On the Brink of Tears

by Peter Rimmer

  “Burns,” said Vivian Makepeace. “Who’s that bum having lunch in your restaurant?”

  “Captain Craig won’t say other than the man is his guest.”

  “Who is Captain Craig?”

  “Captain of the SS Corfe Castle that came into port today. Half my guests to lunch are off his ship. The captain likes oriental food. Recommends the Zanzibar to his passengers whenever his ship comes into port.”

  “Find out, Burns… Be a good chap.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Colonel Vivian Makepeace went back to eating his lunch, satisfied the man with the shoulder-length hair wearing shorts would be thrown into the street. A ship’s captain was one thing; the Controller of British East Africa was quite another kettle of fish. He went on eating, smiling to himself.

  Feeling someone standing at his shoulder, the Controller looked up expecting to see Burns and hear his apology for letting the man into the dining room. The man with the long white hair down to his shoulders was looking at him pleasantly. His eyes were bursting with humour, as if he were enjoying a private joke with himself.

  “It would please me, sir, if you would not divulge my name before I personally reach England. Your man in Mwanza kindly cashed me a cheque on the same understanding. We were in France together. I flew over his forward trench every morning, weather permitting. Very good man. Didn’t believe a word of my story but neither will you… Do I have your word as a gentleman? Captain Craig is an old friend. Fact is, I gave him his present job… Your word, sir, we were lunching without fuss. You are the one making something out of nothing.”

  Vivian Makepeace got up, staring at Harry Brigandshaw with his mouth open.

  “You are dead, sir.”

  “What Cyrus said… Now do I have your word?”

  “Of course… What happened?... We were looking…”

  “Ask your man in Mwanza in six weeks’ time when I’ve had a chance to sort out the mess. Colonel Makepeace, Mr Holmes, a very good day to you both. The food is excellent. Something I have not shared in almost three years. The Tutsi are fine fellows but their food is lousy, to my palate… Not a word. I will consider it a favour if you do not so much as mention my name. One day I will return the favour to both of you… Gentlemen, good day.”

  Harry went back to finish his lunch, not even bothering to look back.

  “Fact is, Cyrus, I’m rather enjoying myself. Let’s have another bottle of wine… Do I really look that bad?”

  After washing his hair in the bath, dinner in the captain’s cabin and a good night’s sleep without having to keep one eye open, Harry looked better to himself in the mirror although he did not feel much better inside. His body was full of parasites. His stomach tumbled every time he had food. He was tired most of the day, nauseous half of the time.

  Lucky not to go down with the malaria that had killed de Wet Cronjé, Harry knew he had contracted bilharzia. The disease had started in ancient Egypt with the Pharaohs. Archaeologists had found the destruction caused by the parasite in ancient Egyptian mummies.

  Living in freshwater snails, the parasite had spread down the Nile into the Great Lakes and rivers as far as Rhodesia. If left, it ate away the liver, slowly killing a man in twenty years.

  Harry’s first stop in London would be the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Bloomsbury. It was not Harry’s first dose of bilharzia, which could be caught simply by putting a hand in contaminated water in the shallows of most African rivers; the parasite entered the body through the pores of the skin quite unbeknown to the victim at the time.

  Harry knew it was why he felt and looked awful, why his skin had turned yellow. Had his condition been yellow fever he knew he would have been dead.

  Even had he not known Tina was on Elephant Walk with his children, he would have gone back to London first to have his body checked out. There were probably diseases in the Congo even London did not know about.

  Three months before de Wet died they had run out of quinine. Their mosquito nets had fallen apart, rotting in the tropical heat, and the aircraft medical chest was exhausted. For both of them it had then been just a matter of time. The Tutsi had built up immunity to the bilharzia disease over their evolution, like the modern Egyptians who lived on the banks of the Nile. Each race had survived in its own environment where others would have died.

  It seemed to Harry that mixing civilisations caused more problems than each absorbing the other’s culture, as the Red Indians had found in North America where the common European flu had wiped out most of them. Harry had been saying for years that guns and the Christian Church alone would not conquer Africa the way the civilised world seemed to wish.

