by R. N. Morris
He was in his element.
Portman held a steady course at around 5,000 feet. Having turned after making his ascent, he was flying east now. A mild southerly wind blew across him. He felt it as a contrary will driving the aircraft in its own direction. But Portman, like any human aviator, was cleverer than the wind, even if he wasn’t stronger. He knew how to trick it into blowing him exactly where he wanted to be.
He had leisure now to look down at the countryside below. The way the fields locked together looked to him like the scales of a monstrous reptile. Clusters of dots twitched and teemed like parasites over them, sheep moving in their placid, mindless career of gorging.
He despised nostalgia, that sense of merry England that certain writers of his generation seemed to espouse. If the human race was to survive, the future had to be organized along entirely different lines, rational, unsentimental, efficient. There must be a move away from the pastoral to the industrial. The patterns of land-holding of the past were no longer relevant. He did not know with what they would be replaced; he was not an agricultural scientist. But if it was with vast, scientifically regulated factory farms, run by technicians and land economists, then so be it. It was to such men that they must look for a vision of the future countryside. Not to the poets and painters of bygone ages. And certainly not to the gentlemen farmers.
And yet, at the same time: the way the sunlight burnished the land, turning each blade of grass into a tiny green flame, the silent stealthy spread of incandescence across field after field, as effortless and wondrous as a miracle; all this caught at his heart and dared him not to celebrate. Even with the detachment afforded by elevation, from which he looked down on the realm of the earth-bound with godlike omniscience, he could not but be moved.
It would be a hard comfort to give up, the rural idyll, and it would need eloquent men like him to persuade the lawmakers of the future of its necessity. As well as to soothe a sluggish, sentimental populace into compliance.
They were over Hendon golf course now. Tweed-clad insects paused in their pursuit of an invisible goal to look up at the clattering sky. Portman smiled at their puny bewilderment.
The landscape to the east of the golf course grew markedly more built-up, as the outskirts of north London made their presence felt. Rows of houses sprouted like a crop of unnaturally cuboid mushrooms. A network of straight new roads set at right angles to one another imposed an artificial rigour, infecting the land with shape and purpose.
Then, as quickly as it had appeared, Finchley was behind them. The buildings thinned out, replaced by a hotchpotch of allotments.
The wind was adding a northerly curve to their trajectory east. But Portman knew full well where they were tending.
He checked the gauges, and made a few small adjustments to the altitude and course. Then glanced out over the starboard side of the nacelle.
There it was. A palace set in parkland.
Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum.
And although it was, in one sense, a symbol of the past, and he, W.G. Portman, was very much the angel of the future, still he never tired of looking down at it. It was a paradox, perhaps. But he lived in an age of paradox. And he was the foremost prophet of that age.
THIRTEEN
The room looked much the same as the last time Quinn had been there, except that now there was no dying man propped up on the camp bed.
A sour and complex smell permeated everything: of unwashed bodies, of seeping wounds and discarded medical dressings, of pill bottles and off milk, of old mite-eaten journals, their pages yellowed and brittle, of stale air and dead houseplants, of mouse droppings and rat poison and rotting vermin.
The camp bed itself was still in evidence. It looked like it had been slept in recently. The impress of a head showed in the lank, sweat-stained pillow. A coarse grey blanket hung limply over one side, the leg of a pair of grubby flannel pyjama trousers peeped out, like a hostage looking to be rescued.
In truth, it was hard to imagine anyone actually sleeping on that narrow, rickety bed. Least of all Malcolm Grant-Sissons. He can’t have enjoyed very many good nights’ sleep on the bed in which his father – or the man he called his father – had died.
But Quinn guessed this was where he was living. 3, St. John’s Passage, Clerkenwell. Quinn had used the house key that Macadam had found among Malcolm’s belongings to let himself in.
He did not know for sure that Hugh Grant-Sissons was dead. He had not read any obituary, or seen a death notice in The Times. But the man was close enough to death the last time he had seen him to assume the worst.
Nor did he know for certain that he had died in that bed. But it looked like a bed a man had died in. And if that were the case, then what a miserable, stark and comfortless death it must have been.
He had died surrounded by the accumulated junk and clutter of his failed life. Grant-Sissons senior had been an inventor. But he had become convinced that the design of his greatest invention – a shutter mechanism for a moving picture projector – had been stolen from him, along with all the profits that were rightfully his.
The idea had come to obsess him. He wallowed in his sense of grievance for decades, fixating on the success of his enemies, which came to include the entire motion picture industry. They were all against him. And they were all to blame.
What he should have done was confound his imagined enemies by inventing other, even greater contraptions. Instead, he devoted his energies to a hopeless case. So long as the public had moving pictures to enjoy, they little cared who had invented what in the machine that brought those flickering dreams to life. And he was up against some powerful vested interests. Those who had stolen his idea had grown rich off it. They could afford the very best legal representation. Grant-Sissons had been forced to represent himself. He may have understood the mechanics of motion picture projection, but he failed to grasp the basics of patent law.
His bitterness poisoned and ultimately destroyed what was left of his life. It was almost as if the cancer that was racing through him at the end was the incarnation of that bitterness.
