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131 pages

English

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A stark and unusual story told in Spartan English. A weak hero becomes stronger through the adversity he faces and the pain he endures.A worldly and cynical heroine is softened by the same story.Tom is born of wealthy parents in England in the 1960s. He hates his violent father and loves his mother. His father owns a Munch. His parents are killed in a plane crash. Sir Peter controls his fortune until he is twenty-one. He wants to buy the Munch. He's obsessed by it. Tom refuses. Tom becomes a recluse on a beach near Darwin. He meets Annie and falls in love. She has had a hysterectomy and cannot have children. She says the Munch is damaging him and convinces him to sell it. An expert declares it genuine.Tom will not sell it to Sir Peter. He hates him. They find another buyer. After the sale, the Munch is found to be a fake. There has been a switch and only Tom could have done it.Before he is arrested, Tom is shown photos of Annie with Sir Peter, she is his mistress and he is the real buyer. Tom now hates Annie. Annie now loves Tom.They all come to Darwin for the trial. Annie visits the expert. He commits suicide. He has left a letter and the truth comes out.Annie is found mutilated. Tom saves her life. He still hates her.He meets Ambrosia. She becomes pregnant with twins. There is a wedding. After the birth, he goes home to his wife. It's Annie. She is the mother. They were her eggs. Ambrosia was their surrogate. He vows vengeance on Sir Peter.

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	05 septembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789012309
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Witness to a Life

A tale of love and hate.
Of art fraud, treachery and retribution deferred.

Stephen Baddeley
Copyright © 2018 Stephen Baddeley

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781789012309

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For Biscuit.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Acknowledgements
One
I live with my wife and two daughters in a house on low cliffs overlooking the Arafura Sea. The girls look just like their mother. We have two spaniels and five chickens. One of them has stopped laying. I don’t know which one. We are happy. We haven’t always been happy.

