captain Harry Brigandshaw. The air ace. CE is a chap to know in the City. If you need anyone to help you float Colonial Shipping, CE’s the man.”
“How did you know I was thinking of taking the company public?” With less whisky fogging his mind, Harry would not have pursued the issue.
“It’s the right thing to do,” said CE Porter, putting out his hand for Harry to shake. “Put in a professional manager. With respect, Mr Brigandshaw, never try to run a business you know nothing about. The business world is changing. Leave it to the professionals.”
“You know about me?”
“It is my business to know about what is happening in the City. The internal politics at Colonial Shipping will run you ragged. Find a good, strong man from the outside. Give him a mandate. Then leave him in charge. If you wish to learn the business, that is another story. But mark my words, it will take you five years. You can’t start at the top of anything, however many shares you own. It simply doesn’t work.”
Barnaby was smirking at Harry like any good pimp with a really sexy woman. The world worked in strange ways. The man Porter was talking sense. More sense than he had heard all day. Harry was well aware that a man with money was always a target.
“Do you have a card, Mr Porter?”
“Of course, Mr Brigandshaw. I have to leave now. I like to wake fresh for business each morning. The City of London may look polite and gentlemanly at first. It is not. Keep a cool head, Mr Brigandshaw. And watch your back for a Brutus. Some of them would stab a brother to make more money.”
Across the table, Tina was trying to catch his eye while licking her lips. Harry avoided eye contact. He was ready to go home. Some of the others had already left.
Harry called for his bill. When it came, Barnaby was nowhere to be seen. The bill included everyone’s drinks and cover charges. It was the largest single bill Harry had ever seen in a restaurant. Harry paid the bill with a sigh. He said goodbye to Justine Voss and left on his own.
At the exit door, his waiter was waiting for him. The man had called him a taxi.
“Whose bill was it really?” asked Harry, knowing perfectly well.
“Mr St Clair. He said you wouldn’t mind. Didn’t have the cash on him.”
“I thought so.”
Outside in the taxi, Harry laughed at himself.
“Teach you to dance close with another man’s woman.”
“What did you say, guv?”
“Nothing. The Savoy Hotel. What time is it?”
“Midnight.”
“Feels like four in the morning,” said Harry.
“One of those nights, guv… You a foreigner?”
“Yes, I am. But I also know the shortest route to the Savoy.”
“A man can only try.”
The man was brazen. Harry liked it.
When they reached the Savoy by the direct route Harry gave the man a pound note for a tip.
“Blimey! What’s that for, guv?”
“Being honest.”
What CE Porter was trying to tell him was right. A fool and his money are soon parted. When he drifted off to sleep, he thought of the free drink for Samuel Adams in the Lion was the best value for his money all day… First thing in the morning he was going to check up on CE Porter.
Then Harry fell into a dreamless sleep.
The office of the managing director of Colonial Shipping was an unpretentious affair. Harry’s grandfather had seen to that and Uncle James had carried on the tradition. The board table was in the same room. The board of directors met in the managing director’s office. It made the point of who was in charge as well as saving space. Harry soon gathered his grandfather was not a man to fritter away his money showing off.
They showed him the books of accounts that might just as well have been in Greek. They showed him pictures of the ships. They gave him a list of subsidiary companies that was as long as his arm, with job descriptions that meant very little. There was a confirming house, whatever that was. A shipping and clearing company divorced from Empire Castle Line with subsidiaries with foreign-sounding names. There was a freight company that Harry surmised rightly moved goods by truck from inland in Britain and Africa to the ports and the ships of Empire Castle, as well as a company previously owned by two companies merged by Colonial Shipping. There were storage companies right throughout Africa and at all the large British ports.
CE Porter was right. He had no idea what was going on. He knew how to fly an aeroplane. He knew how to explore for minerals and recognise a rough diamond from a piece of quartz. He knew how to grow maize and look after a herd of cattle. Thanks to his Grandfather Manderville he even knew how to grow and cure tobacco.
“Five years! I don’t think so.”
“What did you say, sir?”
“Nothing, Grainger. Well, not nothing. I just have no idea what this lot is all about.”
“You’ll get the gist of it soon enough.”
“I had no idea the business was so spread. So diverse. So complicated… Just out of interest, do we have ships with cold rooms? Places where the temperature is kept to say five degrees on the centigrade scale.” Harry was thinking of his friend Pierre Le Jeune and the acres and acres of new fruit trees growing in the Inyanga.
“I don’t know, sir. Why would anyone want a commercial cool room on board a ship?”
“To carry fruit from Africa to England when the fruit season is over in Europe. An industrial-sized freezing compartment to carry my beef from Rhodesia to England.”
“We have beef in England, sir.” Now Grainger was buttering up.
“Thank you… We don’t have such ships, do we?”
“No, sir.”
“Ask around. Better still go to Birmingham, Mr Grainger. Go and see an engineer or two. The British are the most inventive nation on earth.”
“The Americans?” Grainger was now being generous.
“Yes, well, maybe the Americans… Do you wish to go to America, Mr Grainger?”
“No, sir. Birmingham will be sufficient. We have clients in Birmingham who make heavy machinery. Bakers. Electric generators. We ship their goods out to all parts of Africa. They’ll probably know what to do… Are there any fruit growers in Africa?”
“Maybe this business is not so difficult after all. If I’d studied economics at Oxford instead of geology, I’d know what all these books and papers were about.”
