With motive the disputed ownership of whatever the downstairs room had been ransacked for?
But why had Zack wanted him to die?
And how had he achieved it?
This was the twentieth century, close to the end of it. Not the Dark Ages. How could I have believed even for one fleeting minute…?
Since my meeting with Zack on Saturday morning (Zack? Zack?), no, since my meeting with Zachary Cornelius on Saturday morning I had been in a state of trance—of hypnosis—of enchantment. I could see that now. I hadn’t been like a real person living in the real world. I had been a marionette. Bewitched.
Bedevilled.
Spellbound.
I had thought he represented the Enlightenment. Of course he represented nothing of the sort. Despite his denial of it, he had most surely come from hell.
I sat hunched inside my car, forearms flung across the steering wheel, face pressing into damp flesh. Had the meeting with my mother, then—her half-forgotten dimples, flirtatiousness, Utility costume, black-feathered hat—had all that been hallucination? Were his powers so strong he could sweep me back to boyhood without preparation, transport my present body to address an earlier one, escort me there as keeper or control? If so, he could almost certainly have mesmerized a person into suicide. Drowning wasn’t necessary. What would Cornelius care about the feelings of a dead man’s parents?
But apparently his plan had needed to include somebody like myself.
Why?
I was a nonentity. I had nothing to offer. No special talent. Why should he wish to have me—or, for that matter, anyone else—convicted of this killing?
For beyond a doubt they would convict me. They’d find my jacket in the bathroom. Driving licence, credit cards, the lot. Fingerprints all over. I’d slammed the door as I came running from the house, but even if I hadn’t, could I really have been bothered to go round trying to wipe away the evidence? Did I really care that much about my future?
I raised my head, dully. The women who had witnessed my arrival were gone, and so was the boy who’d been working on his bike. But there were others who could talk of my departure. I’d almost collided with the postman as I charged into the street. A neighbour, to whom in all likelihood he’d just delivered something, had still been on her doorstep.
So here was one murder hunt that wasn’t going to cost the public tens of thousands of pounds. Only the motive would prove to be a puzzle.
I started the windscreen wipers.
I gazed at them, like Bob Hope gazing at a swinging brooch in Road to Rio.
Then I thought of something. I’d always heard that you were safe when orders proved abhorrent to your nature.
So? In that case had part of me actually enjoyed what I’d been doing? Found it fascinating, seductive? The lure of the forbidden, the unique power of the strong? My God! Had it been excitement which had let my hands maintain their pressure on his skull—bone against enamel—while his hair straggled on either side of them like black seaweed?
No.
It wasn’t true. It was not true. Just couldn’t be.
No pleasure. No fascination. No excitement. Simply the thought of Philip. Of Philip and my life ahead. Those were the only things that could have made it possible, apart from the victim’s own resolve to have it happen. I would swear to it.
I engaged the engine.
I had to see Cornelius.
I had to pray that I could find him.
I was scarcely aware of how I got back into town. But that was no different to the outward journey. Presumably I stopped at traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, presumably I got into the proper lanes. At any rate no police car gave me chase.
It was too early for that.
The road where he lived ran alongside the cemetery in which we’d met. I remembered my lightness of spirit as I’d approached this house on Saturday. But the memory now evoked only loathing and self-pity, literally a howl of self-pity. I hadn’t known when I was well off.
I rang and the buzzer sounded without my needing to identify myself. Oh, yes, naturally! One of his party tricks! I felt relief along with, as I climbed the stairs, an onset of breathlessness. I even felt a modicum of hope. Now, at the very least, I’d get an explanation. Possibly a solution. I would know what I must do.
But it was a stranger who awaited me. Short and puny, sharp-faced, cross. Accusatory.
“You aren’t the Gas Board!”
People had always hoped for something that I wasn’t.
I said, “I’m looking for Zachary Cornelius.”
“Who?”
I repeated it.
“You’ve got the wrong house,” he said.
“I spent the evening here, the night before last.”
“This flat’s been empty for three weeks.”
“No.” A note of cunning, even of triumph, had seeped into my voice. “If I hadn’t been here, how would I know about the sunset and the beach? The starry sky?”
He tried to close the door but wasn’t fast enough. I shoved him back. The flat had two rooms and kitchen and bath. All walls and ceilings were covered in white. The paint could hardly be new. It looked dingy and didn’t have a smell.
Dear God! Could I have imagined it? Could I have imagined all of it? From start to finish?
Think!
What other evidence? What other absence of evidence?
The Post-it note on which he’d written his address—on which I thought he’d written his address—was in my wallet. Allegedly.
My wallet was in my jacket. My jacket was on the chair. The chair was in the bathroom.
Allegedly.
The bathroom was in the house.
The house that Zack built? The house of cards that Zack built?
On the other hand, if I was really losing my mind, at least I was aware of it; and they said you couldn’t truly be mad if you were still able to acknowledge it.
Or was this as fallacious as their claim about hypnotism?
In any case I apologized to the landlord. (“My God,” he said, appearing to recoup some of his courage, “you’re all wet!” We could see my tracks on the hall carpet.) I returned to the car. Sat back and covered my face with my hands.
