To the Manor Born

by Peter Rimmer

  “Father, it’s wonderful,” said Stella. “Isn’t that the mayor of Boston?”

  The whole family were having the time of their lives at his expense. The mother who brushed his cheek, the brothers who shook his hand, never looking him in the eye. Cousins of many stripes. Hangers-on. Everyone making the most amount of noise as possible greeting him, the man of the moment, not one of them seeing him as a man. In the war in France, the noise of bombardment had had a meaning. The meaning of death. Here with the train still waiting at the platform, the noise had no meaning for him at all. In the midst of so much noise and people, he had never been lonelier in his life.

  “Stella,” he said taking her arm in his grip, “I can’t do this.”

  “Of course you can. You’re in America. Please stop hurting my arm or you’ll leave a bruise. My dress for tonight has short sleeves.”

  “Do you too despise me, Stella?”

  “Of course not, John. What on earth are you talking about?”

  “The circus. This is a circus.”

  “Well, it’s some circus. The mayor is coming through. He wants to shake your hand for the cameras. John, please smile when they point at you with a camera… And let go of my damn arm.”

  * * *

  To Stella, it was all intoxicating. Everyone she had ever known in Boston had come to greet her return. Even Wesley, her younger brother, had been less condescending than usual. Seamus, the older brother slated for Congress, had actually kissed her on the cheek. Something he had never done before in her life. Her tall, thin mother known throughout the Irish section as Big Annie, had given her a hug instead of telling her what she was doing wrong. Could eight months away in England have made them miss her in the family? For a fleeting moment, she thought it was herself they wanted. Then she saw her father milking the crowd for all he was worth… Seamus shaking hand after hand… Smiling at the press… Making brief one-liners.

  The band had slipped into Irish tunes they knew better than the brief imperial indulgence of Elgar’s music. The train that had brought them from New York pulled away from the platform. Her father took her by the elbow and together they moved out away from the grand reception.

  When they reached the car her family were ready to leave. They all got in, Wesley at the wheel of a new car Stella had not seen before. They were driving to the family house on the bank of the Charles River, ten miles from the railway station. No one seemed to care John was still part of the crowd outside the car. Stella looked for him out the window, saw him and signalled. She was visibly annoyed he had not followed her closely. Whatever he thought, it was too late to change his mind… Make her a laughing stock. Father she knew would stop any of that nonsense. John Lacey was now in America.

  They were going to live in New York where she would start her brilliant career as an interior designer. Everyone in New York would want the famous Marchioness of Ravenhurst to decorate his or her apartment. Her talent to paint would come to be an asset by showing her clients a picture of the room before it was redecorated and expensively furnished. She would be constantly in demand turning down clients who did not take her fancy. Important people. They would be her clients. She would mix socially with all the important people.

  “Where’s Lacey?” snapped her father.

  “Outside still caught in the crowd.”

  “Keep a better eye on him, Stella. I don’t spend that kind of money to be kept waiting.”

  “He’s coming.”

  “About time, Lacey,” Patrick Fitzgerald snapped as his future son-in-law got into the car. They drove off in silence away from all the hullabaloo.

  “People in crowds make me sick,” said her father.

  No one else spoke all the way to the family’s estate on the bank of the river.

  * * *

  In the back, John Lacey felt like a small boy on his first day at boarding school and just as miserable. Only with great self-control did he stop himself from being violently sick, something he regretted five minutes later. If he’d been sick over the back of the burly Irishman they might have mercifully thrown him out of the car. Silently he cursed Cuddles Morton-Sayner with all the power of his mind. He was trapped like a rat in a sewer with his wedding two days down the line. Cuddles had demanded and received the money before he left England… Her nine thousand pounds… His million dollars. John was even more convinced that anyone who said money made people happy should be shot.

  Just before the car reached the modern-looking mansion perched next to the river up the bank, John Lacey began to smile to himself. Under his breath, he spoke words he had first heard from his mother, ‘what’s good for the goose is good for the gander’. Two could play tricks with money. After today as he looked at Stella sitting next to him, he did not think he would be able to make love to her even had he wished. Whatever happened in the future, the seventeenth marquess would have no Lacey blood in his veins.

  “I’m glad to see you smiling, John,” said Stella complacently.

  11

  August to October 1928 – When the Curtain Goes Down

  The one commodity Barnaby St Clair never wished to run out of was money. With money, the rest of his life did what it was told. Women came and went. Friends were used to mutual benefit. When there was no longer mutual benefit the friendship stopped. Life to Barnaby was one long trade culminating in money. Money, Barnaby had convinced himself, never let him down. Mostly everything else always did.

  On 13 August 1928, Barnaby calculated his net worth exceeded one million pounds sterling. Smiling to himself maliciously, he telephoned the seven independent stockbrokers who handled his affairs and told them to sell.

