Omega

ONE

The room was painted a duck-egg green. I lay in a dim light, in a wrought iron bed that was not a modern fashionable type but one of authentic age. My head was raised on a series of pillows with starchy covers. There was the smell of something sooty.

I risked a slight movement of the head, and felt a wave of pain worse than any headache. But it ebbed and I was able to inch myself up from the pillow.

A crimson patchwork quilt lay across the bed. Beyond the foot of the bed was a mirrored dresser on which a tasselled table lamp gave off a dull orange glow. The room looked utilitarian, but the furniture gave it a cosy feel. A computer sat on a drop-leaf table beside the door. It was not switched on, and someone had hung a crocheted doily over its screen. Next to the dresser an area of wall had been hacked out to make a fireplace where coals were burning low in a cast iron grate. Its bricked-in surrounds were crudely finished.

Had I been taken out of hospital? If so, to where? The room was quite unfamiliar to me, though in my drowsy state this didn’t bother me unduly.

The door opened, casting a swathe of brighter light into the room. A squat middle aged woman in a floral dress and black cardigan entered. She came to the bed and, seeing that I was awake, said, “There is water here for your thirst.”

She spoke gruffly, her English heavily accented. I tried to speak, failed.

She filled a tumbler from a glass pitcher on the bedside table, put one hand behind my back and sat me upright. Blood swirled in my head. When my vision cleared I saw that she was holding the tumbler in front of my mouth. She was stocky and swarthy and smelt of mothballs and stale sweat. Her dark eyes regarded me incuriously from what I found myself thinking was a peasant’s face.

I gulped like a child, the water dribbling down my chin. Finally she laid me back on the pillow and swabbed my chin with a scrap of cloth from her cardigan pocket.

“There, there,” she said, giving a gap-toothed smile. “That will be better, yes?”

For a long time after she was gone I just lay there, registering the unfamiliar surroundings with a kind of bleary curiosity. I began to make small movements, growing bolder when none provoked a renewed spasm of head pain. I threw back the covers. Swung my feet down to the floor. Slowly, very slowly, levered myself up until I was standing.

A dull throbbing in the head, nothing more. I glimpsed my nakedness in the mirror as I crossed the room to the window. I began cranking a handle to raise the blind.

Outside it was dark. No street lamps shone and there were no lights in any of the windows of the shadowy buildings visible across a snow-covered square. They were squat concrete fortresses of slit windows and angular walls, their roofs topped with radar dishes, artillery and missile emplacements. I knew them to be just the surface structures of an extensive underground complex housing all the administrative functions of the state. This was Westminster, the heart of a London I’d never seen before.

And I was in one such building myself, several floors above ground. A fleeting memory came of flying low over the city at night: I’d looked down on the coiled milky band of the frozen Thames, with dark lines of roads and clusters of buildings stretching away on either side. There were extensive areas of mottled whiteness between them. The city’s broken panorama was like a study in monochrome, a photographic negative of something that was familiar yet unfamiliar.

A dim reflection faced me in the window glass. It wasn’t me—not quite. A slimmer, harder-edged version of myself, with cropped hair and a more upright stance. An alter ego, staring back like a not-quite-identical twin.

I heard footsteps outside the room, felt my legs beginning to give way. Somehow I managed to get back to the bed, burying myself under the quilt, letting sleep wash over me like a benedicon.

TWO

All that night I dreamt that I kept waking to find myself lying in a modern hospital room, a monitor blinking off to my left. I was propped up under crisp cotton sheets, left alone in the suffocating sterile warmth. It was a fever sleep filled with confusion. At various times I saw two quite distinct women. The first, seated beside the door in the hospital room, was the same age as myself, dark auburn hair framing a sensuous and intelligent face. I couldn’t recall her name, though I knew we had once been lovers. At other times I was back in the green room, attended by a younger woman, sallow skinned and gamin, her black hair tied back in a ponytail. When I woke fully again I was in the wrought iron bed and a man in a white coat was standing beside me.

“Good morning,” he said. “Would you like some breakfast?”

A noise escaped my throat, something between a cough and a clearing of the throat.

“What time is it?”

This was an odd question under the circumstances, but it hadn’t really come from me. The voice was different from my own, huskier, with a stronger Welsh accent.

“Just after eight,” he said. “I’d suggest something light. Some cereal or toast. I’m Tyler, by the way. Sir Gruffydd consigned you to my tender mercies.”

He meant my other self’s uncle. I had an image of a florid, white-haired man in his seventies. A field marshal with a long record of service. His name was spelt in the Welsh fashion—I knew this without knowing how.

“Am I all right?” I heard myself ask.

“You were lucky,” Tyler said. “It’s probably just mild concussion and a few scratches. You should be up and about in a day or two.”

“Was it a bomb?”

“Not my pigeon.” He pulled down one of my eyelids and peered perfunctorily at it. I could smell the nicotine on his yellowed fingers. He was middle-aged, brisk in manner, a horseshoe of greying hair fringing his bald skull. He wore a taupe-coloured shirt and tie under his white coat.

“Any headaches or grogginess?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Other symptoms?”

“Like what?”

“Sleep disturbances? Nausea? Nightmares?”

“No. Nothing.”

This was said brusquely, a determined rejection of any admission that might be construed as personal weakness. It wasn’t me talking: it was my other self.

“Good,” Tyler said. “We’ll rest you up for twenty-four hours, put you on light duties for a couple of weeks.”

“I’m only just back from overseas. I’d rather be occupied.”

“Up to you. But don’t overdo it. Now—breakfast. What’s it to be?”

I realised that I had no appetite—or rather my counterpart had none.

“I never eat breakfast,” I heard him say. “A glass of orange juice would do, if there’s any.”

I sensed a craving for some freshly squeezed juice, like that available during his recent trip to Brazil, sharp and sweet and thick with pulp. There was little chance of it here.

“We’ll see what we can do. I take it you remember everything that happened?”

A sudden panic at this. He was blank. Then he remembered a blinding soundless flash, his car being consumed by it, though he was not inside it. He was hurled over as the shock wave hit him. A further memory of crawling through rubble before hands took him, helping him up into the back of a white van with the shield and crossed swords emblem of the Security Police.

“Of course,” he said. “There was an—”

Tyler put his hand up sharply. “Don’t tell me. Need to know basis. Wait till you see Sir Gruffydd.”

He checked my pulse, asked to see my tongue. It felt coated.

“I do believe you’ll live,” he announced at last. “Make sure you eat something. I’ll pop in tomorrow morning and give you a final once over. All right?”

“Yes.”

With this, he left.

I felt like a spy perched in someone else’s head, an invisible spectator to thoughts and speech and actions that came from within me yet did not belong to me. I was cohabiting, but with no knowledge of the life I had here except what I could glean from my counterpart’s reactions. The explosion that had injured him was not the one I remembered.

As soon as Tyler was gone, I got out of bed—or rather my other self did so. Still naked, he crossed to the mirror on the dressing table.

A cut above the right eyebrow was already healing, and there was no other sign of injury. He had a similar complexion and was about the same height and age as myself, though distinctly leaner. He staot the his reflection for a long time with an expression of mild consternation. It was like looking at a close relative, a brother, perhaps, yet he was someone I had never seen before. A thick growth of stubble did not disguise the pockmarks that covered his face from brow to chin. I assumed he had suffered badly from acne, though his thoughts remained resolutely closed to me at that moment. When he put a hand up to the mirror I saw crescents of grime under his fingernails and felt the cool smoothness of the glass.

An adjoining door opened on a narrow bathroom. It was unheated and chilly. The brass showerhead that sprouted from the white-tiled wall looked antiquated and encrusted with hard-water deposits. When he turned the tap there was a creaking noise, followed by a delay before tea-coloured water began spurting out. It soon cleared, though it remained tepid. To my alarm he twisted the lever to cold before climbing under it. The chill made him gasp with a mixture of shock and exhilaration that I felt myself just as keenly.

The soap was a mustard-yellow brick that stank of coal tar. He lathered himself vigorously, especially his groin and armpits. His body was wiry, with not a hint of spare flesh. I had the queasy feeling of being an involuntary witness to the intimate actions of a stranger. At the same time I was fascinated by the contrast between his habits and my own. I was used to hot showers in a heated bathroom. I’d fold a soft towelling robe around myself, whereas he began to rub himself down with a stiff off-white bath towel redolent of carbolic.

After this, still naked, he shaved, using a bristle brush, a stick of shaving soap and a single-bladed steel razor that sat on the shelf. There were other toiletries in plain white packaging. It was years since I had wet-shaved, and never with such a primitive razor. He was diligent, lathering thoroughly, stretching and contorting his pitted face as he slid the razor over it, paying scrupulous attention to the crevices under his nostrils and the line of his sideboards. There was several days’ growth to remove, and he made a great ceremony of it.

His eyes were a deeper brown than mine, his nose narrower, hair cropped in a short-back-and-sides that made no concessions to style. Abdominal muscles rippled as he did a series of stretching exercises in front of the mirror, taking deep breaths and exhalations. He had none of my incipient middle-aged flab.

His clothing had been draped over the back of an armchair in the bedroom—an army uniform in a greyish khaki. The jacket had shoulder patches showing the Union flag below a sky-blue diamond with a single five-pointed star in gold. It signified a major’s rank.

I knew this only because he knew it: the uniform was otherwise unfamiliar, and certainly not that of the present British Army. Under the chair were matt-black leather boots, fleece-lined. The closure strips had attachments resembling Velcro. A padded thigh-length combat jacket in pale winter-camouflage colours hung on the back of the door.

He donned his vest and underpants. Everything had been freshly laundered. I knew that he was intending to dress and go out, but suddenly he felt weak and sat down on the bed.

A tumbler of orange juice had been put on the bedside table while he was showering. He picked it up and drained it. The juice was thin and from a can; but it took the sour taste from his mouth. He rose again and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.

The toiletries were his own: a bag bearing the initials O.M. sat on the shelf. I knew instantly his name was the same as mine. A plain white tube had FLUORIDE stencilled along it in black. The toothpaste tasted like mashed minted chalk, but he even scrubbed his tongue, probing so deeply I was amazed he didn’t gag.

As we emerged from the bathroom the woman entered. She was plainly surprised to find us out of our bed and in our underwear.

“What is this?” she said in her accented English. “No getting up yet! Back to bed.”

His inclination was to ignore her, but he couldn’t deny the weakness he felt.

“You will land us in bad trouble!” the woman said, scuttling forward and taking him by the elbow. “No getting up today. You must rest. Plenty of resting.”

He let her lead him back to the bed, though he insisted on getting into it himself. She tucked him in as one might do a child, though he noticed that never once did she look directly at him.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Here,” she said, folding under the bottom edges of the quilt. “I live here.”

“I mean originally.”

She gave no answer, still busy with the sheets.

“Are you Polish?”

She made a noise that sounded like an expletive, and left without another word.

THREE

The white hospital room. I was back. Through the window I could see dingy clouds scudding across a blue sky.

There was no sensation of transition. I had simply switched in an instant from one place to another. From another mind and body back to my own.

Unable to raise myself from the pillow, I felt both dull-witted and incredulous. I couldn’t begin to imagine what was happening to me.

I heard a rustling sound, managed to turn my head a little.

Tanya was sitting at the side of the bed.

Tanya! She was the auburn-haired woman I had dreamt was watching over me. Once, in our university days, we had been lovers.

She was wearing reading glasses, a hardback on her lap. Under her brown suede coat shewore a print silk skirt with calf-length boots. Her hair, cropped as a student, was now free-flowing to her shoulders but still the deep red-brown it had always been. She looked prosperous, but not showily so. Her very presence at my bedside meant something dreadful had happened.

Lyneth and the girls had been injured in the explosion, or worse. Tanya wouldn’t have been here otherwise. I had no family apart from my errant brother and my father, who was in a nursing home. Perhaps they’d been unable to contact Rees, who had a habit of dropping out of sight. Somehow Tanya must have heard the news and come to my bedside to be there when I woke. It had to be serious: of her own choice Lyneth wouldn’t have allowed Tanya anywhere near me.

Sara and Bethany. My mind rebelled at the very idea that anything could have happened to them. Perhaps they were all in intensive care, somewhere in the very same hospital, mere wards away. They would be clinging on to life, surviving as I’d survived. Or perhaps the girls had suffered minor injuries and were being tended by Lyneth while I recuperated.

I tried calling out to Tanya, demanding to know what had become of them. But nothing would emerge. Here, unlike in the other world, I had a distinct and proper sense of my own physicality; but my body was refusing to cooperate.

Could it have been a terrorist attack? A suicide bomber, even? Or something as banal as a leaky gas main? How many people had been caught up in the explosion? How many were dead?

My thoughts raced like pond skaters over the surface of these questions, but whatever drugs I’d been given muted my reactions to a dreamy bewilderment.

Tanya turned a page of her book. I willed her to look up, to notice I was awake. This wasn’t happening. I couldn’t allow it to have happened.

“So,” said a gruff male voice, “you’ve been playing with fire again, eh?”

My uncle was short and stocky, with a genial expression on his rubicund face. His epaulettes and scarlet gorget collars bore the insignia of his rank, gold oakleaf embroidery enclosing wreathed batons, a lion rampant within its ring of stars. He pulled a chair up to my bedside and gently pushed me back when I tried to sit up.

“No, no, just lie there,” he said. “The doctor tells me you need to have a good rest, so let’s not have any standing on ceremony.”

I had the immediate sense that he was speaking in another language, lilting and glottal. Apart from a smattering of French, English was the only language I knew, yet I understood him perfectly.

He put my hand between his own, grasping it firmly, his eyes becoming a little glazed. A man of sentiment, despite his status. Protective of family members.

“I was worried we might have lost you,” he said. “A bad business, Owen. A bad business, indeed.”

He pronounced the name O-wine—the Welsh way, I realised. It was the language he was speaking. Presumably it would be written Owain. Yet I, born in Swansea but raised both there and in Oxford, had never learned it.

“Second time around,” I heard myself say, also in Welsh. “Someone up there must like me.”

The field marshal released my hand. “It’s no joking matter, my boy.”

I looked at him through Owain’s eyes with a certain degree of awe: Sir Gruffydd Maredudd, the commander-in-chief of the Alliance armed forces in the United Kingdom and head of the Joint Governing Council, the body that had superseded a defunct Parliament in the conduct of the nation’s affairs. At the same time I knew that in my own life I had never had an uncle by that name, let alone an ennobled senior military commander.

“What exactly was it?” Owain asked. “A missile?”

“What do you remember?”

Owain thought about it. His mind was empty.

“Take your time,” his uncle said firmly. “Tell me everything you remember.”

He made a renewed effort to recall the details. Slowly they began to come.

He had just flown back from a three-week information-gathering mission to South America. His clearest memory was of the snow-camouflaged Bentley that had been waiting for him at Northolt, its driver a talkative Jamaican émigré called Maurice who had fled the American occupation of the Caribbean in the late ’fifties. Cheerful and patriotic, he had served in the old Royal Navy for twenty years. He lived in the Docklands and was looking forward to a family gathering at Christmas.

There was little traffic in central London apart from the usual convoys and patrols. At Oxford Circus an enterprising Sikh trader was selling straggly Christmas trees to the checkpoint guards. Regent Street itself was closed to civilian vehicles, but staff cars were invariably allowed the benefit of the shortcut.

As the barrier was raised for them, Maurice asked Owain if he could pull over and buy a tree. Owain had no objections: he saw an opportunity to stretch his legs after twelve hours of being cooped in various forms of transport.

They drove through and parked in the middle of the empty road. Taking his briefcase, Owain wandered down the street while Maurice returned to the checkpoint to barter with the trader.

Around Owain there was nothing but silence and abandonment. He was surrounded by the shells of once-thriving commercial outlets. On the western side they had been emptied and bricked-up; on the eastern side only reduced façades remained like the half-ruined outer keep of a castle. The entire area of Soho beyond had long been off-limits to civilians, sealed off and plastered with biohazard signs after an anthrax attack thirty years before. His mother had brought him here as a six-year-old to see the Christmas lights and watch a special broadcast from the troops in Persia, where his father was serving. He’d searched the assembled faces in vain for a glimpse of him.

An almost subliminal hum was coming from somewhere. It grew in volume, like the approach of an insect.

“Major!”

He turned and saw Maurice hurrying back to the car, triumphantly flourishing a stunted and bedraggled tree. The hum rose in volume and frequency, ceasing an instant before a flood of white light surged through the gaping windows and balconies of the façade, swamping everything and sending him reeling.

“It was like a massive flare,” he told his uncle. “There was no noise.”

It felt like a confession, an admission of guilt.

“What possessed you to go down there in the first place?”