Should I go to the police? Should I send them to discover Brian Douglas—on the supposition, naturally, of his being dead? Should I give them a description of Cornelius, say he worked for a syndicate promoting euthanasia? Say that I, as a sympathizer, had offered to help?
Would it matter if they didn’t find him? Cornelius?
Was he even there to find?
I took my hands down from my face.
Yes, if I could have imagined that whole striking use of colour…? The events of these past few hours had been amongst the most vivid of my life, yet people sometimes clung to their delusions even in the face of reason. I knew that. Could it be the same with me? Was it possible that if I presently returned to the office I might encounter my colleague looking no less yuppyish than he’d done last week—or last year? Was it possible that I’d be able to say good morning to him on the stairs tomorrow just as naturally as if I hadn’t drowned him in his bath today? Was it?
I sat in the car and experienced the beginnings of a sense of well-being. I was working the whole thing out so rationally. Step by lucid step. In the end I wouldn’t even need to see the police. (Already the notion of what I might have said caused me to cringe. For example, how would Brian have felt to discover he had AIDS?) Because, when it came down to it, there was only one point unexplained. Why was I so damp? Obviously I saw that it was raining, that it was raining hard, yet even so…
But eventually the answer would come. In the meantime perhaps I ought to drive across town to the Queen’s Medical Centre and place myself in the hands of some psychiatrist?
(Suppose it was a Dr Zachary Cornelius? That was another thought which actually produced a smile. No matter how strained.)
I switched on the ignition.
It was the last conscio
us thing I did.
Apparently I had a heart attack. Though I don’t remember any pain. It was the kind of thing I’d always dreaded, and this attack was certainly no small one: long before the ambulance arrived I was viewing the situation from somewhere above the heads of the people who had gathered, and of the policeman who kept asking everyone to stand back please (by then somebody had wedged something underneath my chest to release the pressure on the horn). I was viewing it, moreover, with a remarkable degree of composure, which interestingly suggested I might be passing through a state of near-death detachment. I watched the jostling and regrouping of umbrellas and listened to the hushed exchange of anecdote. Then the ambulance was there and I saw two medics lift me into it, an experience not unlike that of supposedly standing in the Chesham Road in Amersham. I saw them check for vital signs, put a blanket over me and give me oxygen. I heard their observations on the state of my clothing and the fact I must have urinated—and felt glad I hadn’t also defecated. Glad for their sakes, I mean, rather than my own; dignity didn’t seem an overriding issue any more. At the hospital, they wheeled me inside, still with the oxygen mask held firmly in position, and muzzy scraps of conversation floated in and out of my awareness, though none of them connected with myself: one with the forthcoming election and John Major, one incredibly—but I thought I might have blacked out, had possibly dreamt this—with King George and the forthcoming coronation. Also, we picked up snippets of cheerful comment in the corridors whilst making for our destination. Our destination came as a surprise. I had expected the emergency department, not a delivery room. My arrival even coincided with a baby’s startled bellow as it emerged from cosy shelter into cold electric light, and with the midwife’s nearly simultaneous cry of reassurance, before she deftly cut the cord and wiped the baby clean and wrapped him up and put him into the waiting arms of my mother.
7
As she would tell me more than once in future years, and had told me more than once in past years too, I arrived early on the morning of Easter Sunday…“and thereby did me out of my lovely chocolate egg, you devil.”
“Why?”
“Because you made me feel so ill. I got a thrombosis on account of you!”
(“How to pave the way for chronic guilt,” was what I felt like saying. But at the age of three—or, equally, thirteen—I had to express my sentiments with care, even when merely teasing.)
Expressing my sentiments with care wasn’t easy. There were endless pitfalls. “What a precocious little fellow you are!” my father once observed, fondly. “Don’t tell me we’ve a genius on our hands, I don’t think I could stand it!” Pitfalls and temptation, especially when I started school…I had a strong propensity to show off.
Yet it was easier to handle in the playpen. For instance when I heard my mother tell a friend about Errol Flynn’s sex appeal in Mutiny on the Bounty I may have practically ached to correct her, but I knew it wasn’t possible.
And when on that same afternoon I listened to their optimistic reference to the Munich Pact I wouldn’t even have wanted to reveal the truth.
I remembered peace for our time, naturally. I remembered such dates as September 3rd 1939 and May 8th 1945. I remembered Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact I remembered all the major events of the next half century about as clearly as most people would, except in the rare cases when a warning could have been instrumental in averting catastrophe. Hence although I knew that Mahatma Gandhi and Dag Hammarskjöld and John Kennedy and Martin Luther King and President Sadat were all going to be assassinated, and even in what order, I had no idea of the dates or the places. On my fortieth birthday, fifteen years before, I had read that on the previous day two Boeings had collided on the ground at Santa Cruz airport in Tenerife, killing over five hundred passengers, which was one of the few disasters I could normally have dated with exactitude; but now I should have to wait another forty years to read of it again. I knew about the enforced mass suicide of an American religious cult in which nearly a thousand people poisoned themselves or were shot, yet I’d forgotten it happened in Guyana in ’78 and that the leader of the sect was called Jim Jones. I’d forgotten such unnecessary happenings as the Aberfan slagheap tragedy and the My Lai massacre and the destruction of a Korean Airlines plane in Russian air space; such things as Chernobyl and the Exxon Valdez spill, the Alpha Piper oil rig and the Zeebrugge ferry disaster.
