The Summer Isles

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Everything disintegrates.

  The world already knew that John Arthur was dead by the time I was hauled out from the Cottage Spring. I could hear it in the crowd’s sobbing howls as the masonry slid and crumbled, and in the firemen’s rough, angry voices.

  One of the beer-drinking lads survived for two nights at Barts inside an iron lung. Another remains alive to this day, though a mindless cripple. There were also many deaths and disablements amid the onlookers who’d come to gather in the street outside. Only I, Geoffrey Brook, protected by that pillar—and, perhaps, in some strange way, by the fact that I was already close to death—truly survived. I suffered a gash along my cheek which required five stitches you can barely see now, a dislocated shoulder and two septic lungfuls of plaster. Of course, I had my bad right hand already, although that fact often feels as lost to me as it is to the rest of the world.

  Even as I was carried to the ambulance, the flashbulbs were popping, the television lights were glaring. Three days later, propped up in my hospital bed, smoothed and groomed, sweetly drugged, whispered easy prompts when words failed me, I gave my first press conference. The nation’s yearning was so great that I was applauded even by those hardened hacks. For, yes, yes, I knew John Arthur. He was a friend of old. And, although we hadn’t kept in direct contact, our lives had touched and remained entwined over the years. When the time came for the Trafalgar Day celebrations, it seemed only right that he should invite me, and we’d driven out to the East End on that night after the parades. I was with him as he watched the fireworks unnoticed by his adoring people, and we talked about our lives, about the strange twists and turns of fate that had taken him to power, and me to Oxford. Then we went for a drink in a pub called the Cottage Spring where we had seen each other briefly many years before…

  The press returned when William Arkwright called by at my hospital room several days later. Again, the flashbulbs popped, but this time the new Prime Minister said it all for me. He shook my good left hand and grinned around his pipe, frozen by the crackling white wash. Afterwards, when the doors to the corridors were closed and Arkwright and I were briefly alone, he already seemed bigger than the man I’d met in the gardens of New Buckingham Palace. Power, after so long and patient a wait, had finally settled in his hands. Looking at him, dressed in his black tie, his black suit, the notes for the oration he would give later at John Arthur’s State Funeral at Westminster Abbey already tucked into his top pocket, I felt lost and afraid. But Arkwright only smiled and patted my good hand. Then a final thought struck him as he pocketed his unlit pipe and picked up his trademark Homburg hat from the place on my bed where he’d lain it so it would show in the photographs. “And it’s Professor Brook from now on,” he said. “Did I mention that just now? No matter—it’ll be in tomorrow’s papers.”

  John Arthur’s death is already as much a part of his myth as everything that happened during his life. This time, unlike the fire at Old Buckingham Palace, there will even be a trial, although, so slow do the wheels of justice grind in what people are already starting to refer to as post-Modernist Britain, that it won’t take place until the spring. Meanwhile, Jim Toller and several senior officers of the KSG languish in Pentonville Prison. As yet, none of them have committed suicide in their cells.

  The national mood is predominantly one of sadness and disillusion, combined with a new sense of realism. With John Arthur gone, the world seems bleaker. EA badges are less frequently worn, and KSG officers are no longer treated with awe; some may even find it hard to get served in shops, or suffer children’s jibes as they walk the streets, implicated as they are by association in the death of their great leader. The British economy, it seems, is far weaker than we ever imagined, damaged by ten years of over-expenditure. Conscription is being phased out in this mood of belt-tightening, and negotiations with France and Germany about mutual disarmament will commence in February. There is even talk—oblique, as yet—of giving India and Ireland a semblance of Home Rule, and of fresh elections for a new People’s Assembly in place of the sham and farce of the old House of Commons.

  All the rest, that last glorious summer of hope and expansion when nothing seemed impossible as long as we kept our belief, already feels like a dream. After all, the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place—Japan has attacked China, Stalin has annexed eastern Poland—and it’s obvious that the countries of the West must draw together if they are not to be swept away by Communism and a commercially belligerent America. John Arthur’s threats towards France and Germany, his canny alliance with Stalin, and the work in the desert wastes of Western Australia, where British scientists have recently set off a “controlled reaction”, have simply given us a top seat at the table in the negotiations to come.

