Omega

SEVENTEEN

Owain was doing bare-chested exercises at his open balcony window. Outside fog blanketed everything. The television in the living room was on, showing a sky thick with Woden assault helicopters.

Owain ran hard on the spot, pounding the carpeted floor, while soldiers in gas masks and jungle camouflage came swarming out of landing craft onto a tropical beach. Melodramatic music accompanied the action. I understood that this was a patriotic movie, a recent release set in the 1980s and produced by the Cinema Véritié studios in Cannes. It was plain to me that both the hardware and the figures, though superficially realistic, were digital images. It was, in effect, a computer-generated cartoon.

Owain wasn’t really concentrating on the action. He kept running as if in flight from something, his exercising not merely a means of keeping fit but also of banishing both thought and memory. Yet he couldn’t escape them. They were as insinuating as the fog.

He flung himself to the floor and began doing press-ups. I could feel the tendons tighten in his arms and neck. I tried to stop him but was completely ineffectual. On the television screen a battle was raging and soldiers yelled stilted phrases at one another. More explosions, exchanges of gunfire, the music swooning into a maudlin tenderness as one of the principals lay dying.

Lying on his back, hands locked behind his head, Owain began to twist and turn, to push his head towards his knees. I found the rigour and relentlessness of his movements wearying. Machine-gun fire issued from the jungle, and there were glimpses of the enemy’s blacked-up faces—or at least their fanatical eyes: they lacked any distinct racial characteristics. I was sitting on my hospital bed in a shirt, jeans and black shoes. I flexed my toes in them, preparing to stand.

Owain kept rocking and jerking until his breaths came deep and hot. Finally he switched off the set before slumping back and closing his eyes, blood pulsing at his temples.

The ticking of the mantelpiece clock infiltrated the silence. Slowly the sweat began to cool on his body, while the dankness of the outside air became palpable. Owain didn’t move and his mind remained almost resolutely blank, attuned only to the extended rhythms of his body.

Tanya walked in and started talking to me while rummaging in her shoulder bag. She wore a denim jacket over a navy roll-necked sweater. One of my overcoats lay on the bed.

Owain was at his sink, swallowing water from a pewter stein. A souvenir from his time in East Prussia. He’d also served in North Africa and Aden before his transfer to the Special Operations Corps. Steadily rising through the ranks, just like his father had done. An efficient, dependable soldier destined to go far, to emulate him. And now it was all turning to ashes.

Springing to his feet, he closed the windows. He disliked fog. It reduced the world, closed everything in. If you couldn’t see something it was all too easy to imagine that it no longer existed. He’d first thought that as a boy. Things happened when you weren’t around. People were killed, houses sealed off, you never saw them again. All you saw was a box in which dummy versions of them lay. Too much of life had to be taken on trust.

I was plodding down a hospital corridor, the overcoat draped over my arm, Tanya holding my elbow. We were leaving. They’d set me free!

His uncle’s Daimler, driving across an open space through a sleety blizzard. Sir Gruffydd and a stout man in tweeds sitting in the back, the field marshal bemoaning the loss of the old British Army regiments following the consolidation of the Alliance armed forces in the 1980s. The other man replying that it was inevitable, given manpower losses and the spersal of forces on the fronts. He was Sir Henry Knowlton, the Secretary of State for Defence.

The car’s heater was turned up full, filling the confined space with the smell of warm leather and menthol from Knowlton’s impregnated handkerchief. He had a head cold. Technically he was the other civilian member of the JGC alongside Carl Legister, but he had formerly been an air marshal. An old friend of his uncle’s, pleased that the RAF had retained a degree of independence as well as its old name. Both had been ennobled by the last civilian government, mere months before the JGC took over.

Through the sleet I could see a Shrike jump jet squatting on the runway. It was ready for take-off, its engines frenziedly whining. The car’s driver was Giselle Vigoroux. Owain had a sense of being contained within the closest thing he had to a family.

Another car, a nimble Yaris, something rockabilly on the radio, the scent of Tanya’s perfume. She swung us around a corner, trailing a BT van. Grassy spaces on one side, a dowdy garage on the other, bargain cars parked on its cramped forecourt. The line of traffic came slowly to a halt. Up ahead was a set of lights.

A phone started burbling. It was sitting in a holder below the dashboard. Tanya didn’t pick it up. She never did when driving. How did I know that? I knew it because we’d continued to see one another secretly over the years. Geoff once phoned while we were together in the car. She pulled over into a lay-by to take the call. We were en route to a pub and I sat there, feeling nothing at all, while she told him she would be home by seven for dinner.

All we’d ever done on those clandestine meetings was talk. Though we seldom discussed the past or the doings of our respective partners, we always found more than enough to say. A couple of hours every few months, mostly in public places: restaurants, museums, art galleries. Rationed time, both of us very adult about it, though for me it was never enough.

The phone went silent. I checked it. No message had been left. It was another mobile number. Tanya thought it might be someone ringing to confirm an engagement. Nothing that couldn’t wait.

I felt punch-drunk, careening between Owain’s life and insistent recollections of my own past that I urgently needed to recapture. I couldn’t stop any of them.

After Tanya had left for Europe I’d immersed myself in looking after Rees and found myself increasingly entangled with Lyneth. She gave me driving lessons and often invited both of us to dinner at her parents’ house. They were pleasant professional people with none of my father’s prickliness. I think Rees found it comforting. Then postcards from Tanya started to arrive. She was in Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Aachen and Cologne. Her messages were cheery but brief, concentrating on snapshot descriptions of the places she was visiting. As the months went by her progress across Europe began to describe a political as well as geographical trajectory: Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Wroclaw, Krakow, Warsaw. The postcards varied from conventional city landmark scenes to pictures of red light districts, punk bars, busts of Stalin painted pink or decorated with Mickey Mouse ears.

Rees and I spent the Christmas holidays in Florida with Lyneth and her family. A few weeks later a brown envelope arrived. Inside was a hand-made card, a photograph stuck to its front. It showed Tanya standing in the snow, backdropped by the onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral. She was holding a big placard on which she had scrawled in red: Seasons Greetings from Red Square, Love, T. In her fur hat and boots she looked small and alone, dwarfed by the wintry grandeur of the place. At the time it never occurred to me to wonder who had taken the photograph.

I passed my driving test. Rees recovered sufficiently to enrol on a computer programming course in Swansea. Despite his illness he’d done well in his ‘A’ Levels and would depart for Bristol University the following autumn. My father was back in Oxford and I had a temporary job through his auspices with a BBC Wales documentary team that was investigating industrial decline in the Gwent and Rhondda valleys. Throughout the early months of the year I accompanied them, helping out with everything from fetching sandwiches to location scouting. Eventually I ended up in Cardiff, assisting with studio editing.

As spring advanced I missed Tanya more keenly than ever. There had been no further word from her since Christmas. Certain that she was now back in England, I mustered the courage to phone. It was Tatiana who answered. She was away again, I was told. Again? She’d returned for the New Year, before more travelling. To the East. No, she didn’t say when she would be coming home.

Tatiana was not unfriendly, but it was obvious she knew that Tanya and I were no longer an item. I tried calling Geoff a number of times. Finally it was answered by a student. Geoff had gone away, was renting out the house for a year.

I was convinced that Tanya had probably phoned while I was in Florida, but my father claimed there had been no calls. Soon afterwards another photograph arrived. It showed Tanya and Geoff standing outside what looked like a sports stadium. Geoff was wearing a puffy pleated jacket and a big grin. He had his arm around Tanya’s shoulder. On the back Tanya had scribbled a message to say that they were touring the Ukraine and that she hoped things were going better for me at home. It was signed with her initial but no endearment. A postscript said: “Tried the chicken. Nothing special.” From this I gleaned that the photograph had been taken in Kiev.

I’d been outflanked, and it was no more than I deserved. I became prey to all sorts of grubby jealous fantasies. At this point the plug was abruptly pulled on the documentary and I was out of a job. I informed Lyneth that I intended to return to London to find work. She startled me by saying that she would come too. In the event, it was the following autumn before we found a place to live, by which time Tatiana was dead and Tanya half a world away.

EIGHTEEN

Breaded chicken and chips. It was garnished with token salad items, a few lettuce leaves, a sliver of cucumber, a tomato segment. Tanya had a vegetable lasagne. We were sitting at a table in a pub, next to a window overlooking a deserted flagstone patio with trestle tables.

Try as I might, I had no control over my translations to and from Owain’s world. It was vital Tanya suspected nothing of this seesawing; she’d have me back in hospital before I knew it.

“Want to eat outside?” she asked.

It was smoky and hot in the pub, and the place was bustling. I thought I recognised it but my memory wouldn’t cooperate. What were we doing here?

“O?”

“No,” I said. “It’s fine.”

I contemplated my plate of food. I contemplated Australia. The notion of Lyneth having a sister who lived there was persistent. Had we had a row before Christmas so that she had taken the girls away? Perhaps she had deliberately isolated herself from contact. Had I done something so awful she wouldn’t have anything further to do with me, hospitalised or not? Was that why Tanya had looked anxious when I mentioned her name?

I wasn’t going to ask her. I was still under scrutiny.

“Do you know where my mobile is?” I asked.

Tanya swabbed her lips with a serviette. “I assume it was lost in the accident.”

Very convenient. All my phone numbers were listed on it. My old address book was long gone. I couldn’t remember Lyneth’s mobile number, or even that of our home. I had no idea of our address either, only that it was in south London. Couldn’t picture the house. My efforts to do so only filled me with a suffocating panic. How much longer was this going to go on?

“O?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t worry. We can get you a new one.”

I couldn’t allow my agitation to show. I still wasn’t sure whether these speculations of mine were in fact true. But they would explain Lyneth’s absence. What had I done? Something so hurtful that she could never forgive me? Something physically hurtful, even?

No, I was certain I could never have harmed her. So what had we rowed about? Something to do with Tanya? Was this why she was here and not Lyneth? Why couldn’t I remember with any certainty? Surely it couldn’t just be my medication?

The urge to ask was more than counterbalanced by the feeling that some rickety mental edifice would come crashing down. I couldn’t risk it yet. But if Lyneth had taken the girls away, my memory of the four of us together in Regent Street immediately before the accident had to be false. As false as the fleeting belief that I had later stood at their gravesides.

The pub’s hubbub washed over me. I speared a chip, heard the throosbing of a domestic hot water geyser. It was mounted on the wall above the sink. I n so bare windowless room, ranks of white china cups and saucers washed and upended on the stainless steel draining board.

I heaved myself back.

“Catch up?” Tanya said.

I looked at her with incomprehension, at last nodded. She used her teeth to tear open the sachet, passed it carefully to me. I squirted the sauce over my chips. It effortlessly suggested blood. I reached for my drink and gulped a big mouthful, the ice cubes clacking against my teeth. Lime and soda. I’d always disliked lime. A mosquito whine filled my ears. Owain carried a tray of cakes and biscuits into the conference hall. The long room was windowless and stuffy, thick with an acrid haze of cigarette and pipe smoke. Low-slung overhead lights made glazed pools on the polished mahogany surface of a big table. Around it were seated two dozen figures, most of them men, most in uniform. Sheets of paper, empty cups and wineglasses sat on blotters, ignored in the angry exchange that was taking place.

“It’s intolerable,” a man in a dark blue uniform was saying in Italianate French. “You cannot expect us to police the entire Mediterranean when we do not have enough fuel for our ships. It is asking the impossible!”

“That’s no fault of mine!” responded another man, equally irately. He was burly and olive-complexioned, possibly Egyptian. “Until the contamination issues are settled my hands are tied.”

Both men were on their feet, glaring at one another across the table. The burly man wore desert khaki and the insignia of the quartermaster general’s office.

“Gentlemen,” said a third man, rising from his seat, “must we shout at one another? Urgent priority has already been given to remedying the situation. I understand that supplies of shielding equipment and new turbine housings for all major frontline vessels are already being undertaken, is that not so?”

This, Owain knew, was Marshal Coquelin, the French C-in-C of Strategic Operations. He directed this question at an anonymous-looking woman in a herringbone trouser suit. She gave a brisk nod.

“Deliveries are expected?” he prompted.

“Some have already been made. The Clemenceau, Moltke and Ark Royal battle groups are being refitted even as we speak.”

“And the time scale?”

“For capital ships, by the end of the month to the Mediterranean and Baltic fleets. Before April for the Atlantic fleets.”

“Excellent. That should enable you to get your ships to where they need to be, yes, admiral?”

The admiral did not exactly look satisfied but he subsided into his seat, as did the thickset man.

