Thunder in the Blood (33 page)

On Christmas Day he’d gone into a coma. Hopelessly out of their depth, they’d called for an ambulance. Within an hour, Wesley was in hospital in Exeter, a room of his own on the fourth floor. Not getting him into hospital earlier had been a mistake. Without the right cocktail of drugs, his defences virtually destroyed, infection had run riot. His mouth was thick with fungus. Pus had swamped his lungs. A violent rash covered the whole of his upper body. He was three quarters blind. His brain had started to go.

Eileen, a kind woman, told me it was better that I’d never seen him like this, and listening, I believed her. At the end of the beach, where the sand laps up to the cliffs, we paused a moment. I knew what I wanted. I wanted a last sign, some signal, a message he’d left me, something to hang on to. I looked at her, trying to put the question into words, but it was Pete who stepped across and slipped his arm round my shoulders, knowing exactly what I was trying to say, breaking the news as gently as he could.

‘At the end,’ he said, ‘there was nothing.’

Wesley was cremated at Exeter on 2 January 1992. In the flat I found a note he’d written me about the arrangements. He wanted nobody there except his mother, Mark and myself. All
his money was to go to his mother. The rest of what he owned was to come to me. This bequest included his books, notes, tapes, diaries, everything he’d been collecting since he’d met Grant Wallace in Geneva. It also included his ashes, plus a detailed set of instructions about their disposal.

Wesley’s last few weeks at Exmouth had evidently made a real impression on him. He’d loved the view from where we’d lived, the sound of the waves on the beach below the flat. Accordingly, he’d asked me to scatter his ashes at sea, in the deep-water channel, within sight of land. The weather had to be awful. The sea had to be rough and if possible, he wrote, it ought to be pissing down with rain.

The crematorium gave me his ashes in a small metal box. I put them on the mantelpiece in the flat, consulting the television forecasts every night, waiting for the weather to worsen. When a particularly deep depression appeared in the western Atlantic, I made friends with a fishing skipper in the docks. For £50 he’d take me to sea in any weather. For another £50, he’d bring me back.

I waited two days. On the third morning, I got up to the howl of gale-force winds. The trees on the Beacon were bent double and sand was blowing knee-high across the beach. Even my fisherman was having second thoughts.

I’d brought the money in cash. We set sail around noon. The little boat, sturdy enough, bucked and rolled in the heavy sea. The clouds were like smoke, torn and ragged in the wind, and there was a thin yellow light, eerie, almost livid. If Wesley had been there, he’d have found a word for it. Operatic would have done nicely.

We made it as far as the dog-leg that takes the deep-water channel into the open sea. The weather, if anything, had worsened, the wind stronger, the seas longer, the clouds occasionally parting, fingers of light lancing through. The skipper put the wheel over, bringing us bow-first into the weather, steadying the boat as best he could. In the tiny wheelhouse, we exchanged glances.

‘Now?’

He nodded, and I inched open the door and squeezed through, trying not to lose my footing on the slippery deck. At the back
of the boat, I steadied myself against the low rail, freeing my hands, trying to prise the lid off the box. The boat was pitching up and down, taking me with it, the sea boiling an angry brown beneath the stern.

Finally, I got the lid off. Inside, to my surprise, was a thick grey sludge, more solid and more sticky than I’d imagined. I looked at it a moment, nonplussed. There was a layer or two of ash on top, quite granular, and it was already blowing everywhere. I closed my eyes a moment and muttered a simple prayer, good luck, God bless. Then I threw the lot overboard. In the wind and the rain, I didn’t even see the splash, which is probably the way Wesley would have wanted it. The music, he always told me, not the fucking players.

Epilogue

Finishing this book has taken me deep into autumn. The garden outside my bedroom window is glorious, the best possible evidence that my father’s time is now his own, and he potters around it for most of the day, returning to the house for meals and the odd cup of tea. Things between us have eased a lot over the summer, give and take on both sides, and once or twice, nearing the end of this account, I’ve wondered about telling him what it contains, letting him into our little secret, Wesley’s story, but every time the opportunity comes up, something holds me back. My father’s life, after all, has been based on a certain view of the way things are. He believes in the integrity of Westminster and Whitehall. In uniform, he’s risked his life to defend the system. Who am I to tell him that much of it has been a sham? That money and power count for more than mere principle?

This little quandary has preoccupied me a great deal in recent weeks. Then, yesterday, came the perfect opening. The morning paper arrived late. I took it into the living room. My father was eating a boiled egg at the table in the window. I gave him the paper, turning away, hearing him chuckle.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘Here.’

He showed me the paper. Across the top, for once, was good news. A multi-billion-pound arms deal, preserved in the teeth of American competition.
‘SAUDIS CONFIRM TERMS’
went the headline,
‘HUGE BOOST FOR UK JOBS’.
My eye ran on down the page, pausing at the photo in the middle, the DTI junior minister who’d helped clinch the deal. It was a head and shoulders shot, less than flattering. I gave the paper back to my father. He was beaming.

‘Thank God
someone’s
still up to the mark,’ he said, peering at the caption beneath the photo. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Priddy,’ I said, ‘Lawrence Priddy.’

‘Quite.’ My father glanced up. ‘Where would we be without people like him?’