“I think I’ve found a house. I should be out of here in a couple of weeks.”
“That’s good. Somewhere nice?”
“Just off Holland Park.”
His expression grew phlegmatic. “Sounds expensive.”
“When was I ever anything else?”
“Do you want to meet up for lunch while I’m in town? Just the two of us.” He knew there was no way she would ever sit at the same table as Annabelle without spending the whole time sniping.
“Sure.” A troubled frown touched her forehead for an instant. “Jeff, you will be careful while you’re down here, won’t you?”
“I wasn’t planning on anything too wild. Why?”
“There are a lot of protestors here to picket your summit. My taxi driver had to take a big detour to avoid a march yesterday, and the silly thing doesn’t even start for a couple of days.”
“Don’t worry. Our hotel is part of the center itself. We’re inside the security zone. Krober was quite insistent about that. It’ll be perfectly safe.”
ON SATURDAY MORNING at breakfast Jeff called Alison’s house as usual to check that she and Tim were up before he went over. It was Alison who answered. “Looks like you’ve got the weekend off,” she told him.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he was out of here first thing this morning. For someone who’s been moping about all thanks to you, he made a remarkable recovery yesterday afternoon once you’d left.”
“Where’s he gone?”
“Nottingham, apparently. Some friend lives in a village just outside.”
“What friend?”
“Someone called Vanessa. You know her?”
“Tim’s gone to stay with Vanessa?”
Across the kitchen table, Annabelle shot him a surprised look. Her lips parted in a sunlight smile, and she gave him a thumbs-up.
“Yes,” Alison drawled. “He said it was just for the weekend.”
“I don’t care if it’s only for an hour. That’s fantastic news, Alison.”
“Happy to oblige. Now, you two relax for a couple of days before the summit.”
“Will do.”
Annabelle’s smile had become impish. “Well, when did that start?”
“I’ve no idea.” Jeff shivered as he rubbed his hands against his upper arms, feeling the goose bumps under his fingers. “Can we turn the air conditioning down? It’s freezing in here.”
“Sure.” She thumbed the remote. “I suppose they’ll go down to London together.”
He gave her a perplexed glance. It was as though he’d missed a chunk of conversation somewhere. “Why are they going down to London?”
“To join the antitechnocrat Million Citizen Voices. We all agreed to do it months ago.”
“You’re kidding! You mean Tim is going to be outside the summit protesting with all the other hippies while I’m inside presenting a paper?”
Annabelle examined her toast. “Yes.”
“Well, thanks, everyone, for telling me. Jesus wept!”
“I thought you knew.”
“No. I did not bloody know. Goddamn it, how is this going to help? We’re going to be right back on opposite sides again. All that bloody effort I’ve made…”
“No.” She reached out and put a reassuring hand on his arm. “Children always have different politics from their parents.”
“Hardly.”
“Mostly. And anyway, Tim’s known you’ve been going to the summit ever since Lucy Duke fixed it up. That was weeks ago. If he was resentful about that, he would have said. I don’t think it’s an issue, I really don’t.”
Jeff could feel a headache starting behind his temples. He rubbed his palm irritably along his forehead. “Maybe. I don’t know. I ought to check with Alison, see if he said anything to her.” He picked up his PCglasses. Annabelle held his wrist.
“No,” she said. “Let it happen. Don’t make an issue out of this.”
He hesitated for a long moment. “Okay. All right. But if there’s any trouble down there, I want him safe back here in Rutland.”
47. LIFE GOES ON
THE START OF TIM’S BREAK found him more relaxed than he’d ever been while staying with Alison. He was looking forward to seeing Vanessa—for several reasons—and the last of his artificial skin had been taken off, leaving only mild tingles where his injuries used to be.
Vanessa was waiting for him when he got off the train at Nottingham’s elaborate brick-built station, and drove him out to the village where her family lived. She’d borrowed her mother’s Ford ZA-7, a twenty-year-old, two-seater urban car powered by polymer batteries. “It looks like a plastic rickshaw,” Tim exclaimed delightedly as he walked a circle around the well-maintained antique.
“Shut up or I’ll make you walk alongside.”
“Are you sure you could keep up?”
Her home was a lovely old rectory house, with stone walls besieged by climbing roses and evergreen clematis creepers. There was no air conditioning like Tim was accustomed to; the thickness of the stone, over a meter, helped keep it cool inside throughout the long hot summer months. She showed him his room. “Right next to mine,” she said, pointing at the next door along the landing. They looked at each other for a moment before smiling. Nothing was said, but Tim’s ill-defined hopes suddenly skyrocketed. This was nothing like the usual frantic game of chase they’d all played together for the last three or four years at school. What the two of them had begun now was a lot more casual and cool than that. He liked it. There was no pressure.
A large garden at the back of the rectory was bounded by a three-meter-high stone wall, whose individual blocks were slowly being consumed by moss and lichens. They protected a traditionalist layout of flower borders and a small lavender bed. Hordes of butterflies danced erratically through the air between the purple flower stems, hounded by Vanessa’s two young sisters. Both of them waved and said a cheery hello to Tim.
“Nobody’s going to see in through these,” Vanessa said as they walked around the walls.
“You wouldn’t believe what the reporters did in Manton,” Tim told her. “They were tramping through crop fields and everything to try and get a view of Alison’s bungalow. Someone said a couple with ultrazoom lenses were set up at Hambleton. That’s kilometers away.”
“I hate the media. They debase everybody.”
A tall GM evergreen beech hedge marked the end of the broad lawn. Vanessa led Tim through the wrought iron gates in the middle. A broad orchard lay beyond it, also enclosed by the beech hedge. To one side of the gate was a small outdoor swimming pool, with a tiny whitewashed Spanish-style building behind it for changing and showering. Opposite that was a line of wooden stables running out from the end of a big old stone barn.
“Do you ride?” she asked.
“Haven’t for ages.”
“We can try going for a hack tomorrow if you like.”
“Yeah, why not.” Tim was looking longingly at the pool. He hadn’t realized how much he missed swimming.
“There’s trunks inside,” she told him sympathetically.
He tried not to make his stare too blatant as they splashed about together. That was probably the most difficult part of the day; in her chrome-yellow bikini Vanessa was quite something. It was hard not to leave eye tracks all over her.
“Like old times,” she said eventually. After a while they’d stopped swimming, and now just lay about on big inflatable chairs, drifting randomly around the pool as the mild late-afternoon breeze pushed them along.
“Yeah,” Tim agreed. He was wearing wraparound sunglasses, so she couldn’t see him looking at her now.
“Do you still miss her?”
“I don’t really think about her, to be honest.”