Just the Memory of Love

by Peter Rimmer

  Byron followed her into the bedroom and closed the door out of habit. When he turned, Fanny’s dress was on the floor.

  “Do you like the lights on or off?” she asked.

  “On.”

  “Good.” She climbed into bed and smiled at him. In no hurry, Byron took off his three-piece suit, his shirt and his socks. “Do you want the wine?”

  “Not really.”

  It was a perfect weekend for both of them and they never once mentioned how clever it was of Fanny to remember his name and look it up in the telephone book.

  Two weeks later he called for Fanny. She was out.

  “Come on over, it’s my turn,” said Virginia, who was dressed to go out.

  “What about Johnny?”

  “Who do you think’s with Fanny? Good things have to be shared. That’s friendship. None of us want to be serious. We still have a lot of living to do. You can take me to that little Polish restaurant. Fanny said the Polish vodka did something strange and nice. One day we’ll be old. Come, lover. Let the weekend begin. I’m hungry.”

  Two weeks later Virginia suggested Byron throw a small party in his flat for fourteen couples. Fanny and Virginia had invited five of their girlfriends and would he and Johnny invite five nice young men. She smiled at him sweetly and he understood.

  “You won’t be disappointed, lover.”

  Johnny selected three friends and Byron two, all of whom were making money in the new, revitalised London. The party split up at nine for the guests to pair off and go out to dinner in their separate ways. The arrangement was the beginning of a long friendship with Virginia and Fanny, Stepping and Try.

  For Will Langton, the best years of his life were not his schooldays. Stanmore had been a disaster. Years later, when Will looked back on his life and the four years of Stanmore purgatory, he told Hilary Bains, the group captain’s adopted son who had suffered the same indignations, that the modern reform schools would not be able to get away with the public school system that the wealthy thought essential to their children’s careers. The school stuffed the boys fifty-two to a dormitory, half-starved them, prefects beat them for so much as putting their hands in their pockets three times and bigger boys bullied while masters turned a blind eye. If the child happened to be a pretty boy, slight, called the runt, like Will, he was the target of every pervert, senior boy or master.

  Will’s slight build and bad eyes stopped him playing competitive sport, his work was clouded by the vague theory of wanting to be a painter, but, worst of all, he refused to join in the popularity stakes and say nice things about people he hated. People called him a misfit but Will told Hilary there were some things a boy did not wish to fit into and boarding school at Stanmore was one of them.

  The summer after leaving school brought the turning point in Will’s life. At last he had begun to grow and the violet eyes, softer and warmer than the twins’, were attractive to the opposite sex. He had been almost eighteen and still licking his metaphorical wounds, spending most of the summer days at Dancing Ledge, breathing the clean air of freedom and wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life. It was a rare warm summer and the tall kelp of the rocks, washed by a gentle sea, nodded their heads in sympathy with Will’s mood of relieved contentment. The rock pool that had been carved out of the solid rock for the evacuated kids in the war was perfection.

  For most of his time he was alone on the slim strip of level rock that ended at the swaying heads of the kelp, the small, sea-washed pool in the middle sparkling back at the sun with Will’s cave, one blind eye, watching all the beauty of sea and sky, rock and gulls and the slim, good-looking boy entering his manhood, tanned to the colour of hazelnut, hair bleached almost blond by the sun.

  Byron, for Will, had become an enigma and Will was convinced his brother would become a very rich man or end up in jail. On fleeting weekend visits, Byron told him all about the wining and dining and the name of the current girl; and even Will’s mathematics suggested a problem on the salary of a post-war clerk. Will rather hoped his brother was boasting, but that had never been Byron’s style.

  “Come up to London and we’ll find you a girl.”

  “Who’s we, Byron?”

  “Johnny Pike. You’ll like him.”

  Everything came back to Johnny Pike.

  The conversation he overheard between his father and brother had not been complimentary about the Pikes, especially the father who the group captain referred to as a big-time crook. Everyone had seemed to sense there was something not quite right.

