On the Brink of Tears

by Peter Rimmer

  “To find another captain. One without long-standing commitments to the Royal Navy. Actually they know. They gave us the name and phone number of your hotel.”

  The nightmare he had faced in the last war as a young lieutenant was coming back again. What they had said then about a war to end all wars was a lie. This time, getting out of bed to find his slippers, he knew he was going to get himself killed. The fire had gone out in the grate. Shivering, he pulled on his trousers. His slippers were under the bed where he had left them.

  “Twice in one lifetime. What are the chances?”

  The idea of the Atlantic in mid-winter was no warmer than the room. Outside in the corridor he could hear feet walking over the thin strip of carpet, creaking the old floorboards. There was a knock on a door further down followed by what sounded like a rattle of teacups. Cyrus held his breath, hoping. The sound of feet stopped outside his own door followed by a knock. Pulling on a vest, he got up from the side of the bed and, barefoot, walked to the door.

  “Morning tea, sir. Mr Brigandshaw says to meet him downstairs when you’ve had your tea. It’s a bit late.”

  “Are all the young girls in this house as pretty as you?” said Cyrus, grinning at the girl holding the tea tray, the large pot of tea covered by a red knitted cosy that had kept the tea hot all the way up from the kitchen.

  “I’m from the village. Helping out. Times are not easy for my mum and dad. Herb’s here too.”

  “Who’s Herb?”

  “My brother, Herbert.”

  “Tell Mr Brigandshaw I’ll be right down. What’s the time?”

  “Half-past nine.”

  “I overslept.”

  “Happy Christmas. We open the presents at ten.”

  “I’d better hurry.”

  The young girl was still smiling as she put down the tray. Cyrus found a sixpence in his pocket and put it in the palm of her hand.

  “Do you all get presents?” he asked.

  “All the kids and all the servants, even us what come up from the village. The presents are under the big Christmas tree.”

  “Happy Christmas.”

  “Don’t you have kids, you on your own? Sorry, sir, that’s not minding my own business like I should be doing. I’m not a proper servant. If there’s a war I’m going to work in one of them factories.”

  “My wife died having our son. What’s your name?”

  “Mary. Plain and simple, Mary.”

  For some reason the girl stood on tiptoe and gave Cyrus a kiss on the cheek before leaving the room and closing the door. Cyrus listened to her footsteps going away down the corridor.

  Pouring himself a cup from the brown pot covered by the cosy except for the spout, Cyrus had not felt happier in months. The panic from his call-up had evaporated with the girl’s peck on his weather-beaten cheek.

  When he got downstairs properly dressed the big hallway in front of the main stairs was crowded with guests, servants and excited children. Somehow it all made it worthwhile having to go to war, even if war had not yet broken out.

  “Christmas present, Cyrus. Chap just delivered it,” said Harry Brigandshaw. “Keep those damn dogs out, Anthony!”

  “On Christmas Day!”

  “You’ve missed breakfast.”

  “All I could take was the tea and biscuits. Thank you, Harry.”

  “Thank you, Cyrus. Without you and Doctor Andrew Nash I’d likely have succumbed to my tropical diseases.”

  “Is that package what I fear it is?”

  “I’m afraid it is, Cyrus... We really can’t have dogs in here when we open the presents. There’s enough chaos as it is. Do you know there’s one of the cats fast asleep under the tree that will get spitting mad if the dogs find her?… Don’t talk about it. Let’s enjoy this Christmas. I’ve told Thornton and Vivian to stay here for the rest of their leave. When do you report?”

  “On the third. Plymouth.”

  “Be my guest until then… My word, the children are making a lot of noise.”

  “They are what Christmas is all about, Harry. What life is all about. Keeping the home fires burning.”

  “What is it this time?”

  “A corvette.”

  “Best of luck. All they let me do that’s exciting is test fly the odd new aircraft.”

