To the Manor Born

by Peter Rimmer

  * * *

  Keppel Howland was worried about Ralph Madgwick. Even on the ship, Ralph had said little. Now in the saddle, he stared far ahead only seeing what Keppel suspected were the replays of pictures in his head. Many times Keppel had asked Ralph what he was thinking of and the answer was always the same: “Rebecca”. It was like travelling with a man whose spirit was still in America.

  On board the SS Corfe Castle, without being noticed, two pretty girls had tried to penetrate Ralph’s shield. The man who once raced his way through the bars and clubs of London never even looked at the girls. To Keppel, the friend he had been to school with and fought through a year of war in the trenches with, was emotionally dead, just waiting for the physical death to take him out of his misery. Trying to talk to him was a waste of time. The man refused to listen. To make any sign he had heard. Even the kid was better company and a lot more enthusiastic about the outcome based on Tembo’s dreams.

  So far there had been nothing. In Salisbury, they had picked up a Nyasa who spoke Chinyanga as his home language and a little Shona. Both were Inguni languages but as different as French and English with their common influence of Latin. Tembo and the man who called himself Parsons could communicate enough for Parsons to pass on the fact that no one he met on their journey had heard of four white men lost in the bush. After a year of Harry’s disappearance, there had been no word on the bush telegraph as they reached the southern tip of Lake Nyasaland at the end of September, the day after they crossed the Zambezi. They had passed through the small capital, Blantyre, of the British Protectorate of Nyasaland on their way to the great lake where Harry had been due to make a landing in his hybrid according to the flight plan he had filed in England. Keppel had found the man in the capital who had been written to by Harry to supply the plane with petrol. The weather-beaten Englishman who looked to have been in the tropics too long for his health had cashed Harry’s cheque and waited with the petrol drums at the lake for a week.

  When the expedition had reached the lake later in the day to make camp, they even found the petrol drums still full of fuel a year after being dumped but no one had heard of the plane or a crash further north.

  Instead of riding up the shore, Keppel booked them on the passenger boat that sailed up the lake. The boat had space at the back for the horses and the expedition’s equipment. It was hotter than hell. The mosquitoes on the shore were worse than the Zambezi valley. The captain of what he called a ferry said out in the lake it was free of mosquitoes.

  The first report posted to Glen Hamilton in Denver from Blantyre was dated the 30 September 1929. Keppel wondered how many weeks it would take for the Royal Mail to reach America.

  “It’s got a long way to go, ducks,” the postmistress from the East End of London had promised. The big, blowsy woman was a surprise to Keppel in the middle of Africa. “Don’t right know how long. First, it has to go to Salisbury in Rhodesia by horse and then to Beira in Mozambique by train. After that, your guess is as good as mine is. Mind you, it’ll get there. It’s the Royal Mail. The Royal Mail always gets through.”

  With nothing about Harry to say in his report, Keppel had sent a brief cable saying the report was on its way. Luckily the expedition was proving cheaper than planned for in America. Even if Keppel only arrived back in America with his diary, Glen Hamilton would have recouped his money. Just the idea of a Stanley–Livingstone type rescue mission had generated enough interest for the story to be syndicated.

  As Keppel looked across the water with only mountains visible on the other side, Tembo’s dream began to take on a life of its own.

  * * *

  The water in the lake was crystal clear with small, colourful fish darting in and out of the swaying weed that grew near the shore. For the first time since leaving England, Ralph Madgwick began to feel alive. The warm water was smooth on his suntanned skin, the site of the shoals of fish a happy surprise as he swam above them peering down through the surface of the water.

  Back on shore at the camp, the sky was blood red in the west where the sun was sinking behind the mountains. Near the big fire, the mosquitoes left him more or less alone. The tsetse had stopped attacking them at sunset and sunrise once they had climbed out of the Zambezi valley. The shores of the lake were free of tsetse.

