The Once and Future Con (Nick Madrid)

by Peter Guttridge

  I went to stay with her family in Somerset during the long vac between my second and third years. They lived in the gate house of some big stately home. They treated me very warmly. I remember sneaking along the landing, trying to avoid the creaking floorboards, to get into Faye's bedroom without alerting her parents. Not that we did very much. Getting together was only an approximate term.

  She said she wanted to wait until she was married. I don't know if she was really a virgin but she was very strange about sex. She'd kind of freeze up, so we'd only go so far. We slept together and we carried on what used to be called "heavy petting."

  I stayed a week but didn't see her again that summer-I was working in a bread factory over in Bradford. We wrote a lot and phoned of course, until she went off to Italy for a month with her brother and some other friends.

  In my third year, her second, I lived in Summertown with three girls. Yes, that's what I thought too, but it didn't work out that way. Faye moved into a flat in Parktown, a mile down the road, with her brother Ralph. I got to know him a bit better. Moody, intense, but occasionally very funny. He tolerated Faye, who was appalled by his gay lifestyle. He called her Mother Hen.

  Although I was nuts about Faye, it was a frustrating time for me, especially as there were plenty of other girls around more amenable to a lusty young man. Or even to me. One hundred times I was tempted and one hundred times I resisted. Well, ninety-nine times-nobody's perfect.

  The coroner concluded that Jonathan Askwith had died accidentally, passing out from an excess of alcohol and then choking on his own vomit. I didn't go to the funeral but I did send a donation to the charity of Faye's choice, a child abuse organization she was involved with.

  Two weeks after the funeral, Faye phoned to invite me down to Rex and Genevra's place at Montacute in Somerset. She sounded brisk and not at all like a grieving widow. I expressed my condolences then said:

  "Montacute, isn't that National Trust?"

  "Montacute House is, but Rex lives at Wynn House on the other side of the hill."

  "And what is this, a kind of house party?"

  "Kind of. We want to offer you a job, but I don't know how it would fit in with your other freelance commitments," she said. "It would mean you coming down to the West Country for a few weeks."

  A few weeks in the West Country with Faye. Hmm.

  "That's possible," I said casually. "What's the job?"

  "Avalon Offshore Trust has a deal with a publisher to write an account of our discovery. Wondered if you'd like to do it."

  "What discovery? I thought you were building a theme park."

  "Did Rex not tell you? It's focused on something we've found here."

  "I'm a bit rusty on my history-"

  "This isn't a history text. We need a journalist who can give it maximum impact. It will form part of the marketing strategy for The Avalon Project."

  She mentioned a figure-a generous one.

  "What have you found exactly?"

  "I can't tell you that. We're announcing it at a conference at the start of next week. But it's big news."

  Arthurian finds always were.

  "It's not like that piece of slate they found at Tintagel is it?"

  In the summer of 1998 archaeologist's had found a slate at Tintagel in Cornwall with an inscription on it that included the name "Artognov." The more credulous pretended that this was another way of spelling Arthur and that it was proof he had lived there. It wasn't, of course.

  "And, if you've found The Holy Grail, I'm going to have to say no. Even I have my standards."

  "But you're a journalist. What's your problem with the Grail? I know you never used to believe in God but-"

  "It's nothing to do with religion, it's to do with the fact that The Holy Grail as a chalice containing the blood of Christ is an invention of the Middle Ages. In the original stories, the Grail was a horn of plenty or a big stone. And as for that Joseph of Arimathea shit-"

  "Hey, okay, Nick-it's only history you know. People like those stories."

  "Sorry. I'm old-fashioned. Way I was taught my history you can't know where you're going unless you know where you've been."

  "So?"

  "So if you invent the past you're distorting where you've been."

  "Nick, who cares about the past, about what really happened? It's a pageant. People don't want detail they want color, drama, gory deaths, and big love stories. Who cares if Richard the Lionheart was a lousy king and Bad King John was the good guy? Who cares if Richard III's successors painted the hump onto his portraits and framed him for the death of the Princes in the Tower?"

