Where are they? The others, I mean? Is this your headquarters?
Yes, effectively; here and up at the house. The others are all over the place but you might meet a couple this afternoon. It depends how long you can stay.
That depends on Lina, says Dan. And the trains home.
If we’re doing a drop this evening we can give you a lift, says Theo. I want to go in to the hospital in any case.
He walked all the way round! says Lina proudly. I helped him over the streams, that’s all. Her trousers are wet at the hems, and there is mud on her tunic.
Bachgen mawr! says Dan, picking him up and hugging him.
We’ll have some lunch at the house, shall we? says Theo. There’s some bread and cheese. Apples. Then we can go over to the trees. I’ve got a couple to deliver for planting later on – you can help me dig them out.
But Lina is squatting down again at the edge, cupping water in her hands, letting it trickle through.
Is there a microscope at the house? she asks suddenly.
Yes. But there’s one in there too.
Oh, she says. Could I? Just quickly?
Of course. I’ll show you.
I’m taking him up to change his nappy, says Dan. See you up there, is that OK?
Go ahead. There’s stuff in the fridge, help yourselves.
They go into the summerhouse and Theo reaches the microscope down from a shelf. Her fingers run over it softly. It’s lovely, she says.
Pretty old-fashioned by now, he says. The one at the house is slightly better, but this isn’t bad. Here, I’ll get you a chair.
She makes a contented sound. I’m salt-water really, she says, but the water is so beautiful here. Thank you.
He watches her set up. What did you work on – in Syria, was it?
Yes. We were in Homs.
Oh, says Theo.
She looks up at his tone of voice, meets his gaze.
My brother was killed there, says Theo. Photographer.
She nods. My husband too, she says. Doctor.
She twists the lens into focus. Hey, this is busy water you have.
So what is your field?
She looks up again and smiles at him. Marine microbiology. Specifically, Radiolaria. More specifically, the actinota.
Ah, says Theo, delighted. Beautiful. Just beautiful. Have you seen the Blaschkas at the museum? The glass models?
I don’t have much money, she says, apologetically.
You don’t pay, says Theo. Amazingly. You can go and see them whenever you like.
38.
It’s the underground, though she can’t see the names properly. Not Paris, or Moscow, or Prague, or Madrid, just one of the grottier outer branches of the underground, on an unfamiliar line, with a familiar fear in her stomach. The carriage is packed at first, and she is standing, swaying, clutching the pole, keeping her eyes down as she always used to in case one day, by sheer ill luck, she should look straight up into the face of the man she is afraid of, but then the people begin to drain away and she is pretty much by herself, tucked against a window, watching indistinct platforms pull up, blur, and vanish. Between them she watches her own thin face stare back.
When the train stops and shudders and the harsh lights spring on she understands that it is time to get off, and steps onto a well-lit platform with no name and no one else around. There is only one exit, and she takes it, walking decisively in her smart shoes, click clack, along a corridor lined with bright posters advertising circuses, they all seem to be for circuses, three, four, five, half-a-dozen different circuses, which seems like a lot, though she hasn’t got time to stop and look. Then the corridor splits without explaining why. She goes left. It is slightly darker here, and the posters are harder to catch in passing, but look to be much the same, if a little more tatty.
An escalator, going down, which seems counter-intuitive, but doesn’t bother her any more than does the absence of other travellers. She stands on it, lets it carry her down gently past an elephant, a spangled girl, a dancing dog. There is another fork at the bottom, and this time she goes right, stepping onto one of those travelators that lets you walk and glide at the same time, like seven league boots. It sounds rattled, but goes fast enough to make her smile, she can’t remember the last time she was on one of these. It pulls up at another junction. Left, now. She has a superb instinct for direction, though she knows it can be difficult for anyone underground.
After a good while walking like this her feet hurt. She takes off her shoes and puts them in her bag. The concrete feels cold through nylon tights, but not unpleasant, and, as the lights get dimmer and the posters on the wall are nothing but ragged coloured scraps, being practically barefoot means she can tell when the concrete runs out and the path becomes something like compacted soil, perhaps sand. It is obviously not any kind of approved official exit, but for some reason this doesn’t worry her, and she is thinking quite phlegmatically that she could always retrace her steps and catch the next available train back when the path comes up against a stone wall. The light is very dim by now but she can see how massive the blocks are, and that they curve round; she can’t make out how high they might go. There is a single low arched opening, like the entrance to a tunnel, through which she can see only dark.
She doesn’t need to stoop, but does anyway. Her hands guide her through the vaulted archway, down some stone steps, three, four, five, and then she is on a circular terrace looking down on an enclosure, a shallow pit. There is an odour of straw and animals but what catches her breath is fresh air: she looks up to see stars, a million bright stars opening out above her in the night sky. She smiles, and as her eyes adjust to the new light, looks down.
On the floor of the pit a large figure is lying asleep. She can hear it breathing, and is curious enough to want to get closer. A zig-zag path leads her down into the enclosure. The figure is lying on a pile of straw and rags and as she moves quietly towards it she can see it is a man, or something like a man, naked and half-curled, his bull’s head resting on one big arm. She is standing very close now and looks down on him, fast asleep, profoundly peaceful, and sees with fascination how at the nape of his neck, where the heavy animal head joins the big man’s body, his dark hair is slightly tinged with grey. She stoops over and strokes him very gently. He moves, but doesn’t wake.
