Sea of Duplicity: Coming Soon

sea of Duplicity - new novel coming soon

Proposition by Pigeonhole

Part 11 - Proposition by Pigeonhole

Although well ahead of the game with the girls on my course and even those a year above and on other courses, Dr Jennifer Driscoll was outside this pre-selection circle of influence. Yet she taunted me from afar like a silent Siren needing some extraordinary stimulus to sing her special song.

Frustrated, I would have to seek further advice from Nadine about what might work in her case. Despite picking my moment before Nadine dozed off beside me to tell her I was struggling with my FORTRAN work and needed to elicit extra help, she soon caught on.

It became inevitable once I told her I would give anything to have the lecturer focus on me, but I was getting no more attention than her other students on my course.
“How gullible do you think I am, Niko? She said, looking at me askance from her pillow, “you don’t need me to tell you how to get her on your side. You’re more interested in a ploy to get her on her back.”
“Nadine!”
“Don’t you ‘Nadine’ me! I know you better than you know yourself. Stupidly I helped make you what you are, so why not just be honest. A big prize like her isn’t going to fall for the same sort of ruse that works with your usual petty prey. You will have to try to intrigue her, with an apparently innocent approach to make her interested in you...to wonder about you and have you frequently invading her thoughts. The more you are on her mind the more likely she will become vulnerable. She must initiate the actual running, but be able to tell herself you started the ball rolling and she was just too naive to realise what was happening before it was too late. After all, she’s a big cog so needs to be able to excuse herself and still deal with you if things go awry. I have an idea, but it’ll cost you and I won’t tell you until I am satisfied you have paid for my knowledge and experience in full, so if she’s that special, you can make a down payment right now.”

The following month when Nadine deemed I had paid in full, she detailed her considered opinion on a workable strategy. It sounded good and I threw myself into the challenge with a passion. After spending hours on forum sites unearthing advanced problems with FORTRAN and potential solutions, I left a note in Doctor Driscoll’s pigeonhole. I just asked for ten minutes of her time because I was struggling with a FORTRAN problem and needed some guidance. I was thrilled when she left me a note to come to her study at 12.30 on Thursday 16th October, when she could spare me twenty minutes before her lunch.

Encouraged by Nadine’s final briefing, I reached the campus with time to spare albeit I had had a difficult journey on the Tube. Dressed for the occasion and with weathered Fahrenheit aftershave, I walked into the gents of Doctor Driscoll’s building to make last minute adjustments. I reset my watch, ran up two flights of stairs and knocked on her door, breathless, exactly eight minutes late. Late enough, Nadine had advised, to cause disquiet, but not cancellation. I knocked, but paused before I opened her door.

PRESENTS OF MINE

Part 1 - Presents of Mine

Even at four I’d started to question how Santa could read a note that caught fire as it rose in the chimney. My dad said it was magic because the writing still showed and Santa had a special way to read it. I remember dad wrote ‘Nicholas’ on a piece of paper then burnt it to show me it was still possible to read my name. That pacified me for a while but because the burnt paper was so fragile I soon started asking questions again, but each time dad had an answer ready.

This particular Christmas morning I’d opened my presents in my room but the big tricycle, I’d asked Father Christmas for, clearly wasn’t among them. This set me thinking about how Santa carted the bigger things around and got them into the houses. Briefly the tears welled-up as I thought maybe Santa hadn’t brought my trike, even though I’d tried my best to be good. Maybe even his magic couldn’t get it down the chimney and he’d taken it away again.

Anyway, just before the trickle of tears turned into a flood, my dad shouted for me to come downstairs. I ran down, dressing gown flapping, and here in this very dining room was the red trike, I wanted, in the fireplace.

The trike’s front wheel sat in the grate that still contained the previous night’s embers, its handlebars flush with the patterned tile frontage below the mantelpiece and its two rear wheels rested on the raised edge of the tiled hearth, which once came out to here,” I said, slapping my foot down well in front of the panelling.
“So you were happy after all,“ said Nadine, “Saint Nicholas had managed to deliver your present.”
“I already knew all about the tricycle I wanted, I’d seen them in the shops; no, what interested me was how those two wide back wheels had been squeezed through the gap where the fire normally sat behind two bronze knights in helmets and armour. After dad lifted the trike onto the floor, all I wanted to do was look up the chimney and wonder about the fantasy I’d been spun. From that day onwards I knew the presents must already be in the house and the following year I set about finding them with total success until I was nine. Eventually I realised the ritual was kept alive because the parents’ Christmas present was watching the child’s enjoyment.”

