by Peter Rimmer
With the hatches shut down, the cabin on top of the tall crane empty of the driver, the SS Corfe Castle sailed out to sea at five o’clock that afternoon. Harry had told no one onshore. Every time he had gone to the authorities nothing had been done.
“He got off in Cape Town, you fool,” he had said to himself. “He’ll go up to Rhodesia on the train.”
As expected, there was no Braithwaite in the list of passengers. When he asked the master of arms to look for a man with a full black beard in third class, he was told there was no such man on board.
What had stopped Harry recognising the man who had been his commanding officer in France, was the colour of the man’s hair and beard. In France and when he saw him last in London, Fishy Braithwaite had had blonde hair. Something in a bottle of dye had obviously changed. Harry could still see in his mind’s eye the third-class passenger with a full black beard waving at him. He had even waved back.
Tina Pringle had been replaced at the captain’s table by a man. Philip Neville was long in pedigree and short in income. Among his ancestors were dukes and earls. Some said the course of English history would have been different without the Nevilles. They had wielded power for centuries. None of which helped Philip whose private income was exactly one thousand pounds a year, adjusted for inflation, a figure that had been written into the will of an indulgent great-aunt just before she died. It was just enough to stop him having to take a job in the City. Not enough to attract the right kind of wife.
Philip had come on board in Port Elizabeth. He had travelled up the west coast of South Africa in an ex-army truck fitted out so he and his guide could sleep in the truck. They had driven as far as the Skeleton Coast and watched the colonies of seals. Unlike Harry Brigandshaw and Barend Oosthuizen he had not been looking for diamonds.
With the income for life from his great-aunt’s estate he had gone up to Oxford and happily read English literature, a degree he knew would have little commercial value outside of his quest. He was rootless with no ambition and no real idea of what to do with his life.
The aunt had very kindly written a clause into his legacy that increased his allowance if the purchasing value of the pound went down. This calculation each year was made by the executors of her estate, a well-known firm of London solicitors. All they had to do was find out the cost of a single pint of best bitter in each of five public houses nearest their offices. If the average price had gone up, so up went Philip’s annual legacy. What his Great-Aunt Constance knew about best bitter and English pubs was a mystery to Philip, but for ten years the calculation had kept him in exactly the same financial position. Not rich. Not poor. Enough money to go through university and travel.
All the aunt had asked in the will was for Philip to read literature at Oxford and write a good book which is what he had been trying to do with no avail since coming down from Oxford. It was, of course, his own fault like everything else in his life when it went wrong which it did more times than he could count.
Six months before Great-Aunt Constance died at the age of eighty-nine, Philip had made his weekly visit. He was then seventeen years old and still at Harrow School. His visits were not duty visits. His school was close to the London flat where Great-Aunt Constance lived with a paid companion and a pug dog that rarely left her lap, yapping at visitors as well as Philip from the safety of the old woman’s skirts.
“He always barks, Philip, so don’t look like that. Now come and sit next to me and tell me what you have been doing all week.”
“Won’t you tell me about India and Burma?”
“Later, Philip. First you. I want to know what you have been up to. You do remember I pay your school fees ever since your dear father died.”
As usual, Philip gave his aunt a litany of his poor life. She seemed to take comfort from the day-to-day doings of a schoolboy, as if it kept her in touch with a life from which she was slipping away. His aunt fascinated Philip and not for her money. She had done so much and been to so many places always meeting people with something to say. The people who ran and made the greatest empire the world had ever seen as she told him every time Philip paid her a visit.
His mother had told him there had been so many suitors Great-Aunt Constance could never make up her mind. She had never married. Had never needed a husband to keep her and leave her money. Philip thought looking back on the so many conversations that his aunt had had no wish to domesticate herself with a large house and a brood of indulgent children. She was far too intelligent. Far too interested in life. She had inherited half a large industrial fortune from her father. Philip’s grandmother had married a Neville who had gambled away the other half of the fortune. Nevilles had never been good at holding on to money.
He went to see her every week not for her cake and tea but her stories. Great-Aunt Constance was the best storyteller that Philip had ever heard. Every one of them true. Of that Philip was sure. They were far too vivid to have come out of the old woman’s mind.
“What is the one thing you want to do most in your life, Philip?”
“I want to write a good book, Auntie,” he had said off the top of his head.
“Then you shall; fiction or fact?”
“Does it matter?”
“Probably not. Someone said, I’m not sure which wise man, that history is fiction dressed up as fact. That if you want to know the real truth, read the fiction of the time… So you want to be a writer, Great-nephew?”
“Yes, Aunt Constance.”
“Good.”
That was all she had said. ‘Good,’ Philip had thought of it only again when the will had been read out in the dark, dingy offices of Simons, Tilby and Rockerman.
“Write me a good book, Philip. One good book.” The words were cast in stone.
At first, Philip had thought the task quite simple. Armed with an Oxford degree in English literature he would write one good book and have an income forever. Trouble was for the last five years he had found the task not so simple. Writing the first paragraph was simple. Writing the rest was not.
