Forty-Four

Harry was worried about Lin.

When he had woken at eight, there was no other sound in the flat and, after pottering about in the kitchen making coffee, while trying to be quiet, he had eventually tapped on her door. When there was no reply, he had opened it a little way and peered in, to see Lin still asleep. He went back into the kitchen and made her a cup of herbal tea. She stirred as he put the cup down beside her and tapped her on the shoulder.

Yet she was still asleep an hour later. Fully dressed now, he paced the floor for a while. At ten he knocked on her bedroom door again, and was rewarded with a sleepy response.

‘Ten o’clock,’ he said.

‘Ok,’ she murmured.

She came out of the room wrapped in his old dressing gown, voluminous on her, its raggy white towelling dragging at her heels. He had made fresh tea and toast, and laid it on a table in front of the window.

‘I had the strangest dream,’ she said, sitting down.

‘What about?’

‘Ruth …’

‘Ruth doing what?’

She frowned. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘How are you feeling this morning?’

‘Exhausted,’ she said, half smiling, half grimacing, ‘as you probably gathered.’

They ate and drank in silence for a few minutes, while boats ploughed up and down the choppy grey river outside, and the morning traffic threaded a line along the far bank.

‘Have you thought more about it?’ Harry asked eventually.

‘About what?’

‘Doing this programme today?’

She replaced her cup in the saucer. ‘I’m still going to do it, Harry.’ When he opened his mouth to object, she raised her hand with an expression of annoyance. ‘Don’t let’s go into it all again. I have to do it.’

‘There’s no have to about it.’

‘There is.’

Impasse.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘even if you do see these things, hear these things, proving it isn’t your responsibility.’

‘It is,’ she insisted. ‘But I don’t expect you to understand.’

‘I don’t,’ he admitted.

‘You’re very much a pragmatist, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘What you see is what you get.’

‘No,’ he replied, ‘I like to think I’m open-minded.’

She smiled, leaned back, and put her hand to her head. She traced a finger across her forehead, as if rubbing away an imaginary line.

‘Then you must accept—at least the possibility—that there’s more to the world than the things you can see,’ she said.

Harry leaned forward. ‘And this is now your personal mission?’

She started to reply, then stopped. Her hand flew back to her forehead.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Theo,’ she said.

‘Do you want to ring Kieran?’

‘Can I?’

She went to the phone and rang the Priory.

When there was no reply, she next phoned the university. Then Kieran’s mobile, which rang and rang interminably, but was not answered.

‘Not there,’ she murmured. She paused, frowning out at the river. ‘When I finish this programme,’ she said, ‘would you drive me home?’

‘Of course,’ Harry said.

She turned to him, and gave him a fleeting kiss on the cheek. ‘I’m going to get dressed now,’ she said.

They were met at the door of the television centre by a very young girl with a very anxious expression.

‘Mrs Gallagher?’ she asked, holding out her hand. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine, thank you. This is Harry Marks, my agent.’

The girl smiled. ‘I’m Lulu. Lulu Friedman.’

‘Shout,’ said Lin.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Shout. To Sir With Love. No … never mind. Silly joke. Lulu is a singer.’

‘Yes,’ the girl said warily. ‘I know.’ She pointed across the echoing foyer towards the lifts. ‘Shall we …?’

‘Fine,’ Lin murmured.

Harry raised his eyebrows at her as they crossed the foyer.

‘I’m a tremendous fan of your work,’ Lulu said. ‘You write scripts for your husband? It’s a fantastic series. We all absolutely love it.’

‘Thanks,’ Lin said.

‘Ever such a lot of research and stuff.’

‘Yes,’ Lin agreed, ‘a lot of that stuff.’

They were now standing at the doors of the lifts. Lulu apparently did not possess the ability to stand still. Blonde, small and excruciatingly thin, she wore a pair of dark glasses perched in her bleached, spiky hair. She constantly shifted her weight from one foot to the other, like a dancer warming up backstage.

