I read through the notebooks with a mixture of awe, confusion and, ultimately, a dismaying sense of the sterility of the enterprise. It was sterile not because I knew it would never be finished but rather because it expended a mountain of intellectual effort to scale a crumbling anthill. To say that historical process was the summation of individual actions was surely just to state the obvious. To assert that patterns in history only became evident at times of upheaval was unenlightening without a proper definition of what constituted such times. My father also implied that such patterns were visible contemporaneously, a notion at odds with another of his favourite axioms: History is a dish best served cold. While I knew that what I was reading was only a draft, filled with obscurities, non-sequiturs and half-developed ideas, it nevertheless conveyed the impression of a fixation so obsessive that he wanted to shoehorn the whole of history into it. He had succumbed to the tyranny of analogy.
“Where are his notebooks?” I asked Pearce.
The doctor looked puzzled. “You asked us to remove them the last time you were here.”
I remembered. He’d begun to deface them. Scribbling over them, tearing out their pages, perhaps driven by despair because the besieged rational part of him knew the game was up.
And here he was at last, being wheeled into the room by one of the nurses: freshly laundered, wrapped in his black-watch tartan dressing gown, looking both puzzled and disgruntled to find us all waiting for him. He was only seventy-four, but he looked ten years older, defeated by the very status to which he had always aspired.
“How you feeling, dad?” Rees asked cheerily.
His gaze had settled on Keisha.
“Who’re you?” he said to her.
“She’s with me,” Rhys interjected, and I could tell he was disappointed that he had already forgotten.
He looked at me. “Is it a party? Or am I dying?”
“No, dad,” I said, trying to sound amused. “Nothing like that. We’re just visiting. Though I think it’s time for us to be on our way.”
Rees was rummaging in his canvas shoulder bag. He produced a disposable camera.
“I thought we should have a few photographs,” he said. “For old time’s sake.”
“Makes no difference to me. Where’s Madga?”
For an instant it was as if someone had taken all the air out of the room.
“She’s dead,” I said.
“Don’t you think I don’t know that?” he replied. “The photograph. What have you done with it?”
The nurse, obviously practised in such situations, lifted the pillow on his bed. It was a 6×4 in a cut-price pine frame I had bought for it.
With the light fadoutside, we decided that the most suitable place for the photographs was in front of the window. At this point I glimpsed a cluster of figures in the garden beyond—five children and a woman. They were standing amongst clumps of ornamental grasses some distance away, waving at me.
I couldn’t clearly discern their features. The woman was noticeably tall and slim, dressed in a neat navy coat, blonde-haired, a flower-patterned scarf tied at her neck. There were three girls and two boys, all of them young. Two of the girls particularly caught my attention. One wore a silver puff jacket with stripy leggings, her slightly elder sister a red zippered top and jeans. They might have been Sara and Bethany.
A fierce compulsion propelled me away from the window, along with a determined conviction that they couldn’t possibly be waving at me, that there were other windows on this side of the building, balconies even, so it was highly likely they were greeting someone else.
It was essential to believe this, not to allow any futile hope to blossom. At the same time I was certain I had seen the woman before. It wasn’t Lyneth, I knew that. Suddenly it came to me: the park. Was it the same woman I had seen in there, the day I fell out of the wheelchair? With the two children who reminded me most of my own? How was that possible?
I made myself look again. They were gone. There was no one in sight.
“Owen?”
I looked around. Tanya, and everyone else, was waiting for me.
I steadied myself, summoning a smile, certain that it had been no apparition. My father, as if sensing my distress, salvaged me. As we arranged ourselves around him for the photograph, he caught my eye and did something astonishing. It was enough to make me swell with all sorts of emotions as the camera flashed and he sat rigid, my hand on his shoulder, staring straight ahead with a fixed grin like a child under orders. Sentimentally I had imagined that he was going to raise Mother’s photograph to the camera so that her image would be incorporated into the picture, but he had either forgotten or preferred to let her rest where she lay in his lap. Meanwhile I was seized with the certainty that this was the last time I was going to see him alive; and he knew it too, which was why in that private instant he had been able to look at me and, straight-faced, give me a quick knowing wink.
FORTY-SIX
Owain stood at the cabin window with Rhys, staring down at the diminishing outlines of Orford Ness as we flew away into the gathering dark.
The door opened, and two MPs came into the cabin, escorting Carl Legister and Marisa.
Legister was either under arrest or protective custody. Marisa looked guardedly at Owain, but neither she nor her husband said anything as they were seated on the sofa. Both MPs remained, flanking the doorway, submachine guns in their hands. The weapons could be used with near impunity: the Nimbus was triple-skinned, its fuselage reinforced with arched trusses like massive ribs, its deep-set. The entire craft was designed to withstand damage from anything short of an armour-piercing shell.
Legister looked both calm and implacable, staring unemotionally at TV footage of a Befreiungtag parade, held in Breslau each spring to commemorate the final extinction of the Nazi state. Marisa had perched herself at his side, but there was a space between them and they did not touch. She continued to look down into her folded hands. The usual strident music accompanied the footage, though Rhys had reduced the sound to normal levels.
Within a minute of their arrival, Giselle Vigoroux entered. She crouched down next to Marisa and they began a whispered sisterly exchange. It came to me that Marisa must have fled to Giselle after leaving Owain’s quarters. I saw Marisa listen before shaking her head. Giselle nodded and straightened.
“Are we all being confined here?” Rhys asked her with a degree of puzzled umbrage.
“We’ll let you out soon,” Giselle told him.
She exited as briskly as she had come.
Legister and Marisa sat like mannequins. Rhys, sensing the polluted atmosphere, came up close.
“She the one you were seeing?” he murmured, though he obviously knew.
I nodded.
“Pretty.”
“She’s lucky to be alive,” I made Owain say. “For a while I thought I’d murdered her.”
Involuntarily he moved back a little. “You’re joking.”
I shook his head. “I’ve been getting these violent urges. You were right to run away.”
Both of us were keeping our voices low, our backs turned to Marisa and Legister. But I knew they were watching us.
“You had a rough time,” Rhys said sympathetically. “Battlefield trauma’s a real syndrome, even if the military won’t admit it.”