The sinuous strings of the first movement of Debussy’s La Mer washed about the apartment. A storm was brewing. Toby Ashe looked up from his laptop to see the gorgeous figure of a golden-tanned blonde entering with a goblet of red wine, wearing one of his own white shirts and little else. Ashe turned back to his emails.
‘Can I drink this?’ asked the girl in a pleasant, county accent.
‘Didn’t you have enough last night?’
The girl knocked it back in one. ‘Ugh!’
‘That would be your last cigarette.’
‘I’m giving up.’
‘Self-denial, Amanda? Hadn’t thought of you as an ascetic.’
‘A what?’
‘Kind of nun.’
The girl approached and ran her fingers through the long strands of Ashe’s tousled, copper-brown hair. ‘A very horny nun.’
‘Weren’t you going?’
‘Is that what you want, Toby Ashe?’
He thought for a second. ‘Right now, yes.’
‘Well fuck you then!’ Amanda turned to the bedroom door, paused for a second, then launched the goblet at Ashe. The glass shattered on the back of his chair and fell into the sheepskin rug.
Unruffled, Ashe turned from his Mac and looked sympathetically towards Amanda.
‘If you really want to throw the book at me, Amanda, why not try one of mine?’
Amanda’s lively blue eyes focused on a small pile of paperbacks on the windowsill. Grabbing the first that came to hand, she hurled it hard at Ashe’s head.
Ashe ducked and returned to his laptop. ‘Judging from the weight and texture of your chosen missile, Amanda, I should say I’ve been struck by my most popular work to date, The Generous Gene. Pity you didn’t read it first.’
Slamming the bedroom door behind her, a muffled voice emerged from within. ‘I didn’t come for your books!’
‘Blast!’ Ashe’s eye alighted on a familiar email address. ‘Now what do they want?’ Faced with a choice of two possible worlds, his index finger hovered on the mouse: to open or not to open. He bit his lip. There was work to be done, but there was something about Amanda’s rage which turned him on.
Ashe entered the bedroom calmly, half expecting to be hit by another book. Amanda had stripped off his shirt and now lay sprawled on the crumpled bed.
‘Just because your real parents didn’t want you, Toby, it’s no excuse to be so bloody difficult.’
‘Vicious, Amanda? What I didn’t tell you last night was that my dear adopted parents regularly informed me that I was nothing less than a miracle. A gift from above.’
‘A git from above, more like. Typical of you to suggest you adopted them, rather than the other way round.’
‘Which way round would you like it?’
‘You know what I like.’
‘You can keep those on.’
‘Which? Knickers or stilettos?’
‘Both. It’s always interesting with the knickers.’
‘Heightens pleasure, does it?’
‘You were made for fucking, Amanda.’
‘Who isn’t?’
*
Post coitum, triste. Sex with Amanda had been exciting and Ashe wondered if dismissing her as a one-night stand had really been a good idea. But something was wrong in his life: lengthening shadows were threatening to envelop him, and poor Amanda had turned up at just the wrong moment.
For the last seven of his thirty-three years, Ashe had made the cathedral city of Lichfield, Staffordshire, his base. The first time he had set foot in this ancient market town, whose grand cathedral gave it city status, he had felt at once a kind of peace, almost a homecoming. He was not surprised to discover later that writers throughout history had described Lichfield as England’s ‘omphalos’: a kind of primordial navel, a centre and fount for the country’s soul.
Ashe’s decision to quit London in May ’97 had served him well, despite the scepticism of his many friends who had moved to the capital straight after graduating from Oxford and stayed there. Having left behind a successful career in TV documentaries to focus on his writing, Ashe found Lichfield’s relaxed pleasures and jewel-box of characters less distracting. He devoted his prodigious energies to producing a series of books – works that combined popular science with what Ashe called ‘experimental spirituality’. Thanks to two non-fiction international bestsellers, he could enjoy a pleasant lifestyle, so long as he kept his head.
