by Peter Rimmer
When Barnaby first sat down, the captain gave him a hearty smile and introduced himself. It was part of the captain’s job to be polite to the passengers. After the captain with a full beard learnt his name, the smile left his face. He gave a nod and got on with his food. Barnaby felt his stomach sink. He had hoped he had left his indiscretions back in Africa. Albert Pringle was a bigger bastard than he thought, passing word to the ship’s purser. After the curry, having been warned by the steward against first trying to eat the soup, Barnaby settled for a bowl of trifle.
They sat on alone in silence but it made no sense. If he was to be a pariah on the voyage why had they seated him at the captain’s table? Neither of them had ordered wine.
“If we want a drink, St Clair, we’d better go and stand at the bar. You do have good sea legs?” The captain was looking straight at him, challenging him to refuse the suggestion. There were flecks of grey in the man’s beard. Barnaby put the captain’s age at over fifty. It was going to be the headmaster warning a pupil to behave himself, that what he did elsewhere was his business, but anything he did on board ship he was accountable to the captain. Barnaby knew he was about to get an ugly dressing down.
“Very good, thank you,” said Barnaby, keeping his mental balance. He would brazen it out. Stare the man down. Unless there was someone on board to whom he owed money, there was no proof. The thought made him nervous, and he looked around.
“A drink then. Had enough of plate chasing.”
“Splendid,” said Barnaby, trying hard to keep his voice normal.
“You do drink, St Clair?”
“Oh yes. Rather fond of these newfangled American cocktails.” He had a swift vision of the sidecars served in the tall glasses in the ladies’ bar of Meikles Hotel and wanted to bite his tongue. Could the young man be on board ship?
“I was thinking more of a glass of port,” said the captain.
“Splendid.” Barnaby clenched his jaw.
The captain got up and marched out of the dining room past the thin sprinkling of passengers still able to put up with the pitch and roll of the ship.
Barnaby felt himself back at prep school. Following the headmaster with the long cane held in the headmaster’s right hand ready for retribution.
The boat lurched and Barnaby clutched the back of a dining chair. The captain in front of him swayed through the tables as if nothing was moving his ship. A terrible thought struck Barnaby: the captain was going to make him drink all night and tell the bar steward to put the drinks on his bill, for which he had two pounds to last him the voyage. The idea of borrowing money while on board swiftly left his mind. He had an idea the guardroom on board a ship was called the brig where they put thieves and miscreants to be handed over to the police when they reached England. He was not sure of the naval name for his jail but it did not matter now.
The bar was almost empty: a young man with a military moustache and the Indian Army colonel who mumbled to the captain that drink never upset a stomach, only food. Barnaby suspected the man was already tight. The colonel’s face was bright red behind the full set of white whiskers. The captain marched straight to the bar with Barnaby a yard behind him.
“We have a special guest on board tonight,” the captain announced. He seemed to be talking to the steward in charge of the bar but he spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. There were two officers seated at the table within earshot. Barnaby now knew he was going to be given his warning in public. The captain was going to make a fool of him. He would have to spend the rest of the voyage in his cabin, ashamed to show his face. He had never hated anyone more than Albert Pringle. The man was living proof it was impossible to make a gentleman out of new money even if it was dressed in new clothes.
The blood had drained out of his face. He was as white as a sheet when the captain turned round to confront him in front of everyone at the bar. By breakfast, the whole ship would know he was a thief. Then the worst thought struck him like a hammer blow. They would tell his father. They would tell his mother. He would never be able to face his parents again. For the only time since Granny Forrester died, he was glad she was dead. It would have killed that wonderful love he had always seen in her eyes to know her grandson had become a thief.
“Make sure, Hopkins, that all the drinks tonight are entered on my card. This is Captain the Honourable Barnaby St Clair and I want you to look after him, Hopkins, while he is in our care.”
“But you don’t know me, sir,” blurted Barnaby.
