The High Flyer Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Three

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Four

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Five

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Thomas Wavery is the new Consul General at Abyla on the tip of North Africa. A career diplomat, Wavery was once a high flyer, but an affair with a younger woman has dashed his dreams of ambassadorship. He arrives in Abyla with his wife suing for divorce, his passport stolen by a Gibraltarian ape and precious little enthusiasm for the task ahead. His one hope of redemption is a visit from his new love.

  About the Author

  Nicholas Shakespeare is the author of Snowleg, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004, The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask awards, and The Dancer Upstairs, selected by the American Libraries Association as the best novel of 1997 and adapted for the film of the same title directed by John Malkovich. He is also the author of an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin.

  ALSO BY NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

  The Men Who Would Be King

  Londoners

  The Vision of Elena Silves

  The Dancer Upstairs

  Snowleg

  Bruce Chatwin

  To Barbara, with love

  Nicholas Shakespeare

  The High Flyer

  There is no going back in the matter of sensation.

  Ernest Hemingway: Death in the Afternoon, 1932

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  ONE AFTERNOON IN the African War a rogue mortar bomb spiralled into the bell tower of Santa Maria, damaging the clock. The bell continued to announce the time casually, after a pattern of its own. It was faithful to the quarter hour and often enthusiastic about Mass; otherwise, it might strike two at six o’clock, six at one o’clock or midnight at half past seven.

  An engineer was once sent for from across the Straits. He was told how both the bell and the clock had been prised from a Jesuit chapel in the jungle of another continent. He returned to the mainland after less than a week, defeated by the unfamiliar system of springs and pulleys.

  Over the years Abylans had learned to ignore the hours sounded out by Santa Maria de Africa. The chimes were a reminder, nothing more, for them to consult their watches. This was the reason many in Abyla knew the precise moment they became aware of the accident at sea. A thick cloud of smoke blotted out the sun as the clock struck five. It was shortly before midday.

  The smoke unfurled off the sea, masking the city. It had an acrid, tarry, spiteful smell. Captain Panteco smelled it in Las Rosales as he worked on the file of the drug-smuggler known as El Callado. He was entering the name “Joseph Silkleigh” under the heading “Suspects”, when a thought occurred to him. The Basques in D-wing had set fire to the prison! He covered his face with a lilac handkerchief and charged out of his office.

  Joseph Silkleigh smelled it as he sat on his usual stool in the Café Ulises. He was staring into an open notebook. The pages were blank except for the words “Chapter One” above which he had written and crossed out A Man of Promise. “The words are not leading me by the hand, Mohamed,” he told the man behind the bar. He was reaching for his glass when his nose filled with what he knew at once were diesel fumes.

  Dolores caught the same smell and wondered if it might not be something to do with the books, possibly those in the Local History shelves. She locked up the library in a hurry. It was Friday and early closing and she was meeting Rosita for lunch. Rosita wanted to discuss Silkleigh. She wanted to discuss Panteco. Depending on how long lunch lasted, they would end up talking about Ernesto, the conductor.

  At that moment the conductor’s widow was contemplating the cluttered drawing room of her apartment in Calle Zamora. What a revolting smell! thought Genia Ortiz, and she hurried to open the windows. The smell liberated several memories she had imprisoned in the green trunk under her bed: the empty lake-lamps in Balnasharki, the snuffed-out candles after dinner, her arrival in Abyla sixty-eight years before, aboard a ship wreathed in black flies. More disturbingly, it reminded her of Ernesto, whose memory she had made strenuous efforts to fumigate from her life.

  In the dining room of the red house opposite, Senator Teodoro Zamora de Avellaneda Mancheño y Centurión, was eating lunch. It was a while before he realised the smell had nothing to do with the soup which his Portuguese cook had splattered over his purple cardigan as she summarised the plot of last night’s soap.

  Senator Zamora sat and nodded. But his mind was promiscuously elsewhere: on the Governor’s letter, unfolded beside his bread plate, inviting him to be President of the Bullfight; on this afternoon’s drive with his grandson, Pablo, to visit the rock formation known as the Footstep of Hercules; on the tunnel.

  “Give that to me, señor.” Señora Criado, concluding her synopsis, had noticed the soup spot on Senator Zamora’s cardigan. Before he could protest she was undoing the buttons.

  “Thank you, Señora Criado,” he said, allowing her to peel the cardigan off him. She held out a hand and he passed her the bowl. He gave his cook an erudite smile. “A day without soup is a day without sun!”

  If it wasn’t the soup, could the smell be in some way connected to his next course?

  To Marie Amaral, closing her flowerstall for the day and catching sight of the rancid drift above the Club de Pensiones, the smell brought back such a terrible and unexpected memory that she dropped the yellow begonia she was bringing inside and her lungs filled with an Algerian night, a night of burning hair and animal screams and mad klaxons and flames of every colour twisting through the trees. Think of something else, she told herself. Anything but that, Marie Amaral. Anything. Her left arm had been weakened by a tetanus booster and she pulled off her gloves with her teeth. She needed the sanity of her flowers, but their sanity deserted her. She bent to gather up the pieces of shattered terracotta, the spilled earth, the plant. “Where shall I put you?” she said aloud to hear a voice.

