The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

Copyright

The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2013

Copyright © Ian Thornton 2013

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013

Ian Thornton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007551491

Ebook Edition © NOV 2013 ISBN: 9780007551507

Version: 2015-09-08

To Heather, Laszlo and Clementine

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue:

A Refracted Tale of Two Wordy Old Gentlemen in a Blue Prism

Part One

1 Around the Time When Adolf Was a Glint in His First Cousin’s Eye

2 Pawn to Queen Four

3 Serendipity’s Day Off

4 The Butterflies Flutter By

Part Two

1 Fools Rush In

2 A Vision of Love (Wearing Boxing Gloves)

3 Drago Thoms: Pythagoras, Madness, and an Indian Summer in Bed

4 The Kama Sutra, Ganika, and Russian Vampires

5 We Are the Music Makers. We Are the Dreamers of Dreams.

6 A Sweet Deity of Debauchery

7 A Day (or So) in the Country

8 Just a Lucky Man Who Made the Grade

9 The Accusative Case

10 The Black Hand

11 The Day Abu Hasan Broke Wind

12 A Microcosm of the Apocalypse

13 A Farewell of Scarlet Wax and Gardenia

Part Three

1 And the Ass Saw the Angel

2 It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Part I)

3 The Die Is Cast (aka Les Jeux Sont Faits)

4 The Unlikely Bedfellow

5 “Ciao Bello!”

6 The March of Don Quixote

7 In No-Man’s-Land

8 “A Shadow Can Never Claim the Beauty of the Image”

9 The Birth of Blanche in a Dangerous Ladbroke Grove Pub

10 Cicero’s Fine Oceanarium of Spewed Wonders (1920–1932)

11 Suffragettes, Mermaids, and Hooligans (1932)

12 Let’s Rusticate Again

13 Jackboots, Cleopatra, and the Bearded Lady (1932–1936)

14 The Girl in the Tatty Blue Dress

15 She Had a Most Immoral Eye (1937–1940)

16 Archibald’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

17 Then There Were Three Again

18 Music, Brigadiers, and Marigold (1940)

19 It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Part II)

20 “Gawd Bless Ya, Gav’nah!”

21 A Giant in the Promised Land

22 Pepper’s Ghost, Fluffers, and a Brief Encounter

Part Four

1 “Everybody Ought to Go Careful in a City Like This” (1945)

2 The Return of Abu Hasan

3 The Brigadier’s Au Revoir

4 The Veil

5 A Blue Rose by Any Other Name

6 Dragons, Confucius, and Snooker

7 “I Know Who You Are!”

8 The Death and Life of a Grim Reaper

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

Prologue

A Refracted Tale of Two Wordy Old Gentlemen in a Blue Prism

A rural cricket match in buttercup time, seen and heard through the trees; it is surely the loveliest scene in England and the most disarming sound. From the ranks of the unseen dead forever passing along our country lanes, the Englishman falls out for a moment to look over the gate of the cricket field and smile.

—J. M. Barrie

2009. Northern England

I sat with my grandfather Ernest in a very comfortable, spacious ward in the hospital in Goole. The doctors had said that he would not live for much more than a week.

Goole is as Goole sounds, a dirty-gray inland port in Yorkshire not far from England’s east coast. More than one hundred years earlier, Count Dracula might well have grimaced as he passed through, en route from Whitby to Carfax Abbey. Most foreigners (and some southerners) think it is spelled Ghoul, especially after their first, and invariably only, visit. This is where Ernest’s final days were to be spent, though at least the hospital sat at the very edge of town and his window faced the more pleasant countryside.

It had been a rapid decline for a man who, well into his nineties, on the eleventh day of the previous November, had walked the three and three-quarter miles to the train station before daybreak. He had traveled south on three trains of varying decrepitude and two rickety tubes to stand by the Cenotaph on Whitehall with thousands of others. Many were bemedaled, some wheelchaired, but each had a shared something behind the eyes and a similar thought focused just above the horizon, as the high bells of St. Stephen’s in Westminster struck eleven and the nation fell silent. Then, with only tea accompanied by Bovriled and buttered crumpets from the Wolseley on Piccadilly as fuel, he had made the return trip the same day, pushing open, with untroubled lungs, his unlatched door way past the time that saw most decent folks in bed. He had told me that it was the only day he could ever remember when he had not conversed with a single person. He had had his reasons.

Now he tugged at a length of clear plastic tubing, which disappeared under sterile white tape and into the wattle of his forearm; an artificial tributary into the slowing yet still magnificent deep red tide within. He did not appear to be uncomfortable. On the contrary, he exhibited a strong and urgent desire to speak.

