Below the Thunder

by Robin Duval

  Bryn was feeling better now. A short walk to the shops on the Pitshanger Lane convinced him he was fit enough to make it down to his old doctor’s surgery south of the Broadway. He booked an appointment around lunchtime.

  He had given no thought to the route and was concerned only, in the absence of convenient public transport, to get there as directly as possible. But he had over-estimated his physical strength and – critically – his resilience to the emotional effects of his ordeal. He realised there might be a deeper problem when he was approaching Longfield Walk and heard – very faintly ahead of him – a woman’s voice practising her scales.

  The sound froze him where he stood. He felt nauseous and dizzy. Perspiration started to run down his face and he put a hand against a street lamp to prevent himself falling over. Only after a period of deep breathing did he feel able to turn aside and travel the long way round to the surgery. By the time he walked into the little consulting office, he was regretting his decision not to spend the rest of the day in bed. He sat beside the desk as the doctor scrolled through a database of his previous medical history.

  ‘How are you today?’ said the GP cheerfully – still peering at the computer screen. ‘Looks like I haven’t seen you for a while.’

  ‘Not so good. Depressed.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  The doctor swivelled round in his chair. He was an overweight, middle-aged man with a florid complexion who looked as though he could do with some medical advice himself. Bryn had known him for more than twenty years and visited him perhaps six times. He had forgotten to take himself off the surgery’s list when he’d moved to America; but he doubted if his absence had ever been noted.

  ‘What appears to be wrong?’

  ‘I was beaten up two days ago. I don’t know how serious the damage is.’

  The doctor unfurled an inflatable cuff and wrapped it round Bryn’s upper arm.

  ‘You were attacked?’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  He pumped away thoughtfully and made a note of Bryn’s blood pressure in his database.

  ‘You’ve been to the police?’

  ‘No.’

  No. Not after the passport debacle.

  ‘Don’t you think you ought to?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Take off your shirt and trousers now, please.’

  Bryn stood up while the other circled and peered and squeezed him. A few times he gasped involuntarily when a muscle or a rib protested too much. After a thorough inventory, the doctor gestured to him to put his clothes back on and typed some more notes into his PC. A body-mapping template disgorged itself from his printer and he began to mark up Bryn’s injuries.

  ‘So you were beaten up, you say?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got some bruises on your shoulder and on your hips. The kind some people get when they take a tumble. Not much worse than that. You didn’t collide with a door, say?’

  ‘No. Two guys beat me up.’

  ‘Only joking. Pity you didn’t tell the police.’

  ‘What about the muscle pain?’

  ‘I can give you something for that. A bit stronger than Nurofen.’

  The printer hummed again.

  ‘And the injections?’

  ‘The injections?’

  Bryn explained about the hypodermic syringe and the yellow liquid. The doctor looked puzzled. He inspected Bryn’s offered arm and typed another entry into his database.

  ‘Any nightmares? Flashbacks? Trouble sleeping? I can give you a mild sedative if you’re feeling depressed,’ he murmured, studying his notes. ‘And of course something for the pain.’

  There was a chemist’s shop down the road from the clinic and Bryn had the two printed prescriptions filled immediately. He swallowed the first round of pills in the taxi on the way home. By the time he had propped himself up in front of the television set he was feeling decidedly more comfortable.

  The craggily handsome face of four-star General James Scott was on every news channel. The hero of Afghanistan had hit the ground running. He proclaimed himself flattered that people should think him vice presidential material. But he was merely a military man with no aptitude for Washington, no experience of politics. All he could offer was leadership and a proven record as a winner. In a long, exclusive interview, a Fox journalist asked him if he had ever had a role model, and he acknowledged that yes, there was one. That fine soldier and great American, General Alexander Haig.

  Bryn was not the sole observer to find this remark intriguing. Haig had been Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff during the final Watergate-enfeebled months and had managed to accumulate powers more substantial than anyone in American history who was not actually President. Journalists on other, non-Fox, channels sought further elucidation. But General Scott had withdrawn ‘for foreign and domestic policy briefings’ to the Texas ranch owned by one of his supporters – a member of a group of concerned Americans calling themselves the Friends of the Right. Matters were taking an interesting turn.

  He left the television on and went into the kitchen for a sandwich.

  He had not forgotten Marcus’s reference to the Friends of the Right, during their conversation on the mountain. The likelihood that his cousin knew significantly more about these events than the news channels inflamed his interest. He had no reason since their last meeting to be less wary of his cousin. But he remembered Marcus’s invitation in the park… just a telephone call. There could be no harm in that.

  He checked the breast pocket of his jacket for the card Marcus had dropped into it. It wasn’t there, or in his other pockets. He had almost given it up for lost when he found it neatly tucked into one of the credit card pockets in his wallet. Someone had written in ballpoint across the top:

  He did not need to understand Hebrew to register its significance. A decision of some kind: probably to release him. Whoever made the note must have rung Marcus on the cellphone number on the card. How long had his ordeal endured before Eyal and the cameraman discovered the connection? Did they stop because they feared to spoil a good relationship with MI6? Exactly at what point had Marcus become involved?

