Seconds later there was a flash of blinding light. At first I thought we’d had an accident before I realised I was somewhere else entirely. Walking through the glass doors of a hotel into the suffocating heat. I was in shorts, T-shirt and sandals, carrying two drinks out to the pool.
Tanya sat at one of the tables in the shade of a palm, wearing a black vest top and a patterned sarong tied at her waist. The paleness of her skin contrasted with my tan. I’d been here a fortnight, combining location work with a holiday. Cairo, the pyramids visible from the window of my hotel room. Only yesterday I’d come back from a visit to Tobruk. Tanya had arrived that very morning.
I set the drinks down and took a seat opposite her. Hers was an orange and soda, mine a vodka and tonic.
“So what did he say?” I heard myself asking, and I knew I meant Geoff. This was last summer, when Tanya had finally told him about our clandestine meetings.
Abruptly I was back in the Yaris. Tanya hadn’t noticed anything. It was she who’d brought matters to a head after telling me she couldn’t pretend any more. She had told Geoff she was moving out, intended to live alone; but he’d persuaded her to stay,n if they were no longer to share a bed.
He had guessed that she had been seeing me periodically. He’d even accepted her assurances that we weren’t having an affair. It had all been reasonably amicable given the circumstances. He’d always suspected that she and I were still drawn to one another. Lyneth had too. They’d talked about it occasionally on the telephone.
I went cold on hearing this. Tanya hadn’t expected any equivalent action from me, particularly since I had children. But I knew that Lyneth would find out and be far less accommodating than Geoff. So I phoned her from the hotel that evening. There was no answer. When I finally got through next day Lyneth informed me that she’d already made arrangements to fly herself and the girls to Australia. Nothing I could say would dissuade her. They were going to stay for a year. Her sister would help her place the girls in local schools. She had told them I would be away filming.
Tanya and I flew back from Egypt together. We had stayed in separate rooms at the hotel, been more scrupulous than ever in our friendship. But by the time I arrived home Lyneth and the girls were already gone.
Air traffic had thickened overhead, helicopters and fat Behemoth transporter planes orbiting. The sky was coated with a wash of high altitude cloud, the sun just a silvery smear. The weather forecast had predicted no precipitation for the next few days, with light winds and good visibility.
Owain had never visited the Mildenhall-Lakenheath complex. It was extensive, with a network of tunnels and overpasses that converged on roundabouts before forking again, bypassing angular clusters of buildings with squat towers and a panoply of aerial instrumentation. Mobile security units patrolled the hard shoulders of approach roads, armoured cars and riot wagons were parked outside main entrances, missile batteries and little phalanxes of Citadel tanks guarded runaway perimeters.
All roadblocks were opened up long before we reached them. A small formation of Buzzard scout helicopters was flying ahead as though guiding us in.
We descended a long underpass, the tunnel barely lit, cat’s eyes blinking on and off at their headlights. Stradling looked cadaverous in the instrument panel’s glow, while Giselle had her eyes closed. No sounds from the rear of the car.
We emerged, and when Owain’s eyes had readjusted we saw that the convoy was drawing up in front of a line of enormous concrete hangars camouflaged with turf. Two of the hangar doors were open and inside each of them stood a white Nimbus, identical to the one we had glimpsed at Northolt.
Broadoaks Court was a 1920s redbrick mansion at the end of a wooded drive. We parked in one of the side bays and walked around to the front, my heart beginning to pump a little faster as we mounted the steps. There was no sign of Rees’s car.
I still couldn’t fathom why Lyneth hadn’t been in touch since the accident. Surely someone must have contacted her by now? Had she taken the girls on holiday somewhere further afield—Indonesia or the Pacific Islands? Perhaps they hadn̻t been able to track her down. But surely she would have phoned over Christmas, at least had the girls leave a message. It might be on the answer phone at home. Strange that Tanya hadn’t mentioned it. I was certain it wasn’t something I would have forgotten.
“All right?” Tanya asked.
“Fine.”
“Liar.”
I couldn’t ask her about it now. Too much else to contend with. How could Geoff tolerate my presence in his house, knowing what he knew? And not only tolerate it but also actively try to assist me in my recovery. Where was he sleeping? In the locked bedroom? I couldn’t recall. It just wouldn’t come.
We rang the bell. It was answered by a middle-aged nurse in a green plastic apron.
Inside, the lobby had the air of a down-at-heels hotel, a threadbare carpet over mulberry-coloured tiles, a scruffy sofa against one wall. Plug-in deodorisers in the wall sockets failed to mask the smell of stale urine and cold boiled potatoes.
The nurse made a phone call. I remembered that the place wasn’t strictly a nursing home but an outlier of the local hospital where patients with age-related illnesses had agreed to undergo clinical trials of new drugs and therapies. So far nothing that had been tried on my father had worked.
Shortly a middle-aged man in tortoiseshell spectacles came down the stairs. Rees and a black woman in her twenties were close behind.
Rees made a beeline for me. By his standards he was smartly dressed in jeans and a putty-coloured jacket over a black top.
“He’s been asking after you,” he said. “We played draughts.”
“Oh?” I replied. “Did you win?”
“This is Keisha.”
She came forward. Good-looking, buried under an outdoors jacket in burnt orange. Her hair was drawn back in a loose ponytail that had the effect of giving her a sober, professional air. We shook hands.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said.
“Likewise,” I told her. “Has he been behaving himself?”
She rolled her eyes in a long-suffering way. “Does he ever?”
Rees had already gone over to talk to Tanya. The spectacled man was Dr Pearce, I recalled, the unit’s manager.
“Rees told me about you,” I said to Keisha. “To be honest, I thought he was making you up.”
“The last time I looked I was real.”
I tried to choose my words carefully. “I hope you don’t mind me asking—but are you really his girlfriend?”
“Well, today I feel more like his chauffeur.”
Tanya and Dr Pearce came over. Rees was talking animatedly to the nurse, who looked a little taken aback by the ardour of his attentions.
“How is he?” I asked Dr Pearce.
I was asking about my father but my eyes were still on Rees.
“He’s been fine,” the doctor said, obviously with reference to my brother, whose case history he knew. “How are you?”
“Bearing up. We didn’t know he was coming.”
“So I gather. No harm done. Professor Meredith was quite taken with Miss Rutherford here.”
“He kept asking if I’d give him a blanket bath,” Keisha said. “My role in life.”
Her tone was fatalistic. It was far more good-natured than my father deserved. He had always had a contradictory attitude towards non-whites, being a severe critic of colonialism while at the same time seeing in the eclipse of the white-owned corner shop a microcosm of national decline. He abhorred what he called tribalism as manifested in everything from team sports to civil wars but was prone to making irritable denunciations of “Rastafarian music” or the inability of “minorities” to adapt themselves to the prevailing culture of the country where they lived.