  His picture had vanished from the urinals in the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow when I made my recent farewell visit there, leaving just the screwholes and a slightly darker mark on the wall. Gone also, in these straightened times, is the John Bull-reading War veteran, although the nail-marks that I and my acquaintance made in the third cubicle have yet to be covered by fresh paint. Long may they linger. Somehow, as I touched their soft indentations, they spoke to me of nothing but hope and decency.

  The Cumbernalds’ house shines out amid a Christmassy spray of car headlights. There are lights, too, wound like a roller coaster up the tall firs in the front garden, and flashing on and off around the front porch.

  “All terribly kitsch, I know,” Cumbernald assures me as I step in from the raw cold whilst my driver hangs back to make sure that I’ve been passed on to the next safe pair of hands. “But Christmas is for children, isn’t it—the child within us all? There’s no sense in resisting…”

  He takes my coat and passes it to the maid behind him. He’s wearing a red velvet jacket, a glossy blue cummerbund, an iridescent bow tie. A stray bit of Christmas sparkle glitters on one of his eyebrows.

  “Everyone’s waiting for you…”

  It would be bad form for these groups clustered beneath the coloured streamers of the long reception room to burst into applause, but nevertheless a palpable change of mood passes through them at my appearance. Within moments, I’m surrounded, touched, smiled at, reminded of previous meetings and promises of lunch, breathed over, stroked, prodded. Grateful for the armour of my tablets and Nurse Cunningham’s injections, drawing people behind me like the tail of a comet, I shuffle across the carpets towards the largest, warmest and most inviting looking chair. Secure in the knowledge that I will be guided as I cast myself down, I slump in its general direction.

  The pictures on the walls here are pretty scenes of British towns and the British countryside. But for the fact that they lack captions and are probably expensive originals, they’re very much like the images you see in every public place and railway station, and that will soon also grace the cover of Figures Of History. Chilly blue seas and heathered hills, weathercocked spires and awninged marketplaces, dappled sunlight, dotted clouds, lakes and farmhouses, even the occasional glimpse of a car or a tractor. But there are few people about in this lost dream of Britain, and they are disguised by headscarves, hats and raincoats. Looking at these scenes of an empty, blandly-pretty countryside, I realise just how sick of Britain I have become, and how much I long to be rid of it.

  Cumbernald brings me a sweet sherry and a Spode plate with a hard-boiled egg, a leaf of lettuce, a sausage roll; what we English call a salad. The crowd around me thins as it becomes apparent that I’m not responding to their questions. From being a living link to John Arthur, I’m demoted to an old relic, to be touched for luck, then forgotten. Miss Flood will have to hurry if she really expects to capitalise on my fame. Music plays. The fire flickers. The Christmas tree glitters. The Christmas decorations turn and sway. There are many hours to go yet before midnight and the coming of 1941.

  Eileen Cumbernald sits for a while on the arm of my chair, brown as ever in a low-backed dress as she chatters on about reassuring things; she is as she i
s, and demands acceptance on no terms other than the simple facts that she is human, middle-aged, a woman, a mother. Her husband Eric’s impending promotion to Vice Chancellor of Oxford University has left her totally unchanged.

  “I so enjoyed that time we spent together at Penrhos,” she tells me, her face redly flushed. “The girls are fond of you and your funny stories. They’re staying up tonight…” The pearls of her necklace stick to her chin as she surveys the crowd. “They should be around somewhere. You really must come down with us again next year…”

  I have to smile. It’s funny, how people choose to ignore my obvious physical decline. I suppose that they imagine it’s only natural. In fact, for me to appear too hale and hearty after surviving the machine gun attack and explosion that killed John Arthur would probably be seen as suspicious, if not downright blasphemous.

