‘You must be surprised to find me here,’ he said.
But I wasn’t, not really. My capacity for surprise had been exhausted long ago. Instead – for a few seconds, at least – I found I was able to treat Vishram not as my superior, or even as a work colleague, but as yet another stranger whose significance had still to be determined.
‘I hope you’ll forgive me for intruding like this,’ he went on. ‘I wanted to be the first to welcome you when you returned.’ His right foot see-sawed in the air, suggesting that he was both intrigued and entertained by the unusual situation. Either that, or he was nervous. I couldn’t imagine why Vishram might be nervous, though.
I stepped into the room, but chose not to take a seat. I instinctively felt that the act of sitting down would signal acquiescence on my part, if not actual complicity. Whatever we said to each other from now on, it was somehow already apparent to me that our relationship had altered for ever.
I moved towards the picture window that opened on to the terrace. My dim reflection, the darkness of the night beyond. The coolness of the glass. Like Loames, Vishram would be studying my clothes, but I couldn’t imagine what he would be thinking. I had never been able to see into that intricate, shuttered mind of his.
‘You must have been worried about me,’ I said at last.
‘Yes.’ Vishram cleared his throat. ‘We did have some moments of anxiety.’
I looked over my shoulder, waiting for him to go on.
‘There were a number of occasions,’ he said, ‘when you eluded us.’ He paused again. ‘After the bomb, for instance.’
The clock on the nearby church struck midnight.
‘You wouldn’t believe how dangerous it is out there,’ I said.
‘That’s why we had you followed.’
‘How did you arrange that exactly? I’m curious.’
‘I can’t go into specifics, I’m afraid. Suffice to say that we have contacts.’
‘Adrian Croy.’
Vishram smiled to himself, then he looked down and picked a piece of lint off the sleeve of his jacket. For the first time in my life I found myself wondering whether there might not be some higher authority – a committee made up of representatives from each of the four countries, for example, that would convene in secret and oversee the running of the divided kingdom. It would be a natural extension of the clandestine meetings that had resulted in the Rearrangement. A rainbow cabinet … It seemed logical – even necessary. Before I could take the thought any further, though, Vishram spoke again.
‘Was she good?’
‘Was who good?’
‘Your shadow,’ he said. ‘Your guide.’
‘She was very conscientious. I was impressed.’ Then, keeping my voice impartial, I said, ‘You must care about me a lot, to go to such lengths.’
‘I would’ve thought that was obvious.’
‘Because I’m an employee?’
Vishram appeared to hesitate. ‘That would be one way of putting it.’
I studied him as he sat there in my favourite chair. He was wearing a typically elegant and yet understated suit. His feet were neat and slender in their highly polished shoes. He looked immaculate, omniscient.
‘Did you know I was going to do something?’ I said. ‘Have you always known?’
‘Not always.’ Vishram let the words sink in for a moment. ‘I didn’t know what you were going to do, of course, or when you were going to do it. I suppose I expected something out of the ordinary, though.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I would have been disappointed otherwise.’
‘But I broke the law.’
‘Sometimes it’s the only way.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘You’ve been to so many places. You’ve met the people who live there. You’ve learned about their difficulties, their dissatisfactions, and that knowledge is invaluable.’ Vishram paused. ‘I’m almost a little envious.’
‘You could have sent me,’ I said. ‘Officially, I mean.’
‘Not for more than a few days. And anyway, you wouldn’t have seen half the things you’ve seen. You wouldn’t have gone as far as you did.’ He indicated my cloak and boots with one of his vague but graceful gestures.
‘In a sense, then,’ I said slowly, ‘you’ve been using me.’
‘You’re forgetting something. It was your decision to go missing, and yours alone. We had no control over you, and we chose not to interfere. All we did was arrange for someone to keep an eye on you.’
Each time I tried to better him, each time I thought he might be about to yield, he took the force that lay behind my words and turned it back on me. It was as if he had studied an oral version of the martial arts. And yet I sensed a weakness in him somewhere, an uncertainty, which made me want to probe further.
‘How did you explain my absence from the office?’
‘You were ill,’ Vishram said, ‘in hospital.’
‘No visitors?’
‘You were quarantined.’
‘What was wrong with me?’
‘Something that was never properly identified. Something that resisted diagnosis.’
‘A mystery condition.’
‘Exactly.’
We exchanged a smile, our first of the evening.
Rising to his feet, Vishram announced that it was late and that he really ought to be going. He was sorry, he said, if it had upset me to find him in my flat.
‘Have you eaten yet?’ I said.
Both Vishram’s eyebrows lifted. ‘No.’
The wariness in his voice released a kind of adrenalin in me. I felt I had wrested the initiative from him at last.
‘Why don’t you stay?’ I said. ‘I’ll cook.’
