But there was so much more.
And I will tell it here.
17
The King’s condition worsened, there were terrible seizures which caused him to roll his eyes in a hideous fashion and beat upon his breast.
When the madness came upon him, he would cry out in a vulgar tongue, using phases unchristian. Only his pipe brought comfort to him then.
‘He's Richard, you know,’ said Norman.
I looked up from my pint of Death-by-Cider. We sat together in the Jolly Gardeners, Bramfield’s only decent drinking house. It was the summer of ‘eighty-five, the hottest ever on record. Outside tarmac bubbled on the road and the death toll from heat-stroke in London was topping off at a thousand a week. There was talk of revolution in the air. But only inside in the shade.
‘Richard?’ I asked.
‘Richard,’ said Norman. ‘As in barking mad.’
‘Ah,’ said I. ‘This would be that fifth generation Brentford rhyming slang that I find neither clever nor amusing.’
‘No, it’s straightforward one on one. Richard Dadd, mad.
Richard Dadd (born sometime, died later) painted pictures of fairies, butchered his old man and ended his days in the nut house.’
‘Touché.’ I smiled a bit at Norman. The shopkeeper had grown somewhat plump with middle years. He had a good face though, an honest face, which he had hedged to the east and west with a pair of ludicrous mutton-chop side-whiskers. As to his hair, this was all but gone and the little that remained had been tortured into one of those greased-down Arthur Scargill comb-over jobs that put most women to flight.
For the most part, he had grown older with grace and with little recourse to artifice. His belly spilled over the front of his trews and his bum stuck out at the back. His shopcoat was spotless, his shoes brighdy buffed and his manner was merry, if measured.
He had married, but divorced, his wife having run off with the editor of the Brentford Mercury. But he had taken this philosophically. ‘If you marry a good-looking woman,’ he said to me, ‘she’ll probably run off with another man and break your heart. But if, like me, you marry an ugly woman, and she runs off with another bloke, who gives a toss?’
Norman had been brought down to Castle Doveston to do some work on ‘security’. He was as anxious to get back to his shop as I was to get back to my conservatory. But the Doveston kept finding us more things to do.
‘So,’ I said, ‘he’s Richard. And who are you talking about?’
‘The Doveston, of course. Don’t tell me it’s slipped by you that the man’s a raving loon.’
‘He does have some eccentricities.’
‘So did Richard Dadd. Here, let me show you this.’ Norman rummaged about in his shopcoat pockets and drew out a crumpled set of plans. ‘Move your woosie address book off the table and let me spread this out.’
I elbowed my Fiofax onto the floor. ‘What have you got there?’ I asked.
‘Plans for the gardens of Castle Doveston.’ Norman smoothed out creases and fficked away cake crumbs. ‘Highly top secret and confidential, of course.’
‘Of course.
‘Now, you see all this?’ Norman pointed. ‘That is the estate surrounding the house. About a mile square. A lot of land. All these are the existing gardens, the Victorian maze, the ornamental ponds, the tree-lined walks.’
‘It’s all very nice,’ I said. ‘I’ve walked around most of it.’
‘Well, it’s all coming up, the lot of it. The diggers are moving in next week.’
‘But that’s criminal.’
‘They’re his gardens. He can do what he likes with them.’
‘You mean he can behave as badly as he likes with them.’
‘Whatever. Now see this.’ Norman fished a crumpled sheet of transparent acetate from another pocket and held it up. ‘Recognize this?’
Printed in black upon the acetate was the distinctive Doveston logo, the logo that had so upset the late Vicar Berry. The three tadpoles chasing each other’s tails.
‘The Mark of the Beast,’ I said with a grin.
‘Don’t be a prat,’ said Norman. ‘It’s the alchemical symbol for Gaia.’
‘Who?’
‘Gaia, Goddess of the Earth. She bore Uranus and by him Cronus and Oceanus and the Titans. In alchemy she is often represented by the three serpents. These symbolize sulphur, salt and mercury. The union of these three elements within the cosmic furnace symbolize the conjunction of the male and female principles, which create the philosopher’s stone.’
‘There’s no need to take the piss,’ I said.
‘I’m not. The symbol ultimately represents the union between the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom. Man and nature, that kind of thing. I should bloody know, I designed the logo for him.’
‘Oh,’ said I. ‘Then pardon me.’
Norman placed the sheet of acetate over the map. ‘Now what do you see?’ he asked.
‘A bloody big logo superimposed over the gardens of the estate.
‘And that’s what you’ll see from an aeroplane, once the ground has been levelled and the trees planted. The logo picked out in green trees upon brown earth.’
‘He’s Richard, you know,’ said I.
‘He worries me,’ said Norman. ‘And he keeps on about this invisible ink thing. I wish I’d never mentioned it to him.’
‘I don’t think you’ve mentioned it to me.
‘Top secret,’ said Norman, tapping his nose.
‘So?’
‘So it’s like this. He was talking to me about the colour he wanted for the package of his new brand of cigarettes. Said he wanted something really eye-catching, that would stand out from all the rest. And I said that you can’t go wrong with red. All the most successful products have red packaging. It’s something to do with blood and sex, I believe. But then I made the mistake of telling him about this new paint I was working on. It’s ultraviolet.’
‘But you can’t see ultraviolet.’ I sipped at my pint. ‘It’s invisible to the human eye.
‘That’s the whole point. If you could create an opaque ultraviolet paint, then whatever you painted with it would become invisible.’
‘That’s bollocks,’ I said. ‘That can’t be true.’
‘Why not? If you paint anything with opaque paint, you can’t see the thing itself, only the layer of paint.’
‘Yes, but you can’t see ultraviolet.’
‘Exactly. So if you can’t see through the paint, you can’t see the thing underneath it, can you?’
‘There has to be a flaw in this logic,’ I said. ‘If the paint is invisible to the human eye, then you must be able to see the object you’ve painted with it.’
‘Not if you can’t see through the paint.’
‘So, have you actually made any of this paint?’
Norman shrugged. ‘I might have.’
‘Well, have you?’
‘Dunno. I thought I had, but now I can’t seem to find the jam jar I poured it into.’
I made the face that says ‘you’re winding me up’. ‘And the Doveston would like to buy a pot or two of your miracle paint, I suppose?’
‘As much as I can produce. For aesthetic reasons, he says. He wants to paint all the razor wire on the perimeter fences with it.’
I got up to get in the pints. At the bar the landlord kindly drew my attention to the fact that I had dropped my woosie address book. ‘You still working up at the big house?’ he asked.
‘Would I still be drinking in this dump if I wasn’t?’
He topped up my newly drawn pint from the drips tray. ‘I suppose not. Is it true what they say about the new laird?’
‘Probably.’
The landlord whistled. ‘I tried that once. Had to soak my pecker in iodine for a week to wash the smell off.’
I paid for my pints and returned to my table.