Below the Thunder Page 4

  Marcus had – since Cambridge – worked for the Foreign Office so naturally he knew about these things. He was in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, a spy. Or, as he might designate it: a senior intelligence executive. This he had revealed in strictest confidence only the previous year – probably because he needed to explain to Bryn why, contrary to expectations, he had not risen to an ambassadorship. His employer was the Foreign Office’s Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6 as it was more colloquially known; or ‘Six’ as Marcus called it. Marcus was the brother Bryn had never had, who had known him since birth, and who had successfully patronised him for nearly forty years.

  ‘What on earth do you mean, Marcus?’ he retorted.

  ‘Well, I’ve had postings all over the world. Moscow, Pretoria, Washington, Geneva,’ he drawled, between intervals for sipping his club port. ‘And I’ve seen enough to know which colleagues are likely to assimilate and which not. You indubitably fall into the latter category. You’ll always prefer soccer to baseball, your dreadful Guardian newspaper to the Salt Lake City Tribune, our weather to Utah’s eternal sunshine, draught Bass to Budweiser and – above all – conversations about the things that matter to British people to all that up-country Republican stuff you will surely get in Mormonland. It won’t work, Bryn and you’ll be back in a year.’

  ‘You’re half cut, Marcus. And I won’t.’

  But of course he was right. He was always right.

  That was the last time he’d seen him. He wondered what Marcus was doing now. Curing the world’s problems, dripfeeding his unimpeachable British model into less enlightened societies – the Middle East, for example, various post-Soviet republics – or the USA. He probably had his email address. Perhaps he should get in touch. Not to allow him the satisfaction of saying I told you so; merely to… pick up again. For the first time in a year, Bryn felt homesick for old friends and relations. Even for Marcus.

  And now the young couple at the table opposite were having an argument. A lovers’ spat. The man had pushed his chair away and was glaring at the map of Yosemite while the young woman gazed sullenly out of the window. With an expression Bryn had seen on Marion’s face. Many times.

  He wondered if women had mid-life crises, like men. Had Marion reached an age where what she needed was some sort of ‘re-affirmation’? In which case, if she’d achieved that with Dan, should he expect the crisis to pass? Or – a more sober alternative – was this the culmination of all the dissatisfactions of their life together, gathered up and brought to sharp focus by her affair?

  If the latter, then their relationship really was over. The genie out of the box. Nothing left but the dry legal rehearsal of his deficiencies and the end of any prospect of reconciliation. Damn.

  He was, he concluded, demoralised. Like a dog worrying a dry bone, he had even fallen to analysing what depressed him. Was it the loss of that trusty old comfort blanket, marriage? Was it the shock of realising that Marion might actually prefer someone else? Both were perfectly good reasons to be gloomy. But no: there was a better cause. He was demoralised because he had made a fool of himself. Over Dan.

  Dan, about whom he’d never had any doubts. The pillar of the Utah establishment, his mentor and friend since his twenties, Dan who for years had been pressing him to take his chances in America. And all that while with a private agenda. Dan’s was a betrayal more undermining than anything of Marion’s. He could not (he supposed) blame him for falling in love. But he could/should blame him for his manipulation, his persistence, his pantomime of bemusement at Marion’s unwifely reluctance to join her husband in America and at her feisty, un-Mormon-like, attractive, independence of spirit.

  Enough.

  So here he was enjoying the crowd-packed splendours of Yosemite National Park by himself – Marion having exchanged their planned holiday in California for a rafting trip with a girlfriend in one of Utah’s own National Parks, while Dan sorted things out with his ever complaisant wife. Bigamy not being allowed these days by the mainstream Mormon church.

  What next? That question again. The job had not worked out. He had missed the sparky scepticism of his students in London. The earnest attentiveness of his Mormon students had flattered him at first but over time he’d begun to long for something a bit more challenging. He had not been prepared for their incuriosity about the world outside America and their lack of political engagement – beyond an easy-going acceptance of the conservatism of their parents. He had been frustrated by their reluctance to debate, argue and embrace less conventional positions. Perhaps, after all, the clean-cut Utah model was not for him.

