Giving Himself to the Sun

 

‘david? come in. We’ve all been waiting for you.’

Richard Gould stood near the window of the top-floor flat above Cadogan Circle, head raised to the sky, lifting his hands as if he were giving himself to the sun. Around him on the walls of the living room were the optician’s charts, circular maps of the retina that resembled annotated targets. He seemed calm but light-headed, his mind moving among the high trees in Bishop’s Park. Aware of my presence, he withdrew from his reverie like an actor stepping from a spotlight, and beckoned me towards him.

‘David . . . I’m glad you came. I thought you’d need more time.’ He frowned at my smart suit and tie. ‘Is anyone with you?’

‘I’m alone. I wanted to see the place before it’s torn down.’ Glad to be with him, I reached out to take his hand, but he stepped away. ‘Richard, I need to talk to you.’

‘Naturally. We’ll talk later . . .’ He carried on with his inventory of my appearance, shaking his head at my expensive haircut. ‘You’ve changed, David. A few days of respectability, that’s all it takes for part of the soul to die. You’re sure no one’s with you?’

‘Richard, I came here alone.’

‘No one called you? Kay Churchill? What about Sally?’

‘She’s in France with some friends. I haven’t heard from her.’ Trying to distract him from the sun, I said: ‘There’s a special visit  this morning, very high-level - the Home Secretary, and a party from the Ministry. Various experts who think they know what happened at Chelsea Marina.’

‘What did happen?’ Gould turned to stare at the silent streets f the estate, at the smoke still drifting from the fire-gutted houses in Beaufort Avenue. ‘It looks awfully like an experiment that didn’t come off.’

‘Maybe not. At least we tried to build something positive, break down the old categories.’

‘You sound like an expert.’ Relieved, Gould brightened up. He beamed at me, as if I had again become an old friend, and patted me on the back, ready to share a reminiscence. ‘I get it _now _ you’re with the Home Office tour. That’s why you’re wearing your best suit. Camouflage . . . and I thought you’d changed.’

‘I have changed.’ Deciding to be honest with him, I said: ‘You changed me.’

‘Good. You wanted to change, David. You were desperate for change.’

‘I was.’ Hoping to hold his attention, I stood between Gould and the sun. ‘I’ve thought about what you were saying. These dreams you’ve had - the Heathrow bomb, the Hammersmith shooting. They’re deep-set needs. In a way, I feel them too. I can help you, Richard.’

‘Really? You can help me?’

‘We’ll talk through everything. Perhaps go back to Bedfont asylum.’

‘Asylum? It hasn’t been an asylum for fifty years . . .’ Disappointed by my slip of the tongue, Gould dropped his hand from my shoulder. He watched me in a distracted way, like a tired casualty doctor faced with a potentially dangerous patient. He was wearing the same threadbare suit, which he had ironed himself, and I could count the parallel creases in the trousers. For all his friendly welcome, he was already bored by me, his eyes turning to the optical diagrams on the living-room walls.

‘Richard . . .’ I tried to skirt around an apology. ‘I meant the hospital. The children’s wing.’

‘Bedfont? You think that’s where everything started? I wish it were true . . .’ Noticing the bloodied hand I had cut at Kay Churchill’s house, he said: ‘You need to clean that up. There are so many new infections around today, not all of them courtesy of Air India. I’ll see if the bathroom is clear.’

He stepped into the bedroom, and closed the door behind him. I paced around the living room, which had been briefly searched by the police. The optician’s textbooks and catalogues lay askew on the shelves, and the sofa’s heavy square cushions were tumbled like boulders. I touched the blue canvas bag with its Metropolitan Police emblem, and felt the sections of what seemed to be a dismantled fishing rod.

I guessed that Gould had been lying low at a sympathizer’s house on the south coast, and imagined him fishing off a shingle beach, his mind empty enough to contain the sea. He seemed physically stronger, no longer the pale and evasive man who had hovered behind me in Kay’s house. Dreams of violence had calmed him.

