by Peter Rimmer
“Was he drunk?”
“He never gets drunk, Mr Madgwick. Sips just enough brandy through the day to keep himself smiling. He prefers the country. Horses and dogs. That kind of thing.”
“Good old Uncle Wallace,” said Keppel Howland.
“You need a heater in this room,” said Rosie Prescott holding her arms together across her chest. “It’s like an icebox in here… What are you going to do?”
“When does my brother come back from Liverpool?”
“Saturday night.”
“We’ll be working Saturday night.”
“Doing what?”
“Washing dishes at Clara’s. She feeds us.”
“Didn’t you two get an education?”
“The best. We were at school together with Malcolm Scott. Malcolm was blown to pieces when I lost my finger.”
Rosie moved off to look out of their attic window at the snow-covered roofs of the houses.
“Always the war,” she said. “It must have been terrible.” Then she shuddered but not from the cold.
“Makes people do strange things they otherwise would not do,” said Ralph quietly.
“Like living in an attic when you have more money than you can count.”
“Did Barrie inherit my father’s money?” he asked.
“You both did. Provided you run the company. All Mr Madgwick receives now is the salary of a junior clerk. When he has been through all the departments they will make him senior partner.”
“Poor Christopher.”
“Who?”
“My brother. When he lives here, he calls himself Christopher Marlowe. It was going to be Will Shakespeare but that was too obvious. He wants to live like an artist even if he doesn’t have the talent to be one.”
“Then what’s all this about a musical he is writing for Miss Brett Kentrich, the star of The Golden Moth?”
“That’s news to me. We’ve been in the African bush for a long time. As far as the Skeleton Coast in South West Africa looking for diamonds.”
“You didn’t find any?”
“Not one.”
“Then you will be coming to work at Madgwick and Madgwick.”
“First my brother… Please thank my uncle for me… Very much. I’d write a note but…”
“He doesn’t have any children of his own, Mr Madgwick. I don’t know why.”
“There will be a reason. We just don’t know it. You or I, Miss Prescott.”
“The driver is waiting downstairs.”
“Then you must go.”
* * *
They were all too tired to drink the bottle of whisky.
“It’s just wonderful to see you, Ralph.”
“You too, Christopher.”
“I must go back to sleep now. This time I won’t have bad dreams. We’ll get some old mattresses tomorrow from somewhere.”
“The floor’s fine. We’ve slept far rougher than this in Africa… Sleep tight.”
Before Ralph could turn off the one light, his brother was gently snoring. Within a minute he and Keppel were asleep under their blankets on the floor.
It snowed heavily during the night unbeknown to any of them. Ralph dreamt of the eyrie overlooking the great Zambezi escarpment. The leopard was outside eating the remains of the buck. The leopard was smiling at him with soft yellow eyes, growling contentedly in the bottom of his throat but it was difficult to tell if the big cat was male or female. Alfred had retreated to the back of the cave, the big fire he had stoked with wood between himself and the leopard.
* * *
All three of them woke with the sound of Gert van Heerden banging on the door. All three of them had had a better night’s sleep.
“I had some change left over from the meat, Christopher. Rolls and butter with strawberry jam. How does that sound for breakfast? Get up! It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”
They were all ravenously hungry, smiling at each other as they ate, Gert watching them.
“I dreamt of a leopard,” said Ralph.
“Male or female?” asked Gert.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a bad sign dreaming of our animals. It means you’ll want to go back again.”
The paraffin heater had run out of fuel during the night. Keppel finished his breakfast and got up from the floor to fill the small tin tank at the bottom of the heater with paraffin from a bottle.
“When there is so much space in the world, why do we cram ourselves into cities like London?” he asked, screwing the lid back on to the small tank.
“Then why did you come back?” asked Christopher.
“Because it’s home. The Isle of Man is my home. Now there’s a place without too many people. And a raw wind off the sea. The ancestors call to us from all their pain of survival. Do you know in the Island when a house is abandoned we never knock it down? The little people come to live in the ruins. The little people who came before us, long, long ago… I’m going home, Ralph. Whatever my father says. He saved up all his pennies to send me to a good school. I let him down. Oxford. He wanted a son up at Oxford. No one on the island he knew had a son up at Oxford… Then I lied about my age and ran off to war and here I am on the floor of a London attic. All that money spent on my education and not a penny given back in return. In Africa, I imagined finding a handful of diamonds to give him but that was not what he wanted. A son at Oxford. A man of letters. An educated man… It makes you wonder.”
“You can still go up to Oxford,” said Christopher.
“How? Who pays for it? Anyway, I’m too old to go back to school. The war destroyed more than flesh and blood. It destroyed dreams. Here I am at twenty-three and nothing to show for it.”
“There are foundations who put soldiers into Oxford. We’ll find one. Maybe Madgwick and Madgwick could set up a foundation. You fought for King and country.”
The war hovered in the air for a moment.
“It was just da’s dream,” said Keppel. “He didn’t even have enough money to support me for three years at Oxford. There are only so many sheep you can run on a thousand acres of hard ground.”
“What did you want to read at Oxford?” asked Christopher.
“English literature. Then I can be a writer.”
