The Kings of Eternity (33 page)

He hesitated. “And now I’m ready to live again,” he said, and immediately regretted it. It sounded importuning, even pathetic, as if he were asking for her sympathy, and more.

She closed her eyes, laid her head back against the cushion. “I’m tired.”

“I’ll show you your room later.”

“Mmm...”

He corrected that morning’s work while she slept on the sofa, and at six he moved to the kitchen and prepared a tomato salad with fresh mackerel. She was awake when he next looked out.

She rubbed her eyes and stretched.

“How do you feel?”

“Much better. Rested. What time is it?”

“Almost seven. Hungry?”

She laid her head to one side and frowned. “I am, actually. It must be the Greek air. I have an appetite.”

“Mackerel salad with a special Langham dressing,” he announced. “Hope you like mackerel?”

“Love it,” she said, standing unsteadily.

He was ready to catch her. “You’re still weak, Caroline.”

“I thought I’d move to the table.” She gave a little laugh at her feebleness as he lowered her to the sofa again.

“That’s okay, we’ll dine here and watch the sun go down. What could be better?”

He told her about his novel while they ate, outlining the story of Sam in Africa.

At one point she asked, “Isn’t it painful, reliving the past? I mean, writing about someone you loved, and who...”

“I couldn’t have written the book immediately. I had to come to terms with what happened. Then... I don’t know. It might seem crass, using someone as a character like that, but I felt I owed it to her memory, and also, to be honest, it helped me. It was a cathartic exercise.”

“She must have been a lovely person.”

He thought back all those years. “She was an innocent, scarred by terrible events,” he said, and left it at that.

The sun set and the stars came out, pricking the immensity of the sky above the ocean. He pointed to the constellations of Lyra and Pegasus. He took her hand and they sat for a time in companionable silence.

He considered how to start talking about their relationship; every gambit he thought of seemed crass. At last he simply said, “Do you ever consider the future, Caroline?”

“Never!”

Her vehemence surprised him. “Never? You never look ahead, plan things? Wonder where you’ll be in ten years, or where you hope you’ll be?”

She gazed up at the stars. “Never, Daniel.”

“I do, all the time. I suppose it’s a part of who I am.”

She squeezed his hand. “So, where do you see yourself ten years from now?”

Something seemed to stick in his throat. “It’s not so much
where
I see myself,” he began. “I rarely think of where I’ll be. In a way that doesn’t matter much to me any more. I’ve come to realise that most places are pretty much alike. It’s the state of mind you’re in that matters.”

He glanced at her. She had closed her eyes. He went on. “So... the state of mind I’d like to be in in ten years from now? Content,” he said. “I’d like to be content, happy with what I was and who I was with.” He did not mean to do it, but his hand tightened on hers.

She had opened her eyes, staring straight ahead. Her lips were pursed, compressed, as if she were thinking furiously.

“Caroline, I came to realise something while you were away... Sometimes, you only realise the value of someone when you no longer have them around. You suddenly realise how much they mean to you.” He laughed. “God, when I saw that your shutters were open and I realised you were back... I was like a teenager, my heart was banging.” He squeezed her hand again.

He glanced at her. She had shut her eyes again, and he could see that tears were squeezing from beneath her lids and rolling down her cheeks.

“Caroline?”

She shook her head, her lips tight. She pulled her hand away from his, quickly, and pressed her knuckle to her lips, shoulders lifting in quick, tight, constricted sobs.

“Caroline, I’m sorry if what I said...”

She was shaking her head. “I can’t...” she began.

“I understand. These things take time to get over. What you went through with your husband must have been appalling. I understand that. I just want you to know how I feel, and that perhaps in time, if you feel the same...”

She turned her face to him. Her eyes were huge and blurred by tears, her mouth open in agony. “I can’t do this to you, Daniel. After everything you’ve been through.”

“Caroline-”

“I can’t lie any more,” she said. “Those times I was away, the other week and just now...”