“Not you, sir, personally. But your brother-in-law, Harry Brigandshaw. May I say how terrible we felt at Colonial Shipping when we heard your sister had been shot by that madman Braithwaite. They should hang him, I say. Not keep him in an asylum where he can escape again to kill. Now tell me how you found Harry Brigandshaw?… Are you all right? You don’t look well.” A huge smile spread over Barnaby’s face. He was not dead after all.
“I don’t know. After Lucinda died, Harry vanished into the bush to look for his sister’s husband. No one has heard from him since. In over a year… How’d you know Harry Brigandshaw?”
“Don’t you know his family own this shipping line? When London told us we had a family relation on board, they said to look after you properly. Your bar bill will be paid by the company in respect to your late sister.”
“I only met Harry when I was a small boy. He stayed with us when he came down from Oxford with my brother Robert in ’07, I think it was. I must have been around about ten years old. I was in Palestine for the duration of the war. Fighting in the desert.”
“Did you meet Colonel Lawrence? Lawrence of Arabia the papers call him now.”
“Many times,” said Barnaby, lying. He was quickly recovering. Back on his feet. Confident. The old Barnaby St Clair everyone loved. Mentally he thanked his dead sister for somehow saving his bacon.
By the time he drank the second glass of port with the captain, he was laughing. Telling stories of Lawrence of Arabia. The fact that Simon Haller had proved he never met Lawrence in person was quite forgotten, along with the twenty pounds he owed the editor of the Rhodesia Herald. The two ship’s officers had got up from the table to join them at the bar. Even the old colonel seemed to be listening to his stories. He was back in his element. Charming. Listening when spoken to. Smiling deep into each person’s eyes. The resolution to God he had made following the captain to the bar to never lie again completely abandoned. He was back on his wits. He was back in control. And they were loving him. He was going to make some money out of his forced sea voyage after all.
When he staggered to his cabin, he was not sure if the boat or the drink made him lurch. Just before he fell asleep he thought the room was going round and round. On his face was a smile of deep relief.
“Tina, my darling, I’ll be back,” he said aloud.
He gave out two alcoholic burps through his windpipe and fell asleep.
When Barnaby woke in the morning, the sea was calm, the storm over. He shaved very carefully and went down to breakfast in the first-class dining room. He had on his blue blazer with the right hand tucked just inside the coat over his heart. He had thought of wearing the old Harrovian tie he had stolen in Damascus during the war from a fellow officer and changed his mind. Living on his wits needed cunning. In a bar or a restaurant on land, he could walk away from an embarrassing situation. On the ship, he could be asked by a genuine old Harrovian the name of his house, and he had no idea of the names of the houses at Harrow School. The dining room was only half full. Some of the passengers were still recovering from seasickness. He was charming to everyone he met. The captain had not come down to breakfast as was his custom, the ship’s purser had explained. Only in the evening did the captain sit down with his passengers. Otherwise, he ate his meals in his day cabin.
After breakfast, he took a constitutional around the deck to see what there was among the passengers. The thought of Tina Pringle had left his mind. It was a new hunt. A new day. A new confidence.
Ba
rnaby was thinking.
During breakfast, two of the passengers had been talking about the stock exchange, something Barnaby knew little about.
Without appearing to take his mind off the bacon and eggs he listened to the conversation carefully. They were speaking softly, so he had to strain his ears to catch every word. An old woman was talking loudly about how much better she felt. No one was listening to her. A young girl without one ounce of sex appeal was trying to catch his eye from the other side of the breakfast table. The Indian Army colonel looked in the pink. Barnaby was sure the old boy had had a drink or two before his breakfast.
