Hilton Ellis is a renegade white South African who leaves his native country at a young age to escape the military draft. With his world in chaos around him, he arrives in Amsterdam full of high hopes for a life in the city's thriving alternative cultural scene. While living there he experiences a series of comical adventures that challenge his ability to overcome the often surprising obstacles involved in becoming an artist—and more importantly, in gaining greater maturity as an individual.
Written in the tradition of the episodic novel, The Stolen Scenario follows this complex and ironic character as he gradually acquires an increased understanding of the complexity of human nature and of the ironies of his own existence. 'The Third Earl' is chapter eight.
I
‘A storm had gathered at the borders of the garden. Giant blue stick men stalked stiffly among the dense clouds on the horizon, stooping here and there to aim lightning bolts at street lamps, roofs, trees. With each step they drew nearer.
‘Inside the imposing Victorian villa lurked a boy. He was in the library overlooking the lawn, staring wordlessly at the gathering darkness. Rain was beating against the leaded casements. All around him the old house groaned under the weight of the wind.
‘At one point it was as if the library was lit by a series of massive camera flashes: the long ranks of old books along the far wall, the long table with its high-backed chairs, the circle of leather armchairs and sofas around the hearth, the shadowed niches in the walls with their pieces of Ming Dynasty china and Modernist sculpture. Many a controversial editorial campaign had been planned here, many a confidential mediation conducted. It was a Room of Power.
‘He was wearing flannels, which were rather too short, a white shirt, rumpled and half-tucked, and a tight blue blazer. He was aware that he looked like Tweedledum, probably, but he didn’t care. He looked at the storm gathering its forces like an army outside as if at a welcome conqueror. Maybe they would merge in one great flash of thunder and destroy this house.
‘Detecting the sharp note of a voice coming down the corridor over the howling of the wind, he ducked under the long table. The eerie note drew nearer. From his vantage below the table he saw the double doors swing open and the lower part of a heavy black dress move into the room.
‘With chilling certainty, as if following a scent, the dress moved to the great bay window. A crack of lightning revealed its owner in stark black silhouette against the leaded pains. The old woman, lacking only a jagged broomstick, turned sharply, as if sensing the boy’s presence. She began to tiptoe around the room, hideously warbling “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
‘Under the shadow of his father’s table, the boy’s heart quaked in his chest.
‘“Got you, you little horror!”
‘A hand reached in and pulled him kicking and struggling into the room. Still holding onto him, the old woman flicked a light switch. The over-plump schoolboy and the crone with the growth on her chin were confronted with each other in the sudden light.
“What are you doing in the library?” said Miss Warlocke. “You know you’re not allowed to be here while your father is away.”
‘“It’s my house, and I can be where I like,” the boy replied. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”
‘“You awful little boy,” said Miss Warlocke. “So uncouth!”
‘Within a trice the boy’s face was pressed sharply into the long table. The old woman was strangely powerful. The cane cut rhythmically into the tight seat of his trousers. He was aware of the pain but it was far away, as if someone else’s. Outside, the storm settled into steady, heavy rain.
‘“I’ll soon wake up, and you’ll be gone!” he shouted.’
*
Hilton Ellis closed the notebook. It was a relief to get a dream down in writing; that way you could forget about it.
He considered his situation. At this moment, he was comfortably ensconced in his room at the B&B he’d booked for the weekend. He was, in fact, in the scenic Somerset village of Bishops Wood. The village consisted of a neat old high street dotted with ancient stone shops and a few rambling streets of houses, some thatched, some with quaint little leaded windows. His window looked over a green and a solid nineteenth-century pub, the Britannia. A squat grey old Norman church at the centre of the village watched its parish of quaint houses like an Alsatian guarding a herd of sheep, and the grey turrets of an ancient castle loomed over the trees on the steep hillside above.
It was like a scene out of Arthur Ransome, maybe, or Enid Blyton – only, inevitably, the real world was invading. The evidence of it was everywhere. The sleek neon logo of the garage at the end of the high street, the tobacconist offering internet services, the trendy little gallery with brightly coloured installation art, the polished town cars jostling with the muddy tractors that thumped through the Saturday afternoon traffic.
From the table at the window he had a fine view of the village green, the pub, the thatched roofs beyond beneath their canopy of green leaves. The afternoon traffic had vanished. A steady quiet was settling with the early dusk. A solitary man was walking a blonde Labrador on the green, and a union jack was flying from a pole above the entrance to the Britannia. It lent an oddly imperialist note to the scene, as if at any moment the ghost of Kitchener might appear to pressgang recruits for another Great War. Village life. No doubt every summer Saturday ended in this soft gloaming.
