by Peter Rimmer
Earlier he had viewed through the glasses a close-up of the triumphant capture of a butterfly that had left Harry wondering what it was all about. The secret place for keeping the milk cool was revealed, the fire curled smoke from behind a rock, and for a very short while, the catching of a large fish was worthwhile but spoilt when grandfather went about cooking the bream over the hidden fire instead of catching lots of them for supper. The smell of cooking fish wafted over to his hiding place and sent saliva washing down his chin. At some point he fell fast asleep and woke to search for his grandfather with the field glasses, only to find him staring upwards, stock still under a tree where he stood for a long time until a bird came out and flew off down the river. Harry could see and almost hear the sigh of contentment. Later, when his grandfather was off into the thick bush where Harry couldn’t see him anymore, he escaped back over the river and ran back to the compound where he raided the meat-safe with the small holes in the zinc to let the air flow through and was caught by his mother cutting chunks of cold meat off last night’s leg of venison.
“Where were you for lunch?” asked Emily.
“Watching Grandfather. Uncle Gregory says Grandfather’s gone potty. Mummy, what’s potty? Is it catching butterflies and standing still for hours under trees looking up at birds? ’Cause if that’s potty, Grandfather’s potty.”
“I think Uncle Gregory meant eccentric.”
“So Grandfather’s eccentric?”
“Oh yes. They say a lot of Englishmen left out in Africa become eccentric. Even some of those who go to India.”
“I’m an Englishman. Do you think I’ll become eccentric? I hope not. I don’t like catching butterflies and staring into trees.” Harry thought for a moment with his mouth full of meat, chewing. He swallowed. “But I wouldn’t mind those bushbuck trousers.”
“I’ll make you a pair,” said Emily smiling.
“Will you, Mummy? Oh, tops. You’re the best mummy in the world.”
“No she’s not,” said Madge from the open door. “She’d have smacked me for stealing the meat… Mummy, what am I going to do when Barend goes away?”
Alison, with a basket of washing from the communal line, heard the last part of the conversation and walked on to her house. She put the basket down in her kitchen and sat thinking, far away in her thoughts. The baby was due in three weeks’ time but her mind was elsewhere. Ominously, Barend and Tinka were quiet in the back of the house; Tinus had not yet come in from the lands. Rightly, she told herself, she should get up and start setting cutlery and crockery on the long table out on the veranda.
A gecko was climbing up the screen that was meant to keep the flies out of the kitchen, the small sticky feet-pads allowing the lizard to defy gravity. Like the spider of Scottish legend, she watched as the gecko stalked and killed the flies that were trying to get through the finely meshed screen, and wondered where her life would have been if she had not climbed out of the window at Hastings Court and joined the runaways on their odyssey to Africa, to an African farm cut off from the realities of her known world.
It was difficult for her to imagine the young woman who had taken the job of looking after Harry. If she had not loved little Harry so much, she would not have run off in the night; if her brother had not gone to sea; if her parents had not died; if she had not become a child’s nurse, a servant in all but name; if she had not let Tinus have his way before they were married. Now they were going again. Leaving Harry, Emily and the enigmatic Seb who worried about all of them, the weight of the world resting on his shoulders. Now she had two, almost three children, and a husband richer than anyone she had ever known in England except The Captain. Idly, she wondered if the old pirate, as Grandfather Henry called him, ever missed his grandchildren. She doubted it. That old man had money on his brain, morning, noon and night. How strange that Madge, granddaughter of the owner of Hastings Court, old, old money in an old, old house, was worrying about the grandson of a jobbing gardener and not a very good one by all reports, Alison’s education coming from the board school and the lucky interest of a primary teacher.
From being servant and mistress she and Emily had become friends far from the rigid rules of English class. There had just been the four of them in the bush with a common destiny… And then the children… Then again, like destiny, the potty grandfather and his unhappy friend. Sadly, overwhelmed by loneliness, she thought again of leaving her friends, more family than friends, and she understood. There was comfort in their companionship, lost as they were in the middle of the bush. They relied on each other; that was it. Their own preservation relied on each other and even Fran had found it was no place to fall out with the people she needed, no time or place to argue. Alison sighed. She would miss them all so much.
And when she looked for the gecko, it had gone.
3
June 1898
By the end of June, a year after the first Chimurenga, St Mary’s Mission had been rebuilt except for the church. Earthly attractions came before the house of God. The mission comprised a small dispensary managed by Bess, a school run by Bess and Nathanial, a large kitchen and dining room, two dormitories and, after long theological debate, an open area with goal posts at either end. The church, when it was built, would be of great proportions as befitting Nathanial Brigandshaw’s real mission to Africa: the mission of saving souls from the domination of eternal hell, consumed but never dying in the fire of the Devil, the eternal pit of damnation for those who did not accept the one true God and his only son, Jesus Christ. The stone church would rise above the charred remains of sacrilege, the spire visible to the heathen pagans for miles around, the Cross of Christ high and triumphant, throwing its light over the darkness of Africa, bringing that light to everyone who believed in the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Three great kilns were burning the bricks and the House of God, when it rose from the bush, would be so powerful that no mortal man would ever burn it down.
