Tremor Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

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  Contents

  Winston Graham

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Afterwards

  1985

  Winston Graham

  Tremor

  Winston Mawdsley Graham OBE was an English novelist, best known for the series of historical novels about the Poldarks. Graham was born in Manchester in 1908, but moved to Perranporth, Cornwall when he was seventeen. His first novel, The House with the Stained Glass Windows was published in 1933. His first ‘Poldark’ novel, Ross Poldark, was published in 1945, and was followed by eleven further titles, the last of which, Bella Poldark, came out in 2002. The novels were set in Cornwall, especially in and around Perranporth, where Graham spent much of his life, and were made into a BBC television series in the 1970s. It was so successful that vicars moved or cancelled church services rather than try to hold them when Poldark was showing.

  Aside from the Poldark series, Graham’s most successful work was Marnie, a thriller which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1964. Hitchcock had originally hoped that Grace Kelly would return to films to play the lead and she had agreed in principle, but the plan failed when the principality of Monaco realised that the heroine was a thief and sexually repressed. The leads were eventually taken by Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. Five of Graham’s other books were filmed, including The Walking Stick, Night Without Stars and Take My Life. Graham wrote a history of the Spanish Armadas and an historical novel, The Grove of Eagles, based in that period. He was also an accomplished writer of suspense novels. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Private Man, was published by Macmillan in 2003. He had completed work on it just weeks before he died. Graham was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1983 was honoured with the OBE.

  Dedication

  For

  Gwen, Robin and Tina

  Some four thousand million years ago the Earth came into existence as a sphere of whirling gas and molten dust, circling its parent, the Sun. In the next thousand centuries it began to cool and form a crust, and in another thousand the crust hardened and came to contain within itself, and to suppress, the explosive gases, the white-hot fused rocks, the molten metal and the solar energies seething at its centre.

  Passing millennia have strengthened and thickened the crust. But the crust is still only a thin shell relative to the size of the Earth. We build our flimsy structures of concrete and cement upon a frail surface. We strut on thin ice. Thirty miles down the temperature is still a thousand degrees centigrade.

  Now and then the sedimentary rocks, with their covering of soil and vegetation, on which we live and on whose sustenance alone we depend to live, shift themselves under pressure from below. They buckle or slide. Small movements adjusting to a slow squeeze, settling or contracting, yielding to or resisting elemental force.

  The human ants living and multiplying on the thin surface suffer and are disturbed or disorientated by these shifts. If the shifts occur in or near centres of population there is a heavy loss of ant property and life. To them it is a major disaster.

  The most famous of these disasters, because it was the most publicized, occurred in San Francisco on the 18th of April, 1906. Most of the damage was caused here by the fire that followed the earth tremor. Deaths were minimal: fewer than five hundred. The worst earthquake this century was in Kwanto, Japan, in September, 1923, where more than a hundred thousand people died.

  In 1960 Agadir, in Morocco, was almost levelled, with some twelve thousand killed, of whom two thousand were Europeans. Many of these were French residents, but many also were British, Americans, Swiss and Germans, holidaymakers who had come to escape the winter and enjoy the new hotels, the fine bathing beaches, the balmy sunshine.

  It happened on the 29th of February, the day of the Leap Year and the third day of Ramadan.

  Chapter One

  I

  There was no flight from London to Agadir. You took the 13.40 flight to Bordeaux, changed there and then again at Casablanca. On Friday the 26th of February, 1960, the plane was ten minutes late taking off.

  News had reached Air France that a bus bringing eight of their passengers had been involved in an accident, but they would be arriving shortly. Had the plane been nearly full it is likely it would not have waited. But it was less than half full.

  The eight relevant passengers had no means of knowing this, and spent half an hour in a fever of anxiety.

  Among them was Matthew Morris. Tall, cheerful, notably good-looking, twenty-eight, artistic, unreliable, humorous, emotional, having just left his wife. Another was Jack Frazier. Tall, thin, thirty-six, nervy, chainsmoking, talkative, half-French, having just left his friends.

  The bus had hit a taxi, or the taxi the bus, and a steering track put out of alignment. After the usual exchange of insults, a long and exasperating wait for a relief bus. When it came, the too slow change from one bus to another, then the luggage, and finally they had lumbered off on what seemed certain to be a lost cause. The two men, sitting next to each other, had got into conversation. Then the older man, in an obvious fever of impatience, had left the bus and taken a taxi, but in fact had arrived at Heathrow at almost the same time, to discover, as Matthew and the others discovered, that their plane had not yet left but was about to take off.

  So a sprint down endless corridors, and they had all gasped their way onto the plane, with the doors slamming behind them, and the engines instantly started.

  At Bordeaux Matthew found that his solitary bag was missing and it took twenty minutes to locate it. It was retrieved just in time from a plane about to leave for Nice. Not a propitious start to a holiday. The two men had not shared seats next to each other on the first leg, but Frazier dropped into the adjoining seat on the flight to Casablanca and Matthew, explaining about his bag, said he thought there must be a voodoo on this flight. Frazier, too talkative most of the time, grunted and coughed at this and kept his eye on the défense de fumer sign, waiting to light a cigarette. He carried a small suitcase which he kept on his knee all the time.

