by Peter Rimmer
Merlin put his brother to bed and poured himself a whisky. The most vivid recollection of his evening was Tina Pringle recrossing her legs.
“There is no fool like an old fool,” he said out loud. Then he took himself off to bed.
7
Echoes from the Past, January 1921
The next day when Barnaby found out Tina was not going to return his call let alone speak to him, Harry Brigandshaw reached home. It was the end of January, the temperature well over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit and he was two months late. There was no sign of his sister Madge or his brother-in-law Barend Oosthuizen. His mother looked ill, his grandfather was detached and Harry wondered if his grandfather had gone senile. For some reason there was a note for him from a man called Jim Bowman who was looking for a job. It seemed that only the three dogs were pleased to see him. The old ginger cat was still up to its trick on the windowsill in the kitchen, lying fast asleep both eyes wide open. Tembo was nowhere to be seen.
After giving his mother a kiss on both cheeks and shaking his grandfather’s hand he had taken the horses down to the stable and rubbed them down himself. There was just nobody around. He could smell the distinctive smell of curing tobacco coming from one of the tall, red-brick curing barns so the farm had not died while he was away. He could see people in the compound and smell their wood smoke from the cooking fires. The gang must have been given the afternoon off.
Feeling dejected from his welcome he walked down to the river, leaving his two horses in the stable with water and a bail of fresh lucerne. The two dogs and the bitch followed him.
The Egyptian geese were still there, noisily chasing each other down the full flow of the Mazoe River. The rains had been good as he knew to his cost too well. The female ridgeback allowed him the privilege of tickling her behind her ears, looking at him with soft brown adoring eyes.
It had been a long journey. He had been away too long. Almost two years. He had not brought back Barend to his wife and children. He had not reached home for Christmas. He had been wrong to leave home, he knew that. But to be almost ignored on his return was more than he deserved.
It had been nearly five months since he had looked at the SS King Emperor through his field glasses as it sailed on its way to England ten miles off the Skeleton Coast in South West Africa.
He sat down on the high riverbank and thought back over the journey. Somewhere from far away on the other side of the river, Harry heard a lion roar. From the dark building clouds to the west he could see it was going to rain again, but he did not think it would come for a while. Were it not for the crocodiles lurking in the muddy waters of the river he would have gone in for a swim. He missed the sea and the Skeleton Coast. He felt lonely. Totally lonely. Something frighteningly new in his life. As if no one in the whole world wanted him. He was thirty-four years old behaving like a child and he did not care. He was alone and if he wished to cry and feel sorry for himself it was no one else’s business. No one was looking.
His intention of reaching home for Christmas had gone wrong on the north bank of the Chobe River. Thirty miles downriver, the Chobe flowed into the Zambezi forty miles west of its violent drop over the Victoria Falls. Normally the main rains broke after Christmas in that part of the world. Or so Barend had told him. That year when he had to cross the river with the horses the heavens opened in October and rained for a month, leaving Harry stranded and suffering from malaria. At one point he thought he would never see home again. Never see Elephant Walk. He had thought deeply of his father and the farm he had inherited when his father was killed by the Great Elephant. He had been lucky. He still had had one small bottle of quinine. It saved his life.
He spent two months by the river waiting for the floods to subside. He built a reed house that kept out the rain and made his cooking fire in the centre of the one room. In the worst of the storms he brought the horses into the hut. They were his only companions. Far up river in Angola where the rain fed the Okavango which fed the Chobe the sun came out. It was the start of a long drought that was to kill half the native population but no one, including Harry, knew that at the time. They were all too glad to see the end of the rain. All over the plains the grass was rich and green. There were many flowers. The horses fattened as they grazed on the good grass.
He had finished the quinine and had slept each night in the smoke-filled hut. The smoke hurt his eyes and burnt his throat. He hoped it would keep away the mosquitoes. In the first light of day when the mosquitoes stopped their main assault the tsetse attacked with venom. Harry was more worried about the horses who were both salted and thought to be immune from the deadly bite of the tsetse fly. If the horses died, there would be no way for him to get home.
