I had made a pact with the ruling powers, and they were as good as their word: Victor and Marie were left alone. No visits from state officials, no check-ups, no brown envelopes with scarlet peacocks stamped in the top left-hand corner. They’ve obviously given up on us, Victor would tell me over the phone with undisguised glee. We’re hopeless cases. The way things turned out, though, Victor needed less protection than I had imagined. I had only been at the Ministry for eighteen months when he succumbed to a massive stroke, his death occurring unexpectedly, and in slightly unusual circumstances.
Marie called me one Tuesday evening, and I caught a train to the coast the following day, but I didn’t hear the full story until after the funeral, when everyone had gone home. I sat at the kitchen table, the jagged line of the cliff-edge showing halfway up the window. Marie opened a bottle of gin and poured us both a drink. She told me how she had woken early on the morning of Victor’s death, and how the silence had a quality she didn’t recognise. When she drew the curtains, she was almost blinded by the whiteness of the world outside. Snow had fallen in the night, three inches of it. To the east, the cliff rose in a glistening curve, smooth as a sugared almond. She went into Victor’s room to tell him, but he wasn’t there. Though she could just make out the imprint of his body on the counterpane, evidence of a nap the day before, it didn’t look as if the bed had been slept in. She searched the cottage from one end to the other, upstairs and down. She couldn’t find him anywhere. Perhaps he’s gone into the village, she thought. And then she thought, Perhaps he’s gone on a journey. After all, he’d done it before. He was always threatening to up sticks, make tracks. He peppered his conversation with words like ‘vamoose’ and ‘skedaddle’. He was capable of almost anything, she said, in his wild old age.
‘What do you mean, he’d done it before?’ I asked.
But Marie didn’t appear to have heard me.
She found him later that morning, she said, in the back garden. She had come across two shapes lying on the ground, one long and vaguely cylindrical, the other smaller, squarer. She approached the small object first. It seemed safer. She bent down and began to brush the snow away. A piece of pale-green leather showed beneath her fingers. The book of shoes. She knew then what the other shape was. Rising to her feet, she circled him slowly, as though he was asleep and she was trying not to wake him. She couldn’t quite believe he was under there. Then, as she stood uncertainly beside him, she heard a quick, stealthy sound and, looking down, she saw that the snow had slipped, revealing the rim of an ear, already bloodless, and some brittle wisps of hair.
‘Weren’t you frightened?’ I asked.
‘I screamed.’ She grinned at me. ‘Have you ever screamed after it’s snowed? It’s the strangest thing. You feel like you’re in a box. The kind of box a ring comes in, or a trumpet. A box lined with velvet.’ Something lifted in her just then, and she became Marie again, Marie as she had been when I first saw her, framed in the living-room doorway of the house on Hope Street, mischievous, carefree. Then it dropped again, whatever it was, and she turned back into a woman I didn’t really feel I knew. ‘I screamed,’ she said a second time, her voice without inflection now, ‘but there was no one there. A ship on the horizon. A few gulls.’
Later, when we’d finished the bottle, I watched her run her index finger along the table, following the grain in the wood. Outside, the wind swirled against the walls. I was almost sure I could feel the cottage rock on its foundations.
‘What will you do?’ I asked her.
She shrugged. ‘Stay here.’
‘Won’t you be lonely?’
‘I’d be lonely if I moved,’ she said.
At least no one would bother her, I thought as I travelled back to the city the next day. My head ached, and my mouth was strangely perfumed from all the gin I’d drunk. It had been a good funeral, though. People had made an effort to be there. At the graveside I had lifted my eyes from the coffin to see Mr Page standing across from me. His black suit looked immaculate — one would have expected nothing less — but something about him seemed out of character, abnormal, just plain wrong. After a while I realised that although his mouth was still doing its best to turn up at the corners it had crumpled in the middle — or to put it another way, he no longer appeared to be smiling. How I wish I could have caught Bracewell’s eye right then! How I would love to have seen the expression on his face! The miraculous, the almost unimaginable moment had arrived, and sadness had brought it about, not anger, but it was too late to have any real impact on me, it was all too late.
If the authorities fulfilled their side of the bargain, so did I. I threw myself wholeheartedly into my new job. As far as Marie was concerned, I was a quality engineer — I looked at companies and came up with ways of improving their performance — but in fact I was employed by a branch of the civil service that was generally considered to be the government’s right arm. I worked long hours, arriving home at nine or ten at night. Most weekends, too, I could be found in the office. I had almost no social life. I went out with a girl called Alex, who was a violinist, but she ended it after three months, claiming that we hardly saw each other. Somehow I didn’t question the need for such sacrifices — or rather, I always seemed able to justify them to myself. It was up to people like me, I thought, to safeguard the values and integrity of the Red Quarter. Only later did I start to understand why I might have been pushing myself so hard. I had to fight for the system, I had to believe in it, or my removal from my family would all have been for nothing.
Over the years I rose through the ranks, from a glorified filing clerk to one of a handful of people whose responsibility it was to advise on all transfers, both into and out of the country, but the big promotion came just before my thirtieth birthday. During our lunch together in the beer garden, Diana Bilal had mentioned words like psychologist and detective, hoping to capture my imagination, perhaps, and yet the word that seemed to define my new position most accurately was ‘diplomat’. A transfer was, in itself, a highly complex and delicate procedure — no one knew that better than I did — but, viewed in the wider context, it also became a matter of negotiation between two parties who didn’t necessarily see eye to eye. I had to deal, on a regular basis, with people who held equivalent positions in other parts of the divided kingdom, and despite all the obvious differences in temperament and perception it was important to try and maintain good working relations. If I disputed one of their initiatives, it could be regarded as an example of Red Quarter impatience or naivety. If they disputed one of mine, I could just as easily see it as Blue Quarter dithering, Green Quarter cynicism or Yellow Quarter recklessness. The job required flexibility and patience as well as sound judgement, and for that reason, perhaps, it was seen by some as a stepping-stone into the world of politics.