Authors: Philip Kerr
I also grow all my own vegetables and quite a bit of summer fruit; and I have a small boat to go fishing in. You have to sail out of the harbour to catch anything worth eating. Most of the decent-sized bass are gone now but there’s still plenty of pollock and eel. To my surprise I’ve become quite an accomplished fisherman. Fishing makes you patient.
One thing I do miss about Monaco is the weather. As the people in The Bodinnick Arms are fond of saying, there’s a reason Cornwall is so green; it rains a lot. When it’s fine, it’s very fine indeed, but when it’s wet it’s bloody awful. This is a place where rain really does set in for the day. The present summer has been especially bad. It seems that it has been raining for ever. So thank Christ for Sky TV, especially in the winter. I’ve a nice big widescreen set in my sitting room, with HD, and – like any writer – I like to watch the daytime scum shows and the footy, of course, when it’s on. And I’ve managed to put together a complete collection of first editions by Daphne du Maurier and Q. But what I most
like now are books on tape; I’ve become especially fond of listening to Dickens as read by people like Martin Jarvis and Sir David Jason.
Don comes down from London once a month, rain or shine, in his nice big Range Rover – which is the same model that I used to have myself – and stays the weekend. We go to the pub and talk about the storylines for the next novel, or I might hand over the edited manuscript of the last one; he still has a tendency to overwrite – to use three words where one will do, and to quote other writers like they’re fucking saints – so I give him quite a lot of the blue pencil. He has a nicer flat in Putney now – a penthouse that overlooks the river – but he’s just acquired a small apartment in Monaco where he’s planning to live permanently when he starts to make the big money. Which he will, I’ve no doubt about that. I’m not bitter about this. Even before Orla died I’d already had enough of Monty. The place is about as shallow as a Martini glass. It’s all supercars and fancy overpriced restaurants, private beaches, gala nights with royalty and ghastly film premieres. I’ve told him he isn’t going to like it there but he won’t listen. In Monaco there’s just shopping and more shopping and always for something you don’t really need; there are no art galleries or museums to speak of, no social life, and the women are just out for what they can get; Don says he likes women who know what they want and he’ll be quite happy to let them have it. But everyone has to make their own mistakes, I guess. I should know, I made more than my fair share of them.
If he suspects that I once shagged his missus he’s never mentioned it. Fortunately, he sees very little of Jenny – Lady Muck, he calls her – so I think there’s no chance now that she’s going to fess up to what she did with me. Which is
just as well, as that would spoil everything. I had a small moment of panic last May bank holiday when I saw her and the judge in a tea shop in Fowey, but fortunately she didn’t see me. I even managed to go back and get another squint at her. Frankly it was hard to believe that I’d ever fucked her at all. Her hair was so grey she looked like a High Court judge herself. Quite a contrast with the woman wearing a basque and suspenders and string panties who sucked my cock so enthusiastically in the Swan Hotel at the Hay-on-Wye Festival while Don was interviewing some crime writer from Baltimore. To my surprise it was the best blow-job I ever had.
In spite of that – the blow-job, I mean – Don is well out of his marriage. By contrast he looks like the bestselling author he now is. With a hair-transplant, dental veneers, a good tailor (I sent him along to Huntsman) and a permanent tan, he’s hardly recognizable as the backroom boy who used to be my loyal writing devil.
GQ
magazine recently asked him to model some Philip Marlowe-style raincoats. His transformation has been quite startling.
And for once virtue has not been its own poor and always inadequate reward. Don was just made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, which pleased him enormously; last year he won an Edgar Award for
Passing Strange
; and he’s already shortlisted for this year’s Golden Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association for
A Murder Not to Solve
. The material rewards have come his way, too. Quite apart from the Range Rover and the Aston Martin Vantage he drives in London, he seems to have a string of young and willing girlfriends. One of them, Serena, is half his age and looks like a model; but she actually works for
The Daily Telegraph
so I don’t suppose I shall ever meet her in person, just in case she’s the kind with a nose for a story.
