A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online

seemed familiar in a way which made you forget to ask whether or notyou judged it good-looking. His companion, or assistant, but not, she would insist, secretary, was a slim, dark girl displaying clothes newly bought for the cruise. Franklin, ostentatiously an old hand, wore a khaki bush-shirt and a pair of rumpled jeans. While it was not quite the uniform some of the passengers expected of a distinguished guest lecturer, it accurately suggested the origin of such distinction as Franklin could command. If he’d been an American academic he might have dug out a seersucker suit; if a British academic, perhaps a creased linen jacket the colour of ice-cream. But Franklin’s fame (which was not quite as extensive as he thought it) came from television. He had started as a mouthpiece for other people’s views, a young man in a corduroy suit with an affable and unthreatening way of explaining culture. After a while he realized that if he could speak this stuff there was no reason why he shouldn’t write it as well. At first it was no more than ‘additional material by Franklin Hughes’, then a co-script credit, and finally the achievement of a full ‘written and presented by Franklin Hughes’. What his special area of knowledge was nobody could quite discern, but he roved freely in the worlds of archaeology, history and comparative culture. He specialized in the contemporary allusion which would rescue and enliven for the average viewer such dead subjects as Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, or Viking treasure hoards in East Anglia, or Herod’s palaces. ‘Hannibal’s elephants were the panzer divisions of their age,’ he would declare as he passionately straddled a foreign landscape; or, ‘That’s as many foot-soldiers as could be fitted into Wembley Stadium on Cup Final Day’; or, ‘Herod wasn’t just a tyrant and a unifier of his country, he was also a patron of the arts – perhaps we should think of him as a sort of Mussolini with good taste.’
    Franklin’s television fame soon brought him a second wife, and a couple of years later a second divorce. Nowadays, his contracts with Aphrodite Cultural Tours always included the provision of a cabin for his assistant; the crew of the Santa Euphemia noted with admiration that the assistants tended not to last from one voyage to the next. Franklin was generoustowards the stewards, and popular with those who had paid a couple of thousand pounds for their twenty days. He had the engaging habit of sometimes pursuing a favourite digression so fervently that he would have to stop and look around with a puzzled smile before reminding himself where he was meant to be. Many of the passengers commented to one another on Franklin’s obvious enthusiasm for his subject, how refreshing it was in these cynical times, and how he really made history come alive for them. If his bush-shirt was often carelessly buttoned and his denim trousers occasionally stained with lobster, this was no more than corroboration of his beguiling zeal for the job. His clothes hinted, too, at the admirable democracy of learning in the modern age: you evidently did not have to be a stuffy professor in a wing-collar to understand the principles of Greek architecture.
    ‘The Welcome Buffet’s at eight,’ said Franklin. ‘Think I’d better put in a couple of hours on my spiel for tomorrow morning.’
    ‘Surely you’ve done that lots of times before?’ Tricia was half-hoping he would stay on deck with her as they sailed out into the Gulf of Venice.
    ‘Got to make it different each year. Otherwise you go stale.’ He touched her lightly on the forearm and went below. In fact, his opening address at ten the next morning would be exactly the same as for the previous five years. The only difference – the only thing designed to prevent Franklin from going stale – was the presence of Tricia instead of … of, what was that last girl’s name? But he liked to maintain the fiction of working on his