'What about Provender?' Is said, laughing in order that her changing of the subject would not seem quite so obvious.
'Ah, Provender is a man of many anagrams,' said Moore. 'Believe me, my partner and I deciphered dozens. The one that hit me hardest was, in fact, the one I can least explain. I took his full name, including middle name, which is --'
'Stop right there,' said Provender, groaning. 'Don't. It's too embarrassing.'
'Go on,' said Is.
'I beg you, please.'
'It's not as if it's a state secret, Provender. I could easily look it up in Burke's Family Almanac.'
'Mr Moore, I will give you anything you ask, anything at all, just do not tell her.'
They were all laughing now, and Provender kept cajoling, offering Moore wilder and wilder bribes in return for his silence, and Is matched him by threatening Moore in increasingly elaborate ways, bidding against Provender's wealth with promises of violence, until the Anagrammatic Detective eventually blurted out 'Oregano', saying that he feared permanent physical disfigurement far more than he craved material goods, and Is began hooting hysterically and repeating the word Oregano over and over, and nothing Provender could say, no amount of feigned stroppiness, could get her to stop.
This happy scene was brought to a halt by the arrival of a three-strong welcoming committee from the house. Gratitude, Extravagance and Uncle Fortune appeared on the road, and no sooner did the two sisters catch sight of their brother than they broke into a run and fell on him in a flurry of shrieks and hugs and kisses. Extravagance gripped him so hard he had to push her arms off him in order to draw breath. When Fortune caught up, he too embraced Provender, then leaned back to examine him from top to toe.
'Intact. A bit rough around the edges but otherwise good as new.'
'I've been lucky,' Provender said. He submitted to another gratefully extravagant, extravagantly grateful display of affection from his sisters, then made introductions.
Is felt the weight of the Gleed sisters' gazes on her and saw the wary calculation in their eyes. Women always assessed one another on first meeting, but usually from a position of equality. There was no equality here. Gratitude and Extravagance scrutinised her from a viewpoint of implicit superiority, and saw that her clothes were inexpensive, her hair was simply and cheaply styled, her figure was not as diet-gaunt as theirs, and her looks and attitude nowhere near as refined as theirs. She refused to give them the satisfaction of looking cowed, though that was how she felt. She held her head high and, even when they frowned at her bruised cheek and puffy eye, didn't allow that to make her self-conscious. You're no better than me. She radiated nonchalance until, in the end, the sisters had their fill of looking and turned away. Possibly they had come to the conclusion that she was haughty, even impertinent. Is was not bothered. Let them think what they liked.
'Where's Mum?' Provender asked.
'Somewhere,' said Gratitude. 'Carver found us three first to tell us you were on your way home. He said he was going to look for Mum and for Dad. I bet they're not far behind us.'
'Now then, nephew,' said Fortune, 'I think you should tell us all about where you've been and what happened to you.'
'Can it wait till we get back to the house? I'm sorry but I haven't eaten since this morning and I'm...'
Provender's voice trailed off as he spied a figure hurrying along the road towards them. It was Carver, moving at a brisk jog-trot, fast as he could go, which was considerably faster than you would think likely for a man his age. In long, loping strides he reached the group, then braced his hands on his knees while he got his wind back. Finally, raising his head, he gasped, 'Quick. You must. Come quick. The house. Something's wrong. Mrs Gleed.'
65
In the television room, by the bright flicker of images of impending war, Prosper Gleed was in anguish. Medics were on their way. Carver had summoned them by using the emergency hotline in Great's apartment. But how long would they take? How soon could they get here? Soon enough?
