by Peter Rimmer
‘Sunset In Africa’ and ‘The Day The Animals Died’ topped the singles charts by the end of the following week. Financially, it was the pinnacle of Shelley’s career and the money flowed into Music Lane, of which Shelley owned thirty per cent, as fast as the floods had hurtled through Central Africa.
With the Daily Garnet having the inside story on the singer, circulation jumped ten per cent. Byron Langton was getting richer than he ever imagined.
Laurie Hall had just enough money left from the crocodile skins to buy a third-class ticket on the Edinburgh Castle back to Africa. There was no way a man could live with a woman insatiably in love with another man, a man in the process of getting married to another woman. Shelley Lane was obsessed with more than alcohol.
It had been fun. He was thirty years of age, single, broke and with no prospects other than going back to what was left of a white man’s Africa. The nights of debauchery in nightclubs across London, the passion in the nights when Shelley had drowned her memories of Byron Langton, wanton spending of his money without a care for when it ended, a thousand people met and lost, enjoyed to the full, Laurie the most popular man in London spending money on the fools and thinking them friends, the big-game hunter and the icon of the charts, the beautiful people propelled by alcohol from one riotous venue to the next.
She had never made him her manager. Never mentioned it again. The trip home on the boat with the cured crocodile skins for safe delivery at Brindisi had given Shelley the time to write the songs for the Zambezi River album and the recording had taken six months between their bouts of revelry.
When she threw his clothes out of her flat there had been no going back. There was more sadness than fury in his footsteps down the stairs. He could imagine her slumped on the big sofa, crying at the slammed door.
Laurie made one phone call from the cheap hotel found for him by a taxi driver; the album had just been finished.
“Byron? Get a doctor to your girlfriend or this time she’ll kill herself… You know where to find Will?”
“No… Can’t you stay with her?”
“Threw me out.”
“The wedding’s next week.”
“Your problem… You should have married Shelley years ago. One way or another you’ve destroyed that woman.”
“Who the hell are you to talk?”
“You take and never give.”
“Oh, go to hell.”
“No. You go to hell. I’m going to Africa.”
“We have been married a month,” said Fiona Langton. “Apart from a honeymoon that was so short it should not have had a name, one dinner out with the directors of EMI, two weeks together in this damn flat and I haven’t seen you, Byron. Why the hell did you marry me?”
“Look, the flat is near the office and that saves time and you try and run a business when no one will make a decision without the boss’s opinion.”
“That’s your fault.”
“I don’t think so. There are millions of people out there who want money and a job but the vast majority spend their lives creeping up people’s arses to achieve it. There’s one in ten thousand that creates new wealth in this country and when the likes of my twin sister chases them away the rest will bloody well starve. If it isn’t the damn unions it’s the Labour bloody government with a new rule that gives them more power, and business less chance of competing with the Americans. None of the self-confessed do-gooders ever created a penny’s worth of wealth in their lives. Sanctimonious, two-faced parasites that have taken the ‘Great’ clean out of Britain. They all have a permanent attack of the ‘gimmes’: give me this, give me that, and then criticise the very bloody people they are stealing from. The fools get accolades while the few producers in this island either go to America or go out of business.”
“Sit down, Byron. You’ll have a heart attack.”
“No one did a damn thing while I was away.”
“I’m sure they did… All right, you work hard. But if you work hard I can’t sit here cooped up all day with nothing to do. And a string of babies at my age is not on the cards. Kids we’ll have but later. I don’t want to end up without a new thought in my mind. Why I opted for university. You’d better give your wife a job, Byron, that’s what you had better do. Then we can both moan about the paid staff.”
“Are we going out to eat?”
“No we are not. Just because my father sits in the House of Lords doesn’t mean I can’t cook. Fact is, I like cooking and I don’t like servants under my feet in my own home. Pour us both a drink and come into the kitchen. But first give me a kiss. I’m sorry I jumped at you. We all think our problems are the only ones around.”
Byron gave his wife a kiss and a hug and followed her into the small, bachelor kitchen. The flat at 47 Buckingham Court in Knightsbridge had changed very little.
“Would you like to start a publishing house?” he asked, sipping his drink.
“Would I ever?” Fiona had her back to him, standing over the three-plate stove swishing a pat of butter round the hot frying pan. She filleted fish with garlic and herbs. The side dish of salad stood ready on the small counter next to the bowl of French dressing.
“You like garlic,” he said. “That’s good. My mother always cooks with garlic.”
“She told me… Look, I couldn’t just start a publishing company without experience. I’d need a job first.”
“Heath wants to write a book on Africa. I think it will sell. The profit margin on books if you get the right one is enormous. Specialised magazines is something I’ve thought about too. You have the right degree to put it all together. You’d edit Heath’s book. That kind of thing. I’ll speak to the Garnet editor. He’ll have a way of getting you in where you’ll learn the right stuff.”
“You know something, Byron Langton, I’m going to enjoy this marriage. What was a very big problem for me when you came home has been solved on half a drink before supper.”
Three days later, Fiona began her publishing career in the distribution department of Grooms Publishing. Miraculously the following week in the Daily Garnet the summer list of Grooms featured prominently for the first time.
