Kissing Toads (18 page)

‘We'll give her plenty of back-up,' Mortimer said. ‘She knows she can rely on us.'

Delphi was wrong about him, I decided. He might be a bit of a lech, but he was kind at heart. He was looking at me with the glow of kindliness in his eyes – and it couldn't be lust, not with my waistline. (Twenty-seven inches, according to Maddalena.) The thought of being without Crusty's support scared me rigid, but perhaps with the help of Morty's kindness and Russell's inner calm I would get by.

To cement good relations, I sat with Mortimer over a brandy after the others had gone to bed.

‘How did you get interested in gardens?' I asked. It was a conversational gambit: I knew quite well that he'd been an all-purpose TV presenter who'd gone in for gardening because there was an opening.

‘Always was, always was,' he said expansively. ‘It's the English thing, isn't it? The French have cuisine, the Italians have art, but we have gardens.' It was plainly a line he'd used before. ‘When I was a kid in a suburban semi in Bristol I had my own little patch out the back. Grew snapdragons – lovely things.
Antirrhinum
, to give them their proper name – but I prefer ‘snapdragon'. Much more evocative. I used to like pushing my finger into the flower and feeling the petals close over it.' His smile invested the image with sexual undertones, but that might have been my imagination. I hoped so. I wasn't feeling up to sex, even in an undertone. ‘I like to get close to nature. Nowadays we're surrounded by technology, even here. Plumbing, central heating, electricity, computers. It's all man-made, artificial. We need to reconnect with the natural world. We're all too busy to get out into the wide open spaces, but a garden is a little piece of nature on your doorstep.'

‘What about decking?' I said. ‘All gardening shows used to promote decking, but that's hardly natural.'

‘I've gone beyond decking,' Mortimer said, rather as Picasso might have declared he had outgrown his Blue Period. ‘Actually, I'm into the meadow garden now: wild flowers, tall grasses, a stream winding through. We're going to do something like that along the edge of the loch. It should make a great contrast to the formality of the maze and the more contrived layout of the cultivated areas.'

I made appreciative noises.

‘Of course, my interests cover a much wider spectrum than just gardening,' Mortimer continued, happily swigging brandy. ‘I'm working on a book right now.'

‘A gardening book?' I enquired.

‘No, no. I've already done several of those. This is a novel.' Oh dear. Delphi had told me Nigel was doing a piece of historical faction. Now Mortimer . . . ‘It's the story of a TV presenter: attractive, successful, young middle age. He meets this girl in her early twenties – a brilliant mind, stunningly beautiful. She becomes completely obsessed with him. He's married, but she has no scruples, she's determined to seduce him. He struggles to resist her but his marriage has gone stale and he feels alienated from his children: the temptation is too much. They go away for a week of passionate sex – or possibly a fortnight, I haven't decided. Then his daughter takes an overdose and he realises he must sacrifice his happiness and return to his family. In the end, the girl kills herself because he has abandoned her.'

He stopped, obviously awaiting applause. ‘It sounds wonderful,' I said.

‘Ransome Harber have already paid me a six-figure advance for it. I'm looking forward to writing the sex scenes – but perhaps I need to do some more research.'

Bugger.

As soon as it was diplomatically possible I put down my brandy, excused myself on the grounds of jet-lag – ‘London to Glasgow?' Mortimer queried – and bolted to my room.

Delphi and Russell returned on Monday with Alex and the other actors. Brie, who had little to do but stand around looking tragic – Russell hoped it wouldn't be beyond her range – was due a couple of days later. Wardrobe supplied costumes which Nigel declared were from the wrong period, Delphi complained her neckline wasn't sufficiently low-cut and then, when it had been altered, decided it was too revealing, one of the extras inadvertently quoted
Macbeth
, causing a universal panic attack, and another fell down the steps when we were filming in the oldest part of the castle and declared he had seen a ghost. Ash proved unexpectedly helpful here, listening politely to a melodramatic account of the incident and pointing out that the dead, if they are still around, have little power compared to the living. ‘A draught – a whisper – a transparent form – what harm can they do you? The dead are ineffectual: it is our fears which give them strength.'