‘Of course, you’ll be used to it all,’ Lulu said, ‘all this fussing about. The magic of TV! Have you met Robbie? He’s marvellous. So good to his staff. We’re just devoted. You have to be devoted, don’t you? That’s the way shows stick together.’

The lift arrived. Lin stepped in, amused at this breathless team spirit. ‘Have you worked here long?’ she asked.

‘Six months. I did Party Dogs before that. With Gabrielle Choux, eleven on Fridays?’

‘Oh yes,’ Lin said.

‘A scream.’

The lift doors closed.

Lin momentarily closed her eyes. Her retention of events seemed to be getting fragmentary. She did not remember the taxi journey, except for the glass partition behind the driver, which did not quite close; she did not remember lunch, although she recalled the decoration on the plate, and seeing Harry’s small, square hand around a cup. The rest of the day was somehow drowned.

But Theo’s face, seemingly asleep and peaceful, would not go away.

‘Have you ever met Robert?’ Lulu asked.

Lin opened her eyes. ‘Robert?’

‘Robbie England.’

‘Oh … No, I haven’t.’

‘He doesn’t meet people before a show—you realize that? He likes to meet them just on camera. He says it’s fresher that way, OK?’

‘Yes. That’s OK.’

‘I’ll pop you in make-up, then take you on down to hospitality. I’ll be staying with you all through.’

‘That isn’t necessary,’ Harry said. The girl’s voice was grating on him.

‘It’s a house rule—no problem. We stay with our people.’

She was tapping on the lift’s steel doorplate, her nails skirting the button for each floor as they proceeded upwards.

‘Restoration,’ murmured a voice.

Not now, Lin thought.

‘Floor three,’ Lulu announced. ‘I ought to walk it, but I never do.’ She looked over at Lin. ‘Did you drive up all the way from Dorset today?’

‘No.’ Lin put her hand against her temple briefly. Pain had begun to throb across the left side of her head, down her jaw and into her neck. Her ears and hairline and cheek hurt acutely, blindingly, like a white-hot brand being applied there. Overhead, the ceiling light of the lift fuzzed and flashed once.

Lin could see pictures of clock faces. They were laid out on a smooth-topped bench. She tried to squeeze the image away.

The lift stopped.

‘Are we there?’ the girl asked herself, puzzled. She was staring at the floor indicator. Floors two and three were lit simultaneously. ‘Oh, shit,’ she said.

The twin dials of the clock were huge … fitted into a building, a church … twin dials facing west and east respectively … Two dials, both blue with gold Roman numerals. The church was located on a busy street—a shopping street—with two modern doors that opened on sliding runners. Lin thought of Cypriot churches, Greek churches. Once, in Greece, she had seen afternoon prayers conducted in what looked like an open shop-front, curtained, centrally lit, the front wall full of icons … but that was not it. This was not a memory of her own.

Time goes out. Time goes out in ripples.

Under the floor of the lift, the shaft plunged down forty feet into silt and gravel. That’s all it was … silt and gravel where the river had once flowed. Now the water was pushed back into a narrow channel, choked by centuries of its own sand. The gravel lay in thin lenses. Four thousand men had brought the original road from Richborough to the banks of the Thames. It ran … west of here …

Mark Werth was thinking of someone, a man … he was thinking out his problem. He was writing it down. He was using a keyboard: dystonic posturing in epilepsy. He was working in the hospital suite, with his desk turned so that the last faint, dark-gold sun, so dark it was thundery, splashed with dark blue clouds, wouldn’t reflect on his computer screen, and he had brought up a document on screen … ipsilateral head turn … ipsilateral, contralateral …

She jolted, and her eyes opened and widened.

Werth was in Kieran’s mind. And so was Theo.

The girl next to her was thumping the control panel. ‘Come on, for God’s sake,’ she said. She turned and looked at Lin. ‘I hope you aren’t claustrophobic.’