All through the weeks Harry saw no one. It was as if he was the last man on earth. Once in his delirium he thought he was. God had forsaken him. God had forsaken man. There was not to be any more life for man on earth. The species had died out. Extinct.
He was too weak to fish. The trap caught the fish as they swam into the calm waters of the small oxbow lake made by the flood close to where Harry camped. The fish brought back his strength. When he was strong enough to shoot a waterbuck, he cut it laboriously into thin strips and hung the strips from the river trees to dry. He had run out of salt and the meat dried badly. He had found wild sage which he had rubbed into the meat. Before the meat was fully cured a leopard ate most of it during one night.
For the rest of his stay in the reed hut, Harry slept with one hand on his gun. During the worst nights of his dreams he dreamed of Lucinda. At the end of each dream she was always dead and Fishy Braithwaite always got away. Sometimes Lucinda was dead in the cockpit of a German aircraft he had chased and shot down. He only saw her face when he removed the dead pilot’s flying helmet. When he woke from those dreams he went out of his hut and was sick in the bushes clutching his gun again, against the leopard’s attack. Once he had dropped the Purdey in the pitch dark of the night. There was total cloud. The heaving had come right up from his coccyx, making pain shoot through his body. He had panicked in the rain and mud and for a moment when he found the gun was not sure which was back or front. He had stayed awake in the hut with the horses for the rest of the night for fear of falling asleep and dreaming again. There were many nights alone when he thought he was going mad in his mind. Only the light of dawn brought him sanity.
Slowly the water went down until it was possible for Harry to ford the river and continue on his long journey home to Elephant Walk.
“Who are you?”
When Harry turned, a small girl was looking at him. She was sure of her ground. There was no fear in her eyes.
“I might be your Uncle Harry,” he said returning from the reverie in his mind.
“You can’t be. Uncle Harry went away. My daddy went away. They are never coming back.”
“I am your Uncle Harry.”
“Then where is my daddy?”
“I don’t know, Paula. He said he was coming home.”
“You saw my daddy? How do know my name! Who are you?”
“Is that your brother Tinus?”
“Yes, he doesn’t say much.”
“Where’s your mummy?” asked Harry, smiling gently at his niece and nephew. They had grown.
“I heard from Mother you were home. The children wanted to have a look at you first.”
“Didn’t he come back?” asked Harry. His sister Madge came up behind him from the other side to her children.
“Not yet.”
“He will. He said so. He said so last time we spoke.”
“So you found Barend… Was he all right?”
“He never got over the British hanging his father in the Boer War.”
“I know… Mother has a letter for you from London solicitors.”
“What’s that got to do with me and solicitors?”
“We don’t know. We never opened the letter. It came almost a year ago. Mother is ill. She is pining away. Now you’re home, she�
��ll get better. Oh, Harry. Hug me, Harry. It’s been so terrible.”
“Why is Mummy crying?” asked the boy Tinus.
“Mummy always cries, silly. Let’s go and see Grandfather. He won’t be crying. Grandfather never cries.”
“You’re silly… He’s at the tobacco barns. Come on. I’ll race you.”
The dogs left the river with the children. The dogs were barking all the time. The Egyptian geese took flight and flew off downriver. Harry hugged his sister for a long while.
Then they walked up to the house over the lawns that now went right down to the river, the lawns flowing through the msasa trees, each tree ringed with a bed of flowers. The stockade, built by the children’s real grandfather, Tinus Oosthuizen, during the Shona rebellion in ’96 had been removed while Harry was away. The man the children had gone looking for at the barns was their great-grandfather.
The big envelope when they gave it to him was addressed to Group Captain Henry Brigandshaw, Royal Air Force, MC and Bar. No one ever formally addressed him as Henry even though he had been named after his maternal grandfather, Sir Henry Manderville, Bart.
“This looks ominous,” said Harry.