By the time Philip sat down at the captain’s table opposite Justine Voss he had stared at more blank pages than any man alive. Even travelling had done nothing to open the floodgate of his creativity. If only he had not promised his aunt. If only his income did not depend on it. If by the age of thirty he had not published a book, he was done. And here again with Great-Aunt Constance’s usual thoroughness she had listed in her will the only publishers who would count. If there was not one good book by his thirtieth birthday, his income would stop. And then what was he going to do for a living he asked himself, fear rising from the pit of his stomach every time? What was a gentleman without money?
The day he sat down at the table, having boarded the ship at Port Elizabeth after roaming South Africa fruitlessly looking for a good story, he turned twenty-seven. It was his birthday. Until the third course of the meal he avoided all conversation. The man next to him had also not said a word. Twice he had caught the young girl opposite smiling at him and avoided contact with her eyes.
“Just three years to go,” he said to the leg of roast chicken on his plate. He sounded totally miserable, even to himself.
“What happens then?” said Harry next to him.
They had been introduced at the start of the meal.
“If I haven’t written a good book my income stops.”
“That’s a hard one. You want to tell me why?”
Harry needed something, anything, to take his mind from Barend who he was sure was buried alive.
“How far are you going?” asked the man next to him. Harry had already forgotten his name.
“Beira,” said Harry, his mind drifting away again.
“That should be enough time. You don’t know the Zambezi Valley by any chance? I’m looking for a story to write. A good story.”
Justine Voss was looking across at him with big eyes. She was listening to his every word. “You should talk to my father,” she said entering the
conversation uninvited.
Wearily, with the weight of the world on his shoulders, Philip looked up and into the large, open innocent eyes of Justine Voss. Immediately, he knew he shouldn’t have looked into those eyes. It was another one of his mistakes. If the girl in front of him, drowning in his eyes with himself drowning in hers, was seated at the captain’s table she had to be rich. In exactly three years’ time he was not going to have a bean. He was going to be poorer than a church mouse.
Harry looked from one to the other, his mind at last off of Barend. He had seen the deep exchange of looks. Which made him think of Brett and Tina bringing back another flood of personal guilt.
“I know the Zambezi Valley better than any man alive,” he said to them both. “My father was Sebastian Brigandshaw. The big-game hunter. There was Selous, Hartley, Brigandshaw and Oosthuizen. The greatest hunters of their time. All of them hunted the Zambezi Valley. Why don’t you tell Justine your story and we can all hear. I love a good story. You have been introduced to Miss Voss. And her mother, Mrs Voss. Miss Voss’s father is Colonel Voss who fought with Chinese Gordon. Gordon of Khartoum.”
At the end of the meal, Philip had finished the story of Great-Aunt Constance. The whole table had been enthralled.
“Come to Rhodesia, Philip Neville,” said Harry having discreetly called for the passenger list from a steward. “We’ll give you a story. What you must do is start the book with the story of your great-aunt and then tell your story.”
“What a marvellous idea,” said Justine. “We can all help.”
“Or better still, tell her story. It’s what she wanted, I think. What she prepared you to do by sending you to Oxford to read literature, what she’s still paying for you to do. What do you all think?” Harry said to the table at large.
Instead of saying a word, everyone at the table politely clapped including the captain of the ship.
“There you have it then. Your book. All you need is a quiet place to write. Why not come to Elephant Walk?”
Harry was thinking of Justine. His own life was quite complicated enough as it was.
“Do you really mean that?”
For the first time that day the fear left the pit of Philip Neville’s stomach. It was there right in front of him. As it had been all along.
“Mrs Voss and her daughter will also be staying with me at Elephant Walk.”
Justine gave him the perfect look of thanks without saying a word. Harry smiled. Then he went back to worrying about Barend.
On the third day of his entombment, Barend Oosthuizen had seen the pits of hell, the screams of the dead and it was far worse than anything that had happened in his sordid life. Hell was all-consuming and forever. By the time the SS Corfe Castle was steaming into the river port of East London for a one-day stop to discharge cargo which was the day after Philip Neville found his creativity and accepted the invitation to write his one good book at Elephant Walk, Barend was cowering away from the wrath of his God. For five days, while he went on living in the gap between the rockfall in the tunnel and the seam of gold at his back, every bad deed he had done in his life played through his mind time and time again. He knew he was in hell even before the everlasting torment began. With all his heart and soul he wanted to repent. To be forgiven. To start again. To make amends for the horror and filth he had made of his life as he fought to revenge the British hanging his patriot father by the neck. For all the years of his life until God found him in his living tomb, he had railed against the world. Tearing at it with his bare hands. Cursing its existence. Cursing his own life. Wishing to die. To be free of torment. Free of life’s great injustice that had taken from him his father for a reason so wrong he had screamed inside every day of his life since it happened.
After the first hope of death had passed, and he found himself alive he had the time alone to revisit his life. To see himself as he was to other people. To see what he had done to Madge and his three children. The family he had abandoned, deserted, run away from to nurse his personal hate. The mother he had ignored.
