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After his narrow escape with Galatea in Ischia, Finn seeks to leave the island as a crew member on a chartered yacht.

The yacht was privately owned by an Austrian family who had chartered a crew from the marina. They’d brought their own cook but needed an assistant for general kitchen and cleaning duties. Even better, I wouldn’t even need to clear exit formalities. I wanted to call Eve to tell her, but didn’t dare. I just hoped she’d understand when I explained to her later, as I surely must and she surely would.

Before I accepted, I enquired a bit more about the Austrians. They were wealthy: a doctor, Herr Josef Preindlsberger, a man in his fifties, with a younger wife. They had three daughters along with them, plain and slightly plump in their late teens. We were to sail at first light. It all seemed great.

But even before we’d left port, I realized the girls were gonna be trouble. They were clearly sex-crazed and tried their best to get me interested right from the start; but after my recent experience I was determined I wasn’t going there. They could have tied me naked to the mast and tempted me with all the pleasures they wanted, but my ears were full of beeswax and there was no way I was getting involved with another member of the female race. Not after such a narrow escape. Absolutely no way!

Temporary relief, of sorts, came when we stopped off at Messina. It was another Homeric location. I’d heard, of course, the legend of the rocks, of the perilous Scylla and Charybdis. On the Calabrian shore lived the Scylla, a water nymph transformed into a six-headed monster by a jealous sea god; on the opposite side lay the whirlpool of Charybdis, which ate unwary ships’ crews alive.

According to Homer, Odysseus was forced to choose between losing six crewmen to the Scylla and risking his whole ship in the Charybdis. The enchantress Circe warned him about this and advised him in advance to choose the former. Wisely he did.

Messina was my last stop in Italy. That evening was therefore my last chance to come clean. We were due to leave the harbor around midnight, tracking the ferry Edra bound for Reggio di Calabria. The currents were already running and we’d soon be setting out across the deep wine-sea to Greece, the ferry’s lights winking in expectation of our departure

As I reflected again on my own personal dilemma and our conspiracy to fake that robbery, I began to question my own motives. Was I really protecting Galatea or was I just scared for my own skin? If I had any conscience shouldn’t I confess to the police? Or was I just best to stick to the story we’d hurriedly agreed out of loyalty to Galatea? The whole thing was really screwing with my mind. And it wasn’t as if I could talk to anybody about it. 

We reached Lefkas around lunchtime the day after. It held one, and only one, attraction to our party: the towering white cliffs from which the violet-haired poetess Sappho had, by legend, made her final desperate leap into the deep, dark waters below. Six hundred years after her death, Strabo described her as: “a marvellous creature… in all recorded history I know of no woman who even came close to rivalling her as a poet.” Her motive for that suicidal leap will never be known, I guess, but there were tales about her infatuation with a local ferry-man called Phaon; was she driven by frantic longing or the search for some personal epiphany, maybe? But I suppose even love can’t defy the laws of gravity.

Once landed on Greece, Finn abandons the boat crew after an altercation in a bar and meets up with a young shepherd called Pelis, who takes him to the home of an Irish writer called Mani.

Pelis and I got back on his old Triumph and sped along the mountain roads heading south-east. We soon reached Kalamata, a large town known for its olive oil, and then rode due south. We followed the turquoise coastline past endless groves of walnuts, sagebrush and burnt-out pastures. I wasn’t used to riding pillion and my butt was getting real sore. My goggles were also plastered with bugs, so it was hard to see. Just after we passed a quaint fishing village with a fine old church, we turned off down a rough dirt track towards a low pan-tiled stone house perched on a crag above the sea. It was a beautiful location. We got off the bike, my head throbbing, and passed through the open front gate, down a cobbled path that led to the villa and into a sort of arcaded loggia.

Pelis called out and then knocked on the door. After a wait of a few minutes, we were greeted by a female voice and then a north-European-looking woman opened the door. I judged she was in her sixties, but still very fair with attractive sea-blue eyes and graceful but slightly wrinkled features. It was as if her youthful face had been only slightly aged by the unremitting local sun; in fact, she was really quite extraordinarily beautiful. She was wearing a man’s shirt and riding breeches.

‘Of course, Aileen is my very own Helen and she’s quite as beautiful,’ Mani her husband said at that point, squeezing her hand lovingly. She blushed. Mani pointed out examples of her work as a photographer and painter around the walls; ‘she’s a devilishly good chess player too,’ he added. To which she blushed again…

The big guy asked me my name.

‘Nobody,’ I replied joking. I’d been reading my Homer. ‘What would you like to eat?’

He laughed.

‘Nobody, then I’ll eat Nobody!’ he replied with a roar. ‘British?’

‘No nation.’

