Meanwhile, on board the Calypso

I found a novel on a chair in a hotel—a well worn paperback with a coffee stain on the cover.

Little did I know then, the effect it was about to have on me.

A note fell out of the book as I picked it up—a scrap of paper upon which was written: “It’s going to be Malta. Dennis.”

What was going to be Malta? And who was Dennis? I imagined a man in his fifties, with hair the colour of straw. 

The first unusual thing about the book was its copyright year. It was listed as 2735. The publisher, or author had chosen not to use the Gregorian calendar for some reason. It was obviously based on another system. 

Aside from the date, everything else looked normal—the name of the book, the author, and the statement that any reference to real people, places and events was coincidental. It made me think of a person standing in a court of law, one hand on a venerated object—“I swear not to tell the truth, none of it, and nothing but lies.”

On a whim I subtracted the current year from the date listed in the book. The result was 735—quite close to the year that Rome was supposedly founded in 753 BC, when wolves still suckled orphans.

If they were using the Roman calendar—ab urbe condita—and the date listed in the book was 2735, then it had been published in 1982. I was getting somewhere. The note from Dennis looked much more recent. The crispness of the paper and the fresh ink suggested it could have been placed in the book within the last few days. Dennis might still be in the hotel.

I went out to the terrace and sat at a table overlooking Lago Maggiore. The view was beautiful and deeply satisfying. The clouds hung motionless like statues. The sky and the water were separated by countless shades of green. The mountains waited at the edge of the lake. It was good to see things from a distance. 

“Might I have a word with you?” A man had come up behind me.

Could this be Dennis? If so, he was not the way I had pictured him. He was short and slim, with dark hair and thick glasses. His eyes had a cold purity despite their myopic condition. 

“There’s been a misunderstanding.”

He was working for a bureaucrat. That’s what his eyes told me. A lackey who never felt responsibility for anything he did. Instinctively, I felt uncooperative.

“I see. So that would explain why I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He paused. I watched him as he considered for a moment what he could reveal.

“Have you been in the hotel long?”

“What hotel?”

There was a trace of a smile on his humourless lips.

“Let’s not play games.”

“Let’s not. You can start by telling me who you are and what you want from me.”

“I know this may seem unusual to you, but there is more going on at the moment than you’re aware of. Does the number two thousand seven hundred and thirty-five mean anything to you?”

He was obviously after the book I had found but didn’t want to mention it in case it was not me who had found it. He would be studying me for a reaction that would tell him I recognised the number.

“No. Why?”

He gave me a look of resignation like someone who had just lost a chess piece.

“Well, I am no doubt mistaken. I’m sorry to have bothered you. I do hope you enjoy the rest of your stay.”

There was menace in his voice.

I knew then that I had to read this book. I just couldn’t be seen reading it. The world was an odd place. I’d come to Locarno for a holiday, to go to the film festival and just to relax but now everything was veering off in another direction. It was a good thing I’d been looking at the lake, otherwise I might have had it on the table when he crept up on me. It was in the pocket of my jacket.

After that I went up to my room for some privacy. As soon as I opened the door I knew someone had been there, and not the maid. There was no evidence of a search—everything was neatly in its place, but I could sense an intrusion. 

I pulled open the drawer of the bedside table. There was a book in it, with some loose change and my watch. I preferred not to wear my watch, not wishing to become a prisoner of time, but I always kept it with me as it had belonged to my grandfather. 

Everything I had put in the drawer was still there but the book was in a slightly different position. I could remember the angle the spine had made with the side of the drawer. Someone had picked it up and then replaced it, though not exactly in the same position—a professional but not of the highest order.

That evening I went down to the bar, thinking I’d have a quick drink and then go into the town for another. There was a woman sitting alone at the end of the room, a Marlene Dietrich kind of woman. This had to be a set up, a honey trap. She kept glancing over, inviting me to make a move. I drained my glass and left the hotel. These people were relentless.

I walked around the town and treated myself to a meal in an expensive restaurant and then visited a couple of bars. I liked Locarno. I’d been there a few times as a child and liked it then too. We used to stay at a hotel a bit like the one I was in now. I remembered that the owner had a son, who must have been about twenty, though he looked older to me—maybe twenty was old in those days. He spent his time fucking the guests and doing heroin. He seemed nice enough to me. Everyone was nice then.