If I need a woman there’s a lady I go and see at her beautiful home near Padstow who looks after all my needs. She’s very kind and thoughtful, and has a lovely personality. Her name is Myra. Do I envy Don? No, not at all. He’s worked hard and deserves every success. Me, I’m just lucky to be at liberty. On the whole it’s much better here in Cornwall than in some air-conditioned cell in Monaco. I’d have gone mad if I’d been cooped up all day, unable to see anyone or go anywhere. I’ve got much to thank Don Irvine for. He risks a great deal by hiding me down here. I’m better off here and no mistake. The dust and the damp here aggravate my allergies sometimes, and once I had a severe attack of asthma, but apart from that my health has been good. True, I’ve put on a lot of weight. I have a bicycle to try and stay fit, but the hills around here would defeat Sir Bradley Wiggins.
Don has kindly offered to equip one of the outhouses with a treadmill, but I told him that there’s no one here to be in shape for. Certainly Myra doesn’t mind what I look like. Besides, in this area of the world there’s all the walking anyone would need, for miles around. He and I have really only disagreed about one thing since I came to live in Cornwall, and it was not about the plot of a book.
The fact is that early on in my time here at Manderley I tried to kill myself. Overcome with solitude I bought a length of good nylon rope from a ship’s chandler in Fowey and, one midsummer morning, I tried to hang myself in the apple orchard. But as I was hanging there I learned two things: one was that strangling to death is a poor way to die; the other was that the boughs of apple trees are not sturdy enough to take a man’s weight and, eventually, the one I’d chosen broke and I fell to the ground, spraining my ankle quite badly. It was Mr Twigg who found me and called an ambulance
which took me to a hospital in Plymouth. It was Mr Twigg who called Don, who was very cross about what I’d done but came down straight away, and when I was feeling better we argued about it.
‘I didn’t save your fucking neck just so as you could put a rope around it and try to do yourself in,’ he said. ‘That was bloody selfish of you after all that effort I went to. What the hell were you thinking of?’
‘I was thinking that life here in Cornwall seemed like a piece of shit. Will that do? I used to drive an Aston Martin and now I drive an old Fiesta. I had a mistress who belonged in the pages of a men’s magazine. She and I used to drink Dom Pérignon at the Hôtel Negresco. Now I visit an ageing prostitute in Padstow and after seeing her I get fish and chips from Rick Stein’s. In the morning I used to speak French to order a coffee and a croissant in the Café de Paris; but now, when I go to the village shop in the morning to fetch a newspaper and a loaf of bread, I could be speaking French for all the fucking conversation I get. They look at me like I’m a bloody alien. I know I said I wanted to live in England again but this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I feel like I’m living in Middle Earth. Besides, I rather think that it’s my neck to wring, don’t you?’
‘Perhaps. But did you stop and think about what might happen to me if you killed yourself?’
‘Oddly enough, I didn’t.’
‘Perhaps you should have done. You might have considered the job I’d have explaining to Plod just how it is that a man who everyone thought to be dead happens to be hanging in my bloody orchard like a Cox’s Orange Pippin? No, I thought not. They’d have fucking nicked me for sure. I’d be in Vine Street Magistrates Court right now, facing extradition.’
‘I can think of worse fates than a nice prison cell in Monaco.’
‘Don’t forget, two of those homicides occurred on the Côte d’Azur, so for helping you to escape justice the French police could probably claim priority for my extradition over the Monégasques. And I bet the Monty cops would be quite glad to yield authority to the French cops. It would save them the problem of having an embarrassing trial. I may not be nearly as famous as you, but the death of your wife still generates a lot of press. And while a cell in Monty might sound okay to you, the one at Les Baumettes isn’t quite so appealing.’
‘Les Baumettes?’
‘It’s a prison near Marseille. According to the
Daily Telegraph
, the EU justice minister has described it as a living hell and the most repugnant prison in Europe. The next time you feel like sending yourself to heaven, just remember that at the same time you’ll be sending me to hell.’
‘Point taken.’
‘Look, old sport, it’s bound to seem a little quiet down here at first. But things will get better.’
‘You mean I’ll get used to it being shit here.’
‘Yes. If you like. Please, John. Promise me you won’t try anything like that again.’
