by Peter Rimmer
“I only found out quite recently that my mother was married to my uncle when I was born.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I am also a bastard, Mrs Voss. So is my sister, Madge. So was my brother, George. And it doesn’t make the slightest difference to who I am… But I promise you in the name of God, no one will ever hear from me what I know about you and your family… How was your lunch?”
“Fabulous, Mr Brigandshaw.”
“I thought so too, Mrs Voss… Why don’t you both come out and visit me in Rhodesia?”
“Why would I do that, Mr Brigandshaw?”
“To meet Larry Voss again. He’s old, yes. Not the darling soldier. Somehow I don’t think you’ll mind… As I have pointed out, things are different in Rhodesia. There are more important things than social protocol.”
“We would never get away with it.”
“You would if you never came back to England again. As I heard it, you now own your family money.”
“Justine would never want to leave London.”
“She would for her father. A child only has one father, remember.”
“She’d never find a husband in Africa.”
“You’d be surprised. Good-looking young girls are scarce in Rhodesia. Rich or poor. Rhodesia attracts real men like Larry Voss. Men who want to do something for themselves. Not fit into dead men’s shoes like they want me to do here. You’d be surprised how many men of good family are looking for wives in Rhodesia.”
“Are you looking for a wife, Mr Brigandshaw?”
“Not any more, Mrs Voss. My wife was killed by a madman. She was pregnant at the time.”
“How terrible.”
“Life rarely turns out how it is meant to. How we think it was meant to. Lucinda was Barnaby St Clair’s sister. I met your daughter with Barnaby at the Trocadero. She may not have known he was my brother-in-law… There is just one thing I don’t understand. How does Colonel Voss know the name of his daughter?”
“I wrote and told him. I wrote three times. The second to say Agnes was dead. The third to say Walter had been killed in action. He never replied. I myself began to believe he had died in the Boer War.”
To Harry’s surprise, Grainger was a good report writer. Both reports were concise, well written and well researched. They had taken a week to reach his desk by which time he had visited his grandmother and twice postponed his trip to Dorset and Purbeck Manor. Having found a considerable respect for his grandfather he had hoped to find out more about the man.
The flat was looked after by a paid companion. Outwardly, his grandmother looked perfectly well, glad to see a visitor, offering him tea and cake. She smiled and smiled. An old, bent woman with white hair and hands gnarled with arthritis but otherwise well and happy with the world.
At first, Harry thought his visit was difficult for his grandmother. That she had no wish to confront the history that had left Harry growing up in a remote part of Africa. Slowly it dawned on him. His grandmother had no clue as to who he was. Inside her head, her mind had gone. When she gave the paid companion a third name in ten minutes Harry knew his grandmother was suffering from a total loss of memory. Even that part of his grandfather that had been in her mind was lost to Harry forever.
He finished his tea. Said he had to go and left, his duty done.
Outside the block of flats, Harry found himself crying. Without the old, bent lady upstairs, he would have had no life. The coming and going of life seemed so pointless. Even more, he wanted to go home before all the ghosts of England sucked the life out of him. The cry for his grandmother was silent on the street, only the tears were wet and salty. There and then he decided to write to his Uncle Nat to give him Hastings Court. It would be easier written down. More final. If the bishop did not want the family home that had caused Harry’s parents so much pain, he would sell it. Get rid of it. Be done with the whole damn thing.
Harry took a taxi back to the Savoy Hotel and had the desk put a phone call through to his old friend Robert St Clair.
“I’m driving down now, Robert. Will it be all right? Your mother, I mean.”
“You are family, Harry… I want you to read my new book.”
Harry smiled. Happy in himself again. There was always something Robert wanted him to do.
“It’s been a long time,” said Harry. “Too long. Did I tell you I even have a chauffeur?”
“You did. Hoot when you get to the main gate. I’m still working on the book.”
