To the Manor Born

by Peter Rimmer

  Since January, Ralph had learnt nothing. The only day that drew any interest from him at Madgwick and Madgwick was the day Rosie gave him his pay cheque. Rosie even thought Ralph saw himself as a martyr. A victim. The butt of a cruel joke.

  Christopher Marlowe, still conscious of his own guilt when it came to the affairs of Madgwick and Madgwick, had also given up trying to talk sense into his brother. There had never been any logic in his life in arguing with a drunk or a fool. To that, he had now added a brother in the throes of unobtainable love.

  Without Mr Postlethwaite, the company would have fallen apart. The more nephew Ralph went into decline the more Uncle Wallace drank in the office, the cloud of depression right over his head for all to see. Either someone persuaded the girl to come back to England from America in open defiance of her father or the next generation of Madgwicks would never take over the firm, sending, as Uncle Wallace put it succinctly to Rosie Prescott, four generations of hard work down the drain.

  It was in the course of one of Uncle Wallace’s bouts of despair that Rosie came up with the answer or at least she hoped.

  “Send Ralph to America,” she said in the senior partner’s office. “Open an office in New York. Our correspondent in Manhattan makes a fortune doing our business for us. Let us do it ourselves. Make the profit for ourselves. Many of our clients have subsidiaries in America who will happily do business with us. That will be in addition to clearing their shipments from England to America.”

  “But Ralph knows nothing about shipping.”

  “He will learn fast with the right incentive. Say eighteen months of dedicated hard work right here in London. The reward for going to America. Rebecca will be twenty-one with the legal right to make up her own mind. Sir Jacob can then say to his fellow Jews, it was all beyond his power.”

  “He’ll disown the child. I know Jacob.”

  “Even better. They won’t need Rosenzweig’s money. She’ll have been thrown out of the Jewish community. Problem solved for Sir Jacob Rosenzweig.”

  “It won’t work, Miss Prescott.”

  “At least Ralph will know his shipping at the end of eighteen months’ hard work. Better to let Ralph think he has a chance of fulfilling his dreams. Often the journey towards the dream is better than the dream itself. At least it will stop Ralph from drinking. Make him nice again… I can’t stand it any longer.”

  “What’s the matter, Miss Prescott?”

  “Nothing, Mr Madgwick.”

  “Then why are you crying?”

  The door to the senior partner’s office closed with a distinct bang. Not a slam. Uncle Wallace thought, just a bang. He stared at the closed door for a full minute. Only then did it click in his half-sozzled mind.

  “I’ll be damned. She’s in love with him. What a combination for the future of the firm. And the future of me.” Uncle Wallace was smiling.

  For the first time in months, Uncle Wallace saw horses in his mind. And dogs. Gundogs. Hounds following the hunt… He could hear the sound of the horn, the baying of the dogs. See the fox racing away over the fields and hedgerows of his own country estate.

  “By Jove,” he said, “I think she’s got it. Nothing wrong with a nice piece of bribery, come to think of it. Not when it comes to a young lad who is an extortionist… The things a man has to do to get the best of both worlds.”

  From outside at her desk where Rosie Prescott was feeling sorry for herself, she heard the distinct sound through the closed door of the senior partner whistling out of tune.

  * * *

  Tina Brigandshaw knew she had done the opposite of the right thing by telling Harry Brigandshaw the truth. While what was being suggested to Ralph Madgwick dawned on him as the best bit of bribery he had been offered in his life, Tina was contemplating the wreck of her own in her room on the third floor of the Berkeley Square house.

  She no longer shared a room with Harry since the ill-fated flight down Africa. Having quarrelled violently over Tina’s wish to stay in London and thinking the flaunting of her body during the day would break down Harry’s resistance, Tina had moved into her own room. It was her only weapon, which had always worked before.

  But, by the end of the first month in separate bedrooms after his return, Tina had been gripped by a cold fear. Only the once had she managed to get him back into her bed, knowing only too well that by then it was too late. She was more than two months pregnant with Frank, the spawn of a leering seducer who had caught her in the woods, turning their deadly attraction to his will. Laughing at her in public afterwards. At least until Harry had come back from his extended trip to Africa and given Barnaby St Clair a look of cold anger that had put real fear into Barnaby St Clair. People who had killed consistently in battle were still killers. Tina had looked from one to the other, seeing in herself what Barnaby saw. Knowing then she knew no more of her husband than the surface. And only the surface he wished her to see.

  Without sex with her, had Harry gone back to Brett? In private husband and wife said not a word to each other. Only in public did they talk normally for the sake of appearances. He was two people. The affable older man of the world when they were out with friends. A cold, distant monster when alone. A monster with a will she was unable to break.

  * * *

  Back in March 1925, after Harry and Tina quarrelled over his sudden plan to go to Africa, Harry left Ignatius Bowes-Lyon at the Victoria Falls Railway Hotel. Their nine passengers dispersed, going their several ways further into Africa with their journey home booked for them later on the SS Corfe Castle that would sail them back to England. Harry himself had taken the train on the narrow gauge railway to Bulawayo where he had spent the night in the Cecil Hotel, boarding the next train to Salisbury the following evening. Harry had a sleeping car all to himself waking up to the dawn: a beautiful, red and crimson African dawn that drew the bush out of the night. The long elephant grass moving in the morning breeze in waves.

