‘There, there,’ he said to the weeping boy, patting him on the shoulder because he didn’t know what else to do. ‘There, there.’
It’s not all the world that is a stage but each human souclass="underline" the cast list in each of our souls is long and varied and most of the characters queue in the wings and down the dark passages and into the basement, never to be auditioned for a part. Even for the ones who do make it onto the stage it’s only to carry a spear or announce the arrival of the King. In this expectant but likely to be disappointed line of inner selves waiting for the chance to strut out in the world we usually find our inner fool, our private liar, our unrevealed oaf and, next to him, our wisest, best self; our hero and then our coward, our cheat and saint and next to him our child, then next our brat, our thief, our slut, our man of principle, our glutton, our lunatic, our man of honour and our thug.
Called unexpectedly to the front of Vague Henri’s soul queue that night was a most dangerous character (for Vague Henri at any rate): the part in him that believed in justice and fair play.
Cale dealt with his past through being in a state of almost constant rage, Kleist by disdain for everything that might touch his heart, Vague Henri by being cheerful in the face of adversity. The strategies of the first two had failed (Cale had gone mad and Kleist had fallen in love) and now it was Vague Henri’s turn. The idea that one of them could have married and made another human being, an actual baby, pink, small and helpless, touched him with rage at the Redeemers so deep that the deaths of Kleist’s wife and son at their hands burnt like the sun. So he called on the maddest of all his cast of characters: the one who wanted life to be fair, who wanted those who had done harm to be punished and justice for all.
While an exhausted Kleist snored in miserable oblivion on the bed, Vague Henri smoked his way through the last snout of his Health Tobacco and worked on his spidery and ill-advised conspiracy. Demoted to the back of the line in Vague Henri’s inner cast list, his wiser self was calling to him: delay, fudge, avoid, put off as long as possible the moment when you must commit yourself and others to the business of death. But it was the voice of rage that had his ear.
If IdrisPukke had known what Vague Henri was planning he would have had a stroke – instead he was enjoying the absolute success of his plan to manipulate Conn in the matter of the King. With every disdainful look and every sigh of contempt Zog was only the more enthralled by Conn. He’d finally reached snob heaven: he’d met someone who was worthy to look down on him.
Swift though his rise had been, and along with it that of the Materazzi in general, even Conn’s most star-struck admirers were astonished at the announcement that the King was to make him commander of all the armies of Switzerland and Albania. This extraordinary and apparently foolish step, given the threat to their existence that faced the Swiss, was less opposed than it might have been because everyone had been expecting the job to go to Viscount Harwood, King Zog’s now former favourite, a man of no military experience or indeed talent of any kind. It was reliably said that, on learning of Conn’s preferment, Harwood retired to his bed and cried for a week. The more scurrilous rumours, probably untrue, whispered that his penis had shrunk to the size of an acorn. In light of this, Conn’s appointment was less absurd than it first appeared. He had changed a good deal since the ruinous shambles at Silbury Hill. He had come very close to a hideous death there and been forced to endure rescue by someone he’d once bullied and despised. Even IdrisPukke, who had burst into laughter on hearing the news of his appointment to such a ludicrously powerful position, began to realize after a few days of meetings with Conn and Vipond that defeat, death and humiliation at Silbury had been the making of the young man. Here was someone who had been brought up to fight and who had learnt his bitter lessons early. In addition Conn, as Vipond had advised him to do, listened carefully to IdrisPukke and was clearly and genuinely impressed by the work he had done on the coming war with the Redeemers. Conn was not to know that much of the intelligence had been supplied by Thomas Cale.
‘But what if Cale comes back? How is Conn going to take to that?’ said IdrisPukke.
‘Does he know?’ asked Vipond.
‘Does he know what?’
‘The thing it would be better if he didn’t know.’
‘Probably not. If we’re thinking of the same thing.’
‘We are.’
‘Is he likely to come back – Cale, I mean?’ asked his brother.
‘Apparently not.’
It was an unhappy reply and it would have been even more unhappy if he could have seen the boy who he continued, to his surprise, to miss so much. The circles around Cale’s eyes were, if anything, darker – the skin ever whiter with exhaustion at the retching that afflicted him sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for hours. Some days were better – there were even weeks when he thought perhaps it was lifting from him. But the attacks always returned eventually, greater or lesser according to their own devices and desires.
During one of these better weeks, Sister Wray said that she wanted to climb to the top of a nearby hill, both in search of the truth of the rumours that blue sage and orange neem grew at the top and because the view of the sea and mountains was said to be the best in Cyprus.
‘It may be a hill,’ said a breathless Cale, a few hundred feet into their climb, ‘but it feels like a mountain.’
It was as well they started early as Cale had to rest every few hundred yards. At their sixth stop he fell asleep for nearly an hour. Sister Wray went for a wander up and down through the dry scrub and crumbly earth. Even though there had been little rain in the last few months, everywhere, hidden amongst the scraggy burberry bushes and thistle trees, were the tiny pleasures of purple knapweed, rock roses, the tiny eggy flowers of thorowax.
When she got back Cale was awake, and looking pale and even more black around the eyes.
‘We’ll go back.’
‘I won’t make the top but we can go on a bit longer.’
‘Big cry-baby pansy,’ said Poll.
‘One day,’ replied Cale, his voice a whisper, ‘I’m going to unravel you and knit someone a new arsehole.’
Some fifteen hundred feet above them, and two hundred feet below the top of the hill, was a V-shaped rift cut into the hill by the winter rains. It was the easiest way up, and waiting for Cale and Sister Wray to pass through it were the Two Trevors and Kevin Meatyard. Kevin was all puppyish excitement but the Two Trevors were uneasy. They were too well aware that the iron law of unintended consequences seemed to apply even more sharply to the planned act of murder than to other enterprises. They always designed their assassinations as a story where the chain of events could be upset at any point by a trivial detail. They had failed to kill the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo because the carriage driver, a late replacement for the usual driver who’d cut his arm that morning while replacing a wheel as a precaution, had panicked over the hastily given instructions over where to go and taken a wrong turn, not once (the Two Trevors had taken this into account) but twice. Had they succeeded in killing the old buffer who knows what the consequences might have been – but they didn’t, so something else happened instead.
The return of the Two Trevors to Spanish Leeds had been something of a welcome anti-climax. Kitty seemed to believe their reassurances that while they could not reveal their client’s business they were not in any way a threat to Kitty’s interests (not true, as it happened, but neither realized that the other had a stake in Thomas Cale). Kitty guessed that the Redeemers were probably involved but while the political situation was so confused he didn’t want to antagonize them without good reason. He’d considered, of course, disappearing the Two Trevors into the rubbish tips at Oxyrinchus just to be on the safe side. But he now decided that being on the safe side meant letting them go – much to Cadbury’s irritation, given the trouble he’d been put to in order to bring them back. In addition to their lives, the Two Trevors had a lesser stroke of luck: they’d discovered where Cale had taken refuge when Lugavoy had his ear bent by Kevin Meatyard’s boastfulness. A delighted Kevin had discovered Thomas Cale’s reputation as some sort of flinty desperado and was determined to let everyone know that he’d given this celebrity hardcase any number of bloody good hidings. No one really believed him but Kevin’s appearance, as well as his violent boasting, made people nervous. If the human body was the best picture of the human soul, Kevin was clearly someone best avoided. Hence the complaints to Trevor Lugavoy from Kevin’s employer and hence their jammy discovery of Cale’s precise whereabouts. ‘I don’t like ridiculous good luck,’ said Trevor Kovtun, ‘it reminds me of preposterous bad luck.’