“Ah,” said Coquelin, as if he had only just registered Owain’s arrival, “an appropriate time to take a break, wouldn’t you agree?”

A braided kepi sat on the desk in front of him, a relic of the old French army uniform. It was obvious to Owain that the discussion had centred on problems with fuel supplies that had arisen now that wells in the Mesopotamian oilfields were being tapped that contained high levels of gamma emitters. Every ship bigger than a minesweeper in the Alliance fleet would have to have its engine room modified so that it could use the radioactive fuel. No doubt the tanker crews would be expected to make their own safety arrangements.

Coquelin fell into muted conversation with Owain’s uncle, who was seated to his right. He was the head of the French military government and hence a member of the thirty-person Chiefs of State Committee that directed the Alliance’s military and political affairs. On his other side sat the elderly Reichmarschall Schmidt, one of his counterparts and the representative of the German General Staff. He looked half-asleep. Further down the table was Carl Legister.

Owain ventured only the occasional glance in his direction. He was convinced that Legister was watching him as he arranged crockery on the table. A slim, fastidious-looking man, he wore a black suit and a high-collared white shirt buttoned up but without a tie. It lent him an ascetic air. He sat bolt upright, staring straight ahead through contact lenses that accentuated his penetrating eyes.

I kept myself in the background. This was a high-level meeting, and I needed to be as discreet as Owain was being wary.

When Owain came to his uncle’s shoulder, Sir Gruffydd helped himself to three chocolate-coated biscuits from the tray. Another aide was dispensing tea and coffee.

“Sir,” Owain said with an unaccustomed degree of public boldness, speaking in English, “I was asked to remind you of your insulin levels.”

“Damn cheek,” Sir Gruffydd said, though not unkindly. He returned one of the biscuits to the tray and said, “Two sugars in my coffee.”

His uncle suffered from late-onset diabetes. Giselle had earlier supplied him with a little cylinder of sweeteners. He clicked two into the general’s cup.

“Impudence!” the old man said theatrically. “Generaloberst, this is my nephew. What do you make of his insubordination?”

He was talking to the tall man sitting opposite him. Owain saw that it was none other than Wilhelm Blaskowitz, the C-in-C of the armies in eastern Europe.

Blaskowitz was a lean man in his early sixties who sat as stiff-backed in his chair as Carl Legister. Owain nearly blurted out that he had served under him while on the eastern front and that he was esteemed by his men. But such gushing would have been inappropriate as well as foreign to his nature.

Owain moved slowly upble, picking up snatches of conversation. A Spanish general was speaking in broken German to a Czech colleague, discussing refugee problems. A Free French Canadian commander was doubting that the Australians would be able to maintain their neutrality in the face of American encroachments in the Pacific. A Swiss air marshal was complaining that his pilots had been reduced to flying thirty year-old Valkyries and Henschels because disruptions in satellite signalling made state-of-the-art warplanes vulnerable to crashing. Henry Knowlton was scoffing at suggestions that this breakdown had actually been initiated by AEGIS itself in order to destabilise the prevailing period of truce.

Owain lingered, intrigued but sometimes missing the subtleties of the discussion, which was in brisk French. For months there had been gossip that the strategic network had become self-governing and now sought to control the conduct of military operations for its own nefarious ends. The Swiss commander even considered it conceivable that AEGIS was actually working in concert with the American SENTINEL and Russian PHALANX systems, as well as those operated by the Chinese and lesser power blocs. G in AEGIS now meant Gestalt, a global artificial intelligence whose aims superseded those of the humans it had been structured to serve.

It wasn’t the first time Owain had encountered the suggestion that AEGIS might have evolved a directed sentience of its own, though he was surprised to hear it aired at such a high-level meeting. But Knowlton remained airily adamant there was no basis for such a claim.

Owain returned to the kitchen to fetch a fresh pot of coffee. As he came back through the door, Legister raised a finger and beckoned him over.

“Black coffee,” he said.

Owain filled his cup. His hands were surprisingly steady.

“Major Maredudd, isn’t it?” Legister said.

It was a statement. They had met on several occasions, though Owain had never been formally introduced.

“I gather from your uncle that you recently had a narrow escape,” he remarked. “Some business in the West End?”

What was he supposed to say to this?

“An old incendiary went off,” he replied.

“Really?”

Surely Legister would know all the details. Was he fishing for more? Or was this the opportunity for Owain to confess that he met Marisa regularly? To stress as well that their friendship was a purely innocent one?

He couldn’t bring himself to admit it. Hated to imagine the two of them even sharing the same space.

“And are we fully recovered?” Legister prompted.

Owain gave the curtest of nods. “Sir.”

“You must tell me about it. I would be interested in the details.”

He had a reptilian stillness, making only minimal movements. It was impossible to imagine what Marisa was like in his company, what she made of their marriage. They tended to steer away from the subject. It was far too dangerous.

“Biscuit?” Owain said, offering a plate.

Legister put a palm up. “They tell me you were lucky to survive.”

“The report I was carrying was salvaged.”

A stupid thing to say, and Legister was suitably unimpressed. “Oh, good soldier,” he said in a tone too weary for contempt. “Must make sure the paperwork isn’t lost, mustn’t we?”

There was a burst of coughing at the other end of the table. His uncle, beckoning to him, hauling himself to his feet. Owain set the tray down and hurried to his side.

“Get me outside, boy,” he managed to say.

Owain shepherded him through the door and into the kitchen.

“Water,” Sir Gruffydd instructed, half pushing him away, still coughing.

His cheeks were the colour of damsons, his lips flecked with biscuit crumbs. He leant on a table while Owain put a tumbler under the cold water tap.

The field marshal took the glass from him and drained it in one. Removing a handkerchief, he swabbed his lips. He breathed in deeply, didn’t cough again. Already his colour was returning to normal.

“Narrow escape,” he said to Owain in Welsh. “I think you can leave it to us now. I expect you’d like to get some air, yes?”

Owain was surprised by this. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Wouldn’t say so otherwise. We’ll be winding up soon. Take yourself off. It’s an order, Owain.”

NINETEEN

The elevator carried Owain up four, five, six, seven floors. Until now I hadn’t realised he was underground.

The surface hall of the building was thick with security personnel, most of them women. He walked out blinking into the wan late afternoon light, relieved to be released from the fetid smokiness of the conference room.

Beyond the anti-aircraft and missile batteries a long rectangular frozen lake was spread out in front of him, lined on both sides with bare upright poplars. A breeze fnfesouth had raised the temperature unexpectedly. It was almost balmy.

On the balcony were stalls selling drinks and pastries, their cherry-striped awnings incongruously festive in the greyness. The prospect of warmer weather had tempted staff outdoors. They were largely women, a few of Arab or African descent, huddling in their greatcoats over hot drinks.

Everyone was talking in French. Only now did I become aware that we were no longer in London but rather the Alliance’s western continental headquarters in Versailles. Owain had flown out with his uncle for the chiefs of state conference.

He paid an extortionate price for a double espresso, which came with a small chocolate wafer wrapped in silver foil. The coffee was intensely bitter, the chocolate flavourless and gritty, a triumph of style over substance. He gazed out over the ashen parkland, frustrated that he was not able to pursue his investigations into what had happened to him in Regent Street.

“Do you mind if we join you?

It was Giselle Vigoroux. And standing at her shoulder was Marisa.

She wore her black fur coat and smiled uncertainly at him. Giselle was holding two cappuccinos and Owain immediately rose to seat them. It was three days since he had last seen Marisa.

Giselle did not allow any awkward hiatus to develop, immediately remarking that the majority of staff at the headquarters was female and asking Owain’s opinion on the desirability of enlisting women into frontline combat units.

Owain shrugged. Privately he considered the prospect a recipe for indiscipline and a rapid decline in combat efficiency. But he said, “It might work, as long as it’s done on a voluntary basis. And I think you’d need to keep the sexes separate.”

“Indeed?” Giselle said. “What, all-female armies?”

“Just within units. Say on a battalion level. Otherwise there could be complications.”

Giselle took a sip of her coffee.

“I take it you’re in favour,” I made Owain say.

“To the contrary. I am against it. Unless you replace men entirely, from bottom to top. In that way we might see a more rational conduct to our military efforts. Who knows, we might even decide to stop fighting altogether.”

There was a hint of provocation in her voice. He didn’t know how serious she was being. I tried to speak through him again, to ask if she favoured an unconditional truce; but Owain wasn’t having any of it.

Giselle put down her cup and rose. “You must excuse me for a few moments.”

As soon as she was gone, Marisaid, “I wanted to let you know I would be here. But there was no opportunity.”

“I didn’t know myself until we landed,” Owain replied.

“Carl told me yesterday. To give me time to pack a suitcase.”

Owain wondered if this was the only reason. Perhaps Legister was checking his own internal security.

“He’s suspicious of us, Marisa.”

She merely shrugged. “He knows we are friends. I told him we meet.”

“You told him?”

“When he spoke of you the other day. I thought it better to say we sometimes meet. That way the air is clear.”

This was a highly optimistic assumption to him. “He didn’t want to know why you hadn’t mentioned it before?”

“He asked me if we were lovers.”

Owain hadn’t anticipated this, though it was perfectly logical. He had a jittery sense of his privacy having been violated.

“He was very calm about it. As if he was asking about the menu for dinner. I told him we were simply friends. That my days were long and poor in companionship. That I had done nothing to compromise myself.”

It scarcely sounded like an unconditional assertion of her fidelity. “What did he say?”

“He raised no objections.”

“None at all?”

“He said that providing your intentions were as innocent as mine he saw no reason to prescribe future meetings.”

“Proscribe.”

“Yes. That word. He speaks like a lawyer, Owain, even to me. Nothing I do can touch him.”

He was certain the marriage was sexless, though it was not something they had ever discussed directly. It was hard to imagine Marisa submitting even to an embrace.

“We are to spend some time together when the conference is over. We will travel, see some sights.”

She made the prospect sound less than appealing, and Owain himself didn’t relish it. Was he becoming possessive of her? Perhaps he should stop it now, before they compromised one another. But it wasn’t what he wanted.

She was staring at something over his shoulder. Hastily swallowing theast of her coffee, she stood up.

Her husband was coming out of the building with Giselle.

Owain also rose, feeling like a lover caught in the middle of a tryst. Giselle looked as if she was deliberately trying to delay Legister by talking to him—about Sir Gruffydd, it became clear as they drew closer. Legister was listening but he kept his eyes on Marisa. He wore a dark overcoat and a black astrakhan hat. Owain heard Giselle assure him that his concerns about the field marshal’s health were exaggerated.

“Good morning, my dear,” Legister said to Marisa in a businesslike tone. “I trust you slept well.”

“Very well, thank you,” she replied.

“We are having a short break from our deliberations. I thought a walk might be refreshing.”

“Of course. That would be nice.”

“We’ll take the path around the lake. Get some blood into your cheeks. Did you eat breakfast?”

He addressed her as though checking the duties of a subordinate. She nodded, looking cowed. When Legister offered his arm, she stepped forward and took it.

“Stay clear of the woods,” Giselle advised.

Legister patted the pockets of his overcoat before removing a pair of black leather gloves. Without looking at Owain he added, “I believe your uncle is also surfacing for air, major.”

He walked off, taking Marisa with him as if she were a captive.

Owain watched them descend the steps, two dark figures in the snow, Marisa a head shorter.

“Thank you for arranging our meeting,” Owain said stiffly to Giselle.

“I did nothing of the kind,” she replied, but archly. “A lovely young woman. I do believe she’s rather fond of you.”

My own curiosity was intense and I impelled Owain to ask: “How long has he known about us?”

She was surprised by his bluntness. “The secretary of state? Almost certainly from the start.”

There was only amusement in her voice.

“It’s perfectly innocent,” he insisted. “We’re just friends.”

Giselle’s smile was both knowing and noncommittal.

Again I made Owain ask: “Isn’t there a risk? To your own position, apart from anything else. For colluding. He could have us all arrested if he wanted to.”

“Even if it’s as innocent as you say?”

“He may not know that. If I was in his position I’d assume the worst.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t matter to him.”

“Marisa’s his wife.”

Giselle looked thoughtful. I had the impression she was contemplating Owain’s motivations rather than Legister’s.

“You have heard the expression ‘a trophy wife’?” she asked.

Owain nodded.

“Perhaps there is something of that in their marriage. After all, Marisa wants for nothing.”

“She’s unhappy.”

