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Authors: David Smith
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sometimes with Baxter and then returned to Oxford where she found a new desire and mission to help the underprivileged. Rather than make a permanent move to Leamington, she instead visited Baxter and his sister most weekends. During these regular visitations she was the tender homemaker, taking his sister’s place in the kitchen and he was the detached writer, hurtling now towards sixty, unable to put on the brakes.
*
Breaking my daydreams, my sister Claudia, dressed still in her dressing gown, came up alongside me in my study and put her arm around my waist, self-consciously moving her hand away from the line of my trouser belt
.
‘Do you think I should go out and help them?’ I asked.
‘I think it’s too late now. Dottie’s out there; best let sleeping dogs lie.’
There was almost immediately a ring at the front door. Claudia went out into the hall to answer it.
‘Who is it?’ I shouted after her.
‘It’s Dottie with Penny,’ she shouted back, letting Dottie and the policewoman in.
‘Do you need some help?’ I asked, coming out of my study into the hall.
Chapter Four
Et In Arcadia Ego – (Allegro di molto) ‘W.M.B.’
The king doth keep his revels here to-night:
Take heed the queen come not within his sight;
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;
Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
On the day they were going to kill him, Arish Nariman got up at five-thirty in the morning, far too early to wait for the train his friend the American architect was arriving on. He’d dreamed again of the lush tea plantations of his boyhood and he had been happy in his dream, a dream of an arcadia built by his ancestors on the coconut oil trade of the nineteenth century. There were elephants then, and tigers and monkeys and he had been treated like a little prince as a boy, with a hundred servants at his beck and call and a blue and silver Rolls-Royce to drive him to school everyday. Exiled now from his beloved Sri Lanka to this new Arcadia-Arden, he felt the sweat of the early morning in his sheets. Like his mother had once said, ‘Arish, you always dream of trees.’
The Regency pleasure dome, in which he now resided, was the home of his granddaughter, who had recently married the owner, Sir William Flyte. It was both a house of escape and a house of correction. A place of self-exile for sins that he had committed but never confessed. He was revered by name in a hundred towns and villages in his native land but he knew deep in his heart the canker of his own thoughts, the obstinacy of his own will and the measure of both the right and the wrong he had done. Fortune favours the brave. He had been brave and he had amassed a fortune. He always tried to do this in an ethical way but of course this was not always possible in business.
For years he spoke out against corruption and avoided any association with the scams and government bribery that plagued his country. But late the previous year he had been caught up in a scandal involving a former associate that threatened to blacken even his good name. It was a sordid affair. He was grilled for hours by the parliamentary investigations committee about allegations of fraud during a privatisation deal and all through this painful experience he grew increasingly weary and tired of the commercial world. Towards the end of the hearings, he built up an irresistible longing to escape from the family business, to regain the freedom of his academic youth, to enjoy again the solitude and loneliness of his own thoughts, away from the concerns of money, princes and empires. In short, he’d had enough of making money. Finally he had acted upon that impulse.
For him, it was an unexpected but welcome discovery that the future King of France had lived here too. On learning about this connection, Arish had thought that maybe he too would live here for two years, he liked both the irony and the
*
Breaking my daydreams, my sister Claudia, dressed still in her dressing gown, came up alongside me in my study and put her arm around my waist, self-consciously moving her hand away from the line of my trouser belt
.
‘Do you think I should go out and help them?’ I asked.
‘I think it’s too late now. Dottie’s out there; best let sleeping dogs lie.’
There was almost immediately a ring at the front door. Claudia went out into the hall to answer it.
‘Who is it?’ I shouted after her.
‘It’s Dottie with Penny,’ she shouted back, letting Dottie and the policewoman in.
‘Do you need some help?’ I asked, coming out of my study into the hall.
Chapter Four
Et In Arcadia Ego – (Allegro di molto) ‘W.M.B.’
The king doth keep his revels here to-night:
Take heed the queen come not within his sight;
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;
Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
On the day they were going to kill him, Arish Nariman got up at five-thirty in the morning, far too early to wait for the train his friend the American architect was arriving on. He’d dreamed again of the lush tea plantations of his boyhood and he had been happy in his dream, a dream of an arcadia built by his ancestors on the coconut oil trade of the nineteenth century. There were elephants then, and tigers and monkeys and he had been treated like a little prince as a boy, with a hundred servants at his beck and call and a blue and silver Rolls-Royce to drive him to school everyday. Exiled now from his beloved Sri Lanka to this new Arcadia-Arden, he felt the sweat of the early morning in his sheets. Like his mother had once said, ‘Arish, you always dream of trees.’
The Regency pleasure dome, in which he now resided, was the home of his granddaughter, who had recently married the owner, Sir William Flyte. It was both a house of escape and a house of correction. A place of self-exile for sins that he had committed but never confessed. He was revered by name in a hundred towns and villages in his native land but he knew deep in his heart the canker of his own thoughts, the obstinacy of his own will and the measure of both the right and the wrong he had done. Fortune favours the brave. He had been brave and he had amassed a fortune. He always tried to do this in an ethical way but of course this was not always possible in business.
For years he spoke out against corruption and avoided any association with the scams and government bribery that plagued his country. But late the previous year he had been caught up in a scandal involving a former associate that threatened to blacken even his good name. It was a sordid affair. He was grilled for hours by the parliamentary investigations committee about allegations of fraud during a privatisation deal and all through this painful experience he grew increasingly weary and tired of the commercial world. Towards the end of the hearings, he built up an irresistible longing to escape from the family business, to regain the freedom of his academic youth, to enjoy again the solitude and loneliness of his own thoughts, away from the concerns of money, princes and empires. In short, he’d had enough of making money. Finally he had acted upon that impulse.
For him, it was an unexpected but welcome discovery that the future King of France had lived here too. On learning about this connection, Arish had thought that maybe he too would live here for two years, he liked both the irony and the
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