I hooked my feet behind the rung of the chair and stared up at him.
‘The truth is, Oliver,’ he said, ‘your father – when he was your age, or perhaps a little older – discovered a great liking for – an obsession with, one might even say – H. J. Martin, the subject of the biography he bought you. Your father knew that I had met Martin once or twice, and that I’d disliked him, and it seemed – to amuse him, I suppose, to develop this – hero worship. It was an act of rebellion against me, I think. An attack. And when he took you to that exhibition, and bought you the book, it was not only in spite of the fact that he knew I would see it, it was because he knew I would see it. It was nothing more nor less than an attempt to remind me of the tensions of his own adolescence.’
‘You mean he doesn’t care about me at all.’
‘I –’ Granddad paused, took a last drag on his cigarette, then leant towards me to stub it out. ‘It is entirely possible that he does care about you, Oliver, very deeply. I’m simply afraid that it wasn’t uppermost in his mind when he chose that particular gift for you.’
I looked down at my hands, spread out flat on Granddad’s desk. I didn’t want to believe him, but it was Granddad. He didn’t tell lies, not even when everyone else would, to be kind, or to make his life easier. He always told me when something would hurt. Even when I was small, when I’d asked he’d told me that my mother had got ill and died, and that God didn’t exist, and what gay meant.
‘Olly?’ He bent his knees and put his arm round me, so that our faces were on the same level. ‘Oliver, old chap. There’s no need to be ashamed –’
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘And I’m not crying.’ I pulled away. Granddad watched me for a few seconds, and then stood up. He reached for his cigarettes, glanced at me, and put them in his pocket without lighting one. He didn’t say anything. I swallowed over and over, trying to breathe normally, trying not to blink, because my eyes were full of water and I was not crying. I said, ‘I hate you,’ but only my mouth moved, and the cowardly bit of me was relieved that I hadn’t said it out loud this time.
I heard Granddad take a deep breath. ‘I don’t – I honestly can’t imagine that you would enjoy the book, at your age.’
I felt something odd squirming in my stomach. I didn’t look up.
‘It isn’t – Oliver, I don’t want your father to . . . You were terribly miserable all the time he was here, and I don’t want . . .’
It had started to rain again. I could hear it against the windows.
‘Oliver. Suppose we make a bargain?’
I turned my head. Granddad was leaning against the mantelpiece, gazing into his own eyes in the mirror. He reached out and straightened a photo frame, touching the glass gently. My grandmother beamed at the camera, cradling me in her arms, and my mum touched my hair with one hand, as if she couldn’t bear to let go of me completely. That was taken when I was tiny, before my grandmother died and Mum got ill. I couldn’t remember either of them.
Granddad cleared his throat. ‘If I were to give it to you, Olly, would you be willing to make me a promise?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
His reflection smiled at me. ‘You don’t know what it is yet.’
‘Whatever. I don’t care.’
‘Very well. Suppose I ask you to promise that, if I give you this book, you won’t read any other books about H. J. Martin; that you won’t let him become – an obsession, the way your father did.’
I stared at him. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that. I opened my mouth to ask why, but there was something about Granddad’s face that made me stop.
‘Will you, Olly?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
His reflection searched my face with his eyes. ‘You won’t seek to know more about him? Once you’ve read that book, you’ll stop? You give me your word?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But why? I thought you were worried about Dad.’
‘I – yes. Yes, I am.’ But he didn’t look at me, and if I hadn’t known that Granddad didn’t lie . . . ‘You can be a much, much better man than your father, Oliver. I don’t want you to end up like him. Neither do I want to be reminded of him. And as for H. J. Martin, I hardly knew him, but he was –’ For a second his voice seemed to hang in the air, but then he started speaking again and I thought I’d imagined that silence, that fractional pause. ‘He was simply a rather good-looking upper-class dilettante, who happened to be in a particular place at a particular time. He took in many people, but then we – they were like children: eager for myths, for heroes, for easy answers. He was . . . not a good man.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Right.’
He caught my eye and smiled, but he looked more tired than I’d ever seen him, even more tired than he had on Wednesday afternoon when Dad walked out. His face was all creased and baggy, like the framework underneath was rusting away. ‘All right, then, Olly,’ he said. ‘We have a bargain. Now . . .’ He got his keys out of his pocket, unlocked one of the low cupboards and took out the book. He held it for a moment, looking down at the photo, and then passed it to me without a word.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘You’re right,’ Granddad said. ‘What harm can it do?’
I opened my mouth, but he wasn’t expecting an answer. I wanted him to pat my shoulder, or kiss me goodnight, or say something so that I knew I wasn’t in trouble, but he turned away and propped himself against the desk, watching the rain spray the window. It was getting dark.
I waited until I knew he wasn’t going to look at me, and then I left.
As I shut the door behind me, I heard Granddad say quietly, ‘Stop being stupid, Oliver. What harm can it do? The man’s been dead for nigh on sixty years.’
I turned round, confused, but he wasn’t talking to me. He was still looking out of the window, staring into his own reflected eyes.
.
