I took my new car for a drive in the countryside with the top down; the rushing air was a cool respite from the summer heat. The familiar landscape had not changed much; it was still as beautiful as I remembered. Swindon, on the other hand, had changed a great deal. The town had spread outwards and up. Light industry went outwards, financial glassy towers in the centre went up. The residential area had expanded accordingly; the countryside was just that much farther from the centre of town.
It was evening when I pulled up in front of a plain semi-detached house in a street that contained forty or fifty just like it. I flipped up the hood and locked the car. This was where I had grown up; my bedroom was the window above the front door. The house had aged. The painted window frames had faded and the pebbledash facing seemed to be coming away from the wall in several areas. I pushed open the front gate with some difficulty as there was a good deal of resistance behind it, and then closed it again with a similar amount of heaving and sweating—a task made more difficult by the assortment of dodos who had gathered eagerly around to see who it was and then plocked excitedly when they realised it was someone vaguely familiar.
‘Hello, Mordacai!’ I said to the oldest, who dipped and bobbed in greeting. They all wanted to be made a fuss of after that, so I stayed a while and tickled them under their chins as they searched my pockets inquisitively for any sign of marshmallows, something that dodos find particularly irresistible.
My mother opened the door to see what the fuss was about and ran up the path to meet me. The dodos wisely scattered, as my mother can be dangerous at anything more than a fast walk. She gave me a long hug. I returned it gratefully.
‘Thursday—!’ she said, her eyes glistening. ‘Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?’
‘It was a surprise, Mum. I’ve got a posting in town.’
She had visited me in hospital several times and bored me in a delightfully distracting manner with all the minutiae of Margot Vishler’s hysterectomy and the Women’s Federation gossip.
‘How’s the arm?’
‘It can be a bit stiff sometimes and when I sleep on it, it goes completely numb. Garden’s looking nice. Can I come in?’
My mother apologised and ushered me through the door, taking my jacket and hanging it up in the cloakroom. She looked awkwardly at the automatic in my shoulder holster so I stuffed it in my case. The house, I soon noticed, was exactly the same: the same mess, the same furniture, the same smell. I paused to look around, to take it all in and bathe in the security of fond memories. The last time I had been truly happy was in Swindon, and this house had been the hub of my life for twenty years. A creeping doubt entered my mind about the wisdom of leaving the town in the first place.
We walked through to the lounge, still poorly decorated in browns and greens and looking like a museum of Dralon. The photo of my passing-out parade at the police training college was on the mantelpiece, along with another of Anton and myself in military fatigues smiling under the harsh sun of the Crimean summer. Sitting on the sofa were an aged couple who were busy watching TV.
‘Polly—! Mycroft—! Look who it is!’
My aunt reacted favourably by rising to meet me, but Mycroft was more interested in watching Name That Fruit! on the television. He laughed a silly snorting laugh at a poor joke and waved a greeting in my direction without looking up.
‘Hello, Thursday, darling,’ said my aunt. ‘Careful, I’m all made up.’
We pointed cheeks at each other and made mmuuah noises. My aunt smelled strongly of lavender and had so much make-up on that even good Queen Bess would have been shocked.
‘You well, Aunty?’
‘Couldn’t be better.’ She kicked her husband painfully on the ankle. ‘Mycroft, it’s your niece.’
‘Hello, pet,’ he said without looking up, rubbing his foot. Polly lowered her voice.
‘It’s such a worry. All he does is watch TV and tinker in his workshop. Sometimes I think there’s no one at home at all.’
She glared hard at the back of his head before returning her attention to me.
‘Staying for long?’
‘She’s been posted here,’ put in my mother.
‘Have you lost weight?’
‘I work out.’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
‘No,’ I replied. They would ask me about Landen next.
‘Have you called Landen?’
‘No, I haven’t. And I don’t want you to either.’
‘Such a nice lad. The Toad did a fantastic review of his last book: Once Were Scoundrels. Have you read it?’
I ignored her.
‘Any news from Father—?’ I asked.
‘He didn’t like the mauve paint in the bedroom,’ said my mother. ‘I can’t think why you suggested it!’
Aunt Polly beckoned me closer and hissed unsubtly and very loudly in my ear: ‘You’ll have to excuse your mother; she thinks your dad is mixed up with another woman!’
Mother excused herself on a lame pretext and hurriedly left the room.
I frowned.
‘What kind of woman?’
‘Someone he met at work—Lady Emma someone-or-other.’
I remembered the last conversation with Dad; the stuff about Nelson and the French revisionists.
‘Emma Hamilton?’
My mother popped her head around the door from the kitchen.
‘You know her?’ she asked in an aggrieved tone.
‘Not personally. I think she died in the mid-nineteenth century.’
My mother narrowed her eyes.
‘That old ruse.’
She steeled herself and managed a bright smile.
‘Will you stay for supper?’
I agreed, and she went to find a chicken that she could boil all the taste out of, her anger at Dad for the moment forgotten. Mycroft, the gameshow ended, shuffled into the kitchen wearing a grey zip-up cardigan and holding a copy of New Splicer magazine.
‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked, getting in the way. Aunt Polly looked at him as you might a spoilt child.
‘Mycroft, instead of wandering around wasting your time, why don’t you waste Thursday’s and show her what you’ve been up to in your workshop?’
Mycroft looked at us both with a vacant expression. He shrugged and beckoned me towards the back door, changing his slippers for a pair of gumboots and his cardigan for a truly dreadful plaid jacket.
‘C’mon then, m’girl,’ he muttered, shooing the dodos from around the back door where they had been mustering in hope of a snack, and strode towards his workshop.
‘You might repair that garden gate, Uncle—it’s worse than ever!’
‘Not at all,’ he replied with a wink. ‘Every time someone goes in or out they generate enough power to run the telly for an hour. I haven’t seen you about recently. Have you been away?’
‘Well, yes; ten years.’
He looked over his spectacles at me with some surprise.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Is Owens still with you?’
Owens was Mycroft’s assistant. He was an old boy who had been with Rutherford when he split the atom; Mycroft and he had been at school together.
‘A bit tragic, Thursday. We were developing a machine that used egg white, heat and sugar to synthesise methanol when a power surge caused an implosion. Owens was meringued. By the time we chipped him out the poor chap had expired. Polly helps me now.’
We had arrived at his workshop. A log with an axe stuck in it was all that was keeping the door shut. Mycroft fumbled for the switch and the striplights flickered on, filling the workshop with a harsh fluorescent glow. The laboratory looked similar to the last time I had seen it in terms of untidiness and the general bric-a-brac, but the contraptions were different. I had learned from my mother’s many letters that Mycroft had invented a method for sending pizzas by fax and a 2B pencil with a built-in spell-checker, but what he was currently working on, I had no idea.