The Old Limey by H. W. Crocker III Click here to return to book details Nigel hadn’t realised before how cinematic it was to crash a car. There was that moment of swerving and squealing brakes. The jolt of the impact and the sudden flipping upside down; a scraping of metal and a shattering of glass. And then voices in the darkness telling him to lie still and not move. Just like the cinema. It was almost gratifying to wipe his cuff-linked sleeve across his forehead and find it covered in blood. Perhaps he’d been unconscious, perhaps not, but it seemed as though he saw the rotating red and blue lights of the police car flashing through his cracked windscreen almost immediately. Damned efficient, these Americans. He envisaged himself in the Dawn Patrol, trapped in his inverted biplane, crash-landed on the fields of France. He fiddled with the seat belt, and finally snapped it free so that his body slumped down on his neck and squeezed him against the roof of the car. A torch sprayed him in a beam of light. ‘Don’t move.’ It was a woman’s voice, kind and scared. The torch switched off. He saw the door on the passenger’s side was a quarter of the way open and crushed into an irregular parallelogram. There was no glass left in the window. It was twinkling beyond in the moonlight, like frost on the cobbles at Sandhurst all those years ago. He rested calmly in his awkward position. He heard tyres rolling slowly nearby, munching gravel, and scratchy, mechanical voices trading information over radios-reminding him of nothing so much as the urban equivalent of the squawking jungle birds in Katanga. The passenger door was shoved open, scraping noisily along the tarmac. And somehow, in his muddled state he frankly didn’t notice how, he was dragged from the car, strapped on a stretcher, and slid neatly into an ambulance. It was odd, but the first thing he noticed was its cleanliness. He’d seen plenty of ambulances in less than perfect circumstances, but even given the advantages of peace, the Americans were a remarkably clean people, he thought. And professional, too. One had grown used to the idea that the Americans were rather hysterical, given to mass panics and strange fears that they might never find the secret of eternal life. But the male nurse in the ambulance seemed quite friendly and calm as he put him through the usual preliminaries-taking his blood pressure, shooting something into his veins, and wrapping a cloth brace around his neck. When they snapped Nigel out of the ambulance and into the hospital, he was told he was going into some section reserved for non-emergency accident cases. He was not, evidently, in so very bad a shape as one might expect of a man who had recently celebrated his sixtieth birthday and survived a car wreck. And it was a good thing he wasn’t in bad shape, because once the nurses had laced him onto a flat, uncomfortable slab, and incarcerated him in a rather more severe neck brace than the one he’d had in the ambulance, he was left completely alone. He could hear the voices of nurses not far away, but they never came round to see him. After about two hours, a young doctor with owlish glasses, a white smock, and tennis shoes wrapped in plastic carrier bags shuffled in to lecture him on the evils of drink, mysteriously noted something in the file at the foot of his slab, and wandered off again. Good Lord, thought Nigel-entertaining the pleasant idea that he’d been thrown from a horse rather than written off his car (a rent-a-car at that)-have I ridden with Prince Rupert’s right wing at Naseby only to fall wounded and a prisoner to the dreaded Round­heads? It certainly seemed that way, for his next visitor was a uniformed member of Cromwell’s New Model Army, a large, suntanned young man with blond hair shaved close to his head-a fine figure of the California Highway Patrol Regiment. It seemed to Nigel that sometime in his career he had received training on how to handle interrogations when captured by the enemy. But never before had he been captured, and he couldn’t remember the drill. Something to do, certainly, with name, rank, and serial number. After that, it was all rather vague. He was shocked when he saw the Cromwellian Californian flipping through his wallet. How on earth did he get that? ‘An Englishman, huh?’ he said, looking vaguely and dangerously German, Nigel thought, with his chiselled Gothic face. His air was cocky and amused, as it might well be when one’s opponent is chained to a mad scientist’s operating table. ‘Yes,’ Nigel croaked. His throat was dry. He shifted uncomfortably under his bonds. The officer nodded and puckered his lips a little before widening them into an arrogant grin. ‘Kinda old for this sort of thing, aren’tch ya?’ It was a question to which there was no answer; and Nigel gave none. The officer seemed disappointed. ‘Technically,’ he went on, shifting his weight in a manner that seemed to imply his sidearm was remarkably heavy, like a handheld Gatling gun, ‘you’re under arrest for driving under the influence.’ He ambled with the rolling gait of a western gunfighter to the foot of the bed and came back with a clipboard in his hand. He shook his head. ‘Man, your brain was fried.’ Nigel’s mouth grimaced under his grey moustache. Insolent little puppy, he thought. Damned self-righteous, bronzed Puritan. The officer stuck his tongue in his cheek. ‘But then again, you guys do drive on the wrong side of the road, don’tch ya?’ Nigel’s grimace twisted itself into a forced, false rictus. Damned little whelp… ‘Well, anyway,’ the officer said, turning businesslike, ‘you’re technically under arrest, as I said, but you’ll be free to go once they check you out of here. It’ll be up to the D.A. whether to issue a warrant for your arrest. You live in England, right?’ Yes, an England whose crown we’ll defend to the last man against you and all of your republican kin, you vile dogs, Nigel said to himself before he realised his imagination had got the better of him. To the officer he only nodded as best he could given the constraints of the neck brace. ‘Well, as long as you’re out of the States within a week or so, I don’t think the D.A. will think it’s worth the taxpayers’ money to bring you back for trial. After all, nobody was hurt but you. And you’re damn lucky about that. You drunk drivers usually always live. It’s the people you hit that get killed.’ Oh, yes, yes, thank you very much, Carrie Nation. If only you knew why I was here. Doing a policeman’s work myself and doing it a damned sight more considerately than you, you Levelling, surfing, Teutonic moron. ‘I’ll still have to file a report, of course,’ the officer said, pulling out his notebook. Yes, very big on reports, your kind, aren’t they? ‘Are you in the States for business or pleasure?’ ‘Pleasure seems a bit ironic now, but that’s fair enough.’ ‘You’re on vacation?’ Nigel grunted. No need to lie unnecessarily. ‘Where exactly were you going-before you went off the road, that is?’ ‘To my hotel.’ ‘And which one is that?’ ‘Oh, you know, the big one with the French name.’ ‘Too drunk to know where he was going,’ the officer said slowly, scribbling in his notebook. ‘Where’d you been drinking?’ ‘I believe you Californians call it a saloon.’ ‘A saloon,’ the officer repeated, smirking. ‘And you don’t remember the name, do you…?’ ‘The “Billy the Kid” or something…’ ‘… or who you were with?’ ‘With? I wasn’t with anyone. I don’t know anyone here.’ The officer nodded. ‘Suspect completely disoriented,’ he said as he wrote. ‘I think the skid marks tell the rest of the story.’ He put his notebook in his pocket. ‘You know, you totalled that rental. You even blew out all four tyres and bent the wheel stems. I hope you have insurance on it.’ ‘I have.’ Nigel was enough of an old soldier to know the risks he was running on this mission, though he hadn’t considered drink driving to be one of them. ‘Good. That could have ruined your trip, otherwise.’ He grinned again. ‘You know, my grandfather’s been to England. He was there to bail you out during the war.’ ‘Was he really?’ Nigel said in mock politeness, flat on his back and unable to move. ‘Yeah. He thought it was cold. ’Cept the beer-that was warm.’ Nigel nodded thoughtfully. ‘Give him my apologies. But tell him it’s been that way for quite some time.’ Cromwell’s grinning constable took another look in Nigel’s wallet, then flipped it closed. ‘I’ll leave this with the nurses. You can pick it up when you leave.’ He waved it at Nigel. ‘You’d better watch it, old man. Accidents can be gnarly.’ ‘Yes, can’t they just,’ Nigel said, his fake grin following the officer out of the room. Well, he’d survived the interrogation, but now came the true torture that all captured soldiers risked. Torture was what they gave you after you refused to talk. He braced himself for it. In fact, strapped down as he was, he was already braced for it. His first fright came when a nurse stopped by his bed to ask him about payment-always an awkward question when one finds oneself unexpectedly in a foreign hospital, especially when the authorities have confiscated one’s wallet. But he was relieved that his being a foreigner didn’t seem to cause her any anguish. Like a true die-hard, anti-Reform Bill Tory back in 1832, Nigel had always distrusted the National Health Service at home. He’d been all of eight when Nye Bevan introduced the idea. He hadn’t thought much of it then and he didn’t think much of it now. But he also maintained his countrymen’s common fear that an American hospital would either turn him away to die in an alley or take him by his countryman brogues and shake him down for everything he was worth. Taking matters quickly into his own hands he got the nurse to wheel his bed to where the phone was mounted on the opposite wall. He dialled his bank in London, Messrs Coutts, announced himself, and handed her the receiver. (The nurse, he thought, was rather plain and decidedly craggy with age and he’d rather not have her face rubbing cheeks with his.) The clerk on the other end assured her that Nigel’s account was in very good order. She rang off, and Nigel gave the nurse his address so he could be billed and granted her permission to copy down his bank card number as security. It was quite simple, if more mercenary than one would