Fool's Mate

By J.D. Frodsham

Rafe ffoxe-Gentry, a snooty, upper-class Englishman working for GTG, a crooked multinational based in the mythical Australian state of Galahnia, is a rakish womaniser, whose nightly Got Laid Parades terminate abruptly when he falls for his Russian wifes beautiful and eccentrically brilliant young niece, Venetia. Put in charge of a visiting delegation of Russians negotiating a commercial agreement between GTG and the USSR, with Venetia as interpreter, Rafe finds the Soviet delegates more interested in booze, nightclubs, and women than in discussions. During negotiations in Singapore, the riotous behaviour of the sozzled Soviets leads to threatening Cold War complications, major disaster being narrowly averted by Venetias ingenuity. Rafe returns triumphantly home, only to find himself in even greater trouble as the situation becomes unexpectedly perilous, homicidal and dismayingly revelatory. His affair with Venetia, once wildly sexual and heart-breakingly romantic, now degenerates into a series of despairing battles between love and hate. In turn sensual, brutal, satirical and witty, this riotous black comedy depicts the greed, corruption and madness of the H-bomb eighties, and spares no one, including its madcap hero, in its scathing portrait of an era as unrestrained and vicious as it was violent and grasping.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496987105

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© 2014 J.D. Frodsham. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  08/14/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-8709-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-8708-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-8710-5 (e)

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover photograph entitled Game Over by kind permission of the distinguished Spanish photographer Pedro Díaz Molins, from www.pedrodiazmolins.com.

The right of J.D. Frodsham to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

To dear Beng Choo, with deepest gratitude,

on the occasion of our Fiftieth Anniversary.

Chapter 1

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If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.

Kingsley Amis

I was always looking for meaningful one-night stands.

Dudley Moore

As Jane Austen might have put it, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a randy man in possession of a frigid wife must be in want of his wits. Sentences like the preceding are the reason this work was declared Politically Incorrect by the Guild of Publishers’ Certified Politically Correct Readers. Their condemnatory reports are still filed away in my office. Even my name was deemed portentous by the Thought Police. Rafe is here synonymous with Rape, wrote one misguided Reader. ffoxe-Gentrye is clearly a pseudonym indicative of the author’s predatory and elitist temperament, wrote a second. Those two lower case medieval ‘f’s’are meant to be provocative. This man is almost certainly a covert, bourgeois paedophile; for ‘eighteen years old’ simply read ‘thirteen years’ throughout, wrote an Associate Professorial Torturer of Texts from the Politically Correct Department of Marxist (Trotskyite) Cultural Studies at The Edward Kelly University. Militant feminist readers contended that castration alone (not necessarily chemical) could cure my patriarchal view of women as portable and compendious sex objects. This creature adds insult to incest, was their verdict. A more objective viewpoint was found in an article in the Journal of Sexual Psychology which characterised me as a typical sex addict in urgent need of treatment, quoting a jocular remark of mine that I could count all the lovers I had had with the fingers of one hand, providing I was holding a calculator. As Bertie Wooster would have said: I say, dash it all, Jeeves! May not a chap make a little joke now and then?

Politically too, I fared badly. Even my uneventful business dealings with the USSR were looked on with suspicion by the left as almost certainly a cover for espionage, while my suspected affiliations with right-wing subversives and degenerates from the CIA to BHP, Hugh Hefner, Silvio Berlusconi, Mugabe, and the Ku Klux Klan were openly denounced, even though I had never met any of them. "No responsable (sic) state government would ever countenance (sic) such piraticul (sic) operations. His account of GTG’s business dealings is surely libelous (sic)," wrote the former CEO of the company in a vituperative letter to The Galahnian under the pseudonym "Concerned Citizun (sic). (The editor, a friend of mine, had left the letter in its unamended state to show what we thought of the author, Nugget Bounder, AK, AO, OAM, KCVO, FAICD, FAIM, UPU). Other Australian reviewers were equally scathing. This reactionary drivel does nothing whatever to improve Russo-Australian relations, and A shameful caricature of the great nation of Dostoyevski (sic) and Shitakovich (sic)," were typical of loony left reviewers, whose orthography is often as shaky as their ideology. The ABC’s fearless Square devoted a valuable hour to establishing the integrity of GTG and the Galahnian state government, while their daily Marxist Bongo and its collective, Leninist soul-mate, Eavesdroppers, both gave a spirited defence of the integrity of Galahnian socialism, though admitting that the depredations of GTG, while much exaggerated in my bigoted, fascist volume, were, as Stalin and Mao had shown, typical of monopoly capitalism in its final stage of disintegration. The only review which concentrated on the literary qualities of my work, as opposed to the ideological, came from Professor Frōŵczeszkičievič, the renowned Trotskyite critic, asserting that "the capitalist lackey author of this travesty, writing from a background of over-determined, privileged, selective subjectivity, is no more than an ineffectual imitator of Lolita, a decadent chef-d’oeuvre which nevertheless mocks his puny, bourgeois efforts to problematise its inspissated aporia."

So here I stand before you, denounced by all as a clumsy, feeble-minded, paedophilic, incestuous, elitist, libellous, drivelling, reactionary, ineffectual, right-wing rapist, incapable even of understanding the operations of the former KGB’s Directorate 13 (Wet Work)¹, let alone those of its successors, the FSB, SVR and the FSO. (Yet Bortnikov² and I are now good drinking companions and I speak fluent Russian.) Did nobody respect or even tolerate me? I was puzzled, not to say pissed off. Damn it all! I recall complaining to my ravishing, New York agent, Gloria Rosenbaum, during a visit to her office in the early nineties. "It isn’t as though this were American Psycho or The Silence of the Lambs. I mean, nobody gets flayed, raped, sodomised or eaten, or even parboiled in nitric acid. So what’s all the fuss about?" I was looking for sympathy in the wrong place. Gloria claimed she suffered from compassion fatigue when it came to writers. She never spared them.