‘David?’ Gould slipped through the bedroom door. ‘Clean up that hand and I’ll look at it. There are some towels and peroxide in the bathroom. All these police around, they might get the wrong idea.’

I stepped into the darkened bedroom. Heavy velvet cur­tains covered the windows, blackout drapes that allowed the optician to use part of the room as a projection booth. When the light began to clear I saw that two women were sitting on either side of the double bed, their backs to each other, like figures in a Hopper painting.

I drew the curtain, and the nearer of the women stood up. When the light struck the bones of her face I recognized Vera Blackburn. Her eyes and mouth were without make-up, as if she had decided to strip her face down to a minimum of features, erasing all possible emotion. Her hair was in a tight knot behind her head, stretching the skin of her forehead against her skull and exposing the sharp bones around her eyes. For the first time I saw the abused and sullen teenager she had once been, ready to terrorize any bank guard or cashier who tried to stand in her way.

‘Vera? I need the bathroom . . .’

She brushed past me without a word, but I caught an odd scent from her body, a tang of tension and fear. She closed the door behind her with a strong wrist, and I could see the doorknob trembling under the nervous force of her hand.

I drew a second curtain, and turned to the woman watching me from the bed, like a prostitute hired for a corporate client.

‘Sally? What are you doing here? Dear . . . ?’ ‘Hello, David. We didn’t think you’d come.’ Sally sat beside the pillow, hands folded across her lap, eyes lowered against the light. She had brushed her hair, but there was a hint of sleep about her when I held her shoulders and kissed her cheek. She leaned passively against me, as if she had been roused from her bed and was not fully awake. I felt a rush of concern for her, the same affection that touched me whenever I entered the ward at St Mary’s. Despite everything, I was glad to see her again, and sure we would soon be together. ‘Sally, are you . . . ?’

‘I’m all right. It’s you we need to worry about.’ She noticed my injured hand and held it up to the light, reading this new blood-line into my future. ‘You’re hurt, poor chap. I’m sorry, David. Your revolution failed.’

 

 

 

‘Chelsea Marina was only the start.’ I sat beside her on the bed, but she held herself stiffly, unsure of a man’s body too close to her own. ‘Sally, I tried to find you. On the answerphone you said you were -‘

‘Touring with friends? I do that a lot, don’t I?’ She grimaced at herself. ‘Richard invited me to his cottage near the gliding school.’

‘Richard Gould? And you went?’

‘Why not? He’s a friend of yours.’

‘Just about. Was everything . . . ?’

‘He’s sweet, and very, very strange.’ She stared at her hands, marked with my blood. ‘We went to the gliding school every afternoon. Yesterday he flew solo.’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘So was Richard. Last night he explained his ideas about God. They’re rather frightening.’

‘They would be.’

‘Death, violence - is that how you see God?’

‘I’m not sure. He may be right. Was Vera Blackburn with you?’

‘She came at weekends. Do you know her? I like Richard, but she’s weird.’

‘She made our smoke bombs. That’s her world. Tell me, why did the police let you into Chelsea Marina?’

‘I drove my car. Richard wore his white coat and said he was my doctor. A beautiful, crippled woman - they can’t resist.’

‘Sally . . .’ I gripped her hands. ‘You’re beautiful but you’re not crippled. I’ll get you out of here and take you home.’

‘Home? Yes, I think we still have one. I was careless, David. I was careless with everyone, but especially with you. That accident in Lisbon - it seemed to tear up all the rules and I felt I could do anything. Then I met Richard and saw what happens when you really tear up the rules. You have to invent zero. That’s what Richard does. He invents zero, so he won’t be afraid of the world. He’s very afraid.’ She managed a bleak smile, and noticed my suit. ‘You’re all dressed up, David. Like the old days. You must be with the official party.’ ‘The Home Secretary’s? You know about the visit?’ ‘It’s why we’re here. Vera Blackburn knows everything. All those Home Office experts - they ought to meet Richard, he’d shut them up for good.’ A drop of blood fell from my hand onto her knee. She licked it, then thought over the flavour. ‘Salty, David - you’re turning into a fish.’

