The Kings of Eternity (29 page)

“He spoke of you often.”

“He did? My word... It was so long ago. Sixty-five years! Did he tell you we were lovers, once?”

Langham nodded. “He often told me that he’d had an affair with the most beautiful woman in England.”

Carla laughed, a wrinkled hand fluttering at her throat. “My word... He said that? The rascal!”

“He said he regretted how he parted with you. He always wanted to apologise.” He smiled. “He said he was young and immature.”

Carla reached out and touched the back of his hand. Her fingers were warm and very, very soft. “We were both young and immature! Do you know, I think I was his very first love. So of course he didn’t know how to handle me - and I must admit that I was probably a bit of handful, then. I liked a good time, you see, and Jonathon was so very jealous! But we had some wonderful times together.”

“He never forgot you,” he murmured.

She smiled sadly. “I don’t suppose he’s still...” She waved. “Silly of me. I’m outliving everyone I ever knew. That’s the problem of living for so long, Daniel, let me tell you. Everyone you once knew is no longer...”

He picked up the empty bottle suddenly, silencing her. “Excuse me. I’ll get another.”

And before she could protest, he hurried into the kitchen and leaned against the frame of the door, and he could not say whether his tears were for Carla DeFries or for himself.

He busied himself in the kitchen, arranging cake on a plate and opening another wine.

He returned to the patio, composed now, and offered her the Madeira and a refill.

“You shouldn’t have,” she protested mildly, taking a wedge of cake.

“My grandfather died in ‘75,” he said. “He was healthy and happy to the end.”

“He was? That’s good to know. He was as old as the century, you know. He often reminded me of that. He joked that he’d never forget how old he was.”

Langham smiled, remembering...

She went on, “I have all his books, every one of them. But he never published after ‘48, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Not under his own name. He wrote a different kind of book in the fifties, under the name of Christopher Cartwright. He did well - became something of a best-seller.”

“How wonderful for him. He always wanted to be a successful writer. I’m so pleased he achieved his ambition.” She took a sip of wine. “Tell me, was he happy in love?”

He smiled. “I’m sure he was. He married when he was forty,” he temporised, and went on quite involuntarily, “She was a lovely woman called Caroline, a painter. They were very happy, and had one son, my father.”

“And you’re a successful writer yourself? You obviously take after your grandfather. He’d be so proud.” She shook her head again. “My word, looking at you, the years seem to fall away.”

They drank, and she reminisced, and then told him about the filming of
Summer and Winter
. The sun was setting when she looked at the delicate gold watch on her fragile wrist and exclaimed, “Lord! And Stavros will be waiting! It’s been so wonderful talking to you, Daniel.”

“The pleasure was mine. It’s not every day I get famous actresses dropping in for supper.”

She laughed, stood and moved towards the steps. She paused. “Tell me, Daniel, is there a young woman in your life?”

He smiled. “I think there is,” he said.

She nodded. “Like that, is it? Well, I wish you the best of luck. Treat her well, buy her flowers and chocolates. It always works.”

He accompanied her out to the track. She turned to him.

“Well, thank you again, Daniel.”

He reached out, and she was in his arms. They hugged, perhaps for longer than was normal, and she feigned breathlessness when he released her - ever the actress.

She fitted her helmet over her head, climbed carefully onto the back of the motorbike and lifted a hand in a brief wave.

Daniel watched the bike turn on the track and carry her away. He returned to the patio, picked up his glass and the wine, sat on the sofa and watched the stars come out.

He considered the Carla he had known, all those years ago, and the women he had loved since then, and could not stop himself from weeping.

At noon the following day, having finished his four pages, he made his way into the village for lunch.

At two o’clock he crossed to the post office. Yannis saw him coming and had the
poste restante
box on the counter as he entered. He checked for mail, but there was none for him today.

As he was about to leave, Yannis said, “Mr Langham... Your friend, the Englishman, this morning he said he must leave on urgent business. He said he had no time to say farewell to you.”

