by Peter Rimmer
* * *
Across in Hyde Park, which could be seen from the Park Lane entrance to the club, Robert St Clair was sitting on a bench in the shade of a tall silver birch, unaware of Ignatius Bowes-Lyon’s predicament caused by his brother. Robert would have taken off his prosthetic foot were it not for the need to take off his trousers to get at the straps as he did in the woods around Purbeck Manor. He had walked across from his flat, as was the daily habit that would bring him later to have drinks with Merlin at six o’clock. Neither man ever drank before six. It was another good habit. To Merlin, anyone who drank before six in the afternoon was a drunk.
The book was going badly. In fact, he had to admit, it was not going at all. Three months of wasted time that would have been better served in Dorset, working in his room. Except he was enjoying himself. He had had a jolly good time in London and never once felt lonely or bored.
“You deserve a rest. A rest will make the next book a real humdinger if only I could think of what to write.”
Robert felt a small shaft of fear slice into his mind. What, he asked himself, if there were no more books? What would he do for the rest of his life? In panic, he got up from the bench overlooking the Serpentine and almost bumped into Portia Ramsbottom walking the other way all on her own.
“I say, what an extraordinary coincidence. It’s Miss Ramsbottom, isn’t it? Do you live around here?”
“No, and it is not a coincidence. I took a taxi from Brown’s Hotel. You said last night you were a man of habit. That you walked from your flat every day to the same park bench overlooking the Serpentine in Hyde Park. At six, you join your brother for drinks. You may think me a forward little hussy but I do so want to be a writer. You can tell me so much. Your stories last night were spellbinding. You would never have wanted to see me again as you think I’m still a child. Can I sit down next to you?”
“I’m standing up,” said Robert who began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“When I do my plot thinking in Dorset,” he said forgetting he had deliberately not told her he was a writer, “which I do sitting on a series of conveniently fallen trees, I take down my trousers and remove my right foot. If you see what I mean. The straps won’t undo with my trousers on. Let’s both sit down. We are in public so it is still quite appropriate. Well, not the bit about removing a man’s trousers. If you see what I mean?”
“For a man who is a writer and told me so many good stories in Clara’s last night, I do believe you are tongue-tied, Mr St Clair.” They sat down on the bench and both began to talk nineteen to the dozen.
* * *
For the first time in three months, Robert was late visiting Merlin. When he finally reached the Park Lane flat and went up in the lift, it was a quarter past six. Smithers, Merlin’s man, opened the door to the flat.
“Mr Merlin is in the lounge with Miss Scott. How are you, sir? If I may be so presumptive you look very chipper today, Mr Robert… Please go on in.”
Merlin, to Robert’s surprise, did not mention he was late.
The first whisky tasted very good. With it came the first shadow of an idea for a book.
“Hello, Millie. How are you?” he said to her for the second time.
“You’re chipper today, Robert.”
“Just what Smithers just said.”
Only after the third whisky an hour later did it dawn on Robert he was being naïve. How did she know he was a writer? He had not told her the night before. He had spoken of Christopher writing Happy Times but not about himself writing books. Keeper of the Legend was not even mentioned… They must have all known. Why they let such a young girl into a taxi without a chaperone. The young girl he had swooned over in the park was not interested in the old man. The parents must have thought him harmless with his grey hairs. Portia the girl had no interest in Robert the man. It made him go cold at the thought of his assumption. His stupidity. His vanity. Portia Ramsbottom, the aspiring writer, was interested in the author of Keeper of the Legend. The man of letters. Not the man. Not the man, he repeated to himself to make the point clear in his mind.
Millie Scott was looking at him with a peculiar expression on her face.
“What’s the matter, Robert? Someone walk over your grave?”
“Not really. Just as bad. Far worse, in fact. I just made a fool of myself back in the park.”
“What you do? Drop your trousers?” She was indeed a good comedienne Robert thought sarcastically. He had told them both his habit in Dorset. Millie had thought it funny. Merlin had frowned.