  What looked to Cyrus like an ornate oriental drum without a top cover, probably from Japan, was approached by Harry carrying a long-handled weapon with a round cloth ball at one end. All the children fell silent in anticipation. The drum was next to the tree at the foot of the wooden stairs. The guests and servants who were gathered with the children stopped talking to each other. The dogs were barking from somewhere outside the great hall when the clock in the tower began winding itself up noisily before striking the hour for ten consecutive, resonant bongs, followed by Harry hitting the oriental gong with his long stick a mighty swipe, sending the children into renewed frenzy, the younger ones jumping up and down in excitement.

  Tina Brigandshaw picked up a present wrapped in Christmas paper from the pile spilling out from under the sparkling tree and called out a name. Harry Brigandshaw did the same with another present he found under the tree… One by one the presents were given out to the children and servants.

  “Kim from Aunty Genevieve with love… Mrs Craddock from Mr and Mrs Brigandshaw with our sincere appreciation… Kim from Cousin Tinus… Mary Ross from the Brigandshaws…”

  Cyrus, smiling at being part of their Christmas, listened happily to the litany while Mary’s brother Herbert passed among the guests offering cups of steaming coffee, Cyrus having asked the young man his name.

  The dogs got in somehow towards the end and found the cat without knocking over the Christmas tree in its precarious pot filled with earth, the big pot wrapped around in coloured paper, Frank’s fairy at the top of the tree teetering for a moment. All around him the Brigandshaw children and their friends were tearing open their parcels to get at the presents inside, squealing with delight even if they didn’t much like what they found.

  In Frank’s excitement at one big rip at the paper covering his box of trains, he hit his sister Beth round the face, making her look at her brother with a flash that contained nothing of the Christmas spirit. In a very long, thin box Cyrus watched Anthony find a four-ten shotgun of a Belgian make with a single long barrel that made the boy smile from ear to ear. His father placed a hand on his shoulder while his mother, watching from the corner of her eye, gave Kim, her youngest son, another present for the young boy to open.

  When the underneath of the tree was finally bare of presents, with torn Christmas paper all over the parquet floor and most of the children nowhere to be seen, off with their presents, the guests were offered glasses of South African sherry by the same Herbert Ross who had brought them their coffee. Everyone was talking at once, the infectious excitement of the children having spilled over to the grown-ups as the spirit of Christmas ran riot through the old house, a joy to be seen, a joy for Cyrus to be part of, an image he was going to take with him on board the corvette when he took up his command in a week’s time. A warm picture to take with him out into a cold Atlantic where his crew would train with him for the job, a job that Cyrus knew would soon turn from an exercise to a cold, bitter fight for survival.

  When they went into the big dining room with its high vaulted ceiling and big fires burning half tree trunks at either end in the image of medieval England, Cyrus was convinced he could have eaten a horse he was so hungry. Everyone sat down at the long table, everyone smiling at everyone, no one being told where to sit.

  By the time Cyrus reached his small room where the fire in the grate was again burning he was stuffed with food and a little drunk. Roast turkey served from silver trays with sage and onion stuffing washed down with a claret had been followed by a flaming Christmas pudding washed down with a thirty-year-old port that had screamed out to Cyrus to be sampled more than once.

  With his clothes off and tucked up warmly in bed, he hop
efully thought to himself, before he went to sleep, that he would be fit and able to do it all over again in the evening. His last thought was of corpulent Romans sticking feathers down their throats, something that to Cyrus was quite disgusting; it was better to put the fat on while the going was good.

  Just three of them had sat down to Christmas lunch at Purbeck Manor, Genevieve giving the best solo performance of her career to keep the party going for her grandmother. It was her grandmother’s first Christmas without her husband in more than fifty years. Genevieve was too tactful to ask how many years it was since the two of them had met back in a century with horses and carts and carriages, before the invention of the motorcar let alone the aeroplane; for Genevieve it was too far back to comprehend.

