David spoke. “Why leave him alive?”
“Who?”
“Thorne. He launches a satellite unannounced, and without approval, and discovers something he shouldn’t have. The department is disbanded. Everyone else—barring Gethin, who must have proved his loyalty somehow—gets the chop. Why not just kill Thorne?”
“Maybe they thought he had arrangements in place and that he’d pass the information on remotely if they killed him. We don’t even know if they ever got the satellite up.” She sighed. “I’m just guessing.”
Outside the car, on her right, a huge span of long, boxy buildings denoted a farm, one of the new four-tier hydroponic places. “I’m not sure how much longer I can do this, David. It feels like asking the questions, visiting people, is causing them to die. First Thorne, then Fisher. And Harry, whatever happened to him.”
He shook his head. “You’re just following the story, Ellie. But one thing to think about is: what are we going to do when we find what Thorne saw on the satellite?”
She shrugged. “Try to tell people. Somehow.”
David leaned over and, unexpectedly, gripped her hand. They stayed like that for a minute or two, and then he pulled away to change gears as Oxford rose before them.
THIRTY-EIGHT
On the eastern horizon, a pall of smoke hung in the sky, a light gray that stood out against the dark clouds stretching from one horizon to another. The bruise of smoke crawled across the cloud as they moved: some chemical process, Hopper guessed, or factory wastage being incinerated. Perhaps it was just the aftermath of a village on fire. That happened these days.
They were coming in from the southeast, past Headington. The old car factory in Cowley was used by the army now, she remembered, making munitions. The Oxfordshire Zone was proud of its munitions.
Hopper had not been in Oxford since her graduation, a day of threadbare pomp and quiet desperation about the future. She and her cohorts had been given a speech about the benefits of the education they had received, she remembered that. Parts of the day’s addresses had been delivered in Latin, an archaism even before the Slow and a total absurdity now that Rome was smoldering and abandoned.
The university’s vice chancellor, a well-padded man just beginning to shrink into old age, his skin loosening as food shortages bit, had offered some feeble justification for the dead language. His arguments, if she remembered right, were that this world might learn something of a noble death from the old one, and that their new educations would help them keep this world alive. Nobody had pointed out the contradiction. The speech was greeted with a silence more tolerant than attentive. Even from her seat near the back she had seen the deep, dark lines on the speaker’s salmon-colored face, heard the lack of conviction in his voice.
They were at the Cowley roundabout. Headington and Cowley looked the same; even some of the bars she had visited were still there, which pleased her. The sites piled up in her head as they passed them—the bridge over the Isis, chained punts nudging the bed of the shrunken river beneath; the botanical gardens; the high walls of Magdalen covered in creepers; the threadbare, bleached high street. It was less changed than she had feared.
Traffic was light; these were the dog days between terms, when the city was at its emptiest. They turned right off the main road and made their way around the narrow back streets to her old college.
Outside, David parked on the quietest street possible. It felt uncanny to be here, a substantial place of brick and stone, not the half-imagined, half-real place she had been recalling over the last few days. Hopper felt as though she had woken from a dream, only to find herself in the landscape in which her dream had been set.
“Let’s go,” she said, getting out and slamming the door. They walked back up toward the porters’ lodge. Half of her expected cars to pull up as they approached, or Warwick to sprout from the slender oak door, Blake at her heels. She squeezed David’s shoulder, only half consciously. She didn’t know what they would do if they failed here.
Little had changed at the college. The gates, still huge and wooden, with a small cut-out door on black iron hinges closed during the hours of curfew; the cool flagstones in the vaulted archway beneath the inner and outer walls of the college; the tightly defended lodge itself. It was a tiny, perfect facsimile of the whole country. David stayed outside while she ducked her head through into the lodge, crammed with pigeonholes and noticeboards and a glass-screened office in which the porters sat.
The porter was new. This one looked about forty, sallow-faced and bony in his chair, strands of graying brown plastered over the top of his scalp.
“Hello there. Is Fred in?”
“Fred’s retired, madam. Five years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. My name is Ellen Hopper. I used to study here.”
He nodded. “Can I help with anything, madam?”
“Yes, please. I’m here to see Professor Heathcote.”
There was a moment’s pause, and for a second she thought: Jesus, not her too. They might have picked her up. They might have realized where Hopper was heading. They could have arrested Heathcote days ago, if Thorne had tried to contact her as he had Fisher. But the porter simply picked up the phone and said, bored, “What time’s your appointment?”
The clock behind him read ten past two. She swallowed and said, “Two fifteen. Can you tell her the subject of the meeting’s changed? It’s about Edward Thorne. That it’s important.”
He pressed a button on the phone, and passed the information to a secretary. After thirty seconds of waiting—she tried to look around the lodge instead of staring at the phone held by the porter’s ear—she heard a little squeak and he looked back at her. “She can see you at half past.”
“Her residence?”
“That’s right.”
“Thank you.”
