He’d been so naive to imagine that his liaison with Marisa wouldn’t attract more than passive attention. Naive in not even considering the possibility that both Legister and his uncle would know about it from the start and take appropriate precautionary action.
An insight came to me. “Legister wants peace with the Americans.”
Sir Gruffydd nodded. “Yak, yak, not flak, flak.”
“Is he a spy for them?”
I thought the old man wasn’t going to answer, but he said, “We’d have had him shot by now. His view is that the Americans are merely taking defensive measures against the collapse of their satellite systems.”
“They didn’t cause it?”
“That was our doing.” His tone carried no hint of apology. “Do you have any idea how much power the Omega orbiters transmit each time they’re activated? Like putting a three-bar fire in a circuit of Christmas-tree lights. Blew the whole lot.”
“Do the Americans know?”
“Well, they know something’s up. Can’t keep that sort of thing hidden indefinitely, especially when we’re field-testing it. That’s why they’ve been bringing stuff out of mothballs and helping the Russians salvage what they could. They knew their advanced systems were down for good.”
“Is that what was happening at the Minsk base?”
“Well, they probably wanted to provoke an attack. To see what we have.”
“So now they’re in the picture?”
“They’re not clear about exactly what it is. Not yet.”
“If they know we have a new weapon, why haven’t they already launched retaliatory strikes?”
The field marshal looked as if he was enjoying himself. “Hard to say without being a member of their Supreme Command, isn’t it? But I’ll tell you this—I’d rather be in our place than theirs.”
They were going to attack. Sir Gruffydd would have no truck with truces or negotiations. Something else occurred to Owain.
“Generaloberst Blaskowitz?”
“A first-rate commander,” his uncle replied without hesitation. “A man of the utmost integrity.”
“He was killed?”
The field marshal held his stare. “No way of putting a gloss on it. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”
“But he didn’t know about Omega.”
“He had his suspicions. That’s why something had to be done. He wouldn’t have taken kindly to it.”
Owain couldn’t make himself speak. I said, “I don’t get it.”
“He was wedded to the notion of manpower determining military outcomes,” Sir Gruffydd said, for once sounding eager to assuage. “Remember, Omega is a remote system. Its effectiveness doesn’t depend on the resourcefulness of field commanders. To a degree, it renders them redundant. The generaloberst wouldn’t have looked on such developments favourably. There was a long tradition of service. Notions of honour among combatants.”
“Is that so wrong?” I made Owain say.
“Wrongness doesn’t come into it. It’s a question of what must be done to save ourselves.”
Sir Gruffydd had a steely look in his eyes. Owain had seen it before. He cultivated a public persona of bluff bonhomie, but he hadn’t become head of the JGC by being soft-centred.
There was a muffled electronic bleeping. Giselle extracted her pager from her tunic and switched it off.
“You’re needed,” she told Sir Gruffydd.
The field marshal rose stiffly, both hands on his stick. He murmured something to Giselle as she made to shepherd him towards the door.
She handed Owain the TV control panel without expression.
“So now you know,” his uncle told him. He gripped Owain’s arm. “You’ve done us great service, Owain, never forget that. Soon we’ll see the fruits of all our labours.”
FORTY-FOUR
Parks and public gardens. You reached a time in your life when they occupied a larger space in it, when your parents were growing old and your children merely growing. So you were increasingly drawn to these soothing green spaces, with their tranquil arbours for the elderly, their ponds and playgrounds for the active offspring, promising fresh air and nature in its neatest municipal form. Your episodic presence signified nothing but passing time, a message reinforced by everything from the ritual sequence of flowerbed plantings to the names of former patrons inscribed on the benches.
I was thinking of Lyneth and how we had often bundled the girls into the car on a wet Saturday afternoon and hauled them around the grounds of places like Chartwell, the rain beading their lavender plastic macs while they stamped in puddles and pleaded for crisps. She could pack a bag with all the necessities for such occasions in a matter of minutes. She would have made someone the perfect wife.
I stopped myself, bewildered that I had the capacity or the inclination for such reflections, given everything that was going on with Owain. Then it occurred to me that he might well have been triggering all these episodes of intense recollection, trawling my memories as I had plundered his. He would need to know as much about me as possible if he intended to usurp me.
How was I to sever the link? Could I shut him out simply by making myself aware of his intrusions, by insisting on my own prior occupancy? For all I knew he might be controlling the transitions between our worlds, though I had found nothing in his thoughts to suggest this. In fact, I’d still found nothing to suggest he was actually aware—
“O?”
Tanya calling me. There was something important here, but I was trailing behind her and my father. She was wheeling him down the twisting path. I caught up, drawing alongside my father, saying somewhat pathetically: “It’s nice in the sun.”
“Squirrels,” my father said. “They’re vermin, you know.”
I could see none in evidence, but my father generally objected to things in principle, the intellectual equivalent of getting your retaliation in first. It was a policy he had adopted throughout his life. He saw the world as a series of antagonisms, and people as weak, foolish or venal unless there was outstanding evidence to the contrary. There was no one he admired unreservedly, and he disdained almost all organisations, including charities, as tainted by the compromises of bureaucracy. His favourite maxim was Thoreau’s “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”. He was a professional dissenter who’d often swum against the intellectual currents of his age. Admirable in his way; but a hard act to follow.
I took over from Tanya, turning the chair down towards a sunken garden.
“What are your views on gun control?” he said to me.
He was staring straight ahead, his prominent nose pointing the way, as though he were a human bloodhound on the scent of something interesting.
“Here, or in America?” I asked.
“Makes no difference.”
“Dad, I didn’t come to see you to talk about gun control.”
“Surely you have a view?”
“Does it matter?” I asked.
“Of course it matters,” he replied with an irritable growl. “You’re my brother, aren’t you?”
We looped around a damp fountain. My father’s elder brother, Arthur, had been a bomber crewman shot down over Essen in the last months of the war. Nineteen years old, by all accounts, my father himself too young to serve. Another thread of the web. It was as if I couldn’t escape it.
I noticed that Tanya was hiding a grin behind her gloved hand. I mouthed a “What?” at her, but she merely shrugged in a manner suggesting she didn’t know, or that it wasn’t important.
Perhaps it was the best way to take it. To see it as funny, although without disrespect. Tanya had often chided me that I always portrayed my father as an ogre, whereas she was plainly not daunted by him in the slightest. But she hadn’t grown up in his shadow.