  Randolph was now helping to run the farm, plodding along as usual, giving no one even a thought or worry. He had even married, to everyone’s surprise, a very nice, very dull girl whose father was an accountant in Poole, and both of them were as happy as if he was the King of England and she was his Queen.

  Where Josephine looked miserable, her sister-in-law, Anna, looked happy. Josephine’s hair was cropped severely, she wore no make-up, what looked like sackcloth for clothes and maintained a constant outflow of anti-establishment rhetoric that Will found boring. The last time Josephine brought a man to Langton Manor had been the year of his first racing bicycle. Since that Christmas it had been several women, most of them a good bit older than his sister, all of whom gave Will the shivers.

  She had an elfin face and wavy hair the colour of autumn, and she appeared at Dancing Ledge towards the middle of August, just with her parents and then on her own. They had exchanged a flow of glances across the rock but were too shy to talk.

  It was the rarest, sweetest moment of his life and he was to take it to his grave. The joining of hands was outside mortal understanding and within a week they had told each other every thought they had ever had. It was the gentlest of purest love, alone in their world.

  Her parents found them kissing on the sun-blessed rocks, barely clothed in bathing costumes and tore them physically apart, snatching the beauty and shattering it with filth.

  It was all over and Will was never to see her again, except in his mind. In their youthful bliss he had never heard her surname or any beginning of an address. The girl’s family had been staying in a farmer’s caravan and the farmer had no idea where the three had gone.

  “Paid cash, Will. How I like it. No questions. No tax. You lost something?”

  “Probably my life.”

  Then the hope was she would follow him and find her way to Langton Manor.

  When winter came he packed two small bags, kissed his mother, shook hands with his father and Granda and followed in the wake of Hilary Bains to Africa, a self-inflicted exile. It was the start of his odyssey through life.

  Nothing, but nothing was ever to prove more important than the girl.

  Granda gave him a lift to the main road. A shaft of sunlight had penetrated the winter clouds and touched the old car and the men, one old, one young standing awkwardly for a last goodbye. The family had been told a week before that Granda was dying of cancer.

  “Life is an adventure, grandson. Some of them good, some of them not so good.” The old man was bent and in pain. “And if it were not for this growth inside me I’d have a mind to come along. Now go and take the Langtons with you in your genes. I scraped up five hundred pounds. It’s probably all you will get from the family. The price of being a younger son. Now, God be with you and get out of my sight before you see an old man cry.”

  In slow stages, Will hitched lifts around the coast to Dover. The cross-channel boat to Calais took four hours, the seas heavy, the old boat fighting the strong headwinds. Despite the windfall from his grandfather, the cheapest passage to East Africa was still in his mind, hitching lifts across Europe to Trieste in Italy and taking a cargo boat across the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal. Two days into France, the excitement of youth had evaporated with the gloom of death and the pain that lay shattered on the rocks of Dancing Ledge.

  Back at Langton Manor, while Will was paying his passage on a Greek cargo boat that was tramping around Af
rica, Will’s call-up papers for the army arrived, the summons to his two years of national service. The group captain sent it back marked ‘Gone abroad – forwarding address unknown’.

  There was no music playing, just the cursing of the Greek captain. The boat was small, with peeling paint and reeking bilges but at least it was cheap. He was more lonely than at any moment of his life.

  He was sick for three days from the bad food and water and only watched the stars at night when the boat drifted along the British–French-built canal with the Egyptian desert on either side. There was an eternity in the depth of the sky he had not seen before.

  He had purchased a money belt at Dover and with Granda’s gift strapped to his skin he walked the streets of Port Said on the Suez Canal and then the boat broke away from Arabia and turned a heavy head for the Horn of Africa. At Mogadishu, in Italian Somaliland, Will felt the warm, soft air of Africa for the first time. The boat had kept out to sea and lighters shifted the small cargo back and forth. When he woke in the morning, they were well out to sea, the shore of Africa distant on the starboard side. His stomach had recovered.