“Worse than that. I exposed my mind.”
“To a young girl? Her name would not by any chance be Portia…? She wanted to meet you again, you idiot. Smile, Robert. I told her where you sit in the park. The exact branch. I told her you write lovely books. Don’t be silly, Robert. She’s interested in you, not your books. She told me so last night when you were off chatting to Clara. I set you up. Just hope her mother and father don’t find out she was hobnobbing with a man who takes off his trousers in the woods to think… So what she’s nineteen? My father was twenty years older than mother. Without him, I wouldn’t be here and I wouldn’t have grown up among one of the rare happy marriages of life… You can give me a kiss on the cheek when I leave… Now, Merlin, I must go. The curtain goes up in an hour.”
“Smithers has called a taxi.”
“Why are you always so thoughtful? Maybe one more drink. I don’t have to go on till the second act. I’m funnier a bit tiddly… That’s better, Robert. You look chipper again. Don’t they all say life begins at forty which Merlin tells me you will be later this year.”
Only when Millie Scott finally left in a hurry to get to the theatre, did Robert put two and two together. Millie Scott had been in his brother’s flat since the previous evening. She was holding a small overnight bag that likely held the dress she had been wearing in Clara’s.
The front door closed. They both watched out the window in silence. Millie came out of the building with Smithers who opened the taxi door, handing in the small overnight bag.
“You old dog, Merlin. You’ve got two mistresses!”
“I’d like to marry her, Robert. We get on so well together. Have done for years and years.”
“Then get on with it.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. She’s a dancer.”
“Won’t be the first time one of our family married an actress.”
“You think not?” Merlin said quizzically. “Let’s have another drink.”
“Why ever not. I feel marvellous. Tell you what, I’ll take you out and buy you supper… I’ve got a new book coming, did I tell you that?”
* * *
At the end of the month, Ralph Madgwick called in for his cheque. It was ten o’clock in the morning and quite possible he was still drunk. He had brought a girl home from his last port of call in an unlicensed bar near the Chinese quarters in Soho. They had sat up drinking in the flat, both drunk. Ralph had passed out in the chair with a hazy vision of the girl making her way to the door, clutching a one pound note she was going to use to get a taxi back to her own room somewhere in London. Ralph had no idea of her name. He had lost the first girl he had started off with somewhere along the way. Her name was Agatha, a prim and proper lady, unaware at the start of the evening of how badly he could behave. He had not tried hard to keep her. There was in his drunken memory a friend from the army who had taken her away who was a first-class chap. It was not Keppel Howland as it could not have been. Keppel was up at Oxford working hard and had never, to his knowledge, liked prim and proper girls. It must have been the challenge of converting a prim and proper into a slut that had made him take her out in the first place. He was, Ralph told himself, undoubtedly getting worse if that were possible.
Giving Rosie Prescott a leery smile, Ralph put his hand out. The door to the senior partner’s office was closed. There was no sign of Uncle Wallace who mostly came in an hour or two before lunch. The early start, even an early d
runk start, was to avoid his Uncle Wallace while he executed the one and only important task of his month at Madgwick and Madgwick.
As usual, by the end of the month, he was broke. The first day after payday was to go round his friends and pay them back what he borrowed in the last week of the month. They thought him a good chap and did not mind he would be back with them in the last week of the new month. They knew about his cheque. They knew he would pay his debts.
Rosie was looking at him sadly. She was shaking her head.
“No pay without work, this time Ralph. Order of your Uncle Wallace… What about your agreement…? Don’t you love her after all? Not even one day this month did you do any real work.”
“But I don’t have any money. Fact is, I owe the chaps ten quid or was it twenty? Got a list if you want to have a look?”
“Your breath smells of whisky.”
“I’d run out of brandy in the flat… What am I going to do, Rosie?”
“Sober up and do some work. Was eighteen months so long a time for someone you profess to love?”
“Yes… And I don’t like America.”
