Quintin Jardine
Alarm Call
Prologue
Well, hello again; I’ve been expecting you. .
It’s been a while, a year and more, since you made me let you in on my last dark secret.
Thinking back, I probably left you wondering whether I was kidding myself in believing that I had put it all behind me, and that nothing would bubble up to the surface and spoil my party.
If I did, you can relax, or curse, depending on how you really feel about me. There has been no fall-out from that business, and having come this far down the road, there ain’t going to be any.
I suppose that, once I’d told you all about it, you might have made some pretty damning moral judgements about me. If you did. . well, all I can say is that it’s your call. I’m not sorry about what I did; my only regret is that I was left with no other choice.
Has it given me nightmares? No, not a single one; not a new one, at any rate. Do I feel remorseful? No, not in the slightest.
Actually, since all that stuff happened, I’ve been too busy even to think about it. As always, what I’ve been doing hasn’t been exactly conventional. .
Chapter 1
Nobody’s luck holds good for ever. . or so they say. Personally, I have no evidence to prove that assertion, but plenty to disprove it. Every morning I waken. . yes, okay, I concede that occasionally I don’t waken till the afternoon, but only if I have an extra big lump of jet-lag, an occupational hazard in my business, to work off; some movie actors may make a virtue of boogieing all night, but not this happy family man. Anyhow, as I was saying. .
Christ, that brings something back, and a tear to my eye in the process. In my callow(-er) years, after I’d flown the family nest and embarked upon that determined shagathon known as university education, I made a point of phoning my mother every couple of days. (If I’d known how long she had left to live I’d have gone home to see her every other day, but there’s no point in dwelling on that.)
I didn’t call her about anything in particular, not to beg extra funds or anything like that. . she and my dad spoiled me in that respect. . but simply because I missed her more than I’d ever imagined I would when I set off from Anstruther into the real world outside, the Happy Wanderer with my metaphorical knapsack on my back. (Actually, in those days I really didn’t know what missing her was like; I found out after she died.)
We didn’t talk about anything in particular; she’d ask me if I was feeding myself properly, and I’d ask her if she was feeding my dad properly, just joking around, that sort of stuff. My mum was a great listener; she humoured my homesickness (I’d never have admitted it then, but that’s what it was) but she had a wonderful way of bringing my ramblings to an end, and. . she thought. . of sending me back to work.
We all have our habits and foibles in speech, those little things we say as conversation shifters, pauses for thought. The most common among mine was that great nonsense word of the Scottish language, ‘anyhow’. She was always chiding me about it when I was a kid; she was afraid that my sister Ellie and I would grow up with impenetrable East Neuk accents, and took great pains to ensure that we didn’t. Shoddy language was not allowed, period. However, that’s not to say it didn’t happen.
In those long conversations with her, sooner or later, I would fall from grace. It usually happened when I’d run out of things to say, but wasn’t ready for ‘Cheerio’; there would be a silence, which, once I’d worked out what to say next, I would break with a deep breath, and an ‘Anyhow’. When I did, she would give that incredibly warm chuckle of hers and say, ‘Oz, if we’re down to the “anyhow”s, it’s time you got on with your life,’ and that would be that, for another couple of days.
For all the crazy stuff that’s happened to me over the last five years, since I stumbled into acting, I like to think I’ve kept my feet on the ground, and that my boots. . or shoes more often these days. . still fit me. It would be easy to believe my press cuttings. . the favourable ones, that is; I never have any trouble accepting the bad. . and getting altogether too pleased with myself.
While I might get a bit showbiz from time to time, it never gets out of hand, for one simple reason: my mum’s always around when it happens. She’s my safety valve; she comes into my mind with a gentle smile and a shake of her head to bring me back to being the boy she brought up and to make sure that I’m not getting too big for my footwear.
Okay, after some of the things I’ve told you, you may say that if she’s been good for my ego, there’s another side of me she’s ignored. That’s not true, because not even she knew all of me, and everything of which I’ve shown myself capable from time to time.
But mothers are love, and love is blind.
Anyhow, as I was saying: every morning I waken, look at Susie lying there beside me. . I always surface before she does when I’m not jet-lagged, now that wee Jonathan no longer requires to be plugged into the mains at some ungodly hour. . and I pinch myself. . no kidding, I really do give myself a nip. . just to make sure that I’m still alive, and not observing all this through a celestial telescope.
In the last few years I’ve come to think of myself as the luckiest man on the planet, and now I reckon I must be one of the happiest as well. Sure, there are dark memories: for a start, there was my mother’s death, and then the loss of Jan, my soulmate from childhood and my first wife. There was all that bad stuff with Primavera Phillips, who beguiled me for a while, and with whom I shared one of the shortest marriages on record, before she pissed off with a B-list actor. And then, as you know, about eighteen months back there was another local difficulty when someone took it into his head to attack Susie’s construction business, the Gantry Group.
Those things all happened, there’s no hiding from them, but they’re all in their wee mental boxes. . some with extra heavy padlocks so they don’t break out and they don’t stop me enjoying the incredibly good. . and incredibly large … fortune that’s come my way.
It was after we got back from Australia that the small cloud edged its way over the horizon.
I had been out there working on another project for Miles Grayson, my friend and former brother-in-law, and I had taken Susie, wee Janet and wee Jonathan with me. We were there making a movie called Red Leather, about England’s Aussie cricket tour in 1932 and 1933, the bodyline series in which the English captain, Douglas R. Jardine (me), came up with an innovative if homicidal way of beating the Aussies, who were inspired at that time by the legendary Don Bradman (Miles). If you don’t know anything about cricket, take some time to look at Bradman’s record and then compare him with anyone else who ever picked up a bat. All of the rest, even the greatest of them, pale into insignificance alongside him; that’s how good he was.
When the project was announced, Hollywood’s collective eyebrows rose and its media exclaimed, ‘What?’ They were convinced that for all Miles’s record of box-office success as a film-maker, a picture about cricket would be doomed. They argued that very few Americans knew anything about the game, and that most of those who did profess to knowing the rules didn’t understand them. . a bit like Brits and baseball, I suppose.
It was one of their more spectacular mistakes.
In fact, the movie isn’t about cricket, it’s about the incredible confrontation that exploded between the two nations, England and Australia, over Jardine’s tactic of bowling not at the wicket (those three bits of wood with two smaller bits of wood on top that the bowlers are supposed to try to hit with the ball) but at the batsmen (batters, if you’re American) themselves. They didn’t wear helmets in those days, so inevitably the row came to a literal head when an unfortunate Aussie named Oldfield had his skull fractured by Harold Larwood, the English speed demon. Larwood actually apologised to his victim as he was being carted off to hospital, but since Oldfield was unconscious at the time, he did not respond.