“You don’t have to go to Oxford to become a writer,” he said smiling. “Why don’t you write some stories about Africa and see if we can sell them to the newspapers?”
“Do you think I can write about the Handley Page?” said Keppel to Ralph.
“The pilot was a famous fighter pilot during the war.”
“Why don’t you ask him?” said Christopher smiling broadly.
“He lives in Africa.”
“I have an invitation to dinner on Wednesday. With Miss Brett Kentrich. I’m sure he’ll be happy to invite you two as well.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Ralph.
“Harry Brigandshaw. The night he agreed to finance Happy Times he said you stayed with him on Elephant Walk. It was the kind of strange coincidence that made him want to finance another musical… He’s a strange man. Such a mixture. A hard-headed man of business one minute and a dreamer the next, a lover of the African bush, of Africans and their traditions. He tells me Africans see everything in the future through dreams. That they believe in omens. Harry flying over you two outside your cave on top of the Zambezi escarpment was an omen. Meeting the brother of the same man playing two parts was an omen as it is what he does himself. Harry believes in omens. He believes we are given directions and just have to follow them whether we like it or not, brother Ralph.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying nothing. It’s for you to decide. Your own destiny as well as your duty to family and country. To the people before you who made it possible for you to be alive and here and dreaming about your leopard.”
* * *
On the following Tuesday morning, Christopher Marlowe went straight to the office from Clara’s. He had taken off the black beret and the
wig made from his own hair and changed into a business suit. Christopher was both tired and elated.
They had played through all the music from Happy Times. Danny Hill, now officially music director for Happy Times, had kept the band playing until breakfast time when Keppel Howland and Ralph Madgwick brought out the bacon and eggs from the kitchen with Clara’s blessing. They were all involved in the production, physically and emotionally, including Clara.
Harvey Lyttleton had sung all the songs for Christopher’s brother, back from Africa with his friend. Gert van Heerden, employed by Oscar Fleming to stage direct the musical on the instructions of Harry Brigandshaw, had vividly described the sets that were being painted in a studio just south of Wembley.
Christopher had started their evening with two drunks still at the bar. The tables were empty and cleared away by Ralph and Keppel who were employed every night to wash the dishes. January was a busy time for the London theatres and the supper clubs that fed the patrons after the shows finished. With snow and slush on the streets, a warm theatre or a full restaurant was the place to go for those with money. Money, as Ralph Madgwick had found out on arriving destitute at the port of Bristol, was the commodity everyone had to have, rich and poor, if they wished to survive. The two drunks had a paid-for full bottle of whisky that rested on the bar. After the first song from Happy Times that Christopher played out for his brother on the piano, the drunks loosened their starched white evening shirts at the collars and quietly settled in for the night. Danny Hill on the trumpet and William Blake on trombone filled in the brass sections. The clarinet player had had to go home to a sick wife. After the first song had been played through, once by Christopher and the brass section, Harvey Lyttleton began to sing. Very soon, the busking became professional. For the two drunks left at the bar, for Clara and the three waitresses who had stayed behind, the magic had begun and the magic went on all night. All of them were the first in the world to hear the full score of Happy Times. None of them moved until it was all over, the chattering only began with the rich smell of bacon and eggs.
Keppel Howland had been seen to have tears in his eyes when he went off to cook everyone’s breakfast. Even at the age of twenty-three, he knew. All the reading in school, all the long hours in the school library, the Shakespeare plays he took part in as a schoolboy in the speech hall, told him what he heard and imagined was a musical that would last down the years, giving pleasure to so many.
When they went their separate ways into the cold London January morning, they were all light of heart. It was still snowing. There were no taxis. Nobody cared. Not even the now sober drunks who had found a good breakfast in front of them without being asked.
Gert, Keppel and Ralph walked arm in arm back to the room off Shaftesbury Avenue.
“Can’t you just imagine what it will sound like with a thirty-piece orchestra in the pits?” said Gert. “Just imagine the power of the music.”
* * *
The next day, the Wednesday, twenty-three people sat down to dinner in the dining room of Harry Brigandshaw’s new house in Berkeley Square. The house was four stories high and sumptuous. Tina Brigandshaw had made sure of that. Having money to Tina meant one thing: showing it off. Having given birth to her daughter on the second day of the year, she was again able to fit into her evening gowns. Before the dinner party began, she had fed Beth and handed her back to the nurse. Each of her two children had an English nurse to look after them. It was the way Tina always thought motherhood should have been. The pleasure of children without the pain. The nursery was in the attic, far up at the top of the house. Her children were to be seen and not heard. After the excitement of Anthony and catching Harry Brigandshaw, which she had cemented solidly with the birth of Beth, she found children boring. They always wanted something. Tina admitted to herself she was a taker, not a giver. The one thing she had never done in her life was fooled herself. Or so she thought.