  One day Africa would take its revenge, spreading sickness across the world; man tampered with his own natural evolution at his peril.

  “You’ll survive this time,” he told the image of himself in the mirror. “Just.” He was looking forward to the day he felt well again. The way he had before his aeroplane crashed into the jungle those long three years back in his memory.

  By the time the ship sailed the following day with all the passengers back on board, Harry and Cyrus Craig had agreed on their story. Harry could not hide out in the captain’s cabin even had he wished to do so. The stewards would have seen him. As in any small community, the story of a strange man in the captain’s cabin would have spread round the ship, to crew and passengers alike.

  Better to sit at the captain’s table in the first class dining room and face the other passengers with a smile and a good story. A story that began to go wrong from the first night out of Dar es Salaam.

  The idea was for Harry to be a big game hunter in the mould of his father, so no one would catch him out. Along with Frederick Courtney Selous and Tinus Oosthuizen, Sebastian Brigandshaw had roamed the bush along the banks of the Zambezi River, shooting elephants for their tusks long before the territory became Rhodesia and a British Crown Colony.

  Harry’s story was his father’s story set in Tanganyika. He was now going home on long leave for the first time in years, a white man who had lived under the African sun for most of his life making him look the way he was.

  At the captain’s table, Harry was ready to tell a host of good hunting stories to keep the passengers amused. Even if one of them asked any questions about the colour of his skin, the truth of bilharzia would suffice.

  Harry had taken his mother’s maiden name for the voyage back to England. An Indian tailor in Dar es Salaam had run him up evening clothes in twenty-four hours with Cyrus Craig’s money. Harry had filled a cabin trunk with all the trappings of a first class passenger travelling on an English boat.

  “We have a new passenger at our table, ladies and gentlemen. An old friend of mine, the celebrated hunter Harry Manderville.”

  The captain went round his table naming the other nine passengers one by one. It was their first night at sea out of Dar es Salaam. A woman in her seventies looked up from her soup, putting down the spoon with a studied deliberation before staring straight at Harry with a look that turned from interest to amazement.

  “Manderville… Did you say Manderville? I knew a Sir Henry Manderville when I was a gal. Went out to Africa. No idea where. There was a scandal with his daughter… No relation, I suppose. We grew up very close to each other. Don’t his wife’s family own this ship, the Brigandshaws? There was a Harry Brigandshaw who disappeared some years ago. All over the papers. Dead as mutton by now, I’m sure. I wonder what happened to Sir Henry? He was a baronet, very old title. You look like him, Mr Manderville. You must be a relation.”

  “I have no idea, Lady Gascoigne,” said Harry, smiling at the lady opposite to him at the table and thinking looks passed down a family could sometimes be a pain in the neck.

  The world, he told Cyrus Craig when they were alone, was indeed a small place.

  “Who is Sir Henry Manderville?” asked Cyrus Craig.

  “My grandfather. The old bag probably knows more about my family than I do.”

&
nbsp; “Bluff it out, Harry. Bluff it out. Some voyages are destined to be boring. This shall not be one of them… Is your bank account still open in London, or should I hold your cheque for the clothes until you regain the right to spend your own money? How strange to be so rich and not be able to spend a penny. You do have relatives in England, in London?”

  “Not that I talk to or even know. Granny Brigandshaw died a few years ago. My grandmother Manderville died giving birth to my mother. My sister Madge and her children live on Elephant Walk. As does my mother and the now well-known Sir Henry Manderville, Bart.

  “After my grandmother died he never married again. My guess is Lady Gascoigne had her maiden’s eye on grandfather. By then that side of my family was broke. Just the old house mortgaged to the hilt. The rich usually marry the rich. She was rich, he was poor. Makes sense.

