by Peter Rimmer
Half an hour after finishing his breakfast the last smoke from the ship’s funnels washed away in the distant wind. He could no longer tell the difference between the black smoke and the receding black clouds of the storm.
“I did love you, Cinda. I did. In the end… We would have had a good life on the farm… You never said what you would call the boy.”
Ever since Barend had gone off alone, he had started talking to himself out loud. He hoped Barend had gone home to his family. To Madge and the three children.
Gulls were crying in the storm-free sky as he walked down to the beach to pick the long, brown mussels from the rocks. It was low tide. Harry began to whistle. The ship had told him. He had to get on with his life. He had done enough of mourning. They were dead, and he was alive. Whether Mervyn Braithwaite was mad or sane was irrelevant, he tried to tell himself. Hopefully, this time the British authorities would keep him locked up in the lunatic asylum. If his old commanding officer was sane, then he still had to live with himself.
His mind drifted away from the southwest African coastline as he stood alone on the beach thinking back to the first time he had met Sara and Jared Wentworth. Jared was now dead, lost at sea when his ship went down, sunk by German torpedoes in 1917. Jared dying and Sara wanting to tell Harry that he had died, had started the events that killed her and Lucinda St Clair, the girl who eventually had been Harry’s wife for just a few weeks.
The Wentworths, brother and sister, had taken an African safari before Sara was going to be made to marry Mervyn Braithwaite. For his part, Jared was going to be forced to settle down in the City of London as a stockbroker.
They had all met in the African bush by chance. It had been 1907. Harry and Robert St Clair were back from Oxford but Harry was forced to travel back home to Rhodesia on hearing of the death of his father, Sebastian Brigandshaw. Travelling with Harry on the SS King Emperor, Robert and Harry had made friends with Jack Merryweather and Jack was subsequently invited to Elephant Walk.
Harry and Robert had known Mervyn Braithwaite at Oxford. When Sara had mentioned her engagement to Mervyn Braithwaite, they had both exclaimed ‘Fishy Braithwaite’ at the same time. The man had a face like a codfish, something he had been tormented with since a boy at prep school. Mervyn’s family were rich. The senior Wentworths thought wealth a better reason for marriage than love.
Mervyn Braithwaite was besotted by Sara with the long red-brown hair that came down to her waist. The brother and sister had dallied on Elephant Walk longer than they should have done, putting off their destiny dictated by their parents.
Through the years, Jared and Harry intermittently wrote to each other. Jared’s letters always mentioned Sara. Always mentioned Sara was still not married to Mervyn Braithwaite… As he found out later to his cost, Sara was as besotted with Harry as Mervyn was with Sara.
Seven years of being put off by a fiancée should have ended the engagement. A rich woman can look like a horse and get married. Rich men thought they could have what they wanted. The possession of money was the god of most people on earth.
All the time Mervyn Braithwaite had the name Harry Brigandshaw dropped into his ear even though Harry’s letters were not written to Sara but Jared. The idea of a great African romance had stayed vividly alive in Sara’s mind, all unknown to Harry.
When Mervyn Braithwaite had him posted to 33 Squadron, Harry thought it was because they had known each other up at Oxford, not because Mervyn wanted him killed in combat and out of the way.
Harry had survived as a novice pilot in 1916 despite being left alone in the sky by Braithwaite. His hunting skill and intuition from the African bush had kept him alive and made him an ace pilot.
The war had made Fishy Braithwaite a killer. The war had possibly made him mad. Harry was not so sure about the man being mad. Everyone on the Royal Flying Corps station had known their CO’s peculiarity. Whenever he killed a German, he jeered at the dying aeroplane. Yelling at the top of his lungs at the dead pilot, as if anyone could hear over the scream of his engine, ‘I’m not a wet fish. And you’re dead.’ They all knew he yelled but only because he once killed a German pilot whilst shooting from their own runway at a German low-level attack. It was then they heard the words. Some pilots like Harry vomited after they killed. Mervyn shouted an obscenity. The ground crew and pilots of 33 Squadron said it was the war. When the war was over, they would all return to being normal. Everyone shrugged their collective shoulders. Colonel Braithwaite was the CO. Colonel Braithwaite was a fighter ace. Colonel Braithwaite’s tactics in the air battle had kept most of them alive. There was a war on, they said.