In the bathroom I rinsed my palm, watching my blood wash away into the handbasin. Beside me was a glass cabinet filled with ophthalmic supplies, part of the huge stock of Pharmaceuticals that might have turned Chelsea Marina into the central drug exchange of west London. The middle-class residents could have defended a narcotic Stalin grad, pooling their expertise and resources, street by street. Instead, they had thrown in the towel and left for their dachas in the Cotswolds and Cairngorms.

But at least I now had Sally. I was impressed by how quickly she had freed herself from Richard’s spell, but perhaps she had taken what she needed from him and decided to leave. Gould had persuaded her that the Lisbon accident was senseless and inexplicable - her injuries and suffering were meaningful for just that reason. Free at last from her self-obsessions, she had thought first of her husband, and I was touched that she had come to Chelsea Marina in an attempt to rescue me.

‘Right, let’s go. We’ll say goodbye to Richard. Sally?’

I waited for Sally to stand up, but she leaned against the pillow and stroked the bedspread, studying the moire patterns.

 

 

‘I don’t think so.’ She pointed to the door. A strong hand was turning the knob, testing the mortice bolt. ‘We’re locked in. We need to be careful, David.’

I glanced at my watch, surprised by how much time had passed. At the entrance to Chelsea Marina the police were moving the barricades. ‘Sally, the Minister will be here soon. There’ll be an army of police. Richard and Vera Blackburn won’t stay.’

‘They will stay. Dear, you don’t realize what’s happening.’ She looked at me in the kindly way of a wife waiting for a naive husband to get the point. ‘Richard is dangerous.’

‘Not any more. That phase is over. All those fantasies . . .’

‘It isn’t over. And they aren’t fantasies. Richard’s just starting. You know he left the bomb at Heathrow?’

‘He told you that? It must have frightened you.’ I tried to take her hand, but she moved it away from me across the bedspread. ‘It’s a nonsense. Like this television presenter in Hammersmith. He claims he murdered her. For God’s sake, I was parked in the next street. I saw him five minutes later. He would have been covered in blood.’

‘No.’ Sally was watching the door. ‘He did shoot her.’

‘It never happened. He needs to think about violence, the more pointless the better. I’ve tried to help him.’

‘You have. He’s going to kill more people. Yesterday we went to a rifle range near Hungerford. I sat in the car with Vera. She told me he’s a very good shot.’

‘That must make her proud. Hard to believe, though.’ I left Sally and walked to the door, then pressed my head against the wooden panel. The living room seemed empty, the silence broken by the chiming of the mantelpiece clock. ‘Sally . . . you mentioned Hungerford?’

‘It’s off the M4. Richard rented the cottage there. A pretty little place. It’s where he wants to end his days.’

I stared at the door as police sirens sounded in the King’s

Road, a wake-up call to more than the sleeping. I remembered that someone else had ended his days at Hungerford.

‘David? What is it?’

Feet moved across the roof, almost directly above my head, the sounds of a sunbather settling himself on a mat. Or a marksman adjusting his sights. Hungerford? A young misfit named Michael Ryan had shot his mother dead, then strolled through the town shooting at passers-by. He had killed sixteen people, picking them off at random, set fire to the family home and shot himself. The murders were motiveless, and sent a tremor of deep unease across the country, redefining the word ‘neighbour’. No one, not even a family member, could be trusted. A new kind of violence had been born, springing from nothing. After the last shots at Hungerford, the void from which Michael Ryan emerged had closed around him, enfolding him for ever.

‘Sally . . .’ Two police motorcyclists were driving down Beaufort Avenue. They stopped by the roundabout, their radios crackling. Uniformed constables walked along the pavement, scanning the empty houses. ‘That blue canvas bag - what was in it?’

‘Richard kept his gliding kit there.’ Sally stood up and walked around the bed, eyes on my footprints in the carpet. ‘Do you think — ?’

‘What about a weapon? A shotgun or . . . ?’

