The brigandshaw chronicl.., p.116
The Brigandshaw Chronicles Box Set 2, page 116
part #4 of The Brigandshaw Chronicles Series
Without saying a word, the girl got up from her seat and walked away down the airport concourse.
“She thinks we’re spinning a line.”
“Why don’t we get ourselves a cup of coffee?”
“Much better idea, Robert. We’ll go get ourselves a drink in the bar. This is a celebration. This is a family reunion. If we get drunk it don’t matter how long Harry takes a-coming. Take all day, for all I care. Just came up to meet Harry. You got anything better to do?”
“Not at the moment, George,” Robert smiled, getting to his feet.
“What they done to you, Bob?”
“The Germans blew off my right foot in the war. I stump a bit but I still get around. Amazing what doctors do with prosthetics these days. If you listen carefully you can hear the new foot clicking when I walk.”
On the plane, still half an hour out of New York, an oil seal in the right engine having been replaced was doing nothing for Harry Brigandshaw’s nerves, Harry was tapping his fingers on his right knee, watched out of the corner of his eye by Tinus Oosthuizen.
“You don’t like flying, Uncle Harry. I never knew.”
“I like flying when I am in control. How can they replace an oil seal halfway through a flight? Pilot should have sensed the seal about to blow. They’re just taxi drivers, not pilots. Well-paid taxi drivers relying on the ground staff instead of themselves. In France I worked in partnership with my mechanic to stop a problem before it happened. Always look for trouble. Remember that, Tinus. You can’t land in the sea and repair an oil leak.”
“Why don’t you ask the pilot if you can sit in the cockpit?” asked Tinus.
“They don’t want an old man telling them what to do. Anyway, he’s the captain. It’s his job to get us to New York. I hate being late. I hate being flown. I hate what’s going on in the world. And why are you smirking?”
“We’ll be landing soon, Uncle Harry. Genevieve will be at the airport too. Our rooms are booked in her hotel. I’m excited.”
“That smirk said something else.”
“Relax, Uncle Harry. You’re even making me a little nervous. I never think what could happen when I’m flying.”
“Robert said he’d meet the plane. Have you made up your mind?”
“When we get home. I want to walk the bush alone for a couple of days. Then I’ll know what to do with my life.”
“Do you think I should put money into Holy Knight?”
“Films are a gamble that usually lose. Like putting on a play. As your financial advisor, with a brand new degree in philosophy, politics and economics, you’d be safe in government bonds, guaranteed by the Bank of England. But what the hell. The first film made Hollingsworth and Rosenzweig a fortune. Have a piece of it, Uncle Harry, if Genevieve and Gregory do the film. I’d guess it’s just as much the actors who bring the crowds as the film. Why do some people photograph and film better than others? I’ve known Genevieve for too long not to see what’s going on. But if anything, I’d put my money on Gregory and Genevieve, not the film. They both make people want to be like them. Everyone wants them as lovers. The boys and girls who never date can have a perfect fantasy. It makes them feel better about themselves after they’ve seen one of their films. As if they were part of it. Hero and heroine for a day. Better than reading a book as they don’t need the same imagination as when they have to picture Robert’s words. On the screen, there it is. Gregory is the knight and Genevieve the perfect lady. Exactly as they are. You don’t have to think, just sit back in your cinema seat and enjoy. If I had any money I’d put it on Genevieve and Gregory.”
“Tinus, you are biased. I think we are starting our descent. He’s been wiggling the flaps a couple of times. Well, here we come, America. The country will never be the same. Do you know, I really do feel different. Europe is suddenly so far away. All its problems left behind.”
“Maybe I’d better have a look at America,” said Tinus. “Do they recognise an Oxford degree?”
“When Cecil Rhodes made his will and laid the foundation for his scholarship he put America in the Trust as a beneficiary. All members of the Commonwealth and America are allocated Rhodes Scholarships. Rhodes still thought of America as part of the empire. The renegade child that went on its own. Oh yes, they’ll recognise a Rhodes Scholar. And your degree from Oxford. Why ever not?”
“I might just have a word with Gerry Hollingsworth.”
“Does this have more to do with Genevieve?”
“I’m young, Uncle Harry. Risk is in my blood.”
“And not in mine anymore.”
“It would be if you put money into the film.”
“And you stayed near to Genevieve in America to look after my investment! Better think about that when you are all alone walking the bush. Elephant Walk needs looking after. Ralph Madgwick is going to want his own farm one day to leave to his children. I wonder if Jacob knows Rebeccas’s pregnant again? How strange it is we know more about his family than Jacob. I’d hate that. Family to me is the most important part of my life, nephew.”
“You can still have a family in America if you start your own.”
“I was right. We’re going down slowly. My ears are popping.”
“So are mine. Sometimes it gives me a violent headache that only goes when I land. Welcome to America, Uncle Harry.”
Tinus, smiling, noticed his uncle had stopped tapping his right knee with his fingers. Then the butterflies ran wild in his stomach at the thought of seeing Genevieve again so soon.
