I AM DRAGGED BACK towards morning by sleek sheets, a clean sense of spaciousness that cannot possibly be Oxford, and an anguished howling. My head buzzes, the light ripples. London, of course. London. The New Dorchester…
I fumble for my tablets on the bedside table as the sirens moan, then in the drawer beside it where beneath a Bible and complimentary New Dorchester pens and envelopes lies a card detailing WHAT TO DO IN CASE OF A FIRE OR AIR RAID. I’m blinking and rubbing my eyes at it when the door to my room swings open.
“Sorry about this, Brook.” Reeve-Ellis, already in his school tie and cardigan, leans swaying on the handle. He has PC T3308 in tow.
“Frightful cock-up on this of all days. You know what these bongo-bongo players are like—haven’t even heard of an air raid—probably think it’s the Great White God coming down to impregnate their daughters. Still, we’ve got them all going down the stairs now—even Father Phelan, which was no mean feat, the state that he’s in. So I thought I’d better look in on you as well, just to make sure you’ve got the message. There’s a good man. Just pop on that dressing gown…”
It’s pandemonium along the corridors. Half past seven in the morning and people are flapping by in odd assortments of clothing with pillow-creases on their cheeks, electrified hair. Most of them seem to be smiling, though. An air raid’s the sort of occasion that breaks down social barriers even at the New Dorchester, and no one believes it’s the real thing.
“Pretty chaotic, I’m afraid,” Reeve-Ellis steers me through the swirling roar of the crowded main atrium where hotel staff are holding up signs and arrows. “A lot easier if we go this way and find ourselves some peace and quiet.”
He, PC T3308 and I struggle against the flow until we reach an eddy beside the hotel souvenir shop where the crowds are thinner and another PC—K2910 according to his shoulder badge—is standing guard at the door marked NO ADMITTANCE that Reeve-Ellis led me into two days ago. PC K2910 follows us as we go in, then locks the door from the inside. The howl of the siren, the sound of people moving, suddenly grows faint. This early in the offices, there are no phones ringing, no typewriters clicking. But for the three men who are with me, I’m suddenly alone.
“Along here,” Reeve-Ellis says, shoving his hands into his cardigan pockets. PC T3308 strides ahead of me. PC K2910 keeps just behind. Their shoes squeak. They smell faintly of rubber. Reeve-Ellis holds opens the door with an EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY sign just past his office that leads to a damp and dimly-lit concrete tunnel. The door slams shut behind us, setting off ripples of echoes. Here, at last, the New Dorchester’s carpets and luxury give out. The passage begins to slope down. There’s a faint growling of some kind of motor. Water drips from tiny stalactites on the roof. The air smells gassy and damp. A chill runs down my neck.
We reach a gated lift, which PC K2910 drags shut, then activates with his keys, clanking us down past coils of pipework to some kind of railway platform, although this isn’t the normal Underground; the tunnel at each end is too small.
“Dreadfully uncomfortable, I’m afraid,” Reeve-Ellis says as an earthy breeze touches our faces and the rails begin to sing. “Temporary expedient, of course…”
An automatic train slides in, wheezing and clicking with all the vacant purpose of a toy, hauling a line of empty hoppers behind it. The final one has pull-down wooden seats, and a notice that someone has picked away at to read USE OF POST OFFICE NEL ONLY. PC K2910 hops in first, then helps Reeve-Ellis clamber over. I try taking a step back, wondering about possibilities of escape. PC T3308 bumps shoulders with me.
“Might as well just get in, sir,” he says, offering a large, nail-bitten hand.
Hunched in our toy train, we slide into the tunnel. I’m conscious of my slippered feet, my bare calves and ankles beneath the dressing gown, my gaping pyjamas, the huge sliding weight of the Thames that I imagine now lies above us. Our breath smokes, and is snatched away. Grey wires along the walls rise and fall, rise and fall. In what light there is, with me squashed on one side against Reeve-Ellis’s bony body, I study the two policemen who squat opposite me. PC T3308 is bigger and older, with the jowelled meaty face and body of an old-fashioned copper. PC K2910 is freckled, red-headed, thin; he seems too young, in fact, to be a policeman at all. Falling through my head in rhythm with the clicking rails, I can hear the cheery voice of some Look At Life commentator booming out over the one-and-nines. A new tunnel under London… Mail from Inverness and Calcutta… Parcels from Adelaide and Sutton Coldfield… Postal orders and love letters, saucy post cards, holiday photographs, birthdays and bits of wedding cake, car licences, good and bad news, hopeful competition entries, letters from the bank manager…
We disembark at another mail station, and travel upwards in another gated lift. Then, suddenly, the walls are almost new—fresh painted the same municipal green that once covered the walls of the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow, and somehow, as the bare overhead lights slide across it, scarred with similar marks and messages. PC T3308 grips my arm. There are doors leading into offices, but apart from the odd broken-legged chair, the place is empty, abandoned. We’re still deep underground.