At least, Quinn conjectured, he had not died alone. Malcolm had surely been there with him. But that was perhaps not as much a comfort as it ought to have been. The son who was not a son. The truth of their relationship no longer concealed from either of them.
All manner of detritus littered the floor, filmed in a thick layer of grease and dust. There were no curtains at the window; instead, an old corrugated cardboard box had been splayed and tacked up. Half-assembled – or half-disassembled – machines lay about like gutted automata. Smashed bulbs crunched under Quinn’s feet, together with discarded lenses, that must have cost a fortune to commission. An oilcan sprawled on its side, leaking incontinently from its hummingbird snout. Torn and crumpled sheets of newspaper, oily rags and scraps of paper on which calculations and sketches had been furiously jotted down, bore testament to the anguished disorder of an obsessed mind. Overturned jars spilled out nuts and bolts and screws and cogs, to be trodden into the obscurity of an unseen rug, among the desiccated insect husks and food scraps.
The room resembled nothing so much as a clock that an inquisitive boy had taken apart without knowing how to put it back together.
But the debris and despondency concealed a truth about the elder Grant-Sissons. His life had been defined by love as much as failure. He had known all along that Malcolm was not his son. And yet he had brought the boy up as his own.
If Louisa had lived, perhaps he might have been able to put his disappointment behind him. Even if she had left him for Quinn’s father. Knowing human nature as he did, Quinn had to admit that was unlikely. But who could say what a devastating effect his wife’s awful death had had on him, believing as he did that he was at least partially responsible?
She too had died from cancer, which she had contracted as a result of the experiments in X-ray photography to which Quinn’s father and Hugh Grant-Sissons had naively subjected her, a willing voluntee
r.
That knowledge had, it seemed, driven Quinn’s own father to kill himself.
As Quinn surveyed the scene, he tried to remember what he was doing there. He felt in his pocket for the second, smaller key that Macadam had found. He scanned the floor, looking for a tin box perhaps, or a small trunk, that it might open.
He moved over to the window and pulled the cardboard down, allowing the full force of the day to stream in. The sudden action stirred a thick cloud of motes and filled Quinn’s nostrils with a musty smell that set him sneezing. He felt like he was vandalizing a shrine, or breaking into a sealed tomb beneath a pyramid.
In the sudden light, the full despondency of the room was revealed. This was the wake of something. The wake of a life, slowly collapsing in on itself, into nothing. Other lives would come to claim this space, and one day all trace of it would be gone.
Quinn glanced around, his gaze desperate to latch on to something that would make sense of the various tragedies that had culminated in the disorder before him. He saw a row of photographs on the mantelpiece, neatly arranged, the only bit of order there was. He picked his way over to look at them.
His eye was drawn to a recent studio portrait of Malcolm, in a dark three-piece suit (not the corduroy of Colney Hatch), his hair neatly parted. The young man looked surprised more than anything, as if he could not imagine any possible reason why he should be photographed. But his gaze was shy, too, not quite meeting the viewer in the eye.
Quinn wondered what the occasion had been. Perhaps a birthday. Other photographs showed a baby and various versions of the same boy, growing gradually older in each portrait. As well as the simple changes wrought by ageing, there was something else visible in the progression of images. Something seemed to go out of the boy as he grew older. A light in his eyes died. And Quinn realized that the quality he had thought was shyness in the first photograph was more likely to be unhappiness. Was it something to do with his mother’s death, or perhaps with his learning the truth about the horror of it?
There was no photograph of Hugh Grant-Sissons on display, as if his enmity with the moving picture industry had led him to boycott having his image recorded in any form whatsoever. But there was one picture of a young woman. She was strikingly beautiful. Dark haired and pale skinned, and delicately featured. He felt he understood his father’s infidelity a little more now. Not just because of her physical beauty. But because there was something complex, challenging and restless in her eyes. Something you wanted to get to the bottom of.
She was smiling. But her smile was wistful, as if she had an inkling of the unhappiness she would cause, and the pain that she would suffer. He had the feeling that her affair with Quinn’s father had already begun when the photograph was taken.
He picked up the photograph and unfastened the frame, taking out the print and pocketing it. Then he did the same with the most recent photograph of Malcolm.
Next he went over to the camp bed and knelt down. After years in the force, he had learnt never to rule out the obvious. He was looking for anything valuable or important to Malcolm. It was likely that he would keep such an item close to him when he slept.
The first thing he saw was a book, partially pushed underneath the bed. He pulled it out. It was the overdue library book, A Furious Energy by W.G. Portman. It was bound in a green cloth cover with gold lettering and a debossed illustration of two stylized lightning bolts, one gold, one black. That is to say, one the shadow of the other. Quinn held it for a moment, as if he could know his half-brother better simply by feeling the heft of the last book he was reading. He turned the book over to examine the back cover. The double lightning bolt was repeated as a decorative motif in the corners and centre.
He opened the book to the frontispiece, which showed an engraving of the author, gazing with a visionary gleam into the distance. If the illustration was anything to go by, he was a handsome enough individual, something of a ladies’ man no doubt, especially with those profusely masculine moustaches. There was a confidence to his expression, an urgency of purpose, but also a kind of haunted humanity. It was an attractive combination, Quinn didn’t doubt.