Sally said nothing, listening to the sounds from the roof above our heads. I lifted the shade from the standard lamp behind the door. Gripping the chromium shaft, I snapped the plug from its wall socket.

‘No . . .’ Sally held my arm before I could drive the shaft into the door. ‘David, there’s going to be a shooting.’

‘You’re right. A meaningless target, like a liberal Home Secretary

 

 

‘Or you!’ Sally tried to wrest the lamp-shaft from my hands. ‘Richard knew you were coming.’

‘He won’t kill me. I like him. What would be the point?’ The question died on my lips. A line of official vehicles was entering Chelsea Marina, black saloons from the government car pool. The motorcade moved down Beaufort Avenue at walking pace, the passengers gazing at the silent windows and torn banners. Within a minute the procession would reach Cadogan Circle, then turn left below the windows from which I was watching.

‘Sally . . .’ I tried to push her away from the door. ‘If they find us here -‘

‘They’ll think we’re prisoners. We’ll be safe, David.’ ‘No.’ I wrenched at the door handle. ‘I owe it to Richard.’ Sally released the lamp-shaft and stepped back, watching me with weary patience as I stabbed at the door panels. She reached into the breast pocket of her shirt. On her open palm lay a door key.

‘Sally?’ I took the key from her. ‘Who locked the door?’ ‘I did.’ She stared into my face, unembarrassed by her ruse. ‘I’m trying to protect you. That’s why I went to Hungerford with Richard. I’m your wife, David.’

‘I remember.’ I pushed the key into the lock. ‘I have to warn Richard. If the protection unit see him with a rifle they’ll shoot him dead. This may be another fantasy, some Hungerford obsession inside his head

Giving up on me, Sally rubbed her skinned knuckles and turned to the window. ‘David, look

The motorcade had stopped in Beaufort Avenue. The Home Secretary and two senior officials emerged from his limousine. Joined by experts from the other cars, they stood on the pavement and peered at the first of the gutted houses, as if the charred gables would reveal the inner truth of the rebellion. Solemn words were exchanged, and heads nodded sagely. A television crew filmed the occasion, and an interviewer waited, microphone in hand, to question the Minister.

‘David? What’s happening?’ Sally took my arm, her lips fretting. ‘What are they doing?’

‘Grappling with the inconceivable. They should have come three months ago.’

‘Those cars driving in - they look strange

Headlamps flashed behind the stationary motorcade. The police motorcyclists patrolling Beaufort Avenue stopped in the centre of the road, and blocked the approach of a dusty Volvo labouring under the luggage tied to its roof rack. The woman driver pressed on, forced to stop alongside the Minister’s limo. Behind the Volvo three more cars, equally battered, pushed through the entrance gate, and I noticed a sandy-haired man in a check sports jacket ordering away the police who tried to halt them. Major Tulloch, as always, had seized his opportunity.

‘David, who are they? The people in the old cars?’

‘I think we know

‘Squatters? They look like hippies.’

‘They aren’t squatters. Or hippies.’

The Home Secretary had also noticed the newcomers. Officials and experts turned their backs on the burnt-out house. An alert police inspector relayed a message from the Volvo’s woman driver, and the Home Secretary visibly lightened, for a moment standing on tiptoe. After a glance at the TV camera, he beckoned the motorcyclists aside. Raising his arms, as if on traffic duty, he waved the Volvo forward.

‘David? Who are these people? Homeless families?’

‘In a way. They’re residents.’

‘Of where?’

‘This estate. They live here. The people of Chelsea Marina are coming home.’

 

 

I watched the Volvo set off down Beaufort Avenue. The convoy of returning cars followed, dust-caked and loaded with dogs and children, broken wing-mirrors taped to wind­screen pillars, bodywork dented by miles of highland driv­ing. I guessed that a group touring Scotland or the West Country had held a campfire conclave and decided to return home, perhaps suspecting that the Home Secretary’s visit was a signal that the demolition bulldozers would arrive soon afterwards.