He blamed himself. He should have noticed. His attention had been elsewhere. Cynthia had gone quiet and he thought she had simply drifted off to sleep. He had been sitting there, TV-absorbed, not realising - not even having an inkling - that something was wrong with his wife, until Carver walked in. Carver, clearing his throat, had been about to make an announcement of some sort, but one look at Cynthia and that was that. He had hurried over to her, felt for a pulse, tapped her cheek, asked how long she had been like this, then run off to the Granny Flat. Prosper had been alone with her ever since, alternately kneeling beside her and pacing the floor in circles. Her face was terrifyingly pale. When he touched her skin, she was cold. Her breaths were so shallow as to be all but imperceptible. To the casual observer she might have appeared to be asleep, but no one sleeping was quite so slumped, so slack-limbed, so motionless. Like a becalmed yacht, sails drooping, inert. How could he not have realised? It had happened right next to him, whatever it was. This silent, catastrophic collapse. Stroke? Heart failure? He had no idea. How could he have been so idiotically oblivious? His wife, slowly dying beside him! What kind of heedless moron was he?
And where the hell were those medics?
A commotion outside in the corridor brought Prosper's head snapping round and surge of hope to his heart. Here they were. At last.
But it wasn't a team of white-garbed ambulancemen who entered the television room. It was...
'Mum!'
Prosper's jaw dropped as first Provender, then a girl he faintly recognised, then Gratitude, burst in through the door. They were followed by a couple of other people but Prosper was too shocked at the sight of his son to register them. He stammered out Provender's name, but Provender scarcely spared him a glance. He rushed over to his mother with an awful keening wail. The girl was close behind him, and no sooner had she reached Cynthia's side than she began examining her, rather as Carver had but much more methodically. First the neck, two fingers pressed to it. Then lifting one eyelid, checking the eye, doing the same with the other one. Back of the hand to the forehead. The whole procedure was brisk and deft and unhesitating, and Prosper could not understand why he recognised her, but by God, what did it matter? She clearly had medical training. She knew what she was about.
'Poisoning of some kind,' the girl said.
'Poisoning?' said Provender. 'No. God, surely not.'
'Were you here when it happened? Mr Gleed?'
Prosper realised he was being spoken to. 'No. Yes. I mean, I was but I didn't see. She came in with coffee and we...'
'Coffee.' The girl looked around and saw the tray, the cafétière, the drained cups. She snatched up one of the cups, then the other. Something about the dregs in the second cup caused her to frown, then nod. 'OK. Provender, give me a hand. We're going to lift her and lay her out on the floor. Come on, move!'
When Cynthia was supine on the floor, the girl knelt, slipped Cynthia's nearside hand under one hip and began to pull her over. Cynthia was on her side when her body was wracked by a sudden convulsion. Dark vomit spurted from her mouth onto the girl's lap. The girl, without missing a beat, rolled her fully over while the vomit continued to pour. Someone, Gratitude probably, let out a piteous moan.
'No, it's good,' the girl said to nobody and everybody. 'Getting it out of her system.'
When the vomiting had run its course, she inserted a forefinger into Cynthia's mouth and wiped around inside, clearing out blobs of regurgitated matter. She began arranging Cynthia's limbs into the full Recovery Position, then halted. Something was not right. Swiftly she pushed Cynthia onto her back again.
'Not breathing,' she said.
Provender, kneeling the other side of his mother's body, gaped at the girl. 'What did you say?'
'I said she's stopped breathing. We're going to have to resuscitate.'
'We?'
'Yes, we. Works best if there's two of us.' She tilted Cynthia's head back, then placed both hands on her breastbone, ready to start compression. 'Put your m
outh over hers and pinch her nose. When I tell you to blow, blow.'
'But she just --'
'Your mother, Provender. Do it!'
Provender winced. 'I can't.'
'Yes you bloody well can. It's only puke. It won't kill you.'
'I'll do the chest pumping thing.'
'You have to know how. Do you?'
He shook his head.
'Then you're on Kiss of Life. Quickly!'
Provender lowered his head and, with a brief creasing of face, brought his lips to his mother's.
The girl bore down on Cynthia's chest five times, then said, 'Blow.'
Provender blew.
Five times. 'Blow.'
He blew.
Five times. 'Blow.'
Blew.
Five. 'Blow.'
Blew.
Five. 'Blow.'
