“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
“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
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,
“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.”