With his long black skirt touching the dry earth of Africa, Nat strode his domain with the great energy of a man doing the work of God.
Three miles away, the man who had made all this possible by paying for it was gazing down out of the window of his tower across the Hunyani River at the throngs of horses being tended to by his black grooms under the eye of Jack Jones, a man listed in England as a deserter from the British Army. Jeremiah Shank had recognised a soulmate in the men’s bar of Meikles Hotel when the ex-corporal Jones had told him to stop the crap and to use his proper accent. As in everything Jeremiah did in his life, he turned the incident to profit. Anyway, he was too short to start an argument, and the Welshman was looking at his face with the expression of a man looking forward to doing harm.
“’Ave a drink, mate,” said Jeremiah throwing his elocution lessons out of the window, having first looked around the small bar to make sure that he would not be recognised. The barman was a black man dressed up in a red fez and a white jacket whom Jeremiah knew would have no idea of the difference between French and English. When the barman failed to understand the order, he gave his customer a short menu to point to where the bottle labels had been miniaturised in the margin. As Jeremiah had found since he had first come into money through working for The Captain, free drinks turned men’s opinions quicker than fists or guns. “Nice to talk proper,” said Jeremiah sliding the beer to his new friend. “Rumbled me, mate. Jeremiah Shank at your service. Tell me, my old codger, what brings you to the colonies?”
Seven beers later Jeremiah had the story. The Welshman had hit an officer for mistreating a horse and, instead of waiting to be locked up for insubordination, he had thrown away his fifteen years’ seniority with the Welsh Guards and caught a train for Liverpool. For three years he had roamed around America, made friends with a gold prospector in California and followed the American to the gold fields of Monomotapa where they had found nothing, splitting up the night Jeremiah had found Jack Jones in the men’s bar of Meikles Hotel.
�
�You want to come and work for me, Taffy?”
“Why would a good Welshman who likes horses better than men want to do that, I ask?” The man was quite drunk.
“’Cause after Cecil John Rhodes I’m the richest man in this bleedin’ country.”
“Now are you, man? Well, that does make a difference. Fact is, I’m broke.”
“I know, my old cock. But I also know you know all about horses and that bit does make me interested. Pick you up in the morning outside the hotel at ten o’clock.”
“Yes, guv.”
Later, in the best room in the hotel, Jeremiah smiled to himself. Only at the end had he reverted to his posh accent and only at the end had the Welshman called him guv. Jeremiah Shank was really learning about the power of money.
The investment in St Mary’s Mission was as calculated as any business decision. There was nothing in Jeremiah’s background to offer his peers so he decided to dazzle them with good deeds. When it came to sending out the invitations to the ground-breaking ceremony for the reverend’s church, the drawings for which together with the cost were more like a cathedral to Jeremiah, he understood why so many people in history had gone in for charity. A rather nice piece of paper had been printed with the masthead proclaiming the St Mary’s Mission Foundation, while discreetly at the bottom were listed J Shank Esquire (Chairman) and The Reverend N P J Brigandshaw. Even years later Jeremiah was unable to find out what the P and J stood for but at the time he only saw the initials, and was so impressed with the Esquire after his own name that he forgot to ask, the opportunity slipping away forever.
To ask Fran Shaw meant inviting her husband, which brought up the question of asking the younger brother he had heard referred to as the black sheep. That was when the reverend was talking to the army captain who so consciously looked down his nose at Jeremiah Shank. In the end, everyone at Elephant Walk was sent gilt invitations and Jeremiah wondered if the black sheep would remember his face and the part he played with Jack Slater and the police in trying to have Sebastian arrested with the ivory. There was always a risk in everything, Jeremiah told himself.
The invitation to Mr and Mrs M J M Oosthuizen arrived three months after they had left for the Cape, the new baby keeping them in Rhodesia until it was old enough for travel, Alison still hoping Tinus would change his mind. Tinus, she found, like so many men had a one-track mind, and all the guile in the world failed to change his direction. For Alison, it was the worst parting she had ever faced in her life.
Sir Henry’s invitation was soon lost among the litter of books and specimens that infested his one-room rondavel, Harry convinced that some of the bugs were still alive.
Sebastian looked at the invitation with surprise. It was the first social engagement to which he and Emily had ever been invited, the taint of their elopement keeping them off the government social list. The thought of meeting his second brother after they had been in the same country for so many months made him smile; nasty names and rumours were always reported back to their owners even in the African bush.
For Fran Shaw, the name in small print at the bottom under Foundation Directors rang a distinct, faint bell in her mind but failed to connect to a thunderstorm on the veranda of Meikles Hotel. Bored to distraction with her life despite Gregory having squared his shoulders at the prospect of war, she was happy to send off her reply accepting the invitation regardless of the fact she had not been to church for years. After all, the church had always been a social event as well as a communication with God.