Oh for a quiet existence – with a private income. But as things stood Hilton had a performance tonight, and he liked to arrive at the venue early. He liked to sit in the punters’ seats, or to pace the room if there were no seats, before he gave a performance. He liked to speak a few words at different volumes, to test his voice against the acoustics. He was quite superstitious about it. A show could die still-born without the necessary reconnaissance beforehand.
He’d made all this clear before Sparks had headed for the Britannia; and he’d promised to be back in time for a leisurely departure. Now the clock was ticking and he’d still not returned. Hilton wondered if he’d have to cross the village green, like a neglected wife.
He thought about it seriously for a moment and then rejected the idea. They’d grown up on opposite sides of the railway line, back in the Republic. Without the foundation of a shared past, their friendship didn’t extend as far as recrimination. All they had in common was the present.
He caught a glimpse of the little red travel clock which he had placed beside his bed, and was immediately reminded of his impending performance. Still no Sparks. To divert himself, he opened the notebook again. It was one of those publisher’s dummies – a plain, hard-backed octavo volume very practical for any sort of portable work, and cheaper than the fashionable Moleskine. He’d filled a lot of them over the years. Several shelves groaned under the weight of the memories they contained back in his flat in Amsterdam.
He’d decided on a programme of fables, rather than the cynical real-world stories he usually told. It was a wedding, after all. He’d gone through an animal story phase some years ago. Aesop, La Fontaine, Credo Mutwa… He thought he’d begin by telling the story of how a wild dog fell briefly in love with a hare.
Wild Dog one day had gone out hunting
hungry for a morsel of fine bunny
when in the shadows of the thorn tree
he spied a real honey…
There was a knock the door. Caught mid-psychic gear change, in the difficult transition from reality to imagination, Hilton was mightily annoyed. It would be Sparks, of course, returning from his merry digression in the pub.
‘Come in!’ he bellowed, startled to hear how much like his father he sounded.
‘Oh dear, I’m sorry, am I disturbing?’ Mrs Watson, the owner of the Mad Hatter appeared round the door.
The first thing he’d do when he got home, Hilton decided, would be to have a large sign made that he could hang on door handles whenever necessary. DRAGON AT WORK, it would say, DO NOT DISTURB. He stood up, dislodging the notebook, which fell onto the floor.
‘I wondered if you would care for some tea,’ Mrs Watson continued. ‘Oh dear, let me get that.’
She picked up the notebook and handed it to him. She was a slender, harassed woman with prematurely white hair who prided herself on her use of organic products. She had given her guests a description of the impeccably local provenance of all her soaps, oils, fish, meat and vegetables. In his bath, earlier, Hilton had savoured the scents of her hand-made lavender soap and bath oil of flowers-of-the-field. And dreamed of Miss Warlocke.
He explained that they were intending to go out.
‘I don’t know about that,’ said his hostess, idly straightening a pillow on his bed as she searched the room for other imperfections. ‘From what I hear, your gentleman friend’s having a high old time over at the Britannia.’
*
The plan, the day before, had been to take the ferry, enjoy a leisurely drive across the island, check into the B&B, then take a meal in some local restaurant and get to bed early. But they had run into a storm on the Essex highway after crossing the Channel, and by the time they had passed the enormous orange smudge of London and got into the West Country it was dark. The following afternoon they were still driving, having spent the night in a lay-by.
Hilton’s vision of a leisured journey had long since flown out of the window. Sparks, it turned out, wasn’t as proficient at map reading as they’d both thought. Although it was, possibly, quite difficult to drive and navigate at the same time; Hilton gave him that. Still, an unpleasant tension hung in the car. The question now was whether they’d make it to the church on time.
The lanes, lined on both sides by high trees, were like shady tunnels. He caught flashes of meadows, orchards, manses, cottages, church towers, power lines. At last, fleetingly, he thought he glimpsed the long-sought name on one of those antiquated country road signs like quaint props from a TV series. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Go back!’
Sparks slammed on anchors and reversed back down the lane. Hilton’s head swirled. There was an urgent hooting behind them. A car was approaching through the dappled shadows. Sparks was studying the rear-view mirror, but apparently he hadn’t seen the other car. Hilton put his hands to his ears. The back end of their hired car reversed into the elegant front end of the approaching German limousine. Glass crunched, metal groaned.
