Michael’s arm was beginning to throb with a dull pain. The bandage had been put on with more enthusiasm than skill, and was now too tight. He took off his overcoat and shirt and loosened the bandage. The wound was already caking over, and it didn’t look as bad as the girl had thought it. He glanced up at what he thought was a noise from within the tunnel. He realised it was inside his own head. He waited for the dim reality about him to start rippling again. But this was the merest aftershock. He looked over at the sleeping girl and began to cry. Since there was no one to see him and despise him, he rocked back and forth until the chill of the dank, still air got to him, and he put his upper clothes back on. The flexible metal teeth securing an internal pocket, he thought again, were a remarkable invention. They alone were evidence that, if now far into decay, the English had once been a race of giants.
He took a mouthful of water from the girl’s bottle, and stretched out close by her. After a longish time of looking at nothing, and trying to think nothing, Michael fell into a sleep total enough for him to dream of the shimmering marbles and cool fountains of his uncle’s palace in Constantinople—a palace that had somehow been moved far south to the middle of the family estates. From the corner of his eye, in whichever direction he looked, solid walls wavered and crumbled and fell into heaps that reminded him of the broken pediment of that Athenian church. Hovering around the threshold of the audible, there were sharp cries and a sound of burning. As often as he looked up, he could see the letters, in Roman script, for the English word Turkey. He’d seen the word on that picture of Ephesus. It now loomed above the whole Empire. It might as well have loomed above the whole world.
Chapter Twenty Six
Cold and stiff, Jennifer sat up and looked into impenetrable blackness. She pressed the button on her wrist watch. 4:45pm, it said. Hadn’t the Greek boy mentioned an hour’s rest? She brought her knees up under her chin, and thought with a flash of cold fear that she’d been abandoned. Even after she heard the soft breathing beside her, she didn’t relax. She reached past him and felt about for the lamp. She turned it full on and cupped her hand about it to reflect light onto the battery gauge. It was half discharged. They had only one station to go, and the light should more than hold out for that. She put the torch down and tried not to shudder. If there was nothing she could call a smell of death, the air down here was as foul as it was chilly.
She prodded at Michael. He let out a snore and muttered something she couldn’t understand. She dimmed the lamp and shone it onto his face. She looked at the faint redness left by the Indian’s razor and calmly accepted that she’d fallen in with a teenage boy. How he’d lain over her in the tunnel, and hadn’t cried out even when a bayonet was thrust into his arm was the bravest thing she’d ever seen. She’d nodded at his lie about how pain had sent him into shock. If it kept him from what he thought the shame of admitting to epilepsy, she’d have nodded at anything else.
“Michael.” She prodded him again. “Wake up, Michael. We’ve been asleep for ages.” She poked into his overcoat where she’d remembered bandaging his left arm. He let out a sudden cry of fear and curled into a ball. “Michael,” she said, now firmly, “it’s only me, and we’ve slept through most of the day. She illuminated her watch again and pushed it close to his face. Of course, the display might have been Chinese characters for all the sense it could have made. How long had it taken even Count Robert to tell the time properly on his analogue watch?
“No chance of breakfast, I suppose?” he mumbled in plain embarrassment. He rubbed his eyes, then groaned and let his left arm fall back beside him. He tensed his face and sat up.
Jennifer got to her feet. “I’ll see what can be arranged,” she said lightly. She bent down and picked up a walking stick that had a brass top. She carried it over to one of the big refreshment machines. She’d hoped for a nonchalant smashing of glass, and then an almost patronising distribution of Mars Bars and crisps and Coca Cola. It took a lot of loud bashing, and a repeated levering apart of panels, before they could both get at the still edible goodies within. But breakfast it was.
Jennifer flicked through her London atlas to the right page, and pointed at one of the symbols on the map. “If the church you told me is the right one, it isn’t far from Camden Town Station.” There was no getting away from another hour of splashing through claustrophobic gloom. Worse than that that, now they were approaching the end of their journey, there was the question of what next? Would Michael dump her when he made contact with his own network of agents? She waited for her stomach to go tight. For some reason, it didn’t. How, then, to get out of the Underground station? Getting in at Oxford Circus had been made easy. Surely every access would be locked this far out. If there was still no evidence that these tunnels had been left untouched since the last cloud of poison gas had cleared away, how could she suppose that Camden Town would be other than sealed tight?
Michael looked for a moment into her face. He leaned forward again and pointed the torch away from them both. Jennifer followed its beam until she saw how it ended in a desiccated snarl of death. She looked back at Michael and hoped he couldn’t see how she was blinking tears out of her eyes. He touched her gently on the shoulder. “Listen, Jennifer,” he said, with the very slightest hesitation over her name. “I want to thank you for everything you did last night.” He stopped the protest she was forming and continued: “If I did my bit, you did yours.” He stopped and thought. “It wasn’t bad for just a girl,” he said, now lamely. He looked down and thought. “Can I suggest that we stick together once we’re out of here?”
Unable to speak, she nodded and got unsteadily to her feet. Far along the platform, there was a faint splashing. She looked straight down at Michael. “I think it’s a rat swimming about,” he said in a voice that may have been meant to reassure. He jumped up and put both hands on her shoulders. He leaned forward and kissed her shyly on the cheek. “Thank you, Jennifer,” he said.
Jennifer looked into the dark and sewery waters. She waited for Michael to climb down into them. “How old are you?” she asked.
“Nineteen,” he said at once. Jennifer took his upstretched arms and stepped in beside him. She waited till he was splashing ahead of her before smiling. In any language, she could tell when someone was lying to her.
As expected, Camden Town Underground Station was locked shut. This didn’t mean they were sealed in. Just beside the ticket barriers, Jennifer found a door that she and Michael could smash through with an improvised battering ram, and that led into a part of the Underground few passengers had ever thought about in the Olden Days. Checking that they were still alone, and still unobserved, they passed through silent offices and rest rooms and rooms filled with dead monitors. Jennifer didn’t know the details of how the system had been shut down. But it looked as if the staff had been called suddenly away and never let back again. In one of the rest rooms, she even found three coffee mugs, each with a rancid pool in the bottom. The easiest way out would be from one of the first floor windows. It would be a matter of opening one of the stiff metal casements and throwing down a fire hose. But the street outside was crowded with building workers, and men dragging pieces of industrial machinery that might have been requisitioned from a museum. Lounging against the wall on the other side of the street—he might have seen them had he glanced up while they were looking out—a policeman was selling drugs.