Only after Braithwaite went absent without leave did everyone know something terrible was wrong. He faked his own death. As by luck, a ground engineer tried to fly out the plane with Mervyn’s number on the fuselage while in a German advance, and the engineer crashed and burnt. When Mervyn killed Sara in London in front of Harry, he would have killed Harry too with the second shot from the pistol but Harry, who was on sick leave, had hit him with his crutch. Then they said he was mad. Having escaped from Banstead Asylum after the war, Braithwaite took a boat to Africa, waited for Harry to return home with the girl the papers said was his bride. And killed Lucinda.
The tears flowed down Harry’s face as he looked out over the empty sea, the mussels he was going to collect forgotten. After all the horror of the war in France, which he had thought to have left behind him, the war had found him again as the train pulled in to Salisbury railway station. To the peace of home. To the hope of happiness. The future of a child.
Without thinking any more, Harry sat down on the wet sand and cried.
Only when the lonely call of the gulls brought him back to the lonely beach did he understand. The name they had all called Braithwaite from a child, Fishy, laughing in his squashed face, tormenting him, had hurt more than any German bullet could have done.
“How would you like to have been jeered at all your life?” he said out loud.
He walked on down to the edge of the sea where it was calm. A buttress of rock swept out and round, making the sea calm in the small cove. The rock buttress was wet and black, jagged. It had fought with the sea and errant ships for thousands of years. Under the lee of the ten-foot-high rock, the mussels were growing. They were longer than his hand. Harry bent down to pull off enough for his lunch. He was going to eat them raw, tasting the salt from the seawater. He could hear the boom of the sea, the swell crashing the other side of the rock wall. Sea spray came over and drenched him as he worked. The sun slanted into the pool below the dripping wet mussels that clung to the rocks. A sharp reflection from deep down in the pool caught his eye. With his right hand, he swept aside the froth on the surface of the pool, left behind by the angry sea swirling around the buttress. Then he put his hand into the water and pulled out the small rock that had been reflecting the mid-morning sun. The sides were smooth like cut crystal. The water ran off from the stone that sat looking at him from the palm of his right hand.
Harry began to laugh. With a cluster of mussels in his left hand and the rock in his other, he turned his back on the sea and walked out of the pool and ran up the beach. The gulls flew away in alarm. Then he stopped. Turned around and looked out over the vast, lonely expanse of the South Atlantic ocean.
“The diamond pipe is out to sea, you fool. That’s where they are. Deep in the ocean. Only a freak storm brings them up on the beach. Just the odd one.”
The thought that many more might be buried deep in the sand never entered his head. What he had in his hand was worth a fortune. The small rock covered most of the palm of his hand. Like the oysters dislodged by a rough sea, it was big enough for the waves to tumble up the beach and round the buttress into the pool. Only a diamond cutter could determine the true value of the gemstones that would fall from the rock in his hand. If he took the rock to Amsterdam, to the diamond cutters, he would be rich for the rest of his life. Slowly, Harry walked back to his horses, to the stallio
n he rode and the mare who carried his pack. They watched him with big, wet brown eyes, soft as velvet. They had been his only companions for months. Despite his sorrow, he had been happy, alone in the wilderness. The rock in his hand would make no difference. It could even take away the peace he had found on the shores of the Skeleton Coast. For a moment he had the urge to run back to the sea and throw the rock as far out as possible. Elephant Walk was more than he needed to provide his food and shelter. Only a good woman would want to live with him on the farm. Too much money attracted the wrong type of woman. A gold-digger would never be content to live on an African farm.
He was going to marry again as he was going to have children. He owed that to his ancestors. For their struggle to survive. They had not given up, not one of them, or he would not be standing on the beach… He stroked the stallion’s head, and the mare moved up for her share of the attention.
