‘Dave?’ Cynthia’s voice on the recording. ‘It’s me, Cynthia. Hang in there, yeah? I love you, my angel. I just want you to know that. Whatever happens, however bad it gets, just remember me. You hear what I’m saying? The times we’ve had? All those times to come? Just nod, Dave. I know it’s hard but do it for me. For us, my angel. I love you, Dave, I really do.’
The picture wobbles a moment, and then I watch Dave struggling to manage a grunt or two, desperate to cheat the virus of its winnings, but his face has purpled the way you might react to a fish bone in your throat, a moment of panic and then the gravelly choking rasp as he tries to hoist whatever he needs to get rid of. This is a man who knows he’s drowning. Not in some terrible accident, but in the swampy wreckage of his own lungs.
‘Easy, my darling. Easy.’ Cynthia again.
Dave looks briefly grateful, and then collapses back against the pillow, his eyes closed. Moments later, nurses are crowding around the bed, and in a moment neither H nor I will ever forget, Fat Dave raises a thin white arm and his hand trembles as he waves goodbye. Then his fingers clench and we’re left with a single raised thumb. I did my best, he wants to say. And I love you, too.
We leave the house a couple of hours later. Both of us have done our best to comfort Cynthia, to tell her that there may yet be hope, that modern medicine can work all kinds of miracles, but I can tell from her face that she doesn’t believe me and by late afternoon it’s obvious that she wants to be left in peace.
We say our goodbyes at the door, give her a big hug, make her promise to phone the moment she needs us, but all she can manage is a tired nod. Her eyes are welling up again. She seems resigned, already in mourning. After the front door closes, H and I briefly confer beside his car. Thanks to Tony Morse, he’s acquired the key to a vacant apartment down in Southsea. I’m to follow him through the city. The fact that I’ve given Cynthia’s address as my Portsmouth lockdown address doesn’t seem to bother him.
‘You don’t want to go to the hospital?’ I ask. ‘Try and talk your way in?’
The question is superfluous. H stares at me for a long moment and I can tell by the way he rubs his eyes that the afternoon around Cynthia’s table has left him well and truly beached.
‘God, no,’ he says at last. ‘Anywhere but that fucking tomb.’
We spend the evening in the apartment Tony Morse has volunteered. It’s at the top of a property that overlooks Southsea Common, and the views from the third floor are sensational. The Common itself, green after recent rain, stretches away to the distant seafront. Nearer, on the left, I can see tennis courts. To the right, more distant, the Hovercraft departure terminus for the low grey swell of the Isle of Wight. This stretch of the Solent, H tells me, is prime viewing for big-ship nerds. Two generations ago you would have caught the giant Cunarders, the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary, heading up towards Southampton. Tonight we have to make do with a huge container ship the size of umpteen city blocks.
The view is a godsend because the rest of the apartment, in H’s phrase, is a dump. It smells of decay, of dodgy drains, of surrender to old age and maybe infirmity. The paintwork is shabby, the taps in the kitchen leak, there’s a steady draught through most of the windows, and if you ever thought anaglypta wallpaper was a distant memory, you’d be wrong. There’s a damp problem in the tiny bathroom and when I inspect the contents of the bucket beside the sink I find a balled prescription for, among other things, warfarin. This, I happen to know, is a blood thinner routinely prescribed after minor strokes, and this begins to suggest a picture of who might have been living here.
Another clue, more graphic, is the part-completed jigsaw we find on the threadbare carpet in the living room. The accompanying box is still brimming with spare pieces, but there’s enough on the floor to suggest some kind of battle at sea.
‘Trafalgar,’ H grunts, turning away, and when I finally find the lid of the box, I see he was right. Admiral Nelson’s flagship laid up against the French fleet. Our diminutive hero directing events from the quarterdeck with nerveless aplomb.
