Divided Kingdom

Chapter Three

I stepped out of the train just after midday on Monday. A shiver shook me as I stood on the platform, and I wrapped my overcoat more tightly around me. The cloth felt clammy to the touch. Though it prided itself on its spas, its Turkish baths, and its swimming pools, Aquaville had never enjoyed a healthy reputation. In recent years it had been ravaged by flu epidemics, and locals were always falling prey to arthritis and pneumonia. Some argued that the maladies originated in the phlegmatic character itself, its innate quality being cold and damp, but others believed that the Blue Quarter’s first administration should shoulder the blame. In adding some two hundred miles of new waterways to the canals and lakes that existed prior to the Rearrangement, it stood accused of actually altering the city’s climate. I felt fortified by the vitamin supplements Sonya had given me at the weekend. Even so, it would be a miracle if I didn’t come down with something.

I had been told that a conference official would meet me, but I couldn’t see anybody waiting at the barrier. Phlegmatic people had never been known for their efficiency — and besides, the train was at least an hour late. I decided to make my own way to the hotel. According to Jasmine, it was only ten minutes on foot. Picking up my case, I set off towards the exit. I had walked no more than ten yards when a man seemed to rise up out of the crowd beside me. He had moist pale-green skin and a dark pencil moustache, and his black hair had been smoothed down with some kind of oil or pomade. He thrust what felt like a postcard into my pocket.

‘Something that might interest you.’

He spoke out of the corner of his mouth, his face angled away from me and lifted a fraction, as if he was scouring the busy concourse for someone he knew. Then he was gone — like a swimmer caught by a rip-tide, or a drowning man being taken down for the third time.

I walked on. The incident had lasted no more than a few seconds, and yet the contents of my mind had been upended. My thoughts flew past me in a jumbled state, like clothes in a tumble-dryer, and a light sweat had surfaced on my forehead and my chest. I didn’t look at the card. I didn’t even reach into my pocket to check it was still there. It seemed important to keep moving, to behave as though nothing had happened.

Outside the station the crowd thickened and grew sluggish, and I paused once again to take in my surroundings. The streets were narrower than I had expected, and many of the buildings had been allowed to fall into disrepair. Of the several hotels that I could see, for instance, only one — the Tethys — had been painted at all recently. There was a waterway to my right, with taxis moored against a floating wooden quay, but I decided to walk instead. I soon regretted it. I couldn’t seem to synchronise my progress with that of the people milling all around me. They moved with so little purpose, with such a lack of certainty, that I kept colliding with them or treading on their feet. Once, I stepped aside to let a blind man pass only to stumble over an iron bollard and almost drop my suitcase in the canal. I’d not been hurt. All the same, I was beginning to wish I could sit down for a moment and close my eyes. I thought of Jasmine and her offer of medication. I would have swallowed something there and then, if I’d had it on me.

‘Mr Parry?’

I looked round. A young woman with pale-blonde hair was hurrying towards me. In her hand she held a placard on which was scrawled T. PARRIE.

‘Sorry I missed you at the station,’ she said.

I didn’t say anything. I had only just recognised the name on the placard as my own.

She talked on, a tiny muscle twitching under her left eye. ‘Shall we walk? Or would you rather take a taxi? We can take a taxi if you —’

‘Walking’s fine,’ I said.

She led the way, hesitating at several junctions, and even, once, taking a wrong turning, which meant we had to retrace our steps. She must have apologised at least a dozen times, her head sinking between her shoulders, her mouth curling at the corners in a hapless imitation of a smile. I would probably have fared better on my own — or no worse, at any rate. I still had a slight feeling of disorientation, though, and trembled every once in a while like someone suffering from a mild form of exposure, and when we finally got to the hotel, a majestic old building with wrought-iron balconies clinging to a mottled, off-white façade, I plunged into the lobby with a sigh of relief, as if I had been adrift on a stormy ocean for many days and had now, at long last, reached the safety of the shore.

‘Welcome to the Sheraton, sir.’

I spun round. A middle-aged man in a pale-grey top hat and a tail-coat of the same colour had appeared at my shoulder.

‘Are you here for the conference?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I am.’

‘My name’s Howard. Guest Relations.’ Clasping one hand in the other, he bowed from the waist. ‘At your service, sir.’

‘Thank you.’ I attempted a modest bow of my own.

Howard waited until the young blonde woman had taken her leave, then his right arm described a generous arc in front of me, rather as if he were scattering rose petals in my path. I understood that I was being ushered towards reception. He gave the man behind the desk my name and informed him that I would like to check in. Eyebrows raised, the man consulted a computer screen and slowly shook his head. My room wasn’t ready, he told us. Clasping his hands again, almost wringing them this time, Howard asked whether I would mind waiting in the lobby. Aware of his mortification, I didn’t feel I could object. I sat down in an armchair and took out my guide to the Blue Quarter. Every now and then I would lift my eyes and look through the window at the garden, where the flags of the four countries flew side by side on tall white poles.

As I was finishing a passage on the economy — verdict: permanently on the brink of collapse — I became distracted by a fidgeting at the edge of my field of vision. Looking round, I saw a short thin man rise from a sofa and walk towards me. His suit was the most peculiar colour — the fragile pale-blue of a blackbird’s egg. He had a slight cough, I noticed, and the rims of his nostrils were chapped and red.

‘My name’s Ming,’ the man said. ‘Walter Ming.’

At that moment a large suitcase slipped from the grasp of a passing bell-boy. The case promptly sprang open, spilling its contents across the lobby floor, including somewhat bizarrely, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, which came to rest against the toe of my left shoe. The disturbance partially obscured the thin man’s words, just as a clap of thunder might have done.

‘Wing?’ I said. ‘As in bird?’

‘Ming. As in dynasty.’ He smiled mirthlessly.

I introduced myself, and we shook hands. Ming’s palm had a dry, almost papery feel to it, and his black hair was thick and lustreless. Stooping quickly, I picked up the bottle of Tabasco and gave it to the flustered bell-boy.

‘You just arrived,’ Ming said.

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Pneuma,’ I said. ‘The Red Quarter.’

Ming had turned away from me. He was watching the bellboy, who was trying desperately to force everything back into the suitcase.

‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Where are you from?’

Ming didn’t answer. In spite of his slight build, he seemed ponderous, like a city in which too much evidence of the past remains, and I thought of Cledge, the Green Quarter’s capital, whose shabby low-rise tenements I could sometimes see from my office window if the air was clear. I was about to ask whether he was a melancholic by any chance when Howard appeared before me. My room was ready, he was happy to say. Shaking Ming’s hand again, I told him that it had been a pleasure and that I was sure we would run into each other later on. I thought I could feel his curiously lifeless gaze resting on me as I moved towards the lifts.

On opening the door to my room, I was immediately struck by the oppressive quality of the furnishings, which had more in common with a museum, I felt, than a hotel. The sofa and the armchair were covered in a heavy plum-coloured brocade, and both the wallpaper and the curtains were dark-blue. My sense of claustrophobia was heightened by the bookshelves, which had been built into the wall on both sides of the bed and which were crammed with ancient, musty-looking hardbacks. In the middle of a stack of pillows and carefully positioned on a folded paper napkin was a complimentary chocolate in the shape of a smiling mouth. On the wall opposite the bed was a mural depicting a scene in which men in rowing-boats fished under a moonlit sky. I walked over to the writing desk. Here I found a bouquet of flowers and a wicker basket filled with fruit. A card from the organisers of the Sixteenth Cross-Border Conference wished me a rewarding and relaxing stay. I turned to the window. It looked west, over grey rooftops, the clutter only interrupted by the vertical spikes of a number of church spires. In the distance lay a smudged, uneven strip of countryside.

As I stood there, taking in the view, I remembered the man in the railway station — his sweaty pale-green skin, his oiled hair. The image had a surreal clarity about it, like the last fragment of a rapidly evaporating dream, something which, in the ordinary run of things, I would have automatically discounted or ignored. I slipped a hand into the pocket of my overcoat, half expecting it to be empty. There was something there, though — a sharp edge, a piece of card.

When I looked at the card for the first time I was slightly disappointed. I don’t know what I had hoped to find. Something typical of the Blue Quarter, I suppose — a kind of souvenir. But this was nothing more than a flyer for a place called the Bathysphere. It could be a new restaurant, I thought, or a bar. Or it might be a show. I studied the card more closely — the name and address written in dimly visible steel-grey, the background midnight-blue — then lifted my eyes to the window again. I remembered bathyspheres from adventure stories I had read when I was young. Round metal contraptions, large enough to hold a person, they were designed to be lowered to the bottom of the sea. A profoundly phlegmatic idea, then. Perhaps, after all, the flyer did typify the country I had entered. I wondered why the man in the station thought I’d be interested. Or did he hand out the cards indiscriminately to anybody who passed by? After staring over the rooftops for a while, I shrugged, then slid the card back into my pocket and forgot all about it.