Quietly he sat down in his father’s old chair in the lounge of his mother’s house and opened the big brown envelope. The dogs came back from running with the children and took up positions round the armchair. Harry began to read, watched by his mother and sister. Harry could hear the third child, a girl, that had been born at the end of the last war, crying from somewhere within the house. Then the child stopped crying and Harry finished the solicitor’s letter without interruption.
“Uncle James is dead. He’s made me his heir. Not the title, he can’t decide that. Colonial Shipping. Hastings Court. They want me to go to England.”
“You can’t,” cried Madge. “It’s hell here on our own, Harry, please. Stay with us. This is your family. Damn England. It’s only ever given us pain. They don’t need you any more. Why can’t they leave us alone?”
“There’s more to it than that,” said Sir Henry Manderville from the open door to the veranda. “There’s history.”
“Damn history,” said Madge.
When Harry put the letter on the coffee table he looked round at his family. His mother Emily was crying to herself. His sister was looking at him with a look of panic bordering on fear. Sir Henry was smiling philosophically. All three dogs were watching him. The ginger cat had woken up and came in from the kitchen. Tembo had appeared from nowhere and was standing in the doorway that led from the dining room into the lounge. He was grinning from ear to ear. Harry got up and gave him a hug. Harry had known Tembo all his life.
“Shall I bring the whisky and ice,” said Tembo as the two men stood back and looked at each other. “Welcome home, Baas Harry.”
“A drink’s the answer… Bring the tray, Tembo… I’ll worry about England later,” he said back to the room. “Much later. They waited a year. Probably forgotten me. Or think I’m dead. They must have asked you by now, Mother?”
“Yes, I wrote to them saying I didn’t know one way or the other. I told them you had gone into the bush. Far away.”
“Good. What’s for dinner?”
“Cold roast duck and salad,” said Tembo.
“That sounds delicious… How was the tobacco season?” Harry asked his grandfather.
“The price is down after the war.”
“To be expected.”
“The yield’s up. Six hundred pounds of dried leaf to the acre.”
“Now that’s something.”
“When you are settled, then we can talk about the farm.”
“Where’s Aunt Alison?”
“She prefers living on her own at New Kleinfontein.”
“Are they growing any crops?”
“Maize. Just maize.”
Harry had thought his grandfather was going to marry the woman he had always called his Aunt Alison, the widow of Tinus Oosthuizen, the man who had befriended Harry’s father. Tinus Oosthuizen had been Harry’s father’s mentor. Together they had become the most famous white hunters in Central Africa after Selous and Hartley. The one had been hanged by the neck. The other killed by the Great Elephant.
“Let’s have a drink,” he said, not wanting to think about the death of his father. He wanted to change the subject. Looking at his grandfather’s expression, Aunt Alison was obviously a sore point.
With the flow of good whisky, the tension flowed out of the family. Madge went off to put the children to bed. They talked of everything that was not important. When Madge came back they went into the dining room to eat their cold supper. They sat down formally at the dinner table. Sir Henry said grace which had never happened before. The tension had come back again. Harry was glad of the bottle of wine produced by his grandfather. They drank two bottles without saying what was in their minds.
When Harry found his old room, a servant had made up the bed. He was just drunk enough not to dream.
In the morning the birds were singing outside his bedroom window. He knew he was home. He got up and looked through the window. He could now see the river down through the trees, the view no longer blocked by the stockade and he liked what he saw. He sighed with pleasure, smelling familiar smells, hearing familiar sounds from the native compound. The village, a mile downriver was waking up. He could hear their dogs bark and the cockerels crow. There was a lot of noise. He thought a buzzard was trying to steal the newborn chicks. In his mind’s eye he could see the scurrying balls of yellow fluff and everything else making a noise to protect them from the birds of prey. He smiled broadly.
Then Harry remembered, they wanted him back in England.
When he went to join his family for breakfast, he was still trying to make up his mind where his duty lay. Life was never simple. Even back in his own house. He shivered as if someone had walked over his grave.
After breakfast he went with the children to check on his horses. He loved his horses. They were his friends. His horses were never complicated.