  She disliked begonias, but Marie Amaral could never throw flowers away. She would give them away, to the Café Ulises, to the asylum on Calle Silvestre or to old ladies passing through the Plaza de los Reyes, although not to Genia Ortiz who took offence. “That’s very kind of you, Marie Amaral, but I only like white.”

  If there was no one passing through the square, she would leave the flowers in a bucket by the fountain. As an offering. By the time she unlocked her stall in the morning they were always gone.

  “Who do you think takes them?” Senator Zamora’s grandson, Pablo, would want to know.

  “The spirits of the square.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Marie Amaral scanned the shelves. No empty pots. She opened the cupboard beneath the till. She curved her hand behind her scissors, her envelopes for messages, her sulphur dust, searching for a spare pot, and her fingers met a hard object on its side.

  She drew out a teapot by the spout. David’s!

  And here I am, not wanting to think of you.

  She opened the silver lid. Why not? she thought.
She put in the begonia, packing the earth not too firmly about the stem. She pricked the surface and sprinkled it with hydrated lime. Come now, she told herself, brushing her eyes with the back of a hand. Good eyes are not afraid of smoke.

  According to El Faro it was “a smoke from which there was no escape, not even if you dived to the bottom of the sea”. Hardly anyone in Abyla escaped it, but one of these was the driver at the shaft head of the Straits Tunnel. Not until the following shift, four hours later, was he to learn how the ship carrying replacement blades for his boring-machine had collided with a fishing boat off Punta Benzú.

  Chapter Two

  1

  FOURTEEN MILES ACROSS the Straits, a senior British diplomat on his way to lunch paused before a telescope. His name was Thomas Wavery. He was a tall, silver-haired man, in his late fifties. An intelligent man, distinguished even, you would have thought, meeting him on the road to the belvedere – a contented don, or a financier to be trusted. And had he stood perfectly still, you might have added, observing his clothes and the way he held himself, a successful man. But when he walked, his shoulders and the cast of his face betrayed him.

  He had flown into Gibraltar an hour before. He had taken the cable car to the summit from where he walked north down Middle Hill. The road inclined steeply towards the bay and was scattered with gravel. When a military Land-Rover overtook him, he slipped, but kept his balance by pressing his hand into a bank beside the road. He noticed Aaron’s rod and Rock crocus and sawfly orchids, all flowers he had planned to plant with Penny in his retirement garden.

  A drop of sweat salted his eye. He removed his overcoat and afterwards his jacket, folding it into his yellow duty-free bag. The bag contained his wallet, his passport and a box of chocolates for his sister-in-law, the Governor’s wife.

  He walked on, rubbing earth from his palm. The road widened into the belvedere. There was a telescope and, set into the low wall, a slab of Portland stone. “At this spot Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and HRH the Duke of Edinburgh stood and looked over Gibraltar. 10 May 1954.” Across the slab had been sprayed FUCK IS GOOD.

  Wavery stood and looked. Below and to the right of him was the reclamation project where deposits from the Straits Tunnel had soaked up the sea. An empty lorry moved towards Europa point, disappearing into the rock mouth. From that mouth the tunnel began its fourteen-mile journey to the African coastline.

  Wavery placed his plastic bag on the wall and he searched for the city across the Straits. It was to be home for a year. Not for a moment had he dreamed he would be taking up this appointment without his wife. Nor had it crossed his mind that it would be located on the southern coast of the Mediterranean. He was anxious to have one glimpse of his last post.

  “You’ll remember the Yeats poem,” Cullis had said, when informing Wavery of the appointment. The Permanent Under Secretary quoted in a Scottish accent, “The heron-billed pale cattle-birds that . . . cross the narrow straits”. He couldn’t remember the title.

  While not knowing the poem, Wavery was, nevertheless, familiar with the stretch of water below. He wanted to suppress his knowledge, but a dozen classical and historical allusions bobbed into his head. The channel had been dug by Hercules for his Tenth Labour. After separating the continents, the god had erected two pillars, one on either side. Where Wavery stood had been the edge of the world, beyond which orbis terrarum crumbled into the Green Sea of Darkness. These Straits were the key to the association of the Old World and the New. The Phoenicians had sailed through them, as had St Ursula, and Columbus, too, who had nearly drowned when his boat was attacked by pirates. He had reached land clinging to a plank. Wavery thought, I used to make love with Penny on that shore, outside a pleasant town called Lagoa. But he couldn’t help seeing a man in the water, clinging to the small spar the Foreign Office had tossed to him.

  Wavery fumbled with a coin. Like Columbus, he had travelled the world. He had lived in seven of its countries. Now he was destined, in his final days, to be chained to a rock. From that rock, the southern pillar of Hercules, the Moors had invaded Europe, Count Julian sending Tarik’s men to avenge his daughter’s rape by the King of Spain. Wavery fed the coin into the telescope and swivelled the lens towards where he calculated Abyla must be. The lens would open for two minutes. He pressed his right eye to the glass. He had looked back long enough, he told himself. Now, in late middle age, he must look to the future.