THE SOURCE OF MY NIGHTMARES

Part 3 - The Source of My Nightmares

I found my Christmas presents three years ago on the recessed top of my dad’s wardrobe, but the next Christmas, when I was coming up eight and growing taller, they’d decided to use the similar wardrobe in my mum’s bedroom. By the way, I had always taken their separate rooms as normal until I visited my school friends’ homes where games of ‘sardines’ or hide and seek revealed most parents shared a bedroom.

I asked mum why she had her own room and she said dad snored too much; this was true...he sometimes woke me in the next room even with both doors between us closed, so although their choice of separate rooms appeared innocent, it certainly added to my strange sense of being an unwelcome child in a broken family, but I questioned it no more. Anyway, mum’s wardrobe was wider and stood far higher than dad’s so even though they’d told me off many times for trampolining on her bed, they must have thought that I wouldn’t be able to see the growing cache.

Once I’d spotted a sizeable collection, I only had to risk getting caught once when building a platform out of chairs, bedside tables and boxes to get my hands on the stockpile and so carry out my half hour’s scientific assessment. But the next year my presents had been on neither wardrobe, so when they were out I extended my search and became diverted from my quest when I found a black metal box inside my dad’s wardrobe, beneath his row of suits.

It was largish, but far too small to be the new hideaway for my presents, so as I’d stumbled on it, like buried treasure its contents cried out to be assessed. I lifted it onto the foot of dad’s bed and realised this was a real challenge, the mystery container was locked. So I set out to find the key.

It turned out that dad hadn’t given me, or a burglar for that matter, any real test because I soon found the little key in his sock drawer and bingo, his box of secrets was laid open before me. It was full of paper, none of which at first glance seemed of interest to an inquisitive almost nine year-old, but I had to be sure.

There were all sorts of official-looking letters and forms, but the topmost caught my eye; it was my 1968 birth certificate and the next in the pile was my father’s 1922 birth certificate and then my mother Grace’s for 1920. Hers didn’t seem quite right because her parents’ names were the same as those on my father’s certificate, so how could she be married to my dad?

Digging deeper I unearthed an envelope inside which was a marriage certificate dated August 1967 with my dad’s name on it, showing the name of his wife not as Grace, but someone with a weird foreign name who, it seemed, worked as a spinster in the Embassy of Greece.

Cherry Picking

Part 5 - Cherry Picking

When our long-standing Headmaster, dear old Frobisher-James, retired in 1984, I was in what was still called the Lower Sixth. We heard on the grapevine that the Labour-run council had forced the governors to appoint a head-teacher of its choosing. He turned out to be a man with a social sciences degree from a red brick polytechnic in the back of beyond...a man, if that is what he was, whose gender could only be decided by his school-time clothing. In all other respects there might have been a female lurking behind Mr Dearborn’s pencil line moustache, judging by the voice and mannerisms.

It soon went around that because ‘Dear-god’, as we nicknamed him, might not be all he appeared, the reversed school motto (To Seem Rather Than To Be) ‘suited him to a T’. As this probably reached his ears, it very likely accelerated the settling of old scores. It became clear that this head-teacher’s brief was to consign our fifty year-old ethos to the wheelie-bin of equality and eradicate all non-Comprehensive pretence. He wasted no time in pursuing his task with a vengeance.

Apart from the new Head’s rapid erosion of school traditions, which once enveloped us in a unifying feeling of security, by and large my final year of education continued unchanged towards A-levels. However, apart from smoking, there was now a novel and truly compelling reason to spend much of our free study periods behind the bicycle sheds. For this and this alone I was extremely grateful to the Head for admitting girls to the school and especially Samantha Hughes.

