by Tom Holt
♦
There is one pub in Southampton which it is impossible to get yourself thrown out of no matter what you do or say, and there the newcomer ran into someone he knew very well.
At first they tried to avoid each other, since it was three days yet before they had to go back to the ship, and then they would be together again, inseparable, for another seven years. But this plan broke down when the newcomer realised that he had run out of money.
“Antonius,” said the newcomer to his friend in Dutch, “lend me a flyer till payday.”
Antonius felt in the pocket of his shirt and found a five pound note, which he gave to his companion. His companion’s name, for the record, was Johannes, and he and Antonius had been born in the same village south of Antwerp over four hundred and thirty years before. Barring shore leaves like this, they had been out of each other’s company for a period exceeding eight hours exactly once in four hundred and seventeen of those years, when Johannes’ mother had suspected that her son had caught the plague and locked him up in the barn for a few days.
Neither of them would have chosen to have it this way, since they didn’t get on very well and never had. Johannes was a short, noisy man with a hairy face and hairy arms, who liked drinking a lot and falling over. What Antonius liked doing best was standing quite still, unfocussing his eyes, and thinking of nothing at all. Each of them found the other remarkably uncongenial, and the only point on which they were united and could talk for more than three minutes without losing their temper with each other was their dislike of everyone else on board the ship, and in particular Captain Vanderdecker.
“After all,” said Johannes, a few minutes later, as they sat in a corner of the bar under the dartboard and drank their beer, “he was the one got us into this in the first place.”
“That’s right,” replied Antonius. “All his fault.”
A dart bounced out of treble fifteen and point first onto Antonius’ brown, bald head. He extracted it and handed it back to its owner.
“What the hell did he want to go drinking that stuff for in the first place?” Johannes continued, picking a grain of chalk dust out of his beer as he spoke. “He should have known it would end up all wrong.”
“He just didn’t think,” Antonius agreed. “No consideration for others.”
“And then dropping it,” said Johannes bitterly, “into the beer-barrel.”
“Typical,” said Antonius. It was a word he was very fond of and saved for special occasions. He didn’t want to wear it out by overuse.
“This beer,” said Johannes, unconsciously echoing his captain, “grows on you after a bit. You could get used to it.”
“It’s got a taste, though,” Antonius asserted. “You want another?”
“Might as well.”
So they had another, and another, and two or three more after that, and then they went outside to get some air. By now they were feeling quite relaxed, and Antonius remembered the girl who lived round the corner. They decided to go and visit her. They did this every time they came to England, just as, every time, they forgot that she had died in 1606 and that her house was now a car park. They always left a note though, saying that they were sorry to have missed her and would be sure to drop in next time. Since the building of the car park they had taken to sticking these notes behind the windscreen wipers of the parked cars, and once they had left one on the car of an avid and knowledgeable local historian, who had read it and was quite ill for months afterwards.
♦
The plump man, who was also an accountant, although a vastly more important one than the girl, made himself a cup of lemon tea and tried to forget that he had wasted a performance of The Flying Dutchman at Covent Garden, with Neustadt singing Senta, on a cultural void like Jane Doland. Next to his career, he loved opera above all things and a failure to appreciate it was a crime that could not be forgiven. He opened his briefcase, switched on his calculator and put Rienzi on the CD player. Slowly, like the return of spring, the wound began to heal.
TWO
The National Lombard Bank is situated in the very heart of downtown Bridport. It is the sort of location any red-blooded bank manager would give his heart and soul for, right in the epicentre of a triangle formed by the town’s most beguiling attractions—the fish and chip shop, the Post Office and the traffic lights. In summer, whole families still make the difficult journey into Bridport from the surrounding countryside to stand and watch the traffic lights performing their dazzling son et lumiere; and although they now have a set of lights in Charmouth—a deliberate and cynical attempt to poach the holiday trade that has introduced much bitterness into the previously friendly relationship between the two communities—purists insist that the Bridport set has a purer green, a rosier red, a more scintillating amber than any others this side of Dorchester.
