On the Brink of Tears

by Peter Rimmer

  “What’s he doing there?” Merlin had asked before he knew they were in trouble.

  “Walking with his family. I asked them to come and have lemonade. No, not our Barnaby. Just the spitting image of Barnaby when he was eleven years old. I was miles away when he bumped into me which made me call him Barnaby. One of Harry Brigandshaw’s brood. I always thought the Pringles and St Clairs were related though not officially. You can’t have two families living close to each other for centuries without something going wrong. Obviously the boy was a throwback to previous generations. One of the St Clair boys must have been sowing his wild oats, I think is the vulgar term. You never know what went on in the old days in the countryside. Now everyone moves around much more. Rather a rude boy I think. Harry gave him a whack for rudely asking my name. He looks a lot better. His skin isn’t so yellow. I would never have recognised Tina after all these years. As a child she was always at the Manor.”

  Later, when Merlin came to the writing study, they both agreed their mother had no idea what was going on.

  “That was bad luck the boy bumping into her like that in the woods. I suppose one day we’ll have to tell her, Robert. Can’t imagine Barnaby doing the right thing. She took Genevieve quite well, though Esther wasn’t married when she conceived her.”

  “But she was married when your daughter was born.”

  “I suppose so. I wish Genevieve would write more often. Next thing she’ll be married and I’ll be all on my own.”

  “You need a wife, Merlin.”

  “I’m far too old. Do you know anything about pigs and cows?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “The new chap doesn’t either. Old Warren was old but he knew what he was doing.”

  At the end of the month, when the invitation arrived for the whole family to attend the homecoming and birthday celebration of Harry Brigandshaw in April, the two brothers had another meeting.

  “Should we tell mother?”

  “If we don’t and she finds out what do we do then? She’ll know we’re hiding something. Barnaby should be there. For once in his life he should take responsibility for his mistakes.”

  “Then what do you tell the boy? That he’s got two fathers? Let sleeping dogs lie. Lots of people look like lots of people and they aren’t all related. How’s the new book going? You still haven’t told me what it’s all about.”

  “Wait till it’s finished then you can read all about it. Mother gave me the idea.”

  “You’re hiding something from me.”

  “Of course I am. It adds to the fun. So we’re all going to spend a few days at Hastings Court?”

  “Looks like it. Afterwards I’ll run up to London and see how Smithers is getting on.”

  “You don’t really like living at the Manor do you, Merlin?”

  “Not enough to do. Not enough, anyway, of what I know anything about. I miss the London theatre.”

  “And all the show girls.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m your brother. Freya wants us to pack up and go to America and then you’re stuck.”

  “Mother will be all right with Mrs Mason. I find mother and I have nothing to talk about except Genevieve. I’ll miss you, brother, if you go to America. Since I came to live back at the Manor we’ve got to know each other much better. So we take mother to Harry’s party and hope for the best?”

  “I always hope for the best, Merlin. You should try it.”

  When Merlin had gone, Robert immersed himself again in the perfect world of Merlin and Arthur where the knights used words like honour, duty, loyalty, trust, love and knew what they meant. A better world from the mists of time that probably, if Robert was honest with himself, only existed in the hopes of man and the words of fiction.

  While his brother was painting his perfect world with words, Barnaby was looking for new ways to slake his hedonistic thirst. The show at the Windmill had become boring. Not only had he seduced every girl he fancied – some before they got their jobs, some after – the show he had financed had shown a handsome profit and made him even more money. The only snag was getting rid of Celia Larson, who had given up her classical career to play in a group with Fleur Brooks, whose boyfriend had gone back to South Africa. Barnaby, for some reason that worried him, was feeling a tinge of conscience.

  The notion of popular classics played by long-legged girls on two fiddles, a flute and a cello had run its course, the novelty for the public having worn off. By the time Barnaby received his invitation to Harry Brigandshaw’s weekend celebration, the last girl he thought of taking was Celia Larson. Not only was he about to hear from the producer of the Windmill revue that the strings and the flute were out of the proverbial window, he had to tell the girl she was no longer a number in his life, and that she never really had been.