He thought that he’d already explained it. “I was thinking about mother.”

The field marshal gave a grunt of consideration and undisguised sadness. Owain’s mother had died with other family members when the water supply at their estate in Brecon was contaminated with cholera. Easter 1984. Owain and his brother Rhys only escaped because they were still in boarding school in Aberystwyth. It turned out that the well on the estate had been infected with chlorine-resistant bacteria by religious disarmamentarians who were subsequently shot for their pains.

Their father was serving overseas at the time, while his uncle, newly promoted, had been summoned to London because the Soviets had launched a new offensive in the east. To minimise the risk of infection, he and Rhys were only allowed to view the bodies from behind a glass screen before they were cremated. Now their father too was long gone, leaving just the three of them.

“The driver,” Owain said. “Is he dead?”

Sir Gruffydd shook his head. “Knocked over. Shaken up like you.”

“It came out of Soho,” he said.

“Derelict ground, fortunately.”

“What was it?”

His uncle shrugged. “The CIF unit that went in reckon it was a big incendiary, nineteen-seventies vintage. Been lying there for donkey’s years. Could have gone off at any time.”

The CIF were the Counter Insurgency Forces, always sent in if sabotage was suspected. Owain remained puzzled. “I didn’t hear any explosion. Just a rising whine, almost like a jet engine. And a big flash of light.”

Sir Gruffydd didn’t look surprised. “You never hear the one that has your name on it. You were fortunate it didn’t kill you.”

There was something in his uncle’s tone that made Owain wonder if he was withholding harsh facts. Or perhaps it was sheer relief.

“Were there any casualties?”

“Indian chap. Street frontage above the old station collapsed on him. Apparently the epicentre was right behind it.”

Owain couldn’t work it out. “That would have been north of me. It felt like the flash came from due east.”

The field marshal looked unconvinced. “I got the report this morning. Very thorough in these matters, Legister’s legionnaires.”

He was referring to Carl Legister, the Secretary of State for Inland Security. Legister was responsible for anti-terrorism and civilian order on the home front, in charge of both the Security Police and their quasi-military offshoot.

“I don’t understand,” Owain persisted. “It was so bright. One big flash.”

“Maybe it had a magnesium fuse,” his uncle said with the merest hint of impatience. “Maybe it was a white phosphorus charge.”

The mention of phosphorus instinctively made Owain think of his pockmarked face. There was also another more powerful memory that he immediately quashed. It was something to do with his service on the eastern front. He had ended up being invalided home the previous spring.

His continued scepticism must have shown because his uncle said, “It’s dead ground, Owain. Who would want to target it with a missile? We’ve not had a strike on London in over a decade. Count your blessings. You were fortunate it wasn’t anything nuclear or biological. They’ve given you a clean bill of health on that score. Nothing nasty lurking in the system. Physically speaking.”

The last two words were significant. Owain knew his uncle was still concerned he might be suffering after-effects from his combat experience.

“Don’t let it gnaw at you,” the old man admonished. “Trauma makes it easy to misremember the details. You’re still recuperating, and at least you’ve got youth on your side. Wait until you’re my age. Without my valet I’d have a job finding my shoes in the morning.”

His uncle plainly wanted to get off the subject. Perhaps it was what he’d been told: just an old bomb. Owain made himself smile.

“What happened to my report?” he asked.

“Your briefcase was recovered undamaged. I read it over a mug of cocoa last night. You did a thorough job.”

The generals had sent him to neutral Brazil, where he’d met Alliance agents and liaised with various representatives of the US armed forces. His instructions had been to glean more information about American intentions in the central Asian and Pacific theatres. But an air of guarded reticence had dominated all his meetings with his opposite numbers in the US armed forces: nothing was being volunteered. While there was no suggestion that the Americans were preparing renewed offensives on the Northern Indian or Chinese fronts, Owain felt a distinct chill in the diplomatic air. In his report he’d concluded that the laissez-faire approach that had served both sides so well for half a century was now being strained by the overlap of respective spheres of influence.

The strange thing was that the tour already felt remote, like something he’d done years ago. His uncle’s almost offhand reaction to his report made him wonder how much importance he actually attached to it.

“Was the driver on your staff?” Owain asked.

His uncle nodded. “One of our regulars. Very reliable. They discharged him after a couple of days. In time to cut the turkey. I had one sent him specially.”

“Christmas is over?” Owain said. “How long have I been here?”

“Only a few days. We had you in the Berlin Memorial to begin with.”

It was the main military hospital in the capital. Owain’s shock mirrored my own. I wondered if he could sense my presence. He gave no sign of it.

“In hospital?” he said.

“They didn’t tell you? You were in a coma for the first forty-eight hours. Then you woke up raving until they tranquillised you. You were out of it for ten days. We had you transferred here when the crisis passed.”

He was in the surface apartments of the War Office. No wonder the old man was concerned that he might have been hallucinating. “I don’t remember any of that.”

“We had to be sure you hadn’t picked up something, but there were no indications. Just a nasty knock to the head.”

The time between the explosion and the final waking was a complete blank. I knew that a similar period must have passed in my own world.

“Tyler’s a good man,” his uncle said. “He thinks you’re over the worst.”

“I’m fine,” Owain assured him. “A little weak at the knees, that’s all.”

“That’s only to be expected. You don’t look too bad for a mongrel.”

The usual actionate tease about his mother, who had been English. He had only the fondest memories of her, but had been devoted to his father, who’d died in Palestine when Owain was sixteen. Not that he’d seen much of him during those years: his father had served overseas even before he was born and was rarely home on leave. Owain and his brother had been raised on his uncle’s estates in mid-Wales, learning Welsh during the vogue for encouraging regional cultural identity. They had even de-anglicised their names. It proved just a fad, but the language was useful for conducting private conversations since few other people spoke it.

“I’d like to return to my duties as soon as possible,” he announced.

The field marshal looked stern. “I’m sure you would.”

“Sir, I’m fine.”

“Of course you are. But you’re going to wait until the plasters come off.”

Owain didn’t demur; he felt weaker than he had actually admitted.

“Well, my boy,” Sir Gruffydd said, rising, “can’t sit here chatting all day. You know the drill.”

“I appreciate you coming, sir.”

His uncle squeezed his shoulder affectionately. “You’ve had another narrow escape, Owain. Third time might not be so lucky. Go easy on yourself. That’s an order!”

FOUR

A muddled memory of my own life:

I was sitting in a small viewing theatre, watching a preview of the first episode of Battlegrounds. We’d made eight programmes in all, the aim being to recreate the soldiers’ experience of the major land campaigns in Europe and North Africa. For over a year I’d travelled widely, ranging from Norway to Normandy, Libya to Latvia and beyond. The split screen showed me in a T-shirt and jeans, walking a tranquil stretch of desert, backdropped by a computer simulation of German infantry men in a sandy dug-out, under bombardment from the barrage that had opened the final battle of El Alamein.

Lyneth and both the girls were with me. Sara sat cross-legged, watching with wide-eyed seriousness her father up there on the screen. It was the first time any of them had seen the programmes, and I remember feeling peevish towards Lyneth, who spent the entire hour with Bethany huddled on her lap while she flipped through picture books to keep her occupied. Ever the practical one, she’d even brought a small pencil torch for the purpose. I had hoped that at last she would show some interest in my work and acknowledge my achievements. This was, after all, my finest hour. But she kept her head down as she read the books to Bethany in a secretive whisper.

The faint glow of the torch highlighted her flawless complexion and the intense concentration she was putting into the task. She didn’t look up once to sh my small moment of glory. I felt a surge of irritation and affection in equal measure. I wanted to snatch the book from her hands and demand she pay me some attention. I wanted to turn the lights on so that everyone else could see what an excellent mother she was.

The dream was vivid, even though it was the merest snapshot, a true reflection of my ambivalent feelings. But a malignant fantasy intruded and my father was sitting there, the serious professional historian who was gazing at the screen with open contempt.

I surfaced in the wrought iron bed. Back in the body of my other self, Major Owain Maredudd, he of the ravaged face and guarded thoughts. He had lurched upright as though rising from a nightmare.

His body was filmed with sweat, the sheets tacky against him. A pale wintry light seeped through the open curtains. The room was filled with the emphatic ticking of a carriage clock. It had been placed on the dresser and showed two-fifteen.

Owain went into the bathroom. He took another cold shower, which again I endured with far less fortitude than he. After vigorously rubbing himself dry, he began to dress.

I tried to will myself back to my own world. This time I couldn’t sense the undercurrents of his thoughts and memories. He’d shut down, as though in reaction to whatever dream had disturbed him, and was narrowly focused on the here-and-now. I felt mentally press-ganged, hemmed in. But I couldn’t escape.

He stood before the mirror, buttoning his tunic to the neck, checking that he looked presentable. His eyes were shadowed and he hadn’t fully recovered his strength; but I could feel his determination to leave the room. He picked up a leather wallet and flipped it open, staring at his ID card as if he needed to verify his own existence.

He tucked the wallet away and retrieved his belt from the bedpost. It held a canvas-holstered hand pistol which he did not remove, though I gleaned that it was a 9mm Walther APS with a twenty-round magazine, standard Alliance Army issue.

A padded jacket hung on the back of the door. It was lightweight, the fabric waterproofed, closures sealed with what here were called dryads, for dry adhesive strips. There were gloves in one pocket, a furlined hat with earflaps in the other.

A carpeted corridor led to a landing where a swarthy female MP was on duty, her black hair tucked up under her forage cap. Owain knew her by sight if not by name.

“Sir?” she said uncertainly.

“I’m going downstairs,” he told her. “Stretch my legs.”

He went past without saying anything further, taking the stairs at a brisk pace but holding on to the handrail.

The stairs debouched on a broad marble hallway that had been partitioned so that it could function as offices. The place was a bustle of clerical activity. An oriental woman sat at a desk piled with box fs; a boy barely out of adolescence was clattering away on a bulky manual typewriter, pausing to scrutinise a document through thick-lensed spectacles.

Owain walked swiftly through the centre of the workspace, almost colliding with a Nilotic man who was talking loudly down a telephone. I gleaned that electronic communications had been severely disrupted for several months, though the thought was quickly stifled.

A pair of steel doors gave access to one of the stairwells. He went down two floors to the lower ground floor, where the vehicle ports were located. But someone was waiting for him on the landing.

“Good morning, major,” she said. “Up and about already?”

She was a dark-haired woman in her mid-forties. Lieutenant-Colonel Giselle Vigoroux, his uncle’s military secretary, a permanent member of his personal staff. Evidently the MP had phoned down, and good for her.

“I was bored,” he said. “How long can you lie in bed when there’s nothing wrong with you? I needed a breath of air, a little drive.”

She smiled at him in a knowing way. She wore her hair short but in a stylish cut which made her cap no more than an accessory to it. Despite the uniform there was always something casually elegant about her.

The pager on her belt started bleeping. Gently she drew him in through the open doors of the service lift. The doors slid shut.

Owain was nervous of lifts but determined not to show it. They were descending into the subterranean heart of the complex. Most of the building above ground was given over to routine administrative tasks; all the important activity was carried out deep enough down to be proof against enemy attack.

Finally the lift stopped and the doors trundled open, admitting a waft of warm, stale air. A short corridor led to another pair of doors. There were signs on them saying AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY in a dozen different languages. Giselle slid her ID card into a slot and pressed digits on a keypad. The doors parted, releasing a wave of even warmer air.

“Your uncle’s not here at the moment,” she told him as she led him through.

“I wasn’t aware that I’d need his permission to go out.”

“I was told you were still convalescing.”

“Does that make me a prisoner here?”

He was pushing it, he knew, and with a woman he liked and who was extremely good at her job. She merely laughed.

“Are you fit enough to go driving?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t be asking if I wasn’t.”

They had entered a room with metal walkways surrounding a large central well. Attentive staff sat before monitor screens, while above them animated maps showed swathes of eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific islands in electric primary colours. The displays were constantly changing as if searching for a static equilibrium but never finding one. Here, deep below ground, the equipment was securely shielded from the electromagnetic interference that plagued surface transmissions.

“You’ll have to excuse me a moment,” Giselle said, and promptly disappeared down one of the walkways.

The large well below was dominated by a softly-lit area with dark banks of machines arranged around it. I knew from Owain that this was AEGIS, the automated tactical and strategic defence network that had been used by the Alliance to direct their military operations for the past quarter of a century. It was part of a network linked to sites in Paris, Hamburg and elsewhere. The Russians had their own equivalent, as did the Americans. All three had been seriously reduced in their operational efficiency following a catastrophic breakdown of the satellite systems on which so much of their data gathering depended. Or so it was said.

One of the TV screens was showing footage of the Chancellor touring the vast concrete fortifications of New Jerusalem. A handsome middle-aged man in his customary dark suit, he was an electronic composite designed twenty years before as a permanent figurehead of the Alliance, immune to assassination, disease and ageing. The Silicon Chancellor, they called him, and he was held in greater affection than any of his flesh-and-blood predecessors.

Giselle returned and led him out of the room. Owain was grateful for the relative coolness of the concrete corridor as they walked back to the lift doors. She presented him with a set of keys.

“There’s a Land Rover out the back,” she said. “Canvas-topped. Make sure you’re back indoors before curfew.”

The lift doors were already open.

“Don’t do anything foolish,” Giselle added. “You know he’s worried about you.”

She meant his uncle. “I’m fine,” he said adamantly. “I just need to remind myself that there’s a world out there. Tell Sir Gruffydd I’m available for duty whenever he needs me.”

“Before dark,” she reminded him. “Otherwise my neck will be on the chopping block.”

My own instinct was to retort that the British preference was for hanging, but Owain wasn’t prone to such frivolities.

He was greatly tempted to take the stairs back up to the surface but knew it would be a foolish exertion in his present feeble state. He entered the lift.

As I stared at his smeared image in the polished steel wall of the lift I could sense his unease. To me he looked the perfetinldier; he had been raised to it from an early age. Yet he was filled with vague, restless insecurities, not least the nagging anxiety that the lift might at any moment fail and send him plummeting.

His relief was palpable when we emerged at the basement level. We passed down another concrete corridor and went through a storage area with crates piled high on cantilevered shelves. At its far end was a pair of clear plastic doors stuck with black-and-yellow striped tape for the benefit of forklift drivers.

The warehouse was quiet and deserted apart from two elderly men who were crouched around a paraffin stove, sipping a golden brown liquid from glass cups.

“Tea or whisky?” Owain called, surprised at his own levity, which had in fact been prompted by my own instinct to say something.

The men looked back at him with blank incomprehension. I relished a mild sense of victory in my brief display of presence, though I sensed Owain stiffening his control again with a feeling of having spoken out of turn. He viewed the comment as a lax outburst, a mild breach of decorum; he had no inkling I was the originator.

Beyond the doors was an extensive parking space for staff cars and All-Terrain Vehicles. Impacted snow crunched under Owain’s boots as he crossed to a sentry box where two MPs sat, playing cards. They rose and saluted.

He jangled his keys, having already spotted the Land Rover. One of the men waved him on. They’d been expecting him. No doubt Giselle had phoned through.

The vehicle was a left-hand drive of some vintage, the dashboard old-fashioned with its flick switches and analogue dials. He turned the key and the engine chuntered into life. Without delay he drove up the slip road and out onto Whitehall, driving on the right-hand side of the road.

The civilian traffic was sparse, a few long-serving trucks and vans rather than cars. An old double-decker bus went by, ferrying civilians. Its windows were missing and the flaking red paint on its coachwork was almost indistinguishable from the extensive areas of rust. It was followed by a taxicab hand-painted in white and grey, grilles encasing its side windows. A senior officer and a young woman were sitting in the back seat.

Owain drove slowly, in no great hurry. Knots of soldiers and civilians were gathered around the soup kitchens lining the approach to Trafalgar Square, steam billowing from big urns. They looked surprisingly cheerful and were busy bartering food items and medical supplies. A line of people waited at a bus stop, its pole mounted in a concrete-filled drum. The civilians wore all manner of hats and layer on layer of hand-me-down clothing. Most were clutching bulging bags of vegetables and firewood. Dirty snow had been piled on either side of the thoroughfare, barricading buildings with metal shuttered windows. Sandbags and barbed wire framed doorways and forecourts.

Overhead the sky was a marbled grey. Darkness was already beginning to gather. Owain switched on the jeep’s heating. He turned into Trafalgar Square, circling it in an anticlockwise direction. In place of Nelsons Column stood a weathered golden statue of an eagle rampant. The rest of the site had been levelled and was a parking space for snow ploughs and security police wagons. A Cougar battle tank sat in the colonnade of the National Gallery, pigeons perched on its 120mm gun barrel, its slab-faced armour zebra-striped. Soldiers and MPs manned checkpoints all around the square.