  Tembo and the porters had caught Nile perch in the lake and were cooking the fish over the open fire. Behind them in the mopane forest, Ralph could hear hyena.

  Very slowly, without Ralph realising what was happening to him, his depression began to lift. The depression that had gripped Ralph ever since he walked out of Uncle Wallace’s office had thrown his whole life to the wind.

  A lion roared just behind them bringing Ralph right back to the present, his .375 at the ready. The ferry captain who had joined them for their company gave a short laugh.

  “That’s old Simba. Smelled the fish. Couldn’t kill a bloody fly he’s so old. One day I’ll have to shoot the poor bastard. Now, Mr Madgwick, won’t you have a little of my whisky? Looks like Simba woke you up. Best thing in life is to get drunk with a stranger and tell him all your woes. You’re a young man. What’s the matter? Is it love…? Ah, yes… Love… Whisky, young man. Have a whisky, the only love of my life I can still remember… You planning to stay in Africa for the rest of your life?”

  “I rather think so. Thank you. I’ll have a drop of your whisky.”

  “Splendid. Now we can all get started. Properly started. Drinking with a sober man is a terrible thing for an Irishman. Indeed it is.”

  “How long does it take to sail up the lake?”

  “As long as you like.”

  * * *

  The next morning they embarked on the Mary Magdalen and headed up the long lake of Tanganyika. They were the only passengers on the boat. For Captain O’Leary, it mattered little if the boat sailed or not. The old boat was paid for. The cabin just as comfortable on the lake as tied to the old jetty. He was going nowhere for the rest of his life.

  O’Leary had paid ten pounds for the boat he liked to call a ferry. He had bought the boat from a drunk. There were no papers. No record of how the wooden boat came to be on a lake in central Africa. Looking at the hull, O’Leary could see the boat had been made in four pieces each the length of an ox wagon. The heavy diesel engine had been dropped into the boat later. The old masts were still in place, no one having bothered to take them out. The sails had long ago rotted away in the tropical heat.

  There was good fish in the lake, game on the shore and no one asked him for taxes. Singleton, the governor’s ADC brought the whisky when he visited for a weekend every month. There was nothing else to pay, Singleton was O’Leary’s only friend. A good drinking friend. Sometimes they talked of Ireland. When drunk Singleton talked of his wife who lived in England with the children. O’Leary had never had a wife or children so far as anyone had told him. He and Singleton had both been too old for the war. Singleton had reached the rank of acting major at the end of the Boer War which was how he came to Africa. Singleton liked the isolation and the freedom from his nagging wife who had married him when she thought Singleton had prospects just out of Sandhurst. The governor had been at a minor public school with Singleton and did not like his wife who lived on the family estate in England with their children. All the governor’s children were girls who had never married. None of them liked Africa or their father. The governor and Singleton had much in common. O’Leary, looking at the governor and his ADC was glad he never married. Getting drunk once a month with Singleton convinced O’Leary he had not wasted his life. In a perfect world, O’Leary would have liked more whisky. Only when a safari wanted to go up the lake to shoot lion and elephant did O’Leary have any money. Then he drank solidly for days in Blantyre until his money was finished when he went back to the boat.

  Sometimes the black people wanted to go up the lake. He took them when there were enough to cover the cost of the diesel. O’Leary was paid in long-legged chickens that he sold in Blantyre.


  If the Mary Magdalen could run on petrol, the dumped drums by the lake would long have been finished. Twice O’Leary had tried to move the drums up on to a wagon on his own but the forty-four-gallon drums were too heavy for one man. O’Leary had thought of asking the black men to help him steal the drums but that would have been crossing the line. Whites, however poor and in need of a bottle of whisky, had responsibilities to keep up appearances of doing right. All the blacks knew the drums belonged to another white who had never come. The abandoned drums were a small legend and would have been stolen, except only white men bought petrol.

