“Laws are just like any other rules, Mr Lodge, they are only there for the guidance of the wise and for the obedience of fools.”
So, we sailed from Portsmouth. We set course for Gibraltar. It was the first leg of our voyage home. There were many legs to go.
Twenty-Three
We were a triumvirate, the First Triumvirate. Iain, Joe and me. We were The Triumvirate. We were Caesar, Crassus and Pompey. We were a team. Who was who (whom?)? We didn’t know. We didn’t care. We were a team.
We were a triumvirate built on love and hate. My love for Annie. My love for the girls. My different love for Ambrosia. Iain’s love for his father. Joe’s love for Annie. The love he didn’t hide. The love he let me see.
My hatred of Prouse, the man who stole my family. Iain’s hatred of Prouse, the man who killed his father. Joe’s hatred of Prouse, the man who did what he saw he did, to the woman he knew he loved.
I was more Crassus than Caesar or Pompey. I hoped I wouldn’t share his fate. They all died in blood. Crassus and Pompey died defeated. So, Caesar ‘sort of’ won, I suppose. In that funny way we have of assessing who wins and who loses in life. He was murdered because he was a winner. Too much of a winner. That can happen.
Iain was Caesar, it suited him. That made Joe, Pompey. That didn’t fit. Joe was more Marc Antony.
Was I more Cato than Crassus? I hoped not, but feared I was. That pompous self-admiring prick.
Cato was a recognisable man. We’ve all met men like Cato. None of us likes him. Perhaps he didn’t like himself. I’d rather be Crassus.
Who do you think you are?… Cicero perhaps?… Dream on.
So, The Triumvirate worked at things. The stakes were high. The egos were low. That helped. Love and hate drove us.
We knew what we had to do. But not always how to do it. We had our own ideas. We talked. We talked about everything. There was singularity of purpose. Only one purpose. Only one aim. To win against the mad, bad and dangerous Prouse. We were agreed on that.
Twenty-Four
We arrived in Gibraltar. I’d never seen The Rock before. I was impressed. There are some things more impressive than their pictures. The Rock is one. It was for me. There are some things less impressive than their pictures. The Sphinx is one. It was for me.
We anchored inside the mole. Policemen came on board. A lot of policemen came on board. They searched the ship. They searched every part of the ship. They searched every part of the ship for a long time. It wasn’t a routine search. We knew that. They weren’t looking to see if there was something. They were looking, because they knew there was something. We knew how they knew there was something. We knew who told them there was something. We weren’t stupid. We didn’t worry about what they’d find.
So, Prouse knew about the Siena. We expected him to. He wasn’t stupid. We didn’t expect him to know about the Lucca. The sister ship. He didn’t. That was good.
When the Lucca anchored in Tangier, no policemen came on board. We didn’t think they would.
But we knew Prouse would find out about the Lucca. After Gibraltar, we knew he would. He wasn’t stupid.
We knew he knew nothing of the Mermaid. The Mermaid wasn’t a sister ship. Not even J. Maz knew about the Mermaid. We didn’t tell him. Prouse would bug him. He wasn’t stupid.
We needed to be sure Prouse wouldn’t find them. We could never be sure. So why did we think we could? Well, we didn’t. We wanted to be as sure as we could. We couldn’t think of anything more to do. But that’s not right. There were other things to do. All sorts of other things to do. So, we did them.
We played snakes and ladders. We played it back to Australia. We played it at Suez, at Panama too. We played it at Cape Town, at Valparaiso too. We climbed our ladders. Prouse slid down our snakes. He slid down a lot of snakes. We were happy with that.
It was a good time for us. Not a good time perhaps, but a better time. The girls were good too. Brave and good. Their mother would be proud of them. The mother they didn’t have, not yet. The mother we were going to get back for them, but not yet.
The Siena and the Lucca sailed into Darwin. Policemen came on board. A lot of policemen came on board. Came on board them both. They needn’t have bothered.