“It’s in here,” sighs Reeve-Ellis, opening a door after PC K2910 has found the right key. He clicks on the light. There are three chairs and a desk, one battered four-drawer filing tin cabinet with tea or rust stains down the front. A pre-redesign map of the London Underground sags on rusty pins from the notice board. Fat pipes run across the ceiling.
PC K2910 shuts and then re-locks the door. PC T3308 widens his stance and folds his arms.
“You may as well sit down, Brook.” Reeve-Ellis points to the chair on the far side of the desk, facing out from the wall. It’s a standard tubular-frame thing, although old and stained, and I notice as my body settles into it and my shaking hands reach out to grip the armrests that it gives off a sour, unfortunate smell. The air is warm in here, almost swimmingly hot. The heat comes, I suspect, from those thick green-painted pipes spanning the ceiling. We must be near the boilers that service this seemingly empty building. I can sense—more a feeling than a sound, a grating hum that comes up through the floor into my slippered feet and ripples over my skin.
Reeve-Ellis clears his throat. Brushing the dust from the corner of the desk, he hitches at the knee-creases of his flannel trousers and sits down. “May as well get on,” he snaps at the two PCs.
“Whatever all of this is,” I say as PCs T3308 and K2910 exchange glances, “You should know that I’m a dying man. I’ve no close friends or relatives. I have terminal cancer—you can look it up in my NHS records. I have nothing to lose.”
“I’m afraid,” Reeve-Ellis says, “that it doesn’t work like that.” He tucks in his legs to let PC T3308 and PC K2910 past him.
“Right or left handed, sir?” asks older, burlier PC T3308; the one with the bitten nails, the big stevedore’s hands.
I look up at him, his thick head haloed by the bare-bulbed light. The gun and the truncheon and the handcuffs that hang from his belt look like sexual appendages. “I didn’t think this was the sort of thing the London Constabulary specialised in,” I say, and glance over at Reeve-Ellis, who’s watching from his perch at the far edge of the desk. “I always imagined this was all left to the KSG nowadays.”
PC T3308 rumbles a laugh. “We don’t need those fancy boys, sir. Piss-poor at anything, from what I’ve heard. Was it the right or left-handed that you said you were?”
“Come on,” Reeve-Ellis mutters, and reaches in the top pocket of his shirt. He offers me a pen. “Take this will you, old man?” Stupidly, I reach for it. “There you are. Right-handed. Most people are. Just a question of using a bit of intellect.”
PC T3308 blinks slowly. Unruffled, he leans across and lifts my right hand from the arm rest, splaying it palm-up at the edge of the desk. He sits down on it, his fat-trousered bottom pushed virtually in my face. I can’t see them now, but I can feel my fingers dangling in the cool air beyond the edge of the desk. Even with the pressure he’s now applying, it’s hard to keep them still.
I hear the rasp of a belt buckle. Something jingles. A raised truncheon appears above PC T3308’s head, and I glance over at Reeve-Ellis; but he’s looking away now, pruning his nails. I imagine that they’ll start asking me questions at any moment, long before they actually do anything, now that the threat of violence has clearly been made.
“If this is—” I begin just as, with small a grunt of effort, PC K2910 brings the truncheon down across the fingers of my right hand.
The world shivers and breaks apart for an amazed moment, then re-forms in jagged pain.
Alone now, I can hear Reeve-Ellis’s voice as he talks to someone on the telephone in a nearby room. The bell bings. He dials again. Yes. No. Not yet. Just as you say… I can tell from the sound of his voice that he’s speaking to a superior.
