Cloud Atlas (51 page)

No reason to give anything away. “Me?”

My bluff was dashed to pieces on the Rock of Ernie. “Take a pew,” he told me, grim and knowing.

I did so. “Cozy in here.”

“I was a certificated boiler man once upon a time. I service the workings for free, so the management turn a blind eye to one or two little liberties I allow myself.” Ernie poured two generous measures into plastic beakers. “Down the hatch.”

Rain on the Serengeti! Cacti flowered, cheetahs loped! “Where do you get it?”

“The coal merchant is not an unreasonable man. Seriously, you want to be careful. Withers goes out to the gate for the second post at a quarter to four daily. You don’t want him to catch you plotting your getaway.”

“You sound well informed.”

“I was a locksmith too, that was after the army. You come into contact with the semicrim, in the security game. Gamekeepers and poachers and all. Not that I ever did anything illegal myself, mind you, I was straight as an arrow. But I learnt that a good three-quarters of prison bust outs fall flat, because all the gray matter”— he tapped his temple—”gets spent on the escape itself. Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. That fancy electric lock on the gate, for example, I could take it apart blindfolded if I had the mind to, but what about a vehicle on the other side? Money? Boltholes? You see, without logistics, where are you? Belly-up is where, and in the back of Withers’s van five minutes later.”

Mr. Meeks screwed up his gnomish features and ground out the only two coherent words he had retained: “I
know!
I
know!”

Before I could discern whether or not Ernie Blacksmith was warning me or sounding me out, Veronica came in through the interior door wearing a hat of ice-melting scarlet. I just stopped myself from bowing. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Costello.”

“Mr. Cavendish, how pleasant. Wandering abroad in this biting cold?”

“Scouting,” Ernie answered, “for his one-man escape committee.”

“Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot
abide
. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”

“Veronica’s parents served life sentences in the intelligentsia,” put in Ernie, with a dash of pride.

She smiled fondly. “Just look at the people who come here during visiting hours! They need treatment for shock. Why else do they spout that ’You’re only as old as you feel!’ claptrap? Really, who are they hoping to fool? Not us—themselves!”

Ernie concluded, “Us elderly are the modern lepers. That’s the truth of it.”

I objected: “I’m no outcast! I have my own publishing house, and I need to get back to work, and I don’t expect you to believe me, but I
am
being confined here against my will.”

Ernie and Veronica exchanged a glance in their secret language.

“You
are
a publisher? Or you
were
, Mr. Cavendish?”

“Am. My office is in Haymarket.”

“Then what,” queried Ernie reasonably,
“are
you doing here?”

Now, that was the question. I recounted my unlikely yarn to date. Ernie and Veronica listened the way sane, attentive adults do. Mr. Meeks nodded off. I got as far as my stroke, when a yelling outside interrupted me. I assumed one of the Undead was having a fit, but a look through the crack showed the driver of the Jupiter red Range Rover shouting into his mobile phone. “Why bother?” Frustration twisted his face. “She’s in the clouds! She thinks it’s 1966! … No, she’s
not
faking it. Would you wet
your
knickers for kicks? … No, she didn’t. She thought I was her first husband. She said she didn’t
have
any sons … You’re telling me it’s Oedipal…. Yes, I described it again. Three times…. In detail,
yes
. Come and have a go yourself if you think you can do better…. Well, she never cared for me either. But bring perfume…. No, for
you
. She reeks…. What else would she reek of? … Of
course
they do, but it’s hard to keep up, it just … trickles out all the time.” He mounted his Range Rover and roared off down the drive. Sprinting after it and nipping through the gates before they swung shut did cross my mind, then I reminded myself of my age. Anyway, the surveillance camera would spot me, and Withers would pick me up before I could flag anyone down.

“Mrs. Hotchkiss’s son,” Veronica said. “She was a sweet soul, but her son, ooh, no. You don’t own half the hamburger franchises in Leeds and Sheffield by being nice. Not a family short of a bob or two.”

A mini-Denholme. “Well, at least he visits her.”