So where were they? They were in Paris with Julie and having a wonderful time.
Twenty-Five
Buying islands isn’t an easy thing to do. It isn’t a simple thing to do. Rarely is buying an island an anonymous thing to do. So we decided not to buy an island. We decided to borrow one instead.
Borrowing an island isn’t an easy thing to do. It isn’t a simple thing or an anonymous thing to do. Except when you knew Mitsi Prouse.
I can’t remember how I knew Mitsi Prouse owned islands. I think Mother must have told me.
Mitsi Prouse loathed her husband. She loathed him in a special sort of way. I knew that. I knew that because she told me she did. The way she told me how much she loathed him, the language she used when she told me how much she loathed him, left me in no doubt she loathed him. That was enough for me.
I thought I loathed Prouse, and I did. Mitsi loathed Prouse in a way I wasn’t able to. She loathed him all the way down to the centre of him. To the black fetid centre she knew better than me. I loathed him down to the bedrock. Mitsi loathed him down to his molten core.
Wealth can be a funny thing. Sometimes not a funny thing. Sometimes not funny at all. Wealth should make people happy. It doesn’t, not often. And when it doesn’t, the unhappiness is worse. Worse than the unhappiness people have when they are poor. So, if wealth doesn’t make people happy, what’s the point of it?
When people are wealthy and unhappy, they think the only way to become happy is to become wealthier, and that once they’ve become wealthier, they’ll be happy. Well, that doesn’t work (why should it?), and when it doesn’t work, they try even harder. It can be a sad world for wealthy people. Things get happier when they start giving it away.
I travelled through India once. It was on my way down to Australia. I was nineteen. I would inherit the ‘G’ in a year. I wasn’t wealthy then. I knew I would be, soon. It was a bad time for me. I was unhappy with who I was. I was unhappy with who I used to be. I was unhappy with who I thought I’d become. I knew Father’s money would only make things worse. It was then that I decided to give it away.
I spent time in Calcutta. If you are ever in Calcutta, go to the flower market. Even if you don’t like flowers. There’s a man there puts ice in your shoe. He doesn’t charge. He does it for fun. He has nothing. A loin cloth and a bowl of melting ice. We laughed together. He had nothing and was happy. He had nothing and was wealthy.
Poverty + Happiness = Wealth.
Wealth – Happiness = Poverty.
Wealth ≠ Happiness.
So, Wealth = Poverty… Mostly.
It isn’t hard to understand it. It shouldn’t be hard to understand it. But most people don’t understand it. Most rich people don’t understand it. Hardly any rich people understand it. That’s sad.
Bill Gates understands it. He’s happy.
Father was the poorest man I ever knew. Poorer than the man selling ice. He radiated sadness. I was scalded in the beam of his sadness. Without Mother’s happy shield, I would have burned to nothing in the furnace of his wealth, poverty, sadness and hate.
Unhappiness breeds hate. You can’t hate if you’re happy. Not properly. I knew all about hate and I knew all about sadness too. You may know that already.
So, Mitsi Prouse loathed her husband, the Sir Peter-fucking-Prouse I loathed too. She told me why. She told me all about it. I went to see her after Gibralta. I flew to New York. It was where she lived. Mitsi owned an island. I wanted to borrow her island. That’s why I flew to New York. That’s why I went to see her.
I knew Mitsi from my childhood. They came to dinner sometimes, when my parents stayed in to
wn. Usually she didn’t, and Prouse came on his own. Usually she didn’t, because usually she was in New York. New York was her home. It seemed a funny way to have a marriage.
I knew Mother liked her. So I liked her too. We talked about her sometimes. Sometimes just a bit. Sometimes quite a lot. We couldn’t understand why she married a man like Prouse. Then Mitsi talked to Mother, then Mother understood, then Mother talked to me, then I understood too.