Right now, this Agency would swap your entire output for ten pages from Brett Easton Ellis, she pointed out, cruelly. (And yet she had friends at Simon and Schuster!). "He mirrors our age. Your sort of sex is out, I mean OUT, and violence is really in. Look at this city. Look at LA. Look at Schwarzenegger. You remember that opening scene in The Terminator where he fries a hood’s face on a red-hot griddle and then breaks another hood’s arms? That’s cool. That’s what the public wants. That’s big box-office stuff. Now you know why the Republicans got Schwarzenegger to open their Houston convention. He exemplifies today’s family values. You don’t. She softened her tone, seeing my look of despair at the thought of never being worth even a few pages of Brett Easton Ellis. Look, Foxy darling, why can’t you just put a tad more action into your writing? A few gruesome serial killings would do very nicely, to start with. Not necessarily with an ice-pick. Just use your basic instincts. You could go on to the really stomach-turning stuff later."

I looked pained; I have never got on with literary agents. They claw back 12.5 per cent of my earnings for doing virtually bugger-all, and I get the eyestrain, insomnia, migraines and writer’s block. Gloria is an exception; she is a stringent but kindly editor. I recall her once accepting an early draft of these memoires without changing a word. (The word she didn’t change was on page 382). As for her colleagues, if I ever found one of them up to their neck in quicksand, I would just try humanely to hasten their disappearance by hurling rocks at them. Still, I always try to be reasonable with Gloria, since she and I have had some great times together, horizontally speaking. "Come on, Gloria! You should know sex is my forte, not mayhem. I can’t stand violence, especially after what those two thugs did to me. Fact is, I can’t even bring myself to squash a cockroach. That’s why my Vladivostok dacha is full of them. They’ve become insolently fecund."

She laughed. You? Not violent? Try telling that to a grand jury, Superclipper!

That was just a vicious rumour. No charges were laid. And I still prefer the Lawrentian delineation of straight and simple sex to violence. I’m a literary castrato according to the critics, not a Soprano.

She sighed at my ignorance and obduracy. Listen, Rafe! Lawrence’s sex was neither straight nor simple; he was a gay guy, with an unresolved Oedipus complex, who never came out of the closet. And straight and simple sex has been out since we learnt that J. Edgar Hoover wore drag. Pure dissociation in both of them, she said, severely. She was always giving me lessons in cultural deconstruction. Everyone, except Mormons and Southern Baptists, is bored stiff with simple wham-bam intercourse, if you’ll excuse the pun. And then there’s AIDS to think about. Much better to stick to violence. The permutations are fascinating. She paused, and gave me one of her long, smouldering, Jezebel looks. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not speaking personally when I say straight and simple sex is out. Are you free for dinner?

For a moment I was tempted. Gloria reminded me of the young Lillian Gish, long one of my cinema idols. When she tossed back those dark locks of hers, fixed me with her dazzling black eyes and said, in that plangent Queens accent, Omigawd! This is going to need one hell of a lot of revision! I went weak at the knees and did anything she asked. Well, almost anything; I have moral objections to threesomes involving another man. So I said I’d take a raincheck on her offer, pleading a fit of authorial inspiration. She told me I certainly needed it, then went off to lunch with one of those righteous Readers, leaving me to ponder on my failure to achieve really high-tack writing, like that of B. E. Ellis. All this was years ago, but nothing much has changed since then, and so this time-worn manuscript has gone on circulating among publishers’ Readers, having been read and rejected by one hundred and ninety four of them, always on ideological and/or moral grounds. As a mad monarch once remarked, while wondering damply why both his feminist daughters had kicked him out of their cosy castles on a stormy night, Is there any cause in nature that breeds these PC hearts? Luckily publisher number one hundred and ninety five had a fitness-first Reader, a tall, blonde, Nordic Freyja, at home in regions of blizzards and glaciers, who accepted my m/s on condition we spent a winter fortnight together in Alaska, her childhood home, at my expense. Even the dose of double lobar pneumonia I caught while swimming with her in that bracing January ocean and running bare-chested through snow drifts, pretending I was Thor, not sore, was worth the joy of seeing my vituperative offspring leap into the world at last, after so protracted a pregnancy.

All of those who so cruelly spurned me must have forgotten that I am culturally underprivileged. If only these PC Readers would understand that, coming from Australia, the Great Crocodile Dundee Outback of civilisation, I haven’t had the benefit of the sort of liberal elite, Headquarters Economy, Critical Theorist, Cultural Studies, moral education they’ve enjoyed. All of them, whether literary metrosexuals or artistic fashionistas, driving cute little Japanese hybrids and running round in fake, designer gear labelled Made in China, are devout cultural relativists. So why don’t they treat me as any anthropologist would treat a Dobu tribesman from New Guinea? Of course, it’s perfectly all right for you to poison your father-in-law and eat your paternal aunt, these anthropologists tell them, soothingly. It’s all part of your Tradition. And while you’re about it, why not bugger off and roast your next-door head-hunting neighbours? My editor tells me I need just this sort of material for my forthcoming book. Now I have never gone in for cannibalism; my Aunt Leticia was definitely not to my taste and the only head-hunters I know work for Ernest and Young. So why are people so hard on me? I should add that I am not a professional novelist. God forbid! I just write my memoires, of which this is merely volume one. I don’t need the money now, even though I wrangle with the Agency out of habit. Nevertheless, I have known real financial hardship. There was a time before I got into my present business when I was down to my last two hundred and fifty million dollars. Anyway, you must judge for yourself whether the indurated opprobrium heaped upon my name is justified or not.