The first event of the conference involved a visit to the Underground Ocean, which Vishram had alluded to, of course, and which the programme described as ‘one of the Blue Quarter’s most extraordinary attractions’. It would provide delegates with a chance to ‘mingle informally’ before the real business of the conference began. We were to assemble in the hotel lobby at three-thirty that afternoon. Transport would be laid on. As the programme breezily assured me, this was an opportunity ‘not to be missed!’. It would be followed by a cocktail party, which would be held in the Concord Room on the ground floor of the hotel from six o’clock onwards.

We gathered in the lobby at the appointed time, about forty of us. Several of the delegates had met before, it seemed, and were busy renewing their acquaintance, talking and nodding and laughing, while the rest of us stood in awkward silence, at slight angles to each other. Hotel staff were putting up decorations — blue streamers looping from one light fixture to another, and a sparkly golden banner above reception that said Happy Rearrangement Day! A portrait of the Queen gazed impassively down at me. She had been classified as a phlegmatic during the Rearrangement, and now, twenty-seven years later, she was still alive, having outlasted both her choleric husband and her melancholic eldest son.

A conference official finally arrived, and we were guided through the garden to the canal where a glass-topped barge was waiting for us. Climbing on board, I sat down next to a big pale man in a sports jacket. I had noticed him earlier, in the lobby, part of a group of delegates who had greeted each other like old friends. As the boat pulled out into the canal, I turned and introduced myself.

‘Nice to meet you,’ the man said. ‘I’m Frank Bland.’

We shook hands.

‘You seem to know a few people,’ I said.

He grinned sheepishly. ‘I’ve been on the circuit for a while.’ He gave me a glance that slid sideways across my face, like an ice-cube on a mirror. ‘You ever swum underground?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve never been here before.’

‘It’s something else.’ He stared straight ahead, then nodded, as though his opinion needed reinforcing.

A woman with a microphone stood up and started pointing out the sights.

In less than half an hour we were drawing up outside an enormous rectangular building with a flat roof and no windows. It had the dimensions of a film studio or an aircraft hangar, and was painted a colour that reminded me of fired clay. A sign on the roof said THE UNDERGROUND OCEAN in huge white letters. Above the entrance, in blue neon, were the words subterranean surfing.

‘One point two billion litres …’ the woman with the microphone was saying.

Frank Bland leaned towards me until his mouth approached my ear. ‘Quite a body of water,’ he said, and then he nodded again and made his way down to the stern where he collected the surfboard he had brought along.

Once through the main door, we found ourselves in a large draughty area with a concrete floor. The air smelled of brine, and also, faintly, of disinfectant. I felt I had been taken to a down-at-heel municipal swimming-pool, or a brackish and slightly depressing stretch of coast.

Near the turnstiles we were met by a lifeguard. He wore a T-shirt and shorts, both blue, and his long hair was drawn back in a ponytail. In honour of our visit, the ocean had been closed to the general public, he told us. We would have the entire place to ourselves. He had a languid, absent-minded way of talking. I couldn’t envisage him reacting quickly enough to save someone from drowning, but perhaps he was faster in the water than he was on land. Like a seal.

We followed him down four steep flights of stairs, then through several sets of double-doors, the last of which delivered us into a room where there was no light at all. We were standing on wooden slats — a boardwalk, presumably. When I lifted my hands in front of my face, though, they remained invisible. The lifeguard’s voice floated dreamily above us. Any second now, he said, the scene would be illuminated, but first he wanted us to try and picture what it was that we were about to see. I peered out into the dark, my eyes gradually adjusting. A pale strip curved away to my right — the beach, I thought — and at the edge furthest from me I could just make out a shimmer, the faintest of oscillations. Could that be where the water met the sand? Beyond that, the blackness resisted me, no matter how carefully I looked.

‘Lights,’ the lifeguard said.

I wasn’t the only delegate to let out a gasp. My first impression was that night had turned to day — but instantly, as if hours had passed in a split-second. At the same time, the space in which I had been standing had expanded to such a degree that I no longer appeared to be indoors. I felt unsteady, slightly sick. Eyes narrowed against the glare, I saw a perfect blue sky arching overhead. Before me stretched an ocean, just as blue. It was calm the way lakes are sometimes calm, not a single crease or wrinkle. Creamy puffs of cloud hung suspended in the distance. Despite the existence of a horizon, I couldn’t seem to establish a sense of perspective. After a while my eyes simply refused to engage with the view, and I had to look away.

‘Now for the waves,’ the lifeguard said.

He signalled with one arm, and the vast expanse of water began to shudder. At first the waves were only six inches high, unconvincing and sporadic, but before too long a rhythm developed and they broke against the shore, one after another, as waves are supposed to. The lifeguard suggested we might like a swim. I rented a towel and a pair of trunks, but stopped short of hiring a surfboard.

Choosing a bathing-hut, I changed out of my clothes and then climbed down to the beach. I had assumed the sand would feel abrasive, like pulverised shingle, or grit, but much to my surprise it had the softness of real sand. Many of the delegates were already swimming, and the lifeguard was looking on, hands splayed on his hips.

He nodded at me as I passed. ‘Enjoy your dip.’

The water was warmer than I had expected. Up close, though, it had a murky quality, and even in the shallows my feet showed as pale, blurred objects. I wondered how exactly one would go about cleaning one point two billion litres of water. I sensed the lifeguard watching me. Taking a breath, I dived through a wave, swam a few blind strokes, then let myself rise to the surface.

Once I was fifty yards out, I turned over and floated on my back, lifting my head from time to time to look towards the beach. At a glance, the sea-front looked convincing, with icecream kiosks and bathing-huts in the foreground and white hotels behind, but I knew that most of it was fake, a carefully contrived illusion. While I was still out of my depth, however, it seemed important to suspend my disbelief. When I started to doubt what I was seeing, a shiver veered through me — a strange, forked feeling that had nothing to do with being cold.

Later, as I dried myself at the water’s edge, I saw Frank Bland again. He raised a hand as he ran past, his surfboard tucked under the other arm. He wore a pair of green-and-yellow trunks which emphasised the stocky pallor of his body. Plunging into the water, knees lifted high like a trotting pony, he threw himself face-down on his board and began to paddle with both hands.

On the basis of our brief acquaintance, I would have expected Bland to be an enthusiastic surfer, but not necessarily a gifted one. When he caught his first wave, though, he rode it all the way to the shore, showing a lightness of touch, even a kind of grace, which seemed at odds with his bulky physique. A group of delegates had gathered near me on the sand, and we all clapped and whistled as he stepped down into the shallows. Bland looked at us and grinned self-consciously. Then, furrowing his brow, he turned the board around and paddled out to sea once more.

As he came in again, he appeared to be travelling much faster than before. Knees bent, one arm extended, he cut across a wave’s steep inner curve, the water tearing in his wake like ancient silk. Abruptly, he swivelled and sped off in the other direction. At the same time, a dark-haired man who was surfing near by lost his balance and toppled backwards into the ocean. Bland didn’t see him until he surfaced, and by then it was too late. The leading edge of his board caught the man on the temple, and I saw the man go under.

The lifeguard rushed past Bland and hurled himself headlong into the breaking waves. Only seconds later, he was hauling the man up on to the beach. Blood spilled from a gash just above the man’s hairline and slid over his face, the colour so intense, so vital, that it seemed to question the authenticity of everything around it.

Laying the man flat on his back and tilting his head, the lifeguard opened the man’s mouth to check the position of his tongue. Just then, the man’s chest heaved. The lifeguard turned him over, on to his side. The man coughed, then vomited some water on to the sand. I noticed a new silence and, glancing round, I saw that the ocean was quite motionless. They must have switched off the waves.

Frank Bland stood close by, head bowed. ‘I didn’t see him,’ he was muttering. ‘I just didn’t see him.’

I went and stood beside him. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Frank.’

‘He came up right in front of me. There was nothing I could do.’ Bland’s teeth began to chatter. I fetched a towel and wrapped it around his shoulders. Still looking at the ground, he nodded in thanks.

Meanwhile, the lifeguard was pressing a rag against the man’s head to staunch the bleeding. At last the man’s eyes opened. Rolling on to his back, he let out a groan, as though he suspected something might be wrong. He closed his eyes tight shut, then opened them again. They flitted across the bright-blue of the artificial sky.

‘Where am I?’ he murmured.

I arrived outside the Concord Room at ten-past six, but the party was already in full swing, people talking and laughing as if they’d been there for most of the afternoon. Large crêpe-paper models of our national emblems hung from the ceiling, each in the appropriate colour — red peacocks, yellow salamanders, and so on. I glanced down at my name-badge, making sure it was still securely fastened to my lapel, and then moved on into the room. I had just accepted a glass of wine from a passing waiter when Walter Ming walked up to me. He was wearing the same unusual pale-blue suit.