“Three months in each department and back to us,” the Garnet editor had agreed with the Managing Director of Grooms. “Langton’s in a hurry as usual. She has a First in English from Edinburgh. Use her contacts while you have her. Pleasure to do business with you.”
For Byron, the change in his wife was immediate and the evening homecomings bereft of trivia. After the passion of bed it was pleasant to find the lady in his life had a mind that made him think before he talked. With luck and publishing, he told himself, she will avoid turning into the kind of wife they met socially: made-up, stuck-up and stupid. Without a bleep from his wife, Byron took to leaving for his office at half-past six in the morning, coming home at nine in time for supper, an exchange of each other’s day, then bed, both of them exhausted. The nightly sex made them sleep even better.
The chief from Africa came for his money the week after Fiona started her job. The man was agitated but showed large white teeth when Byron gave him the draft drawn on Langton Merchant Bank’s account with the Union Bank of Switzerland in Geneva.
“You bring the money into England as capital,” he told the chief. “Normal bank transfer. The only tax that might be payable would be in Zambia but that is your problem. If you require financial help, call on me or my staff. I understand you are staying in England?”
“Your brother is very different,” said the African.
“Yes we are. Where is he? We in England have not heard a word.”
“The three men who worked as trackers don’t know. Took their Land Rover, the one that belonged to your brother, to the Reverend Hilary Bains. He doesn’t know too… It is a good way of doing business,” said the man, getting up from the chair across from Byron’s desk, the draft for two hundred and three thousand pounds in his pocket. “Will, your brother, he say, ‘an Englishman’s word is his bond’. Thank
you, Mr Langton.”
Byron showed his client to the door through reception and out to the lift where he pressed the down button.
“How it used to be,” said Byron. “How it should be. Not sure how long it will last. You see, the world and its politicians are becoming more and more dishonest. Did you ever meet a politician in your country who did not lie?”
“No, I did not.” The door to the lift opened automatically.
“Everyone honest is much easier,” said Byron.
“I think we might regret the British leaving Africa.”
“The price of progress. Usually rather expensive. People like knocking down what the other system built. Why man, century after century, destroys his capital and has to start all over again from the bottom. And we never seem to learn.”
Back in his office, Byron checked the file marked ‘Crocodile Skins’ and went through the final accounts. In Brindisi the skins had been delivered partly to a shoe factory and partly to a company that specialised in making handbags. A member of Byron’s staff had taken the British designs to Italy and overseen the manufacture. The manufacturers received a fee for their services and the merchandise reverted back to Langton Merchant Bank that shipped the goods to the United States of America under the label of a famous couturier, who received a merchandising fee for every item. Within two months, the consignment had sold out in America and the bills to the retailers discounted by an American collection bank for cash, the net proceeds transferred to the Union Bank of Switzerland, the money disappearing as thoroughly as the skins had disappeared from Zambia. The account of William Edward Langton, address unknown, was credited with thirty thousand pounds and re-invested in gold bullion at thirty-five US dollars per ounce, held physically by the Union Bank of Switzerland.
The delivery, tanning process and liaison by Laurie Hall in Brindisi had been executed perfectly.
When Madge O’Shea, Byron’s red-headed secretary, came in for dictation, Byron was still contemplating the net profit underlined in the file.
“Better put an extra ten thousand pounds into a holding account for Laurie Hall. These figures are staggering. The man deserves a bonus even if the last thing we told each other was to go to hell. No, put it into gold bullion. My bet is the Americans will want to re-inflate the value of their gold in Fort Kent. Eventually they will allow the market to find the true value for gold. They are the largest holders of bullion in the world and the long-standing fixed gold price has not reflected inflation. We’ll buy the great white hunter some gold.”
Shelley Lane swallowed four ‘purple hearts’ while looking at herself in the mirror. She was twenty-six years old and looked every one of those years. The black hair had lost some of the sheen, the brown eyes some of the excitement and the large, inviting mouth had taken on a slight twist that gave her whole face a touch of melancholy. Her flat in Chelsea had none of the homeliness of the apartment with Mrs Page, and once the front door was shut her world shrank to three rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom.
It would take half an hour for the pills to pick her up again by which time the ‘date’ would arrive to take her out on the town. It was party time again. If she missed Laurie Hall she was not going to show it to the world and even less admit that ‘white hunter Hall’ in Africa was not ‘white hunter Hall’ in London. The man had been magical in his own context by the river and mentally she wished him well on his journey back to the bush.
“Never take a man out of his element,” she told her reflection in the mirror.
It had taken her two days back in London to know her lover would never be able to manage her career. The months of spending his money had saddened her but strengthened her reasons for keeping her business link with Byron Langton. Spending his money as fast as he could was part of his inadequacy, his only way to play the game. So many times in a restaurant party, men far richer than Laurie Hall left him with the bill, often with a shrug that only she could understand.
The dress she wore was long and white silk, plunging at the back, her hair done on the side, caught by a small sweet-smelling gardenia, the white of the flower matching her dress. She was the talk of the town, every entrance, every nightclub, causing a stir, people not sure if they were looking at a singer or the stories in the press.
