The Yellow Villa

by Amanda Hampson

  So here he is, hoist with his own petard. Caught in his own trap. The only question that remains is whether he will die of starvation or hypothermia. He contemplates which will be slower and more dreadful as he paces the length and breadth of the cellar. Walking up and down each of the three tunnels, he checks the walls, the floor and the ceilings, imagining a secret escape hatch revealing itself for the first time. He tries pulling at the door, but knows this is futile. He wanted the cellar secure and he got it.

  Old people are always bellyaching about wanting to die in their own home, but clearly not in their cellar. In the comfort of their bed, surrounded by loved ones. That will not be his fate. He will breathe his last breath on a bed of cardboard like a commontramp.

  He gets back on the crate and pushes his nose against the cold grille and looks up into the night sky. Rain falls steadily, no star or moon to be seen. He feels the icy air on his cheeks. He smells the mud outside and wonders at the complexity of that not unpleasant odour, made more beautiful simply because it is a part of the world outside from which he is forever excluded.

  Susannah is most likely on her way to England, running off home to Daddy. Sooner or later she will try to contact him and, no doubt, want to put the house on the market. Some months from now, someone will come to clear the place out and find his body. He feels a little cheered by the idea that this person could be Susannah, only disappointed that he won’t be alive to witness her reaction.

  It makes him furious that she will get her hands on his wine after all. It is entirely her fault that he’s trapped in here. If she hadn’t been stealing from him he wouldn’t have come down here to hide his wines. If she hadn’t come down to steal more wine, he wouldn’t have rushed into the cellar and locked himself in. Why did he do that instead of confronting her? What was she going to do, wrestle them off him? It was a reflex action, a natural response in the circumstance.

  He almost can’t be bothered to be angry at Susannah; he’s worn himself out on that one. He has bigger problems. Or does he? Or is it that he has no problems? Is it that his time has come and all the problems of the corporeal world – lawsuits, divorces, bankruptcy, slanderous stories – are now irrelevant. Now that he faces his own mortality, he wishes he were more spiritual and could experience it on a higher plane.

  He realises all at once that there is a third way to die. Infinitely more pleasant than starvation or hypothermia, and borderline spiritual. Alcohol poisoning. He will poison himself with some of the best wines in the world. It’s almost Shakespearean in its tragic irony. He will work his way through his best vintages; wines he probably never would have consumed because they are simply too valuable to drink. He has everything he needs at hand including a corkscrew and a tasting glass. What a way to go out! He feels positively elated. His death will be a spiritual experience like no other. A time of quiet focus, contemplation and reflection.

  He folds and rips up empty cartons, like a rat making a nest, and packs them into one corner until he has somewhere agreeable to sit and enjoy the experience. He’s excited to discover the rug that he had so considerately wrapped around that wretched woman’s shoulders, discarded on the floor, and adds that to his nest.

  He spends quite some time debating aloud the selection of his final drops. He sets them out in order. Although some of the vintages don’t really need it, he pulls the cork on each of the reds to allow them to breathe. By the third bottle he’ll probably be too drunk to get up, let alone make another selection and open it. Better to have the whole thing planned out nicely in advance. He yearns for a little foie gras or a sliver of cheese to enhance the experience but it is not to be and he accepts that with an equanimity that he can’t help but admire. What a shame his final hours won’t be documented in his memoir; that would be a nice twist. Perhaps someone could ghostwrite that part for him? Or at least add an epilogue detailing the tragic circumstances of his death.

  He has a couple of bottles of Cristal put aside and, at the current temperature of the cellar, the champagne would be perfect for drinking. But then again, he doesn’t want to fill up on bubbles and peak too early, thereby not being able to completely appreciate the first red, which will be the pinnacle of his collection, the remaining la Romanée-Conti. So he decides to skip the Cristal and go straight to the vin rouge.