“Possibly so. But perhaps we should not fault him for that. They are a generation removed from one another. He has many responsibilities, and not all of us are animated by—what shall we say?—cris de coeur. I think perhaps the minister’s concerns are necessarily not those of most other men.”

I saw my uncle emerging from the building. With him was Colonel-General Blaskowitz.

My uncle had his walking stick but he moved laboriously, as though hindered by his bulky greatcoat. The generaloberst wore a peaked hat and an old-fashioned field-grey double-breasted overcoat. It was padded but its basic design had changed little in over sixty years. To me Blaskowitz might easily have been a Nazi officer emerging from a high-level meeting with the Führer himself.

“The generaloberst and I are going to take a little constitutional,” Sir Gruffydd said to Giselle in English. “Any recommendations?”

“The secretary of state and his wife are walking around the lake,” she said pointedly. “If you would prefer a more open view I suggest the Monument.”

She indicated a direction at right angles to the lake, where a broad treeless avenue stretched a short distance to a set of steps that led up to an obelisk.

“Excellent,” the field marshal said. “Owain, you’d better come with us in case I go weak at the knees.”

They set off, the generaloberst initially walking at a brisk pace that he swiftly had to moderate to allow Sir Gruffydd to keep up. Owain hung back, certain that they wanted to talk privately. But his uncle kept calling him forward.

“…a decade of little more than local skirmishes,” Blaskowitz was saying in German, “we’d almost slaughtered one another into peace. Now the destabilisation of our remote systems has introduced renewed uncertainties on all sides. A vacuum of information, into which seeps every sort of speculation, chief of which is this business about AEGIS—”

“No basis for it,” Sir Gruffydd interrupted. “The systems aren’t advanced enough. It’s not possible.”

“We still have no adequate explanation for the breakdown,” Blaskowitz pointed out. “Meanwhile the men at the front are growing increasingly nervous.”

The generaloberst spoke with a Prussian accent. Owain thought he caught the words “Erdbeben” and “Donnerschlag”—”earthquake” and “thunderclap”. Were they discussing impending operations? Somehow he thought not. Blaskowitz was referring to something that had already happened. Something that was worrying his men.

“Combat troops are always superstitious,” Sir Gruffydd retorted. “Especially when everything’s quiet. Breeds time for the demons of the imagination to make mischief.”

“They talk of Armageddon machines, of death rays and of course the ultimate omega weapon. Some of my senior commanders have even expressed the view that the Russians might already be testing such a device.”

“Surely you don’t believe those mouldy chestnuts?”

Owain’s uncle had spoken in English, to Blaskowitz’s incomprehension. He switched back to German: “For as long as I can remember there’s always been some new wonder weapon just waiting in the wings to win the war for whatever side devises it first. Fantasies of wish fulfilment, if you ask me. We’d be mad to give them credence.”

“Perhaps so. But we face the prospect not only of continuing guerrilla warfare within our own territories but the possibility of renewed engagements with the Russians and perhaps even the Americans. These would be no trivial affairs.”

“They have their own problems,” the field marshal countered. “Bogged down in south-east Asia and over-extended in the Pacific.”

They began to climb the steps to the monument, his uncle labouring but refusing assistance. When they reached the top, Owain sat him down on a bench underneath the monument. It was an edifice of dark marble, its base a bulky representation of a crouched Europa, lifting the obelisk to the sky. It had been raised a decade before in commemoration of all those who had fallen in half a century of war.

“Do you realise that we have less than a million men on the eastern front?” Blaskowitz was saying. “And under half a million around our southern borders? There are insufficient conscripts to replace our losses. This is a matter of demographic record. The truce is beginning to crumble, and without satellite links any future clashes will inevitably mean a return to the kind of warfare of old with heavy losses of personnel. Instead of slowly bleeding to death, we will haemorrhage.”

Sir Gruffydd peered at him over the top of his stick. “So what are you suggesting?”

“We declare an unconditional cease-fire along all our borders and invite all our enemies to do the same. It is our moral God-given duty.”

Only coming from a soldier as distinguished as the colonel-general could such a suggestion have had any credibility. Blaskowitz had commanded the armies in the east for ten years. He had reduced their reliance on the monolithic army groups of old by pioneering the use of emergency action formations comprising mobile units that could speedily be dispatched to hotspots. This had helped stabilise the front. It remained a mystery to many of his men that he had not yet received an overdue promotion to field marshal.

“It’s not so easily done,” Sir Gruffydd said. “Some might see it as tantamount to surrendering.”

“And those who advocated it guilty of treason?”

Owain’s uncle made a scornful sound.

“Only a madman would question your loyalty,” he assured Blaskowitz. “It’s more a question of what such a declaration might signify. It could lead disaffected groups within our own territories to come wriggling out like worms in a bud, demanding autonomy, independence, God knows what!”

“I am not suggesting a capitulation. We would consolidate agreed borders and focus our energies on establishing and maintaining order within our dominions while rebuilding a civilised civilian society. It did once exist, you know. Europe was renowned for it.”

Blaskowitz’s face betrayed no smile. Years of the harshest responsibility had made his eyelids and jowls sag. He came from a military family of consequence. His grandfather, a field marshal who had commanded Army Group Centre in the post-Hitler period, had eventually been appointed C-in-C of the Wehrmacht. He had suppressed pro-Nazi elements within the armed forces and facilitated the integration of French and British units. Later he had been instrumental in the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The generaloberst, a maternal descendant, had reverted to his grandfather’s family name while still a young man.

Uncomfortable at the feeling that he was eavesdropping on matters too elevated for his rank, Owain walked around the base of the monument. He had once visited its equivalent in Hampton Court. As Europa had been sculpted to embody Marianne here, at home it was the personification of Britannia. Both monuments stood on eminences, surveying the stately contours of past glories. Both had an air of daunting grandeur best appreciated from afar.

Sir Gruffydd was calling him.

“Help me up, my boy.”

Owain raised the old man to his feet.

“I have confided in you, field marshal,” Blaskowitz was saying, “because I believe you are a man who understands that human welfare must sometimes take precedence over short-term military advantage. Our enemies are not demons. There must be those among them who have arrived at a similar view. Sooner or later, someone has to take the initiative.”

Owain’s uncle was silent for a moment. Before he could reply there came from the direction of the lake the sound of a gunshot.

TWENTY

A narrow white-painted bedroom. I was pacing around a single bed, listening to a cassette recording of Sara and Bethany singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.

The recording had been made a year or two before—I couldn’t exactly remember when. Lyneth had left me, taking the girls, some time ago. Last summer, perhaps. I still couldn’t imagine why, though I was convinced it had nothing to do with Tanya. I’d been living alone—where? In our house, I was positive, though no details of it would come. Lyneth had taken the girls away, gone first to Swansea to stay with her mother. And thence to Australia. Old South Wales to New South Wales. A trial separation that had turned into an extended, possibly permanent one.

Was this true? I didn’t honestly know.

I was in the spare bedroom of Tanya and Geoff’s house. They’d brought me here when I was released from hospital. Days ago. I’d had an extended period of mental abstraction. In fact, my episodes of lucidity were the exception rather than the norm.

The machine fell silent. I recognised the black carryall sitting on top of the pine wardrobe. Opening the wardrobe doors I saw that Tanya had stacked it with clothing that she must have fetched from my house. Everything neatly arranged on hangers. Enough for several days or more.

Frantically I went through the pockets of coats and trousers and jeans; rummaged in the drawer units where she d placed my underwear, even investigated the zippered compartments of the carryall. I found only crumpled tissues and spare buttons in plastic sachets. No keys or driving licence or credit cards or photographs, not so much as an old shopping list. There was only the cassette, which Tanya must have brought from the house as a memento of the girls. Had I asked for it?

“O?”

Tanya, calling up the stairs.

“Yes?”

“You OK up there?”

I replaced the carryall on top of the wardrobe. The room was a mess. “I’ll be down in a moment.”

I tidied everything as well as I could and went out. Four other rooms gave off the landing: the bathroom, Tanya’s study, herf coats anGeoff’s bedroom and another room next to it that was locked.

I descended the carpeted stairs. I was wearing black slip-ons, a grey sweater and the navy corduroys that Lyneth had bought one birthday several years ago. I’d never liked the trousers because they were too baggy. Had Tanya dressed me? No, I was perfectly capable of doing so myself. But I didn’t usually wear shoes around the house.

Tanya was in the kitchen, flipping through a recipe book. She looked very

domestic, a Bart Simpson pinafore draped around her, her hair loosely tied up.

“Have you seen my wallet and keys?”

“They’re safe,” she told me. “You’re not allowed them until you’re better. Doctor’s orders.”

She said this with a degree of jauntiness, but there was a sliver of steel there too. Were they worried I might get the urge to go driving or embark on a spending spree?

Snapshot memories began returning. Walking up the cinder driveway to her 1930s semi-detached, Geoff beaming at me from the porch, the door wide open. Sitting in the bath with the water up to my neck and making a sober assessment of how easy it would be for me to drown. Accompanying Tanya to a big supermarket, all gleaming lights and stacked produce, the incessant bleep bleeping of the checkout machines as we waited in the queue, our trolley stacked with kitchen rolls, salad vegetables, a string bag of oranges. A dream of Lyneth, eighteen years old again, pulling on my arm as she marched me through a department store filled with debris and broken mannequins. She was shouting to me that she had to find a red chiffon scarf while I kept looking around for a toilet. A sales assistant was standing at one of the counters. At first I thought she was a mannequin too because plaster dust had coated her. She smiled at us and told me she was my mother. I’d wet the bed. Tanya had had to clean me up in the bathroom.

“Hell’s bells,” I said aloud.

Tanya looked up. “What?”

“How long have I been out of hospital?”

“Three days.”

“I feel as if I’ve only just got here.”

She didn’t look bothered. “You’ve been out of it. ‘Flu or something. Spent most of the time with your head in a newspaper or dozing.”

‘Flu? I didn’t believe it. They were drugging me, keeping me docile. I had a vague recollection of spending hours reading any paper I could lay my hands on. Looking for some indication of a disturbance in Regent Street just before Christmas. There was none. I had read everything else too: business, sports, holidays—I was completely indiscriminate. It was all I could manage.

I went out to the conservatory at the back of the house, feeling a similar sense of frustration to Owain. I had to break free. Everything was becoming more intense, in Owain’s life as much as my own. I realised that a part of me didn’t want to lose my connection with him, at least not yet. There had to be a reason why we had become linked.

I’d been sitting in an armchair in front of a window overlooking the garden. A brick patio gave out onto a lawn with neglected flowerbeds. Everything had a weary winter look, not least the green garden chairs that were stacked in one corner and held little pools of blackened leaves.

A coffee-table book sat on the armchair—a pictorial history of the twentieth century. I must have been browsing through it. The text was pretty elementary, the photographs stock.

The doorbell chimed. I heard someone talking in the distance. In French. I almost swooned but recovered myself, held that other world at bay.

Tanya entered with two other people, a man and a woman. She found them chairs, seated them opposite me.

The man was familiar, though I struggled to recall his name. He was the same age as me, wheat-haired, energetic in his movements, already talking enthusiastically. His companion was an equally blonde woman, her eyes a startling green. Contact lenses, I realised, telling myself not to stare.

Adrian. Adrian Lister, my producer. We’d had a long working association, and it was he who had commissioned Battlegrounds. As he talked, I knew he was discussing the next series. He spoke with his usual gesticulations, periodically sweeping the hair back from his eyes. His partner was his girlfriend, Rachel. She sat with her legs slightly splayed to accommodate the neat but emphatic bulge at her midriff. She was six months pregnant. We’d had an impromptu party at the studio to celebrate.

Every so often, a pause or a change in Adrian’s tone would provoke me into making some response, though I had no idea what I was saying. But Adrian appeared satisfied with my replies, at least to the extent that he continued conversing with his customary vigour. Rachel, by contrast, was silent and looked rather uncomfortable. I didn’t know her well but it was obvious that for her the visit was an ordeal.

No doubt Adrian had been eager to see me. I’d always envied his energy, and it was entirely typical that he should focus on practical matters relating to our work. But I was battling to shut out other intrusions, intermittent but persistent. A vehicle door slammed, someone spat, there were snatches of male laughter, the smell of warm engine oil—all from afar. Tanya lingered in the background, monitoring everything, looking wonderful. My protector or my warden?

Eventually Adrian and Rachel got up and departed. I heard them talking in the hallway, voices muted, confidential. The murmuring grew in volume, became a clearer conversation, though of a different sort.

TWENTY-ONE

A small dining able was set for dinner. Field Marshal Maredudd shepherded someone into the room.