  Eileen Cumbernald wanders away to be replaced by P. Wiseman. Magdalene man that he is, even he can’t afford to let tonight pass him by now that Cumbernald’s Vice Chancellor elect. For all I know, he may even have used his connection with me to wrangle tonight’s invitation. I’m grateful as he goes through his usual how-are-you-keeping banter—as if he of all people didn’t know—when Christine and Barbara Cumbernald rustle up behind him in their party dresses.

  “You’re even more like dead Uncle Freddie now!” Barbara declares delightedly as she imprisons me in her hot arms. Ribbons are falling from her hair and her face is white apart from a dazzling pink spot on each cheek. She smells of wine and sweat and toffee.

  “What did you both get for Christmas?”

  Barbara rolls her eyes—where to begin?—whilst Christine hangs back a little, looking just as pale and hot as her sister, but more clearly the eldest now, her face and body drifting towards that first rough approximation of womanliness. I really don’t know whether to feel happy or sad for her.

  “Tell you what,” Barbara says, wriggling the points of her patent leather shoes. “We’ll show you. Come on…”

  There are shrieks of fairy laughter, disappearing flecks of grubby cotton underskirt, and I must hurry if I am to follow them, tunnelling out through the sour clinging heat of bodies into wider hallways and turns, past downstairs toilets, unlit billiard rooms, and little alcoves where the coats hang like carcasses and watchful maids with Bellini faces huddle as they puff at their cigarettes. Barbara and Christine scamper ahead into a place where the night empties itself through a hundred arched panes of glass.

  “This is Daddy’s new conservatory,” Christine tells me, her breath whispering in clouds, her face within looking more than ever like that of the beautiful woman she will surely become. “He had it built as a part of his Christmas present, although it wasn’t much of a surprise.”

  “He doesn’t grow any flowers either because he’s too busy,” Barbara adds, skidding across the tiles, whilst I look around for a wicker chair to absorb the swollen pain and weight of my body. “These,” she waves her hand at a pile of wonders, “are our presents.” Under these stars, in this darkness, I can just make out the lifeless faces of dolls, angular bits of board game, what looks like a small but serviceable motor car. “We shoved them in here because we couldn’t think of anywhere else.”

  “Don’t you want to play with them?”

  They shrug and exchange looks.

  “Will you tell us one of your funny stories?”

  “You mean about the past?” I ask.

  They both nod gravely. But I’m lost here. The starlight barely makes it through the glass to my eyes.

  “Why don’t you both tell me a story instead?” I suggest. “Tell me what you know about John Arthur.”

  “John Arthur,” Barbara intones, “died a hero’s death as we as a Nation celebrated Trafalgar Day. Bad people who wanted to—” But at this point, Christine begins to tickle her. They collapse into a squealing heap.

  When they’re almost still again, I do my best to tell them about Saladin and the capture of Jerusalem, but my choice of subject is a poor one and Christine starts to draw matchstick men on the frosted glass whilst Barbara does handstands: they’re plainly not in the mood. After a while, I half-close my eyes, feigning sleep in my wicker chair, and they put their fingers to their lips and creep out, leaving me to my old man’s dreams, these stars, this empty night.

  The chair creaks. The snow that covers the Cumbernalds’ wide back garden is barred with the light of many windows. Will they stay in this house on Raglan Street, I wonder, in the wake of Eric’s promotion and the knighthood that will almost certainly follow, or will they move upwards to some semi-stately home? With the billiard room and this conservatory, the hugely expensive kitchen I got a glimpse of, they’ve clearly got things exactly as they want them. But they will move, of course. They’ll continue to swim through these warm currents until age and frailty finally catch up with them. They’ll probably even accept death with good grace—after all, they’ll know that they’ve have had a few good innings. Just like me, they’ll have no cause to complain.

  I really am a full Professor now. An MA, Modern History, from my own college, too. As Cumbernald has carefully explained, my Master’s can be seen as either honourary or de-facto depending upon the angle from which you choose to view it. The thing often switches back and forth even in my own befuddled mind—a strange state of existence which I suspect that the scientists Walter Bracken refused to join in Australia would recognise from their studies of the hints and glimmers that apparently make up our universe. We’re barely there, it seems, if you look closely enough; just energies and particles that don’t belong in a particular time or place. Stare at the world too hard, breathe at it from the wrong direction, and it falls apart.