‘We meet again,’ I said.

‘Just as you predicted.’ His mouth widened in one of his trademark smiles, humourless and fleeting.

We shook hands. He didn’t have a name-badge on, I noticed.

‘I didn’t see you at the ocean,’ I said.

‘I wasn’t there.’ Looking out into the crowd of guests, he sipped from his glass. ‘I hear somebody died.’

‘There was an accident,’ I said. ‘No one died.’

‘Well,’ Ming said, ‘that’s what I heard.’

‘You don’t happen to come from the Green Quarter, do you?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘I don’t know. Just a feeling I had.’

Ming nodded as if he understood such feelings, as if he often had feelings of that kind himself. ‘Are you going to the club tonight?’

‘What club?’

He reached into his pocket and took out a card that was identical to the one I had been given.

So, I thought. It was a club.

‘I’ve got one of those,’ I said. ‘Someone handed it to me. A stranger.’

‘Are you going?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe.’ Actually I’d had no intention of going — not until that moment, anyway.

‘I think you’d find it interesting,’ he said.

‘How do you know?’ I said. ‘You don’t know anything about me.’

Ming looked at me. His eyes had the opaque, almost filmy quality of stagnant water. I could read nothing in them, and yet the look seemed significant. Muttering something about the need to circulate, he shook my hand, then turned and moved away into the crowd.

I finished my drink.

Ming had used the same words as the man in the railway station. Was that a coincidence, or were the two men connected in some way? Or — more sinister still — was I mistaken in thinking that Ming didn’t know anything about me? Could he have been assigned to keep me under observation, for example, while I was attending the conference? If so, he clearly lacked finesse. If not, who was he?

‘You look lost.’

I turned. A woman stood beside me, wispy grey-blonde curls hovering around her head like an aura. Her badge said Josephine Cox — Conference Organiser.

‘Just thinking.’ I gave her a smile that was intended to reassure her.

She led me across the room and introduced me to a group of delegates. Almost inevitably, we found ourselves discussing the incident that had taken place that afternoon. The injured man was Marco Rinaldi, a social historian from the Green Quarter. He had suffered a mild concussion, Josephine told us, as a result of which he was being kept in hospital overnight. He was going to be all right, though. He was going to be fine. Just so long as none of us thought it augured badly for the conference. I looked at her carefully and saw that she was only half joking. We all shook our heads, some less convincingly than others.

At one point I glanced around the room. There was no sign of the man in the pale-blue suit. It suddenly occurred to me that he might have been an intruder. After all, he hadn’t been wearing a badge, and the name Ming — as in dynasty — could easily have been a fabrication. He had even managed to avoid telling me where he was from — on two separate occasions. I wondered about the level of security in the hotel. Should I call Howard and voice my suspicions? I faced back into the group of delegates. Wait a minute. Maybe I was overreacting. I nodded vaguely in response to something a bearded man was saying. I should relax, I thought. I should relax and enjoy my stay, as the note from the organisers had encouraged me to do.

That night Josephine took me out to dinner, along with John Fernandez, the bearded man, and two people he had met at previous conferences, Philip de Mattos and Sudhakant Patel. Fernandez was from Athanor, a major port in the Yellow Quarter. He worked as a shop steward in the Transport and General Workers’ Union. De Mattos also hailed from the Yellow Quarter, though he was employed as a stockbroker on the Isle of Cresset, an offshore tax-haven. As for Patel, he came from just around the corner, as he put it. He had lived in Aquaville for the past fifteen years, where he practised alternative medicine — acupuncture and aromatherapy. It was an unlikely group, and on the way to the restaurant Josephine had told me — in strictest confidence, of course — that she was a little nervous at having two choleric men in her charge and hoped that I might help her keep the peace, but in the end her anxieties proved unfounded. We spent three hours together, and I didn’t detect even a flicker of tension or unpleasantness. After dinner, the other men wanted to go to a bar they had heard about, and though tempted by their company, which was exuberant to say the least, I declined, thinking that an early night would stand me in good stead for the many surprises and excitements that undoubtedly lay in wait for me.

Back in my room, I switched on the lights. The dark furnishings and massed rows of dusty second-hand books closed around me. I sat on the end of my bed and looked at the mural — men fishing under a full moon. I had drunk wine with the meal, and then a liqueur, and I finally felt as if I was adjusting to my new environment. Somehow I didn’t feel like sleeping, though. On a kind of impulse, I reached into my coat pocket and took out the card the man in the station had given me.

‘The Bathysphere,’ I said out loud.

It was a club, Ming had told me. In the city I came from, we had all sorts of clubs — dance clubs in Terminus, drinking clubs in Gerrard and Macaulay, strip clubs in Fremantle — and I had been to most of them at one time or another, but I knew nothing about clubs in the Blue Quarter. I glanced at the card again. Applied to a club, the name had a certain intriguing ambiguity, I thought, suggesting immersion in a foreign element, a descent into the deepest, darkest depths. Yes, there was definitely a hint of the illicit. If I went, though, I would be breaking the rules Jasmine had laid down for me. No contact with the locals, she had said. But what if I only stayed for an hour? How much damage could I really do? I’d have a drink — one drink — and see what was going on. I’d satisfy my curiosity. If challenged, I would claim to be meeting Walter Ming, a fellow delegate. Somehow, after all the equivocations and obscurities I’d had to put up with, it seemed only fair to use him as my alibi.

Smiling, I shook my head, then I reached for the phone and pressed the button that said Guest Relations. Howard answered. I asked whether he had ever heard of the Great Western Canal. Certainly, he said. It led out to the airport. I told him I would like a taxi, if that was possible. He didn’t anticipate a problem. Replacing the receiver, I noticed that my heart had speeded up. As I turned back to the mural, one of the rowing-boats rocked quickly, the blink of an eyelid, and a fisherman toppled over the side, into the sea. I looked away for a moment, towards the curtained window. When I looked at the boat again, there was an empty space which I was sure had not been there before. But nothing else had moved or changed. I stared at the area of water into which the man had fallen. He failed to surface. Through the wall behind me I heard laughter followed by a burst of applause. Another hotel guest, watching television. Maybe I was more tired than I had realised. More overwrought. If I went out for an hour, though, I could still be in bed by midnight. Or, at the latest, one.

I passed through the revolving doors and down the front steps. Dwarf palms lined the footpath, and lurking in among the shrubs were urns on pedestals. The flags of the four countries stirred above me like huge birds stealthily rearranging their wings.

I emerged from the garden to find a taxi moored against the side of the canal, its engine muttering. It was one of the older boats, the cabin made of weathered blond wood, the bench-seats covered with imitation leather. I climbed on board and gave the driver the address of the club. He nodded lazily, then revved the engine. According to the licence displayed beside the meter, his name was Curthdale Trelawney. Dozens of charms and trinkets dangled from the narrow shelf above the helm. There were anchors, portholes and lifebelts, all predictable enough, but he had crowns too, and top hats, spanners and bibles and coins, the whole array glinting and swaying with the gentle motion of the boat. A superstitious man, Mr Trelawney.

I stared through the window as the taxi glided away from the hotel. Bunting had gone up on many of the big canals. Blue pennants seemed to be popular, or sometimes I saw a lantern in the shape of a sea horse floating high above the water. All the decorations had a faded, slightly weather-beaten look, which led me to suspect that they were brought out year after year. Trelawney drove slowly, absent-mindedly, but I found I was in no hurry. We were travelling through a city that was entirely unfamiliar to me. Well, not entirely. Since I dealt with people from the other countries most days of the week — on my computer, usually, or by phone — and since phlegmatics were generally believed to be harmless, I had assumed, despite what Jasmine had told me, that I would adapt to the Blue Quarter without too much trouble. I couldn’t have been more wrong. During that short walk to the hotel, I had been overwhelmed by the strangeness of the place. It wasn’t just the architecture or the dialect; it was something much larger and more abstract, like the look on people’s faces, or the atmosphere itself. The citizens of Aquaville seemed to equate existence with peril. They spent most of their time and energy trying to protect themselves — against the present certainly, against the future too, and even, perhaps, against the past. Thoughts of this kind had never entered my head before, but now, as a result of having to negotiate the streets and breathe the air, I was absorbing a little of the local people’s trepidation, much as I had once absorbed well-being from Mr Page. I was even seeing figures move in paintings. Though, to some extent, it appeared to threaten or at least unsettle me, it was also proof of the theory I was going to expound in my talk on Wednesday, namely that the divided kingdom was self-perpetuating, and that the need for transfer and relocation would eventually die away. Each of the four quarters had already developed its own unique character and identity. In other words, although the idea of four types of people was fundamentally simplistic, there was a certain amount of self-fulfilling prophecy involved. Place someone in an environment for long enough and he starts to take on the attributes of that environment.

