The Summer Isles (29 page)

“And to recap—the ammunition?”

“What?”

“The bullets—the ammunition. Where did you say you got them?”

“They came with it…” I take a breath. The swollen lump that was my hand is a blazing sun. I am just its circling planet. “With the gun.”

“With the gun?”

“With the gun.” I swallow. “Although I can’t see that it matters now. You know what I planned to do, and all the rest of it was all a long time ago. You can see that, can’t you?”

Reeve-Ellis is slowly shaking his head. “I’m sorry, old man, but that really won’t do.”

“I told you at the start that I have nothing to lose. Why do you think I planned to kill John Arthur? Why do you think I brought the gun?”

“There’s really little point in my bothering unless you can do better than this…” Reeve-Ellis stands up. “I’m sorry.”

I nod and drowse in and out of some terrible dream. There are more questions, the nightmare of the filing cabinet again. Pain’s a strange thing. There are moments when it seems there has never been anything else in the whole universe, and others when it lies almost outside you. I think of Christ on his cross, of Torquemada and Matthew Hopkins. All those lives. And even now. Even now. To the same old gods and the new secular ones. In Japan. In Spain. In Russia. In Britain. I’m not lost at all. Not alone. A million twisted ghosts are with me.

I flinch as the lock slides and the door opens. Alone this time, Reeve-Ellis sits down.

“I was once John Arthur’s lover,” I swallow back a lump of vomit, trying hard not to cough. “I bet you didn’t know that? I
was
his lover…”

Reeve-Ellis frowns at me. A loose scab breaks open as the flesh on my hand parts and widens. The sensation is quite disgusting. A fresh dribble of blood patters the floor.

“I was asked to show you these,” he says, laying out a brown manila envelope.

“I can’t imagine that there’s anything…” I gasp. “…Sufficiently compromising…” I’d almost laugh at the idea if doing so wasn’t excruciating.

“It’s not
that
,” he says, almost angrily.

I do my best to focus as Reeve-Ellis opens the envelope up and slides four photographs out. He swivels them around and lines them up on the desk before me like playing cards, grainy enlargements of four faces and upper bodies, all apparently naked. Three are white-lit against a white cloth background; the fourth—a man, I realise when I’ve sorted out the approximate details of these gaunt, near-bald, blotched and virtually sexless figures—is standing against a wall. They are each holding in spider-thin hands a longer version of the kind of slot-in numbers that churches use for hymns, although these numbers are longer, dotted by brackets and sub-divisions: a tribute to the power of bureaucracy. My vision blurs. A large part of me doesn’t want to recognise these people.

“How do I know,” I say, “that they’re still alive?”

“You don’t.”

I gaze back at the photographs. Eyes that fix the camera without seeing, as if they can fill up with so many sights that light is no longer absorbed. My acquaintance, he looks younger, older, beyond time, with the thin bridge of his nose, the ridges of his cheeks, the taut drum-like skin, the sores. His wife, his children, are elfin, fairy people, blasted through into nothingness by the light that pours around them. Barely there at all…

“These people—”

“—I was just asked to show you, Brook. I don’t know who they are, what they mean to you. Their names…”

The lock on the door slides back. Both PCs stand close to the wall without a word, watching me and Reeve-Ellis.

“Are you proud of this?” I say to them all. “Is this how you wanted it to be in the Summer Isles?”

“The
where
?” Reeve-Ellis looks weary, defensive, frustrated. In spite of everything, I still have this feverish sense that there’s some part of the equation of what’s happening here that I haven’t yet glimpsed.

“They’re dead anyway, aren’t they—this family?” I say. “I don’t understand you people. Even if I could save them, where would they go, how would they live—what kind of life?”

Reeve-Ellis shakes his head. “Just concentrate on telling us everything, old man. Who knows what might happen then—who you might be able to help. Don’t worry about thinking you can shield someone. Don’t worry about betrayal. Believe me, all of that’s in the past. Your plans and your schemes, the simple life you probably thought you were living. Do you really think you could get even
this
close to John Arthur with a pistol unless someone wanted you to? Still, it must have been fun while it lasted, playing your stupid little game.”

He picks up the photos, taps them together and slides them back into the envelope. PCs T3308 and K2910 move towards me, grip me beneath my arms and bear me up once again, towards the filing cabinet.