I was on my way back to the hotel, when two men came up behind me, one on each side. They pulled my jacket up over my head and bundled me into a car. It was so quick I barely knew what was happening. Then I was sitting in the back, wedged between them. One of them brandished a syringe. He brushed aside my jacket and plunged it into my arm.

When I came round I was in a small room, naked and tied to a chair. A man sat across from me. The room was brightly lit. There was a table between us and he had a sheaf of papers in his hand.

“Tell me why you are here.”

I felt groggy and the room was moving. It must have been a residual effect from the drug they had given me.

“I think you'd be the one to answer that.”

He thumbed through his papers, then looked up at me.

"You’d be wise not to play the fool."

“I'm on holiday. I came here for the film festival.”

“You can do better than that. Tell me about Dennis. Where is he?”

“I don’t know anyone called Dennis.”

“Yet he sent you a message.” He held up the piece of paper that had fallen from the book. 

“That doesn’t mean I know him.”

“Tell me about Malta.”

“It’s an island in the Mediterranean, strategically important once. Perhaps it still is. I don’t know much about it. Then there’s the Maltese Falcon, the film with Humphrey Bogart. I think the Knights of St John paid for their lease of the island with a Maltese falcon every year. Maybe that’s where the idea for the film, or the book came from.”

“You're wasting my time. And yours. Flippancy wont help you.”

Just then the door opened and he got up from the table and conversed with someone I couldn’t see. I was unable to hear what they were saying. Then he returned.

“I’ll give you one more chance. Come clean.”

“Come clean with what? I can’t answer questions I don’t understand.”

“All right then.”

He got up again and went back to the door. The two men who had kidnapped me off the street came in. They must have been waiting outside the whole time. They untied me and took me from the room. It was then that I realised we were on a boat.

They led me up to the deck. I saw a plank extending out over the dark water. One of them had drawn a gun.

“Go on, then.”

Better to walk the plank than get shot, I thought, so I tumbled into the lake.

The cold water revived me and I was able to swim away from the boat, underwater at first to avoid detection. The lake was big and how I managed to reach the shore I don’t know. But I had survived and wasn’t the suicide they’d intended, or the delinquent tourist who had accidentally drowned himself. Now, of course, I would have to deal with the Swiss police, who wouldn’t take kindly to a naked man wandering around Locarno.

I lay on the bank listening to the birds. All of this had happened because I’d picked up a book from a chair. I couldn’t remember the name of the author but I hadn’t forgotten the title—Meanwhile, on board the Calypso.

And I never even read it.

 

 

The Jealous Diners

On the third Tuesday of every month thirteen people meet in a private room which contains a round table set for twelve. The place settings are eclectic—each knife, fork and spoon is from a different set, each napkin is cut from a different cloth.

The guests, if they can be considered as such, arrive separately. They bring food with them that they have prepared for the occasion. Their meetings are clandestine and no one else is present.

When they enter the room they immediately sit down at the table. As there are only twelve places, one person is left standing. That person walks around the table and touches someone on the left shoulder. The person thus selected, rises and gives up his seat. 

This person is now the excluded one, and will serve food and wine to the others while refraining from eating and drinking himself. Any of the thirteen individuals can only be excluded in this way once a year. They refer to themselves as The Jealous Diners.

The little that is known about them can only have come from the inside. The most likely source is a man from Bermondsey—a convicted forger by the name of Stan Miller. He claims that The Jealous Diners coalesced from among certain patrons of The Turk’s Head coffee house in London in the early 1660s, and have been in continuous existence ever since. When members die, new ones are elected. Death is the only way out.

This suggests a corporation, albeit tinged with the occult—an entity with a life of its own. Miller will neither confirm nor deny if he is a member. Because he is the only source of information, he is either one of the diners or his story is a lie. And the story has spread. This mysterious cabal with its unknown purpose has resonated with people. 

The journalist, Tessa Walsh, has been investigating The Jealous Diners.

