by Peter Rimmer
“I’ve heard of General Gordon. Did he die at Khartoum?”
“I meant my father.”
“I was only just born during the Anglo-Boer War. We call it the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa. The Boers prefer it that way. We all live together now.”
“I’ll remember that, Miss Pringle… I say, you do dance the Charleston well. You think that charming Mr St Clair will teach me?”
“I’m sure he will… I hope you find your father’s grave. Nothing I can help with there I’m afraid. My brother Walter fought in the Anglo-Boer War. He was killed in France in 1914.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Billy died also. In France. They never found one piece of him. Blown to pieces. Probably why the army know nothing about your poor father.” Tina was still watching Barnaby dancing with the girl.
“I never thought of that… Surely they would know if he was dead or alive.”
Barnaby sat down at the end of the dance. The band were taking a break.
“Barnaby, Miss Voss wants you to teach her the Charleston.”
“It’ll be my pleasure.”
“You two aren’t together then?” said Justine Voss.
“Just old friends,” said Tina.
The waiter had put a piece of steak in front of her that had some meat to it. She turned back to her new plate with relish.
By the end of the meal she was still hungry. Barnaby was trying to teach the girl how to Charleston. They were terrible together and sat down again. Tina was sick of the talk of war and avoided any further conversation with Justine Voss. She drank down the last of her glass of red wine. Barnaby gave her a look that made her thighs melt. She was going to have a difficult time saying ‘no’ to him but she was still going to say ‘no’. She had sworn to herself in the bath.
As the red wine took hold of her, she decided she liked making him jealous. This time he was not going to get away with his nonsense. It was all or nothing. She was going to tell him so. In no uncertain words.
After Simpsons they went to a nightclub. The Voss girl had gone with them. She seemed to like Barnaby. There was another man. Tina flirted with the other man.
When Barnaby drove home, they were both drunk. The Voss girl had gone off with the other man whose name Tina could not remember. At her door Tina put a finger in Barnaby’s chest.
“This is as far as you go my sweet,” she said leering at him.
“Why?”
“Because I say so.”
When she closed the door to her flat, she was proud of herself. Five minutes later she heard the car drive away down in the street.
When she fell asleep, she was still hungry. She dreamed of Africa. Being chased by lion. She woke up in the light of first dawn, just before the lion caught her. She had dreamed of Harry Brigandshaw and Elephant Walk for some reason… Then she remembered the girl whose father had died in the Anglo-Boer War. She thought that was why she had been dreaming of Harry Brigandshaw. He was chasing the lion that was chasing her in her dream. The lion was still vivid in her mind.
When Tina woke again the bedroom curtains were still drawn tight. The telephone was ringing. She let it ring. When the phone stopped ringing she got out of bed and made herself breakfast. The smell of frying bacon made her hunger come back.
“I never want to be really hungry in my life,” she said to the kitchen table when she had finished her breakfast. It was ten o’clock in the morning by the kitchen clock. All through the day she wondered who had been on the phone. It never rang again. She was sure it was Barnaby. He was trying to play her game. She would play the game better than Barnaby.
She had an invitation that night to the theatre. When the young man arrived to pick her up, she was freshly groomed and ready to go. He smiled at her in appreciation. She hoped Barnaby would be at the theatre. He was not there though she did see the Voss girl again. They smiled at each other across the bar during the interval. Tina had no idea what the play was about. Her mind had been elsewhere.
When the second bell rang, they went back to their seat in the stalls. She managed not to fall asleep. They went on to supper. Barnaby was not there either.
When they reached Tina’s flat in St John’s Wood, the man she had been with said he wanted to see her again. Tina could not at first think of the reason why. They had talked very little all night. Tina had told him how much she had enjoyed the play. Which had probably prompted the idea for the man to make a second attempt. When he tried again, she would say no to him politely. She liked to keep all the men she had been out with as friends. She never wanted them saying nasty things about her behind her back. When she saw them again, she smiled just enough to make them think they still had a chance. The personal smile, between her and the man.