She and I had enthusiastically explored our gender differences and before long she had keenly rewarded me with my first ever cherry. She did this before the end of the spring term, while the sap rose amongst the bushes surrounding our slowly decaying sports fields. The weed-infested grass had lain largely unused since Dear-god had decreed that competitive and contact sports signified something of the past. The latest rumour had it that the hallowed turf, still pock-marked by boot studs from years of Rugby Union, was to be dug up to make way for a new housing estate.

Yet long before this, at a time when the playing fields and Samantha remained intact, many of us boys were driven to distraction by being deprived of female attention. At times many of us rued the day we’d opted for an all-boys school and its lack of sexual opportunities compared to those enjoyed at mixed schools. We were taunted by old friends who claimed at their schools they still played with girls in the long grass and in the store cupboards. Adam Hall even bragged he and Lucy Maddick had crawled to the back of the class and conducted a physical experiment under a lab table instead of watching a chemical one in the fume cupboard at the front. Yet for us boys without such opportunities most experimentation was conducted alone or, for the confidently endowed, in huddles during breaks.

Bound to Win

Part 7: Bound to Win

A short walk brought us to Room 7 and after the young lady pressed a button, Aunt Win’s Welsh companion answered, confirmed admission and the door opened automatically. Upon being ushered in, both dad and I paused in the entrance vestibule, shell-shocked by what was indeed a spacious fully furnished apartment. Aunt Winifred was barely visible at the far side of the room next to a panoramic window overlooking the rolling Sussex countryside and the Parish church.

Father ushered me towards her—I was dumbstruck. She was propped up by an army of pillows and attached to attendant columns of blinking, peeping monitoring equipment that stood sentinel around the bed head. Her hair, once a fair representation of her natural red, now looked remarkably like a purple bearskin.

Miss Bevan, her companion, sat ready to respond to her every command, although knitting furiously. Without prompting from father, I decided to get the worst over before being asked. “Auntie Win, Miss Bevan wrote you were unwell, but I must say you now look in the best of health,” I said quietly and with as much concern as I could muster. Holding my breath to avoid the ever-present odour of mothballs, I bent to kiss her on a rouge-encrusted cheek.

However, my efforts fell on stony ground. “What would a whipper-snapper like you know of ill health? You look as though you could have run here from London and still have breath to spare. I, though, have to fight for every lungful. Can’t you see I’m near to dying...dying I tell you and that should please you!” she said in a booming voice that took time to fade while echoing around the room. I stood transfixed, knowing her voice wouldn’t have sounded out of place at Horseguards’ Parade or any army barracks.

“Why should I be pleased? I hope you live to be a hundred.”

“One hundred, Nicholas, not a hundred. What’s wrong with schools these days—don’t they teach you proper English? I offered to pay for you to go to a decent school, even Harrow, but he...” she gestured to my father who was sitting in an armchair almost beyond listening distance, reading a magazine, “...he wouldn’t allow you to go to a boarding school because he reckoned that’s what corrupted him. What nonsense—he was an abomination long before he went away.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, Aunt Win. What do you mean about my father being corrupted? Why do you say he’s an abomination?” I asked, stifling a smile just to see if she would spill the beans.

All Steamed Up

Part 9 - All Steamed Up

On a bright, clear morning, we wandered aimlessly around Brixham, never far away from supervision. Ruth took lots of pictures of the colourful waterfront and the replica of the Golden Hind before we left for the short sail around Start Point to Dartmouth. Mrs G had phoned ahead to confirm there were berths on the visitors’ pontoon still available. Apparently, she had decided we would moor up, not in Dartmouth itself, but at Kingswear on the eastern side of the river. My father seemed disappointed, but I hoped it might turn out to be a blessing in disguise as far as getting away from watchful adults was concerned.

As she led us into the marina pontoons, a piercing whistle made me jump and there, almost on top of us, was Thomas the Tank Engine billowing steam as it hauled a line of packed coaches into the station above.

