Mad Dogs and Englishmen (The Brigandshaw Chronicles Book 3)

by Peter Rimmer

  “Goodbye, Jenny.”

  When she walked down the street from the Rhodesia Herald, she knew she was a much harder woman. Quietly, walking on her own, she shed a tear for her youth. The dream was over. More than France, more than her wounded officer, more than the sight of poor Cousin Mildred plying her trade, the reality of Jim Bowman had brought her down to earth with a crash. There wasn’t going to be any happiness in her life, certainly not the type she had imagined.

  “One door closes. One door opens,” she said to herself, changing direction for Meikles Hotel. She wanted a drink. She wanted a drink very badly.

  In the lounge of the hotel she sat down at a table and ordered herself a gin, caring nothing of what anyone might have thought. There were three men in the room drinking tea. One ordered a fresh pot of hot water in a Scots accent. Jenny ordered a second gin that came with ice and quinine tonic water. She ignored the three men at their separate tables. She could see they were poor. She hoped Jim would walk into the big room. Jim, smiling and confident. A man about town. Above, the punkahs were turning slowly in the high ceiling.

  Ten minutes later a message was delivered to her by the head waiter, a big black man with a red sash round his ample waist. On the card was strong handwriting in a jet-black ink, in perfect calligraphy.

  The Count Le Jeune D’Alment requests the pleasure of the company of Miss Jenny Merryl to lunch.

  RSVP. Philemon. Meikles Hotel head waiter.

  “May I show you the way to the dining room, Miss Merryl?”

  “Thank you, Philemon.”

  For the life of her she had never heard of the count before.

  He was waiting for her at the reception desk. The small lectern stood at the entrance to the dining room. The English maître d’hôtel was hovering at the man’s elbow. She had never seen the man before in her life.

  “Your picture was in the paper. I saw you were alone in the lounge. Excuse my taking such liberty with such a beautiful woman. I think you English have a small saying. ‘Faint heart never won fair lady’. Please be my guest for lunch, Miss Jenny. I’m Pierre Le Jeune. It will be my greatest pleasure. The food is good, I assure you. Isn’t that so Cuthbert?” The maître d’hôtel, smiled sweetly. A tall man in his mid-thirties took her hand. Slowly he brought the hand up to his lips as he formally bent forward. When she looked into the eyes turned up to hers, there was no sign of a predator. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

  Had she been looking out of the dining room window onto the courtyard she would have seen Jim Bowman walk across into the men’s bar. He had stopped briefly, seeing what he saw before hurrying into the bar.

  Jenny thought long afterwards how naïve she had been to accept Pierre Le Jeune’s second invitation. But that was after she knew the habits of men better. The rich and the poor. At nineteen she had still thought everyone was nice, even her officer’s wife had only been protecting a husband from temptation.

  Pierre Le Jeune was not French as she had first thought. He was a Belgian. His father had been an impoverished aristocrat as Jenny learnt, so many of them, to be three generations down the line, had gone to the Congo for Leopold the Second, King of the Belgians and Soi-souverain of the Congo. Pierre told her there were many riches in the Congo and few Europeans prepared to risk their lives. The mosquitoes were the size of an English penny. The Congo River so wide it was more like a sea, even if it was thousands of miles from saltwater where it rose in the heart of darkest Africa. The tribal people looked at through European eyes, were savages in the true sense of the word. Instead of wasting their enemies they ate them. The parts they could not eat, like the head, they boiled and shrank in the sun, hanging them in their grass huts as a reminder to their victory.

  Among the lakes and rivers, the mango swamps, the man-eating crocodiles and snakes that swallowed men whole, Pierre’s father had made his fortune only sharing the wealth with the King himself. Even the British had failed to penetrate the heart of Africa, hard as they had tried.

  It was in the Congo that Pierre had grown up in a great house built by his father on the banks of the great Congo River, a mile downriver from Leopoldville, named after the second King Leopold of the Belgians. A stream of tutors were brought from France and England to tutor the boy and his three brothers. The boys, born in the Congo, bitten by insects from an early age, survived. The tutors mostly died or ran away demented in the head.