  But the main problem was that the job had not been what he’d expected. He realised now how much Dan had managed to finesse its substantial downside in his eagerness to lure Marion across the Atlantic. Although the post was nominally a senior professorship, there was no chance of tenure for years, and meanwhile Bryn remained effectively on probation. The curriculum was rigid and insensitive to modern historiography; even such matters as reading lists and lecture topics were determined by an elderly head of department.

  It was not surprising that relations with his superiors had deteriorated. His somewhat revisionist, not to say hypercritical, approach to the origins of Mormonism – as mythological as the Old Testament’s version of Jewish history – had raised influential hackles. Even without the marriage crisis, it was unlikely he could have survived for long.

  ‘Sir? Will you have finished here yet?’

  A green uniformed Hispanic lady had been pushing a trolley from table to table and tidying away the customers’ leavings, and was now hovering over him. In the background some anxious European tourists had passed through the pay points and were scanning the room for a spare table. He shook his head apologetically and gestured towards his coffee mug.

  He recalled all too well Udell Strange’s warning about how overcrowded Yosemite was in season. He had several days to use up before the next part of the holiday. Perhaps he should take the advice he’d been given in Bayreuth and travel on up north. He could drive through the less visited National Parks along the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Mountains and still have time to get back to San Francisco for his second dose of Wagner this year, at the War Memorial Opera House.

  Chapter 4

  A man sat down at his table. A short, stocky type, wearing an oldfashioned black San Francisco baseball cap with ‘Giants’ scribbled across a red ball on the front of it. The deep, curved peak jutted out over his face like an awning.

  There was no ‘Do you mind?’ or ‘Is this free?’. Bryn wondered if he had even registered that he was sitting there.

  There was a brief flicker of the man’s eyes before they disappeared within the shadow of the cap peak.

  ‘OK, dawg?’ he said.

  He took several plates, a coffee mug and cutlery from his tray and began to arrange them in front of him. With the flat palms of his hands, he moved the maple syrup dispenser and the glass container of the ‘no calorie sweetener’ packs of Splenda and Equal, over to an empty corner of the table.

  He was so engrossed that Bryn was able at leisure to study the unsheltered part of his face. The man had puffy jowls, as if he was on steroids. Or maybe he’d had plastic surgery. Bryn guessed his age at no more than forty, too early, one might have thought, for improvements – he wondered if he had suffered a facial injury. He might be an old soldier, recently retired with a Purple Heart for his wounds.

  When the man had ordered the placement to his satisfaction, he folded his hands together and raised his head slightly so that the cap peak aimed directly at Bryn’s chest.

  ‘You Brits must be pissin’ yourselves laughin’ at us,’ he said.

  Bryn suppressed an impulse to ask how he knew he was British. Perhaps he’d heard him speaking earlier, or picked on some characteristic element of his clothing or demeanour or haircut. Or it could have been the old Harrods carrier bag hanging from the back of his chair.

  ‘Three weeks before Election Da
y and the guy turns out to be a friggin’ closet gay. Hot damn! Waddya think of that?’

  Bryn knew exactly what he meant. Everyone on the globe would have known. Around autumn the previous year, the Presidential front runner – with the polls predicting a landslide – was revealed to have had a homosexual affair. He’d reacted with a categorical and self-righteous denial. Then a thirty year old photograph had emerged of his youthful self, naked and in flagrante delicto. He challenged the authenticity of the photograph. And the man who took the photograph was wheeled out to contradict him. The general view was that his enemies had orchestrated the process to perfection, and stitched up the wouldbe President as neatly as a triple by-pass.

  By now, the November 4th ballot was days away. The candidate stubbornly refused to stand down. To be fair, it was unclear under the American Constitution whether he could legally do so at such a late stage. At all events, the expected landslide completely reversed direction. The conservative evangelical constituency which had built up the candidate recoiled in horror; and his no-hoper liberal rival, a black woman senator, swept in on the lowest popular turn-out in nearly a hundred years.