The women were bitches. Women were always bitches when it came to men. And not just the ones with the horsey faces… She often wondered why people so often looked like their pets, proving to herself once again that all women were indeed bitches when it came to men. Including herself. She rather liked the idea. It was fun. Making Barnaby jealous was fun. Being a little bitch was a lot of fun.
10
England and Harry, April 1922
The leaves were falling in Africa when Harry Brigandshaw found his way to his ancestral home at Hastings Court.
Elephant Walk was running smoothly. Emily, Harry’s mother, said Jim Bowman was quick on the uptake. They were going to plant fifty acres of Virginia tobacco for the first time. The seedbed had been prepared and for three days brushwood burnt an intense heat into the heart of the beds to kill cutworms. This would ensure the seedlings grew to be ready to plant out into the lands when the rains broke in October.
Harry’s grandfather had supervised the making of bricks in a hollowed out kiln that allowed trunks of trees to be burnt right through the kiln for weeks. By the time the bricks were baked the foundation had been dug for a new block of ten barns to cure the tobacco leaf. The three rows would stand parallel with each other.
Harry had brought back enough corrugated iron from Salisbury in the new five-ton truck they had imported from British Army surplus. At least some good had come out of the killing of Harry’s pet giraffe. One of Harry’s neighbours had gone to England to buy ten trucks similar to the one that had followed the touring cars into the bush loaded with the safari equipment. Lord James Worth had cut a path of destruction right to the banks of the Zambezi River. All they took were trophies. Tusks. Heads. Lion skins. The horns of rhinoceros. The carcasses were strewn through the bush left for the scavengers. A man in Salisbury had said to Harry in disgust he could see where His Lordship had been by looking up at the sky where the vultures circled in the wind, waiting their turn to join the carnage. Vultures flopped around the dead elephant day and night after reaching the ground, too full of meat to fly. Instead, the man said, they squabbled with each other like old women, the beauty of the earlier flight no longer imaginable.
“I was ashamed of being an Englishman, Harry. The smaller tusks were left on the carcasses. Most of the animal heads were still attached to the carcasses. Only when they had killed did they measure the tusks and heads, taking the biggest back to their dark dank mansions to collect dust. It was as if they liked killing for the sake of killing. Found joy in destroying God’s creations. One of my friends wanted to shoot the bastard and send his head back to the ancestral home in England… What makes people like that?… Why do they do it?… I stopped my friend and now I wonder why.”
The first thing Harry had done at Hastings Court was to remove the stags’ heads that adorned the low walls of the great chamber where for centuries his family and retainers had eaten their food below the thirty-foot high vaulted roof of blackened timber, blackened by the open fires at each end of the dining chamber. The same chamber where the Pirate, Harry’s paternal grandfather, had died alone of a heart attack.
Harry had put a ladder up to the ancient walls himself and taken down the heads. Some, the old ones from centuries past, fell apart as he
pulled them from their plaques. Alone, in the semi-darkness, old portraits of his ancestors looked down on him, faintly smiling, their eyes following him wherever he walked in the chamber. Thankfully, none of them had gone to Africa. There were no lions. No elephant tusks. Not even a tiger’s head from India. The dead stags had only roamed the hills of England and the Highlands of Scotland.
The house was greater than he remembered as a child. Mostly what he remembered had been told to him by his mother. He thought he was two or three when his father had come back from Africa and put a ladder up to his mother’s bedroom window. There were distant shades of childish memory of the old house. The rest was what he heard growing up in the African bush.
Within a week, Harry wanted to go home to Elephant Walk. The place was too big. Twenty-seven rooms. Too dark. Musty, damp inside. Old. Smelling of mildew. Full of ancient ghosts. Dead people. Despite all the money spent restoring the old pile by his grandfather and Uncle James.
There was no pull. He thought there might have been by what his grandfather had said. There was nothing he wanted from Hastings Court. Not even its history. In the years during the war when in England on leave from the Western Front he had visited his friends the St Clairs at Purbeck Manor in Dorset. Never Hastings Court where Uncle James lived in all his splendour. Even his Grandmother Brigandshaw had gone to live in a London flat. He had been to that flat but never to Hastings Court.