It was not as easy as before for Genevieve to be out in public alone. Dressed in a headscarf and a large pair of dark glasses that caused odd looks but no recognition, she had seen and overheard her Uncle Robert long before he went off to the bar with the older man he picked up sitting in the next seat. She had seen the young girl put her nose in the air as she walked down the concourse, and hoped she’d trip. Genevieve knew talking to Uncle Robert would blow her disguise, his strong British accent announcing to the world her presence for everyone at the airport to hear.
Like Tinus, though unknown to her at present, she was nervous, wondering how they would both feel seeing each other again, even after a month. What they had between them was something neither of them spoke of. The fear that made her tremble with cold in the afternoon heat was going to be told in a few minutes. Tinus was finished with England and going home to Elephant Walk, their paths never again to cross.
“This time I’m going to seduce him and to hell with it,” she whispered to herself, pulling the headscarf further forward to cover her ears. “That’ll make it or break it.” Standing next to a pillar, trying to look like the rest of them, she listened to the loudspeaker announcing the flight had landed, her last chance to get what she wanted almost at hand.
Moments later Uncle Robert stumped his way out of the bar with his new friend as everyone moved to the gate where the passengers from the new flight would come out into the concourse after collecting their baggage.
“How are you, Uncle Robert?” she said, putting her index finger to his lips.
“How long have you been here?”
“As long as you.”
“This is Cousin George from Virginia. Harry’s Cousin George. Thinks Hastings Court belongs to him. He’s the new baronet after Harry’s grandfather died in Rhodesia leaving no sons. A bit like your father, I suppose. Have you ever thought, Genevieve, that were you a boy you’d inherit the St Clair family title?”
“Only if my parents had been married, Uncle Robert. But yes, I have. Now your Richard will inherit after my father dies.”
“Only if I’m dead first. How is he? How’s Mother?”
“He’s fallen in love with the pigs and cows. Smithers is miserable in the London flat on his own. I worry about both of them, the valet and the master I suppose you’d call them in a book. How long will it take for them to come through?”
“Heaven knows. Nobody here tells me anything.”
“Gran misses grandfather and doesn’t much care anymore. I don’t want to get old.”
Cousin George, struck dumb, stood looking at Genevieve, now no longer wearing her dark glasses, without saying a word. The girl who had ignored Robert came up to her all excited with a small notebook and pen in her hand.
“May I have your autograph?” she asked obsequiously.
“No, you can’t,” said Genevieve, delighted at the chance of getting her own back. “You were rude to Cousin George and my uncle.”
“What a bitch.” Genevieve smiled at how quickly people changed when they couldn’t get what they wanted.
“Not as big a bitch as you, darling,” Genevieve said in the cockney accent she had only known as a child.
“Well, I never.”
“No, you never will.”
With a big grin Genevieve once again watched the girl walk away, this time with everyone watching.
“What was that all about?” asked her uncle.
“Women talk. Now, what were we saying?”
“Half an hour. Takes them half an hour to get their luggage. All that speed of flying gets down to a five minute slow walk from the plane to the airport building, to stand around looking at each other waiting for their luggage. They take them off the plane one by one.”
“Buy me a drink. I need one. We can watch for Uncle Harry and Tinus through the glass partition from the bar.”
“It would be my pleasure, Miss Genevieve,” said Cousin George crooking his arm.
2
The next day in the kitchen of Abercrombie Place, Vida could see no difference between herself and a household servant. She was not one thing nor the other, neither paid housekeeper nor wife. The scullery maid was cutting the vegetables while Vida did the cooking, the only difference being she would get to eat the food sitting with the guests at the dining room table, all of them not knowing where she fitted in the picture or whether there was a picture to fit in. It was her last throw of the dice.
For years she had watched the Jews being pushed out of Germany. Their possessions stolen, their lives only spared if they had money to buy their way to another life. Palestine, being a British Protectorate, had shut its doors, turning back the ships laden with refugees fleeing Germany for their lives. Only America was still the promised land. America was where people wrote back, urging their Jewish relations and friends to sell what they had and cut their losses.
America was where Vida had set her sights, and in 1936, eighteen months before she met Jacob Rosenzweig with a forged introduction, she had begun to make up a story that would carry her through the rest of her life and, hopefully, make her rich or at least not live from hand to mouth, frightened of her future. Young and poor was one thing, she told herself as she had planned her future. Old and poor without any family quite out of the question. Someone, somewhere, had even said to Vida: ‘The Lord helps those who help themselves’.
First she had laid out her assets in her mind. She was thirty-two years old. Prettier than most. And, by the luck of spending two years in England, looking after the children of a Jewish family in Kent, she spoke English fluently, even if she spoke with a strong German accent.
To get herself into America Vida knew she had to be Jewish with a hard luck story that fitted the American image of the oppressed Jews in Europe. The first part was to concoct a story that would make the Americans feel sorry for her, to make them pour out their sympathy to a young woman left all alone. The Jewish underground in Berlin whispered of rich men in America who used their wealth to bring the best of the Jews out of Germany, young people with education or old people with money.
With little time for anyone to check credentials, Vida used her friend who worked as a printer to make up her degree and give her the appearance on paper of having more than a poor secondary education. Payment for that was cheap; all she had to do was sleep with him which for Vida with Kurt was a pleasure.
