From Guildford to Terminal 2

 

Sally threw her walking sticks onto the floor and strode across the lounge, shocked by how unconcerned I seemed. ‘David! You could go to prison

‘It’s possible. Don’t worry, though. I’m probably in the clear.’

‘These people are completely mad. Keep away from them.’ ‘Dear, I intend to. All I did was spend an afternoon with them.’ ‘An afternoon? You set fire to Twickenham.’ ‘That sounds like a painting by John Martin. Twickenham Aflame. The stadium burning, the  tennis courts scorched, swimming pools beginning to boil - that really would be the end of the world.’

‘David . . .’ Trying a different tack, Sally sat on the arm of my chair. She had been asleep when I reached home, but over breakfast I described my baptism as a Chelsea Marina terrorist. She said nothing, frowning hard at her toast, thought about it for an hour and then made a fierce effort to bring me to my senses. Anger, wasted on her doltish husband, gave way to cajollery. She took my face in her hands. ‘David, you’re far too involved. Ask yourself why. These people have got to you, for some reason. Arson, vandalism, incendiary bombs? Out in the suburbs, videos are practically sacred objects. Setting off explosions - it’s all unbelievable.’

‘Smoke bombs. The fire was an accident. The fuses were too powerful - why, I don’t know.’

‘Why? Because whoever set them was on drugs.’ Sally grimaced, remembering her own addiction to hospital pain­killers. ‘That’s Chelsea for you. Like my mother’s set in the seventies. Lesbians, heroin, mad boutiques opening all the time, freaky people pretending to be pop stars. Always avoid Chelsea.’

‘Fulham, actually. No hard drugs and the Protestant work ethic going full blast. Middle managers, accountants, civil servants. The promotion ladders have been kicked away and they see the bailiffs swarming.’

‘They should be in Milton Keynes.’ Sally smoothed my scalp, trying to conjure up the contours of respectability. The excitements of the previous day had left my hair springing like a Mohawk. ‘Chelsea, Fulham . . . you’re north London, David. You’re Hampstead.’

‘Old-style socialism? Psychoanalysis and Jewish scholarship? Not really me. You’d like the people at Chelsea Marina. They have passion. They hate their lives and they’re doing something about it. The French revolution was started by the middle class.’

‘Revolution? Attacking a video shop?’

I took her hands and pondered the life-lines, time-routes that ran for ever, still callused by the handles of her walking sticks. ‘Forget the video shop. The interesting thing is that they’re protesting against themselves. There’s no enemy out there. They know they are the enemy. Kay Churchill thinks that Chelsea Marina is a re-education labour camp, the sort of place they have in North Korea, updated with BMWs and BUPA subscriptions.’

‘She sounds mad.’

“She is, a little. It’s deliberate. She’s winding herself up, like a child with a toy, curious to see where she’ll go. Those big houses in Twickenham were an eye-opener. Civilized people, golden retrievers, but each of those homes was a stage set. All they do is inhabit the scenery. They reminded me of my grandmother’s place in Guildford.’

‘You were happy there.’ Sally pinched my ear, trying to wake me. ‘Think what the alternative was - racketing around with your mother, sleeping in strange beds in north Oxford, smoking pot when you were eight years old, drinking Scotch with R.D. Laing. You’d never have become a psychologist.’

‘I wouldn’t have needed to.’

‘Exactly. You’d have been an architect in Chelsea Marina. Going to bijou little dinner parties and worrying about the Volvo and the school fees. At least you’re doing well.’

‘Thanks to your father.’

‘That’s not true. You’ve never liked him.’

‘Face it, Sally. I’d hate us to have to rely on my Adler salary. His company’s retainer is half our income. It’s a kindly way of giving you a hefty allowance without making me lose my self-respect.’

‘You do useful work for him. That problem over car parking at the Luton factory. You made the executives walk further than everyone else.’

‘Common sense. The most useful work I do for your father is keeping you happy. That’s what he pays me for. In his eyes I’m just a glorified counsellor and medical attendant.’

‘David!’ Sally was more baffled than shocked. She stared at me like a ten-year-old finding a spider in her sock drawer. ‘Is that how you see our marriage? No wonder you’re so keen on Chelsea Marina.’

‘Sally

I tried to reach her hand but the doorbell distracted us. Swearing under her breath, Sally made for the hall. I sat in the armchair, staring at the house around me, a gift from Sally’s mother that reminded me of the role that money played in my life, other people’s money. As Sally had noticed, I felt a growing closeness to the residents of Chelsea Marina, to the feckless film lecturer and the evasive priest with the Harley and the Chinese girlfriend. I liked the way they were looking frankly at themselves and throwing their useless luggage out of the window.

Too many of the props in my own life were baggage belonging to someone else that I had offered to carry - the demeaning requests from my father-in-law’s managers, the committee meetings in my year as a governor of an approved school in Hendon, my responsibilities for my ageing mother whom I liked less and less, the tiresome fundraising for the Adler, little more than touting for corporate clients.

Voices sounded from the pavement. Leaving my chair, I went to the window. Henry Kendall was standing near his car, a suitcase in hand. Beside him was a senior policeman in full uniform, looking up at the house while he spoke to Sally. Without thinking, I assumed that he had come to arrest me and had invited Henry, a close colleague, to act as the prisoner’s friend. The suitcase would carry the few belongings I was allowed to take with me to the police station.

I stood behind the curtains, my heart leaping against my chest like a trapped animal throwing itself at the bars of its cage. I was tempted to run, to flee through the garden gate and make my way to the sanctuary of Chelsea Marina. Calming myself, I walked stiffly to the door.

Henry greeted me affably. We lunched frequently in the Institute dining room, but I noticed how well he looked. The haggard figure outside Ashford Hospital had been replaced by a confident analyst and corporate thruster with both eyes fixed on Professor Arnold’s chair. He had become more patronizing towards me, and at the same time more suspicious, convinced that my interest in Chelsea Marina concealed an agenda of my own.

The policeman had returned to the car, sitting in the front passenger seat as he scanned a white folder with the Adler crest. Henry and I paced the pavement together.

‘Superintendent Michaels,’ Henry explained. ‘I’m giving him a lift to the Home Office. He’s working on the Heathrow case.

‘I thought he’d come to arrest me.’ I smiled, a little too easily. ‘Is there any progress?’

‘Unofficially? No. It’s almost a meaningless crime. No one’s claimed responsibility, and there’s no apparent motive. I’m sorry, David. We both owe it to Laura to clear the thing up.’

‘What about the bomb fragments? They must say some­thing.’

‘Puzzling. British Army detonators of a highly classified type. Used by the SAS and covert ops people. No one can understand how the bomber got hold of them.’

I waved to Sally, who was standing on the step by the front door, smiling at Henry whenever he looked at her. Offhandedly, I said: ‘There was a bomb in Twickenham last night.’

‘You heard about that? It wasn’t on the breakfast news.’ Henry peered sharply at me, a pointer spotting a concealed bird. ‘A rugger prank, they think. It’s odd how many of these small incidents there are - most of the “fires” you read about are really bomb attacks. There are some curious targets.’

‘Suburban cinemas, McDonalds, travel agents, private prep schools . . . ?’

‘Good guesswork.’ Henry’s chin rose even higher, and he gazed at me down his nose. ‘You’re in touch with someone at the Yard?’