‘Ah, but now I hear your accent. A Yankee, I like Yankees!’ he replied (a sentiment which, in itself, was not unusual in that part of Italy). I couldn’t make him out; he seemed both friendly and scary at the same time. I could feel the dark halitosis from his discolored teeth envelop me as he shot off his mouth.

Still, his girlfriend was dead gorgeous with milky-white almost flawless skin; she smiled encouragingly at me while the other woman looked on with mild loathing.

I had to leave them to serve another group of marines from the San Diego, but went back every so often, unable to resist Galatea’s smile. She was like a Botticelli angel, although without the curves. I began to enjoy their company and by the end of the evening, we’d apparently all become good friends. They invited me to join them on a sight-seeing trip, and as the following day was my day off, I accepted. The thought of spending a day with Galatea was more than enough inducement.

Next day we got wise. To escape the hordes, Galatea suggested we take the ferry over to the island of Ischia. It wasn’t far and we soon landed at the gay little harbor with its assorted buttermilk and caramel-colored buildings.

Ischia was the site of the first Greek settlement in the western Mediterranean, Pithekoussai, founded in the eighth century BC. Its thermal springs were recorded by Strabo, but even without them it was steaming hot. Galatea was beaming and Martino seemed happy to get away from Naples, too; fortunately his ‘sister’ had inexplicably disappeared. I wasn’t too concerned about that.

Out in the bay, a Riva Rudy Super boat was swinging slow loops through the green waters with a water-skier in tow.

We hired a small sailboat and went cruising in the late breeze. It was a lovely day and the boat glided easily across the bay towards the sheer rocks below the castle. I kept stealing jealous glances at each new inch of Galatea’s body her outfit revealed as she stretched out in the sun. 

Martino had brought with him a supply of grappa, which he shared freely. Galatea wasn’t drinking. I sipped it and grinned senselessly, allowing my arm to rest against her naked skin. I was already high from the excess of wine I’d drunk at lunch. The combination clearly had an impact on him too; the further out we got from shore, the louder he became.

It began to bother me. His speech became more and more boisterous and his words even more obnoxious. He began to reveal lurid details of his past love life. Galatea’s pale skin flushed scarlet and she pleaded with him to stop, but he wasn’t listening. At one stage I thought he was going to hit her, but then he took another swig of the grappa, before collapsing comatose in a heap of ropes and tackle.

‘Why do you let him speak to you like that,’ I said to her as Martino began to snore loudly.

‘I love him. He’s like a drug, like the sun shining on you,’ she paused.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, but then sometimes he gets drunk and…’

I really didn’t wanna leave her alone with him that night, but she insisted. As she went to close the door, she gave me a thankful kiss and told me to get some sleep.

‘Thank you for looking after me.’

A crash woke me around three. The noise threw me immediately into a panic. For a second I was disoriented, unsure where I was. I checked my watch and wondered if there’d been a sudden storm. Fully awake, I walked to the shutters. Everything seemed calm outside, the trees in the gardens hardly moving. The only light entering the room came from a lamppost on the foreshore and the half-glow of the setting moon.

Then there was another larger bang. I felt the wall by my bed shudder as if something heavy had fallen against it. I pulled on my shorts and opened the door. There was a third crash and I walked quickly over to the door of the next room where my friends were sleeping. I didn’t bother to knock, just turned the latch and walked straight in.

The bedside lamp was on and I saw the prone half-dressed body of Galatea cowering on the bed. Martino towered over her, attempting drunkenly to force himself on her. She was sobbing. I ran over and tried to pull him away, remonstrating with him to stop, but she began to scream at me to get out or I’d ‘make it worse’.

Martino was a giant of a man and a lot stronger than me. I saw from the empty bottle on the table that he’d been drinking. However, despite his inebriation, he reacted remarkably quickly to my thrust and twisted me round with the skill of a wrestler. Quickly, he had one arm in a lock and the other behind my neck in a half nelson. I was in real pain. It felt like he would pull my shoulder out of its socket. I could feel his foul breath on my neck. I knew I was in big trouble.

I shouted for him to let me go. I could feel her legs shaking and trembling. He forced my head up so it was buried in the smooth down below her shuddering stomach. I could smell her fear and could hardly breathe from the pressure of his hand. I could feel him loosening his belt and pants with his free hand.

‘Either you do it, or I’ll do it to you,’ he said with real menace in his voice.

Galatea shouted at him to stop, but he caught her across the face with the back of his hand. Remembering what I’d read about self-defence, I stamped on his foot, hard. The shock caused him to relax his grip for a second. That in turn freed my arm enough that I could swing my elbow back into his solar plexus. Off balance, he fell backwards, his head smashing onto the marble fascia of the dressing table. Blood oozed from the back of his skull…

Strangely, in the minutes that followed, it was Galatea rather than me who thought calmly:

‘We’ll make it look like a robbery,’ she said. ‘The police will soon give up.’