  Strangely, O’Leary knew he was happy on the boat in the sun. That his years by the lake were the happiest years of his life. Mostly, he never had to think which was good. Only on the boat the first day out did he discover what the men he was ferrying had come to do on the lake. They had come to look for Englishmen who had flown out from England and never arrived. O’Leary suspected they were the same Englishmen who owned the drums of petrol he had tried to steal. Then he got to thinking as he steered the old boat up the lake.

  * * *

  It was more like something in the ether. Spoken of so obtusely by the blacks that O’Leary knew it did not exist. Slowly, months ago, the wind blew it in. The story. Vague. Ethereal. Not real. A feeling more than a fact. And like so many things about God no one was sure whether it was true. Only those with faith were sure there was a god. Only the believers. O’Leary had little faith by this late stage of his life.

  It was the Celt in O’Leary that made the hair on the back of his neck seem to stand on end every time he heard the blacks whispering the story. It was one of the quirks in O’Leary that had made him learn Chinyanga… The gods had come down from heaven, sent by the ancestors, he overheard. The gods from heaven were among the people. Far to the north. So far away no one knew where they were. Only that the gods had come down from the heaven to be among men. Strange gods. Who looked like men but were not. Gods with great power. Gods who could fly in the sky.

  At the thought of telling Keppel Howland what was floating in the ether, O’Leary had to cross himself and say not a word. O’Leary was more superstitious than religious. The expedition did not carry whisky in their baggage which was lucky. The little people who were part of O’Leary’s existence from the past would have been angry with him for telling such a lie. God was up in his heaven not floating in the sky. Without whisky, O’Leary hoped he would be able to keep his mouth shut.

  * * *

  As the sun went down red into the lake the hairs rose on the nape of his neck warning him again. The blacks were heathens. What did they know about God…? Steering away from the sunset into the night, O’Leary knew he had been an old African hand for too long. Even the superstitions of the black people were getting him. In many ways, he was becoming like them.

  * * *

  When he stopped the boat and dropped anchors for the night, a sickle moon had come up. The symbol of doom. Looking up at the night sky, at the moon and three layers of stars studding the black heavens, O’Leary was certain something bad was going to happen. Shuddering in the heat he went down to his cabin. There was nothing more for him to do. On the Mary Magdalen, people cooked their own food. It was the way it was done.

  All night O’Leary tossed and turned in his bunk waiting for the dawn and the swim in the lake that would cleanse his soul of the bad spirits floating in the ether.

  When he slept, he dreamt of the moon so thin it wanted to cut off his head.

  * * *

  Ralph Madgwick woke to the sound of the hobbled horses shuffling on the lower deck. The first moment brought panic not knowing where he was. The silence was like the prelude to going over the top of the trench in a predawn attack when the artillery barrage had just stopped. The smell of horse manure was sweet on the air and comforting. There were no live horses in the front line. Ralph relaxed.

  Lying on his back on the upper deck where it was cool, Ralph marvelled at the depth of the heavens above and knew where he was. The moon heralded the change in the equinox giving little light to the sky and making the stars brilliant. Only the planets did not twinkle. Ralph found and traced the Southern Cross to find the north and the south: a sailor could steer by the stars in the sky from the time of the ancients. Ralph looked but there were no shooting stars in the heavens. The last time he and Keppel had seen a shooting star it was up on their eyrie, the cave that looked out from the top of the escarpment over the Zambezi valley. The next day from a clear blue sky had come Harry Brigandshaw in the Handley Page. In the back cockpit standing up holding the side was a small boy. The same small boy still sleeping soundly on the deck next to Ralph, the boy who was now twelve years old.

  The lap of lake water on the old wooden hull mingled softly with the sound of the horses. Ralph hoped there was enough fodder for the horses in the morning. To be strong the horses needed to eat a great deal of hay. The hay was in bales tied with wire. If they ran out of hay they would go into shore to graze the salted horses they hoped would be immune to the infectious bite of the tsetse fly.