‘No. It’s ... in the air we breathe.’

‘You’ve obviously got a feel for the subversive.’ Henry handed the suitcase to me. ‘A few things of Laura’s. I’ve

clearing out the house with her sister. Papers you wrote together, one or two books you gave her, conference photographs. I thought you’d like to have them.’

‘Well . . .’ I held the suitcase, surprised by how light it seemed, the documents of a ten-year relationship, the last deeds of marriage and memory. Holding it as Henry watched me, it seemed to grow heavier in my hand.

Sally made her way down the steps, using the walking sticks to complicate her descent, a sure sign that she was thinking her way to an important decision. Henry and I waited for her to join us, but she left us standing on the pavement and stepped into the street, making a laboured circuit of the car. Superintendent Michaels noticed her in his wing mirror, and held out his arm to halt an approaching taxi. He tried to climb from the car, but Sally leaned against the passenger door, her elbows on the roof.

‘Sally?’ Henry waited for her, our conversation forgotten, taking his keys from his pocket. ‘Do you want a lift?’

She ignored him, and stared across the roof of the car, her eyes levelled at me as I stood with the suitcase, filled with my first wife’s mementoes. I realized that she was about to report me to Superintendent Michaels, and tell him of my involve­ment in the video-store fire. She watched me without smiling, as if reviewing our entire life together across the polished cellulose of Henry’s car, a stretch wider than the Hellespont.

Puzzled by her presence at his elbow, the superintendent edged open his door and spoke to her. Sally noticed his concerned smile, and I heard her apologize for not inviting him in for a drink. They waved to each other as the car Pulled away.

Later, in the kitchen, I watched Sally sip a small sherry twitching at the volatile fluid. Her face seemed sharper for the first time I saw the older woman in her bones 1 spoilt and less sure of either her husband or the world.

‘Sally . . .’ I spoke calmly. The superintendent – you were going to . . .’

‘Yes.’ She stirred the sherry with her finger. ‘I thought about it.’

‘Why? He would have arrested me on the spot. If it came to court there’d be a good chance of my ending up in prison.’

‘Exactly.’ Sally nodded sagely, as if this was the first sensible thing I had said. ‘And if you go on with this Chelsea Marina nonsense you’ll definitely go to prison. For a very long time if someone gets killed. I don’t want that, and maybe now’s the moment to stop it.’

‘It won’t happen.’ I stepped across the kitchen, intending to embrace her, and realized I was still carrying Laura’s suitcase. ‘Believe me, it’s finished.’

‘It isn’t.’ Wearily, Sally pushed away her glass. ‘Just see yourself. Hair standing on end, bruised face, that old suitcase. You look like an illegal immigrant.’

‘I am, in a way. An odd thought.’ I left the suitcase on a chair, and turned confidently to Sally. ‘I’ve seen all I need to. Chelsea Marina probably has no connection with the Heathrow attack. They’re not in the same league.’

‘Are you sure? These people are amateurs, they haven t a clue what they’re doing. Anyway, the Heathrow bomb Isn't why you’re going back to Chelsea.’

‘No? Then why am I going back?’

‘You’ve picked up some kind of trail there. You think it leads to a new self you’re searching for. Maybe you need | find it. That’s why I said nothing to the superintendent.

I moved the sherry glass and pressed her hands to table. ‘Sally, there’s no trail, and there’s nothing to find. I’m happy here, with myself and with you. The people at Chelsea Marina can’t cope with their overdrafts. They’re fed up with themselves and are taking it out on a few double yellow lines”.

“Find out why.  That’s the world we’re living in - people will set off bombs for the sake of free parking. Or for no reason at all. We’re all bored , David, desperately bored. We’re like children left for too long in a playroom. After a while we have to start breaking up the toys, even the ones we like. There’s nothing we believe in. Even this flying parson you met seems to have turned his back on God.’

The Reverend Dexter? He hasn’t turned his back, but he’s keeping his distance. It’s hard to know what exactly, but there’s something on his mind.’

‘And on yours.’ Sally placed her sherry glass in the sink. She smiled gamely, the same confidence-boosting grin I had seen in her orthopaedic ward, willing me on as she had once willed herself to walk. ‘Find out what it is, David. Follow the trail. Guildford to Terminal 2. Somewhere along the way you’ll meet yourself. . .’

The Depot of Dreams

 

The rebellion of the new proletariat had begun, but was I foe or friend? Surprised by myself, I helped to drag the handcuffed security guards into the manager’s office, and tried to shield them from the combat boots aimed at their faces. Kay Churchill caught me when I tripped over the sprawl of legs. She steered me around the desk and sat me in the manager’s chair.

‘David, make up your mind.’

‘I have. Kay, I’m with you.’

‘Get a grip for once.’ Her large eyes with their aroused pupils peered at me through the slits of her ski mask. ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

‘I stay by the box office until everyone leaves. I make sure the doors are locked and let no one in. Kay, I’ve rehearsed everything.’

‘Good. Now stop rehearsing. This is the real thing.’

Vera Blackburn, cool and suspicious in her blue overalls, stood in the corridor, waiting for the assault teams to move to their demolition points. She raised a gloved hand towards me, palm upwards, and clenched it fiercely, as if crushing my testicles.

‘Right . . .’ Kay hesitated, and then rallied herself. She adjusted her ski mask, supplied like our snatch-squad overalls and CS gas by a former lover of Vera’s in the Surrey Police. Planned in Kay’s living room, argued over endless bottles of Bulgarian wine, the action against the National Film Theatre had promised to be little more than a student prank. I was unprepared for the ruthless violence of these middle-class saboteurs. Tempted to call the police, I had lagged behind when they gassed and stunned the three security guards.

Two of the guards were moonlighting film students at City University. They lay face down, coughing a gas-green phlegm onto the manager’s carpet. Both were weeping, as if shocked to find themselves in a brutal drama straight from the gangster movies they so venerated.

The third guard was a security company regular, a fifty-year-old man with the heavy shoulders and close-cropped hair of a retired nightclub bouncer. He had been sitting at his console in the next-door office, watching the surveillance-camera screens, when Vera Blackburn stepped quietly behind him. He caught the CS spray straight in his face, but put up a fight, wresting the can from Vera’s hands. She stepped back, surprised by this show of ingratitude, drew her truncheon and beat him to the floor. He now lay at my feet in the manager’s office, blood leaking across his scalp, unfocused eyes staring at the ceiling.

‘Kay . . .’ I knelt beside the guard and searched for a pulse through the blood and vomit. ‘This man needs help. There must be a first-aid kit.’

‘Later! We have to move.’

She threw a security-company jacket over my shoulders and forced my arms into the sleeves, then propelled me into the corridor. In the camera room Joan Chang was stripping out cassettes of surveillance videotape and tossing them into a duffle bag. She was white-faced with fear, but turned and gave me a vigorous thumbs up.

Doors swung in the corridor as two team-members in overalls stepped into NFT i. Junior barristers who were near-neighbours of Kay’s, they carried briefcases holding the incen­diary charges and timers. They moved in step, entering the silent auditorium like bagmen for the mob.