“Now the place is mine,” he had said looking up at the house from the edge of the ornamental lake that spread to the woods and fields. “I don’t want it. I’m an African. Africa runs in my blood. All the bird sounds are strange. Where are the animal calls other than the dog fox at night?” Even then he had had to ask one of the servants that ran the court.
“Must have been a dog fox, Sir Harry.”
“I’m not Sir Harry. Plain mister.”
“I’m sorry, Sir Harry.”
Harry gave up. After cleaning the house of animal heads, Harry had instructed the chauffeur to drive him to Leatherhead railway station where he caught the eight ten to Waterloo and the next stage of his odyssey.
The head office of Colonial Shipping was in the City of London, in Billiter Street, close to Aldgate tube station. The showroom and booking hall for the Empire Castle Line was in Regent Street. There was more to Colonial Shipping than a company that owned passenger and cargo ships. There was much for Harry to learn, none of which he found of the slightest interest.
After a first day of obsequious hand-wringing by the staff and far too much bowing and scraping, he found a small bar near the office, bought a pint of beer and sat down alone to survey his lot. So far, he had told none of his friends he was in England. The two executive directors he had met that day in the office, he had given another story to free himself from their cringing company. He told them he had to go and see his grandmother, Granny Brigandshaw. Which he should do but wasn’t yet ready. The call of duty would be put off for a little longer.
The small bar was half full of clerks having a drink before going home to the suburbs. Harry could hear them talking from his seat at a small table away from the bar. They sounded mostly joyless. The pint of beer the only bright points in a dull day between the drudgery of clerical work and the nagging words of their wives.
Outside it was getting dark. Twilight. Something Harry had never seen in Africa. In Africa it was daylight and ten minutes later pitch dark. With the sound of crickets singing in the long grass. Not the snarl of London traffic.
Harry felt sorry for them. For their dull lives. It made him more determined to fulfil his task. The sooner he sold the family business, created the family trust, ensconced Uncle Nat, the bishop, in Hastings Court, the sooner he could go home, his duty done.
“I don’t even want any of the bloody money.”
“What you say, mate?”
“Sorry. Talked my thoughts out loud.”
“You can give me some.”
The man at the next small table had not been put off by his colonial accent. Harry was dressed in a suit they had made for him in Salisbury. A light, tropical suit. Harry knew he looked out of place. He knew the English from the war. The bar he had chosen was a working man’s bar. The cheapest beer. There was sawdust on the floor and the rich smell of long spilt beer. Harry knew for certain none of the managers at Colonial Shipping he had met during the day would so much as deign to put their feet inside such a bar. It was why he had picked this one for his private sanctuary.
“Where you from, mate?… You got a funny accent.”
“Africa. Rhodesia. I’m a tobacco farmer from Rhodesia.”
“And what the bloody ’ell you doin’ here?”
“It’s a long, long story… Where do you work?”
“Colonial Shipping… You ’eard of ’em?”
“Yes I have,” said Harry, warily.
“Thirty-four years this year it’ll be. Every day the same. Same train to work in the morning. Same train home at night. Flossie. That’s my wife. Flossie knows I have two pints in the Lion and home on the ten past seven. Takes an hour to get home. Last bit I walk from the station. Sun, rain or snow. Ten minutes. In the dark when it’s really raining seems longer. Much longer… Can’t complain, can I? Got a job. Sixteen I was. Offices were right on the water then. The Captain didn’t like being too far from his ships. Could see them in the estuary from his window.