After his long stay in Venice, Finn travels through Italy reaching Rome at Easter 1978. There he gets a job on an English-speaking newspaper.

“By early May, I’d got an idea to do a piece on another literary hero of mine – the English poet Shelley. I often passed the Keats-Shelley House near the Spanish Steps but I’d never gone in. So I arranged to meet up with the curator there who took me round the exhibition, pleased to have someone visiting who wasn’t just ticking boxes on their tourist itinerary. It was actually a very interesting little museum.”

During his tour he meets a young Irish girl, Anna:

“She clapped her hands and started complaining about all the stuff she wanted to see while she was in Rome but couldn’t because of the constraints of the dire tour she was on.

‘Maybe you could help me out a little?’ she asked with a suggestive grin.

‘Sure why not?’ I replied. It was the best offer I’d had in a while.

‘It’s all endless saints and relics, so tedious when there’s so much else to see,’ she added. Of course, I seized the opportunity. I wasn’t missing out this time.

‘OK, why don’t we do all those other things you wanna do, together?’ I asked.

‘Don’t you have to work?’ she replied quizzically.

‘No, I think today’s officially gonna be a holiday!’

They tour round the city, Finn taking her to several off-beat sites he knew near the Trevi.

“Of course, there was no way I could resist the temptation to take her to the ‘Mouth of Truth’ at the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, although it was a bit of a hike.

That man-like face, thought to be part of a Roman fountain, is located in the church portico. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that if you told a lie with your hand in its mouth, it would be bitten off. Gregory Peck tried that routine out on Audrey Hepburn live on the set of Roman Holiday, scaring her witless while the shot was running. Most days, a constant line of tourists tries to relive the scene from the movie.

Delightfully, Anna also fell for it, hook, line and sinker. She screamed, jumped six inches in the air and then thumped me before bursting out laughing.”

Later than evening they meet up again at an open-air disco on the banks of the Tiber, right under the shadow of the Castel Sant’Angelo.

“As the evening wore on, however, a dispute of some sort arose amongst the locals, which turned into a brawl, which turned into a mêlée. Some Swedish lads got themselves involved (the Viking hordes were back in force). They were rounded up by bouncers and it looked like we might be next, but then the cops turned up. In the confusion, I managed to escape with Anna and her girlfriends out of a fire exit. We ran laughing through the back streets trying to avoid the riot police who were randomly firing tear gas.

‘I’d ask you up, Finn, but you know what they’re like in these hotels,’ she said breathlessly as we reached the entrance.

‘Yes and I’d probably end up sleeping on the couch anyway, wouldn’t I?’ I asked ironically.”

“After all those months apart, I thought it’d be an awkward reunion, but I was wrong. Her first words to me, ‘my sweetheart’, set the tone. She was warm and friendly and full of fun. We had a seriously awesome time scooting round Venice. The Saturday was one of those Canaletto days when the blue waters of the lagoon gleam and the whole city is alive and sparking. We did St Mark’s Square, we did all sixty-two Tintorettos in the Scuola di San Rocco, the Lido and Murano, Rizzo’s famous statue of Eve in the Doge’s palace for which a Duke of Mantua once offered his weight in gold.”

“Then on our last evening, under the mist of a silver moon, we ate at a swell ristoranto and walked past the Rialto along the Strada Nova towards the labyrinth of medieval lanes, canals and archways that lead to the blind alleys of the Ghetto.

‘Goddam, isn’t it beautiful here?’ she said. ‘I really feel alive, Finn.’

‘Even on that first day in Olana, I wanted to kiss you,’ I replied stroking the fine down on the back of her neck.

‘Why didn’t you?’”

“‘Hold me closer,’ she said.

‘If I do, I won’t ever wanna let you go,’ I replied and snuggled up so she was enveloped in my arms, with her hair curling around my jacket.

‘I fear this is some sorta dream, that’s all. That I’ll wake up in the morning and it’ll all be gone. That it’s all a mirage.’”

“The next morning, she had to get back to the London to catch her flight back to the States and so took an early train to the airport. Her visit was over in a flash. I realized as I waved her off, tender as it was, that we still hadn’t really answered the most fundamental questions about our relationship. She was always so coy about what was going on in her life back home.”

“Venice in the winter is quite a different place to the straw-hatted heaven of summer. The bright young mistress loses her midsummer make-up. Most of the foreign tourists disappear; in fact there are very few foreigners at all apart from a few language students. What’s more, the weather had suddenly got colder; the languid waters of the lagoon gleamed more dimly, often morose and misty for days on end.”

When Finn arrives in Venice, it’s in expectation of a visit from his French girlfriend Françoise. After a week of sight-seeing on a student budget in the youth hostel, he goes to meet her at the station. He’s shocked at her extravagance right from the start.

