‘In that case,’ I said, ‘why did you need a sign?’
Owen nodded, as if he had known such a question might be coming. At that moment, however, we were interrupted by a knock on the door. A man with a shaved head announced that everything was ready, then withdrew. Owen turned back to me. He would be more than happy to continue our discussion, he told me, but it seemed that dinner was served.
He rose to his feet and, reaching for his tall scarlet hat, fitted it carefully on to his head. With his mitre and his robes, it was possible that he had gone too far, but I wouldn’t be the one to say so. Where would I have been without him and his followers? If he wore elaborate clothes, it must be because he thought that there was a place for ritual and hierarchy, that they were things that made people feel safe.
Though Owen wasn’t looking at me, he appeared to feel my gaze on him and to have a rough idea of what I was thinking. ‘I don’t always dress so formally,’ he said, ‘but tonight’s a special occasion, as you’re about to find out.’
The following morning, after breakfast, I went for a walk. In the daylight I could see that they had put me in a stable-block which, like the main house, had been built from limestone, austere and grey. Though it was only a few weeks until Christmas, the sun was shining, and a haze that felt autumnal clung to everything I saw. Tranquil pathways led between high hedges. Lawns were silvery with dew. I passed a lake with an island in the middle, then climbed unsteady steps into a wild meadow. In the distance a black cat picked its way through the tall grasses, setting each paw down with the utmost care, as though the ground were mined. From where I stood, I saw how a ridge encircled the house on three sides, hiding it from the world. The tension and anxiety I had felt while staying with Fernandez had lifted away, and I was filled with a new optimism. Against all the odds I had made it to the Blue Quarter. The crossing had been unorthodox, to say the least – perhaps they all were – but the border was behind me now, and I could start thinking once again about what it was that I wanted to attain. I couldn’t help but believe that there would be less resistance from now on, less danger, that things would, in general, be easier. The essential nature of the people in this country dictated it.
At the top of the meadow, I looked back towards the house, remembering what had happened the previous night. Once we had left the library, Owen escorted me down a corridor and into a room that was entirely dark. Before I could voice my bewilderment, I was blinded by a sustained flash of electric light. When my eyes had adjusted, I saw that I was standing on a dais at the far end of a dining-hall. In front of me were dozens of faces, all lifted in my direction, all applauding me. Owen put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. These would be the people I had seen on the beach, I realised. These would be the members of the Church of Heaven on Earth.
‘We have gathered here tonight, as you know,’ Owen began, ‘to honour an unexpected guest –’
A ripple of amusement washed around the room.
‘Unexpected, but certainly not unwelcome. In fact’ – and here he couldn’t resist a smile – ‘it might have been nice if he had come a little sooner.’
Loud laughter greeted this.
‘It has been a troubled year for all of us, but now, thanks to the man standing beside me, I think I can honestly say that we feel better in ourselves. Now, thanks to him, our life can go on.’
The hall erupted in cheers and whistles.
Owen lifted his hands in an appeal for quiet. ‘Let’s raise our glasses to this long-awaited messenger – our saviour, you might even say – Thomas Parry!’
I smiled as I started up the hill. Although I had felt humbled by the reception, fraudulent too, in some respects, I had thought it only polite to respond to Owen’s speech with a few words of my own.
‘Thank you.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know very much about your community. I’m not even sure I share your beliefs. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know where I am at the moment –’ My opening remarks had created a slightly awkward silence, but now I heard laughter swooping through the room, the exaggerated laughter that often accompanies a release of tension. ‘But I do want to say one thing,’ I went on. ‘You took me in and showed me kindness, and, in my situation, that was more than I could ever have expected, and I simply want to thank you for that.’ My voice had begun to shake, which surprised me, and I found myself adding, ‘Really I’m just happy to be alive.’
A standing ovation followed. Embarrassed, I looked away.
Owen approached me again, and I thought I saw both fondness and compassion in the smile he gave me. I had surprised him too, perhaps. In a gesture I scarcely recognised, I took his right hand in mine and placed my left hand over it. It wasn’t a handshake so much as a way of demonstrating the sincerity of what I’d said.
I came out on to the brow of the ridge and set off along a path that led to the sea. In half an hour I had reached the cliffs. Far below, the waves threw themselves languidly against a strip of mud-coloured sand. There was an eerie quiet down there, a sense of lassitude, and even though the sun still shone I had the impression that something had leaked out of the day. Whatever had been easy-going and benign was gone.
I found I was thinking about John Fernandez – the speed with which he had arranged a passage for me, his apparent familiarity with procedures which, to many, would have seemed baffling, not to say perilous. And he had mentioned bribing customs officers as well. He worked for the transport union, of course, but still … I had read enough relocation files to know that smugglers operated up and down the coast, trafficking in human beings. There were always people who wanted to cross illegally from one country to another. They just had to pay the going rate. Did Fernandez run a business like that? Had I turned, unwittingly, to one of the few who could actually get me out? He hadn’t asked for any money, though. When I arrived outside his house, he’d been standing in the darkened hall, behind the door. Was I something Fernandez had been waiting for, or even dreading? Was I his day of reckoning? In which case he’d got off lightly, maybe.