Smiling cheerfully, the Home Secretary stepped into the rear seat of his limousine. He waved to the returnees, who hooted their horns in reply, while a Great Dane barked from an open tailgate.

As the echoes reverberated around Cadogan Circle I almost missed the sound of a rifle shot from the roof above my head. The Home Secretary’s car stopped sharply, its windscreen starred by a snowflake of frosted glass. There was a moment’s silence, and then police and experts scattered behind the cars, crouching against the walls of the empty houses.

A helicopter appeared in the sky over the Thames, spotlight playing across the roofs of Chelsea Marina. I waited for a second shot, but the returning families had confused the sniper, almost certainly saving the Home Secretary. Shielding him with their bodies, his bodyguards pulled him from the limousine and bundled him across the pavement towards the front door of a nearby house.

‘Sally . . .’ I held her against me, feeling her heart beating against my breastbone, for once in time with my own. Feet ran across the roof, and a loudspeaker blared from the helicopter, a warning drowned by sirens and motorcycle engines.

‘David, wait!’ Sally gripped my arm, the wife of a foolish husband coming slowly to his senses. ‘Let the police catch him.’

‘You’re right. I’ll be careful. I need to be . . .’

She watched me as I unlocked the bedroom door. The living room was empty. My laptop lay on the sofa, but the blue canvas bag had vanished with Richard Gould. Raising _my hands in an attempt to reassure Sally, I left the flat and crossed the hall. I ran down the staircase, past the deserted landings and open doors, and reached the entrance lobby as the helicopter hovered above the Circle.

Through the whirlwind of noise I heard two brief bursts of gunfire from the basement garage.

 

A Task Completed

shadows raced across the basement walls, kinetic murals in a deranged art gallery. I pushed back the fire door and stepped onto the cement floor. The helicopter was landing in the service area behind the apartment building, and I could see its tail rotor through the open doors of the access ramp. Only one car was parked in the garage, Sally’s adapted Saab, hidden behind a row of wheeled bins near the rubbish chute.

I walked across the floor as the shadows of the helicopter blades fled past, swerved away and then returned to overtake me. Almost deafened by the vibrating concrete, I approached the Saab, which was lit by the helicopter’s spotlight shining through the transom windows.

In the white glare I saw that a man was crouched over the Saab’s steering wheel, his left arm and shoulder supported by the brake and gear levers. His right arm hung through the window, as if signalling a sudden turn. Behind him a woman lay across the rear seat, bony forehead on the arm rest.

Gould and Vera Blackburn had died together in the car. Vera was sprawled face-down over the tartan rug, her tight skirt exposing her thin, schoolgirl legs. She had been shot in the back, and her blood had pooled inside a fold of her patent leather jacket, dripping onto the floor carpet. In her last moments she had clawed at the rug with both hands, tearing the nails from her fingers.

Richard Gould sat in the front seat, a single bullet wound in his white shirt. The damp puncture mark, almost colourless in the glare of the landing helicopter, seemed like a rosette pinned to the chest of a brave but impoverished civilian wearing his only suit. I touched his outstretched arm and felt his skin, warmer now than it had been in life. I noticed his frayed collar and the crude stitching of his repair work unravelling against his neck.

Clasping his hand for the last time, I steered it into the car. The blood had drained from his face, and he seemed years younger than the troubled physician I had known. But his chipped teeth were like an exposed confidence trick, cheap dentistry bared in the frankest of grimaces. To the end, Richard Gould had concealed his thoughts but displayed his wounds.

He sat among the Saab’s invalid controls, small hips twisted as he tried to avoid the bullet fired at him. His left hand fumbled at the brake lever, and his knees were trapped by the metal couplings below the steering wheel. As he died, his body had contorted itself, trying to assume a desperate geometry that would mirror his mind, returning him to the handicapped children and Down’s teenagers who were his true companions.

Trying to meet his eyes, I stared into his chalk-white face, now as toneless and untouched by the world as an autistic child’s. His eyes were fixed on the trembling needle of the revolution counter, and I realized that the Saab’s engine was on, its exhaust drowned by the helicopter. I drew Gould’s hand from the ignition and turned the key, as if switching off the respirator in an intensive-care unit.