She is of the opinion that they are a fiction, most probably imagined by Mr Miller himself. Yet, because people have been made aware of them by the media, certain unknown individuals have been inspired to form just such an organisation. Ironically, the fiction has become real. The Jealous Diners now exist. 

She discovered this when she noticed a short newspaper headline. There was no further information below it.

A potato thrown through a window in Farnham causes £5 worth of damage.

This was odd and didn’t seem newsworthy but juxtaposed with politics and sports, it stood out. It was most likely a cryptic message. Using the press to send messages has a long precedent—Sherlock Holmes did it often and intelligence services have been known to do the same.

If one includes ‘£5’ as a word, there are thirteen words in the sentence and there is also mention of a vegetable. This implies a connection with the Diners, as they are now commonly known.

She assumes that ‘£5’ signifies the number fifteen. The calendar of this year shows that 15 October is the third Tuesday of that month. The message appeared on 18 September—the Wednesday after the third Tuesday. Could it be that the word ‘Farnham’ is not encrypted and should be taken at face value? In that case The Diners are to meet on 15 October somewhere in Farnham. This leaves deeper philosophical questions concerning the meaning of a window—and why a potato?

Tessa Walsh suspects that the answers to these questions will provide the address. She considers the word ‘thrown’—a verb which implies action. This could possibly just mean 'go to' the address specified by the word ‘window’, on 15 October.

If one puts the deeper possible meanings of ‘window’ aside and just considers the word as a collection of letters, one’s attention is drawn to the two ‘W’s, at the beginning and end respectively. Those positions obviously signify importance. From this one can assume that the street name in question begins with ‘W’.

Tessa soon surmises that the street is West Street. There are six letters in the word ‘window’, so the address might be 6 West Street, Farnham GU9. 

She is met with derision. There are a slew of parodies, some of them inappropriately personal. The potato represents her brain. Tessa defends herself by pointing out that since the identities of the Diners are unknown, it is safe to presume that they are of average intelligence, in which case they cannot be expected to have any particular ability at cryptography. Any message directed to them would have to be easy to decode. 

Her articles are widely read. She has supporters as well as detractors and some of them regard her as a savvy conceptual artist and social-satirist. There have been a large number of incidents involving potatoes thrown through windows, and other vegetables are also being hurled about.

Tessa has not yet been able to wring out a time of day from the sentence, though she suspects the potato may have something to do with it. Questions remain. There is an organisation that may or may not exist, which may or may not have existed since the seventeenth century, formed for unknown reasons around the time when the experiment of puritanical government had sputtered out, its lord protector dug up, posthumously executed and decapitated. The king had been invited back. He was taller than the average man, and could not afford to hold on to Tangier, which was given to him in his wife’s dowry. He was fond of fornication but did not approve of coffee houses.

On 5 October, the risen sun, invisible to the eye because of dense clouds, reveals the murdered body of Stan Miller in a shed outside Cheltenham. He has been shot in the chest at close range with a crossbow, apparently while sleeping.

At this point, another character enters the story—Glassy John, so called no doubt because of his glassy eyes which look anywhere but outward—a result of his diet of LSD and methylated spirits. 

He is picked up as a person of interest but is unable to say anything intelligible beyond the fact that he doubts the existence of spacetime. He has three Brussels sprouts in his pocket. They will hold him until he sobers up. But he never does. 

What a perfect assassin—a man who cannot talk sense.

The obvious inference is that Miller was silenced. He had gone strangely quiet in the weeks preceding his death, and according to Mrs O’Connor, his sometime girlfriend, he had become increasingly paranoid and feared for his life. 

Despite a lack of conclusive evidence, other than that he resided in the shed where Miller was found, Glassy John has been charged with the crime and is being held without bail in a closed psychiatric institution. His befuddled mental condition is a convenient justification for the murder, for his motive could have been irrational. They assume that his incarceration under a strict regimen of drugs and observation may allow him at some point to provide intelligible answers. But this is not to be. Glassy John will die within a few days. A heart attack will be the given cause—unsurprising, considering the state of his health.

These two deaths make the existence of The Jealous Diners now seem virtually conclusive—not the pseudo Diners postulated by Miss Walsh but the version spawned in The Turk’s Head some three hundred and sixty-five years ago.