Kay paused to focus herself when we reached the NFT lobby. The high glass doors exposed the box-office area to the concrete night of the South Bank complex. A slip road ran from the NFT to the Hayward Gallery car park below the staircases and pilotis of this cultural bunker. A security company van was stationed near the artists’ entrance of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, but its crew would be by the coffee machine in the foyer upstairs, staring across the river at Big Ben and counting the long hours to the end of their shift.

‘Kay . . .’ I held her arm before she could leave. ‘Aren’t we taking a risk? Anyone can see me.’

‘You’re a security guard. Act like one.’ She pulled the ski mask from my head. ‘Vera needs time.’

‘Fifty minutes? Why so long?’

‘She has to switch off the fire alarms. There are dozens of them.’ She pinched my cheek in a fleeting show of affection. ‘Do your best, David.’

‘And if someone tries to get in?’

They won’t. Salute and stroll away. You’re a bored secur­ity man.’

‘Bored?’ I pointed to the framed film posters. ‘This place holds a lot of memories.’

‘Start to forget them. In an hour they’ll all be ash.’

‘Do we need to go that far? Burt Lancaster, Bogart, Lauren Bacall . . . they’re just movie actors.’

‘Just? They poisoned a whole century. They rotted your mind, David. We have to make a stand, build a saner England ...”

She slipped away into the shadows, a faceless assassin of the most famous faces the world had known. The six of us had arrived in pairs at the South Bank, posing as film noir enthusiasts, an easy task for me but a difficult one for Kay, who considered the

Hollywood motion picture her sworn enemy. We took our places in NFT2 for a late-night showing of Out of the Past. As we sat among the Mitchum fans it was hard to believe that the theatre where I had spent so many formative hours would soon be reduced to cinders. I was too unsettled to concentrate on a single frame, but Kay sat forward, engrossed by this brutal tale of infatuation and betrayal. At one moment of high drama, when the heroine feigned a pang of despair, I even felt the pressure of her hand on my wrist.

Thirty minutes before the end-titles we slipped from the theatre, and made our way to the disused Museum of the Moving Image, now a storeroom filled with packing cases. Here we joined the other members of the team, and changed into police overalls and ski masks. Vera Blackburn kept watch by the locked doors, whose key she had duplicated while working as a volunteer cataloguer of religious films.

Crouching in the darkness, we waited for the performances to end and the complex to empty. In the open crates around me I felt the antique cameras and dismantled lights in their moisture-proof wrappings, the costumes worn by Margaret Lockwood and Anna Neagle, the scripts of The Sound Barrier and The Winslow Boy, the unforgettable furniture of the 20^th Century’s greatest dream, about to exit through a furnace vent of its own making.

Dreams died different deaths, taking unexpected doors out of our lives. Trying to behave like a bored security guard, I paced the carpet by the box office, thinking of the countless hours I had spent here with Laura. I had argued my case with Kay and Vera, urging that we spare the NFT and target a suburban multiplex. Kay, however, had set her mind on the NFT’s destruction.

Despite her casual betrayal of me in the Twickenham video store, Kay had welcomed me back to Chelsea Marina. In the struggle for a better world, she told me without embarrassment, no one was more disposable than a friend. Unless friends were prepared to betray each other, no revolution would ever succeed.

Visiting Chelsea Marina in the week after our Twickenham expedition, I listened to the doorstep meetings, trying to catch any hint of involvement in the Heathrow bomb. I was surprised by the growing number of protest groups. Leaderless and uncoordinated, they sprang up at dinner parties and PTA meetings. One committee planned a sit-in at the offices of the management company responsible for Chelsea Marina’s abysmal services, but most of the residents were now set on a far more radical response to the social evils that transcended the local problems of the estate. They had moved on to wider targets - a Pret A Manger in the King’s Road, Tate Modern, a Conran restaurant scheduled for the British Museum, the Promenade Concerts, Waterstone’s bookshops, all of them I exploiters of middle-class credulity. Their corrupting fantasies had deluded the entire educated caste, providing a dangerous pabulum that had poisoned a spoon-fed intelligentsia. From sandwich to summer school, they were the symbols of sub­servience and the enemies of freedom.

The NFT was silent, a pale blue light filling its toneless corridors. I straightened my jacket in the mirror behind the pay desk. A smear of blood-stained vomit was drying on the identity badge clipped to my breast pocket. Either I had been sick with panic, or one of the security guards was more injured than I realized.

I pulled on my ski mask and walked to the manager’s office. The prisoners sprawled on the carpet beside the desk. The two students were awake and lay back to back, trying to disguise

their attempt to loosen each other’s handcuffs. The older guard was barely breathing, his head lolling on the vomit-stained carpet. He seemed to be deeply unconscious, a faint breath moving through his bloodied teeth.

Smoke hung in the corridor outside the office, diffusing below the ceiling lights. I assumed that Vera had decided on a quick cigarette, once the fire alarms were disconnected. Somewhere a window had been opened onto the night, and a cooler air moved around me, the street scents of diesel fuel, rain and cooking fat from the all-night cafes near Waterloo Station.

I left the manager’s office and crossed the corridor to NFT i. As I pushed back the curtain a cloud of chemical vapour was rising from the stage, an acrid fog that rolled across the empty seats like a wraith freed from a monster movie. The vapour streamed below the ceiling, found the open exit and flowed around me in looping swirls.

I tried not to gag on the plastic stench, closed the doors and ran to NFT2. I searched the aisles for Kay or Vera. The screen loomed above me, a clouded mirror drained of its memories. On its metallized skin floated the pale shadow of my own reflection, a trapped spectre. An acid vapour was filling the auditorium, and there was a flare of light from the stage. The walls glowed with the electric white of an arc furnace, and a hundred shadows flinched behind the seats.

In the entrance lobby the glass doors were open to the night. Smoke flowed over my head and vented itself into the air, rising towards the promenade deck of the Hayward Gallery. The two students stumbled through the smoke in the corridor, hands cuffed behind them.

‘Get out! Run for it!’ One of them stopped to raise his cuffs to me, and I seized his shoulder. ‘Run!’

In the manager’s office I knelt beside the older guard and tried to lift his heavy torso. His eyes were open, but he was barely conscious, blood caked on his chin and shirt. I gripped his ankles and pulled him across the carpet, his huge legs against my thighs.

As I paused by the door, trying to mask my face from the smoke, his feet slipped from my hands. I bent down to seize them, but he drew back his leather boots, arched himself off the floor and kicked me in the chest.

Winded by the blow, I fell against the door, too stunned to breathe. The guard was wide awake, his eyes fixed on my face. Wrists cuffed behind him, he edged himself across the carpet and drew his knees back, ready to kick my head.

A boot brushed my left ear, and I rolled away from him into the corridor. He propped himself against the door, turned onto his side and rose to his feet.

‘Get out of here!’ I shouted through the smoke that filled the office. ‘Run for the lobby

He steadied himself on both feet, lowered his shoulders and charged at me, emerging from the fog like a rugby forward out of a steaming scrum. His head caught a framed film poster of Robert Taylor and Greer Garson, and knocked it to the floor. He stepped onto the glass pane, kicked the fragments out of his way and hurled himself at me through the smoke.

