Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Also by Nicholas Shakespeare
Author Biography
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Inheritance
Western Australia, 1960
London, 2005
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
The Will
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Maral
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Makertich
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Inheritance
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
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Copyright (c) Nicholas Shakespeare 2010
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ALSO BY
Nicholas Shakespeare
Fiction
The Vision of Elena Silves
The High Flyer
The Dancer Upstairs
Snowleg
Secrets of the Sea
Non-fiction
Bruce Chatwin
In Tasmania
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
N ICHOLAS S HAKESPEARE WAS BORN in 1957. The son of a diplomat, much of his youth was spent in the Far East and South America. His novels have been translated into twenty languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves , winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, Snowleg and The Dancer Upstairs , which was chosen by the American Libraries Association in 1997 as the year's best novel, and in 2001 was made into a film of the same name by John Malkovich. His most recent novel is Secrets of the Sea . He is married with two small boys and currently lives in Oxford.
To Jon
Everything that begins as comedy ends as a dirge in the void.
Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
M URRAY B AIL FOR THE idea; Robert Sykes of Parker Bullen for giving it legal legs; Vergine Gulbenkian for helping me to understand Armenia; Rob Libby for turning up at the right time; Mike Rikard-Bell and Bill Howroyd for their experiences of the Pilbara; Don Forrest and Judith Street for memories of Perth; the late Angela Geraghty for details of a bush fire; Gillon Aitken, Niko Hansen, Nigel Horne, Christopher MacLehose, Charlotte Metcalfe, Nick Robinson and Rachael Rose for comments on the text. I would like also to thank Jonathan Beswick, Piers Litherland, Ronnie Lloyd, Ellen O'Halligan, Julia Pilgrim, Susan Richards, Amanda Shakespeare, David Willis and Francesca Zaenglein. Above all, I am grateful to Peter Washington for his red pen, my wife Gillian for her unstinting support and my editor James Gurbutt for his loyalty.
This is a work of fiction and not one of the characters is a real person; nor is Carpe Diem based on any publishing house. Krikor Makertich's discovery was sparked by an interest in the 1952 flight of Lang Hancock, well told in Neill Phillipson's Man of Iron (1974) and Richard Duffield's Rogue Bull: The Story of Lang Hancock, King of the Pilbara (1979). I would also like to pay tribute to Michael J. Arlen's Passage to Ararat (1975) and Terence Cave's How to Read Montaigne (2007). The quotations from Michel de Montaigne are taken from the Everyman Library edition of his complete works (2003), translated by Donald M. Frame.
INHERITANCE Nicholas Shakespeare
WESTERN AUSTRALIA, 1960
T HE GROUND CRACKLED BENEATH his boots and the air was thick with insects. He tramped on over the scorched plain, seeking landmarks on his map.
Behind him lay Marble Bar; to the west, the ocean; to the south, Perth - where she was, though it stung him to think of her. Ahead, if his calculations were correct, was the mountain range. He had seen it only from the air, and then for a flash in blinding rain. What shape it might have from looking at it straight on, he could not imagine.
The sun burned through his eyepatch. High up he saw a flock of birds, like seeds.
He pushed south over the hot tableland, stopping occasionally to take a photograph or to check his bearings, across dry riverbeds and rings of saltbush, threading through the scratching grass and into regions of himself. At the bottom of a clay pan, he came upon a tyre mark. It ran for fifty yards and disappeared, an imprint from some earlier rain. In the dancing heat, he was compelle
d to make his own track; one that would have betrayed his personality to anyone following.
The thunderstorm which had flooded Marble Bar evidently had not passed this way. A fine red dust tinged all objects with a colour peculiar to itself. It might have been the oldest landscape in the world. The bottom of an evaporated ocean out of which his earliest ancestors had floundered and unaltered by any life that had breathed since. He walked on, at the angle of a rheumatic finger, made crooked by the weight of the sun and by what he carried in his pack. Looking down the hard dark length of his shadow, as if the person he was had been thinned out of him into the parched red soil.