To a Sybaritic Londoner like Jane Doland, however, the Bridport Lights meant nothing more than another hold-up on her way to a not particularly pleasant assignment, and with the poverty of spirit that is the hallmark of the city-dweller she assumed that the small throng of children gathered round them were merely waiting to cross the road. She had no street-plan of Bridport to help her find the bank, but she located it nevertheless simply by looking straight in front of her as she drove in from the roundabout. A bank, she said to herself, what fun. This is well worth missing the London premiere of Crocodile Dundee 9 for.
The causes of momentous events are often so bewilderingly complex that even highly-trained historians are at a loss to unravel them. Men wise in their generation have gone grey, bald and ultimately senile in the great universities grappling with the origins of the English Civil War, the Peasants’ Revolt and the rise of Hitler, and it is doubtful now that the truth will ever be known. In contrast, the reason why Jane Doland was in Bridport, two years (give or take a week or so) since she had gone to see The Flying Dutchman at the Royal Opera House, was quite remarkably simple. A decree had gone out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, and since this particular decree had had some viciously unexpected things in it about Advance Corporation Tax, all leave was cancelled in the offices of the leading accountancy firm where Jane Doland occupied a trivial and poorly-paid position, and accountants were dispersed like dazed bacilli into the bloodstream of British commerce to sort out the affairs of the National Lombard Bank, the firm’s largest and most complicated client. Since the National Lombard has more branches than all the trees in the New Forest, and the Bridport branch occupies roughly the same place in the bank’s list of priorities as that assigned to Leatherhead Rovers in the Football League, its affairs were unhesitatingly entrusted to Jane Doland’s skill, expertise and highly-motivated commitment.
Jane was considering this when she parked her car under a lime tree in that famous Bridport thoroughfare which some unusually imaginative soul had christened South Street. In fact the term nonentity had been raffling about in her brain like a small, loose bearing all the way down the A303, and by the time she reached her destination she was in no mood to be pleasant to anybody or to appreciate anything. This would go some way towards explaining her lack of enthusiasm for the traffic lights, which happened to be at their luminescent best this not particularly fine morning.
Nevertheless, Jane said to herself as she walked through the door of the bank. When trying to cheer herself up, she never got further than nevertheless, but it was always worth giving it just one more go. As she had expected, they had looked out lots of nice accounts for her to amuse herself with, and although they were all in such a hopeless mess that Sherlock Holmes, with Theseus to help him, Einstein to handle the figures and Escoffier laying on plenty of strong black coffee, would have had a devil of a job sorting them out. Jane told herself that it is always the thought that counts. She could imagine the faces of the bank staff when the news hit them that an accountant from Moss Berwick was coming to visit them. “Moss Berwick, eh?” she could hear them saying to each other. “Somebody hide the July retu
rns while I shuffle the invoices.”
After several false starts, the hour-hand of the clock on the wall in the pleasantly intimate cupboard they had set aside for her personal use crept round to one o’clock and she made her Unilateral Declaration of Lunchtime. The precious forty-five minutes that her contract of employment allowed her for rest, nourishment and the contemplation of the infinite was mostly dissipated in locating and booking into the Union Hotel, which Jane was able to tell from the public lavatories next door by the fact that the roller towel in the public lavatories worked. By not bothering to unpack, Jane was able to dash down to the bar, fail to get a drink and a sandwich before it shut, and sprint back to the bank just in time to be three minutes late for the afternoon session. The manager wasn’t impressed, and one of the cashiers gave her a look that nearly stripped all the varnish off her nails. At about three-fifteen her pencil broke.
Stay with it, girl, she said to herself as the office junior came to tell her to go away because they were locking up now, you’ve got four more days of this. Think (she said to herself) of the Honour of the Firm. Think of old man Moss hauling himself up by his bootstraps out of the slums of nineteenth-century Liverpool, studying all the hours God sent at the Mechanics Institute to pass his examinations, qualify, meet up with old man Berwick and found the greatest accounting firm the world has ever known. She had read this stirring story in the recruitment pamphlets they had sent her when she joined, and the recollection of it never failed to arouse in her strong feelings of pure apathy. Oddly enough, the pamphlet had been curiously reticent on the subject of old man Berwick, preferring to concentrate on his more dashing colleague, and Jane often wondered where he had pulled himself up out of by his bootstraps. Harrow, probably.