Langham nodded. “Did he say where he was going, or when he might be back?”

Yannis shrugged. “He just paid for his room and took a taxi to Xanthos, Mr Langham.”

He left the village and walked home, feeling as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Perhaps Forbes had given up on his quest, learned as much as he could, and decided there was no story in the reclusive novelist, after all.

Perhaps Langham’s earlier thoughts about leaving Greece and starting a new life were premature. He passed Caroline’s villa, but she was still away, and he looked ahead to her return with longing.

Chapter Thirteen

Tangier, 1963-1964

I am writing this in Tangier in the month of October, 1964. Much has happened during my stay in the city; I have experienced love and tragedy in equal measure, and I feel that the only way I might come to terms with the events of the past year is to set them down in black and white, before I leave Morocco for ever.

In ‘63, after years of travelling from place to place around the world, I found myself in Tangier and decided to remain for a while. There was something about the city that appealed to me, that invited me to stay for longer than the usual month or two.

Since ‘48 I had spent six years in South America and a little longer in Africa. My usual routine was to find a town or a city whose atmosphere spoke to something within me. I preferred quiet, backwater places, towns which the modern world had touched once but then left behind; tropical or semi-tropical, well-composted, fetid and slightly run-down. I despised the trappings of the West, the advertising and the emphasis that the latest was the best, the corrupt ethos that image was everything.

In South America I enjoyed the cities of Santiago and Arica in Chile, Santa Cruz in Bolivia and Paraguay’s lethargic capital Asuncion. I would spend a month or two in each place, making notes for novels and short stories, and then find some village well away from the bustle and commerce of town or city, preferably in the mountain climes of the Andes, and work on the first draft of a novel for three months or so.

These books were more ambitious than those I had written as Jonathon Langham. They were novels of ennui and angst set amid expatriate communities in countries whose temperatures, both political and meteorological, created cauldrons of conflict and insanity.

My first novel as Christopher Cartwright found a respectable publisher in London, and I mailed them a completed manuscript every year thereafter, with scant, usually fictitious, biographical information, and of course no author photograph. The books were reviewed favourably, often earning comparisons to the works of Graham Greene.

In the mid-fifties I moved to Africa and explored the sweltering hell-holes of the Congo, Cameroon and the Central African Republic. I continued writing a novel a year - the work giving my life a purpose it would otherwise have lacked. The ability to write was the only one I possessed; it was both a way of working out what I thought of the world, and coming to some small understanding of myself. The books increased in popularity over the years to the extent that their literary merit, along with the famed reclusiveness of their author, brought the Fleet Street hacks out to Africa in search of copy. They had little to go on; no photograph, no address, no contacts or friends in England. I employed an agent in London, but his cheques were always sent to me care of a
poste restante
address in whichever town I found myself at the time, and if they went missing, then I was little bothered. The money my father had left me in ‘35 had, through careful investment, grown considerably, and with my literary earnings throughout the fifties I once calculated that I was worth in the region of two million pounds. Not that money, or what money might purchase - other than the freedom to travel - much bothered me: I travelled light, my only constant possessions being my toiletry bag, a portable typewriter, and a notebook.

In the late fifties the enigma that was Christopher Cartwright, the best-selling author of
The Human Jungle
and
A Long Way from Timbuktu
, became too much for the feature editors of the Sunday papers. After speculation that Cartwright was the pseudonym of Greene or a number of other authors was quashed by my agent, the race to find the man who was Christopher Cartwright intensified. It seemed that my footsteps were forever dogged by persistent, perspiring Fleet Street hacks, eager for the slightest snippet of information concerning the elusive author. In Kinshasa in ‘59 the chase became too close for comfort, and in order to buy myself time I indulged in a game with the foreign correspondent of the
Telegraph
. I approached him in a bar with the story that I had travelled with Cartwright in ‘57; I even supplied him with a photograph of a hotel in Bamako I had taken years earlier for research purposes: seated at a table before the building was the figure of a slim, dark-haired Westerner, an acquaintance I said was the writer. I claimed that Cartwright had told me he intended to spend the next few years in Zanzibar.