There was no wind. He could smell his breath, like spilled beer; could taste, with his thickened tongue, the dried spit on his teeth. His eye lost all connection to what lay in front of him. The earth glimmered as though it still held an ocean. In mirage-watered plains, he saw lakes perfect and distinct. And floating in the lakes: Cheryl walking up a church aisle in Perth on the arm of an Englishman; his grandmother in a desert like this one, drinking from a puddle that her donkey had pissed in; and always on the perimeter the figure of Don Flexmore.
A fly flew into his ear. It buzzed and ricocheted in his eardrum with a noise louder than any he had heard since leaving the Land Rover. He flicked it out and trudged on, swearing at himself because he had never thought that he would have to walk this far.
The country grew rougher. His legs bled and his soles wore thin, cracked open by sharp stones. He was in a world of stones. He picked one up, the size of a fist and hollow. Studied it intensely. Then threw it aside.
One step in front of another. His feet blistered and his eyepatch chafing. But every time he climbed out of a flood-scoured riverbed with the hopeful expectation of seeing his mountain, his eye drove on past the furthest red rocks into the featureless sky.
The air was so dry that coming to an outcrop he dumped his pack and rowed into the shade, where he waited, siding with the rocks, and a wedge-tailed eagle glided above. The black of its shadow slipped over the earth and merged with the boulder down on which it flopped. It looked at him, head at the angle of Cheryl's mother, calculating how long before it might pick out his eye, and when he moved it flew lazily off.
On the second afternoon he came to the powdery edge of another tableland. Below, pink patches of earth and dark contours of bluish rock - and ahead, in the distance, a peak. But when he reached the top of the next escarpment he was disappointed not to see it. The sun was going down as he walked from the lowland into a deep gully where he camped for the night.
He prepared a fire from dried flood-wreck and boiled up a pan of tea. The tall walls of the gorge amplified the crackling of the flames and the sound of his slapped cheek. He picked a mosquito out of the water and stirred the tea leaves with a tiny bone he had found on the riverbed, the petrified shin of an animal. He was thinking of his grandmother, who smelled of French cigarettes and who fretted with the silver bangle on her wrist as she spoke to him.
The tide of light had gone out when he tugged off his Blundstones, wincing as he withdrew each sore heel. Tenderly, he set down his boots by the fire as though under a bed. The ocean of earth had left salt stains in white ripples on the caps that had become separate and gawped at him. He peeled off his socks. Deep red under the toenails and wet blisters caked with a rusty paste. He bathed his ruined feet with the dregs of the tea-water - the soothing relief, as though the tea might actually do some good, tanning his hide - and bandaged them with strips torn from his shirtsleeve.
After the heat, the sudden chill made him shiver. He scraped a hip-hole to sleep in and laid out the tarpaulin, but termites marched up and down his spine, and so he broke a few mulga branches, some with the ghosts of leaves still on them, and made a spiky mattress and slept on that.
The following day, the sun rose red and undistinguished from the earth, save for the faint definition of fresh tracks. He squatted, examining them.
He had been followed. His billy was knocked over, tin cans dragged towards the bushes and fresh droppings nearby.
His lips came unstuck. 'Hello?'
Nothing.
He rolled his swag and hoisted his pack and tramped along the dried river flat. Lighter for the tinned meat that he had eaten and the water that he had drained from his canvas bag. The early morning warmth was delightful though short-lived, until the moment of realisation that it stood to be another roasting day. The sweat that had dried on him unthawed, and soon his face and neck were damp with it and his back was a coat of flies. The tortured boughs of a desert gum pointed him on.
Further into the gorge, he came upon rockholes filled with oily water and floating with goanna scat, in which he saw his dark eyebrows blonder for moondust. The ground was soft and his boots squelched into the earth. Green grass had shot up in abrupt, unlikely patches, and on steep banks, in bursts of mysterious pinks and yellows, garish bands of small donkey orchids were shrill with finches. Here, the recent rain had brought life.
The gorge petered out in a bluff from which he obtained a view of the plain he had crossed. He was consulting his map when he felt an odd current of air. A noise dragged his gaze to a twisted tree sprouting from the south side of a cracked boulder, and in the same moment he heard a cough. He stood, rooted. The cough came again, like a guilt. Or was it a snigger? And at the tip of his long shadow was another, and he saw the silhouette of two lupine ears.