I’m cradling my right hand. It’s the most precious thing in the entire world. My index finger is bent back at approximately 45 degrees just above the first joint, and it’s swelling and discolouring as I watch. The first and middle fingers are swelling rapidly too, although they could simply be torn and bruised rather than broken.
This is terrible—as bad as I could have imagined. Yet I’ve known pain before. I broke my wrist once after slipping on the tiles in embarrassing circumstances in the Gents’ in a pub in Banbury. And I’ve had plenty of opportunity lately to get more used to pain. The thing about torture isn’t the pain, I decide between bouts of shivering. It’s the simple sense of wrongness.
The keys jingle. Reeve-Ellis and the two PCs re-enter the room. They smell faintly rainy—of cigarettes and tea and London traffic and ordinary mornings. Reeve-Ellis rakes a chair towards the desk.
“I won’t piss you about, Brook,” he says. “I’m no expert, anyway, at this kind of thing. Thanks to you, I and my two friends here have to practise this grisly art whilst some jumped-up AS from Marsham Street takes over my office on temporary and geographical promotion.”
“I can’t say you have my sympathy.”
“Be that as it may…”
PC K2910 extracts his note pad and pencil. With that freckled narrow face of his, he still looks far too young. PC T3308 leans back against the wall and nibbles at his nails. A sick tremor runs though me.
“Perhaps you could begin,” Reeve-Ellis continues, “by telling us exactly why you’re here. What all of this is about…”
“I don’t see how I can tell you when I don’t have any idea. You brought me here. I’m supposed to be an honoured guest, and then you…”
But almost before I’ve started, Reeve-Ellis is getting up from his chair, sighing in weary irritation. He’s nodding to PC K2910 to find the keys to let him out of the room again. Once he’s gone, the two PC’s glance at each other, and come around to me from opposite sides of the desk. Their hook their hands beneath my armpits.
“If you’ll just stand up, sir.”
I try to grab the chair’s armrest, but it slides from under me and the fingers of my right hand catch on the belt of my dressing gown. The world greys for a moment, then I’m standing upright and the PCs are moving me towards the old grey filing cabinet in the corner of the room. In a grunting ballet, PC K2910 bends to slide open the top drawer. I feel the agonising pull of my tendons as they straighten out my right arm and hold my hand over the open drawer as PC T3308 raises his boot and kicks it shut.
“These things have a pattern,” Reeve-Ellis says, sitting in front of me again. “You have to accept that, Brook. And it’s always effective, although I’m sure that to you it appears crude. But what you must realise is that there’s only one outcome. Which is you telling me everything.”
Weeping, gently rocking in my chair, I stare back at his blurred shape.
“So now that I’ve been honest with you, Brook, perhaps you could be honest with me.” A soft click, and there on the table, although stretched and blotched to my eyes as if in some decadent non-realist painting, lies the pistol, the Webley Bulldog gun.
“If you could just tell me how and why you got this thing, and what it was doing in your suitcase at the New Dorchester.”
“It’s a relic,” I say. “It belonged to a friend of mine who died in the War.”
“Can you tell me his name?”
I hesitate. A billow of black agony enfolds me. “Francis Eveleigh. As I say, he’s dead.”
“Where did he live?”
I tell him the name of the street in Lichfield, and then—what could it matter now?—that of Francis’s parents’s house in Louth. “It came back with his effects when he died at the Somme in 1916,” I add. “I have no idea how he got hold of it.”
“And the bullets?”
“They came with the effects as well.”
“They’re not standard Army issue.” Reeve-Ellis strokes his chin. “But I know how chaotic it was over there. So it all came to you, this gun, these bullets, as a memento of this Eveleigh fellow?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve kept them with you ever since?”
“Yes.”
“Ever used the gun?”
“No… Well, a couple of times. I wanted to make sure that it still worked.”
“Did it?”
“I’m no expert. It seemed to fire.”
“I see. And what did you intend to do with it?”
“What do you think?”
Reeve-Ellis frowns. “I thought we’d got past that stage, old man.”
“I intended to kill John Arthur.”
Reeve-Ellis nods. He seems unimpressed. Behind him, PC K2910 frowns, licks his pencil, makes a note. Somewhere, a phone is ringing.
“It was Christlow,” I say, “wasn’t it?”
“Who?”
“Christlow, my scout. He told you about the gun.”
“I don’t see that that matters.”
