The brigandshaw chronicl.., p.157
The Brigandshaw Chronicles Box Set 2, page 157
part #4 of The Brigandshaw Chronicles Series
Feeling slightly nauseous, sitting in the sun under a picture hat decorated with yellow daisies, she hoped Ruthy was not running riot among the rest of the guests’ children in the big room at the top of the house Mrs Hollingsworth had given over as a crèche. Two of Mrs Mendez’s cousins from Mexico had the job of watching the children.
“I love Ruthy, Will. Don’t get me wrong. But this is bliss. We have three whole hours to ourselves. Having the money to pay a nanny is something I dream about.”
“All in good time. When we get home, we’ll employ a nanny and you can come to the office on your own.”
“What about Ruthy?”
“She’s all right now, isn’t she?”
“She’ll be all right. It’s the other girls’ pigtails I worry about. Who’s the woman in the pink dress with an inch of make-up covering her face?”
“Don’t be rude. That’s Esther, Genevieve’s mother. As a young woman when she seduced Merlin I’m told she was a very striking woman.”
“Didn’t he seduce her?”
“I wasn’t there. Have you ever seen so many people at a wedding? Lucky they have a big garden. Where’s young Harry and Bergit? They’re not with Janet and Horatio.”
“I believe they were taken to the beach, under supervision. Said weddings were boring. Isn’t America wonderful? The climate. The people. All the money. Everyone here looks stinking rich.”
“They are, darling. I’ll have to mingle at the reception. If you get lost tag on to Harry and Tina. The more story I dig up on the wedding the more money we make.”
“Don’t worry about me when you want to work. Never stop a man working, I say. It’s all the familiar faces. Familiar from screen. Never seen any of them in the flesh before. This has been the best honeymoon of my life.”
“You’re only meant to have one.”
“Then I’ll treasure it to my dying day, lover.”
Gregory L’Amour watched the proceedings with the same emotion as William Smythe; he was over her. The girl he had brought to the wedding, trying hard to get her face in every photograph, was ten years younger than Genevieve. One of Gerry Hollingsworth’s rising stars. With all Gregory’s heart he hoped the bride and groom would be happy for the rest of their lives. They had had a good chat, as Tinus called it, the previous day. Genevieve had gone off with Tina Brigandshaw to the shops for something.
“It doesn’t end here, Greg,” Tinus had said. “I never once flew in combat without your talisman. Each time we made contact with enemy aircraft I rubbed the rabbit’s foot. Look, you can see there’s very little fur left.”
“I’m glad. Back then I was jealous, buddy. Jealous of the way she looked at you. Jealous of you as a fighter pilot. Now I know I was lucky not to go to war. Too many people didn’t come back from Europe and the Pacific. What was it really like?”
“Frightening. Sad. Yes, sometimes exciting. Like a boxer when they hold up his hand. Except the opponent gets up off the floor in a boxing match. You never forget killing someone. My cousin died in a Lancaster. So many friends in a war that stretched over five long years. As terrible as the bombs on Japan seem now, they will save lives. If America has to invade the Japanese islands, millions will be killed. American and Japanese. Somehow man has got to find a way of arguing without losing his temper and using his fists. Once we were the three musketeers. You remember André Cloete when you came with Genevieve to Oxford? I miss him so much. School. Cricket. Oxford. Rowing on the Thames and the Isis. Janusz is going to be best man tomorrow. I asked him not to mention André in his speech. Once I sat on a stone inside a magic circle on Headley Heath and asked all the gods for protection. Just to be safe. All the time I was holding your rabbit’s foot. Please remain friends. You will always have a big part of our hearts. Find a good girl who loves you, Greg, and not your fame.”
Then the ceremony was over. People rising from their chairs, moving towards the marquee and the drinks. Flash bulbs going off a few feet from his face temporarily blinding his eyes.
“Did you love her, Greg?” asked the girl, surprising him with her perception.
“Oh yes. I loved her. You can’t fool the camera lens all of the time. Now I love her as a friend. She’s giving up the movies. Maybe stage acting after she has had her children. They are going to have three, so she tells me. What we have left, she and I, is our chemistry on screen which will last forever if they replay old movies. They’re going to live in New York when they come back from Mexico. For their honeymoon Tinus has found them an island off the coast with just one thatched house and no other people. Won’t tell anyone where. She wants to be Mrs Oosthuizen, no longer Genevieve.”
“Does the press know she’s retiring?”
“They don’t want to make a fuss. Just let it happen. The orchestra is striking up. Anything over twelve instruments, I’m informed, is an orchestra not a band. I call it a swing band. Let’s go and dance.”
With a certain amount of self-satisfaction, Tina Brigandshaw watched the proceedings sitting at the top table, a long series of interconnected tables covered in one long, white tablecloth, two away from the groom. From where she sat, the dance floor was swinging, the guests glad to get out of the sun and shake a leg. The fact the wedding she had planned so carefully cost a small fortune had never entered her head. Harry had paid for the wedding with a small fraction of the profit he made from the Tender Meat Company supplying tinned food to the Allied armies around the world. She had stinted on nothing. The best florist for the flowers. The best caterer for the food. A wine connoisseur recommended by Gerry Hollingsworth for drinks. The smart little wedding they had given Mary Ross and her plumber on the lawns of Hastings Court paled into nothing compared to the raucous opulence in front of her.