  For three days Barnaby waited for the sales to be complete and only then relaxed.

  Having secured his fortune, the next period in his life was to begin. The C E Porters, Douglas Hayters, the hundreds he had buttered up to get the financial information that made his money were now irrelevant. When his bank manager asked him to lunch, he declined. When C E Porter telephoned to find out what was going on he was abrupt. When Cuddles Morton-Sayner asked him to do a client of hers a favour he told her to go to hell. For the first time in his life, he no longer needed to use his charm on other people to get his own way.

  For a week, Barnaby brooded, not leaving his Piccadilly townhouse except to walk across into Green Park. August had gone to September. The summer was good. His mind was at rest, the money in the bank earning a modest interest.

  Since being sucker-punched by Harry Brigandshaw while watching Tina’s legs as she picked up her skirts, he had deliberately kept his distance from the girl. What had once been fun had nearly cost him dearly if London had found out about his unceremonious dunking in the Thames: the idea of being laughed at was appalling. As Barnaby hoped and expected Harry Brigandshaw had kept his mouth shut to protect his wife and children.

  Like so many other dramatic moments in his life his running back to London soaked to the skin would have drifted into memory, even become a joke. Then as fate would have it, they bumped into each other when they were both sentimentally drunk.

  Tina, he found out, had taken the children down to Dorset to introduce the new member of the family to her parents. Barnaby had seen the birth of Dorian in the birth column of The Telegraph, this time knowing with certainty the child had nothing to do with him. Barnaby had even smiled to himself when he first worked out the dates two months before he met Harry in the bar at Clara’s.

  They were both alone at one o’clock in the morning still not drunk enough to go home on a Saturday night. Taking his medicine and landing in the river had obviously brought Tina and Harry back together. Why else had they produced another son? Barnaby was feeling mellow in himself forgetting the mental pain he had most likely caused Harry with the birth of Frank, a boy conceived when Harry was away on an extended trip to his farm in Africa.

  Barnaby had lurched around on the bar stool he had been sitting on for five hours coming face-to-face with his brother-in-law. Taking
the bull by the proverbial horns, Barnaby began to turn on the charm.

  “It’s twenty years, Harry. I was a kid. You had just met Lucinda who was only fifteen years old back then. You had just come down from Oxford with Robert. That was the time they told you at Purbeck Manor your father had been killed by the Great Elephant. You went home to find the elephant and take your revenge. Can’t we forget my mistakes and be friends again?”

  Even having drunk too much whisky, Barnaby knew he was taking a God sent opportunity to get back into Harry’s good books.

  “Did I break your jaw?” Harry’s surprise, Barnaby saw, had now turned to mild amusement. The luck was still with him. Harry was well on the way.

  “Only my pride, Harry. I was being an ass… She was five years old when I met Tina. You see I always thought she was mine but she wasn’t. Didn’t have the guts like you to marry the girl. She will make you very happy. I was just a fool… I read about Dorian in The Telegraph. Of course, it should be me married to Tina and you still married to my sister. Just how life goes wrong. That damn Braithwaite destroyed more than Lucinda’s young life. And your child’s. I did know about that. Lucinda was pregnant when she was killed. Then he killed Barend Oosthuizen and ruined your sister’s life to add insult to terrible injury. Don’t let us let him ruin our friendship. Harry, please let me buy you a drink and let bygones be bygones. Remember the good bits I say. There’s good and bad in all of us don’t you think? I’m sorry. I’m not as good as you. Never could control myself when there was something I wanted. You have my word as a gentleman it will never happen again.”

  Harry stared at him for a long moment without saying a word… Barnaby continued, “Aren’t you out alone late? Like me? I just felt like sitting here all night listening to the music and getting drunk. Sentimentally drunk. You know what, Christopher Marlowe, or whatever he calls himself, still can’t play the piano. Did you know we first met in France during the war when he called himself Barrie Madgwick? Has a new show coming up but you will know all about that as you finance his musicals… Please, have a drink, Harry? On me. They’re playing a medley from Happy Times. Don’t you think that is appropriate? We can’t go on like this all our lives. You were once married to my sister, for God’s sake.”

  “How are your parents, Barnaby?”

  “They are fine… You drink brandy, I remember?”

  “Thank you. I’ll have a South African brandy. You’re right. My father told me never to bear malice however appalling the reason.”

  “It was appalling. Utterly appalling.”

  “Yes it was, you were…”

  Before Harry could say anything else, Barnaby asked, “Do you think this can be the last of it?”

  “I think it can, Barnaby. For old times’ sake. For all the people we have both known together in our lives that make up who we are. Apart from my own, you have the most wonderful parents in the world.”

  For the rest of the evening, Barnaby deliberately talked trivia until it was time to take taxis to their separate homes. The one thing Barnaby had learnt as he manipulated people throughout his life was when to shut up.