  “Grandfather Brigandshaw, the Pirate, is well known to you, Cyrus. He founded this shipping line and bought Sir Henry’s family house for a large unwarranted sum in exchange for his eldest son marrying my mother. Trouble was she was pregnant with me and my father was the youngest son. They ran away eventually to Africa, my mother and father. I’m a bastard, Cyrus. So is Madge. Mother had been forced to marry my uncle. In the eyes of the law I was legitimate, born to my mother when she was married to my uncle.

  “Grandfather Brigandshaw wanted to buy himself a title and start a dynasty of his own at Hastings Court, grandfather Manderville’s ancestral home, passing the title down through the eldest son. Which brings us back to the old bag at the table… You want another Scotch? I’ve never travelled in the captain’s suite before. Always the owner’s suite, which I did away with to make room for more passengers when my ships were always full. What are we now? Half full by the look of it.”

  “Including the cargo. Break even. Gets worse you’ll have to mothball some of the fleet.”

  “Should have stayed with the Tutsi. Not a bad life until the Hutu attack. Those two tribes really hate each other. I heard a saying once when I was young: there’s no pleasure without pain. The pleasure is drinking your whisky. The pain will be saving grandfather’s shipping line if this depression carries on… We were going to have the first airline down Africa. The excuse for flying my ill-fated trip with Iggy. We wanted to build a flying boat. We had tried the seaplanes, which failed commercially. There were too many things missing, like a wireless that would always be in range. Room for enough passengers. Friendly natives on the lakes where we would land to refuel. One day we’ll fly from England to Africa. Now I am even more determined. I still can’t believe Iggy is dead… We were trying to find any way to make the flying boats work commercially. Iggy was the head of my airline.”

  “How are you feeling, Harry? You look terrible.”

  “The bugs like Scotch. Thought it would drown them. No such luck.”

  “You know you have another child. It was in the papers. The newspapers made a fortune out of your story. The RAF sent a search party. A chap called Howland went looking on horseback, the modern Stanley looking for the modern Livingstone. All splashed in the papers. Some said the papers increased their circulation by ten per cent… The boy was named Kim.”

  Harry was smiling to himself. They had made up after the birth of Frank, fathered by Barnaby St Clair, a few months before his plane crashlanded on the river.

  “She’ll like that. I’m happy for her. Did you know I sired our first son Anthony on this boat? It was the SS Corfe Castle’s maiden voyage. Tina was travelling out to her brother alone; we had known each other in London. She was Barnaby’s girl though he wouldn’t marry her, the silly idiot. Lucinda was dead, Barnaby’s sister. Strange how Frank is part of my first wife. Lucinda was pregnant with our first child when Fishy Braithwaite shot her. Maybe Frank was meant to have her blood but not mine. He’ll never know, of course, we all agreed… Kim, I like the name… Let’s drink to Kim Brigandshaw, my youngest son.”

  “Not for me another drink. I’m the ship’s captain.”

  “Pardon me!... Just a sip.”

  “Just a sip. Just don’t tell the owners.”

  “Not a word shall pass my lips… To Kim.”

  “To your son, Harry… It’s good to have you back with us.”

  “Oh, you mean the depression,” said Harry, trying to cover up the choke in Cyrus Craig’s voice.

  “That as well. A company is only as good as the man at the top, especially in adversity. From what I hear, the Germans are building a new fleet. And a new air force.”

  “Then we’ll have to shoot it down again, Captain Craig… Funny, you don’t drink hard liquor for years and you get pissed as a fart.”

  “Blame it on the bugs.”

  “Those are the little sods I’m after… Thank you, Cyrus. For everything.”

  2

  Three weeks later, when the SS Corfe Castle was steaming out of Alexandria Bay into the Mediterranean with Harry Brigandshaw feeling as sick as a dog, Zachariah Aird, the general manager of Cox and King’s Bank in the West End of London, was facing a dilemma with his chief clerk.

  “Dead men don’t write cheques,” said Zachariah Aird. “Someone has found his cheque book and forged his signature.”

  “Look on the back, sir.”

  “The same someone could know my name.”