Feeling suddenly exhausted by her long, long walk, and a little chilled in the starlight, she crouches down on the straw next to him and pushes herself into the space made by his curved warm body. Then she closes her eyes. The creature’s big arm moves instinctively across her waist, and pulls her in tighter towards him.
39.
I tried a couple of days ago, she says, but I couldn’t get through, I turned back. Stupid.
What happened? he asks.
Grief, she says. Loss. Hopeless. It didn’t seem to matter any more, and then I didn’t think about it at all until this morning. Then I saw you.
It’s not just you, he says, don’t worry. I’ve watched dozens of people turn back like that. The woman I know in Natural History says visitor numbers have been dreadful, and Dan says the university has set up some kind of cctv to record what happens. They interview people. They’ll be after you, you watch.
She smiles. It didn’t work, then, the Parade?
Apparently not. Come on, I’m here now, and going in anyway. I’ll help you through.
He gives her his arm, and they climb the steps quickly. As they get nearer the top he puts his arm right around her shoulder and hurries her through. He doesn’t let her go until they are in the main hall, under the echoing dome. He watches her look up, and around her, astonished.
I haven’t been anywhere like this for a long time, she says. A long time. It’s incredible.
Would you like some tea? he asks. I’ve got about twenty minutes before I’m expected. Or would you like me to show you the Blaschkas? Are you OK for time?
She nods and smiles. Early shift, she says. I’m finished for the day now. Te
a would be good. Then I will explore all this. She makes a big gesture.
He laughs. Come on then.
She doesn’t tell him that she hasn’t eaten since breakfast at the hostel, many hours ago now; that the money for her cheese roll went on the lemons, carefully chosen and amicably haggled for at the corner shop. But she lets him buy her a thick slice of lemon cake, with almonds, and as the girl at the counter puts it onto a white plate she thinks of the three bright lemons left in a white hospital bowl this morning next to the sleeping girl. She imagines her waking.
They talk about their work, going almost straight into the finest details, discovering with pleasure how much of a shared language they possess. Her brown eyes are warm, and she tells him about being in the States as a young woman, an assistant researcher on a big international project on the Radiolaria. He tells her about articles he has seen, developments in the field she knows nothing about. They do not, not yet, talk about their dead.
Theo takes his leave; she has his phone number, she must ring him soon, he says. He points her towards Natural History. Past the stuffed animals and up the stairs, he says. Good luck.
Alone again, she feels daunted. She stands for a moment, a small figure in a dark tunic and headscarf, collecting herself beneath that huge ceiling, and then on an impulse heads up the grand flight of stairs to the right, to the art galleries.
There she drifts unsystematically, letting herself be drawn by colours, by faces, looking only occasionally at the labels. A handful of medieval Madonnas, each with Child. The women are lovely, though most of the babies are unconvincing, one or two almost grotesque; but she finds one she likes, a sweet-faced girl holding a boy who reminds her of Teddy, soft curly blond head, laughing. His mother must have been fair, she thinks; Dan is quite dark.
A large picture at the end of the room pulls her over. In the foreground is another Madonna, this one without Child, standing in front of a busy orchard full of workers piling fruit into wooden carts. She is tall, slender and stern. One hand holds a book close to her body; in the other is a glass of water, lifted to the light, a yellow September light which makes the orchard behind her glow. Lina is curious enough to read the label. Our Lady of the Apple-Carts, it says, Italian, Tuscan School, possibly C15th. Which leaves her none the wiser, really, but then her knowledge of Christian tradition, beyond the basics, is pretty weak. The woman looks almost unhappy, she thinks, in spite of the piles of beautiful apples, the assiduous peasants.
She moves on through other galleries. Castles, a whole wall of them, from all over Wales. Cardiff’s looks lovely, she thinks, all trees and water where the road should be, and a man sitting in the dust with his dog; and a woman hanging out her washing to flap against the walls. Another room. Rodin’s naked lovers unsettle her, and few of the Impressionists make her want to stop. She climbs a small flight of stairs to see where it goes, and finds a big wooden door with a sign on it: Oriel Galatea Gallery : Closed / Ar Gau. She comes back down a different way into a room full of modernist portraits, all of them apparently staring at her, and suddenly feeling she has had enough of Western tradition and its obsession with human form, hurries through two more rooms and down a short corridor to emerge, with relief, into a world of plants and creatures.
Five minutes later she has found the Blaschkas. The pictures she remembers seeing many years ago in a book do not come close. Inside the glass case, glass creatures, her creatures, a million times magnified, exquisite, strange and so familiar she cannot help the tears in her eyes. She blinks them away and circles the case in complete wonder. Reads blurrily how they were created by the Blaschkas, Leopold and Rudolf, father and son, in late nineteenth-century Bohemia, how their techniques have never since been reproduced. And there, centre-stage, is the Actinota Heliosphaera, the fretted glass sphere with irregular rays like slender spears of ice. Crystalline. Uncanny. More than ever, she thinks, more even than under the microscope, they look like entities from the farthest depths of space, from the stars; oh I wish you could see them Ali, can you see them? I wish you were here now, my husband, I wish you could see this.