  "Or that King Arthur was no medieval king in a turreted castle jousting his days away but a sixth-century pig stealer and would-be rapist who was at most a petty tyrant?" I said. "I care. I care that nationalism gets based on such bad history."

  "Nick, please. It would be so good to have you here. And you can tell the story as you see it. But when you see what we have you'll see there's no need to lie or exaggerate."

  Her voice had gone low and breathy. If I'd had any sense I would have been cautious-she'd given me a real emotional mauling the last time around-but my motto is: once bitten, twice bitten.

  As if reading my thoughts, she said:

  "Nick, I gave you a hard time all those years ago. I was callow. I didn't realize how vulnerable you were after your father's death." She was almost breathing the words into my ear. "I'm sorry. I'd like to try to make it up to you."

  I moved the phone away from my mouth so that I could gulp unheard.

  "Where would I stay?"

  "On site." She paused. "I live in the gatehouse."

  "The one your parents had?"

  "That's the one. They moved to Australia years ago."

  So Wynn House was the big house I'd glimpsed through the trees when I'd gone to visit Faye that summer.

  "Nick, it would be really great to have you here. This isn't an easy time for me."

  So I agreed. To be honest, aside from my feelings for Faye, I couldn't afford not to. Since Bridget and I had come back from South America where I'd been covering the Rock Against Drugs tour, I'd found the freelance life increasingly difficult. Newspapers go through upheavals every so often where they get in young new editors who naturally enough want to bring in their own people-their own young people.

  I never imagined I'd be over the hill in my niid-thirties, but that's how I was feeling. To pay the mortgage on my bijou residence I'd taken a job with an Internet company. They handled hundreds of acclaimed sites and my job was to write copy for them. I was the oldest there by a good five years.

  Hack work, but at least I could walk to work-the office was just across the other side of Shepherds Bush Green. And, of course, given that it was the Internet's brave new world it wasn't essential that I go into the office. I could entail copy from home.

  But the work was depressing me. It was so banal. When Faye phoned I was trying to find something interesting to say about a site devoted to looking after your teeth. I'd got as far as the headline: Dentally Does It. Well, yes, I did think that was good.

  I'd got another site to write about that day. On the Celebs Solve It site, E-list celebrities dealt with "gritty human dramas" sent in by members of the public. The latest was: What do you tell your daughter when she wants to have her tummy button pierced? As I said, gritty.

  After three months of this introduction to the future I couldn't wait to go back into the past.

  I started packing that night. When I phoned Bridget, she laughed.

  "I'm not sure what the accepted waiting time is before getting your leg over a grieving widow, but I think two weeks is probably at the lower end of the scale. You're still stuck on her?"

  "We ended badly," I said quietly.

  I'd told Faye about my infidelity. I felt it important to come clean-perhaps in the hope that it would spur her to be more amenable herself. Well, it had worked for Jude the Obscure. I remember I told her on my birthday. It was Frida
y the 13th. That should have warned me. She went nuts-excuse the technical term. That's when she tore the dress in half with her teeth.

  We'd lost touch after university. I remember meeting for a drink in London a couple of times. She was working near Blackfriars so we met in that Arts and Crafts pub that had been done out with gold foil like the interior of a basilica and with frescoes of friars and monks.

  "Hello? Anyone home?"

  Bridget's voice brought me back into the present.

  "Sorry, miles away," I said. "What did you say?"

  "We can travel down together."

  "I don't think I'm supposed to take anybody."

  "I've been invited too, you pillock. By Rex."

  "He wants you to work for them, too?"

  "Darling, you're the hired help. I'm a friend. I've seen Rex and Gennie a bit in London. So at Askwith's funeral I chatted him up for an invitation."

  "You talk about me behaving inappropriately with the widow and you got off with Rex at the funeral! That's rich."

  "He's rich darling. I think I could get used to his lifestyleremember Brideshead Revisited?"

  "The house isn't that big. How's this house party thing work exactly? Do I wear plus fours? H. G. Wells used to go to these big houses and have sex with anything that moved. Do we do our own thing?"