“You’ve never been there.”
“She doesn’t write. She has not written in weeks. Rebecca does not love me any more.”
“Her father stops her, likely. I would if I saw you now and the girl was my daughter.”
“Not a penny?”
Rosie shook her head.
“I’m going home. Didn’t get paid for today so I shall go home and sleep. The chaps will have to wait. Could you lend me five quid, Rosie?”
“No.”
“What on earth am I going to do? I liked being rich. The girls liked me being rich.”
“Find a way to get a letter to Rebecca. Tell her about the offer. Of going to New York in eighteen months. Then come to the office sober, on time and not smelling like a brewery… Do some work, Ralph!”
“Do I really smell like a brewery? How positively terrible… Why are you crying, Rosie?”
“Because you are such a damn fool.”
“The war wasn’t nice, you know?”
“Oh, Ralph! Stop blaming the bloody war! It’s over. Has been for eight years. Just grow up… Please!”
* * *
Back in his South Kensington flat paid for by Uncle Wallace along with the furniture, with Rosie’s last words ringing in his ears, Ralph had a look at himself in the bathroom mirror. His eyes were red and puffy. There were red blotches on each of his cheeks. His hair was too long and all over the place.
“Where the hell were you last night, Madgwick?” he asked the debauched face in the mirror. The eyes were sad. He felt sad. He had no idea what to do. He felt sick. The sickness was alcohol, not food deep in his bowels. He was broke. In debt. No friends to speak of. Christopher had given him a lecture and told him to go to hell. His mother would throw him out of the Ashtead house. Keppel was up at Oxford. The idea of catching a train to Oxford to pour out his woes came to mind and left. He did not have the train fare.
“They’ve got you by the testicles this time,” he said sadly to the mirror of himself. “She’s right. The bloody war’s long over… Nice girl, Rosie. Make someone a good wife… And she’s right.”
Before he could change his mind, he went to the liquor cabinet and took out the bottles one by one, pouring their contents down the kitchen sink. Then he went to bed and fell asleep on his stomach where he lay all day and most of the night. When he finally got up off the bed, his mouth felt like the bottom of a parrot cage. In the kitchen with the light on, Ralph drank pint after pint of water. Back in his bedroom, he lay on his back thinking of the leopard cave and Alfred tending the early morning fire in the mouth of the cave. He even thought he could hear the cry of the fish eagles down in the Zambezi River valley.
Next thing Ralph knew it was morning. In London. The traffic was moving outside. Someone was cooking bacon in one of the neighbour’s flats. The smell of coffee came in with the bacon through the window he had left open day and night.
Ralph was more hungry than he had ever been before in his memory. In his kitchen, he found a tin of baked beans and an old, stale loaf of bread. There was an onion in an empty fruit basket one of the girls had left behind. They were the only ones who ever cooked. He found a bottle of olives in olive oil. Put oil in the frying pan and fried the onion finally tipping over the open tin of baked beans that had cut his hand in the opening. Soaking slices of stale bread in olive oil on a breakfast plate, Ralph poured over the cooked mess and sat with the full plate at the kitchen table where he ate without looking up.
“That’s the best meal I’ve ever had.”
With the change he found in a trouser pocket in the cupboard, Ralph took the Kensington tube, changed twice before reaching the City where he walked to his office and up the stairs to the third-floor and sat down at his desk. Mr Postlethwaite looked at him amazed. Ralph smiled, his eyes crystal clear. It was half-past seven in the morning, an hour before Madgwick and Madgwick opened for business.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
Ralph, for the first time since coming out of the army, told himself he was now ready to do some real work. After all, they had him by the testicles.
8
October 1926 – Falling Leaves
Glen Hamilton, the new editor of the Colorado Telegraph, looked at the unopened envelope on top of the morning mail. Somehow, the handwriting was familiar. An old, comfortable familiarity from a long time ago. He had replaced Matt Vogel the month before, Matt retiring after thirty years with the paper. The stamp on the envelope was without the name of a country, the head of a man in one corner.
