Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  2

  Matthew arrived in England at the end of January 1955, when England was just beginning to shrug off the greyness of post-war shortages. There was still coal rationing, and bombed-out houses were to be seen everywhere. Heart-sick, Matthew cared little for anything and went through the motions of disembarking at Southampton and catching the train to London.

  He was cold in the unfamiliar climate, but colder inside. His mind kept returning to Sandy’s flat, the smell of joss sticks, her body, her voice, her smile, her swift changes of dress habits; his gut chased jealousy for hours.

  No one met the boat, no one met the train – why should anyone? He knew no one in England except a grandmother he couldn’t remember and a black man who would probably have nothing to do with a white South African. There was the job to which he must report on Monday, and a flat to find, or more probably a room. All his savings amounted to five hundred pounds and that was his “I can get home on my own” money and not to be touched.

  At Victoria Station he bought an Evening Standard and ran his eyes down the column of rooms to let. The bedsitters were in Notting Hill Gate, Holland Park and Shepherds Bush. Price Forbes were paying him twelve pounds a week and he intended spending no more than twenty-five per cent on his accommodation. There were things to see and places to go which would all cost money. A bed was a bed, however small. He had not even looked at the women on the boat, staying mostly in the pool-bar drinking cheap, duty-free booze and chasing away his hangovers with another deluge of alcohol.

  The first bedsitter he looked at was on the second floor, and when the landlady said, “No women in the rooms,” he paid her the three-guineas rent and went back on the tube to collect his suitcases from ‘left luggage’. He knew he had to work out the underground train system and now was better than later.

  Matthew had learnt to think of small things to keep his mind from reeling out of control. He would think back to the friendships he had made in Johannesburg, especially with Archie and Lucky. And he would at times let his mind drift back to his early life at Port St Johns, recalling the happier memories of the sun, the sea and the cliffs, while steadfastly refusing to brood on the family sorrows connected with the place.

  His road in Notting Hill Gate – Sycamore Avenue as it said on his address – was off the Bayswater Road, tucked among leafy plane trees. No. 36 was at the end of the road, away from the worst of the London traffic. Matthew forced himself to enjoy and appreciate his tiny oasis of trees and comparative tranquillity so close to the heart of the world’s greatest city. During his first day in London, he slept for twelve hours and, despite his conscious efforts to concentrate on the positive, his dreams were of Sandy. When he awoke, he felt mentally in tune with the heavy, grey, sullen English clouds which seemed to brood only a few metres above his little window. The day was cold and he could not find an English shilling for the gas meter. He lay back on the bed and mentally shook himself.

  “Never ever let another woman get under your skin, Matthew Gray.” he said aloud. And then a little while later, “Shit, I’m hungry.”

  Matthew’s introduction to the British class system came on the Monday morning at eleven o’clock. Arriving at the office in King William Street at eight-thirty, the time he used to arrive at his Johannesburg office, he found no one but the doorman at Price Forbes House.

  “Is it Sunday?”

  “Work starts at nine-fifteen. What can we do for you, young man?” Matthew explained his position to the doorman, as he was to do many times during the next hour to all and sundry, it seemed. Eventually they sat him at a desk among thirty other desks where he listened to their ‘weekend’ conversations. At ten-thirty, he was called into the overseas director’s office, and left five minutes later, none the wiser as to what he was meant to do. The fact that he was placed in the Loss of Profits department on the third floor was, it seemed, sufficient to qualify him for his two pounds a day – after deductions.

  At eleven o’clock, the entire staff rose and went out for morning coffee. Insurance so far had not even been mentioned. Matthew continued to sit behind his desk, hoping that something would happen, that someone would give him some work to do. At home, by now he would have dictated enough already to keep his secretary typing all morning.

  A tall, thin man, maybe seven centimetres shorter than Matthew, turned at the far door. “Coffee, old chap; we all go out to coffee. You should come with me.” Matthew was not aware that the man addressing him in a plummy accent knew that David Todd owned Security Life and that David Todd was Matthew Gray’s godfather. In Johannesburg, that fact had made no difference to his social life.

  “Name’s Gore. Oliver. Eton, ’forty-eight to ’fifty-three. Where’d you go to school, old chap?”

  “What did you say?” Matthew had never been asked about his schooling at the first meeting, or at any other, for that matter. The man repeated his question, sounding slightly miffed.

  “In South Africa. Not really a school. Night school.”

  “Oh.” Oliver Gore had assumed that, with a rich man as godfather, the South African would have been sent to school in England. “You’d better have coffee with us, anyway.”

  ‘Us’ were the public-school boys, minor and major from Eton to Brighton College. By the end of the coffee break, Matthew had taken a thorough dislike to Oliver Gore. All the man ever wanted to know was what his father or grandfather had done.

  “Was he commissioned?” asked Oliver Gore, as they filed back into the office.

  “No, he wasn’t. My father was a private and lived in a woodsman’s hut with my mother who painted pictures. My best friend was Luke Mbeki and all of us were very happy. Oh, and Luke was black, pitch black… Do you speak Xhosa?”