He gestured toward the clock above his bed with his right hand. “In the story I am about to tell, please bear in mind the possible minor defects and chronological leaps in the memory of a dying man or two. Exaggeration is naturally occurring in the DNA of the cadaver known as the tale. This is important.” He looked straight at me in the way that he always had, in order to let me know that this part of the game was not to be taken lightly.

I do not paraphrase, for my grandfather spoke this way from as far back as I can recall. His deliberate and florid verbals had always transformed the planning, execution, and completion of what for a young lad might otherwise have been everyday chores, into marvelous adventures of joyous nonsense. He turned tuneless whistles into lush arias effortlessly.

He had been my mentor and teacher, instructing me on how to hold a fish knife, stun a billiard ball. He taught me the subtleties and implications of en passant on the chessboard. He knew whether to introduce the team to the Queen or the Queen to the team. He taught me that the correct answer to “How do you do?” is indeed “How do you do?” Of his early life, I vaguely recall references to his days as an emetic, vicious, ear-tugging martinet of a schoolmaster; his inherited connections to and shares in the Cunard shipping line, gained through an ancestor’s good fortune in a Cape Town card game over ever-cheapening rum with bothersome (but luckily pie-eyed and wobbly) pirates; his junior partnership with Sir Thomas Beecham,1 England’s greatest-ever conductor and founder of both the Royal and the London Philharmonic orchestras; dinners with royalty, with Niven and Korda, Gielgud and Fonteyn, Olivier and Churchill. I remember framed monochrome photographs of him at that time, as a young man in a Savile Row tuxedo, Jermyn Street cuff links, well-heeled Bond Street shoes, a heavily starched shirt, and a head of black hair expertly topped off with a light Brylcreem.

This did not seem to me to be the same person who, from the boundary rope on summer afternoons of my boyhood, taught me the lengthy names of Welsh railway stations, chuckled at cricketers being struck in the groin or on the backside, and joyously read to me Kipling, Barrie, and The Captain Erasmus Adventurer’s Book for Boys, Daredevils and Young Kings. And he was far from the man who lay before me now, though from the neck up, at least, he appeared unchanged—his matinee idol’s widow’s peak proudly silver, his eyes active and mischievous. The sunken contours of the bedsheets, however, suggested that much of the man I had known all my life was already gone.

I suspected that it was right to remain silent. I thought it misplaced to counter his statement about dying men, for we knew each other too well. He would indeed die, in this bed constructed for such purposes. He would soon be not breathing. And cold. I knew I must simply listen.

I had always loved my grandfather’s stories. At first, I believed them absolutely. Later, I tried to distinguish between truth and fairy tale. I often got this wrong. Of course, I had been spoon-fed cynicism from an early age by Ernest’s wife, Betty, my dear late grandmother, who had told me repeatedly, “Lad! Never believe anything of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”

But of all the stories he ever told me, not one compared to the one he now told me in the last hours of his life. I believed him then. I still believe him.

* * *

It was during a stint as the mayor of Goole that Ernest, a very sprightly eighty-eight, spent two weeks in the hills outside Sarajevo in the sublimely warm and cloudless April of 2003, attempting to find a twin town for his parish. Sarajevo had been chosen for personal reasons; Ernest had recently read his father’s wartime diaries, in which the old city had featured heavily and whose characters had enthralled him.

Very early one Friday morning, Ernest stumbled across a shack in a village destroyed by war, a hermitage surrounded by a sea of flowers, a prism of blues, azures, cobalts, teals, and beryls. Of lilacs and violets.

Ernest recalled with absolute clarity the fine sapphire haze through which he walked. Peeking through a grubby, splintered pane, he saw a small, square room, with unsure blue light leaking in from another window on the opposite wall. An old man was moving slowly within, declaiming loudly enough for Ernest to hear from outside.

“I am the Resurrection.

And I am the Life . . .”

Ernest tapped on the window. The old man stopped moving and turned slowly to him, seeming to beckon him in.

Ernest entered the shack hesitantly. The door opened slowly and required the help of Ernest’s upper arm to overcome the resistance, though there was neither lock nor latch. There were minimal signs of a woman’s recent presence: a tray with two plates, cutlery and an empty goblet, a jug of water, a vase of yellow roses. By them he saw an exquisite old man, with a mournful, creased countenance and worldly-wise eyes that appeared a youthful blue.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” the old man said in a superb English accent. “You might be in a position to help me. The alignment of events is quite remarkable, and I see now perhaps necessary. Are you fond of mathematics, my friend? Symmetry? Patterns? The Laws of Physics? I suspect you think I am a madman. I always proudly confess this to be true. For what is the blasted point otherwise?”