Owain drove on. There were frequent gaps in the street frontages that held nothing but snow-covered rubble. In places the dereliction was extensive. I saw no evidence of what I might have recognised as modern commercial architecture, no sleek high-rises of brick and glass, nothing that looked as if it had been constructed for any purpose other than to withstand a prolonged siege.

Halfway up the Haymarket Owain came to a checkpoint and was directed to pull over. He showed his ID card to an MP. It resembled a credit card, with profile and frontal head shots, a magnetic strip on its rear. The MP told him that if he was headed north he would have to go along Piccadilly and up Park Lane since both Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road were presently closed to traffic. Effectively sealing off all the Soho margins, he thought.

“I’m headed west,” he said, the lie making his pulse surge.

He turned left into Jermyn Street, took a right, and found himself driving straight towards a full-blown roadblock. Temporary signs indicated a left turn only, which would force him west along Piccadilly, away from his intended destination. Instead he drove straight up to the razor-wire barrier.

Ahead of him hoardings around Piccadilly Circus carried patriotic posters featuring images of citizens and soldiers clone in a style that reminded me of Soviet heroic realism. One showed a multiracial group surrounded by a swirl of national flags and a scroll declaring: BROTHERS-IN-ARMS! Among the flags was a red, gold and black banner, its central band surmounted by a black Teutonic cross.

One of the soldiers from the roadblock approached the car. They were CIF men, equipped with Sterling submachine guns and snug hooded winter-camouflage body suits. This one held a senior guard’s rank, equivalent to a sergeant.

Owain surrendered his ID card. The guardsman swiped it through a hand-held scanner before frowning as if it wasn’t working. Or as if it didn’t check out.

“Can I ask where you’re going, sir?”

Owain decided to be direct. “I’d like to take a look at the bomb site.”

The man squinted at him, his eyes shadowed under the cowled brim of his helmet. “And which one would that be, sir?”

He had an Ulster accent; Owain had done a six-month tour of duty there while still an NCO. Suppressing extreme Catholic and Loyalist groups opposed to the Ecumenical Irish Republic.

“Soho,” he replied.

“I have no information on any bomb site, sir.”

“There was an explosion. A few days ago. I mean, a few days before Christmas.”

The man looked studiously blank. “I know nothing about that, sir. I’m afraid the area’s off-limits.”

He was scrupulously formal. Owain knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere unless he raised the stakes.

“Listen,” he said, “I was in Regent Street when it went off. Let me speak to someone.”

The guardsman’s face didn’t change. There were half a dozen of his colleagues at the barricade, all watching.

“Field Marshal Maredudd sent me over,” Owain said. “I’ve come straight from the War Office.”

Another glance at the scanner screen. “As far as I can see, there’s nothing here relating to site access.”

Owain essayed a shrug. “We didn’t imagine it would be a problem. Would I have driven up here otherwise?”

Once again the guardsman scrutinised him against the picture on his ID. “I’m sorry, colonel—”

“It’s major” he said. “Major Owain Maredudd. If I was a spy or a saboteur, you don’t really think I’d fall for that one, do you? Do you want my serial number and my mother’s maiden name?”

The guardsman had the grace to smile.

“Pull in over there,” he said, pointing to an area of waste ground on the corner of Piccadilly. “Oh, and sir?”

“Yes?”

“You might want to switch on your lights.”

A hard-topped truck and a Rapier armoured car were already parked on the waste ground, the latter standing with its view slits shuttered but its engine idling. Owain spun the Land Rover around and reversed into a space.

A blue haze of cigarette smoke was issuing from one of the vents in the armoured car. The guard had gone across to a female superior standing beside a long cargo lorry that was parked right across the entrance to Regent Street. Owain saw the woman look towards him before taking his ID and climbing into the back of the lorry. Cables were trailing from its rear into an open manhole on the pavement.

Owain waited, stamping his feet on the powdery snow, stretching his shoulder and neck muscles. A big RAF helicopter went by, the red-and-blue decal on its midsection enclosed by a circle of yellow stars. None of the personnel on the ground looked up as it went past.

The cles. opter was an Euro Avionics HT-11, I gleaned from Owain, popularly known as the Fishtail for its forked rear end. It was used as a vehicle and troop carrier, and Owain had flown in one many times, especially while on the eastern front. I had a brief image of him driving down a ramp from the belly of such a craft into a cold predawn darkness.

The woman emerged from the trailer. Her head was swaddled in a grey fur hat, the earflaps hanging loose in the wind.

“Good evening, major,” she said. “A raw day to be out and about.”

“Indeed,” Owain replied.

“Perhaps you’d like to sit in your vehicle.”

Was this a suggestion or an order? She had a unit leader’s patches, was roughly the same rank as him. But with jurisdiction. Owain decided not to make an issue of it. He climbed back into the Land Rover and wound down the window. He’d left its engine running.

“I’m here half the night myself,” she went on, turning his ID in her mittened hands. Owain was sure she had already checked it with the database. “The graveyard shift. Much rather be curled up in front of the TV with a mug of something hot.”

Owain was trying to place her accent. South African or Rhodesian, he decided; he didn’t bother to ask.

She was still holding on to his card. Owain drummed his gloved fingers on the steering wheel. He was beginning to regret having made his intentions explicit.

She reached in and extracted his wallet from the dashboard pouch. Removing a mitten, she replaced the card in the wallet.

“Well then,” she said, handing it back through the window, “everything appears to be in order. But it’s not going to be possible to visit the site.”

Owain was striving hard to control his impatience. “I just wanted to see what damage it caused. My driver and I were nearly killed. Check it for yourself if you don’t believe me.” He was certain she had already done so. “I’m only just out of convalescence.”

“You have my sympathies. But I’m afraid no one’s being allowed in without authorisation.”

“Look,” Owen said, “I’m Sir Gruffydd Maredudd’s adjutant. Do I really have to go back to the WO and get his signature?”

“That would be entirely appropriate. You would also need to make sure you’re suitably dressed. There’s a concern that the explosion might have stirred up toxins. My orders are to keep everyone out unless they have security clearance. You will appreciate that they have to be applied without exception.”

This was at odds with what his uncle had t

Owain inhaled sharply. I could feel his fury mounting, and his struggle to control it. It was an emotion unfamiliar to me, or at least long forgotten.

He rammed the gear lever into first. The woman stepped back.

“Lights on, major,” she reminded him. “I wouldn’t want to hear that you’d had an accident.”

Owain drove away, heading straight down Piccadilly. The night fog was already rolling up from the river. This decided him. Out of sight of the roadblock he turned sharply right into an unmanned intersection, driving parallel with Regent Street into Saville Row.

The district was lined with mouldering tenement blocks. The central area of London had suffered from repeated aerial attack over the last half-century and much of it was now depopulated. The buildings, raised hastily on bomb sites in the nineteen sixties, had long been abandoned, the factory workers dispersed to rural sites.

He turned into a side street, into a dead end. Big coils of razor wire had been piled against a breezeblock wall about ten metres high. Above the old yellow-and-black biohazard signs were new ones showing anti-personnel mine symbols. A stark warning in English, French and German said: ENTRY FORBIDDEN: INTRUDERS WILL BE SHOT

I could feel Owain’s powerful urge to investigate, regardless of any dangers. He switched off the Land Rover’s lights but left the engine running. I wanted him to stop, but my anxiety counted for nothing, wasn’t even registered. What would happen to me if he were killed?

The tenement blocks were all sealed off, their doors and windows long bricked up. Owain skirted the barrier cautiously. The razor wire had been laid in haste, thrown down almost casually against the base of the wall, the new signs hammered in with masonry nails. Flattening himself against the wall, he managed to slip past the wire without getting snagged.

The wall itself was at least twenty years old. There were gaps in the pointing, and hardened cement had oozed out like cream from a sponge cake. In one corner, ice from an overflow pipe had piled up, reducing the height by half.

Purposefully Owain began to root around in the snow. Amongst the broken bricks and the rotting cement bags was a pallet of unused blocks, abandoned and forgotten. He withdrew an army knife from his belt and cut off lengths of plastic packing strips before knotting them together into a crude lasso.

The overflow pipe projected from beneath the guttering on the corner of the tenement wall. He managed to hook the noose over it at his second attempt. He tugged several times; it held. Confident that his gloves would prevent the strips from cutting into his hands, he began hauling himself up.

All this was conducted with total concentration on the task. He had a more practical bent than me and was also much fitter. Despite not being fully recovered from the bomb blast, he scaled the wall effortlessly and perched on its lip.

He was just high enough to peer across the deserted street and over the broken frontages into the Soho wasteland. The fog was rapidly thickening, making visibility intermittent. But parts of the area were lit with fuzzy halos of arc-lamp light, and he was able to see the outlines of bulldozers and other earth-shifting equipment. They were moving about amid a tangled, lumpy landscape.

The drone of their engines carried to him. He glimpsed a lorry piled high with debris, driving away into the fog. A few figures were discernible too—men who looked as if they were wearing hardhats and coveralls rather than decontamination suits. Some were directing dump trucks; others were hitching rides on open-topped ATVs. The noise of a mini avalanche reached him as another unseen lorry received its load. Squinting harder he saw that the mounds comprised mountains of earth in which were embedded the broken outlines of heavy machinery parts.

The area was supposed to have been cleared years ago, but it looked as if it had suffered saturation bombing, everything churned up and mangled beyond recognition. He cursed the fact that he didn’t have binoculars and could only rely on murky impressions. But what was certain was that this was no decontamination team: on the contrary, as much of the ground was being turned over as possible.

A wave of giddiness swept over him. We almost went plummeting down. Another sound reached us: that of an approaching helicopter.

Again Owain cursed himself for leaving the Land Rover’s engine running: if it was a patrol craft it would be carrying heat sensors that could locate the vehicle.

He scrambled down the wall, sliding off the ice but landing safely. Edging past the razor wire, he stopped for a moment and listened. The helicopter sound was receding. He glimpsed it in the near distance, banking. It was going to come back his way.

He jumped into the Land Rover and reversed down the street, back into Saville Row. He headed south, only switching his lights on again as he made a westwards turn along Piccadilly.

I was amazed at his calmness, but his hands began to tremble. He peeled off his gloves and gripped the steering wheel tightly, his entire body swimming with a nervous exhaustion.

A vehicle was approaching from the opposite direction, its headlights blazing. It went past him without slowing, an old Army Saxon APC, reconditioned for Security Police use with a rear-mounted machine gun.

At Hyde Park Corner a street market was shutting up for the night. The area around it had been levelled. Owain turned south, winding down the window. We passed what had once been Buckingham Palace Gardens but was now snow-choked allotments that extended into Belgravia. The palace itself had been bulldozed half a century before following a direct enemy hit, the royal family reduced to a handful of survivors who were shipped overseas for safekeeping and were now dispersed around southern Africa and the American-occupied Caribbean. Their departure had only added more legitimacy to the new military government, wch already had its counterparts on the Continent. Fifty years later it was still in charge.

Owain went through a dense pocket of fog. He was driving too quickly. A T-junction materialised without warning. Mentally I lunged, attempting to wrench the wheel around. Brakes screeched, and a wall loomed in front of us.

FIVE

Two male nurses were lifting me into a wheelchair. One of them folded a blanket over my lap. I was pushed to a window and left alone.

Darkness had fallen, but I had a good view out over a rectangle of lawn with two wings of the building on either side. A modern redbrick hospital with row upon row of windows, cars going by on the road beyond.

I tried to lift myself out of the wheelchair, grasping the window ledge and levering myself up. I almost managed to straighten but the giddiness returned. I let go, for fear it might sweep me up and send me spiralling back into that shadow-world.

I lay half-twisted in the chair, my head filled with the pulse of my blood. Someone helped me sit up properly. Tanya.

Her renewed presence, and the sombre look on her face, made me think again that Lyneth and the girls must be dead.

I began raving at her, demanding to know what had happened. But again nothing emerged: I remained as limp and mute as a stuffed toy.

It had to be the medication. Or was I semi-paralysed? Brain-damaged? No, it was neither of these, I was certain. At least not in the conventional sense.

Tanya drew up a chair facing me and sat down. She wore the same brown suede coat as before, looked quite artlessly alluring. But although she sat only a few feet away from me, she might as well have been on the Moon because the rolling, sloshing sounds I could hear were coming from her. She was talking to me but I couldn’t make out a single word.

This went on for some time. What did I look like to her? A zombie? A drooling idiot? What was she trying to tell me? Something about Lyneth and the girls? She didn’t exactly look devastated, more concerned. This encouraged me. I was certain I’d seen only the front of the building collapsing in the explosion. Lyneth and the girls might have been at the back of the store. Possibly they had been injured by flying debris.

Suddenly I had an image of myself standing on sodden grass, watching as a coffin was lowered into a hole in the ground that had been cut square to accommodate more than one. I had no idea whether or not this was a true memory since I couldn’t actually remember anything else apart from Tanya’s previous visit to my bedside. But if Lyneth and the girls were dead they would probably have been buried by now.

No. It didn’t make sense. How could I have attended a funeral when I was still hospitalised and couldn’t even get out of bed without help? Tanya didn’t look pained enough. I had the impression she was more worried about me.

What had caused the explosion? Possibly she was telling me, but I was quite unable to comprehend anything. The idea that anyone would deliberately target a toy store was so repulsive it beggared belief.

I felt such a confusion of emotions. In embarrassment I managed to turn my head and look out the window again. The lawn below became a road, the redbrick hospital the metal-ribbed flanks of a bridge across which I was driving, my knuckles oozing lymph. Then I was back in the wheelchair again.

Tanya leaned forward to wipe my cheeks with a handkerchief that smelt of her perfume. She’d worn it as long as I’d known her, though I couldn’t recall its name. She scrutinised me in silence. This was unreal. Somehow I had to get a grip on things.

Tanya dragged her chair closer and took hold of my hands. She was talking again, and I could tell from her expression that she was insisting that I concentrate. Nothing she said made any sense. The sound of her voice grew higher pitched, became a buzzing that I thought was going to make my head explode.

At this point she did something astonishing. She leaned forward and planted a kiss on my lips.

It was a gentle but unreserved kiss. She hadn’t kissed me like that in years, since our salad days at university when everything had been new and we couldn’t keep our hands off one another.

She drew back and looked closely at me. I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking.

SIX

Owain had produced a torch and was climbing a stairway that zigzagged up the outside of the building.

He emerged on to a broad balcony with a view to the west. The building lay on the south bank near Westminster Bridge, itself an unfamiliar utilitarian structure of girders and thick wooden beams. In the darkness across the frozen river I could see the huddled fortresses of the state. They looked like a latter-day version of an ancient temple complex, but dedicated to their own hermetic ceremonies rather than the lofty aspirations of worship. A deserted park of sinuous walkways and barren trees occupied the site of the Houses of Parliament.

I tried to wrench myself free of him, to hurl myself back to my own world. It was another unwilled and unanticipated transition, a seamless shift from the warm aftermath of Tanya’s kiss to the bitter-cold outside air. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted my own life, as fraught with confusion and uncertainty as it was. How else was I going to find out what had actually happened?

But in this other world I was little more than a phantom in Owain’s mind. I had no physical leverage and couldn’t budge myself. Owain wasn’t aware of my strivings—indeed he still gave no sign of being aware of my presence at all. And I found that I couldn’t in this instance influence his actions in the slightest: he was firmly in command of himself.

Owain had parked the Land Rover in the bays below ground. There was a dent in the wing on the passenger side from the collision with the wall. No one had witnessed the accident, and his only injury was skinned knuckles. Somehow he had managed to drive home without further incident.

His door was painted an anonymous military green. The building, popularly known as the Brass Barracks, had been erected in the nineteen eighties, purpose-built for visiting diplomats and dignitaries. But the effective collapse of civilian politics meant that it had become quarters for administrative officers based in central London. Each apartment suite had its own balcony and was generally arranged to maximise privacy. Which suited Owain perfectly.

The door was double locked, the keys hidden in a niche above the lintel. From the outside the place looked drearily functional, but when he stepped inside and turned the lights on I saw a carpeted corridor that gave out into a spacious kitchen. Doors on either side hung ajar, showing a bedroom, bathroom and lounge. It was big enough to house a small family.

The place was bitterly cold, the air stale; it hadn’t been occupied since Owain’s departure for Rio a month before. The lounge was sparsely furnished with an armchair, a sofa and a television that sat on an old-fashioned sideboard. Owain promptly pulled down the blackout blind over the frost-glazed window.

Again I tried to liberate myself by mentally swooning, hoping that I would literally pass out of his consciousness. It didn’t work. The only noticeable effect was that Owain gave the mildest of shudders and turned around to confirm that no one had crept behind him.

