Horse Under Water

Last Word

I took all the material down to Kevin Cassel in his Central Register last Tuesday. He signed and embossed the official receipt and wished me merry Christmas.

‘Well over the fast,’ I said. Why was he always smiling?

As I drove back through Ripley an old lady was sticking tufts of cotton wool into her shop-window to spell ‘Merry Xmas’. Outside a man was using a shovel to clear a path to the door.

‘Now you see what it’s like where the work is done,’ said Dawlish, and went on to make provocative remarks about lying around in the sun. Dawlish had convened the training structure sub-committee on my behalf. It was a master-stroke in his battle with O’Brien for control of the Strutton Committee. Dawlish had put every member of the Strutton Committee on the training structure subcommittee with the exception of O’Brien. In other words it was like holding meetings with O’Brien locked out. Dawlish was all knees and elbows. He sat in his battered leather armchair and puffed clouds of smoke at the Duke of Wellington, and said that being successful was just a state of mind.

Bernhard had spread himself all over my office but had taken care not to do any of my paper work. The thirteen-centimetre lens for the Nikon had apricot jam on it, and my secretary was doing half the typing in the building. I kicked Bernhard and his twenty cardboard folders out, and although he protested volubly he set up shop elsewhere. ‘And I owe you a two-pound bag of sugar,’ he said as he left.

‘Stealing sugar is a felony,’ I grumbled. ‘Didn’t you learn any manners at Cambridge?’

‘The only thing I learned at Cambridge,’ said Bernhard, ‘was how to put on a pair of fifteen-inch trousers without first removing my chukka boots.’

Alice brought me some sugar.

On Friday I took Charly Christmas shopping in the West End. She bought her father a subscription to Playboy and I sent Baix an Eton tie. I suppose we were each in our own way fighting the establishment. She tried to make some joke at my expense about the ice-melting theories that I had believed; but I didn’t respond.

‘Your old man is an admiral, isn’t he?’ I asked.

‘Yes, dream man.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I want to speak to him about that diving equipment. Lisbon have lost part of it. It’s on my charge, you see. They want me to pay £250 towards it.’

‘Come back to my place,’ she said, ‘I’ll see what can be done.’

‘You’ll help?’ I said.

‘Console,’ she said, ‘console.’