The dinner party was a joint celebration. The most important to Tina being the London house in the heart of Mayfair, not far from the flat leased by Merlin St Clair, nor the townhouse lived in by Barnaby St Clair. She had arrived in London society despite the impediment of her birth. The new child, her re-entry into society after the birth, the celebration of Happy Times being fully cast, the new Colonial Shipping airline that would fly passengers in seaplanes down Africa in five days – all was secondary to Tina. They were Harry’s, not hers to celebrate. She was no longer Tina Pringle from the railway cottage near Corfe Castle in the county of Dorset. She was Mrs Harry Brigandshaw, the young and voluptuous wife of the chairman of Colonial Shipping who, if she had anything to do with it, was going to live the rest of his life in London, making money and just maybe amusing himself in the theatre. Africa, for Tina, was going to stay a long way away. Having used Brett Kentrich and the man who sometimes called himself Christopher Marlowe to keep her husband from running back to the boring African bush where he wanted to go, she was happy to invite them to dinner, safe in her new house and being his wife. Ex-mistresses and men who wrote silly musicals instead of running the family business had no chance of upsetting her future. She had traded her youth and looks for a treasure house beyond her wildest dreams and no one was going to take it away.
The twenty-fourth invited guest had still not arrived and Tina began to seethe. Showing off to the others meant nothing in comparison to showing off to the Honourable Barnaby St Clair. Then the note was brought in on the silver tray by the butler, Engelbert. The note was offered to her husband. Harry read the note and frowned, his only physical display of something unpleasant. The butler removed the twenty-fourth place setting at the table leaving an unsightly gap. There were now eleven men and twelve women sitting under the crystal chandelier. For Tina, it was a slap in the face, something Barnaby had given her most of her life. No one mentioned the missing guest. Everyone knew from the place setting name, written in Harry Brigandshaw’s own hand, who had insulted the hosts by withdrawing at the last moment.
* * *
Not five minutes away, Barnaby was enjoying himself immensely at the bar of Clara’s. It had to be Clara’s to make sure Tina found out. There was no pleasure in insulting someone unless they felt the pain. The girl that had been in his life ever since he could remember had married out of her class to make him look a fool. Everyone in London knew she had been his mistress. By sending his regrets at the last moment, he had shown his friends what he thought of Mrs Harry Brigandshaw. What he had forgotten in his jealousy was that by insulting Tina he also insulted Harry. Harry who he had always taken for granted. The grandson of a self-made rich man. Not the son of an ancient baronetcy. The St Clairs were aristocrats. The Brigandshaws were not. Sometimes his friends sniggered about Colonial Shipping in his presence, knowing his sister Lucinda had been married to Harry before she was killed.
The conversation Barnaby had had at the same bar a week earlier began to play through his head.
“The old man was a bloody pirate did you know that, Barnaby? No offence to your sister, of course. Us aristocrats have to marry money wherever it comes from. Once we make the money respectable, it’s as good as old money. A pirate. What has England come to?”
“His maternal grandfather is a baronet. Old as the St Clairs, I’ll have you know.”
“That’s my point. Had to marry his only daughter off to the eldest son of the Pirate. Manderville was broke. Surely you know the scandal after that. The daughter was already pregnant by the youngest son who had been banished by the Pirate to the colonies. Came back and put a ladder up to his brother’s wife’s window and carried her back to Africa with her son. Harry shouldn’t have inherited Colonial Shipping. He’s a bastard. Did you know that about your brother-in-law, Barnaby?”
“You’re a bastard, Donald.”
“No, I’m not. The bastard is Harry Brigandshaw who married your tart with the big tits… Go on. Take a swing. I’ll have the story around London in five minutes… That’s better. Now, let me buy you a drink and I�
��ll give you the low-down on A V Roe so we can sell them short. Those seaplanes of theirs will never fly down Africa. I have it on good report. The fuel tank isn’t big enough and who is going to sell them high-octane petrol in the middle of Africa when they run out of fuel, even if the chief aviator is the Pirate’s illegitimate grandson. They can only take ten passengers. A big ship takes thousands.”
Danny Hill was sitting in at the piano for Barrington Madgwick who still called himself Christopher Marlowe in the evenings and never gave Barnaby any inside information on the public companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. Barnaby put it down to shell shock from the war poor chap. The man was obviously dotty. All that inherited money and still playing the piano. Writing musicals. There was no telling other people’s taste.
Barnaby got up from the bar and walked off towards the people sitting at the tables. He wanted everyone to see him. Everyone knew he was invited to the Brigandshaw dinner party. With luck, Tina would hear he was at Clara’s before the evening was out. That he was not taken sick from seafood poisoning. If he had seen Harry Brigandshaw frown back at the Mayfair house he would not have swaggered so much. Made the insult so public.
* * *
At the dinner party, Harry was more hurt than annoyed. The St Clair family had had a special place in his heart ever since going down on holiday from Oxford with Robert St Clair in ’07 when he had met the fifteen-year-old Lucinda St Clair for the first time. The two girls who would have been sitting on either side of Barnaby had moved next to each other. Harry walked down the table between courses and briefly joined his chief pilot.
“He’s going to come a cropper one of these days.”
“What you say, Harry?” asked Ignatius Bowes-Lyon, not realising Harry had sat down in the empty chair.
“Sorry, Iggy. Just thinking aloud. Barnaby is jealous of Tina. His way of showing it. All he’s really done is make a fool of himself in public.”