‘The show is cursed,' maintained the injured actor, but the conviction was gone from his voice, and he sounded merely petulant.

‘Can't you do an exorcism?' asked Wardrobe.

‘I'm not a priest,' Ash said. ‘But why? If there are ghosts, they aren't in the way.'

‘Something
pushed
me down the steps . . .'

‘Lay off the Scotch,' Ash said. ‘I saw your hip flask.'

As Russell said later, ‘Nothing gets past
him
. I hadn't noticed the hip flask.'

‘Elf eyes,' I said.

Matters were further complicated by the presence of Fenris, whom Alex had insisted on bringing with him. The puppy was so traumatised by the journey and the change of location that he crapped on several of the Basilisk's rugs, twice rushed on to the set when we were filming, and insisted on leaping into Alex's arms every time Elton and Sting appeared, from which vantage point he would do a volte-face and bark aggressively at them until forcibly muzzled. The two German shepherds, having checked him out with a thorough sniff, paid him no further attention, but Alex was convinced they were out to devour him and wouldn't let Fenny out of his sight.

‘Maybe we could turn him into a sporran,' Russell muttered savagely after a third canine invasion made it necessary to reshoot yet another scene.

‘He just wants to join in,' Alex said. ‘Hey, why
don't
we put him in the show? He's awfully clever, aren't you, sugarpoop? – and I bet Alasdair McGoogle had a dog.'

‘He had several,' I said. ‘There's a portrait of him with a couple in one of the galleries. Lurchers.'

‘Dramatic licence?' said Delphi.

Nigel persisted in hanging around in historical-expert mode, all too often having fresh inspirations, leaving Mortimer to take charge in the garden. When we first arrived, Auld Andrew had been heard to make various remarks in broad Scots about the currse of television and city types who thocht they knew aboot gardening and so on, but Mortimer made friendly if faintly patronising overtures and, thanks to the language barrier and his own native insensitivity, had no idea he was being repulsed. Improbable though it seemed, they bonded; once Auld Andrew realised he might actually appear on the small screen, holding forth on matters horticultural (hopefully with subtitles), his objections vanished. The television was no longer currsed; he even deigned to give advice, matching Mortimer's patronage with a regal condescension that way outclassed him. In between, both of them enjoyed criticising the youthful labourers, though only Auld Andrew was allowed to tell Young Andrew when he was in error.

In the midst of all this HG moved like a king among his courtiers, a rather informal, hail-fellow-well-met sort of king who would frequently join in the digging, uproot a weed or plant a bulb, while Auld Andrew looked on with disapproval at this disruption of the natural order of things, and Mortimer surveyed him with the indulgence of a mentor for a favoured protégé who has stepped a little out of line. HG's part in the historical scenes would be shot later – Wardrobe was still working on his costume, which would be a symphony in tartan and dead badger – so to date he had stayed away from the acting.

He was a thoughtful host, but as the place filled up he showed a tendency to retreat into a private sanctum, dining alone and only putting in occasional appearances to liaise with his guests. I didn't blame him: a houseful of strangers was no joke, even if the house was a castle with more rooms than you could count and an efficient (if colourful) staff to look after them. I'd done some research on him over Easter, trawling the Internet for details of his past, trying to fill in the background so I could have a better understanding of the man I saw daily but didn't feel I knew at all. There were web pages galore, books, newspaper articles, even an autobiography –
Call Me God
– with the ghostwriter credited in smaller print alongside HG himself. As most ghosts get no credit at all, I was favourably impressed. I rang a friend who's a rock enthusiast, knocked him sideways by mentioning my current job and location, and borrowed videos and DVDs of HG's concerts, going right back to the days of the Fallen Angels. I wouldn't have time to watch half of them, but I could skip through, getting a taste of his work.

