On the Brink of Tears

by Peter Rimmer

  The dogs had heard and were wide awake. A lion roared. Emily, Harry Brigandshaw’s mother, now trying to wake up properly, could hear splashes from the direction of the river down below the houses.

  In the old days, at the time of the Shona rebellion, Tinus senior and Sebastian had built a stockade around the houses in case they were attacked, something the rebels of the first Chimurenga knew to be inadvisable as such white hunters had shot their way through elephant halfway up Africa, collecting the ivory and shipping it back to England.

  For years there had been peace and tranquillity in the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia. The stockade had now been taken down, letting the lawns sweep through the msasa trees to the river at the bottom of the long slope.

  Emily Brigandshaw, Sebastian’s widow and daughter of Sir Henry Manderville, had not been sleeping well for years, dozing only on and off through the heat of the African nights, listening for long hours to the wild animals and the night birds that called to each other in the dark. Emily was not sure if the lion or the ringing phone had woken her from her dreams. Lying awake in the house she now only shared with Madge in the term-time, she had waited for Tina to pick up the phone. Only when the exchange rang for the third time did she pick it up. In the night, in the dark, her dreams more relevant than reality, she had no idea who was speaking on the other end of the line. She was getting old and tired and no longer very interested in what was going on in her life where nothing seemed to matter anymore. With Harry dead, she had given up worrying about her children.

  “Please, I’m sorry, who is that? Would you start all over again? I only got out of bed to go and answer the phone.”

  When Emily shouted for Madge asleep in her bedroom next door, the dogs began to bark, making the lion give out a full-blooded roar from the river where it had gone to drink. The family compound came alive, making the dogs in the nearby native compound bark in reply. Emily now realised there was more than a lion drinking at the river. Wild animals were crashing away into the bush, setting off the alarm calls from a flock of guinea fowl.

  After Tina finally picked up her phone and spoke to Barnaby a voice from the exchange said the six minutes were up. By then they all understood. Harry Brigandshaw was alive.

  Princess, Tembo’s seventeen-year-old fourth wife, had no idea what the fuss was all about. If the man had been dead and was now alive, he had not been dead in the first place. The people who had died in her father’s village had never come out of the ground however many dreams people had in their sleep.

  Ever since Tembo had paid her father twenty cows, he had talked about the owner of Elephant Walk he saw nearly every night in his dreams. So far as Princess was concerned, old people were stupid. They imagined the ancestors telling them all sorts of silly things. Tembo had ranted on about a great sea of water with Harry Brigandshaw far away on the other side no one could see, living with an old wizened man who threw the bones.

  Like so many old people who told her the same old story time and time again, she had stopped listening. If she had ever seen Harry Brigandshaw, it might have been different. Now it was plain boring. Worst of all she was being ignored; the girl whose father had received more cows as lobola than any other father in the history of her village. Such an expensive bride who was pregnant, unlike the first wife who was too old, deserved the undivided attention of a man ten years older than her father.

  Sulking as she looked at her husband playing the drums in the middle of the night, she had a good mind to go back to her village and tell her father to give back the cows. Her father, like all other men up to that moment in her life, did whatever she wanted.

  Next to her husband, with another drum tucked in between his knees, was Chirow, the man on the farm who built all the funny brick buildings. Both of them were beating the drums in perfect rhythm, each melding their sound into the other. Chirow was looking her way as he drummed in a trance, the light from the nearby fire playing in the whites of his eyes. Her husband’s eyes were glazed over from the power of the rhythm. Two of Tembo’s wives were shuffling barefoot in the red dust, swaying to the beat of the drums. The rhythmic sound swept far out into the heat of the night.

  For the first time Chirow ignored her look of invitation. The situation was out of hand. In a circle round the dancers and the drums the men were drinking bottles of the white man’s beer sent down from the big house with the news this Harry Brigandshaw was still alive. For Princess, it was a terrible feeling. For the first time in her life, she was powerless over men. In the blink of an eye, she was just like the other three old wives. Silently, Princess, with the big child in her belly, began to cry.