I’d forgotten, even roughly, such recent dates as that of the explosion above Lockerbie or those on which the two Sicilian magistrates, Falconi and Borsellino, were blown up by the Mafia. I’d forgotten the name of the Yorkshire Ripper. And so on. And so on. I should never be allowed to change the course of history.
I didn’t even know any longer that Timothy Evans had been hanged for a murder he didn’t commit, or the year in which Marilyn Monroe ended her own life, or the names of the people taken hostage in Beirut. Although I spent countless hours in trying to pinpoint such pieces of information it was always wholly useless.
“But it’s inevitable I shall be changing history,” I’d said to Zack, in the flat he had apparently never inhabited. “In small ways. Others will work in those offices I won’t return to; on the other hand, the jobs I do take will now be closed to their original holders. And even more than that…I’ll be changing it because I won’t be marrying the same woman, and this time will father a son who doesn’t die. Besides, it’s always possible I may have other children.”
“Oh, well,” Zack had conceded, “changing it in small ways, yes.” In fact, to me they didn’t seem so small. (I had thought, a little tipsily, I should like to have a large family.) “In time, of course, a descendant of yours could hugely influence the history of the world, but this wouldn’t be allowed to happen until…what’s the date on Monday? Right, the 30th…that’s the one unbreakable restraint. After that, it’s up to you.”
“Not merely a restraint,” I’d said. “An impossibility.” For I could hardly imagine becoming a scientist, say, and as a brilliantly creative thirty- or forty-year-old discovering a cure for heart trouble or cancer; or a preventative for AIDS before the disease was even heard of.
(And I didn’t yet know, on that warm Saturday evening in Nottingham, in a house overlooking the cemetery, that some forty hours later I myself should be coming into such close contact with AIDS or that I myself should then be stricken down with heart trouble.)
My views on Zack—as must be evident from all of this—had once more undergone a change. Not only had he existed and kept his promise, I had delightful proof he still existed. (Was still the proper word?) One afternoon as my mother was pushing my pram through the town—I think she’d paused to look into the window of the Bucks Library, on the corner of Woodside Close—there was suddenly a handsome and familiar face gazing down at me and a finger playfully prodding at my tummy. “Who’s such a pretty baby, then?” He was wearing a tweed jacket, shirt and tie, and even a trilby, despite the fact it was a pleasant day in June; and after I’d got over my surprise, though emphatically not my pleasure, I reflected a little dryly—remembering only jeans and T-shirt in March—that possibly there were some fashions he liked a good deal less than others.
Though on the whole, I supposed, he was more accustomed to wearing jackets than T-shirts.
“Who’s such a pretty baby, then?”
To my mother no amount of admiration could appear way-out, especially if it came from a singularly attractive young man who remembered to ask all the right questions as though he were genuinely interested in hearing the answers. “You obviously like babies,” she said. “Have you any of your own?”
“I’m not married,” Zack replied.
“Do you live in Amersham?”
“No. Just a flying visit.”
“I thought it strange I’d never noticed you.” She then inquired if he were here on business.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“A man of mystery,” she laughed. “But what a shame!”
How forward she was, wh
at an unobservant child I must previously have been.
“And here were you thinking,” he said, “you might have found yourself a babysitter?”
I wanted to ask him how many such come-ons he normally received in the course of any one day; he heard me, naturally, and gave a surreptitious wink.
“You must be very proud of Ethan.”
“There’s never been a baby like him! And that’s not just a foolish mother speaking, everybody says the same. He’s so happy. He smiles and gurgles and looks at you all the time as though he really understands what you’re telling him. And would you believe it, he never cries! Honestly! He never cries! Well, only very occasionally, when his nappy needs changing and he’s got no other way of letting you know, poor little scrap. And he slept through right from the day we left the hospital. My friends say he’s a miracle.”
“Are you a miracle, poor little scrap?”
“Piss off!” I gave a winning smile and gurgled irresistibly. It should have felt so odd—this reversal of our generations.
“I wonder if babies ever have problems,” Zack asked.
“Not Ethan,” said my mother.
“My greatest problem,” I told him, “is sheer boredom. Obviously I sleep a lot but when I’m awake I don’t find sucking my toes incredibly stimulating—even though I still can’t get over my ability to do so, and intend to keep it going for as long as I possibly can.”
My mother might be talking but there was something about the tilt of his head which assured me I had his full attention.
“My biggest frustration is that I don’t have the strength to climb out of my cot and lay my hands on a good book. My biggest regret is that, apart from the toe-sucking, I don’t feel much of a sense of wonder. And also…”
He glanced round at me in encouragement.
“Also, I’m a bundle of neuroses. Fifty-five years’ worth of phobias and foibles—which is something, Zack, I truly didn’t bargain for!”
Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart Page 19