Owain’s brother, Rhys.

I could feel Owain stiffen at the sight of him.

Rhys looked fleshier and considerably more prosperous than my own brother. He was dressed in a navy cashmere overcoat with a paisley silk scarf rucked in at his neck. He eyed Owain rather guardedly as he tugged off his leather gloves.

“Well,” Sir Gruffydd said, “aren’t you going to say hello to one another?”

Owain stepped forward and absurdly offered his hand.

Rhys looked at it. Awkwardly he shook, dropping a glove.

“Well, well,” Owain said with a distinct absence of feeling. “This is a surprise.”

“Not an unpleasant one, I hope,” his brother replied tentatively.

His grip was flaccid, the flesh of his hands soft, a thick ring on one finger. He smelt of expensive aftershave.

Owain released his hand and turned away while his brother retrieved his glove. Giselle Vigoroux was also present, standing with her back to an open fire.

Sir Gruffydd introduced Rhys to her. Or rather, re-introduced her: they had obviously met before. Owain had gone rigid with tension. He hadn’t seen his brother in over a year.

Rhys removed his overcoat and handed it to one of the housemaids. He wore tailored herringbone trousers and a burgundy roll-neck sweater that looked as if it was cashmere. Owain noted this with a feeling of angry disgust.

His feelings towards his brother were starkly different from mine towards Rees. Though the atmosphere was tense, I decided not to try to escape. I would lie low and just observe until I had a better understanding of the family dynamics at work here.

The dining table was just big enough to accommodate the four of them. They were in a private house in a Parisian suburb, a walled garden visible in the twilight beyond the window. A maid brought out a savoury tart scattered with rosemary leaves. She cut it into quarters, set it on their plates. A dark-complexioned woman, possibly Greek. Giselle opened a dusty bottle of red wine and filled their glasses.

“To families,” the field marshal said, raising his. “In the end, they’re all we have.”

The wine was good; the best Owain had tasted in many years. Though he’d forsworn alcohol for some years, he let it linger in his mouth until Rhys made a point of identifying it as a rare French claret.

Even Owain knew that the bottle had to be at least twenty years o The French wine industry had been ruined by biowar and climate shift. When Rhys began boasting that he had recently drunk some excellent reds from the Moroccan and Algerian provinces, Owain felt nothing but contempt.

“Rhys has been in Geneva,” the field marshal informed Owain in an obvious attempt to draw him into the conversation.

“That a fact?” said Owain. “Sanatorium?”

No response to this apart from a reluctant, wary smile.

“Your brother was asking after you, weren’t you, Owain? So I thought we’d dig you out of hiding.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Rhys was a boffin, a backroom boy who had done stints in Scandinavia and continental Europe but had been chiefly based at ASPIC, the Alliance Signals Priority Intelligence Centre in Dungeness. Five years ago the site had been obliterated when an old nuclear missile buried in the marshes was accidentally set off during redevelopment work. Luckily for Rhys he had been on convalescent leave at the time. There were hints that he had suffered some sort of nervous collapse. To Owain, who was serving in the east, this was final confirmation of his brother’s lack of backbone. Ever since there had been minimal communication and they avoided seeing one another.

“So,” Owain said, determined to draw him out, “they’ve sent you into the thick of it, have they?”

Rhys looked puzzled. “Sorry?”

“Geneva. Big SIGINT centre, isn’t there? Right in the heart of things.”

“Just for a month,” Rhys replied self-consciously. “I’m based in East Anglia.”

Orford Ness. Owain knew as much already from Sir Gruffydd. It was where the ASPIC operations had been relocated following the loss of the Dungeness facility. A dedicated railway line had meant that Rhys was able to visit London more frequently. Since his own relocation, Owain had felt a certain sense of relish in continuing to ignore his brother’s existence.

He wondered if their uncle had said anything to Rhys about his own spell in hospital over Christmas. Hard to imagine he hadn’t, and typical of Rhys to make no reference to it.

The tart was some kind of chickpea and cheese confection. Owain ate only a portion, whereas Rhys scooped his down as if he was ravenous. He kept fiddling with his signet ring. It was gold, worn on the little finger of his right hand.

“Get married, did you?” Owain said in Welsh, and with heavy sarcasm.

Rhys was able to avoid replying as his plate was removed and a casserole dish

brought to the table.

There hadn’t always been such a distance between them. As children they had

been close, and they had both undertaken officer training at Sandhurst. But while Owain was serving in North Africa Rhys had been suspended from the academy, in murky circumstances involving two other cadets and plenty of sexual innuendo. Their uncle would never refer to it. Later he had re-emerged as an intelligence operative, work to which his talents were more suited, according to the field marshal.

The casserole comprised whole onions, carrots and little cubes of pale meat.

Green beans and mashed potatoes accompanied it. While their plates were being loaded, Giselle started asking his brother how he had enjoyed Geneva.

“I didn’t see much of it,” Rhys told her, swallowing more wine. “Underground it looked and smelt the same as anywhere else.”

Owain waved a second dollop of mashed potatoes aside. “It was a perfectly reasonable question,” he said. “There’s no need to be so damn churlish.”

Rhys looked surprised. “Sorry,” he said to Giselle. “No offence meant.”

“None taken,” she assured him.

“I’ve spent so much time below stairs I think I’ve forgotten how to make proper dinner-table conversation.”

“Below stairs” was backroom jargon for “underground”. Rhys’s easy use of the phrase irritated him.

“Sounds like he could do with a surface posting,” he said to the field marshal in Welsh. “Of course we’d need to make sure it isn’t anywhere where there might be bullets flying.”

The old man gave him an admonitory stare. In English he said, “I didn’t bring you to my table to bicker.”

Rhys just continued shovelling food into his mouth. My own instincts were to impose a more conciliatory manner on Owain, if only because his hostility unsettled me. But Owain was too irritated by his brother’s presence to be chastened.

It was Sir Gruffydd and Giselle who carried the conversation as they ate, the old man talking about an opera he intended to see in the city before he left. Something by Wagner. When the talk turned to the prospect of taking a winter break, Rhys offered the opinion that the Canary Islands were still reasonably unspoilt and relatively warm.

“Been there yourself?” Owain asked, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.

Rhys shook his head. “Someone I work with told me. I haven’t taken a holiday in years.”

“Poor ” Owain retorted. “Still, there are other consolations. Salary good, is it? Looks like you get the pick of the PPs.”

Rhys didn’t reply. PP stood for Priority Provision, stores whose merchandise was unavailable to the general public. Owain ignored another glare from his uncle.” And at least you’re not in the firing line,” he persisted.

“Neither are you.”

I could feel Owain’s face flushing with embarrassment and rage. His brother had spoken diffidently but Owain could not have been more sensitive about the issue.

“Not out of choice,” he said hotly. “I’d be there now if I could.”

“I know,” Rhys said.

“At least I’ve served. Put my life on the line.”

Rhys looked down at his plate. “I didn’t mean anything.”

Owain reverted to Welsh: “You’ve got a fucking cheek, saying that to me.”

“Enough!” Sir Gruffydd shouted, lurching to his feet. “If you can’t be civil to one another, then close your mouths or get out of my sight!”

He was truly angry this time. Angry and, Owain realised, exhausted. He supported himself by resting both knuckles on the table.

“I’m sorry,” Owain said in Welsh. “Please forgive me.”

“It’s not me you ought to be apologising to,” the field marshal said, sticking resolutely to English. “Damn it all, Owain!”

Owain pushed back his chair and stood up, letting his napkin fall. One of the housemaids was hovering in the doorway with a tray of desserts. Owain pushed past her as he hurried out.

A short corridor took him to the front door. The guard on duty opened it and he stumbled outside.

I was as relieved as he was to be outside. The earlier thaw had given way to a renewed chill. Frost glittered on the steps, while overhead the sky was already darkening, even though it was no later than three-thirty. His uncle had always taken dinner in the afternoon, a custom which he claimed improved digestion and warded off nightmares.

Owain descended the steps and stood on the path. The house was of modest proportions, but surrounded by sturdy stone walls. Guards manned the front gates, smoking cigarettes and warming their hands on the slanted nose of an Echelon APC. A black Citroen staff car sat on the driveway, muddy slush now hardening to ice around its wheels. The old man must have had Rhys ferried in for the occasion. He set great store in family ties, the more so since his own direct bloodline had been extinguished. And Owainhad spoiled it all. But, try as he might, he couldn’t feel charitable towards Rhys. Why should he grow plump and pampered on the sacrifices of others?

Behind him the door opened again. His uncle came shuffling out.

“What on earth’s the matter with you?” he asked, more incomprehension than anger in his tone.

“I’m sorry,” Owain said again, taking care to stick to English. “I know you wanted it to be—” he tried to find a phrase—“like old times.”

The field marshal leant on his stick. “I don’t understand why there’s this bitterness between you, Owain. Care to enlighten me?”

How could he explain without saying that he considered Rhys a coward whose personal life he found repulsive?

“We’ve nothing in common,” he said.

“You used to be as thick as thieves.”

“That was a long time ago, sir.”

“He’s your brother. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“We live in different worlds. I can’t find it in me to respect what little I know of his.”

The field marshal shook his head. “You’re too hard on him, my boy. There’s a lot he’s not in a position to talk about. Not all of us are cut out to be men of action.”

“I can’t believe that his—activities have always been a credit to the family and in particular to your position, sir.”

Sir Gruffydd made a dismissive noise. “Which of us are free of peccadilloes, eh? Turn over any stone and you’ll find things crawling about underneath. It’s only human nature, after all.”

“That’s a very generous consideration, sir.”

“Set rank aside for a moment. This is a family gathering. Rhys is all you have apart from me. And I’m not always going to be around.”

His breathing was laboured in the sharp air. Owain said, “Is there something I should know, sir?”

The field marshal wasn’t looking at him. “We live in challenging times, Owain. There might come a day when you’ll need one another, when the ties of blood are the only thing you can be certain of. Could be sooner than later.”

He didn’t elaborate. Owain was unsure what to say, though he was conscious that Rhys and his uncle were his sole surviving relatives. When the o marsha was gone—then what?

Frustrated with taking a back seat, I made Owain blurt: “Are you dying?”

His uncle at first looked surprised. He gave a humourless laugh. “Aren’t we all?”

Owain squirmed with embarrassment: he couldn’t fathom what had possessed him to say this. In a sense it was cruel of me, but his uncle didn’t show the least sign of being offended. And there was a limit to my tolerance of Owain’s reticence.

I had also wanted to see if he finally knew I was there. But he viewed my interventions as maverick outbursts of his own.

“My dinner’s getting cold,” Sir Gruffydd said, going inside. “Clear your head and get back to the dinner table. Where you belong.”

Still feeling mortified, Owain walked around to the garden at the rear of the house. The walls obscured views of everything except the lowering sky. They were in Croissy, but it might have been anywhere.

Only the muted drone of the Echelon’s engine disturbed the silence. The garden was featureless, devoid of shrubbery. Its lawn had been swept and diminutive goalposts set up at either end. Near the centre spot several identical birds were rooting around, searching for something to eat.

“Redwings,” a voice said softly at his shoulder.

Rhys had come up behind him.

“Northern thrushes,” his brother went on. “Once upon a time they were rarely seen this far south.”

The usual irritation blossomed in Owain, swamping any feelings of shame. His brother had always been a pedant, always ready to flaunt his store of useless facts.

Owain turned slowly to face him. Rhys had only just come outside but already he was shivering, his hands clasped across his chest.

“What do you want?” Owain asked.

“I think we need to talk.”

“I’ve nothing left to say to you.”

“Perhaps you just need to listen.”

“To what? More empty boasting?”

Already his voice was raised again. Already Rhys was recoiling from it. I tried to calm him. They were saved from further embarrassment when Giselle appeared in the rear doorway and informed Owain that there was a telephone call for him.

The phone was in the lobby, an ancient shiny black Bakelite affair whose handset felt lead-weighted.

He put the receiver to his ear. There was the whoosh of static and below this a drowned, barely audible voice saying something in a querying tone.

Owain waited a moment to see if the interference would clear. The door to the dining room was ajar, his uncle and Giselle back at the table, talking quietly. Rhys passed by, not looking at him, closing the door as he rejoined the others.

Still the interference continued. It conveyed a sense of vastness and disorder, spreading out over the entire world like an electronic ocean into which he could quite easily be washed away. Amongst the turbulence there suddenly surfaced something that bore his name.

He stared at the mouthpiece, said into it: “Marisa?”