Having moored up, we watched an engine that was more like Thomas’ bigger friend Henry. The huge green engine, shining with polished brass and copper, hissed its way off the train and shunted around to the other end. There were hundreds of holidaymakers swarming like ants on the platforms, “Where have they all come from Dad?” I asked, like a little child captivated by a magical world.
“I have no idea, but I will take great delight explaining the physics of the steam engine. Do you think we could leg-it up there without being stopped in mid-flight?”
Never had I heard father use such language but caught up by his enthusiasm, leg it we did. “I reckon you, Dad, will pay a heavy price for not seeking the Admiral’s permission to leave our vessel unattended.”
“That’s just tough! I’ve been on my best behaviour since the voyage started. I can take a little earache.”
He had underestimated Mrs G’s determination to keep him on the leash, “Quick, Dad, don’t look back, but you have just a few minutes to think of something.”

Forced to ignore the lure of steam, we dashed into the booking office where redemption was at hand. By the time Hillary and Ruth caught up with us, my father was holding two tickets for the evening dining train leaving at 6.30pm. While he was buying the tickets, I had spotted a poster on the wall advertising a paddle-steamer river cruise and managed to tell him about it, seconds before our capture.

“Didn’t you hear me call you, Victor? Why didn’t you wait for us? You just wandered off as if we didn’t exist.”
“Oh drat, now you’ve spoiled it—I wanted it to be a surprise, Hillary,” he said, convincingly.
“Wanted what to be a surprise?”
“I was about to head back to the pontoon and break it to you,” he said handing her the tickets and brochure.

Dad and I hung back on the return to the marina, but we could hear Hillary becoming increasingly vocal. Every few paces she paused to read more about her treat. We could hear her clearly telling Ruth and half of Kingswear about the romance of the period journey and the bill of fare. Sadly, the magic had worn off by the time we reached our boats and realisation dawned.

cupboard love

Part 2 - Cupboard Love

Although teaching us Greek, Nadine was really our housekeeper. At first I wondered if she might be the spinster from the embassy using a different name so I asked her outright one day if she was my real mother. She laughed at me and the expression on her face was enough but she felt the need to comfort me, “No Niko, I have no children but if I did I would have been proud to have one as handsome and bright as you.”

It was really just as well she cleared that up because I was feeling dreadfully guilty about the thoughts of her I was having. As a pre-adolescent youngster whose sexual awareness came mostly from playing doctors and nurses in the long grass, I sensed Nadine radiated some mouth-watering attraction that confused me.

This magnetism, I determined to explore furtively. Unluckily, one day she caught me peeping at her from inside her wardrobe where I had lain in wait, “You little malakas,” she shouted, pushing the door shut and turning the key, “if you like it so much in my wardrobe, you can stay there until your father comes home.”
I had sobbed for ages, “Please don’t tell him, I promise to stop being a Peeping Tom...let me out, I won’t do it again.”
“All right you little toe-rag...I won’t tell your father this time but if I ever catch you spying on me again I will, after I squeeze you where it hurts, katalaveneis?
“Nai, katalava, I understand...never again, I swear.”

I felt ashamed, as if there was something evil about me; but, as promised, she did not tell my father. Yet as puberty hit me with a greater vengeance she always appeared totally innocent when her towel slipped or an ill-bolted bathroom door swung open to reveal her slender, heavy breasted olive-skinned body.

Esse Quam Videri

Part 4 - Esse Quam Videri

I was over the moon on reading my new school’s prospectus, which said it was adhering to its standards as a long-established Grammar School. I read up all about such schools and looked forward to my first day.

When I asked my dad why he decided I should go there, he confessed he had planned to send me to boarding school but changed his mind, because he liked having me around. His stated reason sounded suspect because we’d spent very little time doing anything together. Whatever the real reason might have been, he was happy I was pleased with his choice. My ‘mother’ did not tell me what she thought because after she left us, I had never seen or heard from her again.

It was August 1979 when father took me into town to buy the school’s uniform where my friend Patrick was going too. Proudly I stood in front of the mirror in peaked cap, over-long grey trousers and baggy ‘growing-space’ blazer with only the tips of my fingers poking out.