Mitsi’s father, Buz Ben Johnson, came from Mississippi. He mined Bentonite which made him rather rich. Rich in money, rich in ambition for his family. Rich in happiness? No one knows. He wanted more than money. He wanted ‘advancement’, whatever that may be. He wanted it for his only child, that was Mitsi, had to be, of course. So he bought on Central Park. He parked his daughter there and waited. He knew he wouldn’t wait long.
Mitsi was beautiful, Mitsi was funny, Mitsi was elegance with a Southern drawl. Mitsi was eligible with a Southern drawl. Her father knew that. She was bait on a hook for the ‘advancement’ of her family. Her father loved her dearly, but he loved ‘advancement’ too.
So, he put her on the ‘market’, her beauty, her elegance, her Southern drawl and his money. Then the bees came humming, as her father knew they would. One of the bees was Prouse. Of course it was.
Lord Prouse, Prouse’s father, lost his money in the Great Depression. So, the Prouses were down, not down-and-out, just down. Younger son Peter was sent to America to see what he could do. What he could do, was woo Mitsi Johnson. It was a match made on Wall Street and in the pages of Debrett’s. Everyone was happy, at the start.
But Prouse was a monster, even in his twenties. Once he had her money… well, imagine the rest.
I knew him in his middle years. I had no problem believing what Mitsi told me of his younger years. Of the cruelty of his soul, of his emotional savagery, of the bleak darkness that emanated from him and almost overwhelmed her. And then the thing to end it all. His breaking, bankrupting and humiliation of her father. The alcohol and the suicide. Mitsi had good reason to hate her husband, that’s why she tried to kill him. But alas, she failed. Sometimes bad guys get all the breaks.
I told her what was happening, and what Prouse had done to us. She said she would help in any way she could. So, we borrowed Mitsi’s island. She owned a string of islands. We only borrowed one.
We borrowed Mitsi’s island. It was an island no one knew about. Almost no one knew about. Would probably never know about, except for us. It was Motorina Island in the Calvados Chain. You’ve never heard of it. Admit that. It was next to Kuwanak Island. You’ve never heard of that either. Admit that too.
No one knew it, because no one lived there. That was a good reason not to know it. Only people give places significance. Okay, Okay, the Galapagos, but that’s about it.
There was a reason no one lived there. There wasn’t any water. Not all of the time. Not in ‘the dry’. That’s why people didn’t live there. But people used to live there. They built ways of collecting water. Collecting it from the sky. Ways for storing water from the sky. So why did they leave? No one knew.
There were palm trees, coconut palms. There were oysters, two-bite oysters, oysters you couldn’t eat at one go.
The reef had an opening, the opening had a channel, the channel had a mooring, the mooring was safe. That’s why we went there. There were fish.
No one ever went there. There was no reason to ever go there. That’s why we went there. It was a long way from Paris.
The girls were fantastic. We knew they’d be fantastic. They understood the story, and the part they had to play. Not play now, play later. They were their mother’s daughters. There was the actress in them too.
Nature and nurture. Don’t forget nature. Nurture’s ‘for the birds’.
It was months since they saw their mother. The mother I was going to get back for them. And get back for me too.
Twenty-Six
Ambrosia was brave. As brave as I knew she’d be. She came home from hospital. Her life was a wheelchair life. Her body lived a wheelchair life. So, not all of her lived a wheelchair life. Her mind didn’t live a wheelchair life. Her mind was grown, from her months with Annie, from her months with me, from the things she learned, from the books she read.
When I first met Ambrosia, she was empty. She was waiting to be filled. The school in English Harbour was a good school, she said. She never saw reason to learn things there, she said.
She left school at fourteen, she said. She could read and write, she said. She had no wish to do either, she said. She didn’t know about books. Didn’t know what was in them. She never read one. She read bits from the Bible. The bits she read made her scared of God. Scared of the things he would do when she died. Scared of the things he would let the Devil do when she died. She was scared of the Devil. She was more scared of God. So, she didn’t like reading the Bible. That’s what she said.
