Research

John Houston’s story Part two

Last night I dreamt I was still at Manderley. It seemed to me that I stood by the rusting iron gate at the bottom of the short drive and could not leave, for there was a bloody great padlock and chain upon the gate. I called in my dream for someone — anyone — in the road outside to come and open it, and had no answer because no one was there. No one is ever there. Because this is fucking Cornwall.

It’s two years since I came to live my secret life in Don Irvine’s house in Polruan. It’s a nice enough house, I suppose; Georgian probably, made of grey Cornish flint, with four bedrooms, several acres of garden and a nice view of Fowey harbour on the other side of a picturesque-looking estuary river. A view of Fowey is, in my opinion, rather better than a view of Polruan; but only just. Together, Fowey and Polruan are about the same size as Monaco, and in the summer the place is very popular with yachtsmen, although these are nothing like the kind of magnificent yachts we used to see in the harbour there. They’re more your weekend sort of yacht — more of a polite letter from the bank than a statement. And when I say popular I don’t mean popular like Monaco was popular. There’s no money here and it’s not remotely fashionable. Fashion is something that only exists east of Exeter. I think everyone in Cornwall must wear a shit-coloured fleece, even in summer. And hardly anybody who’s anybody ever comes to Fowey and Polruan.

Frankly I think there are even fewer people living down here than when Daphne du Maurier was still alive. Back then she wasn’t the only famous writer living in Fowey. Kenneth Grahame and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch used to live down here, too. But today there’s no one you’ve ever heard of writing in Fowey. Which is probably lucky for me. There’s a small literary festival of course. These days no town with aspirations can afford to be without one of these. Not that the Du Maurier Festival is any good; it certainly doesn’t surprise me that no writer of note can be bothered to travel five hours from London to sit in a rain-lashed tent in front of a small, unresponsive audience that looks like it has been hand-reared on fudge, clotted cream, cider and Winston fucking Graham. I sneaked into the back of the tent to hear some bitch no-hoper down from the Smoke bore us all to death with her so-called comedy novel about mother culture — whatever that is — but I left before I passed out with ennui.

I keep myself to myself, which is easy enough. Not long after I arrived in Polruan I read in the newspapers that a body was found in a forest north of Monaco; it had been burned beyond all recognition and it was generally assumed that this charred body was mine, dumped there by my murderers, Philip French and Colette Laurent, which means that the police aren’t looking for John Houston any more. But this doesn’t mean to say I can relax and go exactly where I want. Far from it. I keep away from London where people might recognize me, even with my Papa Hemingway-sized beard. If ever I was seen again then the whole case might be reopened and I might easily find myself under arrest; for me it would be a very short step from being a hapless victim to becoming an obvious suspect. I’ve been to Truro and Penzance a few times and Exeter once or twice, but one of my daughters is at university there now, so I tend to keep away, especially during term time. Of course, I’d like to see her, but I don’t dare take the risk. Sometimes I feel a bit like Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations. And, truth be known, I probably look like him, too.

So I stay down here and knock out seventy-five-page storylines just like before, only now I do most of my research online; there’s not much you can’t find out with a decent broadband connection and Google. I find I was more right than I ever knew that the internet connection and a TV are all you really need to see enough of the world to write a book. Hemingway describes sitting in the Café des Amateurs on the Rue Mouffetard to write, and truth be told that’s how most punters still think it ought to be done; but the truth is that you can write a lot more if you just stay home and write. Travel might broaden the mind but it means you get less writing done. Besides, the world is all the same when you actually look at it. Denver looks like a smaller version of Chicago; Lyon looks like Cheltenham; Cagnes-sur-Mer looks like St Austell; and Athens looks like Sunderland. The so-called global village is just one huge shopping mall. I don’t miss the world very much. It certainly doesn’t miss me.

I write the storylines and Don writes the books — most of them anyway, and it’s an arrangement that suits us nicely. Lately he has brought in Peter Stakenborg to write one of our new titles: The Other Man from Nazareth. Peter doesn’t know anything about me, of course. As far as Peter’s concerned it’s Don who writes the storylines; and after all, it’s Don Irvine’s name that’s on the books now. Don’s become very successful doing it, too; not as successful as I was, but that’s to be expected; besides, we’ve only been doing this for two years. Publishing has changed a lot in that time. There’s less money sloshing around than there used to be. Publishers are feeling the pinch thanks to eBooks and the general ignorance of a public who seem to have a diminishing appetite for books — at least books for which you have to pay more than a couple of dollars. Even so, he’s doing all right; he just signed a new contract with VVL that means he will deliver six books within three years for ten million dollars. And that’s just in the US. I don’t doubt that in three years’ time when he comes to negotiate a new contract he could expect to make at least twice as much.

Don pays me thirty thousand pounds a year. That might not sound like much when you compare it with what he gets, but I don’t pay any tax of course — I don’t even have a National Insurance number — and down here thirty thousand a year is still a fortune. Besides, there’s nothing to spend the money on anyway. The local shops are full of pasties and tourist tat — hideous ornaments and ghastly paintings of Cornwall. I get a Tesco online delivery once a week, paid for by Don, as is almost everything else: oil for the Aga and the heating, electricity, water, broadband charges, books and DVDs from Amazon, the car — even my Celestron telescope was paid for by Don. So that thirty grand is mine to do whatever I like with. But mostly the money just stays in the bank.

