Flying Dutch

jetsam from the rubbish that her memory was sorting and discarding; her mind, she reckoned, was like the little grill thing over the plug-hole which catches fragments of cauliflower and pasta shells when the washing up bowl is emptied. She was reckoning thus when sleep finally caught her out, and she slept through Warwick Avenue and only just woke up in time to scramble out of the train at Maida Vale and walk home the long way.

¦

There is one pub in Southampton which it is impossible to get yourself thrown out of no matter what you do or say, and there the newcomer ran into someone he knew very well.

At first they tried to avoid each other, since it was three days yet before they had to go back to the ship, and then they would be together again, inseparable, for another seven years. But this plan broke down when the newcomer realised that he had run out of money.

“Antonius,” said the newcomer to his friend in Dutch, “lend me a flyer till payday.”

Antonius felt in the pocket of his shirt and found a five pound note, which he gave to his companion. His companion’s name, for the record, was Johannes, and he and Antonius had been born in the same village south of Antwerp over four hundred and thirty years before. Barring shore leaves like this, they had been out of each other’s company for a period exceeding eight hours exactly once in four hundred and seventeen of those years, when Johannes’ mother had suspected that her son had caught the plague and locked him up in the barn for a few days.

Neither of them would have chosen to have it this way, since they didn’t get on very well and never had. Johannes was a short, noisy man with a hairy face and hairy arms, who liked drinking a lot and falling over. What Antonius liked doing best was standing quite still, unfocussing his eyes, and thinking of nothing at all. Each of them found the other remarkably uncongenial, and the only point on which they were united and could talk for more than three minutes without losing their temper with each other was their dislike of everyone else on board the ship, and in particular Captain Vanderdecker.

“After all,” said Johannes, a few minutes later, as they sat in a corner of the bar under the dartboard and drank their beer, “he was the one got us into this in the first place.”

“That’s right,” replied Antonius. “All his fault.”

A dart bounced out of treble fifteen and point first onto Antonius’ brown, bald head. He extracted it and handed it back to its owner.

“What the hell did he want to go drinking that stuff for in the first place?” Johannes continued, picking a grain of chalk dust out of his beer as he spoke. “He should have known it would end up all wrong.”

“He just didn’t think,” Antonius agreed. “No consideration for others.”

“And then dropping it,” said Johannes bitterly, “into the beer-barrel.”

“Typical,” said Antonius. It was a word he was very fond of and saved for special occasions. He didn’t want to wear it out by overuse.

“This beer,” said Johannes, unconsciously echoing his captain, “grows on you after a bit. You could get used to it.”

“It’s got a taste, though,” Antonius asserted. “You want another?”

“Might as well.”

So they had another, and another, and two or three more after that, and then they went outside to get some air. By now they were feeling quite relaxed, and Antonius remembered the girl who lived round the corner. They decided to go and visit her. They did this every time they came to England, just as, every time, they forgot that she had died in 1606 and that her house was now a car park. They always left a note though, saying that they were sorry to have missed her and would be sure to drop in next time. Since the building of the car park they had taken to sticking these notes behind the windscreen wipers of the parked cars, and once they had left one on the car of an avid and knowledgeable local historian, who had read it and was quite ill for months afterwards.

¦

The plump man, who was also an accountant, although a vastly more important one than the girl, made himself a cup of lemon tea and tried to forget that he had wasted a performance of The Flying Dutchman at Covent Garden, with Neustadt singing Senta, on a cultural void like Jane Doland. Next to his career, he loved opera above all things and a failure to appreciate it was a crime that could not be forgiven. He opened his briefcase, switched on his calculator and put Rienzi on the CD player. Slowly, like the return of spring, the wound began to heal.

TWO

The National Lombard Bank is situated in the very heart of downtown Bridport. It is the sort of location any red-blooded bank manager would give his heart and soul for, right in the epicentre of a triangle formed by the town’s most beguiling attractions—the fish and chip shop, the Post Office and the traffic lights. In summer, whole families still make the difficult journey into Bridport from the surrounding countryside to stand and watch the traffic lights performing their dazzling son et lumiere; and although they now have a set of lights in Charmouth—a deliberate and cynical attempt to poach the holiday trade that has introduced much bitterness into the previously friendly relationship between the two communities—purists insist that the Bridport set has a purer green, a rosier red, a more scintillating amber than any others this side of Dorchester.

To a Sybaritic Londoner like Jane Doland, however, the Bridport Lights meant nothing more than another hold-up on her way to a not particularly pleasant assignment, and with the poverty of spirit that is the hallmark of the city-dweller she assumed that the small throng of children gathered round them were merely waiting to cross the road. She had no street-plan of Bridport to help her find the bank, but she located it nevertheless simply by looking straight in front of her as she drove in from the roundabout. A bank, she said to herself, what fun. This is well worth missing the London premiere of Crocodile Dundee 9 for.

The causes of momentous events are often so bewilderingly complex that even highly-trained historians are at a loss to unravel them. Men wise in their generation have gone grey, bald and ultimately senile in the great universities grappling with the origins of the English Civil War, the Peasants’ Revolt and the rise of Hitler, and it is doubtful now that the truth will ever be known. In contrast, the reason why Jane Doland was in Bridport, two years (give or take a week or so) since she had gone to see The Flying Dutchman at the Royal Opera House, was quite remarkably simple. A decree had gone out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, and since this particular decree had had some viciously unexpected things in it about Advance Corporation Tax, all leave was cancelled in the offices of the leading accountancy firm where Jane Doland occupied a trivial and poorly-paid position, and accountants were dispersed like dazed bacilli into the bloodstream of British commerce to sort out the affairs of the National Lombard Bank, the firm’s largest and most complicated client. Since the National Lombard has more branches than all the trees in the New Forest, and the Bridport branch occupies roughly the same place in the bank’s list of priorities as that assigned to Leatherhead Rovers in the Football League, its affairs were unhesitatingly entrusted to Jane Doland’s skill, expertise and highly-motivated commitment.

Jane was considering this when she parked her car under a lime tree in that famous Bridport thoroughfare which some unusually imaginative soul had christened South Street. In fact the term nonentity had been raffling about in her brain like a small, loose bearing all the way down the A303, and by the time she reached her destination she was in no mood to be pleasant to anybody or to appreciate anything. This would go some way towards explaining her lack of enthusiasm for the traffic lights, which happened to be at their luminescent best this not particularly fine morning.

Nevertheless, Jane said to herself as she walked through the door of the bank. When trying to cheer herself up, she never got further than nevertheless, but it was always worth giving it just one more go. As she had expected, they had looked out lots of nice accounts for her to amuse herself with, and although they were all in such a hopeless mess that Sherlock Holmes, with Theseus to help him, Einstein to handle the figures and Escoffier laying on plenty of strong black coffee, would have had a devil of a job sorting them out. Jane told herself that it is always the thought that counts. She could imagine the faces of the bank staff when the news hit them that an accountant from Moss Berwick was coming to visit them. “Moss Berwick, eh?” she could hear them saying to each other. “Somebody hide the July returns while I shuffle the invoices.”

After several false starts, the hour-hand of the clock on the wall in the pleasantly intimate cupboard they had