Harry read Grainger’s report again while seated in the comfort of the back of the car. By the time Pierre Le Jeune’s apples and pears were growing on his trees, there would be cold rooms on the ships. Grainger had even done a costing. He asked Fortnum & Mason what they would pay for fresh fruit during the months of the English winter. Pierre would be pleased. He would make a fortune.
Instead of reading again the report on CE Porter, Harry sat back in the comfort of the car. At the least, Porter was devious in his business dealings. At the worst, he was a thief. The kind of man to know a thief when he saw one. Dangerous as an enemy. The man, of course, would be able to run Colonial Shipping standing on his head. Whether the shareholders would profit was altogether another thing.
“It’s all too damn complicated,” Harry said out loud.
The uniformed driver was unable to hear. Someone had built a glass barrier between the servant and the master. Harry would have much preferred to sit in the front seat and chat the miles away while they drove down to Dorset. Better still, he would like to have driven the car himself.
11
Hastings Court and Colonial Shipping, April to May 1922
Barend Oosthuizen had gone back to his old haunts and old habits. Madge’s husband and the father of their three children was a mean drunk. He enjoyed inflicting pain. In the years since he had parted company with Harry Brigandshaw on the Skeleton Coast of South West Africa, he had put on weight and muscle. He had two uses for the money he earned a mile down in the bowels of the earth: hard liquor and the bodies of cheap women. No one loved him. No one liked him. Down the gold mine where he dug rock from the face of the seam of gold, sweating in the damp heat, shirtless, covered in dust and dirt, they kept their distance as they tried to do in the bars he trawled, looking for the fights that gave his violent aggression the pleasure he craved, the exquisite pleasure of inflicting pain on other people. He neither liked the world nor its people, especially the English people who had killed his father. His father, a Boer general, hanged by the neck by the victors of a war to show the world what would happen to them for daring to defend their land and farms from the greatest empire on earth.
Barend had done it before as a younger man. Had even then forsworn his hatred of the British. Married a British girl. Now, happy again. Wallowing in his self-pity, he fought his way through the bars of Jeppestown hoping that one day he would get himself killed.
The small room he slept in contained a bed and dirty blankets, the cheapest rent he could find. Every night he returned home drunk, a great bulk of a man swearing to himself, often bloodied, mostly with the blood of his victims. When the drink had been enough, he picked a fight. When his lust was satisfied, he hit the whore. Always he paid. Always they forgot and let him back again. He never broke anything other than his victims’ bodies.
In the mining camp that was Johannesburg, below the surface of the new wealth wrenched from the bowels of Mother Earth, Barend was at home. This time he was the bully. No one knew his name. No one knew his background. The wise never even met the mean stare in his eyes. Only the very large or very drunk stood their ground and paid the price.
In the weeks and months of his nightly destruction, he never found out the name of the woman to whom he paid the rent. She never once asked his name. Never wanted to know. The old hag had seen many men like Barend come and go through her life. She only had one rule. They must pay. What they did with their lives after that was their own damn business. She knew better than any of them. There
was nothing soft below the surface of Johannesburg. Life was hard. Mostly short. Always painful.
In the morning, Barend’s hangover woke him feeling depressed. The day was tormenting, hitting the rock face with a pickaxe, the dregs of the alcohol fighting to sweat itself out of the pores of his skin. Barend ate a mean lunch of bread and cheese he took down the shaft at the start of the day he did not want. By the time he came out of the ground his body was screaming for alcohol. The shower and change of clothes made no difference to his feeling. The first three beers only quenched his thirst. Then the brandy began to answer the screaming. Helped for a while. For an hour, sometimes two, Barend was content. Until the brandy brought out the aggression.
What Barend wanted more than life was to get his own back on a world that made him go on living. He hated them all.
On the north side of a larger world, while Barend Oosthuizen was self-destructing, unbeknown, Harry Brigandshaw was fighting his own demon.
Most people would have been content to inherit a fortune. To take the title and benefits of being managing director of a large, successful company. Harry even understood the ungratefulness of what he was trying to do.