Nervously, on the first day, Patrick and I rode our new bikes, with mandatory old-fashioned satchels strapped to the crossbars, to what most people still called the Grammar School. I hadn’t intended to dwell over much on my secondary education but, along with the anchors of family, friends and society’s norms, it helped make me what I am. Throughout my early life I was haunted by feelings of inadequacy due to a recurrent nightmare caused by the box of secrets I’d stumbled upon and these were reinforced by doubts about my school and a distorted version of its motto, Esse Quam Videri, (To Be Rather Than To Seem To Be) so let me try to explain:

My pride was dented the moment I found out it hadn’t been a real Grammar school since 1974 when selection by the 11 plus exam was abandoned by the County Council. I was disappointed to discover that the school I felt so privileged to be attending had been ordered to throw its doors open to all-comers as a Comprehensive school. However, rumour had it that the longstanding Headmaster found being in charge of a basic comprehensive too hard to swallow and sought means to maintain the ethos that had made the school the place for the brightest and best to attend.

I felt even worse when our English Master, Dr Pickles, in an early lesson said, “It has been suggested, Boys, that as this is no longer a true Grammar, the motto is the ultimate misnomer, verging on a travesty, which might better be restyled to Videri Quam Esse, or ‘To Seem Rather Than To Be’.”

This distortion still haunts me to the present day.

Dad's Science of Sailing

Part 6 - Dad's Science of Sailing

Perhaps Dr Pickle’s throw-away remark about going to school in my father’s academic robes had gone deep inside my sub-consciousness. I admired my father and tolerated his personal idiosyncrasies but was determined to make my own way in life, without any hint of nepotism.

I am not quite sure how my father had been drawn into sailing, maybe the accompanying social activity was like the nineteenth hole at a golf course. It certainly was nothing to do with achieving career advantage, like becoming a Freemason. It was nothing of the sort in his case because he had already reached the pinnacle of his career and his Chair was secure, dust-laden and immovable. Yet suddenly he announced he intended sailing from Brighton marina to Fécamp in France in the company of ‘some decent chaps’.

I, as a near fifteen year-old, thought this was rash at the one-foot-in-the-grave age of sixty. When pressed about his latter-day conversion from risk-aversion to risk-taking, he said he could rely on these fine chaps. I think he fell under their spell when he, on behalf of the university, had undertaken a hush-hush consultancy for the Ministry of Defence. However, it was not something he was allowed to discuss with a raw youngster who knew nothing of palm-greasing. I doubt my naïve parent did either, but afterwards he revealed he’d sailed in a sizeable schooner belonging to an MoD bigwig. The other fine chaps were representatives of a well-known south-coast defence contractor and some sub-contractors. I did wheedle out of him he was technically assessing their proposals for new weaponry as part of the university’s commercial activities.

While he told me little about their camaraderie, he did let on the men were keen to savour the gastronomic and other physiological delights of northern France. His imagination, though, had been more stirred by the science of sailing, which he was keen to tell me about. He reckoned it could be open to supplementation by an array of navigational equipment and automated devices. These, he enthused, would enable such genial chaps to stay below in the comfort of the main cabin while crossing one of the busiest and most dangerous sea lanes in Europe.

Taking the Bait

Part 8 - Taking the Bait

We had made good time to Chichester and turned off the main road heading for Appledram Marina. Dad inserted his card pass and up went the barrier in robotic salute. There were few people out and about, but the clubhouse seemed to be well patronised. “Would you care for a snifter after your ordeal, Son?”

“I’m not really bothered about booze, Dad, but I could do with a cup of coffee. Don’t let me stop you though. I expect your ordeal was far worse than mine!”

I was introduced by my proud father to yet another new circle of his friends. I quietly drank my coffee while listening to Doctor Victor Foster, in professor mode, sharing stories with men claiming to have encountered all manner of challenges at sea. It seemed to my untested mind that many of the difficulties could have been anticipated and prepared for if each had spent more of life’s precious hours planning a critical voyage rather than bragging after the event about how they had managed to overcome a chance crisis.

