To Indigo

the fields had become town, and a new estate had been built practically on the front lawn. But Harris’s father had sprung by then what I took for his final surprise. In his sixties he’d been expected hourly to die of drink, or other over-indulgence, but instead he had cut and run to Spain with a girl of twenty-four. She was rich apparently, too. The last I’d heard he was still there, seventy-one by now and going strong, his child-bride of thirty-something firmly at his side and “Serenely putting up with,” Harris had said, “Dad’s endless stream of bimboritas from the bars.”
No doubt Wybrother Senior’s youthful tendencies had moulded Harris’s aura of age. (How I dislike the Americanised apostrophe’s following an s. But I’ve given up on that one. Hardly any publisher in the English language would now countenance the old tradition of Harris’. Not that this, as will become obvious, is ever intended for publication.)
When I received the most recent summons to lunch with Harris in London, I went. The possible chances of a book contract were usually illusory. So one took what one could get.
Harris came “down from the country”, from the Wodehouse house. We met at a restaurant called Le Grill in Holborn, one of those small quirky venues that can sometimes supply haute cuisine, and are a kind of Masonic secret among any that know. Harris had previously ordered me: “Don’t tell anyone about this, eh, Roy? Keep it for us. The good and the slightly great.”
We ate steak, Scottish, or so it purported to be. There had been starters of something to do with Scandinavian prawns, ‘seasonal’ asparagus. We drank the appropriate wines, which were very drinkable. Naturally Harris knows exactly what to choose. Frankly I can never be that bothered. If something is palatable, and in my case, affordable, I’ll drink it. After the main course there was cheese – actually very good. We took coffee.
And now, I thought, having as always been careful and restrained, as my own father would have instructed, Harris might offer a titbit, some man – or more often now, a woman – who might be interested in a book from me. At this point I’d better add, my forte is usually the minor thriller or detective novel. But such basic works may, if wanted, be constructed to incorporate certain preoccupations. Or should I say themes.
This time, however my lunch impresario did not suggest a single thing. Over the brandy and coffee his eyes grew suddenly like an infant’s. And by that I mean through changing colour – to a sort of milky blue; by nature they’re grey.
“Fuck it, Roy,” he said, gazing out into the vistas of Holborn Viaduct, “Dad’s dead.”
Such a phrase, bathetically, heaven forgive me, alliterative. Dad’s dead.
But I was shocked too, in my own (little) way. Both at the news and Harris being abruptly so unlike himself.
Stupidly I said, “Your father…” I certainly didn’t mean to seem to correct him.
But he snapped, “Dad, yes. My bloody father.”
“I’m so sorry, Harris.”
“So am I. No, let me be painfully honest, Roy, I don’t give a flying – I don’t care, Roy. Which has to be wrong, yes?”
His milky eyes said something other. Poor bastard, he seemed not to know. Had some hidden unnoted weeping turned his eyes blue?
“When did it happen?”
“Two days ago. Two days. Can you believe that bitch Veronica…” he meant the thirty-something child wife, “only called me last night. And do I mean night? It was two minutes to two in the morning.”
“Well, from Spain perhaps – And she must have been upset.”
“Must she? How would one know? Perhaps. Oh, perhaps. I’ll give the cow the benefit of the doubt. I have to go over for the funeral and to sort things out. And there has to be an inquest. Oh not,” he startlingly nearly bellowed, so our fellow lunchers raised their brows, “like one of your bloody yarns. They just do it. Oh God, Roy.”
I forbore to ask if Janette, his glacé fiancée, was going with him to give support. I’d only met her once.
Possibly she wasn’t really as she had seemed to be, not when he and she were alone.
Just then anyhow his mobile phone went off. His ringtone was a special piece of Brahms.
At once, like Pavlov’s dogs, trained to the right response, he was chatting into it in his ordinary Harris manner. His eyes unfilmed, went grey again.
“Sorry, Roy,” he said as the call ended. “Emergency over at The Elms.” The Elms was his name for a well-known publishing house near the Euston Road. “Get me a cab, will you?” he added to the waiter, “and the bill. Really sorry to run out on you. You must email and tell me all your news, what projects you’re working on…” Projects meaning books. Projects. “Don’t rush off because I have to, stay and have another brandy.”
We shook hands and he went away.
I didn’t want another brandy, hadn’t really wanted the first one. It was quite hot although only April, too hot for excess alcohol.
I walked down from Holborn to the Strand feeling rather flat, although Harris’s lunches seldom led to much work nowadays. And I was slightly unnerved. Probably at the touch of what my father had been used to call the Grim Reaper. Harris’s father had been just over seventy, but I was fifty. Well over the boundary on the downward path to old age and death.
After all I went into a pub and ordered half a pint of Wincott’s Bitter, a funny old brew you see less and less.
Sitting in the dark corner, staring into the beer’s murky depths, I had a bleak look at my life. What was I doing, where heading for? Why? What aims did I have, hopes cherish? It was a sorry and banal resume. I was a plodder, and I did what I was told where I could find anyone – parent, employer, publisher – to tell me. I kept the “wolf from the