  Pierre had survived eleven tutors prior to being sent to Oxford to finish his education and then returned to Africa where he belonged. Speaking English as easily as French and Flemish, even with a continental accent, had made it easy for the Le Jeunes to move into the territories of Cecil John Rhodes. Northern Rhodesia having a common border with Katanga, the copper-rich southern province of Leopold’s fiefdom.

  The four brothers were all good businessmen. The father was still very much alive. The family’s problem was finding new homes for the piles of cash generated by the family business. Pierre had proudly told Jenny it was said in the Congo, the old count would trade his grandmother for a profit, if he had had a grandmother to trade. Everything that came in and out of the Congo, a country nearly half the size of continental Europe, passed through the Le Jeunes’s hands. The old count even admitted to his children he was not sure of the size of his wealth. Largely, the Le Jeunes only had one fault. They never knew when to stop accumulating wealth, to find time to enjoy it. The old count never forgetting his parlous state before his king sent him to the Congo with Pierre’s mother as a young bride. Over the weeks Jenny had pieced together the family story from snatches of conversation.

  Back at the beginning, Pierre Le Jeune wanted to show Jenny what he had done since arriving in Rhodesia. The lunch had gone far better than he thought it would. The girl he had seen three times without her knowing his presence was not just a pretty face. There was English north country savvy behind the eyes that savaged his sexual parts from the moment he looked up from kissing the back of the hand. Uneducated maybe but the girl had brains.

  “We’re going to Inyanga for a week,” he had told her after lunch. “A house party. The Inyanga and my estate in the Eastern Highlands. Some of you English say it is like your Scotland. It is high, six thousand feet above sea level. Free of mosquitoes. The place to be at this time of year. You’ll come with us, of course, Miss Jenny. Jenny is so much nicer than Jennifer. You could never be a Jennifer. Always Jenny. We can catch the trout. Fly my aeroplane which we have to do to get there.”

  “How big is the aeroplane to take all those people?”

  “They will go by car. You will come with me, yes?”

  “How many people fit in the plane?”

  “You and me, Miss Jenny. Just you and me. We each have a cockpit.”

  “YOU know how to fly?”

  “Of course. In the war, I kill Germans. One time I also kill Austrians though mostly they stay on Italian front. It is a British aeroplane. Made by your Mr de Havilland. In France she was a bomber though she never dropped the bombs. The war finished so I bought her cheap from the British government. Took it to pieces. Pieces in big boxes. Big boxes to Africa and I put her together. You’ll be quite safe. There can be no hanky-panky in an aeroplane.” Jenny remembered he had giggled like a small, endearing boy. She had accepted his invitation for the following week.

  Somehow the other guests never arrived. She was still in the Inyanga when Jim Bowman was offered his job on Elephant Walk which was why he had not seen her for sixteen days and why their love story, except in the papers, came to an abrupt end. In the time between the lunch and her first flight in an aeroplane, she went on seven dates.

  Jenny never knew that Pierre’s mother was of peasant stock, the real glue that held the family together. The last thing Pierre wanted as a wife, was some social lady wanting to hide from the African sun. Pierre wanted to live out his life in Africa without having to traipse backwards and forwards to Europe. Society bored him. Long journeys cooped up on the same ship with the sam
e people bored him. Maybe when aircraft flew regularly from Africa to Europe, he would not mind the journey so much.

  When it suited him he was no more a gentleman than the rest of them. He was rich and bought what he wanted when he wanted. Which was why, he told himself, he had never married. He was thirty-five and every woman he met and liked he turned into a whore. The only woman he had ever respected. The only woman he had ever loved was his mother. No one had ever turned his mother into a whore and it was not what he would do to Jenny.

  Pierre knew the full story of Jim Bowman and Jenny Merryl from the newspapers. When he found out later his friend Harry Brigandshaw had employed Jim Bowman, he was not surprised. Salisbury. Rhodesia. All were small places for white men. The country, someone had said to him, was vast, the white population sparse.

  Pierre Le Jeune and Harry Brigandshaw had both been in the Royal Flying Corps. They had both been at Oxford but though they were up at the same time they had never met at university. Oxford was a bigger place than Rhodesia. A bigger place than the RFC for that matter.