The heavy clatter of the helicopter’s fans filled the garage. Deafened by the din, I looked up to find a tall man in motorcyclist’s leathers standing between the Saab and the refuse bins. His face was hidden by the visor of his helmet, a window crossed by the rotating shadows, which moved more slowly now that the helicopter had landed. He wore a clergyman’s dog collar, and without thinking I assumed that he had arrived on his Harley in order to pronounce the last rites on the dead couple.

In his hand he carried a heavy crucifix carved from a black and polished stone, and offered it to me as some kind of explanation for the deaths. Then the helicopter’s spotlight left the garage to search the first-floor windows, and I saw that the crucifix was an automatic pistol.

‘Dexter!’ I stepped away from Gould and walked around the car. ‘You found the gun? I think they shot themselves. Or . . .’

Dexter’s face emerged from the confused light, as blanched as pain, so expressionless that I was sure he had spent the past months draining all emotion from himself, his mind set on the one task that lay in front of him. He stared at me calmly, scarcely aware of Gould and Vera Blackburn, and his gaze turned to the helicopter we could see through the transom windows. Pointing the pistol at me, he watched the light in the same way that Gould had followed the sun through the high branches at Bishop’s Park.

‘Stephen.’ I tried to avoid the pistol. ‘Get away from here. The police are armed . . .’

The clergyman stopped, testing the cement floor with his metal-tipped boots as he listened to the helicopter’s fading engine and the shouts of security men. He raised his visor and moved around the car, the pistol in his hand. I knew that he had always seen me as Richard Gould’s chief collaborator. Aware that he was about to shoot me, I stepped back to the Saab and opened the front passenger door, ready to join Gould at the controls.

But Dexter pressed the pistol into my hand. I caught the harsh scent on his clothes, the same reek of fear I could smell on my own skin after the burning of the NFT. I gripped the pistol, surprised by the warm metal that seemed to beat like

a heart. When I looked up, Dexter had withdrawn into the shadows behind the rubbish bins. He stepped through the steel service door that led to the boiler room and the caretaker’s flat. He pointed to me, like a target-master encouraging a novice at a rifle range, closed the door behind him and slipped away, vanishing into another time and space. The task he had set himself so many months earlier at Heathrow had at last been fulfilled.

I waited by the car, pistol in hand, watching Gould’s face empty itself, shedding all memories of the young doctor who had once gazed so fiercely at an inexplicable world. But I was thinking of Stephen Dexter in the few moments when he raised his visor. Watching him, I had seen the temper and conviction that he had brought to his first ministry, lost under his captors’ whips, and then searched for in this west London estate, encouraged by a disbarred consultant with a punitive vision of his own.

The first police were entering the garage. An inspector signalled to two armed officers who trained their weap­ons at my chest. He shouted to me, his voice lost in the horns sounded by the residents impatient to return to their homes.

Then a thickset man in a police forage jacket stepped forward and strode over to the Saab, his sandy air ruffled by the helicopter’s downdraught.

‘Mr. Markham? I’ll take that. . .’ Major Tulloch gripped my arm with a tobacco-stained hand and pushed me against the car. ‘You’re a better shot than I thought

I gave him the pistol and pointed to Richard Gould, sprawled among the controls like a crashed aviator. ‘He was going to kill my wife. And the Home Secretary.’

‘We understand.’ Major Tulloch looked me up and down, as unimpressed and detached as ever. He leant into the Saab and checked the bodies, feeling for any weapons, and then searched perfunctorily for a pulse.

Police now filled the basement, and a forensic team was already laying out its gear, the cameras, crime-scene tapes and white overalls. Sally waited by the fire door, face tense and her hair in a swirl, but determined to stand on her own legs. Henry Kendall hovered beside her, nodding to a silent police sergeant, almost light-headed among the armed constables. He took Sally’s arm, trying to calm himself, but she eased him away and walked towards me. With a brave effort, she managed to smile at me through the noise, and gestured with the damp laptop she had carried from the flat. Watching her proudly, I knew that everything would be well.