“My first job was cleaning those windows. Showed me himself the first time. ‘Samuel,’ he said, and he always called me Samuel till the day he died, God bless his soul, ‘if you clean the window proper, you do the rest proper.’ Never left a speck on those windows, inside or out. We were on the second floor. Had to put a ladder up to clean the outside. The Captain was a stickler for having everything clean. Came from his days at sea. Said a dirty boat was a killer boat. People died of disease on a dirty boat. No one died on our boats. Some that didn’t like the Captain called him the Pirate. More like Robin Hood, I say. There was a story at the beginning. During the American Civil War. A Frenchman was trying to run guns to the South. The Yanks caught the Frog. Chased him onto some rocks. When the Yanks came back with a big enough boat to take on the Frenchman’s cargo someone had cleaned it out. The Yanks had taken the crew off after putting the boat on the rocks. Kind of sailors’ honour. They say the Captain had watched the action from the small island where the Frenchman went aground. By the time the Yanks came back, the Captain had taken the guns overland to his ship. The canon was quite a good job to shift, so they say. While the Yankee navy was busy looking for the guns, the Captain put up sail and took the ship into Mobile without a hitch. Sold the guns to the Confederacy. That’s not piracy. Just good thinking… Not boring you am I, mate?”
“Not at all,” said Harry.
“The French government told the British that the guns were stolen. The British told the French the guns were abandoned. Rightful salvage… After that, the Captain ran guns to the Confederacy for the rest of the war. Took cotton back to Liverpool. How he got rich, they say. You have to be lucky to get rich. Or make your luck, I say.”
“Can I buy you a beer, Samuel?”
“Very kind of you. There’s another train at seven forty. Sometimes I tell Flossie I had to work late… You know how it is… My name’s Samuel Adams. What’s yours?”
“Do you have any children Mr Samuel Adams?”
“A boy and a girl. Pigeon pair. The boy’s a sailor. Empire Castle Line. Too young for the war. The girl married and went to Australia. When I retire, me and Flossie are going to Australia. For a holiday, mark you. None of this emigrating.”
Harry went to the bar and came back with two beers. He was thinking how one man’s conception was so different to another. For the first time in the day he was interested in Colonial Shipping.
“When do you retire, Mr Adams?”
“When I’m sixty. Ten years’ time. And that’s my worry. When the Captain died suddenly, he left the business to his eldest living son, Sir James. James ha
d been in the army. Regular soldier. A good man even if he did not know how to put up a sail. Or navigate a ship. Changed nothing. Always asked what the Captain would do. So we told him and everything ran smooth. You see, all of us what worked for the Captain, loved the Captain. If you was loyal to him and the company, he was loyal to you. Twice he helped me out. ‘Cleaned my windows them years ago, Samuel,’ he said to me, ‘now it’s my turn. You go home and nurse your Flossie till she gets better. Pneumonia needs good nursing. And love, Samuel. Come back to work when she is better. I’ll get your pay packet to you. She’ll be all right.’ That’s what he said to me. And he was right… Then I got sick. A few years later. Doctor said to Flossie I was going to die. The Captain came down to my little house in Fetcham. Brought his own doctor to have a look at me. When I came back to work, he never mentioned it to the day he died. Loyalty. Now Sir James is in his grave there’s no loyalty at work. There’s talk of floating the company on the London Stock Exchange. Making it a public company so all the managers get shares for very little and sell the lot. Not us workers, mark you. The clerks. Like me. I never got past desk clerk, first grade. No education, so to speak. Like the Captain. Taught himself to read on board ship. They said he was no gentleman but to me he was more of a gentleman than all of them toffs put together. If they sell the company, what’s going to happen to me? Floss and I have a little saved but you can’t save much on a clerk’s salary, first grade… You got to have loyalty. The Captain had loyalty. Sir James had loyalty. A company owned by all of them people who buy shares on the stock exchange don’t have no loyalty. They don’t know Samuel Adams. I don’t know them. I didn’t clean their windows when I was a boy. Now did I? Dump me, they will. Early pension they call it. I’ll get half for thirty-four years instead of all my pension in ten years’ time. I asked the chief clerk if they could do that. He said they could. Daylight bloody robbery… Now that’s piracy, I say. Things like that didn’t happen when the Captain was alive. And some called him the Pirate… You think it’s right they throw me out ten years short with half a pension for the rest of my life?”