He turned the page to a list of W.G. Portman’s other titles:
THE DISTANT MOONS
THE LAST MORTAL
A GODLIKE NOTION
MR HARTLE’S DOPPELGÄNGER
WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS
INFINITY’S PLAYTHING
AGENTS OF PARADOX
THE VISITORS
THE BLOOD PLANET
As a youth, Quinn had enjoyed the stories of Jules Verne. He understood the appeal of fantastical adventures in imaginary worlds. When the difficulties of the real world threaten to overwhelm you, such fiction offers a welcome escape. But what had he been trying to escape from back then? Naturally, he had known nothing about his father’s affair with Louisa Grant-Sissons. But he had been aware of his father’s long absences. And he had grown sensitive to his mother’s moods, her cold, silent anger, and her nurtured bitterness. All the reproaches that she should have cast at her husband, she converted into a constant griping dissatisfaction with her son. Nothing he did could ever please her, so he gave up trying.
So was this taste for astounding tales – which Quinn had not indulged for a long time, not since his father’s death – something that he shared with Malcolm?
Quinn settled back on to his haunches and began to read the book.
CHAPTER 1. SOMETHING IN THE AIR.
Peter Pilling could still remember the day that electricity came to Godalming. He was only three years old at the time. But even at that tender age, he knew that the world would never be the same again.
He was allowed to stay up late to see the Great Switching On. One by one the lamps on the High Street buzzed and flickered into life, to a chorus of gasps and rapturous applause from the watching crowds. Little Peter and his older brother Michael slipped away from their distracted parents to chase one another up and down the street, weaving between the lamps and shouting, ‘Trick, trick, electric trick!’ at the top of their lungs.
Their mother, as soon as she noticed them missing, was filled with alarm, especially when she realized their game. She feared that, if they ventured too close to the streetlights, sparks of the mysterious new power would leap out and electrify them, possibly to death. And so with one hand on her bonnet, and the other hitching up her skirts, she gave pursuit.
Picturing the scene many years later in his imagination (for that is what memory is, the recasting of a tale we are told into something we imagine actually happened), Peter came to see it as epitomizing a moment in history. For his Victorian mother, the new source of energy was a thing of danger and fear. For Peter and his brother, who were children of the future, it was a thing of joy, a cause for celebration and dancing. Despite the wording of their chant, they did not consider it a trick. That was purely a childish jingle, prompted by simple verbal coincidence. No, to them, this was magic, pure magic.
And indisputably a force for good.
Why the Fates had picked Godalming to be the first place in the world to receive a public electricity supply, Peter Pilling could not say. But as a resident of Godalming, he was grateful to those antic sisters for the signal honour they conferred upon his home town …
Quinn gave a deep sigh of regret as he closed the book and laid it to one side.
He cleared a space and stretched out, trusting to his ulster to act as a protective layer between his person and the indeterminate seediness of the floor. The smells that he had noticed when he first came in grew stronger the closer he got to the boards, as if the misery of Hugh Grant-Sissons’ life, and death, had sunk and settled at the lowest point of the room.
His hand reached out and touched something metallic. A moment later he retrieved a cashier’s box from under the camp bed.
The key fitted. The lid sprang open.
The box contained a bundle of letters wrapped in a pale blue ribbon.
He did not need to take th
em out to know who they were from, and to whom they were addressed.
Quinn sat up and covered his face with his hands.
In the same instant he felt his palms grow wet as a surge of emotion shook him.
FOURTEEN
As a copper, Macadam had interviewed all sorts. Toffs and low-lifes, artist types and stockbrokers, hard-working labourers and bone-idle drunkards, penniless writers and millionaire businessmen. But he’d never interviewed anyone like these socialists.
Adam Manley Adams lived with his wife and sister in a four-storey house in Fitzroy Square. Macadam supposed there was a bob or two to be made in this socialist lark. He was admitted by a maid. His professional glance took in the quality and expense of the furnishings and decorations. The oil paintings on the walls would not have been out of place at the National Gallery, if he was any judge.
Manley Adams’ name came up repeatedly in all the articles he had read about the Fellowship of the Gracchi. He was one of the co-founders, along with Oscar Villiers. Both men had inherited fortunes, and in the case of Villiers, a title too. Until ten years ago, Villiers had been the Fourth Viscount Penryn.
Macadam had to admit that the aristocratic name and origins of the other man, even if he had given up his title, had put him off talking to him. Once a nob always a nob, was his view. And he knew how these upper-class types liked to look down their noses at a chap.
On the other hand, Manley Adams sounded like the sort of fellow you could get a straight answer from.
Macadam was shown into a drawing room and invited to wait for the Master who would be along presently.
Before too long, the door opened and a woman of middle years came in. She possessed that confidence that came from being born into money. She radiated command. It was her birthright. And yet Macadam felt that she would find it very interesting – because it would be novel – to have anyone stand up to her. It seemed likely that she had once been beautiful but that this had never mattered to her. Perhaps she had not even noticed.