In the end, it’s the pain. When all’s said and done, our bodies are selfish creatures, and they control our minds. Forget love. Forget loyalty. Forget hope. Forget the dream. Remember pain.

When I’ve told them more than I imagined I ever knew. When I’ve told them about Walter Bracken and about Ursula. When I’ve told them, yes, about Francis Eveleigh and about my acquaintance and about poor Larry Black at the
Crown and Cushion
and Ernie Svendsen who deserves it anyway and all the children I used to teach at Lichfield Grammar who I know are grown up by now and culpable as all we British are yet at the same time totally blameless. When I’ve told them about that time in the twenties when I saw Francis Eveleigh again at the Cottage Spring except he was now really John Arthur, and about the stupid, stupid joke of tomorrow being the fifteenth anniversary of that day. When I’ve told them everything, I’m suddenly aware of the sticky creak of the chair I’m still tied in, and of the waiting emptiness that seems to flood around me. It’s still too hot in here, although I’m shaking with cold. The pipes are humming. And I’m flying through everything, right down into the earth’s core and the grinding, meshing heart of history.

“Well…” Reeve-Ellis says eventually. His arms are folded. His legs are stretched out. He’s sitting well back from the desk and the mess I’ve made. “I suppose we had to get there eventually.” He glances back at PC K2910. “Did you get most of that?”

PC K2910 nods. His face is paler than ever now; the freckles are like drops of blood.

“Then give me that notebook.”

Reeve-Ellis takes it from PC K2910. The way he stuffs it into his pocket, I know he’s going to destroy it as soon as they’ve finished with me.

“Well—you know what to do.”

PC K2910 fumbles with the keys. PC T3308’s staring at me, a half-smoked cigarette behind his ear. He looks like a family man, and I can see him now with his own chair nearest the telly and the fire in a nice police house in Ealing, and taking his eldest lad to watch Spurs when they’re playing at home. I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for all of them.

The two PCs come around both sides of the desk. They’re careful this time as they loosen the ties. They lift me up almost gently. Reeve-Ellis steps back into the corridor as they drag me out.

“Might as well try using your legs, sir. You’ll find it’ll be easier.”

Amazingly, my limbs do still work as we stagger along the corridor in what seems like the opposite direction to that from which we came. But that was an age ago and I can no longer be sure of anything. We find the stairs, and my body is still surprisingly functional as I shuffle up them one at time. We come to doors marked M
AINTENANCE
O
NLY
, and PC K2910 fiddles with the bolts, swinging them open into a shock of London night air. I can hear the murmur of traffic as PC T3308 hooks his hand around my left arm and leads me into the darkness, but the sound is distant, shielded on all sides by brick and glass and concrete. This is one of those ugly shaft-like courtyards that architects design to let light into the centre of large buildings. The distant patch of sky is the same shape and colour as a cooling television screen—there’s even one small dot-like star in the middle. I’d always imagined that my life would end in a prettier place. A remote clearing in some wood in the Home counties, the cry of a fox and the smell of leaves and moss…

I glance back. Reeve-Ellis stands in the lighted doorway, hands stuffed into his old cardigan as he leans against the frame. It really is quiet here, although it’s probably past midnight in London by now. The whole of this pre-Trafalgar Day, and the celebratory service I was expecting to attend at Westminster Abbey, has gone past me. A faint, bad smell comes up from the central drain that the concrete slopes to.

PC T3308 lets go of me and I sag to my knees, still struggling to protect the precious burden of my hand. He nods to PC K2910 and reaches to release the flap of his holster. The leather creaks slightly. Somewhere, faintly, dimly, deep within the offices, a phone is ringing. His breathing quickens.

“I’m sorry about all this, sir. If I had any say in these things…”

PC K2910 is backing off. Somewhere, the phone is still ringing.

“Wait!” Reeve-Ellis calls across the courtyard.

The two PCs stand as he disappears whilst I hunch between them. The night falls apart, pulses, regathers. From somewhere, I can hear the scream of a whistle, the clattering wheels of a train. Eventually, the phone stops ringing and I stare down at the stains around the drain and breathe the rotten air that it and my own body are making, trying to wish away this moment, this pain. The train whistle screams again. I think of a rocking sleeper carriage. A man’s arms around me, his lips against mine. The gorgeous, shameless openness…

I hear the sound of Reeve-Ellis’s footsteps. The thin lines of his body re-shape against the bright doorway.