Did he sense me at last? No, there was nothing in his mind to suggest this. I had the impression that he was always to a degree on mental guard, ready to anticipate the unexpected. He’d been trained that way.

But though powerless, I was not entirely passive. I shared his sensory experiences and could access associated memories. Perhaps my urge to orientate myself and make sense of my situation meant that I was actively stimulating them.

Owain entered the kitchen and flicked a switch on the wall. After a moment I heard the laboured thrumming of the heating system. From a cupboard he produced a medicine box, extracting a bottle of surgical spirit and a wad of cotton wool. He swabbed his grazed knuckles, relishing the stinging as though only pain could take him beyond himself. Again I tried to black him out. He steadied himself, clenching his fists, digging his fingernails into his palms. His heart vaulted in his chest as the doorbell buzzed.

He moved cautiously up the corridor and peered through the spy hole. A young dark haired woman was standing there, her head poking out of the upturned collar of a voluminous black fur coat.

I recognised her immediately: she was the other woman from my dreams, the urchin beauty who had been standing by the wrought-iron bed. Owain swiftly opened the door.

She grinned at him. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold.

“Marisa,” he said, smiling.

Somewhat to his surprise, she flung her arms around him, pressing her cheek against his. She was of medium height and slimly built, the ridge of her shoulder blades prominent under his tentative fingertips. The familiar citrus-musk scent of Apropos filled his nostrils: he remembered the name because she had told him it was a Chanel perfume that had long ceased to be publicly available.

He pulled back. “Were you waiting for me?”

She nodded.

“How long?”

“One hour, maybe two. I sat in the car.”

“Alone?”

“Of course. Did you think I would ask Carl to drive me?”

Her husband, Carl Legister.

“That’s dangerous, Marisa. Especially after dark. Anyone could have come along.”

“I kept a pistol warm in the glove compartment.”

Was she teasing him? Her accented English always made it hard to judge.

He ushered her inside, locking the door behind them.

“I can only stay one hour,” she announced. “Two at most. I wanted to see how you were.”

“You came to my bedside.”

“In the middle of the night like a thief,” she said gleefully. “No one else saw me.” She made a funny face. “There was a fat woman fast asleep on a chair. Her mouth was open and she was snooring.”

“Snoring,” he corrected gently.

She was of exotic Austrian and Anglo-Lebanese ancestry, and had lived most of her life overseas, her father having been a much-travelled Alliance diplomat. Owain had met her at a reception six months before and the two of them, both feeling isolated among the throng of notables, had struck up a rapport that had grown more thrilling with each subsequent clandestine meeting.

“It was risky,” he remarked. “How on earth did you get in there?”

A conspiratorial grin. “Giselle.”

“You told her you wanted to see me?”

“I told her we were good friends. She understood and arranged everything so I could come at night when no one important wasaround. It was all very confidential.”

He wondered how anonymous such a visit could have been; but nothing could be done about it now.

“I missed you,” she said with emphasis, “and when I heard you had nearly been killed of course I had to see for myself.” She grinned again. “You looked very peaceful and handsome when you were asleep. Like Prince Charming.”

The flattery pleased him, though he didn’t show it. She had always been free in expressing her feelings.

“How did you find out?” he asked.

“I heard Carl speaking to your uncle on the telephone.”

Legister was the only civilian on the JGC. According to official sources, he had rescued Marisa from enslavement in the aftermath of the North African insurrection six years before. According to Marisa herself, the truth was somewhat different. Only seventeen at the time, she had been taken hostage and held in the southern Sahara by a renegade group of Aryan supremacists, who’d exiled themselves beyond Alliance territory after the passing of the racial emancipation laws. A captive for three months, she was finally liberated by Italian special forces and delivered to Alliance headquarters in Alexandria. Legister had been on a fact-finding mission there at the time. Thirty years her elder and hitherto a bachelor, he’d had a chaplain marry them in a hastily convened ceremony before bringing her back to London.

All this came to me in a matter of instants. Whenever he met Marisa, Owain was always very conscious of her past. I had a sense that he sought within it a clue to her future.

“I left a message,” Marisa said, going over to the telephone and pressing the Play button.

There was a moment of silence, followed by a series of electronic hisses and whooshes.

“I didn’t know you spoke static,” Owain said with a ponderous lack of humour.

She took his hand to lead him into the kitchen. He winced as she touched the raw skin of his knuckles.

“More damage,” she said.

“It’s nothing. I slipped.”

Her gaze was direct. “You are telling me porkies.”

“It’s icy out there.”

She let it go. “Do you know what they call a pig who works in the secret service?”

Only the glimmer of mischief in her eyes alerted him to the fact that she intended a joke.

“Go on.”< ><p>

“A pork spy!”

It was a child’s joke, but her laughter invited collaboration. She took a foreigner’s delight in the quirks of the English language, which was only one of several that she spoke.

Owain felt an unsettling brew of emotions. He himself had never married. His fiancée had abandoned him shortly before their wedding, leaving London to join her family on holiday in Venezuela, whereupon they deliberately sailed into US waters and were interned by the Americans. She’d sent him a note on perfumed paper to say that she wanted a better life.

Eight years ago. Caroline. These days whenever he thought of her it was merely as a deserter to her country rather than their marriage. There had been no one else until Marisa came along. But she was a married woman, even though his impression was that she had been duped into it by an older man taking advantage of her vulnerability. It was his own sense of honour and self-preservation that prevented him from even declaring let alone acting on his feelings. It was quite possible that Legister knew she was here.

“You must take more care,” she told him seriously. “They said you were lucky not to be killed. It was a bomb.”

He wasn’t sure whether this was a question or a statement.

“Of some sort,” he replied. “They’re still investigating. I don’t remember much.”

This, of course, was a lie; but he didn’t want to involve her in complications. Yet she might be able to help.

“What did your husband say?”

“Carl? He never speaks to me about official matters.”

“I thought you said he was talking to my uncle about it.”

“Only that there had been an incident. I heard him mention your name.”

“Apparently his men are doing the investigating. I’m surprised they’re involved.”

“Do you think he would explain things to me? I am only his little wife.”

She said this with resigned amusement rather than rancour.

“My driver,” he remarked. “His name was Maurice. Jamaican originally. They told me he was OK, but it would be nice to know.”

“Is it not possible to contact him?”

He couldn’t risk asking his uncle or Giselle, and it was unlikely he would be allowed access to personnel details without raising suspicions.

“It’s not encouraged,” he told her. “You know how these things work. But I’d just like to be sure, unofficially, you understand?”

He disliked being less than straightforward with her, but there was something slippery about the whole business; and Marisa was no fool. Staff details would surely be accessible at her husband’s ministry. Drivers were unlikely to have a high security classification.

“Of course I will do this for you,” she said. “With the uttermost discretion.”

She was grinning, pleased that she could help. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” she went on. “I missed you badly when you were away. You’re the only one who makes me feel I can be myself.”

Her candour unsettled him because the sentiments she expressed were so desirable.

“So how is Carl?” he asked.

“I hardly see him,” she replied. “Every day he is gone before dawn. Every day there are meetings, conferences, and I never know whether he will be home or not. Always at six in the evening he rings, often to tell me he will be late and I am not to stay awake for him.” She gave an exasperated sigh and said, “Am I bad to say I would prefer it that way except that sometimes it is hard to occupy my days?”

But she did keep herself busy. He knew she helped out at a local surgery, as well as doling out Red Cross parcels at refugee centres. She was also charged with exercising Legister’s pair of wolfhounds. Her evenings were spent watching Hollywood movies, many of which were now banned from public viewing following the deterioration in relations between the Alliance and the USA. They would meet up whenever their schedules and the vagaries of the telephone system permitted; she invariably phoned him from a call box to arrange the rendezvous. Of course it was furtive—that was part of the thrill. But anyone keeping an eye on them would have no evidence that they were doing anything more than innocently enjoying one another’s company.

Until now. It was the first time she had come to his apartment. He wasn’t sure quite what to do next. His shyness was quite in contrast to my own nature, which was more outgoing. The blinds were drawn on the windows so no one could peek in. I would have risked a kiss.

Marisa took off her fur coat. Without it she looked diminished, her slim body sleeved in a knee-length black dress. She wore sturdy furlined leather boots, hand-made by the look of them. Legister had never denied her material luxuries.

She rummaged in the deep inner pocket of her coat and produced a package wrapped in silver foil.

“A present,” she said, leading him into the kitchen.

She filled the kettle and put it on one of the gas rings before opening the package and holding it under his nose.

It was, as he’d suspected, fresh-ground coffee. He inhaled its pungent aroma gratefully.

“Costa Rican,” she told him. “I stole it from Carl’s special supply.”

He found a box of England’s Glory and lit the ring under the kettle.

“I bought you Belgian chocolates,” he announced. “They’re probably splattered all over Regent Street.”

“It was a kind thought. I am touchéd.”

He laughed, certain that this was a pun rather than another mispronunciation.

There had been good coffee aplenty available in Brazil, but he’d wanted to get her something overtly luxurious. And consumable. But such gestures didn’t come naturally to him, with the result that he’d flown halfway around the world and come back with chocolates she could have acquired herself through her husband. He’d picked them up during a stopover at Conakry Airport, selecting a big scarlet box with a gold ribbon. A little too ostentatious, really; as if he were buying a gift for a lover.

She opened the fridge and grimaced at its emptiness.

“I’ve been away,” he said unnecessarily. “There’s only powdered milk.”

She darted back into the living room, returning with a silver hip flask.

“Whisky?” Owain said. “Cream.”

“You certainly are well prepared.”

“A little celebration to welcome you back. Since you do not care for alcohol, I thought this would suffice. I missed you, Owain.”

She pronounced his name 0-wayne, which despite himself he found charming and intimate, her private name for him.

Yet he remained reticent. I had a strong feeling that it was something more than a simple matter of shyness or discretion. Clearly Marisa was attracted to him and was free in expressing her feelings by look and touch. But the very idea of greater intimacy attracted and dismayed Owain in equal measure, for reasons that remained inaccessible to me.

The kettle had started to sing. Marisa rinsed two army-issue mugs while humming a tune he didn’t recognise. Owain found some sugar and carried mugs and spoons through into the living room. Marisa joined him on the sofa, putting the cafetière down on the coffee table. He’d never used it since he’d occupied his quarters here the previous spring.

“You must tell me about your trip,” she said. “Not the military work. What places did you see?”

“Not much to tell. Most of it involved meetings in stuffy rooms.”

“Rio. Is it really beautiful there?”

There were times when her youth showed through. Or perhaps it was just a wilful determination to discuss matters that didn’t involve the war.

“I didn’t get out much,” he said, declining to tell her about the riots and epidemics, the squalor of the favelas. Neutrality bred its own discontents.

“You didn’t even visit the beach, dip your toes into the ocean?”

“Forgot my swimsuit.”

She screwed up her nose. “You should have found time, Owain. Life is short.”

In fact he’d spent most of the tour in the company of a Portuguese multilinguist called Carmela, a swarthy beauty who’d been sent along as his subordinate. She’d travelled practically everywhere with him, sitting in as a secretary-cum-translator on all his discussions. They’d been billeted next door to one another and he’d had the impression she would have made herself available if he’d desired. But he’d never risked compromising himself.

“What is it?” Marisa said. “You are smiling.”

“Nothing.”

But he felt virtuous, like a faithful husband.

His weariness descended again as Marisa poured out the coffees and talked of the wolfhounds. They usually met in St James’s Park when she was out walking the dogs. No doubt Legister had her shadowed for security reasons. No doubt he knew of their liaison. This hadn’t concerned him unduly while they met in public places. But now she was here, in his private domain.

He took his coffee from her, holding it to his nose, inhaling its fragrance. A sip, its delicious sugared warmth spreading through him.

“Look at you,” Marisa said. “You are a mess.”

She said it affectionately. I would have smiled and even winked at her; but not Owain.

“It must be late,” he remarked.

“Soon I will go, and you can sleep.”

“I should ride home with you. In case you’re stopped.”

“Ridiculous! It is no distance. I have my identification, and they will see who I am. Besides, you are like the cat has dragged you home. You need someone to look after you, Owain.”

“Are you volunteering?”

She laughed out loud, as though he had told a vulgar joke. Owain blushed, mortified by his own boldness, though it had in fact been prompted by me. I sensed him stiffening his control.

Outside a night patrol helicopter went by. Owain idly wondered if it was the same one that had sent him fleeing like a subversive less than an hour before. He swallowed a yawn. The coffee had done nothing to drown his exhaustion.

“Lay your head on my lap,” Marisa said. “I will stroke it until you fall asleep. Then I will go.”

Somewhat self-consciously he did so. He felt the warmth of her slender thighs across the back of his head, her splayed fingers tracing slow paths across his scalp. Sensing an opportunity to escape, I willed him to relax.

Despite himself he began to bathe in sensation; it was years since anyone had touched him in this way. Marisa was humming again, the same elusive melody.

Rain on the window. It was night and I was alone in my room. Slowly I rolled over. Tanya was long gone, a folded newspaper on her chair.

I couldn’t gauge how long it had been since I had departed from Owain. It might have been a matter of seconds or hours. Everything was jumbled, fragmented.

Determinedly I resisted the impulse to ponder Owain’s situation, to dwell on his encounter with Marisa. It was too seductive, in more ways than one. Instead I managed to reach out and grab the newspaper.

It was the Guardian. I had to squint in the dim light but I was perfectly able to see that there was no reference on the front page to anything involving a terrorist outrage or any other kind of disruption in Regent Street. I’d woken with a new uncertainty that I’d actually seen any explosion at all. Had I merely imagined the store frontage disintegrating?

Laboriously I worked my way through the newspaper, inspecting every story. There was nothing, no mention of it anywhere.

By the time I’d reached the sports section my head was pounding but my spirits had begun to soar. An explosion in the middle of the capital? Even weeks later there would have been some reference to it, had it occurred. Which meant that it couldn’t have done.

I slumped back on the pillow, grinning with a giddy sense of relief. Though I still couldn’t explain Lyneth’s absence, at least I knew she was still alive. The girls too. I could survive the wrenching dislocations to my counterpart’s world in this knowledge. Let them come. Let them come. Nothing could daunt me as long as my family was safe.

I might have dozed: I might simply have been drifting in the shallows of sleep. But at some point I experienced a great surge of arousal which brought me to full alertness. As I lay there, sharing with Owain the same confused feeling of having been capsized from sleep, I was sway the tidal surges of a nightmare in which he had relived an episode from his recent past.

Though it came as a torrent of images and incidents, fraught with all sorts of threatening emotions, in the aftermath I could only make sense of it by reassembling it as a narrative.

SEVEN

An engine roar, a bumpy ride. Owain driving along a frozen mud track that meandered across a pockmarked wasteland. Four other men in the Spectre, including his commander, Major van Oost, who sat in the co-driver’s seat and kept yelling at him to slow down.

Dropped by Fishtail at dawn, they were deep within the No-Go Zone that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. They’d been sent in to check out satellite evidence of heavy vehicle movements near Minsk. The city itself was just a name on a map: it had been obliterated during the limited nuclear exchanges of the nineteen fifties.

An abrasive babble over the satellite link as the major received the latest update from CommandCom in Leipzig. A remote-imaging satellite had picked up possible exhaust heat signatures in their target area. They were to proceed with extreme caution.

Everyone bulky in the new NBC snowsuits with hoods that enveloped their helmets; respirators hung at their necks. The squad was part of the multinational Special Operations Corps, the cream of a rigorous selection programme.

They descended a frozen gully and made a steep ascent. The Spectre coped effortlessly with the incline. The vehicle’s bolt-on panels meant that it could be adapted to a variety of combat roles.

Near the brow of the ridge, with the display flashing an urgent red to indicate their proximity to the target, van Oost ordered Owain to pull over.

The major was already zipping up his respirator. A blast of snowy air swept into the cabin as he clambered out. Owain caught a stench of frozen mud and rotten vegetation before he fitted his own mask. It was early March, the temperature outside ten below zero, the sky oppressively grey.

Like a slim-line polar bear with a crooked black snout, van Oost scrambled through the snow. On the brow of the ridge he unhooked his binoculars and pressed them against his eyepieces. At this point the familiar hiss of Owen’s satellite link died, as did the dashboard screen.

Silence, expectation, nothing. The men in the back making brittle jokes behind their respirators, Sabrioglu saying that they’d forgotten to put a coin in the meter, Benkis telling Vassall that he should climb up on the roof and thump the dish with a hammer. Vassall, a corporal, stonily silent at first, then warning that rebel groups could rig up signal jammers from little more than an UHF generator and a plastic pipe wrapped with copper wire.