“You don’t deny it?”
“We seem to be forgetting here exactly who is asking the questions.” Reeve-Ellis smiles. I sense that the two PCs behind him are loosening their stance. Perhaps all this will soon be ending.
“And to recap—the ammunition?”
“What?”
“The bullets—the ammunition. Where did you say you got them?”
“They came with it…” I take a breath. The swollen lump that was my hand is a blazing sun. I am just its circling planet. “With the gun.”
“With the gun?”
“With the gun.” I swallow. “Although I can’t see that it matters now. You know what I planned to do, and all the rest of it was all a long time ago. You can see that, can’t you?”
Reeve-Ellis is slowly shaking his head. “I’m sorry, old man, but that really won’t do.”
“I told you at the start that I have nothing to lose. Why do you think I planned to kill John Arthur? Why do you think I brought the gun?”
“There’s really little point in my bothering unless you can do better than this…” Reeve-Ellis stands up. “I’m sorry.”
I nod and drowse in and out of some terrible dream. There are more questions, the nightmare of the filing cabinet again. Pain’s a strange thing. There are moments when it seems there has never been anything else in the whole universe, and others when it lies almost outside you. I think of Christ on his cross, of Torquemada and Matthew Hopkins. All those lives. And even now. Even now. To the same old gods and the new secular ones. In Japan. In Spain. In Russia. In Britain. I’m not lost at all. Not alone. A million twisted ghosts are with me.
I flinch as the lock slides and the door opens. Alone this time, Reeve-Ellis sits down.
“I was once John Arthur’s lover,” I swallow back a lump of vomit, trying hard not to cough. “I bet you didn’t know that? I was his lover…”
Reeve-Ellis frowns at me. A loose scab breaks open as the flesh on my hand parts and widens. The sensation is quite disgusting. A fresh dribble of blood patters the floor.
“I was asked to show you these,” he says, laying out a brown manila envelope.
“I can’t imagine that there’s anything…” I gasp. “…Sufficiently compromising…” I’d almost laugh at the idea if doing so wasn’t excruciating.
“It’s not that,” he says, almost angrily.
I do my best to focus as Reeve-Ellis opens the envelope up and slides four photographs out. He swivels them around and lines them up on the desk before me like playing cards, grainy enlargements of four faces and upper bodies, all apparently naked. Three are white-lit against a white cloth background; the fourth—a man, I realise when I’ve sorted out the approximate details of these gaunt, near-bald, blotched and virtually sexless figures—is standing against a wall. They are each holding in spider-thin hands a longer version of the kind of slot-in numbers that churches use for hymns, although these numbers are longer, dotted by brackets and sub-divisions: a tribute to the power of bureaucracy. My vision blurs. A large part of me doesn’t want to recognise these people.
“How do I know,” I say, “that they’re still alive?”
“You don’t.”
I gaze back at the photographs. Eyes that fix the camera without seeing, as if they can fill up with so many sights that light is no longer absorbed. My acquaintance, he looks younger, older, beyond time, with the thin bridge of his nose, the ridges of his cheeks, the taut drum-like skin, the sores. His wife, his children, are elfin, fairy people, blasted through into nothingness by the light that pours around them. Barely there at all…
“These people—”
“—I was just asked to show you, Brook. I don’t know who they are, what they mean to you. Their names…”
The lock on the door slides back. Both PCs stand close to the wall without a word, watching me and Reeve-Ellis.
“Are you proud of this?” I say to them all. “Is this how you wanted it to be in the Summer Isles?”
“The where?” Reeve-Ellis looks weary, defensive, frustrated. In spite of everything, I still have this feverish sense that there’s some part of the equation of what’s happening here that I haven’t yet glimpsed.
“They’re dead anyway, aren’t they—this family?” I say. “I don’t understand you people. Even if I could save them, where would they go, how would they live—what kind of life?”
Reeve-Ellis shakes his head. “Just concentrate on telling us everything, old man. Who knows what might happen then—who you might be able to help. Don’t worry about thinking you can shield someone. Don’t worry about betrayal. Believe me, all of that’s in the past. Your plans and your schemes, the simple life you probably thought you were living. Do you really think you could get even this close to John Arthur with a pistol unless someone wanted you to? Still, it must have been fun while it lasted, playing your stupid little game.”