“Feel free to look around the college. You’ll know your way around, I suppose. Since you’re an alumna.”
David was standing at the edge of the shaded area, looking over the quad. The lawn was still unfeasibly green. “Well?”
“She’ll see me. Us.”
“Good.” They turned and began to walk around the quad. The sky was as close to darkness as it ever got. Heavy banks of clouds sat across the sun’s spot, with further, darker heaps piling up to the west. She wondered whether the dye in the lawn had to be reapplied after rain. In the corner, she saw Thorne’s old room, and felt momentarily sick.
Halfway around the second side came the chapel. “Want to go in?”
“Not especially.”
“Come on. You don’t know when we’ll be here again.”
They had been married in there. The chapel was absurd really, a nineteenth-century monstrosity kitted out in high Victorian Gothic style, crammed with elaborate brickwork, tapestries, enormous stained-glass windows, ornate tiling, benches of carved oak. A couple of major works by minor artists hung unvisited in a side chapel.
The choice of venue for the wedding had been hers, more by default than anything else. It had been a poor choice. Her friends from college had mostly left; David’s friends from different points of his life were variously in London and Scotland. Oxford was a point of almost mutual inconvenience for all attendees. But by then it was too late, and David had been pleased by the archaism of the religious element. He had been amused too, to have the ceremony conducted by the college chaplain, a young man whose carefully assumed aura of gravitas could not wholly conceal his pleasure at officiating what must have been one of his first weddings.
The guests had huddled at the front, barely filling the first three rows. The ceremony had been conducted with vigor by the young chaplain, his Adam’s apple bobbing in the light of the candles along the front rail.
And yet she had been happy; happy even in the partial knowledge of the gap between herself and David, assuming it might one day be bridged,
that a few years’ aging might change things. The truth—that she had found her resistance to motherhood hardening rather than eroding as the years passed by—was a surprise neither had expected, but still, there it had been, the gap broadening until the other bridges between them had collapsed.
David pushed at the door. It was heavy but unlocked, and slowly gathered momentum before crashing into the wall. Hopper picked up a hymnbook—it was clean, where she had expected dust. The air was lemon-scented, and the flagstones underfoot still bore the final imprints of a mop.
“Want to go again?” He was grinning, enjoying himself. He had always enjoyed teasing her. He moved up the aisle away from her, laughing, and she felt the lump of tension in her throat dissolve a little, appreciating his idiocy, forgot temporarily the pain in her ankle and ribs. He sat in the front row and looked forward, his shoulders still moving, and yet as she approached him, she realized with a start that he was no longer laughing. He had slipped somehow into crying, clawing his glasses off his face and masking his eyes with his hand, fat tears rolling down his face as he breathed and sobbed and spoke all at the same time.
He was saying the same phrase, over and over again: “What am I going to do?” It took a few attempts to make the words out.
“You’re going to be all right. We’re going to find out—”
“I’ve always had work, El. I’ve always done the right thing. And now I’m out.” He spoke in a whisper, but the high ceiling above them magnified his words. “I don’t think I realized before. It’s just shock.” He was almost hiccupping with the effort of suppressing tears. She remembered the panic she had felt the last time she had seen him cry: in a restaurant in London, two days before she had left.
And yet here there was nothing to panic about. “We’re going to be all right, David. We are. We’re going to be fine. You’re going to be fine. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” She spoke in low tones, as one would to a child, and she could not help but reach out and put her hand on his back, and from there it was a short step to putting her other arm around him, tucking her chin over his shoulder. They sat like that for some time, oblivious to the quiet movements of the birds that had made their roost in the roof beams high above them.
It took a while for his breathing to slow, but it did, and he moved so his arms could be around her as hers were around him. She shifted, pushing her head to one side on his shoulder, looking to the front of the chapel. To her this new pose felt more normal, more like the pose any couple might adopt. Any couple, she thought, and wondered whether they now were.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right. If it had happened to me I’d probably have dragged you in too, to be honest.”
“That’s what you get for being so useful.” She felt his jaw muscles tighten in a grin.
“Were you happy? With her?” Hopper spoke without thinking.
“I don’t think it matters now. We weren’t very happy. That’s certainly true. But it was better than being without anyone.”
“You’re not without anyone.”
His arm tightened around her. From where they were sitting it would take hardly any movement at all for them to kiss.
It was only after a few minutes sitting like this that she heard the chapel bell ringing, and realized it was time to meet the warden.
* * *
A thin drizzle of rain had started to fall while they were inside the chapel. Little gusts of wind whipped discarded leaves into spirals along their path.
The warden’s residence was in a corner of the second quad, a large detached house somehow transplanted into the college. Hopper found the doorbell—a discreet pad with security camera, sitting beside an ostentatious Victorian bellpull that hung polished and abandoned. Eventually the door opened a few inches, on a chain, and a suspicious eye observed them through the gap.
“Warden’s residence.”
“We have an appointment.”
“Under what name?”
“Hopper.”