The major returned, unzipping his mask as soon as he was inside.

“Looks like an old army base,” he told e blast oone. “It’s surrounded by trees so I can’t get a good view. But something tells me it’s active.”

“The link’s just gone down,” Owain informed him.

Van Oost peered at the blank screen and nibbled on his damp moustache. He was a sandy-haired man with a lived-in face that made him look ten years older than he was.

“Fuck it,” he said at last. “All right, everybody out. Maybe one of you has better eyes than me.”

Securely packaged in his suit, Owain followed the others through the snow. The latest issue automatic rifles were slung over their backs: Heckler & Koch PF-1s that fired 4.7mm caseless cartridges. Already Owain’s head was filling up with a swampy smog of recycled breath and acrid sterilising vapours.

The NGZ had been relatively quiet for the past decade. Evacuated by both sides in the late eighties when Alliance counter-offensives left vast areas polluted, it had become a buffer zone and a barren sanctuary for all sorts of outcast groups.

Beyond the rise was a compact area of pinewoods with a rectangle cut out of its middle. Owain’s binoculars revealed a large complex with roads leading into it from the south and east. Flat-topped buildings were arranged around what looked like a parade ground.

“What do you think, captain?” van Oost asked him.

“Hard to say. I’d guess a base. But there’s no sign it’s being used.”

“Look further east.”

Owain shifted his field of vision, following the easterly road through the trees. The extensive plain beyond the whiteness was overlaid with darker rectilinear areas.

“See them?” the major prompted.

“I see something.”

“Something’s been assembled there.”

“How about we launch a drone to take a closer look?” Owain suggested.

“The link’s out,” said another voice. Vassall.

“We can do it by line-of-sight,” Owain said. “Guide it in from the wagon. The terrain’s favourable.”

From the ridge the ground sloped straight down towards the base. It was the perfect vantage point for an overfly.

“We bring the wagon up far enough to deploy the dish. Should be plain sailing.”

Vassall made a sceptical sound. “Assuming some sharp-eyed guard down there doesn’t notice the wagon sitting up here in plain sight.”

The major rounded on him. “When I want your opinion, corporal, I’ll ask for it. And expect it to be constructive.” He turned back to Owain. “Fetch the wagon.”

The radio dish was mounted in a cavity at the rear of the vehicle. Owain reversed the Spectre up the slope until its back end rose above the ridge. He deployed the dish, angling it until it was pointing towards the base.

Vassall opened a metal case on the snow. Inside were six finger-length chrome cylinders. He removed one and unfolded its silver wings before setting it down on a flat rock.

The drones, miniature reconnaissance aircraft with head-mounted cameras, resembled robotic dragonflies. They were powered by lithium batteries in their abdomens.

Vassall tapped instructions into the case’s keyboard. It screen flashed on. The corporal looked up at van Oost.

“Get on with it,” the major told him sharply.

The drone’s wings began vibrating, giving off a low electronic buzz. It lurched into the air and veered off towards the base.

Owain, hanging out the wagon’s window, swung back into his seat and flipped up a flat screen from the dashboard.

The image from the drone’s camera was grainy and monochrome, but it was a clearer picture than they’d get from the case’s diminutive screen. Owain gave a thumbs-up to the others on the ridge.

Van Oost joined him in the cabin. He’d unzipped his mask again and Owain did likewise to make conversation easier.

The drone was closing rapidly on the base, its flight steadying as Vassall got the measure of the wind.

Benkis and Sabrioglu were perched on the ridge, keeping an eye on the roads out of the base in case their radio signals were detected. The Spectre’s exhaust was also pluming into the air above the ridge. An alert sentry armed with an IR scanner might pick it up if they were unlucky.

Vassall took the drone at altitude over the perimeter wall. There were no sentry posts, though it was indeed an old military base, square utilitarian flats lining a road edged with skeletal deciduous trees. Smoke was rising from a chimney on one of the blocks.

The screen showed a building that was evidently an arms store, red-and-white drums stacked against its walls. A trio of men were standing outside it. Vassall took the drone down for a closer look.

Two of the men were smoking cigarettes, the third swigging liquor from a bottle. They wore a mishmash of flak jackets, coveralls and recycled headwear. Automatic rifles and bandoleers were slung over their shoulders, their belts hung with grenes and stuffed with pistols in an exorbitant display of firepower.

Van Oost started yelling at Vassall to keep the drone at a safe height and downwind of the men. The corporal was a late addition to the team, sent in just twenty-four hours before they flew east. A standoffish sense of self-importance meant that he had not endeared himself to anyone, least of all the major.

“What do you think?” van Oost asked Owain.

“They look like irregulars,” he replied. “Maybe they’ve taken over the place as temporary winter quarters.

The drone picked up a scattering of their laughter and an exchange in a language that sounded Slavic to Owain’s ears. Van Oost called Benkis back to the wagon, asking if he could identify it.

“Lithuanian,” Benkis said instantly. “With a little Russian and German mixed in.”

The major squinted at him. “Are you sure?”

Benkis gave a dry laugh under his mask. “They always cluck like turkeys, and this lot are worse than most.”

Benkis was Latvian, a large-framed, hearty man, unfailingly cheerful. As a child he’d escaped on one of the last boats out of Klaipeda before it fell to the Red Army in their 1984 offensive. That had been the nadir of the fortunes of the Alliance, when Berlin was obliterated, the Ukraine lost and the front rolled back to the Oder.

“What are they saying?” van Oost asked the big man.

“I’m going to disappoint you,” Benkis replied. “They’re talking about the joys of drink and the delights of loose women. Of course I’m putting it a little more politely than they are.”

The men were wearing various badges with insignia that not even Sabrioglu, their expert on partisan formations, could identify. This wasn’t surprising. Within the zone allegiances were constantly shifting between motley groups that might be made up of regionalists, ultra-nationalists and outright thugs.

Van Oost directed Vassall to take the drone up over the line of apartment blocks. Suddenly Owain was gawping at the screen.

The plain beyond the base was swathed with sheets of winter camouflage netting. There were mounded shapes underneath it, rank upon rank of them.

Vassall took the drone in low. At close quarters, just discernible under the netting, were phalanxes of tanks, self-propelled assault guns and infantry combat vehicles.

“What do you make of it?” van Oost asked him.

Owain was studying their shapes through the netting. “T-92s, AMXs, even a few Snow Tigers. They’ve really been scourig the scrap heaps.”

“I’m talking about the quantity, not the vintage. Have you ever seen so much armour in one place? Outside of a regular army?”

He hadn’t, of course. The armed bands within the zone rarely mustered more than a dozen vehicles, while their obsession with speed and manoeuvrability meant that they disdained heavy equipment, especially tanks.

The drone was now showing field guns and rocket launchers under the netting. Also trucks and heavy transporters.

“Chevrolets,” Owain said. “Chrysler Trojans. Late ’nineties models, by the look of them.”

The major shouted to Vassall to begin photographing. Of course the Americans had for decades bolstered the Red Army with supplies of trucks and support vehicles, but it was years since anything had been seen this far west. And these had to be recent supplies.

Vassall did a series of close-range shots before flying the drone higher to obtain a panoramic view. Although the actual picture on the screen was less than perfect, the processed photographs from the drone’s on-board image-bank would give good resolution.

The wind had strengthened and the men on the ridge were dusted with snow that was pluming up the incline, drowning the entire world in white haze. Here the winter often extended into April or May, whereupon much of the landscape became a radiation-and toxin-soaked quagmire with the spring thaw. Rasputitsa, the Russians called it: the roadless season.

The dashboard clock showed that they had been in the field for two hours. The original plan was to have CommandCom arrange helicopter pick-up as soon as they accomplished their mission. With the link down, they faced a long drive out of the zone and might need to scavenge extra fuel.

The drone withdrew back over the apartment area, where suddenly there were many more men emerging from the buildings. Without waiting for van Oost’s instructions, Vassall reduced its altitude to take a closer look.

“Fool,” the major muttered. “We’re upwind.”

He jerked his head out the cabin door and shouted to the corporal to pull up. But it was already too late. A squat man wearing an antique leather pilot’s helmet suddenly pointed straight up at the camera.

Vassall accelerated the drone away. There was the cracking sound of small arms’ fire as it raced towards the perimeter wall. It jerked and began flying in an erratic path up and over the wall.

One of the wings had been damaged: that much was obvious from the roll of the craft as it took in woodland, sky, woodland again. Vassall was battling to keep it in the air. At one point the picture whirled completely out of focus, as if it were somersaulting. Then it was back on course again, but with its altitude dropping.

“I see it,” Sabrioglu shouted, peering through binoculars.

Owain followed van Oost out to the ridge. He heard Sabrioglu mutter something in Turkish before saying: “It’s going to come down in the trees.”

Vassall was on his knees in front of the case screen, frantically toggling.

“A down draught took it,” he said.

“Get it higher,” van Oost told him. “If we lose it you’re in shit to your eyeballs.”

“Can’t we make do with what we’ve got?”

The major didn’t dignify this with a reply. He wanted the image-bank from the drone so that they could go home with visual evidence that was absolutely unambiguous.

Vassall furiously tapped buttons on his keypad. The drone cleared the forest and flew towards the incline, still dropping. It was going to crash straight into the ground.

“Cut the power,” the major said calmly. “Try for a soft landing.”

Vassall did as he was ordered. The drone fell, the screen picture yawing and jolting before it stabilised again. A dark line of snow obscured half of it, the rest showing ashen sky.

“It’s down in one piece,” Vassall said redundantly.

“Right,” said van Oost. “So just stroll down there and pick it up, there’s a good fellow.”

Vassall looked at him anxiously. His freckled face was flushed.

“I was given express orders to remain with the vehicle at all times. Sir.”

The corporal had been sent in to provide extra technical support, but it was obvious he wasn’t a team player. Neither did he have a sense of humour.

“You prick,” van Oost said. He told Benkis and Sabrioglu to prepare for the descent.

“Stay here with the wagon,” he instructed Owain. “Vassall will launch another drone while we’re down there and do an overfly at altitude. Make sure he keeps it high. Get some panoramic shots, and then bring it home.”

“Why another fly-over?”

The major looked at him as if the question was stupid. “In case we don’t make it back, captain. If we get into trouble you take the wagon out of here, understand?”

Vassall was already launching the second drone. Owain crouched on the bro the ridge as the men descended in loping, sideways strides, the major leading, his automatic tucked under one arm. Owain heard a familiar heart-wrenching screech. The slope exploded, snowy turf and earth flying over the brow.

Vassall had returned to the wagon, leaving the laptop unattended. Its screen showed the drone already flying over the base.

Owain raised his head over the ridge. There was no sign of van Oost and the others through the haze and smoke. Another shell erupted close to the first.

Keeping low, Owain used the toggle to send the drone in a wide arc over the plain, photographing at five-second intervals. The outlines of the tanks and trucks were clearly visible through the netting. He took a series of photographs and gave the drone the return command.

Still the incline was clotted with dirty white smoke. Nothing was visible.

Owain backtracked on elbows and knees before hoisting himself up into the Spectre’s doorway. Vassall was sitting at a workstation he’d unfolded from a compartment behind the driver’s seat. Hood and mask thrown off, he was furiously typing instructions into a keyboard. Data streams were rushing across the screen, line upon line of letters and numbers that were meaningless to Owain.

“What are you doing?” Owain shouted. “We need you out here!”

Vassall didn’t answer but glanced at the main screen on the dashboard. The link was still out, but the screen was active again, showing a panorama of the base and the plain. There was an explosion nearby, and Owain was pelted with debris.

He leapt down and elbowed his way back to the brow of the ridge. The laptop was overturned, its screen smashed.

There was the sound of small-arms fire, among it the familiar chittering of PF-1s. They soon fell silent.

Vassall had angled the radar dish so that it was now pointing straight up. The wind had dropped but the smoke was thinning. Owain found his binoculars, managed to hold them steady. Tracked vehicles were coming out of the woods, clusters of men perched on them, firing indiscriminately. One, two bodies lay sprawled on the incline. He couldn’t locate the third.

A pulse of brilliant white light split the murky sky. It was like an intense burst of sheet lightning, swiftly gone but leaving him blinded for a few instants. The ground beneath his feet surged forward in such a massive lurch he was almost hurled over the incline. There was an enormous ripping explosion, as if the air itself had been torn in two. Seconds later a shockwave hit him.

EIGHT

He lay there in the snow, trying to blink back his sight as the thundering and rumbling went on. The very earth kept on heaving, while clouds of snow roiled in pulses of wind. It continued for several minutes before everything eventually became still.

eight="0em" width="13" align="justify">As his vision slowly cleared, Owain rolled over and crawled back to the brow of the incline.

He looked down on a seething torrent of cloud and smoke. A personnel carrier had stalled on the slope, and men lay flattened all around it. Behind them was nothing but elemental rage, a cold billowing cloud that he was certain was a nuclear explosion. The base and the plain beyond it were gone, consumed. Yet he could see no mushroom cloud.

There was a noise behind him. Vassall was clambering out of the Spectre.

The corporal shouted something, but the words were drowned in a spasm of gunfire. Owain saw him do a spastic pirouette that sent him tumbling into the snow.

He lay face up beside the Spectre, dead eyes staring at the sky. There was a bloody hole at the base of his neck. No pulse there.

Owain backed away, risking another glance down the ridge. A whirling storm of snow was sweeping up the slope, enveloping everything.

The instant it hit him he could feel it stinging his face—but with fire rather than ice. It clung to his suit and began searing holes through it.

He bounded for the wagon, unable to see clearly, finally finding the open door. As he was climbing in, something grabbed the leg of his suit.

Vassall had raised himself to his knees. He closed both hands around Owain’s ankle. His eyes were rolled up in their sockets, the blank white gaze somehow fixed on Owain’s face. He was dead, an animated corpse.

“Save me,” he burbled, the hole in his neck dilating, blood oozing out of his mouth with each word. “Take me with you.”

Owain was seized with revulsion and incredulity.

He kicked the corporal in the chest, sending him tumbling, and slammed the door shut.

Through the window Owain saw Vassall raise himself to his feet with jerky movements, heedless of the stinging snow that was assailing him. Owain scrambled into the driver’s seat. As he was putting the engine in gear Vassall heaved himself up and pressed his face to the window.

“Help me,” he mouthed, smearing redness across the glass.

Owain accelerated away at speed. For a while Vassall clung on, pleading with Owain from outside the window, his words lost in the engine’s roar. They hit a hollow and snow fountained up over the windscreen. Owain flicked the wipers on and kept driving. When he dared to look again the corporal was gone.

He drove madly through the blizzard, ploughing across terrain that made the Spectre buck and veer, climbing inclines and descending slopes with frantic abandon, wrenching the wagon through its gears. His face was still burning, and when he glanced in the miror he saw that it was covered with festering pinpoint burns. The body of the Spectre appeared undamaged by whatever was in the snow.

It had to be a new enemy weapon. There were rumours of experimental devices that used microscopic machines. Perhaps they had seeded the snowstorm with mini-incendiaries or engineered particles that would penetrate flesh and clothing.

The land levelled and he drove straight across it as fast as he was able. With the navigation systems out of action there was no way of telling whether he was driving in the right direction. The wagon bumped and pitched, throwing him around in his seat. There was a mechanical bang, and the right-hand side of the Spectre dropped away. Owain was catapulted forward, his head smashing against the dashboard.

It took all his willpower not to pass out. At length he raised his head and managed to lever himself up.

The blizzard had stopped and he saw that the Spectre was lying at a forty-five degree angle, a corner of the windscreen buried in snow. Its engine was still running, though all the electronics on the dashboard were dead.

He clambered out through the co-driver’s door. The cold air was like a balm on his face. It felt washed and sterilised.

The Spectre had gone down into an old bomb crater and lay in a pool of muddy slush, exhausts still billowing, a single red light flashing on its rear. The heat from its underside had melted enough of the snow for him to see that it would be impossible to reverse it out.

He skirted the wagon, half expecting to find Vassall still clinging there, grim and dogged even in death. But there was no sign of the corporal.

Overhead, the clouds had rolled away and the sun was shining in the palest of blue skies. It felt like months since had had last seen it, and the sight made him want to cry.

Nearby a line of birch and pine backdropped a ramshackle cluster of wooden huts, long abandoned and half buried by the blizzard. The snow lay over everything like some enormous flag of truce, nature’s response to the ravages of men, an effortless obliteration of all their works. Nothing moved, and the silence was so profound it was clamorous.

His face had started to burn again. Suddenly he was kneeling in the snow, scooping it up and slapping it against his cheeks, bathing himself in the whiteness.

He heard a familiar rumbling. It grew in volume as he raised himself to his feet, the ground beneath him rippling, snow cascading from the trees, inundating the derelict hamlet.