Fear clutched him. “You were seeing someone?”

“No, you silly man!” she cried, half-amused, through her tears. “How could I possibly want anyone else, with you around?”

His heart gave a skip of joy, but delight was soon followed by fear and confusion.

She shook her head. “Oh, my God... This is so hard.” She reached out and took his hand, staring at him. “I wasn’t in a migraine clinic in London. I was undergoing chemotherapy. A couple of months ago, before we met, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. They thought they’d caught it early - they were optimistic. Then I met you, and do you know something, the meeting seemed somehow right.”

He gripped her hand, experiencing such a surge of ambivalent emotion. Principally he shared her pain, an appreciation of her appalling fear - but beyond that, stirring deep within him, he experienced a nascent joy, a joy he wanted to share with her.

“Then I began feeling pretty bad, pains all over, aches, sudden, excruciating agony like you wouldn’t believe. I made an appointment for another check up, and three days ago they told me...” She pressed her lips together.

He reached out and pulled her to him, and she was so light. She leaned against him with her head on his chest and sobbed. “I’m so frightened, Daniel. I’m so awfully bloody frightened!”

He patted her back, kissed her hair. He held her, as there was little else he could do. He was trying to think of the best way to break it to her, of telling her not to fear, that she could begin to think of the future again, that there was, indeed, hope.

He felt an exhilaration course through him, then, as he considered the fact that it was within his power to give her something that actually mattered. He could bestow upon Caroline Platt the gift of continued life, banish the dread at the prospect of all she had ever known and experienced being taken away from her, extinguished. He could give it all back to her, rekindle the flame.

She sniffed back the sobs and continued, “They... they told me it had spread. To my spine, lungs. They said that I have between three and six months.”

He kissed the top of her head, and he was crying with her now.

How best to tell her, he wondered? She would never believe him. It was all too fantastic. She would think him cruel for suggesting such an incredible thing. He could let her read the journal he had kept over the years, of course, but that did not constitute proof in itself, or he could slice open his wrist and make her watch as it healed before her eyes, but that would be to resort to melodrama, and that was not part of his character.

Or, quite simply, when she was sleeping tonight, he could take the serum pistol from where he kept it locked in the drawer and, without telling her anything, apply it to her neck and let the tiny machines - the nano-machines, as they would be called now - do the work of saving her life.

She stirred on his lap. “Do you understand, Daniel?” she whispered. “I was so attracted to you, but I didn’t want you to suffer all over again. I was weak. I should never have come back here. I was weak and terribly cruel. I thought of staying in London. You would have forgotten about me in time... But I wanted you. I wanted you to hold me, just like this, because - I know it might sound stupid - but it does help to know that I’m loved.”

He kissed her head. “Shh,” he said, and almost whispered that in the morning it would all be okay.

She cried herself to sleep in his arms, and her sobs subsided and her breathing became even at last. He sat with her for a long time, regarding the night sky.

He recalled something they had talked about, on the quayside in Xanthos following her exhibition. They had discussed her painting,
Considering the Future,
and how for him it was optimistic because of what the stars symbolised. He had received the impression, then, that for her the painting held a different meaning, and now he knew that he was right. For Caroline, the stars represented night, and darkness, because for her the future
was
an unfathomable darkness towards which she was irrevocably heading.

He carried her into the villa, surprised at how light she was, and into his bedroom. He lay her gently on the bed and watched her sleep in the low glow of the bedside lamp. She seemed to be at peace.

He moved to his study and unlocked the drawer containing the serum pistol, and carried it back to the bedroom.

He sat beside her, reached out and swept the hair back from her pale neck. He could see the vein, raised in the lamp-light. He placed the pistol against her gently pulsing carotid, and paused.

He had almost gone ahead and bestowed eternal life on Sam, all those years ago, but something had stopped him then - just as now, on the cusp of saving Caroline’s life, something stopped him again.