The door closed and opened again, without the chain. Before them stood a woman of about forty, dressed in a severe skirt and a ribbed bottle-green polo neck with pearls peeking out from beneath. Her face was lined and exhausted. Hopper remembered this woman, had seen her sitting beside the warden at dinners. Back then she had been in her middle twenties, glamorous but bored; now she seemed simply bored, and the glamour lent to her for her youth had been recalled, bestowed just as unfairly on some other young woman who would lose it in turn.
“Are you Professor Heathcote’s daughter?”
“I am.” She gestured with one hand; Hopper could smell the nail polish on it. “Please, will you wait in here.” It was an instruction, not a question. As they moved into the room she had pointed out, she began to draw herself up the stairs, haltingly and painfully.
The room was light; huge windows at one end, shutters half-opened. It was a library: the two long walls were filled with enormous bookcases, groaning with volumes and each fitted with a mobile set of stairs mounted on a rail. One was interrupted by a fireplace, a huge stone monstrosity clearly still used, with tarnished brass tools sitting inside a wire screen. The room’s far end held an array of open glass cases, stuffed with artifacts, antiques, bits of flotsam from the time before the Slow. It reminded Hopper of Hetty’s warehouse. She gingerly picked up a small red-and-black vase and turned it upside down.
“What do you think?”
Caroline Heathcote—the warden—was standing at the door, her hand resting lightly on the handle. David, who had been examining the bookcases, jumped. Hopper spoke first.
“Very beautiful.”
“Very pointless.” Heathcote shuffled into the room. “But part of me found all those things beautiful once, I suppose. A lot of them I collected before the process of slowing even started.” She moved cautiously, staying close to the edge of the bookcase, and holding a discreet railing placed at hip height, until she reached one of the red leather armchairs.
Professor Heathcote had always been short, but now her spine had begun to curl over. She must be at least seventy-five, Hopper thought, maybe even eighty.
“If they’re pointless, why do you keep them?”
“You never know. Someone else might find them beautiful. I must confess—please, sit down—I have a little fantasy that this might be one of the last rooms to survive. That it will be boarded up after my death, and discovered one day, to puzzle archeologists.” Heathcote sighed. “Then again, once I’m dead, I suspect the next warden will have different tastes and give it all away. I imagine there will be at least a couple more wardens before everything comes to an end.”
Heathcote paused as she examined Hopper, then David. “I hope my daughter wasn’t too abrupt with you. A disappointing life, I think, sitting around in a big house you know you’ll have to leave when the old woman dies. But there are worse fates, of course.” She smiled. Hopper’s slight and instinctive dislike of her gained substance.
“I’m Ellen Hopper.”
“I know who you are. I remember you.”
“And this is David Gamble. He’s a friend of mine. We’re here about Edward Thorne.”
Heathcote nodded. “Yes. You’ve caused quite a fuss.”
“For you?”
“For me.”
“What sort of fuss?”
“Let’s just say I was aware I might meet you before you turned up at the lodge this afternoon.”
Hopper spotted the deflection of her question, and as she looked at Heathcote, became aware of the intelligence behind her slow speech: another creature, squatting inside the decrepit frame, watching her through the hooded eyes.
“We have a photograph of Thorne and what we think is a satellite.”
Heathcote looked at Hopper, more sharply this time, then at David, standing by the mantelpiece and still holding the book he’d taken
from the shelf.
“Yes?”
“We think it might be important.”
Heathcote sighed. “I knew about the satellite.” Hopper glanced at David, euphoric for a second, until the older woman continued. “But I’m afraid he never told me what he found.”
“Why not?”
Another pause, this one embarrassed. “I never asked.” Hopper’s look of incredulity must have betrayed her, because Heathcote continued: “I think he might have said something to me, if I had done. But it’s not always proper for people to tell each other everything. This way, if I had been questioned I could quite happily tell the officers from the security services I had no idea what Edward’s satellite was designed to observe. I was confident he would confide in me if it was important to him to do so.”
“Why did he tell you about it in the first place?”
“We were close, Miss Hopper.” As she said “Miss,” her eyes slid to David and then back again to her. “I took Edward in here, you know, when nobody else wanted to have anything to do with him. It cost me a lot.”
“You sacked him too, though, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “I loved Edward. But he felt his continued presence here was causing the college problems. And it was. I wish I hadn’t had to choose between him and the college. But I did. And this place is more important than any one of us.”
“It doesn’t sound like it was a difficult decision.”
From his spot beside the fireplace, David coughed: a little warning not to provoke too far. Hopper was irritated that he was right, and spoke again. “I’m sure you did everything you could for him.”
“It wasn’t enough, I fear. I barely heard from him after he left. But you’re not interested in his post-university career. You want to know what brought him here.” She was clearly determined to milk this little moment of celebrity for all the attention it was worth. “You know, someone else came to see me on this very matter, just yesterday. A woman called Warwick.”
The Last Day Page 28