They stalled by a wooden gate that led to a green meadow sprinkled with yellow flowers. A large brown cow with a numbered tag in its ear was standing at the gate as if it had been expecting them. The early afternoon was golden in the sudden stillness.
Hilton wound down his window. They listened to the ticking of the hot engine. Behind them, a car door slammed.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
A man in a smart morning coat appeared at the driver’s window, his hands at his hips. Behind him, at her gate, the cow considered the exchange with astonishment, tilting her head to one side like a country yokel.
Hilton leaned over. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘We’re late for a wedding.’
The man leaned an elbow on the car. ‘Then you’ll want to turn right and follow the lane up the hill.’
‘Excuse me?’ said Sparks.
‘For God’s sake,’ said the man.
It was Jeremy. There was a round of introductions and handshaking.
‘Thank god we ran into you,’ Hilton said.
‘You certainly did that,’ Jeremy said, ruefully inspecting the damage to his car.
‘Sorry, brother,’ Sparks said. He held out his half-jack of whisky.
Jeremy looked at the bottle. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ He tipped the bottle in salute at each of them, and then at the cow.
The cow swung its head in disapproval and turned back to its golden meadow.
*
They had followed Jeremy’s bent Mercedes up the lane to a village. A crowd of family and friends were waiting. Suits, morning coats, satin dresses, bouquets in the bright June sunshine. Despite the heavy, soldierly aspect of the solid Norman church, it made a happy scene.
‘Christ, you’re cutting it fine,’ one of the younger men said. His morning coat and worried manner suggested that he was the best man. ‘Your better half will be arriving any moment.’ He caught sight of the mangled front end of Jeremy’s car. ‘Fuck me!’
‘I ran into some friends,’ said Jeremy.
‘Looks like they ran into you,’ said his friend. ‘You can’t let Bella see that. She’ll take it as a bad sign. Give me the keys, I’ll move it.’ He got into the damaged car and reversed it back down the lane.
Jeremy introduced Hilton and Sparks to a throng of people standing on the steps that led up to the arched door. Hilton had an impression of well-scrubbed middle-class faces, but he wasn’t ready for names. His underwear was releasing its stranglehold on his scrotum. He repressed an impulse to scratch.
A verger, womanishly white-skirted in recognition of the happy occasion, shooed everyone into an atmosphere of cool and musty stone. It had been a long time since Hilton had been in a church. He had attended an expensive Wasp boarding school during one stage of his upbringing back in the Republic. From his point of view that school hadn’t been a success. ‘Boy, it’s all education,’ his father had said in his grand dismissive way. But of course it hadn’t been his father who’d done the learning.
He and Sparks took a pew at the back, to be out of the way. The church of St Julian the Compassionate had been consecrated in the year 1086, he was informed by a pamphlet that accompanied the order of service. It had been donated by a cousin of William the Conqueror in penance for murdering his wife and her lover. Faded, moth-eaten regimental banners hung along one wall like the standards of long defunct legions. Visitors to the church were invited to make donations to the upkeep.
Christianity, up close and personal, seemed quite pagan, Hilton thought. St Julian was patron of fiddlers, hotel-keepers, hunters, jugglers, knights, travellers, wanderingm musicians – and murderers. Even killers had a saint up there in heaven to look after them...
‘Hey,’ Sparks had said, jogging him sharply with an elbow.
Hilton started. Had he missed something? Indeed: the congregation – well-heeled bankers, doctors, accountants, no doubt, their wives in stylish hats and dresses, their children in Laura Ashley outfits – were already filing out, and making jokes. The organist was playing a version of ‘ When I ’m Sixty Four’ that sounded like a barrel organ tune.
‘What happened?’
‘The wedding, it’s over, my bra,’ Sparks had said, as he drained the last of his half-jack.
All of which proved one thing: bringing a friend on a job confused things. Sparks was looking at him as if it had been perfectly normal to let him sleep through a wedding.
‘Hey, you were tired, comrade,’ said Sparks.
Ultimately, Hilton knew that all this had really been his own fault. He had broken the single most important hit man’s principle: work on your own. Fellow travellers only tied you down. You had to make allowances for them. Worse still, you had to rely on them.