The taxi bumped against a row of car tyres, the engine noise subsided. We had stopped outside a tall stucco-fronted building that was set back from the canal. Wide steps led up to glass doors with vertical brass handles, and the words that featured on my flyer — THE BATHYSPHERE — were spelled out in black block capitals on the white neon strip above the entrance. If I hadn’t known the place was a club, I would have assumed it was a cinema, The Bathysphere being the title of the film that was showing. But there were no queues outside. I couldn’t see any doormen either. There was no one around at all, in fact.

‘Not much happening, is there?’ I said.

My driver surveyed the building. ‘What’s it supposed to be?’

I told him.

‘Maybe you’re early,’ he said.

Though I had my doubts about the club, I thought I should give it a try. After all, I had gone to the trouble of finding it.

‘Could you come back later on and pick me up?’ I said.

‘How long are you going to be?’

I looked at my watch. ‘Let’s say an hour.’

‘Fine by me.’

Once on the quay, I glanced behind me. In the boat’s cabin, Curthdale Trelawney was lighting a cigarette. When he exhaled, the smoke unfolded against the dark glass of the windshield like a flower that only blooms at night.

The air roared and trembled as a plane went over, its wheels already lowered for landing. I adjusted my coat collar and looked around. Most of the buildings that lined the canal had once been business premises — factories, offices, warehouses — but they had long since been vacated. Bleak sodium lights stooped over a deserted towpath. The whole area had a forlorn, abandoned feel to it. I checked the address again — a nervous reaction, obviously, since the club’s name was there above me in foot-high letters — then I climbed the steps and opened one of the glass doors.

The foyer was semicircular in shape. Its walls were red, with a gold picture-rail. The centre-light, housed in a black metal shade, cast a bright, unsteady circle on the carpet. In front of me stood an archway, sealed off by a velvet curtain. To my right, and built into the curve of the wall, was what appeared to be a ticket booth. A girl sat behind the perspex, reading a magazine. She had plucked her eyebrows into two perfect arcs, and her blonde hair shone. She glanced up as I walked over.

I took the card out of my pocket and showed it to her. ‘Have I come to the right place?’

‘Yes, you have. And that card means you get in free.’

‘And it’s a club?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m not too early?’

She smiled. ‘You haven’t missed a thing.’

‘Wonderful.’ I hesitated. ‘How long does it stay open?’

‘You can leave any time you want.’

I tilted my head at a slight angle. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I can’t hear any music,’ I said.

She smiled again, more winningly. ‘It’s not that kind of club.’

Her answers seemed precise and clear, and yet she consistently told me less than I wanted to know. It was vagueness in a most sophisticated form. Though it did occur to me that I might have been asking the wrong questions.

‘Which way do I go?’ I said.

‘Through the curtain, then round to the right.’

As I was turning away, one of the glass doors swung open, and I glanced over my shoulder, half hoping to see Walter Ming walk in. After all, there was a sense in which I needed him to justify my presence in this place. I could have bought him a drink. We might even have joked about the whole experience. But the couple who entered the foyer weren’t people I knew or recognised. The man had an equine face and bad teeth, and his muscular figure was wrapped in a long, tight-fitting pale-grey overcoat with a black velvet collar. His companion wore a wide-brimmed hat at such an extreme angle that I could only see the powdered whiteness of her neck and the scarlet of her mouth. Her high heels were sharp as ice-picks. Well, I thought, at least I won’t be the only person here.

I followed the directions the girl had given me and soon found myself in a narrow corridor that sloped gently downwards and to the left. Dim lights studded the walls at regular intervals, and there was the smell of warm trapped air. I had assumed the corridor would lead to a theatre of some kind, with rows of plush seating and a stage. I had been listening for the muted buzz of an expectant audience. Instead, I walked into a triangular room which had red walls and a black ceiling. In front of me were four doors, all painted pale-gold. To my right, on a simple wooden chair, sat a man in dark clothes. His hands rested on his lap, and his head was bowed, as if in prayer. For a moment I thought he might even be asleep.

‘Choose a door.’ His voice sounded automatic, almost prerecorded. Presumably he had to say the same words every time somebody came into the room.

‘What am I choosing between?’ I asked.

‘You’re choosing without knowing what you’re choosing. You’re taking a chance. You’re going into the unknown.’

‘The unknown?’ I said.

‘You’re free to leave at any time,’ the man said in the same bored monotone. His head was still bowed, his hands still folded in his lap.

‘So I just choose a door and open it?’

He nodded.

How does one choose between objects that appear to be identical? I had entered the realms of the arbitrary, the intuitive, and I didn’t feel entirely comfortable, but I spent a while studying the room and in the end I found what I was looking for. At the foot of the second door from the right the carpet had been worn away, which led me to believe that this particular door was more popular than the others. Now, at least, I had something on which I could base a decision.

I opened the door and stepped through it, closing it carefully behind me as if I were a guest in someone’s house. As I let go of the door-knob I became aware of a faint stinging sensation in my hand. Glancing down, I saw that I had scratched myself. Except they weren’t really scratches. They looked more like pinpricks — four or five neat punctures in the centre of my palm. It must have been the door-knob. Some jaggedness or irregularity in the metal.

‘Did you hurt yourself?’

I looked up quickly. A boy was walking across the room towards me. His fair hair glinted as he passed beneath the light that hung from the ceiling.

‘Jones!’ I couldn’t believe that it was him. ‘What are you doing here?’

He just smiled.

‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘I’m fine. Just like you said I’d be.’ He took hold of my hand and turned it over. We both gazed down at my palm, the miniature beads of blood. His smile seemed to widen.

‘Are you sure?’ I said.

He was still looking at my hand. ‘You shouldn’t worry so much.’

They were the very words I had used a quarter of a century ago. He had remembered them. I had so many questions, but they all merged, forming a kind of blockage, like leaves in a drain.

I stared at the top of his head. His hair had the gleam of beaten metal.

‘What happens next?’ I said.

And then it was as if I had blinked and missed half the evening. A girl stood in front of me. It was my sister, Marie — or rather it was a girl who looked just like her. Younger, though. Seventeen, eighteen. The age Marie had been when I first saw her.

‘Where’s Jones?’ I said.

‘Jones?’ she murmured, lips slanting a little.

I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter. Jones is all right. Jones is fine.’

Her face slowly lifted to mine, as slowly as the sun crossing the sky, as slowly as a flower growing, and her skin glowed as if lit from the inside, and the whites of her eyes were the purest white imaginable. I became aware of a change in the temperature. The air in the room seemed warmer now, and it was scented too, not with perfume, though, and not with incense, no, with something sweeter, more indefinable, more rare — the breath of angels, perhaps …

I don’t know how we reached the street. I simply found myself standing on the kerb, the girl beside me, her eyes as dark as liquorice or mink. My heart seemed to have swollen in my chest. My heart felt like a beacon, a source of light.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked.

‘I’ve never been happier,’ I said.

She took my hand and led me to a car.

‘Is this yours?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer.

Before too long, we were moving along a straight road, our progress fluid, cushioned. She handled the car with great efficiency and deftness. Lights streamed past my window, all different colours.

‘You drive beautifully,’ I said.

She looked across at me and smiled. The space between us glittered.

‘Where are we going?’ And then, before she could reply, I said, ‘I know. I shouldn’t talk so much.’ It didn’t matter where we were going. Our destination didn’t interest me at all. I just wanted everything to remain exactly as it was.

I wanted it to last for ever.

I stared out of the window, secure in the knowledge that she was still beside me. To look away from her felt like sheer extravagance. I was so confident of her presence that I could squander it.

The city faded. A glow in the rear window, a distant phosphorescence. I leaned forwards as the car took a series of long, sweeping curves at high speed. We seemed to be climbing, but I could see nothing through the windscreen, nothing except the headlights pushing into the darkness ahead of us. Every now and then a sign would loom up at the side of the road like a skeleton in a ride through a haunted house, only to fall away, insubstantial, obsolete. There was never a moment when I was frightened or even unnerved.

The girl didn’t speak again. Once in a while she would glance across the magical secluded space inside the car, and the looks she gave me meant more than anything she could have said. Those dark eyes in the dashboard lights, that darker hair, the muted howling of the wind as we rushed on into the unforeseen, the incomparable — and then I was sitting next to a canal, a street lamp hanging over me, and everything plunged deep in a sickly orange solution, everything deformed somehow and yet preserved, as if in formaldehyde. I couldn’t seem to focus properly. My throat contracted, and I coughed so hard that I thought I might vomit. I put my head in my hands and kept quite still. What had happened? I didn’t know. I sat there until I felt the cold air penetrate my clothes.