Telling her family, none of whom were Jewish, the family having emigrated from Lebanon in the previous century, that she was going back to England as a child nurse to younger friends of her family in Kent, she had booked her passage to America. Even her Wagner surname was false, the name she said she had taken to hide her Jewish ancestry from the Nazis.
By the time Vida landed third class in New York, having used herself and her mother’s jewellery as payment, she was the epitome of a Nazi victim of hate, her family dead, most likely because of her father’s political beliefs, no one knowing what had happened to them. Only by luck had Vida avoided being sent away. It was the luck of speaking English that made her story plausible. She could explain herself. Make the Americans understand. Make people cry at her story, and, most important, as she had always understood, make people feel sorry for such a terrible story and want to give her help.
Finding Sir Jacob Rosenzweig had been the easy part of her journey. Inveigling her way into his life only a little more difficult. He was lonely, past the age he thought possible to indulge in female comfort. Even Miss Cohen had missed what was coming when Vida walked into the Manhattan office of the Rosenzweig bank of New York and given the secretary her letter of introduction from a well-known Jewish family in Berlin who, soon after giving her the letter, had unfortunately been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, their business and factory confiscated, something Vida was well aware of when Kurt concocted the letter on the Jew’s forged company letterhead.
Dressed in black, Vida was shown into the chairman’s office. Smiling, she had begun the process that had led her to the kitchen preparing for the first of what Vida hoped would be many more dinner parties, and a trust fund, if not a ring on her finger if the old goat could be persuaded to divorce his wife. She could still hear his happy words of astonishment the night she seduced him.
“You look so much younger than forty, my dear.”
Forty, she thought, sounded just right, the lie supported by the white streak in her black hair, a pigmentation flaw since birth. If he had known she was thirty-two he might have questioned her authenticity and smelled a rat.
“I’m going to change for dinner, Amy.”
So far so good, she told herself as she left the kitchen to dress for dinner, the food certain to be perfect, her father a chef in one of Berlin’s top restaurants.
“It’s all in the preparation, Amy. Buying the right food. Being organised in the kitchen. You can’t make good food out of bad ingredients.”
They were going to serve themselves from the buffet when Amy brought the trays of food to the long dining room. Soon after moving into the apartment at Abercrombie Place Vida had fired Jacob Rosenzweig’s cook.
“Why waste money? I can cook as well as Mabel. Never waste money, I say. My mother, bless her soul, was a stickler for avoiding waste.”
All day alone in the flat, the old bag might have found out the truth. By then, the old goat, as she thought of the tall, wiry Jacob Rosenzweig, was besotted. Mabel was asked to pack her bags and given six months’ pay.
“It’s always better to be generous,” she had smiled into his face, sitting on his bony old knees while Jacob sat on the couch.
“Now we are alone,” he had said with a boyish smile.
To Vida’s surprise for such an old man, the old goat was permanently horny, a word she used in her mind, picked up in England from the father of the children she looked after during the day, and the man who had told her money was more important than happiness, that without money everyone found life hard and sad. That money was not the root of all evil but the power to do what she wanted. It had worked for the father of the children in her care, now it was going to work for her. With real money she could tell the whole damn lot of them to go to hell.
Not only was it the first dinner party, it was the first time the dining room was being used. With his new lease on life Jacob had bought the apartment next door, broken down the common wall and joined the two together. A woman half his age was not going to be prepared to sit in the lounge looking at an old man wearing slippers. She needed to be entertained in the best way possible, by entertaining others. What was the point of having so much money, he told himself, if it sat in his own bank? With Vida by his side, the Rosenzweig apartment at Abercrombie Place was going to be known the length and breadth of Manhattan Island as a mecca of entertainment, where the best in film, literature and business came together to express their views.
With Harry Brigandshaw in the offing and the renovation complete, their first introduction to the world of entertaining was made in heaven, even if that young star of film, Gregory L’Amour, was out of town; there was always a second opportunity to fill in that gap, Jacob told himself happily. When Jacob told Vida Genevieve was coming to dinner the light of his life’s jaw had dropped making Jacob feel so good he burst out with a peal of happy laughter, something the walls of the apartment had not heard in abandon since Rebecca ran away back to England and on to Rhodesia to marry Ralph Madgwick.
Adding to a film star, a Hollywood producer, a New York publisher and a famous fighter pilot, he knew buying the next door apartment had been worth every cent. The recently purchased dining room table that had originated in a French salon during the eighteenth century seated twelve people in considerable comfort, a long beautiful piece of mahogany that stretched the length of the two original rooms, the connecting wall having been removed by Jacob’s builder.
At one end he would hold court. At the other end would sit Vida in all her beauty with her beautiful foreign accent to charm the guests. Like a good game of tennis, they would play the brilliant conversation between themselves up and down the ornately decorated table spread with the new silverware from Christie’s, bought for him in London without one word reaching Aaron his eldest son to be reported to Aaron’s mother and Jacob’s wife. Everything was going so smoothly Jacob felt like hugging himself.