Ernest chuckled, and then chuckled again when he realized that the old man was being totally serious.

“And what about time travel?” the old man continued. “I think I may be about to crack it. Johan Thoms is the name,” he said.

Ernest moved cautiously across the worn boards into an area less cramped by relics and reminders whose relevance he was soon to understand. This old man’s collection appeared to him to encapsulate a life, and to fill his nostrils with a poignant aroma, a scent of a moment in time.

He watched as the man edged forward, barefoot. Barely keeping his balance, he shuffled to a stop. Ernest continued to observe the solitarian.

“These things you see here are my vortex, my portal, a wormhole in the space-time continuum, my passage back in time.”

They heard a noise in the corner of his shack.

“That bastard thug of a rat is back to ruin my day!”

He started to reach for a rusty old fork that lay on the stained sideboard beside him. But before he had managed any back lift with which to propel the missile, the toothy rodent was gone.

“One of these old friends shall allow me to slip through, slip back. My escape route.”

The old man waved at a handful of aged objects, nestled around him in his makeshift hermitage; a trilogy of aged books, some sepia photographs, a wireless radio set, a crystal paperweight within which a bit of paper seemed to float, a battered typewriter, several bound manuscripts, an empty bottle of cologne, a remarkable open sea chest filled with yellowed, crispy letters and powder-blue ones written in the same tidy feminine handwriting. “If I concentrate hard enough at the right time, when the stars are in the right constellation,” he explained to Ernest, “I’m sure I’ll be transported back through history.” Back to the time when the paper was new, without words. To when the ink was royal blue, fresh and wet, still on the nib hovering above the top left corner of the sheet and about to leave its indelible and permanent message.

Johan picked up a handful of the blue sheets, inhaled deeply, a trace of a smile on his lips, and then passed them to Ernest, keeping his eyes on them. Some were addressed in identical fine calligraphy to Miss Blanche de la Peña.

Johan continued. “I shall now glide back to our belle époque. I shall balance the books and save mankind. And this time around I shall perhaps allow myself the small luxury of being with her. I know where and when to find her. Even if I did not, my pulse should be drawn to her conductivity.” Here he paused, closing his eyes and gathering his breath. “This time I shall bathe in her. This time she will be my perpetual banquet of roasted delights and also my scarlet Bacchus with which to wash her own self down. I swear it.” His diatribe gathered momentum and volume, reaching a crescendo. “As a youth, I shall keep one eye on the white June night when we shall meet on the lawns of the Old Sultan’s Palace, but I shall glide there and not burn my precious days en route. I shall bask in the knowledge of devilish, God-given treats ahead to be devoured over decades. She will feel a vampirus coming through time. She will demand it and recognize it when it comes with uncomfortable, pleasurable consternation. Lorelei!”

He paused, and tilted his head back to speak to a higher power.

“Dionysus! Inform those spirits to clear the way, for my dry run is over, and what sort of cretin does not learn by his mistakes, particularly ones of the magnitude and the severity in which I infamously deal?

“I have attempted to cultivate the mythical and elusive Blue Rose of Forgetfulness to erase my memory forever and to therefore discover the ecstatic state of knowing no pain, but I have merely succeeded in shrouding and blanketing the landscape around this hut in a mass of flowers of varying hues of azure. Indeed, the shades of the flora only haunt me more, reminding me of my pivotal summer almost ninety years ago. Time is so short. I have to escape this scabby quod, this jail, this grimmest of prisons which I call my mind, which is right now closing in on the remnants of my consciousness and the shards of my sanity. If only I could find that portal back. For the sake of all mankind.

“I am the Resurrection

And I am the Life.”

He repeated this until his deluded mantra was broken by his own words.

“I have afflicted every soul on this planet. Believers and infidels. Heretics and blasphemers. I defy you to find a life I have not changed or ended. The twentieth century was mine. Just the final Apocalypse to welcome in. Should I have the politeness, should I display the etiquette to die first?”

My grandfather Ernest did nothing all Easter weekend but sit in one of Bosnia’s most dilapidated chairs, in an excuse of a dwelling, with another old man. He did not budge except to urinate and to move his bowels. Uncharacteristically, Ernest hardly said a word himself. He just sat and listened. It was one old gentleman’s story to another; that of the host, a tale which covers a life of over one hundred years; the other not far off, and therefore (as in many biographies and autobiographies) one where a day may seem to last an age and where a decade may slip by within a sentence or paragraph.

