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The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2013 Copyright © Ian Thornton 2013 Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013 Ian Thornton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. FIRST EDITION A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007551491 Ebook Edition © NOV 2013 ISBN: 9780007551507 Version: 2015-09-08 To Heather, Laszlo and Clementine Contents Copyright Prologue:
A Refracted Tale of Two Wordy Old Gentlemen in a Blue Prism
Part One
1 Around the Time When Adolf Was a Glint in His First Cousin’s Eye
2 Pawn to Queen Four
3 Serendipity’s Day Off
4 The Butterflies Flutter By
Part Two
1 Fools Rush In
2 A Vision of Love (Wearing Boxing Gloves)
3 Drago Thoms: Pythagoras, Madness, and an Indian Summer in Bed
4 The Kama Sutra, Ganika, and Russian Vampires
5 We Are the Music Makers. We Are the Dreamers of Dreams.
6 A Sweet Deity of Debauchery
7 A Day (or So) in the Country
8 Just a Lucky Man Who Made the Grade
9 The Accusative Case
10 The Black Hand
11 The Day Abu Hasan Broke Wind
12 A Microcosm of the Apocalypse
13 A Farewell of Scarlet Wax and Gardenia
Part Three
1 And the Ass Saw the Angel
2 It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Part I)
3 The Die Is Cast (aka Les Jeux Sont Faits)
4 The Unlikely Bedfellow
5 “Ciao Bello!”
6 The March of Don Quixote
7 In No-Man’s-Land
8 “A Shadow Can Never Claim the Beauty of the Image”
9 The Birth of Blanche in a Dangerous Ladbroke Grove Pub
10 Cicero’s Fine Oceanarium of Spewed Wonders (1920–1932)
11 Suffragettes, Mermaids, and Hooligans (1932)
12 Let’s Rusticate Again
13 Jackboots, Cleopatra, and the Bearded Lady (1932–1936)
14 The Girl in the Tatty Blue Dress
15 She Had a Most Immoral Eye (1937–1940)
16 Archibald’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
17 Then There Were Three Again
18 Music, Brigadiers, and Marigold (1940)
19 It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Part II)
20 “Gawd Bless Ya, Gav’nah!”
21 A Giant in the Promised Land
22 Pepper’s Ghost, Fluffers, and a Brief Encounter
Part Four
1 “Everybody Ought to Go Careful in a City Like This” (1945)
2 The Return of Abu Hasan
3 The Brigadier’s Au Revoir
4 The Veil
5 A Blue Rose by Any Other Name
6 Dragons, Confucius, and Snooker
7 “I Know Who You Are!”
8 The Death and Life of a Grim Reaper
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Publisher
A Refracted Tale of Two Wordy Old Gentlemen in a Blue Prism
A rural cricket match in buttercup time, seen and heard through the trees; it is surely the loveliest scene in England and the most disarming sound. From the ranks of the unseen dead forever passing along our country lanes, the Englishman falls out for a moment to look over the gate of the cricket field and smile.
—J.
