On the Brink of Tears

by Peter Rimmer

  By the time Barnaby St Clair had worked out his one-time brother-in-law was on his way back to England assuming his grandfather’s surname, Harry was in the sickbay of the SS Corfe Castle being watched over by a concerned ship’s doctor.

  The problem for Harry was far more than the bilharzia parasite slowly eating his liver… And the doctor had no idea what it was. Harry found the irony at the end of his three-year ordeal amusing. The young doctor had dosed him with quinine and given him three injections of penicillin, but nothing had brought down his temperature of 103. Quite lucid and aware of his predicament, Harry managed a smile.

  “I’m a bit run down. Haven’t had a proper meal for three years. They live on a type of cornmeal most of the time. They try to catch animals but the animals live high in the canopy out of their reach. They didn’t have the right equipment to fish. It was the purest form of hunting and gathering with animals on equal terms competing all the way, something our ancestors developed from thousands of years ago when we lived in caves.”

  “Where have you been, Mr Manderville? The captain said you were a big game hunter.”

  “With a tribe of Tutsi. Three years. Deep in the jungle northwest of Lake Victoria. The village was surrounded by thick forest and periodically raided by the Hutu.”

  “But you are a hunter.”

  “I was all right. Ammunition was low. Kept the cartridges for the Hutu. We couldn’t take much on the plane.”

  “What plane?”

  “I’m raving, don’t take any notice. In London they’ll find out what’s wrong with me. You’re doing the best you can, Doctor Nash. Can’t expect a man to do more than that.”

  By the time the Wednesday came, they carried Harry off the ship at Tilbury Dock on a stretcher, Cyrus Craig leading the way to the waiting ambulance. By then Harry was delirious and unable to recognise Barnaby who had waited all morning for the ship to dock.

  They all got in the ambulance that drove to Bloomsbury and the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, where Barnaby signed Harry in. The young ship’s doctor who had gone as far as the ambulance reported a temperature of 104. Looking at the delirious man on the stretcher, Barnaby knew he would not have recognised the man without knowing who he was.

  “Thank you, Mr Craig. You’ll want to go back to your ship. Does anyone else on board know who he is? Harry has a lot to unravel. People to confront. A good lawyer. Once the government has your money it’s not that easy to get it back again. When you get a moment phone me at this number and tell me what you know… Where are the others?”

  “One died of malaria, the aircraft engineer. The others went for help and never came back. He lived with a local tribe as a prisoner.”

  Within ten minutes, the blood tests were being sent to the laboratory for analysis. The laboratory assistant found amoebic dysentery in the blood. Now knowing what to look for, the doctor found blood in the patient’s stool. Harry had a potentially lethal disease.

  Patiently, carefully, the hospital set about bringing Harry back to good health.

  For the first time in three years, Harry Brigandshaw found himself in the right place at the right time, blissfully unaware of his luck.

  Doctor Andrew Nash had watched the ambulance go off with his patient until it was out of sight around the corner of a long shed before turning back to his ship and climbing up the gangplank. There was a lot more going on than met his eye. He had never heard of a ship’s captain going off with a sick passenger, however important the man.

  Captain Craig and the big game hunter had to be friends. Very good friends. The other man who seemed to be waiting for them at the dockside had fallen into the crisis as if both he and the captain knew what was at stake. Big game hunters, so far as Andrew Nash knew, did not ply their trade from aeroplanes, or live with tribes who hunted meat and picked their food from the forest. There was something wrong with the story of patient H Manderville.

  Packing his small suitcase to go on two weeks’ leave before his ship sailed again for Africa, he found himself thinking about the nature of the man’s true identity. It was then that the chance of making some extra money first came to his mind.

  As usual, he would give his mother most of his pay, which would leave him broke. His mother had used every penny of his late father’s legacy to put him through medical school. Andrew’s salary kept up the small house in Wimbledon, opposite the common. He had six bottles of good Cape wine in the case, wine he had bought cheap in Cape Town, which he would enjoy with his mother who spent each of his long voyages waiting for him to come home.