Everything was shaking and heaving, his teeth chattering in his mouth. He fell face down in the snow and tried to cling to it, to hold on like a man perched on the very skin of the earth, about to be torn off it in its final cataclysm.

When he came to, it was twilight. He was being hauled on a stretcher through a glittering haze towards a Fishtail that sat with its belly open, i rotors whirling. Men were calling to one another in German, and a tractor truck was going up into the belly of the helicopter, the wrecked Spectre on its trailer. Before he passed out again he felt a fleeting sense of amazement that against all his certainties he had been saved.

Owain was still lying on the sofa in his living room. A woollen blanket slithered from his lap to the floor. Marisa must have covered him up before she left, hours ago.

I knew I hadn’t directly experienced his dream: he had already woken before I shared his fraught memories of the mission. It had all happened over nine months before, but Owain had relived it many times since. To him, the nightmare had the absolute stamp of authority. There were crucial features of it that he had never told anyone.

Owain was agitated; he couldn’t keep his thoughts from me. More than ever I wanted to be free of him but I couldn’t will myself away. He had eventually woken to find himself in a military hospital in Hamburg, confined to bed and with his face bandaged. He’d spent a month in solitary convalescence, attended by a parade of bedside visitors that had included combat counsellors and personnel from the intelligence services.

They told him he was the only one of the team to survive and that he was lucky to be alive. Despite the loss of life, the mission had been more of a success than he might have imagined, though of course they weren’t permitted to go into details. Owain was in turn as cooperative as he could be, though circumspectly so. He recounted everything he could remember of what had happened, omitting only any mention of Vassall’s ghoulish resurrection. As a military man, he knew it was never prudent to talk of things that could not be objectified.

He repeated his story numerous times, to both medical and military people. Their responses varied from the curious to quizzical, especially when he spoke of the burning effects of the snow, which had left clusters of sores across the whole of his face. They wouldn’t confirm or deny that nuclear weapons had been used to obliterate the base: all the major powers had observed an unofficial moratorium on their use for over a decade. But he was assured that he had suffered no radiation exposure. This puzzled him because the assurances appeared so patently genuine.

Towards the end of his convalescence his uncle unexpectedly visited him. Sir Gruffydd was jovial and fulsomely relieved that he had survived. They conversed in familial Welsh, as in their domestic fireside chats of his youth. The field marshal was quick to reassure Owain that he had not been a victim of some nefarious new enemy weapon. There had been no microscopic particles embedded in the blizzard that had struck him: instead he’d been hit by the blast of an old-fashioned phosphorus fragmentation mortar shell. He was fortunate to have escaped being blinded.

His uncle praised his resilience in getting away; he had it on good authority that the rebel group they’d encountered had almost certainly used nerve-gas agents. Possibly he had been exposed to them, which was why they were keeping him under observation for a little while. Did Owain have anything to report that might suggest such an exposure? Anything he recalled that he hadn’t yet mentioned? The field marshal’s tone was gentle and unthreatening. Without prejudice to yourself, my boy. Owain considered before shaking his head and insisting that he was fine.

Shortly before his discharge from hospital, his uncle visited again. He told Owain that he’d made a good recovery and that everyone was pleased with his progress. However the medical experts considered it prudent that he be taken off frontline combat duties for a spell. It was standard procedure, no reflection on his calibre as a soldier. In fact, he was being promoted to major in recognition of his services. To ensure a thorough convalescence Sir Gruffydd had arranged a posting to his staff in London.

Owain was both relieved and humbled. Though he knew it was irrational, his predominating emotion was a sense of failure, a feeling that he had abandoned van Oost and the others, had fled from the field like a coward. It shamed him to contrast himself with his father, who had been awarded the Valour Cross for his part in the defence of Istanbul. His father was a war hero, whereas Owain had a growing conviction that he himself would never be a frontline soldier again.

NINE

The fog was gone, dawn a bruised light seeping through mottled cloud. Decades of warfare had led to pollution and ionisation of the upper atmosphere so that the skies were seldom truly dark by night or free of murkiness by day.

Owain walked briskly along the riverbank, where ice-locked freighters and barges lay abandoned until the spring thaw. In recent years winters had become long and bitter, summers short and torrid.

He entered a large park that was empty apart from the verdigrised statues that flanked its paths. They were life-sized representations of military men, generals and admirals and air marshals, their heads and shoulders crusted with bird droppings. I scrutinized their faces and names as we passed but recognised none. The snow-bracketed plinths held inscriptions celebrating achievements that meant nothing to me, covering campaigns that ranged from West Africa to the Arctic Circle over more than half a century.

I managed to get Owain to pause beside a statue I finally did recognise. It was a bronze of Field Marshal Montgomery, cited for his achievements in leading amphibious landings along the Baltic coast in December 1943. From Owain I gleaned that Montgomery’s divisions had bolstered those of the German Army Group North threatened by a Soviet winter offensive.

Britain had entered the war on the German side; France, too. Hitler had died in a plane crash soon after the invasion of the Soviet Union began. Peace terms were arranged following an anti-Nazi coup in Berlin—peace and a withdrawal from occupied territories in the west in exchange for military assistance in the east. Sixty years later the successors of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army had fought themselves to a standstill.

There was a loud crack overhead and a jet swept past at low altitude. It was gone as quickly as it had come. I had no idea why Owain had come here from his bed, except perhaps to escape his own memories. Now he was stirring, and I found myself being pushed into the hinterland of his mind as he reasserted himself. He’d found a scrap of paper in the pocket of his coat. Marisa had written that she would be exercising the dogs in St James’s Park at noon the following day. It was the last thing I saw before Owain swamped me so completely that I was extinguished.

TEN

My father used to say that military history was the refuge of scoundrels, a judgment that was typically sweeping. He had a special distaste for what he called “fantasists”—historians who did not stick scrupulously to the facts but were prepared to speculate on alternative outcomes. He always had a prodigious appetite for disapproval, and I’m certain he despised my career path. He himself was a distinguished though not uncontroversial historian who had made his name with a study of the interwar years, published before Rees and I were born. He’d married my mother, Magda, when he was forty. She was sixteen years younger, the daughter of a former German army officer, a widower who had immigrated to England in 1951. She died in a car crash when I was six.

My father was one of those men who aspired to old age as though youth was intrinsically disreputable. During the academic year we lived in a house near Balliol College, where he had a professorship. The rest of the time we made our home in the village of Bishopston, outside Swansea. This was where I’d first met Lyneth. Our romance, if you could call it that, always had an air of being a leisure-time activity, with treks to secluded coves and chaste kissing on the gorse-and-bramble heaths.

My father kept near-identical studies in both places for his work. I remember once, when I was about eight, finding the heavy oaken door ajar. I can’t recall whether we were in Oxford or Swansea, but the same rules applied: neither Rees nor I were allowed inside except on his express instructions. On that particular day I just couldn’t resist: I wandered in.

The room was filled with dark bookcases and antique furniture. It smelt musty and male. Half drawn curtains shaded everything. I didn’t dare put on the light.

My father always worked in longhand at a pedestal desk, a lanky man perched on the edge of his office chair, scribbling notes and scrutinising documents with his reading glasses gleaming in the lamplight. Grey-haired and meticulous in his habits, he was old to me even then.

I clambered up into his chair and peered at the unfathomable piles of paper there. I tried to mimic his posture, but as I did so the chair began to roll out from under me. I grabbed the desk, upsetting a pile of papers, which scattered on the floor.

I did my frantic best to tidy them and put them back on the desk in a semblance of order; but I knew my efforts would be futile. I crept out of the room and closed the door, saying nothing to Mrs Bayliss, our housekeeper. When my father returned home that evening it was only a matter of minutes before he emerged from his study and began demanding to know who had been interfering with his documents.

I owned up immediately, making a determinedly cheerful attempt to explain how I’d tidied everything up. He just stared down at me in a controlled fury, and when I was finished his bony fingers encircled my wrist and he propelled me into the study, closing the door behind him and turning the key in the lock. Wwereut saying a word, he snatched a slipper from under the desk—a buff tartan slipper that to me had hitherto symbolised indolent adult comfort. He bent me over his crooked legs and proceeded to slap my trousered bottom a precise and emphatic ten times.

He didn’t speak once, not even when he thrust me blubbering out the door. Nor was the incident ever spoken of again.

I was lying on a trolley, being wheeled into a room that looked like an operating theatre. Two nurses hoisted me and laid me face-up on another surface. Slowly it began to move forward towards some kind of metal tunnel just big enough to accommodate my body. I could hear the drone of the motor, sense its vibrations. I had the panicky idea that I was a corpse about to be deposited down the chute of a crematorium. They’d pop me into the tube, tip it up and I’d slide to oblivion.

In I went, moving deeper down until only my head protruded. It stopped.

A female Asian doctor loomed over me. She was smiling and appeared to be saying something comforting. It came to me that I was wearing one of those hospital gowns, an absurdly comforting thought. If they were going to dispose of me, surely I would have been naked.

“Wait,” I yelled. “Where’s my wife? Where are my children?”

I couldn’t hear anything emerge; but the doctor turned towards me.

“Hamley’s,” I said passionately. “Has anything happened to it?” I had awoken with a renewed anxiety that perhaps the store had been destroyed, that Lyneth and the girls were dead.

“An explosion,” I persisted. “Are they alive?”

I felt as if I was talking at the top of my voice. The doctor looked a little perplexed. It was plain she couldn’t hear me. I was still locked in; probably not even my lips were moving.

“Try to relax,” she told me. “There really is nothing to be concerned about.”

Easy for you to say, I thought; you’re not the one who keeps lurching between worlds. I was unable to control or even anticipate the transitions. The latest episode had been by far the most intensive, as though Owain’s life was exerting an increasingly seductive pull.

I could see my face in a slanted mirror just inches away. Everything looked normal: no cuts or bruises, all my hair in place. I managed to grin at myself—a small but defiant upturn of the lips. For some reason I started thinking about my mother. I had few memories of her apart from her death. Another thing my father never talked about.

I was moving again, being drawn right inside the tube. I closed my eyes, trying to summon my mother’s face and failing. Rees had driven himself crazy in later years with the conviction that she had deliberately killed herself and that our father was to blame.

ELEVEN

The sun shone low on my face above a line of terraced houses. I was sitting in the hospital grounds in my wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket. The flowerbeds were filled with red-stemmed dogwood, the earth around them freshly turned over. There was frost on the grasswhere it was still in shade. Tanya was coming along the path from an ice-cream van parked beyond the railings. She was carrying two cones.

“Look,” she said, pointing to a little cluster of white flowers on the grass.

“Snowdrops,” I heard myself say.

She nodded as if I’d just answered the jackpot question on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”

I had the impression she’d been working hard to lift me out of my stupor. She handed me a cone and sat down beside me on a bench. A swish of nylon as she crossed her legs, a whiff of scented leather.

The sky overhead was cloudless, that porcelain winter blue. I had to look down for fear I might swoon into it.

“What were we talking about?” I asked.

“It wasn’t exactly a conversation,” she told me through a mouthful of ice cream. “I’ve been doing all the gabbing and you’ve been giving the occasional grunt.”

It dawned on me that this must be the first time since the explosion that I had spoken and definitely been heard. I’d made some sort of breakthrough. At last I was able to communicate.

“Where’s Lyneth?” I asked immediately. “Where are the girls?”

Tanya went motionless. Something changed in her eyes. She looked as if I had just slapped her.

Immediately I felt a crushing sense of having committed a terrible faux pas; but I had no idea why.

“She’s in Australia,” I heard her say carefully.

“Australia?”

There was a pained expression on her face. Or was it pity?

“Are the girls with her?”

Now her discomfort was obvious.

“Owain,” she began, at the same time as I said, “Are they all right?”

For a very long moment nothing at all happened. Tanya kept looking steadily at me. All sorts of thoughts were swirling around behind her eyes, but I couldn’t imagine what they were. She gave a funny sort of nod, andI knew that somehow I had insulted or confused or disappointed her.

And now a blistering embarrassment swamped me, without me having any context for it. I’d forgotten something. Something crucial.

In that moment I was possessed by an overwhelming urge to protect myself and salvage the situation. And I could only do this by withdrawing, by not asking blundering questions that might reveal the extent of my memory loss and confusion. Things were out of kilter, but not in the way I’d first imagined.

“You don’t remember what happened?” Tanya was asking gently.

Lyneth was in Australia. So, presumably, were the girls. Therefore they were safe, not dead.

“Bear with me,” I managed to say. “It’s all a bit of a muddle.”

I saw that she was holding her breath. Slowly she exhaled.

“Well,” she said finally, “you’re speaking. Putting sentences together. It’s progress, O.”

She always called me that. No one else did. I had to stay with her, deal with the here and now. Be more circumspect in finding out what I needed to know.

“Look lively,” she said with reference to the cone. “Lick.”

I caught a trickle with my tongue. “I don’t even remember you arriving.”

“No? The helicopter made a hell of a racket when it landed.”

She spoke with a breezy candour that I knew was typical of her. For a moment I almost took her seriously.

“Or you wheeling me out here,” I persisted. “It’s blank. As if I’ve only just woken up.”

She took this on board without qualm. I think she was relieved that the conversation had moved on from the subject of Lyneth and the children. And I felt safer, less exposed, too.

“Hardly surprising, is it? You were knocked down.”

“I was?”

“Black cab. You just stopped in the middle of the road, he said.”

This made sense, even though I hadn’t seen anything coming. I considered and finally said: “I did hear this big bang.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t killed. Everyone’s amazed you didn’t break any bones. Bit of a crack on the head, though.”

I k another lick. “Nothing else?”

“Isn’t that enough to be getting on with?”

“I just wondered. Was anyone else hurt?”

“The cabbie’s dignity, I should imagine. Bruised ego. Or maybe you triggered a fit of apoplexy. Not hot on wayward pedestrians, are they?”

No explosion, then. But it still didn’t make sense. If Lyneth was in Australia, how could she and the girls have been with me in Regent Street?

Panic crawled through me again, though I fought hard not to let it show. What Tanya was telling me didn’t mesh with my memories. Did I have something wrong?

Before I could say anything further Tanya reached out and steered my hand towards my mouth.

Her fingers were cold but I welcomed their touch. My cone had a chocolate flake poking out of it. Tanya and I had once eaten a choc-ice together, starting at either end and finishing with a sticky melted ice-cream kiss. But that had been years ago.

The cone tasted of nothing except a cold sweetness. Tanya showed great patience as I slurped and munched like a toddler. It wasn’t that I was being deliberately difficult but simply that my co-ordination was poor, my thought processes tortuously slow.

“He’s an opportunist.” Tanya was saying with reference to the ice-cream seller. “Doing a roaring trade.”

There was a queue of half a dozen people beside the van, most of them adults. The sunshine was bringing people out of their houses, like subterranean creatures stirred from their burrows.

A young man in running shoes and jog pants strode down the path, the sleeve of his fleece rolled back, his arm in plaster. Two nurses were smoking cigarettes next to a big galvanised trashcan. Steam plumed from an aluminium chimney on one of the hospital annexes. For the first time since the accident I felt that I was connected, however loosely, to the real world.

“Don’t tell the doctors,” I remarked.

“About what?”

“My—fogginess. Otherwise I might never get out of here.”

“It’s just a hospital, O. They need to make sure there’s nothing they’ve missed.”

Her level of concern didn’t marry with any deaths. It was as if everything that had happened was no more than a serious inconvenience rather than something truly awful. Either that, or she was incredibly skilled at keeping things from me.

I couldn’t fathom it. Why were Lyneth and the girls in Australia? When had they gone? It must have been before my accident, surely?

Tanya took the soggy remains of the cone from me and swabbed my face with a lemon-scented moist tissue. She gave me another for my hands.

Then Geoff appeared, navy-suited, jangling car keys.

“Ready to roll?” he asked.

“I think we are,” Tanya replied.

Geoff walked to the back of the wheelchair. “OK, Owen,” he said to me, “let’s be having you.” And he pushed me forward.

A dark green Renault Scenic was parked in one of the bays. Between the two of them they managed to haul me into the back and fold up the chair. It was Geoff who belted me in. His crisp white shirt and spotted burgundy tie told me he must have come straight from work, was perhaps taking a few hours to help his wife with their mutual friend who was obviously in a bad way. I felt like a charity case.

The Scenic was quite new, a dusting of crisp crumbs in the folds of one seat. Did they use it, I wondered, for weekend trips to the country or just the local supermarket? They must have had plenty of disposable income. Tanya was a successful science journalist, while Geoff was a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital, with a lucrative private practice as well. He cheerfully worked long and unsociable hours. They had no children. Tanya couldn’t have any.