  Harry had been awake from the first rays through his open window, tasting the morning scents of the new dawn. They were still twenty miles from the capital of the newly self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia. There was game on both sides of the train as the engine at the front slowly pulled the line of carriages through the veld. Harry stood looking out the window smiling like a small boy with his first toy. He was truly home. Twenty miles the other side of Salisbury was Elephant Walk. Tembo was meeting the train with the car at Salisbury station. By breakfast time, he would be home.

  So overwhelmed by the thought of seeing his mother and sister, his grandfather and Madge’s children, he had forgotten to think of Tina and his own children back in England.

  “If you could just see this, Tina… Everything will be fine when I bring you and the children home. This is our home. Africa. Here is space. Space for a man’s family. Here is living away from all the damn people who want to steal and tell tales. It’s here we’ll grow old together in peace.”

  The intention was a two-week stay on Elephant Walk with Harry returning to the Victoria Falls for Ignatius to fly the empty seaplane back up Africa over the lakes and the Nile River.

  * * *

  The dogs had chased around the garden as if the devil was after their tails. Flowers from the round beds that circled the msasa trees that scattered the lawn right down to the Mazoe River flew into the air, torn from their stems by the ridgebacks, the bitch leading the mayhem in front of the two dogs. The cat on the windowsill of the main house stopped even trying to look asleep with her eyes open. The tame Egyptian geese had gone off honking to the river where they flew round and round making as much noise as the dogs. The two tame giraffes looked across from their paddock next to the farm buildings and kept staring. Everyone on the farm, black and white, was smiling despite the previous year’s drought. It had decimated the cattle, limited the maize crop to three bags to the acre and produced a Virginia tobacco so off-type the buyers in London had said they would not take the crop after receiving a sample sent by Jim Bowman on the i
nstructions of Sir Henry Manderville, Harry’s grandfather.

  The only crops that had grown in profusion were in the vegetable gardens close to the Mazoe River and watered by Sir Henry’s combination of windmills, gears and pipes. The river was still flowing but would likely stop before the next rains in October.

  The first job Harry did after taking up young Tinus his nephew in the Handley Page for a flip to stop him pestering, was to look for a dam site upriver from the farm.

  His grandfather began to explain the problem.

  “One year it rains too much and the water leaves Rhodesia down the Zambezi River for the sea in Mozambique. Useless to man and beast. The next year there is little rain and most of the smaller rivers dry up and stop flowing. We must have dams, Harry. Big dams. To survive. With our medicine and a constant supply of proper food throughout the year, the black population is exploding. In a normal drought year like this, they’d be dying of starvation by September, especially the young children. With the new government stockpile, there will be enough food for everyone. But not in five years’ time if we don’t increase production with irrigated water. When you go back to London, Harry, send out an engineer. My bit of amateur irrigation isn’t enough for a grand scale… When are you going back?”

  “Two weeks was what I said to Ignatius. Tinus is already in a state of hypertension. When I go back, he is going to go wild. He misses his father and I miss my children and Tina doesn’t want to live in Africa. I’ll stay for a month. A compromise. Then we fly out of Victoria Falls all being well. The planes we have now are too small for commercial purposes. We need much larger seaplanes. More like flying boats. It’ll work one day… I know a chap from Birmingham who is a good engineer. He was involved with the construction of the causeway connecting Singapore with the Malayan mainland. He may yet get a knighthood for getting the road across that swamp. A few dams in Africa will be a holiday in comparison. Now, let’s sit down under that tree and you can tell me everything that happened while I was away… How are you?”

  “Getting old, Harry. I’ll be seventy-four next year. No man lives forever.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “I’ve been in Africa over thirty-five years. Been in Rhodesia ever since Cecil Rhodes started the country. Almost as long as you and your mother.”

  “Any regrets?”

  “Why on earth should I? Look at the place. Look at Elephant Walk.”

  “Why can’t women be happy wherever they are?”

  “Maybe she will be one day.”

  “We had such a row.”

  “I’m sorry, Harry.”

  * * *

  After Frank’s birth, Tina had told him the truth on a bench in Berkeley Square not far from the front door to their house. Anthony, who had turned three the following year, had walked off with his nurse in pursuit of a butterfly that he could not catch. Eighteen-month-old Beth was fast asleep in her pram under an elm tree. Six-month-old Frank was in the nursery back in the house.

  It had been one thing to suspect it was Barnaby. Another to know. Harry’s first instinct was to get his gun and go shoot Barnaby St Clair. Strangely, he was proud of his wife for telling the truth, confirming what in his heart he already knew. That Frank was his first wife Lucinda’s nephew, not his son. He had asked Tina a direct question. Usually, the husband was the last to find out. Harry outlined the dates. Their two months apart when he flew with Ignatius to Africa. His return in late May. Frank’s birth on the 29th December the same year. Six months after they had made love, that once. That one time before he saw Barnaby leering at his wife, turning his desire for Tina to nothing.

