by Peter Rimmer
“So you will come with me to Elephant Walk? We are going to find Harry.”
“Have you seen his wife?”
“Yes. She told me to mind my own business and burst into tears. I saw Percy Grainger the Managing Director of Colonial Shipping to get some funds for the expedition now I have Glen Hamilton and Robert St Clair behind me. I think he’ll spring for another ticket at least. He’s having a row with Mrs Brigandshaw. She wants to sell a large number of Colonial Shipping shares to cover death duty due next September. I think she’s right. The markets are jumpy for some reason. Or they were in New York. Grainger won’t let the solicitors authorise the sale. Says it will look bad if the Brigandshaws start selling the shares of their own company. Says people in the market will think there is something wrong with the shipping company. I didn’t listen properly. More interested in extracting a big fat donation to help look for Harry.”
“How much did you get?”
“My passage and hopefully yours. We can share the same cabin. The only extra cost will be food. I’ll stand for the drinks. Drinks are cheap on board. No duty on booze outside territorial water so the cost isn’t a problem. She’s lost a lot of weight.”
“Who?”
“Mrs Tina Brigandshaw. Now there’s one good-looking broad to use a rather vulgar American expression. You remember when we first saw her on Elephant Walk in ’25 after Harry dropped us that message wrapped around a spanner from the cockpit of his Handley Page? Always did rather fancy her.”
“She’s going to be one very rich woman if we don’t find her husband.”
“But we will. Kind of ironic don’t you think?”
“Why? Do you think she fancies you? You’re an ugly-looking bastard.”
“I have no idea. The idea of taking on five kids would probably put me off. And I’m not a bastard. I have it on good authority of both mother and father who I should go and see in the Isle of Man before we leave for Africa but I don’t have time. My poor mother. She puts up with so much and gets very little in return. I’m selfish. I admit it. Why are we all so selfish, Ralph?”
* * *
Christopher Marlowe had not gone to Tilbury Docks to see his brother off. He thought Tina Brigandshaw had gone through enough pain without Keppel Howland and Ralph adding to her woes. The expedition was a publicity stunt. To give Keppel Howland a boost at the start of his career as a journalist. The comparison even in the English papers to Stanley finding Doctor Livingstone was in Christopher’s opinion a lot of rubbish. In Livingstone’s day, there were no phones or aeroplanes. Africa was not even colonised. The colonial powers had brought a semblance of civilisation to Africa. Africa was no longer the dark continent of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. If Harry and his crew were still alive after a year, the world would have heard about it. Glen Hamilton and Robert St Clair were in bad taste but it was none of his business.
Ralph had appeared in Clara’s with Keppel Howland a month ago when Christopher first heard of his resignation. If he was really honest with himself, his feeling of guilt was part of the reason for his animosity. As the older brother, he should have been the one to take up the family responsibility at Madgwick and Madgwick, instead of indulging himself playing the bohemian piano player and writing musicals for the West End stage however successful they might have become. A man born into wealth had his duty to do and Christopher knew plainly he had avoided his family responsibilities. Now Ralph had done the same thing and poor old Uncle Wallace, with one eye missing from the war, was still in a job he hated in the City instead of retiring, as he well deserved to do in the country where he had wanted to be all his life, instead of answering the call of duty. Even if Mr Postlethwaite largely ran the company.
Ralph was now a disgrace. He himself was a disgrace. And since he had married Brett Kentrich his life had been stood on its head. He was no longer the happy-go-lucky piano player in a black beret playing mediocre piano every night to people getting drunk. He was married to a star of the West End stage and now did what he was told to do.
No longer did he live in the attic. No longer did he shop for food in the Portobello Road. He was now living in Brett’s flat in Regent Mews, the one she had been given by Harry Brigandshaw back when she lived with Harry as his mistress… Before she was famous. He even had had to cut his hair and buy clothes that Brett considered more in keeping with his new position as her husband… When Christopher looked in the mirror he knew his long chase of Brett Kentrich had come to a ghastly end. Only when they were married did she tell him she never wanted children. That having children would make her look fat. Interrupt her career… When he confronted her, she said he could take it or leave it. She had married him hadn’t she…? The beautiful moonlit night on the banks of the River Thames forgotten. Never mentioned.
All they had together was the show and the eternal social round with people Christopher would have rather never met, let alone hobnobbed with. They were all rich, artificial and vain, not interested in who they were but what people thought of them, their false image enhanced by being seen out with a famous actress and a man whose name they rarely remembered but wrote musicals. Christopher’s last sanctuary had been Clara’s and even that had been taken away. Were it not for the new musical in rehearsal away from his wife he would have been even more miserable. Which, when he finally admitted to himself, was the real reason why he had not gone to the docks to see Ralph off at the start of the search for his wife’s ex-lover.
To add to his loneliness, Gert van Heerden was going back to Africa, the itch of the theatre finally scratched out of Gert’s life. Gert was going to be a farmer. He was going to make wine. He was going home where he said he really belonged. For Christopher, the new musical at Drury Lane was just a money machine. The fun had gone. There was no difference in making money out of a musical than sitting in an office. The only thing in the end that people wanted to know was how much money he was making. Brett was the star. He just wrote the musical, an anonymous name on the programme. Not even his picture. When he went down to Ashtead to see his mother for the first time since the wedding in Ashtead church, she laughed at him.