  What she would do if he met a nice girl and decided to get married Andrew had no idea. For five years, since his father had died of cancer after a four-year illness, Andrew’s mother had barely been out of the house except to go to the shops, wallowing in her own self-pity. What he needed was money to take her up to the West End and the theatre to prise her out of her self-imposed rut.

  “Oh my goodness,” he said aloud to the cabin with its roof just high enough not to bump his head.

  The scene at the ambulance began to run through his mind. The other man called him Harry. “How’s Harry?” the man had said to Captain Craig as Andrew Nash helped put the stretcher into the ambulance.

  The story had broken in the Daily Mail, that much he clearly remembered. Everyone at the hospital was talking about the famous fighter pilot who had disappeared on his way down Africa flying a seaplane designed to land on the big lakes and rivers of the continent.

  Searching his memory for the story he had intermittently read in the papers, Andrew worked out that the man had disappeared with his crew three years ago, the same time his patient said he’d lived with a tribe of black people. Covered it up by saying he was rambling. The other man had asked Captain Craig what happened to the others.

  The patient he had just kept alive was not H Manderville but H Brigandshaw, the owner of the shipping line, pronounced dead by a London court after a two-year waiting period, finally closing out all the hullabaloo in the papers.

  Half running down the gangplank leaving the suitcase behind, Andrew found himself a telephone kiosk in the docks. All fingers and thumbs, he found the number of the Daily Mail in the phone book and dialled it, pressing button B when told by the operator to dislodge the coins he had slotted into the metal box beside the telephone.

  “The Daily Mail, can I help you?” came a distant voice down the line.

  “Put me through to the reporter on the Harry Brigandshaw story. The one about Africa. Stanley looking for Doctor Livingstone three years ago, if you remember?”

  “Hold on.”

  Andrew Nash had to wait less than a minute before a male voice came on the line.

  “Horatio Wakefield. What do you know about Harry Brigandshaw?”

  “Do you pay for a story?”

  “Of course.”

  “How much will you pay me if I tell you where to find Harry Brigandshaw?”

  “He’s dead, sir.”

  “My name is Doctor Andrew Nash. A medical doctor. I have just put my patient in an ambulance.”

  “Please, old chap, I’m busy.”

  “I am now certain my patient was Harry Brigandshaw whose aircraft went down in Africa three years ago.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At Tilbury Docks.”

  “Don’t bloody move, Doctor Nash. Fifty quid. How does that sound?”

  “Just fine. My mother will be so pleased.”

  “What’s your mother got to do with it… Which ship?”

  “The SS Corfe Castle.”

  “Now that makes sense, so you’re not talking shit. The shipping line once owned by Harry Brigandshaw before it was sold after his death owns the SS Corfe Castle. So you are the SS Corfe Castle’s ship’s doctor?”

  Putting down the phone, Horatio Wakefield could not believe his luck. The biggest story of his life was back on track. He had liked being the pin-up boy of the Daily Mail. He had also liked Mrs Brigandshaw, a good-looking woman muc
h younger than her husband with a body Horatio could still see in his mind.

  He had put the poor girl through hell with his story, chasing it right to the end. His reports in the paper had sent the Royal Air Force searching the path flown by the ill-fated plane, keeping up Mrs Brigandshaw’s hopes.

  More than once, she had slammed the front door of her townhouse in his face; a big four-storey townhouse in Berkeley Square where she lived with servants and a pack of kids all under ten who, though Horatio tried hard to keep the story afloat for as long as possible, would never see their father again.

  The unmapped jungle in the heart of Africa was vast. The only reason for the first search party was public relations. Both dead pilots of the ill-fated seaplane had fought with the Royal Flying Corps during the war. Harry Brigandshaw had shot down twenty-three enemy aircraft and been decorated by the King.

