'Perhaps,' he conceded, 'but it was very economic.'
I was nervous as hell, and so was he. We were talking about everything but what we really wanted to talk about.
'Shh!'
'What?'
'Was that Friday?'
'I didn't hear anything.'
'A mother's hearing is finely attuned. I can hear a half-second wail across ten shopping aisles.'
I got up and went to have a look but he was fast asleep, of course. The window was open and a cooling breeze moved the muslin curtains ever so slightly, causing shadows of the street lamps to move across his face. How I loved him, and how small and vulnerable he was. I relaxed and once more regained control of myself. Apart from a stupid drunken escapade that luckily went nowhere, my romantic involvement with anyone had been the sum total of zip over the past two and a half years. I had been waiting for this moment for ages. And now I was acting like a lovesick sixteen-year-old. I took a deep breath and turned to go back to our bedroom, taking off my T-shirt, trousers, remaining shoe and socks as I walked, half hobbled and hopped down the corridor. I stopped just outside the bedroom door. The light was off and there was silence. This made things easier. I stepped naked into the bedroom, padded silently across the carpet, slipped into bed and snuggled up to Landen. He was wearing pyjamas and smelled different. The light came on and there was a startled scream from the man lying next to me. It wasn't Landen but Landen's father and next to him, his wife, Houson. They looked at me, I looked back, stammered, 'Sorry, wrong bedroom,' and ran out of the room, grabbing my clothes from the heap outside the bedroom door. But I wasn't in the wrong room and the lack of a wedding ring confirmed what I feared. Landen had been returned to me only to be taken away again. Something had gone wrong. The uneradication hadn't held.
'Don't I recognise you?' said Houson, who had come out of the bedroom and was staring at me as I retrieved Friday from the spare bedroom, where he was tucked up next to Landen's Aunt Ethel.
'No,' I replied, 'I've just walked into the wrong house. Happens all the time.'
I left my shoes and trotted downstairs with Friday tucked under my arm, picked up my jacket from where it was hanging on the back of a different chair in a differently furnished front room and ran into the night, tears streaming down my face.
26
Breakfast with Mycroft
FEATHERED FRIEND FOUND TARRED
Swindon's mysterious seabird asphalt-smotherer has struck again, the victim this time a stormy petrel found in an alleyway off Commercial Road. The unnamed bird was discovered yesterday covered in a thick glutinous coating that forensic scientists later confirmed as crude oil. This is the seventh such attack in less than a week and Swindon police are beginning to take notice. 'This has been the seventh attack in less than a week,' declared a Swindon policeman this morning, 'and we are beginning to take notice.' The inexplicable seabird-tarrer has so far not been seen but an expert from the NSPB told the police yesterday that the suspect would probably have a displacement of 280,000 tons, be covered in rust and floundering on a nearby rock, Despite numerous searches by police in the area, a suspect of this description has not yet been found.
It was the following morning. I was sitting at the kitchen table staring at my ring finger and the complete absence of a wedding band. Mum walked in wrapped in a dressing gown and with her hair in curlers, fed DH82, let Alan out of the broom cupboard where we had to keep him these days and pushed the delinquent dodo outside with a mop. He made an angry plinking noise, then attacked the boot-scraper.
'What's wrong, sweetheart?'
'It's Landen.'
'Who?'
'My husband. He was reactualised last night but only for about two hours.'
'My poor darling! That must be very awkward.'
'Awkward? Extremely. I climbed naked into bed with Mr and Mrs Parke-Laine.'
My mother went ashen and dropped a saucer.
'Did they recognise you?'
'I don't think so.'
'Thank the GSD for that!' she gasped, greatly relieved. Being embarrassed in public was something she cared to avoid more than anything else, and having a daughter climbing into bed with patrons of the Swindon Toast League was probably the biggest faux pas she could think of.
'Good morning, pet,' said Mycroft, shuffling into the kitchen and sitting down at the breakfast table. He was my extraordinarily brilliant inventor uncle, and apparently had just returned from the 1988 Mad Scientists Conference, or MadCon '88 as it was known.
'Uncle,' I said, probably with less enthusiasm than I should have mustered, 'how good to see you again!'
'And you, my dear,' he said kindly. 'Back for good?'
'I'm not sure,' I replied, thinking about Landen. 'Aunt Polly well?'
'In the very best of health. We've been to MadCon I was given a lifetime achievement award for something but for the life of me I can't think what, or why.'
It was a typically Mycroft statement. Despite his undoubted brilliance, he never thought he was doing anything particularly clever or useful he just liked to tinker with ideas. It was his Prose Portal invention which had got me inside books in the first place. He had set up home in the Sherlock Holmes canon to escape Goliath but had remained stuck there until I rescued him about a year ago.
'Did Goliath ever bother you again?' I asked. 'After you came back, I mean?'
'They tried,' he replied softly, 'but they didn't get anything from me.'
'You wouldn't tell them anything?'
'No. It was better than that. I couldn't. You see, I can't remember a single thing about any of the inventions they wanted me to talk about.'
'How is that possible?'
'Well,' replied Mycroft, taking a sip of tea, 'I'm not sure, but logically speaking I must have invented a memory erasure device or something and used it selectively on myself and Polly what we call the Big Blank. It's the only possible explanation.'
'So you can't remember how the Prose Portal actually works?'
'The what?'
'The Prose Portal. A device for entering fiction.'
'They were asking me about something like that, now you mention it. It would be very intriguing to try and redevelop it but Polly says I shouldn't. My lab is full of devices, the purpose of which I haven't the foggiest notion about. An ovinator, for example it's clearly something to do with eggs, but what?'
'I don't know.'
'Well, perhaps it's all for the best. These days I only work for peaceful means. Intellect is worthless if it isn't for the betterment of us all.'
'I'll agree with you on that one. What work were you presenting to MadCon '88?'
'Theoretical Nextian mathematics, mostly,' replied Mycroft, warming to the subject dearest to his heart his work. 'I told you all about Nextian geometry, didn't I?'
I nodded.
'Well, Nextian number theory is very closely related to that, and in its simplest form allows me to work backwards to discover the original sum from which the product is derived.'
'Eh?'
'Well, say you have the numbers twelve and sixteen. You multiply them together and get 192, yes? Now, in conventional maths if you were given the number 192 you would not know how that number was derived. It might just as easily have been three times sixty-four or six times thirty-two or even 194 minus two. But you couldn't tell just from looking at the number alone, now, could you?'
'I suppose not.'
'You suppose wrong,' said Mycroft with a smile. 'Nextian number theory works in an inverse fashion from ordinary maths it allows you to discover the precise question from a stated answer.'
'And the practical applications of this?'