A year or so back, the compilers of the same recruitment guide had been going round interviewing members of staff for the new edition, and they had asked Jane what the most satisfying, fulfilling, life-enhancing thing about working for the firm was, in her lowly opinion. She had replied, without hesitation, going home, and they hadn’t included her in the guide or even the video, although she prided herself that she had the best legs in the department. Since the rest of the legs in the department belonged to Mr Shaw, Mr Peterson, Mr Ferrara and Mr Timson respectively, this was no symptom of vanity on Jane’s part, merely the scrupulous accuracy and devotion to truth which marks an accountant out from his fellow creatures.
Since then, Jane had kept her opinion of her chosen career very much to herself; but, as if to compensate, she let it out of its cage pretty freely once she was alone with it. As she was now, for instance, on a cold Monday night in Bridport.
There are few excitements to compare with one’s first night in a strange new town, and despite her weariness and a deplorable urge to take her tights off and watch “Cagney and Lacey” on the black and white portable in her room at the Union Hotel, Jane set out to immerse herself completely in the town. After all, she reckoned, she might never come here again; live this precious moment to the full, crush each ripe fruit of sensation against the palate until the appetite is cloyed in intoxicating richness.
The cinema was closed when she eventually found it, what with it being half past September, and since she had no wish to be raped, robbed or murdered she didn’t go into the White Hart, the Blue Ball, the Bunch of Grapes, the Prince of Wales, the Peacock, the Catherine Wheel, the Green Dragon, the Four Horseshoes, the Hour Glass, the Half Way House, the Bird in Hand, the Bottle and Glass, the Jolly Sportsman, the Dorsetshire Yeoman, the Boot and Slipper, the Rising Sun, the Crown and Cushion, the Poulteney Arms, the Red Cross Knight, the Two Brewers, the Black Dog, the Temporary Sign, the Duke of Rochester, the Gardeners Arms or the Mississippi Riverboat Night Club. Apart from these, the only place of entertainment open to the public was the bus shelter, and that was a touch too crowded for Jane’s taste. She went back to the Union Hotel, had a glass or orange juice and some fresh local boiled carpet with gravy in the dining room, and went upstairs to catch the last ten minutes of “Cagney and Lacey”, which had been cancelled and replaced with athletics from Zurich.
Isn’t it fortunate, Jane reflected, that I brought a good book with me. The only thing which can stop me enjoying my book is if the proprietors of this charnel-house forget to put a shilling in the meter. She picked the book out of her suitcase, opened it where her expired Capitalcard marked the place, and began to read.
This is not the right book, she said to herself as her eye fell upon the corduroy furrows of the page. This is the book I finished reading yesterday.
You can tell of your Torments of the Damned. You can, if you wish, allude to Sisyphus and the Stone. You can wax eloquent, especially if you are a television evangelist, about what is going to happen to the fornicators and the bearers of false witness when they finally come eyeball to eyeball with the Big G. But you cannot begin to describe, not if you speak with the tongues of men and of angels, the exquisite agony of being stuck in a fleabag hotel in a shut town with a choice between watching a load of tubby East Germans putting the shot in their underwear or reading a detective story every detail of whose plot is etched on your mind.
A berserk fury came over quiet, tranquil-minded Jane Doland. She pulled on her tights, picked up her room-key and went out into the gloomy corridor. Downstairs, in what was described with cruel irony as the residents’ lounge, there might be a week-old newspaper or the July 1956 issue of Woman and Home. Or perhaps she might find a reasonably well-written telephone directory, or even a discarded matchbox with a puzzle on the back. There is always hope, so long as life subsists. The beating of the heart and the action of the lungs are a useful prevarication, keeping all options open.