Major Tulloch spoke tersely into his radio, the identification over. Handing me into the custody of an inspector, he said: ‘Mr. Markham, you’ve been taking too many chances. Just for once, try a quiet life . . .’

Outside, louder than the engine of the helicopter, a noisy carnival filled the air, the braying horns of the middle-class returning to Chelsea Marina.

 

A Sun Without Shadows

 

the clocks seemed to pause, waiting for time to catch up with them. Calendars scrolled back to calmer months before the summer. Sally and I resumed our life together in St John’s Wood, and the residents of Chelsea Marina continued their return to the estate. Within a week a third of the residents had moved back to their homes, and within two months almost the entire population had re-established itself. Kensington and Chelsea Council, nervous of the effects that a social revolu­tion would have on its property values, ordered an army of workers into the estate. They dragged away the burnt-out cars, asphalted the streets and repaired the damaged houses. The few tourists and social historians found that nothing had changed. Money, always harder-wearing than asphalt, helped to repave the streets. Amicable negotiations with the management company ended with the promise of a financial sweetener from the council. In return, the company postponed the rise in maintenance charges that had set off the revolt. Public concern that lower-paid workers were being priced out of the London property market shelved all plans for a complex of luxury apartments. Like nurses, bus drivers and traffic wardens, the middle-class professionals of Chelsea Marina were now seen as poorly paid but vital contributors to the life of the city. This sentiment, repeated by a relieved Home Secretary in many television interviews, confirmed the residents’ original belief that they were the new proletariat.

The Minister, having survived an assassination attempt by demented paediatrician, generously urged that no charges o arson, assault or public mischief should be brought against the residents. The attacks on the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern, the Peter Pan statue and numerous travel agents and video stores were quietly forgotten. The Heathrow bomb was blamed on unknown al-Qaeda extremists.

Kay Churchill was the only resident to receive a short custodial sentence, for biting Sergeant Angela when she tried to restrain Kay from burning down her house. The former film studies lecturer served sixty days in Holloway and returned in triumph to the estate. Her agent secured a large advance for her book-of-the-revolution, and Kay went on to become a successful columnist and TV pundit.

Stephen Dexter slipped out of the country, and lived quietly in Ireland before he emigrated to Tasmania. His faith restored, he became a parish priest in a small town fifty miles from Hobart. A postcard he sent to me showed him handsome and pensive, rebuilding a Tiger Moth in a barn behind his rectory. He wrote that he had begun to construct a runway, and had cleared fifty yards of stony scrub.

I returned to the Adler Institute, taking up my post again, the only member of the staff who had fired a bullet in anger. Many of my colleagues had damaged their patients, but I had killed one. Henry has told me that I may well be the Institute’s next director.

Whether Major Tulloch, the Home Office or Scotland Yard believed I shot Dr Gould and Vera Blackburn, I seriously doubt. They were careful not to question me too closely or submit my hands to a powder test. But media speculation is today’s crucible of accepted truth, and I am widely identified as the man who spared the Home Secretary from the assassin’s second bullet.

Sally testified that I had saved her. At the inquest she confirmed that Richard Gould had kidnapped her, and then lured me to Chelsea Marina, intending to kill us both. This may well be true, but I like to think that it was Sally who saved me, locking me into the bedroom before I could follow Gould to the roof.

Marriages are nourished by small myths, and this one brought us together, reversing the roles of patient and protector that bedevilled our early years together. Sally threw away her sticks arid bought a new car, becoming a devoted and strong-willed wife. As we play bridge with Henry Kendall and his latest fiancée, I see Sally look at him with the puzzled eyes of a woman who finds it inconceivable that she ever decided to be his lover.

The police released her old Saab two months after the coroner’s inquest. The forensic team had completed their work, and I was surprised that they made no attempt to clean the car. Blood still stains the front and rear seats, and Gould’s fingerprints cover the interior, ghostly whorls that mark his strange grip on the world.