TWENTY-TWO

“…consider yourself lucky… might take a little time… anything you wanted to talk about…”

It was a familiar male voice, casual yet somehow earnest, conversational but with a purpose.

I looked around. Geoff was beside me in a green waxed jacket, a tweed cap on his head. We were walking around a small lake on a common, Tanya some distance ahead in a wine-coloured parka.

It was a blustery afternoon, the wind cold as it came off the water. Nearby someone was flying a boxy scarlet-and-blue kite. Wimbledon Common. We had just come out of a pub where I’d eaten knuckle of lamb with mash and root vegetables: snug in the alcove near an open fire, Geoff and Tanya and me.

“The thing is, you’re bound to feel disorientated for a while. Don’t try to rush things.”

He spoke in a soft, reasonable tone without making eye contact. This was him in his professional capacity, perhaps hoping to tease something out of me. Or keep me lulled.

Under his jacket he wore a Fair Isle sweater in earthy, autumnal colours. Heathery woollen trousers were tucked into green Welling-tons. It was just perfect. Easy to imagine him walking the fields of a family estate with a shotgun draped over one arm. But his family weren’t really landed and he disapproved of blood sports.

By contrast Tanya was in black leggings, her hair flowing free. I suppose what had drawn her to him was Geoff’s seriousness of purpose, his steadfastness and honesty. In the long term they were qualities more durable than passion.

There was so much I had to do, so much to find out. But the pressing conviction remained that I needed to make sense of my own recent history, be certain I had everything in place. And Tanya was somehow central to this.

After receiving the photograph from Kiev, I didn’t hear anything from her for three months. I assumed she was still travelling. Then one day t a message on my father’s answer phone. Tatiana had died suddenly and was being cremated the following Monday. Tanya gave the time and place, said that it would be good to see me if I could make it.

I rang her number several times but there was no reply. I told Lyneth that I was going to London to scout for suitable living places. She didn’t understand why it was suddenly so urgent, but I insisted it couldn’t wait. I added that I might stay the night with Geoff, whom I’d mentioned to her before.

The service was being held in the local crematorium. Toting my overnight bag, I arrived late and found perhaps two dozen people in the chapel. I’d never imagined Tatiana would have had that many mourners. Tanya was at the front in a sober skirt and jacket. Beside her, in a dark suit, was a beardless Geoff.

Of course I shouldn’t have been surprised, but my own vanity undermined me. To see them together in such a formal setting was far more significant than on a mere holiday snap.

After the service I loitered outside, watching Tanya accept condolences from elderly well-heeled men. One by one they were led away to smart executive cars by middle-aged companions who were presumably their sons and daughters.

Finally Tanya stood alone. I went straight over and gave her a hug.

Tatiana had had a heart attack two days before what was probably her seventy-fifth birthday. Tanya had found her sitting slumped on the toilet with a copy of Hello on her lap, open on an article about Princess Diana.

I didn’t know you were back, was the only thing I could think of saying. Since June, she replied.

The cars were driving away. Tanya told me they were old colleagues, civil servants, most of them. They’d worked with Tatiana in the post-war years, in administration, they said. How did they know about the funeral? She reminded me of the yearly birthday phone calls from Lionel. Tanya had given him the news.

A silver Carina pulled up. Geoff was at the wheel. He greeted me heartily. Tanya climbed into the front passenger seat and asked if I was coming back to the house. I slung my bag into the back.

I didn’t allow much of a silence, remarking that it must have been a pleasant surprise to see so many mourners. Tanya said that they’d all been warm about her grandmother but uninformative about the precise nature of their working relationship. Lionel himself hadn’t been able to attend: he was ill, but had sent flowers and a card.

I asked about their travels. Tanya told me that over Christmas her grandmother had let slip that she had been living in Kharkov, in the eastern Ukraine, “when the Germans came”. She wouldn’t elaborate but was miffed that it hadn’t been on their autumn agenda. So she and Geoff had spent a few days there that spring.

Naturally I wanted to know more, but we’d reached the house and floral tributes from the service were waiting for us, some m neigh-bours who’d plainly been fond of the old woman. We decorated the living room, piling bouquets on sideboards and armchairs, hanging wreaths from the mantelpiece and around mirrors so that it looked almost festive.

We sat out in the back garden, just the three of us, sipping fizzy wine and munching corn chips. Tanya asked after my brother, and I also talked about my experiences with the abortive documentary. We didn’t so much skirt around any other details of my home life as tacitly declare them off limits.

At some point Geoff announced that he had a few errands to run. Tanya’s lack of surprise told me that this was a tactical move planned beforehand in the event of my appearance. Geoff even fetched my bag from the car and set it down at my feet.

As soon as he had gone, Tanya indicated my bag and asked if I was planning on staying the night.

I immediately plunged into a hectic confessional, beginning by saying that I’d told Lyneth I might be staying overnight at Geoff’s. I was conscious that I’d never mentioned her name to Tanya before, but I hurried on, telling her that it was true that we’d been going out since our schooldays but it was nothing passionate, that I’d stayed with her out of loyalty. I should have told her from the start but I was afraid it might spoil what we had. And what I still wanted.

Tanya regarded me gravely before saying that she’d had enough emotional upheaval for one day and did I want to see some holiday snaps?

I should have known that with Tanya these would not prove conventional tourist photographs. In fact the pictures, which showed a drab post-war Soviet city indistinguishable from many others, were far less interesting than the narrative that accompanied them.

Tatiana’s claim that she had been living in Kharkov “when the Germans came” proved ripe with all sorts of possibilities. The city, the fourth largest in the USSR, had been a centre of tank and tractor production and hence an important target for the invading Wehrmacht. The Germans first captured it in October 1941 and instituted a brutal regime in which opportunistic Ukrainian nationals were employed to police the local population. Always close to the front line and of strategic importance to both sides, Kharkov remained under military rather than Nazi administration. Briefly recaptured by the Russians fifteen months later, it was lost again within a month before the German army finally quit the city in August 1943. By this time the population had plummeted, with many of its women and young men deported west to serve the German war effort. Many others had died of starvation during the winter months when all available food was appropriated by its occupiers.

What there was no longer any means of knowing was how long Tatiana had actually spent in the city during this period—a question that was crucial to her ultimate fate. As a Russian national she would probably have been hated by the native Ukrainians, while as a university worker she would have been categorised as an intellectual by the Germans and shot. Had she remained in the city, she could only have survived by somehow making herself useful to the occupiers—but would have suffered the consequences with the return of the Red Army. Even enforced collaboration would not have saved her, given that liberated Soviet prisoners-of-war were routinely executed or shipped to the gulags.

Tanya showed me an old postcard of a building that she’d bought from a street trader who’d told her it was once the Gestapo headquarters in the city. Why such a building would be commemorated on a postcard was beyond both of us, but the old man had claimed that he was once imprisoned there. When the city was reoccupied by Soviet forces, the same building and its basement torture chambers had been used by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, who added letterboxes so that liberated citizens could post denunciations of traitors.

Tanya had found no wartime trace of her grandmother. There was no way of knowing if she had used the same name in those days. Even if she had, it was a long time ago, and Petrova was as common a surname in Russia as Smith was in England.

Somehow Tatiana had not only survived but also ended up in the West. Tanya considered it unlikely that she had been in Kharkov when the Red Army recaptured it. Her knowledge of German might have meant that she was used by the occupiers for interrogations of captured Soviet officers. Or she could simply have been put aboard a slave train and sent west to become a captive worker for the Reich. If she had ended up in the British or American zones of occupation, she may have been employed as a translator by the Allied armies of occupation. Later she might have been granted special status and been dispatched to London, where her experience would have continued to be of considerable use during the Cold War.

There was another, rather more personal, scenario that I did not discuss with Tanya. As a young woman in 1941 it was highly likely that Tatiana had had the same striking good looks as her granddaughter. I could easily imagine her attracting the interest of a senior German officer who may well have continued his patronage throughout all the military upheavals that ensued. Such a man could have found her safe passage to the west at any time. She could have survived by the sheer good fortune of being a beauty.

The possibilities were numerous, and Tanya and I explored them with increasing relish as the afternoon shaded into evening and we sat together in the garlanded room. We even contemplated writing a fictionalised biography based on our speculations. There was nothing ghoulish in this: it was driven more by a sense of wanting to memorialise Tatiana’s doubtless remarkable story in some way.

Because of the absence of documentary evidence the true story of Tatiana’s life was always to remain an enigma. Though I often fantasised that one day Tanya would discover some crucial piece of evidence, or that one of her grandmother’s elusive civil service colleagues—if that’s what they really were—would re-establish contact with her, it never happened. The closed book of Tatiana’s life, with all its potential for drama, remained a slim domestic volume, crucial chapters missing, gone forever. It was much the same, I realised, for my own grandfather. He would never have the opportunity to answer the implicit charges that my father had brought against him in The Eye of the Storm.

A sheepdog came bounding out of nowhere and waded into the shallow water of the pond to retrieve a red ball. It clambered out, shaking itself, spraying Geoff with water.

I heard Tanya laughing. She was on the opposite side of the lake and waved to us with a mittened hand. There was a little cluster of young children nearby, shepherded by a woman in a navy coat and floral headscarf. Tanya tossed a stray ball back at them. One of the boys kicked it back in her direction. Two of the girls ran after it, squealing. Someone was making groaning noises.

“Owen?” said Geoff.

It was me. I made myself stop.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Felt a little nauseous.”

I made him walk on, my back the children. He kept asking if I was OK. I kept insisting I was. My stomach was churning. My head felt like it was going to implode.

He led me gently by the elbow. I was grateful for the contact, for his solidity. He was one of those lucky people with no rough edges, immune to the grubby sort of insecurities that afflict most of us from time to time. He hadn’t returned to Tanya’s house after the cremation for over two hours, by which time I’d told Tanya that I planned to move back to London chiefly to be close to her again. Tanya gave a small laugh at this and said, With Lyneth. She asked if we would like to rent the house while she was away. She was going to need reliable tenants. Away? I said. She was off to California, to Berkeley, to do a PhD. Geoff was accompanying her. He had an internship at a hospital in San Francisco. They were leaving at the end of the month.

In desperation I asked her to write to me so that we could stay in touch. She invoked Lyneth: Wouldn’t she find it odd? I insisted I didn’t care, that whatever happened I couldn’t bear the thought of not being any part of her life again.

She took pity on me, promising that she’d let me know how she was getting on, would send any mail to my father’s address in Bishopston, in a plain brown envelope to avoid embarrassment. This was, of course, a joke, but for me it was no laughing matter.

“Dad! Dad!”

The girls were calling me. I looked around. There was nothing. Tears were oozing out of my eyes.

“Come on,” Geoff said gently. “Nearly there.”

He led me towards the road, where the Scenic was waiting. Didn’t he deserve Tanya far more than me? Wasn’t I, even now, more preoccupied with my private yearnings for Tanya than the whereabouts of my own family? Though I no longer believed them dead, their absence was like a form of bereavement. I could visualise myself in Hamley’s. Sara inspecting the jigsaws and board games, Bethany in the pink and purple realms of fairy-tale Barbie. That had been the previous Christmas, the last one we’d spent together. I was alone in Regent Street when I’d had the accident. Just like Owain.

Tanya came up and swabbed my nose with a tissue. I could smell the sheepskin leather of her mittens, feel the wool brush againsmy chin. She tucked her arm forcibly through mine and kept me walking. Geoff went ahead, hurrying towards the Renault.

When he’d returned to Tatiana’s house it was with a Chinese takeaway for three. I’d been drinking steadily and kept doing so while we ate, conversing on autopilot as we talked about old times, sticking resolutely to our student days. At some point Tanya announced that she didn’t want to spend the night alone, would make up beds for both of us. Neither of us wanted to sleep in Tatiana’s bedroom, thus neatly sparing Tanya any dilemma of who would be closest to her. I arranged armchair cushions on the living room floor, while Geoff bedded down next door on the front room sofa.

And that was how I spent my last night with her: in a room full of dead flowers, feeling as if I was already worlds away. Next morning they drove me to Paddington station. Geoff took himself off again to allow Tanya and me a last few minutes alone. It’s you I should be with, I blurted, but she just laughed and said I didn’t know what I wanted. It would be three years before I saw her again.

TWENTY-THREE

The sound of laughter again. Only this time it was Marisa. She was hauling me to my feet, wobbling as her skates shifted about on the ice.

I managed to find my footing. Marisa was bundled up in a black outfit with furlined collars and cuffs. She looked like the young heroine from a Hollywood version of a Tolstoyan epic, her hair tucked under a domed hat.

