The stunned look on her face showed him he had made another mistake. ‘Only a little one,’ he added hastily. ‘Hardly anything, really.’
‘You must tell me all about it,’ she said brightly, and his heart sank at the very idea. ‘Perhaps you want to see your room?’
Chang nodded eagerly, anything to bring his ordeal to an end, and she led him upstairs, then upstairs again. As he followed her frail form, he eagerly drank in every detail — the brown paint, the wallpaper peeling charmingly off the wall, the smell of damp exuding from the carpet. The aroma of old food hanging in the air...
There was a bed, a desk, a little heating device, a couple of chairs with the stuffing coming out of them, dirty yellow linoleum on the floor.
‘I should have it all painted, I suppose...’
‘It is perfect. Perfect. Just what I wanted.’
She seemed quite surprised by his response. ‘Well, if you’re sure...?’
Chang sat on the old bed, his feet tapping on the cold linoleum. He found it helped him think. He could feel a thin gust of wind coming in through the ill-fitting sash window, and he was cold. He sat perfectly still for many hours, digesting and sorting information, occasionally getting up and distracting himself by switching on and off the taps in the small cracked ceramic sink on the wall.
He was fairly confident that everything he needed had now been restored; the transmission had wiped his memory, and it had taken time for the information to seep back to a place he could access. He was fully himself again, and he even knew what he needed to do.
His job was to find Angela Meerson, and he had to do that by finding Henry Lytten. His secondary task was to find and recover the manuscript known as the Devil’s Handwriting. Then... what? He had no idea.
He did some breathing exercises to achieve a measure of concentration and slowly wrote down a list on a piece of paper. He could not yet rely on being able to remember efficiently. As fast as his memories had come back, he had jotted down notes. Angela. Henry Lytten. Rosalind in that article. Not much, as he found writing incredibly hard, but enough to help him recall the details.
Then he went shopping, which took much of the afternoon because every item was sold in a different shop, and in each one he had to wait his turn. He returned home with three pounds of carrots, some bread, a packet of sugar and some baby food. Not perfect, by any means, but not bad for a first go. He also bought a bottle of whisky, one of beer, one of gin, two cigars and a packet of cigarettes. The baby food was delicious.
Well, he said to his memory, tell me. What do I do now?
There was a long silence until the response came back. ‘You might as well get on with finding this Henry Lytten.’
‘How do I do that?’
‘Ask your landlady if she has a phone book, and look him up. Then I can give you directions. Will you want the pretty route or the quick one?’
Did he want to go home? he thought as he walked cautiously down the street the next morning. Could he survive here? Perhaps he could use the knowledge he had in his head to make some money, settle down. He could blend in. Get married, join a darts club or play snooker on a Friday. Buy a car, and wash it on a Saturday morning. Have children and worry about them. Go on holiday to the seaside every August. Could be worse.
He crossed the road (narrowly being missed by a bus) then, with increasing confidence, walked north until he came to Polstead Road, where the directory said Lytten, Dr H., lived. He was red-faced and puffing from the effort, but walked until he stood outside what was supposed to be the house. Now what? Should he just ring the bell? Was that allowed without an appointment? The idea frightened him. What would he say? He stood in the entrance to the scruffy little front garden as he thought through all the options. As he stood, the door opened and a man came out. Chang stared, fascinated. He was of middling height, with thinning hair, a portly look about him. Perfectly ordinary face. He wore those strange trousers with a ribbed effect and a green checked jacket. Chang watched as he bent down and put on a pair of bicycle clips, then grabbed a bike and, with a mighty push, began to wheel it towards the road, and towards him. He spoke, but Chang was too flustered to understand.
‘Are you Henry Lytten?’
‘Yes. Can I help you?’
Chang panicked and ran.
22
For all its gloomy side, I found the Second World War immensely useful. By keeping quiet, watching and listening, I perfected the art of being a middle-class lady of uncertain antecedents. Indeed, I learned how to be quite English in my general appearance, and devoted myself to growing flowers and wearing tweed. When I was in England, that is; I left all of that behind when I went back in 1946 to my little house in the south-west of France, where I spent much of the next few years growing vegetables and cooking.
In France (which I preferred for the food and the weather) I cultivated a generally bohemian air which satisfactorily disguised my occasional lapses. I also set up as a sculptor. Not because I wished to express my creativity in a three-dimensional plasticity, exploring the multi-faceted tactility of the solid form, you understand. I was rather more used to expressing myself in eleven dimensions and found a mere three a little puerile. But in the 1950s I started to build the new, improved version of my machine and, as it resembled a piece of abstract modernism, I decided that I might as well explain it as such to anyone who saw it and asked.
Once I had thought about it for a decade, I realised that the machine itself was not that difficult to construct; the version I had overseen for Hanslip had been over-designed because it passed through so many committees that it ended up being far more complex, expensive and cumbersome than was necessary. I needed no materials that weren’t easily available and I realised that the amount of power required could be greatly reduced with only a few modifications. Until I worked that out (in about 1957) I had the problem of potentially needing the output of an entire power station to get it to function. After serious thought I reduced that requirement to a quantity I could get out of an ordinary plug socket, which meant I could finally start building properly, rather than just playing around.
I used an iron pergola as the basis for it — a piece of nineteenth-century garden furniture that you were meant to grow roses over. It was quite pretty in a rusty, decrepit sort of way. This became the framework for a matrix of carefully placed and shaped materials — from aluminium to zinc — arranged so the various elements in the body would be recognised and transposed in the correct order. Ideally I would have used refined aluminium, but I had to use aluminium foil in its place. Instead of sheets of pure graphite, I used lead pencils and old newspapers. Other requirements were satisfied by using patent medicines containing iron, potassium, sodium and all the rest as needed. Not quite as efficient, but a damn sight cheaper.
The result was most peculiar, and it took a lot of work to get it laid out properly, but first tests were satisfactory. I called it ‘Momentum’ and told anyone who saw it that it was a biting critique of modernity, representing how the culture of the past (the pergola) was contaminated and overwhelmed by the detritus of consumerist industrialism that was covering over the elegance of civilisation with mass-produced conformity. It was thus both a radical critique of capitalism and a nostalgic vision of traditional society. The essence of the concept lay in the inherent tension that existed between the two competing visions. The explanation, which sounded a lot better in French, was generally met with a look of panic and a rapid change of subject, which was just what I wanted.
I set up a base in Oxford in 1959. My work had advanced greatly by then, and I was ready to begin trials. I was pleased, but I needed to run tests to see if the theory held up.