  Christlow was found drowned on a muddy bank of the Thames down by the Isle of Dogs the morning after the Cottage Spring. A presumed suicide, there were whispers on the Oxford grapevine of evidence found in his rooms of preferences that should never be entertained by a man who did volunteer work with children.

  I don’t doubt, in fact, that he was following me. Where and how it began, and whether he always knew of my sexual dalliances, or whether his suspicions of me were more recent, I will never know. But I’m sure that he found the pistol in the suitcase beneath my bed. No doubt he imagined he was doing no more than his patriotic duty by reporting my movements. But here the picture grows fuzzy, unscientific, unhistoric…

  My thoughts always come back to the man who has most plainly benefited from John Arthur’s death. More than ever now, it’s clear that we all underestimated William Arkwright. He’s a consummate survivor, a dealer and a fixer, a betrayer, a maker and an unmaker of men: a politician in the sense that John Arthur—who lived, for all his faults, by the gut, by the heart, by the flame and the fire—never was. It must have been plain to Arkwright long before it was to the rest of us that Modernism was in crisis, seduced by its own myth and in danger of launching itself into economic catastrophe and a disastrous European war. So perhaps Arkwright finally persuaded the generals, the old guard—the relics of an establishment that we all presumed had died off but now, resurgent, is so supportive of him—that enough was enough. As even the arrest of Jim Toller and his senior KSG colleagues acknowledges, John Arthur’s death was executed too professionally to be the work of mere fanatics.

  From this, I soon find myself taking the kind of wild flights that, even when I was spinning though the most dangerously speculative pages of my long-projected book, I would never have considered undertaking. History—the only kind of history, anyway, that anyone ever cares about—is always reducible to solid facts that can be learnt by students in hour-long lessons and then regurgitated in exams, or used to add colour to television dramas, or as the embroidery in escapist novels. But it seems to me that my own plan to kill John Arthur, of which he himself clearly had no knowledge, was known about, indeed accepted and encouraged from its inception, by senior figures within the Government who already wished him dead. What could have been more convenient than to have som
e dying madman perform the deed? So my path was cleared, and perhaps even poor Walter Bracken was dispatched in a sham suicide once he had given me what I required of him. I still remained, though, just one of several options. An idea to be toyed with—or at least not discarded until the last appropriate moment. Even as I wandered the gardens of New Buckingham Palace two days before Trafalgar Day, it was still quite possible that I would be allowed access to John Arthur with my Humane Bullets and my Webley .45 Bulldog Revolver. After all, I had done well enough so far. There was no particular reason why I shouldn’t succeed, other than the question mark that hung over my own character. And whom should I meet there amid the terraced fountains, but none other than William Arkwright?

  It was then, I think, that I was finally weighed in the balance and found lacking. I was dropped from the contingencies, and Arkwright ordered that I be arrested by his own officials, questioned, then shot whilst more reliable plans were put in hand. Only some chance enquiry from John Arthur’s office about my whereabouts—that midnight phone call echoing in that shaft between the buildings—saved my life.

  Did John Arthur know that an assassination attempt was likely? Did he welcome it? Did he send that invitation to me half-expecting that I would be the final link in the chain that would break him? And was it I who led both John Arthur and his killers to the Cottage Spring? But no, no. All of this is too fantastic—worse than those dreadful Modernist books that I forced myself to read. Even now, I’m still swept on by the myth of John Arthur.

  The fact is that I will never know. Perhaps in years to come when the truth is no longer potent, some hack or scholar will come up with a theory that questions the role of Jim Toller’s KSG in John Arthur’s death. They may even stumble across the strange fact that another figure, an obscure populist academic named Brook, was arrested in possession of a gun. Odder still, this Brook character was then released and was with John Arthur at the time of his death—survived, even, the explosion. I cannot imagine what threads they will draw out from these odd facts. By their nature, the true conspiracies are the ones that are least likely to be unearthed in the future. The truth, at the end of the day remains forever silent. We are only left with history.