“Why didn’t you open this one, Freya?”
“Marked private.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
“To see what’s in the letter.”
“Then it won’t be private.”
“Only if you tell me what’s in it.”
“Have I ever told you how infuriating you can be, Freya?”
“All the time.”
“How long have you been my personal assistant?”
“Oh, ten years, I think… Come on. Open the letter. It’s from England.”
“How do you know? The stamp?”
“Turn it over.”
On the back was the name and address of the sender: Robert St Clair, Purbeck Manor, Dorset.
“He wrote Keeper of the Legend,” said Freya.
“I know. I met his brother-in-law during the war. Was at the Salisbury railway station when Braithwaite shot her. And Tembo later shot Braithwaite… You remember?”
“The fighter pilots. We had it all over the paper. Weren’t you trying to investigate another of Braithwaite’s victims during the war? Sara Wentworth. Harry Brigandshaw was married to Robert’s sister, Lucinda. Come on! Open the letter. Must be important. I met Robert when he came to America after Max Pearl published his book. Didn’t you send Max the manuscript?”
“So that’s it. You fancied Robert.”
“Poor chap only had one foot. The other was blown off in the war.”
Getting nowhere, Glen opened the letter. Inside was another letter sealed in an envelope addressed to a Miss Rebecca Rosenzweig. The handwriting, Glen noticed, was not that of Robert St Clair. There was no return address on the back of the envelope.
Glen read the short letter from Robert and smiled, putting down the letter on the pile of opened mail. To Freya, standing in front of the desk, the letter was upside down. Slowly, still smiling, Glen turned round the letter so Freya could read.
In the silence, Glen listened to the tick of the clock on his office wall while Freya read the three paragraphs. Then she smiled.
“Such a romantic. Such a romantic. Doesn’t waste words. He wants you to go to New York, find this Rebecca girl and give her the letter from her lover without the father finding out. Robert thinks the father has been stopping Ralph’s letters reaching Rebecca for months… There’s much more to this than meets the eye.”
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“Most probably.” Glen was giving Freya a queer look.
“When are you going, Glen?”
“I’m not. You are. You are going to find Rebecca and give her the letter from Ralph Madgwick. It will give you an excuse to write back to Robert and suggest he again visits with us in Denver. We can arrange a bit of a book tour. Or he can come out for the young lovers’ wedding.”
“You are so clever.”
“That’s why they gave me Matt’s job when he retired. Now run along with you. You have a job to do.”
“How do I find her?”
“Her father is a prominent Jewish banker, as you read in the letter. Go and see Max Pearl. He’s Jewish. The way your eyes flashed at the idea of inviting Robert, I think you’ll find her. Now run along.”
“Can I go now?”
“Wasn’t that what I just said?”
“To New York?”
“To New York, Freya. All the way to New York. The newspaper will pay your train fare and expenses. Everyone in the world loves a romance.”
“You can’t publish her name!”
“We give them false identities. It’ll still sell newspapers. We’ll syndicate right around the world. There were some newspapermen in Salisbury, Rhodesia, I met after my visit to Elephant Walk, Harry Brigandshaw’s farm. Did the same thing and made a name for themselves. Most of the best stories in the world start at provincial papers and spread.”
“What happens if the father finds out we’re promoting a match between Jew and Gentile?”
“Hopefully… By then… It’ll all be too late and we can all go to the wedding… You do like weddings, Freya?”
“You are yanking my chain again!”
“Probably… Best of luck.”
Glen was still smiling when Freya left his office with the letter to Rebecca clutched in her hand. He was remembering. The couple brought together by the Rhodesia Herald were happily married and living on Elephant Walk. The man, Jim Bowman, was the tobacco manager, the nurse, Jenny Merrill, the paper had searched for, was running a clinic for the local black people. The Herald had done a series of follow-up stories that was syndicated around the world.