II
Over at the Britannia it was too early for the evening crowd, and dead quiet. Kitchener, of course, stared grimly from a wall. The publican was manning his ornate draught taps with the boredom of a helmsman on a routine voyage. Hilton was tempted to tap on the counter with a coin, and say: ‘Now look here my good man…’
‘You’ll be wanting your friend,’ the man said.
He looked like a former wrestler, but then it was hard to tell; most British men under a certain age looked like former wrestlers these days.
‘So he’s here,’ Hilton said. ‘Thank god. I hope he hasn’t torn up the place. He goes crazy if he’s too much to drink – especially spirits. You haven’t been letting him drink whisky?’ He was rewarded by the oily gleam of alarm that appeared in the man’s eye.
‘Your friend’s quite a character,’ the publican said. ‘I’ll say that.’
Other performers didn’t have to put up with this shit, Hilton thought. Obstacles to his preparations for the evening were popping up at every turn like targets on a live shooting range. He fought an impulse to throttle the fellow. Proud of his restraint, he merely raised an eyebrow.
‘His lordship’s in the private bar,’ the man said, indicating a heavy door on the other side of the room.
In the right mood Sparks could be very convivial, Hilton knew, especially when booze was involved. The man made friends wherever he went; he received postcards from people he’d dined with in Kigali and Ouagadougou, or had drinks with during stopovers in Rome or Cairo. He worked for some sort of international NGO. But ‘his lordship’? Lord Mchunu? It had certainly been the speediest elevation to the peerage in history.
The private bar was actually just a room, and it was stuffed with leather armchairs and nineteenth-century prints of hunting scenes. There was a lovely view of a garden running down to boathouse on the bank of a tree-lined river. Toad Hall would be somewhere just over the horizon.
Sparks was sitting in an armchair by a low table, engaged in conversation with a cultured-looking older gent in a cravat and red corduroy jacket. Sparks himself, in his off-duty gear, looked like a militant reggae star; he had added dark glasses to his usual short beaded dreads and green military jacket. On the table between them stood a bottle of whisky, half-full, and several heavy cut-crystal glasses.
‘Comrade!’ said Sparks.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Hilton said pointedly.
‘Ah, there you are,’ said the gent. ‘Do join us.’
He rose to shake Hilton’s hand. It was an ingrained courtesy merely, but pleasant all the same. It seemed to suggest shared citizenship in a world where people behaved decently and helped each other along the bumpy track of life. Hilton had him pegged him as a semi-retired antique dealer, or a rare book seller perhaps.
‘You friend was just entertaining me with some stories of his exploits in Africa and the Communist Bloc,’ said the bookseller.
‘Yes, we’ve certainly seen some interesting times,’ said Hilton.
‘I was telling all about you too, comrade,’ said Sparks. ‘How you are our mbongi, back in Amsterdam. Our teller of tales.’
‘Well, thanks, man,’ said Hilton. This was more like it. He felt a guilty rush of affection for Sparks, about whom he’d been entertaining some distinctly black thoughts earlier. He decided that it might be safe to sit down.
‘Have some whisky,’ said the gent. ‘No? All right, I’m sure we’re ready for another.’ He poured generous dollops and sat back in his armchair. ‘So, I’m led to believe you’re a storyteller?’
‘Yes,’ Hilton said cautiously. It didn’t sound very legitimate, he had to admit. It sounded like ‘tinker’, or ‘poet’.
‘How interesting,’ the gent said. He leaned back in his armchair and arched his hands. ‘Well, then, perhaps you’d consider telling us a story.’
‘Here?’ said Hilton.
‘Why not?’ said the gent.
He indicated the gorgeous room, the old softness of the leather on the Chesterfields, the carved wood panelling, the country scenes of the chase, the ornate gilt clock on the mantle piece, the view on the garden through the leaded windows. The windows were oddly similar to the ones in Hilton’s dream earlier. Outside, a blackbird was fluting his ornate serenade to the dusk.
Hilton had been thinking about the stories he’d do tonight. He had them lined up in his head like good little soldiers.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘This is the story of “The Hunter and the Fox”.’
A hunter had got lost one day;
he heard his friends hallooing
somewhere in a distant wood,
and who knew what the hounds were doing.
And he was trotting down a tree-lined lane
sunk in deserved embarrassment
when in a field he saw a dash of red.
He needed no encouragement.
Off after her the hunter charged.
If he brought home the Fox’s brush
he’d be the hero of the hour!