  In the taxi back to his Piccadilly townhouse he hugged himself. Frank would go through life as Frank Brigandshaw and neither he nor Harry would say a word. He wondered what Tina would think of him had she been a fly on the wall.

  * * *

  Barnaby and Harry had met on more than one occasion during the spring and summer. Outwardly, their old relationship had returned to normal. He just hoped his son looked like Tina when he grew up and not like himself.

  * * *

  At the end of his week of contemplation, Barnaby took his Bentley 3 Litre from the garage and drove out of London. He had told Edward, his valet to expect him when he saw him and to tell no one what he was about.

  He was rich and free as air. For once in England, the sun was shining. The road to Scotland clear. He wanted to get away from where he was to get a better look at where he wanted to go with the rest of his life. He was happy, he realised, something he had not been for a very long time.

  * * *

  Douglas Hayter was not so happy and it had nothing to do with Barnaby St Clair closing down their lucrative two-way business. He had never liked the man, seeing him for what he was… A man who always took giving back as little as possible. A man who only gave the appearance of being a friend. Everything about Barnaby was top surface. Hiding the truth.

  The first three months had been the worst, waiting for Stella Fitzgerald to come back to Riverglade for her clothes she had left the night of the Nuneham House May Ball. There had not been a May Ball in 1928. The one that had changed his life had been the last. None of them had come back to visit him. C E Porter had spoken business with him on the telephone. So had Barnaby St Clair until he sold out of the market, a fact Douglas kept to himself, as it was none of his business. Cuddles had vanished from the scene with her protégée.

  At first, Douglas wondered if it had all been in his mind. The calling owls. The white light of the moon. The naked woman. The explosion in his groin. The brief surge of pure happiness. The feeling of fulfilment. The peace. The hope. The love… Had it all been a figment of his imagination? Had his body been there on its back that night straddled by the girl to whom he had talked all of the previous day?

  He wondered more as the days of silence went from weeks to months, and not another word after so many down by the river after she had run pell-mell into his chest as he held the wheelchair from rushing back into the river.

  Only after six months when he knew she was never coming back, did Douglas act like a thief and look in her suitcase. The ballgown was there in all its blue and white, the smell of her as powerful as the night of the dance when she had shown him her finery. The smell of perfume, not the smell of raw sex, that stayed in his mind from her visit to his room in the middle of the night. Everything was there of her in the case, her memory lying at his feet, the only part of Stella he still possessed. Instinctively that first empty morning when he woke to find them all gone he knew they had mutually taken each other’s virginity. It was this that kept him certain the night had been real.

  There was a room near the lounge his mother had always kept locked from the servants where he took the contents of her suitcase turning the room into a shrine. Day by day, he wrote down every word they had spoken so none would be forgotten with the passage of endless time. The dress was placed on a stand he made himself. In all its splendour. The small shoes she had worn to the dance at the bottom resting on the old wooden floor. The rest of the bits and pieces he left in the case. The dress stood alone in the middle of the room he had cleaned of his mother’s sewing and personal memories she had never wanted the servants to see. Who the man in the photograph was, he would never know. He had never seen the man before. Next to the dress, he placed a small mahogany table where he presented the writing of their conversations as they were done until each word was complete and would live with him forever. Each time he locked the door.

  From then on, he only visited the room when the moon was full and the owls in the trees outside were calling. As a libation to her memory, he never again called back to the owls, his way of pouring wine for the gods.

  * * *

  Tina seemed quite happy after Dorian, and life went on. Harry Brigandshaw went to the office and performed well the job he hated, running a business like any big business, trying to give the public what they wanted with the help of Percy Grainger, the managing director of Colonial Shipping. Harry was chairman of the board. The bringer of new ideas or so he hoped though mostly everything in the shipping line stayed the way it was. Ships were ships. Passengers to Africa came and went, as did the cargo. In Belfast, even the Short Brothers continued with their design of building a flying boat that would bring Harry’s Africa so much closer to England. Harry knew in his frustration it was all still talk and research, nothing ready to fly a passenger route and make a profit.

  Surprisingly to Harry, Tina had lost h
er figure after Dorian. She seemed to have little wish to get it back. She was thirty, smiling, good with the four children and, as he thought, seemingly happy. They had even met Barnaby socially without a mishap. It was as if all three of them had changed since the fight by the river.

  He and Tina were even comfortable talking to each other except for one subject: Africa, where he had to go whether he liked leaving his wife alone or not. Whether he trusted her or not. Whether he loved her or not, he loved all four of the children.

  Harry had not been home to Elephant Walk for three and a half years. Now his mother was sick and he was going. In a hurry. Flying again down Africa in a new hybrid flying boat with Ignatius Bowes-Lyon. A test flight for the future.