by Peter Rimmer
"At least I wasn't bored," he said picking up the letter, not recognising Harry Brigandshaw's writing. The note was brief, the old cable to the point.
"It seems those two women wish to haunt me," he said out loud. "Stuck in the mailbox for those years. Poor Sallie. The gods were not with you." Then he shook his head, walked into his sitting room and poured a large amount of whisky into the waiting crystal glass. This time, he did not even bother squirting a slosh of soda from the syphon into the glass.
For no reason whatsoever, a cold shiver ran through his body, as if someone had walked over his grave.
The sale of the Mansion House went through quickly. Sallie had discreetly put the business on the market as she concluded everyone with money thought they could run a restaurant, a bar and a whorehouse. She rather thought most men were familiar with all three of them which made them feel comfortable and competent; all they had to do was pay their money and reap the profit. Sallie wished the buyer the best of luck. She had her money in the bank. The first big gamble had paid off. Never again would a business of hers be illegitimate.
Lily had gone off on a world cruise before deciding what to buy with her money. They both waved her goodbye at the railway station.
"Do you think we will ever see her again?" asked Albert.
"No. Some man will have that money off her before she reaches New York."
"What will she do then?"
"Who knows. People find a place somewhere or they die. Always other people have made Lily her money. Men. Jack Merryweather. You and me. None of us owe each other anything. It was a business partnership. Who the hell knows, Albert. Maybe she'll meet a man on the boat who likes fat women. I believe the Turks are like that."
"I hope you're wrong about losing her money."
"So do I… We will both have to sell our houses."
"Whatever for? I like my house."
"We need the money. There's going to be one hell of a war in Europe. Everyone at each other's throats. The Americans, the Germans, the French; they have all envied the British Empire for too long. The Americans talk about freeing our colonies for egalitarian reasons but the real reason is they can only do business with them without British interference. Kick out imperial Britain, bring in the imperial dollar. The Germans covet our possessions. The French and English have hated each other for centuries, though this time for fun we are going to be on the French side. Balance of power to stop Germany. They need us, we need them. The Germans made a mess of everything in 1870… The Americans will try and trade with everyone. There's going to be one big world war, according to the financial papers I read. Despite the Boer War, I think here the generals, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts will side with the British Empire. They have found which side their bread's buttered. Smuts in particular has been so feted by the English he's besotted with the attention of so many royals. Flattery. Nothing like a bit of flattery. He's joined the big club… Now, Albert Pringle: it's time we go for lunch. We will each pay half of the bill which is the way I want it for the rest of our partnership."
The train carrying Lily had run out of the station leaving the platform empty. Sallie took off her glasses and tossed them in the first dustbin.
"Why did you do that, Sallie? You always say never waste money."
"I don't need them any more."
"You can see properly now!"
"I always could. Before lunch I'm going to the hairdresser and then I'm going to buy myself some clothes. Oh, and there is something else I never told you. There are two sets of books."
"You've been stealing!"
"In a kind of way. Hiding would be the better word. It cost something when I sold the business, as the second set of accounts show a higher profit and would have valued the business for more than we got. Lily is her own worst enemy. I have created a legal trust for Lily Ramsbottom from which she can only draw the interest. Your share of the skim is in a separate bank account which can only be drawn upon with your signature. You will see for the last five years there are only credits, including half-annual interest on the balance. It represents your twenty per cent of the skim! Lily's sixty per cent is in the trust. Lily will never go hungry. She was more than good to us… Do you think I did the right thing?"
"You said she would have to settle for a Turk."
"I wanted you to understand why I hid the trust from Lily. She may not come back to Johannesburg. But one day she'll be asking us for money. She'll say we owe her one, which we do."
"You think of everything."
"Over lunch I want to tell you about our dynamite factory. There are two shareholders at present. One is an industrial chemist and knows how to blow things up; the other is a fool. Inherited his money. Couldn't run a brewery selling free beer. He is the one you and I are going to buy out and then refinance the company."
"I thought we were going into mining."
"We are. The factory sells explosives mainly to the mining industry. When the war comes they'll want a lot of explosives to blow up people instead of rocks. I want a new factory ready within the year. Why we have to use all our money now."
"What happens if it doesn't work? If the other man wasn't such a fool?"
"Then we go broke. Where we started, Albert. What's the difference?"
"Can't I keep my house?"
"No. And we're not going to go broke. You just start reading everything you can find on dynamite. Detonator caps. Safety precautions at explosive factories, if you can find such literature, which I can't. Every piece of knowledge in the world is in between the covers of books. Someone said that years ago."
By the time Sallie joined Albert at the restaurant in the Langham Hotel, there was no resemblance to the girl who had run the accounts at the Mansion House. The very pit of his stomach ached for what he knew he would never have. They were business partners. She had made that quite plain.
"There is always a snag in all good things," he said getting up from his chair as she sat down.
