Barnes. Pdf

2. THE VISITORS 
[p. 33] 
F
RANKLIN 
H
UGHES HAD
come on board an hour earlier to extend some necessary bonhomie towards those who would make 
his job easier over the next twenty days. Now, he leaned on the rail and watched the passengers climb the gangway: middle-
aged and elderly couples for the most part, some bearing an obvious stamp of nationality, others, more decorous, preserving for 
the moment a sly anonymity of origin. Franklin, his arm lightly but unarguably around the shoulder of his travelling 
companion, played his annual game of guessing where his audience came from. Americans were the easiest, the men in New 
World leisure-wear of pastel hues, the women unconcerned by throbbing paunches. The British were the next easiest, the men 
in Old World tweed jackets hiding short-sleeved shirts of ochre or beige, the women sturdy-kneed and keen to tramp any 
mountain at the sniff of a Greek temple. There were two Canadian couples whose towelling hats bore a prominent maple-leaf 
emblem; a rangy Swedish family with four heads of blond hair; some confusable French and Italians whom Franklin identified 
with a simple mutter of baguette or macaroni; and six Japanese who declined their stereotype by not displaying a single 
camera between them. With the exception of a few family groups and the occasional lone aesthetic-looking Englishman, they 
came up the gangway in obedient couples. 
`The animals came in two by two,' Franklin commented. He was a tall, fleshy man somewhere in his forties, with pale gold 
hair and a reddish complexion which the envious put down to drink and the charitable to an excess of sun; his face seemed 
familiar in a way which made you forget to ask whether or not 
[p. 34] 
you 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