“Well, Barrie, finally you have grown up. Up until now, you were living in a dream world. She’s nasty like all the rest of us. All we want is our own way. You followed her around like a puppy dog and look what you got.”
As usual, his mother was right. He would just have to make the best of a bad job… It was just so strange how people changed once you married them.
* * *
While Christopher Marlowe was commiserating with himself on the reality of marriage, C E Porter was reassuring Tina Brigandshaw. The stock markets of the industrialised world were safe as the Bank of England, where a pound sterling was backed up by gold in the vaults of the bank to the exact amount promised by the bank on the note.
“I had the honour to take Colonial Shipping public. While your late husband was away in Africa, I sat on the board of directors. The company is sound, rich in assets with little liability and a spread of income from many spheres of business. Stop worrying. The agreement the company solicitors have come to with the Department of Inland Revenue is a stroke of brilliance. Why, the shares went up again today minimising your exposure to otherwise exorbitant death duties, which in my mind are quite immoral. They will be why every great British company is destroyed, the ancestral management cast to the four winds. Then who is going to run the companies? The government! Goodness gracious me. This is not democracy. This is legalised theft by the masses from the few who know how to run a company. Bring the whole Empire down that sorta thing and then where will the poor people be?
“Turning on each other I should think. Scratching each other’s eyes out for the few scraps left. My oh my, what greed can do. You can have all the workers you like and nothing happens. People have to be put to work by people who know what they are doing. Leave your shares where they are Mrs Brigandshaw. You may have lost your husband in a terrible accident but you still have your chi
ldren and a beautiful home. Go home and enjoy them.”
Not sure whether to be rude at so much pomposity, most of which she did not understand, Tina resigned herself to having done her best. It was, as they say, a man’s world she told herself. She just hoped the men knew what they were doing. In Tina’s life, enough money was enough. She would far rather cover her debt now and know there was enough left over for the children. Like any good housewife. As she got older and the more she saw of great wealth, the less she understood people’s reasons for wanting more and more when they would never be able to spend what they had in three lifetimes.
Leaving C E Porter’s office in the City, she still felt sick in her stomach. All the new book learning was only adding to her fear. In her own mind, Tina compared the stock market to one large gambling casino controlled by the rich. And the rich, from her perspective, was not always as clever as they thought they were… Except for Barnaby which set Tina thinking of Barnaby comfortably sitting on the fence with his money safely stored in the bank… For one brief moment, she even thought of going to see him. To ask his advice. But she knew how all that would end. With her in tears, feeling even lonelier than she now was in the taxi on her way back to Berkeley Square.
By the time Tina reached the house, she was thinking of Harry and the new expedition to find his remains, which was surely all they would be able to find if anything at all.
On her doorstep was Horatio Wakefield from The Daily Mail. They just never left her alone.
Brushing past the newspaper reporter, who hounded her before, she refused to give him an interview.
“Have they at least left for Africa?”
“Yes,” she said going into the house and slamming the door rudely in the man’s face.
Outside the closed front door, Horatio Wakefield gave her a smile and a wave… For him, it was all in a day’s business.
* * *
On the morning at the end of September when Tina was back with her parents in the small railway cottage having done what she thought was her best, the family doctor was visiting Freya St Clair further down the path that led along the stream to Purbeck Manor. He had come to check on her pregnancy which took him less than five minutes. Everything, he said, was exactly as it should be for someone five months pregnant.
Walking the doctor back to his car, Robert told him the story of old Warren appearing at Hank Curley’s window, Robert’s conscience still nagging at the back of his mind as to whether a man can indeed drop dead from a fright. To make his family seem in the best light in the circumstances, Robert told the doctor a large part of the story only leaving out the priest’s bolthole and the tablets in the form of panels carved on to the walls of the sanctuary deep down under Corfe Castle.
“You see, can a man be frightened to death?” asked Robert hopefully.
“Oh, indeed. Probably grounds for a police investigation. Not old Warren, of course. He was just told what to do. Following orders like they have to do in the army. You are lucky the man ran away on his own two feet and was not removed in a coffin. Couldn’t have signed a death certificate for death from natural causes, under those circumstances, Mr St Clair. Not even for Lord St Clair but please don’t tell him that… Very dangerous. Have you heard from this man since?”
“Not a word.”
“My goodness. Sometimes they die a few days later. We call that aftershock.”
“But no one would know what had happened.”
“Probably not… You say he took the Corfe Castle taxi to London? Very expensive, poor chap. Better, I suppose, than dropping dead. Did the right thing he did getting away from the Manor house. Another big fright would have killed him. The first one would have weakened his heart. The second dropped him on the spot like a stone… Have you spoken to the taxi driver?”
“The American got to London but never went back to his hotel where we sent his luggage. I packed his suitcase myself.”
“Jolly good of you. Well, I’ll be off. Same time, same day, next month. Isn’t your wife an American? What did she say?”