  ‘Could that ever happen in Ing-e-land, man?’

  ‘Not under our system. No,’ said Bryn, trying not to get drawn into an extended conversation.

  But at that point, regrettably, the inner pedant took over.

  ‘You see in Britain, technically,’ he said, ‘we vote for a party not a leader. So in principle it should be easier to unload the candidate even at a late stage.

  ‘Though I suppose,’ he added, more reflectively, ‘the nett effect might be much the same. But maybe we wouldn’t worry quite so much about what a man did when he was twenty.’

  The most remarkable effect of the debacle was that the new President – once unelectable because of an agenda closer to socialism than any in American history – now had a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Congress and a genuine if brief opportunity to change the whole direction of American policy at home and abroad.

  ‘Waddya think of that?’ said the man again, waving a hand towards the neatly folded tabloid newspaper he had placed beside his breakfast setting. All Bryn could see was a screaming headline attacking the latest government policy.

  ‘It’ll be the end of freedom, I tell ya,’ he exclaimed vehemently. ‘Freedom of speech for a start. You can wave goodbye to all that, dawg!’

  In fact Bryn had rather enjoyed the humiliation the Election had wrought upon the American media. Its partisan identification with the disgraced candidate had – in particular – made a bonfire of the credibility of the television and radio channels. To such an extent that there was now a Bill before Congress to renew the old 1950s ‘Fairness Doctrine’ abolished in 1987 by President Reagan. Significantly toughened up to enforce political balance across all news and comment programmes.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It could be the end of Glenn Beck and Fox News.’

  ‘It’s like goddamn Soviet Russia!’ said the man, even more passionately.

  He had a peculiar voice, reedy, thin, almost falsetto. Bryn reckoned himself pretty good at identifying accents, but failed to pin this one down at all. Not from California anyway.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ Bryn replied. ‘You can’t legislate for texting and twitter and the blog networks. I’d say the people are now finding their voice and the views of the mainstream channels will become irrelevant. The problem for the ruling classes is that it’ll get more and more difficult for them to spend their way to power.’

  But he was on a roll and could not resist a little gratuitous provocation.

  ‘Who knows,’ he added, ‘you could get real American democracy at last.’

  The man lowered his cap towards Bryn’s middle shirt button and lapsed into silence. For a moment Bryn thought that his professorial authority might have cowed him into submission. But no. For the second time in a month, he found himself marvelling at the capacity of people with fixed political views to assume that he must agree with everything they said.

  ‘The American people won’t stick for it. Right. If you ask me,’ the man added, confidingly, ‘the real problem is the guy she’s got as Vice President. Flaxman. East Coast Jew. He never thought he’d be anything – you know, like Harry S Truman. Now he’s runnin’ Congress and it’s gone to his head. No way is she ever goin’ to get re-elected. But him. Hell, she’s a friggin’ woman, for Christ’s sake. How would she deal with a war? Commander-in-chief? Don’t make me laugh. Flaxman would take over. He needs to be stopped hard, know what I mean? You’re an expert on history, aren’tcha? What’s the odds on a VP takin’ over before the friggin’ President completes her first term?’

  You’re an expert on history?

  Where did that come from?

  The cap peak continued to target Bryn’s shirt as if awaiting its reply.

  ‘Why would I know?’ he murmured.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘I thought you knew about these things,’ the man replied. ‘From what you said earlier.’

  And that seemed to be it, at least for the time being.

  The young man at the table opposite was writing something on the back of the Yosemite map. He pushed it across to the young woman. She continued to study the landscape through the window. He pushed it again, like a dog nudging his mistress’s ankle. Eventually she consented to look down, and picked the document up. Her features began to crumple. She grabbed his hand. And kissed him full on the lips.

  Bryn had to look away.