  In the channel there was a band of thick fog. A trail of dark smoke coiled out of the fog, transforming the horizon into one absolute and dreary blankness. In the smoke Wavery thought he deciphered the contour of a hull. When he looked again the shape had vanished.

  2

  The ape climbed urgently through the wild olives, the five fingers of fear on his back. At the base of the low wall shoring the road to Upper Battery, he sat and rested. His heart beat fast. He did not hear the herring gulls in the updraught, nor the lorries, only his booming heart.

  The sea was in the wind. He could taste the spray. The wind blurted that his reign was over. It blew against his cheeks and unbalanced the haughty gulls. He listened to its argument. It blew through his beard, over his arms and stomach, blowing coldness onto cracked teeth and fingers knobbly with arthritis, patterning its current on the grey winter fur where his body had lost its slenderness and his hunger was audible.

  A gall wasp circled his nose. He batted the wasp away and the sun burst from the silver case in his hand. He held it against his face. The surface was curved and it smelled of dry tobacco. An inscription read LAWRENCE – FROM EDWINA, WITH LOVE and there was a date. Mesmerised, he inspected the outcrop of limestone over his shoulder, the military pylons above him, the slopes of Middle Hill spotted with corn poppies. He rotated the silver and in the net of fine scratches he caught his own features.

  He was contemplating the wound on his neck where Philip had bitten to the bone, when there was a movement in the reflection. He sprang about. Twenty yards to the left of him, the wild olives shifted and Charles’ head appeared.

  Until last night, Charles had been his sentry. But last night Philip had challenged him. Afterwards, Charles had blocked his path. They faced each other, listening to sounds in the leaves. They were the sounds of his children’s heads being ripped from their shoulders.

  Charles’ appearance meant Philip was not far away. If Philip was near, so were Marlene, Catriona, Germaine.

  There was a shriek of alarm and Charles disappeared in a blur of light fur. Futilely, he hurled the case after him. He was alone in the darkness of his fear. Desire also resounded in that darkness. He felt the buffets of his desire, his fear. Hungry, frustrated, angry and lonely, he climbed the wall.

  The shutter closed on the telescope. Wavery’s time was up and he had not seen Abyla. He raised his head and, hearing a scuffle, looked down into a pair of fierce brown eyes. Had he reacted by gathering up his bag and retreating he might have avoided the embarrassment of what happened next. As it was, his attention remained elsewhere. He continued staring, with the result that the ape bared its chipped teeth and let out such a growl of distress that Wavery was compelled to step back – and so abandon the plastic bag he last saw as a yellow flash tumbling down the hillside between clumps of lavender borago.

  3

  At the Convent, Sir Lawrence’s ADC was massively aloof. He conveyed to Wavery the Governor’s profound regret he could not after all make the lunch arranged a fortnight before. Something requiring his immediate attention had unexpectedly cropped up.

  Wavery, who had been bracing himself for this lunch, said: “Could I speak to Lady Tredwell?”

  He was led through a courtyard planted with bog primulas into a pale green room in the middle of which stood a round table. On it were two packs of playing cards and a history of the Royal Fleet Air Arm without its dust jacket. After a while he heard the hard stab of heels on the tiles. Edwina Tredwell appeared. She accepted his hand.

  “Thomas, how nice to see you,” she said glacial
ly. “I’m so sorry about lunch. Lawrence’s golfing, as you know.”

  “I didn’t, as a matter of fact.”

  “I thought he left a message.”

  Wavery understood her remoteness. For three weeks since the announcement she would have had to endure her husband’s contempt for the Foreign Office. Wavery and he had never got on. “They’ve sent him here to annoy me. He divorces my sister and they send him here – when they had the whole world to choose from.”

  “Darling, it can’t possibly have been intended personally.”

  “Edwina, you have no idea of that miraculous organisation. I disliked him from our very first meeting. I knew from the start he would treat Penny like that.”

  “His message must have come after I left,” said Wavery.

  “I could offer you a sandwich,” said Lady Tredwell tentatively.

  “As a matter of fact, Weena, I’ve come about something else.”

  “Penny?”

  “No, not Penny.”

  “I was sorry to hear about that. Both of us were.”

  “That is kind of you. But actually it’s not about Penny.”

  She said, “We’d better sit down.”

  They took up positions in a pair of high-backed orange chairs. She crossed her legs and stretched out her hands one above the other on her left knee. “Well?”

  “I’ve had a slight mishap,” began Wavery and he described the irrational, furry mad thing which had swiped his identity. “There were some chocolates for you,” he added.

  “Oh, Tom!” Lady Tredwell’s voice was a whisper. Her behaviour had altered. “Then it’s the same one.”

  “Sorry, Weena. What are you talking about?”

  “I know it is. It must be.” And she explained.

  It had happened two hours before, when she went to clear the breakfast tray. She recalled the crystal tentacles tinkling overhead and how she had murmured, “What a breeze.” She was thinking that when the British took Gibraltar they brought their weather with them. She bent to pick up the tray and she screamed. Sitting among the breakfast crumbs on their unmade bed and bleeding into the eiderdown was a large Barbary macaque.