  “Are you sleeping with Brett?” she had asked Harry.

  “Once. The day Frank was born.”

  “I’ll move out.”

  “You don’t have to, Tina. You and I now know the truth. Only we know. Barnaby cannot be certain. If we had shared the same bed just before I left with Ignatius, Frank could have been mine. Think of the children. It was all very well being a bastard like me in the wilds of Africa where nobody cared. Quite another in London. I hate keeping up false appearances but there is no choice. What we have to do from now on, Tina is make everything look normal when anyone else is around.”

  “The servants know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That we sleep separately. They also can count on their fingers.”

  “Do you want to go and live with Barnaby?”

  “Do you want to go and live with Brett…? Barnaby won’t have me. Not with the children.”

  “With Frank? Not with Anthony and Beth.”

  “Not even with Frank. He’d laugh in my face.”

  “He would not laugh in mine.”

  “You don’t know Barnaby. I’ve known him all my life. I just never could get him out of my system… Am I evil, too? He’s evil, Harry. He only ever thinks of himself. Unless you threatened to kill him, he wouldn’t care less what you said. And he knows you won’t kill him because of Lucinda. Because of his family. What are we going to do, Harry?”

  “Nothing, Tina. Absolutely nothing.”

  Harry had got up from the bench and not looked at her since, not even in public.

  * * *

  In the small bedroom that was now her prison, Tina began to sob. Since sitting on the bench in Berkeley Square it had been the longest month of her life. He had not hit her. Not shouted at her. Not spoken to her. Harry had done nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  * * *

  The news had reached them from India the previous day.

  Robert St Clair had finally taken Barnaby’s bad-tempered advice. He had bought the lease of a flat near Merlin, in Stanhope Gate. The royalty cheques from Keeper of the Legend had been invested in good quality shares since the end of the war. Robert was a rich man by anyone’s standards. Living at home and investing his money had turned the worth of his first novel into fifty thousand pounds and the cheques were still coming. Trying to spend some of the money had proved just as difficult as writing the first book. Mostly because he could not see the point of being in London in the first place. Living at home in Dorset where he had been all his life except for the war years was what he most enjoyed. For weeks on end, the old Manor house, the woods and fields that had been in his family for eight hundred and fifty-six years, no trace of the sound of man emanated from his own household. To Robert that was the true way of life for a man. Not in the small flat without animals, the sound of strangers all around, dodging the snarl of traffic in Park Lane on his way to walk each day in Hyde Park, the foul smell of man-made engines that always brought back the horrors of the war. These were strange exchanges for his lost tranquillity. It had taken him three months to write not one word, his consolation was seeing things to write about in a time some distance from his present.

  Most days he visited Merlin. Old bachelors happily chewing over the long ago.

  Their mother had phoned from Purbeck Manor. A letter had come from Penelope, in India, living with her parents, the widow of Frederick, the eldest of the St Clair brothers, killed in action in France 1917. Richard, the heir to the St Clair barony and Frederick’s only son, had died of typhus at the age of nine, leaving Merlin heir to the barony.

  “You know what this all means,” said Robert looking out from Merlin’s favourite breakfast alcove over Park Lane into the green trees of Hyde Park on the other side of the road.

  “That Penelope is in misery. I’ve been trying all day to write her a letter of condolence. It’s not easy making words have real meaning.”

  “That I know, Merlin… Apart from poor Penelope.”

  “What apart from poor Penelope?”

  “You will have to get married.”

  “I’m forty-one. Don’t be ridiculous… Why?”

  “Barnaby will inherit the title.”

  “Not if he dies first.”

  “Then his eldest son will inherit.”

  “He doesn’t have a son.”

  For a full minute, there w
as an awkward silence as both brothers stared out the window.

  “If I die first you will inherit the title. Why don’t you get married Robert?” said Merlin nastily.

  “I’m forty.”

  “Not quite but so what.”

  “I only have one foot.”

  “Good God, Robert, don’t tell me you’re a virgin?” Merlin had put the monocle in his left eye for a better effect.

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “I’m quite happy as I am.”

  “So am I.”

  Esther, his mistress, and Genevieve, his daughter, hung in the air.

  “You don’t have any children.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “A lot.”

  “We can’t let Barnaby’s bad blood taint the title.”

  “Where’d you think he got it from?”

  “How should I know?”

  “He’s exactly the same blood as you and I.”

  “Nonsense. A throwback. Something one of our ancestors did years ago they shouldn’t have.”

  “Then you had better find a wife as well, Robert. To make sure.”

  “Don’t be silly, old chap. What do I know about women?”

  “Then why did you come up to London?” said Merlin giving him a lecherous look. “I’ll help you, Robert. I know lots of very nice girls from very nice families who would love to marry a famous author with only one foot.”

  “What do I say to them?”

  “Would have thought that the least of your problems.”

  Robert looked at his brother. Merlin was actually having a giggle at his expense.

  “How are Esther and Genevieve?” said Robert spitefully.

  “Why don’t we go down to Clara’s for a drink and dinner and talk about women. You’d better go home and change. Clever of you to get a flat within walking distance.”