For the first time in years, Tina felt she was doing something worthwhile, glowing in the warmth of all the attention, the reflected attention, she admitted to herself, directed at the star of the show, Genevieve. William Smythe had promised to mention her by name as the well-known Mrs Brigandshaw from Hastings Court in the English county of Surrey who planned the sumptuous wedding attended by so many Hollywood stars. For the first time in her life, Tina felt she had personally arrived. If only her children, left at boarding school in England, could now see her sitting with the stars.
Even the upset of watching Tinus and Janusz in their RAF uniforms had lasted through the Reverend Thackeray’s ceremony, a man of God who impressed her immensely. Never before had Tina met a famous priest, one as equally recognisable to the press as the stars. With all the publicity in the English papers, the old families in Surrey who looked at her down their noses would have to think again, accept her in English society despite the fact she was raised in a railway cottage, her father a porter at the time she was born. Now, with the biggest wedding in America for many a year swirling around her, she was satisfied.
“Isn’t it all wonderful?” she said to Cousin George sitting on her right, Harry on her left smiling more than she had seen him do since Anthony’s death.
“Mixing with the rich and famous, I’d call it. My wife never seen nothing like this before. You done a job fit for a queen. Pity her father didn’t come. Like to have shaken hands with a real-life baron. Never done that before, despite me being a real life baronet under all my American. This band can play real swing. Where’d you get them, Tina? Come on Thelma, you and I are going to dance.”
Getting up, moving back his chair, Cousin George bowed from the waist to his wife, pulled back her chair and offered her his hand.
“Can you dance, George?”
“Let’s go find out. There are still things you don’t know about George. All these young good-looking people make me feel a young man with his beautiful wife.”
“What’s got into you?”
“The wedding, Thelma. Weddings make me smile.”
Harry Brigandshaw, watching with pleasure the happiness between Cousin George and Thelma, was thinking how different his life could have been had his great-grandfather come to America instead of his younger brother. That way, Harry surmised, he would have been an American. Had he been twenty years younger he might have considered living in America, a compromise between England and Africa for Tina.
“Would you have liked to live in America, Tina?”
“Oh yes. There’s none of the class nonsense in America.”
“I think there is. Here it’s just money, not who your father was. People always drift into company where they feel most comfortable.”
“What would we do with Hastings Court?”
“Or Elephant Walk?”
“You’re not harping back on that one, Harry. We’ve been through all that.”
“It’s always in the back of my mind. It gets into your blood.”
“Never got into mine.”
“Seems to have got into Frank’s. The war in Europe’s been over for months and not a word from him. Last letter from Ralph Madgwick said Frank’s hunting in the Zambezi Valley.”
“I read the letter, Harry.”
“Sorry, darling. Just it doesn’t look like he’s coming home in a hurry. Do you mind?”
“The children should live their own lives, whatever we say. Can you imagine us as grandparents? Beth’s going to be married first. She’s very beautiful. They grow up so quickly. She was a bit torn in coming to America but I think staying at home and having a bit of freedom from us was really what she wanted. Dorian and Kim will be out of boarding school before we can blink.”
“What does Beth want to do? I’ve asked her. All she says is to enjoy herself. Twenty-one next year. Key of the door. So many of the men she would have married died in the war.”
“Please, Harry. Don’t remind me.”
“I’m sorry. Would you like to dance, Tina? Just look at Cousin George. There’s more to him than meets the eye.”
“Would you live in America, Harry?”
“If it would make you happy.”
“And make you miserable. Hard enough to keep you in England. Come on. Let’s shake a leg. I hate the speeches. Do we have to have them?”
“You are lucky not to have to give one. Just me. Janusz as best man. Tinus as the groom. It’s called tradition. They both look nervous.”
“Do you like giving speeches?”
“No one does. Especially at weddings. The trick is to make them laugh once and sit down. Barnaby’s enjoying himself.”
“Of course he is,” snapped Tina. “The place is crawling in young girls. Just look at him. That one’s young enough to be his daughter.”
Sighing to himself, having brought up two subjects he should not have done, Harry put out his hand to his wife having pulled back her chair. Then he led her onto the wooden dance floor in the middle of the marquee.
They all had a small table to themselves next to the third pole that held up the tent. William and Betty Smythe, Horatio and Janet Wakefield, Gillian Kannberg playing the part of the lone dutiful wife waiting for her husband to be released from a Japanese prison. On Tina Brigandshaw’s scale of importance, William thought, none of them ranked very high. There were so many newsmen at the wedding, two more from England made little impression.
Arthur Bumley of the Daily Mirror in London had asked William to report on the British prisoners to be released from the Japanese prisons. And take Mrs Kannberg with him; a human story of the Mirror looking after its own would be good for circulation. As in Europe, there was going to be a tribunal to charge the Japanese Prime Minister Tojo with war crimes, especially for his handling of Allied prisoners of war. Stories of atrocities building the Burma railway line with British troops had been circulating before the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. For some reason the Emperor was above the fray.