  Later that day, when Tina was packing up the children to go to England, sixteen hundred miles away in Cape Town young Tinus was lounging under the oaks with his best friend Andre Cloete. Their cricket match had taken place earlier that day against Rondebosch High. Bishops had won by two wickets with Tinus batting through their innings scoring forty-six runs, his best opening score for Bishops that season. Andre had gone on to take three wickets. For five minutes the two friends had been diminishing their achievements with practised downplay, both silently bursting with pride for what they had done on the pitch. In case they spooked their chances, neither mentioned their burning hope to play for the senior eleven in the following season.

  Tinus was going on fifteen, a year younger than his friend and the youngest player in the under-16 side. Tinus had two secret hopes in his life: to fly an aeroplane, and play cricket first for Rhodesia and then for South Africa; the international side fielded by South Africa to play England included players from Rhodesia. In the winter, Tinus had played rugby with a similar but not quite equal passion. The whole game of cricket appealed to his English heritage, from Granny Ford to his mother. Cricket to Tinus Oosthuizen was a game for gentlemen, something Tinus wished to be most of all in his life. After Bishops, he was going up to Oxford, to New College where his Uncle Harry had studied geology. With the same geology degree and hopefully a blue at cricket, Tinus was going to join Anglo-American and rise to the top of Africa’s largest mining house. He was going to live in Johannesburg with a summerhouse in the Cape. At the age of fourteen Tinus had fired a clean arrow into the future of his life. He knew where he was going, the life he had in his mind one long beautiful summer.

  Both boys were deliberately ignoring Tomkins Minor walking towards them across the well-cut grass of the school lawn. The boy with the round glasses halfway down his nose was holding a book in one hand, what looked to Tinus like a newspaper in the other. Tomkins Minor never played sport and always came top of the class, the same class attended by Tinus who had tried unsuccessfully for two years to beat him.

  “Spiffing show, Oosthuizen,” Tomkins Minor said, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

  “Did you watch?” asked Tinus, hoping the other boy had seen him bat.

  “Of course not. Just heard the score. I hate any form of exercise, even watching it. Wasn’t that flying type who disappeared three years ago your uncle? They’ve found him according to the London Daily Mail. It’s all in the Cape Times, including a photograph of Brigandshaw lying in hospital. The other British papers say it’s a hoax to boost their circulation. Have a look. The photograph isn’t very good but if he is your uncle you should know… Here, have a look for yourself. I thought you would have heard all about it by now… Twenty-three kills in the war, I’m impressed. You can keep the paper, I’ve read it right through. You’ll probably want to look at the sports page after you’ve read about your uncle… Spiffing show, both of you. See you in class on Monday, Oosthuizen. I’m off to read Plato.”

  Grabbing the newspaper out of the boy’s hand, Tinus looked at the front-page photograph and promptly began to feel sick, forgetting where he was. The face with the sunken cheeks surrounded by long hair on the pillow was not that of Uncle Harry.

  Embarrassed, Andre had turned away. Thankfully, Tomkins Minor had his back to them. Andre had never before
seen his friend blubbing, not even after the housemaster had beaten Tinus with a cane for smoking behind the lats. That day, Tinus had come jauntily out of the housemaster’s study with a sore bottom and a big grin on his face.

  Realising what he was doing, Tinus took out his big handkerchief, wiped his eyes and blew hard on his nose.

  “Sorry, Andre. After my father was shot dead standing next to him at the railway station, Uncle Harry was like a father. Some said my father stood in front deliberately. That Braithwaite was aiming at Uncle Harry. My father and Uncle Harry were like brothers. For a moment I had some hope, but look at the photograph. This man looks seventy.”

  “People look older when they’ve been sick. Have another look. If you ask me those eyes have the steady look of a fighter pilot. Why would they put it in the paper if it wasn’t true? They’d just make fools of themselves. I’ll leave you to read the paper, Tinus. To be alone. Why don’t you try and phone your farm in Rhodesia?”