Both of us were breathing hard, puffing vapour. A few other skaters were in action on the ice, most of them staying close to the tumbled remains of the stone bridge that jutted out from the bank. They were all military personnel, young men and woman enjoying a brief liberation from their duties. The boundaries of the “rink” had been demarcated with striped yellow-and-black hazard tape pinned to the ice with chunks of masonry.

The frozen Seine was dusted with fresh snow that had fallen overnight, its whiteness etched with the lines and arcs of the other skaters. On its far side a fire had been lit under the bridge’s broken overhang. A ragtag group of dark figures was gathered around it, roasting small carcasses on skewers, thin smoke rising slowly and forming a hazy blue layer in the windless air.

Marisa’s face was so close to mine that I could feel the heat of her breath on my cheek. I became conscious that it was Owain, not me. He and Marisa held one another at the waist, still unsteady on their feet, Marisa laughing. Neither of them were practised skaters and both had taken several tumbles.

It was a moment when it would have been easy for Owain to kiss her, though of course he did not. Gingerly they made their way back to the bank, where an ice mobile was parked on the shoreline. Marisa had picked him up in it at their rendezvous earlier that morning, a vintage Skoda she’d temporarily requisitioned from a refitting shop. She’d never driven one before but somehow they’d managed to survive a hair-raising trip along the river, dodging ice-locked boats and refuse spills that would lie there until the spring thaw. Owain could still taste the craft’s sooty exhaust.

They surrendered their skates to an old woman huddled in a booth and climbed the embankment steps to a prefabricated building that housed a restaurant. It was one of the few independent establishments that still served a three-course meal, run by an enterprising Laotian family who specialised in seafood but would rustle up a steak for those customers who wouldn’t question the meat’s provenance.

The restaurant was deserted, and they were given a window table on the balcony overlooking the river. The balcony was enclosed but there was no heating, and Marisa used a serviette to swab the condensation from the window. They watched the refugees and homeless around the fire on the opposite shore. Uniformly clad in clothing blackened by grime and smoke, wearing wraparound hats of every description, the men, women and children waited in turn for their portions. Another company of the army of the dispossessed.

“What do you think they’re cooking?” Marisa said to Owain.

“I’d rather not know.”

“It feels obscene to be dining here when they’re scavenging for scraps.”

“It’s not our doing. And we have to eat, just as they do.”

She still looked troubled, though it surprised him. It was a common enough sight.

“We can always leave,” he said.

She shook her head. “What difference would it make?”

They ordered a fish soup. Marisa said something in French to the waiter that Owain didn’t catch. She handed over a hundred euromark note and told him she didn’t want change.

“Very generous,” Owain remarked.

She tucked her purse away. “Carl gives me plenty. I always have more than I can spend.”

“So where is he at the moment?”

She sighed. “Another meeting. We leave tomorrow morning.”

She’d rung to tell him that today would be their last chance to meet.

“Any idea where he’s taking you?” Owain asked.

“Carl would not go anywhere without importance, even for leisure. He said it would be somewhere warm, though I think it will turn out to be another working holiday. I’ll have to fence for myself.”

“Fend.”

“Fence. Nowhere is safe when you are a woman on your own.”

She said this without self-pity.

“Perhaps he’ll lend you his Radom.”

Legister’s Polish handgun: a twenty-centimetre combat pistol that he had used to shoot a feral mastiff when he and Marisa were walking around Versailles. Owain was one of the first to reach them and see the corpse. A single 9mm shot, just below one eye, the dog lying in the snow with its head in a comma of blood. According to Marisa the creature had loped out from behind a tree as they were passing. Legister pulled the pistol from his overcoat and despatched it with a single shot.

A big tureen arrived, brimming with dumplings and flakes of greyish fish. Wedges of coarse brown bread accompanied it, still warm from the oven. It was far more than the two of them could eat. They filled their bowls and ate in silence, Marisa sipping rose from a half bottle, Owain with an untouched glass of Vichy water.

The stew was heavily spiced, the fish indeterminate but tasty enough. An odd air of solemnity had descended over the table, in marked contrast to their earlier frivolity. There was a sense that they had somehow reached a climax to their gaiety too early. Both of them stared out the window. The skaters were all gone but the people under the bridge remained, now huddled around the guttering fire.

Marisa didn’t finish her bowl, and Owain had no appetite for a refill. She asked him if he had had enough. When he nodded, she took a napkin and lifted the tureen off the table. It was still three-quarters full.

“Marisa—” he began, knowing what she intended.

She shook her head, shutting off any objection, and began to manoeuvre the tureen towards the fire escape. Owain had no alternative but to take one of the handles and help her carry it down. They set it down on one of the bridge’s fallen stones.

Marisa began calling to the people across the river in French, telling them that there was a portion of free stew for anyone who could find a container for it.

Within no time a crowd had formed, thrusting plastic bowls, broken cups and tobacco tins at her. Their eyes looked large and white and infinitely needy. They stank of sewage, smoke and pulverised masonry. Their filthy condition blurred all distinctions of nationality, though pleading voices were raised in a variety of languages. Some were obviously diseased but Marisa showed no qualms in serving them. They ranged in age from the elderly who could barely stand upright to children too young to walk who clung to the necks of adults—adults who disregarded their very presence as they jostled forward and begged for their portions.

And more of them were coming. Figures were appearing from the ruins on the far bank, surmounting crests of rubble, scrambling down the embankment, slithering across the ice in their haste to join the throng. Marisa was heroically doling out portions, one ladleful per person, but she couldn’t keep up. The growing crowd pressed in more strongly, more vehemently, squabbles breaking out as the etiquette of the queue fragmented in the face of inishing reserves.

Despite their desperation, not a single person in the crowd attempted to manhandle Marisa; they were afraid to touch her, afraid to risk rejection. Nevertheless, it was obvious to Owain that the situation was swiftly becoming unmanageable. In French, he shouted to the crowd to get back, form an orderly line. But it was far too late for this and no one would budge.

The tureen was almost empty. Owain drew his Walther and shouted that there was no more food, that they should disperse. But while nervous faces turned towards the sound of his anger, still no one was prepared to withdraw.

I was trying to stop him firing over their heads when I heard a deep-throated barking. The restaurant proprietor came down the steps, followed by two younger men. One was carrying a rifle, the other restraining a black Labrador on a chain leash that was already barking fiercely.

The noise and sight of the dog finally galvanised the crowd. As swiftly as they had come, they began to melt away, leaving only a few die-hards at the very front of the queue.

One of them was a slender young man with an avid face who pushed an upturned helmet at Marisa over the heads of others. It was a GRP Alliance army helmet, stripped of its internal webbing.

Fury welled up in Owain. Before Marisa could ladle the last of the stew into it, he stepped forward and knocked the helmet out of the man’s hands. He pushed him back so hard he went sprawling.

The man lay still for a moment before heaving himself up and attempting to recover the helmet. Owain kicked his hand away. He brandished his pistol and the man scrambled away. I had to focus so intensely on keeping his rage in check that I was quite unable to discern what had actually provoked it.

Owain retrieved the helmet. The restaurant owner approached Marisa and began gesticulating wildly and jabbering in broken French. Owain couldn’t understand most of it. He heard Marisa reply that since she had paid a good price for the stew it was hers to dispose of as she pleased.

Owain stepped between them

“This is an unfortunate misunderstanding of no great importance,” he said in French. “Let’s content ourselves with the fact that there has been no injury or damage, and therefore no need for continued unpleasantness. We are finished here. I suggest we all get back to our business without further fuss.”

Still holding the helmet, Owain walked Marisa across the ice towards the snow mobile. She kept glancing at him curiously.

“I’ll drive us back,” he said.

“Why did you hit him?”

His behaviour had clearly disturbed her as much as me. Still Owain gave nothing away. He climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Why, Owain?”

“Because he’d jumped the queue.”

She didn’t move. “No. That wasn’t it.”

He hadn’t wanted to explain. But he owed it her. Turning the helmet in his hands he pointed to two small holes at the front.

“See these? Rivet holes. For a badge, the circlet of stars. Probably levered off and sold.”

Marisa looked blank.

“They don’t make them like this any more. To reduce production costs, they starting leaving the badges off. This has to be at least twenty years old.” He showed her the dark interior, criss-crossed with paler strips where the padding had been. “Glass reinforced plastic with a carbon fibre lining. An officer’s helmet, rank of colonel at least.”

It was obvious the significance of this still eluded her.

“Don’t you see?” Owain said vehemently. “It couldn’t have been his. He had no business having it.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Tanya. A black-and-white photograph on the inside flap of the dust jacket. It was a side-lit shot of her sitting at a desk, staring off-picture at something, looking both glamorous and intellectual, the epitome of the seriously sexy science writer.

The cover of the book carried her name, Tanya Z Peters, and the title, The Paradox Realm, in bilious green and tangerine lettering. It was a popularisation of quantum physics, its cover a lurid swirl of electric pastels.

Tanya hated the cover because it suggested a sherbety confection of easily digestible facts aimed at the casual reader. In fact it was a book about a difficult and non-intuitive subject, aimed at a scientifically literate audience. I’d read it soon after it appeared and still found much of it bewildering.

Her other titles were on display in a glass-fronted bookcase of her study. The first was Elemental Fired, a book on stellar nucleosynthesis that had been published when she was still in her twenties. Others had followed on subjects as diverse as genetic engineering and the greenhouse effect. She was a regular contributor to Radio 4 and the Discovery Channel, and she also taught a course on the social impact of scientific developments for the Open University.

Her study was quite unlike my father’s: a light, airy place, its window overlooking the garden. There were modern prints on the wall, a bronze samovar, a set of Russian dolls arranged along the mantelpiece. Trophies of her travels.

I put the book back on the shelf, saw a copy of Battlegrounds. The book had been ghosted by a freelancer but was based on e wres transcripts that I had written. It seemed a fake in comparison to Tanya’s, not truly a product of my own efforts.

I felt a powerful urge to bolt from the house, go running and never come back until I’d found out where I was supposed to be.

A toilet flushed and a door opened. Geoff came in.

He wore a navy suit and his only concession to informality was that the top button on his shirt was undone and his striped tie loosened. I wondered if he had just popped home for a couple of hours, was taking time out to give me a bit of psychological counselling.

As though rehearsed, we resumed our seats in armchairs opposite one another. “So,” he said, smiling. “Where were we?”

“You were asking me if I was still having problems with my concentration,” I said, surprised that I had remembered it.

He nodded earnestly. “And?”

“And what?”

This threw him.

I grinned and said, “Joke.”

Geoff mustered a smile of his own, though it wasn’t particularly convincing.

“I’m finding it hard to retain anything,” I said, giving him what he wanted. “Though I know you’ve just been for a pee.”

He looked at me carefully, trying to figure out whether I was still joking or not. Very straightforward, Geoff: no side to the man whatsoever. I’d always imagined it would be a disadvantage in his profession, but evidently not. Unless he was a Supreme Master of subterfuge.

“Believe me,” I insisted, “it’s a major achievement.”

Slow, repeated nods, his gaze on me all the while, inviting some further comment. I started thinking about Owain and the sudden rage that had enveloped him over the helmet. He’d seen it as a form of sacrilege, a filthy grasping civilian in unlawful possession of precious military equipment. But there was even more to it than this.

“Any difficulties sleeping?” Geoff prompted.

I made a noise like a laugh. “Staying awake’s the big problem.”

“But no headaches?”

“Not as such.”

He waited. I felt obliged to give him more.

“Just a vague buzzing sometimes. Especially when people are talking to me. It gs into a kind of auditory blur. I lose track.”

He didn’t pick up on this. “Any giddiness or nausea?”

“No. Nothing like that.” Which wasn’t totally true. “I just don’t feel with it.”

This was putting it mildly, but I certainly had no intention of telling him about where I really went when I wasn’t “with it”. He’d have me pegged as psychotic or brain-damaged in no time at all. Which I supposed was a distinct possibility. Except that it didn’t feel like that. It didn’t feel like that at all. It felt real.

“Well,” Geoff said again, “there was no indication of any organic damage. But, as you know, Tanya feels you’re still not quite yourself.”

I didn’t know, but it was scarcely surprising.

“We could send you back for more tests. Just to be sure there’s nothing we’ve missed.”

“Ah.” I wasn’t keen. “You think the old neural spark plugs may be misfiring.”

His laugh was far too hearty. “I don’t think it’s very likely. My own suspicion is that you’re still in the recuperative phase. But sometimes there can be hidden trauma.”