Comparing the concerts with filmed interviews, I realised he was one of those performers who only come alive on stage (and, presumably, at certain wild parties). Offstage, he was quiet, articulate even when stoned, betraying his alter ego only in rare moments, usually when drunk. But once in front of a live audience, with reeling lights and the throb of the music, his inner demon was unleashed: he became manic, electrifying, dripping with sweat, vibrating with sex appeal – more than mortal, less than human. A god, maybe, but pagan, feral – a god of crude passion and the dark. In the sixties he looked fresh-faced and rather clean under the daringly shaggy haircut; by the seventies his cheeks had begun to hollow, his hair was longer, his clothes tousled, his jeans tighter in the crotch. Come the eighties there were deep lines in his face beneath the gloss of perspiration, and the theatre lights showed his eyes both hooded above and puffy below. In interviews he slurred his words, and failed to meet the gaze of the camera. Then, as the century turned, it was comeback time. Under the ripped T-shirt his chest was fleshless, a web of rib and sinew that twitched in response to the plucking of his fingers, as if the twang of the guitar strings flowed throughout his whole body. His arms were all knobs of bone and knots of muscle; his hips were too lean for the clinging leather trousers, and the bulge in his groin looked like the only spare flesh he possessed. On talk shows it was clear he had gone beyond wildness, recovering the quiet of his youth in the calm of age. This was the Hot God I had met, but now, having seen the film excerpts from his life, I could glimpse the spectres of time and tide in his face. What was it Ash had said? Something about how the ghosts are inside us, not the dead but the living.

We all carry our own ghosts, I thought. Bits of our past selves whom we can never be free of.

HG's private life had been nearly as public as his performances. There had been the inevitable early marriage which had gone with fame and fortune: a little investigation revealed that the wife had used her divorce settlement to train as a lawyer, had remarried, and HG's first son had taken his stepfather's name. His second marriage, to the actress Maggie Molloy, an Irish redhead with as much temper as temperament, had been the stuff of legend. There were two daughters of the union, Melisanda Moonshadow and Cedilla Stardust, both evidently named by their mother under the influence of hallucinatory drugs. (That was the only possible excuse.) Once asked by a journalist if she realised Cedilla was a form of punctuation, she replied airily that she didn't care, she was too dyslexic to punctuate and had chosen it because she liked the sound. She died in a car accident when she was barely thirty, out of her mind on LSD. HG was said to be heartbroken and didn't marry again for at least a year.

After that came the first of the models, Romany Leighton, a brunette a foot taller than her husband who streaked through his life in a mere six months, reputedly costing him five million in alimony. Deciding marriage was an expensive hobby, he refrained for a while, instead parading a succession of girlfriends in the public eye, each blonder and leggier than the last. He ventured into matrimony again with Tyndall Fiske, Dorian's mother, a relationship which ended with her in an obscure American cult and him in rehab. When he emerged it was the turn of Basilisa Ramón – the Basilisk – a Spanish model famed for doing her own stunts in a succession of daring car ads. She had balanced on the bonnet along a twisty mountain road, steered with one foot while painting her nails, and tossed the driver out with a judo-throw in order to slip into the driving seat herself – and all this while wearing nothing but a leopard-print bikini and five-inch gold stilettos. Her marriage to HG had so far lasted six years, perhaps because he was tired of divorce, more probably because they spent a lot of time apart. She had a reputation for rapacity unequalled by any woman since Imelda Marcos, and columnists opined that if they ever did split up, he would be lucky to come out of it with a tent, let alone a castle.

But I didn't think that was the reason he continued to put up with her. Watching him one evening when he joined us for a drink after dinner, I thought he looked bone-weary, world-weary, far older than his years. He stuck with Basilisa the way he stuck with Dunblair, if with less affection, because he'd had enough of drama and changes; he just wanted to settle down.

He made me think of a poem by Lord Byron:

I couldn't remember the rest, though there was something about ‘We'll go no more a-roving By the light of the moon', but I felt it said everything about HG's state of mind. He was a pirate retired from a life of blood and swashbuckle, an adventurer who would have no more adventures, a Casanova who had hung up his – well, whatever he had to hang up – and relaxed into restful celibacy. All HG wanted, after decades of chaotic rockstardom, was to linger quietly in his garden.