He followed me into the night, past the lobby doors and onto the slip road to the Hayward Gallery, hands behind his back, smoke rising from his clothes. Only twenty feet ahead of him, I ran around the parked security van, searching for the staircase to the Purcell Room. The students stood back to back, still trying to unpick their handcuffs. The guard head-charged them, throwing them aside with his powerful shoulders.

His boots rang on the concrete steps when I reached the promenade deck of the Hayward Gallery. Behind the glass doors two security men watched me run past, apparently followed by an injured colleague. Their eyes turned towards the column of smoke rising from the roof of the NFT. Both

spoke into their radios, and I heard the first police siren wail along the embankment near Westminster Bridge.

I crossed the upper terrace beside the Festival Hall, gasping at the damp river air. I could barely stumble, but my pursuer had given up the chase. Bent double, he leaned exhausted against a piece of chromium sculpture, phlegm dripping from his mouth, eyes still fixed on me.

I set off towards the Millennium Wheel. Launched onto the night sky, the gondolas circled the cantilever arm, a white latticework cut from frost, the armature of a swan that sailed the dark air. A corporate party was taking place in three of the gondolas, and the guests pressed against the curved glass, watching the first fires break through the roof of the NFT.

I smoothed my security jacket, brushing away the sooty smuts, and walked past the catering vans parked below the Wheel. Waitresses were clearing away the trays of half-eaten canapes. I chewed on a chicken drumstick, and gulped from a bottle of Perrier water. Together we watched a fire engine turn into Belvedere Road, bell clanging. A police car stopped out­side the Festival Hall, and its spotlight played on the Hayward Gallery. Firemen and police on foot were closing in on the NFT, and would soon find the handcuffed security guards.

An empty gondola moved past me, its doors open. The corporate party would be over in an hour, and as the guests strolled across the green to their cars I would lose myself among them.

I stepped into the gondola and leaned on the rail overlooking the river, almost too weary to breathe. While we moved along the boarding platform an off-duty waiter swung himself through the door, a tray bearing two champagne flutes in his hand. He placed the tray on the seat and sat beside it, searching his pockets for a cigarette.

As we rose above County Hall the fires lit the night air and seemed to burn on the dark water of the Thames. A huge caldera had opened beside Waterloo Bridge and was devouring the South Bank Centre. Billows of smoke leaned across the river, and I could see the flames reflected in the distant casements of the Houses of Parliament, as if the entire Palace of Westminster was about to ignite from within.

The waiter pointed to a champagne glass on the tray. With­out thanking him, I tasted the warm wine. The bubbles stung my lips, cracked by the fierce heat in the auditorium. I thought of the smoke-swept corridors lined with the portraits of the film world’s greatest stars. The fires set by Vera Blackburn had taken hold, burning fiercely throughout the NFT, engulfing the smiles of James Stewart and Orson Welles, Chaplin and Joan Crawford. My memories of them seemed to rise with the turning Wheel, escaping from a depot of dreams that was giving up its ghosts to the night.

I crossed the gondola, my back to the smoking waiter and the Thames, and searched the streets around County Hall. I almost expected to see Kay and Joan Chang darting from one doorway to another as the police cars sped past, sirens wailing down the night. Needless to say, they had escaped without warning me, through the riverside entrance to the theatre cafe, which they had left open to create a fire-spurring draught.

The first smoke had reached the windows of the gondola, laying itself across the curved panes. I began to cough, tasting the acrid vapour that had churned outside the manager’s office. I retched onto the rail, and spilled the champagne over the floor at my feet.

Concerned, the waiter stood behind me, and nodded when I cleared my throat, smiling in an oddly complicit way. He was so close that I almost expected him to whisper some proposition, and it occurred to me that the Millennium Wheel might be a favoured place for gay pick-ups.

I tried to wave him away, but he took the empty glass from my hand. He was a slim, agile man with a strong forehead

and bony, almost emaciated face, and a tubercular pallor that should have ruled him out as a waiter. I imagined him moving on the fringes of a twilight world of obscure corporate venues. Like so many waiters I had known, he was friendly but slightly aggressive, a skin-thin charm overlaying a barely concealed aloofness.

When he stepped behind me there was something evasive about him that reminded me of another shadowy figure who had concealed his face. There was the same odour of forgotten hospital wards and languishing children. But his movements were quick and decisive, and I could see him reaching between one of his small patients and a clumsy nurse, a syringe in one hand and distracting toy in the other.

‘Dr Gould?’ I turned to face him, trying to see behind the disarming smile. ‘We’ve met before.’

‘At Kay Churchill’s, that’s right.’ He steadied me as the gondola rocked in the billows of smoke and overheated air. ‘You did well tonight, David.’

‘You remember me?’

‘Of course. I wanted us to meet, at the right time and place. There’s so much I need to show you.’ He took my arm in a firm grip as the gondola began its final descent. ‘But let’s get out of here before someone else remembers you . . .’

The flame-lit buildings along the Thames threw their light into his unsettled eyes. I tried to free myself from him, but he held me with a hard hand.

A darker fire drew closer.

 

The Children’s Sanctuary

 

A cheerful frieze of children’s drawings looked down on me when I woke, a lively patchwork of armless men, two-legged tigers and shoebox houses that peeled from the walls of the empty ward like the sketches of disassembled dreams.

I lay on the shabby mattress with its stains of ancient urine and disinfectant, glad that this amiable gallery had watched over me as I slept. A thick dust covered the Victorian panes, and trembled in the ceaseless drone of airliners landing at Heathrow. The handicapped children in their dormitory beds must have sensed that the entire world around them suffered a perpetual headache.

I sat up and steadied my feet on the floor. I had slept for four deep hours, but my thighs jumped as I remembered the violent night at the National Film Theatre. A rush of images scanned themselves across my mind like a cassette at fast forward - the spectral smoke that searched the corridors, Vera Blackburn’s hard fists, the flinching shadows in the auditoriums, the desperate run to the Millennium Wheel and Richard Gould in his waiter’s jacket, offering me a glass of champagne as he fired the Thames.

I stood up, swaying slightly on the unsteady floor, and waited for my bones to engage with each other. Thinking of Sally and a hot bath in St John’s Wood, I walked between the worn mattresses. Few parents, I guessed, had ever visited

the retarded children who had lingered here. Yet the drawings were touchingly hopeful, the optimistic echoes of a world these handicapped infants would never know. A patient and kindly teacher had steered them towards the crayons and a colourful pathway into their own minds.

Beyond the connecting doors was a stone landing that led into the next dormitory, another high-ceilinged space filled with dust. A dark-haired man in a white coat, his head lowered in thought, appeared briefly and waved to me, then hurried up a staircase to the next floor.

‘Dr Gould! We need to . . .’ I called to him, my voice lost in the infinite space of this disused hospital, and listened to Gould’s footsteps making their way to the roof. The ancient but imposing architecture, moral judgements enshrined in every forbidding corbel, reminded me of other halls where justice was dispensed. I wanted to warn Gould, this elusive author of the Chelsea Marina rebellion, that we would soon be hunted down by the police and locked away for the next five years.

I slapped my thighs, trying to calm the jumpy nerves. I had taken part in a serious crime, against a museum of film and my memories of my first wife, but I felt curiously uninvolved. I was an actor standing in for the real self who lay asleep beside Sally in St John’s Wood. A dream of violence had escaped from my head into the surrounding streets, driven on by the promise of change.