“I liked James,” said Henry Manderville to Harry later in the day. “He was a stuffed shirt but they all were in the army. Part of being a regular officer. Sandhurst. Good regiment. Did everything he could to save Tinus from hanging. He was a major then. Don’t think he had made colonel. It was all politics, the hanging. The Boer War should have finished when Roberts marched into Pretoria in 1901. A small contingent of Boers wanted to fight on. Smuts. De la Rey. Louis Botha. They fought a guerrilla war and ran us all over the highveld of the Transvaal and Free State. Then they invaded the British Cape Colony from where the Boers had trekked in the last century. Not all of them, of course. Not all of them wanted to get away from British control. Many stayed and prospered, becoming British subjects.
“After Tinus and your father split their assets, Tinus went to the Cape, to the farm Kleinfontein in Franschhoek. Even by then he was a British subject. He had lived most of his life in what became Rhodesia. Tinus thought himself a true Boer wherever he roamed. In the land of Lobengula or Rhodes.
“When the Boers called on their Cape brothers to fight the British Tinus went out with G J Scheepers, the Cape rebel. To stop the Boers being further replenished with Boer men from the Cape, the British said they would hang all captured rebels for high treason. Tinus, a Boer general by the time they caught him, was in British eyes the epitome of a rebel. They hanged him as an example. To stop the war. It was politics… Damn politics… Now I’m right off the subject and probably want to be. You’re going to ask me what you should do. What is your duty, Harry? The reason you were born. Your responsibility to those of your family who came before you and those of your family that will come after you. From generation to generation… What we want to do in life is rarely what we should do. Most of us run away. I ran away. I regret most of the things, important things, that I did in my life. I don’t want you to do the same.”
They were seated in the small house in the family compound that was Harry’s g
randfather’s. Harry had waited till the middle of the afternoon to find him alone.
“Much of my life’s regrets have to do with you, Harry. The truth is bitter. Full of human frailty. We are all the product of that frailty from time long gone by. Some say it is what makes us human… I’ll give you a large whisky when I’m finished… What you do is up to you. First, I have to tell you the truth about your birth and upbringing. Do you want to hear, Harry? Or do you want me to shut up? You’ve been through a terrible war. You are not a boy any more. You have the right to say now you don’t want to hear.”
Harry was white in the face, dry in the mouth and for some absurd reason wanted to go to the toilet. He thought he wanted to run away. Anywhere. The toilet was good as anywhere.
“Please go on, Grandfather,” he said formally.
“Your mother and father were childhood friends. My estate, Hastings Court, or what was left of it was near The Oaks, your paternal grandfather’s home. He was evil. A man only concerned with himself. He cared nothing for any of you, least of all your father and you. He hated being self-made. Building Colonial Shipping first out of piracy I suspect. I always called him the Pirate. He probably called me the Fool. He surely thought of me as a fool right up until the time he died alone at my dining table in Hastings Court. You see he got what he wanted. Whether he died happy only he could know. I would prefer not to have lived than to have lived his life. And that is not sour grapes.
“Emily was my only child. My wife died very young. I’ve never even looked at a woman to breed from again. Never. Alison and I hoped to be companions. We Mandervilles, like your friends the St Clairs, came over from Normandy with William the Conqueror. My ancestor, your ancestor, fought at the Battle of Hastings. The French won. In exchange, William gave his knights land. Land to defend for the King. Rather like Cecil Rhodes gave his pioneers land to occupy and defend for him in Rhodesia. Through the centuries we fought as knights for the King. Now the English king. The de Ville had become Derville. We were now English and proud to be English. We fought at Agincourt, Crécy, Poitiers, Blenheim, Waterloo. In the Crimea against the Russians. We have just again fought in France, Group Captain. We are an old line of knights and proud of it, something your Grandfather Brigandshaw desperately wanted to be part of. And even that he thought his money could buy, and I sold it to him. I did business with the devil. Sold the soul of the Mandervilles. Sold my only daughter in holy matrimony to the eldest son of the Pirate.”