H and I do our best to settle in. H insists I take the bigger of the two bedrooms, while he’ll doss down next door. I dump my bag on the rumpled counterpane and pull the curtains back. An inspection reveals that the big freestanding wardrobe is empty, save for the lingering scent of mothballs. Ditto the chest of drawers. It’s at this point that I conclude we may be spending the night with a ghost. Warfarin probably wasn’t enough. Whoever lived here, whoever began to piece together those bloody hours off Cape Trafalgar, is probably dead and gone.
Either way, I tell myself I’m only here for a single night. I can hear H in the bedroom next door. He’s on the phone to a long list of local names, telling them about Fat Dave, and so I return to the living room at the front of the apartment, stepping carefully around the bones of the jigsaw, the abandoned homage to blood and treasure, knowing I have a couple of calls of my own to make.
The first goes to Malo. After I’ve closed the door, I tell him about our visit to Cynthia.
‘Your dad’s definitely in a state,’ I whisper. ‘It’s worse than I thought.’ From the sound of his voice, I can tell that Malo is disturbed. Once again, he offers to come down.
‘Don’t,’ I tell him. ‘They’ve sealed the borders. Police everywhere. On-the-spot fines. Heavy jail sentences. Transportation, if you’re lucky. You heard it here first.’
‘But what about you, Mum? You’re supposed to be in London.’
‘I’m back tomorrow.’
‘How?’
‘God knows. I’ll phone you if I make it.’
‘And Dad?’
‘I’m guessing he’ll stay.’
‘All by himself?’
‘In this city? I doubt it.’
We part as friends. He tells me to take care and says that Richmond Park has never been so empty. My son, bless him, is back in training for his first triathlon after a succession of injuries, and now runs most nights.
‘And Clemmie?’
‘She comes with me.’
‘Good. Keep it that way, eh?’
My other call goes to Tim. I’ve no idea where he lives in this place, but that turns out to be irrelevant.
‘I’ve self-evacuated,’ he says at once. ‘Think the Blitz. Think 1940. I’ve got a label round my neck and a packet of sandwiches but they can’t spell my name right.’
‘As in …?’
‘Tom. Funny thing is, I quite like it. Nice period touch. Young Thomas setting out on his big adventure.’
‘This has to be a joke.’
‘No way. Have you ever been out in the country? Free-range chickens at the bottom of the garden? Fresh-baked bread every morning? Home-smoked bacon? I thought Waitrose had it nailed, and you know what?’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘Yeah. Again.’
‘So, where are you?’
‘Bere Regis.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Dorset. Ask that hooligan mate of yours. He might know.’
‘I doubt it. You’re there for the duration?’
‘Yeah. God willing.’
‘Relatives?’
‘My mum. Are we getting the picture here? I’m doing it for her sake, of course. I just have to find room for all this tucker before I explode.’
Tucker. When I finish talking to Tim, I start wondering about something to eat. The fridge in the kitchen is turned off and empty. The old-style pantry offers nothing more than a little scrap of discarded muslin, the dried corpse of a sizeable bee, a packet of pasta, and a box of Oxo cubes. I look in on H but he’s still deep in conversation. When I do the knife and fork mime and tap my watch, he simply nods. Your call. I retreat to the living room to scroll through the take-out offers on my phone and settle for an Indian restaurant that seems to be round the corner. The food is with us within half an hour, the bagged cartons left outside the front door, my card swiped at arm’s length.
H is still on the phone. T
he gas stove turns out to be working and I manage to light the oven to keep the food warm. Back in the living room, waiting for H, I browse the books on the many shelves. The shelves themselves are DIY, poorly done. I doubt they were ever troubled by a spirit level, but the harder I look, the less that matters.
Books appeal to the detective in me because they can tell you everything you need to know about the reader, and the more attention I pay to the choice on offer, the more intrigued I become. Five Joseph Conrad novels, including Nostromo and Typhoon. The near-complete works of Patrick O’Brien. Several wartime biographies from warrior scribes on the Atlantic and Russian convoys. A rich selection of reads on the Nelsonian Navy. Books like these connect directly with the jigsaw at my feet but even more intriguing are the contents of the shelves below, most of which address crime and punishment. Famous murder trials. Legendary miscarriages of justice. Ten Rillington Place I happen to have read twice, not least because I was in for a part in the BBC radio drama adaptation. A fine book, deeply shocking.