The Saab is stored in the garage of my mother’s house in High Barnet. After her death my solicitor urged me to sell the house, but I prefer to keep it, a shrine both to my mother’s selfish nature and to a far stronger and more destructive mind that had an even greater influence on me.

Sally swears that ghosts haunt the Barnet house, and she is happy not to visit its dusty rooms with their framed photo­graphs of forgotten nightclubs and anti-nuclear rallies. But I call in once a month, and check the ceilings and the roof. Before leaving, I let myself into the garage and look down at the Saab with its controls that seem designed, like the brain-damaged children, for a parallel world that Gould tried so hard to enter.

I accept now that Richard set off the bomb that killed Laura at Heathrow. Almost certainly he shot dead the television celebrity whose name he could never remember, picking her because she was both famous and a complete nonentity, so that her death would be truly pointless. Dreaming of Hungerford, he would have gone on to commit ever more serious crimes.

In his despairing and psychopathic way, Richard Gould’s motives were honourable. He was trying to find meaning in the most meaningless times, the first of a new kind of desperate man who refuses to bow before the arrogance of existence and the tyranny of space-time. He believed that the most pointless acts could challenge the universe at its own game. Gould lost that game, and had to take his place with other misfits, the random killers of school playgrounds and library towers, who carried out atrocious crimes in their attempts to resanctify the world.

But even Chelsea Marina helped to prove Gould’s point. As he soon realized, the revolution was doomed from the start. Nature had bred the middle class to be docile, virtu­ous and civic-minded. Self-denial was coded into its genes. Nevertheless, the residents had freed themselves from their own chains and launched their revolution, though now they are only remembered for their destruction of the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens.

A mystery remains. Why did the residents, having achieved so much, then return to Chelsea Marina? No one can explain their puzzling behaviour, least of all the residents themselves. Social workers, Home Office psychologists and experienced journalists have spent months roaming the estate, trying to find why the residents called off their exile. No one I talk to at Chelsea Marina can explain their return, and a curious vagueness comes over them when the subject is raised.

Did they realize from the start that the Chelsea Marina protest was doomed to failure, and that its pointlessness was its greatest justification? They knew that the revolt in many ways was a meaningless terrorist act, like the fire at the NFT. Only by

cutting short their exile and returning to the estate could they make it clear that their revolution was indeed meaningless, that the sacrifices were absurd and the gains negligible. A heroic failure redefined itself as a success. Chelsea Marina was the blueprint for the social protests of the future, for pointless armed uprisings and doomed revolutions, for unmotivated violence and senseless demonstrations. Violence, as Richard Gould once said, should always be gratuitous, and no serious revolution should ever achieve its aims.

Yesterday evening, Sally and I joined friends for dinner at a King’s Road restaurant not far from Chelsea Marina. After­wards we strolled through the gates, past the former manager’s office that is now a residents’ advice bureau. The accounts and billing department, the banks of meters that log the residents’ consumption of gas, water and electricity, are out of sight in an annexe at the rear. In the windows a retouched aerial photograph represents Chelsea Marina as a place of almost millennial charm, with crime-free streets and ever-rising property values.

Happy to be with each other, Sally and I walked down Beaufort Avenue. A dozen dinner parties were in progress, conversation fuelled by the better second growths. Adolescent girls still wearing jodhpurs after their afternoon riding classes flirted around the family Jeeps and Land Rovers, teasing the well-bred boys who aped the latest black teen fads.

‘It’s all rather nice.’ Sally leaned comfortably against my shoulder. ‘It must be fun living here.’

‘It is. They’ve built a sports club and enlarged the marina. There’s almost everything you want here.’

‘I can see. What exactly were they rebelling against?’

‘Well ... I may write a book about it.’

 

But I was thinking of another time, a brief period when Chelsea Marina was a place of real promise, when a young paediatrician persuaded the residents to create a unique repub­lic, a city without street signs, laws without penalties, events without significance, a sun without shadows.

 

 

 

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