I remembered our flight across London only a few hours earlier. Gould’s car had been parked outside the Marriott Hotel in the old County Hall, a Citroen estate with Hospice de Beaune stickers on its rear window. From the way Gould searched the controls I guessed that he had never driven the vehicle with its complex hydraulics, left for him by a francophile resident at Chelsea Marina. Concerned by the keening sirens and the police cars blocking Westminster Bridge, I offered to drive, but Gould waved me aside, calming me with his distant but ever-friendly smile. Hunting the dashboard and control levers for the ignition lock, he reminded me of Sally when she first sat in the adapted Saab, faced with a geometric model of her own handicaps.

We lurched away, leapfrogging along the kerb, and rarely left second gear as we accelerated through the dark streets south of the river. I could see the fear in Gould’s eyes, and thought of him serving drinks to the corporate clients on the Millennium Wheel. Out of the smoke and fire I had blundered into his lookout post, but he seemed relieved to see me. When we swerved past the Lambeth Palace roundabout the window pillar struck my head, and he held my arm with surprising concern, as if I were a frightened child at a fairground.

We crossed Chelsea Bridge and turned into the darker streets that led to the King’s Road. The headlights picked their way through a maze of turnings, drawing us past shop windows filled with kitchen units and bedroom suites, office furniture and bathroom fittings, tableaux of a second city ready to replace the London that burned behind us. Gould withdrew into himself, retreating behind the bones of his face. As he watched the rear-view mirror he became a tired graduate student in a threadbare suit, undernourished and self-neglected.

We crossed the stucco silences of South Kensington with its looming museums, so many warehouses of time, and headed westwards along the Cromwell Road. Inner London fell behind us when we left the Hammersmith flyover and Hogarth House, joining the motorway to Heathrow. Twenty minutes later, we entered the operational zone of the airport, a terrain of air-freight offices and car-rental depots, surrounded by arrays of landing lights like magnetic fields, the ghosts of business parks and industrial estates, a night-world haunted by security guards and attack dogs.

Somewhere near the airport we stopped by a cluster of high Victorian buildings that stood beside a vast construction site. Gould edged the Citroen past the mud-flecked hulls of graders and tractors, and parked in a yard filled with Portakabins and bales of breeze blocks on wooden pallets.

We left the car, and Gould led the way into a disused building, through a crumbling foyer filled with signs pointing to relocated hospital departments. We climbed the iron steps to the fourth floor. Exhausted, I followed Gould into a ward of dusty and unmade beds. Too tired to resist, I let this odd man, a thoughtful fanatic with gentle hands, pick out a mattress for me. I fell deeply asleep among the drawings of deranged children.

Gould was on the roof when I joined him, face raised to the sunlight, shielded from the wind by a breastwork of Victorian chimneys. He held his mobile phone to one ear, apparently listening to an update on the night’s action against the NFT, but he was more interested in the builder’s cranes below the parapet. Looking at his sallow face, I could see years of hurried canteen meals and nights spent dozing fitfully in hospital dayrooms. He wore a doctor’s name-tag on his coat, as if he was still the paediatrician in charge of the departed children.

I watched a police helicopter flying along the motorway, and tried to work out how I could get away from this derelict hospital. I scanned the huge buildings, immense masonry piles with gables like the superstructures of battleships. This was the architecture of prisons, cotton mills and steel foundries, monu­ments to the endurance of brick and the Victorian certainties. Three buildings still remained, beside a neglected park where patients had once been wheeled by starch-obsessed VADs.

David?’ Gould switched off the phone in mid-message turned to survey me, like a busy consultant faced with an unexpected patient. ‘You feel a lot better. I can see it.’

‘Really? Good

I guessed that to Gould I seemed exhausted and fretful, in urgent need of coffee and definitely out of my league as a weekend revolutionary. By contrast, he was surprisingly calm, as if he had injected himself with a strong sedative before going to sleep and a strong stimulant on waking. The muscles in his face had relaxed their grip on the underlying bones, and he moved jauntily in the quiet Sunday air. He was at home in this one-time asylum, and it occurred to me that he had not been a doctor here but a patient. Released into the community when the hospital closed, he had assembled a new identity that easily convinced the residents at Chelsea Marina. The website and its story of the department-store fire would be a clever touch. He was a little too friendly, keeping a careful watch on me out of the side of his eye, but there was a frankness that was almost likeable, and a nervous authority to which everyone at Chelsea Marina had responded.

He waited until the police helicopter was safely out of view, and reached across to pat my arm.

‘You’re unsettled, David. Operations like last night’s - they leave the heart pounding for days. You’ll recover, and feel stronger for it.’

‘Thank God. I’d hate to be like this for the rest of my life.’

‘It won’t happen. There’s nothing better for us than acting out of real conviction.’

‘I’m not sure if I was.’ I stared at my bruised palms. ‘I nearly handed myself in to the police.’

‘The others didn’t wait for you? No . . .’ Gould shook his head in a display of sympathy. ‘These middle-class revolution­aries - they’ve been repressed for years. Now they can taste ruthlessness and betrayal, and they like the flavour.’

‘Too bad. They’ll be tasting cold porridge before they know it.’

‘It’s a risk. We’re safe, as long as we keep up the element of surprise.’ Gould frowned at the sun, resenting its efficient control over events, and then fingered his badge, reminding himself of his own identity. ‘Don’t worry about prison. At least, not yet.’

‘So everyone got away. How’s the NFT?’

‘Completely gutted. Sadly, some reels of an early Fritz Lang were lost. Still, Vera Blackburn knows her stuff.’

‘She’s unbalanced. You need to watch her.’

‘Vera?’ Gould turned to look at me, and then nodded in full agreement. ‘She’s a damaged child, trying to make sense of the world. I’m doing my best to help her.’

‘Drawing her out? Giving scope to her natural talents?’

‘That sort of thing.’ Amused by the sarcasm in my voice, Gould waved a white hand at the derelict buildings around us. ‘David, who cares about the NFT? Look what they’ve done here. For three hundred children, this was the only home they knew.’

His bloodless fingers pointed to the isolated wings. High walls masked by rhododendrons surrounded each building. There were courtyards within courtyards, barred windows on the upper floors.

‘Walls and bars,’ I commented. ‘It looks like a prison. Where are we?’

‘Bedfont Hospital. A mile south of Heathrow. A good place for a madhouse - you can’t hear anyone scream.’ Gould made a mock bow. ‘The last of the great Victorian asylums.’

‘A mental hospital? So the children were - ?’

Brain-damaged. Encephalitis, measles cases that went wrong, inoperable tumours, hydrocephalus. All of them severely handicapped, and abandoned by their parents. Social services didn’t want to cope.’

‘Grim.’

‘No.’ Gould seemed surprised by my reflex response. ‘Some of them were happy.’

‘You worked here?’

‘For two years.’ Gould gazed across the empty roof, smiling as if he could see the children skipping around the chimneys. ‘I hope we gave them a good life.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘I was suspended.’ Gould caught a fly in his hand, then released it to the air and watched it swerve away. ‘The General Medical Council has spies everywhere. They’re like the Gestapo. I used to take a few children to the theme park at Thorpe. They loved it, packed into an old minibus. No supervision, I let them run free. For a few minutes they knew wonder.’

