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?’