Quintin Jardine - For The Death Of Me

It was summer, and so it had to be Monaco, because Scotland is too cold and Los Angeles is just too damn hot.

I sat on our hill-top terrace, beneath a sun-blind, gazing out at Roman Abramovich’s yacht as it eased towards the harbour. A few feet away, Susie, Janet and Tom were swimming in the pool, all three of them topless. Wee Jonathan was curled up in my lap, having chased himself into a sound sleep.

There was a time when I used to stop and pinch myself, to check that I was solid flesh and blood, that everything was real, and that I wasn’t playing the unknowing lead in a sequel to The Truman Show, with millions of viewers tuning in every night to update themselves on the soap opera that was my life. Not any more, though. Now I accept the craziness of my existence without question. No longer do I contemplate how it came about or lie awake wondering how long it will last.

I’m Oz Blackstone, A-list movie actor, and I have at least ten years, more if I look after myself, before they start offering me ‘old guy’ parts. I have a beautiful wife, three beautiful kids and three. . yes, three. . homes.

Until around this time last year, Susie and I thought we’d never leave our estate overlooking Loch Lomond. We’re both loyal Scots and we’d always insisted that it would always be home base for us, no matter how exotic our lives became. But finally we were worn down by the arguments of agents, of accountants and, crucially, of my dad, who told me that if he’d had the chance at my age he’d have hightailed it out of Scotland as fast as his sturdy legs could have carried him. If there had been any lingering doubt, it was all topped off by the proposal of the Government of the day that people should be locked up without trial on the say-so of a politician rather than a judge. Who’d want to live under a regime that could even contemplate that? They had one in Iraq, and look what happened there.

So, decision finally made, the next step was to decide where we would live. My career makes a place in Los Angeles more or less essential, but our tax people advised us against settling there. They offered us a choice between Ireland and Monaco.

Did I say ‘choice’? Hah! ’Nuff respect Dublin, but it took about two seconds to make that one. We went shopping on the Cote d’Azur and found a newly built villa with three public rooms, a study, six bedrooms, a self-contained apartment for Ethel Reid, the kids’ nanny, and a small bungalow guarding the entrance to the property, to be occupied by Audrey Kent, our secretary, and her husband Conrad, whose euphemistic job title is ‘security manager’.

We didn’t sell Loch Lomond, of course. I’ll never do that, for all sorts of reasons, some sentimental, others very practical indeed. But we decided that Monaco would be home base, and that Janet, Tom and wee Jonathan would be enrolled in its international school.

Tom is the newest addition to our family. He’s my son by my brief second marriage, to Primavera Phillips; he was conceived in its final unhappy moments, but Prim chose not to tell me about him. Indeed, she kept him secret from me until he was three years old, finally leading me to him by way of a merry dance of the kind only she could orchestrate. Not that she meant to: he’d still be unknown to me if she’d had her way. I like to think, though, that whatever had happened I’d have found him eventually. And if I had, whenever it was, wherever it was, I’d have known him straight away. I’ll never forget the first time I set eyes on him, in a roadhouse hotel in California, or how it turned my life upside-down.

Funny, my three kids each look completely different. Janet’s her mother to the life. Wee Jonathan, the older he grows the more he’s looking like my dad. Tom? Well, he’s me, no doubt about that, and if you look closely you’ll see Primavera’s boldness in his eyes. But there’s more, there’s more, only I’m not ready to deal with that, not yet.

My second marriage, I said. My first, of course, was to the lovely Jan, my soul-mate; but you know about Jan, how we grew up together, then drifted apart, only to be reunited when we realised that we didn’t really exist without each other, not properly at any rate. You know how happy we were, living an idyllic, uncomplicated life together in Glasgow, until it became all too complicated, and she and our unborn child were killed, by the intervention of some very bad people. What happened to them? You know that too: they’ve all gone to hell, and I had the sublime pleasure of sending the biggest and baddest of them there with my own two hands.

‘Oz!’ the girlies yell at premieres, award bashes and other movie events. ‘Over here, Oz! Give us a wave, Oz! God, isn’t he nice, isn’t he gorgeous? Did you see that smile? ’ The girlies, even one or two of the boysies too, but I don’t mind them: I’m a liberal-minded guy. After all, I’m a member of a minority group myself. . I’m a Fifer. Besides, they’re right. I am nice, I am gorgeous and, courtesy of Mac the Dentist, my dad, I do have a pretty dazzling smile. That’s what they see and if it makes them happy, well, it makes me happy too. Very few people have seen the other Oz; in fact, I can’t think of any who have and are still around to describe him. No, that’s not quite true: there’s one who’s doing thirty years in the USA. He’d be well advised to serve all of them: by that time I might just have forgotten about him.

So, anyway. . as my mother always chided me for saying. . there I was, sat in front of our private, well-guarded, multi-million-euro villa, watching the big blue boat and suddenly feeling relatively poor. Only relatively, though: I might not own an oil company, but I’d hit eight figures per movie and there aren’t too many of us do that. I’d just finished the third of a trio of projects that Roscoe Brown, my agent, had negotiated for me a year before, and we had reached the stage where we were turning down more work than we were accepting. I’ll tell you how big I’ve become: people are stopping Keanu Reeves in the street and asking if he’s me, rather than the other way round. (I believe it pisses him off mightily.)

I’d earned a couple of months’ break and I was looking forward to it, to a holiday with the whole family, maybe the last unfettered time we’d have together before Janet started proper school and we were hit by its limitations. My film schedule was fixed for a year ahead, but I wasn’t due back in California until mid-September, two months distant. When I went back to work, it would be for Miles Grayson, my mentor and one-time in-law. He had picked up the rights to a boxing movie and wanted me in the lead, opposite his wife, Dawn Phillips, Prim’s sister. Miles had decided that he was through with acting: he had recognised what the rest of us in the business had known for a while, that he was much better in the director’s chair. The part meant I had to keep myself in good physical condition, but that’s part of my normal routine. Every one of my homes has a gym. (Spoiled bastard, eh?)

I looked away from the Big Blue with not a trace of envy. . Oz is not into boats. . and laid wee Jonathan gently on the seat next to me, taking care not to wake him as I covered him with a towel. I stepped out into the sun and dived into the sparkling pool, so cleanly that Susie didn’t hear me until I surfaced behind her, clamping myself on to her flotation devices.

‘G’roff.’ She chuckled. ‘The kids are watching.’

‘No, they’re not. They’re too busy piloting their big green crocodile. Anyway, it’s good for them to see Mummy and Daddy happy.’

‘Happy’s one thing, Daddy fondling Mummy’s tits is something else.’ She turned and slipped her arms round my neck. I felt myself harden.