by Peter Rimmer
“Made it myself.” She was smiling at them mischievously. Hedley was only a few miles from Ashtead. Once Ralph had stood outside the gates of Hastings Court looking up the long driveway. And, Harry knew more about the Madgwick family than he was letting on. Dutifully, the two friends went off to wash their hands. Mrs Brigandshaw was holding their plates that she now put down on the table.
“Wow,” said Keppel as they hurried after Harry. “That really makes me feel homesick.”
The three young children appeared washed and scrubbed.
When Ralph and Keppel came back from their own ablutions, the children were seated on small chairs at a small table eating ravenously. Madge, their mother, was trying to stop them talking with their mouths full.
By the time Ralph and Keppel retrieved their plates, the children’s mother had given up and was walking away to the food table. She seemed bewildered. Not quite there. Ralph learnt later the same lunatic who had killed the first Mrs Harry Brigandshaw had shot dead her husband.
Three dogs began chasing each other around the trees that dotted the lawn. Bits from the flower beds flew into the air around them.
* * *
After lunch, Ralph and Keppel were shown the guest cottage where the curtains had been drawn all day against the sun. Within minutes, they were sound asleep on the twin beds, the treble noise of the children’s voices background to their dreams. The guest cottage was a rondavel. One round room on the same lines as a native hut. The Brigandshaws had added a small bathroom to the architecture connected to Sir Henry Manderville’s system of pipes, windmills, pumps and a Rhodesian boiler that gave the houses hot water.
When Ralph woke an hour later, he could not remember in the first moment where he was. When he pulled back the curtain to the one window in the room, all was quiet outside. The food table had been cleared. The families had gone back to their own houses. Remembering the lunch made him feel quite at home.
They walked back to the stables and retrieved what they needed for the rondavel. The horses had been put out to graze in the fields with the tame giraffes. There was no sign of Alfred or Tembo. With their sponge bags and what went for clean clothes packed in army kit bags, they walked back out into the sun. Passing the tractor shed, Jim Bowman, who had not come into lunch, was still tinkering with the same tractor. They could hear Harry talking to someone in Shona.
A sweet smell permeated the air from the largest of the sheds. They could see the tobacco and trestle tables inside the long shed. Black women with babies strapped to their backs by long towels were standing at the tables piling leaves of what Ralph realised was cured tobacco from the previous growing season. The women were making different stacks of tobacco. When one stack seemed about to fall over, a man collected the pile and took it to another woman who tied the leaves of tobacco into hands. It seemed to Ralph some of the leaves were different and needed sorting into grades. He would remember to ask Sir Henry Manderville what it was all about in the morning. At the entrance to the shed, a square box was being fed with hands of tobacco. Next to the box were square tables of compressed tobacco in hessian sacks. Ralph saw when the wooden box was full of tobacco, a lid was placed on top and screwed down tight to make the square bales. From seeming chaos came neat rows of square bales.
Ralph had had no idea how much went into the cigarettes he had started smoking out of fear during his first enemy bombardment in the trenches. All three were then private soldiers wearing tin hats, and waiting to die. The cigarettes had been their only comfort, glowing in the dark of the wet cold trenches where they stood up to their knees in mud. When the barrage shifted, the fear became more intense waiting for the German infantry to attack. The glamour of war had gone for them. Ralph had cried in the dark. Much later, when Malcolm Scott was dead and Ralph missing a finger, Keppel admitted he had also cried during the first bombardment. Afterwards, they waited more stoically to die, puffing their cigarettes in the midst of hell. The noise numbed their brains and bodies. By then they had given up on staying alive.
* * *
When they got back to the rondavel, someone had put many books on the dressing table. All the books were about geology. They began to read.
2
September 1923 – London
Christopher Marlowe, Ralph Madgwick’s elder brother, was a man of many small talents. He could paint a little. Play the piano by ear. Write poetry that was not embarrassing. He had even once had a small part on the West End stage playing himself: the quintessential bohemian as he liked to think.
After surviving three years on the Western Front without a scratch, he had taken a new look at life and decided he did not like what he saw. Prim, upper class and a well-mannered life was boring. The life of the bohemian was not.
Born Barrington Madgwick, the eldest in the family, he had gone home briefly to Ashtead at the end of the war to be treated like a schoolboy. There had been a row with his father, four years earlier.
“May I remind you, Father, I’m a major in the British army and no longer a child. War makes a man change. Sometimes for the better. Your life will not suit me. I outgrew it in the trenches. There has to be more to life than material wealth. Maintaining appearances for the sake of appearances. Keeping strictly to one’s class. Fulfilling a parent’s ambitions however well-meaning the parent. I want to be an artist but I’m not good enough so all I can do is live the life of an artist. My life, the way I live it, will be my art. I will have friends. I will have enemies. I may well go hungry. But all will be real. Like the trenches and watching all my friends die. I will not live a pose. An appearance. I will not appear to be what society says I should be… I want to live, Father. One life. This life. I want to live it. Really live it every moment every day. So many times, I came within a hair’s width of losing my life. A stray piece of shrapnel meant for me. The trench wall not in a timely position. God gave me another chance that I shall not waste. I promised Him that every time He saved my life.”