Without waiting for an answer, I went out to the hall and fetched the bag of groceries Odell had bought for me. Back in the kitchen, I reached for the frying pan and placed it on the stove. Dropping a wedge of butter into the pan, I lit the gas. I broke four eggs into a pudding basin, then beat milk into the eggs with a whisk, adding sea salt, black pepper, and a few brittle sprigs of parsley from the freezer. When the butter had melted, I tipped the beaten eggs into the pan where they sizzled loudly, as if in protest, and then began to spread.
The phone on my bedside table woke me at five-past nine the next morning. I let the machine take the call. Pulling on my dressing-gown, I opened the curtains. The city glittered beneath a sky of unadulterated blue, every roof and dome and spire clearly defined. From my bedroom window I couldn’t see any checkpoints or watch-towers. They were lodged deep in the jumble of buildings that lay before me, as were the rolls of razor wire and the attack dogs with their sharpened ears. Standing on the sixth floor, looking south, it would have been easy to imagine that the borders didn’t exist, and that the city was a single entity. An illusion, of course. A heresy as well. A crime.
I turned and went through to the kitchen. The frying pan was still soaking in the sink, traces of omelette welded to the rim. Vishram had offered to wash up before he left, but I had called him a taxi instead. I’d had enough of him by then. As I ran myself a glass of water, I remembered how I had brought him back to his moment of hesitancy, asking once again why he had gone to all the trouble of having me followed. I had been thinking he would tell me, with some small show of embarrassment, that it was because he had grown fond of me, because he enjoyed my company, because – who knows? – he had come to think of me as a kind of son. But that was not how he replied.
‘I’d like you to take my place,’ he said, ‘at the Department.’
At last he had succeeded in surprising me.
‘Are you retiring?’ I said.
‘There’s some research I want to do. I might even return to academia.’ He smiled downwards at his plate, as if the idea was both shameful and absurd.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
His face stiffened a little. My reaction had disappointed him. I ought to have been enthusiastic or grateful. I ough
t to have considered it an honour.
‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘It’s probably too soon to be talking of such things.’
I nodded.
Later, I asked how his biography of the Prime Minister was going. He seemed to flinch slightly at the question. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Yes. It’s going very well.’
‘I never told Sonya, I’m afraid. About the job.’
‘That’s all right.’ He gave me another of his opaque looks.
Soon afterwards his taxi arrived.
Still standing at the sink, I went back over the encounter. It had been awkward for any number of reasons, most of which were entirely predictable, but there had been an aspect to the awkwardness that I wouldn’t have expected, and which seemed to have something to do with Vishram’s state of mind. I could only think that he had problems of his own. The second hand ticked on the cooker’s built-in clock. I drank half my water, then put it down. Whatever doubts or reservations I may have had about him, I couldn’t help but be amused – and curiously touched – by the fact that he had been so intent on being the first person to greet me when I got home that he had somehow contrived to break into my flat.
I fell back on my usual routine that morning – laps in the swimming-pool downstairs, followed by a shower, then breakfast with the papers – but I had the constant, niggling sense that I was only pretending to be myself. At times I could even detect flaws in my own performance. I put the kettle on. I poured cereal into a bowl. The flakes tinkled against the china like tiny bits of metal. Everything felt familiar, and yet the notion of familiarity was, in itself, strange.
As I reached for my glass of orange juice, a fly landed on my newspaper. It wasn’t a normal house fly. It was much smaller than that. In fact, if it had remained airborne, I’m not sure I would’ve noticed it at all. I leaned forwards to inspect the fly, but it chose that moment to rise unsteadily off the page. Seconds later, it alighted on the edge of my plate. This time I was able to crush it. There was no blood, just a minute dark stain on my fingertip. I lifted the finger to my nose. The dead fly smelled exactly like a Brazil nut. I wondered what kind of fly it was, and how many more of them there were. I’d ask my cleaning lady to look into it – if I still had a cleaning lady.
When I was dressed, I took the lift to the ground floor. The front doors of the building stood open to the street, and Loames stooped in the gap, polishing the curved brass handles. He had rolled his shirtsleeves back to the elbow, and his strong, unusually hairless forearms gleamed in the sunlight.
‘Morning, Mr Loames.’
‘Morning, sir.’ He stepped aside to let me past.
Once on the pavement, though, I paused. ‘Lovely day.’
He straightened up, his eyes on a smart middle-aged couple who were emerging from the hotel opposite. ‘They say it’s going to last all week.’
‘That’s good,’ I said.
There had been no allusions to my sudden bizarre appearance the previous night. There had been no ambiguous glances either, no attempts at wit, just ordinary, solid words whose only concern was that life should go on as before, as always.
‘I heard you were ill, sir,’ Loames said after a while.
‘Yes, I was.’
‘Feeling better now, are you?’
‘Much better, thanks.’ Casting around for a change of subject, I remembered what had happened at breakfast. ‘You know those flies you mentioned once?’
‘Flies?’
‘Back in October. You told me you had flies.’
Loames was nodding slowly now. ‘Ah yes, I remember.’
‘Were they small? Like this?’ And I curled my forefinger against my thumb so tightly that only a pinpoint of daylight could squeeze through.
