Thirty-Four

Harry spent a sleepless night at the Priory.

Finally, at six a.m., he couldn’t stand it any longer and got up from the single bed, crept to the bathroom at the end of the corridor, and took what turned out to be a merely lukewarm shower. Returning to his room, he dressed, then went downstairs.

He had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach: he could guess what the papers would make of Lin. She would be savaged.

Opening the front door, he went out, down the drive, and out onto the village road, desperate for fresh air and thinking time.

No one was about. It was a greyish morning, humid and still.

He came to the centre of the village, to the ugly hall, and the row of thatched houses looking surgically neat and ordered. For a moment he looked longingly at the pub with its red-and-gold sign and firmly closed doors. Then he crossed over to the telephone box. It was no use delaying. Lin would be furious if he didn’t do as she had asked.

Far away in London, the phone rang.

‘Hello,’ said a man’s voice.

‘Hello, Geoff. It’s Harry. Is he there?’

‘Hello, Harry. Good morning, and how are you? What the devil are you up to? He’s about to go out. It’s location for Six Of One, you know.’

‘I know. Get him for me, will you?’

‘As you desire.’ The phone was put down. He heard someone running down a corridor. Then, Michael Shale’s voice.

‘Harry, you old bugger.’

‘Hello, Michael. How’s your man?’

‘Who? Robert England, Esquire?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, the usual cockney repartee. What can I do for you?’

‘England Expects this Friday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you fit in another face?’

‘Why … who is it?’

‘Lin Gallagher.’

There was a muttered conversation on the other end. ‘Have you seen the papers this morning?’

‘No.’

‘Look, it’s a good prospect for us. And the tennis player and his mother just pulled out last night. But you know that England will rip her to shreds.’

‘She insists.’

‘They say she’s having a breakdown, Harry.’

‘Will you book her in?’

‘There’s no problem booking her in. He’d love it. But don’t you remember what he did to that guru headcase? Do you want her to sink without trace?’

‘Can you book her in?’

‘She’s a sweet girl, Harry. Is it for real?’

‘Just book her, so I can say it’s done.’

There was a silence, then a sigh. ‘OK, Harry. He’ll be delighted.’

Harry gave him the Priory fax number. In mid-sentence his time on the phone ran out. He replaced the receiver and looked at it hard, thoroughly disgusted with himself.

Harry and Lin reached the hospital in good time for her appointment. It had been a pleasant enough journey through an early-morning spring landscape.

The secretary showed them straight in, as soon as they arrived.

Werth looked frazzled, tired. ‘How are you?’ he asked Lin.

She settled into a chair opposite him. ‘Headache,’ she said.

Harry frowned at her. Only fifteen minutes before, when he asked the same question, she had told him she was perfectly all right.

‘How is your walking—your balance?’

‘The same.’

‘The feeling of disorientation?’

‘Better,’ she said.

This seemed to surprise him. ‘Better?’ he echoed. ‘Really? How so?’

‘I know what it is now.’

He considered her. ‘Would this new-found knowledge be the same kind of knowledge I see described in the newspaper today?’

‘Yes,’ she said. They had stopped to buy several nationals on the way, and Lin’s story appeared in two of them.

‘I see,’ Werth said. ‘Would it be fair to say that you now feel convinced you’re privy to something not available to the rest of us?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She was not defensive about it, in fact she seemed extraordinarily relaxed. Even elated.

Werth made a couple of notes on the file in front of him. ‘I’d like you to describe this headache in more detail,’ he said. ‘Where exactly is it?’

Lin gave Harry a look which was very nearly a smile. ‘All over.’

‘Have you noticed any deterioration in your sight?’

‘No.’

‘No reduction of vision in one eye rather the other?’

‘No.’

‘But you’ve had hallucinations?’

Lin shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘OK,’ Werth conceded, not willing to push her. ‘Have you lost any weight over the last few weeks?’

‘Maybe a little: three or four pounds.’

He scribbled again, then looked up. ‘Well, Lin,’ he said, ‘you’re quite a conundrum.’

‘Ain’t that the truth,’ Harry murmured. Lin now smiled fully at him.

‘We have the results of something called an ESR,’ said Werth. ‘A blood test.’

‘Standing for what?’ Lin asked.