This story began the day my Russian wife, Yevgenia Nikolaevna Romanova, flew to Nice to solace her dying sister, and I flew Olga Crvenkovska down from Port Deadland to solace me. Olga! A willowy, green-eyed, red head from Skopje, with mouth-watering breasts, skin like milk, and a temper like an Irish barmaid’s at a wake. If all Macedonian women are as hot as Olga, then that may partially explain global warming. We were rolling around happily in bed one evening, recuperating from several apolaustic orgasms, when she suddenly pushed me aside, sat up, and began to babble about living together. I reared like a kangaroo startled by a tiger snake with a bad hibernation hangover. Living together? I’m afraid that’s impossible. I’ve already got a wife, who would object to this. I reminded her gently. Don’t forget I’m happily married.

Women bewilder me; she was unaccountably furious. Happy married? If you really so happy married then what you fucking well doing in bed with me?

I should have though the F word explained why. Nevertheless I tried to reason with her, explaining calmly that being in bed with her and others like her was an essential constituent of being happily married. Yevgenia and I are sometimes quite good friends, I pointed out. It’s just that she’s into literary theory, not sexual praxis; and Nietzsche not divorce.

She did not appreciate my scholarly little joke, retorting, Now you are tell me your wife has lover called Neesher? If she has lover then you divorce her. She marry her Mr Neesher and you marry me. Yes?

A heated argument ensued, which I lost on points and a knockout, for Olga packed a hefty punch. She abused me in English and Macedonian, burst into tears, hurled my current bedside book at me (Sexual Life in Outer Mongolia), and finally stormed out of the bedroom, wiggling voluptuously in her stilettos, black nightdress in hand, to spend the night in a distant guest room, deaf to my abject pleas to come back to bed.

Happy married? You divil! I am now removing instant, and niver, niver coming agine. I shall remove homely now! she told me, through the locked door of her room.

I was incredulous about her never coming again; with such a libido that would be impossible. Nor was she in any sense homely. True to her word, she left the house in high dudgeon and a Pelican taxi as dawn was breaking. Before she departed, I managed to purloin a pair of red lace panties from her suitcase, to add to the extensive collection I keep in a locked filing cabinet labelled Bottom Line. This regrettable incident led me to formulate ffoxe-Gentrye’s Apothegm: Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.

The following day, a private fax for Nugget Bounder, my orthographically challenged CEO, arrived in the general office and was read by all and sundry before being photocopied, sent round the building, despatched to The Galahnian, and finally solemnly handed to me by Aurélie, my secretary. It read:

Dearest Sir Mr Bounder, I ensist you are removeing my red laice expensiv pantys now from your divil imploiee Mr Rafe ffuckse-Gently. He stealed them seekrettly. I am lowthing him very much for his hardness after I have wetted for him so long. I am sinseerley continually and always remaining yours, Miss Olga Žĕňčüčüčövč.

Several of my colleagues were surprised that she could spell her surname but not the word loving, but faxed her at her place of work in the Allout, selflessly volunteering to debag me, retrieve her panties, and take my place in her heart or anywhere else she might specify. Naturally, this piece of inspired idiocy actually came at my instigation from Dusty Miller, my best mate, as the Aussies say, via a mate working in Olga’s company.

Why did I play such practical jokes? I suppose it was either my infantile way of reacting to rejection or simply my persistent refusal to grow up, though coming events were soon to cure me of the latter. Though I was upset at losing Olga, who was charming, sexy, voluble, and fitfully intelligent, even if her syntax, grammar, lexis and orthography, like her surname, were somewhat eccentric, I felt I could not compromise my strongly-held principles. I was not prepared to divorce my awful, wedded wife simply because she was narcissistic, careerist, poststructuralist, feminist, conceited, vain, arrogant, supercilious, grasping, greedy, testy, temperamental, verbally abusive, valetudinarian, pedantic and frigid, no matter who wanted to live with me. Had I not taken her in Oily Matrimony for much worse than I had ever imagined as well as for better? Furthermore, as I explained to Olga, I resented being treated as a manipulable sex object, an executive dildo, a mere meek receiver of the Female Gaze. Such behaviour reminded me of a former girlfriend’s witticism that whenever she saw the sign Members Only she thought of me.

Yevgenia Nikolaevna, my afore-mentioned spouse, returned that evening. Natasha’s dead, Rafe, she said, somewhat unnecessarily, as she stepped out of the company limousine. After all, I had sent a flamboyant wreath. The pallor of her classical features was accentuated by her little black dress, and her matching mascara, slightly smudged by tears. Her elder sister’s death had obviously deeply upset her; I had never seen my wife cry in nearly ten years of marriage, except when peeling onions or putting a contact lens in sideways.

In the midst of life we are in death, I observed, sententiously. And in the midst of death, deep in debt; the funeral had cost a French fortune in francs. She gave me a withering look, thinking I was clowning again, instead of trying to comfort her. I took the suitcases from Jim, our driver, and slipped him his usual exorbitant tip. Strictly speaking, company limos were not for unaccompanied wives, but Jim and I had never had the heart to break the news to Yevgenia, who grew upset at having to pay for anything.

