Really, this was an impossible conversation. Quite impossible. He began to gather up his maps and notebooks. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have some rather important business to — ’
The woman’s face broke up into a network of creases and lines in whose intricate web he suddenly, and unaccountably, felt himself to be a fly.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ she said.
Frightened? Him? Outrageous. And yet –
This world. So very different. The cloth of the night dyed orange, embroidered with voices, torn by screams and the screech of brakes — had it frightened him?
The woman’s words pricked his skin like needles. Doubts began to run in his bloodstream.
‘You’re not comfortable,’ she was telling him. ‘You’re a long way from home, maybe that’s the reason. Yes, I think that’s the reason.’
Her voice scraped like dry leaves blowing over the surface of a road. Her dark eyes turned up stones. His scrambled eggs arrived, but he watched them congeal on the plate.
‘Give me your hand,’ she said.
He held out his hand, and she wrapped it in her cool papery fingers. She began to murmur to herself. This seemed to be taking place in a vacuum. Or not taking place at all. He was thankful nobody in the village could see him now. He observed his own submissiveness as if it was happening to somebody else.
‘Who are you exactly?’ he asked her.
‘Oh, you can speak!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought maybe you lost your voice. My name is Madame Zola. I’m a clairvoyant. Famous clairvoyant.’
He stared at his hand lying in hers.
‘I can see,’ she said, ‘that you are, how shall I say, curious.’
He recovered. ‘Where can you see that? On the palm of my hand?’ But his sarcasm drifted past her. She seemed not to have noticed it. Beneath notice, perhaps. ‘I am an old man,’ he began again. ‘One thing I’m not particularly curious about is the future.’
‘You’re also human.’
He didn’t follow.
‘You may be old,’ Madame Zola said, ‘but I’m older and I have to tell you one thing that maybe you don’t know. People are always curious about the future. It’s human character. They can be on the death bed. Still they have to know. Will I die? Will I live? How long will I live? What will happen when I die? All these questions. Always questions. Don’t tell me you’re not curious about the future.’ She waggled a hand, almost in admonition, under Peach’s nose. ‘And that — ’ one of her fingers stabbed the air triumphantly before curling up and rejoining the others — ‘is why I’ll never, never go out of business.’
Peach was thinking about Lord Batley. Batley had tried to escape at the age of seventy-nine. He had obviously believed in some kind of future. And wasn’t he, Peach, desperately curious as to what the outcome of today’s investigations would be?
Sighing, he admitted, ‘You’re right.’
‘I know I’m right.’ Her mouth curved downwards. ‘Do you want to know what I see in your hand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah, you become simple now, you see? That’s my effect. I see it happen. Everywhere I see it.’ She waved a hand to include not just the café, but the city, the country too, the earth even, and the planets in attendance. ‘That’s my power.’
Her eyes drifted away from his, drifted beyond the yellow café walls and the steamy plate-glass, into a world that he couldn’t imagine. A smile spread like water through all the cracks and crevices in her face until it was irrigated with a look of pure contentment.
‘You’re going on a journey,’ she told him. ‘An important journey. A difficult journey. It will happen very soon, this journey.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m right?’
‘Yes.’
Her eyes misted over again. ‘You’re looking for something.’
He stared at her. She spoke in cliches, but the clichés were true. Her simple, almost facile, statements lodged under the mind’s skin.
‘But you feel lost,’ she was saying. ‘Among strangers. Alone.’
Her eyes refocused, seeking confirmation. He gave it to her.
‘There’s some danger — ’
He remained calm. ‘What danger?’
‘That I cannot see.’
He glanced down at his untouched plate.
‘You must forgive me, I didn’t wish to stop you eating,’ Madame Zola said (she had a foot in both worlds, it seemed, and could move from one to the other like someone playing two games of chess at the same time), ‘but sometimes I feel something and when I feel something I cannot keep it inside. It has to come out. If I keep it inside I burst. Pif. Like a balloon.’
Peach suddenly found that he was hungry. He slid a forkload of cold scrambled egg into his mouth, then reached for a slice of toast. The butter had melted clean through. The toast sagged in his hand. He shrugged, ate it anyway.
‘Anything else?’ His briskness had returned with his appetite. They might both have been restored to him by Madame Zola.
She examined his left hand again. With his right, he gulped cold milky tea.
‘I see only your strength, your power. You remember I said that you have power?’
‘I thought you meant a different kind of power.’
‘You have both,’ and her smile, like a fishing-net, caught all possible meanings.
He withdrew his hand and wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. He began to gather his possessions together.
‘You have to go now,’ Madame Zola said. As if it was her idea, as if she was dismissing him.
‘If you’ll forgive me. I have an extremely testing day ahead of me.’
‘I think I’ll stay here a little longer.’ She indicated the unfinished cup of tea in front of her. ‘I wish you luck with your — ’ and she paused, dark eyes glittering — ‘business.’
‘Thank you, Madame Zola.’ Peach even bowed slightly.
He paid the waitress and left the café. It was 8.45. The sun pressed against the inside of a thin layer of cloud. He unbuttoned his jacket as he hurried down Queensway. His mind, unleashed, sprang forwards.
That woman had slowed him down with her mumbo-jumbo. You’re looking for something, she had said. But they all said things like that, didn’t they, fortune-tellers? She couldn’t have told him what he was looking for or whether he was going to find it, could she? Of course she couldn’t.
Free of the Blue Sky Café, out in the open air, he welcomed his scepticism back like a friend whom he hadn’t seen for a long time.
*
By the time he reached Bayswater Road the sun had broken through. It landed in a million places at once: a car windscreen, the catches of a briefcase, a man’s gold tooth. He watched the city organise itself around him. He had his bearings now. Marble Arch stood to his left, half a mile away, solid as muscle. Hyde Park lay in front of him, a stretch of green beyond severe black railings. And somewhere to the south, approximately seven miles away, The Bunker waited. He leaned against the bus-shelter, his jacket draped over his arm.
After ten minutes the bus came. It dropped him at Oxford Circus. He caught another going south on Regent Street. The route he had selected took him past many of the famous sights of the city — the statue of Eros, Trafalgar Square, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament — but he only absorbed them subliminally. It was the action that interested him, not the scenery. His mind moved in another dimension, juggling possibilities, shaping initiatives. He wasn’t a tourist. He was a policeman.
The bus swung left over a bridge and he knew, without looking at the map, which bridge it was. A barge loaded with machinery forged downriver, shouldering the water aside. Gulls fluttered above. They reminded him of the greengrocer’s story. The gulls in the air above the ploughed field: symbols of freedom. How far he seemed from that closed world. How far he was.