“You’ll get not a penny from me, Barrington. I’ll cut you out of my will. You can get out of this house. Don’t come back again. Ralph will run the firm.”
“You’d better ask him. And, Father, I never wanted your money. Just your love…”
“Get out of my house.”
“Sadly, but truly, it will be my pleasure.”
* * *
Within a week, Major Barrie Madgwick had morphed into Christopher Marlowe and moved into an attic off Shaftesbury Avenue. Soho was the place to be an aspiring bohemian. Cosmopolitan. Classless. Full of life. Italians. Greeks. Chinese. Indians. A microcosm of the world where a man was judged by what he was and not where he came from: man and woman. Love, and there was much of it, was free. Christopher Marlowe, twenty-six years old, dived in head first, wallowing in the happiness. To his mother he wrote every week, explaining his life. The good son wrote for six months without a reply. To his family in Ashtead, he might just as well have died in France. They were ashamed of him. Wanted nothing further of his life.
Ralph found him in the attic four months after the armistice. The war had made them see the same problem. The terrible shortness of life.
“I can’t be like you, Barrie,” he told his brother.
“Christopher. Christopher Marlowe. It has the perfect ring for the long hair to my shoulders don’t you think? The black beret on the profusion of my dark hair. The paint spilt down my smock. The attic. The smell of garlic. Music. The new bohemian… Not to mention all the free love… Of course, you can’t be like me, Ralph. You can only be like yourself. Anyone who says we are all born equal is a fool. We are all born different. That is what makes us human. Sometimes interesting… Have a glass of wine? My army pay has run out but I still have some wine.”
“What are you going to live off?”
“There’s a restaurant down the road where I tinkle the ivories. They give me a meal. I may even sell a painting. People don’t really know what they are buying. I may beg. I will not steal. We help each other. Most imp
ortantly this attic is cheap.”
“You will freeze in the winter.”
“We froze in France and nobody worried about us.”
“I wish I could play the piano.”
“How long have you been working for father?”
“Three months.”
“Does he give you a salary?”
“He says I’m of little value until I know the business.”
“When will that be? No, let me tell you, Ralph, you will come into your own when our esteemed father passes away to the other world. You will then become rich. You will then be old. Your life behind you. A house in Wimbledon still with a mortgage that your inheritance will instantly liquidate. A shrew of a wife. Six brats all like you and me. Is that what you want?”
“Of course not.”
“Why didn’t you come and find me earlier? I could have stopped you wasting three good months of your youth.”
“They would not let me.”
“So you now want to be a bohemian?”
“I don’t know. I do know I don’t want to catch the ten past eight to Waterloo six days a week for the rest of my life.”
“Do you have a friend?”
“Of course. Keppel Howland… There were three of us…”
“I know, Ralph,” said his brother gently. “Have you any money?”
“A little. I live at home.”
“Go to the docks. Get a ship. You and Keppel. Go and see the rest of the world. The American prairies. The Amazon jungle. The African bush.”
“What will you live off, Barrie?”
“Christopher.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What I live off which is very little, but very nice. Go and live your lives and then come back and tell me so I can write it all down and tell the world. Only then will I make my fortune when I am far too old to enjoy it. When I’m thirty.”
“Can’t I write it down myself?”
“You can try.”
“What shall I tell father?”
“Probably best to say nothing. I’ll bet it will take him a month to find out you are gone… Now. The wine. We shall drink a bottle of wine. Spill a libation to the gods… Did I tell you I met Ivor Novello? Even though he’s one of them it does not matter in Soho.”
“Have you become one of them?”
“Don’t be silly. The Hippodrome is just up the road. All those saucy revues. All those girls with legs that go all the way up to heaven.”
“I envy you, Christopher.”
“A cliché it is, brother Ralph. But life is what you make of it. Go and make something of your life. Please. I implore you.”
* * *
Sitting in the attic window with his legs dangling down the slate roof, Christopher Marlowe felt deeply satisfied with his life. The rooftop pigeons were talking to him. The September sun was shining. Down below in the small garden the grass had just been cut by Gert van Heerden who lived in the room next to Christopher that did not have a window. The smell of newly cut grass drifted up in the late summer evening. Only when the sun went down would he go to the supper club where he played the piano to the after-theatre diners who flocked to Soho from the West End theatres, dancing late into the next morning. Men in tails and white bow ties. Girls in tight dresses, cropped hair, the appearance of flat chests forced on them by the flapper fashion… hedonists, every one of them. Free from the horror of war, mindless in the never-ending party that raged across London.
They liked him in the supper club with his shoulder-length hair and the black beret that never left his head. The black opera coat that opened to a velvet maroon. The patent leather shoes. The smile. The soft look of perfect happiness. A man in his own world wrapped in his music. The room so full of cigarette smoke a man with a long knife could cut out a piece and take it home… Christopher was not the best piano player in London. It was his charm the patrons liked. His familiar smile of recognition. One raised, laconic hand from the keys that never changed the music. Always recognising a face when it came again. Making the diners welcome. Sophisticated. A man about town. A gal who had been around. Christopher made each of them feel special. To know Christopher Marlowe at Clara’s was a mark of distinction. Old customers brought new friends. To show them. To feel a cut above the rest… Christopher knew it was only a pose but it did not matter. They all liked it: the recognition.