“The trick is to know what’s happening before the public,” he heard the younger man confide. “You need a friend on the inside. In accounts. With an ear to the ground. I have a chap in one of the merchant banks. A junior, but he is good. Going to be a rich man one day. I pay him for the information. Half his firm’s clients are listed on the London Stock Exchange. You can make just as much when you hear a company has some bad results coming out. I just sell a block of shares I don’t have knowing I can buy the stock a couple of days later at a cheaper price before I have to give any broker the share certificates. When I tell him to sell, he doesn’t know if I’m holding the stock. He only wants to know ten days later when I pass him the share certificates. When I buy, of course, I use another broker. They all know but they don’t care. Both of them make their commission. All you need is inside information and you can get rich without starting with a penny. I started with a hundred quid after the war and now look at all this.”
The man waved a hand at the first-class dining room and smirked. Barnaby was deeply impressed. When the man changed the subject, Barnaby changed direction and gave the ugly girl his sweetest smile. If she was sitting at the captain’s table her parents had to be rich. Barnaby had heard a rude but accurate statement from a drunken fellow officer during the war. He remembered it now as he smiled. ‘You don’t have to look at the mantelpiece when you poke the fire.’ Men without women could be so crude. It made him smile again. The ugly girl blushed right down her skinny neck where Barnaby had a quick look. ‘That one doesn’t have to tie her tits down.’ He quickly put the new picture of Tina Pringle out of his mind and concentrated on the girl at the table. Going back to what was on his plate, he decided not to start a conversation. He would let the captain introduce them at dinner. The captain would use his title and hopefully mention in front of her parents that the family of his brother-in-law owned the shipping line. He would be aristocratic, which he was. From a rich family, which he wasn’t. And doubly eligible. Then he would find out if there was anything in it for him.
Barnaby smiled, thinking back over breakfast. His world was beginning to look much better. He decided to take another turn round the deck.
The storm had been left behind though the sea swells still made the ship pitch and roll. The shore of Africa was a thin line on the starboard side. They were sailing up the Skeleton Coast, a coastline that had torn ships apart from the time of the earliest Portuguese explorers. If Barnaby had been able to see ten miles to the dunes of the Namib Desert, he would have seen the lonely camp of his brother-in-law, Harry Brigandshaw. Barnaby would have seen Harry alone with his horses around the roaring fire, cooking his breakfast.
3
Finders Keepers, September 1920
Harry Brigandshaw stood up to his full height to get a better look at the ship passing far out to sea. It made him think of people, which made him think of Lucinda and the pain came back again. The single shot that killed his new wife on the train at Salisbury Station had been fired by Mervyn Braithwaite the previous year. After sixteen months he could still hear the shot.
They were going to have a second wedding in Rhodesia, at the church his Uncle Nathanial had built outside Salisbury as a missionary, soon after Harry’s father had taken up the farm he called Elephant Walk. Harry had sailed home on the SS King Emperor, the family-owned liner. His party on board with him had been his new wife Lucinda, his two brothers-in-law, Robert and Merlin St Clair, and the American Glen Hamilton, who had found the publisher for Robert’s Keeper of the Legend.
He had tried to run away from himself soon after his wife’s murder. He had said he was going to look for Madge’s husband Barend Oosthuizen, but that had only been part of the truth. The excuse. The reason he gave his mother to run. Lucinda had been pregnant so Braithwaite’s revenge had killed two people not one. Other than Jack Merryweather, only he and Lucinda had known she was pregnant. The doctor on board the ship had given them the news that lit Lucinda’s face. Harry had not told his mother. Initially, he had not told Barend after he followed him into the African bush. Barend had always been a silent companion, and this had suited both of them as they went on towards the Atlantic coast of Africa, alone with their troubled thoughts. Not even once had Harry asked Barend about Barend’s marriage to Madge. Or their children left behind on Elephant Walk. Years before, Harry had heard an expression in Afrikaans that translated badly into ‘no man knowing what was in another man’s head’. He had learnt from life that what people said and what they thought were mostly two different things. Harry hoped it was what made them individuals, having thoughts no one else could see, man’s own privacy. It always gave him comfort.