  A small, cosy dining room had been created by her father soon after inheriting the title and coming to live at the Manor, to make it easier for Mrs Mason and Little Mavis, the maid. Both Mrs Mason and Little Mavis were coming to the end of their lives and missed the company of Old Warren, who had died soon after Genevieve’s grandfather. The new cowman was Old Warren’s son, the one who had stayed at home and carried on his family’s tradition of working at the Manor. The man was married, his two unmarried daughters helping to milk the herd of Sussex cows Merlin had started by buying the first of the pedigree Sussex in 1917 with some of the money he had made by investing in Vickers, the makers of the machine gun that had been so successful in killing Germans on the Western Front.

  The big banqueting hall, far from Mrs Mason’s kitchen, was left to its memories of knights and their ladies, brooding alone with the fires cold at both ends of the long table, too big now the St Clairs were down to two living at the Manor. The chances of Robert and Freya coming back with young Richard and baby Chuck, born in October, were getting less by the day with war clouds gathering on the English horizon. The house, to Genevieve, needed children, lots of children.

  The spaniel dogs had followed Mrs Mason in with the lunch and gone to sleep under the small table that Genevieve’s father had found in one of the old storage rooms, a table so old no one knew its beginning. All three of them had put on paper hats. The wine had been poured into long-stemmed crystal glasses, the glasses to Genevieve as heavy as lead when she picked hers up.

  “A toast, kind sir and lady. To my wonderful grandmother. To my fabulous father. To absent friends. To all the joy of life. I give you Christmas, everybody, the season of good cheer, the time to celebrate how lucky we are… There will always be an England! My friends, the King, God bless him.”

  Banging the table with the back of a spoon, Genevieve had made them stand and drink the Royal Toast, sitting down afterwards with a big grin on her face, looking from one to the other.

  “I think I, as the Lord of the Manor, give that toast, my darling.”

  “In Keeper of the Legend the youngest knight proposed the toast. Consider me the youngest knight.”

  Soon she had them smiling, listening to her anecdotes of a country far away. Twice her grandmother had chuckled and asked, “Do they really do that in America?”

  With consummate energy, Genevieve kept the party going until all three of them took to their beds for an afternoon nap to digest the turkey and Christmas pudding.

  “That was hard work,” said Genevieve getting into her bed to lie on her back and think of Tinus having Christmas out in the sun with maybe a lion or two roaring in the distance, black servants in red hats, white long shirts and short pants, padding round barefoot serving everyone long, cool drinks, the tall glasses clinking from the floating cubes of ice in the way he had described his home on Elephant Walk so many times to her in the past. “Next year, Tinus. Next year we’ll Christmas together, wherever it is.”

  Then Genevieve fell asleep, dreaming of knights of old as the fire in the grate burned bright and light faded from the sky and outside it began to snow and the day was gone.

  By the time Genevieve had fallen asleep dreaming of knights, William Smythe had spent his lonely Christmas Day eating a cold supper. Sitting in front of his fire, he poured himself another whisky from the nearly empty bottle, thinking miserably of his lost love.

  The following morning, an idea came into his head. If Betty Townsend had not gone to Brighton on her own, which he doubted, she would be at home in the flat she shared with friends, friends that would likely welcome him into their home. Betty had said none of them had anywhere to go for Christmas.

  Putting on his overcoat in the small hallway he let himself out of his flat, making his way to the Tube station. Finding a seat, he settled down for the short journey.

  “What was the point of it all?” he said aloud to himself, trying to keep the picture of Genevieve out of his mind. “Whoever said ‘it is better to have loved and lost’ was a bloody idiot.”

  “You’re wrong, young man,” said the elderly woman sitting opposite. “It’s always better to have loved, shows you have feelings.”

  “Did I just speak out loud?”

  “You did. Merry Christmas.”

  He must have repeated himself he thought, as the train pulled out of the station. Maybe the old girl opposite was right. Maybe, just maybe he still had not lost.

  “Hope springs eternal.”

  “Old, but true.”

  For the next fifteen minutes they journeyed in companionable silence, both of them keeping their thoughts to themselves.