At last I was able to look up. I was at the top of a flight of stone steps which led down into flat black water. Was it the Great Western Canal? I couldn’t tell. There was no sign of the taxi. Perhaps I had fetched up somewhere else entirely. I risked a glance over my shoulder. No, there behind me was the tall white building. I climbed slowly to my feet, then stood still for a moment. The sweat had cooled on my face, and I felt more awake. My vision was sharper too. I made my way across the towpath to the club. When I tried a door, though, it wouldn’t open. I tried them one by one, methodically. They had all been locked. I peered through the glass, but the lights had been switched off. All I could see was a dim distorted version of my own face. I banged on a door with the flat of my hand. Nobody came. What would I have said anyway? I went back to the bottom of the steps and gazed up at the façade. The white neon strip above the entrance was quite blank; the letters that spelled THE BATHYSPHERE had been taken down. It was only then that I thought to look at my watch. Twenty-past four. I let out a strangled cry and swung round, staring wildly towards the motionless canal, the empty buildings with their broken windows and their barricaded doors. I had to get back to my hotel — but how?

I began to run towards the city centre. A pain started up in my right side, and I slowed to a fast walk. My feet felt only loosely attached to my ankles. My throat burned. The conference would be starting in four hours, and I hadn’t gone to bed yet. I didn’t even know where I was.

A plane went over, tearing the clouds to shreds. I swore at it. The next time I looked up I saw a dimly illuminated sign that said TAXI. I burst through the door. The small office was filled with grey-skinned men smoking cigarettes.

‘I need a cab,’ I said.

Their heads turned in my direction, their lips purple in the drab yellow light. Somebody asked me where I wanted to go. The Sheraton, I told him. He named a price. It seemed expensive, but I agreed to it. In the circumstances, I suppose I would have agreed to almost anything. He consulted a clipboard which lay on the counter in front of him, then pointed at one of the younger men.

Twenty minutes later I was standing in my bathroom, staring into the mirror. It was hard to believe that I was back in the hotel, that I was safe. It had the banality of a true miracle. And the face that was looking at me didn’t appear to have altered. The same wide, slightly furtive brown eyes. The same low forehead, two uneven horizontal lines etched delicately into the skin. I touched my hair where the sweat had darkened it, then I brought my hand down and turned it over so the palm faced upwards. Studying it closely, I could just make out five tiny marks.

At breakfast on Tuesday I sat with Frank Bland. He had called the hospital first thing, he told me. Rinaldi was feeling much better. He would be discharged within the hour. Bland celebrated by ordering smoked haddock, a basket piled high with toast and a large pot of tea. Later, we were joined by John Fernandez. When the waitress came, he wanted scrambled eggs and black coffee, nothing else.

‘How was the bar?’ I asked him.

He shrugged, then took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. ‘We were out till about two.’

‘What about you?’ Bland said to me. ‘Did you get an early night?’

I smiled ruefully. ‘No. Not exactly.’

Waking at seven, after less than two hours’ sleep, my first sensation had been one of almost painful nostalgia. I had been part of something wonderful, but it was over. At the same time, I didn’t know quite what to believe. It was possible that I’d been drugged. That would explain the exquisite clarity, and the way the minutes, even the seconds, had seemed to slacken and stretch out. And the nausea that came afterwards, it might explain that too. How much of what happened had been imaginary? And if it had all been imaginary, could it be imagined again?

‘Parry?’

I looked up. Fernandez was staring at me.

‘I didn’t get to bed till five,’ I said.

‘Five?’ Fernandez and Bland both spoke at the same time. People at the other tables looked up from their breakfast.

Fernandez was the first to recover. ‘Where did you go?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure.’

Bland and Fernandez exchanged a glance.

‘You know, you shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Sudhakant Patel, who had just arrived at the table. ‘After all, this is the country of the mystical, the unex —’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Fernandez said. He produced a bottle of Tabasco from his jacket pocket and shook a few bloody drops on to his eggs.

The next few hours passed in something of a blur. I heard a phlegmatic delegate deliver a softly spoken and yet impassioned plea for the statue of the famous admiral to be removed from its column in no man’s land and installed outside a maritime museum on the Blue Quarter’s south coast, and though I acquitted myself reasonably well, I thought, making at least one contribution to the debate, my mind was restless and jittery throughout. I kept drifting back to the events of the night before. My gamble had paid off. I hadn’t had any contact with the local population, not unless you counted the club’s employees and the taxi-drivers. What’s more, the experience itself had exceeded any expectations I might have had, so much so that all I could think about was going back again that evening.

When lunchtime came, I bought a map of the city from a kiosk in the lobby and took it into the restaurant with me, settling into a booth next to the window. I had just located the Great Western Canal and was following it with my finger when I sensed somebody at my shoulder. I looked up to see Walter Ming standing beside me. He had really surpassed himself this morning. He was wearing a green tweed suit with leather-covered buttons, a bright-yellow shirt and a knitted tie of an ambiguous brownish colour.

‘Walter,’ I said. Somehow I felt I was beginning to know him a little, even though we hadn’t seen each other since the cocktail party.

He blinked. ‘Mind if I join you?’

‘Not at all’

He glanced at the remains of my lunch. ‘You know, before I sit down, I think I’ll just go and get myself something to eat.’

While he was busy at the self-service counter, I folded up my map and put it away.

Ming returned with a white coffee and a bowl of rice pudding topped with two generous scoops of vanilla ice-cream. He took a seat opposite me, his eyes immediately sliding towards the place where the map had been.

‘So,’ he said, ‘did you go?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘How was it?’

I nodded. ‘Like you said. Very interesting.’

He gave me a careful look, then turned his attention to his dessert.

‘I didn’t see you there,’ I said.

‘No. In the end I couldn’t get away.’

I watched as Ming spooned rice pudding and ice-cream into his mouth. He had the unusual habit of biting his food up with his front teeth, which made me think of certain rodents. It pleased me to have noticed this about him. Though I had the feeling he possessed information to which I wasn’t privy, I wanted him to realise that he, too, was under observation. It helped to redress the balance.

In less than a minute Ming had finished. He bent over his cup of coffee, took a quick sip and then sat back. ‘Will you go again?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘From what I hear,’ he said, ‘it can be a bit addictive.’ He crushed his napkin into a ball and let it drop into his empty bowl. ‘Well,’ and he shifted in his seat, ‘I probably won’t be seeing you again.’

‘Oh? Why not?’

‘I’ve got to get back to work.’ He rose to his feet. ‘I had a half-day off, so I thought I’d look in on the conference. Get some ideas, some inspiration.’ He smiled in that mirthless way of his, then we shook hands. ‘It’s been a pleasure meeting you,’ he said. ‘Enjoy the rest of your stay.’

From where I was sitting, I was able to watch him leave the hotel. Something about his manner failed to convince me. He didn’t look like a person who was going back to work. Not that he faltered or dawdled. No, he walked at a steady pace, looking neither to the right nor the left. But there was something… Then I realised what it was. He looked as if he was walking away from an appointment rather than towards it. One hand in his jacket pocket, the other lifting casually to smooth his hair, he had the air of someone who had just relaxed. The job had been done, the mission had been accomplished. What job, though? What mission?

I glanced at my watch. If I didn’t hurry, I would be late for the afternoon session. Far from making sense of the previous night’s events, I had somehow managed to wrap them in extra layers of mystery. I felt like the fly that struggles to free itself from the spider’s web only to discover that it is contributing to its own imprisonment. As I rose from the table, there was a moment when the floor appeared to be sloping away from me and it seemed I might be about to faint.

Should I or shouldn’t I?

I stood on the front steps, under the awning, and looked out into the dark. It was ten o’clock in the evening, and it had been raining continuously for hours. A light mist curled and drifted on the surface of the canal. I had found a gap in my schedule that afternoon and slept for two hours, and I felt calmer now, more balanced. I put my anxious, befuddled state of earlier in the day down to simple exhaustion. After my nap, I had showered and dressed, then I had eaten a quiet dinner with Patel and Bland. Once the meal was over, I had excused myself; I had an event in the morning, I told them, and I needed to prepare (not entirely true: I had written my paper weeks ago). Now I was lurking outside the entrance to the hotel, trying to decide whether I could risk going to the club a second time.

A water-taxi drew up, and a young couple got out. Their coats held over their heads, they ran through the garden and up the steps, then pushed hard on the revolving doors that spun them, laughing and breathless, into the lobby. As I turned back to the canal again, still trying to make up my mind, I noticed someone sheltering in the shadows at the far end of the steps. The figure wore a long, pale, shapeless garment, a kind of cloak, and its face was hidden by a hood or cowl of the same colour. I knew instantly that this was one of the White People.