  Another good reason to speak to him.

  But when Bryn dialled the number himself, all he reached was an anonymous voice inviting him to call later or leave a short message. He tried several more times that day and the next until, in the end, he left Dieter’s telephone number and a request for ‘someone’ to call back.

  The pills had done an adequate job of relieving the muscle pain and after a couple more days he was moving around freely. The effect of the sedative, though, if indeed it had any separate effect at all, was more transient. His absorption in the news had diverted him for a while, but now – with too much time for his own thoughts – he was already beginning to fall back into his slough of despond.

  Memories of the padded cell persisted like unhealed wounds. He had a troubling sense of loss, like a bereavement, as if he had left part of himself behind, a more innocent and self-confident part. And he could not shake off a presentiment of continuing vulnerability. There seemed to be no one in this morass to whom he could turn for trust or protection. He considered visiting the police again – but there was still that small matter of illegal entry, and a general shortage of witnessed credibility.

  Then one afternoon, the telephone rang.

  It was Dieter’s house phone. No one had ever rung in on it before, not since he’d moved in. If it was Marcus returning his call, he was not even sure now that he wanted to pick it up. He let it ring till it died.

  A few minutes later it rang again. This time he did lift the receiver.

  ‘Bryn?’

  It was the last person he’d expected.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  There was a note of concern, that he had only once and fleetingly detected before. A similar remembered hesitancy.
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  ‘I have had some trouble,’ he confessed.

  ‘Tell me about it, Bryn. Everything.’

  He found it exceptionally difficult to come to the point. The first attempt at his story was a brief throw-away outline, as if he did not expect her to be interested or to believe him. She pressed for more and it was the evident sympathy in her voice that unmanned him. Hard as he tried to censor out any self-pitying detail, some of the pain began to spill over the barricades.

  Mostly she listened in silence. Twice, when he paused, she repeated his name as if to encourage him to keep going. Even his bare-boned version was much longer than he’d intended. By the end, though, he was relieved to have at last got it out. But he wished it had not been Agnete who had to hear the sorry tale.

  ‘I’m fine now,’ he said. ‘Been to the doctor. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Where are you, Bryn?’

  ‘Ealing.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘Where in Ealing?’

  He told her.

  ‘Stay there. I’m coming over. About an hour.’

  Chapter 19

  One hour gave him little enough time to shower, clean up the rooms, make himself more presentable. In the event Agnete was late and he was impatient for her arrival. He was watching through a bedroom window when a taxi arrived and she clambered out, packages cascading around her.

  She was upon him before he could step through the door; only the framework kept him upright. He’d not experienced so enveloping an embrace since childhood. It was as if she meant to squeeze every last remaining breath – and ache – from his body. But when he tried to return the favour, she detached herself and kissed him lightly on the lips.

  ‘I’ve brought you a meal,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve eaten properly in days.’

  She gathered up the bags and strode through to the kitchen as if she’d known the house all her life.

  While she pulled out pans and plates, bowls and cutlery, he busied himself opening and emptying the packages. There was a bottle of Billecart-Salmon Rosé (‘put it in the refrigerator – now’), a cool bag of cold meats, salads and desserts, and an ovenready meal from some upmarket delicatessen.

  ‘Do you know how the cooker works?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can I trust you to heat the moussaka?’

  He watched her squinting short-sightedly at the packaging. The mystery of her enigmatic, spell-binding gaze was solved. Not witchcraft after all.

  ‘Forty minutes at 180.’

  ‘I can do that.’

  He persuaded her, with some difficulty, to leave the rest of a not very complex operation to him. She cast around until she found a key to the French windows, and went out onto the garden terrace.

  When he brought out the champagne and two glasses, he found her sitting at Dieter’s picnic table with her hands folded demurely in her lap and her eyes closed. He thought about pilfering a kiss. He still did not know quite where he stood.

  He laid the tray on the table and started to open the wine. By the time he had finished pouring it out, he was conscious that Agnete was watching him.

  She picked up a glass and held it towards him.

  ‘En skål på venskab og måske… mere end det.’

  He had no idea what she meant.

  She smiled. Not a wide-lipped English smile at all – but the same small private smile he’d seen not more than a couple of times previously. Ice blue eyes and cool command. But the thought that she might be seeing him in soft focus, too proud for lenses, made everything now seem more possible. He brought his glass up to hers and leant over and kissed her.

  ‘Whatever you said, I wish it too.’

  ‘Mere end det?’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Look it up on Google. Tomorrow.’

  She laughed and produced an iPhone, box-fresh still in its translucent plastic cover.

  ‘I want a picture of us,’ she said. ‘Before the bubbles die.’

  The sun was already descending into the taller trees at the bottom of the garden. He set up the phone so the pair of them could pose together – artistically – with the light glinting on the glasses in their hands. Dieter would have approved. Agnete circled the terrace taking snaps of the house and of Bryn, while he laid out the feast she had brought with her.

  It was a voyage of discovery.

