by Peter Rimmer
Merlin St Clair came down the steps from the long terrace that ran the length of the house and shook his hand. Mrs Mason, the cook, was standing just outside the gothic front door of the house.
“I’m so sorry, Harry,” he said. “If anything ever happened to Genevieve I don’t know what I would do. How are you coping, Harry?”
“Went up on the hills over there and screamed at the heavens.”
“You did that, I remember, when you came back from Africa two years after Lucinda was killed.”
“Somehow again it has made me feel better.”
“How long are you staying?”
“Back in the office on Monday. With the war going on, we have to go on for the ones that can’t fight anymore… I need the distraction.”
“Judging from last night’s six o’clock news, the invasion has been a success. You likely know more than us tucked away in the country. Old Mrs Mason will see you have a room. You remember Mrs Mason? She’s still the housekeeper and the cook. She and mother are a comfort to each other. He was such a lovely boy. Why does God always take the best in a war? We weren’t so lucky either, Harry. Lost Frederick, then Robert lost his foot, which wasn’t so bad for a writer. A writer doesn’t need two feet to write a good novel. But you know this… Robert has a new book on the way. Freya said she was going into Corfe Castle for something. For Chuck. Why do Americans call Charles by the name of Chuck? Never did understand. Richard’s at school. Well, you know all that as well. How long are you staying?”
Smiling at Merlin’s forgetfulness, Harry followed them into the old house. When he reached the lounge, Lady St Clair was waiting to give him another sympathetic hug. Harry wondered if she knew Frank was her grandson, Barnaby’s son, not his. The thought of his family coming back from Africa made him suddenly smile.
“Nothing like a good scream,” he said, accepting the glass of dry sherry Robert put in his hand.
“To absent friends,” said Robert raising his glass.
“To absent friends,” they all said in reply.
For Harry, it was good to be among old friends who had shared so much of his life. Through the open door, Harry could see Mrs Mason going off with his old flying coat to make him up a room. For the first time in many years he could feel the presence of Lucinda, dead for so long. Outside the window, looking out from the back of the house, the lawn was uncut, like the lawns at Hastings Court, for lack of petrol to drive the lawnmowers.
“Why do we bother to cut lawns, Harry?” asked Robert following the direction of Harry’s gaze. “We could trim everything and bring it into line. Does that make it any more beautiful? We like to impose our will. Silly. All of nature is best left alone. You think we’ve lived too long, Harry? Is there more in the past, for the likes of you and I, than the future? Oxford. Where you and I met. All that enthusiasm to change the world. All that energy expended to get our degrees. Did we ever use our degrees? Did we ever learn anything?”
“We learnt to think. That was all it was about. Now I’m thinking too much. All I do is think of him. Will it fade? Will his face fade away by the time I’m very old? Is there anything left of this life when we die? The world only exists when it is seen in our own minds. Without our minds creating the picture there would be nothing… Are you going back to America when the war’s over? Won’t be long now. Months rather than years. All that death and destruction. What for? We all have to rebuild what we knocked down. The Americans are talking about rebuilding a new Europe with some kind of an economic plan. To stop us all squabbling. There will always be disagreement. Human nature. To kill and be killed. Darwin and his bloody survival of the fittest. Anthony was one of the fittest. So was André Cloete, South African friend of my nephew Tinus. Only the living talk. The dead stop where they died, soon forgotten. Sorry, Robert. I’m just feeling sorry for myself; the most pointless act of mankind. What’s the point of feeling sorry for oneself? Makes me achingly sad. The children coming back will help.”
“And Tina?”
“Four years is a long time. I never ask her on the phone what she’s up to. If it’s bad, I don’t want to know. If it’s good, I hope she will tell me. It’s only ever about the children. Never about us. We need the children more than they need us. Does Freya miss her parents, I wonder? Not as much as they miss her. What I’m going to do to amuse myself after the war I don’t know. Right now, Tinus is giving air cover over the landing beaches. Once the army have secured the German airfields he’ll fly his wing to France, I suppose. He’s survived so much. Just a few more months. How does Merlin see Tinus as a son-in-law?”
“Never talks about it.”
“I suppose he wouldn't. Fathers can be jealous of their daughters, so I am told. How’s the new book coming along? Whatever happened to the mother? Esther, I think, was her name. Barmaid at the Running Horses at Mickleham. Strange, Merlin should meet her so close to my ancestral home. These things happen in times of war.”
“Like the rest of them. In the end they get written. People read them. Just another business really, Harry. Another way to make money. She’s drunk most of the time, to answer your question. Genevieve keeps in contact. Drunks live solitary, lonely lives.”
“There must be more to it than that, writing a book.”
“Sometimes. The publishers get excited. Max Pearl in America likes money. His whole life has been focused on money. Why do people want more and more money when they’ve got enough?”
“Feelings of insecurity. As hunters and gatherers our ancestors always searched for more. Even when they had enough food. Wired into us, I suppose. Barnaby can never get enough. Do you think she knows?” said Harry, looking at Lady St Clair where she sat talking to Merlin on the deep settee.
“Probably. My mother would think it rude to talk about something like that. ‘Some things, Robert, are best left alone,’ she would say to me. Frank’s birth is one of those subjects.”