  Maybe, he thought, just maybe there was some life after death and the mental vision of her screaming parents took passage with the ship’s wake and left him empty and sad.

  Hilary Bains trudged out to the long drop, checked it carefully for snakes, took down his trousers and sat on the throne. He had grown used to the flies and smell but not the magnificent view from the hill where he sat with his trousers round his ankles and the wide Zambezi River flowing below in constant pressure towards its destination in the unknown, distant sea.

  The mission station outside Lealui, Paramount Chief Mwene Kandala III’s winter capital, was a desolate affair consisting of two broken-down thatched huts for the priest, a tin shed for the school/clinic, a patch of ground where Hilary tried to grow vegetables mostly eaten by buck, baboons and bush pigs, and an open patch under a spreading acacia tree where Hilary held classes that did not amount to much as his knowledge of Lozi, the language spoken in the British Protectorate of Barotseland, was basic and the children were more interested in the free lunch than the learning.

  The London Missionary Society had sent him to Africa to preach the word of God but all he had been able to do was carry on with the rudimentary clinic and try and teach the children. For weeks on end Hilary did not speak English or have any kind of conversation. The few Europeans who lived in Barotseland, in the west of Northern Rhodesia, were eleven miles southeast of Mongu where the British Commissioner conducted his administration. The only way for Hilary to reach Mongu was to walk as the Land Rover promised to him in London six months earlier had not arrived. He was cut off in the middle of nowhere, the previous priest having died of malaria the week before Hilary arrived. His letters to London were sent to Mongu with one of the elder children of the mission who asked at the magistrates’ court for return mail. For three months there had been silence. Twice Hilary himself had gone down with malaria and dosed himself to recovery, sweating it out under the crumbling thatch, an old retainer, the mission’s only convert, cooking his food. Hilary’s belief in God was stretched to the limit. On both occasions, he had thought he was going to die.

  The railway station at Beira was teeming with black people, mostly dressed in rags. A massive steam engine of Rhodesia Railways was blowing smoke and steam over the third-class passengers that were crushed into the three forward carriages. The last carriage, after the second-class coaches, was first class and Will Langton had a compartment to himself with plush green leather seats and two sleeping bunks at shoulder height below the luggage racks.

  The Greek boat had sailed on down to Lourenço Marques and left Will on the dockside with his two small bags and no knowledge of Portuguese. Searching the dockside, Will found the largest building and the sign ‘Manica Trading Company Limited’ and found an Englishman to not only give him a cup of tea but drive him to the railway station and see him into the carriage for Salisbury where he would change trains for Bulawayo and Livingstone.

  “Mongu, old chap? Why on earth do you want to go to Mongu?” The Englishman at Manica Trading was rather short and bald together with his all-pervasive helpfulness. “Back end of beyond, old boy. You’ll have to go to Livingstone. Did hear once there’s a narrow gauge railway to a timber mill near Mongu, but no idea if they take passengers. Could be some kind of trading boat going upriver. Why on earth do you want to go to Mongu?”

  “Brother’s a missionary.”

  “Poor sod.”

  As the guard blew two sharp whistles, the carriage door was wrenched open and a huge man threw in two duffle bags and a leather gun case before turning sideways and pushing himself into the compartment, his head just below the top of the door. Using the leather window strap, the man slammed the door shut, wound down the window to the bottom and looked out at the platform, swearing in a language Will had never heard before. The train lurched forward, and the man collapsed onto the inadequate seat and stared at Will.

  Frightened, Will kept his own counsel. The man’s hair was a soft, wavy off-blond, as was his full beard. The softness of the hair was in contrast to the rest of the bulk that bulged out of the khaki trousers and khaki shirt, the underarms of the short-sleeved shirt wet with sweat and the sleeves fighting the man’s biceps for survival. Will found the age of the man was difficult to guess.