“And here’s why.” An attractive, wicked gleam illuminated the old lady. “When Mrs. Hotchkiss got wind of his plan to pack her off to Aurora House, she crammed every last family gem into a shoe box and buried it. Now she can’t remember where, or she can remember but isn’t saying.”

Ernie divided up the last drops of malt. “What gets my goat about him is how he leaves his keys in the ignition. Every time. He’d never do that out in the real world. But we’re so decrepit, so harmless, that he doesn’t even have to be careful when he visits.”

I judged it poor form to ask Ernie why he had noticed a thing like that. He had never spoken an unnecessary word in his life.

I visited the boiler room on a daily basis. The whiskey supply was erratic, but not so the company. Mr. Meeks’s role was that of a black Labrador in a long-lived marriage, after the kids have left home. Ernie could spin wry observations about his life and times and Aurora House folklore, but his de facto spouse could converse on most topics under the sun. Veronica maintained a vast collection of not-quite-stars’ autographed photographs. She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman. I could say things to her like “The most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid” and, safe in her ignorance of J. D. Salinger, I felt witty, charming, and yes, even youthful. I felt Ernie watching me as I showed off, but what the heck? I thought. A man may flirt.

Veronica and Ernie were survivors. They warned me about the dangers of Aurora House: how its pong of urine and disinfectant, the Undead Shuffle, Noakes’s spite, the catering redefine the concept of “ordinary.” Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured.

Thanks to her, I ruddy well bucked my ideas up. I clipped my nasal hair and borrowed some shoe polish from Ernie. “Shine your shoes every night,” my old man used to say, “and you’re as good as anyone.” Looking back, I see that Ernie tolerated my posturing because he knew Veronica was only humoring me. Ernie had never read a work of fiction in his life—”Always a radio man, me”—but watching him coax the Victorian boiler system into life one more time, I always felt shallow. It’s true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.

I cooked up my first escape plan—one so simple it hardly warrants the name—alone. It needed will and a modicum of courage, but not brains. A nocturnal telephone call from the phone in Nurse Noakes’s office to the answering machine of Cavendish Publishing. An SOS for Mrs. Latham, whose rugger-bugger nephew drives a mighty Ford Capri. They arrive at Aurora House; after threats and remonstrances I get in; nevvy drives off. That’s all. On the night of December 15 (I think), I woke myself up in the early hours, put on my dressing gown, and let myself into the dim corridor. (My door had been left unlocked since I began playing possum.) No sound but snores and plumbing. I thought of Hilary V. Hush’s Luisa Rey creeping around Swannekke B. (Behold my bifocals.) Reception looked empty, but I crawled below the level of the desk commando style and hoisted myself back to the vertical—no mean feat. Noakes’s office light was off. I tried the door handle, and yes, it gave. In I slipped. Just enough light came in through the crack to see. I picked up the receiver and dialed the number of Cavendish Publishing. I did not get through to my answering machine.

“You cannot make the call as dialed. Replace the handset, check the number, and try again.”

Desolation. I assumed the worst, that the Hogginses had torched the place so badly that even the telephones had melted. I tried once more, in vain. The only other telephone number I could reconstruct since my stroke was my next, and last, resort. After five or six tense rings Georgette, my sister-in-law, answered in the kittenish pout I knew, Lordy, Lordy, I knew. “It’s gone bedtime, Aston.”

“Georgette, it’s me, Timbo. Put Denny on, will you?”

“Aston? What’s wrong with you?”

“It isn’t Aston, Georgette! It’s Timbo!”

“Put Aston back on, then!”

“I don’t know Aston! Listen, you
must
get me Denny.”

“Denny can’t come to the phone right now.”

Georgette’s grip on her rocker was never exactly firm, but she sounded buckarooed over the rainbow. “Are you drunk?”

“Only if it’s a nice wine bar with a good cellar. I can’t abide pubs.”

“No, listen, it’s Timbo, your brother-in-law! I’ve got to speak to Denholme.”

“You sound like Timbo. Timbo? Is that you?”

“Yes, Georgette, it’s me, and if this is a—”

“Rather rum of you not to turn up at your own brother’s funeral. That’s what the whole family thought.”

The floor spun.
“What?”

