He laughed. “Never better. I enrolled at the London uni. A mature student.” He looked at Lucy and grinned. “Amazing, isn’t it, that I had to travel two hundred miles in order to meet someone from the same village.”
I looked at Lucy; she seemed hesitant and oddly nervous. She cast a quick glance across at her father. Davey, beside her, gave her a subtle nudge, and I guessed what was about to happen.
She said, “Dad…” She coloured prettily, and turned and looked at Davey. “Dad, everyone, I thought it’d be nice to announce it among friends. Davey and I are planning to get married later this year…”
We cheered, and Richard Lincoln ordered a bottle of champagne, and we took it in turns to kiss Lucy and shake Davey’s hand.
It was the start of a long night, one of the best among many I’d experienced in the Fleece with my friends.
I thought back almost a year, to the last time I had met Davey Emmett and his remarkable mother.
Even now, not all the citizens of Earth chose to be implanted. Katherine Emmett had been one of these people.
For the most part I viewed these mavericks as misguided, or as short-sighted religious crackpots—though not Katherine Emmett. I had nothing but respect for the old lady and her decision to remain without an implant.
It’s a testament to the power of her faith, and her humanity, that she allowed her son the opportunity to make his own choice.
NINE
A CHOICE OF ETERNITIES
I was in the Fleece on Tuesday night when Richard Lincoln buttonholed me about old Mrs. Emmett. I’d arrived at seven and ordered a braised pork chop with roast potatoes and a pint of Landlord.
Sam was serving behind the bar. “You’re early, Khalid.”
“Hard day at the mill,” I said. “I need to wind down.”
“Well, the Landlord’s on form tonight. I’ll just go put your order in.”
She disappeared into the kitchen and I took a long draught of ale. Sam was right: it was nectar.
I’d had a tiring day at the hospital. Usually the implantation process went like a dream, but that afternoon, just as I was about to start the last implantation, the patient decided that he’d had second thoughts. He wanted a little time to consider what he was doing. It had been after six before I’d been able to get away.
I was the first of the Tuesday night crowd to arrive, but the others were not far behind. Ben and Elisabeth came in first, looking frozen stiff after the long walk through the snow; then the ferrymen Richard Lincoln and Dan Chester blew in, talking shop as usual, followed by Jeffrey Morrow. Next came Doug Standish and Andy Souter, and last of all Samantha’s husband, Stuart Kingsley. Samantha finished her shift at the bar and joined us.
I thought of Zara and the many happy Tuesday nights we’d spent at the Fleece with our friends, before my wife walked out on me and I killed myself, over ten years ago now.
I was on my third pint when Richard Lincoln returned from the bar with a round and sat down beside me.
Richard wore old-fashioned tweeds and liked his beer, but far from being the conservative country type he so much resembled, I found him liberal and open-minded. He lived next door to me along the street from the Fleece, and I considered him my best friend. Certainly he was the only person I’d told about what had really happened ten years ago.
“Cheers, Khalid,” Richard said, dispatching a good quarter of his pint in one swallow. “I wanted to talk to you about something. Another reluctant customer.”
On my return from Kéthan, I had told Richard that I’d decided to stay on Earth and spread the good word about the implantation process. From time to time he put me on to people he came across in his line of work who were reluctant, for various reasons, to undergo the implantation.
“Old Mrs. Emmett, up at High Fold Farm,” Richard said. “She has a son, Davey. He’s mentally handicapped.”
“And he isn’t implanted, right?”
“That’s the thing. Mrs. Emmett isn’t implanted, either. She’s no fool, Khalid. No addled hermit living on the moors. She might be in her seventies, but she’s all there. A retired university lecturer. She isn’t implanted on religious grounds.”
“Always the hardest to convert,” I said.
“The thing is, Davey is dying. Lung cancer. He was diagnosed a couple of months ago. I sent a counsellor from the Onward Station to talk to Mrs. Emmett last week, but she was having none of it.”
“And you think I might be able to talk her round?”
“Well, she does think highly of you,” Richard said.
I looked at him, surprised. “She does?”
“You treated her in hospital way back. She remembers you. I saw her in town last week and happened to mention your name. Actually, I asked her if you could come and talk to her about the Kéthani.”
I smiled at his presumption. “And she agreed?”
“When she heard your name, she relented. I was wondering, if you didn’t have a lot on…”
“Why not? You never know…” I thought hard, but couldn’t put a face to the name. It had been years ago, after all, and the workload of your average intern even back then had militated against the recollection of every patient.
Last orders were called and the final round bought, and it was well after midnight before the meeting broke up.
When I said goodbye to Richard outside my front door, I told him I’d visit Mrs. Emmett at the weekend.
High Fold was no longer a working farm. Like many once-thriving sheep farms in the area, it had suffered in the economic recession in the early years of the century. Its owners had sold up and moved away, and Mrs. Emmett had bought the farm, converted it at great expense, and lived there now in retirement with her son.
The snow was so bad on the Saturday morning that I had to leave the car on the main road above the farm. I struggled down the snow-filled track, towards the sprawling stone-built house on the hillside overlooking Oxenworth. By the time I reached the front door I knew I would never be cut out to be an Arctic explorer.
Mrs. Emmett answered my summons promptly, took one look at my bedraggled figure, and smiled. It was only then that I recalled the woman I had treated as a patient all those years ago.
The smile. Some people smile with just their mouths, others with all their faces. Mrs. Emmett’s smile encompassed all her face and emanated genuine warmth. I recalled the experience of feeling like a favourite nephew as she welcomed me.
“Dr. Azzam!” she said. “Khalid, it’s lovely to fee you. Come in. It’s terrible out there.”
I stepped into a spacious hall, removed my coat, and stamped the snow from my boots on the mat, then followed her into a lounge where a wood-burning stove belted out a fierce, furnace heat.
“I seem to remember you prefer coffee. I’ll just go and put it on. You know Davey of course.”
She left the room, and I sketched a smile and a wave at the man seated at a small table beside the stove.
He looked up briefly, but didn’t respond. He was absorbed in a world of his own. Davey Emmett was nearing thirty now, a chubby, childlike man, in both appearance and manner. I had never treated Davey—his affairs were looked after by a local doctor—and I had no idea of his medical history, whether his condition was congenital or the result of some childhood illness.
He rarely spoke, as I recalled, and had the mental age of a young child. He was obsessed with collecting stamps—he was poring over a thick album now. I remembered looking at one of his albums years ago when he’d come to the hospital with his mother. He collected stamps not by country or subjects depicted, as is common with philatelists, but by size and shape and colour.
Now he lowered his head short-sightedly over the page, a big Tweedledee absorbed in the polychromatic pattern of stamps before him.