Then I remembered the voices I thought I’d heard, and it occurred to me that there might have been stowaways in some of the other containers. Unable to unbolt their doors, they had been calling out for help, their cries muffled by the metal walls and by the rush of water through the hold. No, no. Surely someone would have mentioned it. That docker in the overalls – or Fernandez himself…
I stepped back from the cliff-edge, took the dank air into my lungs. It seemed difficult in this place even to breathe. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come down to the sea. I would head east along the coastal path, then circle back towards the house. It was almost midday now, and Owen had asked me to join him for lunch.
When I knocked on the library door, I was greeted by the shaven-headed man from the night before. He was Owen’s personal assistant, he told me. Unfortunately, Owen had been called away unexpectedly. He was very sorry. I was shown to a table by the window. There was a plate of freshly cut sandwiches for me and a jug of lemon barley water. If I needed anything else, the man said, he would be in the next room.
After I had eaten, I wandered into the conservatory where I found Rhiannon sitting in a wicker chair, doing needlepoint. She was working on an image of a woman and a small boy. Dressed in sandals and brightly coloured robes, they were walking hand in hand along an unpaved road. There were olive trees behind them, and stark white hills.
‘I don’t know if I’d have the patience for that kind of thing,’ I said.
She looked up and smiled. ‘It’s Epicurus and his mother. She was a fortune-teller. He used to travel from house to house with her when he was young.’ She reached into her bag for a new ball of wool. ‘It’s for Owen’s birthday.’
She had reminded me of something that had been bothering me. ‘You know, I still don’t understand why you were looking for a sign,’ I said.
She laid her needlepoint aside and ran a hand slowly through her hair.
‘In January,�
� she said, ‘one of our members committed suicide. He had only been with us for a month. We thought we could help him, but he was too unstable. He would have been better cared for somewhere else – a hospital …’ She sighed, then leaned forwards in her chair. ‘Well, anyway, after Kieran’s death – that was his name – a shadow fell over the community. It was as if something had been lost. An innocence, perhaps. Nothing bad had ever happened here before …
‘The sign was Owen’s idea. If we were going to change the atmosphere, he told us, we would have to look outside ourselves. Something special was needed – some symbolic event or ruling. We were quite prepared to abide by it too. If the sign had gone against us, we would all have had to leave.’ She stared out across the garden. ‘I don’t know where we would’ve gone, though.’
I followed her gaze. Two girls were playing badminton on the lawn, laughing whenever they swung at the shuttlecock and missed.
‘How did all this begin?’ I said.
She had never heard the whole story, she said, but she would tell me what she knew. When Owen was in his twenties, he had owned several factories that made pre-cast concrete. He had been wealthy even then, apparently. But the Rearrangement had turned him into a multimillionaire. He won a contract to act as sole supplier to the governments of all four countries. Uniformity of product was vital. Every wall that was erected had to look the same.
‘A concrete millionaire?’ I said. ‘I’d never have guessed.’
Rhiannon shook her head, as though she too found it hard to believe.
The authorities were always telling Owen that he was helping to create a better world, she said, that his name would go down in history, and so on, but he soon began to feel uncomfortable. He must have noticed how much misery was being caused, and he must also have realised that, for large sections of the population, the most powerful symbol of that misery was the concrete that he had himself supplied. He stopped going in to work, hoping the business would collapse, but it had become so established that it more or less ran itself. There was only one course of action left. He sold everything – the factories, his town house, the lot – and moved to the coast. He went from being a dynamic, glamorous industrialist to a man who grew tomatoes and read books about comparative religion. He still enjoyed company, though. Friends came to stay. Then friends of those friends came. One day he looked around and saw that he was living in a community. It hadn’t been planned, or even thought about. It had happened organically. And, purely by chance, their way of life was perfectly in tune with the phlegmatic temperament. They understood the need for sanctuary, they rejected materialism without being puritanical, and with their emphasis on gratitude and celebration they were able to channel or harness all manner of emotion. People heard about the community, and it spoke to them, and they began to arrive on the doorstep.
‘And they’re still arriving,’ Rhiannon said, ‘even now.’
‘By sea as well as land,’ I said lightly.
‘Actually’ – and she gave me a smile I couldn’t fathom – ‘I think you’d fit in rather well.’
My eyes drifted beyond her. The girls had disappeared, leaving their rackets lying on the grass. The lake beyond was motionless.
‘In the end, there’s something about this place,’ Rhiannon said. ‘I don’t know what it is. An absence of pressure, I suppose. A sense of acceptance.’ She smiled again, more openly this time. ‘A kind of peace.’