I was born in London on the thirtieth of April 1966. It was the anniversary of Hitler’s suicide. I got stuck on the way out. We should both have died. We didn’t. I was born by caesarean section. Julius Caesar wasn’t. I read that.
My family lived in the Chilterns, north of Beaconsfield. A long time ago Disraeli was our neighbour. I had a brother. He was four years older than me.
I was left-handed. I still am.
Mother gave me a red cocker spaniel for my birthday. I was six. I called her Candy. I loved her. Her hair was the same colour as Mother’s. I loved Mother too.
I couldn’t speak properly. It wasn’t a stutter. The words wouldn’t come out the way I wanted them to. People thought it was because my parents tried to make me right-handed. They didn’t. They say the Queen’s father stuttered because of that.
The words wouldn’t separate themselves between my brain and my tongue. They came out jumbled. Everything was there, but it was out of order. I knew what I wanted to say and sometimes what I wanted to say was smart, sometimes funny. They wouldn’t come out right and people thought I was stupid. Mother knew I wasn’t stupid.
It was worse in company. I was taken to speech therapists in London. They diagnosed ‘tangled-speech’. Nothing helped. They decided there was something wrong with the wiring inside my brain. They were right.
I was shy. I still am, a bit.
The ‘tangled-speech’ was better if I said simple things. Simple sentences, subject, object, verb. Compound sentences were my enemies. So I avoided them. It made me think in simple sentences. That may not have been good for my brain. I still think in bursts of staccato sentences. I still talk like that, even though the speech has improved.
People thought I was being rude when I talked like that. I wasn’t. I don’t like being rude. Some people do. You’ve met those people.
Some people are rude because they feel weak. Some people are rude because they feel inadequate . They think being rude makes them strong. I wasn’t being rude, but I knew I was weak and inadequate .
I met a woman later and she showed me I wasn’t as weak as I thought I was or as inadequate as I thought I was. That was a long time later. I was grateful to her. Then I fell in love with her. It was a mistake. She comes into the story later. It’s sad.
Two
My name’s Annie and I’m the woman who comes into the story later, the one he fell in love with. He fell in love with another woman too, or thought he did, but I’ll tell you all about me later, about all of us. Some of it’s sad, but not all of it. I think men have a tendency to over-dramatize emotions, even broken men like Tommy, and perhaps they should tend not to.
Well, Tommy wasn’t really broken , as you will see, he was just damaged. I knew Tommy was a damaged man, soon after I met him. Lots of bad things had caused the damage and a lot of the damage was below the waterline, so I couldn’t see it at first. I cared for him and repaired him and then damaged him more. So a lot of this story is about how I damaged him more and about why I did.
I didn’t really have a choice about damaging him more. Well, that’s what I thought at the time, but later, I realised, I did have a choice, but just made the wrong one. I thought it was the right one at the time, but it turned out that it wasn’t. I ended up making such a mess of it all.
I may have damaged him more, but it has an almost happy ending, nearly happy, but not absolutely happy. Happier than it could have been, but not as happy as it might have been. Not a happy ending for everyone and not a happy ending for me.
Three
I didn’t have to talk to Candy, and Mother usually knew what I was trying to say. I was happy when I was with them. My brother, Bob, called me ‘The Reject’. He teased me. He did impersonations of me. They weren’t much good. Nothing Bob did was much good.
‘Bob’ wasn’t his real name. The Laroche-Lodges didn’t do common names like that. There was a lot of snobbery in my family. It went back centuries and came from having too much money and not enough contact with everyday people.
Father was an elitist . I have my own idea of what that means, but it may not mean the same to you. To me it means he was a snob-with-talent and that he liked the company of snobs-with-talent. That he thought the world should be run by snobs-with-talent. He thought, if you weren’t a snob-with-talent, then you were a ‘peasant’ and being a ‘peasant’ wasn’t a good thing to be. Not in the way Father saw the world.
Mother and I didn’t like the way Father saw the world. We saw it differently and we saw it the same.
He was smart, worked hard and achieved a lot. I didn’t respect any of the things he achieved, but he did achieve them. If he didn’t, he would have been a snob- without -talent, like his elder son. Bob didn’t have any talents to make him elitist. He was a snob -without- talent because he was a vacuum. I didn’t like Bob.
That’s wrong. I loathed him. I loathed almost everything about him and the bits I didn’t loath were the bits that turned out to be missing. There were a lot of bits missing with Bob. All the good bits. All the smart bits. All the bits that might have stopped him being what he was.
If Bob was dropped to earth without privilege he would have played pub darts, become tattooed, pierced, morbidly obese and of dubious personal hygiene. He would have licked his knife at the dinner table, smoked roll-your-owns, shaved his head, had missing teeth, picked his nose in public and yawned so you could see his tonsils. He would have continued as a xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, capriciously malevolent bully and all round, twenty-four carat arsehole. I didn’t like Bob.
Bob’s real name was Randolph, the same as Father. To avoid confusion Mother called him Bob. So we all did. Sometimes visitors called him Robert. That was wrong.
He went away to school when I was eight. That was a good thing. He came home for holidays. That wasn’t a good thing. I was the only schoolboy in England who didn’t look forward to holidays. I didn’t like Bob.
Bob was the only person I ever met who wasn’t good at anything .
Everybody’s good at something . It may not be a big thing and it may be a simple thing, but Bob wasn’t good at anything . He couldn’t even imitate me properly. He was a bully, but wasn’t much good at that either. His bullying was just brute force and you didn’t need any talent to be stronger than someone four years younger. He couldn’t even learn how to bully from Father, who was an expert at it.
Father was a talented bully. More later.

I had a nanny called Peggy. She was a nice lady. I called her ‘Nurse-Peggy’. I don’t know why. Not everything in life has to have an explanation, even though we’re told it should. Father called her ‘Mrs. Cranshaw,’ and Mother called her ‘Peg’. I think they were friends. I knew they both loved me.
She came from Brighton and married when she was young. Her husband was killed in the war. They didn’t have time to have children. She never got married again. She kept a photograph of him in her room.
There are little sadnesses hidden away inside all of us. Hidden away in our deep places. Some sadnesses are big.
She was meant to be the nanny for me and Bob, but he said he was too old to need one. I knew she didn’t like him. She didn’t like him, because of the way he bullied me. She didn’t like him, because he wasn’t a likeable person. Father liked him and that was enough for Bob.
I developed a pidgin language with Mother and Nurse-Peggy. It may not have been the best thing for me and I’m sure the elocution teachers wouldn’t have approved, but I was able to make myself understood by the two most important people in my life. I knew it wouldn’t do forever, but it was useful at the time. I can still remem