  Rona. It was a funny old thing, Matthew thought, to leave your wife. Rona Ellison, she’d been; twenty-eight now, with dark, short cut hair, trimmed to chin level; a round face; pretty and full of common sense. Abounding with common sense; a solicitor’s daughter; qualifying herself; a good brain. They had married four years ago, just before his first novel was published. So her husband was a rising young novelist of twenty-four, who already had one book in production and a brilliant future.

  It hadn’t quite worked out that way.

  All the same, it might have worked. Incompatibility? Did the lawyers still use that dreary term? A £500 advance hadn’t lasted long. He’d spent freely and enjoyed it, and hadn’t bothered about another novel, expecting much of the first. Anyway, music was his chief love, the basic love of his life. But you couldn’t live off it. Two years in Paris – he’d
squeezed the concession out of his mother – had proved that. Played the piano well – always had – but not good enough. Played the bass sax well, also the guitar – not good enough. Sang moderately – not good enough. He’d had a talent with words, quite amusingly, so he wrote a comedy thriller about his years in Paris.

  Third publisher took it. ‘Refreshingly different’, he called it. So had some of the reviewers. But not the public. If they wanted thrillers they went to Chandler, if comic they went to Wodehouse. Never the twain should meet. Or so it seemed. The book hadn’t earned its advance.

  It hadn’t been an angry parting yesterday. He still found her attractive, and she him. But a second novel written and published last year had hardly sold as well as the first, and he was discouraged at the thought of trying a third. For three years they had received a subsidy from both fathers but that had dried up. Now that she was qualified she was keeping him. Not a happy situation.

  He knew she was mainly in the right. It seemed likely that had he beavered away in fairly regular hours scribbling away like Mr Gibbon, or even tapping away like Mrs Christie, Rona would have given him all the support she could. She didn’t like, and she made it plain she didn’t like, coming home to find him plucking at a guitar or moodily preoccupied reading an article on Diatonic Harmony, and to be told without apparent embarrassment that he hadn’t done any work, any real work, that day.

  The tiny flat in Hampstead was hers. Aside from a piano, a mass of records and a lot of art books, so were the contents.

  He didn’t know what to do now. Most of his clothes he’d left with his mother. ‘ Two weeks in Morocco?’ she’d said. ‘Will that solve anything?’ ‘ Not much. But I need a holiday. Maybe something will happen. Inspiration – I’m thin-blooded.’ ‘But it’s really over between you and Rona?’ ‘I reckon so.’ ‘Pity. She’s such a nice girl.’ ‘I think the same.’ ‘Your father doesn’t want me to lend you any more money. Says it’s unfair on Dorothy and Jean.’ (His half-sisters.) ‘Thanks, no, I’ve an overdraft that can still stretch a bit.’

  This second Caravelle was nearly full, passengers almost all French. The hum of talk matched the hum of the engines.

  Last Tuesday, he’d supposed, had helped him to make up his mind. He was not a quick mind-maker-up, and without it he might have dragged on a while longer.

  Rona knew Eileen Patterson, the successful woman novelist, and at a recent meeting of something called the Women’s Guild had scraped an acquaintance with the famous Hannibal Scott, who was there as a guest speaker, and had invited them both to dinner. At it there had been much talk of writers and writing: of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, of dear Morgan Foster, of Tom Eliot, of Aldous and Wystan, of Christopher Isherwood and Marcel Proust.

  Matthew had been quite out of his depth: he read Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Raymond Chandler, et al. If, on the other hand, the subject had turned to music, he could have held his own pretty well whether it was on Schoenberg, Stravinsky or Fats Waller.

  Neither of the two eminent authors had read either of Matthew’s novels, but towards the end of the meal, when writing habits came up (could this, he suspected later, have been Rona’s doing?) they were both emphatic that Matthew’s idea of an author’s life was really the romantic public’s idea of how an author operated. In their own cases, and in the case of nearly every other professional writer they knew, the very reverse was the case. To wait for inspiration was fatal. Inspiration, they insisted, was the product of work, of regular writing at regular times, and every day, irrespective of the ultimate value or amount of the work produced.

  At this point Matthew had added visibly to Rona’s irritation with him by explaining that he didn’t really like writing at all. He had no fervent wish to make it his permanent career. He was really only writing novels, he said, in the hope that one or another would hit the jackpot and enable him to retire.

  It had been rather a brutal thing to say – its brutality born out of his own irritation at being patronized. Afterwards, after they had gone, he was sorry because he knew of Rona’s efforts to get these eminent people to their unpretentious flat in the first place. And all for him. As she said coldly, when he tried to apologize, it had all been done for him.

  A two-hour wait at Casablanca. There were a few English books on the bookstall and, as if to cheer him out of his depression, he was surprised to find his first novel among them. Chance Medley, by Matthew Sorensen.