I had seen White People before — once at school, with Bracewell, and once with Victor, while out on a walk — but only from a distance. I remembered how Bracewell had pulled me away from a gang of boys who were taunting one of the poor creatures. He had been disappointed in me, assuming — wrongly, as it turned out — that I’d been actively involved. They were helpless, he said. They deserved better. I could still recall the rhyme the boys had chanted: You don’t belong/ You don’t fit/ You’re not a he/ You’re an it. Almost a decade later, on seeing a small group of White People on the cliff-tops, I had recited the rhyme for Victor, and he had winced. Cruel, he said, but not wholly inaccurate. They were society’s untouchables, he explained on that occasion. The past had been taken from them, as it had been taken from everyone alive at the time of the Rearrangement, but these were people who had been either unwilling or unable to find a place in the future. They didn’t fit into any quarter, he said, or any humour. They had ended up marooned between the old kingdom and the new one. Lost in a pocket of history. Once I joined the Ministry, I began to learn a little more about these strange nonentities. Known formally as achromatics, they were required to wear white because white had no status as a colour. Since they were perceived as having no character, they were deemed incapable of causing psychological damage, and as a result they were allowed to cross borders at will, to wander freely from one country to another. They were commonly believed to be both sterile and psychic — sterile because the idea of non-beings giving birth to non-beings was too bizarre to think about, and psychic because their apparent inability to speak had led to a reliance on other, more obscure forms of communication. Perhaps, after all, they had something to impart, and yet this had never really been acknowledged — except for here in the Blue Quarter, that is, where they were sometimes viewed as mystical beings or spiritual guides. In the Red Quarter, a far more secular environment, they could rely on charity: among other things, for instance, we had started a foundation that provided them with food and clothing. Throughout the divided kingdom they were, generally speaking, either tolerated or ignored, though in the Yellow Quarter, predictably enough, they were held in such low esteem that they were often treated as scapegoats.

I moved towards the figure slowly, so as not to frighten it.

‘Do you need any help?’ I said.

The figure looked round. It was a woman of about my own age. Though she had chapped skin and a runny nose, the expression on her face was remote and strangely benign, as if she had been contemplating an object of great beauty.

‘You’re wet through,’ I said. ‘Can I offer you some dry clothes?’ I pointed to the revolving doors behind me. ‘I have a room here.’

The woman took two or three steps towards me, and then stopped. Her expression hadn’t altered, and I felt that I had now been incorporated into whatever she was thinking about.

‘Come up to my room,’ I said. ‘I’ll find you some —’

Before I could finish my sentence, she launched herself at me, almost knocking me off my feet. Her strength took me completely by surprise. I staggered, but remained upright. She had wrapped her arms around me, trapping my own arms by my sides, then she had pressed her face into my chest. She had gone quite still. It wasn’t an assault, I realised, but an embrace, and I was reminded, for one brief, unnerving moment, of Marie.

‘Oh dear.’

Howard had appeared on the steps. He began to try and free me from the woman’s grasp, but she must have locked her hands behind my back. She had clamped her teeth together and turned her head to one side, her eyes fixed on some abstract point beyond my shoulder. There was a sense in which I had become incidental. She was clinging not so much to me, I felt, as to the idea of human contact, human warmth.

Howard moved round behind me. When the woman’s fingers were finally prised loose, she let out a bellow of distress and fell back, flushed and panting.

I looked at Howard. ‘Can’t we offer her some shelter?’

‘I’m afraid it’s against hotel regulations, sir,’ he said.

I watched as the woman lumbered down the steps and along the flagstone path that led to the canal. She appeared to dissolve into the rain.

‘Where will she go?’ I asked.

‘They have their places.’

I saw that Howard was trembling. ‘Are you all right, Howard?’

‘It upsets me too, sir.’ He eyed my raincoat. ‘Can I clean you up at all?’

I told him not to worry.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘there is something you could do for me. You could order me a taxi.’

Howard nodded, then withdrew into the lobby.

Standing on the steps, I could still feel the woman’s grip around my ribs. She had left damp marks all down my front. I could even see the place where she had pressed her face against me, a stain with three segments to it — the imprint of her forehead, nose and chin. My raincoat had become a shroud. I stared out into the darkness. The force with which she had attached herself to me had been testament to her loneliness, her desperation. I was reminded once again of what Bracewell had said, that the White People couldn’t help themselves, that they deserved better, and I rebuked myself for not having acted with more compassion.

By the time the taxi drew up outside the hotel, the rain had slackened off. The city seemed quiet, almost shocked, as if it had witnessed the entire episode and sided with the woman. Of the woman herself there was no sign. They have their places. I stepped down into the boat and gave the driver the address.

He frowned. ‘What do you want to go all the way out there for? There’s nothing out there.’

I didn’t answer. Curiously though, his reaction provided me with exactly the kind of stimulus I had been waiting for. You’re phlegmatic, I thought. What would you know? We were different people, the taxi-driver and I. We had different needs. A strong sense of conviction was flowing through me now. I could have been having drinks with John Fernandez, Philip de Mattos, and the rest of them. I could have been forging new contacts, furthering my career. Instead, I was in a water-taxi heading west, towards the airport.

There’s nothing out there.

That’s what you think, I thought with a smile.

Inside, it was all exactly as I remembered it. There before me was the foyer, half-moon-shaped, and decorated in flamboyant if slightly tattered red and gold, and there on the carpet lay the bright circle of light, trembling a little at the edges, and there in the ticket booth sat the girl with the blonde hair. I was filled to the brim with a joy which, even at the time, felt disproportionate. It was as though I had invested my whole being in this one image, and somehow, simply by walking in and seeing it, I had been repaid in full.

Well, not quite in full. There was still the pale-gold door, and what I would find when I stepped beyond it. I moved almost hungrily towards the ticket booth. The girl was wearing something different tonight, a silk kimono embroidered with exotic birds and trees. The backdrop was a landscape, lush mountains rising above calm bays, suns sinking heavily in skies of peach and lilac, and for a moment I was drawn into that world, and I was looking at the birds and trees from the other side, my face drenched in a lurid apocalyptic glow. The girl’s voice came to me from everywhere at once, and across a great distance, like the voice of God.

‘Can I help you?’

Feeling slightly dizzy, I took out my card and showed it to her.

‘That was a special offer,’ she told me. ‘This time you’ll have to pay.’

‘That’s all right.’ I slipped the card back in my pocket. ‘I’m just really glad you’re open,’ I said. And then, not wanting to appear eccentric or over-eager, I added, ‘You must hear that all the time.’

She smiled uncertainly. I noticed how the sleeves of her kimono widened below the elbow, dark trumpets from which her arms emerged, like music. Her beauty was just the prelude to something even more exquisite. I looked away into the foyer, my happiness extravagant, baroque.

‘You’ve been here before, then?’ I heard the girl say.

Turning to face her again, I felt a momentary stab of disappointment. Somehow I had expected her to remember. ‘I was here last night.’

‘So you know where to go?’

‘I thought you wanted me to pay.’

She laughed and shook her head, the light skidding off her hair. ‘I don’t know what’s got into me today.’

I laughed with her. ‘It’s been an odd day for me too.’

She named an amount, and I slid the money into the shallow metal bowl at the base of the perspex screen. I took one final look at her, which she failed to notice, then I parted the velvet curtain and passed on into the corridor beyond.

When I reached the triangular room, the man in the black clothes stopped me by putting a hand on my arm. ‘You’ll have to wait.’

I sat down on the only other chair. The man was seated to my right. I hadn’t looked at him properly the previous night. There hadn’t been time. He had hooded eyes, which he kept lowered, and his hair was cropped so short that I could see his scalp. His face was made up of cavities and hollows, as if the bones had been broken and then imperfectly reset. Though his clothes looked new, they seemed dated, archaic. He was dressed like a footman, I thought, or notary — or even a church-warden. In his left ear he wore an earpiece, which would be how he received instructions from elsewhere in the club.

I looked still more closely.

His ankles, though long and spavined, were sheathed in expensive black silk socks. The ankle-bones protruded in the way that Adam’s apples sometimes do.

A pulse beat patiently in the thick vein on the left side of his neck.

This was like no waiting I had ever known. I wasn’t upset by the delay, or even curious. I simply assumed there must be a good reason for it. I felt physically comfortable, despite the cramped nature of the room and the hardness of the chair. Time was just a pool in which I happened to be floating. At one point I smelled violets. Not the real flowers, though. A synthetic version. They must have opened secret vents and released some kind of air-freshener into the room.

At last, and without looking up, the man signalled to me, a peculiar double gesture of his left hand, as if he were brushing cobwebs from in front of his face.

‘You can choose a door.’