‘The erythrocyte sedimentation rate. It simply measures the rate at which the red blood cells in the blood sink to the bottom of a tube. A raised ESR usually means that there’s something abnormal going on.’

‘And mine was raised?’ she asked.

‘Yours was raised,’ he confirmed, ‘but the X-rays didn’t help us much. And the lumbar puncture was clear.’

‘So she hasn’t had meningitis?’ Harry asked.

‘No … though I tend to think Lin, by a particularly bad stroke of luck, has experienced something perhaps like meningism: a flu-like viral inflammation which looks and feels very like its big brother.’

‘Well,’ Lin said, ‘that’s something, anyway.’

‘You’re still looking?’ Harry commented.

‘Yes, we’re still looking. Because Lin’s symptoms are very peculiar.’

‘Will you please talk as if I’m here in the room with you,’ Lin said.

Werth smiled. ‘I’m sorry—common occupational dysfunction.’

‘What are you looking for now?’ she asked.

‘Well, I want to do two tests: an EEG and an MRI scan.’

‘The difference being?’

‘One listens to the brain; one looks at it, broadly.’

‘Aren’t they very expensive?’ Lin asked.

‘Well, they are; but that doesn’t have a bearing.’

‘I think it does,’ she said, ‘as I don’t think they’re necessary.’

There was a brief silence.

‘You don’t?’ Werth said at last. ‘Why’s that?’

‘Because I know what it is, and it isn’t anything physical.’

Harry looked down into his lap, embarrassed for her.

‘OK,’ Werth said, ‘explain that to me.’

‘And it isn’t psychological.’

‘All right …’

Lin looked away from him. ‘Life has its own policing patterns, despite the randomness of events,’ she said.

Werth frowned. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand that.’

‘Life is a structured system,’ Lin said slowly, ‘planned and formed by a governing body. Inside that structure, we invent ourselves. We create and learn, we reproduce, we travel, we construct, we die. As does everything else. Everything possesss a consciousness, part of a larger consciousness. Its threads—its energies—run through life. But everything we do isn’t part of our main purpose.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Werth. ‘I really don’t follow you.’

‘There’s only one purpose,’ Lin said, ‘and that’s to recognize the wholeness, the way we’re linked—the necessary way we must operate together.’

Werth considered, turning his pen over and over between his fingers. ‘Lin,’ he said, ‘that doesn’t help me explain a raised ESR.’

‘No, I know,’ she said, and then she smiled. ‘Although it might. Wow … wouldn’t that be something, if it did?’

‘Go back a little way,’ Werth said. Harry had a flash of admiration for the man’s patience. ‘Do you consider your experiences of the last few days indicate this wholeness, this link? Do they demonstrate an energy flowing through life?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She seemed inordinately pleased, so much so that she stood up and walked backwards and forwards a few paces, like an excited child, before sitting down again.

‘It makes you feel very happy?’

‘Yes, it makes me see patterns, makes me feel part of the world. I only have a problem in that no one else can feel it.’

‘You mentioned this before: that you couldn’t find a sense of belonging or understanding. And now you feel that you have that?’

‘Yes, absolutely. I can feel the world thinking.’

‘I’m sorry?’

Werth and Harry glanced at each other.

‘Thinking, thinking,’ Lin repeated. ‘It thinks all the time. It moves and flows.’

‘And you see it?’

‘Yes. I see we’re all part of a greater scheme.’

‘Can you hear it, this energy?’

‘Yes.’

‘What exactly?’

‘Voices in everything,’ Lin said.

Werth looked down at his notes momentarily. ‘What do they sound like?’

She sighed in exasperation. ‘Like an electrical current: a distant humming on a single note. Occasionally the note changes, then drops back again.’

‘I’ve heard other people say that,’ Harry interjected. ‘I read about it once. It was supposed to mean acute hearing—picking up radio frequency.’

‘My hearing’s no different to anyone else’s,’ Lin insisted, ‘but I hear other voices—human voices. I can hear people thinking, if I touch them. I hear the living and dead all mixed together, because we are mixed, you see? The dead are in a different part of the pattern, but they haven’t gone, and I can pick them up as easily as I can hear you.’ She leaned forward, something like joy in her face. ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ she asked. ‘It all goes around and around. You remember that old song: the music goes round and round, and it comes out here?’

