The Man Who Rode Ampersand Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Early Morning

  Weighing Out

  The Off

  CHAPTER TWO

  Night Life

  On the Rails

  Flagrante Delicto

  CHAPTER THREE

  Silesian Bliss

  Intercessional

  The Last of England

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Barrack-room Ballad

  Mussolini’s Tits

  Back of Beyond

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Copyright

  About the Book

  * * *

  The man who rode Ampersand was in fact, an amateur jockey named Harry Cotton. Harry is a compulsive gambler. The resulting decline in his fortunes takes him through three decades of adventures, melancholy, heroic, and comic by turn, which cut a broad swathe of disorder through provincial race meetings, ‘one-night cheap hotels’ and three luxurious redoubts of the fabulously rich. The inhabitants and frequenters of these places are every bit as bizarre as their surroundings.

  About the Author

  * * *

  Ferdinand Mount has been editor of the Times Literary Supplement since 1991. Of Love and Asthma, which forms part of the series, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. Umbrella, the first of his Tales of History and Imagination, was described by the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson as ‘quite simply the best historical novel in years’. He is also well known as a political columnist and essayist and has written several works of non-fiction including The Subversive Family and The British Constitution Now.

  ALSO BY FERDINAND MOUNT

  Tales of History and Imagination

  Umbrella

  Jem (and Sam)

  A Chronicle of Modern Twilight

  Of Love and Asthma

  The Selkirk Strip

  The Liquidator

  Very Like a Whale

  The Clique

  Fairness

  Non-Fiction

  The Theatre of Politics

  The Subversive Family

  The British Constitution Now

  Communism (ed.)

  THE MAN WHO

  RODE AMPERSAND

  Ferdinand Mount

  For Julia

  Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgement is made for excerpts from songs reprinted by kind permission of the publishers:

  For ‘Green Carnation’ from the musical play Bitter Sweet: composer and author, Noël Coward. Copyright 1929 by Chappell & Co. Ltd., London; Chappell & Co. Inc., New York. For ‘Two Little Babes in the Wood’ from the musical production Paris: composer and author, Cole Porter. Copyright 1928 by Harms Inc., Chappell & Co. Ltd., London; Warner Bros. Music, Los Angeles, U.S.A. For ‘I’m Gonna Get Lit Up’: Peter Maurice Music Co. Ltd., 138–140 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0LA.

  CHAPTER ONE

  DAN was my father’s keeper. That was not how it seemed at first glance. They were an unlikely couple. My father affronted the street, the weather, the other pedestrians; he sniffed cold air like a connoisseur called in to describe its bouquet, he bore into the rain as stoic as a lifeboat skipper, inspected passers-by with friendly but lingering gaze. When he stopped to look into a shop window or to wait for the traffic from a side street, an invisible regiment stamped to a halt behind him. He seemed all exuberance and will.

  From a long way off, with his glaring tweed overcoat and weathered red face he could have passed, if there was passing to be done, for a big farmer come to town for a cattle show. Closer up, this air of commercial gusto dissolved. There was nothing shrewd about him. Though oddly unlined, he did not look at ease with himself. The way his head was drawn back into his shoulders as if expecting a blow undermined his panache. Yet it may have been this very shadow of unease which lent magnificence to my father’s overcoat and thick grey hair and gave a crozier’s dignity to his umbrella with its silver band inscribed ‘Dr J. McKechnie, Kirkintilloch, 1897’, picked up not entirely cheap in some den of serendipity. When his hair grew long, people sometimes said he resembled a minor prophet, which pleased him although he would remark later that it only showed how little they knew about minor prophets. In any case, his hair was usually cut short, not because he wished to present a respectable profile to the world but because he liked going to the barber.