  Somewhere in the background, his new companion had changed topics and was now developing a private theory about the malign intentions of objects.

  ‘Have y’ever noticed,’ he said, in his high, thin alto, ‘how stuff works against ya? Sure you’ve noticed. But have y’ever wondered why friggin’ computers always crash before you’ve saved the friggin’ work? Why stuff falls out of the highest part of the cupboard? Hey, have y’ever thought there might be some kind of mind behind all this? Somethin’ messin’ with us. Like I’m walking through woods and a poison ivy vine… ’

  He paused to check Bryn was following him, and continued –

  ‘… falls across your face the goddamn second I pass below it. How many times has your car run low when you’re miles from anywhere? It never happens in town, does it? Always when you’re out there on the turnpike, two hours from the next gas station. Don’t nobody tell me it’s coincidence, dawg.’

  Time, Bryn felt, to make his excuses and leave. He put his coffee mug down.

  ‘Have you done here, sir?’

  It was the trolley lady again. As she reached out for Bryn’s empty mug, his companion pushed a plateful of untouched hash browns and eggy French toast towards her.

  ‘You can take that,’ he said.

  She stared at it as if non-plussed.

  The man produced a wallet from the back of his jeans and laid it open on the table and teased out a dollar bill and thrust it at her. She backed away in embarrassment.

  ‘Why you give me that?’ she said, her voice rising up the scale. ‘I not waiter. I just do my job.’

  And with that, she swept his plate onto a tray with a pile of other dirty crockery and scuttled away to her trolley.

  The interruption gave Bryn his opportunity and he rose to his feet. The man’s California State ‘Driver License’ was in a transparent window in the open wallet. He could see a San Francisco address and a name. Jack Wilson. A name he felt sure he’d heard somewhere before.

  ‘Nice knowing you,’ said the man, as Bryn prepared to leave.

  But something seemed to have disturbed him and he started looking around anxiously.

  ‘Do you have the salt?’ he said. ‘Do I have to get it from somewhere else?’

  He began to get up too, as if he intended to raid the next table or pursue the departing trolley lady.

  ‘No no,’ said Bryn. ‘I think you’ll find it’s behind the napkin box.’

  ‘No way,
buddy.’

  ‘Behind the paper napkins. Really.’ He picked up his carrier bag and backed away.

  ‘There’s no salt on this fuckin’ table, you fuckin’ idiot!’

  Or that’s what Bryn thought he heard him say.

  It stopped him in his tracks. He returned to the table and quickly moved aside the napkin container – not a particularly substantial item – to reveal the salt and pepper shakers. The man stared at them perplexedly.

  As Bryn left him, he was still sitting deep in his private contemplation – and was in the exact same position when Bryn reached the self-service counter at the far end of the room and took a last look back.

  It was then that he realised the man was wearing short, expensively tooled, cowboy boots, one of which, like a child, he’d kicked off. They had the highest and slimmest Cuban heels he had ever seen; and though Mr Wilson’s torso was that of an average-sized man, his legs were so short that the boot-less foot did not quite reach the floor.

  The room began to clear. It was the mid-morning exodus when the tourist parties rose as a single person, as if a starting gun had been fired, to catch their coach tours. One of them must have bumped into the trolley lady because there was an almighty crash as her pile of crockery cascaded to the floor. She burst into tears and colleagues scrambled across the restaurant to comfort her. Every head turned to gaze at her humiliation.

  Except for one. Jack Wilson remained absorbed in the mystery of his salt shaker.

  Bryn returned to his room.

  He needed a breath of fresh mountain air. He rummaged in his travelling bag for the iPhone. He’d not used it since Bayreuth – it had been a present from Marion and its facilities had rather lost their charm. But he was beginning to feel more relaxed. Sufficient to memorialise his magnificent surroundings with a few snaps.

  He walked down to Yosemite village, bought a large-scale map in the serious hiker shop, two bottles of water and some milk chocolate Hershey bars, and set off for the less populated eastern end of the valley.