‘I remember it,’ Harry said. ‘But then I’m older than you both.’

Lin laughed. ‘It’s just like that. We’re the music. We go round and round, and we come out here. Or there. Or anywhere. And then we go round and round …’ She lifted her hands, and laughed at the pleasure of it, like seeing a toy revolving and miraculously making sounds. ‘It really is fabulous. It’s so clever, and it makes such sense. Nothing’s ever wasted. We’re recycled—everything is.’

‘All organized by a higher energy?’

‘Yes.’

Werth was writing. ‘Have you always had this sense of a personal God?’

‘God again,’ Harry muttered.

‘I’m sorry?’ Lin asked.

‘Was God always very close and personal to you? Do you see a real personality, hear his voice, and so on?’

Lin laughed briefly. ‘No, it’s not that. God isn’t a face, a name, or a personality.’

‘But I see that you think you’re in touch with him.’

Lin sighed, helpless in her attempt to describe her sensations. ‘Oh, OK, if you like.’

Werth sat looking down at his desk for some seconds. Then he stood up and walked to the far side of the room. ‘Would you do a little test for me, Lin?’ he asked.

‘Yes, OK.’

‘Stand up and go to the opposite wall.’

She did so.

‘You see that line in the carpet? The join line?’

‘Yes.’

‘Try walking along that, towards me.’

She set out slowly, placing each foot precisely in front of the other to adhere to the line. Halfway across she stumbled, and righted herself, going back to the line. But her progress after that was erratic at best: wavering away from the line, bracing her feet wider to maintain her balance.

‘OK,’ Werth said, ‘thanks. Sit down again, Lin.’

She sat back in the chair, looking pained, self-critical.

‘One of the things we considered, to explain this, was a TIA,’ Werth said. ‘That’s a transient ischaemic attack. It’s a stroke-like event that usually goes away after a couple of days.’ He smiled at her. ‘They simply mean that the blood supply has been cut off by a jamming of one of the smaller arteries in the brain. That part of the brain stops functioning for a while; but then the blood clot disperses, and everything drops back to normal again. These attacks can be quite dramatic. A person might lose the feeling in an arm or a leg, or be unable to speak or understand. We blame platelets—platelets that get bunched up together, fight to get through a reduced entry, and then sort themselves out. The person feels sensation in their leg or arm again, or they can understand again, or they can speak.’

‘None of that happened to me,’ Lin commented.

‘Well … no, not quite. But you have an altered feeling in your legs, don’t you? In your hands? And you’re thinking differently and comprehending the world differently.’

‘But better—not worse.’

‘Yes … yes, OK.’

‘So it’s not a TIA?’ Harry said. ‘What else could it be?’

‘Well … migraine sufferers experience an aura sometimes,’ Werth said. ‘Euphoria, or flashing lights, or numbness—a sensitivity to light. Women get migraine more than men. Sometimes migraine makes a patient feel that he’s grown too big—out of his body—or that his body doesn’t quite belong to him, as you’ve described.’

‘Out of his body?’ Lin asked.

‘Some kind of distortion of the body map inside the head.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘Would you also get a floating sensation?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I see,’ she repeated.

‘Does that mean anything to you?’

‘No,’ she replied, but she looked away from him.

‘Euphoria?’ Harry said.

‘Yes,’ Werth replied. He didn’t look directly at Lin, but Harry did. She had stretched her legs out in front of her, and was scrutinizing them, frowning.

‘What else could it be?’ Harry asked.

‘Epilepsy,’ Werth said.

‘But she’d already have experienced that. That starts in childhood,’ Harry said.

‘Yes, usually, but it can start in adulthood too. Temporal-lobe epilepsy causes visual hallucinations. And, rarely, it can cause headaches. Sometimes, in children, a fit can indicate meningitis. Rarer still, temporal-lobe epilepsy can be caused by meningitis, or possibly by a meningism. Which is where all these boundaries between epilepsy, TIAs, meningitis and so on get a bit blurred. You can’t really say what you’re looking at until the tests are done.’

‘There’s something else, of course,’ Lin said.

‘What’s that?’ Werth asked.

‘A tumour,’ Lin said. ‘Headaches, numbness, hallucinations, epileptic fits … they can be caused by a brain tumour.’