He studied the shape I’d made with my hand almost as if he were afraid of it. ‘They were normal flies, sir,’ he said. ‘House flies.’
‘I see.’
‘I could call in the exterminators if you like – or I could do the job myself.’ His head lunged heavily towards me, like a cow’s.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’
I was supposed to have been ill, and appropriately enough, I found myself behaving like an invalid. I had the same dazed responses to the world, the same naive blend of gratitude and reverence. On leaving my flat the previous night, Vishram had told me that he didn’t expect me back at work until the end of the month, which was a fortnight away. We would call it my convalescence, he added in a light but conspiratorial voice, then he invited me to dine with him at his house on Saturday – or perhaps I had other arrangements … Other arrangements? I had laughed at the idea. He must have been referring to Sonya, but I hadn’t spoken to her. I couldn’t, not just yet. I wouldn’t have known what to say. I was like somebody who had jumped out of a plane. I had watched my parachute bloom in the vast, empty dome of sky above, and now I was drifting earthwards. A deep silence enveloped me. No doubt the ground would rush up to meet me soon enough, but in the meantime I wanted to keep everything the way it was – distant, abstract, peaceful.
I had left my flat with no clear purpose in mind, drawn out by the fine weather, but I soon realised I was following the same route Odell and I had taken the night before, only in reverse, of course, a route that now seemed thoroughly saturated with her presence. I lingered outside the supermarket where she had bought my groceries. Her image bent over the tilting shelves of oranges and pears. Further on, I turned down a street renowned for its jewellery, and I remembered how she had stopped once or twice to look in windows. I had ignored her and walked on. I regretted that now. I would like to have known what it was that had attracted her. That row of antique rings, perhaps – but which one in particular? I crossed another, larger thoroughfare, still heading north. Not long afterwards I entered the park.
I rounded the boating lake and arrived at the bench where the man with the ponytail had been sitting. In the daylight I could see that somebody had carved a heart into the wood. Close by, on the grass, a notice said NO BATHING FISHING OR DOGS ALLOWED IN THE WATER. I thought of the woman with the tennis racket – the plump sound of the ball landing on the surface of the lake, the black dog plunging after it – then I smiled and moved on. I passed the wolves asleep in their enclosure, and leaving by one of the park’s north-eastern exits, found myself in Gulliver once more. The smallest details came back to me. The smell of coffee, the piano music. The tree where Odell and I had stood and talked.
At last, towards midday, I reached the checkpoint, its steel barrier lowered, two guards on duty in their scarlet helmets. At the rear of the guard-house I could see the place where I had washed. The tap was dripping. Tiny glass beads shattered on the concrete, one after another, without a sound. Otherwise everything was still. The shadow of the watch-tower lay across the road like something that had been run over. I stared out into no man’s land, remembering the tension, the bright-white glare, the stench. It was hard to believe the memory was mine.
I had been standing there for several minutes when one of the guards walked up to me. He had a gaunt, clean-shaven face and clear grey eyes. I didn’t recognise him from the night before. The shift must have changed.
‘Just having a look, are we?’ he said pleasantly.
I nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘Pretty quiet today.’
‘Do you get much trouble?’ I asked.
‘Not much,’ he said. ‘It’s not like twenty years ago. Things have settled down a lot since then.’
He thought for a while. I had the impression that he wanted to convey something of his life.
‘Sometimes the Yellow Quarter guards do things,’ he said.
‘Like what?’
‘Once, about eighteen months ago, they released some peacocks on to the area that’s mined. We had to stand here and watch as the birds exploded, one by one.’
‘That’s barbaric,’ I said.
The guard shrugged. I was stating the obvio
us.
‘This section of the border’s haunted,’ he added a moment later.
‘Not the peacocks?’
He smiled. ‘No. There’s a young woman. Mid-twenties. She’s always walking away, into the darkness. You only ever see her from the back.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Me? No.’ He paused. ‘She must be someone who was killed here during the early days, I suppose.’ He stared out into no man’s land. ‘Some say they can feel her sort of brushing past them. It gives them the creeps.’ He grinned at me, rendering his scepticism apparent, then glanced at the guard-house. ‘I should be getting back.’
‘Nice talking to you,’ I said.
That afternoon I sat in my living-room and tried to read a book, but I couldn’t seem to concentrate. My eyes kept skidding across the lines of print. Eventually I put on a choral work that Victor had given me one Christmas, then I lay down on the sofa and closed my eyes. Though my mind seemed coated with a kind of scale, the residue of everything I had experienced, the singing had a cleansing effect, the voices overlapping and merging in such a way that the inside of my head became a smooth, shining space. How remarkable, I thought, that my early life had been inaccessible to me for so many years! But might that not reflect how happy I had been back then, how loved? Surely there had to be a correlation between the two. That total blankness stood for something, in other words, something immensely powerful, and it might prove a source of strength and comfort to me, if only I could learn to trust it …
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