Divided Kingdom (13 page)

I had been due to attend a seminar on the south coast, and on the spur of the moment I had phoned Marie and asked if I could stay with her. I remembered a cliff-top path, a bright November day. Skylarks were chattering high above, black splinters in the sky's blue skin. The sea sprawled to my left, hundreds of feet down, its waves fluttering like gills. My blood felt fresher for the walk. Then I came over a rise and saw the cottage below, a roof of dark slates, smoke coiling upwards from the chimney and merging with the air. Even at a distance I could see Marie in the front garden, the only figure in a vast panoramic landscape. How solitary her life had become, I thought, now Victor was no longer there.

I drew closer, then stood still and watched her. Bending from the waist, her hair hanging loose on both sides of her face, she was weeding a bed of irises. At last she seemed to sense my presence. She looked round, then straightened slowly, squinting into the light. I raised a hand and waved.

‘Oh Tom. It's you.' She walked over in her clumsy wellingtons, touching her right sleeve to her nose. When she embraced me, she laid her head against my shoulder, and I could feel her voice vibrating in my collar-bone. ‘I forgot you were coming. I mean, I forgot it was today.'

I stood back. ‘You look good, Marie. You look really well.'

‘Do I?' She glanced down at her cardigan, which was darned in several places and missing a button, then her eyes lifted again. ‘Look at you, though. How much did that coat cost?'

Later that day I sat at the kitchen table with her, drinking tea. She told me she had got a job at the local railway station, in the ticket office. Victor would have approved, I said. She nodded absently, and wrapped both hands around her mug, as if to extract warmth from it. Her bottom lip had split down the middle, and the shine had gone from her hair. She would be forty now. It was hard to believe.

‘You can't imagine how anyone can live like this,' she said.

I smiled faintly.

‘Things happen here. You'd be surprised.' She had become defiant, as though my presence had ignited some aspect of her that had been lying dormant, just barely smouldering. ‘I shouldn't tell you this – he made me promise not to – but I don't suppose it matters now.'

He. Our father.

At breakfast one morning, she told me, Victor had come up with an idea. He had decided to walk round the border. All the way round. He wanted to see exactly where he had been living for the past twenty years. He was curious about ‘the dimensions of the cage'. And they had done it, the two of them. They had walked nearly seven hundred miles. It had taken them most of the summer.

‘I didn't know,' I said.

‘We crossed the border too,' Marie said. ‘Illegally.'

She seemed to relish the look that appeared on my face. She had startled me out of my complacency. At the same time, I had a sense of how comprehensively I had deceived her over the years. It had never occurred to her that I might work for the Ministry. She just saw me as someone who obeyed the rules.

‘We crossed it in broad daylight,' she said. ‘We walked right through. There was no one there.'

‘Where was it?'

She named the place. I knew it as a marshy stretch of country, bleak and windswept – the only border we shared with the Green Quarter.

‘There must have been some kind of wall,' I said.

‘There was. But it had a hole in it'.

‘A hole?'

‘A gap,' Marie said. ‘I don't know what had happened. Maybe the wall had collapsed. Or maybe it was being repaired. I don't know. But there was definitely a gap. We couldn't believe it at first. After everything we'd heard about national security and the integrity of the state. We thought we must be seeing things.' Her eyes slanted towards the window – a thin stripe of grey-green
sea, the grey sky above. She smiled. ‘We walked towards it, and we walked really slowly, as if it was alive and we might startle it. Then we just climbed through.'

‘Both of you?' I said.

She nodded. ‘I remember standing on the other side. It looked the same, of course – but it
felt
different. Completely different. Like the moon or something. There was this moment when we looked all round and then our eyes met and we started laughing.' She shook her head, as if what had been stored there still astonished her. ‘We jumped up and down and shouted things and danced, even though there wasn't any music. We behaved like mad people. You should have seen us.'

You should have seen us.

‘Thomas?'

I jumped, the breath rushing out of me. Sonya stood in the doorway. She was naked, her face in shadow, one foot turned slightly inwards. I had gone so deep into my memory that I had forgotten where I was.

