Tom Holt: Flying Dutch

It’s always a little startling to hear your name in a public place, and Vanderdecker froze. The beer in his glass didn’t, and the froth splashed his nose. He put the glass down and listened.

“The story of the Flying Dutchman…” the man opposite had said. Slowly, so as not to be seen to be staring, Vanderdecker looked round. His profession had trained him to take in all the information he needed to enable him to form a judgement in one swift glance, and what he saw was a plump young man wearing a corduroy jacket and a pink shirt with a white collar. Trousers slightly too tight. Round, steel-rimmed spectacles. Talking at a girl at least seven years his junior. American. Vanderdecker wasn’t much taken with what he saw, but he listened anyway.

“Most people think,” said the plump young man, “that Wagner invented the story of the Eying Dutchman. Not true.”

“Really?” said the girl.

“Absolutely,” the plump young man confirmed. “The legend can be traced back to the early seventeenth century. My own theory is that it represents some misconstrued recollection of the Dutch fleet in the Medway.”

“Where is the Medway, exactly?” asked the girl, but the plump young man hadn’t heard her. He was looking through her, as if she were a ghost, to the distant but irresistible vision of his own cleverness.

Vanderdecker knew exactly where the Medway was, and frowned. He disliked being referred to as a legend, even in his own lifetime. But the plump young man hadn’t finished yet.

“The version used by Wagner—I say used, but of course the Master tailored it to his own uses—tells of a Dutch captain who once tried to double the Gape of Good Hope in the teeth of a furious gale, and swore he would accomplish the feat even if it took him all eternity.”

“You don’t say,” said the girl.

“No sooner had the fateful oath left his lips,” he continued, “when Satan heard the oath and condemned the wretched blasphemer to sail the seas until the Day of Judgement, without aim and without hope of release, until he could find a woman who would be faithful until death. Once every seven years the Devil allows him on shore to seek such a woman; and it is on one such occasion…”

“I always thought,” said the girl, “that the Flying Dutchman was a steam train.”

This had the effect on the plump young man that sugar has on a full tank of petrol. He stopped talking and made a request that Vanderdecker, for his part, would have found it difficult to grant.

“Pardon me?” he asked.

“Or was that the Flying Scotsman?” said the girl, realising that the joke needed explanation before an American could understand it. She might as well have been speaking in Latvian for all the effect she had, however, and again a moment of bewilderment the plump man started off again with the details of the Daland-Senta plot from Wagner’s opera. At this point, Vanderdecker let his attention drift back to his pint of beer, for he loathed the story. He had seriously considered taking legal action when the opera was first presented, but the problems of proving who he was would have been insurmountable.

By an odd coincidence, although not even Vanderdecker was aware of it , the plump young man was Vanderdecker’s the final product of an evolutionary process which had started with a fleeting encounter with a barmaid in New England in 1674. And there was proof, if proof were needed, that the version of the story that Junior had just gone through was nothing but a pack of lies, for Vanderdecker had been off and away without waiting to see if the barmaid in question would be faithful until a mild cold, let alone death. He was younger then, of course—a stripling of one hundred and sixteen—and still obsessed with wild notions of having a good time every once in a while. Nowadays, on the rare occasions when he met them, he looked upon barmaids simply as people who were paid to sell him alcoholic beverages.

The girl looked at her watch for the third time in four minutes and said that they had better be getting along or they would be late for the curtain. Her companion said there was no hurry, he hadn’t finished telling her the plot. She replied that she would just have to muddle through, somehow or other. Vanderdecker got the impression that she wasn’t enjoying herself very much.

They got up and left, leaving the Flying Dutchman staring at his glass and wondering why, when so many things had remained basically the same through the centuries, the human race had chosen to muck about with beer quite so much. In his young days they slung some malt in a bucket, added boiling water, and then went away and forgot about it for a week or so. The result of this laissez-faire attitude was incomparably preferable to the modern version, he seemed to remember—or was that just another aspect of getting old? Not that he was getting old, of course; no such luck. He looked and felt exactly the way he did in 1585—which was more, he reflected, than you could say for Dover Castle.

Melancholy reflections on the subject of beer led him to even more melancholy reflections concerning the great web of being, and in particular his part in it, which had been so much more protracted than anybody else’s. Not more significant, to the best of his knowledge. His role in history was rather like that of lettuce in the average salad; it achieves no useful purpose, but there’s always a lot of it. But this was by no means a new train of thought, and he knew how to cope with it by now. He finished his drink and went to the bar for another.

As he stood at the bar and fumbled in his pocket for money, he tried playing the old “I-remember-when” game which had entertained him briefly about a century ago and which now only irritated him. I remember when money was real money, he said to himself, when it was made of solid silver and had lots of Latin on it. I remember when you could have bought all the beer in Bavaria, plus sale tax and carriage, for the price of half a pint of this. I even remember flared trousers. That dates me.

As he sat down to his drink, he tried to think of something that wouldn’t set him thinking about how incredibly long he had lived, just for a change. He tired to think of what he was going to do next. But that, of course, wouldn’t take him very long, because he knew exactly what he was going to do next. He was going to get pathetically drunk, crawl back to his hotel, and wake up with a splitting head next morning which would leave him in no fit state to go flogging round Hatton Garden selling gold bars. After he had sold the gold bars, he would traipse through the bookshops and buy up enough reading matter to keep him from going stark raving mad for the next seven years. Then he would do the rest of his shopping, which would only leave him just enough time to get pathetically drunk again before slouching back to Bridport and his bloody ship and his bloody, bloody shipmates. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to find a woman who would be true until death; he simply didn’t have the time.

He was following the first part of this programme with almost religious diligence when, several hours later, the plump man and the girl came back for a last drink. Vanderdecker hoped that they would enjoy it, since it might make up for an otherwise completely wasted evening witnessing that puerile burlesque of his life story. For his part, as usual, Vanderdecker had come to terms with modern beer, and was rather better adjusted to the world in general. He no longer cared if he appeared to be staring. Staring was fun—at any rate, it was considerably more entertaining than what he had been doing for the last seven years—and a good long stare might help clear his head.