The responsibility was not the problem. Learning the job was not the problem, though he could still not understand in his mind why any man would wish to earn more money than he could possibly ever spend. Or gain satisfaction from the applause of other people impressed by the simple fact of wealth.
What he did not like was living in a city. Concrete and tarmac under his feet. The noise of man to pleasure his ears. Getting up in the dark, going to work in the dark, working under electric light in a concrete building all day and going home in the dark. Never the trees, the grass, the sound of birds. The blue sky and cotton wool clouds. A distant bark. The smell of the earth. Insects singing in the grass.
The months of the English winter gone were heavy on his mind. There was now a spring, but it was far away from London. Even giving away Hastings Court had proved a problem, a mountain of a problem.
Uncle Nat, the Bishop of Westchester, had prospered in the church. The zealous missionary had gone. Harry even thought God had gone, having proved his worth in his uncle’s pursuit of a successful career in the Church of England.
“Oh, goodness me, nephew. For what do I want Hastings Court? That was my father’s goal in life. When I’m Archbishop of Canterbury, I will live at Lambeth Palace. Surely you can’t compare Hastings Court to Lambeth Palace? Ridiculous. You’d better go, Harry. Kiss my ring.”
Harry had kissed the bishop’s ring on the bishop’s hand and gone. His uncle, he rather thought, had become a pompous ass. For the first time in seeing him his uncle had not asked Harry when last he had been to church. The man had bigger things on his mind. Goals loftier than one stray sinner.
A week later, Harry had offered the house of the Mandervilles to the National Trust, promising to endow a rehabilitation centre for wounded soldiers from the war. At least the home of his ancestors would again have a purpose. Men blasted in the hell of war could sit among the green land of England and try to repair their souls.
Harry was asked by the man from the National Trust to put the proposition in writing. The prim voice had sounded no more interested in Hastings Court than the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Westchester, the one-time Uncle Nat and African missionary in the diocese of Mashonaland. Harry shook his head and wrote a plea from his heart for the men who had suffered in the war.
Having then had no reply to his letter, Harry telephoned the man.
“Oh, no, we don’t want any more houses, Mr Brigandshaw. People are trying to get rid of the big houses these days. Giving them to us to maintain and still go on living in a small part of the premises. The war was most unkind to the landed gentry. You must know that. Sometimes two generations killed within months of each other. Two lots of death duty, you see. They’re broke. We are the last resort to save the old piles, you see. We have enough, Mr Brigandshaw. Quite enough, in fact. You can try to sell the place to a developer if you are near enough to London. Or just watch it crumble. There are ruins all over England. One more won’t make any difference.”
“I am prepared to endow the property, you remember?”
“What do I remember, Mr Brigandshaw?”
“I wish to turn Hastings Court into a rehabilitation centre for wounded soldiers, sailors and airmen.”
“Then why don’t you, Mr Brigandshaw?” The man was now irritated.
“I want you to own and administer the property. I wish to go home to Africa. I’m an African. I have a farm in Rhodesia.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with us, Mr Brigandshaw. It is Mr Brigandshaw?”
“You haven’t read my letter, have you?”
“I told you, we don’t want any more properties, Mr Brigandshaw.”
That weekend Harry had gone down to Hastings Court to have a quiet word with the portraits of his ancestors that hung on the walls above the great staircase that led up from the hall. It was a cold wet day in November. The light was dim. The features of his ancestors, other than their eyes, dim. All of them, including the women, seemed to give him a rueful smile.
“They know. They jolly well know. They probably tried to get out of their own responsibility.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said a voice from the stairwell. It was Uncle James’s butler. Harry had kept all the staff though he lived in a small flat in London.
“I was just talking to my ancestors, Crosswell.”
“Very good, sir.”
Harry chuckled. Talking to dead ancestors was more common than he thought. It seemed the house and Harry were bound together whether he liked it or not.