Of course there was trauma, I thought. Aside from my lurches into Owain’s existence I still didn’t know where my family was, or why they’d left. I had a sudden image of a terraced Victorian house with a burgundy door and a white-painted wooden fence. I knew at once it was where Lyneth and I had lived. A compact two-bedroom place with a long narrow garden, the girls in bunk beds in the rear bedroom. Down the hill from Blackheath not far from Lewisham station. I’d put up a pair of swings at the bottom of the garden one summer. We’d been trying to decide whether to have a loft conversion or simply move out. Lyneth favoured going back to Wales, whereas I was keen to stay in London because my career was flourishing. But we hadn’t fallen out over that.

Somewhere in the house another door opened and I heard a burst of music—a swirling, soulful tune, with a lyric like a holiday commercial.

Geoff was waiting for me to say something. He gave every appearance of being relaxed and patient, but he’d crossed his legs and was wiggling his right foot.

Good old Geoff: never a brusque word to say to anyone. His three years in California had left no mark on him: he was still the perfect English gentleman.

He was talking to me again, but I let the words roll past.

By the time he and Tanya had returned to London they were already a couple. I knew this from the postcards Tanya sent every few months—pictures of quirky Americana following visits to Las Vegas, Yosemite, Beverl Hills, Salt Lake City. They always carried brief messages detailing humorous incidents but few personal details.

As promised, the postcards always came in brown envelopes, my name and address written in anonymous neat capitals. My father diligently observed my instructions to keep them safe until I visited rather than post them on to me in Brockley, where Lyneth and I had bought a flat. She was doing teacher training while I had been taken on by a small independent production company that made educational videos for schools and colleges—twenty-five-minute pieces on British history and the geography of the islands. I began as a researcher but soon progressed to organising location shoots, staging re-enactments, writing scripts and doing voice-overs.

I’d imagined that Lyneth wouldn’t thrive in London, but she met another woman from south Wales at the local library who ran coffee mornings and a nursery group. Lyneth swiftly became involved, being especially invaluable for babysitting duties since she was the only one of the group with no children of her own.

This was a looming issue, along with familial pressure to get married. Our sex life was regular enough if unspectacular. For two years we jollied along amicably, though occasionally I’d find myself looking at her and wondering what she saw in me, and what I was doing with her.

That November Lyneth announced that she was pregnant. By mutual agreement I’d continued using condoms, and inevitably there had been accidents with slippage and haste. They happened so infrequently I’d ceased to take account of them and even Lyneth, who demonstrated perfect recall for such instances, couldn’t specify this particular occasion. Perhaps it had just split. Perhaps there had been a leakage. Perhaps, it occurred to me much later, she’d actually contrived it out of sheer impatience.

It was obvious she wanted the baby. My feelings were more mixed but the alternatives were far too ugly. Apart from anything else I felt that I owed it her.

Sara was born shortly after Lyneth obtained her B.Ed. and shortly before Geoff and Tanya returned from California. We’d married by then, in a church near her family home. Her parents were thrilled. Even my father raised a smile. Rhys was my best man. He made a near-incomprehensible speech in which he likened us to the n-p junction of a transistor.

I realised I was laughing. Geoff was sitting there, looking quite perplexed.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about something else.”

The door opened and Tanya poked her head into the room.

“Everything all right?”

Her hair was tied back, a pencil propped behind one ear, her reading glasses hanging from her neck.

“Wonderful,” I said, deadpan.

Tanya glanced at Geoff before giving me a look that I read as sympathet to my plight in the specific sense of having to accommodate Geoff’s professional interest in it. In that moment it was easy to imagine that he was the visitor and I the resident, that Tanya and I somehow still had the closer relationship, despite the formalities of marriage and cohabitation. I felt quite blithe.

TWENTY-FIVE

Morning prayers.

It was a small chapel—or rather a room furnished as one. Field Marshal Maredudd and Giselle Vigoroux sat with their heads bowed in the front rank of chairs as a chaplain gave the usual thanks for their blessings and asked that true believers everywhere be allowed to stay in God’s grace.

Most of the desk chairs packed into the room were filled with personnel. Owain was sitting alone at the back, waiting for the service to end. The chaplain stood in front of a gilt cross set on a small covered table. A picture of a haloed Jesus hung on the wall above it. He floated above a landscape in which the wretched and needy worshipped at his feet, accepting the shining spiritual bounty that flowed in golden rays from his outstretched hands.

His uncle always made him attend the services when they were together, judging his declared atheism irrelevant to the requisite observance. Maintaining ritual, he would declare, was vital to a healthy spirituality, irrespective of belief. Without God, he often added, the whole damn thing was meaningless. Owain found it hard to disagree with this.

His uncle had been raised a Methodist, but now most Christians in the country, and in western Europe at large, belonged to the officially sanctioned United Ecumenical Church, which embraced everyone from Catholics to Nonconformists. The flexibility of its creed suited the diminished availability of both congregations and places of worship.

Now the chaplain was espousing the righteousness of their cause and asserting his belief that with God’s help they would ultimately prevail against all the forces of darkness that sought to overwhelm them. He made a point of stressing that he did not identify those forces with specific races or religions: all beliefs were tolerated and valued within the Alliance borders through the enlightened assimilation of refugees and liberated populations. Far from being exclusive, the Church sought to embrace everyone in a holy community of civilised values they were forever determined to protect.

The small multinational congregation murmured its “amens” at appropriate points. I found myself wondering if any of them were Moslems, Hindus or Sikhs. If any were, they would have found little in the chaplain’s words to offend their religious sensibilities. The expressed allegiance transcended both faith and nationality. It was rooted in an unspecified yet pervasive sense of protected territoriality, one based on values that were essentially military. The enemy was simply the spiritual barbarians outside the walls of the city.

Only Owain showed any stirrings of dissent. He had cast his mind far beyond the confines of the room, to distant places beyond the frontiers where others were worshipping: Confucians and Shintoists in far-eastern temples; the Orthodox congregations of the old Soviet sates and dissenting émigré Greeks; Jews in their Diaspora; Pagans and Animists in the nether regions of the world; Evangelicals, Mormons and the Christian fundamentalists of the American Bible Belt—all consumed with their own particular brand of righteousness, all possessed of their own spiritual certainties and the shining moral imperatives that flowed from them. Antagonistic to those who did not share their beliefs.

Owain knew that such thoughts were vaguely seditious—but only if he ever expressed them. Which he had no intention of doing. As the service ended he sprang up and opened the door, almost standing to attention as his uncle came out first, Giselle following.

“Don’t forget to collect the hymn books,” the field marshal said to him with a gruff laugh as he shuffled off down the corridor, tapping his stick almost jauntily as he went.

“He’s not going to need you this morning,” Giselle told him. “Probably not for the rest of the day.” She handed him a two-way radio. “I’ll contact you if you’re wanted.”

They were in a secluded mansion near Catterick with protected short-range communications. His uncle had a series of meetings with strategic planning groups, who had various war-game scenarios to present to him. They had flown in by Shrike early that morning from London.

Owain checked his watch. It was not yet eight o’clock.

“Anything you’d like me to do?” he asked.

Giselle shook her head. “Relax. Go and get some breakfast. There’s quite a good menu—by English standards.”

I tried to make him say something, but he was perfectly controlled, letting nothing untoward out. It was as if he rationalised my presence merely as an occasional tendency towards careless thoughts and actions, a slightly wayward aspect of his personality which he was determined to resist.

He followed the signs downstairs to the canteen. The smell of bacon greeted him, drenching his mouth. The chalked menu was also advertising fresh farm eggs, greenhouse tomatoes and Assam tea. I sensed him still holding himself under strict control; I could observe but not participate in any way.

He ordered a full English breakfast. The place was already crowded, mostly with naval staff. At a table in one corner sat a small group of raddled young women, migrants by the look of them, tarted up in fake leather, clinging skirts and dark stockings. Sipping drinks and smoking cigarettes, they jabbered at one another in heavily accented English. The youngest looked barely pubescent.

Owain carried his tray to the opposite side of the room, occupying a stool at a ledge near the serving counter. It faced a mirror, which began to ripple like water. He focused on his food: bacon, eggs and tomato with a thick triangle of fried bread. Three spoonfuls of sugar in his tea.

It was hot in the canteen, and the drone of conversation from the other tales was like a murmuring in his head. His stomach felt both hollow and bloated. He kept eating, forcing the food into his mouth, washing it down with the tea. There were other servicemen he’d recognised when he’d entered but he couldn’t contemplate the idea of small talk and brittle bonhomie.

His head was throbbing. He looked up, and I saw myself, my tongue poking out.

I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them again. My tongue was a healthy pink at its edges but yellowish-grey at its centre. A pale sea-blue room surrounded me. It stayed.

There was a toothbrush in my hand. I used it to scrub my tongue until I gagged.

A few deep breaths. Still here. I looked down at the blister pack of tablets on the window ledge above the sink. Small red ones, anticonvulsives, anti-psychotics, antidepressants—I couldn’t remember which. To be taken after meals, with water or a hot drink.

I pressed out two but dropped them down the toilet. There was a bottle containing white tablets. Again I removed a pair and consigned them to the same place. And flushed, watching the water swirl and foam with pine-scented cleanser, before putting the pack and bottle back in the overhead cupboard.

I’d been doing this for days, I remembered: morning and night.

Tanya’s bathroom, a bright clean space of gleaming chrome, white porcelain, aquamarine tiles. I was standing naked, just out of the shower, a navy towel at my feet. There was a disposable razor on the washbasin—one of Tanya’s. I’d been about to use it, despite the fact that my own electric razor sat in full view on the window sill. It was years since I’d last wet-shaved.

I looked in the mirror. Owain was gazing over the shoulder of his own reflection. One of the young women was close by. Eighteen or nineteen, with peroxide hair, dark eye make-up, lipstick like a silvery bruise. She was clad in a tight black skirt and a khaki combat jacket. Slavic, by the look of her, probably with a limited grasp of English, a stock vocabulary of come-hither phrases.

Owain looked past her to the others at the table. They were laughing, appeared to be enjoying one another’s company. The Soft Division, soldiers called them; the Pink Brigades. They could absorb any thrust, frontal assaults or rearguard actions. They were experts at close-quarter engagements.

The blonde woman’s face was ash-pale with lack of sleep. Doubtless she had a quota to fulfil. There would be rooms set aside for them, perhaps even an anonymous customer log. Payment according to results.

Owain stumbled off his stool and went in search of the nearest men’s room. They unnerved him, these whores, even though he knew they were powerless. He’d served with men on the front who’d ruined such creatures in a single brutal encounter; men who would only take women in the teeth of their opposition; men who liked an audience, who preferred minors or mutilation. Under circumstances where there was no prospect of sanction, any appetite could be satisfied.

He’d had his own opportunities, of course. Once, while doing a routine sweep of houses in a Polish village near the NGZ, he and his men had come upon a young woman who’d tried to attack them with a knife. A real vixen whom he’d only managed to subdue by pinning her down on a bed. When he looked around his men were withdrawing, laughing, saying that they’d give him ten minutes.

The woman lay beneath him, her handsome face still full of a defiance that suggested she was determined to survive anything he could do to her. This aroused him, as did her continued angry silence as he tore open her clothes. She would submit to him, her expression said, but he would never conquer her. Terms that he considered more than acceptable.

But when it came to it, he couldn’t perform. It wasn’t long after Caroline had left, and something had shut down. Physically nothing would stir, despite his ardour, despite all his frantic strivings. Eventually she began to laugh at him—a scornful, heartless laugh, devoid of redemption for either of them. He put his pistol to the side of her head, his other hand around her throat. Almost fired. But she’d gone silent and was looking at him with terrified eyes. Eventually she started to make gagging noises. He tore his hand away, fired a single shot into the wall just above her head and stormed out, flooded with rage and shame.

Ever since he’d avoided the danger, embracing chastity as a form of purification. He had even, despite all his usual instincts, confessed to Marisa soon after they met that he was incapable of physical arousal. The admission was a form of intimacy that liberated both of them not so much from temptation itself as from its necessary consequences. He was free to enjoy her company without the risk of compromising himself.

I could sense Owain writhing at these thoughts, wanting to banish them to the deepest recesses of his mind. They were a fact of his life that he preferred to remain implicit and guarded from the attentions of others. It was another reason why he was drawn to Marisa: she had accepted his condition from the outset, seeing it as noble. But he was also shamed and angered by it.