  The second search party under Keppel Howland that went out on the ground by horseback had been financed by an American newspaper with the same motive as himself: the circulation of a newspaper.

  Now Saturday’s edition of the Daily Mail blazing the headline under his byline would sell out across London.

  Fame was again beckoning Horatio Wakefield as he fell into the taxi. This time he was going to write a book. To hell with Keppel Howland and his lost cause. His cause was no longer lost. He had found him. The man was alive. The story he was about to hear of the man who had disappeared in darkest Africa for three years was going to be far bigger than the story of Stanley finding Livingstone, or Howland’s modern version.

  The ramifications went tumbling through his mind: an uncompromising government forcing the estate to pay an exorbitant amount of death duty that, when paid, wiped out the deceased’s estate, beggaring the widow and children of a war hero, a country’s memory so quickly lost.

  A rapacious manager of the shipping line forcing the estate to sell him the shipping line to pay the government’s bill, ‘we all have to pay our tax’ an excuse for extortion.

  The widow and her children fleeing to sanctuary in the colonies. Afterwards no one giving a damn.

  As the taxi flew through the streets of London, the stories flooded through his mind, whole, ready to print.

  “Fifty quid for you, Doctor Nash, if it’s true. If Brigandshaw is alive,” he mused.

  Leaning forward and opening the partition between himself and the taxi driver he was more excited than he’d been in a long time.

  “That’s him,” he pointed, “the lone young man on the dockside. Here’s a quid.”

  “Thanks, guv.”

  “Just wait.”

  As he got out of the taxi and walked to the man, it began to spit with rain. Neither of them seemed to notice.

  “Doctor Nash?” The man nodded. “Where is he?”

  “Bloomsbury. Hospital for Tropical Diseases. The captain and another man took him through in an ambulance five hours ago. My goodness you were quick.”

  “Fleet Street isn’t that far away… What’s wrong with him?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “How sick is he?”

  “Very.”

  “Can he talk?”

  “He couldn’t when I helped put him in the ambulance.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  With Horatio Wakefield taking notes in shorthand, the taxi driver steered the cab out of the docks. No one took any notice of them speeding parallel with the wet rails of the railway line that ran the length of Tilbury Dock.

  Lying in bed, Harry Brigandshaw wondered if he was going to leave the hospital alive. Everything ached. His head was splitting. His bowels were red hot. Every bone in his body ached at touching the bedclothes. Sweat was pouring out of him. Nothing worked normally except his brain, which registered every movement of the pain as it coursed through his body.

  Cyrus Craig and Barnaby St Clair had left half an hour ago. By then he was wide awake.

  “The last thing I want is a couple of idiots staring at me. You’ve got a ship to run, Cyrus, off you go. Barnaby, thanks for the bridging finance. They know what’s wrong with me, so you say, time will tell. If I could stop my brain I could get some sleep.”

  The hospital was quiet; with so many things to undo, Harry willed his body to get better. Someone had said to him life was mind over matter. Strangely, he was not even frightened of death. Like during the war when aerial combat commenced, he cleared his brain to crystal clarity.

  When Horatio Wakefield was shown into his private ward, there was a faint smile on his face. Harry knew the best mental strength a man could play on was revenge.

  “Are you Harry Brigandshaw?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Wakefield. Daily Mail. I ran your story that forced the RAF to go and have a look. What was your mother’s maiden name?”

  “Manderville. Now piss off.”

  “Her name?”

  “Emily.”

  “What is your degree?”

  “Geology.”

  “Which you never practised.”

  “Yes I did. Once. In South West Africa when I found diamonds on the Skeleton Coast. Not like the pipe stones washed ashore. If you go to my farm in Rhodesia, you’ll find what looks like a chunk of quartz embedded in the mantelpiece over the fire in the lounge that no one but me knows about. An insurance for the future of my family. The stone is a fifty carat diamond, safe as the Bank of England.”

  “Welcome back, Mr Brigandshaw.”