like from a medical establishment, which, one likes to assume, no doubt falsely, is a rather idealistic place, with Angels of Mercy floating silently through the wards like Nightingales. And of course, Nigel thought to himself, given that they already had his wallet in their custody, they could be gracious rather easily. The next torture to be borne was more severe. This torture wasn’t clever, like Chinese water torture. It was more neglectful, more modern, more bureaucratic; in fact, it was very much like the National Health Service. He was left strapped on his mad scientist’s operating table, ignored, abandoned, and alone. He lay on his rack for a good twelve hours in a position that rapidly became far more painful than the quick and irrevocable accident that had sent him there. Whenever he tried to move, the apparatus blocked him. It was like trying to roll over in bed, only to have Helga of the SS pin his shoulders back, saying, ‘You vill sleep on your back and you vill like it.’ It would be wrong to say that he was being kept under observation, for he was barely observed at all. And then it was only to wheel him in to be X-rayed-which they did twice, because the first batch didn’t come out properly-and to stitch up a cut near his eye. Nigel hadn’t been seriously injured before he entered the hospital, but by the time he left-when a doctor happened upon him and said, ‘Hmm, they haven’t let you out yet. That’s funny.’-his spine felt as though it were about to snap. When he was finally discharged and in receipt of his confiscated valuables, he stepped into the remarkably hot October sun-a portrait of elegant, unclimatic dishevelment: blood-spattered cavalry twill, a Frankenstein-monster scar on his forehead, and a swollen black eye that he tried to hide by giving his Panama a rakish tilt. He knew he was not a pretty picture. And at his age he knew it would be a bit hard to claim it was all a result of a stirring round of fisticuffs-his glory days as a pugilist for Eton were long behind him. But it was a very pretty picture that had plunged him into this mess. A very pretty picture indeed. It was a leg, actually. Or rather, two pairs of legs, belonging to two young women who were the very embodiment of a ‘Come to California’ tourist advertisement. He remembered walking down a sunbaked street lined with flashy shops, coming to an outdoor café, where his eye was caught by the long, suntanned leg of a beautiful blonde whose face had what he assumed was called ‘an innocent, all-American look.’ Plan A, thought Nigel. Whenever, in his long and distinguished military career, he had had to do a recce up country, in darkest Katanga or the border country round Crossmaglen, he’d invariably enlist native support to help him catch his prey. There was Ngube Mboto, who’d led him to the Katanga rebels, whom he secretly-and rather dangerously for his career as a wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant and military observer-advised in their secessionist war against the Congo’s communist government; and Paddy O’Rourke, who drank with the Provos. These two lovelies might well serve the same purpose. Except the objective now was not settling the borders of the Congo or keeping a close eye on the IRA, but recovering his own goddaughter. She was twentysomething; these girls were twenty­something. Perfect. Plan A. As he passed the blonde, he touched his Panama in greeting. He then walked straight into a chair that was shoved in his way by a woman getting up at the next table. Nigel remembered feeling momentarily quite proud that though he was stumbling in a strange, hopping, froglike sort of way, his hands skipping along the ground, propelling him forward if not upright, he hadn’t yet fallen flat on his face. He did, however, propel himself full force into an unoccupied table, bringing it crashing to the ground, its umbrella, a chair, cutlery, salt and pepper shakers, packets of sugar, and other odds and ends falling on top of him. A purple ceramic vase with a single colourful flower plopped on his lap. He quickly brushed it aside so that it shattered on the pavement into convenient shards for cutting his hands. And to his shame he saw that the vase’s water had spilled out into a Rorschach ink blot on the crotch of his trousers, which quickly emitted a sheepish smell to match the sheepish look on his face. He heard a woman say, ‘Oh my God’ (it was the woman who had knocked him over), and he groaned a bit. He was much too old to be playing rugby with furniture on the pavement, his erstwhile fame as scrum half for Eton but a distant memory. Surely a few bones were broken. Perhaps he was paralysed. He shut his eyes for a moment, making a quick mental catalogue of his pain before he decided to move. When he opened his eyes, he was surrounded by the sound of shoe leather scraping on the pavement and the umbrella being wrenched aside. The blonde siren knelt beside him and put her hand on his Panama. ‘Don’t move,’ she said to him. ‘Are you all right? Do you want me to call an ambulance?’ ‘No, no,’ he said, half bravely, half in fear of causing even more of a scene. ‘I’m quite all right. Really, it’s my own damn fault for not looking where I was going.