‘I woke up and you weren't there,' she said. ‘I thought for a moment you'd gone home.'

I smiled and shook my head. ‘I wouldn't do that'.

She moved into my arms. ‘You're cold.'

‘I couldn't sleep, that's all'.

‘You've been working too hard. When you come back, maybe we should go away – a long weekend …'

I held her tightly, kissed her hair.

‘Come on, my darling,' she said. ‘Come back to bed.'

On the Wednesday before I left for the Blue Quarter, I went for a walk, thinking I might sit somewhere quiet and read for an hour. I crossed the main road, making for the park that lay to the west of the office. Though it was overcast, the sky seemed to have retreated a great distance from the earth, and I had a feeling of lightness, almost of vertigo, as if there was too much space above my head, as if I might fall upwards. I passed through the park gates and took a path that curved around the south side of the lake. A blackbird spilled rapid, trembling drops of sound into
the air. Something about the way a willow hung its branches over the water, leaving its trunk exposed, reminded me of a woman washing her hair in a sink. Odd thoughts. I stood still and stared up at the clouds, my eyes pushing into the greyness. I was trying to detect a surface, gauge a depth. Impossible, of course.

Following our lunch in Fremantle, Vishram had invited me back to his office, where he loaded me down with reading material. He always insisted on thorough preparation, no matter what the assignment, but I had never seen him quite so openly enthusiastic. As I turned to leave, my forearms already aching with the burden of articles, essays and treatises, he murmured,
Wait, Thomas, I forgot something
and consulting his shelves again, he selected yet another volume,
Nightmare in Pneuma
by D.W.B. Forbes-Mallet, a high-ranking Green Quarter diplomat who had attended the inaugural cross-border conference. During the past fortnight I had got through a number of books – among them, an introduction to phlegmatic cooking called
The Cautious Kitchen
, with recipes for bread-and-butter pudding and fish pie, and a monograph on the mating habits of the sea horse – but now I had
Nightmare in Pneuma
tucked under my arm. Given the title, it was no surprise to discover that the first conference had gone badly wrong, with gangs of drunken Yellow Quarter delegates running amok in the streets, and a Green Quarter delegate jumping to his death from the roof of his hotel. He had been a colleague of the author's, and a good friend. It was almost as if the authorities had brought everyone together in order to illustrate the wisdom of their grand design, as Forbes-Mallet rather sourly observed.

I sat down on a vacant bench and stared out over the lake – the ducks with their black velvet necks and their enquiring heads, the colour of the grass enhanced by the cloud cover, the air shifting at my back … A young couple walked past, arm in arm, and I overheard a fragment of their conversation.
It'll be great
, the girl was saying.
You'll see.
The future tense, I thought. The tense that comes naturally to sanguine people. Though everything was normal, it seemed at the same time to be heightened in some way, not unlike the feeling one might have during an eclipse.

‘How's the reading going?'

I looked up to see Vishram standing on the path, then I glanced down at the Forbes-Mallet, which lay unopened on my lap. ‘It's going well,' I said, ‘though I've only read about half of what you gave me, I'm afraid.'

‘I did get rather carried away.' Vishram turned his eyes towards the sky. Were the atmospheric conditions affecting him as well? ‘I was just going back to the office,' he said. ‘Would you care to join me? Or perhaps you're not ready?'

‘No, I'd be happy to join you.'

As we set off round the lake, I thought of our recent visit to Fremantle. It was now my conviction that Vishram had had affairs with several of the waitresses and, intending to draw him on the subject, I told him how much I had enjoyed the restaurant. We should go again, I said, on my return. Maybe next time I would try the famous
crème brûlée
, I added, remembering the white china pot that had been placed in front of him, the lid of melted caramel like a small round pane of amber glass. Vishram nodded, his usually opaque eyes lighting up at the prospect, but he seemed disinclined to speak.