Yes, Don has been a good friend to me. But for him I’d be in prison, I’ve no doubt about that. True, I get a bit depressed, sometimes. It can be lonely here, especially in winter when the ferry across the estuary stops and if you want to get to the other side you have to drive all the way around the river, which takes exactly forty-one minutes. There’s a woman called Mrs Trefry who comes in to clean and we chat a bit sometimes, and there used to be a gardener, too — Mr Twigg — only I discovered I liked doing the garden myself, so he stopped coming because there was nothing left for him to do; after a morning sitting in front of a computer there’s nothing I like better than a bit of gardening. Kipling used his Nobel Prize money to add a rose garden and a pond to his house in East Sussex. I’m thinking of doing something similar so that I can see more of the bird life that is abundant in this part of the world. I’ve already built a small observatory in the old cider house, where with the aid of an eight-inch telescope I can look at the stars and the planets; the skies down here are remarkably clear. It makes me feel small but I don’t mind that. I’ve discovered a kind of humility I never had before.

I also grow all my own vegetables and quite a bit of summer fruit; and I have a small boat to go fishing in. You have to sail out of the harbour to catch anything worth eating. Most of the decent-sized bass are gone now but there’s still plenty of pollock and eel. To my surprise I’ve become quite an accomplished fisherman. Fishing makes you patient.

One thing I do miss about Monaco is the weather. As the people in The Bodinnick Arms are fond of saying, there’s a reason Cornwall is so green; it rains a lot. When it’s fine, it’s very fine indeed, but when it’s wet it’s bloody awful. This is a place where rain really does set in for the day. The present summer has been especially bad. It seems that it has been raining for ever. So thank Christ for Sky TV, especially in the winter. I’ve a nice big widescreen set in my sitting room, with HD, and — like any writer — I like to watch the daytime scum shows and the footy, of course, when it’s on. And I’ve managed to put together a complete collection of first editions by Daphne du Maurier and Q. But what I most like now are books on tape; I’ve become especially fond of listening to Dickens as read by people like Martin Jarvis and Sir David Jason.

Don comes down from London once a month, rain or shine, in his nice big Range Rover — which is the same model that I used to have myself — and stays the weekend. We go to the pub and talk about the storylines for the next novel, or I might hand over the edited manuscript of the last one; he still has a tendency to overwrite — to use three words where one will do, and to quote other writers like they’re fucking saints — so I give him quite a lot of the blue pencil. He has a nicer flat in Putney now — a penthouse that overlooks the river — but he’s just acquired a small apartment in Monaco where he’s planning to live permanently when he starts to make the big money. Which he will, I’ve no doubt about that. I’m not bitter about this. Even before Orla died I’d already had enough of Monty. The place is about as shallow as a Martini glass. It’s all supercars and fancy overpriced restaurants, private beaches, gala nights with royalty and ghastly film premieres. I’ve told him he isn’t going to like it there but he won’t listen. In Monaco there’s just shopping and more shopping and always for something you don’t really need; there are no art galleries or museums to speak of, no social life, and the women are just out for what they can get; Don says he likes women who know what they want and he’ll be quite happy to let them have it. But everyone has to make their own mistakes, I guess. I should know, I made more than my fair share of them.

If he suspects that I once shagged his missus he’s never mentioned it. Fortunately, he sees very little of Jenny — Lady Muck, he calls her — so I think there’s no chance now that she’s going to fess up to what she did with me. Which is just as well, as that would spoil everything. I had a small moment of panic last May bank holiday when I saw her and the judge in a tea shop in Fowey, but fortunately she didn’t see me. I even managed to go back and get another squint at her. Frankly it was hard to believe that I’d ever fucked her at all. Her hair was so grey she looked like a High Court judge herself. Quite a contrast with the woman wearing a basque and suspenders and string panties who sucked my cock so enthusiastically in the Swan Hotel at the Hay-on-Wye Festival while Don was interviewing some crime writer from Baltimore. To my surprise it was the best blow-job I ever had.

In spite of that — the blow-job, I mean — Don is well out of his marriage. By contrast he looks like the bestselling author he now is. With a hair-transplant, dental veneers, a good tailor (I sent him along to Huntsman) and a permanent tan, he’s hardly recognizable as the backroom boy who used to be my loyal writing devil. GQ magazine recently asked him to model some Philip Marlowe-style raincoats. His transformation has been quite startling.

And for once virtue has not been its own poor and always inadequate reward. Don was just made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, which pleased him enormously; last year he won an Edgar Award for Passing Strange; and he’s already shortlisted for this year’s Golden Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association for A Murder Not to Solve. The material rewards have come his way, too. Quite apart from the Range Rover and the Aston Martin Vantage he drives in London, he seems to have a string of young and willing girlfriends. One of them, Serena, is half his age and looks like a model; but she actually works for The Daily Telegraph so I don’t suppose I shall ever meet her in person, just in case she’s the kind with a nose for a story.