After the sets, he moved among the tables talking to the rich. If he was mocking them, it never showed. If he liked a girl, it never showed. The man paid the bills. Booked the tables. Christopher made the man feel proud of his gal even if the gal flirted with the piano player with the affected upper-class accent they all thought was put on for their benefit. They called him Christopher. Never Marlowe as they would an equal. In the restaurant with its small dance floor, he was their friend. Outside they would have cut him dead in the street…
Once, at a table sipping a vintage glass of French wine, the party insisted he sit down and drink with them, and they were talking about his father. In all, Clive Madgwick was a big man in the City and liked to throw his weight about.
“Sorry, old chap, to talk shop. Boring really. You wouldn’t know of course. Wish I could play the piano. You wouldn’t like the life in the City.” Drunkenly the man paying the table’s bill that night waved at the smoke-filled room. “I think the rest of the band are coming back again, old chap. Jolly good.”
Christopher was being cut dead.
That night he had smiled more than usual. The truth, indeed, came from the mouths of drunks and babes. It made him very happy in his soft cocoon. It was always nice to know a little more than the other man, he told himself when the party left later in the evening, his right hand rising to them laconically from the keys. Only just that once did he look the departing patron straight in the eye, frightening the wits out of him with a parting look of mockery… The man had never come back again but the gesture had been worth it. Rather like spitting in his poor old father’s eye that would pass his son in the street with the rest of them… How often in his new life, had Christopher been looked at by the rich but never seen.
Despite the attic, the long hair like Lord Byron’s, the beret, even the company of unpublished poets, the only one who had seen through his façade was Clara. Sometimes Christopher caught her looking at him. In those looks spoke irony and a secret to be kept. A look of faint, amused approval. Of how the world so often stood people on their heads. Christopher was sure she had once been a smasher. When the light played at an angle through the smoky room and magic made her young again.
“Are you going to Clara’s after the show?” they would ask.
“Couldn’t get a table.”
“I’m so sorry, old chap. Such a bore not being able to get a table at Clara’s. Next time give me a ring and I’ll see what I can do.”
To Christopher Marlowe, they were all snobs. The whole lot of them. Strangely he never once regretted not being part of the City… Well, maybe once, he always contradicted himself. When Brett Kentrich, star of The Golden Moth, looked straight through him with nothing more than a smirk. And when he began playing the piano, she smirked again. Not a word. Not even a look in his direction but Christopher knew it was for him. ‘You can’t even play the piano,’ the smirk had written all over it.
Every time Brett came into the supper club, always creating a stir, he tried to catch her eye without success. Well, he thought, some success. Always the smirk when he started to play.
Only then did he not want to be the anonymous piano player with the long, Byronic hair.
Once when an old army friend sat at her table did he contemplate dropping his guard. For a brief second, Christopher thought, Barnaby St Clair had recognised him. The look of recognition then puzzlement followed by a shake of the head. The dugouts in the trenches had had the same smoke-filled look of the flickering light. Guttering candles and wooden boxes. The same cacophony of sound. In the brief eye exchange, both of them had flashed back into the war. Then the spotlight c
ame on the piano player, chasing away the ghosts.
Christopher remembered staying at the piano that night, not moving among the tables. There had been too many dead men in the room.
* * *
At the end of September when the leaves were falling in Green Park opposite his four-storey townhouse, the Honourable Barnaby St Clair paid a second visit to Clara’s and this time he was sure. The piano player was Captain Barrington Madgwick of The Royal Dragoon Guards. Mentally stripping the long hair and black beret, replacing the headgear with a tin hat, it was the same man he had last seen on the Somme in 1916. Barnaby had been on a short visit to the Western Front from Palestine where he had spent most of the war. There was talk of the Turks confronting the allies with trench warfare. He had returned to the Middle East with his major and a long report that had never been read as the Arab revolt, led by Colonel T E Lawrence, was by then underway. The Turks had better things to think about than digging trenches in the sand. Barnaby had been a young subaltern not long out of Sandhurst military college.
By the age of twenty-six, Barnaby had made more money playing the London Stock Exchange than most City workers made in ten lifetimes and was still not satisfied, gambling again and again with good inside information he gleaned on the social circuit. His borrowing at the bank, known only to himself and his bank manager at Cox and King’s, was always at the limit. He told himself he had the Midas touch… With the courage of youth, he never saw the consequences or the point of converting the gambling profit into solid property without a mortgage. The money was not what made Barnaby excited. It was the game. The adrenaline pump from winning. The hollow void of fear at the thought of losing. If he had ever taken the time to think about himself other than selfishly, he would have blamed the war for his malady. The war had been exciting. Fear and greed went hand in hand in peace and war. Wars were fought for conquest. Barnaby could have analysed it all the way back to the basic human condition born in the slime of evolution.