  "I'm going to do Rex if I get half a chance. Don't understand how I missed him before."

  That Friday Bridget came over to Shepherds Bush just after lunch for our drive out to the West Country. When I opened my door to her, my jaw dropped. As did hers.

  "What do you think you look like?" we both said simultaneously.

  She was wearing court shoes, a pleated tartan skirt, pink cashmere twin set, and, yes, pearls. Not to mention a Hermes scarf hiding her hair and knotted under her chin. She only needed a couple of dogs and a shooting stick to complete the ensemble.

  "What are you trying to do?" I said, ushering her in.

  "You can talk," she said. "Since when did you start wearing blue blazers, cavalry twill, and cravats?"

  I touched the cravat at my neck. "I've had this years. And cavalry twill is very hard wearing."

  I wasn't quite aping the nobs. I'd always liked the idea of a cravat and in fact I'd got the idea from a young cockney drug dealer who looked like Lesley Howard and always wore cravats and cashmere sweaters.

  I'd been on a bit of a shopping exhibition for the weekend. I'd drawn the line at the brightly striped city shirt worn without a tie and the highly polished leather loafers worn with neatly pressed denims. But when I came to look at them, these blazers-double-breasted, two lines of metal buttons-were quite stylish.

  "Yeah, yeah."

  "But Bridget, this isn't your style. Why?"

  "I'm trying to blend in."

  "With whom? Sloanes? If Rex likes you it's for who you are, not who he wants you to be. He's a man not a woman."

  "What does that mean?"

  "You know-women get a man then want to change him even though they risk losing the qualities that drew them to him in the first place. Men just accept the woman they've got.

  "Which magazine did you get that particularly insightful piece of information from?"

  "I do have ideas of my own, you know."

  She looked at me.

  "GQ. But my point is you should just be yourself. If he doesn't want you as yourself then he's not worth it."

  "He's worth L16 million."

  "Have you got a spare headscarf?"

  My plan was to drive down through Chiswick and on to the M4, but when we got there Chiswick roundabout was backed up to the high street.

  "I always think of traffic jams as an aid to contemplation," I remarked cheerily to Bridget. "The still moment in the rush of city life."

  Bridget peered at me. "Hope you're not breathalyzed."

  "You know, I'm not drinking at the moment. I'm serious. It's an opportunity to see the familiar for the first time. To look properly at buildings that once existed only when you were passing at speed."

  "After all, you've missed your meeting, your career is in ruins-what else is there to do? So I suppose Madonna's given up drink too has she?"

  "Bridget, I was doing this yoga long before Madonna took it up. I've stopped drinking because I'm about to start the second series and I need to purify my system."

  The yoga is split into six levels of difficulty. Most people are happy to stay on the first level, known as the primary series, but I'd finally, after about six years, got the hang of it enough to go onto the second series. To do it properly I'd decided to give up alcohol and be very sure I only ate organic food. It had made me a pretty exciting date, but since I hadn't been dating lately it didn't matter.

  I surveyed the traffic ahead. There was the obligatory taxi driver wedged across two lanes, thanking his passengers for not smoking while polluting the air with his mundane hatreds, holding down his bile beneath a lifeless bonhomie.

  "That car in front with the `heart' sticker on the rear window," I said. "Can you fathom the mind of someone who thinks it's important to make a public statement along the lines of `I heart shopping at North End Market' or `I heart my mini'. Milton Glaser, j'accuse."

  "Who?"

  "Milton Glaser-he devised the heart as part of the Big Apple tourism campaign for New York back in the eighties."

  "How do you know all this shit?" she asked wearily.

  "I'm a journalist-instant expert on everything."

  The traffic began to move. Before long we were heading west down the M4. It was still raining. It had been raining solidly for eight weeks and there was flooding in Lincolnshire, East Anglia, and parts of Somerset, where we were headed.

  There was also a hint of flooding inside the car.

