‘I said, didn’t I? Are you calling me a liar?’
‘Penny, I’m just trying to help you out. Christ, when did I become the enemy?’
There was silence and I realised she was crying.
‘Tell me what’s going on.’
‘We’re moving out of London. There’s this community. They want me. I feel at home there. I need to move some stuff – mainly clothes, a bit of furniture – you know.’
‘So I should drive you.’
‘Stop trying to organise my life, all right?’ I heard exasperation, but something else as well, something I didn’t expect – panic.
‘Is everything OK, Penny?’
‘We’ve got it worked out, see. We just drive down with our stuff, stay overnight and drive back. Then I get the train down at the weekend with Simon. That’s it, that’s the way we’re doing it.’
‘We – who’s we?’
‘Me and Troy.’
‘Ah.’
I was listening to silence again. Then the sound of breathing, quick sharp breaths.
‘Oh fuck off then Jason if that’s the way you feel. Fucking fuck right off.’
A van pulled out from the kerb and I overreacted. For a moment I was straddling the centre line with a bus hurtling towards me. I jerked back to my own side of the road and slowed down while my heart rate settled.
Why was I even listening to Penny? Why was I willing to consider lending her a car? I wasn’t even convinced she could drive. Probably Troy would end up driving, which would be better in the sense that he probably could drive and worse in the sense that he was more than slightly deranged.
The phone rang and it was Penny. She was crying again. Or still crying from the last call. ‘Don’t be angry with me Jason. Just lend me the car, OK? I promised you would, that’s all, and I can’t go back on it. I can’t. This is the way we planned it.’
There was more like this. What’s the point of going over it? I lent her the Nissan, that’s all. I wasn’t there when she picked it up. I’d remembered you had an appointment at the clinic, Caroline, for your first scan, and I’d promised to come with you. So I filled it with petrol and left the keys with my secretary and set off with you in the Mercedes. I didn’t hear until later that she’d shown up with Troy and that she’d looked sort of out of it.
That got me worried. I googled the solutionists without any luck. So I added the word Kishar and discovered I hadn’t been paying attention. The Kishar solution in all its mutations was everywhere, bubbling just under the surface. BK Compton was revered and occasionally reviled. I found myself in chatrooms where people earnestly debated what kind of solution she had in mind. There were references to the book’s conclusion. So I dug out the copy of Kishar in Crisis Penny had given me and turned to the end. There it was, the very last sentence – Once we accept that we are the problem, it doesn’t take much to imagine the solution. But what did that mean? Even fans of the book couldn’t agree. Was it advocating population control? Should people stop breeding altogether? Should governments put hormones in the water like fluoride? In interviews, BK herself had always refused to elaborate.
By next morning it was national news. The Elmbridge Farm suicide cult. Seven people found dead in a barn in Kent, the door sealed and a Nissan Pathfinder inside with its engine still running. Presumed cause of death – carbon monoxide poisoning. They’d left a cryptic note. The solution starts here.
Within hours everyone knew about the solutionists. Pundits analysed the features of cult behaviour. A few warned that this might be the start of a trend, but most treated it as the end rather than the beginning of something. BK Compton was not available for comment.
We’d seen our baby moving on a screen, but the deaths overshadowed our celebrations. I was sick with grief and guilt and unfocused dread. You tried to help, but had your own feelings to cope with – fury, mainly, that Penny had dragged me into this madness.
I look at your picture now in its silver frame. The beach front at Brighton. I have no right to mourn you with so many dead, so much irrevocably destroyed. I do though, Caro. And what if I could have you back and the rest gone, or have the rest back – the whole ruined world – and you dead. What if I had that choice? It wouldn’t really be a choice, even if I was offered it. Death is OK. It’s always been OK. People die. They die young. Even children die. That’s nature. But what the solutionists did – that was something else.
Agnes
Dell has shown me such a treasure. Cat gave it her as a child, said it came from Janet who slipped it in her hand all those years ago while Brendan was seeing to his horse. Janet didn’t say, but Cat knew it was from Dell’s mother.
It’s a picture of a woman, pale and faintly coloured but so beautiful and so skilfully made she might be alive, her hair loose and flying as though the wind is blowing right through the cracked glass. The frame is silver and carved with lilies. I’ve seen treasures like it at the Hall, some on the shelves in the turret.
‘Is it my mother?’
‘Not your mother, no. It’s from the endtime. No villager could make such a thing.’
‘I thought so.’ She was disappointed, but not too much. I could tell she had more to show me. ‘I loved it as a tot, kissed and snuggled it in my bed. Later, though, I found something else.’ She turned it over and fiddled at the back of it. At last she lifted out a thin piece of wood and a sheet of paper, fine but rough down one edge, and with writing on both sides. It didn’t make sense at first. I’d never seen paper like it that wasn’t part of a book. Then I understood.
‘Oh Dell.’ I didn’t know what else to say. It disturbed and excited me to see it, to know the Book of Air was spoiled and that Sarah had done this in secret for her baby daughter and known it all these years and told no one. ‘Oh Dell. It’s beautiful.’
And it was. It was the colour of milk, with tiny delicate letters, quite black and each one perfect. Stroking it I could feel where the letters lay, something like the scales on a fish. I thought at first this was the paper itself, but the margins were butter smooth, so it must be the ink made this small roughness. I saw then there was a line drawn in the margin against some of the words. I read them aloud, while Dell listened.
‘The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass. That bitter hour cannot be described. In truth, the waters came into my soul, I sank in deep mire, I felt no standing, I came into deep waters, the floods overflowed me.’
Dell said, ‘What does it mean?’
‘It’s a page from the Book of Air, and this text she’s marked for you to study.’
‘But all what you said about it, what does it mean?’
‘I’m not sure what it means. I don’t understand all of it, but it’s about Jane’s sadness.’
‘And Jane’s my mother?’
‘No.’
‘Who then? What’s Jane to me?’
‘Oh, Jane is everything. Our first Governess.’ I saw there was a lot to explain. ‘She wrote the Book of Air. This is a hard text, though, and must be read four ways like any text in the book, so Jane’s sadness is only one part of it. This text is about water. Because water, like earth and fire, brings death as well as life. And even air, the most precious, can be poisoned with disease. And they must fight with each other, as fire boils water, and water quenches fire. And here, you see, Jane’s hope is quenched – like a flame by water.’
‘But what do I care about these four meanings? One meaning would be enough if it was meant for me. What did my mother mean by it?’