‘So should I sort out the UN first?’
She gave a startled laugh. ‘’I’m not sure that’s what the Secretary-General has in mind. It might be interesting, though I fear you would be a – how do you put it? – a fox in a hen coop.’
I grinned. ‘I can imagine much clucking, flapping and flying of feathers, yes.’
She turned and looked at me thoughtfully. ‘You are not what I expected.’
‘Do tell.’
She hesitated. ‘I saw all of those TV reports showing you always running, expressionless, and I thought how alien you were, what a strange being you must be.’
‘Oh I am, I am all of that.’ I looked out to sea and saw a large sailboat with, I sensed, a family on board. I felt the sparks of their individual lives, their carefree joy together, and perversely a grim, harsh mood suddenly swept over me. ‘What would you say if I told you that I could kill everyone on that sailboat, this instant, without moving a muscle? And that I have done such a thing before?’
She was shocked into silence and sat staring at me. After a while she spoke, slowly. ‘I would say that you must have had very good cause. That you would not harm anyone as innocent as those.’ She gestured out to sea.
I relaxed a little, not aware until then how tense I had become. ‘You are right of course, I could not hurt them. You are also right that I had good cause.’ The desperate fury I had felt in that remote Essex lane came back to me then, and Freya gasped. I glanced down and saw that my skin was flaring crimson, as if I pulsed with rage. I consciously calmed myself down and the colour faded back to my normal dark purplish-green. I felt suddenly tired. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m inflicting this on you.’
She looked levelly at me. ‘When was the last time you sat and talked to someone, just for the sake of it?’
I fought my mind away from that Essex chalet. ‘Not since I left England.’
‘Everyone needs to talk. It’s what stops us all from going mad. It’s also what keeps the UN in existence.’
I laughed rather shakily. ‘I suppose you’re right. It’s just that sometimes I’m scared by what I can do, what it might all be for. Well, if nothing else, you can be my counsellor!’
She laughed. ‘Tell me, have you ever been to Iceland?’
A timely change of topic and mood, I noted; she was good at her job. ‘Once, several years ago. There was a conference on geothermal power. But I had time to get out and see the usual touristy bits, at least those within easy reach of Reykjavik.’
‘That’s where I’m from. What did you think of it?’
‘Very neat and clean. The freshest air I’ve ever known in a city. Although I couldn’t get over all those four-by-fours trundling through the streets, with jacked-up suspensions and vast balloon tyres. They make Land Rovers look like shopping trolleys.’
‘Our national form of transport. They may look silly in town, but they’re essential to travel around the countryside in winter. They can even travel over deep snow, as long as it’s not too soft; nearly all the air is let out of those tyres so they spread out over the ground to reduce the pressure.’
I sighed. ‘Just what I feel like doing, sometimes.’ Our conversation turned back to the UN and its business and we talked until the sun set over the Sound, sending glittering reflections through the house.
Very early the next morning I ran to the sea and plunged in, swimming out as strongly as I could. My urge to exercise, to tire out my muscles had returned. At first, the water was shallow and disturbed, but after a while the floor fell away into deeper water. I slowed my stroke and angled down into the pre-dawn darkness, seeking out the slowing of consciousness which brought the calm of the deep. But the water depth was only thirty metres or so, and the ocean was too far away for me to sense, no more than a hint of it penetrating into the Sound. Disappointed, I turned for the shore and burned off my frustration at racing speed.
When I walked off the beach onto the lawn in front of the house, the sun was already warming my face and Freya was sitting on the terrace, polishing off her breakfast with evident relish.
‘You had me worried there,’ she said rather unconvincingly, ‘I thought a torpedo had been aimed at us.’
‘It was the sight of you eating – it reeled me in.’
‘Well, I’m glad you don’t eat the same food as I do. Otherwise I might have felt guilty about not leaving you any.’
‘I doubt that.’
She grinned. ‘All right, I lied.’
‘Where do you put it all?’
‘I’ve earned it – I had a swim, too. But you went far out of sight. If you want to get back to England, there are easier ways.’
‘I’m not that ambitious – the Azores will do.’
Freya wiped her mouth with her napkin and settled back in her chair while I ploughed through my usual fare. She looked at me thoughtfully over the rim of her coffee cup. ‘Have you come to any conclusions now you’ve had a chance to sleep on it?’
‘A few. First of all, I don’t want to be a cog in a machine, a part of other people’s operations; it would be too constraining, and I suspect very frustrating. I want to focus on clearly defined operations which I can deal with myself. And I’m not interested in joining the UN staff. I’ll listen to requests but make my own decision about what to do. And all of my contacts with the UN will all be via you.’
‘Fair enough.’ She smiled sunnily. No doubt that would elevate her status in the UN’s turf battles. ‘You are regarded as such a hero, no-one’s going to argue with you.’
I snorted. ‘A much misused term. In my book, heroes are people who voluntarily put themselves at risk in order to help others. That leaves me out. Now, let’s talk about the possibilities.’
A day of discussions followed. I learned a lot more about the troubles of the world than I had previously gathered from casual news browsing of the current international crises. It seemed such a catalogue of disaster, grief, incompetence, short-sighted selfishness, prejudice, corruption and downright malice that it was difficult to work out where to begin. Even where governments were doing their best, the problems they faced often seemed insurmountable. In the poorest parts of the world, the joint pressures of population growth and declining natural resources presented impossible dilemmas which cash aid could not solve – even if it didn’t get siphoned off en route. At best, foreign aid staved off immediate famine and meant more people survived, but simultaneously developed a dependency on it, sometimes leading to farming being abandoned as unnecessary. Even those aid projects which recognised the difficulties and focused on improving agriculture sometimes brought problems of their own, such as irrigation systems using up the groundwater in an unsustainable way. And projects to remedy this by building reservoirs to trap more rainwater provided more breeding opportunities for malarial mosquitoes. And all of that was without taking the various forms of endemic warfare into account. It seemed to be a set of vicious circles, and I wondered what Luke thought of it all, how he maintained his motivation to do his charity work in the face of its apparent hopelessness.
Halfway through the day I discovered that Freya was a tennis player, so we took a carefree break from the problems of the world, dashing about the outdoor court for an hour or so. My speed was much greater than Freya’s but she was far more skilled than I and kept me running frantically around the court, so the match was fairly even.