‘Yeah, all right. Anyway, it’s not something I want to try again. Hanging myself, I mean. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.’
‘Thanks.’ Don nodded. ‘It’s difficult enough keeping you a secret as it is. But now the fucking hospital is wondering just how it is that you have no medical records.’ He grinned. ‘Next time pull the bung out of your boat while you’re out at sea. Like Maxim de Winter. No body means no awkward fucking questions.’
‘It didn’t exactly work out for him, did it?’
‘No. But he was an amateur. And besides, Rebecca left a note. I trust you won’t be so careless.’
‘Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind.’
What is especially touching in retrospect is the way Don was so upset about my wish to die; indeed, he took it very personally, almost as if he had become my guardian, and I realized just what a true friend he is. Anyway, I’m over that now. I hardly ever think about suicide and I’m settling into life down here, like the rain.
Tonight I shall probably listen to
Little Dorrit
again on CD. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.
It’s a tiny apartment I have in Monaco – about the size of a postage stamp – but that’s okay. You don’t own an apartment in Monaco to live large but to save millions in tax. There’s just a bedroom, a sitting room (which serves as my office), a bathroom and a kitchen area. It’s nicely decorated though;
Le Point
magazine are going to do a little spread on it, and me. It’s a far cry from the sort of penthouse that John used to own in the Tour Odéon, but this apartment cost less than a tenth as much as that one did and does me for now. The pre-war, cream stucco building occupies the corner of the Rue des Violettes, and my apartment is on the second floor, above a chicken and pizza restaurant, which sounds awful but is actually quite handy given the size of my kitchen. From my bedroom window you can see across a picturesque series of steps that lead up onto Rue des Roses, and straight into the sitting room of the apartment opposite. It’s not very private but at this price I can’t really complain. Not when I consider how much money I’ll be saving when, eventually, I move out of London and live here permanently. The apartment opposite is owned by a woman who I think must be a prostitute; she spends ages getting ready to go out and all sorts of men seem to visit her at various times of the day and night. People-watching:
it’s one of the things that make Monaco so fascinating. At night the delivery motorcycles for the chicken and pizza restaurant can get a bit noisy as they rev up like angry mosquitoes; and the electrical wholesaler next door to the chicken and pizza place seems to open pretty early in the morning when several white vans collect outside to load up with various bits and pieces; but that’s just the penalty you pay for living in an interesting part of town. Other than that, everything is working out just fine.
Whenever I’m in Monaco I’m always up early to catch the best of the day; so, most mornings at around six o’clock, I put on a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones and start writing on my iMac. I work through until midday, when I go to
Le Neptune Plage
, which is a private beach on Larvotto. In the summer
Le Neptune
is always busy and it’s usually advisable to reserve a sunbed, which costs about twenty euros a day. That’s where I eat my lunch. I have the set menu, which is about forty euros. They know me there and I like that. The water is nice but right now it’s best not to swim at all because of the many jellyfish. I stay at
Le Neptune
until about four, when I go and do another five hours at my desk before going out again to have dinner somewhere. Usually I go to the Hôtel Columbus, which is a pleasant half-hour walk – if you don’t mind all the tourists. You get used to them – even the large coaches that deliver them in their hundreds just outside Casino Square. Anyway I’m not really here often enough to mind them very much. My books are already published in forty-seven languages, so I’m frequently touring a new title abroad. It’s a rare month when I don’t have to go to another country to promote something; this year I have a book being published somewhere, in translation,
every week
.
It’s all a marked contrast to my life in Putney, where I have a penthouse flat in Putney Wharf Tower that overlooks the river, and which is where I conduct my business when I’m in London. It’s there that I have meetings with Neville – the web-master I’ve employed to look after my Facebook, Twitter and website – and Tiffany – the PR person who I have on a monthly retainer to handle all my print and broadcast media publicity. The first thing I do every morning is send Neville a little publishing or philosophical
aperçu
that he can put up on my Facebook page. These are especially popular in France. Don’t ask me why but they love me in France. Right now I have two books on
Le Nouvel Observateur
’s list of top twenty bestsellers.