There were two women, drinking little and missing less, sitting on the other side of our talkative gathering. They looked as if they could be mother and daughter and I assumed they were here with one of the group of experts that had bored me already. Following Aunt Win’s grilling I reckoned the worst I faced would be two cold shoulders and at best, a half-hearted welcome for an interlude to break what seemed to be the monotony of their prearranged lives. I took my cup to the bar, beyond the grandee’s knot of conversation, where I asked for another. While waiting I prepared myself to test one of the many theories about women I had gleaned from Nadine. Picking up my new coffee, I started back towards a seat, but turned my head suddenly and was pleased to find both women looking at me, the younger one particularly slow to lose her smile. Good enough, Nadine, I thought, so I went over to them, my self-confidence at an all-time high.

I stayed standing, “It’s encouraging to see sailing is a female passion too. I’m Nick Foster and this is my first time here in the clubhouse and already I’m in two minds if that sort of chitchat,” I said, tipping my head back towards the throng, “would ever be for me.”

“Why don’t you sit down Nick? I’m Mrs Gibbon and this is my niece, Ruth Wheeler. It is our passion, well mine really, but I’ve been trying to captivate Ruth because single-handed sailing in the Solent, although challenging, can be lonely and often boring. I believe she’s taken the bait because now we hope to go further afield—in fact we plan to head for Dartmouth in a couple of weeks when Ruth’s school holidays formally start.”

“It’s not school holidays Auntie Hillary, I am still at Torquay Girls’ Grammar, but I’m on the sixth form campus in my last year.

I smiled, I was delighted with another of Nadine’s theories, which she called her number one guideline; ‘Men do not chat up women, they like to think they do, but in truth women allow themselves to be chatted up by men they take a fancy to. Never waste your time with those that show little initial interest’.

ALL SEWN UP

Part 10 - All Sewn Up

I found him in the garden, brandy and Evening Standard in hand, “Dad, what happened to my left leg, do you know?”
Dad slowly shifted his focus from the bottom of his empty brandy glass to the underside of the pulled up trouser leg I presented to him. “You were born with single talipes, Nick; I’ve not given it a thought till now, you don’t limp or anything so what’s the problem? Is it hurting?”
“What’s single talipes? I’ve never heard of it?”
“When you were born, your left foot pointed to the three o’clock instead of the twelve o’clock. If we hadn’t had it operated on, you would have been walking on the edge of your foot and required a special built-up shoe.”
“How old was I when they operated?”
“Fifteen months or so. It was the absolute earliest you could have the surgery. I took you to the foremost surgeon in the country. I thought he did a marvellous job, so what exactly is wrong?”
“I have to be able to run a fixed distance quite fast for ULAS entry and I can’t manage it. An instructor at the uni gym questioned my scars. I told him my mother put them down to barbed wire. Why the lie?”
“It was only a white lie, Nick. Straight after the op you were in bandages and after they came off, the scar was quite visible and people kept asking. We couldn’t just tell them you had a talipes because the term would mean nothing to them. If they persisted, we would have to say you had a clubfoot, the old term. To people of my generation, where it often went untreated, it meant built-up shoes and stigma, so I told them you had cut yourself on barbed wire. I didn’t want you looked on as an oddity and rejected again.”
“Rejected again? What do you mean, rejected...by whom?”
He flushed red and refilled his glass, “It’s all so long ago,” he said, before sipping at his brandy and slowly emptying the glass.
“You’re draining my patience, Father. Who rejected me?”
“I seem to remember the first hospital we went to was reluctant to do the surgery,” he said, avoiding my eyes and picking up the brandy bottle again to pour another glassful.
“You said I was rejected. I don’t believe the hospital nonsense is what you meant at all. Tell me the truth. Who really rejected me?”
He spluttered into his brandy, his knuckles white as he clenched the glass. “Don’t press me, Nicholas! I won’t let you hound me! Just think yourself lucky I took you on...”
“...took me on?” I snarled, my anger rising.
“Took you on to another hospital I was going to say. What gives you the bloody right to interrogate me? You’re twisting my words. What’s got into you? None of it matters in the big scheme of things,” he prattled into the brandy glass, “they were obviously wrong about your leg. It hasn’t affected you so far.”
“Well it’s bloody well about to affect me now, for all you care. Look at yourself, half pissed all the time because your career’s over and you find yourself with nothing to live for! My career could well be finished before it starts. Should I start drinking myself to death now or just kill myself in some quicker way?”