The Triple Goddess (125 page)

‘But get there he did in the end; and while others were jetting elsewhere in first-class luxury, or reading a newspaper in the back of a limousine en route to some resort stuffed with tourists and staffed by ersatz natives, he would be standing patiently as inquisitive villagers, who’d never seen a white man, tugged his hair and beard and pawed his clothes.

‘As I said, once he arrived in a country Pappy never just crossed the name off his list and hurried on to his next destination, in an attempt to proceed through the alphabet as fast as possible. Quick in-and-out visits were not for him, and Z, just because it came last, in his mind did not beckon him to hasten towards it like a holy grail, or carry any greater significance than the other letters.

‘My grandfather’s interests were catholic, and he wanted to know everything about each place he was in, from the cities and towns, to the tiniest settlements of mud huts and reed platforms. He took the time, though his programme didn’t call for him to embark on such diversions or side trips, to trek through mountains and forests, to paddle up estuaries and crocodile-infested rivers to their sources, and to explore jungles in search of unknown tribes. Swamps, rapids, glaciers, and icy peaks: he came to know them all.

‘Amazingly, other than a mild dose of malaria, which he treated with copious draughts of gin over which a small bottle of quinine-infused tonic water had been ceremonially waved, Pappy never contracted a day’s illness, despite refusing every kind of inoculation that doctors issue dire warnings about forgoing before setting off on such journeys.

‘As one might expect of one who was so un-uxorious and un-family-oriented, my grandfather was fiercely independent, guarding his privacy jealously and always travelling alone. He hugged his experiences to himself as if they were precious stones: metaphorically speaking only, for he was not in the least greedy or acquisitive, and did not even bother to write them up in a diary. He didn’t care that such records would have been of the greatest interest to explorers and anthropologists, and avidly read by a public that was accustomed to subsisting on a thin gruel of library fiction, and jungle adventures written by men who’d never left the equivalent of Surbiton. He wouldn’t talk to journalists, and if there ever were any aspiring Stanleys on the trail of the Bulstrode Livingstone, they did not catch up with him.

‘It did not matter to Grandpa Cecil that the populace at home was dying to know about arctic wastes, barren steppes, and the tundra; about mountainous icebergs and treacherous crevasses, places where beards freeze and even the polar bears long for a thermostat. About where one can cross millions of acres without seeing a human, and get lost in forests in which wild animals take having their personal space invaded very personally, and wolverines drop out of trees onto anything that looks edible. Where the flora is poisonous, and where the fevers and infections and flesh-eating diseases, and bites and stings of snake, rat, scorpion and spider, more often than not are fatal.

‘For it is a truth that the yeast of every imagination needs to be fed more with the rumour of fact than with fact itself. Rumours cease to be interesting when they are raised, or rather lowered, to the level of fact. What the world wants to hear about are not new species of animal and bird, but mythical beasts; such as the kraken, an enormous sea-monster supposedly seen off the coast of Norway. Fabulous creatures like the griffin, which has the head and wings of an eagle, and the body and hindquarters of a lion; or, in the case of the hippogriff, those of a horse like the centaur...while centaurs themselves have a human head, torso, and arms. And the basilisk, or cockatrice, a reptile with a lethal gaze of breath, hatched by a serpent from a cock’s egg.

‘The human mind craves stories of abominable—the word means inhuman—snowmen, and prehistoric mammals such as sabre-toothed tigers, mastodons, woolly mammoths, and dinosaurs. By dinosaurs, I don’t mean the mild-tempered vegetarian variety of diplodocid sauropods with long necks, nor the pet created in the Hanna-Barbera studios, Dino, who is so pleased to see Fred Flintstone every night when he gets home from work; but the appalling Utahraptor, which as every child knows was intelligent and cunning and hunted in packs; which measured twenty-five feet, had arms with sickles for talons, an enormous head with sharp curved teeth, and an immense tail to balance it as it ran at great speed.