He picks up the photos, taps them together and slides them back into the envelope. PCs T3308 and K2910 move towards me, grip me beneath my arms and bear me up once again, towards the filing cabinet.
In the end, it’s the pain. When all’s said and done, our bodies are selfish creatures, and they control our minds. Forget love. Forget loyalty. Forget hope. Forget the dream. Remember pain.
When I’ve told them more than I imagined I ever knew. When I’ve told them about Walter Bracken and about Ursula. When I’ve told them, yes, about Francis Eveleigh and about my acquaintance and about poor Larry Black at the Crown and Cushion and Ernie Svendsen who deserves it anyway and all the children I used to teach at Lichfield Grammar who I know are grown up by now and culpable as all we British are yet at the same time totally blameless. When I’ve told them about that time in the twenties when I saw Francis Eveleigh again at the Cottage Spring except he was now really John Arthur, and about the stupid, stupid joke of tomorrow being the fifteenth anniversary of that day. When I’ve told them everything, I’m suddenly aware of the sticky creak of the chair I’m still tied in, and of the waiting emptiness that seems to flood around me. It’s still too hot in here, although I’m shaking with cold. The pipes are humming. And I’m flying through everything, right down into the earth’s core and the grinding, meshing heart of history.
“Well…” Reeve-Ellis says eventually. His arms are folded. His legs are stretched out. He’s sitting well back from the desk and the mess I’ve made. “I suppose we had to get there eventually.” He glances back at PC K2910. “Did you get most of that?”
PC K2910 nods. His face is paler than ever now; the freckles are like drops of blood.
“Then give me that notebook.”
Reeve-Ellis takes it from PC K2910. The way he stuffs it into his pocket, I know he’s going to destroy it as soon as they’ve finished with me.
“Well—you know what to do.”
PC K2910 fumbles with the keys. PC T3308’s staring at me, a half-smoked cigarette behind his ear. He looks like a family man, and I can see him now with his own chair nearest the telly and the fire in a nice police house in Ealing, and taking his eldest lad to watch Spurs when they’re playing at home. I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for all of them.
The two PCs come around both sides of the desk. They’re careful this time as they loosen the ties. They lift me up almost gently. Reeve-Ellis steps back into the corridor as they drag me out.
“Might as well try using your legs, sir. You’ll find it’ll be easier.”
Amazingly, my limbs do still work as we stagger along the corridor in what seems like the opposite direction to that from which we came. But that was an age ago and I can no longer be sure of anything. We find the stairs, and my body is still surprisingly functional as I shuffle up them one at time. We come to doors marked MAINTENANCE ONLY, and PC K2910 fiddles with the bolts, swinging them open into a shock of London night air. I can hear the murmur of traffic as PC T3308 hooks his hand around my left arm and leads me into the darkness, but the sound is distant, shielded on all sides by brick and glass and concrete. This is one of those ugly shaft-like courtyards that architects design to let light into the centre of large buildings. The distant patch of sky is the same shape and colour as a cooling television screen—there’s even one small dot-like star in the middle. I’d always imagined that my life would end in a prettier place. A remote clearing in some wood in the Home counties, the cry of a fox and the smell of leaves and moss…
I glance back. Reeve-Ellis stands in the lighted doorway, hands stuffed into his old cardigan as he leans against the frame. It really is quiet here, although it’s probably past midnight in London by now. The whole of this pre-Trafalgar Day, and the celebratory service I was expecting to attend at Westminster Abbey, has gone past me. A faint, bad smell comes up from the central drain that the concrete slopes to.
PC T3308 lets go of me and I sag to my knees, still struggling to protect the precious burden of my hand. He nods to PC K2910 and reaches to release the flap of his holster. The leather creaks slightly. Somewhere, faintly, dimly, deep within the offices, a phone is ringing. His breathing quickens.
“I’m sorry about all this, sir. If I had any say in these things…”
PC K2910 is backing off. Somewhere, the phone is still ringing.
“Wait!” Reeve-Ellis calls across the courtyard.
The two PCs stand as he disappears whilst I hunch between them. The night falls apart, pulses, regathers. From somewhere, I can hear the scream of a whistle, the clattering wheels of a train. Eventually, the phone stops ringing and I stare down at the stains around the drain and breathe the rotten air that it and my own body are making, trying to wish away this moment, this pain. The train whistle screams again. I think of a rocking sleeper carriage. A man’s arms around me, his lips against mine. The gorgeous, shameless openness…
I hear the sound of Reeve-Ellis’s footsteps. The thin lines of his body re-shape against the bright doorway.