According to my grandfather, Johan claimed to have changed—actually to have destroyed—the twentieth century.

Ernest had hoped to keep the story for a time when we would have an adequate number of days together to record the magnum opus of Johan Thoms. There remained within him a discipline to do things correctly and with due process, though this was marvelously mixed with a sense of the romantic and the truly delicious. My grandfather, the ordered musician, the headmaster, the recounter of fine and giant fables. Time, though, would have her wicked way. And so it was my task, my solemn duty, not only to hear the tale of Johan Thoms, but to complete it. Ernest pleaded with me, “Glide gently, my dear boy. In buttercup times. Down country lanes. Never forgetting to fall out from the ranks, look over that old gate, and to smile.”

Part One

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

One

Around the Time When Adolf Was a Glint in His First Cousin’s Eye

Give and it shall be given to you. For whatever measure you deal out to others, it will be dealt to you in return.

—Luke 6:38

February 1894. Bosnia

Johan Thoms (pronounced Yo-han Tomes) was born in Argona, a small town twenty-three miles south of Sarajevo, during the hellish depths of winter 1894.

His family was not overly religious. They were, however, surrounded in the village by enough Catholicism to expose Johan osmotically to the curse of guilt.

Johan was an only child, and had been lucky to live through a worrying labor. He was a breach birth, and arrived a month early, on the twelfth of February. He had jaundice and coughed up blood. The umbilical cord was wrapped tight around his neck. Thick black curls crowned his large head. The cause of his parents’ worry was that another boy had been born to them four years earlier in exactly the same manner. He’d shared the same characteristics: the yellow skin, the breach, the cord, the blood, the hair. Carl had not survived. Drago and Elena feared a repeat. It was probably from this fear that there developed an extra-special bond between parents and child.

Johan pulled through. Within three months, he shed his sub-Saharan curls, and he appeared less yellow by the day. With his now fair hair, the blue eyes of his mother, Elena, and the surname Thoms, there was more than a hint in Johan of Aryanesque lineage from Austria and the north. He became almost normal looking.

Johan was happier than most boys, alone with a soccer ball in the street, or a chess set in front of the hearth. Even if he was only playing against himself—usually the domain of the autistic and potentially schizophrenic—he would remain occupied for hours.

He was a smart child, and he went about his boyhood business with a minimum of fuss. If it had not been for the food disappearing from his plate three times daily, his underclothes getting a weekly scrub, and his bedclothes marginally disturbed each morning, his parents might have sworn that they were nursing nothing more than a friendly poltergeist. He was ordinary and unobtrusive. If he was two, three, or even four hours late home from school, he was not missed. Maybe it would have been better for all involved if his lateness—due usually to his error-riddled sense of direction—had been noted.

Maybe then, things would have been different.

* * *

Johan’s father, Drago, was also an only child, born on his parents’ isolated farm near the Serbian border in 1854. He was forty years old by the time young Johan appeared.

Drago resembled a mad professor (which was convenient given that he was one, albeit a fine one). His unruly hair looked like it was always ready for a street battle, and he lacked full vision in his right eye. He loved to don an eye patch, but equally enjoyed switching the patch from one eye to the other, or even to remove it to see people struggle to know into which pupil to look. His poor vision meant he only did this when stationary, to avoid accidents. This was one of his many ideas of fun. Yet his strong, handsome features outweighed his quirks. He was a strapping six foot three and boasted a lean jaw, olive skin, mocha eyes, and a regulation fashion sense. However, he always donned at least one distinctive, unforgettable item on any given day. This might be a solid silver pocket watch (engraved, chiming, charming), or bright red socks; or, to complement a handlebar mustache, he would loop around his sinewy neck a gold chain with a miniature comb attached. He christened the comb “Jezebel” and would run her through his hirsute top lip.

Drago had flat feet and a tendency to waffle on about absolutely nothing for an age, often to complete strangers. But he had a huge heart. The whole town knew it, as he teased and trundled through his daily life without setting their world on fire.

Two

Pawn to Queen Four

Chess is a fairy tale of 1001 blunders.

—Savielly Tartakower

May 1901. Near Sarajevo.

Most adults fell in love with Johan’s deep blue eyes, but his contemporaries at school preferred to concentrate on the size of his ash-blond mopped head, which was larger than average at best. At worst, he resembled a fugitive from Easter Island.

Johan walked with that six-year-old’s nongait, which, accentuated by the size of his head and pipe-cleaner legs, verged on a cute stagger.