If I need a woman there’s a lady I go and see at her beautiful home near Padstow who looks after all my needs. She’s very kind and thoughtful, and has a lovely personality. Her name is Myra. Do I envy Don? No, not at all. He’s worked hard and deserves every success. Me, I’m just lucky to be at liberty. On the whole it’s much better here in Cornwall than in some air-conditioned cell in Monaco. I’d have gone mad if I’d been cooped up all day, unable to see anyone or go anywhere. I’ve got much to thank Don Irvine for. He risks a great deal by hiding me down here. I’m better off here and no mistake. The dust and the damp here aggravate my allergies sometimes, and once I had a severe attack of asthma, but apart from that my health has been good. True, I’ve put on a lot of weight. I have a bicycle to try and stay fit, but the hills around here would defeat Sir Bradley Wiggins.

Don has kindly offered to equip one of the outhouses with a treadmill, but I told him that there’s no one here to be in shape for. Certainly Myra doesn’t mind what I look like. Besides, in this area of the world there’s all the walking anyone would need, for miles around. He and I have really only disagreed about one thing since I came to live in Cornwall, and it was not about the plot of a book.

The fact is that early on in my time here at Manderley I tried to kill myself. Overcome with solitude I bought a length of good nylon rope from a ship’s chandler in Fowey and, one midsummer morning, I tried to hang myself in the apple orchard. But as I was hanging there I learned two things: one was that strangling to death is a poor way to die; the other was that the boughs of apple trees are not sturdy enough to take a man’s weight and, eventually, the one I’d chosen broke and I fell to the ground, spraining my ankle quite badly. It was Mr Twigg who found me and called an ambulance which took me to a hospital in Plymouth. It was Mr Twigg who called Don, who was very cross about what I’d done but came down straight away, and when I was feeling better we argued about it.

‘I didn’t save your fucking neck just so as you could put a rope around it and try to do yourself in,’ he said. ‘That was bloody selfish of you after all that effort I went to. What the hell were you thinking of?’

‘I was thinking that life here in Cornwall seemed like a piece of shit. Will that do? I used to drive an Aston Martin and now I drive an old Fiesta. I had a mistress who belonged in the pages of a men’s magazine. She and I used to drink Dom Pérignon at the Hôtel Negresco. Now I visit an ageing prostitute in Padstow and after seeing her I get fish and chips from Rick Stein’s. In the morning I used to speak French to order a coffee and a croissant in the Café de Paris; but now, when I go to the village shop in the morning to fetch a newspaper and a loaf of bread, I could be speaking French for all the fucking conversation I get. They look at me like I’m a bloody alien. I know I said I wanted to live in England again but this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I feel like I’m living in Middle Earth. Besides, I rather think that it’s my neck to wring, don’t you?’

‘Perhaps. But did you stop and think about what might happen to me if you killed yourself?’

‘Oddly enough, I didn’t.’

‘Perhaps you should have done. You might have considered the job I’d have explaining to Plod just how it is that a man who everyone thought to be dead happens to be hanging in my bloody orchard like a Cox’s Orange Pippin? No, I thought not. They’d have fucking nicked me for sure. I’d be in Vine Street Magistrates Court right now, facing extradition.’

‘I can think of worse fates than a nice prison cell in Monaco.’

‘Don’t forget, two of those homicides occurred on the Côte d’Azur, so for helping you to escape justice the French police could probably claim priority for my extradition over the Monégasques. And I bet the Monty cops would be quite glad to yield authority to the French cops. It would save them the problem of having an embarrassing trial. I may not be nearly as famous as you, but the death of your wife still generates a lot of press. And while a cell in Monty might sound okay to you, the one at Les Baumettes isn’t quite so appealing.’

‘Les Baumettes?’

‘It’s a prison near Marseille. According to the Daily Telegraph, the EU justice minister has described it as a living hell and the most repugnant prison in Europe. The next time you feel like sending yourself to heaven, just remember that at the same time you’ll be sending me to hell.’

‘Point taken.’

‘Look, old sport, it’s bound to seem a little quiet down here at first. But things will get better.’

‘You mean I’ll get used to it being shit here.’

‘Yes. If you like. Please, John. Promise me you won’t try anything like that again.’

‘Yeah, all right. Anyway, it’s not something I want to try again. Hanging myself, I mean. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.’

‘Thanks.’ Don nodded. ‘It’s difficult enough keeping you a secret as it is. But now the fucking hospital is wondering just how it is that you have no medical records.’ He grinned. ‘Next time pull the bung out of your boat while you’re out at sea. Like Maxim de Winter. No body means no awkward fucking questions.’

‘It didn’t exactly work out for him, did it?’

‘No. But he was an amateur. And besides, Rebecca left a note. I trust you won’t be so careless.’

‘Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind.’

What is especially touching in retrospect is the way Don was so upset about my wish to die; indeed, he took it very personally, almost as if he had become my guardian, and I realized just what a true friend he is. Anyway, I’m over that now. I hardly ever think about suicide and I’m settling into life down here, like the rain.

Tonight I shall probably listen to Little Dorrit again on CD. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.