And so he chased her through thick bush
and all across his neighbours’ fields –
running for her life Fox ran helter-skelter
flashing her red tail in the sun
to reach her den and shelter.
At length the hunter and his horse
arrived all puffed out at their goal
to find Miss Fox regarding them
from the safe darkness of her hole.
‘Without your dogs, without your bullies
dear sir, you’ll never get my tail,’
said she with subtle grin. ‘Now run along,
and if you dare to – tell your tale.’
‘Splendid!’ said the bookseller heartily, rather to Hilton’s surprise.
‘Very nice, comrade,’ said Sparks. ‘When was it written?’
Hilton would have given him the stiff middle finger but maintained propriety in the presence of the gent in the corduroy jacket.
‘Have another drop,’ said the bookseller. ‘Talking of tales, you’ve heard the story of how Mr Mchunu here climbed the Berlin Wall? Quite extraordinary.’
*
A short while later, a maroon Jaguar Mk 2 drew out of the parking area at the Britannia. It turned into the quiet high street, past the Mad Hatter, and glided past the garage and into the countryside, where the fields and hedgerows lay under the golden haze of an English summer evening.
‘What about some music?’ said the bookseller. He slotted a CD into the player. Hilton had expected opera, but the old duffer was a Beatles fan.
The reception was being held at a place called Chartham, and he’d offered Hilton a lift; he was going in that direction apparently. Hilton had seized the opportunity. This way, at least, the hit man would arrive at the venue early and get his routine on track. Sparks, meanwhile, had gone back to the Mad Hatter for a bath. He’d turn up at the reception later, he said. Despite his annoying insouciance, things had come out right in the end.
The bookseller drove with a gloved hand on the wheel, silently singing the words of the songs. They were both happy enough to enjoy gliding through that gorgeous afternoon as Let It Be unfolded on the car stereo.
Hilton savoured the smell of the leather seats, the polish of the walnut finishing, the supernatural smoothness of the engine. He wasn’t particularly interested in cars, not being a driver, but he could certainly appreciate quality when he saw it. His father had had a car just like this one, only his had been (fittingly) white. Hilton had spent many hours in it, being ferried to and from school by Morrison, his father’s Malawian driver. He had even deflowered a girl on its back seat once – Jeremy’s cousin, as it happened. She had been visiting during a summer holiday, and there’d been a fuss about it. (Well, she’d looked sixteen.) He wondered if she was among the guests, and if he would recognise her. Or she him.
The car turned into an arched gate with a little gatehouse. Chartham stood at the end of a winding drive lined with chestnut trees like guardsmen standing to attention. Its central part, in red stone, a complex masque of intricate mini-columns, curlicues, and leaded windows, was supported on either side by wings that had been added later, in different styles and other shades of stone. A lawn like a cricket field rolled down from the Renaissance-style viewing gallery to a shady copse. On a hill, half-hidden among green trees, the white columns of a folly gleamed in the early evening.
Hilton was relieved when the bookseller gunned the Jag up the private road. It was a considerable distance to the house.
III
In the ballroom, the micro-scenes of a bourgeois wedding were in progress. An assortment of upper-middle-class characters had been dancing to Abba, Wham! and Queen and getting totally sloshed in the English way. Niceness hung in the air like a Bond Street perfume. Now it was the time of slow dances.
The bridegroom’s father, CEO of a successful gold brokerage, was dancing formally with the bride’s mother, a straight-backed former prima donna of the London stage. Her father, the country doctor, was dancing rather less formally with the bridegroom’s stepmother, a lady some years younger than her husband. The bride’s younger brother was dancing with a little girl in a pretty flounced dress. Around them were circling men whose shirts were rumpled and women whose dress straps were descending. In the middle of it all floated the newly married couple.
The DJ had put on ‘Heaven’. Jeremy was oblivious to anything but the smell of his Bella’s hair and the music. It was probably the music that had been playing when they first looked into each other’s eyes. ‘Now the band in heaven/they play my favourite song…’
More to the point, this was the kind of audience Hilton had secretly been hoping for. He’d been happy to make a modest life for himself in underground Amsterdam. Who wouldn’t? But recently he’d been nagged by a sense that something was missing in his performances on home turf. Sadly, his audiences didn’t always appear to get every nuance, shading, or telling little rhyme. This gig was an opportunity to break through to a new and critical market. Who knew what contacts there might be in this well-heeled crowd. He’d been psyching himself up for hours.