‘Such strange mutational permutations there are in mythology! The chimera is a fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and a serpent’s tail. Then there’s the wyvern, a winged dragon with two feet like those of an eagle—lions and eagles are very well represented in legend—and a serpent-like barbed tail; and the Rukh or Roc, a white bird of enormous size and such strength that it is capable of picking up a camel…it ate two of the Bactrian variety for breakfast at its mountain nest…or an elephant in its talons.

‘Mr Cecil Bulstrode lived for nobody but himself. He was fascinated by beauty, whether it came in the form of a fine-looking woman, dramatic waterfall scenery, or the expert playing of a Chinese lap harp. After an exhausting day being grilled by the sun in the bush, he’d sit for hours cross-legged on the earth-trodden floor of a grass hut, chewing the fat with a Hottentot. After a fortnight’s fighting though mamba-tangled lianas—or was it liana-tangled mambas?—in shirt-drenching humidity, he’d show up in a cannibal restaurant, wave aside the menu, and leave it to the chef to decide who to serve. Without giving a thought to hot bath or shower, or freshly laundered sheets, Pappy would happily listen for as long as they lasted to the ramblings of a man with a bone through his nose; or spend an evening learning how to prepare armadillo, the taste of which he considered superior to the finest corn-fed and aged beef.

‘Also astonishing was that, every night before dinner, no matter where he was and however great the heat and humidity and how primitive the circumstances, Cecil always had in his hand a large squeaky-clean frosted cut-glass tumbler of London Dry Gin over ice with a dash of Angostura bitters.

‘Very early on, as he was coming to the end of countries beginning with the letter C, Grandpa began to acquire chameleonic qualities. His skin would of its own accord darken or lighten to match that of the people he was amongst. The effect of this, when combined with the native style of dress or costume that he assumed, made it impossible to distinguish him from the locals; and because each location he visited was usually far removed from the last, being sometimes on opposite sides of the world, these metamorphoses in his appearance would have been the more striking, had there been anyone to remark the difference; which there never was, Pappy being the very definition of a loner.

‘The transformations were the more dramatic for being so sudden: at some point between the time Pappy crossed the border from whatever land he was departing, and entered wherever it was that was next on his agenda, his skin would turn a different shade of white or yellow or brown or black to match the indigenous hue. If it was a French or German colony, he would arrive with his hair
en brosse
; and on a Nordic trip it would be hanging blond and long. His face, which one moment might have been long and smooth with high cheek bones, could become round, jowly, and swarthy. His orbs would alter their setting, expression, and colour, from prominent piercing and blue to sunken sullen and dark.

‘When he passed amongst the Turkic and Mongol tribes, the Bashkirs, Tatars, Udmurts, and Komi-Permyaks, he acquired what Thomas Mann memorably described in
The Magic Mountain
as “those Khirgiz eyes”, almond aslant and umbery.

‘His character and mood, though much more difficult to define, would also alter, ranging through many degrees from outgoing and animated to introverted and lugubrious.

‘It was always the same: as soon as Pappy stepped across a gangway onto the deck of an internationally outbound ship, or ascended the step from platform to an equivalent train, his features began to revert to those that are as typical of the Bulstrode clan as a protuberant jaw is of the House of Hapsburg. But as soon as he arrived at his next foreign port of call or station, not only his dress, but his bone structure, the colour of his skin and hair and eyes, his deportment and demeanour: all would have altered to whatever was most typical of the region.

‘You won’t be surprised to learn that Grandpa also acquired multi-linguistic skills. In the course of his travels he spurned the services of an interpreter, and applied himself to picking up the common language and dialect, including tonal inflections and idioms and slang terms. In this he was so effective that the natives, even those who had never strayed farther from home than the ex-Mrs Bulstrode’s Skegness seed merchant, were it not for the fact that they’d never seen him before, and he wasn’t known to be related to any of them, might have said that he had grown up among them.