“We knew about your various tiffs,
but
I
mean
—”

I fell. “Georgette, you just said Denny is dead. Did you mean to say it?”

“Of course I did! D’you think I’m bloody doolally?”

“Tell me once more.” I lost my voice. “Is—Denny—dead?”

“D’you think I’d make something like this up?”

Nurse Noakes’s chair creaked with treachery and torture. “How, Georgette, for Christ’s sake, how?”

“Who are you? It’s the middle of the night! Who is this, anyway? Aston, is this you?”

I had a cramp in my throat. “Timbo.”

“Well, what clammy stone have
you
been hiding under?”

“Look, Georgette. How did Denny”—saying made it more so—”pass away?”

“Feeding his priceless carp. I was spreading duckling pâté on crackers for supper. When I went to fetch Denny he was floating in the pond, facedown. He may have been there a day or so, I wasn’t his babysitter, you know. Dixie had told him to cut back on the salt, strokes run in his family. Look, stop hogging this line and put Aston on.”

“Listen, who’s there now? With you?”

“Just Denny.”

“But Denny’s dead!”

“I know that! He’s been in the fishpond for absolutely … weeks, now. How am I supposed to get him out? Listen, Timbo, be a dear, bring me a hamper or something from Fortnum and Mason’s, will you? I ate all the crackers, and all the thrushes ate the crumbs, so now I’ve got nothing to eat but fish food and Cumberland sauce. Aston hasn’t called back since he borrowed Denny’s art collection to show his evaluator friend, and that was … days ago, weeks rather. The gas people have stopped the supply and …”

My eyes stung with light.

The doorway filled with Withers. “You again.”

I flipped. “My brother has died! Dead, do you understand? Stone Ruddy Dead! My sister-in-law’s
bonkers
, and she doesn’t know what to do! This is a family emergency! If you have a Christian bone in your ruddy body you’ll help me sort this out this godawful ruddy mess!”

Dear Reader, Withers saw only a hysterical inmate making nuisance calls after midnight. He shoved a chair from his path with his foot. I cried into the phone: “Georgette, listen to me, I’m trapped in a ruddy madhouse hellhole called
Aurora House
in
Hull
, you’ve got that?
Aurora House
in
Hull
, and for Christ’s sake, get anybody there to come up and rescue—”

A giant finger cut my line. Its nail was gammy and bruised.

Nurse Noakes walloped the breakfast gong to declare hostilities open. “Friends, we have clasped a
thief to
our bosom.” A hush fell over the assembled Undead.

A desiccated walnut banged his spoon. “The Ay-rabs know what to do with ’em, Nurse! No light-fingered Freddies in Saudi, eh? Friday afternoons in the mosque car parks,
chop!
Eh? Eh?”

“A rotten apple is in our barrel.” I swear, it was Gresham Boys’ School again, sixty years on. The same shredded wheat disintegrating in the same bowl of milk. “Cavendish!” Nurse Noakes’s voice vibrated like a pennywhistle. “Stand!” The heads of those semianimate autopsies in mildewed tweeds and colorless blouses swiveled my way. If I responded like a victim, I would seal my own sentence.

It was hard to care. I had not slept a wink all night. Denny was dead. Turned to carps, most likely. “Oh, for God’s sake, woman, get some proportion in your life. The Crown Jewels are still safe in the Tower! All I did was make one crucial telephone call. If Aurora House
had
a cybercafe I would willingly have sent an e-mail! I didn’t want to wake anyone up, so I used my initiative and borrowed the telephone. My profoundest apologies. I’ll pay for the call.”

“Oh, pay you shall. Residents, what do we do to Rotten Apples?”

Gwendolin Bendincks rose and pointed her finger. “Shame on you!”

Warlock-Williams seconded the motion. “Shame on you!”

One by one those Undead sentient enough to follow the plot joined in. “Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!” Mr. Meeks conducted the chorus like Herbert von Karajan. I poured my tea, but a wooden ruler knocked the cup from my hands.

Nurse Noakes spat electrical sparks: “Don’t
dare
look away while you’re being shamed!”

The chorus died the death, except for one or two stragglers.