  When Gore sat down five desks away from Matthew, the only word Matthew caught in the subsequent group conversation was ‘colonial’. Apparently there was something wrong with being a ‘colonial’. The head of the Loss of Profits department, four desks up the line from Matthew, still had not spoken to him by lunchtime. Matthew watched everyone else departing with their luncheon vouchers to places unknown, without sparing him so much as a glance. After sitting by himself for ten minutes, Matthew went out into the cold street to find something to eat. He did not yet own an overcoat. He trudged for some time, consciously keeping the whereabouts of Price Forbes in mind. Then he entered one of the many eating places, a self-service, took a tray as instructed, and bought a pie and a cup of coffee.

  “Got y’r vouchers?”

  “No. Cash. Here we are.” The shop was warm, the tables full and Matthew began to feel stupid towering over everyone with a tray in his hand. To his left, ‘lunchers’ pushed up further and left him room to unload his tray and sit with half his backside on the bench. His knees were a problem. “Thank you.” He ate his pie in total isolation, despite the fact that there were ten other men at the table. It was the worst cup of coffee he had ever drunk in his life.

  “Everything burns if it gets hot enough. Concrete explodes at a given temperature. If the chance of fire is small, so is the rate. Our job is to argue down the rate, not leave a client uninsured.”

  “What else can you teach me?” Matthew tried a smile, but the man was as frigid as an Eskimo left out in the snow.

  “Do you always ask so many questions?”

  “I go on asking questions until I understand. I was short on a formal education. I started work when I was thirteen. I read and ask questions. Lot of catching up. Where is the library?” The man was looking at Matthew with a queer look. “I started Plato before I left Johannesburg but I can’t afford to buy books.”

  “Ask Oliver Gore. He has an Oxford degree in English Lit.”

  “What’s he doing in insurance, then? What’s the use of a BA in English in this job? He doesn’t like colonials.”

  For a brief moment, the head of the Loss of Profits department, a man maybe five years older than Matthew, almost smiled. An hour later, he handed back the Rolls calculation.

&nbs
p; “Some of the standing charges should be put in as partly variables,” he was told. “We go for a beer after work on Fridays. You’d better join us. I don’t imagine Oliver Gore ever imagined a colonial had heard of Socrates. Do you like music?”

  “Something I know little about.” He knew the man was not referring to Elvis Presley or Bill Haley and the Comets. “But I like jazz.”

  “There’s Humphrey Littleton. Went to Eton a few years before Oliver. Chris Barber’s club. All in Soho or the West End. I went to Westminster.”

  “I want to go there myself.”

  The man gave him another queer look and returned to work. Matthew was left to fend off flying paper clips from the few bored occupants of the office who appeared to have nothing better to do than flick them at anyone else whose back was turned. Only department heads worked after three o’clock on Friday. There was already a holiday atmosphere pervading the third floor of Price Forbes House.

  Matthew’s impression after a week in the City of London was that no one did any work, that he did more work in a day in Johannesburg than they did in a week. With a few exceptions, they were all playing a game, and it made him wonder how the British ever founded an empire. He had a strong suspicion that these people were going to waste his time.

  Finding a library near his bedsitter, he withdrew the books he had listed to read and continued his self-education. Plato’s analysis of right and wrong in the dialogues of Socrates and his disciples made more sense than flicking paper clips. He read through ‘The Republic’ and started again, struggling to maintain complete concentration and understanding. The grey skies and cold winds were unable to penetrate his small room with the double gas cooker, gas heater and sash window that looked out over the slate roofs and the chimney pots. To counter his loneliness and the loss of his friends, to stop his thoughts shifting back to Sandy, he steeped himself in literature, absorbing some of the distilled wisdom of three thousand years of Western civilisation. Once he went out with another purpose in mind, and knocked on the door of a house in Shepherds Bush. The paint had peeled from the front door. The sour smell of cooked cabbage enveloped him when the door was opened by an old woman with a face as sharp as a chisel.

  “Does Luke Mbeki live here?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Where does he live now?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Didn’t he leave a forwarding address?”

  “You a friend of his?”

  “Yes. We grew up together.”

  The door slammed shut less than a foot from his face. He rang the bell again and again. “Bugger off,” he was told. “Never did want a bloody nigger in the first place.”

  He next tried the London School of Economics.

  “What department?” he was asked.

  “He’s studying for a degree in economics.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Mbeki.”

  “What?”

  “Mbeki.”

  “There are thousands of students here.”

  “Aren’t they listed somewhere?”

  “If they are, I don’t ’ave the list. Where are you from?”

  “South Africa.”

  “Why they let you lot in, I don’t know.”

  Finally, he wrote to his godfather and awaited news of Luke’s new address. The bursary had to be paid somewhere.

  On his third visit to the library, he was greeted almost like a friend, and it was the first human warmth he had been shown since leaving the boat at Southampton. The librarian had obviously noticed Matthew’s keen interest in books, and had apparently decided that here was a man worth getting to know. He greeted him with something of a smile as Matthew approached his desk. But this time Matthew had something else on his mind besides books.

  “I want to trace a coat of arms,” he said. “A family coat of arms, I’ve been told. All I have is an old piece of silver.”