Even though he would be giving her the gift of immortality, it came to him that he could not do so without first consulting her; it would be somehow immoral to save her life without her having a say in the matter. She would choose to remain alive, he knew she would, but it would be her own choice, made in the full knowledge of all the wonderful and terrible implications that that choice entailed. To live was all very well, but life was pain and grief and much else besides, as he would make clear when he told her all about himself in the morning.

He replaced the pistol in the locked drawer, then returned to the bedroom and lay down on the bed beside Caroline, and took her in his arms.

Chapter Fifteen

Lower Cranley and Crete, 1975

In ‘64 I fled Tangier and what had happened to Sam and travelled the world. For nearly ten years I lost myself in the Far East, spending six months at a time in various quiet, sequestered places well off the beaten track. In the early years of that period I was unable to write, still less to commit myself to friendships, or relationships with women. I drifted, in both a physical and mental sense.

Every year I visited Charles in India and Vaughan in Rome; they were my saviours at that time - the only people who might come close to understanding what I was going through. They, however, had their own lives to lead; Charles had his meditation to occupy him, and Vaughan his art. After two weeks in their company, having unburdened myself of my anguish and relieved for having done so, I would move on with a feeling of renewed enthusiasm for life. In time I began to write again, long novels not meant for publication but to satisfy some craving for creativity deep within me.

After almost a decade of aimless wandering, I awoke one morning on an idyllic island in the Philippines and felt a strange compulsion to return home. In the summer of 1973 I flew to London, and then, the strange compulsion still drawing me onwards, took a train to Aylesbury and a taxi to Cranley Grange.

I walked around the house, peering in through the dusty windows at the library where, nearly forty years before, amazing events had played themselves out. From the Grange I walked to Hopton Wood, and relived that night long ago when the portal had opened briefly and Kathan had fled to Earth aboard his star-carriage.

I walked into Fairweather Cranley where, before the war, I had made my home. Little had changed in the village; my cottage was just as I had left it all those years ago, inhabited now by a retired couple in their seventies. I watched them pottering in the garden, bent and infirm with age, and realised with a sudden pang of sadness that they were as old as I.

I had another shock in store as I hurried away in search of a taxi to carry me to Aylesbury. In the street I passed a man in his eighties who, before the war, had been the landlord of the Fox and Hounds. The years had been kind to him, but even so had etched their lines deep in his face, and slowed his pace. He smiled and nodded as I passed, and for a fleeting second I thought I saw a light of recognition, and then confusion, in his ancient eyes.

I hurried on.

That weekend I decided to set up residence in the nearby village of Lower Cranley, two miles from Fairweather and just a mile from the Grange and Hopton Wood. A month later I bought a converted coach-house beside the pub and moved in. It was as if I had reached a time in my life when I needed quiet and tranquillity; something within me craved proximity with the area where, to all intents and purposes, I had been reborn.

I wrote novels for my own satisfaction, investing my emotional life in these invented scenarios. In time, a year or more, as if the process of fiction had worked as some form of cure or catharsis, I found myself venturing out more and more, making social contact and even establishing liaisons that I was loath to term friendships but which I knew could be called nothing else.

And then I met Tara.

After what had happened to Sam, I had vowed never to become romantically involved again, but the woman worked an invidious magic upon me. There are some things which seem entirely natural, ordained by that irresistible chemistry of pheromones and mental attraction, and that I should fall in love with Tara Sayang was one of them. I was powerless to resist.

I was sitting at my usual table in the corner of the bar, going through the recently completed manuscript and making last minute corrections and alterations, when I noticed the woman seated on a high stool at the bar.

She saw me looking at her, and smiled - and only then did I notice that she had a book in her hand. My surprise at seeing a diminutive, dark-skinned - and very attractive - woman in the public bar of the Fox and Hounds was compounded when I realised that the book she was holding was
A Tropical War
by none other than Christopher Cartwright.