In the men’s room an NCO in shirtsleeves was washing his hands at the sink. He looked vaguely familiar, greeted Owain cheerfully. Owain fled into one of the cubicles, locking the door behind him.

His nausea had subsided and yet he still felt sick. He closed his eyes, willing himself to be calm.

For a while there was only the sound of his breathing. I became aware of a knocking, a steady tapping on the door.

“Are you all right in there?”

More knocking. I unlocked the door and opened it.

“Aren’t you ready yet?” Tanya said in a tone of faint exasperation.

I was still naked, the towel clutched at my midriff.

“Ready for what?”

“We’re going out. Did you forget?”

Completely, though I wasn’t about to admit it. “I was thinking about trying a wet shave.”

The white plastic razor was in my hand.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” she said, gently lifting it from my fingers. “I use it for my legs. And my bikini line.”

TWENTY-SIX

We ascended from the shooting gallery, Owain flexing his fingers to restore circulation. He’d spent most of the morning inside its subterranean halls, with their ersatz landscapes and every kind of weapon from the latest pistols to hand-held rocket launchers. He’d flamed tanks, brought down helicopters, planted a missile straight through the slit eye of an enemy bunker and watched it erupt in freeze-motion like an unfurling blossom. Hidden from the light, the artifice of the machines worked perfectly. The surrogate action had done much to restore his spirits.

The complex was well equipped, with a swimming pool, fitness suites and viewing theatres showing the latest Cinema Vérité releases. Owain retraced his path to the chapel room, and found it filled with a small but raucous audience who were watching jerky video footage on the screen that had been set up at its front. It showed a portly middle-aged man, who was obviously known to them, frantically mounting a much younger woman in a pink ballerina’s tutu who had draped herself across a gymnasium vaulting horse. She was looking knowingly at what might have been a hidden camera with a crafted expression in which outrage and amusement were intermixed. There were bursts of hilarity and encouragement from the watchers.

Owain descended the stairs and went outside. He walked down through formal gardens of pruned rose bushes and stunted shrubs, past ranks of greenhouses, workshops, stables. Migrant workers were using besoms to brush the snow off the fairways and greens of a golf course. A quartet of senior officers was already teeing up at the first hole.

It was a surprisingly bright morning, the clouds like mother-of-pearl. He found himself in woodland, next to a glittering stream. He’d come out without an overcoat but the freezing air was invigorating. He followed the stream through the woodland until eventually the trees thinned and he came out on heath land where a tall triple-layered fence marked the edge of the estate.

There were distant bursts of gunfire. Surmounting the hill, he saw beyond the fence a small group of riders pursuing a darting creature over the white landscape: feline, with mottled grey flanks, like an arctic leopard. It was a werecat, a breed originally engineered as a potential plague carrier but released into the wild for sport. The riders, all women, sat in pairs on the broad backs of their horses, the pillions brandishing automatic rifles. They swiftly vanished between the folds of the hill.

The fence was electrified, enclosing a tank trap and, according to the signs, landmines. The ground dropped away sharply, was almost a cradown which he might easily plunge. He looked skywards, searching for the bright smear of the sun. Suddenly he felt adrift again, almost disembodied. If he let himself fall, who would ever find him?

“So?” Tanya said. “What did you think?”

We were coming out of a cinema in Leicester Square. Already it was getting dark.

I looked blankly at her. I couldn’t remember a single thing about the movie. Not one thing.

She gave a short laugh.

“What?” I said.

“You were sitting so still I had to keep nudging you to check you were awake.”

She tucked her arm through mine and led me off. Inwardly I was still reeling. What would happen to me if Owain died? Would my connection with his world be severed? Or would I be extinguished too? It was a very real possibility, given my increasingly visceral identification with him. I was also unnerved by the revelation about his sexuality and its murky undercurrents. The more I found out about him, the more he alarmed me.

We wandered across the square. It was filled with neon and bustle, people hurrying in all directions, wolfing burgers, talking on mobiles. It was the first time I’d been in central London since the explosion. Regent Street wasn’t too far away, a few minutes walk at most. Fortunately we were going in the opposite direction.

“Are you hungry?” Tanya asked. “We ought to eat. There probably won’t be much this evening apart from vol-au-vents and carrot sticks.”

She yanked me through a forecourt of empty tables. “By the way, who’s Marisa?”

I jolted. “What?”

“You said her name at one point. While you were dozing.”

A trilling noise. Tanya unzipped her shoulder bag and rummaged inside. It would probably be Geoff calling. I felt as if I had been rescued.

Something squawked. It startled him. A second or two passed before he realised it was the radio in his pocket.

Owain pulled it free. He was walking along a two-lane road, keeping up a brisk pace to banish the chill of the day. He’d followed the line of the perimeter fence and must have almost completed a circuit of the estate. He couldn’t imagine where all the time had gone. Now, with night rapidly falling, he had no idea where he was.

A crackle. “Owain?” Giselle’s voice.

“Yes?”

“Where are you?”

“Out walking.”

“We need you here. A.s.a.p., please.”

He could hear an uncharacteristic anxiety in her voice.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“The field marshal. He’s collapsed. Just get yourself back here, OK?”

He asked what had happened, but she’d already cut the connection. Owain thrust the radio into his pocket and broke into a jog, heading towards where he thought the nearest road would be.

Soon afterwards he heard an engine sound. A squat Centaur ATV appeared from behind rusty mounds of rhododendron.

Owain stood in the middle of the road, waving his arms. The Centaur pulled up. It had army markings, a young khaki-bereted head poking out of its top. A corporal.

“I need a lift back to the house,” Owain called.

The corporal squinted at him through the gloom. “Can I ask what you’re doing out here, sir?”

“Bird watching,” Owain said aggressively, leaping up on to a wheel arch. “This is an emergency. Get moving!”

It took less than a minute to reach the mansion. Slivers of golden light were leaking out of its shuttered windows.

His uncle had been put to bed in one of the upstairs rooms. Giselle was at his side, as was another man whom Owain recognised. A portable television sat next to the bed, but Sir Gruffydd lay with his eyes closed, breathing shallowly, the colour drained from his face.

“He collapsed an hour after lunch,” Giselle told him.

“What happened? Is it his heart?”

Giselle shook her head. “We think he ate something that disagreed with him. They’ve just pumped his stomach.”

Strands of curly white hair were stuck to his forehead. The corners of his lips were cracked and crusted with dried blood.

I made Owain ask: “Was he poisoned?”

“Unlikely,” said the doctor. It was Tyler, the man who’d attended him after Regent Street. “Though if you ask me the chef wants shooting.”

“Mussels,” Giselle said. “He had a big dish. I warned him they didn’t smell right.”

Tyler turned to a nurse. “Where’s the damned monitor?”

“It’s on its way,” she told him. “They’re having to bring it up from the gyms.”

“Is he going to be OK?” Owain asked.

“He’ll be on his back for a day or two,” Tyler said. “Should sleep now till morning at least. We’ll keep an eye on things. Make sure he doesn’t do anything for twenty-four hours. Complete bed rest, eh?”

He was addressing Giselle. “I’ll lock him in if I have to,” she assured him.

“Get rid of the TV. No news reports, bulletins, paperwork. Nothing that’s likely to raise his blood pressure.”

The television was showing brief campaign scenes, intercut with the smouldering ruins of an aeroplane in a field of snow and broken pines. It was the BBC’s restricted access channel. The sound had been turned off, but the caption read: CinC & CofS DIE IN POMERANIAN CRASH.

“What’s that about?” Owain asked Giselle.

“He insisted on watching,” she said wearily. “A Dornier carrying some senior commanders came down near Kolberg this morning. Engine failure.”

The picture switched, showing the Chancellor delivering a tribute. He was in his office, backdropped by the flags of state, looking suitably grave but in command of the situation. His image had been refined over the years to maximise his appeal to a diverse audience.

Owain’s uncle made a growling sound and subsided. The picture had now cut from the Chancellor to that of the two principal victims of the crash. I recognised one of the faces instantly.

Generaloberst Blaskowitz.

I swirled the white wine in my glass. Two young men were talking to me, one about war-gaming, another about his collection of replica model tanks.

The room was hot and crowded, subterranean, with bare brick walls and arches. A crypt, possibly. People stood in clusters, holding their complimentary drinks, chatting earnestly. A few spilled bowls of dry-roast peanuts remained on side tables. At a bustling bar two attractive young women in black dresses were doling out wine and bottles of Becks. A poster hung on one pillar showed a shield with runes severed vertically by a lightning bolt.

A publisher’s party to mark the launch of a new book. I’d been invited months before, had been persuaded by Tanya to attend. Where was she? I scanned the heads, failed to spot her. Now one of the young men was talking about the SAS and how they would be a brilliant subject for a series. Both of them had ardent faces. Both of them were obviously thrilled to be talking to me. I kept making affirmative noises that encouraged they hecontinue.

Nobody in the place looked older than fifty. The book was something about the Waffen-SS, I remembered. They were always among the most popular of wartime subjects for military enthusiasts. The Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Totenkopf, Wiking. A mantra of storm troopers, the elite of the Wehrmacht, always shown with their hulking Tigers, invariably smashing enemy formations, racing to plug gaps in the German lines, conducting desperate heroic counterattacks. And all the while butchering and burning and raping and maiming. For the good of the cause. The Triumph of the Will.

At that moment I felt complicit. I felt my father at my shoulder, asking me what I was doing here, demanding to know when was I going to treat history with the respect it deserved.

Unfair, I thought. As ever, his judgements were too severe.

The two young men were waiting for me to say something. I excused myself, slipping away through the crowd towards a darker corner where few people were lingering, nodding to anyone who spoke my name or said hello but not risking eye contact, keeping my head down.

I retreated as far as I could into the shadows, still wondering where Tanya was. There were few women in the place, but plenty of leather jackets, short haircuts and thick-soled boots. The two publicity girls who were serving at the bar stood out. Both were blonde, like perfect examples of young Aryan womanhood. Both thoroughly enjoying the attentions of those they were serving.

“So there you are,” said a voice. “I thought you’d gone AWOL.”

Adrian. He looked a little drunk.

“I’m in hiding,” I said. “Watching the detectives.”

“They’re so cute,” he countered. “Especially that pair.”

Inevitably he was indicating the two publicity girls.

“Not much competition,” I said. “How’s Rachel?”

“Sorry we ever started, if you want my opinion.”

“On the baby?”

“On everything. I couldn’t persuade her to come.”

“I’m not surprised. Hot and smoky.”

He wasn’t really listening, was peering through the crowd, looking for someone.

“Have you seen the book?” he asked.

“I’ve seen the poster.”

“I’s tat. Honestly, Owen. Like someone’s ransacked a private collection of photographs and stuck some text around them. I bet it’ll sell like hot cakes.”

It was Adrian’s theory that the renewed interest in the second world war arose from the collapse of ideologies in the modern world, the absence of the very polarities so manifest during Hitler’s time—left against right, democracy against totalitarianism, a clear sense that evil regimes had to be destroyed. I doubted it was that simple, given the fascination with some of the least savoury aspects of the war. There was something more ceremonial and expressive of darker yearnings about it.

Weariness was descending on me. How much had I drunk? I couldn’t remember. I wasn’t even sure exactly when I had re-emerged from my counterpart’s world; while the transitions to it were often abrupt, the return to my real life was sometimes more disjointed, a spluttering into full consciousness. Owain’s situation was becoming more intriguing, harder to resist. This time I hadn’t even tried to break free. Had his uncle been poisoned? Had Blaskowitz been murdered? What would Owain have made of this gathering of celebrants to a war that in his own world had never ended?

Adrian was now talking to a dark-haired woman who I knew was an editor from a publishing house; she also looked as if she was seeking sanctuary. I slunk away again, trying to remember how long I’d been here, how much longer I would need to stay.

A little cluster of people was standing around a man who was presumably the author. He wore jeans and a sports jacket, looked like an academic. I didn’t know him. Among the group was a silver-haired man who was possibly the only person in the room to have actually been alive when the war was taking place. What did this signify? Everything, or nothing at all?

“Gordon Bennett,” said an exasperated voice.

It was Tanya, emerging out of the morass.

“I’m not sure I’m cut out for this,” she said to me. “There’s this chap who wants to take me home and show me his collection of insignia.”

“You should be so lucky. Do you want to leave?”

She nodded eagerly, swallowing the last of her orange juice. “You need to say any goodbyes?”

Adrian was in huddled conversation with the editor. For Rachel’s sake, I hoped that they were discussing work rather than pleasure.

“Nope,” I said. “Swift tactical withdrawal.”