While that unfortunate island was inundated with eager feature writers, I contacted Vaughan and changed my identity yet again.

Vaughan, Charles and I had continued to meet every year since ‘48. In the early fifties Vaughan lived in the south of France and, though going under the name of Kenneth Edmundson, continued publishing scientific romances, known now as science-fiction. We exchanged copies of our novels when we met, and I was amused to find that veiled references to the events at Cranley Grange and Hopton Wood occasionally featured in his books.

Charles Carnegie spent the fifties in India, working for the Red Cross as a doctor in Madras - I forget the name he used at the time. We kept in contact by means of letters, and every year in June or July we would arrange to meet for a week or two of reminiscences and catching up. As money or distance was no object to us, the venues throughout the fifties were as diverse as they were exotic. The Kings of Eternity met in Paris in ‘53, and Singapore in ‘54. In ‘55 we took a cruise of the Mediterranean for a month, and the following year trekked in the Himalayas. 1957 found us for a few weeks in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, and ‘58 in Anchorage.

In ‘59 we arranged to meet in London and go about the process of changing our identities yet again.

Vaughan kept a flat in Kensington, and it was here we were reunited in the June.

I would have been fifty-nine that year, Charles a year younger. Physically I appeared to be in my late thirties; travel in the tropics had made me lean and tanned, and something of my experiences over the past twenty-five years had etched itself into the lines of my face. My eyes, according to the occasional acquaintance, looked far older than the rest of me.

Charles had transformed himself over the years, from the rather thin, stooped figure I recalled from the thirties, to an upstanding, muscular mountaineer of a man. Vaughan, for his part, remained the tweed-clad, patriarchal man of letters. He looked to be in his fifties, while in fact he was almost seventy-five.

On the first night of our meeting in ‘59, I suggested a restaurant in Greek Street. We ordered a bottle of raki, and we toasted the Kings of Eternity with that noxious brew.

Conversation was continual and tremendously entertaining. We talked of our experiences since we had last met, the sights we had seen, the books we had written and read: from the personal and the specific, talk always turned to events in the world at large. Over the course of nearly twenty-five years, it was as if we had gained intellectually, as well as physically, from the serum. Our analysis was precise and perceptive, our conclusions often profound and radical. I lay no claim in this department - it was the company of my learned friends that promoted any originality of insight on my part.

But, most of all, I enjoyed these meetings because they brought me into contact with the only two human beings on the planet who understood what I had been through, and whom I could trust implicitly.

Loneliness, to a differing degree with each of us, was a constant problem. How was it possible to make friends when we knew that in time, ten years or fifteen or whatever, one would have to move on, leave behind the person one was, along with one’s friends and acquaintances? Charles was only a little affected in this regard: he claimed never to have made great or lasting friendships - though he excluded us from this generalisation - and therefore he felt no qualms in leaving the friends and acquaintances he did make now: people moved on all the time, he said, and failed to keep contact. Vaughan was the same: he said he was so absorbed in his writing that he had no need for other friendships - the ones he shared with us, he said, sustained him.

I began to wonder, then, if my reluctance to make friends during my travels was less to do with qualms about giving them up, and more to do with some innate reserve: I did not want to make friends because I did not need them. I had the Kings of Eternity, after all, and they were sufficient to my needs.

“But what,” I recall asking, somewhat drunk on the raki, “about affairs of the heart? Women. How do you both stand on that?”

“I think,” Vaughan admitted, “that the serum caught me at a time when my libido had reached its nadir. I must admit that I seldom feel the urge.”

I nodded. “Charles?”

“At the moment I’m engaged in a casual affair with a French nurse at the hospital where I work. There’s no risk of marriage or attachment, and in time she’ll grow restless and move on.”