“I have to go out today,” Tanya told me. “There’s a quiche in the fridge if you want it for lunch and plenty of salad stuff. Or you can have any leftovers from last night.”
She’d said as much during dinner. But I wouldn’t have remembered if she hadn’t mentioned it again.
Tanya was wearing fresh makeup and a navy skirt and jacket over a petrol-blue top.
“Meeting?” I asked, wondering if she’d already told me.
“British Library first,” she replied. “I need to do a bit of burrowing in the archives. After that there’s this thing at the ICA.”
I recalled that she was writing a book about Alfred Wegener and the hostility of the scientific community towards his theory of continental drift. The “thing” at the ICA was actually a presentation she was delivering on the Two Cultures.
“Maybe I’ll come to the talk,” I said.
“The ticket’s on the mantelpiece if you want it. But don’t feel obliged. You’ve probably heard most of it before. I should be back by five. You can always ring me on the mobile if there’s a problem—but not between two and three. I’ll be spouting.”
“OK.”
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
“No problem,” I said. “You in a rush?”
“Not hugely,” she told me. “Why?”
“I wanted to ask you abou something.”
“Go ahead.”
“Multiple worlds.”
This took her by surprise. “What?”
“It’s in one of your books.”
Tanya perched herself on the edge of the bed, looking intrigued. “Uh huh.”
“The idea that all events can have more than one outcome. That histories can branch at any given point.”
A slow nod. “That was the gist of it, yes.”
“Do you think it’s possible? In reality, I mean? That it could actually happen?”
I had her full attention now. “It’s just a theory,” she said. “One interpretation of quantum events. Tiny changes having a knock-on effect.”
“So in one of these branching worlds there could conceivably be alternative versions of you and me?”
She nodded. “Alternative versions of everything. Even universes.”
“Is it given much credence?”
“The theory? Well, as much as any other, I suppose. It’s where physics shades off into metaphysics. Why do you ask?”
“Just curiosity.” I took a sip of my tea. “Could these different worlds be connected, linked to one another?”
“Once they’ve branched? Personally, I don’t see how they could be. They’d be like spokes radiating from a hub. Or different fragments from the same explosion. Flying further and further apart as time went on.”
A little silence fell. I swallowed more tea. Tanya had sugared it liberally, even though I’d always drunk it without. I was, I realised, a little thin. Hadn’t been eating much until recently. She was trying to fatten me up.
“Do you believe that such worlds exist?” I asked. “In practice, I mean.”
She looked contemplative, though I suspected she was thinking more about me, wondering why I was suddenly so interested in the subject.
“Personally I don’t buy it,” she said. “To me, it’s too profligate, it doesn’t have any utility. So anything could and has happened—so what, if you’re never going to be in a position to know one way or the other? I don’t see how it’s open to falsification like the best theories. I also think it flouts the principle of Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation is the best.”
“There could be stuff we don’t yet know about,” I offered.
“Things beyond our ken,” she said in a portentously doomy voice. “Well, no doubt there are. And always will be.” She paused for a moment. “So what about you, professor? Do you think it’s a runner?”
“I don’t know,” I said hastily. “I’m just the layman here.”
“You’re still entitled to an opinion.”
“I’ve no idea,” I insisted. “Really.”
I don’t know whether I sounded agitated, but she laid her palm on my forehead.
“Some of the best scientific minds have been arguing about quantum interpretations for decades,” she told me. “The jury’s still out. For one thing we don’t really understand how the fuzziness at sub-atomic level translates itself into the actualities of the world we live in. It’s slithery, non-intuitive stuff. Maybe, if you go deep enough, the universe just isn’t designed to be comprehensible to the human mind.”
I thought about it. “Fair enough. Though somewhere there could be another version of yourself saying something quite different.”
“Touché.” She removed her hand and eyed me with curiosity. “You look dead worried.”
“Do I?” I manufactured a laugh. “It was just something I read in the paper.”
She must have suspected that there was more to it than that, but she didn’t press me.
“It doesn’t pay to obsess too much about it,” she told me. “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Would it change your life if you knew?”
THIRTY-ONE
“Please wait here, major,” the MP said.
He withdrew, closing the heavy oaken door behind him. Owain lingered for a moment before crossing the lobby to an administrative area.
I didn’t want to be with him. At first I resisted, trying to wrench myself back to my own world. Then it occurred to me that if Owain was active here, he could not be doing anything there. When I occupied him he remained alert to his surroundings; when he occupied me, I was seemingly absent in both worlds. Which meant that perversely I was spared his intrusions when I shared his life.
He perched himself on a stool close to a television that was playing unheeded in one corner. It was the BBC News-24 channel, showing Carl Legr in a meeting with the American chargé d’affaires in Lisbon. The volume was turned down low, but Owain gathered that the discussions had centred on the disputed territorial waters around the Azores. The picture switched to the Chancellor, who was shown giving a speech to a large audience in which he expressed his concern about unprovoked American incursions in the Guianas and Australian territorial waters. His tone was one of measured exasperation. Now there were shots of USAF overflies of the Alliance launch complex in French Guiana, and Nemesis-class submarines that were said to be conducting provocative manoeuvres in the Torres Strait.
The door opened and the MP came out. Owain was on his feet in an instant.
“You can go in, sir,” he was told.
Owain entered the anteroom. It was furnished with antique dressers and upholstered chairs with elegant cabriole legs. The walls were crammed with a variety of paintings from Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” to a 1940s portrait of a tank commander pictured in the turret of his Comet, done in the Documentary Realist style of the period. Owain knew this only because his uncle had told him as much: he had little appreciation of art.
Owain was five floors down in an eastern annex of the War Office where Sir Gruffydd had his private quarters. Bare subterranean tunnels connected it directly to both the Admiralty and the MoD, wide enough to accommodate vehicles in the event of an emergency. By contrast the offices and apartment rooms were fully carpeted and lavishly furnished with items removed for safekeeping from galleries, museums and private houses. Had it not been for the absence of windows, Owain could have imagined himself inside some ancient stately home.