‘God is Love and God is Peace.’ That’s nonsense. God is a nasty piece of work. God is not a tender, loving or caring God. God is a malicious, mean and spiteful God. Not the God the Church tries to sell us. He’s the God of Leviticus 2. Not a tolerant or loving God. Not the God of Love and Peace.
God is a homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, genocidal, infanticidal, capriciously malicious, petty and vindictive God. If we believe in the God of Love and Peace, we are being more gullible than we ought to be. That’s why I don’t believe in him. That’s why other people don’t believe in him. That’s why churches are never full. Not anymore.
Ambrosia only knew fear from the things she read in the Bible. She thought it would be the same with anything else she read. That was until she met Annie. Annie gave her books to read. They were books that weren’t scary. They were books to make her world enlarge. Then Annie left us. Then I gave her other books. I read to her from other books. Listened as she read to me from the other books. I watched her as her world enlarged. She was a smart woman. I liked to watch her as she read. She read everything. At the start, I thought I should guide her. Then I thought I shouldn’t. She should read anything she wanted to. That turned out to be everything. She read light things, silly things, funny things, clever things and things so dense no one could ever understand them. Well, the things so dense I could never understand them. Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, stuff like that. And I was meant to be smart.
She read everything. She was smart. The more she read the smarter she got. The smarter I saw her get. The smarter she saw herself get. We talked about the books she read. The more books she read and the more books we talked about, the smarter she became.
It was wonderful to watch her germinate and grow. Annie did the germination. She was already germinated when I met her. I watered her and fertilised her. In both ways, I suppose.
After Annie left us, left us for the first time, she read through the library. They were bad days for both of us. She did it to escape. I watched her escape. In the evenings we read. I did it to escape as well. I sat on the sofa. She lay with her feet on me. She held the book in front of her. She became a fast reader. I thought she couldn’t absorb all the things she was reading. I was wrong.
When she finished a book, she wanted to talk about it. I liked doing that. She read more, she understood more, we talked about more. She understood what she read. It was good for me to talk about the books she read. It made me think again about the books she read. About the people who wrote the books she read. What those people were trying to say.
It was good to watch her as her world enlarged. Then to bed, to make love, to ease the damage. The damage Annie did to us.
That was the first time Annie left us.
Then Annie left again. Left me a letter and left us both again.
Ambrosia came home from the hospital. I wasn’t much help. Not much help in the things that mattered. Not the things that mattered to her or the things that mattered to us both.
&
nbsp; The physical things, the things for her wheelchair, the things for her body, were the only things I could help her with. The things I could arrange for her to make her life in a wheel-chair easier for her, were the only things I could help her with. For the rest of it, I was empty. She said she was empty too. The emptiness of loss. The loss of the woman we loved. And then, later, the loss of the girls we loved.
She said we should do a thing. A thing Annie said we should do when bad things were happening in our lives.
And that was read Shakespeare. The bits of Shakespeare that would help us. She knew the bits to go to. Some of the bits we needed to go to. Some of the bits only I needed to go to.
‘Tell them, that to ease them of their griefs, their fear of hostile strokes, their aches, losses, their pangs of love, with other incident throes, that nature’s fragile vessel doth sustain in life’s uncertain passage. Time will kindness bring.’
That was all very well. So ‘time heals all’? Not bloody likely. Not from where I was standing. It didn’t do much for Ambrosia either. Not from where she was sitting.
‘Give sorrow words, the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it break.’
So, talking about Annie and the girls was going to help? I didn’t think so. Neither of us did.
‘Praising what is lost makes remembrance dear.’
Praising her would be hard to do, given what she did to us. Even though we didn’t know why she did what she did to us. Even though we suspected we knew. Hoped we knew. Kept faith that we knew why she did what she did to us.
A Judgement on a Life Page 19