  He had been told that the hairdressers at the Army and Navy Stores were known by number rather than by name and, taking perpetual delight in the rituals of unfamiliar worlds, would ask for cryptic telephone messages to be relayed to the barber’s shop from the food hall or the haberdashery department to which he had been wrongly connected, the messages couched in telegraphese—‘Number Three, 11.30, confirm soonest’—as if he were a capo mafioso transmitting instructions for the elimination of a troublesome rival. I later heard that this system was a fantasy, the Army and Navy hairdressers being known in the ordinary way as Mr Clive, or Mr Frederick, but they politely humoured my father’s whim in referring to each other by number when he was present—‘Number Three is engaged just at the moment, but you will find Number Two will look after you very well.’ This power to impose a language of his own flowed entirely from my father’s zest; he was in no way domineering. People acceded to his fancies out of sympathy not fear. On the other hand, this zest had something reckless and inflexible about it. He could not bow with the wind.

  By contrast Dan submitted meekly to the elements. A gust of wind would send him scurrying past my father, his shoulders hunched, a curled autumn leaf. If the wind was against him, Dan tacked into it like a dinghy on a ruffled estuary. But in the sunshine he would dawdle, open-shouldered, slant-hipped, taking his pace from the other strollers on the King’s Road: bickering leathery American couples, mind-blown loafers, puzzled matrons. Dan occasionally turned a little to catch an eye or flip a faunish wave, posing almost with neck turned and legs sketching the third ballet position. This fluid, cool pantomime—half designed to attract attention, half the unconscious imprint of his training—made him a part of the crowd from which my father stood out so unnervingly. They rarely walked side by side.

  Sometimes my father had stopped to remark on some object of interest—the soldiers drilling outside the Duke of York’s barracks, a grimy painting in the antique shop window set out to catch the tourists but pronounced by my father to be probably a Julius Caesar Ibbetson. Then Dan would walk on, hardly concealing impatience, looking backwards like a relay runner waiting for the baton change, repeating softly, ‘Oh, Harry.’ Less often, the roles were reversed. Dan stopped to exchange a few words with an acquaintance, muttered, furtive, so brief as to suggest an inconsequential meeting arranged for a few hours later, though in fact he might not leave the house again for days, crouching in front of the fire, motionless except for the thunderous blink of his black lashes.

  While waiting for Dan, my father would stand quite still with complete good humour, relishing his own exquisite patience, perhaps even looking back with amiable regret on a lifetime of missed appointments, trains seen steaming out of stations and notes pinned to doors by people who had got bored of waiting. He radiated the perfect manners of someone who would not dream of reminding his dawdling companion that they were expected the other side of the river at half past twelve sharp. As they were in fact expected nowhere, there was no reason for him to be other than good humoured; all the same, his patience came from temperament not lack of occupation. When Dan caught him up, my father would continue this display of courtesy, looking straight ahead, perhaps even humming, behaving as if Dan had merely paused to do up his shoelace and had spoken to nobody. This ostentatious refusal to pry would th
row Dan into a more than usually brooding silence, so that when finally my father reopened the conversation, it could be an occasion of some shock to the people walking in the opposite direction. The elderly man with the umbrella looked decidedly unattached; so in a different way did the tousle-headed dancer in thigh-length boots. The revelation that they were in fact together seemed to send a thrill of pleasure through visitors looking for the exotic side of metropolitan life. Was the elderly man trying to pick the boy up or had they arranged to meet on the trot at precisely this time and place? Sometimes, my father, swaying a little as the morning wore on, appeared to be echoing Dan’s sinuous hesitant gait as if they were together mimicking a soft-shoe duo, carried away by high spirits.

  They shared a taste for reflection upon the passing scene, though from differing viewpoints.

  ‘It’s fantastic the things they have in the big stores now,’ said Dan staring into the window of Peter Jones. ‘The paper says in the States you can even buy a midget submarine.’

  ‘I don’t want a midget submarine,’ my father said. ‘I am not a midget.’

  ‘No, no, it’s just a small submarine big enough for one or two people.’

  ‘If I needed a submarine, I would want to take all my friends out in it, but I do not need a submarine. My life is already full enough.’ Dan was frequently on the receiving end of similar didactic reproofs. On the whole, he took them sceptically but without resentment.

  ‘You cross a zebra crossing like a woman, Dan. Women always cut off the corners. If I was driving a big lorry, I would not be able to see you jumping out from the kerb like that.’

