‘The Great Work? Uncle Jon Peru’s Great Work?’
‘The very same. But we shall speak of these things at some other time. I don’t want to keep you talking now.
‘You don’t?’
‘I don’t. You’ve got decorating to do. You’ll find all the stuff in the kitchen along with the plans for which walls you have to knock down and how to plumb in the dishwasher. Try and get it all done by next week, because I think I’ve got a buyer lined up.’
‘You what?’
But the Doveston said no more.
He turned on his designer heel and, like Elvis, left the building. He did pause briefly at the door to offer me a smile and a wave, before he went.
And it was then I saw it.
That look in his eyes.
The look that Uncle Jon Peru had had in his.
That look that the monkey in the Mondo movie had.
And I suppose it was at that very moment that I realized, for the first time ever, just how absolutely mad the Doveston was.
But I wouldn’t let it spoil our friendship. After all, I was on a roll here. I was in the money. I had a Paul Smith suit, a Piaget watch, a Porsche and a personal organizer.
All of these began with a P.
I really should have noticed that...
16
Beatle bones and smokin’ Stones.
For a man who was not into property, the Doveston sure bought a lot of it. During my first six months of freedom, I moved house eight times. Each to somewhere grander in a more up-market neighbourhood. By Christmas of 1984, I had made it to Brentford.
Yes, Brentford!
The Butts Estate.
And which house was I living in? Why, none other than that once owned by Uncle Jon Peru Joans. It would have been a childhood dream come true — had I ever dreamed of such a thing in childhood. The dreams I’d had in childhood, however, were formed of far humbler stuff. Never once had I thought that one day I might live on the Butts Estate.
The conservatory had been rebuilt, but not in its original style. Two local jobbing builders, Hairy Dave and Jungle John, had hobbled a nasty double-glazed atrocity of the monstrous carbuncle persuasion across the back of the house and my first job was to pull it down.
I did have a bit of a party when I moved in. But all very low key and sophisticated. I’d been hoping to get my leg over Jackie, but she wasn’t having any. She told me that even though there wasn’t much that she wouldn’t do for a man in a Paul Smith suit, there was no way she was going to shag a bloke who was a painter and decorator. What did I think she was, a slapper?
I took that one on the chin and determined that one day...
One day...
Norman spoiled the party for me somewhat. He’d brought with him several bottles of home-brewed sprout brandy, of which he imbibed too freely. In a moment of drunken bonhomie, he called me his bestest friend and said that this was the bestest party he’d ever been to.
Except for one he’d been to back in ‘sixty-three, where somebody had blown up the host’s dog with dynamite.
Oh how we laughed.
I was really up for rebuilding that conservatory. I’d managed to get copies of the original plans from the Memorial Library and a nearby foundry had agreed to take on the job of casting the columns and decorative ironwork.
When, in the January of the following year, the Doveston told me that it was time to move again, I said no. I wanted to stay where I was, complete the conservatory and once again be a Brentonian.
To my great surprise the Doveston said that he didn’t mind. I could keep the house, but on one condition. He himself had recently acquired a property in Sussex. If I would decorate that for him at no charge, the house in the Butts was mine.
I readily agreed.
I was pretty nifty now, when it came to the old renovating. I had a small team of lads who worked for me and we breezed through it at the hurry-up. I figured that a month or two’s work on the Doveston’s property, in exchange for Uncle Jon Peru’s house, was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
There was just the one question that I should have asked.
And this was: ‘How big is this property?’
The winter of ‘eighty-five was the coldest ever on record. The River Thames froze over and thousands died from hypothermia. Few of these thousands, I suspect, left Filofaxes to their next of kin. The nation had divided itself into two separate classes. The we-have-lots and the we-have-bugger-alls. The we-have-lots were topping off their walls with razor-wire. The we-have-bugger-alls were planning revolution.
The Doveston’s limo, an armoured affair with bullet-proof glass and gun-ports on the roof, picked me up on a February morning to ferry me down to Sussex. The snow had been falling non-stop for almost a month and if it hadn’t been for the chains on the tyres and the snow-plough on the front, I doubt whether we could ever have completed the journey.
I’d never been to Sussex before and all I knew of the countryside was what all Londoners knew: the folk there lived in thatched cottages, hunted foxes and shagged the sheep. When not shagging sheep, they shagged their daughters, and if their daughters weren’t keen, they set to work on the chickens.
I am prepared to agree now that this commonly held view of country folk is not altogether accurate. Most country folk do not shag their sheep, their daughters or their chickens.
They do, however, practise human sacrifice in their worship of Satan. But who doesn’t nowadays?
And they do make nice jam.
The Doveston’s property was situated on the edge of a picture-postcard village called Bramfield, some ten miles north of Brighton.
Bramfield skulked in the South Downs. Most villages nestle, but not Bramfield. Bramfield was a definite skulker. It had its head down. It was cowering. And, as we reached the end of the High Street, it was plain to see from what.
Ahead, across the snow-covered fields, arose a terrible building. It looked as I imagine Gormenghast must look. A great black hulking Gothic nightmare of a place, all twisted towers and high cupolas, gabled roofs and flying buttresses.
‘Look at that bloody horrible thing,’ I said as we approached it.
The Doveston raised an eyebrow to me.
‘It’s not?’ I said.
‘It is,’ was his reply.
And the nearer we got, the bigger it grew, for such is the nature of things. When we stepped from the car into three feet of snow, it was heads back all and gape up.
Jackie huddled in her mink and her mouth was so wide that I’m sure I could have climbed in there to shelter from the cold. The Doveston’s chauffeur, Rapscallion, took off his cap and mopped at his African brow with an oversized red gingham handkerchief ‘Lordy, lordy, lordy,’ was all he had to say.
I, however, had quite a bit more. ‘Now just you see here,’ I began. ‘If you think I’m going to decorate this monstrosity for you, you’ve got another think coming. Who owned this dump before you bought it, Count Dracula?’
‘Most amusing.’ The Doveston grinned a bit of gold in my direction. ‘I have my laboratory here. I only wish you to decorate some of the apartments.’
‘Laboratory?’ I shook my head, dislodging the ice that was forming on my hooter. ‘I assume that you have an assistant called Igor, who procures the dead bodies.’
‘He’s called Blot, actually.’
‘What?’
‘Let’s go inside before we freeze to death.’
‘We belong dead,’ I muttered, in my finest Karloff.
Inside it was all as you might have expected. Pure Hammer Films. A vast baronial hall, flagstones underfoot and vaulted ceiling high above. Sweeping staircase, heavy on the carved oak. Minstrels’ gallery, heavy on the fiddly bits. Stained-glass windows, heavy on the brutal martyrdoms. Wall-hanging tapestries, heavy on the moth. Suits of armour, heavy on the rust. Authentic-looking instruments of torture.