Alas, poor Natasha! I had only met my late sister-in-law once, during a trip to Paris in 1980, on our honeymoon. I remembered her as tall, blonde, haughtily vivacious and flat broke. Since Yevgenia was also tall, blonde, arrogantly vivacious and – thanks to me – rich, they were clearly sisters. Both possessed high intelligence inherited from their father. Their French mama, a former Vogue model and close friend of the great Lee Miller, had contributed only her stunning looks.

Poor Natasha died only two hours before I arrived in Nice, she went on, dabbing at her eyes with a lace-embroidered handkerchief. If I hadn’t missed my connection in Paris, I’d have been with her at the end. But, as usual, our wretched plane was three hours late leaving Burpe.

Death upset me in those days, before I’d got used to it. It seemed to me to be both inconvenient and unpleasant. To quote Woody Allen, I had no objection to death; I just didn’t want to be around when it happened. And the hours were depressingly lengthy. Undaunted, I tried to bring our conversation down to a less starkly existential level. That damned airport of ours is like one of my Chinese contracts, I went on. Impossible to exit unless you know whom to pay off.

Yevgenia ignored my feeble witticism, disliking anything savouring of English flippancy. She removed her black Manolo Blahniks, put on her fur-lined slippers, walked solemnly through the hall and sat down in the kitchen, where she began wailing noisily into a tissue. She had waited until she got home to behave in this ear-splitting, Slavonic fashion, being Aussie enough to detest displays of emotion, especially in public. Australians are a troglodytic race of proletarian kitchen-dwellers. Though we had a house only slightly smaller than the Winter Palace, with sixteen largely unused, cavernous rooms and eight marbled bathrooms, Yevgenia, aristocratic by birth but petty bourgeois by preference, would always ensconce herself in the kitchen.

Would you care for a drink? I asked, uncomfortably. Weeping women disturb me. As befitted a feminist poststructuralist, Yevgenia was normally all left-hemisphere intellect, and kept any passing emotion she might stumble on strictly in its kennel.

She shook her lovely head impatiently. You know I can’t sleep if I touch alcohol. Just a glass of iced water will do. An appropriate beverage for my Ice Queen, who sipped it appreciatively. Flying always dehydrates me. You should know that by now, if you’ve not been drinking.

Hence her dry wit? Like most women, she generally felt compelled to give reasons for her actions. Natasha had never been like that; paradoxically, though half-French, she was all Russian. Yevgenia, however, was in the grip of whatever French lunacy inspired the bloodthirsty, atheist Jacobins to worship the Goddess of Reason in a Christian cathedral. La raison has been important to the French since Descartes decided he existed. "Soyez raisonnable, they would say when I was haggling with them over some business deal. Meaning, Just do things our way. Incidentally, as Venetia would later observe, for most of us Descartes’ famous maxim, I think, therefore I am, should read: I think, therefore I’m wrong."

I’ve arranged for poor Venetia to come and live with us, she said suddenly, breaking the respectful silence I had accorded her grief. She’ll be here in a week or two, as soon as she’s got her visa. In the meantime, she’s staying on in the convent.

I was taken aback, to put it mildly. Venetia Olga Tatiana Maria Anastasia Romanova de Vigny? A girl who bore the names of the late Czar’s four beautiful, murdered daughters tagged onto her mum’s surname as a political memento? A descendant of the great French poet, Alfred, himself, that hapless victim of an insipid English wife née Bunbury, like the imaginary friend in Wilde’s play? Good God! How was a childless couple, verging on sedate middle age, going to cope with the intrusion of an unruly teenager into their peaceful lives? She would monopolise the phone for interminably inane conversations, play death metal at 135 decibels, joy-ride in my purloined Ferrari, hang around rapacious shopping malls and drug-dealing nightclubs, bring home boyfriends with Grade IV terminal acne and perhaps even get herself up the duff. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to pack her off to Roedean or Cheltenham or even a boarding school in Tasmania? Or anywhere? Yevgenia brushed aside my unreasonable objections, as she always did. Venetia’s hardly an unruly teenager. She’ll be eighteen next week. Besides, she’ll only be with us for a year, while she does her Tertiary Entrance Exam. After that, she’ll be off to uni, and living in college most of the time.

I was relieved. Not having any children of my own, I had forgotten the brats grew up so fast. The last time I had seen Venetia, Natasha’s only child, she had been a shy, studious seven-year old, always with her nose in a book, as her mother had complained, a charming little brat with blonde pigtails and a couple of missing front teeth. That was just after her father’s death. Comte Robert de Vigny had been rash enough to try to land his hired Cessna in stormy weather at Avignon, instead of sensibly finding another airport, thus killing himself and his current young mistress. I don’t know whether Natasha had been more horrified to learn of his death than of his infidelity. The shock may well have triggered off the cancer that unseasonably ended her life at forty-two. Is this girl bright enough to get into university? I asked. After all, she’ll have to take all her exams in English, not French.

A silly question, since all the Romanovs were scintillatingly clever. Yevgenia gave me a contemptuous look; intellect was her province, not mine. As Associate Professor of Creative Arts in the School of Transgressive Studies at our local Green and Trotskyite dominated Edward Kelly University, she knew all about university entrance. The eponymous Ned, now seen by academics as a staunch champion of humble selectors against wealthy squatters and hence a victim of the eternal Class Struggle, was thought to be a fitting symbol for a newly-founded, progressive university. Requirements for such entrance were undemanding, many students managing to stumble into the Neddy Groves of Academe without even having finished Year Ten, to saunter out five or six confusing years later, madder but none the wiser, with a useless PC degree, wondering why they were now unemployable even in McDonald’s. As I used to tell Yevgenia, BA they have, MA they may have. Even Transgressive PhD they may have. But do they have a J-O-B?

