The Last Day

by Andrew Hunter Murray

  Hopper shivered. This was Lambeth. The old War Museum stood here, the gates padlocked, the site ostensibly deserted. The rusted howitzers still sat at the front gates, and between them was the husk of an armored personnel carrier, burned out by vandals and looking like a monstrous beetle. But the grounds were planted with crops behind the barbed-wire fencing, and she saw figures moving slowly back and forth at the windows.

  The area got poorer as she moved south. Past the crumbling plastic blocks at Elephant and Castle; down Walworth, a long high street of near-empty shops and youths idly scuffling over footballs.

  It took her two abortive attempts to find the street where Thorne’s old friend Chandler lived. Eventually she found it and pushed open the protesting gate of Number 45, a two-story house halfway along the terrace. The front garden was a hopeless tangle; fallen leaves lay everywhere in various states of decomposition. Between them she saw lily weed, ragwort, and knotweed; huge loops and tangles of tendrils occasionally arced above the soil like sea monsters before plunging back down to devour the foundations in peace.

  She knocked. After thirty seconds the door opened a crack, on a double chain. In the darkness beyond she could see only a slice of a figure, smaller than her.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Chandler?”

  “Who are you?” The voice was quavering, high and thin with age.

  “My name’s Ellen Hopper. I’m calling about Dr. Edward Thorne.”

  “Thorne?”

  “Yes. I believe you used to work for him.”

  The figure made no movement.

  “I was wondering if I could speak to you about him.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m from the Times.”

  The line had occurred to her as she walked through Waterloo, but she was surprised to hear the facility with which she offered it now. First Jessica Hayward outside Thorne’s house yesterday, and now this. When had she become such a good liar?

  “Why do you want to speak about him?”

  “I’m afraid he’s dead, Mr. Chandler.”

  “Thorne?” The figure repeated the name forlornly.

  “I’m part of the obituary team. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to break the news like that, I—”

  “How did you find out about me?”

  “Your name was on our list. Our other writer, Harry Markham, may have phoned you, some years ago?”

  “Why didn’t you ring? The phone works.”

  “I live nearby. They let me leave the office early.”

  Chandler still did not move.

  “It needn’t take long. I’m sure ten minutes would do it. But if you’re not free, I can always go.” Hopper smiled reassuringly.

  Another long pause. Then he slowly shut the door.

  She had ruined it. And she hadn’t even come up with a false name to give him. What if he reported her visit? Stupid, stupid.

  A second later, she heard the rattle of the chain against the door, and he opened it to let her in. “You can’t stay for long.”

  “Thank you. I won’t take much of your time.”

  It was uncomfortably warm inside the house—the cooling system must be broken—and dark, too, the semidark of a home without proper blackouts. Most people who lacked the luxury of underground darkness just thickened the curtains in their bedrooms or taped them at the edges. Some daylight always made it through, though: it pried its way in, testing every seam it found.

  In the hall, her eyes adjusted to the gloom. The man before her was at least eighty. His eyes were small, a little clouded. He wore loose, shabby trousers and a jumper stained with egg. Beneath the jumper his shirt was far too large for him, and billowed briefly out before being tucked in at his waist. On his feet were worn slippers emblazoned with some smiling figure from a child’s cartoon. He looked at her with hostility.

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Ellen Hopper.” Too late to lie now.

  He nodded, and turned along the long, wood-lined corridor to the back of the house. There was a heavy smell here, a tang both sharp and sour, and the air grew thicker as they moved.

  The first room they passed was open to the hall. The shutters were sealed, but it was lit nonetheless by an image projected onto a large, yellowed canvas sheet hanging at the back of the room. It was the sun, tinted red, pushing up from the horizon while a little voice burbled about the beauty of dawn. The only occupant of the room was a hunched figure sitting before the screen in a chair, facing away from them. In the corner was a single bed and a cabinet covered with medicine bottles.

  “My wife,” Chandler muttered. He leaned into the room and spoke up. “It’s someone from the paper, Miriam. They want to talk to me. I won’t be long.” The figure in the chair gave no sign of having heard.

  He walked on, into a second parlor at the back of the house, decorated with dark floral wallpaper and Victorian furniture, and gestured to a chair. “Will you wait in here?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like anything to eat, or drink? Tea?”

  She nodded. “Tea, thank you.”

  He nodded. “Was it the Mail you said you were from?”

  “The Times.”

  “Ah. I misremembered. Back in a minute.”

  He shuffled out of the room, carefully closing the door behind him. She heard a kettle click on, and then the sound of laborious footsteps on the stairs.

  She got up and looked around the room. This side of the house was the darker one—northwesterly, so it would have got little enough sunlight even when it was built. On one wall hung two bronze snakes with candles sticking out from the tops of their heads, on either side of a mantelpiece. Below it, a huge stack of old paper tottered in the blackened fireplace.