  ‘Have you ever driven a big lorry, Harry? Well then, how do you know?’

  ‘It’s a question of angles.’ My father felt strongly about the rights and duties of pedestrians. Ever since he had given up driving, to the relief of his friends no less than of the police, he had become a professional pedestrian. He looked with exaggerated care to right and left before crossing, always between the studs when there was no zebra. He reproached strange old women for failing to do the same. On the other hand, motorists who neglected to observe the Highway Code down to the last particular might, if delayed by the traffic, be startled by the rattle of my father’s umbrella on their bonnets. On one occasion, stoutly standing his ground on the black-and-white stripes, he met his match and was carried fifteen or twenty yards on the bonnet of a mini driven by an impatient model in granny glasses. ‘It is an extraordinary and rather wonderful experience,’ he explained later as he sat in bed receiving well-wishers. ‘You are swept up and for a moment hang in space, entirely weightless, glaring at the bad-tempered face the other side of the windscreen glaring back at you like a fish in an aquarium.’ In the violence he wrought upon the motoring classes, he totally disregarded the armour at the disposal of the enemy, as tribesmen with bow and arrow might consider a tank as merely another kind of juju whose superiority was unproven. For him the moral issues at stake outweighed base calculations of relative strength. Dan disapproved of these quixotic assertions of principle. He regarded crossing the road as something to be achieved only by alertness and low cunning.

  If their attitudes were different, their interests were more divergent still. When my father let go one of his more morose aphorisms—‘all dress designers secretly hate women’ or ‘only small men and masters of foxhounds like Wagner’—the exasperation in Dan’s, ‘Oh, Harry, come on, really’, revealed a world of difference. Yet it must not be assumed from this lack of shared enthusiasms that they did not get on together. Their occasional spats were more in the nature of work-outs. In general, their association, although freely chosen by neither of them, was marked by a certain mute communion. They showed one another a particular sort of recessive courtesy and when they walked side by side without speaking there was a sympathy between them as of companionable strangers on a train temporarily lapsed into silence while passing through a tunnel.

  They had drifted into each other’s company rather than having sought one another out. Dan had started to accompany my father on his daily round because he had nothing better to do and perhaps to his surprise soon found himself established as a bodyguard-cum-psychotherapist, in return for which services he was fed, lodged and given a home. After two or three years of this arrangement, his situation had become not unlike that of a trusty palace eunuch; his loyalty unquestioned, his grasp of reality considerably superior to that of his master’s.

  Since I had moved into that part of London, I often used to catch sight of this conspicuous couple. Only a few weeks earlier, I had seen them making their way through the holly-laden crowds, dazed by the blasts of muzak carols from the supermarket. Ghosts of Christmas Past spoke to me then. Mythic, nearly forgotten simplicities swept my mind clean of the worries of a minor civil servant. I remembered how I panted to catch up with my father, crunching through the thin ice into the brown puddles, my wellingtons as usual leaking at the ankle where the rubber joined. The wind rattled through the rusting tin of the War Department ‘Keep Out’ notices, posted at intervals along the barbed wire fences, the white arrow on the red ground pointing ever upward as if to draw the attention of potential trespassers to some celestial military police post. The straight, chalk-scarred track split a landscape that was still half-prairie, rolling, patched with plough only at the edges, an eternal nursery for war toys—prehistoric camps, Roman forts, Centurion tanks. My father, with his torn, dirty sheepskin coat and his long shepherd’s crook, looked like a pastoral refugee driven from his ancient grazing grounds down a demilitarized corridor. As it happened, he knew nothing about sheep but he would spend hours talking to the local shepherd on the steps of the latter’s ramshackle caravan. To be accurate, it was more a question of listening to the shepherd who talked in a strange, unceasing monotone as if he had not seen another person in months, although he rarely spent more than two nights on the downs before descending to the village pub. But then my father said that shepherds were always like that; he claimed once to have seen a shepherd run the length of a field in order to pass the time of day with him, or had he read it somewhere, in W. H. Hudson perhaps?