  "How's work?" I said to Bridget to distract from the rainwater dripping on her through the canvas roof above our heads. Her latest job was as part of an editorial team charged with repositioning an old fogey newspaper. The editor-inchief and editor were two of those people who were failing upwards-they would be headhunted for a newspaper, fail to reverse its decline, get fired, get hired by the next newspaper.

  This paper's circulation had been sliding so the new editorial team decided to make a brash appeal to the youth as every desperate newspaper had been doing for twenty-five years.

  The paper launched a campaign to legalize cannabis. Teenage models were signed up as columnists. Political pundits put pop lyrics into their columns. Bridget's first splash was a double-page spread on a gay wedding in Timbuktu. Within weeks, the circulation was in freefall.

  The problem was the usual one. The editors were ignoring demographics. There were more old people than ever, they were living longer and the grey pound was more important as each year went by but still they chose to target young people.

  But Bridget was happy there, the expenses were good and it did still have those links to the toffs. I thought Bridget had been joking when she'd said she could meet some blue blood and get married, put her feet up for the rest of her life. Apparently not.

  "I envisage being down here most weekends," she said airily.

  "But Bridget you hate the country. Remember when you visited me in Sussex when I was down for that Aleister Crowley story-you couldn't wait to get back home."

  "Nick, there's the country and there's the country. I don't anticipate spending much time on Rex's allotment, you know."

  "No, you'll be in his theme park. If he's worth million, why does he want to go ahead with this scheme?"

  "Sixteen million doesn't go very far these days. Wouldn't get him into the 500 richest people list."

  "I can't believe you just said that. I mean I know you like spending but even you can't imagine getting through k16 million in your lifetime." I glanced at her. "Can you?"

  She winked. After a few more minutes she yawned and said:

  "He seems keen on this King Arthur stuff. History-yech. I suppose you've been swotting up."

  "I've done a bit of reading," I said. />
  "You'd better fill me in. All I know is Arthur became king by pulling a sword out of a stone although he also got one from some hint who lived in a lake. One or other of these swords was called Excalibur. He formed the Round Table at which all knights are equal, except he always has the last word. Marries Guinevere and they live happily in Camelot until Lancelot turns up, shags Guinevere, then all the knights go off looking for the Holy Grail. I forget the rest."

  "You've got the main lineaments of the story-"

  "Lineaments? I say, thanks awfully."

  "But you missed out that at the start Arthur is born in Tintagel Castle, Cornwall, the son of Uther Pendragon. While Guinevere is having an affair with Lancelot, Arthur sleeps with his sister Morgan le Fay and they have a son, Mordred. Later Mordred challenges his father's power. Arthur kills him then, mortally wounded himself, is carried off to Avalon, a magical otherworld from where he will return when his country needs him."

  "Hang on-he sleeps with his sister?"

  "She's his sister in some versions. In earlier stories Mordred kidnaps and rapes Guinevere-his mother, see. Classic Oedipal stuff."

  "And all this is based on fact?"

  "Hardly. Geoffrey of Monmouth made most of it up in the twelfth century in his History of the Kings of Britain. Medieval French and German Romance writers took his epic story and embellished it-they changed the name of Arthur's sword from Caliburnus to Excalibur. They did without his lance altogether. That was called Ron."

  "I can understand that. But there was a real King Arthur?"

  "There is some early written evidence for a historical Arthur, yes."

  "There is some early evidencefor a historical Arthur, yes. I'm hearing my friend turning into a pedant before my very eyes."

  "I think you mean before your very ears. Do you want to hear this stuff or not?"

  She scowled.

  "No, but if I'm to impress Rex I'd better."

  "Why is it women always feel obliged to pretend an interest in a man's interests-at least until they've got him?"

  "Nothing like a good generalization about women, is there? I don't know why-except that in this case the answer is k16 million. Now tell me more, prof."

  "If Arthur did exist it was as a British war leader, living somewhere between 450 and 520 A. D., fighting against the Saxons when the Romans abandoned Britain. The Britons won a breathing space in about 500 A. D. by winning a major battle at Mons Badonicus. Arthur may have been the British leader. Then again he may not have been-a historian writing only forty years after the event doesn't mention him at all."