“She asked where I’d been staying. When I told her, she looked at me in disgust, rolled her eyes, smelled my duds and said something very rude in French. Then she announced that she’d be staying in the Danieli. I’d be welcome to join her but only if I showered and if not, then it was really up to me. My mouth dropped.”

In fact even more ostentatiously, Françoise has booked the very same room that George Sand stayed in a hundred and fifty years older with her lover Alfred de Musset. He realises pretty soon, that the comparison is one he ought not to relish.

“George Sand was thirty when she stayed at the Danieli, de Musset was only twenty-three but reputedly exceedingly handsome with dazzling eyes. I might have flattered myself, therefore, that there was some sort of intended echo; however, I wasn’t that stupid.” 

When, after a month, he [de Musset] became ill with delirium tremens, Sand called for a medic, but ended up falling in love with Pagello, the handsome Italian doctor. He attended to de Musset for a few days but then they absconded together to Paris, leaving de Musset to recover, stranded and with a huge hotel bill.

“Life is the most beautiful thing of the world when one loves, and most hateful when one ceases loving,” wrote Sand.

Finn soon discovers the real reason that Françoise has agreed to meet him in Venice, is in fact to introduce him to Peggy Guggenheim, the famous art collector.

“The next day we had a pleasant enough breakfast together on the balcony. She suggested I might like to shower again while she got dressed. ‘But that would be twice in twenty-four hours,’ I protested. Then she announced she was taking me shopping to buy some decent clothes. ‘I’m dead-ass broke,’ I objected, but she said it was business and she’d be paying. Apparently, we were going to visit her good friend, la padrona Guggenheim, as she was known, at her villa and ‘You need to look [and presumably smell] the part,’ she said.”

“Two hours later, suitably smartened up in an obscenely expensive Italian silk shirt, flannels and jacket, we approached la padrona’s villa, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, by gondola. Its low façade formed a welcome break in the tottering line of grand palaces. It had a sort of ordinary human scale to it. However, that was the last aspect of la padrona that did seem ordinary!”

Peggy had glided back and forth amongst the glitterati, weaving the shuttle of her golden loom through the art history of most of the twentieth century. Although not exactly a beauty (she had a prominent nose that had been badly reset after cosmetic surgery), she’d been renowned as a collector of men as well as art. Finn had read that she’d slept with a thousand lovers (although that number seemed more than a little improbable). In any case, she’d certainly exhausted three husbands.

“At four-thirty precisely, we descended the moss-stained marble steps and glided out onto the busy canals. The gondola was steered expertly by Gino, her personal gondolier, dressed in full seventeenth-century livery. It was like a royal procession; the gondola was thickly carpeted and cushioned, with polished brass seahorses and colored oars and the iconic six-pronged ferro at the prow. We were accompanied by one of her prized Lhasa terriers.”

Françoise starts to behave very oddly after this visit. Not sleeping well, being generally difficult. All this comes to ahead after a day of sight-seeing, when she suddenly draws Finn to one side at the top of St Marks as they view the famed bronze horses in the loggia and reveals her true motives:

“From somewhere, who knows where, she’d apparently conceived the sickest notion that I’ve ever heard. She outlined it to me in clipped breathless words. She’d been told in a dream the previous night that I would be the last conquest, the last paramor of la padronna. She’d come up with a plan. There would surely be a Pollock, a Blue Pole, in it for me, or a Picasso for her. It was simple; it couldn’t go wrong…”

“‘Now do you know how I feel?’ Mrs Gereth asked when in the wondrous hall, three minutes after their arrival, her pretty associate dropped on a seat with a soft gasp and a roll of dilated eyes.”

Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton

My third novel Love in Lindfield takes its structure from Henry James’ novel The Spoils of Poynton. There is a connection to Lindfield in that Henry James visited Charles Eamer Kempe at Old Place in Lindfield around the time the novel was published and there is a fair possibility that he based the character of the dowager Mrs Gereth on one of Kempe’s close female friends, Lady Louisa Wolseley:

“‘Wolseley, come to think of it, perhaps I do know that name,’ he replied. He looked at his notes. ‘Yes, I was looking online last night to see whether Henry James had ever visited Old Place. It turned out he did. I found a letter of his from March 1897 to a Lady Louisa Wolseley where he described such a visit. It sounded like she’d been trying to persuade him to come for some time. The letter’s very precise: he caught the 11.40 from Victoria arriving in Haywards Heath at 1.17 where he met up with Lady Wolseley coming from Brighton. The train was late!’

“‘Nothing’s changed, then!’ laughed Maggie. ‘But yes that would be Frances Wolseley’s mother, I’m sure.’