  The faint burbling still came from the recorded voice in the front room, through the thin wall. Faint sounds of wildlife accompanied the voiceover now: birds with strange calls, the screams of primates.

  While television broadcasts lasted, it had been official government policy to show sunrise and sunset on public screens at the beginning and end of the day. The practice was supposedly calculated to help the population adjust.

  She had first heard of the custom at about age ten, and it had seemed childish even then, a spasm of magical thinking intended to trick oneself into believing the world had not changed. Her own father had had no patience with it: “Most of these people paid no attention whatsoever to the sunrise when they had it, so for them to start now is absurd.” He had drummed disbelief into her, hardening her against the world.

  And yet, when he had fallen ill with pneumonia in her twelfth year, in the few days when his survival was uncertain, he had admitted to her shamefacedly that he would love to see a sunrise and sunset once again. Too tactful to point out this recantation, she had scrounged a projector from a school friend and set it up in his room. He had cried almost instantly at the picture on the screen, and she had too, although she could not say whether it was for him or the sun.

  After a few years, the government had ended the practice, whether in tacit acknowledgment that it did no good, or in impatience with the sentimental streak it betrayed among the British people. She had had no idea it still happened. She wondered how many sunsets and sunrises the old woman in the front room sat through each day.

  The stairs creaked again. After a minute the door opened and Chandler entered, carrying a tray. “I wasn’t sure what you wanted,” he said, in his high, querulous voice, “so I’ve just done it straight.” He was probably trying to save milk. She took the mug and sipped the steaming, bitter tea.

  He sat opposite her, breathing hard, and reached over to the tray for his own drink. He looked at her, sharp little eyes staring out from a pale, etched face. “So. What do you want to know?”

  She pulled her notebook from her bag. Thank God she had brought it. �
��Really I’m just trying to find out as much as I can about Dr. Thorne’s career. We’ve spoken to some of his relatives, but obviously his work was such a large part of his life . . .” She remembered reading somewhere that the liar supplied too many details, and tried instead to allow silence to fill the room. Panic rose in her throat. What am I doing here? “We really just want to know what it was like working with him.”

  Chandler let the silence hang for ten full seconds. Hopper forced herself to wait, to stay calm. Then he spoke. “We first worked together soon before the Stop. You don’t remember the time before the Stop, do you?”

  “Not quite.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  She said nothing.

  He carried on. “I always think it must have been better to be Cain than Adam. No memory of paradise. Just yourself and the new state of affairs.” He lapsed into silence, and as she wondered whether to prompt him again, he began speaking, slowly.

  “I was at Cambridge when I met Edward. I was a sort of assistant to lots of the dons. Passed all my exams and never got around to leaving. Thankfully they liked having me around, so I got a job as a factotum of sorts, and they let me stay.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He was brilliant, of course. Quite brilliant. Younger than me. I couldn’t teach him anything after his first term. He just went straight up the tree. Eventually I became his laboratory assistant. We worked on crop strains together.”

  “Which ones?” Her curiosity had got the better of her, and he glanced at her.

  “Plenty. Will your readers know or care about rice varieties?”

  “Perhaps not. I’m sorry. Please carry on.”

  “Eventually I became Edward’s personal secretary. He came to rely on me, I think.” Even at this distance, Chandler was flattered by his small importance in the life of a significant man. “When he left Cambridge, I followed him to Harvard.”

  “What was he like personally? To you, I mean?”

  “I don’t think I knew him very closely. I don’t think anyone did. He was only interested in the work. He barely even mentioned his own son.”

  Hopper interrupted in spite of herself. “A son?”

  “Yes.” Chandler looked at her sharply. “I’m surprised none of the family you’ve spoken to mentioned he had a son.”

  She forced herself to speak slowly. “They weren’t close relatives I spoke to.” Chandler nodded vaguely, and she allowed herself to breathe again.

  “A boy. Joshua, that was his name. He came to the office a few times.” He lapsed into silence again.

  “Is he still alive?”

  “No. He was in the army. Died young, like his mother before him. Thorne never spoke to us about any of that.”

  “And when you worked with Dr. Thorne . . . what were you working on?”

  “As I said, initially on the crop programs. This was several years before the Slow began, of course. Then he went off into the army and came back, and moved into government. He was promoted. Then when the Slow happened and Davenport came in, he was promoted again. I went with him.”

  “When did you stop working with Dr. Thorne?”

  “When he left. Fifteen years ago.”

  “I see. Can you tell me any more about that?”

  He looked at her sharply again. “I don’t think I should.”

  “It would be very helpful. Obviously I won’t put anything in the obituary . . .” Hopper let herself tail off, leaving the words unspoken: that would harm you.

  A thin cry came from the next room, repeated after a few seconds, pitiful in the silence of the house. Chandler stood. “Excuse me.” He shuffled once more from the room. After a long pause, the cries stopped. She heard him speaking muffled words. After several minutes, he returned and sat again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry. But it would be helpful to know.”