This naturally causes speculation upon what evil motives such an organisation might have and how far their tendrils might reach. They no doubt have accomplices, latent, and indistinguishable from the crowd.

In his book, Ignorance and Boredom, Graham Harker makes the point that humanity is entertained by evil. This is a natural inverse response to the effort and repression required to maintain a civilisation. Individuals crave relief from their perpetual struggle against entropy, a battle they instinctively know they cannot win. They seek relief in distraction and entertainment and most often find it in the suffering of others. For that to happen people must be caused to suffer. He sees this as the root of evil, the negation of the beneficial qualities of civilisation, like soiling one’s own bedding, or imbibing poison. He acknowledges that the meaning of evil is a thorny philosophical question, never satisfactorily answered. However specious his argument, he has a point. Is the purpose of this murky cabal to foment suffering?

No one seems to consider that The Jealous Diners might be more of a club than a cabal—a group of people in the late seventeenth century, who would meet once a month to share food and conversation. Over time they established traditions, which grew strong enough to transcend generations. Their obsessive secrecy might only have been a desire for privacy. At that time during the Restoration, King Charles II, who had dissolved parliament several times and was ruling by himself, viewed coffee houses as potential beds of intrigue and closed a number of them down. So their sensitivity towards privacy was understandable and reasonable, and besides, no one in their right mind would feel compelled to advertise their meals to the world at large.

The name is interesting. Why jealous? Could it have started out as zealous, and shifted over time, in the vein of flutter-by butterfly? Perhaps it has more to do with their ritual of the excluded one, if Mr Miller can be trusted, which he cannot.

The excluded one, chosen in a curious two step process that seems to mimic the mixing of chaos and order, does not share the food and might conceivably be jealous of those people sitting round the table enjoying themselves. Jealousy, in this case, should be considered symbolically rather than literally—the symbolic expression of an emotion.

The ritual is reminiscent of a more ancient rite, as when a man is elected king for the day and then violently driven from his village, an exclusion or banishment that could be seen as a sacrifice.

The purpose of this more modern version might have been to remind those original Diners that commodities were not ubiquitous and there were those who could not afford a table spread with food—a reminder to take nothing for granted and to respect the less fortunate. Far from being nefarious, The Jealous Diners may well have had a deep moral conscience. 

Why was the group composed of thirteen members, a number that is considered unlucky?

An obvious explanation is the association with The Last Supper, when thirteen people were supposedly present and a meal was involved. One might also consider the old Norse myth—twelve gods are dining in Valhalla. Loki, who has not been invited, arrives and sets off a chain of events that plunge the world into darkness.

On 13 October, 1307 there was a mass arrest of Templars in France and the Jealous Diners might have chosen that number to symbolise a restitution of the order, or as an expression of resistance to over-arching monarchical power. The thirteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is Mem, which along with its equivalent in other semitic alphabets is said to derive from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing water and this may have had a mystical, occult meaning. Alternatively, the number may have been some form of gematria and represented an encoded message. Or perhaps the answer might be given by a numerological reduction:

13

1 + 3 = 4

4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10

1 + 0 = 10

1 = Unity

It is also quite possible that the number thirteen had no special significance at all. There may have been thirteen original members by chance—a number which became calcified by tradition.

Early in the morning on 15 October, before dawn, news teams and their vehicles converge on 6 West Street, Farnham. That address houses a yoga studio. Because the time of the meeting has never been determined, the journalists are prepared to wait all day and into the night. The owners of the studio are extremely upset about the encampment outside their premises. They threaten legal action. Their business has been disrupted and they have been harassed since the press connected The Diners with their address. Someone even threw a potato through the window, causing much more than £5 worth of damage. They decide to remain closed for the day.

Time passes, as it does, and by midnight nothing at all has happened. The journalists decamp and go home. What were they expecting? The Jealous Diners would never appear under such scrutiny, assuming they existed.

***

Tessa Walsh had stayed away from Farnham that day and remained in her office making phone calls. She left early, telling her colleagues that she had a dinner engagement with friends and had to get ready.

No one thought twice.

© Tom Newton 2025.

These stories are from the collection The Right Moment & Other True Stories by Tom Newton, Recital Publishing 2025.