“Harry went on to read from the notes he’d made on his iPad. ‘James described Kempe as ‘very amiable’ and the house as a ‘phoenix’.

“‘The man himself made the place more wonderful and the place the man. I was greatly affected by his courtesy and charm.’”

The novel describes the struggle between Mrs. Gereth, a widow of impeccable taste and iron will, and her son Owen over a houseful of precious antique furniture. The story is largely told from the viewpoint of Fleda Vetch, a young woman in love with Owen but sympathetic to Mrs. Gereth’s anguish over losing the antiques she patiently collected.

Widow Adela Gereth tells the sensitive and tasteful Fleda Vetch that she’s afraid her son Owen will marry the coarse Mona Brigstock. Owen soon becomes engaged to Mona and wants to take over Poynton, the family home filled with Mrs. Gereth’s carefully collected furniture and other art objects. He would like Fleda to help get his mother to leave the house with a minimum of fuss.

Mrs. Gereth moves to Ricks, the smaller family house. Fleda visits the house and is unhappy that Mrs. Gereth has furnished it with the best pieces from Poynton. Owen says that Mona is angry with the “theft” of the valuable heirlooms. Meanwhile, Owen is becoming more attracted to Fleda instead of the crude Mona and eventually declares his love for her. Fleda insists that he honor his engagement to Mona unless she breaks it off.

I’ve adapted the story and set it in Lindfield. Mrs Gereth is translated to Serena Ross, the widowed owner of Old Place, who is considering downsizing to a house on the common. However she is against giving Old Place to her son Ryan (Owen Gereth) because of his infatuation with the ‘unsuitable’ Monica Malling (Mona Brigstock) the local pub land lady. Our heroine Ellie (Fleda Vetch) is employed by Mrs Gereth to do an inventory of the house prior to Mrs Gereth’s move, but becomes sucked into the family dispute in a way that turns increasingly dangerous for all concerned.

In The Spoils of Poynton, Mrs. Gereth finally returns the fine furniture to Poynton. After a few days Owen and Mona are reported to be married, and they go abroad. Fleda gets a letter from Owen asking her to select any one piece from Poynton as hers to keep. Fleda goes to Poynton but finds it completely consumed by fire.

In my own novel Love in Lindfield… well I’m afraid you’ll have to read the ending for yourself, but it has some dramatic turns of its own!

By the time she arrived in Münich six months after her father’s death, Clara Clemens, Mark Twain’s surviving daughter, was no stranger to pain. She’d suffered almost twenty years of family tragedy, including two near fatal accidents, but was still remarkably hopeful:

At last if nothing happens to my husband I have really landed in a beautiful harbor & soon enough [can] worship every ripple in the delicious blue sun flecked water. Even father’s & Jean’s deaths cannot take from me this longed for happiness which is actually mine.

But the reference in her letter to what might happen to her husband was eerily fateful. By the summer of 1914, the pieces on the European chessboard were moving rapidly, perhaps more rapidly than they’d ever done before. She escaped with her husband, who as a Russian had been arrested, to Zurich with the help of a friend, the Prussian Ambassador. At the same time, James Joyce, stranded as an English teacher in Trieste, began work on Ulysses while plotting his flight to Switzerland. Four years later, in 2018, he was still there. He’d published Portrait of an Artist and was still slaving away at Ulysses. But Clara Clemens had returned back to the US with her husband.

Much of this period has been captured in Tom Stoppard’s work Travesties. But I too have been wondering, like Stoppard, what would have happened if the chronology had moved in slightly different ways? It’s given me an idea for my own take on Stoppard’s play, a sort of sequel. But in my version, Clara Clemens makes an, as yet historically unremarked, second appearance in Zürich.

“The atmosphere at the Pfauen was jubilant. The English Players’ first performance of The Importance of Being Earnest had been a triumph. James Joyce and Claud Sykes, a former actor in Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s company, had started up the acting troupe the previous year in an attempt to earn some ready cash. Joyce was holding court, reading from his latest manuscript, occasionally breaking into song while swilling down bottles of Erzherzogin Fendant de Sion.

“‘White wine is like electricity. Red-wine looks and tastes like liquefied beefsteak,’ he declared.”

“His black jacket, grey flannel trousers and little round black hat; his pale blue eyes; the small tuft of hair under his lower lip and smart moustache all gave him a slightly rakish appearance. His appearance was that of a friendly, very competent man of the theater rather than a figure that would eventually change the world. None of Joyce’s closest friends thought of him as a potential international celebrity.”

“The Joyces: James, Nora (still Miss Barnacle, as they married many years later), Giorgio (12) and Lucia (10), lived in an apartment on the first floor of Universitätstrasse 38. Lucia Joyce was a happy and hard-working schoolgirl but she hated the damp and crowded poverty they lived in, the struggle to obtain food, the all-consuming obsession of her father’s master work in progress. More seriously, of course, she was well aware of her father’s failing eyesight and increasing drunkenness and her mother’s slow descent towards a nervous breakdown.”