I heard Geoff asking Tanya if she wanted to drive, and her replying that she was happy for him to do so. Tanya climbed in beside him but made a point of reaching back to squeeze my hand. I felt absurdly grateful.

Vaguely I heard them talking as we drove along. Something about Christmas. They spoke as if it was weeks ago. Which of course it was. Just as in Owain Maredudd’s world.

So Lyneth and the girls hadn’t come to visit me because they were in Australia. As far as I knew, there had been no cards either, nothing to say they were on their way home. I had a vague notion that Lyneth might have a sister or cousin who lived outside Sydney. A suspicion that she and the girls had left just before Christmas, that perhaps I was supposed to join them later. What if I had muddled two separate visits to Regent Street, one in which all four of us had gone together, and a later one in which I was alone and had had the accident? Perhaps no one had been able to contact them since; perhaps they were on an extended trip to the outback or somewhere, still blissfully unaware that I’d nearly been killed.

That didn’t make sense, either. Tanya would have referred to it. Which left the unpleasant possibility that there had been some sort of serious rift between us. I just couldn’t remember. My urge to know was tempered by an equally fierce determination to find out for myself rather than risk asking Tanya. Because I did know this: Tanya had once been Lyneth’s deadliest rival.

“All right?”

She’s looking around at me.

I nodded reassuringly. It occurred to me that I hadn’t even asked where we were going. Or had I? Tanya had told me before we set out but I hadn’t absorbed it. It was an excursion, I was sure of that, a little respite from my hospital bed.

I had put her on the spot by asking her about Lyneth and the girls. The topic of children, in particular, was a sensitive one for her. Then again perhaps she and Geoff were deliberately hiding something. But what?

I had no idea. It distressed me to think that Tanya might ever be less than candid with me. We’d met during my final year at UCL, at an extra-mural class entitled “Apocalypse Now and Then: The Turbulent Twentieth Century”. I chose it partly because of the provocative title but also because it was being run by an academic rival of my father’s whom he was never able to speak of without loathing.

As it turned out the course was less stimulating than I’d hoped. Our professor, a doughty Marxist historian, couldn’t persuade us that the self-evident implosion of Communist states was merely a blip in the decline of capitalism and the rise of a politicised working class. Far more interesting was the retreat to the pub after the lecture that became a ritual for a small group of us. Tanya, a final-year student like me, travelled to the class on a vintage Lambretta motor scooter. She wore leathers and was doing a degree in astrophysics. As well as being attractive and intelligent she was also exotic, claiming that she lived with her Russian grandmother in a house in Balham. Though I was still dating Lyneth in Swansea, it wasn’t long before I asked her out. She turned me down three times before finally giving in.

TWELVE

Tanya and Geoff were wheeling me around a park. There were the usual dormant flowerbeds, the smell of leaf mould, water dribbling across tarmac paths. Geoff walked ahead, as though discreetly observing a requisite privacy between us. I found this odd, though not unwelcome. They had always been an unlikely couple, but I’m hardly unbiased.

We stopped at a lake, where children were tossing scraps of bread at avid Canada geese. There was a small island in the middle on which herons were roosting like motionless emaciated hermits. I tried to stir myself but my thoughts were like treacle. It was hugely frustrating. Why had they brought me here? Why didn’t I know what the hell had happened to me?

Tanya put a hand on my shoulder while Geoff paused to scan the treetops before saying something about parrots.

Blah, blah, I thought, though I knew he was only doing his best to normalise the situation. Still as kind-hearted as ever, though physically much changed from our university days. Gone were the beard and the bulk he’d carried, along with the saggy corduroy trousers and chunky cable sweaters. He’d been captivated by Tanya from the start, though of course I hadn’t realised it. I’d shared a flat with him in my final year. He was studying medicine but chiefly interested at the time in concocting potent beers and other alcoholic drinks in the house’s capacious cellar.

Most Sundays Tanya would take me home to have tea with her grandmother, who was indeed a Russian national called Tatiana. She’d anglicised her surname from Petrova to Peters. A stocky steel-haired woman, bent over with arthritis but still vigorous, she spoke English with an emphatic eccentricity that suggested she had originally learned it from books. Whenever I visited I found her welcoming, despite her disconcerting habit of calling me “Odin”.

My visits were generally brief, and I suppose I couldn’t have spent much more than a total of six hours in the old woman’s company. Yet she has always loomed larger in my imagination than this. Conscious of my own mother’s origins, I was intrigued by the mysteries surrounding her past, in particular how she had made the transition from the wartime Soviet Union to quiet suburban retirement in south London.

From the outset Tanya warned me not to say anything about my grandfather’s background or to ask Tatiana about the war years. On the one occasion I broached the latter subject she simply waved her hand at me and said, “That was so long ago. I have neglected most of it”. Tanya herself knew only that her grandmother had been a young woman working at a university in the Ukraine when the German invasion began and that she’d somehow ended the war in the West. Over the years Tatiana had occasionally volunteered information about her later life but the details often varied. She claimed to have married an English brigadier who’d brought her to London at the war’s end; or that her husband had been a wealthy businessman, a lawyer, and even that she’d been engaged to a member of the aristocracy who’d abandoned her when she became pregnant.

None of these stories could be verified because the old woman kept no memorabilia beyond family photographs taken in England. However Tanya had once found an old book amongst the rafters in the attic: a pre-war German edition of A Tale of Two Cities, annotated in English in her grandmother’s hand. She suspected that the old woman was reasonably fluent in German as well as English, though she would never admit to it. There were also once-yearly telephone calls from a posh and elderly-sounding gentleman called Lionel, always on her birthday. Tanya had no idea what they signified because Tatiana always shooed her from the room.

On the living-room sideboard was a black-and-white photograph of Tanya’s mother, Irina. It showed an attractive young woman in a ’sixties floral dress. She’d been born in 1947 and the old woman invariably dismissed her as hopelessly irresponsible. She had left home and lived “with the hippies” in the late ’sixties before finally returning eight months’ pregnant with Tanya, whom she’d named Zelyna, meaning Star. She’d died within days of Tanya’s birth—of malnutrition, according to the old woman, who considered this more scandalous than anything else. There had never been any trace of Tanya’s father, while Tanya herself had officially been christened with a diminutive of her grandmother’s name. A Church of England ceremony, Tatiana told me proudly, as though nothing could have been more authoritative.

I’ll admit that I found the comparisons and contrasts in our respective backgrounds part of Tanya’s allure. In the case of my own grandfather, who had died a decade before I was born, there was ample documentation of his life to the extent that my father had been able to write a memoir based on his wartime diaries that he’d acquired from my mother. Though I hadn’t read it, I knew that it had generated sufficient publicity to be published in a mass-market paperback edition under the title In the Eye of the Storm. It was this book that unhinged Rees.

At the time I was much too concerned with establishing my own independence to acknowledge any of my father’s published work. But Tanya and I had family histories that mirrored one another, reinforcing my romantic conviction that we had been destined to meet. It never ceased to amaze me that she ended up marrying Geoff.

Here he was now, hurrying back from the bridge over the lake: slimmed down, clean-shaven, respectably affluent in his tailored suit and polished black brogues. He righted the wheelchair, looking a little concerned. I’d been put on one of the park benches, Tanya swabbing my muddy palm. I must have fallen over, though I had no memory of it.

Nearby a terrier was yapping at the geese. Tanya crouched next to me and said, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” while stroking my hand. Geoff looked a little anxious. It occurred to me that perhaps they thought I was making a noise, though of course this was absurd. And yet I was agitated. I’d seen something. Couldn’t think what.

They hauled me back into the chair and wheeled me away. Everything started to haze over. I tried to shake myself back to full alertness because I didn’t want it to happen. All I could hear was footsteps, the sound of boots crunching on snow.

THIRTEEN

Owain stood beside a park bench. Marisa was coming down the path, tugging on leads to restrain her husband’s wolfhounds.

The park was their favourite meeting place, at once public and private because it was seldom used, especially in winter. Marisa unleashed the dogs, which went bounding off into the snow but stayed within sight. She hurried forward, approaching him open-armed so that he had no alternative but to embrace her.

She drew back and regarded him before saying, “You look very elegant, Major Maredudd.”

He was wearing dress uniform under his jacket, his tunic brass-buttoned and gold braided, scarlet piping on his trousers.

“There’s a service in St Paul’s,” he told her. “I can’t stay long.”

“Ah. A shame. But you came.”

She tucked her arm through his and they wandered down the path. The still, icy air was filled with the thinnest of mists. All sounds were muffled. They moved through the bare white landscape like ghosts.

Marisa was talking, telling him she hadn’t seen Carl for two days. Abruptly I was back with Tanya, being helped into the passenger seat of a small car. Tanya belted me in and folded the blanket across mp. I flipped again.

“Slow down,” Marisa was telling Owain with gentle admonishment. “This is a stroll, not a march.”

He relaxed his pace. One of the dogs loped up, a ragged tennis ball in its mouth. Owain levered it out and flung it away, both dogs bolting after it.

“I have found out what you asked,” Marisa said.

Owain stood poised, awaiting the dogs’ return. He didn’t say anything.

“Your Maurice. His family name is Clarkson. He is the only one who fits your bill.”

Owain eyed her. “And?”

“He has been sent to North Africa. On New Year’s Day.”

Tanya was pushing something into my mouth. A mint humbug that released its sweet vapours as I rolled it over with my tongue.

“A six-month posting,” Marisa told him. She produced a slip of paper from the folds of her fur coat.

The dogs bounded around him. Legister had christened them Scylla and Charybdis, though Marisa referred to them as Lili and Mimi. Owain hurled the stick into a tangled patch of brambles and ruins.

The paper gave details of the posting, including the information that Maurice still had support staff security clearance but was being reassigned to Recuperative Duties. The whole family had been transferred to the Alliance headquarters in Tunis, where he would be put into the governor’s pool of drivers.

“It was all I could find,” Marisa told him. “Perhaps you could send a letter?”

Maurice’s old address in the Isle of Dogs was listed. The transfer had plainly been arranged in haste; but at least there was something on record. He hadn’t simply vanished.

“I appreciate it,” he said to Marisa. “I hope it didn’t cause you difficulty.”

She shook her head emphatically. “Owain, I would do anything for you.”

An air-raid siren. I jolted.

“Sssh,” Tanya said gently, squeezing my hand.

The noise grew louder, and a police car overtook us before executing a sharp left turn.

She waited until the noise had started to diminish before moving off again.

“I’m OK,” I told her, though this was patently untrue.

height="0em" width="13" align="justify">“Stay calm. We won’t be long.”

Her face was so close to mine I could have kissed her. My heart was racing. What on earth was wrong with me? Why did I keep coming and going?

“Did I have a fit?”

She shook her head. I could tell that for once she was finding it difficult to be jolly.

“Have I disgraced myself?”

“You fell out of your chair. Next time you need to give us some warning before you try to go walkabout.”

I had no memory of it myself. “Nothing else?”

She opened and closed her mouth. Didn’t know what to say. Or she did, but didn’t know how to put it. She was keeping something from me.

What had happened to the Scenic? And where was Geoff? Perhaps he’d had to get back to work. Perhaps they’d decided that enough was enough. No doubt both of them were in on it. They might even be drugging me to keep me docile while keeping up a ludicrous pretence that everything was normal.

I wanted to rage at her, to demand the truth. At the same time I felt that everything was incredibly fragile at that moment, poised on the brink of something truly destabilising. After all, neither Tanya nor Geoff was responsible for Owain. Perhaps I really was losing my mind, and if I started ranting about Lyneth and the girls that would only be confirmation of it. I’d be incarcerated again, kept under permanent scrutiny, until they found out what was wrong. I couldn’t risk this. I needed to be at liberty to find out things for myself.

Tanya let go of my hand. She couldn’t disguise the disappointment in her face.

However had I ended up marrying Lyneth rather than her? It was a mystery to me still. Even while I was dating both of them as a student I’d been confused about my feelings: but at least I’d been in full possession of the facts. And I’d had Geoff to sound off to: him of all people.

I didn’t actually have sex with Lyneth until the Easter holidays of my final year at UCL. I think she offered it as a concession, perhaps sensing that I was semi-detached. I’d stopped using condoms with Tanya when she told me that there was no chance of her getting pregnant: a teenage uterine infection had scarred her oviducts and left her infertile. My reaction to this was predictably shallow: I saw it as grisly in detail but fortuitous in effect since it allowed us greater sexual licence. But when Lyneth saw me produce a packet of Durex she frowned and asked whether I was seeing anyone else. I assured her I’d been carrying them for months in the hope of this moment.

We made fumbling love on her lilac quilted eiderdown. She was much more inhibited than Tanya, hesitant and even quizzical, peering up at me with serious eyes throughout as though assessing the pros and cons of t wo her something quite new. And I was a complete amateur again. I briefly lost my erection in the middle of it, and afterwards we discovered that the condom had slipped off inside her before I’d ejaculated. Lyneth shut herself in the bathroom to retrieve it.

Of course I told Geoff all about it when I returned to London. He was never judgmental, I’ll give him that: in fact he couldn’t have been nobler. He made a point of assuring me that he felt honour-bound to say nothing of my indiscretions to Tanya before announcing that he considered Tanya the most extraordinary young woman he’d ever met and that if I stepped aside he intended to begin his own courtship of her.

Tanya turned into the hospital car park. She said something to me, but I didn’t catch it. Suddenly I remembered why I had panicked in the park. I’d looked up and seen Geoff standing on the bridge a little distance away. There was a woman and two children close by. They must have been strangers, just passing between us, but for an instant I’d thought that they were Lyneth and the girls. I’d tried to wave, to get up and run to them. And had fallen. When I looked up again they were gone. And I was raving.

FOURTEEN

A military convoy went by, trucks and trailers hauling light artillery, the guns’ snouts muzzled. Owain drove on, passing an elderly Levantine woman in black robes who was diligently sweeping the pavement outside a redbrick mosque.

I was veering between floods of my own memories and Owain’s life. Almost by rote I tried to will myself back to Tanya, but it was halfhearted. For once I was relieved to escape my own turmoil, and intrigued to know where Owain was going.

He turned the Land Rover down a broad street. In the near distance the rusting cranes of Millwall Docks could be seen over the tops of shoebox apartment blocks, rank upon rank of them, raised during the 1960s and ’70s to house the influx of refugees from the Caribbean and the Middle East. Their breezeblock and concrete facades were dilapidated and sometimes bomb-damaged, reinforcing rods poking out of broken beams, shattered rooms laid bare to the elements. The roadsides were dotted with gutted vehicles, while sagging power lines had been jury-rigged to any available eminence. Despite this, the area had an air of colourful defiance. Walls were daubed and over-daubed with ancient posters, insignia and exhortations in Arabic, Turkish, Greek, all of which suggested a determined vibrancy, an insistence on sheer existence.

There were few people on the streets, and those in evidence halted and watched with a protective stillness as we drove past. To Owain, it was a little like entering a disputed frontier zone. This had long been a non-European settlement area, many of its inhabitants originally employed as merchant navy auxiliaries before emancipation allowed their conscription into the armed forces. With the docks no longer functional for half the year they were largely left to their own devices.

Owain pulled up outside a Victorian apartment building that looked as if it had once been something municipal. He checked the address on his sheet of paper and switched off the engine.

Neat ranks of black refuse sacks were stacked like body bags on both sides of the steps leading up to the front entrance. The apartment was located on the ground floor. Owain crossed a bare foyer and rapped on the door. Music was playing somewhere, tinny but energetic, a hectic oriental reel.

The place smelled of bleach and rancid drain water. Behind the thick glass of the door’s window hung a faded union flag in the Jamaican colours of green, yellow and black. Ten summers before the Civil Affairs Ministry had instituted a vogue for such ethnic adoptions in order to boost immigrant morale, along with parades and organised celebrations of multicultural life. It had proved popular while the weather remained good.

Owain knocked again. There was no reply. He hadn’t expected any, but it always paid to check.

He went outside and clambered up on the sacks to peer in the front window. Blackout curtains were drawn, but through a crack he could see that the room had been emptied.

He heard footsteps, and a dark-skinned man in his thirties came out of the main entrance, hobbling down the steps. He wore an old flak jacket zipped to the neck and a tank commander’s cap, its padded ear flaps dangling.

“The Clarksons,” Owain said to him. “Any idea where they might be?”

The man almost came to attention.

“Gone,” he said after a moment. “Major, sir.”

He was stick-thin, hollow-cheeked, some of his front teeth missing. An ex-serviceman, probably invalided out.

“Know when?” Owain asked.

“Just after midnight. New Year’s Eve.”

“That’s pretty precise. See them go, did you?”