He noticed an older man in a rather nice suit standing nearby who had been pointed out to him as an uncle of the bride. He was nursing a tumbler of gin and tonic while he observed dancing. The expression on his face was ambiguous, somewhere between politeness and contempt.
‘Great wedding,’ said Hilton.
The man turned his mask in acknowledgment of having been spoken to. ‘Indeed.’
‘She’s a lovely girl,’ Hilton persisted. ‘I’m sure they’ll be very happy.’
‘Are you.’
‘Jeremy and I were neighbours back in Johannesburg when we were growing up. I’m glad to see him doing so well for himself.’
‘That he is,’ the man replied, frowning. ‘He’s in a new line, I hear. Dot com shares, I think they’re called. They’re all the rage. Know anything about them?’
His mask reverted to its ambiguous, slit-eyed consideration of the bridal couple. The saxophone slid into the last verses of the song. ‘Now when this kiss is over/we’ll start over again...’
‘Uh, no,’ Hilton said.
The man glanced at Hilton’s cap-and-bells and well-filled African print outfit. ‘No, I didn’t think so,’ he said.
‘Actually, I’m supposed to tell some stories tonight,’ said Hilton. ‘Jeremy asked me to.’
‘You’re an actor?’
The word, as he used it, carried strong connotations of unsavoury, and possibly criminal activity.
‘Well, yes,’ said Hilton. ‘But mainly I tell stories.’
‘I see,’ the man said. ‘You’re a sort of clown.’
Hilton thought of the alternative films and theatre pieces he’d performed in over the years: the bad language, the ubiquitous drugs, the gratuitous sex. Ironically, the uptight old cunt wasn’t too far wrong.
*
The members of the bridegroom’s party had gone outside for a smoke.
‘They must have a lot of gardeners,’ Sparks said, looking at the cricket field-sized lawn. He had turned up a few minutes before, having been delayed at the B&B by a long call home.
‘A whole brigade of them, probably,’ said Barry Bravo.
He was a restless man with a grooved face that suggested hard living. Until recently he had been working for the intelligence services in South Africa, but there’d been some sort of putsch and he’d had to leave the country. Now he was teaching at a language school off Leicester Square. He was with his girlfriend, a pretty woman in a slightly retro Afro-chic outfit. She was stoically observing the roughneck dope circle unfolding on the lawn of the stately house with crossed arms: ja, hey, boykies.
Jeremy appeared out of the shadows. ‘There you are!’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
‘Just in time, bru,’ said Barry Bravo.
Jeremy noticed Sparks. ‘Hey, dude, got some whisky?’ he said.
In fact, true to form, Sparks had coolly brought a supply of drugs through Her Majesty’s customs. He nodded in recognition of Jeremy’s joke as he mulled some of it in the palm of his hand. Barry Bravo, meanwhile, was preparing the bottleneck. Yet somehow the atmosphere didn’t seem convivial.
Jeremy noticed the woman. ‘Hello. Having a good time?’
‘Hello yourself. Yes, so far. I don’t know how long it’s going to last though.’
‘Oh? Are we running out of booze?’
‘They have issues,’ Barry Bravo’s girlfriend murmured, nodding at the men.
‘Wanna bust?’ said Barry Bravo, offering Jeremy the charged bottleneck.
They knew the protocol. It was instinctive. They’d all grown up with it in far away Jo-burg, if on different sides of the fence. You always passed the pipe clockwise. You didn’t gob it up. You didn’t hold onto it too long. And only a poes refused the privilege of busting.
Jeremy had become an MBA and a trader in the City and all that stuff, but he recalled that he’d been red-blooded once. He grasped the bottleneck and set it stoutly to his lips.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t, brother,’ said Sparks. ‘It’s strong stuff. All the way from Amsterdam.’
‘Thank you, comrade Sparks,’ said Barry Bravo.
Sparks shrugged and held the flame of his silver Zippo to the jagged mouth and Jeremy set the mix glowing. He took a sharp intake of breath, then another. The bottleneck blazed red and orange.
‘There’s a taste of home!’ he said.
He smiled. Then his eyes glazed, and he folded like a rag doll onto the lawn.
*
In the bright high ballroom of Chartham a group of wedding guests were collapsing on chairs and sofas after dancing the Macarena, which was all the rage that summer. The sexy hip movements of the dance had occasioned much laughing.
‘I’m looking for Jeremy,’ a voice said. ‘You haven’t seen him, have you?’