  Henning von Lieberman’s suite at the Savoy, paid for by the Nazi Party, was the largest in the hotel; two big rooms and a large private bathroom. Before the successful lunch downstairs, Henning had made contact with three more on his list of eleven, interviewing them in the same way he had interviewed Rodney Hirst-Brown. No acknowledgment of what was in the future came into the discussions though all three discussed politics in Germany, where National Socialism stood between Russian communism and the rest of Europe.

  Only Rodney had thought he was, in his own words, ‘hard done by’, the other three falling into the category of fanatics, people who considered a new world order better than the chaos of so-called democracy that had people voting for someone they knew little about.

  The two men and one woman believed society had to be told how to run itself with strict rules that put people in their place. The idea of a pure uncontaminated race appealed to all three of them, much to Henning von Lieberman’s hidden doubt. He was told in three different ways, order and discipline would stop the world fighting amongst itself. Everyone would be under control. Everyone would live according to his place. No one would be allowed to disrupt an ordered society; anyone who tried to disrupt and inflame would be brought to justice.

  What all three of them wanted, while Henning encouraged them to rant on, was a well-ordered party comprised of dedicated men and women who would enforce the peace. It should allow the average citizen to go about his life without being disrupted, his life interfered with, or his property taken away on the whim of some idea like communism, that claimed everyone should be equal, everyone should have according to their needs while the communist hierarchy plundered what they wanted in order to live like feudal kings, as one of the three had pointed out triumphantly. Quietly, he had listened to their diatribes that to Henning, educated at Heidelberg and the London School of Economics, made very little sense. What the three fortunately failed to understand was that National Socialism, what others called fascism, was for the benefit of Germany alone. Fascism was a way of creating the most powerful empire that for Henning would dominate a peaceful world under German hegemony for centuries to come; fascism was merely the means to that end.

  In between the interviews Henning entertained, making a palaver of the visits to his suite to cover over the more important visits of the eleven. After the formal Christmas luncheon in the Savoy ballroom, where in deference to Christmas the dining room had been silent of music, Henning invited his guests up to his rooms.

  “I have a surprise for you, my dear Fleur. A surprise. Let us repair to my suite.”

  Only a contr
olled stutter was now impairing his speech, a worthwhile bonus from his trip.

  Barnaby St Clair was now bored stiff with the assignment given him by Harry Brigandshaw. He considered the German a man who liked young girls but was otherwise a bore, and certainly no threat to England. He was hoping he could leave Fleur with the German and take Celia back to his Piccadilly flat where they could do more than talk frivolous rubbish and eat too much food, the thought of not going home to his mother still at the back of his mind niggling away.

  Upstairs at the man’s suite, to be confronted by a large cello and two violins was as much as Barnaby wanted to take. Dance music was all right when a girl was in his arms, even pleasant, but classical music played on strings ground his teeth.

  “You see, I also play an instrument,” the German was saying, making Barnaby want to run for the door. “Borrowed from the orchestra. There is some lovely sheet music on the little stands for the three of us to play. Brahms, Beethoven, Bach. Wagner unfortunately never wrote music for strings. The maestros of Germany. The epitome of civilisation. Our music and our writers. The glory of Goethe.”

  To Barnaby, this man Harry said was a menace was definitely a crashing bore.

  Plonking himself on a small sofa near the window where the curtains had already been drawn, he settled himself down to just about the worst that could happen to him at Christmas: listening to two violins and a cello, however well played. To add to his woes he was not even offered a drink. When the bows scraping on strings began, Barnaby had the notion to howl like a dog. “For this, Harry,” he said under his breath trying not to wince, “everything I ever did to Tina is forgiven.”

  Then the music began in earnest. Folding his arms across his chest and shutting his ears, Barnaby St Clair wondered what else he was expected to do for King and country that could possibly be worse. Getting up and pulling back a piece of the curtain, Barnaby could see it was dark outside with the odd flake of snow drifting down outside.

  With all the good food and wine he had consumed downstairs in the dining room, Barnaby, again comfortable on the couch, quickly fell asleep, the fluting sound of his snores washed over by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Not even the sound of bows scraping catgut penetrated his dreams.