  “It’s a party line. You can never get through.”

  “You can try.”

  For the first time in their friendship, Andre put an arm round his friend’s shoulder. Then he walked towards the school buildings a hundred yards behind Tomkins Minor. Suddenly his three wickets were not so important for Andre Cloete. Tinus watched them go before reading the paper.

  And there it was. The great lake, the largest of them all, Lake Victoria. Tembo’s dream playing out in the story as Tinus read. The plane going down in a storm. Blown off course from the route they had searched on horseback. The river feeding Lake Victoria, the Great Lake impossible to see across, had harboured the man the paper claimed was Harry Brigandshaw. All those long weeks in the heat and rain with Keppel Howland, Ralph Madgwick and Tembo had almost not been in vain.

  Tembo’s dream was right. The ancestors’ message was right. The search party had not gone far enough, if what he read was true and not, as some in England claimed, a newspaper hoax.

  Looking again at the photograph, Tinus tried his best. The eyes, yes, the eyes did stare at him. But so did the man on page three. However much he wanted to believe, he was still not sure. He wanted it so much he still had to see with his own eyes to truly know his Uncle Harry was back from the dead. That the magical life he pictured for himself would really come true. Could people be that cruel to make money out of a newspaper article, he asked himself.

  As he rose to follow the path of Andre across the school lawn, tears pricked the back of his eyes.

  2

  When William Smythe came down from his flat on the Monday morning, Bruno Kannberg of the Mirror was waiting with his camera. The fog was swirling in Notting Hill Gate, the street grey, colourless, the leaves of autumn from the plane trees that flanked the side road long swept away. Even the pigeons were silent on the rooftops, their small heads sunk into their grey chests. Bruno had never met the man he had been following for three days, only knowing his quarry from a photograph shown to him by the editor of his paper who had told him to follow the man to Harry Brigandshaw just in case the story of the dead man rising was true.

  “If you find him, Kannberg, get an interview or another job.”

  “But you said he was dead. The Daily Mail’s story a hoax.”

  “Nothing like building up reader interest. Find him. Even the Daily Mail doesn’t print such a lie and expect to get away with it.”

  “Why should the man be in London?”

  “He’s sick. If Smythe goes anywhere near the Tropical Diseases Hospital, we’ve got him.”

  “Have you asked the hospital, sir?”

  “Don’t be so naive.”

  With the fog swirling it was not the best day to sleuth. With Smythe was a shorter man wearing glasses. The man with the glasses had come back the previous night with a woman. The woman had furtively come out into the dank street ten minutes earlier before being swallowed up in the fog. Bruno had been twenty yards from the girl in a doorway. When she passed, she was smiling to herself, making Bruno jealous of the shorter man with the glasses. The girl’s face looked like the face of the cat that had swallowed the cream. Both men as they passed him deep in his doorway were older than himself. Men of the world he would expect to find with women leaving their flats early in the morning. At twenty-three, Bruno hoped one day a girl would leave his room early in the morning with the fog swirling down the street to stop the landlady seeing what was going on.

  “If I find girls in your room after eight o’clock at night, you are out.”

  Mrs Portman, his landlady, was an aristocrat fallen on hard times. Rumour had it her maternal grandfather was an Earl. Now she lived in the basement at the bottom of the house in Holland Park and rented out the rooms above to young men.

  Whenever Bruno saw Mrs Portman, she was wearing red rubber gloves that came halfway to her elbows. She was either washing up or peeling potatoes when he paid his three shillings every week for the room at the top of three flights of stairs that creaked loud enough to bring the old woman out of her basement with her hands on her hips if she heard shenanigans in the early hours of the night. Theodore Wells, the out of work actor who shared the top floor and the cupboard of a bathroom, had had to use all his charm not to be thrown out on the street. Especially having not paid his rent for six weeks… Mrs Portman was full of contradictions.