“You don’t have to sell it. You don’t even have to tell anyone. In the history of every family, there has always been a rainy day.”
Slowly and carefully, Harry packed his belongings onto the packhorse. He was going home to Elephant Walk. To Madge and hopefully Barend. To his mother and grandfather. He would make himself forget the rock in his saddlebag and get on with his life.
He was thirty-four years old. When he looked in the sea pool’s reflections he was slim. Nearly six feet tall with long hair that fell down his back under the wide-brimmed hat. The exposed parts of his body, his face and hands, were burnt the colour of mahogany by the sun. His green eyes, flecked with grey, could count a herd of buck at two thousand yards. From the horror of war on the Western Front, he knew he stared for long periods without seeing anything. Only the same pictures playing out the past in his mind. It was a stare that only saw the past.
At noon, when the sun was right overhead, he began the journey home. He was going to surprise them. He was going to be home for Christmas. It would take three months to navigate his way back into the heart of Africa, to the high plateau of rich grassland watered by many rivers they now called Rhodesia.
If a man could ever be happy then Harry Brigandshaw was happy. The past would always be the past. It was the future he wanted now that he was at peace with himself and his ghosts… Or so he hoped.
Merlin St Clair was a year older than Harry Brigandshaw. At first meeting, people found him uncomfortable to be with. Dogs ran away. Cats arched their backs. Women stood transfixed like a rabbit caught in the headlights of the new motor cars that were noisily powering themselves further and further afield.
His mother and his siblings had seen the look and called him Merlin after King Arthur’s magician. On closer regard, the strange look of the small baby and the grown man was simple. Merlin’s eyes were different colours. The right was a soft, clear blue. The left a darker blue, almost black. The first reaction of anything alive that looked into the two eyes staring back was to run away. The twisted smile that came shortly after the shocked recognition did not help either. But it gave Merlin power, and he knew it. Even the Germans on the Western Front were unable to kill him, and they had tried very hard for four years. Merlin was one of the few officers to go right through the war without a scratch. His men said nobody dared kill him, for fear of a terrible retribution. Merlin, smiling, was never heard to make a contradiction. Not out loud, anyway, he told himself. Merlin knew perfectly well that no one was immortal.
Over the years the left eye that had started only a little different to the right became darker and darker compared to the soft sky blue of the right eye. Something to do with pigmentation, the doctor told him. Two eyes surgeons had looked and shrugged. There was nothing wrong with his eyesight.
To make the effect more dramatic, Merlin began to affect a monocle over the left eye. The single eyeglass hung around his neck on a red cord. When he wanted to put someone off their stroke, he peered at them with his eyeglass screwed into his left eye socket. The glass in the lens was clear glass though the effect on the stared-at was sometimes dramatic. Robert, his younger brother by a year, liked him to stare at elderly ladies holding teacups. To see how many of them rattled their saucers. It became a constant game for Robert, though they were careful to try the experiment only when their mother was out of the room. It had worked quite well even before the advent of the monocle.
The strangest thing was the birds. The birds loved Merlin. They were more inclined to fly to him than fly away. By the age of five, he had had robin redbreasts eating from the palm of his hand. His father, Lord St Clair, had said the birds knew something nobody else did, but he never said what.
His flat in Park Lane overlooked London’s Hyde Park which he liked to walk in when it was not raining. His clothes were made by a tailor in Savile Row and fitted him perfectly. The cravats were always his old school or his old regiment the Dorset Fusiliers that had been affiliated with his family for two hundred and forty years.
His old flat in the Barbican had been given up towards the end of the war, a couple of years after Esther went off and married a corporal who soon after got himself killed. Esther had been the barmaid at the Running Horses at Mickleham where he had found her on a walking holiday in the Surrey countryside. He still gave her a small allowance but had no idea where she lived. Once his trust in Esther had been broken, there was no going back. She had said a week before running off with the corporal that he had no intention of ever marrying her, which was perfectly true.