  When Ralph thought of Rebecca, for the first time since being told by Uncle Wallace to leave America, he could see her smiling face with the soft brown eyes and not sink into depression. Instead, the memory made him smile. From such a great distance, they could still smile at each other in the night. He knew he would never hold her again. Knew he would never go back to England. If he were lucky, he would find an old boat like Captain O’Leary and spend the rest of his life on his own. Being alone with his memories was better than having other people around and have to look at their happiness.

  The night looking over the rails of the boat was quiet of bird call or the bark of an animal. There were no mosquitoes so far out on the lake. For as long as he could keep himself awake, Ralph lay on his back looking up at the stars smiling at Rebecca.

  * * *

  In the first light of dawn, Ralph threw the rope ladder over the side and dived into the water. He had been told there were no crocodiles in the middle of the lake. That the water was too deep… He was naked. Had been all night in the tropical heat. As he came up to the surface, water cascaded down from his long hair that hung over his face. Water had never felt so good. Life still had a chance. They could take away Rebecca but they would never be able to take away the memory locked in his mind.

  Striking out away from the stationary boat, Ralph revelled in the soft touch of clean water.

  Later, floating on his back and moving his arms and legs to keep afloat in the freshwater, he looked back at the Mary Magdalen. The old captain was leaning on the rail watching him from a hundred yards away. Ralph waved. The old man turned his back. Ralph could smell the old man’s first pipe of the day. Ralph felt the man’s sadness from right across the water. The rest of them were still asleep or lying on the deck. The porters were down with the horses. He could hear them sluicing the deck. On the opposite lower deck, someone must have been hauling up buckets of lake water. Ralph continued to swim around for a while.

  When he reached the side of the boat, he climbed up the rope ladder. It was already getting hot. Captain O’Leary went and fetched him a mug of coffee as Ralph pulled on his trousers over his underpants. Only when the sun began to scorch his skin would he put on a long-sleeved shirt. They had been back in Africa long enough for his tan to come back. His skin was no longer red and raw as it had been the first months with Keppel and Alfred soon after the war.

  Ralph smiled at the captain as he took the mug of coffee. Their eyes met. The old bastard knew what he was thinking without saying a word. There had once been a woman in the old Irishman’s life. A long time ago. Living alone wasn’t so bad after all. The captain seemed about to say something and changed his mind, turned and walked back to the engine room in the centre of the boat. The engine drove the propeller down a long shaft. The quiet was broken by the sound of it. They were underway as the captain pulled in the small anchors that were not necessary for the tide-less centre of
the lake. Or so it seemed to Ralph.

  Ralph found he was hungry and went to look for the cold fish they had cooked the previous night, before coming on board. Afterwards, Ralph went to check the horses. They all had dark soft eyes as big as chicken eggs that spoke of love. Ralph’s own horse whickered when she saw him. The fodder was almost finished: they must have been eating through the night by the light of the stars.

  * * *

  By ten o’clock, the reflection of the sun off the surface of the water was so strong none of them could look at the lake near the boat as it chugged slowly forward. Again, Ralph thought the captain was going to say something important. Above there were white puffs of cloud in the powder blue sky. A pair of ducks were flying fast just above the water. Ralph could hear them but knew better than to look and sear his eyeballs. Young Tinus was hopefully trawling a line for tiger fish. Keppel was sitting in the shade of the small cabin. The porters had put up the canvas to shade the horses and themselves. Tembo was scratching his crotch, which reminded Ralph of his own heat rash that had cooled earlier in the water when he swam. There was something very satisfying to Ralph about a man scratching his crotch when there were no women about.

  Ralph began to wonder what Rebecca was doing in America. Then he wondered what everyone else was doing including Rosie Prescott and his Uncle Wallace. They had all probably forgotten him by now which was just as well. Then Ralph too began to scratch his crotch which was the worst thing to do for heat rash.

  Ralph was hungry again. The cold fish had gone. There was cold venison somewhere. He stopped scratching himself and went to look.

  * * *