  He sighed. “It’s not a secret. We were all sacked unceremoniously. It was very unpleasant. We worked together for many years, you know.”

  “When you say ‘we’ . . . ”

  “All of us. The heads of several departments under him, and their assistants. When he went, we went. He’d been in charge of so much. He was responsible for agriculture, yes, but his operation was doing far more than that. They were reorganizing the hospitals, re-planning the cities, starting the population program . . . More or less everything that wasn’t direct state security was Edward Thorne. They had to hire four people to replace him.”

  “Why sack you all?” Chandler glanced at her, and she realized she was risking the lie, knew that an obituarist from the Times would be more careful than this, but she had to know. “Did they give a reason?”

  “He was working on something he shouldn’t have been. With Thomas Gethin. One of our other bright young things back then, Thomas Gethin. Always the golden one. They became inseparable. They wouldn’t shut up talking. Until I walked into the room. They were doing something all right.” His voice was bitter, and his mouth made little chewing motions.

  “Do you know what it was?”

  “I never managed to find out. Some projects are clearly too important to share with the help.”

  “But you were all let go?”

  He nodded. “All of us. I think some of the top team were really let go. If you know what I mean. All of them bar one.”

  She felt a prickle on her forearm. “Who stayed?”

  “Need you ask? Gethin.”

  “Surely the department couldn’t survive if you—”

  He waved his hand. “They had replacements lined up for the top officials. Barring Gethin, of course. Not the boy wonder.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Why do you want to know?” He was sharp again now, veering between indiscreet and secretive.

  “Professional habit.” She leaned forward. “I won’t write any of this up.”

  “He was sacked originally. He cleared his desk with us. I thought they’d got rid of him the same way they did us.”

  “Then how do you know he stayed?”

  “I saw him again. About three years ago, I was walking through Whitehall—and I saw him. He was going into one of the ministries—Internal Security, it was. I watched. He walked right on through the reception; he wasn’t visiting. I rang later, and they said there was nobody of that surname in the department.”

  He plucked a lump of sugar from the bowl and dropped it into his now lukewarm tea. Then he spoke again.

  “Why’ve you come here?”

  Hopper blinked. His memory must be unreliable. “I’m an obituary writer from the Times, Mr. Chandler, I—”

  “You’re not from the Times.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  His milky eyes remained unfocused, looking past her as he spoke. “I don’t think the Times would be writing about the way Edward left, or the reasons why. I think they’d be too careful for that. And Times journalists have cards, they have credentials.” He spoke with venomous satisfaction and his eyes flicked to her. “So you’re not from the Times, are you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Hopper managed to say. “If you like, you can ring my editor. He’ll tell you. Thorne died in hospital yesterday, we’re writing his—”

  “Are you from Security?”

  “No, I’m not, I . . .”

  The cry came from the next room once more—higher, more insistent.

  He ignored it. “No, you’re not. If you were from Security, you’d probably have said so. So you’re not from the Times and you’re not from Security.”

  The cry rose to a wail. He shouted past her at the wall, his high, thin voice ragged with anger: “Shut up, will you?” The noise subsided.

  “I think I’d better go,” Hopper said.

  “I think you’re right.”

  She stood
, gripping her notebook, and walked along the dark corridor with its burning smell, past the door from which the keening cry had come. But as she reached the front door, a strong, claw-like hand gripped her arm. Chandler was close to her now.

  “My life was ruined when we were got rid of. Ruined. And it was his fault.”

  “I have to go. The piece will appear in . . .” Her sentence got lost as she stumbled out into the garden. Then, without knowing what she was doing, she started to run, past the swirl of dead leaves, back through the rubble and weeds to the crumbling brickwork of the gate, away from the decaying house and its two wretched occupants.

  SEVENTEEN

  She was out on the street, breathing deeply; she was out and hardly knew where she was. Her heart was hammering at her chest. Even London’s tarry air felt clean in her lungs compared with the foulness of Chandler’s house.

  What had he said? Thorne had been sacked along with all his colleagues, except the man Thomas Gethin.

  What else did she know? Thorne had written to her telling her he had something to show her. His house had been burgled on the day of his death. He had been anxious in the hospital, worried about her safety even as he died. And his final words to her: My house.

  She had to go back to Hampstead.

  As she walked back toward the main road, she heard a footfall, and glanced around to see two men about twenty meters behind her. One was rotund and bald, halfway through mopping his brow. The other was taller and leaner, and walked with a bony, angular gait. Both men wore long gray coats, unsuitable in this heat.

  She had to struggle not to walk faster. It was unlikely they were following her. Impossible. Why would she be of interest?

  Two hundred meters later, they were behind her still, a little farther back. But when she looked around again, they were not talking, and their attention was focused on her. For a second her eyes met those of the taller man.

  There was a café up ahead. She ducked in, ordered a cup of tea from the proprietor, and waited for the men to pass by. A minute later, they did so. The shorter one glanced inside as they went.