Consciously and with a great effort, Lin shut down the roaring screens in her mind, where pictures leapt in high colour: road sections, graphs, clocks. There was something linking this girl with clocks, perhaps her father, perhaps a brother, someone in her past that she had purposely put on one side, shuttering the past behind the present, where it clattered behind the barrier, constantly threatening to undermine her. The hands on those clocks were intimately linked with this same girl’s hands … Lin pressed and pushed at the words and images, the hands on the dials, the shade of blue, the colour of the river before the silt, the anxiety bridging Werth and Kieran like a brick band, clumsy, heavy to handle … she crushed them flat. Flat, silent. The confined space of the lift interior came flexing back like a thick, textural colour photocopy that had been rolled into a tight tube and then released. The girl was staring at her.

The lift jolted.

Lulu looked away.

‘Thank Christ for that,’ she muttered.

The show began at eight.

In the hospital, a hundred miles away, Kieran had not left Theo’s side.

Theo had suffered a hairline skull fracture. Kieran had been told it was not serious and that Theo would make a full recovery. But his son hadn’t woken at all so far.

‘It’s a kind of healing,’ the nurse had advised him. ‘Don’t worry. Go home for a little while, and rest.’

But Kieran refused to go.

He had left Theo once too often. He would see him through this, no matter how long it took. He thought of ringing Lin, but didn’t know what to say to her. Once Theo came round, he told Edith, who was also still there, he would drive up to London and tell her face to face. In Lin’s condition and state of mind, he was frightened of breaking such news to her over the phone. He wanted to be there to make sure she travelled back home with him at once.

He had spent an hour with the police, going over and over the sequence of events involving Ruth. When asked why she had jumped, he had to tell them he didn’t know. Because of him? Surely not just that. Work? Not that either. There was something else, some inner death.

Late in the afternoon, Kieran fell asleep, his head slumping onto Theo’s bed, his arms crossed in front of him serving as a pillow. He dozed fitfully, dreamlessly, the sleep of exhaustion, until he was woken by a sensation on his arm.

He raised his head to see Theo’s fingers tightening around his wrist—and the little boy’s eyes open, staring straight into his.

Lin stood in a corridor waiting to be called.

It was the wrong place to be, but she felt uneasy in the green room. She had walked out into the corridor, and gazed for some time at the river and streets, then turned away from the windows and paced the long passage. Eventually she headed downstairs, using a service stairway this time. Lulu followed her like a miserable child, cheated of her moment of being depended on. Before their turn in front of the cameras, most other guests did all but cling to her arm, whimpering. ‘There’s really nothing down here. This isn’t the right way. This is all film crew,’ she moaned.

‘I only want to watch them,’ Lin said.

‘It isn’t allowed.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Lin said.

Lulu dropped behind her, muttering, ‘Bloody hell.’ She had unhooked the small mobile from her board and began punching keys.

Lin had stopped outside the studio doors. She could hear the audience laughing inside. Robbie England had a full orchestra, a double set, an audience of two hundred, the biggest studio. And somewhere out there, beyond the hotly lit stage and the tiers of seats and the surrounding dark, were sixteen million viewers, recently increased by virtue of England’s own much-publicized divorce and his remarriage to a girl of eighteen. Lin tried to hear his voice.

‘Lin!’ someone called. She turned.

It was Harry, holding out a phone to her.

‘It’s Kieran,’ he said.

She looked at it, torn with indecision.

‘Tell him you can’t find me,’ she murmured.

‘I can’t do that,’ Harry replied. ‘I’ve told him where we are. He says it’s urgent.’

She took the phone reluctantly, and put it to her ear.

‘Lin,’ Kieran said. ‘Lin?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Thank God. Harry just rang me to say you’re still doing England’s show. Listen, you mustn’t do it because …’

She shook her head, and handed the phone back to Harry.

Kieran realized that she had disconnected, and he cursed.

‘Isn’t she there?’ Edith asked.

He turned, and put his arm around her shoulder. ‘She won’t talk to me. I’ll have to drive up to London.’

Edith frowned. ‘Be driven, you mean,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay here with Theo.’

‘Thanks. OK—be driven.’ He started dialling on the mobile again.

‘And what are you going to tell Lin when you see her?’ Edith asked.

‘Besides about Theo?’

‘Besides Theo.’

Kieran smiled at her. ‘That I believe her, of course.’