Werth looked at her carefully, kindly, for a moment before replying. Then he nodded. ‘Yes, Lin,’ he said. ‘Sometimes they can be caused by a tumour.’

The MRI scanner was located in a different part of the hospital.

They walked there together, a route that took them through the children’s department and the Special Care baby unit. It was a glorious morning now, and some of the children waiting for appointments for the ear, nose and throat consultant were playing boisterously in the play area, tumbling over foam blocks.

Harry nudged Lin’s arm. ‘I’ll stay here,’ he said.

‘You can come with me, if you like,’ she said.

‘I don’t like,’ he told her. ‘Do you mind? I’d be in the way.’

‘Coward,’ she said, smiling.

‘You saw through me,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

She squeezed his arm and walked on.

Werth explained the procedure to Lin as they neared the MRI suite.

‘The good thing about this is that it’s non-invasive,’ he said. ‘No probes, no biopsy, no tubes. All you have to do is lie still for a quarter of an hour.’

‘And the bad thing?’ she asked.

‘The bad thing,’ he said, opening the door for her, ‘is that some people find it a bit claustrophobic. It’s a bit like being pushed into a giant cotton reel: once in, you can’t get out.’ They were now in the reception area. ‘Do you think you’ll find that a problem?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Good.’

Werth gave the sister Lin’s name. She looked at him twice, evidently a little surprised that he had brought Lin to them himself. Then a light seemed to dawn. The woman looked at Lin with a sympathetic smile.

They all think I’m mad, Lin thought unconcernedly.

Harry sat down on a chair, a little distance from the group of parents patiently waiting their turn.

He watched, envying the freely tumbling children. He didn’t think he had ever possessed that ability to let go—even as a child. Right the way through school he had been a fat boy, horribly awkward at games, slow at maths, laughable in art class, appalling at science. His only interest had been books. Somewhere around the fifth form, however, he had discovered an extraordinary talent. Drafted into the debating society one night as a very late understudy, he found that he could talk.

He found he had the knack of twisting arguments on their head, making little comic asides that won the audience around. He was no humorist, no comedian, but he was quick—and he got to the point without a lot of flannel. When he stepped down from the stage, the English teacher had taken him to one side, patted him on the shoulder and said, ‘Marks, you’re going to make a great salesman for some lucky corporate giant.’

Harry had known almost instinctively that the man was right. Or, almost right. He knew then he had a gift, but he wasn’t going to use it for any company’s benefit. If he could be persuasive, he thought, he would use it to make money for himself.

He took fine arts at university. In the evenings he went round the snooker halls and the pubs and the working-men’s clubs, and he signed up his first contracts for singers and magicians and comics—most of them dreadful, a handful promising. His break came when one of the snooker players proved to be a nerveless machine at the table.

Harry could still see through people, assess them, rank them. He could smell their potential, and their character faults, sometimes simply by watching their expressions as they waited to go on stage, sometimes by seeing how they related to their partners, to other performers, to the bar staff and cleaners and doormen.

You had to be loved. That was all there was to it.

Perhaps that’s what Lin’s getting at, Harry thought. Connections. An audience could feel connections: when a comic was with them, laughing at himself, for instance; showing himself perhaps to be a fool, but also the kind of man you would love for a friend. People did laugh at cruelty, but not for very long. They laughed best out of affection.

Harry represented performers—not writers, not academics. He knew Kieran only because the man had camera appeal, though that jaded, slightly superior air was starting to wear thin now. It wasn’t yet obvious on screen, but Harry could feel it coming, could see Kieran’s future as though displayed in letters twenty feet high. Kieran would become bored with the camera lens; his goals were more internal, more private. Lin, however … Lin was emerging, she related to people, she was fun when out of Kieran’s shadow. And she had a brain as well as looks. She was the millennium woman, the epitome of girl power. With a mathematical turn of mind, a witty sexy look, a way with words. He could see her as the next thinking man’s fantasy.

If she just could get over this.

He looked over at a parent waiting on the row of seats opposite.

The man was reading the National. On the third page, Harry knew, in a slot reserved for something shocking and light-hearted, was a photograph of Lin with a cross-page headline:

I am God, says the History Man’s wife.

They would ridicule her, for sure.

Pity her, perhaps.

But afterwards … afterwards would they love her?