  “You need to go to the College of Heralds for that. It’s only possible to look it up here if you know the name.”

  “My mother’s name was Metcalf but the piece belonged to her mother’s family. My great-great-grandfather that would be. Or so the story goes. I’ve lost touch with my grandmother and these people you mention may be able to help. The silver’s pretty worn. Just an old snuff box. She’s probably the only relative I have.”

  With the address of the College of Heralds in his pocket, he took the Tube the following Saturday and offered his snuff box for inspection.

  “That’s easy,” said the man in the dark suit. “That’s the crest of a Scottish earl. Do you mind if I take the box?”

  “Please bring it back. It’s the only connection I have with any relatives.” The man raised an unbelieving eyebrow and went off, leaving Matthew at the desk. Ten minutes later, he was back.

  “Did you buy this in Portobello Road?”

  “My mother gave it to me. My grandmother gave it to her.”

  “The earls of Lothianmore.”

  “Is there a living earl of Lothianmore?”

  “Of course. That piece of silver was made in the reign of Charles I. The one they beheaded. My armourer tells me that they also cut off the head of an earl of Lothianmore.”

  “Then the title must have died.”

  “Not at all. That title was old in the reign of Elizabeth the First.”

  “Where can I find the earl of Lothianmore?”

  “Look him up in Debrett’s. They’ll give you his current address and his clubs… Are you thinking of visiting him?”

  “I think I will.”

  “Are you from Australia?”

  “South Africa.”

  “Why aren’t you black?”

  Matthew looked at the man, who was trying not to snigger, thanked him for his trouble and left the Royal College of Heralds to their patronage.

  A month after Matthew’s unsuccessful search for his family and Luke Mbeki, Oliver Gore happened to announce that his family were heralds to the earl of Lothianmore. Matthew chanced to overhear him as they were sitting around a table in the coffee shop to which Matthew followed his colleagues every morning. Immediately he became alert.

  “Do you ever visit them?” asked Matthew, showing casual interest.

  “For the grouse shooting.”

  “Recently?”

  “Last twelfth of August. Grouse season opening. Do you shoot?” The man was being sarcastic.

  Matthew gave the matter some thought, and decided to drop the subject for the present. When he reached his bedsitter, there was a letter under the door from David Todd. It was the first letter he had ever received from his godfather.

  Thinking again about the earl of Lothianmore, he decided to befriend Oliver Gore. He wanted an invitation to Scotland to shoot grouse. The piece of silver and the vague reference to a Scottish title had finally stirred his curiosity, and he idly wondered if kinship to an earl would make any difference to Sandy. It was going to take him years to make his fortune, but the blood-line connection was immediate and Matthew Gray still wanted Sandy de Freitas more than anything on earth. Maybe he could write to her on the earl’s notepaper from the earl’s castle and see if that did any good. If she was hot after money, maybe she was hot after aristocracy, however distant the relationship. He had written to her four times without receiving any reply.

  Matthew was not sure if he would spend many days in the company of Oliver Gore, but there was no pleasure without pain, as his mother had often said. He thought of his mother often and his thoughts were mostly sad. When he thought of his father, there was always a mixture of happiness and a terrible feeling of loss. His father had gone one day; his mother had declined in front of his eyes. The memories of Port St Johns returned with joy. They gave another meaning to his pursuit of happiness, his wish to be free from want and the necessity of having to rely on other people.

  Luke Mbeki had found that his bursary was inadequate soon after his landlady had made his life so difficult that he looked for another room in w
hich to stay. Apartheid was alive and well in London, though the English had not legislated for their prejudice. With so many colonies giving out British passports, the country had been flooded by people looking for an escape from poverty in their own lands. And they were prepared to work, to do the jobs the new welfare state had considered below the dignity of a large number of working-class Englishmen.

  It had not taken tens of thousands of people very long to abuse the Labour government’s welfare state. These were the people who took the dole and worked for cash on the side, leaving the roads to be swept by the dark-skinned immigrants. A smouldering fire had been introduced into a homogenous society, and Luke Mbeki felt the full force of the silent insidious resentment. The British were turning their backs on the empire, and they would like to exclude its people as well. The empire had been costing money and Europe seemed the better proposition. Changing gear, the new England was shedding its industrial empire and turning its shop keeping mind to trade and to the service industries, with London still at the centre of the financial world despite the free-fall in the value of the pound.

  Luke moved four times before he worked out a routine for his survival, which included crane feathers, ankle and arm beads, genet tails and a magnificent leopard skin, head and all that he found among the walks in the Portobello market. If London expected a savage, then he would be their savage and dress accordingly.

  Wisely, in view of the climate, Luke chose the middle of summer to cause his sensation on the Tube, at the London School of Economics and, more importantly, at the jazz club he frequented nearly every night. He had introduced the bongo drums there with mild success, which turned to near hysteria when he played them solo in full tribal costume, having his spear and cowhide shield (these had been sent to him from Soweto) against the bandstand. He followed the drum session with some magnificent leaps and bounds that Sipho had taught him in Port St Johns. Remembering the best sensations can be overdone, he had changed into jeans and a shirt before going home on the Tube, leaving his regalia at the Soho club in Greeth Street.