Then, before he could cast around for a stone - there it hung in the distance, looming over the stunted tops of the spinifex and obliterating all concern for what it was that had vanished back into the dirt. His first thought when he saw it: I'm looking at Mount Ararat . One large peak, one smaller and both rising from the desert at the spot he had circled.
He muscled forward, oblivious to his mashed feet and the pricked-up ears, dominated by his hatted shadow that stretched out now in the direction of the mountain. Needles of thirst and the constant dialogue of flies. And all the time the peaks growing before him and the glare in that rolling eye overhead.
Through the haze, he saw ridges of drifted red iron-sand lapping the purpler slopes. They were part of a range of weathered hills crafted by wind and rain into spectacular shapes. He snapped a picture for his inevitable return. The rocky mass of his Ararat, as already he thought of it, gave the impression of a citadel more than anything, with ramparts, turrets, chimneys. It shone in the sun, polished by wind and wind-borne debris.
It took him the whole day.
He camped in a ravine at its base. The sky, formerly blue and lucid, had clouded over with banks of thick dark cumulus. Night came on quickly, but lying on his back he saw no stars. He heard thunder vibrating in the hills and waited for raindrops the size of pennies to fall hissing onto the earth.
A cool breeze blew up before dawn. It funnelled down the ravine, and he listened to it communicating with the saltbush, but it did not rain.
At first light, he scrambled over a jagged overhang of ancient conglomerate and picked his way along slabs the colour of dried blood. Moisture had revitalised the earth and given it a gloss, but in the grey light the sides of the mountain were not shiny as he remembered them. The only indication that he might be close - his distracted compass, fluctuating from one escarpment to another.
The wind breathed into his face and over his skin. Not scented, as in Perth or Aleppo. Dustless and clean and sweet. Without history. Earlier, he could make no sense of its gibberish. Now the wind had the sound of a beginning, he thought.
Twenty minutes later, he reached his destination.
He stood there, trembling at the knee. It was as though something had gulped at the rock face. He laughed, and his heart flapped wildly from one side of his ribs to another as he looked right and left, seeing rust everywhere.
The young man afterwards calculated that on that day he followed his shadow over 1,000 million tons of high-grade iron ore, stretching forty miles one way, thirty miles another. And all of it his.
LONDON, 2005<
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1
O N A COLD WET afternoon in February, Andy Larkham was hunched over his desk in the offices of Carpe Diem when a woman appeared in the doorway.
Some time passed before Andy became aware of her. He looked up and licked the tip of his pencil.
'Don't you have a funeral to go to?' she said.
'Oh, my God -' pushing back his chair and springing up. His watch read 2.35 p.m. He unhooked his father's blue suit from behind the door and started to change into it even as she stood there. One arm thrust into his coat, he asked: 'How long to get to Richmond?'
'In this weather? Half an hour - but you'll need to take a cab.'
Andy had reached the door when he remembered the card on his desk. Coming out again: 'Could I borrow twenty quid?'
'And the twenty you borrowed on Friday?'
'Please, Angela. It's Saint Valentine's Day. You know you'll get it back.'
'Do I?'
'First thing tomorrow, I'll go to the bank. Promise,' running a comb through his thick blond hair.
She gave him the money, as she always did, along with a sour look that he ignored, and he hared down three flights of stairs, past Errol in Reception, to the kerb outside.
Raindrops fell on the black-bordered card as he checked the details. The service began at 3 p.m. Chapel 8.
He did not have an umbrella and he stood there getting wetter. A bus splashed by towards Kensington High Street and a line of schoolchildren hurried down into the Underground holding their book bags over their heads.
At last a taxi stopped and a woman got out and Andy climbed in.
'Richmond Crematorium,' he said.
In the taxi from Hammersmith, as all the rain from the sky spattered down on the roof, Andy wondered who else would be there.
His first teacher, Miss Carron? A lovely lady - kind, fair. The next year, Miss Lightfoot had taught him. Young, pretty. He had really taken to her. Unlike the vicious former lacrosse player who followed. 'Stalin' Podhoretz had lasted only a term before a new teacher arrived: a tall, sturdy bear of a man, older than the rest of the staff, with silver curly hair and piercing eyes, and disarmingly passionate about a range of subjects, from Vermeer and Argentine tango to the stories of Flannery O'Connor.
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