  The man took a piece of hard black dried meat from inside his shirt and began to tear at it with fanged teeth, chewing with satisfaction. Will watched him like a spring hare watching a snake, mesmerised. The train stopped and lurched, lurched and stopped, the steam engine belching up its strength to drag the carriages out of Beira across the Pungwe Flats. The big man took another piece of dried meat out of his sweaty shirt and offered it to Will, the girth of the proffered arm bigger than Will’s thigh. Again the strange language and Will shook his head.

  “I can only speak English,” Will squeaked and for the first time the light blue eyes opposite took on a twinge of merriment. The big man put the biltong back inside his shirt.

  “Where are you going, kerel?”

  “Mongu,” said Will, apprehensively.

  The man laughed out loud. “Hannes Potgieter. Trader. Hunter. Whatever, man. What they call you?”

  “William Langton. Will Langton… I’ve just arrived from England.”

  The big man laughed again and choked on a piece of dried meat that had stuck in his throat. “You don’t say,” he said and chewed some more. “How you going to get from Livingstone to Mongu?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe we will see about that,” he said to himself. “What you going to do in Mongu?”

  “Visit a sort of brother. Reverend Hilary Bains.”

  “Sort of brother, hey… And then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t seem to know much.”

  “I’m only eighteen… just,” added Will.

  “And straight out from England.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I never.”

  After a long silence Will thought of something to say.

  “I say, what language were you speaking when you got into the train?” His voice was light and, Will hoped, free of nervousness.

  “Afrikaans.” Will looked blank. “Language of the Boers.” Will still looked blank. “You heard of the Boer War, Englishman?”

  “Yes,” squeaked Will.

  “Fifty-three years ago. Not so long, really. My grandpappy still has his Boer War rifle. Mauser. Said he killed four Englishmen but I don’t know.” The man was grinning at him. “Don’t think you’d have lasted long.”

  “I don’t think so either,” said Will and impulsively put out his hand which was enveloped in a paw the size of a York ham.

  The smell of coal smoke permeated the carriage, but it was too hot to close the window. On either side of the train stretched the floodwaters of the Pungwe River, trees half-drowned, water birds scattering from t
he noise of the train. The big man had closed his eyes and appeared to be asleep. The rhythm of the train and track, iron on iron, made Will drowsy and when he woke there was dense bush on either side of the train and Hannes Potgieter was sprawled uncomfortably in the too-small seat, fast asleep, the half-chewed stick of biltong fallen from his fingers onto the carpet. Threatening, dark clouds billowed above the smoke-spewing funnel from the train engine and the first big blobs of rain were slanting through the open window into the carriage.

  The crash of thunder sent Will bolt upright in his seat. Lightning forked far away in the bush, followed by thunderous claps as the tropical storm raged. Will was too frightened to close the window. Solid rain was pouring onto the big man’s head and down his beard and still the stomach rose and fell. Three thunder crashes in quick succession sent the rain into a frenzy and Will lost sight of the trees. The sky darkened. A big, pink tongue broke from the big man’s mouth and licked to the far reaches of the moustache and beard and then the eyes came open and the right one winked.

  “Lekker rain, man. If I was in my bush camp and the rain comes like this, I run out naked and make a lot of noise.”

  “The lightning?” asked Will, fearfully watching the violent display outside the train window.

  “What’s the difference?… No rain in Africa, we all die.”

  The storm finished as quickly as it came and the clouds broke open to the clear blue sky of Africa. Will settled back in the green leather seat and watched the Afrikaner sleeping again, the matted wet hair drying in the wind from the open window, the click-clack of the rails lulling Will’s mind and the pangs of hunger that had grown with the sight of the half-chewed, dry meat lying on the floor of the carriage at his feet. Then Will Langton slept, to be chased through the dark, primeval forest by a giant the size of a mountain who stood on the top of the trees, plucking at Will running for dear life along the tangled forest path. When he woke, after a long sleep, the big man was standing at the window looking out onto a railway station and the train had come to rest. On the opposite side, the compartment door to the corridor slid open and a swarthy man in uniform asked for his passport. Before Will could pick up his wits and ask for a place to buy food, the train was moving again. The piece of dried meat was still on the floor.