  Memory jinks and fades like a woodcock in the bare woods; I can remember only the wind beginning to whip my chapped legs and the boots rubbing my ankles raw. For me these midwinter walks were an uncomfortable mixture of running and waiting, of fear and boredom, the child always out of step with the rhythm of adult life just as the civilian is alternately bored and terrified by life in wartime. Besides, flat-footed and asthmatic, I was bound to fall behind, however kindly my father spaced his pauses to review the landscape. In panache too, I fell behind, or rather I never began to compete. In these blank, unembroidered days it is implausible at best to recall that as we serially breasted the highest ridge of the down my father would burst into song—no other phrase will do—the song as often as not the drinking song from Don Giovanni, its invitation to the feast bellowed to the downland sky. This aria, all light and dash, yet printed its underlying melancholy upon the empty fields the more memorably because it called up crowded squares and faces heated by wine and feet stamping time. The compressed gaiety rang forlorn in the unbounded winter landscape. The wind blew the notes back to me . . . vo’ amoreggiar, vo’ amo-oreggiar—a flowing counterpoint to the call of the peewits flapping over the rare ploughland.

  Once or twice my father borrowed a gun and took me shooting across the fields of a friendly farmer. He would splash through the marshes, crash through the brambles, clucking encouragement to the sluggish birds. Occasionally he would flush a pigeon or even a bedraggled wild pheasant and I would fire in the general direction of the fugitive if my numb fingers could shift the safety catch in time. As the darkness crept on, I would loose off at anything that moved, partly in hope of rewarding my father’s enthusiasm, partly out of humiliated rage. Once I shot a lapwing at dusk, hardly able to see what I was doing. I thought it was a snipe, although even to my ignorant eye its flight was slow. I rushed forward to retrieve my t
rophy, boots sucking in the wet ground. My father shouted from the other side of the stream: ‘I’m afraid it’s protected.’ ‘What?’ ‘Pro-otected’ . . . The syllables rolled slowly across the cold air like the savoured verdict of a hanging judge; they still bring back as fresh as a wet print the image of the bird cradled in a tussock, its soft white breast trembling warm and its sleek crest bowed like a widow praying. I do not know whether there really is an Act of Parliament protecting the peewit—my father was not always reliable on such matters—but even now the sound of a human voice through a winter dusk revives that feeling of having made a mistake so terrible and irreparable that there can be no forgiving or forgetting, just as the Mozart aria still stands for an exuberance unattainable and unattained.

  It is mere melodrama to suppose that each man kills the thing he loves, but often, I think, a man is drawn to love the thing he has killed. It seems to me now that I have never felt for any living animal as I did for the murdered lapwing, or is it only that hindsight softens guilt for the deed into affection for the victim? Certainly the embarrassment that my father’s singing caused me at the time has been elevated by the years into admiration for anyone who could sing so loud to an empty horizon and a stumbling child. But there is more to the operation of time than the soft blurring of distance. The mythical perspective never ceases to alternate with the factual. This demanding, ferocious giant, a legend of caprice, a tower of strength and love, shrivelled under the glare of my growing self-esteem. The fairy-tale ogre dwindled into a tiresome but manageable obstacle to my plans, a thing to be thwarted, humoured, coaxed, spoken straight to, ignored or even avoided. My father became a case to be compared with other fathers amongst my friends, like doctors discussing their patients in the staff-room. But suddenly to my surprise I found my patient had taken up his bed and hopped it. And there ambling down the King’s Road was the old fabulous monster, the last survivor on the whole flat earth of the age of ghosts and kings, his sceptre now given for a palmer’s walking-staff, now bent and milky-eyed, but still exacting reverence and love. The myth had been made flesh again and trod the crowded pavements. The fact that my father should actually be walking past the Safeway Stores on Christmas Eve seemed to me as incredible as the legend of Glastonbury. That my father should walk past the Safeway Stores almost every morning, that his existence was not an occasional intrusion into my life like a comet which passes once in a millennium but rather itself amounted to nothing less than a life was not only incredible but intolerable.