On the fourth day he had shouted to his children. ‘You don’t deserve it. Why must you lose a father because I lost mine?’ In his head, God had answered. ‘Evil brings more evil. Stop the hate. Atone. Atone. Atone.’
Crouched on the ground he had seen his past and heard the wrath of God.
With the long metal spike he had once used to make holes in the face of the rock to insert sticks of explosives he banged on the tin box that had held his lunch. There was still light in his tomb from the box of candles he had carried in his pack. Only the day before that long ago morning when the tunnel caved in, the shift boss had inspected his pack.
“You’re a bloody fool, Oosthuizen. So you hit your helmet a couple of times and walk back up the tunnel a mile for more candles at my expense. Time at the rock face is money. I told you more than once to take down a full box of candles… And where’s your first aid kit? Follow the bloody rules or you go.”
Barend had wanted to hit the man. Instead he had done as he was told and replenished his pack before going down in the cage for the last shift.
He had used the candles to give him light when the fear of the dark and his wrathful God had had him fumbling for matches in the dark. For some reason the air was still sweet, a quirk of the rockfall that had buried his way but left a small tunnel to bring him air and keep him alive.
It had taken Barend three days to finish his bottles of cold tea he took down each shift to quench his thirst as he hacked at the seam of gold-bearing rock.
He could now smell the pony buried in front of him. With his new will to live, came the revelation of food and liquid in front of him, sending him scrambling to unearth enough of the poor pony to give him food and blood. Only after he had cut the raw meat from the carcass and thrust it into his mouth had he laughed at God’s irony.
God was keeping him alive to punish him. To show him there was no road other than to perdition unless he atoned for his terrible sins. He had to get out or face eternal hell.
In his cold fear he cleaned the cut on his right hand where human teeth had cut to the bone. The iodine stung. The dark came back. He was still alive and no longer wishing he were dead, fearing the hell God had promised more than death itself. Barend began to scream until his throat no longer let out a sound. Then he whimpered in the dark, fumbling for the matches to light a candle to take him out of the dark. Then his bowels opened, emptying the contents down his legs, oozing onto the rock floor of his tomb. The stench made him sick, heaving up undigested horsemeat from his stomach. The horsemeat tasted rotten, Barend began to cry as he sat down on the floor in his own shit.
There was no hope. There had never had been any hope in his life.
Harry Brigandshaw bought a two-day-old copy of the Rand Daily Mail the morning the ship docked in East London. He had made an arrangement with Justine and her mother to go up the Buffalo River to look at the game from a boat. Philip Neville had been invited along with two other passengers that had never been to Africa before. While Harry felt melancholy, the rest were excited at the thought of going into the bush, even if it was from the luxury of a boat powered by a petrol engine that would likely scare the game long before it came into view round the bends in the river.
The headline was simple. ‘Survivors!’ There was a picture of families at the pithead and a group of dirty men emerging from an iron cage.
Harry found a seat in reception and read the two-day-old story from the Witwatersrand. The Colonial Shipping receptionist watched him curiously. More worried about Barend than interested in his ships, he had not introduced himself. A quiet place to read came first.
Barend was not among the rescued. The paper told Harry to go to page three for more on the disaster. On page three there was a whole article devoted to the son of General Oosthuizen. There was a good human story to be had.
The man in the bar fight with Barend that had taken place the night before the rockfall had died soon after choking o
n one of his own teeth as blood gushed back from his lacerated mouth down his throat. The man had been drunk from a long day of drinking. The police had taken the man to hospital where a doctor pronounced the man dead. Only then did the police begin to enquire how the man had died. By the time they wanted to talk to Barend Oosthuizen he was down the mine. The police had told the mine manager not to let Barend off the mine premises when he came off shift and inform the police the moment he came above ground.
Before the police could do anything more than say a murder docket had been opened, the tunnels had collapsed. The Rand Daily Mail, sensing a good story, had talked to everyone who had seen the fight in the bar and came out strongly in defence of the Boer general’s son. Harry sensed reading the article that had Barend been above ground in the hands of the police the newspaper story would have been different. People were more inclined to feel sorry for a dead man no longer able to defend himself.
The only sign of life reported by the paper on the third day after the rockfall was the distant sound of someone beating a tin can with a piece of metal followed soon after by terrible screams followed by silence. The rescue teams were digging out a tunnel that had collapsed during the underground earth tremor. The newspaper was doubtful there would be any more survivors, not wishing to create false hope among the families at the pithead. After more than three days anyone not killed by the rockfall would have died of suffocation, according to an expert quoted by the newspaper.
There was a long paragraph that talked about the injustice of hanging a prisoner of war who just happened to be a British subject as well as an Afrikaner. It was clear where the journalist stood on General Oosthuizen. The man wrote in English under the byline of Viljoen. The Viljoens were Afrikaners.
Harry smiled bitterly where he sat on the bench. At least Tinus Oosthuizen was no longer referred to as a traitor by an English newspaper. There was nothing else to read of the mine disaster after Harry read the editorial that called for more stringent safety regulations. Harry smiled again. Newspapers always called for regulations after the event, not before.