  Given that he wouldn’t have drunk both of the Romanée, he feels less distressed by the thought of Susannah flogging one. He settles down in his little nook, wipes out the glass carefully with the corner of his shirt, pours the wine, inhales deeply and takes his first sip, carefully savouring every nuance. It is, just as he anticipated, almost a religious experience. It’s as though every wine he sampled in his life has brought him to this moment, educated his palate to appreciate the multi-dimensioned character of this nectar.

  As he drinks, he ponders his life and the story he has documented and feels a deep sense of satisfaction that he has put the work in and left a legacy. Even the manner of his death will be very attractive to a publisher. And if someone was to do their homework and tot up the cost of his exit plan, they would discover it was well over the ten-thousand-pound mark, perhaps more. He will be published posthumously. Readers will mourn his passing. He was a real character, they will say. Like a good wine. Ironically, Joanna’s story will help sell his book, so she’ll actually be working for him instead of against him. It was a shame the way it all turned out. He had rather liked her.

  The first bottle goes down smoothly over the next hour as he takes his time with it. Sitting with his back against the wall, he looks around with a renewed appreciation for the construction of the cellar. He admires the workmanship of the bricks that form the arches and even goes so far as to examine them closely, wondering if they had been fired in a local kiln. Now he’ll never know and there’s something restful in that sense of finality. His thoughts wander in a pleasant, almost mystical, way that is quite new to him.

  Towards the end of the second bottle, he begins to feel a little maudlin. He finds himself more concerned about the hereafter, wondering if there is one. He’d been brought up a Catholic and, regardless of how lapsed one was, there was always the niggling worry they might be right.

  His conscience begins to bother him. All this time he’s been telling himself that Farash had a choice. No need to fall on his sword. He could have just parked his car somewhere else, for Christ’s sake! How difficult could it possibly be? Then the whole episode could have been avoided and the man would still be alive, poppaduming to his heart’s content. Now facing his own imminent demise, Dominic can admit to himself that he isn’t proud of the part he played; his mean-spiritedness, his spite, his dishonesty. He thinks back to the beginning and wonders how things might have played out differently.

  The King of Kashmir had been right opposite the Harringtons’ house and, from the bay window of the living room, they had a clear view into the interior of the restaurant. Although nothing flash, it was a celebrity haunt and Dominic would see Farash come out of the restaurant to meet chauffeur-driven limos, ushering the occupants inside, bowing and scraping like a servant. It had annoyed him when Farash bought a Rolls Royce. He didn’t care about him being Indian, it was simply that the man just didn’t know his place. He seemed to think that a great lumbering Rolls Royce would make him a toff or a celebrity like his customers. Typical of people who hobnob with celebs and soon begin to believe they are one. Farash behaved as though he actually was the king of Kashmir.

  Directly outside the restaurant was a bus stop and therefore no parking. Prior to his extravagant purchase, Farash, who lived with his family in a flat above the restaurant, had been satisfied to park his clapped-out old Jag off down the street. But he was so proud of his Roller, he insisted on parking it opposite the restaurant – directly outside the Harrington residence – where he could admire it and keep it in full view of his clientele. Every few days, the son, a boy in his twenties, would bring a bucket and wash the gritty black crust of London air off it, drying it lovingl
y with a chamois until it glowed.

  Living above the restaurant, Farash often went for days without using the car and Dominic’s frustration began to build day by day. The minute he saw Farash get behind the wheel, smugly infatuated with his own stateliness, Dominic would be out the door at an unseemly pace to collect his own car parked up the street. He’d be in a lather to get back to the contentious spot before some other driver nabbed it. All that aside, the sweet relief when he secured that spot, knowing that Farash would be cursing in Punjabi or whatever it was he spoke, made all the effort worthwhile.

  It wasn’t as though Dominic hadn’t tried to reason with him. He went with the high-handed approach first: ‘Look, Farash, you can’t park your car there. It’s right outside my house. I’ve had to park two streets away.’