Blew.
Exactly eight minutes later an ambulance skidded to a halt outside Dashlands House with a spray of driveway gravel. Carver was waiting to greet it and hurried the ambulancemen indoors and through the house to the television room. There, the ambulancemen found Cynthia Gleed sitting up on the floor, supported on one side by her son and on the other by a girl who informed them that she was a nurse and that Mrs Gleed had taken an overdose of an unknown sedative or tranquilliser. She had vomited and had had to be given CPR. Her breathing had normalised but she remained listless and unreactive.
The ambulancemen unfolded their stretcher, declaring that Mrs Gleed required immediate hospitalisation. They were overruled by her husband, who told them point-blank that it was out of the question. Family did not go to hospital. Hospital, if anything, came to Family.
The ambulancemen objected but Prosper Gleed was adamant, and so in the end they had no choice. They stretchered the patient up to the master bedroom. Items of medical equipment were commandeered from the Granny Flat, most importantly Great's emergency oxygen cylinder and mask. Further equipment was brought over from Reading General, along with a couple of doctors. Cynthia Gleed was made comfortable, put on a saline drip, and hooked up to an ECG monitor, and the doctors then began giving her a blood transfusion using plasma from the exclusive, Family-donated blood reservoir which was kept at the hospital. Her condition was officially designated serious but stable. The next hour was, the Family were told, crucial. If she survived the next hour, then the prognosis was good. During that time it would also be possible to begin to establish whether any lasting damage had been done to her system. There was a possibility that organs such as the liver and kidneys could suffer failure as a result of the overdose. If that happened, the doctors said, she was going to hospital whether Prosper Gleed liked it or not.
A bedside vigil commenced. Prosper and his daughters kept watch over Cynthia, taking it in turns to hold her hand and trying not to get in the doctors' way. Fort, meanwhile, constantly harassed the medical professionals in order to make sure his sister-in-law was getting the very best attention and care. It was unlikely that the doctors would be neglectful when it came to looking after a critically ill Gleed, but Fort, at least, felt better for chasing them around. As for Provender, he wafted in and out of the room, never staying for long. He couldn't bear to see his mother lying there so weak and pallid, but more than that, he couldn't stand to be in the presence of his father, who he knew was the reason his mother had taken the overdose. It was obvious she had set out to prove a point to him, to shock him out of his belligerent stance against the Kuczinskis. In that respect she had succeeded, but if she were to die now... She was still enough of a Roman Catholic to believe that suicide was a mortal sin. If she were to die now, she had damned herself. For her husband's sake she was risking eternal hellfire. The disgust Provender felt for his father then meant he could barely look at the man. His sole consolation was that, to judge by his father's distraught manner, Prosper Gleed loathed himself almost as much.
It was while Cynthia Gleed hovered between life and death, surrounded by her Family, that the first shots were fired in what looked like becoming the Third European War.
66
Neither side, in hindsight, could say with any accuracy who started it. Arguably, neither side did. What had been simmering all day finally reached boiling point and seethed over into conflict. It was, in that sense, spontaneous, an inevitable outcome that the politicians couldn't have prevented even if they had tried. At a certain stage, events took over. The build-up to war, which had been achieved so speedily, just kept accelerating until it started helter-skeltering out of control. Men were involved - from nervous footsoldiers in the theatre of combat to calculating field marshals and rear admirals in their strategy rooms - and men could make mistakes, and did; but really war itself was to blame. War, one might say, was an organism. Once conceived, given a glimmering of existence, like any organism it wanted to survive, and thrive, and be strong, and spawn, and proliferate. Offered a chance to live, it took it.
Initial contact occurred in the Bohemian Forest, that section of the German/Czechoslovakian border where the dividing line was blurred, one country shading coniferously into the other. There, an advance detachment of Western Alliance troops encountered an advance detachment of Pan-Slavic Federation troops. Encountered? Stumbled upon would be closer to the truth, for the Federals were in a clearing, sitting on cushions of heaped pine needles, brewing themselves tea, and were as startled as the Allies were to find themselves all at once face-to-face with the enemy. There was a limited exchange of fire, before both detachments beat a retreat and radioed news of the skirmish to headquarters.