It was the bride, Bella. Like her mother, she was neat and trim, with the erect carriage of a ballet dancer. Her eyes were bright with happiness.
‘Uh, not really,’ Hilton said. ‘Actually, I’ve been hoping for a word with him myself.’
Jeremy was still keeping him waiting in the wings. He was a fool to be caught up in the events and motives of other people’s lives like this.
‘You know how he is,’ he continued, improvising. ‘We used to call him Zebedee when we were at school. Sproing! Always somewhere else.’
‘Zebedee?’ she said. ‘How funny. How true! I’m going to use that.’
‘You didn’t get it from me.’
‘Who else could it be?’ she said. ‘You’re the only one he was at school with.’ She touched his arm. It was a nice gesture. It made him feel trusted.
The uncle chose that moment to wave at the DJ to shut down his noise and clap his hands.
‘I know you are all tired from your exertions on the dance floor,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d make a quick announcement while enough of us are still compos mentis.’
An expectant hush fell in the great ballroom. Hilton knew instantly what the uncle had been like as a younger man – a sly, horribly repressed individual. He had probably enjoyed playing Graham Greene’s Hate Game. And in all those years he hadn’t changed.
‘It appears we have a guest with us who has come all the way from Jeremy’s home town to tell us stories,’ the uncle continued inexorably.
He gestured with a courtly, malicious gesture at Hilton. Astounded – for obviously he, Hilton, must have demanded to be announced – all eyes turned on him.
*
There’d been no question of leaving the bridegroom out on the lawn of course. Sparks had slung him onto his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and they’d sneaked their comatose host past the heavy red ropes and up the grand carved staircase that led to the private wing without anyone seeing them.
Barry Bravo’s girlfriend stood at a door in the long patrician corridor, keeping watch. The plan, Hilton discovered later, had been to prime Jeremy with Sparks’ whisky and then put his head under a cold tap. Then they’d clean him up and get him back to his wedding, good as new, no one the wiser.
She admired the stately corridor with its pictures and busts in alcoves and its rows of clearly private doors. She’d seen some of those pictures in books, surely. She became aware that the rescue operation in the room wasn’t going smoothly. Through the door she could hear the two men’s voices. To judge from the clink of glass and the slight whoosh of plumbing they were getting on with the ‘treatment’, but they were also arguing.
‘Hi,’ said Bella, appearing suddenly at the top of the stairs.
Barry Bravo’s girlfriend had lived with him through all the years in exile, the years of underground work in Gaborone, Harare and Lusaka. She’d learned to cover for him.
‘Hi,’ she said.
But the sound of male voices in low-voiced, persistent argument could still be heard through the door. She’d been right, earlier: the two men did have issues. They’d trained together in Angola, and had been on a number of training missions to countries in the East Bloc together too. In fact they’d been in East Berlin on a counter-surveillance course, all those years ago, when Sparks Mchunu had defected to the West.
‘Ought we to be here?’ said Bella.
‘I’m just, you know – ’
‘Ah,’ said the bride. She didn’t know, but it would be gauche to ask. ‘Well, I’m just looking for my husband.’
Luckily a reply was unnecessary. The door opened and Jeremy emerged. He looked surprisingly fresh, considering, although his collar hung skew. Bella’s eyes narrowed and she crossed her arms. But her doubts diminished when Sparks and Barry Bravo appeared behind him.
‘Darling,’ Jeremy said. He took Bella’s hand.
So far, so good. But behind him, Sparks and Barry Bravo were arguing again in fierce undertones. Something Sparks said caused Barry Bravo to grasp him by his shirt. The two men grappled each other and began to yell. Their wrestling brought them to the top of the staircase.
*
In the ballroom, Hilton was facing his audience. In a way, the moment was the sum total of his life. To entertain these people, he would have to defeat Miss Warlocke.
During most of his childhood his father had been writing the book for which he had later become famous, The Rise and Certain Fall of the South African Reich. It had required extensive research abroad, when Hilton had been left in the care of a succession of English housekeepers. None of them had been anything like Miss Warlocke, of course. But they had shared one trait: they had all spent as little time or money on housekeeping as possible. Jeremy, the rich boy next door, had often been his only resource.
He took a breath and launched into his opening spiel. This crowd was drunk, they’d just been dancing. He decided to skip the courting stories and go straight into ‘The Marriage of the Elephant and the Flea’. He felt his voice relaxing, and he saw the hostile Who-the-fuck-are-you expressions in all those eyes change to Okay-mate-you’ve-got-thirty-seconds.