  “When I get out of here, we’ll talk. You can help me.”

  “They said you couldn’t speak in the ambulance.”

  “I was thinking about my family, or dreaming. They must have given me shots.”

  “She’s very beautiful. Your company tried to roll her over.”

  “If you have something in life, something of value, there are always people trying to take it away from you. That is a fact of life that will never change. No one cares a damn about poor people however much they say to the contrary… Leave your card on the bedside table. When I’m up I’ll call you.”

  “I’m going to report you alive in my paper.”

  “I’m sure you are. Didn’t I just say everything was about money?”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Amoebic dysentery, bilharzia, among others. They are still doing tests. Ask them. You are from the press. Why should they lie? Barnaby St Clair’s footing the bill so the longer they keep me alive, the more money they make.”

  “You’ve become a cynic, Mr Brigandshaw.”

  “A realist, Mr Wakefield… How was Tina?”

  “As good as any woman with five kids and no husband. You don’t know they sold your estate to pay death duty. She’s in Rhodesia. You have another son. She called him Kim.”

  “Did anyone try and help her?”

  “Not a soul, in London.”

  “Not even Barnaby St Clair?”

  “Not that I heard.”

  “They didn’t get back together? They were lovers before I married Tina. My first wife was his sister. I rather hoped he would have taken up with her again. In the first few months, I was jealous of the idea. When Iggy didn’t come back and de Wet was still alive, I thought the idea was a good one. All women need a man. All men need a good woman.”

  When the reporter left the hospital having agreed not to say where the man actually was, to give Harry Brigandshaw time to recover his strength to be able to fight to regain what was his, Horatio was amazed by people. There was the man who had fathered Harry Brigandshaw’s fourth child paying for his hospital bed.

  From the man’s look when he spoke of Barnaby St Clair, the two of them were friends. Underneath the façade of social rightness, they shared the same woman. Harry knew Frank was not his son, a fact which Horatio had established three years earlier. Harry Brigandshaw had accepted his wife’s infidelity.

  No, he told himself, people never failed to amaze him. There was always the tide of true emotion flowing beneath the surface designed
to confuse the issue. All the habits of man’s self-styled civilisation were only skin deep, a way to get through life without tearing each other to pieces, physically and emotionally.

  By the time he reached his rundown flat that evening, having promised Doctor Andrew Nash fifty pounds from his paper, his flatmate William Smythe was already home and Andrew Nash, who had waited downstairs at the hospital so as not to seem a Judas Iscariot to the sick Harry Brigandshaw, was presumably back at his ship.

  Horatio had walked a mile back towards Fleet Street in the rain before flagging down an empty taxi. All the way while plodding through the wet from the hospital he had contemplated the vagaries of life, oblivious to his physical discomfort… By the beginning of November the rain was cold, an east wind blowing down the empty road as dusk folded into night. The airman had seemed disoriented when he left, making Horatio question in his mind how long he had to live.

  “Poor Tina Brigandshaw,” he said, opening the door to his small flat. He knew that once it was in the paper, she would hear soon enough. To have her happiness soar to the heavens, or crash if he died.

  “Harry Brigandshaw’s alive, William. Just spoke to him. Remember the pilot lost in darkest Africa three years ago?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding… Are we going to the club Saturday?”

  “Why not? It’s cheap and full of warm bodies. This flat is freezing.”

  William Smythe was twenty-eight years old, the same age as his friend Horatio Wakefield. When he worked for the Manchester Guardian before losing his money, he told the girls he was the paper’s political correspondent. It sounded better than plain reporter.

  He had found out from an early age women liked more than the look of a man, especially if they were going to bed with him.

  Despite Kidderminster Grammar, three years at left-leaning Manchester University after his brief stint at the Mail with Horatio as a cub reporter, joining the British Communist Party, then the British Labour Party in his third year, even despite all his espoused philosophy of socialism, William knew in his true heart that the biggest aphrodisiac for women was money.