‘What am I smelling?’ H is at the door, just off the phone. I’ve ordered his trusty favourites, which appear to pass muster. He has a selection of lagers in his suitcase, plucked from the fridge at Flixcombe Manor. Chicken jalfrezi with all the trimmings, plus a can or two of warm Stella, isn’t a combination I’d normally go for, but under these circumstances it feels curiously apt. Tim had it right. We’re all living through the Blitz again.
We eat in near silence. H is preoccupied, remote, distant, and when I ask who he’d talked to he tosses me the bones of the conversations. Wesley Kane, his one-time enforcer, is pissed off. He’s watched Goodfellas twice in twenty-four hours and doesn’t know where to turn next. Mick Pain, another stalwart back in the day, has developed Type 2 diabetes. While Gloria, an enormous Jamaican who once serviced Fat Dave in a private suite in a seafront hotel, has moved to London. In short, the passage of the years, and now the virus, are moving the Pompey story on.
‘Had to happen.’ H forks another cube of chicken. ‘Stay put in this life and you’re half fucking dead already.’
What I really want to talk about is H himself – what’s gone wrong, how he’s coping, and just how difficult this situation of his could get – but the last thing I want to do is betray any of my son’s confidences. And so I start at the other end, with Malo.
‘So what do you make of him these days? Our boy?’
‘He’s fine,’ H grunts. ‘Shaping up nicely.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I had my doubts about all the Doomsday crap but hey …’ He looks around and spreads his hands wide. ‘Turns out that mate of his was right.’
Malo’s mate is Sylvester Penny, the only son of our sometime ambassador in Berlin. The moment I first met him, the physical likeness to my son was uncanny – the fashionable gypsy tangle of black curls, the hint of predatory glee in his smile, his easy charm, and the sheer tightness of his focus when something interesting pops up on his radar screen. Sylvester’s big idea throws the mega-rich a lifeline in the face of numberless catastrophes – anything from nuclear war to, God help us, global pandemics – and just now his superyacht packages offering sanctuary at the ends of the earth are heavily over-subscribed. Malo, through his own efforts, has become part of this adventure, winning his father’s guarded approval.
‘He told you about the Audi?’ he asks.
‘No.’
‘Gone. Binned. Sold on.’
‘And now?’
‘He’s driving a series-seven Beamer. How many twenty-one-year-olds spend that kind of money to look like a middle-aged twat?’
The Audi was a present from H after we all returned semi-intact from the D-Day beaches. Malo selling it, I’m guessing, has hurt.
‘He’s still running,’ I point out. ‘He’s off the booze. He and Clemmie seem pretty tight. He’s making a name for himself, thanks to Sylvester. Do I hear a round of applause?’
‘No fucking way.’ H isn’t having it. ‘That boy thinks he knows every trick in the fucking book. Fact is he doesn’t, and won’t for a good while, but when did he ever listen to me?’
‘He loves you. To bits. Doesn’t that matter?’
H has always been uncomfortable with the word ‘love’, but I’m sensing, once again, that something has changed.
H takes a final swipe of sauce with what’s left of his chapati and then pushes the plate to one side. Only then does he look up.
‘He loves me? He said that?’ He very badly wants me to nod.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He did.’
THREE
I leave Southsea next morning. H has already put a call through to Cynthia, making sure she’s OK. Dave, it seems, has had a very difficult night and just now Cynthia wants to get her head down before she braces herself for another call to the ICU.
‘I’ll go round later,’ H says. ‘Maybe this afternoon. Check out exactly what she needs.’
I’m about to suggest she might want to be left alone but there’s something in H’s face that tells me it would be pointless. Fat Dave is dying and, for whatever reason, H needs to be part of that.