  The good news, Barnaby convinced himself, when he rationalised his position, was the girls were still young. Fortunately for Barnaby London was a big city, an easy place to hide when he no longer wished to see a girl that had come to bore him, his hormones calling out for something new to bring out the spark of lust. The fact that at thirty-nine the sparks were waning, never entered his head. The pursuit of selfish pleasure had been with Barnaby all his life. Being stuck with one girl for too long was on the top of Barnaby’s list of horrors. Not for him a wife and children who only wanted to make him do what he was told.

  Picking up Harry’s invitation from the table that sat next to the window, looking out into Green Park where the spring had broken out in lime-green leaves while the call of birds carried across the traffic down Piccadilly, Barnaby tried to think who he would take, not for a minute thinking of Tina who had passed out of his lustful mind soon after his childhood friend turned thirty.

  Any thought of seeing his son Frank never entered his head. So far as Barnaby ever thought of him, the boy belonged to Harry, the product of a brief ejection of lust he could barely remember, now the mother had lost her charm. Tapping the table with his index finger, Barnaby tried to think of something to do with the rest of the day that would give him pleasure.

  Showing their legs had never been part of the girls’ ambition so when Charlie Fox intimated the quartet were being taken off the bill at the Windmill, they had already made plans to play at a supper club. Celia was having an affair behind Barnaby’s back so that did not matter either.

  Once they left the show at the Windmill she was going to dump him anyway, his usefulness something of the past; right from the start at Purbeck Manor Celia had used Barnaby to get herself on in life. Playing Beethoven was one thing to Celia Larson; making money something much more important. The months playing at the Windmill had made Fleur and Celia independent of their parents, paying their own rent in the Paddington flat. Celia’s conversations with her mother having blissfully come to an end, the financial cord to her sanctimonious parents was severed forever.

  In future, no one was going to tell Celia what to do and certainly not the Honourable Barnaby St Clair, as she made plain to Fleur who was still in a state of permanent unhappiness without Andre Cloete.

  “He was never going to marry you, Fleur. Anyway who wants to live in South Africa? He was up at Oxford on a fully paid scholarship reading History, a subject as much use as the Pope’s balls. You don’t know if the family had money or where Andre fits in the picture. Don’t the family have a sheep farm or something horrible? It was nice while it lasted. A good-looking boy. A good athlete. You have to get on with your life. We have to get on with our lives. I want to call the group Dancing Girls, bring in a piano player. Play nightclubs and make them dance the way you and I did at the old man’s last party. I liked him. Dear old soul. Glad we did something to cheer him up at the end. These days bands are being recorded and their songs sold on records. And that’s something else: you and I have got to sing. People like good-looking singers in bands, not violinists with a bow stuck up their nose.”

  “You’re going to turn us into a band! We’re classical musicia
ns.”

  “Not anymore. We’re good at playing our instruments but that is only part of it. We all four are lucky to be good-looking in very different ways. Sophia is half Italian. Wanda thinks a gypsy got into the family tree somewhere which gives her that slit-eyed sly look the men all fall for. If I could find a girl that plays the drums I’d bring us up to six. We’re on our way. Playing the Windmill has given us cachet. Now we move on. Forget Andre, Fleur. He’s history. What counts in life is the future, like what’s going to happen tonight.”

  “Have you told Barnaby?”

  “Why do I have to tell Barnaby? I’m sick of old men. I want a young, firm, strong man with muscle. Someone to really give me a go. Often Barnaby is too drunk at the end of the evening. Back we go to his posh flat and the bugger falls asleep. Before we do it! Now what’s the use of that, I ask you? Men have no idea how to treat a woman, the selfish bastards. It’s all over when they are finished. Never think of us.”

  “Andre did.”

  “I did leave myself open for that one. Has he written lately? Nothing I’ve seen in the mail at the flat.”

  “No, he hasn’t.”