  The jacket had a small tear in it, and the tops of the pages were yellow from exposure to light and heat. He suddenly felt proud of it, and then sorry for it, representing him as it did so far away from home. He almost bought it out of sympathy, but the price in francs was inflated, and after all if he bought it he would be withdrawing it from someone else who might eventually fancy it and buy it for themselves.

  This third plane was a much smaller one, and quite full. Matthew and Jack Frazier, having shared a coffee together, boarded the plane together. Matthew took a window seat and Frazier sat next to him, the suitcase firmly between his knees. The stewardess had wanted to stow it in the luggage compartment above, but Frazier refused.

  Next to Frazier was a blowzy woman of about fifty, over made-up and in a girlish outfit that didn’t suit her at all. She had two younger women friends in the seat in front, and they had made a fuss because they could not have three seats together. The two friends were also floridly dressed and chattered away in loud voices in provincial French. Again almost everyone on the plane was French.

  Frazier, who had a nasal Birmingham accent when he spoke English, and an accent Matthew couldn’t place when he spoke French, was back at his most talkative and was soon chattering away to the three Frenchwomen, shouting to make himself heard above the roar of the engines.

  Presently he turned and offered Matthew a Gauloise. Matthew smilingly refused.

  ‘I hate catching bleeding planes,’ Frazier said. ‘That panic this morning! Phew! I doubt I could’ve felt more in a muck-sweat if I’d been the last Jew leavin’ Hitler’s Germany!’

  Matthew smiled. ‘Lucky they waited. And lucky we got away when we did.’

  ‘What? How d’you mean?’ Frazier’s voice had sharpened.

  ‘I mean, once you lose your slot at Heathrow it often takes time to get another.’ Matthew opened a newspaper he had bought in Casablanca.

  ‘I suppose you paid in francs for that,’ Frazier said. ‘The Moroccan franc has just been devalued, you know, and they’ve a thing called a dirham that’s worth a hundred old francs. We’ll have to watch it, especially in the hotel. Someone always tries to overcharge you when these currency contortions happen.’

  Matthew said: ‘You can’t get the dirham outside Morocco. Or so I was told. They say the French franc will still be legal currency.’ After a minute he added: ‘D’you come here often?’

  ‘Nah. It’s years since I been over. Just came to do a bit of business, then I’m off again. And it was a good excuse to see the sun. Know what I mean?’

  Matthew folded the paper open. There was a report on the Channel Tunnel project. It was recommended that it should be a rail tunnel system only, and cost estimates were it would be upwards of a hundred million pounds. A pipe dream? They had talked about it so long.

  ‘And you?’ asked Frazier.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You. You just on holiday?’

  ‘More or less. I needed a break.’

  ‘But you read French.’

  ‘Yes, I spent two years in Paris.’

  Two years not very profitably occupied, he thought now. Except to come to terms with his own shortcomings. Chiefly he had studied life. And he now spoke fluent and colloquial French. (He might be a bit out of date in the latest fashionable phrases: French argot altered and changed its meaning every few weeks.) And some Dutch he knew from a girlfriend who came from Leiden. Not exactly a portfolio of learning and achievement to bring home to England as the product of two years. But of course he had enjoyed it. And there had then bee
n the novel.

  His companion now turned back to the blowzy Frenchwoman, who it seemed was called Laura Legrand. Frazier introduced Matthew to her, and then to the two younger women. It seemed they were just ‘friends’, meeting together in Bordeaux after a long absence and taking a three-week vacation together. Where were they staying? The Hotel Saada, of course; it was very luxe. Me too, Frazier said: a happy coincidence. And Matthew? Yes? So they were all to be at the same hotel.

  Matthew’s custom was always to stay at the best hotel his overdraft could afford, and the agent he had booked through said he thought he would profit from the devaluation; but he did not join in the mutual congratulations because his eye was caught by a girl in a green linen suit, two seats forward on the opposite side of the aisle.

  Thick warm red-brown hair shoulder length. Clear, clean young profile. Nose a bit tip-tilted. Thick lashes that were not stuck on; what colour would her eyes be? Green, blue, brown? Fine skin. Her arms were bare to just above the elbow. A long slim hand raised a glass to her lips. She drank with the bottom lip slightly forward: a suggestion of appetite. Matthew knew that many French girls had poor skins, but those that were good were very, very good, poreless, like alabaster.

  He had had no particular thought of finding that sort of comfort while he was away. Susceptible enough to good looks, and being himself attractive to women, he had nevertheless been faithful to Rona throughout their marriage. Rona was pretty and, until disillusion set in, ardent. But this girl was a stunner. He watched attentively but could not see her speak to the woman beside her. Could it be so lucky that she was on her own? And staying – who knew – at the Saada?

  The plane droned on over the desert. Presently the girl he was watching got up and walked towards the loos at the back. Sometimes sideviews are deceptive; a full face brings disillusion. Not so here. The eyes in the half-lit plane looked grey-green, which meant her hair was probably not its natural colour. Perfect oval face, good cheek-bones; she didn’t look more than twenty-five or -six. He thought their eyes met as she went past, but she glanced away. She must be used to glancing away; a lot of men would look at her as she passed.