Or perhaps not
affairs
exactly, I thought. Because, in the end, what the restaurant had reminded me of more than anything was a brothel – refined, discreet, infinitely sophisticated, but a brothel nonetheless – and I suddenly wondered if the whole establishment might not be a front, and all the talk of ambience and cuisine – of
crème brûlée! –
an elaborate euphemism, a code.

‘And how's Miss Visvikis?'

Vishram's question dropped into my thoughts with a studied innocence, a certain delicious incongruity, and he smiled at me across his shoulder as though perfectly aware of the effect he had just created. As far as I knew, though, his many gifts did not include mind-reading. I had introduced him to Sonya at a party fund-raiser in August, and he had spent the best part of an hour discussing book-binding with her – or so he'd told me afterwards.

‘She's very well,' I said. ‘She's worried about me going away, of course. I think she's a bit jealous too, in a way.'

‘That's only natural'. Vishram paused. ‘Is she still working at the library?'

‘Yes, she is. Though she'd like a change, I think.'

‘Really?' Vishram lowered his eyes almost coyly. ‘It just so happens that I'm looking for a research assistant'.

One of his impeccable eyebrows arched, as if he had just made a joke, but at his own expense. He was starting work on a new book, he told me. He had been commissioned to write the official biography of Michael Song.

‘I can't think of a better person for the job,' I said.

Vishram thanked me for the kind words.

With so much of his time taken up by the Ministry, he went on, and by other related obligations, he doubted he would be able to carry out all the research himself. Perhaps I could mention it to Sonya, when I saw her next. He felt sure that she'd be equal to the task. Of course he wouldn't be able to pay very handsomely –

‘I'll ask her,' I said. ‘You never know.'

On Friday afternoon I reported to Jasmine Williams in Personnel for a briefing on my forthcoming trip. When I walked into her office she looked up and smiled. She had altered her hairstyle since I had last seen her, the neat cornrows drawing attention to the natural elegance of her head. Jasmine and I had gone out together for a while, when we were both trainees. She'd had a lovely unruffled quality about her, the ability to view any mishap with a kind of amused tolerance. She'd also had the most beautiful body I had ever seen, with breasts that tilted upwards, as if in eagerness, and skin that smelled like butter and sugar melting slowly in a pan. She had been posted to a branch of the Ministry up north, though, which meant we could only see each other at weekends, and after several months we had gradually drifted apart.

‘So,' she said. ‘This time it's you.'

‘Yes.' I moved across the room towards her. ‘I like your hair.'

‘Thanks.'

As I lowered myself into a chair, there was a knock at the door
and Vishram appeared. ‘I hope neither of you mind if I sit in on the meeting?'

Jasmine smiled at me again, a little more inscrutably this time. ‘We don't mind, do we?'

‘Not at all,' I said.

Vishram seated himself at the back of the room, against the wall. Crossing one leg over the other, he took off his glasses and began to polish the lenses. I would be issued with a standard business visa, Jasmine told me, valid for up to seventy-two hours. The visa permitted travel between the Red Quarter and the Blue Quarter, one journey in each direction. It was a stipulation of this type of visa that contact with local people be kept to an absolute minimum. Obviously the system worked on a trust basis – but then presumably I had earned that trust, she added with a glance in Vishram's direction, or I wouldn't have been selected in the first place. I should remember that the laws of both countries were equally specific about the dangers of psychological contamination. She need hardly say that the kingdom had been divided for its own good, and that it was in no one's interest to jeopardise twenty-seven years of comparative equilibrium.

‘What about contact with other delegates?' I said.

‘No restrictions.' Jasmine consulted her computer. ‘We haven't mentioned medication.'

‘Medication?'

‘As you might imagine, things are a bit different over there. The pace of life is slower, but it's also more unpredictable. There's more indecision, more ambiguity. If you like, we can issue you with medication that will help you to adapt'.

‘No, I don't think so,' I said.

Jasmine watched me carefully.

‘I want to experience the Blue Quarter for myself,' I went on. ‘I want to see it as it is. Not diminished in any way – or enhanced, for that matter.'