  ‘I have a parking permit,’ Farash assured him. ‘I can park wherever I choose. That is the law. You should be very proud to have this beautiful beast outside your house. What a splendid view you have! And at no cost to you.’

  ‘Yes, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The fact is that it’s a matter of common courtesy not to park right outside someone else’s property.’

  ‘I am not aware of this courtesy. This is a street owned by the public. I am a member of the public. So are you. Sometimes you park here. Sometimes I park here. This is very fair, I think.’ His tone was careful and polite, punctuated by alternating smiles and frowns.

  This was the first of many such conversations. All of which irked Dominic. Farash seemed to think that Dominic should be honoured to live in such close proximity to the King of Kashmir, as if he enjoyed views of the Taj itself instead of a bog-standard shopfront with its name painted in gold ‘Indian’ calligraphy across the window. Farash had invited Dominic to come and dine at the restaurant as his guest and see for himself that this was the best Kashmiri cuisine in London. Of course, the man was unaware that he was talking to one of the nation’s most highly esteemed food critics.

  Regardless of how rude and aggressive Dominic was towards Farash, the man continued to be both courteous and uncompromising. Dominic tried digging in, leaving his car there and using buses, taxis and the tube. But this was highly inconvenient, not to mention expensive.

  Susannah had not one iota of interest in or sympathy for Dominic’s skirmishes with Farash. Despite up-to-the-minute commentary on the escalating situation, she continued to believe that Farash and his family were lovely people. Typical of her indiscriminate approval – no insight whatsoever into the dark souls of her fellow human beings.

  Over the years, Dominic had written some scathing reviews, and he had closed down at least half-a-dozen restaurants that were, in any case, a blight. He performed a public service by clearing out the dross. The King of Kashmir was not one of those and the truth was that he had never eaten there. He went over one morning before it opened, peered inside and read the blackboard menu. He then put his imagination to work, documenting his non-existent experience with vivid description, metaphor and a sprinkling of apt adjectives. He typed it up and called it through to the paper. It was one of his more incisive pieces, partly because he had free rein, unconstrained by truth or accuracy. He wishes he could remember it now, but only fragments remain: something about the burrah kebab grilled lamb chops having the flavour of something rescued from a house fire, a sizzling synthetic taste. The salmon tikka, so dry that a hacksaw would have been more useful than a knife. The soft-shell crab coated in wallpaper glue and dusted with scorched remnants from the aforementioned house fire.

  Just to make sure, he made an appointment with his doctor and fabricated a lurid account of illness. He based his symptoms on a previous bout of food poisoning that had actually been contracted in India, so was loosely related to Farash. Naturally in the interests of public service, this had to be reported to the appropriate authorities. By that stage, he had become so caught up in his story, he had almost forgotten it was a fiction. He even felt a little bilious, which just goes to show the power of the mind.

  While he’d had the satisfaction of being instrumental in the closure of those other restaurants, he’d never actually had the pleasure of watching it happen. Quite quickly, there were indications that all was not well. This, presumably, was because his reviews now appeared online, communicating faster with more people.

  Where it had been famously difficult to obtain a table, within weeks, empty tables proliferated. The limos gradually disappeared. A month later the King of Kashmir began to close one, then two nights a week, when it had previously been open every night. Farash himself could be seen some afternoons, standing in the doorway smoking pensively, looking up and down the street as if trying to make sense of this downturn. Dominic wondered if he had actually seen the review and considered slipping a clipping under the door. If by some remote chance Farash hadn’t seen it, the mysterious drop in his popularity would be a humbling experience for him; perhaps he would interpret it as a karmic reprisal for his former pomposity. Dominic would not be the one to enlighten him.

  The final victory was slow to dawn. On a couple of occasions, Dominic had noticed a fellow looking the Roller over. He was accompanied not by Farash himself but the son, and Dominic was quietly confident that this chap was a potential buyer.