  With the idea of illicit sex foremost in his mind, Bruno broke cover behind William Smythe and the man with the glasses, following them down the street into the London fog. It was drizzling and Bruno pulled down the brim of his trilby hat to keep the rain out of his eyes, like the man in the picture he had seen at the Odeon cinema the previous Friday night before his editor made him into a sleuth. Usually he lost his quarry early on in the pursuit, which was why he was again waiting for his man in the street outside the place where William Smythe had gone to ground late on Saturday night.

  To Bruno’s surprise, despite the swirling fog, today seemed to be much easier. Instead of calling a cab which always gave Bruno problems, his quarry walked up the main street to Notting Hill Tube station and bought himself a ticket on the underground train.

  Quietly, Bruno went through the same procedure and followed his man onto the down escalator, all three of them going underground in the morning rush-hour crowd as thousands of men and women wearing wet raincoats down to their ankles made their way to work. Even the faces of the young girls looked pinched and unattractive. Bruno’s only consolation was his father saying that where the family had come from in Riga, running away from the Russians when the communists invaded Latvia, the weather was worse than London. His father had fought in the White Russian Army until 1920. Like all optimists, Bruno only remembered the summers by the sea in Riga. In winter, the big family house had been full of warmth from big fires in every room tended by a host of servants, memories all lost in the panic and running that came in the aftermath of war.

  When Bruno came out of his private thoughts, hanging from a strap by his right hand, he could still see the back of William Smythe’s head and the face of the man with the glasses. The man in the glasses looked very pleased with himself, which came as no surprise to Bruno.

  By the time they arrived at the offices of the Daily Mail in Fleet Street with the man still following them, William Smythe was thoroughly enjoying himself, the jealousy from Horatio’s conquest of Janet Bray having temporarily evaporated.

  “That Russian émigré from the Mirror is a twit. Look at him down there standing in the rain with the brim of his hat pulled down like some cheap private detective.”

  “If you want to see the editor about an office you’d better stop looking out of the window.”

  “How was she?”

  “I’ve no idea what you are talking about. Come on.”

  In his hand, William held the next instalment of the Brigandshaw saga. The two pages were hidden in a large brown envelope. Earlier on the Sunday, hungover and still slightly drunk, he had typed the thousand words on Horatio’s typewriter in the flat.

>   It was nice to be on the winning side for once in his life.

  The editor seemed pleased to see him.

  “You can share Wakefield’s office. The typing pool will give you a stenographer… Is that the next one?”

  “Yes, sir. We have an interview with Brigandshaw this afternoon. The matron says he looks much better… If you look out of the window, you’ll see a chap in a trilby hat standing in the street in the rain. He looks very wet. It’s Bruno Kannberg of the Mirror. Was waiting outside the flat when we came to work.”

  “You are not employed by this paper, Smythe, strictly piecemeal, one article at a time.”

  “As it should be, sir. That way each time we can discuss the price. You’ll like what you read inside the envelope.”

  “Won’t he follow you to the hospital?”

  “He had trouble following us to Fleet Street.”

  “Are there any other newspapers on your tail?”

  “He’s the only one still standing in the street.”

  “Report to me after you see Brigandshaw.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And don’t call me sir. It makes me nervous.”

  “Of course, Mr Editor.”

  When he saw them come out into the rain that afternoon, a wet and hungry Bruno Kannberg followed as far as the taxi rank. By the time his own taxi had pulled out into the street he had lost them. For some reason the man in the glasses had taken a separate taxi.

  Three hundred yards down the road, Bruno paid the cab driver the minimum fare. Across the road was a Lyons Corner House.

  “Those buggers had me on a piece of string all day,” he said to himself.

  The cup of hot, sweet tea was delicious, making his empty stomach talk back as the hot liquid went down inside. After a big plate of bacon and eggs with two plump Wall’s sausages smothered in tomato sauce, Bruno went outside. He had an idea and was smiling as he crossed the road heading for the taxi rank.