by Peter Rimmer
When Harry came into the room, all smiles after taking his phone call, she was happy for Lucinda. This was going to be the day. Lucinda could not take her eyes from the boy's face, a gentle smile of pure happiness. She was in love, that much Granny Forrester could see as plain as a pikestaff.
"I'm afraid I've got to leave you all," he said. Everyone else in the room came fully awake. Lucinda's expression turned to panic. "Trenchard is sending down an aeroplane. They'll land on one of the fields. They want me to command 33 Squadron again." The household, not receiving a newspaper had not read Glen Hamilton's article.
"When are you going?" asked Granny Forrester.
"Oh, not for a couple of hours."
"They can't land in the dark," said Lord St Clair.
"You're right. I wasn't thinking. Then tomorrow."
"Are you going to fight?" barked Lord St Clair.
"I rather think so sir. That's the idea of a fighter squadron. There's a hate on. With the Americans on our side. We are now going to win the war."
Lucinda got up and ran out of the room.
"You'd better go after her, Harry," said Granny Forrester.
"Yes, I had hadn't I. She seems upset. I was going to ask her to marry me as a matter of fact. With your permission of course, sir. Till I got the phone call. Well the war will be over soon. Then everything will be back to normal. It's been such a wonderful Christmas. Excuse me. I'll go and find Lucinda. And write my mother a letter… I just hope my father's still talking to me. Thank you all for giving me a nice time."
In the morning, when they came in a twin-engine bomber aircraft to take Harry back to the Western Front, they found Granny Forrester dead in her bed with a smile on her face. He left the family in disarray and climbed up into the aircraft with a small bag. The rest of his luggage he had left in his room.
When the plane was out of sight and out of sound, Lucinda went into his room to look at what was left of her life, the bits and pieces of another man she loved and was about to lose. And now there was no Granny Forrester to go to and cry on her shoulder.
Merlin followed her into the room.
"He'll come back," he said.
"How can you know?"
"Cinda, I know these things. I know. Weird but I know. Like Barnaby he won't have a scratch. One day you'll be mistress of Elephant Walk and your children will live there for many generations."
"So you can see down the generations."
"Well maybe not quite that far. I've never been to Africa. Come and give your brother a hug and we can both have a cry together for Granny Forrester… Now there was a woman I really loved."
"Me too," said Lucinda crying… "Are you sure about Harry?" she said in a small voice on his shoulder.
"Certain. So was Granny Forrester."
They silently cried together for a long time, holding each other for comfort.
"Did you buy the cows?" she asked at length.
"All seventy of them. They arrive this afternoon and father still doesn't know."
"Did Granny Forrester know?"
"Of course."
"And the big bull?"
"And the big bull."
By the time the bureaucratic wheels had turned sufficiently, and the civil police arrived at the Banstead Lunatic Asylum, Mervyn Braithwaite was on a boat to Demerara, that would first call at Mobile in North America, where Mervyn intended to jump ship. He had no intention of being landed at a British colony, however far-flung the outpost. Like Glen Hamilton, he had bribed the male nurse. The American had searched the newspaper archives and come up with a photograph of Mervyn receiving one of his medals. The well-bribed male nurse had taken Glen Hamilton to his quarry in less than ten minutes. Another large sum had stopped the nurse reporting his absence after Mervyn climbed over the ten-foot high red brick wall behind the apple orchard. There the nurse had a motorcycle waiting, full of petrol. Money could buy most things, he had chuckled to himself. The man had known from the start he was sane. There was always money to be made from a rich man's adversity.
Soon after the police found he was gone they lost interest. After the war, the male nurse bought himself a small farm in Cornwall and married a local girl. Everyone was satisfied.
The big hate that was now killing Americans by the thousands took up the headlines in the papers. Glen Hamilton's story was lost. No one remembered it. Yesterday's hero had already been forgotten. The manuscript of Keeper of the Legend was also forgotten at the bottom of his old sea trunk. The war continued to consume everything. Men, material, and wealth. The so-called civilised world was smashing itself to pieces with every new means of destruction at its disposal. Glen Hamilton went back to reporting the war with the rest of the journalists. He avoided Merlin and was glad Harry had gone back to his squadron. Jack Merryweather gave him one nasty look and everyone at Army Headquarters in France went their own way.
On returning to 33 Squadron, the weather was good for flying and the Allied hate at full intensity. Harry flew straight into battle, three to four times a day for a week. No one had said anything to him. They had lost two pilots while he was away and lost another to German ground fire during the week. By the middle of January 1918, the British had shot most of the German aircraft out of the sky. Then the weather came down and they were grounded.