‘You’re off then?’ he grunts. We’re standing on the pavement beside my little Peugeot. In daylight, I notice for the first time that one of the ground-floor flats is available for rent.
‘Yes.’ I turn back to H. ‘Call me if you need me.’
‘You’ll be back? For the funeral?’
I nod, letting that single word, so final, settle between us.
‘Of course I will,’ I say brightly. ‘Provided they don’t arrest me.’
This isn’t as fanciful as it might sound. All morning, first on my smart phone and later on the ancient TV that belongs to the flat, I’ve been following the news. Lockdown is what it says on the tin. Every inch of the country I’ve always taken for granted – Holland Park, rural Dorset, and now Portsmouth – has become a giant set in some disaster movie: abandoned, empty, eerily quiet.
Upstairs in the flat, I’ve spent nearly an hour plotting a route north that should keep me out of trouble. This will involve a series of detours through the leafy shires from village to village. Given the time of year, mid-spring, I’m hoping for fields of skipping lambs and roadside trees heavy with blossom, and as I leave the low, grey clutter of Pompey, I realize I’m in some danger of enjoying the journey to come. It does me no credit to admit it, but I’m glad to be out of that hideous flat, itself a kind of tomb. The virus has already cast a long shadow and last night in bed, alert for every sound, I felt I could almost touch the darkness.
By mid-morning, much happier, I’ve left the South Downs behind me and I’m desperate for a coffee. I know it might sound improbable but alone in the car my thoughts have strayed to my mum in Brittany. She was born in 1940, the year the Germans helped themselves to half of France. Back then, she and her family lived in Paris and, with the Germans at their heels, she and most of the rest of the city fled south. My mum was a babe in arms at the time and therefore oblivious but later, after the war, she listened to story after story about those sweltering June days, and much of this she passed on to little me.
I was in my teens by the time I mustered the patience and the interest to listen properly and what struck me then, as it strikes me now, was the sheer speed with which things can change. Only two days ago, the shuttered wayside cafes would have been open. I could have sat down with a big fat cappuccino with spoonable sprinkles on top, and maybe even a croissant or two. But now, locked down, there’s nothing. How long will this coffee-less purdah last? Will I ever hear that gorgeous, anticipatory hiss of steam foaming the jug of cold milk again?
Idling in the middle of the latest village, waiting for the postman to cross the road, I think of my grandmère once more. Given the circumstances – milling hordes of refugees, broken-down cars, wailing kids – she would have killed for this solitude, this peace, this blissful absence of other people. But the shock of her own vulnerability she would have recognized only too well.
The virus, thank God, isn’t delivered by squadrons of wailing Stukas, but its sheer invisibility – death by stealth, death thanks to someone else’s sneeze, death after days and nights of slowly drowning in your own secretions – is in some respects more terrifying. Boris Johnson is doubtless doing his best to play Churchill in this crisis but it’s beginning to dawn on me that this virus, Dave’s virus, has no respect for bombast and fancy rhetoric.
Deep in my reverie, the lone driver in an otherwise empty village, the knock on my window comes as a surprise. The face staring down at me is oldish, female, and darkened by something I can only describe as rage. She’s wearing a slash of lipstick, the brightest red, and one thin hand is trying to steady her hat in the lively wind.
The moment I lower the window, she steps back and turns slightly away. This village isn’t big. I’m definitely an intruder and it’s probably wise not to inquire about the off-chance of a coffee.
‘Well?’ she says.
‘Well what?’
‘Some kind of explanation? Don’t you think that’s the least you owe us?’
‘An explanation for what?’
‘For being here. When you shouldn’t. Don’t you listen to the wireless? To the television? Haven’t you read the papers? Or don’t these rules apply to you, young lady?’
Young lady? This conversation, I think, at last shows signs of promise. Wrong. My new friend wants to know where I’m going, where I’ve come from.
‘I’m going home,’ I tell her. ‘To lock myself down.’
Intermission Page 3
