Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart (24 page)

“Oh, that. Nothing to tell. Frankly, it's risible. I dreamt I had a son.”

I hadn't realized he had meant that sort of dream. I'd supposed he was referring to some unachievable ambition.

“But I've dreamt it repeatedly and that's what makes it odd. Each time it's exactly the same. You'd think it was prophetic.”

I seized on this last word. Almost with gratitude.

“Well,” I cried, “supposing it was?” The bath appeared to be filling faster. “Supposing you
were
going to have a son? Supposing that dream was somehow
meant
?”

He shrugged. His shoulders looked less bony beneath the woollen robe. “Then it would be a miracle,” he said. “I have never—not once - never in my life made love to any woman.”

“And yet you keep on getting this message. If it's that persistent how can you ignore it?”

“You're not suggesting that a man with AIDS should now go out and propagate?”

“No. But…” I wanted to say that on the very rare occasion—one could hardly rule it out, surely?—miracles
might
occur.

He uttered a harsh laugh. “Of course, you could always place bets on whether I or the woman or the child died first. That would be interesting.”

“Fostering?” I murmured. “Adoption?” I must have been drunker than I realized. These options sounded feasible.

“Mind you,” he said, “
that
would have been the rational part.”

“How do you mean?”

“Guess who my son turned out to be.”

“Prime Minister? President?”

He shook his head.

“King?”

“No. But you're getting warm.”

The phrase was unfortunate. Sweat was running down my neck and torso. I had to turn off the tap. I tried to make the movement look casual.

“You'll have to tell me.”

“My son,” he said, “turned out to be Arthur.”

“Arthur?” I repeated, stupidly.

“
King
Arthur.”

“
King
Arthur? Goodness!” I really couldn't think of anything more to add.

“But you know the story, don't you? That when Britain finds itself on the brink of destruction King Arthur will return to save it?”

“Oh,” I said, “yes, of course! Isn't he sleeping in a cave somewhere? Glastonbury?”

“What, with his trusty steed alongside? When we need him he'll wake up and leap into the saddle? Ride hell-for-leather down the motorway?”

“Well, it's only a legend,” I replied. I sounded practically defensive.

“Then tell me, why should I have dreamt—dreamt a dozen times over—that he was born again, and went to school, and led a normal childhood, here in Nottingham? And that, in addition to all of this, he was born on my twenty-seventh birthday?”

His voice had actually risen in excitement. It was indescribably dreadful how he suddenly remembered. How we both suddenly remembered. I believe that for fully fifteen seconds each of us had forgotten our surroundings; certainly the reason why we sat in them. For fully fifteen seconds he had seemed inspired. More than inspired. Elated.

But now, abruptly, he stood up. Took off his bathrobe.

He looked at me and shook my hand again.

“Oughtn't we to pray?” I suggested.

But the few sentences I managed to come up with sounded unnatural, false. He nodded his Amen. We hugged and then he stepped into the bath. “Thank you,” were his last words. He raised his knees and let his head slip underneath the water. My sweat and my tears and my concentration on the future (scenes from a life I hadn't yet lived passed unconvincingly before me)…my sweat and my tears and the peeing of my pants—nearly, but not quite, the shitting of them too—all played their desperate part in the drowning of a man I used to say good morning to upon the stairs, and had never greatly liked.

6

So it was done.

So it was done and I was still here.

Zack was a fake.

He wasn't only a fake. He must be evil. He was inwardly as black as he was outwardly beguiling.

I had just spent the most horrific minutes of my life. Killed someone. Held a man's head under water and watched his frenzied splashings for survival, watched the bubbles streaming to the surface with tenacious, terrifying vigour. Been forced to watch because if I'd looked away I should undoubtedly have lost my grip—my God, how he had threshed and seemed to possess a strength belied by his frail body. My God, how it had lasted. And why? Why had I done it? I couldn't even feel any longer he had really wanted to die, not after all that flailing, those wild, reverberating thumps. More than once I had nearly stopped. But how could I have stopped, when the worst, or half the worst, or a quarter of the worst, had had to be over by then, when he was perhaps a split second away from that hoped-for review of his brief time on earth? How could I have raised his head only—it was possible—to have to re-submerge it?