‘What happened?’

‘Some of them got lost. Police tipped off the social services.’

‘Too bad. Still, it doesn’t sound that serious.’

‘Don’t believe it. In today’s climate?’ He tilted his head back, closing his eyes at the follies of bureaucracy. ‘There was another matter. The great taboo.’

‘Sexual?’

‘A good guess, David. Genital molestation, they called it. You look shocked.’

‘I am. It doesn’t seem . . .’

‘Like me? It wasn’t. But I sensed it was going on.’

‘Another doctor?’

‘One of the nurses. A very sweet young Jamaican. She was their real mother. Some of the children had brain tumours and only weeks to live. She knew a little sexual stimulation did no harm. It was the only glimpse of happiness they would ever feel. So, a bit of mild masturbation after lights out. A few seconds of pleasure touched those damaged brains before they died.’

‘You were the doctor in charge?’

‘I defended her. That was too much for the governors. Six months later the health authority closed the place down. Bedfont Asylum was due for a makeover.’ Gould pointed across the park. ‘They sold the whole site to a property company. Look closely, and you can see the future moving towards you.’

I stared beyond a screen of poplars at the western perimeter of the park. Advancing across the grass were rows of timber-framed houses, the vanguard of a huge estate. Already the first roads were laid out, cement diagrams that led to car ports and minuscule gardens.

‘Starter homes,’ Gould explained. ‘Rabbit hutches for aspiring marrieds. The first taste of middle-class life. A no-deposit, low-interest dream, cooked up by my father’s old firm. One day they’ll cover the whole of England.’

‘It’s quite a place to pick.’

‘The old asylum?’

‘Heathrow.’ Shielding my eyes, I could see the tail fins of passenger jets beyond the roofs of the air-freight terminal. They’re living in the suburb of an airport.’

‘They like that. They like the alienation.’ Gould took my arm, a teacher relieved to find an intelligent pupil. ‘There’s no past and no future. If they can, they opt for zones without meaning - airports, shopping malls, motorways, car parks. They’re in flight from the real. Think about that, David, while I make some coffee. Then I’ll drive you back to London.’

‘Good.’ Glad to get off the roof, I reached for Gould’s mobile resting between us on the parapet. ‘I ought to tell my wife where I am.’

Don’t worry.’ Gould slipped the phone into his pocket and Peered me to the staircase door. ‘I called her last night. You ^Were asleep.’

‘Sally? Was she all right?’

Absolutely. I explained you were staying at Chelsea Marina.

She might have contacted the police.’ Gould patted my back as I lowered myself down the narrow stairs. ‘Interestingly, she asked me if you were sleeping at Kay Churchill’s house.’

I paused on the steps, trying not to lose my footing. ‘What did you tell her?’

‘Well . . . I’m never the soul of discretion, David.’ I listened to his generous laughter echo off the stone walls, carried through the silent dormitories as if summoning the ghosts of his dead children and calling them out to play.

Absolute Zero

 

 

‘Sally sounds very sweet, David.’

‘She is.’

‘That’s good. Traffic accidents often bring out the worst in people.’

‘She told you she was . . . ?’

‘Handicapped?’ Gould slowly shook his head. ‘An awful word, David. You don’t think of her like that.’

‘I don’t. Her “handicap” isn’t physical. She can walk as well as you or I can. It’s her way of reproaching the world, reminding it of the evil it’s capable of doing.’

‘I’m impressed. She’s a woman of spirit.’

We sat at the table in the fourth-floor dispensary. Without moving from his chair, Gould hunted the line of refrigerators. The electric current had been switched off for months, and each refrigerator was an Aladdin’s cave of rotting cakes and lurid cordials. He found a bottle of mineral water with an intact seal, and began to warm a saucepan over a can of jellied heat.

‘So . . .’ After spooning instant coffee into the pan, Gould poured the dark brew into paper cups decorated with Disney characters. ‘I’d like to meet her. Bring her along to Chelsea Marina.’

‘Perhaps not.’ I watched Gould sip thirstily at the scalding “quid, his lips almost inflamed. ‘It’s not her sort of place. Besides, she has a thing about . . .’

‘Physicians?’ Gould nodded tolerantly. Eyeing my own coffee, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, leaving a blood-like smear on his white skin. ‘She prefers your diagnostic computers and virtual doctors. Press Button B if you’re having a nervous breakdown. Right?’

‘Yes and no. Curiously, people prefer talking to a video screen. They’re far more frank. Face to face with a real doctor, they’ll never admit they have VD. Give them a button to push and they uncross their legs.’

‘Great.’ Gould seemed genuinely pleased. He took the coffee cup from my hands and sipped at it encouragingly. ‘You don’t realize it, David, but you’re the apostle of a new kind of alienation. You should move into one of those starter homes. I watched you on that TV series, whatever it was called - a kind of DIY take on the Almighty.’

‘It was facile. A Neuroscientist Looks at God? Television at its most glib. A game show.’

‘About God?’ Gould smiled at the ceiling. ‘That’s quite a thought. But I remember one or two things you said - the idea of God as a huge imaginary void, the largest nothingness the human mind can invent. Not a vast something out there, but a vast absence. You said that only a psychopath can cope with the notion of zero to a million decimal places. The rest of us flinch from the void and have to fill it with any ballast we can find - tricks of space-time, wise old men with beards, moral universes ...”

‘You don’t agree?’

‘Not really.’ Gould finished my coffee and pushed the empty cup back to me. ‘It isn’t only the psychopath who can grasp the idea of absolute nothing. Even a meaningless universe has meaning. Accept that and everything makes a new kind of sense.’

‘Difficult to do, without dragging in your own obsessions.’ I tossed the cup into the cluttered sink. ‘We all carry baggage.

The psychopath is unique in not being afraid of himself. Unconsciously, he already believes in nothing.’

‘That’s true.’ Gould waved his hands over the table, an underbidder throwing in his cards . ‘You’re right, David. I’m too close to the ground. Besides, there were real voids here, unlimited space inside a small skull. Looking for God is a dirty business. You find God in a child’s shit, in the stink of stale corridors, in a nurse’s tired feet. Psychopaths don’t manage that too easily. Places like Bedfont Hospital are the real temples, not St Paul’s or . . .’

‘The NFT?’ Before Gould could reply, I said: ‘A build­ing on fire is quite a spectacle, especially if you’re trapped inside it. As a matter of interest, did we need to burn it down?’

‘No.’ Gould waved the question away, consigning it to the bedpans under the sink. The coffee had brought a wintry colour to his face, but his skin was as pale as the unwashed tiles. Undernourished for years, he was held together by professional resentment and his commitment to the lost children. ‘The NFT? Of course not. That was absurd — completely pointless, in fact. And dangerous.’

‘Then why the firebombs?’

Gould let his limp hands circle the air. ‘It’s a matter of momentum. I have to keep the wheels turning. Ambition feeds on itself. Kay, Vera Blackburn and the others at Chelsea Marina, they want to change the world. Always the easy option. Near-nonentities have pulled it off. That’s why I need people like you, David. You can calm the hotheads. And your motives are different.’