Venetia speaks excellent English, besides Russian, Italian and French, she informed me now. She also has a firm command of Latin and Ancient Greek. She is above all a genius of a mathematician. The nuns told me she is the most brilliant student the school has ever produced, as well as the most eccentric. She would have certainly gained admission to the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieur had she remained in France. As it is, she’ll have no trouble at all in coping with its feeble-minded, Australian counterpart, I assure you. I am quite sure she will top the state in her exams.

While overjoyed to hear of her proficiency in Classics, indispensable in any sophisticated, mining town like Burpe, I was also relieved to hear that her English was good. I hadn’t fancied trying to muster up enough French to tell a sulky teenager that she couldn’t scamper off to a drive-in in a souped-up panel van with some well-hung plumber’s mate, until she’d finished colouring in all her homework. I had enough problems of my own without having to discipline recalcitrant French females, whether geniuses or not. Fortunately, I recalled Immanuel Kant’s dictum: A woman who has a head full of Greek and carries on fundamental controversies about mathematics might as well have a beard. Since Venetia appeared to fulfil both these requirements, I probably should not have to worry unduly about her being pestered; even bogans would flee from a bearded polymath.

I was then Business Development Director of the Galahnian Transcontinental Group (GTG), one of the largest in Australia, ruling an empire consisting of some 69 companies. After working for several years in Singapore, I had joined GTG in 1980, attracted by Galahnia’s rapid development of iron ore mines, offshore gas, oil and executive salaries. After decades of being a backwater state where it seemed forever 1935, a sandy wasteland sustained only by reluctant handouts from distant Canberra, Galahnians were at last able to stay in the black. Since GTG was heavily involved in mining, our headquarters were in Burpe, state capital of Galahnia, land of the Common or Inebriated Lesser Cashed-up Tattooed Bogan (Boganus Parvus Pictus. var. Pecunia multa), here found inhabiting a wide variety of habitats. I spent much of my time travelling around Galahnia, especially to the Allout, a striking mining region almost two thousand kilometres north of Burpe, up in the tropics, where GTG had extensive iron-ore mines. I was currently developing a diamond mine in the well-named Bungle Bungles, several hundred kilometres north of the Allout. In the GTG hierarchy, I ranked third, after our Managing Director (known as the CEO), Nugget Bounder, and our Deputy Managing Director, Stephen Cadd. Stephen was due to retire in October 1988, suffering from those occupational diseases, advanced cirrhosis of the liver and softening of the brain; I was in line for his job as Deputy Managing Director, a post corresponding to that of Executive Vice President in American firms. That meant I had about two more years to go before reaching the penultimate rung of the greasy ladder I had set out to climb when I joined GTG.

It had not been a facile ascent for an expatriate Englishman or Pom, with an Eton-Cambridge education, a plummy Mayfair accent, Jermyn Street shirts, Saville Row suits and handmade shoes, all of which served to vex and irritate the local executive bogans, who regard all sartorial correctness as evidence of silvertail depravity. Though Galahnians are normally genetically averse to work, I habitually put in a ten to twelve hour day, invariably working weekends as well, which only served to further annoy my colleagues, who saw me as subverting their own time-honoured practices of slacking off. Extra-curricular activities took up what little leisure I had. I kept myself trim by swimming, jogging and regular work-outs in the company gym. I also had other semi-athletic interests since I had an open marriage – open to all offers from the open-minded. Before taking up with Olga, I had just finished a brief but tropically torrid affair with a couple of Sri Lankan flight stewardesses, foundation members of the Four, Five, Six Mile High Club. My tastes could well be called catholic, even though Lalita and her bosomy cousin were actually Buddhists.

Yevgenia had married me, partly for identity, partly for money. Looking back on our relationship now, I can say, quite dispassionately, that she must have been quite dispassionate about our marriage. I was physically attracted to her; she never felt the same way about me. She had an essentially abstract intelligence, and was out of touch with her own instinctual self. My eudemonic infidelities not only gave her a powerful hold on me, but also discouraged me from pestering for sex, as she used to say. For Yevgenia, it was always the wrong time of the month. That is why she had for years turned a blind eye to my cavorting around with a sybaritic seraglio of good-looking fashion models, secretaries, WP operators, receptionists, flight attendants, ground hostesses, saleswomen, clerks, cashiers, hairdressers, waitresses, hospital and dental nurses, masseuses, physiotherapists, physician’s assistants, lab assistants, radiology technologists, home health care specialists, managed health care specialists, telecommunications specialists, computer programmers, valuers, financial advisers, accountants, bank tellers, actuaries, management consultants, industrial hygienists, information technologists, forex dealers, public relations officers, primary and high school teachers, travel agents, insurance agents, real estate agents, settlement agents, librarians, social workers, and even the odd epicurean female lawyer, dentist, doctor, architect, publisher, chemical engineer, biotechnologist, forensic accountant, executive recruiter, civil servant, postgraduate theology student, and mortuary cosmetician (the latter a brief liaison, terminated when she told me I’d make a handsome corpse). I might have been a sex addict but I was no one-night stander; I never finished with a girl unless I had had her three ways, as the great John F. Kennedy used to say. And I always rewarded my partners handsomely, with some jewelled memento of our romance, believing as I do that sex is the most beautiful, natural, organic, wholesome thing money can buy. Moreover, I now avoided all GTG secretaries (sex in the office leaves you open to subversion) and all waitresses, who had the disconcerting habit in the midst of our passionate embraces, of offering me Today’s Specials, or saying Is everything ok with you? Is everything all right over here? I also shunned most married women and all female academics; the former, because I had strong views on the sanctity of marriage; the latter, because I dislike ideological logomachies and being kissed by ladies with incipient moustaches. And besides, most of the Derridated akademikovas I had encountered in the concrete jungle of Ned’s Indoctrination Centre looked like bag-ladies en route to a street brawl with female bikies. I fled from them as fast as a French president from his latest First Lady. Apart from this I continued to be mullerose, a useful though recondite term meaning extremely fond of women.