War twitched and stirred.
At approximately the same time, out in the Baltic there was a brief naval engagement, when a Swedish frigate dropped depth charges on a Federation submarine, or what it thought was a Federation submarine. Sonar had picked up a large moving object which could just as easily have been a grey whale, but the captain of the frigate was new to his command, lacking in experience and also in caution. Better to attack the thing, he felt, just to be on the safe side. If it was a submarine, then he would have done well in defending his ship against possible torpedo attack. If a whale - well, what was one less cetacean in the world? The depth charging proved nothing conclusively either way. The moving object went into a steep dive, hastening out of detection range. The captain dutifully reported in to his base at Karlskrona, ship-shaped models were shunted around on a table map of Europe, and support vessels were despatched to his location.
War flicked open its eyes and drew breath.
In the skies above north-eastern Germany, over the canal-fretted lowlands of Uckermark, a feinting sortie by six Luftwaffe fighters ended in disaster. Instrument failure in the group captain's aircraft, or possibly a misinterpretation of the dial readings, resulted in him leading his wingmen over the border into Polish airspace. By the time anyone realised the error, it was too late - a larger group of Polish fighters was zeroing in on them, guns blazing. The dogfight was nasty, brutish and short. One and one alone of the Luftwaffe pilots escaped, limping back across the border with his engine smoking and his tail rudder shot to pieces. He had to bail out over the Oder river, but alas his parachute failed and he hit the ground simultaneously with his plane and only slightly less explosively. The Polish pilots returned to base triumphant, and word flashed to Warsaw. An incursion. Roundly repulsed, but an incursion nonetheless.
War flexed its limbs and started to rise.
And so the news began zinging along the wires, journalists speaking, looking and sounding properly anxious, electronic footage and phoned-in reportage whirling through the ether to transmitters, to receivers, being pumped out again by the TV and radio stations, finding its way down aerials into homes and workplaces, the truth, the knowledge, the information, unfurling with deadly earnest now in million upon million of living rooms and office rec rooms, crisis becoming event, potential becoming fact, and nothing, it seemed, could halt the process, nothing could kill the nascent beast that was crawling out of the belly of the continent to sprea
d carnage everywhere.
67
The name of the Gleeds' Phone, for he did have one, was Neville Quigley.
As a rule, Quigley enjoyed his job. It was an important job, perhaps the most important in the entire household. It had a cachet which elevated Quigley above the other domestic staff. He didn't flaunt that, he never put on airs and graces, but he knew it and they knew it: at Dashlands, Phone outranked butler, cook, housemaid, chauffeur ... everyone except Carver. Phone sat in on Family meetings other staff members were excluded from. Phone was privy to Family secrets other staff members could only guess at. Sometimes Quigley wondered if he was, in fact, even more essential to the running of the Gleeds' daily lives than Carver. But no, that was not possible. It was madness even to think it.
To be a Phone demanded a knack for remembering numbers, a tolerance for standing still for long stretches of time, and discretion. Discretion was the real watchword. As a Phone you listened in on intimate, inter-Familial conversations. Admittedly you only got one side of them, but that was enough. The revelations Quigley had overheard, the details he had eavesdropped on... He could tell you a story or two. Only he wouldn't.
Some Families employed deaf-mutes as Phones for just that reason. What couldn't be heard or repeated remained safely within the Families. However, there were problems with the use of deaf-mutes, mainly the difficulty of summoning them when required and communicating your wishes to them, but also the fact that they couldn't necessarily detect when there was an incoming call, although that had been remedied by fitting their backpacks with a vibrating buzzer or even, unpopularly, with a node that emitted a mild electric jolt. A hearing-unimpaired Phone was better on all fronts, on condition that he was not a blabbermouth.
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