Yet I was scared, scared now that it was over and his eyes gazed up at me quietly through the water, now that the bathroom lino was awash and my shirt and shoes and trousers were all drenched, my socks and underwear as well. Scared that he might have changed his mind. Scared that what had started out as suicide would now, in the eyes of the Law, have taken on all the aspects of a murder.

With motive the disputed ownership of whatever the downstairs room had been ransacked for?

But why had Zack wanted him to die?

And how had he achieved it?

This was the twentieth century, close to the end of it. Not the Dark Ages. How could I have believed even for one fleeting minute…?

Since my meeting with Zack on Saturday morning (Zack?
Zack
?), no, since my meeting with Zachary Cornelius on Saturday morning I had been in a state of trance—of hypnosis—of enchantment. I could see that now. I hadn't been like a real person living in the real world. I had been a marionette. Bewitched.

Bedevilled.

Spellbound.

I had thought he represented the Enlightenment. Of course he represented nothing of the sort. Despite his denial of it, he had most surely come from hell.

I sat hunched inside my car, forearms flung across the steering wheel, face pressing into damp flesh. Had the meeting with my mother, then—her half-forgotten dimples, flirtatiousness, Utility costume, black-feathered hat—had all that been hallucination? Were his powers so strong he could sweep me back to boyhood without preparation, transport my present body to address an earlier one, escort me there as keeper or control? If so, he could almost certainly have mesmerized a person into suicide. Drowning wasn't necessary. What would Cornelius care about the feelings of a dead man's parents?

But apparently his plan had needed to include somebody like myself.

Why
?

I was a nonentity. I had nothing to offer. No special talent. Why should he wish to have me—or, for that matter, anyone else—convicted of this killing?

For beyond a doubt they would convict me. They'd find my jacket in the bathroom. Driving licence, credit cards, the lot. Fingerprints all over. I'd slammed the door as I came running from the house, but even if I hadn't, could I really have been bothered to go round trying to wipe away the evidence? Did I really care that much about my future?

I raised my head, dully. The women who had witnessed my arrival were gone, and so was the boy who'd been working on his bike. But there were others who could talk of my departure. I'd almost collided with the postman as I charged into the street. A neighbour, to whom in all likelihood he'd just delivered something, had still been on her doorstep.

So here was one murder hunt that wasn't going to cost the public tens of thousands of pounds. Only the motive would prove to be a puzzle.

I started the windscreen wipers.

I gazed at them, like Bob Hope gazing at a swinging brooch in
Road to Rio
.

Then I thought of something. I'd always heard that you were safe when orders proved abhorrent to your nature.

So? In that case had part of me actually enjoyed what I'd been doing? Found it fascinating, seductive? The lure of the forbidden, the unique power of the strong? My God! Had it been
excitement
which had let my hands maintain their pressure on his skull—bone against enamel—while his hair straggled on either side of them like black seaweed?

No.

It wasn't true. It was not true. Just couldn't be.

No pleasure. No fascination. No excitement. Simply the thought of Philip. Of Philip and my life ahead. Those were the only things that could have made it possible, apart from the victim's own resolve to have it happen. I would swear to it.

I engaged the engine.

I had to see Cornelius.

I had to pray that I could find him.

I was scarcely aware of how I got back into town. But that was no different to the outward journey. Presumably I stopped at traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, presumably I got into the proper lanes. At any rate no police car gave me chase.

It was too early for that.

The road where he lived ran alongside the cemetery in which we'd met. I remembered my lightness of spirit as I'd approached this house on Saturday. But the memory now evoked only loathing and self-pity, literally a howl of self-pity. I hadn't known when I was well off.

I rang and the buzzer sounded without my needing to identify myself. Oh, yes, naturally! One of his party tricks! I felt relief along with, as I climbed the stairs, an onset of breathlessness. I even felt a modicum of hope. Now, at the very least, I'd get an explanation. Possibly a solution. I would know what I must do.

But it was a stranger who awaited me. Short and puny, sharp-faced, cross. Accusatory.

“You aren't the Gas Board!”

People had always hoped for something that I wasn't.

I said, “I'm looking for Zachary Cornelius.”

“Who?”

I repeated it.

“You've got the wrong house,” he said.

“I spent the evening here, the night before last.”

“This flat's been empty for three weeks.”