"What are you talking about?"
"You, Sallie."
"You can stop that right there," she snapped. "I may not have told you in as many words but after that fat, farting German raped me, men and sex frighten me. Don't even let your mind think down that road or our partnership stops right now."
"Then why the clothes? The new hairstyle?"
"It will give me power. Power over men, and I like that."
Like Jack Merryweather had done early in the day, Albert Pringle shivered as if someone had walked over his grave.
"Did you ever hear from Jack about your mother's address?" he said at the end of the shiver down his spine.
"Not a word."
Chapter 9: July 1913
The Ninth Earl of Pembridgemoor, Peregrine Alexander Cholmondeley Kenrick, woke from his dream under the wild fig tree on a tiny island in the Okavango Delta. For a moment he was not sure where he lay, while the tears rolled down the deep crow's feet from his eyes, into the grey-white bush of his unkempt beard. Above in the tree the birds were singing, strange birds for the first moments from his dream, and then he remembered and tears followed tears from the small blue eyes. The fleshy mouth was open, caught by a ray of the African sun through the tangled fig tree.
The tree was full of birds and all of them were singing their separate songs, the sound of different calls mingling in a symphony of sound. By the shallow water, the two donkeys grazed the lush grass, that without the thousands of rivulets sinking into the Kalahari sands would be gone; left to die in the dry red dust of desert. The swamps, Peregrine called them, rioted this lost garden of Eden, the Okavango the only river in Africa he knew to flow inland and disappear into the sand; other rivers, like the Nile, meandered into the sea giving their pure sweet waters to the fish; Peregrine the Ninth thought that was rather a pity.
The rivulets, five feet deep at the worst, surrounded his island with a tree topping the central mound, the water so pure and clear, so good to drink, he could see every
detail on the bottom; the reeds tall at the water's edge were high to a man's shoulder; the thicker forest was across the thirty feet of water, where a tall island dominated the great river on its last flow as the waters dispersed over mile after mile into the thankful desert that drank and drank. Peregrine could hear the elephant moving on the big island, the tall, tangled trees keeping them from his blurred vision. His small leathery hand came up and wiped away his tears. He had dreamed of his long ago.
He had first run away to France, the rough rude winter channel testimony to his father's wrath. He was twenty years old. Educated to tell others what to do in far-flung colonies, or when his time came, to inherit the great estate that had belonged to his family for centuries. For all intents and purposes, he was penniless with not even the skill to steal. None of them had been on his side, not even his mother. They and that meant all of them, his brother, his sisters, both families and with some help from his father's purse, had conspired to send her away, out of his reach, out of his life, and when she was gone he was meant to do what he was told. Looking back he wondered if the whole performance, the pride, the pain, the sheer longing, had been, along with his wandering life, fruitless, wasted, sometimes mellow, sometimes sad, mostly alone. Well, he had told himself a thousand times, he had burnt his boats, and there was no going back, not even when he read in the paper his father was dead.
The family had put notices in many newspapers around the world. The estate was entailed, and despite his father's better wishes, would always belong to the eldest son, the head of the family, the holder of the title. While leading Harry Brigandshaw on a wild goose chase looking for the last gold of King Lobengula, he had chanced to read a piece of old newspaper used to wrap the crystal glasses they drank from when the sun went down. His father was dead at the age of ninety-five. He no longer needed guile to drink good whisky. He burnt the piece of paper on their fire that night. Going back was out of the question. It was far too late, he told himself.
She had seduced him, a virgin. There had been no wicked uncle to take him south to London, to pay an older woman. No older brothers, he was the eldest. And she had probably known exactly what she was doing. Having caught his eye she called his body in the woods. From then on Peregrine was besotted with the girl. Still was, with her memory. His father, he suspected, like many fathers before him had been right. There had even been some patience in the beginning.
"Perry, my boy," he said. His father had always called him 'Perry, my boy'. Never plain 'Perry'. "We all fall in lust when we are young. That is primal nature calling. Probably way back then, when land and money had not come into the equation, we procreated with whoever came along, fighting for the survival of our species. I don't even think man and woman are meant to be monogamous. At the beginning, there was no need to take a lifetime partner to protect our property and our children. Everything and everyone belonged to everybody. I rather think the tribes in darkest Africa and Borneo are the same today. Most likely they have a short sweet life, the fittest surviving the weak by killing them. Mr Darwin has some interesting theories which if they get out all over the place will change the way we think of ourselves, even the way we are told on pain of fiery hell the way we were created. Fact is, I rather agree with his logic which comes back to you, my son, and our ancestors. We have been on this land a long time but to survive we have had to be the best, the strongest, the richest. We have to dominate as the Empire dominates or we will be knocked off our perch. Do you really think I married your mother for love, though you might think so after eleven children? There was a girl in my day, I forget her name deliberately. Like your girl, she was poor. No dowry. Probably after me for my potential money and title as much as anything, though we both swore to each other money had nothing to do with it. My father took away my horse. Told the stable boys on pain of dismissal not to saddle me a horse. They locked the stables at night. He took away all my money and anything else I could turn into money. He knew I would not steal what was not mine and there he was right. We all so hate being told we are wrong. I had met your mother a few times socially. We had not even glanced at each other. And then it was arranged. You see, Perry, my boy, your mother had the right breeding and half a million pounds. So they married us. The other girl married into her own class. I heard she was happy. And I ask you, my son, is this a happy house? Don't you love your mother? Doesn't your mother love you? Are we not a close family in harmony with each other and our surroundings?"