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Quite sure.’ ‘You’re sure nothing’s broken?’ ‘Yes.’ The blonde nodded to a very pretty brunette, and they each took an arm and helped him up. He came to a wavering upright position. They let his arms go slowly and stood by him, as though he were a babe who might tumble over. Plan A was working perfectly. Silly old limey duffer, completely out of his depth, needs help. He could practically read the advert in the local paper. ‘Ah, there,’ he said, feeling more unsteady than he wanted to let on. He spread his legs a bit to improve his balance. The woman who’d broadsided him rushed towards him with profuse apologies. No wonder she’d capsized him. It was like a hippo ramming a punt-the latter might be elegant (like Nigel) but the laws of physics determined he was no match for Hermione the hippo’s well-fed bulk. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Please, I’m perfectly fine. I do it all the time. No peripheral vision at all. Always knocking things over. Really. Perfectly, perfectly fine.’ Roar as solicitously as she could, Nigel had no interest in pursuing a conversation with this emigrant from Lake Victoria, and bravely, if gently, brushed her aside, the way a daring crocodile might, and moved boldly to his original objective-the blonde, who had retreated to her table with her friend. An officer ought always to take the initiative, he thought. What was it Frederick the Great had said? ‘An officer awaiting an attack shall be cashiered.’ This was especially true when on special operations. It was, after all, imperative to secure the loyalty of the locals. ‘May I join you?’ he asked, bowing slightly at the waist, interrupting the blonde and brunette, who had already fallen back into their pre-Nigel-falling-on-the-ground conversation. The blonde nodded, her lazy, bedroom blue eyes lighting with apparent deep concern for Nigel’s well-being. ‘Oh, yes.’ ‘I’m sorry about all this. But I think I need a bit of a rest.’ He slowly lowered himself into a chair. He was pleased his bones didn’t creak as he did so. A young waiter with shiny black hair hurried to their table, his worried eyes watching a couple of Mexican busboys cleaning up the wreckage from Nigel’s fall. ‘Are you all right, sir? Shall I call a doctor?’ ‘No, no, I’m perfectly fine,’ said Nigel, who couldn’t help but consider the waiter a damned nuisance. He had a sun-drenched table with two beautiful young women. What the devil did he need with a pretty-boy waiter with slicked-back hair? ‘Can I get you anything? A glass of water?’ ‘You can bring me a beer.’ The waiter recited the dozen beers of the house. ‘A Bass will do me fine.’ Nigel looked at his companions, but they were happy enough sipping their fizzy cola drinks, as Americans were wont to do. Nigel felt fairly knowledgeable about Americans from his days cooperating with them ousting the Iraqis from Kuwait. Many were the hours he’d sat in the Pentagon with Schwarzkopf and Powell breaking pencil nubs and working out the finer points of the Mother of All Battles. He had to admit to being a little hurt when Stormin’ Norman gave all the credit for the Gulf War to the tactics of Alexander the Great and not so much as a mention to Nigel the Pretty Good Really. But the last laugh was his now, wasn’t it? While Schwarzkopf and Powell were reduced to attending old soldiers’ reunions or dull, formal dinners with desiccated, boring foreign pol­icy mandarins, here was Nigel enjoying the café life with two radiant, sun-kissed creatures. ‘You must be from England,’ said the brunette. ‘Yes, yes I am.’ Apart from acknowledging her amazing powers of deduction, he also carefully noted her features: warm brown eyes, though brown eyes always reminded him of animals rather than people-still, hers seemed affectionate, beautiful doe eyes; a bright, welcoming smile; a walnut tan… ‘I’m April,’ she said, ‘and this is Penelope.’ ‘I’m pleased to meet you both. My name is Nigel, Nigel Haversham.’ ‘Are you all right? That was quite a fall you had.’ ‘Oh, yes. I suppose I was rather blinded by the sun. In England, we usually have rain in October-and every other month of the year.’ ‘Would you like something to eat?’ asked Penelope. ‘We haven’t ordered yet.’ ‘Oh, haven’t you?’ he said, accepting the menu from her hand. He looked at it briefly and put it aside. Looking at Penelope was more interesting: tall, blonde, and beautiful, with pouting lips, and eyelids that rested half unfurled, reminding one of the joys of the long Norwegian winters. ‘It gets rather warm here in L.A., doesn’t it?’ he asked, easing his shirt collar. ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling politely. Nigel shook with a violent cough. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ she asked him. ‘Yes, I think it’s just the smog.’ He coughed again in wrenching spasms. Good Lord, did I dislodge my intestines? ‘Here, have some water,’ April said, handing him her glass. Drinking someone else’s water in a sexually promiscuous and Aids-infested area like Los Angeles was undoubtedly dangerous, but Nigel had a long streak of fatalism in his character; and anyway, better to swig someone’s water and die of Aids than to sit here and embarrass everyone with one’s uncontrollable coughing. ‘Isn’t it awful?’ asked Penelope. Actually, Nigel thought it tasted quite pleasant-cold, clean, and quite free from every disease from the Tropics, without even a hint of tsetse. His eyes were question marks. ‘The smog,’ she explained. ‘Oh, it’s not so bad. We invented it, you know.’ He didn’t want to appear an ugly Englishman. ‘Do you live in England?’ asked April. ‘Yes, smoggy old London. It’s quite as bad as here. Diesel fumes, mad motorcyclists, a jogger’s nightmare. Perhaps that’s why we don’t have any; joggers, that is. Not like you Americans.’ ‘Oh, we don’t jog. We do Tae-bo,’ said Penelope. ‘Tae-bo?’ ‘Yeah, you know, like aerobics and kickboxing.’ ‘Ah, savate,’ he said, thinking of the secret foot-fighting technique practised in the dangerous alleyways of Marseilles, something he’d picked up during one of his more adventurous school hols. ‘Gesundheit,’ said April. Penelope glanced heavenward, ‘I don’t like jogging in this air.’ Nigel was just on the point of imagining Penelope in one of those form-flattering outfits he knew were de rigueur for any self-respecting exercising Angeleno, when his view was suddenly blocked by the waiter bending over the table. He gave a growling sigh as the toy boy produced a glass, filled it halfway, and placed the sweating bottle beside it. ‘Thank you,’ Nigel said sourly. ‘Are you ladies ready to order?’ the waiter asked, flipping out his notebook. ‘I’ll have the turkey on whole wheat, lettuce and tomato, with mustard, but no mayonnaise, please,’ said Penelope. The waiter scribbled. ‘I’ll have the taco salad. And can I have rice instead of beans? And hold the meat. And could I have some extra guacamole and tomatoes?’ asked April. ‘Oh, and can you hold the peppers?’ ‘Do you want something, Nigel?’ asked Penelope. He almost laughed. Here I am in a foreign land and all I have to do is sprawl on the pavement to get invited to luncheon with two beautiful young women. This was really too good to be true. ‘Ah, yes, yes… hmm… roast beef?’ ‘Sandwich, sir?’ ‘Yes, yes, sandwich.’ ‘And what kind of bread?’ ‘Uh…’ His mind raced. ‘Sourdough!’ It seemed to him he remembered reading somewhere that sourdough bread was the delicacy of the California gold miners, even if the Forty-Nine was some time ago. And roast beef? Surely that’s what the California cowboys ate, along with their buffalo chips and endless beans. ‘Mayonnaise?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Lettuce or sprouts?’ Sprouts were green vegetables one has with the turkey at Christmas. But in a sandwich? ‘Lettuce.’ ‘Tomayto?’ ‘Tomahto.’ ‘Thank you.’ The waiter gathered their menus and disappeared. ‘Like, I love the way you say,’ April mimicked him as though he were Colonel Blimp, ‘tomahto.’ ‘All a matter of upbringing, I suppose,’ he responded. Good Lord, he thought, don’t raise my hopes just to make me a figure of fun. ‘So are you here on vacation?’ asked Penelope, whom he much preferred. ‘Yes, a holiday,’ Nigel lied. ‘I came here for the sun.’ ‘Then you should be like, you know, wearing shorts and a tennis shirt. Aren’t you hot with that tie on? Take it off.’ ‘Yes, well, you see I need my cavalry twill-it cushions my falls. And my tie, well…’ He smiled and loosened the knot. ‘Where do you work?’ asked April. ‘Oh, Katanga, Cyprus, Aden, the Falklands,’ he smiled mischievously. ‘Or I used to anyway. I’m a retired officer of Her Majesty’s Army.’ ‘Oh,’ they said, with obvious boredom and disappointment. Nigel assumed that with his debonair good looks and their California ignorance, they had probably taken him for a gentlemanly fashion photographer, a sort of Lord Lichfield. But to a more discerning eye, an English eye, Nigel knew his looks would have given him away-neat, grey, military moustache; surging white-water eyebrows over intense blue eyes; the handsome, ruddy, weather-beaten face that retained, if he said so himself, a certain Fairbanksian charm. He thought it only good manners to shift the conversation back to his hosts, especially since he needed to gauge their worth for Plan A. ‘Do you girls have jobs in L.A.?’ April laughed as though there were something funny about the way he said L.A. ‘Not real jobs,’ said Penelope. ‘We’re Xers. You know, like Generation X. The baby boomers have all the real jobs. All we have are part-time, go-nowhere, do-nothing jobs.’ ‘Yes, very difficult, I suppose,’ he said, adopting a look of pained concern for their difficulties, while he wondered what they were talking about and what they would have made of the depressions and wars previous generations had faced, and also how they had failed to make the cool million that apparently every other twentysomething American was making via computerised commerce of some sort. ‘Do you aim to be movie stars?’ ‘That’d be fun, but it’s really hard,’ said April, with a gleaming smile that seemed as bright as any Hollywood star’s. ‘Actually, I’d like to get married,’ she said sincerely. Nigel was touched. He didn’t for a moment think she had him in mind-no, of course not. But it was touching, wasn’t it, in this time of women’s lib, massive divorce, and enormous pressure on young girls to lift weights, dye their hair green and purple, and put pins through their noses (and other places), to find an unspoiled young thing whose choice was for the kinder and gentler ideal of matrimony-even if they apparently, and disconcertingly, practised savate on the side? He warmed to her. His every fibre cried out in wonder at her. Ecce femina! he wanted to shout to the women of the Western world, conjuring up his classics from the old school-Floreat Etona! Behold the woman, behold her dignity and charm, behold this untarnished-though she is delightfully tan-paragon of the unbought grace of life! If only his goddaughter could see this girl’s example and appreciate what it means-the proper path, the right course, the future of England-even if, in this case admittedly, the golden exemplar happens to be a Californian. April touched his forearm, startling him from his reverie and melting him even further. ‘But right now we’ll do anything for money.’ ‘Well, almost anything,’ said Penelope, laughing in a rather coarse, horsey way that distracted from her natural endowments and brought Nigel’s dreams crashing down like crockery hurled off a mantelpiece by a California earthquake. ‘Believe me,’ said April, stroking his sleeve, ‘we Xers need money.’ Nigel forced a smile, feeling very self-conscious. Surely he wasn’t being propositioned. This was just the way our American cousins showed their frank, unrepressed, friendly equality… wasn’t it? Well, if it was, he couldn’t help thinking that their frank, unrepressed, friendly equality was rather like walking around naked. It might be very comfortable for you, but it’s damned distressing to your neighbours. ‘How do you support yourselves now?’ he asked. He’d never raised a daughter himself, or been married for that matter-though of course he did have his goddaughter, the reason he was here. But he was already becoming rather concerned for the welfare of his two beautiful companions. ‘Oh,’ said April, ‘our parents pay for us. Pen and I live together in Westwood.’ ‘Well, have you been to school? Do you have any qualifications?’ ‘We want to get into public relations, but, like, nobody’s hiring,’ said Penelope. ‘We’re thinking about setting up our own public relations firm, but you can’t do that without money.’ But surely, thought Nigel, that’s what striving young men are for, to take care of beautiful young girls like these, set them up in flower shops, or public relations boutiques if that’s what makes them happy. ‘Public relations… who would your clients be?’ ‘Athletes.’ Penelope’s beauty had kept Nigel from noticing her voice, but now he decided it was rather odd-thick, as if her tongue were swallowed by the swelling of her bee-stung lips, and whining. ‘Athletes,’ he repeated after her, thoughtfully. ‘Do you know any?’ ‘Like, we were cheerleaders,’ she said condescendingly, as though it had been on the front page of The Times for weeks. ‘Quite. And what would you do for them?’ April giggled and flashed her shiny teeth, but Penelope held forth as though she were Lord Keynes confronted with a particularly ignorant, ugly, heterosexual boy. ‘We’d be their image consultants. A lot of them aren’t very smart, you know. They need an image consultant so we can market them for promotions and commercials. We’d match athlete,’ she stuck up one finger, ‘and product,’ she stuck up another finger and brought the two together. It wasn’t a very flattering gesture, especially as Nigel thought it meant something rather offensive in California. It also exposed Penelope’s rather large hands. Obvious Viking blood, could run to Rhine-Maiden-fat in the future, Nigel thought. But he said: ‘Very clever. No wonder you outdo us economically. Born entrepreneurs, I’d say.’ He looked at the girls beneath his surging waves of eyebrows. There was a veiled intensity in his look. Undoubtedly, it made them slightly uncomfortable. But he imagined they rather liked that, making them feel as though they were in the presence of a personality of startling masculine magnetism, rather like Sir Richard Francis Burton, that fiercely handsome nineteenth-century soldier, explorer, linguist, secret agent, Sufi mystic, and all-round Rambo of the ‘forces of conservatism’, so feared by Prime Minister Tone and so revered by Brigadier Nigel Haversham. ‘Oh, look,’ said April, pointing across the street. ‘There’s one.’ ‘There’s what?’ Nigel asked, looking around somewhat angrily. ‘That giant white poodle. That’s what I’m talking about, Pen. Don’t you want it?’ A woman with an enormous hat and dark glasses was strolling by across the street, a vast white dog on the end of a leash. On the other hand, Nigel thought, young girls are rather self-absorbed creatures, aren’t they? Liable to miss subtleties, or not feel appropriate awe. Put that old scoundrel Benjamin Disraeli in front of them and they’d probably advise him on where to find a better hairstylist. Give them Sir Richard Francis Burton and they’d advise a plastic surgeon to cover up the scar on his cheek, won honourably from a Somali spear. Nigel’s stare-the sort of stare, he thought, that might become a Brontë hero, rather wuthering, in a way-bore into April’s excited brown eyes. But she didn’t even notice him. Already she and her blonde roommate were discoursing on the pros and cons of giant poodles. Oh well, Nigel thought. It’s not as though he didn’t already know and hold as a principle of life-especially after meeting his goddaughter Alexandra’s friends-that young women were really rather like miraculous talking cows who, when one’s conversation didn’t involve them personally, when one took the conversation onto some higher, theoretical plane, would suddenly remember that they were indeed cows, not human beings at all, and turn away, chewing their cud, gazing in contented vacuity over the long green fields-or in these girls’ case, over the large white poodle prancing in front of the long row of shops on the opposite side of the street. The waiter bent in front of him and broke his stare. He was welcome this time. If he was going to be ignored, he might as well lose himself in his food and play the part of a hungry old man in need of nourishment to build his strength, to restore his brittle bones. And the food was delightful. The Americans could certainly set a fine table. The roast beef was as good as any in England. (Better, perhaps, he conceded to himself, what with BSE and mad cows and all.) And the sourdough bread was wonderful. His imagination made it seem quite rustic. Every bite made him think of bearded men panning for gold, calling the wind Maria. And every gold miner he dreamt of was somehow a remarkably active and agile old duffer only just in his sixties. Nigel remained polite and occasionally dipped his oar in the stream of the girls’ conversation-saying, ‘No, no, April’s right. Giant poodles can be charming. Prince Rupert had one, you know. He was the nephew of our King Charles. No, no, nothing to do with Diana. But Irish wolfhounds, there you have the real thing.’-which would win him a smiling glance of acknowledgement from April, but leave him otherwise beyond the pale of the conversation. It was a no-hoper. None too soon, the waiter slipped the bill on the table. Nigel gracefully slid his left hand for the bill and his right into his coat for his wallet. April and Penelope leaned for their handbags. ‘No, no, ladies. I’ll take care of this,’ he said gallantly. At least it gave him something to do. There were the usual protests, but they were put down. He filed his American dollars beneath the bill and paused over the dregs of a second beer. ‘Do you know anyone here in L.A.?’ asked Penelope. Here was a surprise. He looked over his shoulder. The poodle had passed out of sight. ‘No, not a soul.’ Her arms slammed on the table and her head jumped towards him like a jack-in-the-box. ‘Good Lord!’ Nigel exclaimed, thrown back in his chair, at rigid attention. ‘Then let’s show you the city. It’ll be really fun.’ Excellent, thought Nigel, Plan A clicking into place without even a nudge from him. He looked at April. She was quickly brightening to Penelope’s fevered look. ‘Wouldn’t I be in the way?’ he said. ‘Don’t you have appointments to keep?’ ‘Come on, Nigel,’ said Penelope. ‘We can take you drinking at the Guards. It’s very English.’ ‘The Guards?’ Nigel echoed. ‘Do you know it?’ ‘My dear girl, I was in it-the regiment, that is.’ ‘It’ll be really fun,’ said April, grabbing his sleeve. So he tottered to his feet, though he was feeling much better now, and followed the girls to their car (his rent-a-car was not far away), and he agreed to follow them wherever their inspiration might direct. Driving in a strange city in a strange car on the wrong side of the street was, he thought, strange. But Los Angeles was a fairly orderly town, and the traffic moved slowly. It wasn’t difficult following Penelope’s white Mustang convertible in the slow, meandering lineup of metal, the girls’ hair streaming behind their sunglasses like Mercury’s wings whenever they could pick up speed. The day was turning a bit overcast. The air looked as though it had been heavily laced with black pepper. He pulled up alongside of them. ‘I say, girls,’ he called out, ‘do we know where we’re going?’ April shouted to Penelope, ‘He wants to know where we’re going.’ He heard Penelope shout back, ‘The Queen Mary. He’s old. He’s English. He’ll like it.’ He did, rather. It wasn’t the ship so much, cresting the Cunard waves with her 81,000 tons, or the nostalgic memories of a bygone era that it could have evoked from him. It was the sight of these two young women, tripping their long legs on the deck, giggling hysterically at private jokes that meant nothing to him. The Queen Mary was in dry dock, the Empire was a Commonwealth of criminality to chisel money out of the old country and snigger at the Windsor family, but at least girls were still girls. They could still make one feel rather like Maurice Chevalier. And for that he was grateful. So the afternoon was spent pleasantly enough. And as dusk crept over Long Beach, casting long red shadows, his companions’ high spirits surged even higher. It was the Guards! Yes, they had to take him to the Guards! ‘Oh, you’ll have to meet Tom! I’ll call Mike. He’d get such a kick out of you!’ They punched their cell phones as quickly as a Chinese flipped beads on an abacus, but neither of the men could be found. Perhaps they were there already. So on to the Guards it was! The Guards was in a ritzy part of town. It was dark, but livelier than any pub he’d been to recently, and the clientele was a good deal better looking. They settled into a rounded booth, and the girls plumped him beneath a large portrait of Winston Churchill, looking for all the world as if he’d just lost the 1945 election. They thought this was very funny. Nigel smiled graciously beneath his grey moustache. And when their pints of Courage arrived, he led them in a toast to the great man. ‘To Winston,’ he growled. Their glasses clinked, and immediately Penelope and April fell into excited conversation over clothes that they’d seen either on the Queen Mary, or on the drive over, or here in the pub, or… Nigel didn’t really know where. It didn’t seem to matter, and he took his being ignored with wise equanimity. He was happy enough sitting with his pint, watching the beautiful people, an even-tempered gentleman beneath the determined bulldog face of the prime minister. Yet all the time the even-tempered gentleman’s eyes were watching. His goddaughter was here somewhere in California. Perhaps this was the way to find her. Plan A. The girls turned to him occasionally to ask whether he wanted another, to which he always replied, ‘Yes, I believe I will,’ until he found his mind bobbing up and down like a cork on a wine dark sea. Eventually he was inspired to interpose in the girls’ conversation. ‘I should tell you,’ he said, slightly slurring his words but within a suave, self-disciplined sense of verbal control, ‘that I think you two are dressed quite handsomely, showing a long bit of leg, I grant you. But colourful. And you can do it. You’re the right age, you’re fit, you’re quite… charming.’ Their blank looks were starting to crease into knowing smiles. Nigel felt compelled to warn them. ‘But life, you must remember,’ he said, ‘is rather a sort of struggle of some kind in which one must be aggressive of course but graceful as well. You must always remember that, and remember the absolute importance of character. I’m always amazed at the absolute tyranny of weakness. So many weak people. How do they survive? I mean people who lack character. Life always destroys them. Crushed and tossed away, they are. You mustn’t allow it, you know. Especially if you’re to dress like that.’ Having delivered his fashion credo of the hour, he swung himself back into the padding of the booth and looked at them with powerful, sceptical, gimlet eyes that were seeing as through a beer glass darkly. They looked at him for a moment-April puzzled, Penelope smirking-and then resumed their conversation, casting concerned looks at him every now and again. Then two young rugby players, all jock straps and rolling mauls, hurled themselves into the booth, to the joyous rapture of Penelope and April. At last, the competition had arrived. ‘Phil and Steve, this is Nigel. He’s an Englishman.’ The lads were very friendly and offered their hands. Nigel gave Steve a rather flinty, sidewise look that had the desired effect. He backed off. He’d been sitting on the tail of Nigel’s coat. They tried to include Nigel in their conversation, but his mind was slipping far away. It was thirty-six years ago, Katanga, the Congo. His chin dropped to his chest and he stared deeply into the amber in his glass. The jeep bumped along the treacherous dusty road full of rocks and potholes. They were climbing a steep incline to where the United Nations troopers were dug in on the hill. The African sun was a dying ball of fire behind the purple bars of the clouds. He pulled the lapels of his coat tight around his neck and felt for his pipe, suddenly shivering in the knowledge that night was the winter of the Tropics. ‘’ang on, sir!’ The jeep bucked and jolted, nearly throwing him clear, and then a hand pulled him back by the shoulder. ‘Nigel!’ It was Penelope. ‘What?’ ‘I’ll call you a cab.’ ‘No, don’t bother. Please don’t.’ ‘You shouldn’t be driving.’ ‘Are you leaving?’ ‘It’s very late, Nigel.’ He noticed that April, Steve, and Phil were talking amongst themselves behind her. ‘Oh, I’ll be fine. I’ll just sit here a while, if you don’t mind. I’ll have some coffee.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘I’m perfectly fine.’ ‘Do you know how to get to your hotel?’ ‘Yes, I’m sure I can manage. I have a map.’ ‘Which hotel is it?’ ‘Le Grand Extravaganza. I’m sure I’ll be fine.’ ‘Here.’ She reached into her handbag and scribbled her phone number on a scrap of paper. ‘Call me if you need any help.’ He stood outside the hospital in the late morning sun, sweating in his cavalry twill, feeling damned uncomfortable. He reached into his pocket. Sure enough, there it was. He needed her now. Price: $15.95 - Click here to order: Click here to return to book details