  What had brought them together as friends on the Western Front was being African. It was when the air war was talked through in the wet days, when there was no flying, that Harry and Pierre found themselves lost in the general conversation. Most of which was social trivia that neither of them liked or had experienced.

  They had been on a conversion course together, learning to fly the new Sopwith Camel. Among the terrible noise, the mud and slush, the quick death of the Western Front, the idea of the Inyanga farm had been born.

  “We can’t grow deciduous fruit,” Harry had told him. “Apples, pears and plums. Elephant Walk is too hot. My grandfather is growing tobacco, believe it or not. The place to put a great orchard is in the Inyanga. The Eastern Highlands. If you can think of a way of packing, cooling and shipping to Europe when there isn’t any fruit in the shops you will make a fortune. Rhodes had an estate in the Highlands which is still flourishing and he left the estate to the people of Rhodesia in his will as a national park. You buy yourself ten thousand acres up there, Pierre, and I’ll visit you every summer to get away from the lowveld heat. The air is like champagne. Clean. Cool. Beautiful. You can stop sweating your life out in the Congo. When this course is over, keep in touch. You and I are the same. We’re Africans. It’s in our blood. Build yourself a beautiful home when the war is over and find yourself a wife who loves Africa. That bit’s difficult, I know… Europe is too cramped with too many people and a man needs space. You can see forever from the Inyanga. Put some trout in the mountain rivers. Build some dams. In the Rhodesian winter you will need a big log fire up there. That’s nice… Just don’t get yourself killed in this damn war. What made you come and fight?”

  “We drew straws. Father thought one of us should go when the Germans invaded Belgium. What about you?”

  “My younger brother was killed. I wanted revenge.”

  “Did you get it?”

  “Revenge is rarely what you think it will be. The other side is just the same as us. How men get to kill each other is built into us. We are born with a wish to have a good fight. Such a waste of time. Maybe none of us ever wanted to grow old. Elephant Walk, Rhodesia. A letter will get to me. I’m sure you can remember Elephant Walk. What made you join the RFC? The British?”

  “The Belgians don’t have an air force so to speak… How long before an apple tree bears fruit?”

  “Fourth year. Peaks at seven or eight. You get a crop for twenty years if you prune the trees properly.”

  Jenny Merryl stayed with Pierre Le Jeune for a month. No one visited. The black staff ran the small house. The big house, he told her, was yet to be built. Never once did Pierre try to touch her.

  “You are Royal Game, my dear. Untouchable as a guest under my roof.”

  “Have you never been with a woman?”

  “Oh, don’t be silly. I’m thirty-five. I won’t ask you if you have been with a man as I don’t wish to know the answer. Many things are best not spoken.”

  Back in Salisbury after her second flight in the air, men kept knocking at the door of Jenny’s small room. Her landlady was also from the northern part of England which was why she had taken the room. Her month away was not even questioned. Mrs Winterbottom was the height of discretion. Her only rule was no men in the room.

  “I have my reputation, dearie. Can’t have that kind of thing going on now can we? Enjoy yourself while you’re young, I say. Be careful, Jenny. Careful. Don’t let ’im touch you till ring on finger. The wedding ring, not the engagement ring. Men never want no second-hand goods neither. I know. Not for me to say. No it isn’t. But I’m going to say none the less. That foreigner’s too old for you. Nearly old enough to be your father.”

  “He’s thirty-five, Mrs Winterbottom.”

  “That’s what I say. Old enough to be your father. He ain’t touched you, has he?”

  “He’s a perfect gentleman.”

  “There ain’t no such bloody thing.”

  “I’ve got a job at the new hospital.”

  “You’re not movin’?”

  “Of course not. I love it here. I don’t know what I would have done without you. I may have to go on night shift so don’t get the wrong idea.”

  They both laughed.

  Pierre had flown himself back to the Inyanga after only one night in Salisbury. With all the new men coming into her life she settled down to enjoy herself. She had a job as a nurse. She had a comfortable room. She was happy. Jim Bowman stayed further and further back in her mind. Jenny lived for the day and made herself look as pretty as possible. If Pierre came back, all well and good. If not, she told herself, there was more than one fish in the sea. Doors, she smiled, were opening for her all over the place. The sun was shining, and the sky was blue.