And because she doesn’t want to frighten the beautiful young man sitting discreetly against the wall in the attendant’s chair, and because she is on the verge of something worse than tears, she hurries down the stairs, through the galleries, past groups of primary-school children in the busy main hall and out down the steps through the shiver of silence to find a bench where she can put her head in her hands and weep.
40.
Even if it didn’t do any good, says someone, it didn’t do any harm either; no harm at all.
Everyone, says Phoebe, had a wonderful time.
And it was good publicity, excellent really, with the professor’s stunning media profile applications have simply rocketed up.
Luke, who has been told by someone very senior, in no uncertain terms, and in the strictest confidentiality, that he will be strongly recommended for fast-track promotion, is keeping modestly quiet.
Are there any biscuits? says someone.
Biscuits would be nice, says Phoebe. I’ll go and ask. And has everyone got coffee who needs it?
Can you do me a fennel and liquorice tea? asks Aslan, who is chairing this meeting in the professor’s absence. There’s a box by the kettle. Wrth ymyl y degell. Diolch.
They listen to three reports. The Museum Steps project now has a hundred and seventeen recorded negative reactions (NRs), and fifty-two follow-up interviews, mostly carried out by Phoebe who is very good at such things, and whose respondents offer a range of explanations for turning back. Roughly sixty-five percent say they felt an overwhelming sense of grief or despair, twenty-two per cent felt ill and dizzy, and the rest said they’d just thought of something else they needed to do instead, and had changed their minds.
The relevant graphs are projected and explored at some length. Luke presents a brief round-up of the benches project, though he explains that, because of involvement in the Parade, he has had to delegate most of the data-collection to other people. Everybody nods vigorously. The figures here speak for themselves, revealing a gradual, inexorable thinning of sitters, attributable mainly to the lower temperatures around the benches where the cold silence swirls and pools.
The third report, a PowerPoint prepared by the professor and presented by Aslan, shows the current reach and spread of the silence across the city. A month’s worth of day-by-day mapping, with brief analysis of the directions of flow and the principal channels. A note at the end adds that they are currently in talks with Physics to explore ways of measuring the intensity, or it may be that the better word is viscosity, of the silence in different designated areas. This initiative meets with considerable approval.
The final item on the agenda is titled Ar ôl yr Orymdaith/Post-Parade. It asks for a brief assessment of the effect of the Parade on a) the silence and b) the profile of the university, and suggests, by way of concluding the meeting, a half-hour brainstorming session to come up with new ideas. The assessment part is quickly done, since the general feeling is that although the effect on a) was negligible, the effect on b) was entirely positive. The discussion that follows is predictably chaotic, with suggestions involving everything from electricity to hot-air balloons, and tempers are properly starting to fray when Aslan manages to remind them that the task in hand is not so much to solve the problem of the Interference – they have, after all, got most of the university science section on the case, quite apart from the work being done by the Government people and the scientists at the museum – as to be seen to be engaging with it in persuasively exciting ways.
Events, he says. Smaller-scale than the Parade, obviously, but public events, workshops, short films – things that will get reported in the media, to show we’re doing our bit, you know they’ll be bored with this story soon, we need to find ways of keeping it alive. Creative responses are always good, too. Can we find some artists?
41.
When he was about ten, on holiday, so
meone let him drive a tractor. Grey, a Massey Ferguson, and already very old, a thing of utter beauty. Later on, as a student, he would associate it at some odd subconscious level with that picture of Samuel Beckett, it was that important. Iconic. His hands on the wheel. And he feels like that now, sitting in the front of the van. Not driving, Theo is driving, but the effect is the same. His excitement is multiple and manifold: beautiful May evening; out without the baby; doing something new; something bordering on a misdemeanour. Theo understands, is pleased for him, amused.
And as they discuss the practicalities of the job in hand both men have glimpses of Lina sitting at the kitchen table in Dan’s terraced house with half-a-dozen borrowed copies of the NMBJ, delighted to be catching up on work in her field again, but probably more delighted at the thought that she might be disturbed, he is teething again after all, and have to comfort him in her lap with warm milk and songs.
Dan has already done two ponds this last week, both commissioned, the first in a private garden, the second a home for the elderly, each time with Theo and a different member of the group. He finds them congenial company, these people, and he is full of admiration for their work. And they like him, clearly, enough to let him join a non-commissioned drop, which this evening will be on a roundabout somewhere on the edge of town. As they wait at some lights Theo points to one they did earlier, tucked between a disused factory and a bankrupt Bathroom Supply Stores. A little hawthorn tree, full of creamy blossom, guarding a small pond which throws back the pale grey of the empty warehouse as a circle of light.
How do you get away with it? When you’re doing the digging, I mean.
You act as if you’re supposed to be there; it’s easy enough.
But don’t people get suspicious? You lot lurking about on roundabouts?
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