“He must know instinctively he’s different to the others. Always fighting. Always on the offensive. Always on the outside is Frank.”
“He’ll grow out of it.”
“I hope so. For his sake. And everyone else’s. Do you believe the sins of the father are visited on the son?”
When Harry looked up, Lady St Clair was looking straight at him. A look of admonition he remembered from his own mother. Lady St Clair must have heard what they were just saying.
“Have another sherry, Harry.”
“I’d better. What a strange life it has been for all of us.”
“Where are you going to live after the war?”
“Who knows? Tina will want to live in England. I want to go home to Africa. My mother would love to fuss over my children on Elephant Walk. Do we ever get what we want? I don’t think so. Even when we get what we think we want. The human race is never satisfied. No wonder we are always fighting... Will the bike be all right in the driveway?” They could both hear a car outside.
“I expect so. Sounds like Freya and the children. Let’s go out and say hello. That look my mother just gave you was so sad behind the disapproval.”
The next day after breakfast Harry took the footpath along the stream in the direction of Corfe Castle. The previous evening Mrs Mason had made them sandwiches for their supper. No one had wished to sit down to a formal dinner. Halfway to Corfe Castle, Harry knocked on the door to the railway cottage. The walk had softened his mood. Mrs P, Tina’s mother, opened the door. Old Pringle was in the shadow behind his wife, the morning sunlight blinding Harry at first as he went inside. No one said a word. In the kitchen, on the mantelpiece over the wood-fired stove, was a photograph of Anthony in his officer’s uniform, the peaked hat at a jaunty angle on his head. The photograph took in the head and shoulders with the RAF wings on Anthony’s uniform prominent. Next to the photograph was the picture of a young girl. Mrs P began to cry. Old Pringle put his arm through hers and took her to a comfortable chair near the kitchen table where he sat her down. On the stove, the kettle was just on the b
oil. Harry had never visited his in-laws without finding the kettle ready to make a pot of tea.
“Who’s the pretty girl?” asked Harry.
“Eleanor Botha,” said Mrs P looking up through her tears. “They were going to be married and live in Rhodesia.”
“When did he last visit you?”
“A month ago. Said not to say. Worried you were always on your own in that big house over the weekends. Every third leave he visited us, Harry.”
“Tina phoned?”
“She’s coming home with the children. There’s a telephone at the railway station. Mr P’s still working. Doesn’t want to stop. Are you staying at the Manor with Lady St Clair?”
“Do you mind?”
“You were Lady St Clair’s son-in-law first. What are we all going to do, Harry, without Anthony?”
“Remember him as he is in that photograph. Now he’ll never grow old.”
“Your nephew all right?”
“Yes. They would have told me. I always leave a number when I’m not in my London digs or up at the Court. I was so selfish to think I was the only one feeling pain.”
“All we leave behind are our children.”
“I’m glad Anthony came to see you two often. You will always have those memories.”
“Yes. He was our favourite grandson. Mr P always said Anthony was the only one in his family ever to be given a King’s Commission. Our grandson the officer, we used to say. We were so proud of him.”
When Harry left the cottage after drinking his tea, trying to find a subject to talk about other than Anthony, he walked slowly back to Purbeck Manor. Most of the time they had drunk their tea in silence. There was nothing more he could do for them. They all had to live their different lives the best they could.
“You are good people,” he had said as he left. “I have not been able to say that truthfully many times in my life. Tina will bring down the children when she comes home.”
“You don’t mind about Frank?”
“The truth? Of course I do. Except for one part of the mess, Frank is a living part of Lucinda in my house.”
“Of course. She would have been Frank’s aunt. God has strange ways of compensating our follies.”
“The one I worry about most is not myself, Tina or even Barnaby. It’s Frank.”
“Does he know?”
“Nobody has told him. What he does know is that he’s different. Different to the rest of the children.”
“She loved Barnaby so much. From a child. We never saw it coming, you might say. Let them play together as children. Barnaby never married. All about class. Him from the big house, us common people.”
“It’s how we behave that counts.”
“Don’t be hard on her. Wasn’t her fault. Never could say no to Barnaby. Whatever he wanted she did for him.”
“She gave me five lovely children.”
“You include Frank?”
“Of course, Mrs P. I have always treated him as my son.”
How such a deep chasm had come between two families living five miles apart for centuries was beyond Harry’s comprehension, as in Frank they had to be related. Not once but many times. If the truth of the family trees were known, they were likely one interlocking family of cousins, distant and not so distant.
As he walked back under the trees near to the river, some with their branches under the water, Harry thought of a distant conversation he had had with his father before he left Rhodesia to go up to Oxford. His father had been explaining why there was no difference between his own father, the Pirate, and Harry’s mother’s father, Sir Henry Manderville Bart with a written pedigree that went back to the time of William the Conqueror.
“You can usually be sure who is your mother, Harry. Never your father. The origin of your father you take on trust. We are all the same. Some are luckier than others to have the man they call their father with enough money to send us to Oxford.”
“Are you really my father, sir?”
“Of course I am. Your mother said so.”