Ever since, he had employed a manservant to look after his needs. That was after he sold his main block of Vickers-Armstrong shares shortly before the Americans came into the war spelling the end of hostilities. The war had gone on into 1918, his shares had risen further, but it did not matter. Afterwards, he said greed was how people lost money on the stock exchange. ‘When you see a good profit, sell, old boy. It worked for me. Look at the price of Vickers shares now. They can’t even give away Vickers machine guns to the revolutionaries in South America.’
With some of what he thought of as his ill-gotten gains, he had sent in the best firm of builders to repair Purbeck Manor, the family home of the St Clairs for centuries. When the builders left, he bought for his father a pedigree herd of Sussex cows and a bull that even chased Merlin over the fence. That happened just before Christmas 1918. Then he had gone off to Africa with Robert, Lucinda, Harry and the American Glen Hamilton on what was meant to have been his safari.
He was a confirmed bachelor with a predilection for girls in the theatre which was why he had taken his flat in Park Lane on a sixty-year lease, thinking that should be enough to last him. London’s West End theatres were close at hand. His one rule was no girl stayed overnight. That had been the start of the problem with Esther. In those days he had no money to send her home in a taxi all the way down south to Mickleham. She had arrived and stayed. Cooked his food and cleaned his flat. Esther had been plain comfortable. Being away at the Front, most of the war had kept the flame of lust burning for both of them. Merlin believed in lust which he told his male friends should never be muddled with love. So far Merlin had never been in love and wondered if he ever would be. To marry just for lust he found quite ridiculous. After two years it was all expended and then what did you do for the rest of your lives? Too many people tried to make up love that was going to last the rest of their lives. In Merlin’s mind, romantic nonsense could never take the place of reality. Love was rare. Few knew it.
Breakfast was always at nine o’clock. Exactly nine o’clock. The ritual was repeated every day. The newspapers were presented to him by Smithers, the man who looked after him. Always on the same silver tray with the same clear coat of arms that Merlin had commissioned from Asprey’s. All the morning newspapers. It amused him to read reports that purported to be about the same subject. How different they looked depending on the newspaper’s politics. Anything important, he read in all the papers to find a balanced view. It was the only way he could form his own opinion.
He kept the Daily Examiner until last as it made him la
ugh. Not that what it said was not true very often. It was always a sensational headline. A quick, sure-fire encapsulation of yesterday’s events. If two men heckled the Prime Minister in the Commons, the Examiner shouted ‘Parliament in Chaos’. They were currently having a heyday with the rights of all women to vote from the age of twenty-one, instead of only married women from the age of thirty, which Merlin interpreted as women bought the Daily Examiner and not only those who were married and mature.
He turned over the first and second pages to get away from the previous day’s social politics. Then an article caught his eye. A soldier living in Africa, a war hero who had won the Military Medal and had been made an officer in the field, was looking for his childhood sweetheart, or rather the newspaper was looking for the girl. The headline read: ‘£25 for Anyone Finding War Hero’s Sweetheart’. Reading the short article brought back the war and the terrible noise. The constant bombardment with the silence at the end feared more than the incoming shells. After the silence of the big guns often came the German attack, bringing his machine-gun nests into action. It was the job of his unit to stop the German infantry reaching the British trench.
Merlin put down the Daily Examiner on the white linen cloth of his breakfast table. The table was comfortably situated in the nook that looked out over Hyde Park. He wondered if the war would ever leave his head. He hoped the man the paper called Jim Bowman found his girl. He hoped they would be in love. Maybe they would be the lucky ones.
He was still staring at the ceiling when Smithers put the plate of eggs, bacon, one sausage, one kidney and one spoonful of kedgeree in front of him, the exact same breakfast he ate every morning.
“You think I’m getting into a rut, Smithers?”
What Merlin most liked about Smithers was his habit of never replying when there was nothing to say.
Smithers poured tea into the large breakfast cup and added the milk last. Merlin never took sugar in his tea. The triangular pieces of toast with the crusts cut off rested in the silver toast rack at his right elbow. Merlin buttered himself a piece of toast and began to eat his breakfast.