He ordered all the pilots into the briefing room and told them the truth, right from the first years of Colonel Braithwaite's life when a small boy had noticed his face resembled a cod, the wet, squashed face of a fish with bulging, wet eyes. The small boy who was ten years old nicknamed Mervyn Braithwaite 'Fishy', and it had stuck for the rest of his life. Harry explained how he too was guilty of hurting a good man by calling him 'Fishy' to his face at Oxford. How so small a thing to some people had festered into so much hate. How so small and insignificant a word had caused a good man so much pain. And, finally, how the women had laughed at his squashed faced, including his own fiancée, the fiancée he had shot in front of Harry Brigandshaw. He told them how he had met the girl and her brother in Africa, and made friends with them, but nothing more of the girl's obsession with him, even though she was engaged to Mervyn Braithwaite. Of the returned ring. Of their first commanding officer successfully proving to everyone at 33 Squadron that he was the best pilot of them all. How it had made it worse when the woman he wanted to marry still scorned him.
"We are all insane at moments in our lives. We are all hateful. We can all be foolish. As the friend I should have been to him and wasn't, I ask you all to forgive him killing Sara Wentworth in a moment of insanity. To remember him as the CO of the squadron. Why many of us are still alive because of the training we received from Colonel Braithwaite. I have heard he is no longer in the asylum, gone no one knows where. There is no scandal. Only a war. And a small boy with a facial impediment who made himself one of the best pilots in the Royal Flying Corps. I want you all to remember him as a pilot and forget the rest. I call for three cheers. Three cheers for Colonel Braithwaite."
Some months later, after the Allied breakthrough, 33 Squadron left the old French farmhouse and its fields. The aircraft and the guns went forward. The ghost of Mervyn Braithwaite stayed behind with the ghosts of the dead pilots, German and British.
The war dragged on and Robert St Clair went from euphoria to the depths of despair. Even his right foot still hurt even though it had been blown off two years earlier. After weeks of excitement at the ring of the telephone and the sight of the postman, he had withdrawn to his room a broken man. Food was no longer an obsession. Sleep difficult to find. Depression, the trough into which he had fallen. The few pages of the sequel to Keeper of the Legend, taking St Clairs to the Crusades, left at the bottom of the drawer as punishment. He had his small army disability pension. With the family roof over his head, there was enough money to live. Mostly he stayed in his room, looking out of the window, seeing nothing. He told himself he was thirty-two years old with nothing to do for the rest of his life.
&n
bsp; When Merlin, on a brief leave, told him the real purpose of Glen Hamilton's visit to Purbeck Manor for Christmas, his whole life fell apart.
"How can people say things they don't mean?" he had asked his brother.
"He wanted to interview Lucinda after Harry refused. Even found out from me where the authorities had hidden Braithwaite."
"Mendacious bastard. Emotionally, I would have been over it by now if I'd been told it was rubbish. And father was so excited. You said it was good… And Hamilton's got the only copy. I'll never trust another person in my life. I knew in my own heart it was no good, as who was I to write a good book when so many others have failed."
Merlin had decided Glen's last words of praise were better left out of it. The man had then sounded genuine but having done nothing, it had been another lie. He thought the man might rewrite the book. Change the names. Publish under his own name but he kept his thoughts from Robert. The book had gone. That was the end of it. No one would know. At least gambling on the stock exchange had been something he could follow from beginning to end. He was in control. The American had probably thought it easier to throw the manuscript in the dustbin than explain it was no good… What did the family know? They were amateurs. Maybe it would have been all for the best if the damn man had not raised Robert's hopes so high. America was thousands of miles away. Once the war was over, the chance of anyone in the family meeting the man again was nil. Personally, he wished the man would leave Army Headquarters. They never spoke. He would never ask about the book. When they saw each other in the mess they passed as strangers. Well, they had asked him a favour. Invited him down to the Manor under false pretences. So what could they expect? In the end, the deceit had worked out for only one of them.
Robert had watched his sister sink into the same despair. She feared answering the ring of the postman at the side door. Hated the ring of the telephone. And Harry, his best friend was a lousy letter writer. Barnaby wrote more letters which was not saying very much. He once said Tina Pringle was writing to him which was strange.
His mother missed her mother, as did everyone else in the house. Genevieve for some reason had gone back to live with her mother-in-law in Norfolk and never wrote. Maybe she wanted to be near someone who had been near to her husband. Annabel was living in Manchester with her husband but what on no one understood. His painting for the cover of Keeper of the Legend stood in Robert's room with its face to the wall. If his brother-in-law had not done the painting with so much love he would have burnt it long ago. Artists really did have a hard time!
Spring came at him from outside the window, and for the first time, he ventured out to look at the new pedigree herd of cows and had to run away from the bull. He was much better on his wooden leg and managed to get over the sty at the top of the ten-acre field before the bull could insert its horns into his backside. He had laughed nervously, the first laugh after Merlin had told him Glen Hamilton was more than likely a lying bastard. Mendacity personified. That evening he ate his meal with relish. The next day he found the few pages of the sequel in the bottom of his drawer and read them through. It was better than he imagined. Two more pages were added before he knew what he was doing. The first book had gone forever but there was nothing to stop him writing the second.