‘What made this all the more surprising was that, as a schoolboy, Pappy hadn’t been able to master more than a few words of French, and those he pronounced with an anglicized accent so frightful that it made even his own countrymen cringe; people who, afflicted with a common hangover from colonial days, believed that “If you say it loudly enough they’ll understand you.” Whereas it had once been remarked of my grandfather that he would have failed an oral exam in pig Latin, “igpay atinLay”, or in Silence, now, whether the language was Slavic, Arab, Oriental, or Romance; harsh and guttural or lilting and smooth; no sooner had he awoken the morning after arriving at his destination, than Pappy was fluently asking where he might breakfast upon whatever it was usual to serve there.

‘He would invariably be offered hospitality, and invited to sit down with the families of those clamouring to make his acquaintance. As soon as he’d been introduced to everyone, observing all the customs and courtesies as to the manner born, he would consume whatever was put before him with every evidence of enjoyment, no matter how unappetizing or unorthodox or irreligious such food might have been considered where he’d just come from.

‘Pappy always knew when it was time to move on, because the soles of his feet started itching. He would experience strange bodily sensations and urges, which couldn’t be denied any more than John Masefield’s sea fever. The citizens were always most disappointed when he told them he was leaving, and would turn out in their masses to see him off, so fond and respectful had they become of him and appreciative of his interest in them.

‘As he bade farewell to the tearful crowds, they would implore him to change his mind and stay, and often their officials would offer him substantial inducements to do so. Pappy turned down many senior public offices, of senator, judge, councilman, and mayor, and any number of tribal posts. Several countries asked him to be their president, and in one instance offered him kingship. The riches of towns, cities, principalities, and nations were promised him, along with mansions, palaces, and estates—even a wife or wives, depending on the culture.

But Grandpa politely refused every generosity, including parting gifts, which he declined on the grounds that he liked to travel as light as possible. This was true: he never owned more than would fit in a portmanteau, and he scorned the chests and steamer trunks he saw others dragging about with them in the more so-called civilized places he visited.

‘In my opinion, the reason for his inflexible personal rules was that Pappy hated the idea of commitment. It wasn’t that he wanted the freedom to be licentious, because he was the soberest and most moral of individuals, with the single exception of the way he treated his own family; but it wasn’t in his nature to call any place home.

‘This has been the case to greater or lesser degree with all explorers, up to the last century’s peripatetic instances of Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Bruce Chatwin. Such individuals refuse to be tied down by settlement and shackled by domestic routine. They reject the expectation of compliance and conformity. They deem the definitions and regulations that society seeks to impose upon an individual not just restrictive and onerous, but offensive. To them, authority is the enemy of liberty, of both body and mind.

‘But every person manifests variations of character, and inconsistencies of behaviour. Though in Pappy Bulstrode’s make-up there was only one, it was, considering the person, major…and it concerned a “thing” he had for the town of, of all places: Margate, in Kent. This was not an affectation or pretence with which my grandfather sought to mislead those who strove to analyse and comprehend his eccentricities; he had a genuine attachment to the place.

‘As with all other things, Pappy’s passion was controlled, regulated and regular: every year, on June the fifteenth, he would arrive in Margate on what he called his “hiatus holiday”. He always put up at the Cockleshell Bed and Breakfast, which was run by a widow, Mrs Bayliss.

‘For two weeks Pappy would stroll up and down the seaside promenade in a white floppy hat and white shorts, and eat fish and chips, ice-cream and candy floss. He trudged the sand ripples at the low tide’s edge with a shrimping net, or ventured a little farther out in the hope of a prawn. He wandered the beach with bare feet picking mussels from the rock pools, and sat on the shingle in a deck chair watching the children take donkey rides.

‘I well remember one year my mother and me going to meet Grandpa’s ship when it docked at Southampton. Grandpa had developed an inexplicable long-distance fondness for his youngest daughter as he got older, which was the more surprising since she had been born after he decamped from the marital railway carriage; and my mother, who was a forgiving soul, was happy to reciprocate.

‘It was upon the occasion of my grandfather’s “hiatus holiday” return from Uzbekistan, and Pappy’s journey had been long and tortuous: along the Silk Road from Tashkent and Samarkand to Bukhara, and thence to Tehran and Isfahan; before proceeding south to sail through the Persian Gulf and enter the Suez Canal, connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.