“You went to Oxford, sir!”
“Even colonial hicks from Africa are sometimes allowed into Oxford, Grainger.”
“I’m sure they are, sir… When would you like me to go to Birmingham, sir?”
Harry mentally gave up. Any minute he expected the shipping manager to put up his hand and ask permission to go to the small boy’s room down the corridor.
“As soon as possible, Mr Grainger.”
“Right you are, sir. Will that be all, sir? There’s a woman outside said she wants to see you, sir. Mary at reception was going to come and tell you but I thought it was better for me to knock on your door, sir.”
“Very kind of you, Grainger. Please ask the lady in question to come in… I met this man last night.” Harry handed Grainger CE Porter’s card. “I want him investigated.”
“Has he done something wrong?”
“Bank report. Where he lives. Clubs. Friends. Business partners. Everything about the man. Can you do that for me, Grainger?”
“Before or after I go to Birmingham?”
Harry went back to reading the paper on his desk that he had been reading when the knock came at his door. He was just glad Grainger had not flown as his wingman during the war or else he would have been dead. He was reading and comprehending very little when Mary from reception showed Justine Voss’s mother into his office. It was almost lunchtime.
“I think you and I should talk about this over lunch, Mrs Voss,” he said gently after Mrs Voss introduced herself. “I presume Justine told you I know your husband?”
“Well, he wasn’t exactly my husband, Mr Brigandshaw. Larry was married to another woman at the time. She’s dead now. So is her son, Justine’s half-brother. Walter Voss was killed in 1916. On the Somme.”
Mrs Voss, as she liked to call herself, was a good-looking woman. Better looking than her daughter, whose prettiness came from her youth. Mrs Voss had a mature good look that was rare in women. Harry guessed she was only a few years older than himself. He liked her directness. For not beating around the bush.
On the fifth floor of Colonial Shipping House, there was a small private dining room. The managing director’s private preserve. On the other side of the kitchen was a larger room for senior managers. The executive dining room. A similar room fed the rest of the staff. The canteen. The Captain liked his staff to eat properly. Said they worked better, so Harry had been told. The real reason, Harry thought, was a half-hour lunch break instead of an hour. The old Pirate had traded a free lunch for an extra half hour of their time. Harry thought the trade was worth it. The food was good and overabundant with fresh vegetables. Even on land, Harry’s grandfather had not forgotten the scourge of scurvy, a disease caused by not eating fresh fruit and vegetables.
The small dining room was only big enough for two people. The Captain did not entertain in the dining room. He either did business one-to-one, or ate lunch on his own. For an employee to be invited to lunch by the Captain was usually an ordeal he remembered for the rest of his life. All the snippets of gossip were fitting together in Harry’s mind. Already he knew he had missed something important in his life by not knowing his grandfather.
“I want you on my side, Mr Brigandshaw,” Mrs Voss had said the moment they sat down at the table that was set for two people. Harry now had an excuse to eat in his own dining room without inviting one of his managers.
Once the food came, he decided in future to eat alone or with someone from outside the company. The food was as good as the food he ate at home on Elephant Walk.
“This had to come, of course,” said Mrs Voss. “No one can live forever with a lie. If it gets out, Justine’s chances of a good marriage will be over. Despite my father’s money which will one day be hers.” Mrs Voss had waited for the food before getting into the delicacy of her subject.
Harry was smiling broadly.
“Why are you smiling, Mr Brigandshaw?”
“Please go on, Mrs Voss. I assure you, I was not being rude.”
“How is Larry?” The good-looking woman in front of Harry had a whimsical, faraway look.
“Last time I heard of him he was trying not to be stampeded by a herd of wild horses. Please, I don’t know him well. He’s more of a legend in a perverse kind of way. You know he does not have a penny?”
“He gave his wife and son his money before he disappeared. That is before Justine was born. Larry resigned his commission when he fo
und out I was pregnant. Everyone knew of course. Among the families. It was agreed by everyone Larry would go to Africa and not come back… Have you ever been torn between duty to a son and duty to a child not born? To a woman on one side indifferent to anything but the social swirl. To a woman you loved more than life itself. Divorce was a rare thing in 1899 but it was possible if all the parties were to agree. Agnes, that was Larry’s wife, would not agree, of course. In exchange for every penny of Larry’s money, she agreed to a compromise. She would tell the world she had divorced Larry. I would tell the world I had married Larry. Larry would never again see his son. Larry would later get it reported he had been killed in the war in South Africa that had just started… He would never set eyes on the child that was growing in my womb… I don’t think she cared a fig about Larry. Or Walter for that matter. She was only concerned with herself. How she appeared in society. She was quite frivolous, Mr Brigandshaw. My parents agreed to the compromise. So did her parents. What else could they do? I went away for two years to Greece. And came back as Mrs Voss. The irony of the whole thing was Agnes was by then dead. I don’t even know what she died from.”
“Why didn’t Colonel Voss come back to England?”
“He had no money. My father would not allow it. And anyway, how did one live with a dead man?”
“You could have gone to Rhodesia.”
“And been penniless. For me, that would have been perfect. But not for Justine. The evil tongues had stopped wagging, Mr Brigandshaw. Whichever way, people might have found out. I had sinned in the face of God. I had fallen in love with a married man. I did not want Justine to bear the burden of my sin… Mr Brigandshaw. Please. This is no laughing matter.”