The previous year Joyce had suffered a recurrence of attacks of iritis and synechia, connected to severe toothaches. The pain made it impossible for him to work. He was also suffering attacks of glaucoma and his doctors advised an operation. But Joyce resisted, blaming the weather for his eye problems. He agreed finally, however, to leave Zürich for the Italian part of Switzerland over the winter, where the weather might aid his recovery.

But on that wet late-April evening, he was walking home from the Pfauen when he collapsed in the street with an acute attack of lumbar pain. The attack left him motionless for twenty minutes before he could move at all. There was nobody around to help him. Slowly, he began to crawl along the sidewalk. He was in total agony, already bitterly regretting his decision to ignore his medics’ advice.

“‘Can I help you, sir, are you all right?’ shouted a pretty young woman in evening dress from the window of her passing cab. Joyce looked up. The woman spoke oddly precise German. She must have seen him lying there on the pavement through the lights of her cab. Her husband was sitting beside her on the back seat. The night had turned cold; it was no weather to be out alone on the streets.

“Joyce was surprised but certainly relieved to hear the hint of an American accent. ‘Yes, I’d greatly value your help,’ he replied, in his calm but slurred Irish-German. ‘I’m in quite some pain as you can probably tell.’

‘Oh my Lord, but it’s Mr Joyce, isn’t it? Why, we were only at your play a few hours ago. Mein Herr, bitte helfen Sie ihm, so schnell wie möglich einzusteigen. Wir müssen ihn sofort nach Hause bringen. Ossip, don’t just set there, give the poor man a hand, won’t you?’

“Clara Clemens, her Russian- Jewish husband and their seven-year old daughter Nina, had recently arrived back in Zürich from the States. They’d made a long and arduous journey to fulfil a promise to fundraise for those that had helped them escape four years earlier. Before the outbreak of hostilities, Ossip had been conductor of the Munich Konzertverein. They’d fled following his arrest as a possible spy after the outbreak of the war. He’d only been freed following the personal intervention of Herr von Treutler, the Prussian Ambassador to Bavaria, an intimate friend of the German Emperor and great fan of Mark Twain.”

A week later they met up again with Joyce and his partner Nora Barnacle for dinner:

“‘So, Mr Joyce, are you working on a new book?’ Ossip asked changing the subject.

“‘Indeed, yes I am. I’m working on a novel. It’s a sort of reworking of Homer’s The Odyssey.’

“‘How very interesting, Mr Joyce. My father was familiar with Homer, you know,’ said Clara. ‘He was a great travel enthusiast. Of course, his first book Innocents Abroad was about his tour of the Mediterranean. He visited many of the sites mentioned in The Odyssey,’ she added.

“‘I know of the work, although I confess I haven’t read it. I’m afraid that although Homer was a master of poetry, he was a pretty unreliable travel writer; most of the sites he mentions are almost impossible to identify nowadays. Interestingly, I’ve recently come across an amusing epigram written by Eratosthenes that Strabo quotes in The Geography: ““You will find the scene of Odysseus’s wanderings when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds.”’

“They all laughed.

“‘In fact, my interest in Ulysses is not that of a traveller, nor even a warrior; it’s in his humanity. I believe his story is not only one of the earliest but also one of the most human in literature. He didn’t want to go to Troy; he viewed the war, rightly, as a pretext for Greek mercantilism. You may recall that when the recruiting officers arrived on Ithaca to take him with them, he pretended at first to be ploughing, then pretended to be mad. That was, of course, till they pushed his two-year-old son Telemachus into the furrow in front of his plough. His decision to go to war was purely that of a father and husband. It was a simple choice really, a matter of parental love, of flesh and blood. He had no choice.’

“‘My father would have loved to hear this; he hated the stupidity of war, you know!’ added Clara.

“‘Indeed, I’d have loved to discuss this with him. You know one day I have it in my mind to do my own Huck Finn story. I’ll name it in his honour of course. Finnegan’s “fin” or “wake”. It’s a play on words; my own homage to one of your father’s finer wisecracks! If I can ever get around to reading the original properly, that is!’

‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax –
Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
And whether pigs have wings.’

