There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
—Ernest Hemingway
The routine of their Portuguese days and nights remained the same over the next two years. Johan kept his hair neatly clipped, but there was always a sandpaper shadow to his chin, which now needed some meat on it, as he otherwise neglected himself for days on end. He needed to bathe more regularly, and not just in the force of the Atlantic breakers. He had been setting no good example to his pal, who now kept a nursing eye over his elder. And there were many days when Johan thought about just taking the boat out by himself at dawn, with one intention. Each time, however, his responsibility to Cicero came back to him. It was at these times, too, that he remembered his family and Kaunitz and Bill and how he had let them down enough already. He began to pen notes to his family from time to time, but always would have them sent from Lisbon or, farther afield, from Spain or North Africa, to mask his true whereabouts.
He received a note soon afterward from his mother, which he carried with him at all times. He constantly reread it, or perhaps (Cicero suggested more than once, and never to a denial) he was soaking in her fine handwriting.
Dearest Son,
I could weep at just writing those words. Oh my, where do I start?
To receive your letter last week was the most wondrous surprise. Your father and I had dared to dream of such a day. We are deliriously happy to know that you are alive. We immediately contacted your friend Kaunitz, who reluctantly (but gladly, too, if that is possible) gave us the name of your village.
Please come home. No blame attaches to your name, and certainly none within these walls.
I shall write more later today, for I have so much to say, but I simply need to get this to the mail right now to send you my undying and unconditional love.
More later.
Your mother, who misses you more than you could imagine,
More later,
Mama
More letters indeed followed, and after reading them to Cicero and Alfredo, he stored them away. Their tone and their message never altered much, and he was comforted to read that Kaunitz’s generosity was not restricted to Thoms Junior. The only things that changed, with a pendulous swing, were his father’s bizarre activities. These always made Johan chuckle proudly.
It was around this time that Johan started to write prolifically. He bought an old typewriter from an emporium of weird delights and low ceilings, just by the market square. Later in the afternoon when Cicero arrived back at the hut, he saw the latest acquisition, which had been given a central spot on their kitchen table. He did not expect a large literary output, though, not even when his friend walked in hoisting a stack of paper that went from his belly button up to his jutted-out chin.
“Writing might be addictive,” Johan said, “and if I am thinking about my tales, then I cannot be thinking about other things. We are men, and ’tis how we were builded, my Roman pal. And anyway, we’ve run out of books to read. So, we had better write some! And you know what? I can even control how these stories go. Imagine a life like that!” He smiled to himself while staring at the single lightbulb above his head, until his vision blurred and all he saw were Lorelei’s Nubian eyes.
Within a year, he had finished a manuscript. In secret, high above Zavial Beach, Cicero copied the manuscript out almost concurrently as his pal tapped out the subsequent chapters either in the hut or in the small amount of shade offered outside at the front of it. Johan entitled it The Brigadier in the White Kilt. He was very proud of the opus, and tucked it away, happy in the knowledge that each page had allowed him a time of respite from guilt. The brigadier in question is a young man called Stanley Rex-Foyle of the Dragoon Guards. He is the only soldier in the whole of the British army who is allowed to wear a white kilt. His unique distinction is that he had saved the life of the Queen in 1895 after uncovering a plot by enemies of the empire. This he did quite inadvertently in a dangerous pub in Ladbroke Grove, but such is life, he supposed later. Our hero, while exhibiting courage and daring, ultimately professes to a pacific leaning, and through the very public confession of this on the steps of the British Museum, he wins his darling’s heart.
Johan signed the manuscript with the nom de plume Blanche de la Pena—blanche as the French for “white”; pena, the Portuguese for “feather.”
“The white feather is the symbol of cowardice in the British army, Cicero.”
“But you know that pena in Spanish means misery, sorrow, regret, penalty, and cowardice? But peña (pronounced pen-ya) is a rock!”
“Yes, I did, but I had forgotten,” Johan said, staring out the window and nodding. Then his laughter took over and left him gasping for breath. When he finally recovered his poise, he announced, “It is therefore perfect, for this stout young wench called Blanche, with the help of her quill and perhaps her marigold, shall overcome her pena and become a peña. I swear it, my Roman friend.”
So, Blanche de la Peña it was. And he, or rather, she, began almost immediately on Stanley Rex-Foyle’s next adventure, entitled The White-Kilted Brigadier and the Exquisite Daring Rescue of Lady Heather Belle.
Meanwhile, Cicero had stealthily sent his own copy of The Brigadier in the White Kilt to a publisher whose name he’d found on the sleeve of Johan’s battered copy of David Copperfield. Two years later, the sequel followed to the same London address, as did, eighteen months after that, The White-Kilted Brigadier, the Secret of the Black Hand, and the Powder-Blue Plume, a fictionalized tale of the events of June 28, 1914. A full confession of Johan’s single, yet pivotal, error seemed imminent.
* * *
News had constantly filtered through to Sagres of Passchendaele, Verdun, the Somme, and Ardennes. Their full scale was not yet apparent, but what was heard was not far off the mark. The typical sensationalizing process of Chinese whispers did not apply: to exaggerate this Great War was not possible, for there were no words in the lexicon of the time to encompass this horror. Johan considered resuming female company as a diversion, but soon there were hundreds of happy American soldiers in the village, spreading news of victory. The doughboys had arrived in Europe and, with their duties complete, were now infiltrating its corners. (Johan was intrigued as to why they had earned this name and their second moniker of dogfaces. One leggy, pink-skinned youth from Arkansas was happy to explain, over a deck of cards by the harbor: “I don’t know where ‘doughboys’ comes from, my friend, but ‘dogface’ is easy. It’s because of our dog tags; also we sleep in pup tents, we growl at everything we eat, and we try to seduce every female we see.”)
The news of victory eased Johan’s psychosis microscopically, or at least slowed his lunacy’s acceleration. Cicero managed this process as best he could, filtering information to suit his pal’s mental health, becoming a microcosmic Ministry of Information for the independent state of El Capitania.
At eleven A.M. on November 11, 1918, over four years after their arrival at World’s End, the war was finally ended. Johan Thoms had been sleeping still, but not as soundly as millions of other boys.
When he woke and heard the news of the armistice, he was soon hovering over a pint of port, and he wrote the first of several letters to Bill, cheekily marked thus:
Bill Cartwright
If you, Mr. Postman, do not know him, ask your sister
Huddersfield,
England.
Johan would never discuss the contents of these letters, despite more than one prompt from my grandfather. They were written to Ernest’s father after all. Early in 1919, a letter was returned, with a scrawled note in what appeared to be a young girl’s hand. The ink was smudged and stained, as if by a tear, and the details were thankfully brief. Johan then knew why his previous missives had gone unanswered.
* * *
Johan passed this note to Ernest.
“I sent my best friend to his death,” he said, squinting hard at Ernest. “Of course, there are millions of deaths with which I have to deal, but this single slaughter possesses a proximity and represents a regret more difficult than who knows how many noughts after a number. How many more would I have sacrificed to save my beloved Bill! I know I am not in control of any such devilish exchange, but I suspect that if I were, a large number of unknown soldiers would be held up and offered to Faust. The poor bastards.”
Ernest had no immediate words, and Johan, too, fell silent.