“You don’t know your real parents,” she said talking to the mirror. “Your adopted parents think you are a whore for singing in public… Your lover’s somewhere lost to you in Africa… The man you love is married to a Lady. But who cares? It’s party time.”
The pills had begun to take effect.
The crystal glass, shimmering the amber liquid in her glass, the gentle clink of ice in the silent flat, were reflected back to her from the mirror as she sipped the soft whisky in the glass, the brown eyes watching her carefully from the other side of the mirror.
“Cheers,” she said to herself.
Less than half a mile away, Heathcliff Mortimer was marvelling at the way of things. He was seated comfortably on a bench next to a weeping willow tree. The summer evening was hot and the late sun threw long shadows across the lawn down from the pub. There were customers on the terrace chattering away, the late evening bringing their distant words to the elderly man on the bench, in front of him the dark flow of the River Thames and the ways of commerce taking boats up and down, direct in their purpose. The pint of Worthington’s best bitter was half empty on the wooden table next to the wide-brimmed white hat and the silver-topped cane, the head of the cane the face of a lion. Heath was dressed in a cream-coloured linen suit from Africa and his shirt was tieless. He had lost weight in his travels around Central Africa as much from the tainted water and food as the heat and humidity. His stomach was always in jeopardy when he travelled in Africa.
Some trippers waved to him from the deck of a boat and the man with the mane of long, white hair raised the silver lion-headed stick from the wooden table, the silver tip at the opposite end to the lion rising a foot from the table in acknowledgement. The boat and people were soon gone.
The first marvel in Heath’s life was the smart flat in Chelsea with the flower boxes over the old mews and the pub a short walk to the river, courtesy of the generous nature of Byron Langton, the bonus cheques for Heath’s private reports now exceeding his salary from the Daily Garnet. There was never any report back from his contacts or acknowledgement from Byron of the tainted histories of the new heroes, the great, black liberators of the European colonies in Africa. By now, Heath knew, Byron Langton had a file on every leader, present and future, in Central and Southern Africa, from Kenya through Tanganyika and the old Belgian Congo, to the tip of South Africa. There were many men of power and future power who would have wished to burn those files that spoke of every evil known to man’s pursuit of supremacy.
The second marvel to Heath was the twisted morality of man, motivated by the angry pursuit of wealth. In Zambia the portion of financial reserves which was the new country’s after the break-up of the old Federation of Central Africa, was used by the new government to nationalise the mines and businesses in the name of the people, providing the party with new patronage to dispense to those brave souls who had fought the struggle against imperial power and won. There was a list of worthy fighters for the cause in the order dictated by the deeds of the past and another list of jobs in order of importance that came from the new patronage. The two were joined and the jobs allocated by salary worth. Whether the man or woman in question had any previous knowledge of the job to be done was irrelevant. The Party controlled allocation of government jobs and the Party gave those jobs to the faithful. The previous owners of the mines, businesses and farms drifted out of Africa, never to be seen again, thankfully forgotten by the Party.
In previous years, the world price of copper had been delicately balanced by the producers controlling the output of the mines to match as nearly as possible the demands of world industry. They were equally careful to make sure the price was low enough to prevent the introduction of substitute materia
ls. Mining the copper efficiently was only part of the mining equation. The new government, to retain its popularity with the voting public, whose one man one vote had placed the Party in power, subsidised the price of basic foodstuffs and fuel, using the income from the copper mines.
Within a few months, the insatiable demand of the subsidies required more money from the mines and the new managers quickly sold the strategic stockpiles and told the mine captains to increase production. Combined with the miniaturisation of much of the circuitry that required copper, which was reducing the world demand, the extra Zambian copper flooded the market, dramatically forcing down the spot price. To counter the problem, the Zambian government began printing more money to pay their bloated and largely ineffective civil service, beginning the awful spiral of inflation.
Heath, drinking his beer, marvelled anew. Of course there was a political way out of the quandary which only required words. The fault, screamed the new state, was the old colonial powers who had now manipulated the downward price of copper. The clarion call rang across the new Africa, demanding compensation for the dreadful wrongs of colonialism, which some more strident than the rest called a crime against humanity. The flow of aid to Africa had begun which Heath in later years would describe as ‘decanting money down the rathole’.
The sun was almost down when Heath finished the last of the beer, picked up his hat and cane, eased his way off the bench and wandered his way up the lawn to the bar. There was still almost an hour to closing time and then he would go home, pack his bags and be ready for the flight at eleven the following morning for Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, the last British colony in Africa. He was to meet Josephine Langton with the British delegation at the airport.
“Southern Comfort please, Fred. Make it a double. Lots of ice… What a beautiful summer’s evening.”
Byron Langton’s information was quite clear. The British government’s delegation would not convince the Rhodesian settlers to hand over power to the black majority. Ian Smith, the Rhodesian prime minister, would declare unilateral independence. The British would not send in the army as it was still controlled by the establishment, ninety-five per cent of all officers having attended a British public school. Over half the Rhodesian settlers were born in Britain, a large proportion from the same upper establishment. Harold Wilson, the British prime minister, would not be able to convince British generals to fire on British people, especially their own class.