I m glad to hear it. As a matter of interest, what are my motives? It might be useful to know, if I get asked by the police.’

well . . .’ Gould cleared the table, placing his paper cup in the sink and returning the saucepan and jellied heat to a cupboard. ‘Your motives are fairly clear - your first wife’s death at Heathrow. That affected you deeply.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Don’t underestimate it. First wives are a rite of passage into adult life. In many ways it’s important that first marriages go wrong. That’s how we learn the truth about ourselves.’

‘We were divorced.’

‘Divorce from a first wife is never complete. It’s a pro­cess that lasts until death. Your own, that is, not hers. The Heathrow bomb was a tragedy, but it didn’t bring you to Chelsea Marina.’

‘What did? I take it you know.’

‘Something much more mundane.’ Gould leaned back, trying to adopt a sympathetic pose, his toneless face pulled in rival directions by a series of small grimaces. ‘Look closely in the mirror, David. What do you see? Someone you don’t like very much. When you were twenty, you accepted yourself, flaws and all. Then disenchantment set in. By the time you were thirty your tolerance was wearing thin. You weren’t entirely trustworthy, and you knew that you were prone to compromise. Already the future was receding, the bright dreams were slipping below the horizon. By now you’re a stage set, one push and the whole thing could collapse at your feet. At times you feel you’re living someone else’s life, in a strange house you’ve rented by accident. The “you” you’ve become isn’t your real self

‘But why Chelsea Marina? A collection of club-class profes­sionals complaining about their legroom? Kay Churchill trying to shock the bourgeoisie out of its toilet training?’

‘Exactly.’ Gould leaned forward, arms raised to take me into the fold. ‘The entire protest is ludicrous - I knew that when I first set things going. Double yellow lines, school fees, maintenance charges ... a rumour here, a murmur there. Everyone responded, even though they knew it was

senseless to fight back. This was the last throw of the dice, and the more meaningless the better. That’s what brought you to Chelsea Marina. It’s a wild card, an impossible bet, a crazy gesture that signals some kind of message. Blowing up a video store, setting fire to the NFT - completely absurd. But that alone made you feel free.’

‘Kay and the others have a point, though. Middle-class life at their level can be fairly tight.’ I stood up, trying to avoid Gould’s pale hands as they reached for my wrists. ‘Cheap holidays, over-priced housing, educations that no longer buy security. Anyone earning less than ,£300,000 a year scarcely counts. You’re just a prole in a three-button suit.’

‘And we don’t like ourselves for it. I don’t, and you don’t either, David.’ Gould watched me as I tried to turn a tap on the cluttered sink. ‘People don’t like themselves today. We’re a rentier class left over from the last century. We tolerate everything, but we know that liberal values are designed to make us passive. We think we believe in God but we’re terrified by the mysteries of life and death. We’re deeply self-centred but can’t cope with the idea of our finite selves. We believe in progress and the power of reason, but are haunted by the darker sides of human nature. We’re obsessed with sex, but fear the sexual imagination and have to be protected by huge taboos. We believe in equality but hate the underclass. We fear our bodies and, above all, we fear death. We’re an accident of nature, but we think we’re at the centre of the universe. We’re a few steps from oblivion, but we hope we’re somehow immortal . . .’

‘And all this is the fault of... the 20^th Century?’

‘In part - it helped to lock the doors on us. We’re living m a soft-regime prison built by earlier generations of inmates. Somehow we have to break free. The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was a brave attempt to free America from the 2oth Century. The deaths were tragic, but otherwise it was a meaningless act. And that was its point. Like the attack on the NFT.’

‘Or Heathrow?’

‘Heathrow . . . yes.’ Gould lowered his eyes, careful not to catch my own. He stared at his hands, lying in front of him like a pair of surgeon’s white gloves, and noticed the coffee smear. He licked a thumb and tried to rub it away, so intently that he seemed not to notice me. ‘Heathrow? That’s difficult for you to think about. I understand, David, but your wife’s death wasn’t necessarily pointless.’

I watched him sit back, glancing at his watch as he decided whether it was time to leave. Had he played any part in the Heathrow bomb attack? He was so confined within his own shabby universe, this ruined hospital and his memories of the children, that I doubted it. I could almost believe that he had created the entire protest movement at Chelsea Marina as an act of defiance against the medical establishment. At the same time I found myself liking him and drawn to his wayward ideas. His threadbare suit and neglected body spoke of a certain kind of integrity that was rare in the corporate world of corridor politics taking over our lives.

He seemed aware of my feelings, and as we moved down the iron stairs he suddenly stopped and shook my hand, smiling at me in an eager and almost boyish way.

I felt his hand, and the bones waiting for their day.

 

Black Millennium

 

it was noon when I reached St John’s Wood, and the late editions of the Sunday newspapers carried vivid colour photographs of the fire at the National Film Theatre. The same inferno glowed from the news-stands in Hammersmith and Knightsbridge. At the traffic lights I stared down from the taxi at the fierce orange flames, barely grasping that I had been partly responsible for them. At the same time I felt an odd pride in what I had done.

On a whim, when we reached Hyde Park Corner, I asked the driver to detour to Trafalgar Square and the Embankment. The last smoke rose from the rubble of the NFT, a moraine of ash that had given up its dream. A hose played on the charred timbers, sending a plume of vapour over the Hayward Gallery. Engineers on a trestle below Waterloo Bridge were examining the damage to the arches. The Millennium Wheel hung motionless beside County Hall, its gondolas blackened by the smoke, a swan that had shed its plumage. A silent crowd lined the Embankment and stared across the slack water, as if waiting for the Wheel to turn, a machine from a painting by Bosch, grinding out time and death.

We set off for St John’s Wood, past the same images of disaster hanging from the kiosks in the Charing Cross Road. Central London was dressed for an apocalyptic day. Arson in a film library clearly touched deep layers of unease, as the unconscious fears projected by a thousand Hollywood films at last emerged into reality. I thought of Kay Churchill in her dressing gown, forking scrambled eggs into her mouth while she watched the television news. Vera Blackburn would be in her apartment, playing moodily with her fuses and timers, ready to tackle another bastion of middle-class servitude, Hatchards or Fortnums or the V&A. The Day of Judgement was being planned by neurotic young women with badly bitten nails, and put into effect by out-of-breath psychologists with guilt complexes and dying mothers.

The taxi reached our house, and pulled to a stop behind Sally’s car. I decided to say nothing about my role in the NFT attack, which Sally would never understand and soon confide to her friends - when I arrived at the Institute on Monday morning Professor Arnold would be waiting for me, Superintendent Michaels at his shoulder.

I let myself into the house, picking the newspapers from the doorstep. I waited for Sally to call to me, but the undisturbed air carried no trace of her morning shower, the aroma of towels and fresh coffee, and the soft, wifely realm where I now felt like an intruder. The kitchen was untouched, the dishes of a supper for one, an omelette and a glass of wine, lying by the sink.

I climbed the stairs, realizing how exhausted I was, bruised and bludgeoned as if I had spent the night with a violent policewoman. No one had slept in our bed, but the imprint of Sally’s body dappled the silk spread. The telephone sat squarely on my pillow, almost reducing my husbandly role to a series of digits and unanswered messages. I assumed that Sally had waited up for me, watched the midnight news from the NFT and never guessed that her husband had been one of the arsonists. But Richard Gould’s call had probably unsettled her. Confused by this maverick doctor, she decided to spend the night with a girlfriend.