The Generous Gene, his most widely appreciated book, was both a humorous refutation of popular atheism and a vindication of spiritual knowledge in a sane mind. Every age has its prophets of atheism and every age has its defenders of the spiritual life, though Ashe disdained to appear as a prophet of anything. Resolutely refusing all requests for media appearances and interviews, the man behind the bestsellers remained invisible to the general public. Ashe could have gathered a devoted following if he had wanted one; such behaviour would have attracted greater sales, but not contentment.
Ashe’s problem was his other job. It made him feel a kind of fraud, or ghost: someone removed from life. Strolling about the cold Cathedral Close in search of clarity, Ashe passed by the sandstone tombs of forgotten medieval dignitaries, clinging for salvation to the walls of the three-spired cathedral. He knew that even if he decided to see Amanda again, an invisible wall would always separate them, like the wall that kept the lesser servants of the Church outside the warm Lady Chapel within.
For he could tell neither Amanda nor anybody else that he had been recruited for the Secret Intelligence Service while studying psychology and behavioural sciences at Oxford. A tutor’s recommendation, a useful bout of ‘playing soldiers’ with the Oxford Training Corps, and a rugged talent for mountaineering, as well as impressive intellectual skills, had led to a secret rendezvous and subsequent invitation to join the Service shortly after graduation. Ashe liked to think it was chiefly loyalty to his country that had made him accept the burden of working for the Service, but in truth he was attracted to the idea of unknown agencies being determinative not only in science but in global power-politics as well. His superiors, nevertheless, had detected a maverick quality in Ashe which had, to date, kept him confined largely to research, presentational and advisory roles. Ashe had to slake his thirst for active adventure in foreign expeditions that served none but his own need to be relieved of discipline.
Surely now was the time to seize that holiday and head for France’s Languedoc region. Caught between Amanda’s attention seeking and a communication (unopened) from that Other Job, why not take this chance to accomplish the hike he had long dreamed of doing, from the medieval Cathar castles of the Corbières across the Pyrenees to Catalonia and the medieval churches of Lérida; lush vineyards, romance and no responsibilities.
Fired up with this new decisiveness, Ashe dashed back to his apartment, located in what had been the old Swan Hotel, across from the pool that had once been the cathedral’s moat. A quick scout of the net would secure him a first-class ticket to a better state of mind.
The apartment door was open. Ashe found a note lying on his old Bang & Olufsen record deck: eloquence, scrawled with a black mascara brush.
I only seem to go for bastards, Toby Ashe, and I’m not sure about you.
The inevitable phone number. The open door was symbolic; the note, he surmised, desperate. Ashe screwed it up. He opened the CD player in his black hi-fi stack. Out with the melancholy waves of Debussy, in with the boundless, star-bound freedom of Jimi Hendrix.
Soon the flat was vibrating with the magma-swamp, earth-core bass of ‘Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)’. Hendrix’s angel extended her mysterious invitation to step into her world ‘a while’. Long enough, presumably, to realise that she was The One: the angel of love, liberty and an elusive wisdom lost on the timid and the earth-chained.
Ashe poured himself an early tumbler of Talisker and typed his password into his Mac. Still flashing in a corner of the screen was that familiar greeting code:
OB_B5pearl.
He toyed with the mouse. What if he had already left for France when the message had arrived? He could be out of Lichfield in minutes. They’d probably never know.
OB_B5pearl.
He knew what it meant. A call from on high. An obligation. Tired of being at the beck and call of… someone, this was the fate of the man who knew something; he would never be left alone. To know is to be a marked man.
Ashe stared at the delete button. It grew and grew until it filled his mind’s eye. Delete and go! Delete and freedom. The angel was calling him.
‘Fuck it!’ said Ashe, out loud.
OB_B5pearl.
He double-clicked. The message was stark, boringly simple:
Saturday, noon.
Ashe sat back in his upright chair. Caught again. England expects… He sent a blank reply, deleted the message, swigged back the malt, looked at his watch and turned off the New Rising Sun.