William’s commission was to interview released British prisoners on how they had been treated. According to Arthur Bumley, the British public were entitled to the truth and with the truth, retribution. If Englishmen had died like dogs under a Japanese whip, someone was going to pay, the Mirror calling the fouls. In William’s personal opinion, one he would keep out of his dispatches to London, there was going to be a witch-hunt in the Far East, similar to the one taking place in Germany. To the victors the spoils and the righteousness; to William the job of digging up dirt. The fact that Arthur Bumley had not so much as mentioned William’s cousin Joe in Changi jail, said something for Arthur Bumley’s priorities.
“It’s like Versailles all over again if we’re not careful,” Horatio had said to him before they left their small hotel in Long Beach for the wedding. “Don’t we ever learn? Hanging a few poor sods won’t change what happened. We flattened Cologne and Dresden with the help of the Americans. The Yanks just flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki on their own. What do you think the Germans and Japanese would have done with Truman and Churchill had they won the war? Our kids will have to live in the same world as their kids. With this new bomb we can annihilate each other, entire countries in one day, not cities pounded into the rubble week after week. Hatred. All they think of is hatred. What can the likes of us do, Will? Janet and I are staying a few days after the wedding before flying home. The kids want to play in the sand and swim in a warm sea. They never knew the sea was warm before. Do you know, this is the first holiday we’ve taken as a family? What are we going to write about now the war’s over, William? They won’t listen to a lecture on the stupidity of war.”
“Don’t you worry about that. There’s always a story the public want to read. The big one from our side of the pond is the end of the British Empire. From now on America will call the shots. We’ve won a war and are about to lose an empire. Like Churchill. The opinion of those in the know says Labour will win the election by a landslide. Take from the rich and give to the poor. Wonderful politics. Especially when the poor voters outnumber the rich by ten to one. Oh, we’ll have plenty to write about. My pieces on Genevieve are paying well. People want to know the intimate details of the famous.”
“There’s no dirt on Genevieve.”
“Of course there isn’t.”
“Gregory says she’s pulling out of film now Pacific War is on the circuit.”
“When you’ve made your money what’s the point of making more? Give the next lot a chance.”
“How are you getting to Singapore?”
“The American Air Force are flying us. Big press detail. You know the Americans. Like to do everything big. They also want the dirt on the Japanese to show the public why it was imperative to drop the atomic bomb. Betty’s looking forward to the wedding. Tina’s organised a crèche in the house. Give Betty some peace from Ruthy. As you know, they’re demanding, young children. In the old flat Ruthy slept on a mattress in the bath. Only way we could get any sleep with the door closed.”
“When’s the new one due?”
“January.”
“Good luck.”
“Do you know, I like being married.”
“So do I.”
“We’d better find the women and go to this wedding.”
“That’s why we came here.”
Looking across now to Horatio and Janet dancing like lunatics on the dancefloor brought so many memories back to William. From the days they were both cub reporters on the Daily Mail. The almost catastrophic trip to Berlin before the war.
“Would you and our son like to dance, Mr Smythe?”
“Thought you’d never ask. How do you know it’s going to be a boy?”
Then the thought of meeting Joe and Cherry Blossom in the days ahead made William smile with the pleasure of expectation.
Tinus Oosthuizen had listened to his Uncle Harry’s speech with tears in his eyes, the pain of losing his father flooding back to him as Uncle Harry talked about his friend Barend, Tinus’s father. Uncle Harry read out a letter from Tinus’s family in Rhodesia. Another one from Lord St Clair and his mother. Genevieve’s Uncle Robert St Clair stood up among the guests at the mention of his name, having brought his American wife to the wedding with their two children. Janusz Kowalski made them laugh as the best man. Then it was his turn in front of the guests and the press. Remembering every word his Oxford tutor, Mr Bowden, had told him about speaking in public, Tinus began without any notes. Everything he wanted to say about his new wife was firmly in his head. For a moment he had the soft-hearted ladies among the guests looking for their handkerchiefs as they soaked up every sentimental word; when he looked at Genevieve there were tears in her eyes.
“No, I’m not going to thank you all individually for coming to our wedding. I’m not going to say the names of my friends who will never be able to go to a wedding. We have waited long years through the war for this moment, Genevieve and I, God bless you all.”
Pulling out her chair from the back, Tinus having stood behind his own chair for his speech, he helped Genevieve to her feet. Then they moved together among the guests, all of them standing and clapping as they passed. On the dance floor, Tinus took Genevieve in his arms.
“Where’d you learn to speak so well in public, my darling?” asked Genevieve.
“Oxford University Debating Society. Are you happy?”
“Of course I am. It went off without a hitch. How soon can we make a duck? Mother’s getting quite tiddly.”
“Barnaby has promised to look after her. You can’t worry about everything.”
“After this dance I’m going to change. How are we getting out of here?”
“On the back of a motorcycle. Compliments of Uncle Harry. Parked at the back of the house near the path down to the beach. The press will never think of that one. Give it an hour. Then we’ll be off on our own.”