I chose the second door from the right. As my hand closed over the door-knob, I shut my eyes, and it wasn’t Jones I saw but the girl who looked like Marie, her face lifting slowly to mine … I stepped through the doorway. This time I felt nothing. I glanced instinctively at the palm of my hand. There were no marks, no tiny punctures, no telltale beads of blood. Something opened in my stomach, bottomless, like an abyss. I was standing in a room I hadn’t thought about in more than twenty years. There was my bed, the blankets and the eiderdown pulled back, part of the top sheet trailing on the floor. I had been sleeping in this room when the soldiers came, the beams from their torches lurching across the pale-blue walls. I had always slept here, even as a baby. The air itself seemed to remember me.

I moved into the alcove where the window was. Sunlight was falling on the copper beech in the front garden. I had climbed its branches so many times. I knew them off by heart. And the road beyond, I knew that too, its pavement smooth enough for rollerskates, and then the dark curving scar on the tarmac where a car had swerved to avoid me when I was six. I faced into the room again. Draped over the end of the bed was one of my father’s old gowns from the university. I would put it on when I was pretending to be a vampire or a wizard. I ran my hand over the white fur collar, and a word appeared on my lips, familiar but magical: ermine … Smiling, I turned away.

On the mantelpiece was my favourite piece of rock. I had found it halfway up a mountain while on holiday. It had rained so hard that morning that the footpath had become a shallow stream. Veined with turquoise and tawny-gold, the rock looked valuable, like treasure. Back home, though, it dried out, quickly fading to a dull grey-green. My parents told me I should keep it in water — in a fish-tank, perhaps — then it would always look the way it had when I first saw it and I would never be disappointed, but somehow I had never taken their advice, and it had sat there above the fireplace ever since …

That dropping feeling in my stomach again, though steeper this time, and faster. I had been so startled by the room and then so caught up in its spell that I had overlooked the fact that it was just one fraction of the house, and that the bedroom door would take me to the rest of it, and that my mother and father might be somewhere close by. I stood still and listened. No voices came to me, and yet I had the sense that they were both downstairs. I thought I could hear the washing-machine, for instance. The whirr of it, then the shudder.

I opened the door, stepped out on to the landing. The dark wood of the banisters, almost black. The stairs, carpeted in pale-pink. And then the hall below, in shadow … There was another noise now, harsh and rhythmic. It was me, I realised. It was the sound of my own breathing.

‘Matthew?’

My stillness seemed to thicken, to intensify.

‘Darling, are you coming down?’

I couldn’t see my mother, but I knew she would be standing by the kitchen door, the fingers of her right hand curled around the leading edge. She would be looking upwards, in the rough direction of my bedroom. Beyond her, the table would be set, with bread and marmalade, a pot of tea, and if it was the weekend my father would be there.

Though I couldn’t move, I found my voice and called out, ‘Coming.’

I felt so buoyant in that moment, so free, and I stepped back into my bedroom, thinking I would take one more look at it, only to be confronted by walls that were red and a ceiling that was black. I swung round. My bedroom was no longer there. The piece of rock, the gown, the window framing sunlit trees — all gone. There was only a row of pale-gold doors. I reached for the door that was second from the right, but a voice stopped me.

‘Only one choice allowed.’

I turned to see the man in dark clothes sitting on his chair. ‘What?’ I said. ‘You never told me that.’

The man rose to his feet. Standing only a few inches from me, he somehow gave the impression that he could expand rapidly to fill an enormous space. He was like something in its concentrated form.

‘This way.’ Taking me firmly by the arm, he propelled me through a curtain and out into an unlit corridor. If only I had not turned back. If only I’d gone on across the landing down the stairs …

I stood on the towpath, my eyes angled towards the ground, one hand wrapped around the lower half of my face. The rain had stopped, but I could hear water everywhere, like a tongue moving inside a mouth.

A blast on a horn made me jump. I looked up. My taxi was still waiting, the small craft rocking and swaying in the wake of another boat. I nodded at the driver to let him know I was aware of him, but couldn’t bring myself to leave.

In the end, though, there was nothing for it. I crossed the towpath and climbed down into the taxi. The driver turned in his seat with the self-righteous air of someone whose perfectly good advice has been ignored.

‘You see?’ he said. ‘I told you there was nothing there.’

I had the feeling I’d been turning and turning in the bed for hours, but when I finally gave up trying to sleep and switched on the light I saw that it was only five-past one. Maybe I should try and read for a while — after all, the shelves on either side of me were full of books — or else I could go through my lecture one last time … I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. Leaving the lights off, I peered into the dim well of the mirror. My face floated there, not on the surface seemingly, but just below it, like someone underwater looking at the sky. As I stared at myself I heard my mother calling me again. Matthew? I had recognised her voice immediately. It was as much a part of me as blood or hair. Each layer of my skin had been inlaid with it. And it had sounded different to the voice I remembered from that night on the road, not piteous, not pleading, but tender, even, calm — the voice I had lived with, day in, day out, for years … I filled a glass with water, drank it down.

As I put the glass back on the shelf, loud laughter came from the corridor outside my room. I opened the door. There were five of them out there, arms round each other’s shoulders — Fernandez, Bland, de Mattos and two I didn’t recognise. Fernandez was holding a huge rabbit made of green crêpe paper. Bland appeared to have lost one of his shoes. When they noticed me standing in the doorway, their mouths opened wide, and they lifted glasses and bottles in a collective salute.

‘It’s the mystery man,’ Fernandez said.

I grinned self-consciously and shook my head. The mystery man. That’s what they had started calling me. Because I had gone to bed at five in the morning, and they still hadn’t found out why. They staggered towards me, all at the same time, as if they had been pushed from behind. I took an involuntary step backwards.

‘Sorry,’ Bland said, ‘but we’re drunk.’

‘I’d never have guessed,’ I said.

They reeled back again, wheezing and chuckling, bumping against each other gently like boats in a harbour. Yes, they’d been drinking all evening, so many drinks, but now they were going to play cards. I’d play cards, wouldn’t I?

‘I’m not very good at cards,’ I said.

‘Well, you can watch,’ de Mattos said. ‘How about that?’

I thought about it. Probably anything was better than lying in bed and being unable to sleep — and besides, the idea of company appealed to me.

‘All right,’ I said.

With a resounding cheer, the five men swept me off down the corridor in my pyjamas and bare feet. Fernandez danced a celebratory rumba with the enormous bright-green rabbit. Bland offered me his one remaining shoe, which I graciously declined. They were going to Boorman’s room, de Mattos told me. Charlie Boorman was the name of one of the men I hadn’t met before. The other was Rinaldi. Marco Rinaldi. They were both miserable bastards, de Mattos said. You know, from the Green Quarter. From Cledge. Boorman and Rinaldi grinned queasily.

I noticed the surgical tape on Rinaldi’s forehead. ‘You’re the one who had the accident, aren’t you?’

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ Rinaldi said. ‘He did it on purpose. He was trying to kill me.’

I stared at him. ‘Really?’

The others fell about laughing, Bland included.

Boorman’s room was at the far end of the corridor. His bed hadn’t been made, and empty beer bottles lay scattered about, together with dirty clothing, old newspapers and the remains of a meal.

‘Talk about melancholy,’ Fernandez said. ‘Talk about fucking gloom.’

Bland and Rinaldi said they were going off to find some chairs. I looked at the wall opposite the bed. Where I had a mural of men fishing, Boorman had a beech forest in the autumn.

‘Dangerous, that wall.’ Boorman stood next to me, one hand resting heavily on my shoulder.

‘What’s dangerous about it?’

‘See that tree?’ He pointed, the tip of his finger revolving unsteadily, like a fly circling a light bulb. ‘I pissed all over it.’

‘I thought I could smell something,’ de Mattos said.

‘Woke up in the night,’ Boorman went on, ‘needed a slash. Thought I was outside, didn’t I. Pissed on the first tree I could find.’ His eyes squeezed shut, and he was shaking his head. ‘Maid didn’t like it.’

‘What about this game?’ Standing on a table, Fernandez was fastening his rabbit to the centre-light with someone’s tie. ‘Are we going to play or not?’

Rinaldi and Bland returned with extra chairs, and the five men settled round the table. Sitting on the bed, looking over Boorman’s shoulder, I watched as Fernandez shuffled the cards. He was due to speak tomorrow, after lunch. He would be discussing terrorism in his native Yellow Quarter, with special reference to the supposed links between various disaffected elements and the trade unions.

‘I’m looking forward to your talk,’ I told him when I caught his eye.

He grunted. ‘At least someone’s interested.’

The game began. They were drinking Boorman’s brandy. Old, it was. Aged in special oak casks. I’d have some, wouldn’t I? I said I would, secretly hoping it might make me sleepy. The green rabbit rotated solemnly above the table.

‘We had a peacock too,’ de Mattos said, ‘but Rinaldi fell on it.’