  “We have this second cheque, sir. This one made out to a man that the Tanganyika Bank in Dar es Salaam, to whom the cheque was presented, states is the British Resident in Mwanza. The same signature is on the back of the first cheque under the note to you, sir. Why would a dead man write a cheque to Salaam Gunsmiths in Mwanza, which I looked up with some effort, and found on the shores of Lake Victoria? Who, may I ask, sir, knows you personally in Mwanza? The note on the back is clearly written, ‘Please cash this Zach. I’ll sort it out later’.”

  With arms folded in front of him, the chief clerk smugly watched the general manager confront the puzzle, knowing the decision to honour the cheque was now out of his hands.

  “Doesn’t his brother-in-law bank with us? They were both in the services. Why they started banking with us in the first place when we were paymasters for the army and the Royal Flying Corps. The first Mrs Brigandshaw was St Clair’s sister. I’ll give him a ring. Meantime, pay the Tanganyika Bank in Dar es Salaam even though Brigandshaw’s account was closed a year ago when the court pronounced him dead.”

  “Whose account shall I debit, sir?” The chief clerk was now enjoying himself.

  “Mine for the time being. Goodness gracious, Jones, he was one of our biggest clients.”

  “But he’s dead. And as you said, sir, dead men don’t write out cheques.”

  Barnaby St Clair was bored as usual having nothing to do. Once in a while, he sold the stock market short when the markets bounced. In the old days before the crash, he bought shares on good information which he gleaned on his social round of London, the process that made his considerable fortune taking up much of his time.

  At the age of thirty-four, he was bored stiff sitting in his Piccadilly townhouse gazing through the window at Green Park where the leaves were falling, adding to his mood of depression. So far as he could see he had done everything he wanted to do in life too early. The years beckoned with boredom.

  Whatever he wanted he bought, and this included people. The wrong kind of women hung on his words because he was rich. The right kind of women wished to marry him, which was even more boring. He had a son in Frank so his biological needs were fulfilled without all the problems of being a father to his son.

  The boy was living happily in Rhodesia with his mother, thinking he was Frank Brigandshaw. He had little brothers and a sister to keep him happy as a lark. They even had a family of tame giraffe, something Barnaby was sure every small boy would kill for.

  When the telephone rang he let his man Edward do the answering. There was no one he wished to speak to so there was no point getting out of the chair to answer the phone himself. Outside in the park it had begun to rain. Racking his bra
in, Barnaby tried to think of something to do for the rest of the day which did not include making himself drunk.

  “Mr Aird for you, sir.”

  “What the hell does he want?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Tell him I’m not here.”

  For Barnaby, having a conversation with his bank manager was the last idea in the world to spark his excitement.

  “Says he wants you to verify a cheque signed by Mr Harry Brigandshaw.”

  “Harry’s dead. Tell him to go to hell.”

  “Mr Aird says the cheque was dated last month and presented in a place I am unable to pronounce. He asks you to come to his office as a particular favour. He says you were Mr Brigandshaw’s brother-in-law.”

  “Tell him I’m coming. Then order me a taxi.”

  There was something to do after all… As Barnaby walked into the rain he was grinning his head off.

  Having verified Harry’s handwriting in Aird’s office, Barnaby called on the shipping lines. There was a railway line from Mwanza to Dar es Salaam. Excited for the first time in months, he demanded to see the passenger lists of every vessel out of Dar es Salaam, in particular the names of passengers embarking at the East African port. Most shipping lines wired their London head office of new passengers and cargo picked up en route to be certain payment was made correctly. Harry himself had told Barnaby of the practice.

  Chuckling at the prospect of other people’s pain when Harry rose from the dead, the last call he made was to Colonial Shipping. A sweet girl’s voice eventually told him what he wanted to hear.

  “You old fox, Harry. Someone has tipped you off. H Manderville. My oh my. On your own ship that was… Of course… The captain. You would know the captains personally...”

  “Lady,” said Barnaby, putting the mouthpiece where the girl could again hear what he was saying, “when does the SS Corfe Castle dock in London?”

  “Tilbury Dock on Wednesday in the morning, sir.”