She did find a matchbox, as it happens, but all it said was “Made in Finland, Average Contents Forty Matches”, and after the third reading Jane felt that she had sucked all the value out of that one. Disconsolate, she wandered out to the reception desk. The sound of a television commentator joyfully exclaiming that Kevin Bradford from Cark-in-Cartmel had managed to avoid coming last in the six hundred metres drifted through the illuminated crack above the office door. Jane looked down and saw the hotel register. Salvation! She could read that.
It was a fascinating document. For example, Jane learned that in November 1986 Mr and Mrs Belmont from Winnipeg had stayed three nights at the Union Hotel, and although they had had breakfast, they had not had any evening meals.
Why was that, she wondered? Had they spent every last cent on the flight, and been reduced to eating their way through all the individual portions of jam and marmalade on the breakfast table to keep body and soul together during their stay? Did they spend the evenings flitting from casino to night-club to casino, scorning the Union’s prosaic cuisine? Perhaps they just didn’t like the look of the menu terribly much. She could sympathise with that. And what had brought these globe-trotting Belmonts half-way across the world, uprooting them from their cosy timber-frame home among the wheatfields, beside the immeasurable vastness of the mighty lake? Had they come back in search of their heritage, or to pay their last respects to a dying relative, resolving a twenty-year-old feud in a final deathbed reconciliation? Did they feel that same restless urge that drove much-enduring Ulysses to see the cities of men and know their minds? Or had they simply got on the wrong coach?
Another thing that Jane discovered, and could well believe, was that not many people stayed at the Union Hotel, or at least not enough to fill up an optimistically large register in a hurry. This one went back nine years, to when a Mr J Vanderdecker of Antwerp had booked in for two nights. Oddly enough, she noticed, another J Vanderdecker (or the same man that bit older and wiser) had booked in seven years later. On neither occasion had he risked the evening meal, but he had insisted on a room with bath both times. A shy, private sort of man, Jane imagined, who would rather die than have strangers see him in his dressing gown and slippers wandering the corridors at half-past seven in the morning.
The office door started to open
, and Jane dodged guiltily away from the desk. As she did so she barked her shin on a low table, on which reposed a dog-eared copy of Shooting Times and Country Magazine. She seized it, fled, read it from cover to cover, finally fell asleep and had a nightmare about a man-eating ferret.
“I spy,” said the first mate, “with my little eye, something beginning with W.”
Nobody took any notice. Even Jan Christian Duysberg had guessed that one back in the 1740s, and he had been thirty-four years old before he realised he was left-handed.
A seagull drifted across the sky, staggered in mid-air, banked violently and flew off to the south-east. Cornelius Schumaker clipped his toenails quietly in the shade of the mast. Wilhelm Triegaart completed his seventy-ninth crossword of the trip.
For some of the crew of the sailing-ship Verdomde (which is Dutch for “Damned”) the second year of each seven-year term was the worst. Just as Jane Doland often felt at her most miserable on Tuesdays, because the memory of the brief freedom of the weekend had already faded without bringing Friday appreciably nearer, so it was with the more impatient of Vanderdecker’s command. Others were content to take each year as it came, whiling away the time with impossible projects—Pieter Pretorius, for example, was building a scale model of the baffle of Lepanto inside an empty Coca-Cola bottle, while his brother Dirk pushed back the limits of pure mathematics by calculating the overtime claim he was going to put in when the trip finally ended—while the remaining members of the crew saw no further than the next watch. By now, the only man on the ship who even bothered trying to do something about the mess they were all in was the captain himself.
Captain Vanderdecker was a great reader of the Scientific American. He sat in his cabin with his feet up on the map-table and a relatively recent copy of that publication on his knees, trying to do long division in his head while he shook his solar calculator violently in a vain effort to make it work. Something important to do with the half-life of radium was on the point of slipping away from him for want of the square root of 47, and if it got away this time it might take him weeks to get it back. The fact that time was not of the essence was something he tried not to think about, for fear of giving up altogether.