“Is he lucid at all?” I asked Pearce.
“It’s unpredictable. Your brother certainly kept him stimulated.”
“Until I dragged him out of there,” Keisha volunteered.
“Where is he?”
“In the recreation room,” Pearce said. “He hasn’t been out today. Perhaps you’d like to take him out for some air?”
Pearce was already moving towards the corridor, drawing Tanya along.
“What about Rees?” I said. He was talking avidly to the nurse about golf, a game I was certain he’d never played.
“I’ll keep him out of your hair,” Keisha reassured me.
FORTY-TWO
Thwoman wore RAF blue but her uniform resembled that of an air stewardess of old. She was offering hot drinks from a trolley. I wondered if this was intended as a grim joke, though it was hard to imagine that we were inside an aeroplane in the first place. Owain was sitting in a spacious wood-panelled cabin that could have been a terrestrial office except for the diminutive oval windows, giving vistas of wing and sky beyond them.
They had taken off ten minutes before, by which time Giselle had escorted him to the cabin and ordered him to wait there. It was equipped with a wall-mounted screen and a workstation, neither of them switched on. Armchairs and coffee tables were arranged around its periphery, bolted to the floor. There was even a wastepaper bin.
Every time the plane banked, I could see that we were flying low over snowy fields and angular expanses of woodland. At one point I spotted the dark tentacular mass of what was probably a deserted town, suspended like a spider in a web of roads. A recent report had estimated that less than a quarter of a million people now lived in East Anglia. Thirty per cent were military personnel.
The stewardess was attractive and perfectly proportioned, dark hair tucked up under a cadet’s cap. Her pale skin had a silken sheen. In her early thirties, Owain guessed, accustomed to her surroundings yet with the detached air of someone performing an irksome duty. Her trolley held savoury snacks and biscuits along with miniatures and a selection of cigarettes that included Lucky Strikes. He asked for a coffee but declined anything to eat.
She was Icelandic, she told him, had been in overnight quarters at Speer Airport when the Americans occupied her island ten years before. She’d been working the Frankfurt-Paris-London axis for Concordair, ferrying diplomats and industrialists around. Owain knew it was the only remaining airline that offered some of the comforts of civilian flight, though the pilots, most of them women, were all air-force trained.
“So what did you do?” he asked her.
She gave him a candid look. “Made the best it.”
Owain asked her to spoon sugar into his coffee. Her fingernails were manicured, painted coral pink, as perfect as her make-up. She looked absurdly flawless under the circumstances, with blemish-free skin and arctic-blue eyes. Two gold stars on the shoulders of her tunic told him she was technically a first lieutenant: a brevet rank, he was certain, and another dismaying example of the recent tendency to award them whenever the occasion demanded it, and to civilians as well as non-commissioned officers. Frequently it was done in the face of manpower shortages, sometimes for rather more private reasons. He was pretty certain she would be the mistress of one of the senior staff, who always looked after their own.
I could feel his growing, wilful urge to seduce her. At the same time he’d become convinced that he must have murdered Marisa, though the memory of it still refused to emerge. Both Giselle and his uncle knew, he felt certain, but Sir Gruffydd would continue to protect him. Even Legister would be kept at bay. If he took this woman now, even against her will, who would make him answerable? His uncle outranked everyone in the country.
I made him raise his coffee to his lips, did my utmost to quell his instincts and persuade him that he was letting her leave in a generous spirit of self-denial.
“Christ Almighty,” I blurted.
“What?” Tanya said.
She’d come into the recreation room with me. We were facing my father who, in tweeds and a dark woollen cardigan, was sitting in a wheelchair at the French windows, his nose so close to the pane that his breathing misted the glass.
“Nothing,” I murmured.
This wasn’t the time to be discussing Owain, as disturbed as he was, though it occurred to me that if he intended a permanent escape from his world by usurping me he might commit any act there, confident that he wouldn’t be called to account. If I were thrust permanently into his identity in reverse, it would be me who would shoulder the consequences.
I couldn’t allow it to happen. I wanted to be back in his world so that I could keep watch on him. But transitions never came to order, and I couldn’t muster one now.
Tanya nudged me. From one state of anxiety to another.
“Hello, dad,” I managed to say to my father.
He turned towards me. His long face had deflated a little more since I’d last seen him and his grey eyes looked duller, their light inexorably waning.
“Owen,” he said, “isn’t it?”
A cautious tone midway between query and affirmation. I nodded.
“Your lovely wife,” he remarked, looking at Tanya. “Where are the children?”
She smiled and, effortlessly accommodating him, said gently: “They’ll be along later, Alwyn.”
It was always a surprise to hear his name. I had never called him anything but “Father”, the very word often capitalised in my head. Alwyn—an Anglo-Saxon name, he liked to point out—was reserved for my father’s contemporaries, a form of familiarity I could never countenance. To hear Tanya saying it now was a measure of her autonomy. She must have met him before, though I couldn’t think when.
“How old are they now? Shouldn’t they be at school?”
My eyes filled up and I couldn’t speak. I hadn’t told him that Lyneth and the girls had gone to Australia. Even if Rees had mentioned it earlier, he was unlikely to have retained it. Blissful ignorance. There was something to be said for it on occasions.
“Is it Christmas?” he said abruptly. ÜIt looks cold out there.”
“It’s been and gone,” I told him.
“I could do with some new socks. Thermals. And a decent pair of slippers. Can’t ever get my feet warm here. Where’s Mrs Bayliss?”
“You’re not in Oxford, dad.”
He puzzled at this, squinting around him suspiciously. The room was mostly empty, a squat woman in a housecoat dozing in one corner, the television showing an afternoon soap to another woman who sat so still and upright it was as if the glow from the screen had turned her to stone. A male nurse sat in one corner, texting on his mobile.
“Who did you say you were again?” my father asked.
I wasn’t convinced that these little seesaws of memory were the real thing as opposed to a deliberately alienating device, designed to keep me at bay and retain a semblance of control. There were times when I’d catch a look in his eyes like that of a cornered animal, conscious of his plight, both fearful and angry at his dependency. He’d never really needed anyone until now,
“So how are the children?” he said to Tanya.
“They’re fine,” she told him. “They send their love.”
Did he know? Was he being deliberately cruel? I wanted to shake him, to tell him to stop. To hug him until I squeezed the madness out.
“We thought we’d take you out for a walk,” Tanya said.
He looked insulted at the notion. “Can’t go walking in slippers.”
“We’ll take your chair,” I said.
“What about an overcoat?”
“It’s in your room, dad.”
He squinted out the window as though inspecting the weather. The sun had come out, oblique shadows lying stark across the lawns and flowerbeds.