‘I just fell over. Squashed it flat.’ Rinaldi looked at me. ‘Nothing personal.’ He glanced down, fingered his lapel. ‘Lost my name-badge too.’

‘Rinaldi’s name-badge,’ de Mattos said, ‘it’s not for people at the conference. It’s so he knows who he is when he wakes up in the morning.’

The mention of name-badges reminded me of Ming, and when the laughter had died down I asked if anybody knew him. Fernandez looked blank. So did Rinaldi.

‘He wears strange-coloured suits,’ I said.

‘I saw someone like that,’ de Mattos said. ‘What’s his name again?’

‘Walter Ming.’ I had begun to see Ming’s enigmatic behaviour as a kind of indecisiveness, and that, together with his persistent cough, led me to believe that he might come from the host nation, that he might, after all, be phlegmatic. ‘I think he’s from here.’ I turned to Bland. ‘But if that was true you’d know him, wouldn’t you?’

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Bland said. ‘Our civil service, it accounts for something like three per cent of the population. There are thousands of us.’ He threw down a card. ‘What about him, anyway?’

‘I don’t know. He seems devious, somehow — and he keeps following me around —’

‘Sounds like Rinaldi,’ Fernandez said.

Rinaldi grinned uneasily, then put a hand over his mouth. Standing up, he lurched towards the bathroom.

‘He’s going to vomit.’ Boorman hadn’t taken his eyes off his cards.

‘He always vomits,’ Bland said.

A terrible noise came from behind the bathroom door, somewhere between a roar and a groan, as though Rinaldi was being tortured.

Bland looked across at me. ‘Don’t worry. It always sounds like that.’

‘Rinaldi,’ someone said.

There was a general shaking of heads.

A few minutes later I asked if anybody had been to a club called the Bathysphere. None of them had even heard of it. De Mattos wanted to know whether it had live girls. He knew a couple of places, if I was interested.

‘It’s not like that,’ I said.

It was true, I suppose, that there had been an erotic edge to my first night at the club, but something else was happening now, something quite miraculous. I had gained access to a part of me that I had assumed was gone for ever. The club’s name conveyed exactly what was being offered: a journey into the depths, a probing of the latent, the forbidden, the impenetrable … As for Ming, the suspicions I’d been harbouring now seemed ludicrously exaggerated and melodramatic. He was like the Blue Quarter, I decided, only in microcosm. He was fluid, elusive, a source of disorientation, but he didn’t necessarily pose a threat. I was glad I had come to watch five drunk men playing cards. In an oddly paradoxical way, it had put everything in perspective.

At half-past two I thanked Boorman for the brandy, and though the others tried to talk me into staying I said goodnight and walked back down the corridor.

Sometime later, already curled up in bed, I thought I heard a person crash to the floor outside my room. There was a snort of laughter, then someone said, Quiet! I didn’t really wake up, though, and the next thing I knew, the sun was slanting through the window — I must have forgotten to draw the curtains — and a maid was standing at the foot of my bed. She was sorry if she had startled me, she said, but she had knocked on the door — she had knocked twice, in fact — and there had been no reply.

That morning I decided to go and listen to Frank Bland, since his event immediately preceded mine on the programme. He arrived ten minutes late, his face drained of colour, his hands shaking as he fumbled among his papers. He had called his lecture ‘Power and Energy: A Study of the Nature of our Borders’, and though he lost his thread several times during the next half-hour he held my attention throughout since he was elaborating on what Vishram had talked about during our recent lunch together. The path taken by our borders had sometimes been determined by roads or rivers, Bland said, and sometimes by the boundaries of a country, a borough or a parish, but ancient ley lines had also played a part. To its immense excitement, the committee responsible for drawing up the borders had discovered that certain ley lines could have an adverse effect on the health of the people who lived within their sphere of influence. For centuries mankind had attempted to dissipate the hostile energy of these black streams, as they were known — there were a number of methods: the driving of iron stakes into the ground, the encircling of one’s property with copper wire, the judicious placement of chips of jasper, amethyst, quartz or flint — but the architects of the Rearrangement had decided to harness it instead, to make it work in their favour. They had drawn directly and quite deliberately on the land’s innate psychic strength, using spiritual power to reinforce political will. Maybe that helped to explain why so many phlegmatics believed that it could be fatal to cross a border, that certain borders could maim or even kill — unless, of course, one wore a copper suit or filled one’s pockets with the appropriate crystals. Bland ended his talk by wishing those of us who had come from elsewhere a safe and pleasant journey home, and the ripple of amusement provoked by this remark shaded into warm applause as he thanked us for listening and began to gather up his notes.

I was just rising to my feet, preparing to move towards the podium, when Josephine Cox appeared at the microphone, Bland’s last slide — a glowing chunk of amethyst — still showing on the screen behind her.

‘I’ve got an important announcement to make,’ she said.

I slowly sank back down into my seat.

‘Mr Bland has been speaking of the possible dangers involved in crossing a border,’ she said. ‘What he doesn’t know is that he’s about to experience those dangers for himself — as we all are, in fact.’

She paused, seeming to relish our bewilderment.

‘As you know,’ she continued, ‘today is Rearrangement Day. To mark the occasion, we have planned a special trip for you.’ She consulted her watch. ‘In just under three hours you will be flying to the city of Congreve, in the Yellow Quarter.’

She was now speaking into an intense silence.

Once in Congreve, we would be attending a grand firework display, she told us, and since fireworks were something the cholerics understood better than anybody else, it ought to be an unforgettable experience. Afterwards, a banquet would be hosted by the Mayor.

‘Visas have been procured,’ she said, ‘and transport has been arranged. We’ve chartered a small plane, which will be leaving Aquaville at three o’clock. All you have to do is pack an overnight bag. Be back in the lobby no later than one-thirty.’

As she stepped away from the microphone, everyone in the lecture hall began to talk at once. It seemed I would not be delivering my paper after all. I slid my notes back into my briefcase, then I glanced at Charlie Boorman, who happened to be next to me. He raised both his eyebrows. I expressed surprise that the phlegmatics had been able to put together something so dramatic, so ambitious. He nodded in agreement, then leaned forwards and spoke to Rinaldi, who was sitting in the row in front of us. What I was actually thinking was that I had more or less adapted to life in the Blue Quarter, and that I didn’t relish the notion of being plunged into yet another unfamiliar environment. Certainly it was the last thing I’d expected. Rinaldi turned to face me, as if he had just read my mind. There was an aspect of the phlegmatic disposition, he said, which we had either forgotten or overlooked. It was the most flexible, the most whimsical, of the humours — the most feminine, one might almost say. He didn’t think an idea like this was particularly uncharacteristic, though he would be astonished, he added, if everything went smoothly.

‘I think I’d better go and pack,’ Boorman said.

I went to have a word with Josephine, who had been surrounded by the more anxious and excitable of the delegates. Her eyes glittered, and her frizzy hair appeared to have filled with static. She had pulled off a kind of public-relations coup. This was likely to be the most talked-about conference in years.

‘Will we be safe?’ one of the delegates was asking.

Josephine turned to him. ‘Well, there has been some rioting —’

‘Rioting?’ The delegate’s eyes widened.

‘During the last few days,’ Josephine went on, ‘but it’s mostly in the north, apparently. In any case, they often riot at this time of year. It’s practically seasonal.’ She permitted herself a small, vague smile, as though contemplating the behaviour of a wayward but cherished son.

When I was finally able to talk to her, she apologised for the seemingly impromptu and high-handed cancelling of my lecture. She had been determined to retain the element of surprise, she said. She hoped I didn’t hold it against her. I would now be speaking on Thursday morning. It would be the last event on the programme, and everyone was very much looking forward to my contribution.

I took the lift to the seventh floor. They had already made up my room, a new chocolate mouth smiling at me slyly from the pillow. I opened my suitcase and started packing. After a while, though, I found my eyes returning to the mural. As usual, I scanned the blue-black water for the man who had fallen overboard. As usual, it yielded nothing. Then my gaze lifted an inch or two, and I noticed a stretch of barren coast beyond the rowing-boats. A small figure stood on the shoreline, looking out to sea. Was that him? Had he actually managed to reach dry land? Or had that figure been on the beach the whole time? I rose to my feet and moved towards the wall. Up close, the figure turned back into a smudge of darkish paint. It might have been driftwood, or a rock, or a heap of kelp abandoned by the tide. A lone siren spiralled up into the air outside my window. Still staring at the mural, I had an abrupt and pronounced sense of opportunity, as if there was something I ought to be doing, as if I ought to be exploiting the situation to my advantage. What, though? How?

I was looking round the room, hoping an answer would come to me, when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver. It was one-thirty, the receptionist informed me, and the delegates were about to depart for the airport.

‘Please ask them to wait,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right down.’