“No.” A note of cunning, even of triumph, had seeped into my voice. “If I hadn't been here, how would I know about the sunset and the beach? The starry sky?”

He tried to close the door but wasn't fast enough. I shoved him back. The flat had two rooms and kitchen and bath. All walls and ceilings were covered in white. The paint could hardly be new. It looked dingy and didn't have a smell.

Dear God! Could I have imagined it? Could I have imagined
all
of it? From start to finish?

Think!

What other evidence? What other
absence
of evidence?

The Post-it note on which he'd written his address—on which I
thought
he'd written his address—was in my wallet. Allegedly.

My wallet was in my jacket. My jacket was on the chair. The chair was in the bathroom.

Allegedly.

The bathroom was in the house.

The house that Zack built? The house of cards that Zack built?

On the other hand, if I was really losing my mind, at least I was aware of it; and they said you couldn't truly be mad if you were still able to acknowledge it.

Or was this as fallacious as their claim about hypnotism?

In any case I apologized to the landlord. (“My God,” he said, appearing to recoup some of his courage, “you're all
wet
!” We could see my tracks on the hall carpet.) I returned to the car. Sat back and covered my face with my hands.

Should I go to the police? Should I send them to discover Brian Douglas—on the supposition, naturally, of his being dead? Should I give them a description of Cornelius, say he worked for a syndicate promoting euthanasia? Say that I, as a sympathizer, had offered to help?

Would it matter if they didn't find him? Cornelius?

Was he even there to find?

I took my hands down from my face.

Yes, if I could have imagined that whole striking use of colour…? The events of these past few hours had been amongst the most vivid of my life, yet people sometimes clung to their delusions even in the face of reason. I knew that. Could it be the same with me? Was it possible that if I presently returned to the office I might encounter my colleague looking no less yuppyish than he'd done last week—or last year? Was it possible that I'd be able to say good morning to him on the stairs tomorrow just as naturally as if I hadn't drowned him in his bath today?
Was
it?

I sat in the car and experienced the beginnings of a sense of well-being. I was working the whole thing out so rationally. Step by lucid step. In the end I wouldn't even need to see the police. (Already the notion of what I might have said caused me to cringe. For example, how would Brian have felt to discover he had AIDS?) Because, when it came down to it, there was only one point unexplained. Why was I so damp? Obviously I saw that it was raining, that it was raining
hard
, yet even so…

But eventually the answer would come. In the meantime perhaps I ought to drive across town to the Queen's Medical Centre and place myself in the hands of some psychiatrist?

(Suppose it was a Dr Zachary Cornelius? That was another thought which actually produced a smile. No matter how strained.)

I switched on the ignition.

It was the last conscious thing I did.

Apparently I had a heart attack. Though I don't remember any pain. It was the kind of thing I'd always dreaded, and this attack was certainly no small one: long before the ambulance arrived I was viewing the situation from somewhere above the heads of the people who had gathered, and of the policeman who kept asking everyone to stand back please (by then somebody had wedged something underneath my chest to release the pressure on the horn). I was viewing it, moreover, with a remarkable degree of composure, which interestingly suggested I might be passing through a state of near-death detachment. I watched the jostling and regrouping of umbrellas and listened to the hushed exchange of anecdote. Then the ambulance was there and I saw two medics lift me into it, an experience not unlike that of supposedly standing in the Chesham Road in Amersham. I saw them check for vital signs, put a blanket over me and give me oxygen. I heard their observations on the state of my clothing and the fact I must have urinated—and felt glad I hadn't also defecated. Glad for their sakes, I mean, rather than my own; dignity didn't seem an overriding issue any more. At the hospital, they wheeled me inside, still with the oxygen mask held firmly in position, and muzzy scraps of conversation floated in and out of my awareness, though none of them connected with myself: one with the forthcoming election and John Major, one incredibly—but I thought I might have blacked out, had possibly dreamt this—with King George and the forthcoming coronation. Also, we picked up snippets of cheerful comment in the corridors whilst making for our destination. Our destination came as a surprise. I had expected the emergency department, not a delivery room. My arrival even coincided with a baby's startled bellow as it emerged from cosy shelter into cold electric light, and with the midwife's nearly simultaneous cry of reassurance, before she deftly cut the cord and wiped the baby clean and wrapped him up and put him into the waiting arms of my mother.