  When Dominic came downstairs one morning and saw the parking space empty, he left it that way. Over the next couple of days, various cars parked there for short periods, their owners unaware that this tiny patch of London was disputed territory. By the end of the week it was clear that the Roller was gone and victory was his for the taking.

  It was an empty victory to some degree because no one cared about it the way he did. There was no one with whom to celebrate. Susannah had not shown an ounce of support throughout the ordeal. Every time she found him staked out in front of the window or witnessed him belting out the door, keys in hand, she would insist he was obsessed and needed to find something else to do. But he couldn’t think what that might be. His column inches had already shrunk to half of what he’d been allowed a year earlier. His friends had dwindled due to financial issues, relocation or – in a couple of cases – untimely death. Almost everything he had achieved in life had arrived of its own accord. He had made a career out of being the man in the right place and had no idea how to initiate something himself. The battle for the parking space had given him a sense of purpose that he hadn’t even realised had gone missing, if it ever existed at all.

  In the month following his triumph over Farash, he felt a definite sense of anticlimax. The hell Farash had put him through had lost its bite, and he barely looked over at the King of Kashmir any more. It ceased to exist for him. But he did notice when the restaurant remained in darkness for a few days. The Farash family were presumably still there since the lights were on in the upstairs flat. Not long after this observation, a ‘To Let’ sign appeared in the window and then, the same week, wreaths and bouquets of flowers were laid in the doorway.

  Initially, Dominic assumed these were tributes from loyal customers mourning the loss of the business but when he crossed the street to read some of the cards, he discovered that the king himself was dead. Neighbourhood gossip later revealed he had hung himself in the kitchen.

  Dominic hardly had time to process this unintended tragedy when a member of the press, a hungry young hack, turned up at his door. He was a friend of Farash’s son, whose name was Pran. Dominic had stood his ground, insisting that he’d dined there, booked under a pseudonym and hedged on the actual date of his booking. But the restaurant evidently had CCTV monitoring that not only revealed he hadn’t been there, but had captured him hovering in the doorway as he copied down the blackboard menu.

  The headline read ‘Critic Buries Chef’. Other papers picked it up, then current affairs television and, after that, life spiralled into chaos. His contract was cancelled. His reputation in tatters. Susannah, who had known nothing of the review (never bothering to follow his work) spent her days railing against him and weeping helplessly. Even
after the papers lost interest, he was a pariah in his own street. It seemed impossible that Farash had garnered such loyalty. People who previously greeted Dominic as a local now rejected his custom. Friends not only did not commiserate but failed to return his calls, presumably for fear of contamination. He felt like a prisoner in his own home, drinking the day away. So when Susannah suggested they escape to France, it wasn’t as though there was anything more appealing on the horizon, and so he agreed.

  Now, ironically, he is once again a prisoner in his own home. This time drinking the night away. His destiny, so it seems. This is where it will end.

  Drinking at a steady pace, he continues to load up his system. All appreciation is lost, the wine tastes sour and poisonous. Somewhere between the fourth and fifth bottle, he will lapse into unconsciousness. Inevitably organ failure will occur and he will be done for. The most surprising aspect of the whole fiasco is his sense of inebriated equanimity. He can already feel himself fading, and it’s not at all disagreeable. He has lived in the best of times, and has no desire to face the worst of times. He feels a sense of peace and satisfaction in the knowledge that he will be remembered. His memoir will outlive him. His words will be read, his story shared, his name uttered long after he has gone.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  It’s late August when Susannah returns to Cordes-sur-Ciel. As she walks the dogs up the rue Albert Bouquillon towards the Tinkers’ house, she has a vivid recollection of the sense of hope she felt that first time she visited. It’s almost impossible to believe that so much has happened in less than a year. She has thought often of the Tinkers, always with remorse and guilt. There is no doubt in her mind that her and Dominic’s contribution to their lives was nothing but destructive and she half expects to find the place for sale and the Tinkers gone.