After Olga’s panty-deprived departure, I resolved to reform. I had sworn to do this several times before, without success, like a smoker trying to give up nicotine by smoking only two packs a day. (Incidentally, if you smoke after sex, you’re doing it too fast). I had forgotten that the only remedy for sex is more and more sex. But this time I was working at such a pace that I had no leisure to pursue my usual pastimes, and was forced to be temporarily celibate, a novel but frustrating experience, given my nympholeptic temperament. Yevgenia soon got over Natasha’s death, for deep down, as Sam Goldwyn would say, she was shallow, and no more was heard of Venetia, except for the occasional letter informing us that she was well and still waiting for her visa. We had overestimated the diligence of our empire-building Immigration Department, determined to over-fulfil their norm by increasing our population to twenty million by Christmas, for the visa did not arrive until two months later. I had sent the V-brat, as I affectionately dubbed her, a ticket in October ‘86 and then forgotten all about her, until Yevgenia accosted me at breakfast – a well-known crisis time for matrimony – one hot, sunny morning, not long before Christmas. She was sitting in our marbled kitchen eating-nook when I came down, drinking black coffee, nibbling a piece of dry toast, and reading the Arts section of The Australian. I greeted her politely, kissed her perfunctorily on her noble forehead – I hadn’t ventured lower than that for years – and started to prepare my own breakfast. Yevgenia was a liberated woman, so I had to depend for matinal nourishment on our rotund Russian housekeeper, Ninotchka Ivanova, a linguistic innovator of genius who normally arrived at seven a.m., bringing with her mistermed goodies like Bread Mushrooms (muffins), Cow Squirt (milk), Hen Poops (eggs), Pig Slice (bacon), or Yellow Greasy (butter), in a Stove Bowl (pot). She was late this morning, perhaps having sprained her Hand Ankle (wrist), hurt her arthritic Leg Hinge (knee), caught a Nose Shit (cold), missed her Wheel Tram (bus) or even stopped for a ride on a Horse Tornado (carousel), or to buy Cold Water with Corners (ice), so I had to get my own breakfast. I liked a cooked meal in those days – buttered toast (Greasy Burnt), lime marmalade (English Sticky), coffee and four or five poached eggs (Floaty Hen Poops) with tomatoes (Tom Toes), as prepared by Ninotchka.

"Your breakfast are ready, Graf, she would say. Please to be eat him before he catches a cold." Though she always addressed both Yevgenia, and later Venetia, as Knyagina (Princess) she habitually addressed me as Graf (Count), in spite of my protests that I was no such thing. She did so because she believed that Yevgenia would never have married anyone who was not a dvoryanin (noble), while also believing that, as an Australian, I was not worthy of any higher rank. It was thus that Yevgenia addressed me when she was in a particularly good mood or wanted something from me.

"May I remind you, Graf, that Venetia’s arriving this morning at eight-fifty-five? Yevgenia told me, without looking up from her paper. I’d like you to meet her. I have a ten o’clock lecture and can’t get away."

It was already eight minutes to nine. An old Kwakiutl proverb says: If your squaw tells you to jump off a cliff, you can only pray there is a river at its foot. I rang Aurélie and asked her to cover for me. That phrase, along with It was like that when I got here, and Brilliant idea, boss! are an executive’s most useful ploys, according to Homer.³ Then I rushed through breakfast, and set off for what then passed for our International cum Domestic airport, the International section being a corridor in the northern corner, next to the loos. I enjoy driving. I love fast cars almost as much as I love fast women, my father used to say. He was joking, of course; my mother kept him on a very short leash. Anyway, he’d been eventually allowed to drive a Rolls Silver Spur, a car which resembled my mama, Ursula (etymologically Little Grizzly), she of the cashmere cardigan, pearls and Shalimar, in being dignified, costly to run, overweight, and boringly well-bred. A drawing room on wheels, so to speak, which one just pointed, not drove. (The Rolls, not my mother). At that time I owned not one but four very fast, classic, sports saloons. My favourite was a rare Ferrari 275 GTB, with a genuine top speed of around 290 kph. I also had a Lamborghini Miura P400SV, one of the most strikingly aggressive cars ever designed, an Aston Martin DBS V8, which I had recently christened Olga, because it was beautiful but hell to handle, and a spanking new 1987 Bentley Turbo R, with only a sprinkling of kilometres on the odometer, later christened Venetia, since … But let me reserve that for later. Thanks to our absurd speed restrictions, I seldom had the chance to let any of these cars flat out, except on long, straight stretches of remote, country roads. When I did so, I had the feeling that my Death was sitting beside me, in the passenger seat, with her hand on my thigh, urging me to take the next corner even faster and see if I could avoid the tree this time. In retrospect, I see that’s probably the reason I liked fast cars. Yevgenia, ever anxious not to offend her impoverished, bearded Trotskyite colleagues, drove some sort of socialist, faculty-approved, fully PC Volvo, which I had dubbed The Trotsky Trundler or Bolshie Bus.