The lawns down to the Hunyani at Holland Park were immaculate, and where the msasa trees had been left standing on the way to the river small flowerbeds ringed their trunks giving a splendid splash of colour amidst the dryness of the leafless branches, rain having not fallen for months. In between the trees, black men in bare feet, starched white uniforms, and red fezzes with black tassels hurried between the multitudes of guests. Earlier everyone had watched a visiting English bishop scoop out an inch of hard dry soil with a silver trowel presented by Jeremiah with the bishop’s name on the back as the presenter. Drops of water were thrown at the dry patch of the cleared bush by the sweating bishop dressed in his full regalia.
In a cluster around the tiny scooped-out hole in the ground, a crowd of overdressed Europeans were being watched with amazement by a crowd of Africans who had come for the free lunch and had no idea what all the fuss was about. Thankfully the group of Europeans sang for a while out of tune and then got into their carts and drove away from St Mary’s Mission leaving the Africans to the fine spread of food, most of which none of them had ever seen in their lives before. There was some dissatisfaction at the lack of maize beer at such a festive occasion but the black people in a few short years had become accustomed to the less pleasant habits of their new masters. One of the young boys named Amos by Nathanial, who was to play a major role in the future of the mission, said that half a celebration was better than none at all, even though he was far too young to drink.
The three miles from the Mission to Holland Park had taken the guests half an hour and young Amos would have been amazed to see how much liquor was flowing between the trees and their neat ringed flowerbeds. There were trays of champagne and Pimm’s No. 1, silver trays of light and brown sherry, the latter a euphemism for sweet as no English lady of culture could ever bring herself to ask for a sweet sherry. Trays of canapés to go with the liqueurs were handed round and all before the main luncheon to be served on the terrace of the great house.
Guiding the red-fezzed black waiters with military precision, Taffy Jones was dressed as a major-domo and used the social skills he had learnt as a part-time waiter in the officers’ mess of his regiment. Taffy had been enjoying himself up to the point when Major Brigandshaw, recently elevated by the British Army, took a glass of champagne from a waiter’s tray, turned and looked straight into Jack Jones’s eyes.
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” James Brigandshaw was splendid in his red uniform and medals and for a moment the ex-corporal thought it was all over. Then the major gave him a wintry smile and turned back to the only good-looking lady, the really good-looking lady in the whole crowd of them, and for the rest of the day, Jack Taffy Jones intended keeping well away from the man in the crimson uniform.
Thankfully out of earshot he missed the comment of James Brigandshaw to Fran Shaw.
“That man’s been in the army. Probably Guards. Tall enough. Now I suppose I’d better go across and talk to that reprobate younger brother of mine. Father said he’d cut me off if I paid him a visit but he never said anything about talking at a church function, though frankly this looks more like a garden party at Bucks Palace than a religious dedication, and if someone doesn’t get that poor bishop out of his robes he’s going to expire in the noonday sun even if this is meant to be the winter. You want to come across and introduce me to Seb? Probably won’t recognise me, you see. Only thing we all agreed upon at home was that brother Nat was a bore, harmless but a bore. Thank goodness no one let him give a speech at that ground-breaking ceremony. If you can call ground-breaking digging up an inch of soil. That poor bishop, he’s so fat and the ground so low. You know, I told your husband there’s going to be a war with the Boers in the Transvaal over the right to vote and he became rather excited. Said I’d inquire about a new commission. You see, he left Chittagong of his own volition.”
“How do you know, Major Brigandshaw?”
“You’d be surprised how much the British Army knows about everyone. Including our host.”
“Do tell. He’s such a mystery.”
“Not if you know the facts.”
“Now you are teasing and you’d better stop as here comes the man in question. I’m sure I’ve seen him before somewhere, but bless me I can’t remember.”
“Probably just as well,” said James under his breath. To James, women were either naïve or plain damn stupid. Or was she playing a game? Deliberately, he left her talking to the host as he moved off to join his yo
unger brother in what would be their first conversation in many years. As he walked he was amused to see the tall major-domo move away in the opposite direction. Mentally he marked down a need to find out more about the man.
To Jeremiah’s surprise and annoyance, the woman for whom he had gone to so much trouble failed to recognise him and was about to stand back, waiting for a formal introduction.
“We have met, you know,” he said in his best British accent. “Fact is, we had supper together… There was a thunderstorm, you remember?… Meikles Hotel.”
“Oh dear, are you the same man who paid for my room?” Then it all came back, including the memory of her hangover, and she blushed. “Then I must thank you for being so kind. Storms are so terrible in Africa.”
“You reached home safely the next morning?”
“Yes, I did… Do you think the church will look splendid?” she said, changing the subject.
“I hope so, seeing I’m paying for it. Maybe we will both remember each other the next time we meet.”
“I do hope so. Holland Park is such a lovely home. What’s in the tower?” she said, looking up.
“My telescope. That dome opens to the sky. At night the sky is very beautiful.”