Lewis Carroll – Through the Looking-Glass

The final chapter of my second novel Death In Leamington is set as a party at which a lot of loose-ends get sorted out, some in unexpected ways. The party, given by Eddie for his wife Alice’s 40th birthday, turns out to be quite a surprise:

“‘For heaven’s sake, Eddie Peterson, can’t I trust you for a minute?’ Alice demanded loudly as she entered the kitchen. She turned down the volume on the CD player and surveyed the mess covering the kitchen table. Carrie and Eddie had been making jam tarts while dancing wildly round the kitchen to the latest release from a well-known Swedish pop duo. She wished Eddie would not encourage Carrie like this; she was growing up quickly enough as it was. Alice was however relieved that he, for once, was dressed reasonably smartly in a tweed Burberry jacket, twill shirt, rolled-up green cavalry trousers and Converse trainers and had remarkably thought to wear an apron over his best clothes while preparing the tarts. She wasn’t sure but she could swear that he was wearing eyeliner too. Carrie, on the other hand, was wearing a scruffy T-shirt and jeans and was almost completely covered in flour; there was pastry, jam and orange marmalade all over the table and more flour on the floor. There was also the distinct smell of burning sugar from the oven. Alice opened the oven door, cursed and then quickly opened a window to allow the smoke to escape.”

Alice is dressed in a little blue and white flowered dress that she’s found waiting for her, but she still has no idea what Eddie has planned for her 40th birthday party. As he leads her up the steps out of their basement flat onto the road, she imagines the restaurant that she hopes he’s booked for her and she’d seen ringed in the phone book the other evening.

“‘So where would you actually like to go?’ he asked, somewhat vaguely, staring up at the evening stars as if he had not quite made up his mind where to take her yet. The air was slightly chilled after the warm autumn day, so that their breath escaped into the darkness in quietly swirling coils of moisture. Alice was shivering slightly, either from excitement or from the change of temperature; the goose bumps raised on the skin of her forearm. The scent of late jasmine from the window boxes on Lady Mary’s windowsills above them was slightly intoxicating in the night air.

“‘I’ll go wherever you are planning to take me, handsome sir,’ she replied, enjoying the game but also getting slightly frustrated with his obvious tactics to confuse her. She suspected he knew exactly where he was taking her. 

“‘Well then, if it’s really going to be up to me, then it has to be ‘second star to the right, and straight on ’til morning,’ he said, laughing.”

I got the idea for this scene from a play “Peter and Alice” based on a meeting between Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the woman who inspired Alice, and Peter Llewellyn Davies, one of the boys who inspired Peter Pan, at the opening of a Lewis Carroll exhibition in 1932. The play sees enchantment and reality collide as this brief encounter lays bare the lives of these two characters. The play starred Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw.

But as it turns out, Eddie has other plans and instead of the hoped for restaurant, leads her instead into the main house above their flat, where a series of surprise guests are waiting for her.

“Alice was now very confused. This was not at all what she was expecting. The hall was strangely quiet, only disturbed by the patient ticking of a long case clock, but she was suddenly aware of a white fluffy shape pushing to get past her in the doorway. The white shape (actually a rabbit called Carrie) deposited a little glass box under the ornate Empire console table and ran off into the room at the end of the corridor. Alice, intrigued, stooped to pick the box up and opened it to find a small cake, on which the words EAT ME had been beautifully marked out in currants.”

My own version continues with various details and characters taken from both books including Captain Hook, Mr Smee and Tinkerbell and a very blue Caterpillar called Hugh:

“There was a big sign hung above the entrance – The Blue Caterpillar’s Hookah Palace.

In the corner of the gazebo, sitting on a cushion shaped like a mushroom, was a very blue-looking caterpillar, smoking the advertised hookah. He puffed three times and then took the pipe out of his mouth and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

‘So, who are you, little girl?’

‘Alice,’ she said, flirting just a little bit with her hands and eyelashes.

‘Well come and sit beside me, little Alice,’ said the caterpillar, smoothing off the cushion for her to sit on. ‘May I offer you a drink?’ he asked, pouring her a huge glass of champagne.”

I hope this all makes sense, but if not I’m afraid you will have to read it to understand how the story finally unravels!

BRITAIN is triangular in form; its longest side lies parallel to Keltica […] The greatest portion of the island is level and woody, although many tracts are hilly. Their atmosphere is more subject to rain than to snow; even in their clear days the mist continues for a considerable time, in so much that throughout the whole day the sun is only visible for three or four hours about noon.

Strabo, Geography Book IV, Chapter V

Finn, despairing of his hot and cold relationship with his french art gallery friend Francoise, crosses over to England from Paris to meet up with Gwendoline Bryon, a scholar and Strabo expert in Milton College Cambridge. Right from the start she poses a challenge to Finn, she’s not at all the dusty archivist he expected:

“In the flesh she was quite different from what I’d imagined. Small, even waif-like, with short reddish hair and a plaited fringe threaded with beads. Her cherubic dimples, bitten down nails and slightly whimsical smile made her look like a schoolgirl rather than a woman in her late twenties.”