“Heard it to start with. A big CHAP with a trailer for their stuff. They were out and gone in an hour.”

CHAP was shorthand for a Chariot All-Purpose vehicle, a workhorse transporter. “Did they say where?”

“Nobody knew anything in advance. Maybe not even them. But the younger boys were ripe for it, I can tell you that. Made enough racket to wake the whole street.”

“They were shouting?”

“Whooping with delight.”

“So it wasn’t a forced evacuation?”

The man was starting to look wary. “I’m just telling you what I saw. We were all taking a look, thinking maybe Santa was making a late delivery.”

There was a silence before the man said, “Is it a wedding?”

He was obviously referring to Owain’s uniform.

“Something like that. You didn’t see or hear anything else?”

A shake of the head.

“He was a friend of mine,” Owain said.

“Santa?”

Owain made the sound of a laugh. “Maurice.”

The man looked doubtful. He looked as if he was waiting to be dismissed.

FIFTEEN

I was standing in front of a mirror in navy pyjamas, rinsing my hands at the sink. A male nurse waited at the doorway, in charge of my wheelchair.

“What time is it?” I asked him.

“Quarter past three,” he said without looking at his watch.

I was losing time as well as space. How long ago had Tanya delivered me back to the hospital?

I dried my hands with a paper towel. The nurse looked impatient and bored. He was young, with a wispy moustache.

“Any news from my wife?” I asked him, as casually as possible.

“Your brother phoned,” he announced, as if he’d only just remembered it. “Said he’d drop in.”

The news didn’t exactly thrill me. Rees wasn’t the easiest of customers, brother or no.

I took a few steps, thinking that I might be able to walk out of there. But my legs had little strength in them and I barely made the chair. As I struggled into a sitting position I thought I heard singing.

“Did he say when?” I asked.

“Wasn’t me who took the call.”

He was already wheeling me off. I could almost smell his indifference.

I thought of the woman I’d seen in the park. Too tall to be Lyneth, though for a moment she had looked familiar. And the children so bundled up in trousers and hooded jackets they might have been either sex. Yet hope had surged in me. And it was still, in some fashion, alive.

There was a faint background chorus from somewhere. At least I was managing a few steps. It was a stt. I’d been in the TV room for the past hour, watching the news. He was taking me back there. I’d sat through a report about high street sales during and after Christmas that had made no mention whatsoever of any disaster in Regent Street. It was the final confirmation I needed that nothing had happened there apart from my own accident.

I could hear a congregation singing a hymn as we approached the TV room. Was it Sunday? Would I have to sit through “Songs of Praise”? I tried to ask these questions aloud, but nothing came out. I was slipping away again.

A church choir in a big cathedral. It was packed with military men and women in ceremonial uniform—army, navy and air force. The vaulted space echoed with the hymn: “Oh God Our Help in Ages Past”.

Owain stood at the back of the cathedral, mouthing the words but not actually making any sound. The rest of the congregation sang lustily, wholeheartedly.

Finally the hymn ended and everyone fell silent as a senior clergyman rose to address everyone. He looked withered with age, swamped beneath his mitre and ceremonial robes.

From Owain I understood that he was the Cardinal-Archbishop of Canterbury and Westminster, the chief prelate of the United Ecumenical Church in Britain. The walls of the cathedral were hung with national flags and naval ensigns, an array of ceremonial colour and heraldry. Behind the altar there was a memorial to the fallen, a huge bronze scroll topped by the Alliance eagle rampant, glittering in the candlelight. Owain’s uncle leant on his stick in the front row, other dignitaries beside him, listening to the funeral oration for a group of senior naval officers whose ship had sunk under mysterious circumstances off Dakar.

Owain was standing alone near the entrance, respectful of the ceremony but unmoved by its religious content. Many people, especially those of his uncle’s generation, were still strong believers, but he had long lost what little faith he’d once possessed. When he was confident that no one was looking, he slipped outside.

The men on duty were huddling in the lee of staff cars. A raw easterly was blowing, stirring up the fresh snow. Sandbag walls framed a narrow entrance to the west porch of the cathedral. Only its dome made it recognisable as the St Paul’s I knew: the west front towers were gone and the flanks of the building had been reinforced with concrete buttresses.

I got Owain to pull on his jacket as he hurried down the steps. He crossed to a skeletal observation tower on the opposite side of the churchyard. A vertical ladder was the only means to the top. Swiftly he began to climb. His gloves were folded inside his jacket pocket but he did not take them out, despite the fact that the metal handgrips were so cold they almost stuck to his skin.

The two SP guards on duty at the top of the post were startled by his sudden appearance. Both wore ribbed balaclavas under their helmets. Seeing his uniform and rank they brought their mittened hands up in an uncertain salute.

“Can we help you, sir?” one of them said.

“Just came up for a look,” Owain replied. “Everything all right?”

“All’s quiet, sir.”

He walked to a corner and peered south towards the footbridge across the river. It was busy with pedestrian traffic, civilians coming and going, wheeling handcarts piled with winter provisions. Dark smoke was streaming out of the truncated chimney of the Bankside power station, giving the illusion that it was a great ship travelling at speed.

Owain turned back to the guards. The corporal had a pair of binoculars tucked into his belt.

“Lend me those,” Owain said to him.

The corporal handed them over. Both men looked somewhat nervous, as if they weren’t sure whether this was an inspection. Owain felt distinctly overdressed for the occasion. Yet he was purposeful. I didn’t try to intervene in any way: I knew why he had come here.

He took the binoculars and made a show of scanning the south bank of the river before swinging them slowly west.

The observation tower was tall enough so that he could see over the tops of buildings out to the west until the winter haze blurred everything. The gentle curve of Regent Street was visible, while in front of it was nothing but a flat barren expanse of snow-dusted ground.

There was no activity in the area as far as could be seen—no earth-movers or busy teams of men, no mounds of churned earth and mangled metal. Everything had been cleared, levelled. As if nothing had ever gone on there.

But he could see dark smears marking the roads in the vicinity: evidence of recent muddy traffic, the trucks and lorries that had carted everything away. What did it mean? He had no answer yet at the same time felt that he should know. Or that someone who did should tell him.

The scene lunged at him as if on fast-forward, and recoiled. A surge of dark nausea overtook him.

I held him fast, letting the gut-wrenching sensation pass, willing him not to fall. It was similar to what he had experienced on his mission in the east, a sense that the world itself had buckled momentarily like a punctured bladder.

For an instant I was back in hospital, staring at a gardening programme, sipping tepid milky tea.

“Sir? Is everything all right?”

Owain’s hands were trembling. The expected view was restored. He held the binoculars out to the corporal.

He began descending as quickly as he had climbed. Halfway down he almost lost a foothold but managed to cling on. Again I had to brace him. His heart was racing in his chest. He breathed steadily until all his panic had subsided, until he had convinced himself that he had exerienced nothing more than a particularly violent spasm of vertigo.

The sound of another hymn was carrying from the cathedral: “Nearer My God to Thee”.

Giselle Vigoroux was standing beside his uncle’s Daimler, her overcoat collar turned up. She gave him a curious smile and said, “Taking the air, major?”

Owain managed a nod, continuing to walk towards the cathedral steps. “Needed to stretch my legs.”

She didn’t say anything in reply, though he wondered what she was thinking. Nothing had been said about his late delivery of the Land Rover or the dent in its side following his flight from the bombsite; to the contrary, the vehicle had been assigned to him for his personal use. Nor had anyone raised any fuss about his unannounced decision to resume the occupancy of his apartment. Perhaps they were simply giving him a little leeway, keeping the pressure off. Technically he was still convalescing, so that would make sense. But he needed to be more careful and considered in his actions. He didn’t want to be thought of as a security risk.

He slipped back inside the cathedral. The memorial service was reaching its climax, piped organ music swelling stridently. The coffins draped in Union and Alliance flags were slowly rising on an automated dais. Forty-two gold stars made up the circle on the Alliance flag, each one representing a recognised constituent state within its borders at the height of its dominion. The number hadn’t changed throughout Owain’s lifetime, despite the fact that at least a dozen of the countries had either ceased to exist or now lay beyond its territorial control.

The transition from the outside chill to the crowded heat of the cathedral interior disorientated him. He was still wearing his jacket and sweat was springing out all over him. The hymn had transmogrified into some sort of Hallelujah chorus with an angelic counterpoint. Everyone was rapt and respectful—everyone except Owain, who felt himself drowning in its otherworldly crescendo.

SIXTEEN

There was a movement at the foot of the bed. I saw the silhouette of a hunched figure in the half-light.

A shuffle around the room, picking up my chart, inspecting the Get Well cards on the bedside table, slurping water from my plastic tumbler.

Brighter light flooded the room as the door was opened. The ginger-haired ward sister.

“How did you get in here?” she demanded to know.

The figure straightened, his features now clear.

“He’s sleeping.”

“How did you get in here?”

Silence. Finally: “I’m his brother.”

She stood half in and half out of the room, holding the door open.

“It’s late. You can’t just walk in here.”

“I came to see how he was.”

A glance in my direction. “At eleven-thirty in the night?”

“Is it?”

“Visiting hours are over.”

“One of the nurses said it was all right.”

“Did she indeed?”

“It was a he.”

A brief silence. “I’m afraid you shouldn’t be here.”

“I wasn’t going to wake him.”

“Better let him sleep, in that case. You can always come again another time.”

“Come again?” Rees echoed in a hard-of-hearing cartoon voice.

He looked his usual dishevelled self, hair tousled, a grubby windcheater hanging from his slouched shoulders.

“What did you say your name was?” the sister asked carefully.

“Rank Hovis McDougall,” Rees replied and gave a broken laugh.

This was an old joke he’d derived from the initials of his full name—Rees Hywel Meredith.

The sister peered out into the corridor, obviously looking for assistance. With slow rhythmic precision Rees began to sigh heavily, as if he were mentally reciting a calming mantra.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the sister said.

“Is he coming out of this?”

“What?”

“I was wondering. Will he get better?”

Another glance down the corridor. “He’s making progress. But he needs to rest.”

Rees produced something from a pocket of his windcheater. The sister shrank back as he came forward but she took it from him when he offered it to her.

“That’s me and Owen,” he told her. “And our mother. She’s dead now.”

It was a strip of photographs, dog-eared at its corners. I knew it would be the one that had been taken in a photo booth during a day trip to Porthcawl when Rees was nine. Four near-identical shots, all three heads crammed together, frantically grinning. He always carried it with him.

“See?” he said as though vindicated, plucking it from her uncertain fingers.

He returned to my bedside and looked down at me. I narrowed my eyes to slits, not wanting him to know I was awake. He didn’t notice anything. He was staring at me yet not seeing me, with the air of being haunted not so much by my condition as by the effect it might have on him. Rees had his own problems and frequently turned those of others into crises of his own.

“I really must insist,” the sister said.

“No problem,” Rees told her. He glanced at me one more time and said, “I’ll be back,” in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger manner, before slouching out.

The sister came briefly to my bedside. I closed my eyes again, tried to look as tranquil and undisturbed as possible. After a few moments she exited.

Presently I heard voices in the corridor—the sister speaking angrily, a male voice defensively. I couldn’t make out the words but the man didn’t sound like Rees. Soon two more nurses appeared at my bedside, checking everything around me, tucking me securely in. There was more conversation in the corridor, dwindling away. And at length silence.

I lay there, fully awake, marooned in my bed. The night-time hospital quiet invaded the room, bringing with it a perverse sense that while nothing untoward was happening on the ward its very tranquillity made some new nocturnal emergency imminent. I had the growing urge to scream, just to jolt something into action.

Had Rees been escorted off the premises? How did he get in in the first place? Lax security, or simply through the force of his singular personality? And how long had he been at my bedside before I’d awoken? It was typical of him to come at some unsociable hour, but I could easily imagine him inveigling the confidence of a sympathetic nurse by insisting on seeing me in that innocent yet adamant manner that would brook no denial.

Rees was three years younger than me, a cheerful child who had become more withdrawn in adolescence. I’d just finished my finals when my father phoned to say he had been hospitalised. He’d been found wandering the streets near Swansea jail in the middle of the night, dehydrated and malnourished. It turned out he’d scarcely eaten in over a week.

For weeks after his release from hospital he remained fragile and uncommunicative. There was talk of a thyroid imbalance, of anaemia-induced depression, of possible drug abuse. My father put the episode down to exam pressure at school, even though Rees had been found less than a mile from the spot where our mother had died. Slowly, throughout the summer, his condition improved, but his illness ultimately triggered my eventual split with Tanya. To beginit I kept in touch with her by daily telephone calls. We’d planned to go travelling in Europe later that summer. Typically I hadn’t bothered to consider how I would square this with a similar promise to Lyneth.

In those days I lived too narrowly in the present: with me it was always proximity that made the heart grow fonder. And Lyneth wasn’t merely on hand; she was also a big help with Rees. She drove a little Fiesta that proved useful in taking him out on recuperative drives around the Gower. She made herself very available to him—so much so that the two of us only spent time alone together on prim shopping trips or visits to the cinema. Sex was very much off the agenda. But one afternoon in the Tesco car park she told me that she’d missed her period in May, followed by a heavy one the next month that she suspected was a miscarriage.

This was said without any hint of reproach or even expectation; she might have been informing me about a decision to buy apples rather than pears. Her matter-of-factness had the odd effect of making me feel I couldn’t possibly abandon her for Tanya. She was selfless, self-disciplined, and considerate of others—all the things I’d decided I was not.

I kept Tanya waiting throughout the summer, fobbing her off with excuses that my father was away until finally she phoned to say that she was taking the ferry to Ostende at the end of September. By now she must have guessed I wasn’t going to accompany her, especially since I’d discouraged her from visiting me in Swansea. I remember asking her if she intended going alone. She told me that she’d rather have me with her. I let a silence extend before saying that I didn’t think it was going to be possible.

There was a background hubbub of noise from her end of the line; she’d been working behind the bar in one of the local pubs since her finals. She asked if I couldn’t manage a few weeks.

My silence felt like a dereliction of emotional duty. I had the impression that she switched the receiver from one ear to another before asking me if that was it, if I’d decided “between me and her”.

I made to protest my innocence but suddenly I was convinced that Geoff must have said something. When I made the accusation she just laughed and said she’d known from the start and had wondered if I would ever get around to telling her. She told me that I had her phone number and address if I wanted to get in touch. Then she hung up.

I should have rung back immediately but instead I waited a week. Tatiana answered and informed me that Tanya had already gone to Europe, would be away until the New Year. She was travelling around. There was no forwarding address.

I’d got a two-one for my degree: Tanya, I learned later, a first. My father announced that he was taking me out for a celebratory meal. A few days before he did so, I was playing cards with Rees when Rees informed me that mother had killed herself.

Swallowing my surprise and unease I asked him why he thought this. He replied that he’d read the book Father had written. The one about her father. Our grandfather. He’d destroyed him, turned him into a monster. And M mo never been able to live with that. Which was why she’d done herself in.

I skim-read his copy of the book before Father took me out. That Saturday we drove to Oxford, to a gentleman’s club in the heart of the city. I was still a little unbalanced from reading the book. To this day I don’t believe that Mother committed suicide, but I’d certainly detected a savagery in my father’s unstinting portrait of my grandfather’s wartime years. Before I knew it, I’d blurted out what Rees had said to me.

My father took it in his stride. In one of his rare expansive moods, he almost laughed at the suggestion. My dear boy, he said to me in his most patronising manner, Rees is scarcely in a position to form balanced judgements, particularly about matters pertaining to his family; he’s not in complete possession of his faculties.

I knew only that our mother had died in a head-on collision with a lorry on the outskirts of Swansea. My father told me that the lorry driver, who escaped unscathed, claimed that the car had simply veered across the dual carriageway into his path. Neither the brakes nor the steering appeared to have been faulty, and there was no evidence that mother had suffered anything like a heart attack or a seizure. But it was raining heavily at the time and possibly she had hit a patch of standing water and simply lost control. Failing this, she might have sneezed violently or suffered a blackout or even a sudden unbearable cramp in a leg. A random instant of misfortune that had proved fatal. We would never know for certain, but everyone agreed that something like this must have happened. Everyone except Rees.

According to my father, history would be tantamount to book-keeping if it didn’t seek the causes and meanings of events; but he refused to entertain any psychological speculation about Mother’s death. He did, however, say that he considered mental illness to be largely genetic: it was like a neural time bomb waiting to go off, and no one should be blamed for its eruption. If Magda had for some unfathomable reason killed herself—a proposition he was by no means endorsing—it would be reasonable to suppose that Rees had inherited his own instability from her side of the family. He was confident that I had the more robust constitution of his own bloodline and with sufficient effort would go on to achieve whatever I wished in my chosen career.