I went upstairs, trembling, holding the book in my arms like it was alive. I was filled with an odd mixture of shame and triumph – because Granddad had given in and I’d won.
I sat on my bed, opened the book, and started to read.
.
On June 21st 1936, at half past five in the morning, a motorcycle and its rider hurtled along the long, straight road that still runs from Falconhurst in East Sussex north-east towards Tunbridge Wells. It was already a clear, sunny day. In that era the traffic along the quiet country roads was minimal, and it would have been unusual – even startling – to meet another vehicle, especially so early in the morning, on a Sunday. The road holds no other surprises or hazards for the driver, stretching as it does for several miles without unexpected changes in direction or gradient. It was also well-known to the motorcyclist who rode along it that morning: his familiar, habitual route to the nearest town. We know, from evidence I will examine later, that he was travelling at no more than 38 mph; we also know that he was ordinarily a careful driver, averse to taking unnecessary risks.
Why, in the early hours of that glorious summer morning, H. J. Martin should have crashed his motorcycle – in such a violent impact that he was apparently flung several metres from the machine – and been killed instantly, we simply do not know.
There are other, secondary, questions that surround his death. We do not know, for example, where he was going; indeed, we do not know the direction in which he was travelling. We do not know why he was travelling so early in the morning, or where he had been. We do not know whether he met another vehicle on the road, or whether the boy who discovered his body under a tree next to the road and alerted the police was the first person to learn of the accident. We cannot even be sure that he was travelling alone.
These are not questions which I can answer. They are not, perhaps, questions that will ever be answered. But to me, and to all the other biographers of H. J. Martin, they ar
e an incisive reminder of the enigmas which make him both a fascinating and an elusive subject. The ease with which Martin’s life has achieved the status of myth – to the extent that the contemporary military historian S. S. Hamley remembers being told by his father that ‘H. J. Martin would come back, if we needed him, like King Arthur’ – has in part been increased by the circumstances of his fatal accident. But there is an element of the reverse: that while the mystery of Martin’s death satisfied a collective desire for intrigue, it was the interest aroused by his life that created that desire in the first place; that a solitary, violent, perplexing death was felt to be a fitting end for the hero who had so inhabited the imagination of the British public.
What died that morning was not simply a celebrity, a man who had made a name for himself first on the vast battlefield of the Middle East and then in the smaller, more intricate spheres of politics, academia and literature. Neither was he merely, as the politician Dominick Medina said, ‘a piece of the old England’. H. J. Martin was indeed an icon – a living metaphor, as it were, for ‘the old England’, the last avatar of Victorian Boy’s Own heroism – but he was also an extraordinarily complex figure, a man who told and retold his own story so inconsistently and ambiguously that he seemed to occupy a no-man’s-land between truth and fiction. Martin was not only a magnetic, charismatic, seductive personality, but a man whose life seems to embody the spirit of empire, of danger, of history itself . . .
.
I wasn’t a very quick reader in those days. By the time I got to the end of that first section it was late and I’d missed dinner. I knew Granddad would’ve kept some for me, but I wasn’t hungry. I had a hot, sick feeling in my stomach. I couldn’t believe it. All this fuss, for this! It was just history. It was the kind of book Granddad wrote. I reread the last sentence. Martin was not only . . . whose life seems to embody . . . history itself . . .
Then I threw the book across the room as hard as I could. It hit the wall with a thump and dropped into the corner behind my laundry basket.
A few days later Rosina picked it up when she was cleaning and put it on my bookshelf. But I never opened it again.
.
.
III
.
.
Dear Dad,
thank you for the book you bought me, it was very good. Granddad gave it back to me because I asked. I read it I have just finished reading it. I hope your flight home back to Sydney was good. I like aeroplanes.
I am doing well at school, we had a test in history and I got 89% which was good. I got a commendation because I knew when the 1st World War was.
When are you coming I really liked meeting you, I hope you did too. I am sorry it would be nice My Christmas holidays start on Wednesday and I have until the 6th of January.
How are you? I hope you are well. How is your job? It sounded very fun when you told me about it. My best friend Adeel says you can go scuba diving in Cornwall.
Love from Oliver
.
Dear Dad,
I hope you are well, and had a good Christmas. Me and Granddad had a good Christmas. I got a new games console and some games. My favourite is called DARK CLOUD: ENIGMA. Rosina gave me some money and a box of chocolates. What did you get? Do you have lots of friends in Sydney?
I am still doing alright at school. I am not very good at French because we drop things out of windows. Me and Adeel dropped everyone’s textbooks out of the window the last day of term. Adeel says its more French and educational if we say ooh la la! while we do it. Granddad told me off. but he said de Gaulle would be proud of us.
How are you? Is it good weather there? I expect it is much nicer than England at the moment because it is summer. Maybe you could I hope you are well.
Love from Oliver
.
Dear Dad,
Happy Easter! I hope you are well. I’ve just broken up for Easter and Granddad is taking me to Italy but I have two weeks holiday and I am spending the second week at home in London. How are you? I hope you are okay.
I hope you don’t mind me writing to you. I don’t have very much to say but I am fine. Please write soon.