He wrote a long letter to his Grandfather Manderville explaining his dilemma. Suggesting his grandfather come to live at Hastings Court where he was born and lived the best part of his life. Harry thought his reasons persuasive. There was now money to live in the style the house suggested. Harry would pay for everything.
A letter came back in six weeks.
“Elephant Walk suits me well, Harry. There’s the tobacco, though Jim Bowman is learning fast. The girl from the newspaper article came for a visit. Jenny, somebody. Nice girl. Jim’s going to be a competent farmer but I hope he will always need my guidance. Emily doesn’t want to live in England. Madge is still hoping Barend will come home but we haven’t heard a word. You seem to have forgotten my great-grandchildren. Paula is now six. Tinus is five. Doris four. They spend a lot of time with me. Emily says it is my job to give them an education which I’ve started with Paula. She is more interested when we go out looking for butterflies so I have shown her butterfly books. We are using them to teach her how to read or I won’t tell her the names of the butterflies… All you find in England are cabbage whites in profusion. The other day Paula was surrounded by at least a hundred butterflies. Big and small. She was so excited. A small girl in a small dress with butterflies flying all around her. I’ll take that beautiful memory to my grave. I’m not going back to England, Harry. Have the ancestors been talking to you or something? And on the subject of grandchildren, when are you going to marry again? Lucinda died three years ago. She would not want you to live out your life alone, Harry. You need children of your own. I thank God I had your mother before my dear wife died.”
Harry had smiled at his grandfather’s double standards. The man had been a widower most of his life. It was quite clear. No one was going to help his problem other than himself. He owned Hastings Court, and that was that.
By the time spring came, Harry understood most of what was going on at Colonial Shipping. What had once seemed Greek was now plain English. Harry’s experience of life helped. Commanding the squadron during the war. Managing Elephant Walk after his father was killed by the Great Elephant. It was mostly running people. The actual business, whatever it was, had the same end product. The making of money.
Harry had never worked harder in his life than he had over the last few months.
Harry thought the last thing in the mind of Brett Kentrich was having babies. All her thoughts were carnal. On and off the stage. Whether eating oysters or ravaging Harry in her four-poster bed she slyly claimed had once belonged to Hannah Lightfoot, the mistress of George the Third.
They had met through Merlin St Clair who was so besotted with Tina Pringle he no longer pursued the actress in the West End. The spat with his brother Barnaby was the talk of London town. Two brothers chasing the same girl. Once the Tatler had managed to take a photograph of Tina Pringle, the sister of the South African rand baron, and the brothers St Clair. In the photograph Barnaby was glaring at Merlin which Harry learnt had pleased Tina no end. The girl was a terrible tease, and though it seemed through the winter to Harry that Tina was everywhere to be found, he made it his business to avoid the ‘come on’ looks and the winks. It was as if they had some big secret together which from Harry’s perspective they did not. Unless it was to make Barnaby so jealous he would overcome his class snobbery and make her his wife. It was obvious to Harry, Tina Pringle was the one girl all the men wanted to wine, dine and bed. Even himself. She oozed sex appeal. Her body. Her eyes. Her mouth. Only the danger lurking at the back of Barnaby’s eyes kept him from inviting her out. He owed that much to Lucinda. Not to make her brother Barnaby do something the whole family would regret.
Miss Kentrich was playing the second lead in a musical at Drury Lane that had lasted a fortnight. She was out of work though not out of money for the moment. She said she was twenty-five which Harry thought a lie to get her work. Most drama companies favoured girls with long experience. The young, very pretty ones too often forgot their lines or were more interested in catching a husband, using the stage as their net. She had all the looks and sex appeal of Tina Pringle without the power to control a man. She was far too nice. She liked to give. She liked to make people around her happy, especially the men. The demands of her own body were tremendous. When she had exhausted herself on her man, the man was drained to the last drop. He had had all he wanted. The mystery, the tease that kept women in control of their men, was spent. Brett, like the men she satiated, wanted something new. For Harry, she was the perfect foil to Tina Pringle.