  If he had ever thought she would be the conventional echo of her boss, the evening quickly disabused him. Agnete was something more frightening and entrancing: an independent woman. The first shock was her politics. How she fitted into MI6, he could not imagine.

  ‘I blog a lot,’ she said cheerily. Between mouthfuls. ‘Kochadoodledo.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Kochadoodledo.com. You’re really ignorant, Bryn.’

  He was happy to be so.

  ‘It’s a US-based blog dedicated to challenging anti-democratic arguments. It started off as a counter to the Koch Brothers, the boys behind the Tea Party. You must know them. Anyway, we’ve moved on from that. There are hundreds – radical blogs and websites. The problem is keeping them clean from trolls and rightist hackers. People have got to control their own destiny.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Bryn. ‘I know that argument.’

  She frowned sternly.

  ‘Are you trying to patronise me?’

  ‘Au contraire.’

  ‘It’s a new world, Bryn. Pay attention. Twitter and Facebook were the start. We have the levers of power if we can learn to use them properly.’

  ‘I can’t imagine Marcus would go along with this.’

  She smiled back at him contentedly.

  ‘Fuck Marcus.’

  As they sat, drank, talked and ate, he found his own convictions – such as they were – under increasing pressure. He’d read Marx, Engels and Lenin as an undergraduate and later – in the line of duty – Luxemburg, Gramsci and Althusser. But he had never managed to get far beyond a detached academic interest in radical politics. This was not good enough for Agnete.

  ‘I know you’re on our side,’ she said. ‘You’re just too frightened of leaving the middle of the road.’

  ‘It’s an intellectual thing. Objectivity. Balance.’

  ‘Bollocks. It’s a middle-aged thing.’

  She must have recognised that this was below the belt. She at once leant over and kissed him on the cheek; and changed the subject. Very slightly.

  She began to talk about Udell Strange. It was her first acknowledgment of the evening that she and Bryn had a prehistory. She was much more informed about Strange than he was. She talked about his campaigns for political and legislative change and the clandestine funding arrangements that supported them. About how much of the darker, reactionary side of the web – what Bryn had taken, with all its faults, to be the natural downside of grassroots democracy – was, in fact, paid for and promoted by Strange and a small circle of his allies. Bryn wondered how deeply embedded she was in her political activism and what dangers she risked. He did not believe that the myrmidons of Marcus’s shadowy trade could be ignorant of this side of her life.

  ‘The older a man gets,’ she said, ‘and the more power he accumulates, the less interest he has in other people and other people’s opinions.’

  ‘Power corrupts.’

  ‘Tends to corrupt. You’ve read Spinoza?’

  Steady on.

  ‘The greatest of the great Jewish philosophers.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘“God loves no one and hates no one, too full of power to let anything exist other than himself”. Well, it’s the same with Strange. Only, immortality for him means imposing his world on future generations after he has gone.’

  It was the kind of academic dirty talk he loved. It was intoxicating; and he realised how badly he had missed it over the past year. The Danish ice maiden had vanished. He could see fire now in her cheeks and – as the last embers of the setting sun faded behind her – flames in the glo
wing corona of her hair.

  They got up from the table and went through the house to the sitting room.

  ‘Put some music on,’ she commanded.

  There was a sound system in the corner, and a rack of CDs. Dieter’s collection – pretty well all opera – was unlikely to be what she had in mind but he found a recording of Puccini’s Tosca near the top of the pile and put on a disc of the Third Act. He hoped the tunes would be good enough for her not to object.

  She did not even comment. She had kicked off her shoes and was waiting in the centre of the room. When he went to embrace her, her unzipped dress slipped away from his hands onto the carpet. He backed away like a man caught with a shattered vase.

  She placed a hand on the top button of his shirt.

  ‘Am I going to do everything tonight?’ she said.

  They made love where the garments lay. Uncomplicatedly and unhurriedly. As if they had known each other all their lives. The world dwindled away. Clocks, traffic, music – all the surrounding sound – faded to nothing. Time suspended itself. Only the moment existed.

  When it was all over, and he had returned to earth, he become aware of the opera on the CD player and of the half-completed tenor’s aria.

  E lucevan le stelle

  e olezzava la terra

  Appropriate words, appropriate melancholy.

  He took her back to his room and she fell asleep in his arms, while he lay awake exploring his thoughts. Why – when he should have been purely happy – did he feel so uncertain? Spinoza, famously, would have put it down to a universal animal tristesse. He suspected a different cause. If he was sad it was because of unfinished business: something the sex had merely – and for its duration – postponed.

  Entrava ella, fragrante,

  mi caddea fra le braccia.

  Oh! dolci baci, o languide carezze,

  mentr’io fremente le belle forme discogliea dai veli!

  So many questions he should have asked her.

  He looked down at Agnete, perfectly at peace in his arms, sprawled across his chest with a hand against his cheek and gossamer strands of hair floating on the eddies of her breath. He marvelled at the capacity of women to sleep so soundly, at such a time. Oxytocin. The uniquely female hormone released at the moment of climax – creating a calm spiritual contentment and sense of trust and security. It did seem unfair.