“Well,” Geoff said again, “there was no indication of any organic damage. But, as you know, Tanya feels you’re still not quite yourself.”
I didn’t know, but it was scarcely surprising.
“We could send you back for more tests. Just to be sure there’s nothing we’ve missed.”
“Ah.” I wasn’t keen. “You think the old neural spark plugs may be misfiring.”
His laugh was far too hearty. “I don’t think it’s very likely. My own suspicion is that you’re still in the recuperative phase. But sometimes there can be hidden trauma.”
Of course there was trauma, I thought. Aside from my lurches into Owain’s existence I still didn’t know where my family was, or why they’d left. I had a sudden image of a terraced Victorian house with a burgundy door and a white-painted wooden fence. I knew at once it was where Lyneth and I had lived. A compact two-bedroom place with a long narrow garden, the girls in bunk beds in the rear bedroom. Down the hill from Blackheath not far from Lewisham station. I’d put up a pair of swings at the bottom of the garden one summer. We’d been trying to decide whether to have a loft conversion or simply move out. Lyneth favoured going back to Wales, whereas I was keen to stay in London because my career was flourishing. But we hadn’t fallen out over that.
Somewhere in the house another door opened and I heard a burst of music—a swirling, soulful tune, with a lyric like a holiday commercial.
Geoff was waiting for me to say something. He gave every appearance of being relaxed and patient, but he’d crossed his legs and was wiggling his right foot.
Good old Geoff: never a brusque word to say to anyone. His three years in California had left no mark on him: he was still the perfect English gentleman.
He was talking to me again, but I let the words roll past.
By the time he and Tanya had returned to London they were already a couple. I knew this from the postcards Tanya sent every few months—pictures of quirky Americana following visits to Las Vegas, Yosemite, Beverl Hills, Salt Lake City. They always carried brief messages detailing humorous incidents but few personal details.
As promised, the postcards always came in brown envelopes, my name and address written in anonymous neat capitals. My father diligently observed my instructions to keep them safe until I visited rather than post them on to me in Brockley, where Lyneth and I had bought a flat. She was doing teacher training while I had been taken on by a small independent production company that made educational videos for schools and colleges—twenty-five-minute pieces on British history and the geography of the islands. I began as a researcher but soon progressed to organising location shoots, staging re-enactments, writing scripts and doing voice-overs.
I’d imagined that Lyneth wouldn’t thrive in London, but she met another woman from south Wales at the local library who ran coffee mornings and a nursery group. Lyneth swiftly became involved, being especially invaluable for babysitting duties since she was the only one of the group with no children of her own.
This was a looming issue, along with familial pressure to get married. Our sex life was regular enough if unspectacular. For two years we jollied along amicably, though occasionally I’d find myself looking at her and wondering what she saw in me, and what I was doing with her.
That November Lyneth announced that she was pregnant. By mutual agreement I’d continued using condoms, and inevitably there had been accidents with slippage and haste. They happened so infrequently I’d ceased to take account of them and even Lyneth, who demonstrated perfect recall for such instances, couldn’t specify this particular occasion. Perhaps it had just split. Perhaps there had been a leakage. Perhaps, it occurred to me much later, she’d actually contrived it out of sheer impatience.
It was obvious she wanted the baby. My feelings were more mixed but the alternatives were far too ugly. Apart from anything else I felt that I owed it her.
Sara was born shortly after Lyneth obtained her B.Ed. and shortly before Geoff and Tanya returned from California. We’d married by then, in a church near her family home. Her parents were thrilled. Even my father raised a smile. Rhys was my best man. He made a near-incomprehensible speech in which he likened us to the n-p junction of a transistor.
I realised I was laughing. Geoff was sitting there, looking quite perplexed.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about something else.”
The door opened and Tanya poked her head into the room.
“Everything all right?”
Her hair was tied back, a pencil propped behind one ear, her reading glasses hanging from her neck.
“Wonderful,” I said, deadpan.
Tanya glanced at Geoff before giving me a look that I read as sympathet to my plight in the specific sense of having to accommodate Geoff’s professional interest in it. In that moment it was easy to imagine that he was the visitor and I the resident, that Tanya and I somehow still had the closer relationship, despite the formalities of marriage and cohabitation. I felt quite blithe.
TWENTY-FIVE
Morning prayers.
It was a small chapel—or rather a room furnished as one. Field Marshal Maredudd and Giselle Vigoroux sat with their heads bowed in the front rank of chairs as a chaplain gave the usual thanks for their blessings and asked that true believers everywhere be allowed to stay in God’s grace.
Most of the desk chairs packed into the room were filled with personnel. Owain was sitting alone at the back, waiting for the service to end. The chaplain stood in front of a gilt cross set on a small covered table. A picture of a haloed Jesus hung on the wall above it. He floated above a landscape in which the wretched and needy worshipped at his feet, accepting the shining spiritual bounty that flowed in golden rays from his outstretched hands.
His uncle always made him attend the services when they were together, judging his declared atheism irrelevant to the requisite observance. Maintaining ritual, he would declare, was vital to a healthy spirituality, irrespective of belief. Without God, he often added, the whole damn thing was meaningless. Owain found it hard to disagree with this.
His uncle had been raised a Methodist, but now most Christians in the country, and in western Europe at large, belonged to the officially sanctioned United Ecumenical Church, which embraced everyone from Catholics to Nonconformists. The flexibility of its creed suited the diminished availability of both congregations and places of worship.
Now the chaplain was espousing the righteousness of their cause and asserting his belief that with God’s help they would ultimately prevail against all the forces of darkness that sought to overwhelm them. He made a point of stressing that he did not identify those forces with specific races or religions: all beliefs were tolerated and valued within the Alliance borders through the enlightened assimilation of refugees and liberated populations. Far from being exclusive, the Church sought to embrace everyone in a holy community of civilised values they were forever determined to protect.
The small multinational congregation murmured its “amens” at appropriate points. I found myself wondering if any of them were Moslems, Hindus or Sikhs. If any were, they would have found little in the chaplain’s words to offend their religious sensibilities. The expressed allegiance transcended both faith and nationality. It was rooted in an unspecified yet pervasive sense of protected territoriality, one based on values that were essentially military. The enemy was simply the spiritual barbarians outside the walls of the city.
Only Owain showed any stirrings of dissent. He had cast his mind far beyond the confines of the room, to distant places beyond the frontiers where others were worshipping: Confucians and Shintoists in far-eastern temples; the Orthodox congregations of the old Soviet sates and dissenting émigré Greeks; Jews in their Diaspora; Pagans and Animists in the nether regions of the world; Evangelicals, Mormons and the Christian fundamentalists of the American Bible Belt—all consumed with their own particular brand of righteousness, all possessed of their own spiritual certainties and the shining moral imperatives that flowed from them. Antagonistic to those who did not share their beliefs.