They had not found the source of the diamonds. They had found the rock on the coast where Barend had marked his initials. They had walked the same piece of beach where the seven diamonds had been found. There was nothing but sand and the sea. They were too far north up the coast. The big diamond strike had come just north of Alexander Bay far to the south. After nine months of diligent searching, they had wandered off on their separate ways. Before parting, he had then told Barend about Lucinda. The big man had crushed him tight in a bear hug without uttering a word. They had been friends from childhood. The three of them, Harry, Barend and Madge.
“Are you going home?” Harry had asked.
“Some day. Now you look after yourself.”
They had been speaking Afrikaans, the language of the Boers. Sometimes they spoke in English. It did not matter.
His geology degree from Oxford had been worthless in the search. Either a prospector had dropped the seven uncut gem diamonds, or they had been swept ashore from the sea, both highly unlikely in Harry’s opinion. Nowhere in the world had diamonds which were heavy been washed ashore in a rough sea.
Amber, which was light, came ashore on many an English coast. Diamonds were tumbled down rivers from sources far inland. Gold was washed down rivers. Men panned for gold and sometimes diamonds. Where the rock stood with Barend’s initials carved bold and clear in the grey granite, there was not a river mouth for miles. And never had been through all the millennia. Harry had looked for signs of an old river mouth. Nothing. Just the seven diamonds Barend had brought back to Elephant Walk from his first wanderings while he mulled the hanging death of his father by the British for being a Boer patriot. Harry was Barend’s only English friend. Their bonds from childhood had withstood the hatred forged by the Anglo-Boer War.
Harry watched the liner through the field glasses he had brought back from his own war. They were German and good. His only trophy from a crashed German triplane.
Harry had shot the pilot in the air. The plane had drifted down and crash-landed through the fence at the end of a French field, the German slumped in his cockpit. Harry had landed his biplane in the field. The dogfight had broken his squadron into lonely personal flights. With his adversary slumped forward in his seat Harry had looked for his pilots. They were alone, he and the German. His intention had been to help the pilot, but the man was dead. A young, good-looking man with a bullet in his head from a Vickers machine gun. The long leather case that contained the field glasses was on the dead pilot’s lap, the case unopened. They had been made by Zeiss. They had the German’s initials carved into the leather: ‘H B’. French peasants were running over the field. They would steal the field glasses. His own initials on the German case was too mu
ch of a coincidence. He had taken the case and left the rest of the plane to the looting Frenchmen. He had stood to attention and saluted the dead pilot. Then he had taken off back down the field to fly back to the temporary airfield of 33 Squadron and report his kill to the commanding officer, Major Mervyn Braithwaite.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Harry said out loud. “It’s the King Emperor.” Ridiculously, he waved his wide-brimmed hat, soaked black at the rim from sweat, as if they could see him in the sand dune. The fish he had caught earlier in the morning was sizzling in the pan on the open fire. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said again as if to convince himself.
Smiling, he wondered who had become the new captain. Captain Hosey had been due to retire. Strangely, the knowledge of a friendly crew so near and yet so far made him lonely for the first time. Even his dogs were home on Elephant Walk.
He turned the fish in the pan and stood staring at the ship for a long time. Then he ate his breakfast and fed the horses the fodder he had collected the previous day, the thin patches of long grass between the sand dunes watered by the mist that rolled in from the sea. The roots of the grass were embedded deep in the sand, white and tubular, and came up when he pulled. The roots were good for the horses even if the animals looked at him with pain in their eyes.
“You want to go home too?” he asked them. “Maybe we should.”
The last time he had seen the SS King Emperor he had been with Lucinda at the port of Beira. Then they were alive and happy. The three of them. The secret baby that no one knew about except themselves and Jack Merryweather. They had caught the boat train into the interior and their destination, Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia. The destination that had ended his wife’s life when Braithwaite killed her for vengeance. As he had killed Sara Wentworth.