Love from Oliver
.
Dear Dad,
Could you tell me if this is the right address for you?
.
Dear Dad,
Please will you answer my letters because I want to know if you’re dead.
*
Dear Dad,
I know it’s been a while since I last wrote. I’m hoping this is the right address for you, because, as you know, you never wrote back. But all I can do is hope that you’d have the decency to tell me if you’d moved, or if you wanted me to stop writing, so here we go, I’m writing to you anyway. If you’ve managed to earn enough money to buy a phone, then you could even ring on +44 208 779 6454. I’m still at the same address. You know, the one where Granddad shouted at you and you walked out without saying goodbye. Remember?
I don’t have much to tell you. I did OK in my GCSEs (mainly A’s and B’s. I expect Granddad told you, because he at least takes your paternal responsibilities seriously). I’m taking a couple of A-level modules this summer, but my main exams aren’t until the end of sixth form.
Sixth form is OK, although the girl I was going out with last year left to go to another school, and we’ve kind of drifted apart. I liked her, but we don’t see each other much, and I think she’s seeing someone else now. It’s fine, though. (My mate Adeel was really jealous when I asked her out and she said yes. He said that she’d gone for style over substance, although when I told her that she said it was more like mind over matter. I couldn’t tell whether that was meant to be an insult.)
Oh, by the way, you remember that book you bought me? The only thing you’ve ever given me, in sixteen years? (Did I mention that my birthday is the 3rd of July? Not that you’d care.) I told you I’d read it and it was really good. Well, actually, I didn’t read it at all. It was really boring. I don’t know why you even bothered to buy it for me. Let me know if this is the right address and you can have it back.
Anyway. I won’t bore you any longer. I don’t know why I’m writing this, really, as I know you won’t reply. Maybe you’re dead. Or maybe you want me to think you are. Whatever.
Your son, Oliver
.
It was all wrong, but I sent it anyway.
.
That was the day I got home from school and found Granddad celebrating. You could hear the music – some classical thing, Mozart or someone – playing from halfway down the street. That day we’d had a school trip to the British Museum and I was in a strange mood; I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, even Granddad. I was going to go straight upstairs to change my clothes but Granddad flung the kitchen door open and called, ‘Olly! How are you? Duly edified by our national treasures, I trust?’ He’d turned the music down a bit, but he still had to raise his voice. He looked flushed and excited.
I paused on the bottom stair. ‘Shouldn’t you be working, Granddad?’
‘Good news. I’m celebrating. Come and have a drink.’
He grinned at me and my bad mood receded. How many of my friends got home to their legal guardian playing music too loud and plying them with drink? I said, ‘OK,’ and followed him back into the kitchen. There were piles of CDs on the kitchen table, an overflowing ashtray, and a half-empty glass of something fizzy. ‘What’s the occasion?’
He pulled the fridge door open just slightly too enthusiastically; the jars rattled and clinked ominously. ‘Champagne, my boy?’
He only ever called me that when he was drunk. Or tight, as he’d say – I’m a trifle tight this evening, my boy. I’d told him once that tight didn’t mean that any more but he was still sober enough to get the Oxford English
Dictionary out and teach me the error of my ways.
‘Thanks.’ I watched him pour it; it looked like it wasn’t the first bottle. ‘I thought we only had champagne on Sundays.’
‘High days and holy days. They’re going to publish Arthur.’ Granddad handed the glass to me with a flourish.
‘Who’s Arthur?’
‘My book on King Arthur, Oliver. The one I’ve been working on. And talking about, every evening, for a year or so. The pinnacle of my life’s work. The one –’
‘Oh, yeah, that one. Congratulations.’ I raised my glass to him and took a mouthful of champagne. It was cold and slightly sour, like fizzy water.
For a second Granddad carried on smiling at me: the huge, unlikely, lighthouse-beam grin that seemed to extend beyond the actual edge of his face. It was irresistible; I couldn’t help smiling back. He lit a cigarette, sauntered over to the CD player, and turned the volume down so we could talk without having to shout.
He still had his back to me when he said, ‘Oh, and there’s a book tour for it in the summer. In the United States and Canada.’
‘Fantastic,’ I said. ‘How long for?’
‘Hopefully a month or so, Robin said. Starting in New York, then moving west. The details aren’t fixed yet.’
‘Great.’ I’d never been to America. I took another swig of champagne. ‘When’s it start?’
‘June.’ Granddad reached over and plucked an olive from a plastic tub balanced on the nearest pile of CDs.
‘What about my exams?’
Granddad paused, the olive poised between finger and thumb a few centimetres from his mouth. ‘Well, you don’t need me to be here, do you?’
I took the largest gulp of champagne that I could, and felt a trickle of something wet slide down from the corner of my mouth. After I’d swallowed I said, ‘No. ’Course not.’
‘I’ll send you an appropriate present.’
‘Right.’ I watched him eat his olive. It was one of the ones Rosina liked, the ones that came in a tub with bits of soggy garlic and lemon peel. I hated them but Rosina bought them anyway.
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