  “Then forget him like he’s obviously forgotten you.”

  “You’re cruel, Celia.”

  “You have to be cruel sometimes to be kind.”

  “What a terrible cliché. We love each other.”

  “Then why doesn’t he write?”

  “I don’t know. Life is so horrible. When are you telling Mr Fox we are quitting?”

  “When he tells us to bugger off, which he’s going to. That way I can force Barnaby to give us a month’s salary for doing nothing. You’ve got to be canny in this world when it comes to men and money.”

  “Why not ask him for three months? He was the one that took us out of the college. He can find out what we’re doing after we have the money.”

  “That’s my girl. After tonight’s show we’ll talk to Sophia and Wanda.”

  “What can they lose unless they want to go back to the Royal College of Music? If they can get in again. I can’t wait to see Barnaby’s face when he walks into our nightclub and sees us playing… So you were using him all the time?”

  “What else do you think I was doing with him? If he’d asked me to marry him it might have been different. He’s very rich and I don’t want to be poor when I am old. You either make your money or marry it. We’re going to be famous and independently rich so when we are old and not so good-looking we can hook young men, the way I hooked Barnaby.”

  “Some people might call you a conniving bitch.”

  “I’d consider it a compliment, Fleur. Better than some poor man treating you like a skivvy in your own house, cooking and cleaning for the rest of your life with a bunch of screaming brats to add to your worries, old before thirty. Now let’s go and catch the bus to Soho. The show must go on, as they say in the classics.”

  Not far away, in Bruno Kannberg’s flat on the Edgware Road, Gillian West, a week younger than Celia Larson, was planning for the biggest day of her life the following month. The royalty cheques for Bruno’s half share in Genevieve were coming in nicely much to her satisfaction, giving them a good chance if the money continued to buy a small house in Wimbledon by the end of the year.

  Robin Hood and his Merry Men was showing to good houses in America, the book having gone on sale in New York the night the film opened at cinemas across the States. A brief note from Genevieve to Bruno said even the Americans wanted to escape into a world where good always triumphed in the end, what with a war brewing across the pond in Europe.

  With the nice increase given to Bruno by Arthur Bumley, Gillian was sure the family she was going to make with Bruno would have sufficient money to maintain proper standards, even sending the children to public school, even a third-rate public school like Dulwich College where most of the pupils were day boys, giving them the same education as a boarding school at half the cost. Gillian had yet to make up her mind on the names of the children or where to send them for preparatory school.

  She herself had taken a job with a firm of solicitors in Holborn where she intended to work until the first child was born, saving every penny of her salary. Were it not for her father paying for the wedding, she would have taken them both to the Registry Office to save money. The reception, provided the guests brought proper wedding presents, was a good investment that, according to her school friends who were married, reaped a good profit above the cost of the catering. In her mind she had chosen the curtains for the lounge of the Wimbledon house and the wallpaper for the children’s nursery.

  At not quite twenty-two years old, Bruno had to admit his wife to be was the most organised and practical woman he had met in his life, just the kind of girl to look after him for the rest of his life. With mutual satisfaction they had sent out the wedding invitations to their spring wedding the previous week, by which time Gillian had planned their lives together in detail. Even Arthur Bumley was impressed when Bruno explained some of the detail.

  “It’s better than having a scatterbrain,” Arthur Bumley said, looking at Bruno with sympathy. “While you still can, let’s drink some beer together, Kannberg. Before she locks the ball and chain.”

  “Why are you laughing, Mr Bumley?”

  “You’ll be able to answer that in a couple of years’ time, provided Mosley hasn’t teamed up with Hitler, eliminating all freethinking journalists who disagree with them. What a lovely world we live in. Can I give you a little advice from an old married man who’s a Catholic, and whose religion doesn’t allow divorce?”

  “Of course you can. I owe my coming marriage to you and your generous new salary.”

  “Don’t let her henpeck you. Stand up for your rights as a man. Remember who wears the trousers, or you’ll look back on my salary increase and curse me to my grave.”