Within a day, he was cracking jokes with the family. Without him realising, the whole family let out a collective sigh of relief. The same day Lucinda received a long letter from Harry Brigandshaw. She let them all read her letter. Between the lines, and despite the censors, it was clear the war was going to be won within months. By the time the month of May was out, Harry Brigandshaw arrived on the doorstep in uniform and unannounced. He had flown in alone, landing on the field next to the cows.
Cook answered the side door in the big front door.
"May I see Lord St Clair?" said Harry.
"Don't you want to see Miss Lucinda?"
"No thank you Cook. Lord St Clair."
"He's in his study."
"That's very good and I do know the way."
"Shall I tell Miss Lucinda?"
"Not yet Cook. Not yet." He was grinning from ear to ear until he reached the door to the study. Then he felt like a schoolboy, not a group captain in the Royal Air Force. With his peaked cap under his arm, he knocked on the study door of his future father-in-law.
"Come in, Harry."
The Lord of the Manor had watched him land some time ago. He had heard the conversation in the hall and just had time to scuttle into his study and close the door. From the top of the stairs, unseen, Lucinda had listened as well, expecting to run down the wide flight of curving stairs into his arms. Then she ran back to her room and waited. It was all a lot of rubbish but she loved every moment. Harry Brigandshaw was formally asking her father for her hand in marriage.
By the end of August Glen Hamilton was convinced that if Shakespeare had submitted Hamlet to every American publisher it would have come back each time attached to a printed rejection slip. He had no idea what he was going to do with Keeper of the Legend.
The Russians had surrendered to the Germans, giving away Poland and Lithuania, and gone back to war, this time with each other, Red Russians killing White Russians in a Bolshevik revolution. With troops released from the Eastern Front, the Germans reached to within seventy kilometres of Paris. Backed by American troops, the Allied counteroffensive looked to Glen decisive. The Germans had finally shot their bolt, as he put it to his Colorado Telegraph readers, smashed to pieces by their own offensive. He depicted in the paper German surrender in weeks rather than months.
The cynic in Glen reported the sending of American and British troops to help the White Russians fight the Red Russians as a way of keeping the slaughter going for the rest of the twentieth century. He questioned whether man ever learned a lesson when there was greed involved and the chance of killing each other. Europe was a mess, and America had fallen into a quagmire from which she would never get out. With the big Pacific one way and the Atlantic the other, he asked readers what they were doing in Europe. After running away from the wars of man and the wars of religion to find freedom, why had they run back into the mess? In the euphoria of potential victory, he was told afterwards Matt Vogel had censored most of his vitriol… If nothing else, he had enjoyed getting it off his chest. It just made him a little more cynical: the motives of men were rarely what they wanted them to appear to be.
For weeks, the manuscript at the bottom of his sea trunk burnt his conscience. He kept away from Merlin St Clair and Jack Merryweather and was glad Harry Brigandshaw had gone back to the real war. After the non-event of his great exposé, lost in the greater fog of war, he found he was jealous of Robert St Clair's writing something that would probably live forever and not sink without trace within days. Deep inside of him, like most journalists, he knew he was a frustrated novelist, that the story of Mervyn Braithwaite should have been turned into fiction. But hindsight was easy after the Pulitzer and his writing career had sunk with his article. Whether he could ever write a full-length novel was another question for his self-debate. Deep down, he doubted it. Certainly not now at the age of thirty-three.
No one had even told him Braithwaite had escaped. If they had he would not have been interested. The story was dead. He was a hack journalist and that was all there was to it. For the rest of his life… And it was then his conscience got the better of him.
The first job was to have the manuscript typed to make it easier to read. Long typing jobs he knew were done for love and not money. The English girl at Military Headquarters had the strange name of Wendy Wallop. She thought she was in love with him and eked out the typing of Robert St Clair's book for as long as possible. Glen was sure she loved the idea of America more than she loved Glen Hamilton. The British had the idea every American was rich back home. They were targets. When the corrections in the manuscript were done, he slept with her twice, found the experience hopelessly unrewarding and kept away from the girl's place of work
. Reading the book through for typing mistakes had convinced Glen again. The book was an even better read the second time. There was far more to the characters in the fast storyline that pulled them along together.
He took the typescript back with him on the boat for his annual home leave, and personally called on the biggest New York publisher of big fiction, thinking his name as a journalist, his recommendation, would get the book read quickly, and in print long before the Germans surrendered. They had never heard of him. When he called on the editor on his way back from Denver as his boat left for New York he was told the man was out. The man had previously refused to take his phone calls. After kicking up a rumpus at the reception desk on his third visit, three hours before his boat was due to sail for France, he was given back the manuscript by the receptionist in the same brown paper wrapping found in France. The only reason anything happened at all was due to his uniform. It was well worn. He was no new recruit to the war.
"Mr Klausberger says the book was very nice but not for our list." The receptionist by now had her defensive back up. She had a know-all look on her face.
"Bullshit. He never read a page. Tell Mr Hamburger from me, to be a man and enlist."