Reading Between the Lines
Nicholas Shakespeare on S.P.B. Mais
In 1999, at the age of 42, I settled at last. I met a girl named Gillian whom I wanted to marry and found the first house I wanted to own. It was built of Canadian cedar and looked out over the Freycinet Peninsula on Tasmania's east coast. I knew nothing about Tasmania: I had no friends here, no family connections, no reason to linger. But this was where I wanted to be. Directly facing the South Pole and 13,000 miles from England, it seemed as far away as I could get from Bliss House, Lindfield.
Except that, of course, it wasn't.
A few months after taking up residence with my wife Gillian, I discovered in S.P.B.'s first volume of autobiography, Buffets and Rewards, this reference to his boyhood hero, Horden Tamlyn. "He was so reckless and so generous that in the end he went bankrupt and had to emigrate with his family to Tasmania."
Nicholas Shakespeare is the author ofBruce Chatwin: A Biography andThe Dancer Upstairs: A Novel, both available from Anchor Books. The film version ofDancer, directed by John Malkovich and starring Javier Bardem, will be released next year by Fox Searchlight.
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