“There’s been,” he says, “a change of plan…”
Reeve-Ellis drives a Triumph Imperial, a big old car from the pre-Modernist early thirties with rusty wings and a vegetable smell inside given off by the cracked leather seats. It creaks and rattles as he drives, indicating fitfully, jerking from side to side along the night-empty London streets. He’s found me an old jacket to put over my shoulders, a doggy-haired tartan blanket to put across my legs. He got PC K2910 and T3308 to clean me up in the toilets of that deserted office before sending them home, although I’m still hardly presentable.
“Who was that phone call from?”
“After what you’ve been through, old man…” He says, stabbing at the brake as a taxi pushes ahead of us from a junction. “You really don’t want to know. Believe me. Just count yourself as bloody lucky…”
I get a glimpse of my face reflected in the windscreen. Red-eyed, shining with a cold sweat in the passing windows of the big shops along Oxford Street. I sway against the car door as he takes a corner too rapidly, the tyres squealing, and pain sweeps over me and London dims.
Reeve-Ellis finally parks his Triumph at the back of a clump of large buildings with flaking Regency windows, then climbs out and opens my door and waits for me to struggle out, clearly irritated by his new role as chauffeur. Viper’s nests of piping curl overhead. There are many dustbins. Steel tanks. The parched smell of incinerators.
He leads me through sheet-rubber swing doors into a long corridor where people are rushing, white on white in breezes of laundry starch and Dettol. He barks at a staff nurse. Clearly busy, she swivels to face him, ready to shout back until she sees the gold identity card he’s holding. Then I’m found a wheelchair, and borne into the presence of a doctor in what I suppose must be one of the London teaching hospitals. The doctor’s manner as he examines me is brisk and irritated. He explores my hand, my arm, without bothering to meet my eyes, and listens to my heart and lungs, then asks if I’m not under treatment already. Reeve-Ellis sits amid the kidney bowls on a corner table. Outside, I can hear the rumble of trolleys, the chatter of nurses, raised, angry voices. Life is, after all, still going on.
“You know how busy we are,” the doctor mutters. “Half the drunks in London have celebrated Trafalgar Day a day early…”
“Just get a move on,” Reeve-Ellis says, checking his watch. “There’s a good man. We need to be out of here. You can save the Hippocratic rubbish for someone else.”
Two extra nurses are summoned to hold me as the doctor unravels a gauze and prepares to set my fingers. One of them clicks her tongue as, gasping and sobbing, I sink to the floor and try to crawl away. “You men!” she chuckles, gathering me up as easily as a heap of laundry. “You’re all the same! You’ve got such a low threshold of pain…” The mole in her cheek is dotted with tiny dark hairs. I do my best to count them in the moment before the bandages whisper and the light on the ceiling pours down and through me.
It’s nearly dawn when Reeve-Ellis drives me back through London from the hospital. The street lights are fading and milkmen are leading their wagons from the dairy whilst vans and handcarts head towards Covent Garden, Smithfield and Billingsgate. A few night-time revellers wander home, trailing mists of silk, cigarette smoke, laughter. The brightening sky shines greyish-pink on the Thames as we cross Westminster Bridge and I swallow another of the new thicker tablets I’ve been given. They taste bitter. Sweet.
At the New Dorchester, the remnants of a fancy dress party are lingering. A Black Knight is clanking around in the remains of his armour whilst Robin Hood is arguing mildly about some aspect of room service with Reception. A body-stockinged Lady Godiva sleeps against Henry VIII’s shoulder on the stairs. They all glance at Reeve-Ellis and me without surprise as we move towards the lift. We fit in here, Reeve-Ellis and I. He’s come as what he is, and I’m a War veteran—or some symbol of the NHS—with my sling, my gaunt face, my hospital gown. Or perhaps I’m the last guest at The Masque Of The Red Death.
Reeve-Ellis punches the button for the lift. Instantly, it slides open.
“The message,” he says as the lighted numbers rise, “is that you carry on as before.”
“What?”