“She was married to your elder brother when I was born.”
“A little too soon after the marriage, son. No, Harry, it was me. In the grotto at Hastings Court, your grandfather’s ancestral home. She only ever loved one man. That was me. Why, when I knew the date of your birth I came back to England, put a ladder up to your mother’s bedroom window and ran off with the three of you.”
“Who was the third?”
“Your nurse. The wife of Tinus Oosthuizen, my mentor and friend when I first arrived in Africa. Long before Cecil Rhodes sent his column to Fort Salisbury and hoisted the Union Jack.”
“So you are my father?”
“Of course I am. Mark my word. One day Madge will marry Barend. The Brigandshaws, Mandervilles and Oosthuizens will then join to create one African family. Madge swore to marry Barend on her sixteenth birthday. One happy family, my son.”
“General Oosthuizen was hanged by us British for treason. For going out with a Boer commando from the Cape.”
“Something I tried to stop. With every fibre of my body. Not for going out with his fellow Boers. For us British hanging an honest person.”
“It’s all so complicated.”
“It’ll get more complicated as you go through your life.”
“Is it all worth it?”
“Only you will be able to answer that question Harry. Have a good life. It’s the only one you are going to get, despite what my Reverend Uncle Nat the missionary might have to say about it. One life. Make the most of it. You never know how short it is going to be. Uncle Nat says a lot of things he’s not quite sure about. All part of increasing the empire, I suppose. Make them all Christians and they’ll behave themselves.”
With the tall chimney pots of Purbeck Manor now in his sights, Harry came back in his mind to the present, worrying about Wing Commander Tinus Oosthuizen, Royal Air Force, old General Oosthuizen’s grandson.
4
Seven weeks later when Tina Brigandshaw brought the three youngest children back to Hastings Court, Betty Smythe put the morning mail on William’s desk. On top of the opened letters was an envelope.
“Thought you’d like to see the envelope first. Indian postage stamps. Can’t read the postmark. The return address on the back in Singapore. From your cousin-in-law. My guess is she got the letter to India in a bigger envelope. Someone then posted this letter to England.”
“You’d better go look at Ruthy. She’s making noises.”
“Your servant, sir.”
“Go on then.”
“I want to know what’s inside. Ruthy’s gurgling to herself. She’s going to be a singer. They all start singing in the pram. The good ones. Go on, Will, open the bloody thing. It must have something to say about Joe and the children.”
Carefully, having peered at the stamps, William slit the envelope open with a letter opener. Inside were four sheets of pale blue paper.
“It’s in English.”
Watching her husband read the pages, Betty saw his face light up as he read.
“Joe’s in Changi jail. The Japs brought his unit back from building the Burma railway line… The RAF have bombed Singapore naval docks from Rangoon… Wavell’s Chindits have pushed the Japs halfway down the Malayan peninsula. It’s all here. The Royal Engineers are trying to rebuild the docks under Japanese guards. We’ve sunk some of their ships in the harbour. Joe’s going to come out alive. I don’t think Cherry Blossom wrote this letter. It’s been dictated more likely. All the spelling and grammar are correct. Somehow, Cherry Blossom, or her father, have contact with Joe in prison when the work detail is over for the day.”
“Or Chinese friends in the docks.”
“There’s a PS. She says there’s a British journalist in Changi with the rest of them… That Joe says I know… She says his name is Bruno Kannberg, from the London Daily Mirror. Where’s Horatio right now? Well, I’ll be buggered.”
“How must I know? Don’t be vulgar. So
meone will hear.”
“Do we have Gillian’s phone number in New York? She never came back to England. Go and phone Arthur Bumley at the Mirror. Bruno must have been captured by the Japs right at the start of the American attack on Guadalcanal. The Japs found out he was British and sent him to Singapore with the rest of the British prisoners.”
“Calm down, Will!”
“Why should I? This is the first good news to come out of the bloody war.”
“Did she say anything about the kids?”
“They’re fine. I’m going to phone Harry Brigandshaw right now. Cheer him up. Isn’t his wife due back from South Africa this week? She had to wait to get the kids out of school at the end of term. Why weren’t we told the RAF have bombed Japanese shipping in Singapore harbour? Get your shorthand pad. We’ll get this story out before Arthur Bumley. We can wire it to Glen Hamilton in Denver. News, Betty, what news. Even in Asia we have the enemy on the run… It’s Bombay. The postmark is Bombay.”
“Don’t you want me to check Ruthy?”
“She can wait.”
“Men and their priorities,” said Betty sarcastically.
“Money, Betty. You want new furniture for the house.”
“Are you going to mention Bruno by name? It’ll be big news in America. He went ashore from an American boat.”
“He’s still a Japanese prisoner.”
“If the Japanese know we know he’s alive they’ll be careful. They know they are going to lose the war. People change their minds when the boot is on the other foot. Prison guards in particular.”
“We’ll make it front page news across America.”
“You’re more excited about Bruno than Joe.”
“Of course I am. Bruno’s famous. Bruno’s news.”
“Joe’s your cousin.”
“She says he’s all right. The Japs need a sergeant in the Royal Engineers to repair their docks. What a bit of luck.”