“Laughed her head off. You see my publisher turned down Mr Curley’s book on the war of American independence … Now I feel absolutely terrible.”
Unbeknown to Robert, the doctor waited until he was down the driveway safely inside his car before he began to laugh, which he did in bursts most of the way back to Swanage. The doctor had felt quite sorry for the American even if it did serve him right.
By the time Robert had carefully drafted a letter to Max Pearl asking him as a favour to Robert to think again about publishing Hank Curley’s book on the American revolution, the doctor was back in his surgery telling his nurse the story. By dinner time, it was halfway around Swanage.
* * *
The next day Robert took the Rover 14 to Corfe Castle and posted his penance letter to Max Pearl. Only then did he feel a little less guilty.
Walking across to the Greyhound to have a pint of beer he felt the weight lift off his shoulders.
“Frighten your guests to death,” said Barty Shead, the landlord who had pulled Robert’s first pint the day Robert had turned eighteen.
“Oh my God. It’s all over the county. Old Doctor Dorkin was pulling my leg.”
“Laughed myself all the way to his surgery. Nurse Shead told me the story on the phone. She’s my cousin. Never married did Marty.”
“But couldn’t he have died of fright?”
“Not without a dicky heart in the first place. Probably not even then. Now, right from the beginning Mr St Clair. Good stories like this don’t come often. This will keep the locals amused for a week and drinking my beer, bless ’em. American, you say he was. Fancy old Warren pulling that kind of stunt. Served the bugger right for pushing his nose into other people’s business. My old mother always told me to mind my own business. Now that’s good advice.”
* * *
While Robert was drinking his second beer in the Greyhound, in southern Africa, the horses were moving through the mopane forest. Last year’s leaves crackled under the hooves of the horses it was so dry underfoot. The rains were still a long month away for the riders in the sweltering heat of the Zambezi valley as the expedition moved away from the river deeper into Mozambique on their way to Nyasaland. They had crossed the Zambezi River one week after leaving Elephant Walk.
The only one of the three white men who was not bothered by the heat was twelve-year-old Tinus Oosthuizen, born into a family with three hundred years of ancestors in Africa. Tinus was having the time of his life. He was going to find his Uncle Harry and show the two men from England what Africa was all about. The day before while the black men under Tembo had built the raft to ferry the horses around the islands that dotted that part of the Zambezi River, Tinus had shot the eye out of an impala from two hundred yards and carried the carcass back into camp to feed themselves and the porters. Even Tembo had given him a faint smile of approval, having taught Tinus to shoot after his Uncle Harry stayed in England with his new wife.
The argument with his mother on Elephant Walk had lasted two days. Tinus had had to whine and plead with the two men leading the expedition to find Uncle Harry when they arrived on the farm to recruit Tembo to take them up Africa on horseback. The men had wanted Alfred to go with them but Alfred had long gone back into the bush. Tinus thought Alfred had gone off to find himself a wife, which was only sensible. Tembo had three wives and kept them on the farm. One day Tinus expected Alfred to come back with three wives, build each of them a round hut by the river, make a vegetable patch and brew maize beer for Alfred and his friends to get drunk on Saturday nights, like Tembo.
According to Tembo, they were going to find Uncle Harry as Tembo, in a dream, had spoken to his ancestors who had seen Uncle Harry beside a big, big river that was so big they could not see the other side, despite the ancestors being up in heaven. Uncle Harry was well and living with the tribe besides the river. Tembo said the ancestors had only seen Uncle Harry. Uncle Harry was now a God and living in the sam
e hut with the holy man who threw the bones and made everyone in the tribe do what they were told.
Tembo said he had had the same dream many times for a whole year so Uncle Harry was still alive, and Tinus was going to find him and bring him back to Elephant Walk to teach him how to fly the Handley Page, which was still in the shed with the tyres flat. Many times Tinus and Tembo had started the engine but neither of them knew how to fly the aeroplane. To stop it going off on its own they had tied the wings to the ground and left the tyres flat.
The row with his mother had only ended when his great-grandfather, who was as old as the hills, had said he should go and look for his Uncle Harry as great-grandfather loved Uncle Harry like the son he had never had, whatever that meant. Afterwards, Tinus thought, it a good thing great-grandfather had never had a son as his grandmother then joined in the row, two against one, and the next day he was on his horse with the rest of them, which was just as well. Even though the two new uncles had lived in the bush before, they knew nothing about what was going on. Only then had the dogs gone wild with the rest of them while his mother sat down and cried. Tinus thought, maybe his mother did not love Uncle Harry as much as the rest of them, which to him made sense. Uncle Harry was his mother’s brother and there were times when Tinus hated his elder sister Paula but not all the time. When Tinus had looked back from the saddle on his way out of the family compound with the rest of the expedition, Paula was holding one of his mother’s hands and his younger sister, Doris, the other. Just then, he had liked both his sisters and given them a wave.
Even as Tinus looked back at the river for the last time, he knew it was going to be a very long journey. If the ancestors could not see across the big, big river from up in heaven how much bush did they have to cross to find Uncle Harry?