“Today, old man, you still get to see John Arthur…”
We arrive at my floor. He follows me to my room. The lights come on—far too bright—as he closes the door. The bed has been made and Tony Anderson’s half bottle of Bells has been put back in the cabinet, but otherwise nothing has changed since I left here a day ago. The nymphs still cavort across the ceiling. Saint George is at prayer in his forest.
“Get some rest,” Reeve-Ellis advises as he stands in the doorway and I wonder as the world spins if I shouldn’t spit at him, claw at his eyes. “Watch the parades on television. I’ll make sure that someone sees you’re sorted in time…”
“Those people—the photographs you showed me.”
“I don’t know.”
“And what about you?”
“Me?”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Of what, old man?”
I gesture wildly about me, nearly falling. “Hell.”
“If there is a hell,” Reeve-Ellis says, reaching to grasp the handle of the door, “you and me, old man—we’d probably hardly notice the difference.” Then he closes the door, leaving me alone once again in my plush room here at the New Dorchester. My wristwatch on the bedside table has stopped ticking, but the electric clock on the wall tells me it’s just after six in the morning. I press the button that makes the balcony curtains open. Dawn light from the Thames ripples and flashes.
I make the effort to slide back the wardrobe doors with my left hand and check my suitcase. The scent of my rooms wafts from inside. Everything has been left so neatly that it’s almost a surprise to find that the pistol is missing. I take another of my new tablets and study the label on the bottle to compare them with my old ones. The handwriting is indecipherable, but how would my body react if I took both together? Six of each, perhaps, or ten? A round dozen of the older, smaller ones—if I could get the screw cap off? Would that be enough to do it? And the little anti-inflammatories, I could take a handful of those, too. The label says you should take them after meals, so they must be bad for your stomach. On the other hand, I really can’t face the idea of any more pain…
I gaze at the stained glass frieze of Saint George. There’s dragon’s blood, I notice now, on his praying gauntleted hands. I’ve been left alone—so perhaps they’re expecting this of me; a bid at suicide. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been given these tablets, and they’re simply watching to make sure that I make a proper job of it. But wouldn’t they have killed me already? Do they want me dead, alive, or stuffed and framed like some grisly hunting trophy when I’m presented to John Arthur? I’m still holding the new bottle. I throw it across the room with my clumsy left hand. Somehow, raining tablets as it describes a slow arc, it actually hits the stained glass frieze. But it bounces off with a dull clunk, nothing is broken, and the pain caused by the sudden excess of movement falls like a sledgehammer on my right hand.
Weeping, I scuttle across the floor, picking up tablets. Then I ease myself flat onto the bed, which is the only possible way I can lie with this sling. Beyond my windows, a barge sounds its horn and lozenges of light ripple and dance with the nymphs on the ceiling. Big Ben sounds the fall of another hour. I’d press the button on the headboard that makes the doors slide back, were I able to reach it from here. I’d like to smell the Thames on what feels like this last of all days; I’d love to hear it innocently lapping.
I think of clouds over the sheep-dotted Cotswold hills, dissolving into rain, forming springs and streams, then rivers with fairy-tale names like Windrush and Evenlode that swell and meet until, brown and wide, dipped by willow branches, punt-poles and the beaks of wading birds, twirling beer-bottles, dead leaves and blossom, hissing over weirs past the mouths of factories, the Thames finally reaches Oxford. There, as it passes beneath Osney Bridge and Aldgates, it is briefly called the Isis in honour of some forgotten Latin pun before it hurries on. Here in London, it has fostered trade, cholera, prosperity and the muse of a thousand poets. There were bonfires upon it in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, so hard did it freeze…
I see myself in front of a class of students, speaking these words. Francis Eveleigh is there—he’s a young boy, no more than ten, and for some reason his arm is in a sling. And Cumbernald, and Christlow, and Reeve-Ellis, and Walter and Ursula Bracken and my acquaintance and the many other faces that have filled my life are there also. I smile down at them as they sit with their scabbed elbows and knees, their grubbily cherubic faces and their whole lives an unspoilt territory before them. Mischief and the looming playtime are forgotten for a while as they listen. For once, my words carry us on together. I’m a teacher, I want to tell them through the tears that threaten to engulf me. That’s all I’ve ever been. These are my only moments of greatness. So listen, just listen. All I want to do is to tell you one last tale…