Owain was both relieved and humbled. Though he knew it was irrational, his predominating emotion was a sense of failure, a feeling that he had abandoned van Oost and the others, had fled from the field like a coward. It shamed him to contrast himself with his father, who had been awarded the Valour Cross for his part in the defence of Istanbul. His father was a war hero, whereas Owain had a growing conviction that he himself would never be a frontline soldier again.
NINE
The fog was gone, dawn a bruised light seeping through mottled cloud. Decades of warfare had led to pollution and ionisation of the upper atmosphere so that the skies were seldom truly dark by night or free of murkiness by day.
Owain walked briskly along the riverbank, where ice-locked freighters and barges lay abandoned until the spring thaw. In recent years winters had become long and bitter, summers short and torrid.
He entered a large park that was empty apart from the verdigrised statues that flanked its paths. They were life-sized representations of military men, generals and admirals and air marshals, their heads and shoulders crusted with bird droppings. I scrutinized their faces and names as we passed but recognised none. The snow-bracketed plinths held inscriptions celebrating achievements that meant nothing to me, covering campaigns that ranged from West Africa to the Arctic Circle over more than half a century.
I managed to get Owain to pause beside a statue I finally did recognise. It was a bronze of Field Marshal Montgomery, cited for his achievements in leading amphibious landings along the Baltic coast in December 1943. From Owain I gleaned that Montgomery’s divisions had bolstered those of the German Army Group North threatened by a Soviet winter offensive.
Britain had entered the war on the German side; France, too. Hitler had died in a plane crash soon after the invasion of the Soviet Union began. Peace terms were arranged following an anti-Nazi coup in Berlin—peace and a withdrawal from occupied territories in the west in exchange for military assistance in the east. Sixty years later the successors of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army had fought themselves to a standstill.
There was a loud crack overhead and a jet swept past at low altitude. It was gone as quickly as it had come. I had no idea why Owain had come here from his bed, except perhaps to escape his own memories. Now he was stirring, and I found myself being pushed into the hinterland of his mind as he reasserted himself. He’d found a scrap of paper in the pocket of his coat. Marisa had written that she would be exercising the dogs in St James’s Park at noon the following day. It was the last thing I saw before Owain swamped me so completely that I was extinguished.
TEN
My father used to say that military history was the refuge of scoundrels, a judgment that was typically sweeping. He had a special distaste for what he called “fantasists”—historians who did not stick scrupulously to the facts but were prepared to speculate on alternative outcomes. He always had a prodigious appetite for disapproval, and I’m certain he despised my career path. He himself was a distinguished though not uncontroversial historian who had made his name with a study of the interwar years, published before Rees and I were born. He’d married my mother, Magda, when he was forty. She was sixteen years younger, the daughter of a former German army officer, a widower who had immigrated to England in 1951. She died in a car crash when I was six.
My father was one of those men who aspired to old age as though youth was intrinsically disreputable. During the academic year we lived in a house near Balliol College, where he had a professorship. The rest of the time we made our home in the village of Bishopston, outside Swansea. This was where I’d first met Lyneth. Our romance, if you could call it that, always had an air of being a leisure-time activity, with treks to secluded coves and chaste kissing on the gorse-and-bramble heaths.
My father kept near-identical studies in both places for his work. I remember once, when I was about eight, finding the heavy oaken door ajar. I can’t recall whether we were in Oxford or Swansea, but the same rules applied: neither Rees nor I were allowed inside except on his express instructions. On that particular day I just couldn’t resist: I wandered in.
The room was filled with dark bookcases and antique furniture. It smelt musty and male. Half drawn curtains shaded everything. I didn’t dare put on the light.
My father always worked in longhand at a pedestal desk, a lanky man perched on the edge of his office chair, scribbling notes and scrutinising documents with his reading glasses gleaming in the lamplight. Grey-haired and meticulous in his habits, he was old to me even then.
I clambered up into his chair and peered at the unfathomable piles of paper there. I tried to mimic his posture, but as I did so the chair began to roll out from under me. I grabbed the desk, upsetting a pile of papers, which scattered on the floor.
I did my frantic best to tidy them and put them back on the desk in a semblance of order; but I knew my efforts would be futile. I crept out of the room and closed the door, saying nothing to Mrs Bayliss, our housekeeper. When my father returned home that evening it was only a matter of minutes before he emerged from his study and began demanding to know who had been interfering with his documents.
I owned up immediately, making a determinedly cheerful attempt to explain how I’d tidied everything up. He just stared down at me in a controlled fury, and when I was finished his bony fingers encircled my wrist and he propelled me into the study, closing the door behind him and turning the key in the lock. Wwereut saying a word, he snatched a slipper from under the desk—a buff tartan slipper that to me had hitherto symbolised indolent adult comfort. He bent me over his crooked legs and proceeded to slap my trousered bottom a precise and emphatic ten times.
He didn’t speak once, not even when he thrust me blubbering out the door. Nor was the incident ever spoken of again.
I was lying on a trolley, being wheeled into a room that looked like an operating theatre. Two nurses hoisted me and laid me face-up on another surface. Slowly it began to move forward towards some kind of metal tunnel just big enough to accommodate my body. I could hear the drone of the motor, sense its vibrations. I had the panicky idea that I was a corpse about to be deposited down the chute of a crematorium. They’d pop me into the tube, tip it up and I’d slide to oblivion.
In I went, moving deeper down until only my head protruded. It stopped.
A female Asian doctor loomed over me. She was smiling and appeared to be saying something comforting. It came to me that I was wearing one of those hospital gowns, an absurdly comforting thought. If they were going to dispose of me, surely I would have been naked.
“Wait,” I yelled. “Where’s my wife? Where are my children?”
I couldn’t hear anything emerge; but the doctor turned towards me.
“Hamley’s,” I said passionately. “Has anything happened to it?” I had awoken with a renewed anxiety that perhaps the store had been destroyed, that Lyneth and the girls were dead.
“An explosion,” I persisted. “Are they alive?”
I felt as if I was talking at the top of my voice. The doctor looked a little perplexed. It was plain she couldn’t hear me. I was still locked in; probably not even my lips were moving.
“Try to relax,” she told me. “There really is nothing to be concerned about.”
Easy for you to say, I thought; you’re not the one who keeps lurching between worlds. I was unable to control or even anticipate the transitions. The latest episode had been by far the most intensive, as though Owain’s life was exerting an increasingly seductive pull.