  “Don’t you like being married?”

  “Why don’t you ask my wife when she comes to your wedding?”

  “I’d never be so presumptuous. I can’t go to the pub tonight. Gillian is waiting in my small flat with the final details of our wedding.”

  “May the bells ring out, Kannberg. How’s the book selling?”

  “Gillian says we can buy a house in Wimbledon by the end of the year. She’s going to work until she has our first baby. The sales in America will be important. People have fickle minds. They forget. Depends, I suppose, if Genevieve ever becomes a big star. Gillian says if Genevieve becomes a big star we will buy a bigger house for the children. What’s the matter, Mr Bumley? Why are you looking at me in that funny way? And why would I ever want to curse you to your grave?”

  In Horatio Wakefield’s knowledge of human life there was always a war going on somewhere in the world, but why two of them should affect his short life was beyond his comprehension. As foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail the information that came to his desk, some of it published, some kept secret for reasons of Britain’s security, left him in no doubt appeasement never worked.

  A thug was a thug. The means by which they got what they wanted never troubled their minds. The trick, it seemed to Horatio, was first to gain power, then kill off the opposition while telling the mob what they wanted to hear, pandering to envy, jealousy, their feeling of oppression, telling them in simple words their plight was all the fault of someone else, like the Jews, while making them ridiculous promises. And now the Saarland was back under German control following a popular vote the Allies were unable to do anything about, and German troops were marching into the Rhineland in defiance of the Versailles Treaty.

  In Horatio’s opinion the next in line was Austria with its German-speaking people watching the new euphoria of pride erupting among their fellow Germans just across the border. The tribes of Germany were on the march, the hordes of the Huns massing again in Europe, looking for hegemony, the domination of Europe by an organised Aryan race that would make the world a better place to live in when everyone did what they were told.

  To ad
d to the irony was a marriage to Janet that was made in heaven; Horatio knew that at home he was happier than at any time in his life. Only when he reached his office and read the daily reports did he understand what it meant to live in a fool’s paradise. In Spain the biggest birds that flew were men in aeroplanes dropping bombs on civilians that had never caused the pilots the slightest harm in their lives.

  William Smythe had called into Horatio’s office in Fleet Street before he flew to America to find out what English-speaking people thought on the other side of the Atlantic.

  “To take the temperature, so to speak,” he said to Horatio when the tray of tea was put on Horatio’s desk.

  “The perks of the job,” explained Horatio smugly, picking up the teapot and pouring their cups of tea. “Darjeeling. Only the best for the senior foreign correspondent of the Mail. Help yourself to sugar and milk. When are you going?”

  “First to New York for a few days. I fly on Monday. Then to Denver, Colorado to see Glen Hamilton of the Denver Telegraph.”

  “Is he still syndicating your articles?”

  “I hope so. Especially after what I think I am going to say. I’m doing a series, Will Americans go to war again?. Many of my informants in the States are sick of the way we Europeans behave ourselves. Another lot are smugly hoping a war in Europe will loosen our financial bond to the British colonies around the world, giving big American corporations the chance to get in on the business. When America calls for the British Empire to be free and democratic they are not thinking of the poor sods running around putting crosses on bits of paper they know nothing about, or, fortunately, the wonderful people who are going to steal what’s left of the taxes instead of uplifting the people.”

  “You’ve become a cynic, William.”

  “A pragmatist. What the hell does the average American care about someone in Kenya or Rhodesia? The people with money want to control the export of coffee and tobacco to prevent competition at home. They want to buy the coffee and tobacco cheap straight from the natives and sell it for a fortune in a smart package. They want access to the raw materials we British dig deep out of the ground. Calling it freedom and democracy makes their plundering all the easier. And best of all, they don’t have to run democratic countries, put in roads, build schools, hospitals and maintain law and order. It’s much easier to buy what you want cheap and let the natives do what they like, running their own affairs in the good name of democracy. They even come up with nice new words like indigenous peoples to show how equal they are to everyone else in the world, ha ha.”