Flying Dutch

“I see,” Jane said. If she’d had a notebook, she would probably have written it down. “So you’ve never had any urge to rule the world, or anything like that?”

“What, me?” Vanderdecker said. “No, I can’t say I have. It would be nice to change some things naturally.”

Jane leaned forward and looked serious. “Such as?”

Vanderdecker considered. “I don’t know,” he said, “now you come to mention it. I can’t actually think of anything that even remotely matters. You get such a wonderful sense of perspective at my age.”

“You look about thirty-three.”

“Thirty-five,” Vanderdecker replied. “And you flatter me. Aren’t we getting a bit sidetracked, or is this all relevant?”

“It’s sort of relevant,” Jane said. “So you would say that you’re a relatively balanced, well-adjusted person?”

“Perhaps,” said the Flying Dutchman. “When you consider that I’ve lived for over four hundred and fifty years, and seven-eighths of those years have been mind-numbingly boring, I think I’ve coped reasonably well. What do you think?”

“I think,” said Jane with conviction, “that I’d have gone stark staring mad in the early fifteen-sixties.”

“I tried that,” Vanderdecker reminisced. “It lasted about eight hours. You can’t go mad running a ship, which is what I do most of the time. You simply don’t get an opportunity. Just when you’re starting to work up a good thick fuzz of melancholia, someone puts his head round the door to tell you that the cook and the bosun are fighting again, or that some idiot’s lost the sextant, or we appear to be sixty leagues off the Cape of Good Hope and weren’t we meant to be going to Florida? There’s all sorts of things I was always meaning to get around to—learning to play the flute, calculating the square root of nought, going mad—but I just didn’t have the time. After a while you give up and get on with things.”

“But don’t you ever feel…” Jane searched for the right words, only to find that she’d forgotten to bring them. “Don’t you feel sort of different? Important? Marked out by Destiny?”

“Me?” Vanderdecker said, surprised. “No. Why should I?”

“I’d have thought you might,” Jane said. “What with being immortal.”

“That’s not what it feels like,” Vanderdecker said. “May I put it bluntly?”

“Please do.”

“It’s hard to feel special or important,” he said, staring at the table in front of him, “let alone marked out by Destiny, when you smell quite as bad as I usually do. I trust I make myself clear.”

“Perfectly,” Jane said.

“Good.” Vanderdecker lifted his head and grinned. “Do I get to hear your story now? About this life policy of mine.”

“If you like,” Jane said. “Fire away.”

So she told him.

¦

“Look,” Danny said to the telephone, “what you obviously fail to grasp is…”

The pips went, and Danny fumbled desperately in his trouser pocket for more small change. What he found was five pennies, a washer and a French coin with the head of Charles de Gaulle on it which he had somehow acquired at Gatwick Airport. He made a quick decision and shoved the French coin into the slot. Remarkably enough, it worked.

“What you obviously…” he said. The voice interrupted him.

“No, Danny,” it said. “What you fail to grasp is that you’re supposed to be filming a boat race. Anything not germane to high-speed navigation is therefore off limits. Keep that principle firmly before your eyes and you won’t go far wrong.” Danny dragged air into his lungs, which were tight with anger. He forced the same air out through his larynx, but he sublimated the anger into determination.

“All right,” he said. “You leave me with no alternative.”

“You’re going to film the race?”

“I am not going to film the race,” Danny said. “I am going to telephone Fay Parker at the Guardian.”

Coming from a man with five pennies and a washer in his pocket, this was clearly an idle threat. But of course the voice didn’t know that, and just for once it said nothing.

“And you know what I’m going to tell her?” Danny went on. “I’m going to tell her the truth about the Amethyst case.”

The voice wasn’t a voice at all any more. It was just a silence.

“I’m going to tell her,” said Danny to the silence, “that the person who recommended to the Cabinet Office that the Amethyst documentary should be banned wasn’t the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary or even the Minister of Defence. It was the head of BBC Current Affairs, who wanted it banned so that he could get himself hailed as a martyr to the cause of press freedom and then nobody would dare sack him on the grounds of gross incompetence. Do you think she could use a story like that?”

The silence carried on being a silence, and Danny was terribly afraid that Charles de Gaulle would run out before it became a voice again. “Well?” he said.

“Bastard,” said the voice.

Danny glowed with pleasure. “Thanks,” he said, just as the pips went.

¦

“Really?” said Vanderdecker.

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Jane replied, rather tactlessly. “That’s why I was looking for you.”

“Oh,” Vanderdecker said. “Do you know, that’s rather a disappointment.”

“Is it?” Jane queried. “Why?”

Vanderdecker scratched his ear. “Hard to say, really,” he replied. “I suppose it’s just that I’ve been half expecting people to be looking for me for a long time now, and for other reasons.”

“That’s a bit paranoid, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” said Vanderdecker, shrugging his shoulders. “I just had this notion that what I was doing—being alive after so long and all that—was—well, wrong, somehow, and that sooner or later somebody was going to find out and tell me to stop doing it. Act your age, Vanderdecker, that sort of thing. And since I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to, I wasn’t keen to be found. I have this feeling that somehow or other I’m breaking the rules, and that’s not my style at all.”

“What sort of rules?”

“The rules,” Vanderdecker said. “Maybe you don’t understand; let me try and explain. Do you remember the first time you went abroad?”

Jane shuddered. “Vividly.”

“Do you remember that awful feeling of guilt,” Vanderdecker said, “that you felt—I assume you felt—as if you were breaking all sorts of local laws and violating all sorts of local customs without knowing it, and sooner or later one of those policemen in hats like cheeseboxes was going to arrest you?”

“Yes,” Jane replied. “That’s a natural feeling, I guess, from being a stranger in someone else’s country.”

“Well then,” Vanderdecker said, “that’s how I feel all the time. I’m a stranger everywhere except on a ship in the middle of the sea. I don’t think I’ve broken any laws—I don’t think just being alive is actually illegal anywhere, except maybe in some parts of South–East Asia—but the thought of all the embarrassment if anyone ever asked who I was or what I was doing…Do you see what I’m driving at? It means that I can’t give a truthful answer to virtually any question I’m likely to be asked, for fear of being thought crazy or rude. It gets to you after a while, let me assure you. And of course there’s the smell.”

“Yes,” Jane said. “I could see that would be a problem.”

“It is,” Vanderdecker assured her. “Decidedly.”

“If we could just get back to what I was saying,” Jane suggested tentatively. “About your life policy.”

“You want me…”

“No.” Jane couldn’t understand why she was so definite about this. “They want you to sign it away. Assign it back to them, actually, but it amounts to the same thing.”

“I see,” said the Flying Dutchman. “Why should I?”