Waiting for her to ring, I lay in the bath for an hour, then watched the lunchtime bulletin. The NFT attack still led the

broadcast. No credible motive had emerged, but there was talk of an Islamic group protesting against the vilification of Arab peoples in Hollywood films. Once again, thanks to luck and bungling, we had got away with it.

Picking out a clean pair of shoes, I noticed Sally’s overnight bag on the cupboard floor. Her dressing gown hung next to mine, but she had taken her painkillers from the bedside table, and the foil sachet of contraceptive pills.

I sat on the bed, staring into the open drawer. I lifted the telephone receiver and pressed the redial button, jotting the number on Sally’s scribble pad.

The digits were painfully familiar, a number that I had often called, a long-standing private code for feelings of loss and regret. It was the number I dialled whenever I rang Laura to discuss the solicitor’s slow progress with our divorce, in the year after she moved in with Henry Kendall.

I parked the Saab by the kerb, a series of complex and exhausting manoeuvres, and lay back gratefully, hiding my face behind a newspaper propped against the steering wheel. Fifty feet away was Henry’s small terraced house in Swiss Cottage, a red-brick villa I had always disliked. The short drive from St John’s Wood had tested to the full the tolerances of both the north London traffic system and my own temper. But by mastering the difficult and headstrong car I was in some way maintaining my grip on its errant owner.

Crossing Maida Vale, I tried to change gear and pulled the handbrake, stalling the engine under the eyes of a nearby policeman. He walked over to me, staring gravely into my face, and then recognized the adapted controls. Assuming that I was a crippled driver, he held back the traffic until I restarted the engine, and waved me on.

By the time I parked in Swiss Cottage I almost felt that I had become a cripple - more so than Sally, who dispensed with her sticks when the mood took her, and could easily drive my Range Rover. I resembled-a skilled ballroom dancer obliged to do the tango on his hands. Sitting like a haunted husband in the car of his faithless wife, controls chafing my knees and elbows, I was now a distorted version of myself, reshaped by my sweetly affectionate and promiscuous wife.

I waited for an hour, gazing at the yellow blaze of forsythia beside Henry’s dustbins, while the Sunday traffic carried fami­lies towards Hampstead Heath. I assumed that Sally had spent the night with him, though her telephone call had possibly been an attempt to find me. The terrorist bombs made her nervous of sleeping alone. But she had not rung for a taxi, and someone had driven to St John’s Wood to collect her.

As I knew perfectly well, Sally insisted on the freedom to have her affairs. There had been only a few during the years, none lasting more than a week, and some briefer than the parties where she would pick an unattached man and slip away into the night. Often she reached home before I did. She always apologized, smiling hopelessly over a social gaffe, as if she had dented my car or ruined a new electric razor.

She took for granted that she had earned the right to these impulsive gestures. Like Frida Kahlo, the tram accident entitled her to indulge her whims, to play her own games with chance and a tolerant husband. Giving way to these infidelities was a means of paying me back for being so kindly and understand­ing. In her mind she remained a perpetual convalescent, free to commit the small cruelties she had displayed at St Mary’s. I knew that the affairs would go on until she found a convincing explanation for the accident that had nearly killed her.

Cramped in the driver’s seat, I stretched myself against the wheel, arranging my knees and elbows between the invalid controls, a contorted world that seemed to mimic a realm of deviant sexual desires. I held the pistol grip of the accelerator,

A heard the linkages click and spring, the sound of relays coupling and uncoupling.

In many ways, my life was as deformed as this car, rigged with remote controls, fitted with overriders and emergency brakes within easy reach. I had warped myself into the narrow cockpit of professional work at the Adler, with its inane rivalries and strained emotional needs.

By contrast, the firebombing of the NFT was a glimpse of a more real world. I could still taste the smoke in the doomed auditoriums, rolling above my head like a compulsive dream. I could hear the hot breath of the goatlike figure who chased me to the Festival Hall, and see the calming smile of the waiter offering me a glass of champagne in the gondola of the Wheel. My quest for Laura’s murderer was a search for a more intense and driven existence. Somewhere in my mind a part of me had helped to plant the Heathrow bomb.

A taxi pulled to a halt twenty feet from the Saab. Henry Kendall stepped out and paid the driver. He was tired but elated, his handsome face flushed by more than a good lunch. He reached through the passenger door and helped an attractive woman with shoulder-length hair, a long-stem rose in her hand. As he guided her from the taxi he seemed to lift her onto the pave­ment like a husband carrying his bride over the threshold.

Sally took his arm, smiling wryly as if the two of them had pulled off a clever conjuring trick. Laughing together, they paused to stare at Henry’s house, pleasantly unsure where they really were.

Sally strolled across the pavement while Henry hunted for his keys, but her eye was caught by the headlines on the front page of the newspaper shielding my face. She stopped, recognizing her car, and pointed to the handicapped person’s sticker on the windscreen.

‘David . . . ?’ She waited as I lowered the window, and then beckoned to Henry, who was staring at me as if we had never met. ‘We’ve just had lunch.’

‘Good.’ I waved to Henry, who made no movement. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Why not? Thanks for bringing the car round.’ She bent down and kissed me with unfeigned affection, clearly glad to see me. ‘How did you know I was here?’

‘I guessed. It wasn’t hard to work out. I’m a psychologist.’

‘So is Henry. I’d give you a lift home, but . . .’

'I'll take a cab.’ I stepped from the car, extricating myself from the controls, and handed her the keys. ‘I’ll see you soon. There’s a lot going on. The NFT . . .’

‘I know.’ She searched my face, and touched a small bruise on my forehead. ‘You’re not fighting with the police again?’

‘Nothing like that. I’m still looking into the Heathrow bomb. Some new leads have come up - I think they’re important. You can tell Henry.’

‘I will.’ She stepped back, giving me a clear run at Henry, waiting for a show of husbandly outrage. When I failed to react, she said: ‘Right, I’ll be home later.’

‘Good. When you’re ready . . .’

I watched her hurry away, head down and her eyes on the pavement. For once, she had failed to provoke me. Henry stood by his front door, the rose in one hand. He waved it at me, but I ignored him and walked past.

Heading towards St John’s Wood, I lengthened my step. I had made a small payment in masculine pride, but the investment had been worthwhile. The attack on the NFT had unlocked the door of my cell. I felt free again, for the first time since I joined the Adler and was inducted into the freemasonry of the professional class. Its suffocating regalia still hung in a wardrobe of my mind, the guilt and resentments and self-doubt, demanding to be taken out and paraded in front  of the nearest mirror, a reminder of civic duty and responsibility. But the regalia were heading for the dustbin.” I  no longer resented my mother for her offhand selfishness, or my  colleagues at the Institute for the bone-breaking boredom they inflicted on the world. And I no longer resented Sally for her little infidelities. I loved her, and it mattered nothing if I was her father’s private nurse.

I crossed Maida Vale and saluted the constable on duty, who seemed surprised that I was now striding along with such a skip in my stride. I was thinking of Chelsea Marina and the fire on the South Bank, and the black Millennium Wheel ready to turn above the ruins. I remembered Kay Churchill and Vera and Joan Chang and, above all, Dr Richard Gould, and knew that I needed to see them again.

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