  9

  Games and more Games, June 1921

  Tina Pringle found Barnaby St Clair’s one weakness the moment his brother Merlin invited her out to lunch. He was jealous.

  Through the English winter and spring Tina taunted him with a sweet smile before turning her back. They had met many times on the social circuit after the one and only time she had agreed to see Barnaby when he invited her to his brother’s flat for dinner. Smithers had prepared a meal better than she had eaten in any of the expensive London restaurants. She had enjoyed herself. The suave Barnaby thought everything, including Tina, would fall at his feet. Whenever he tried to make the conversation intimate she turned the subject, usually back to Merlin who was grateful for every crumb of her attention while trying to tell them he knew she was Barnaby’s friend, not his. The poor man was besotted with her right through dinner.

  The next day Barnaby had called her room at the Savoy, trying to give her the impression nothing had changed from their halcyon days in Johannesburg. He had invited her to dinner, an invitation she refused. He had tried again three days later with the same result. Tina even told the girl on the telephone exchange at the hotel to not put calls from Barnaby St Clair through to her room. Only when she saw him from a distance during the social swirl of the tea dances, the American new fashion of stand-up cocktail parties, the groups that gathered at the nightclubs after the West End shows, did Tina give him a warm, sexy smile and lick her lips.

  More than once he came across with the swagger of an old friend.

  “Ah, you must be the Honourable Barnaby St Clair.”

  She would then turn back to her friends, leaving him standing. There was nothing more she enjoyed than ignoring Barnaby. The boy thought himself too popular. Expected her to jump back into his bed. Like the other men that flowed through her life she gave them just enough to send them crazy and then went cold. She wanted a husband. A rich one. She wanted Barnaby more than anything in the world. But not as his mistress. She was no longer the little girl from the railway cottage that had lugged jam jars back from the river that was more of a stream, jam jars full of tadpoles and once a baby stickleback. With Barnaby. Always with Barnaby. Always her car
rying the jam jars.

  She had sent her brother Albert copies of all her press cuttings knowing the mention of his name in the London social papers would stroke his vanity, even bringing him back to London for a visit. The one-time gentleman’s gentleman to Jack Merryweather returned a rich man to the town where he had lived as another man’s servant. She told him she had seen Barnaby. Had seen Merlin. That she was now socially their equal. She even told him in her letters how she snubbed Barnaby on more than one occasion. Only then had she asked her brother for an allowance that would give her time to land a rich husband, a prize close to the heart of Albert Pringle. It would be her brother’s way of getting back at the English class system.

  Just before her money ran out. Just before she would have had to run out of the Savoy Hotel with her tail between her legs a man at Lloyds bank rang to ask her to visit the bank to open her account. On her behalf, the bank was holding five thousand pounds. Miss Pringle, the man had said pompously, would need a chequebook. She only just refrained from telling the man at the other end of the telephone just how much Miss Pringle needed a chequebook.

  She had cabled her brother her joy and gone out and found herself a small, well-furnished flat to rent in St John’s Wood.

  She had found the perfect address to further her campaign. She even employed a woman to come in and clean every day, Tina’s first servant. The poor girl was almost destitute and glad of the job. Tina did not tell her how near she was to having more in common with the girl in the circumstances of their births. Servants talked. Among each other. No one was ever to know. So far as London was concerned she was South African. Sister of the rand baron, Albert Pringle.

  Even at a young age Tina had worked out the nonsense of life. That it was what you appeared to be that counted, not who you were. A man in a smart suit was a man in a smart suit. Nobody asked if he had paid his tailor. The Savoy. The rand baron. The flat in St John’s Wood, the perfect elocution, compliments of Miss Pinforth. That was who she was. Her brother’s money had made her a lady. To those who asked, she told them her parents were dead, rolling sad please ask no more questions eyes, making the conversation fall silent. Like in a church. Each time she denied her parents she mentally apologised to her mother and father.