“There’s been,” he says, “a change of plan…”

Reeve-Ellis drives a Triumph Imperial, a big old car from the pre-Modernist early thirties with rusty wings and a vegetable smell inside given off by the cracked leather seats. It creaks and rattles as he drives, indicating fitfully, jerking from side to side along the night-empty London streets. He’s found me an old jacket to put over my shoulders, a doggy-haired tartan blanket to put across my legs. He got PC K2910 and T3308 to clean me up in the toilets of that deserted office before sending them home, although I’m still hardly presentable.

“Who was that phone call from?”

“After what you’ve been through, old man…” He says, stabbing at the brake as a taxi pushes ahead of us from a junction. “You really don’t want to know. Believe me. Just count yourself as bloody lucky…”

I get a glimpse of my face reflected in the windscreen. Red-eyed, shining with a cold sweat in the passing windows of the big shops along Oxford Street. I sway against the car door as he takes a corner too rapidly, the tyres squealing, and pain sweeps over me and London dims.

Reeve-Ellis finally parks his Triumph at the back of a clump of large buildings with flaking Regency windows, then climbs out and opens my door and waits for me to struggle out, clearly irritated by his new role as chauffeur. Viper’s nests of piping curl overhead. There are many dustbins. Steel tanks. The parched smell of incinerators.

He leads me through sheet-rubber swing doors into a long corridor where people are rushing, white on white in breezes of laundry starch and Dettol. He barks at a staff nurse. Clearly busy, she swivels to face him, ready to shout back until she sees the gold identity card he’s holding. Then I’m found a wheelchair, and borne into the presence of a doctor in what I suppose must be one of the London teaching hospitals. The doctor’s manner as he examines me is brisk and irritated. He explores my hand, my arm, without bothering to meet my eyes, and listens to my heart and lungs, then asks if I’m not under treatment already. Reeve-Ellis sits amid the kidney bowls on a corner table. Outside, I can hear the rumble of trolleys, the chatter of nurses, raised, angry voices. Life is, after all, still going on.

“You know how busy we are,” the doctor mutters. “Half the drunks in London have celebrated Trafalgar Day a day early…”

“Just get a move on,” Reeve-Ellis says, checking his watch. “There’s a good man. We need to be out of here. You can save the Hippocratic rubbish for someone else.”

Two extra nurses are summoned to hold me as the doctor unravels a gauze and prepares to set my fingers. One of them clicks her tongue as, gasping and sobbing, I sink to the floor and try to crawl away. “You men!” she chuckles, gathering me up as easily as a heap of laundry. “You’re all the same! You’ve got such a low threshold of pain…” The mole in her cheek is dotted with tiny dark hairs. I do my best to count them in the moment before the bandages whisper and the light on the ceiling pours down and through me.

It’s nearly dawn when Reeve-Ellis drives me back through London from the hospital. The street lights are fading and milkmen are leading their wagons from the dairy whilst vans and handcarts head towards Covent Garden, Smithfield and Billingsgate. A few night-time revellers wander home, trailing mists of silk, cigarette smoke, laughter. The brightening sky shines greyish-pink on the Thames as we cross Westminster Bridge and I swallow another of the new thicker tablets I’ve been given. They taste bitter. Sweet.

At the New Dorchester, the remnants of a fancy dress party are lingering. A Black Knight is clanking around in the remains of his armour whilst Robin Hood is arguing mildly about some aspect of room service with Reception. A body-stockinged Lady Godiva sleeps against Henry VIII’s shoulder on the stairs. They all glance at Reeve-Ellis and me without surprise as we move towards the lift. We fit in here, Reeve-Ellis and I. He’s come as what he is, and I’m a War veteran—or some symbol of the NHS—with my sling, my gaunt face, my hospital gown. Or perhaps I’m the last guest at
The Masque Of The Red Death.

Reeve-Ellis punches the button for the lift. Instantly, it slides open.

“The message,” he says as the lighted numbers rise, “is that you carry on as before.”

“What?”

“Today, old man, you still get to see John Arthur…”

We arrive at my floor. He follows me to my room. The lights come on—far too bright—as he closes the door. The bed has been made and Tony Anderson’s half bottle of Bells has been put back in the cabinet, but otherwise nothing has changed since I left here a day ago. The nymphs still cavort across the ceiling. Saint George is at prayer in his forest.