He let her lead him back to the bed, though he insisted on getting into it himself. She tucked him in as one might do a child, though he noticed that never once did she look directly at him.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Here,” she said, folding under the bottom edges of the quilt. “I live here.”
“I mean originally.”
She gave no answer, still busy with the sheets.
“Are you Polish?”
She made a noise that sounded like an expletive, and left without another word.
THREE
The white hospital room. I was back. Through the window I could see dingy clouds scudding across a blue sky.
There was no sensation of transition. I had simply switched in an instant from one place to another. From another mind and body back to my own.
Unable to raise myself from the pillow, I felt both dull-witted and incredulous. I couldn’t begin to imagine what was happening to me.
I heard a rustling sound, managed to turn my head a little.
Tanya was sitting at the side of the bed.
Tanya! She was the auburn-haired woman I had dreamt was watching over me. Once, in our university days, we had been lovers.
She was wearing reading glasses, a hardback on her lap. Under her brown suede coat shewore a print silk skirt with calf-length boots. Her hair, cropped as a student, was now free-flowing to her shoulders but still the deep red-brown it had always been. She looked prosperous, but not showily so. Her very presence at my bedside meant something dreadful had happened.
Lyneth and the girls had been injured in the explosion, or worse. Tanya wouldn’t have been here otherwise. I had no family apart from my errant brother and my father, who was in a nursing home. Perhaps they’d been unable to contact Rees, who had a habit of dropping out of sight. Somehow Tanya must have heard the news and come to my bedside to be there when I woke. It had to be serious: of her own choice Lyneth wouldn’t have allowed Tanya anywhere near me.
Sara and Bethany. My mind rebelled at the very idea that anything could have happened to them. Perhaps they were all in intensive care, somewhere in the very same hospital, mere wards away. They would be clinging on to life, surviving as I’d survived. Or perhaps the girls had suffered minor injuries and were being tended by Lyneth while I recuperated.
I tried calling out to Tanya, demanding to know what had become of them. But nothing would emerge. Here, unlike in the other world, I had a distinct and proper sense of my own physicality; but my body was refusing to cooperate.
Could it have been a terrorist attack? A suicide bomber, even? Or something as banal as a leaky gas main? How many people had been caught up in the explosion? How many were dead?
My thoughts raced like pond skaters over the surface of these questions, but whatever drugs I’d been given muted my reactions to a dreamy bewilderment.
Tanya turned a page of her book. I willed her to look up, to notice I was awake. This wasn’t happening. I couldn’t allow it to have happened.
“So,” said a gruff male voice, “you’ve been playing with fire again, eh?”
My uncle was short and stocky, with a genial expression on his rubicund face. His epaulettes and scarlet gorget collars bore the insignia of his rank, gold oakleaf embroidery enclosing wreathed batons, a lion rampant within its ring of stars. He pulled a chair up to my bedside and gently pushed me back when I tried to sit up.
“No, no, just lie there,” he said. “The doctor tells me you need to have a good rest, so let’s not have any standing on ceremony.”
I had the immediate sense that he was speaking in another language, lilting and glottal. Apart from a smattering of French, English was the only language I knew, yet I understood him perfectly.
He put my hand between his own, grasping it firmly, his eyes becoming a little glazed. A man of sentiment, despite his status. Protective of family members.
“I was worried we might have lost you,” he said. “A bad business, Owen. A bad business, indeed.”
He pronounced the name O-wine—the Welsh way, I realised. It was the language he was speaking. Presumably it would be written Owain. Yet I, born in Swansea but raised both there and in Oxford, had never learned it.
“Second time around,” I heard myself say, also in Welsh. “Someone up there must like me.”
The field marshal released my hand. “It’s no joking matter, my boy.”
I looked at him through Owain’s eyes with a certain degree of awe: Sir Gruffydd Maredudd, the commander-in-chief of the Alliance armed forces in the United Kingdom and head of the Joint Governing Council, the body that had superseded a defunct Parliament in the conduct of the nation’s affairs. At the same time I knew that in my own life I had never had an uncle by that name, let alone an ennobled senior military commander.
“What exactly was it?” Owain asked. “A missile?”
“What do you remember?”
Owain thought about it. His mind was empty.
“Take your time,” his uncle said firmly. “Tell me everything you remember.”
He made a renewed effort to recall the details. Slowly they began to come.
He had just flown back from a three-week information-gathering mission to South America. His clearest memory was of the snow-camouflaged Bentley that had been waiting for him at Northolt, its driver a talkative Jamaican émigré called Maurice who had fled the American occupation of the Caribbean in the late ’fifties. Cheerful and patriotic, he had served in the old Royal Navy for twenty years. He lived in the Docklands and was looking forward to a family gathering at Christmas.
There was little traffic in central London apart from the usual convoys and patrols. At Oxford Circus an enterprising Sikh trader was selling straggly Christmas trees to the checkpoint guards. Regent Street itself was closed to civilian vehicles, but staff cars were invariably allowed the benefit of the shortcut.
As the barrier was raised for them, Maurice asked Owain if he could pull over and buy a tree. Owain had no objections: he saw an opportunity to stretch his legs after twelve hours of being cooped in various forms of transport.
They drove through and parked in the middle of the empty road. Taking his briefcase, Owain wandered down the street while Maurice returned to the checkpoint to barter with the trader.
Around Owain there was nothing but silence and abandonment. He was surrounded by the shells of once-thriving commercial outlets. On the western side they had been emptied and bricked-up; on the eastern side only reduced façades remained like the half-ruined outer keep of a castle. The entire area of Soho beyond had long been off-limits to civilians, sealed off and plastered with biohazard signs after an anthrax attack thirty years before. His mother had brought him here as a six-year-old to see the Christmas lights and watch a special broadcast from the troops in Persia, where his father was serving. He’d searched the assembled faces in vain for a glimpse of him.
An almost subliminal hum was coming from somewhere. It grew in volume, like the approach of an insect.
“Major!”
He turned and saw Maurice hurrying back to the car, triumphantly flourishing a stunted and bedraggled tree. The hum rose in volume and frequency, ceasing an instant before a flood of white light surged through the gaping windows and balconies of the façade, swamping everything and sending him reeling.
“It was like a massive flare,” he told his uncle. “There was no noise.”
It felt like a confession, an admission of guilt.
“What possessed you to go down there in the first place?”