In fact she takes charge from the beginning, showing him around Cambridge and putting him right on the basic facts about Strabo in the depths of the college library. But her mischievous smile and no-nonsense enthusiasm quickly begin to get under Finn’s skin:

“To her credit, she didn’t flinch at all when I opened the door wearing only my shorts. She asked if I wanted to join her for lunch. I nodded and went to close the door, but before I knew it she’d barged into the room and was opening up the drapes to let in the bright sunshine. She was clearly intent on taking charge. 

‘Nice legs,’ she said, hardly looking up from her book.”

Over the weekend, Finn falls somewhat in awe of her, so when she invites him to supper in the college hall he goes along and then joins her for an evening punt trip along the Backs that runs past the main colleges:

“Someone once said about girls that: “They are either very pretty or very clever or very sweet but never all three.” In Gwen’s case that was a load of malarkey. She absolutely nailed all three at once, but not in any classic mixture. She wasn’t pretty in a girlie sense and you couldn’t have described her blue-stocking confidence as merely sweet, but she was fearsomely clever. There was something inherently appealing about the way her passion for her subject shone through. What’s more, her slightly croaky voice was hellishly sexy.”

Fortunately sense prevails and despite a couple of awkward encounters, they settle instead for a brother-sister relationship which progresses throughout the novel. She giving him tips for where he should go on his travels, he seeking her advice. It’s a sweet relationship that develops ultimately into a deeper friendship.

“‘Why are we holding hands?’ she asked.

‘Sorry, it just seemed…dark.’

‘Ah, my knight in shining armour,’ she joked and pulled me closer.”

At the end of their long weekend they take a trip to London to see the sights. after a day touring sites and galleries, Gwen is keen to take Finn to a London play and they are lucky enough to see two future giants on the English stage, Judie Dench and Ian McKellen in an Ibsen play called Pillars of the Community.

It proves quite a eye-opener to Finn, with its anti-capitalist and feminist messages. Right up Gwen’s street though he thinks. Then, during the interval they are drinking in the bar where they both spot a poster for a performance of Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties. Finn is struck by some lines on the poster. His next destination has been determined.

“During the interval, we went to the bar and stood drinking rancid warm white wine, while admiring a display of film posters from the previous season’s performances. Gwen pointed out the one for Stoppard’s Travesties. She’d been to the performance herself. That was quite a coincidence because I’d seen the same play before I left the States. I read out a great passage written on the poster:

I learned three things in Zürich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary… I forget the third thing.”

So next stop Zurich, via Heidelberg and Basel and an encounter with James Joyce.

 

 

Britten’s Four Sea Interludes form the backdrop for my novel Searching For Amber. The first movement: Dawn provides the opening scene of the novel on the brave, shingle beach at Aldeburgh.

“Under the fluid metal of a steel-blue sky, the body of a young woman strokes silently through the dawn waves.”

We soon learn that Jade, the swimmer is also a photographer, determined to complete her project to record the daily movement of the village. Her ambition whetted by the tales of the sea that she has found there. She meets two strangers on the beach, a young girl, who could have been her fifteen years ago, and an older man. A man she will encounter again as her story unfolds.

Sunday Morning.

“Can I see a falling tear, and not feel my sorrow’s share?”

William Blake’s line open up the next phase of the story. Jade has now met Martin, the dark, brooding shipwright, who lives in a shadow-land of his own making. Half-seduced by his rough edge and determined to find out more about him, Jade sets out to discover the truth behind the disappearance of his sister after a family tragedy, twenty years ago. She is drawn on a calm Sunday morning to visit the local church, where she finds a plaque commemorating the loss at sea of a boat about the time of Martin’s sister’s disappearance. The vicar guides her to visit Thomas Ogilvie, who lives in a manor-house up the coast, to find out more about the story. But she is met by his obvious attempts to distract her from following the story.

Our story now moves on to Moonlight. It’s ten years on from their first meeting and Jade visits Martin at his home in Coggeshall. He is now a successful carpenter, she is equally successful as a magazine freelance photographer. But her visit reignites her earlier curiosity about his past. This time she is determined to see her project through, but in doing so begins to discover more about her own past too. So that her and Martin’s story become more and more intertwined.

The Storm, in which Martin’s father perished at sea, and was commemorated in the church now provides the resolution to the story. The tragic loss of the fishing boat set off a chain of events, between Martin’s sister Amber, Thomas Ogilvie and his brother Ralph that led to a further tragedy and Amber’s flight from the scene.

We discover the final truth in the last chapter Passacaglia, where Jade returns to the beach at Aldeburgh and the full story of who Amber really is unfolds.

“Under the fluid metal of a steel-blue sky, the body of a young woman strokes powerfully through freezing waves, her legs extended, the winter ice chilling her skin, her arms reaching for resolution in the evening air.”