"Yes, father."
"Then do as you're told. If we have to have this discussion again I will not be so pleasant. With wealth comes responsibility. You will have a great weight on your shoulders when I die. Mary's not a bad girl. You have the same background, the two of you. In the end, you will find that more conducive to harmony than primal lust. You will be able to trust each other. The families will be marrying each other. If she were to seduce you in the bushes, how many others might she seduce, and then where would you be?"
"How do you know?"
"I have my spies."
And all the logic in the world had been to no avail. He was in love, not in lust. He was incapable of other thought. The arguments with his father grew violent. The happy family began to disintegrate and they told him it was all his fault. Then the girl had gone and in this temper and frustration, he had run away. Put his back to them. And still in his dreams she came to him and made him cry. They were sweet moments in his life.
Peregrine rather thought to himself, as he looked back on his lonely life, that we want what we can't have, and curse a moment when we have what we want and it is taken away from us. He knew, in his heart, if the affair had been allowed to follow its natural path it would have petered out like the others. His love, his lust, his passion would have waned. He would have satiated himself. But all the daylight logic churning in his mind had never stopped the night-time dreams. Somewhere, back then, there had been perfection in his life. The cold hard reality he had faced since then was, to him, an indictment on life itself. Without that sweet, brief perfection in his mind, he rather thought he would not survive. She never changed. Never grew old. Was always perfect in his thoughts.
The journey through his life had gone on and on, place to place, people to people, country after country and little had stuck in his memory. He had soon found a way to make a living, a transient living but mostly it had worked. When he wished to be, he could be the most charming man in the room. Educated, well spoken. Good at talking. Good at listening. And he had a courtesy title, Lord Peregrine Kenrick, which he used sparingly, only letting out the surprising news when he had found himself a mark. And they had never been difficult to find throughout his wandering, especially in America, when hostesses would have killed to lay their hands on a young handsome genuine English lord. In many ways, it had all been too easy. Like the lady he wanted in his dreams, they always wanted what they could never have. No matter how much money they had, no one would ever call an American the Right Honourable, the Earl of Pembridgemoor. They had fought a war of independence to make sure it never happened, that they were all a happy, egalitarian similarity. But if by chance their daughter married an English earl… It was all rather pointless, Peregrine had thought. But then, so was the variety of certain men and woman. And he had to have a living, and in a roundabout way, he was selling them a product, their ability to refer to their good friend Lord Peregrine Kenrick for the rest of their natural lives. He was a celebrity in America, and celebrities cost money, 'that's Lord Peregrine, you know'. The fact that Lord Peregrine was a bum never entered their heads.
Like with any job, he grew tired of the constant need to keep on his toes to stop the lie being understood by his benefactors. To give them their money's worth. He hoped it was the way of people to create a façade that gave them the most from life. And society and business, because of all the falsity, were riddled with the fear of being found out.
After thirty years of drifting and ignoring letters from his family as they followed his car
eer in the American social papers, he had come to Africa. He had never married one of the daughters, as none of them compared to the lady in his dreams. And then he had disappeared from sight. And in Africa he called himself Peregrine the ninth just in case: it was his own private joke.
There were moments when his lack of family responsibility involuntarily turned his stomach. Someone, one of his youngest brothers, would be running the estate. Maybe they had proclaimed him dead. Maybe he was not the ninth Earl of Pembridgemoor. However which way he looked at it all it was too late now, in the swamps of Africa, six years after reading about his father's death. He would be a ghost from the past, a past best left to get on with itself. Even friendly ghosts were rarely welcome, he argued. He had a letter for them in the wagon should there be someone around to give it to when he was dying. And then again someone might find the wagon and his corpse. And then again he would just turn to dust and sink into the soil of Africa, Clary and Jeff, his donkeys, himself, and an abandoned wagon.
He was hungry. Reminiscing in his mind always made him hungry. A nice piece of dried venison was exactly what he fancied for his breakfast. Getting up surprisingly easily for a man of seventy, he walked across to his wagon in the beautiful yellow light of early sunrise. A heron rose above the reeds, long-legged from the river and somewhere deep in the swamps an African fish eagle called its lonely cry.