The unearthly stillness that had troubled me during my walk turned out to have been the prelude to a change in the weather. That night a storm blew in, gale-force winds rushing through the courtyards and passageways of the house. Sheet lightning lit up the sky every few seconds, making the clouds look like stage scenery, artificial and melodramatic. After dinner I retired to my room with a book I had borrowed from the library, an essay on gardens by someone called Sir William Temple. As I lay on my bed reading, a lamp on beside me and the rest of the room in darkness, the door came open. At first I thought the wind must have forced the latch, but then I saw a figure silhouetted against the steel-grey light in the yard outside.
‘Rhiannon?’
‘It’s not Rhiannon.’
A girl crossed the room with a tray. She had brought me a herbal infusion that smelled a little like warm grass. I didn’t think I’d seen her before – unless, perhaps, she was one of the girls who’d been playing badminton. The silk dress she was wearing came down to her ankles, but it showed off her forearms, which looked slender, almost golden, as she reached into the fall of lamplight to pour the tea. Her dark-brown hair was so long that it hid her shoulderblades. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen.
‘I was the one who saw you first,’ she said.
‘I’d been wondering who it was,’ I said – though, in truth, I had done my best to put the events of that particular day behind me.
She looked away into the room. ‘I’m often out there early. It’s a beautiful time. That morning, though, I saw something on the water, a figure that had arms, a face. Then I saw you crouching on top of it, all huddled up. I ran back to the house. I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast.’
‘I heard a bell tolling as I was drifting in towards the beach,’ I said. ‘I thought it was a funeral. There was a part of me that thought I must have died.’
She glanced at me sideways. What I had just said seemed to disturb her. Outside, the wind swelled, surging against the walls.
‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.
‘About a year.’
‘And will you stay?’
‘I don’t know. I’m happy at the moment.’ She moved her shoulders, as if to rid herself of the burden of having to decide too soon. ‘Would you like to go for a walk?’
She saw me hesitate.
‘It’s not raining,’ she said. ‘It’s not even cold.’
I closed my book and put it down.
She led me through the stable-yard, then along the side of the conservatory whose sheets of glass creaked under the gale’s weight. We crossed the lawn at the back of the house. In Owen’s library, the curtains had been drawn against the storm. After circling the lake, we entered a wood on the edge of the property. Lightning flared. High wrought-iron gates stood on the path ahead of us, forbidding as a row of spears. Any sound they might have made as we hauled them open was drowned by the trees hissing and thrashing all around us. We began to climb upwards, over rugged ground, and soon the house had shrunk to a collection of frail yellow lights afloat in a swirling blackness.
Before long we found ourselves on a headland, its cropped grass the colour of slate when the sky lit up. Only now did the wind reveal its true power, gathering the girl’s long hair and lifting it away from her neck until it flew at right angles to her body. Her exhilarated laughter was snatched from her mouth and carried off into the night. I watched the silk of her dress ripple against her belly and her thighs, and I imagined that, if I kissed her, her breath would taste fresh and slightly bitter, like the petals of chrysanthemums. I remembered the tea that she had served with such care, then carelessly abandoned, tea which would be cold by now, and I thought how young she was, how little lay behind her, how far she had to go.
She had brought me to a part of the cliffs I hadn’t visited before, and I could hear the sea below, boiling and roaring on a steep bank of shingle. The waves didn’t break so much as shatter. We leaned into a wind that seemed to want to fling us to the earth. Once or twice, miles out, sheet lightning flashed, and I could just make out the clouds massed on the horizon, their furious shapes, their ripped and jagged edges, like molten metal left to cool.
The girl linked her arm through mine and pointed to the east.
‘Look that way,’ she shouted.
For a moment, though, I couldn’t take my eyes off her face, which was so eager, so elated. It was one of the purest things I’d ever seen.
She tightened her grip on my arm and pointed again. ‘Keep looking.’
And then it happened.
White water came leaping from the ground in front of us, rising high into the air, only for the wind to reach out and bend it sideways. Now I could see the blow-hole in the cliff-top, just a few feet from where we stood.
The girl leaned close to me again. ‘There’s a cave down there. We swim there in the summer. When it’s calm.’
‘I’ll be gone by then,’ I said.
But she had already turned away, and didn’t hear.
My door was open, and a triangle of early morning sunlight stretched out on the floor, as white and pristine as a sail. Since my suit was beyond repair, I was wearing the clothes Rhiannon had found for me, which would in any case be more appropriate for the kind of travelling I had in mind. Before throwing the suit away, I’d checked the jacket collar, but the banknotes had been reduced to a pulp. I was broke. If I was to reach Aquaville, I would either have to walk or hitch.
The room darkened. Rhiannon stood in the doorway, holding a knapsack. ‘You’re leaving,’ she said.
I nodded. ‘I think it’s time.’
‘So you know about our visitors?’
‘What visitors?’
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The day before, Owen had been interviewed by two officials from Customs and Excise, she told me. They suspected there had been at least one survivor from the boat that had recently gone down just off the coast. If the person or persons in question were illegal immigrants, as appeared to be the case, they would have to be apprehended and taken to a detention centre where their true status could be established.
Divided Kingdom Page 23