The safest car on earth, she assured me, smugly.

So what? Dogs! Do you want to live forever? I would ask her, like Frederick the Great urging his troops on to some suicidal attack. We were mismatched, needless to say. Yet, oddly enough, like her Volvo, the marriage trundled along. Or so I thought.

This morning, it was the Miura’s turn for an outing. I only hoped Venetia would not have too much girly luggage; Miuras aren’t baggage wagons, if you’ll forgive the pun. The Pelican River was sparkling in the summer sunlight as I drove over Everjam Bridge and swung out onto the already crowded freeway. Burpe can be uncomfortably warm in summer, reaching the mid-forties and above. But this morning the weather was perfect, with the thermometer around eighteen degrees and the promise of a high of twenty-eight, with an afternoon sea breeze dubbed the Feralport Doctor. The Pelican, our noble river, and its tributary the Banksia, were sparkling like cut glass. I noticed a flight of pelicans on the broad Swagman’s Bay, as the Miura crawled silkily but sulkily towards the Shallows Bridge. Bizarre birds, with a prehistoric look about them, especially in the air, when they resemble pterosaurs, they fit in well here. Galahnia, generally known as GA, is geologically one of the oldest landmasses on earth, much of it, along with many of its inhabitants, being Pre-Cambrian. As Lawrence observed, after consulting both Big Frieda and the electric darkness of his loins, the place has a strange antediluvian feel to it, once you flee the MacMansions and venture out into the endless desert and bush. For once, he was right; civilisation seems ephemeral here, as though born only yesterday out of the endless, brooding Dreamtime. I often feel it will not endure for long, especially under the present government.

I loved our two rivers, especially the Pelican. Over five kilometres wide at Swagman’s Bay and looking more like a lake than a river, it lapped the bottom of my Gumcross garden. I then owned what local real estate-agents call riparian rights on the Pelican. "Almost as good as droit de seigneur, I used to tell them, but they never got my joke, thinking I was referring to a French vintage. When it comes to subtlety, Galahnia, long the Appalachians of Australia, is still trying to metamorphose itself into an approximation to a really sophisticated state like Mississippi, or even Arkansas. Still, small improvements have been made. When I first arrived in this frontier Fargo, complete strangers addressed me as mate, and nobody bothered with niceties like good manners. When I greeted my normally ill-dressed, hungover colleagues with a polite Good morning! they would either ignore me completely or snarl, Not after what fucking happened to the bloody Eagles last night." I thought for a time they were bird watchers lamenting the near extinction of Aquila sudax, the indigenous Wedge Tailed eagle, not supporters bemoaning the defeat of a local AFL team. Now some of them actually returned my greeting and the lower ranks occasionally called me sir. In short, when I came here I wasn’t expecting the place to be a second Paris, but was disappointed to find it merely a pretentious version of the Goldfields hamlet of Broad Arrow (population nineteen). No wonder I Woke in Fright, to refer to a horror film detested by all right-thinking Aussies because it depicts the Outback as populated by unshaven, alcoholic homosexuals who torture helpless kangaroos for fun. As if it could be!

Since the last photograph Natasha had sent us of Venetia had depicted a lanky twelve year old, with braces on her teeth, Yevgenia had asked her to carry a copy of Le Figaro, to help me recognise the V-brat. Some brat! I was glad of the newspaper, for I would not otherwise have recognised her, being totally unprepared for her beauty. Like a hard blow to the heart, it took my breath away. She was wearing a blue denim skirt and a white, woollen sweater, which clung to her full breasts. Her white fun-fur coat – it had been freezing in Paris – was slung over her arm. She was slender and becomingly tall, some five feet eight or so, comfortably shorter than I. But she looked taller, for she walked like a model on a catwalk, in her black, knee-high boots, and carried herself like a Greek canephora on an ancient frieze, as though she bore a brimming Bacchic jar upon her head. Her long blonde hair, worn in a single, thick plait, haloed a complexion like Dresden china, incongruous among the sunburnt Australian faces around her. Her face was a perfect oval, graced by a high forehead, a sensitive mouth and white teeth now displayed in a welcoming smile. Her sapphire blue eyes had a slight upward slant, giving her an intriguingly oriental look, in spite of her peaches and cream colouring. All great beauty has something slightly strange about it; in her case, it was undoubtedly her eyes. As I greeted her, something flashed momentarily in their depths, only to vanish again. Zut alors! Her limpid, level gaze disconcerted me. I felt that she had seen right through me, and might not like what she had found. (I know I didn’t).

She held out her fine-boned hand to me as though she were royalty, which, in a way, she was. I took it, let my lips hover above it in the approved manner, and then kissed her decorously on both cheeks, noticing she was wearing an unusual scent. Later, she identified it for me as Patou’s Que-sais-je, a mixture of rose, carnation, iris, and jasmine. Its flowery freshness suited her perfectly. She was irreproachably a bonne femme of the haute bourgeoisie, and exuded bon chic, bon genre. She looked as though she spent her time attending rallyes, those mating dances of the French aristocracy that I had frequented with my French girlfriend, Hélène. But she would have been equally at home in the then fashionable Tyrolean hunting clothes which I used to see in Paris Match. She exuded what Americans vulgarly call class. I liked her air of cool hauteur. It was this fire in the ice, like the glitter of diamonds under chandeliers, that had attracted me to my earlier loves. Very soon, I was to learn that she was neither cold nor haughty, but had simply adopted this mien as a defence against a bewilderingly strange world. This was the first time she had left her native France; she and her widowed mother had been too poor to travel. Normally I would have descended on her like a peregrine falcon on a hapless hare. Not now. She was my niece by marriage, and therefore taboo, though nobody had ever bothered to explain why. Not that this relationship stopped me from admiring her, of course.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I’m your uncle Rafe. You may call me Rafe or Foxy. That’s my nickname. But please never address me as Graf!"