And they got it, immediately. At the end of the first part someone echoed back the refrain, ‘It’s just the way of things, we don’t know why’. He had them! He was gonna rock.
That was the moment when Sparks and Barry Bravo came tumbling down the stairs into the great entrance hall, wrestling with each other and yelling in fluent tsotsitaal.
*
Outside, the night air was cool, and the stars were bright above the trees at the far end of the lawn, where the fields began. Summer smells were drifting on the breeze: dew on mown grass, a lake cooling after a warm day, the loamy richness of an ancient soil.
Hilton had thought it best to slip out during the commotion that had followed the sudden appearance of his pugnacious compatriots. He pictured the bed he’d lain on so briefly that afternoon, back at the Mad Hatter. It was far away, along a twisting, maze-like route of country lanes now deeply swathed in evening shadow. And I have miles to go before I sleep.
‘Pleasant, isn’t it?’ a voice said. A heavyset man had emerged from the gathering darkness. He was dressed in a tie and cardigan, as if for an evening at home with Mozart on the gramophone. It was the bookseller. Hilton was surprised. He hadn’t noticed him among the guests earlier.
‘Lovely,’ Hilton said cautiously.
‘Care for a dram?’ Hilton saw that the man had a bottle with him and a couple of whisky glasses.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said. The old chap sloshed generous portions.
‘Usually take mine with a drop of soda water,’ he said. ‘Sometimes one needs something stronger. Well, bottoms up.’
Hilton drained his glass. The whiskey burned like napalm through his system.
‘A pity, just now,’ said the man. ‘You had them going, all right.’
Hilton said nothing. He was learning to say nothing.
‘We get fights at weddings quite often, you know,’ said the old man. ‘It’s the damndest thing. My theory is testosterone. Young men, still unattached, suddenly afraid they won’t become alpha males themselves and propagate. Of course, it happens to most of them in the end anyway.’
‘It must be lovely here when there aren’t all these people about,’ Hilton said.
‘Ah, yes,’ said the old man, his tone that of a man of property talking to another. ‘The place costs a lot in upkeep, of course. Last year we had to redo the entire roof. The cost of labour these days. Ruinous.’
Mentally, Hilton allowed his jaw to drop. Outwardly, he hoped that he kept his composure.
‘Another dram?’ said the Earl, the lord and master of all this beauty. Hilton didn’t mind if he did. His day of surprises dropped away like a discarded rocket booster.
‘I don’t mind telling you, I do get rather tired of seeing day-trippers around the place,’ the old man continued. ‘Gets like a bloody museum around here sometimes. Still, it’s worth it I suppose… Here, let me show you something.’
He took Hilton by the elbow and pointed to a wall of one of the wings of the house, which was splendid in the lights. ‘Do you see?’
Hilton saw an elegant face of carefully worked red stone in the floodlights. The stone was rather pitted in places, as if the house had once come under heavy fire.
‘Exactly,’ the fellow said. ‘Sixteen forty-six that was. A gang of Cromwell’s Roundhead thugs. Shot up everything in sight, including a statue by Bellini, so the legend goes. That was in the third Earl’s time, of course. Sent the bastards packing. Cromwell, Blair, the lot of ‘em, eh? Here, have another drop.’
Hilton accepted another well-filled tumbler. The stars of Somerset were spinning.
*
Most of the wedding guests had gone when Hilton returned to the house later. He’d woken up in the middle of the vast dark lawn.
Flunkeys were piling chairs in the ballroom and clearing away the remains of the plentiful supply of food and drink that had been provided. Hilton found Sparks and Barry Bravo on the magnificent Renaissance balcony. No sign of the girlfriend. No doubt she’d departed to her comfortable room.
Sparks was hidden in a pungent cloud of smoke. Having taken his fill, he passed the bottleneck to Barry Bravo. Here they were, the mortal enemies of an hour before, passing the peace pipe.
‘You’re lucky, bru,’ said Barry Bravo. ‘We were just going to leave.’
‘I was chatting with the Earl,’ Hilton said.
‘Must have been a long conversation.’
‘Look, what the hell happened earlier?’ said Hilton. Not that he really wanted to know. He wanted his bed.
‘Forget it, comrade,’ Sparks said. ‘It’s history.’
© 2012 by Richard Jurgens
'The Third Earl' was first published in Litnetmagazine