She blushed slightly. That’s very kind of you, Uncle Rafe. You, of course, must call me simply Venetia.

But are you not a princess too? Shouldn’t I address you as Your Highness?

She laughed. Luckily, no. Russian titles were passed on through the father and Papa was neither a Russian nor a prince. I’m merely plain Venetia, unlike dear Aunt Yevgenia.

It was my turn to laugh. Plain! That’s the last epithet anyone dare apply to you. You’re dazzlingly beautiful. Every man in the hall was watching you as you came through those doors. And, in a different way, so was every woman. A hundred pairs of female eyes were being narrowed all around me.

She blushed again. I found it enchanting. I hadn’t seen a local girl blush during my seven years in Australia; they were all either too sunburnt or too brazen to do so.

I do hope you had a comfortable flight, I remarked, as we made our way to the car. Phatic banalities seemed called for, to break the ice.

She gave me an effulgent smile. It was apolaustically sybaritic, not just comfortable! It was so good of you to accommodate me so luxuriously.

Apolaustically sybaritic? Well, stone the flaming crows, mate! Yevgenia had underestimated this girl’s command of English. Not at all. First-class is the only sensible way to spend twenty-two hours in the air.

She exclaimed at the heat as we emerged into the car park. It’s so warm! It’s like Nice in July. She had a slight French accent, which I found nostalgically musical. It reminded me of my lost love, Hélène, who had a voice like a silver bell when not too PMS. She exclaimed again when she saw the Miura. It’s so futuristic! she told me, stepping back to admire its lustrous red duco. Our gardener, Reinhardt Heinkel, used to burnish my cars till they glittered like Nazi medals. I was pleased at her enthusiasm; this kid might be young, but she had impeccable taste. I had a feeling she and I would get on quite well together. Having a teenager around the house might not be too excruciating after all.

The design was revolutionary in its day, I explained. It was almost the first mid-engined car produced. Unfortunately, it was built for a race of dashing dwarves. There’s not much room for one’s legs.

I think there’ll be plenty of room for mine. They’re not very long.

Involuntarily, I glanced at them. They were not only long, but very shapely. She caught my appreciative glance and coloured slightly. Something to do with her convent upbringing? Was Blushing Modestly 101 on the finishing school syllabus? As she was helping me stow the luggage in the Miura’s small boot, she glanced at my private number plate: RAFE 6997. A little private jest of mine, referring to both my favourite sexual practice and the number of notches on my gun when I registered it.

An interesting prime, she remarked casually.

I was taken aback. Was she just bluffing? I looked it up later and found she was not.

Indeed! I remarked casually. Clever of you to spot it.

Clever? Not really. I just happen to know the first ten thousand primes by heart. What made you choose that one?

She knew ten thousand primes by heart! Merde alors! What the hell was I dealing with? Had convent girls nothing better to do in the evenings than sit round memorising primes? I stifled my rising panic, smiled enigmatically and said, It just happens to have been my lucky number in a major business deal. Strictly secret. I wasn’t going to explain things to her which were then not on the average convent’s syllabus.

I like to play with numbers. She went on, I practice doing things like cube roots and so on in my head.

There are things I would like to practice doing in your head myself, I thought, lustfully. I was finding her so unsettling I was nervous about a rising disturbance in my trousers. To distract myself, as we drove out of the car park, I asked, In that case, what’s the cube root of 61,629,875? I had taken the numbers at random from the plates of the cars around me. She closed her eyes and concentrated for about twenty seconds before replying.

375. That wasn’t very difficult. Why don’t you give me a harder one?

I would have loved to have given her a much harder one, but managed to bring my mind back to the subject in question. Anything to lessen this growing sexual tension. What about seventh root? I asked. Which is exactly what I had in mind just then. Say 170,859,375? Once again, I was just plucking the numbers from car plates. This time she took longer, closing her eyes and frowning intently. A minute or so passed in silence. I thought she’d given up in silent despair, so took the opportunity to study her legs while at the traffic lights. What pristine perfection!

Eventually, she said, That was rather more difficult. The answer’s fifteen.

I asked her to scribble down the numbers on a scrap of paper. Later, I checked them on the office PC. They were both correct. I was not just astonished; I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know much about mathematics, but a eighteen-year old who could do calculations like that in her head was obviously either a genius or an idiot savant.

Please don’t tell aunt Yevgenia, or anyone else about this.

Why not? You have an extraordinary talent. Amazing! You should be proud of it.

Thank you. It’s little more than a party trick, and has little to do with real mathematics. Any computer can do as much. But all the same I’d be grateful if you just kept it a secret.

This girl was not just clever but shrewd. She guessed, rightly, that to get on with Yevgenia and her friends she should avoid any bourgeois display of her talents. How did you like your convent? I asked, to change the subject.

I didn’t. Maman sent me there because it was cheap. I didn’t fit in, I’m afraid. My heretical views upset the nuns. At first they thought I was a disciple of Hans Kung.

And are you? I recall his saying some harsh things about religion in general.

She laughed. Of course not! I’m not even a Christian. I told them I was actually a Tantric Buddhist, and found their dogmatic theology unconvincing. Aquinas was illogical and naïve compared with the subtleties of Vajrayāna.

I was