The stream of passengers from our flight who had British citizenship dribbled rapidly past a separate set of desks. Not such a very thin stream, though – it seemed to me that about twenty per cent of the people who had flown to England with me were ‘servants of two masters’. The others lined up sombrely between the queue guides. Men dreaming of a smoke after the flight fidgeted miserably. Children who had sat still for too long in the aeroplane were acting up. Women dreaming of ‘strolling along Piccadilly’ and storming the shops of Oxford Street sent text messages and rummaged in handbags.
Of course, I could have jumped the queue altogether. One way or another. If it came to that, I could simply enter the Twilight and bypass passport control altogether – a young guy did that before my very eyes, although on the plane I hadn’t even suspected that he was an Other. In fact, if I hadn’t had a visa in my passport, I’d have done the same without the slightest hesitation.
But I felt uncomfortable. A woman patiently joined the back of the queue with two little infants, feeding both of them simultaneously, ‘Macedonian-style’. Admittedly, after a while she was sent to a short queue for those who didn’t have to stand in line with everyone else. There were children and old people standing in front of me too. But there was nothing to be done – we’d arrived at a bad moment, and for Europe the endangered species of Russians is made up of the same kind of suspect ‘third-world’ folk as the denizens of any overpopulated Asian country. Maybe even more suspect – although Russia might have accepted its role as a third-world country, but from time to time it still demonstrates certain ambitions and is reluctant to acknowledge its colonial status openly.
Anyway, positively overflowing with noble feelings, I decided to wait out the queue together with my compatriots. And for the first half-hour I felt genuinely proud of the way I was acting.
I held out for a second half-hour from sheer stubbornness, realising that to pronounce a spell and bypass passport control now would be as good as admitting my own stupidity.
No special questions arose when my turn came. The officer, who was a Sikh to judge from his turban, glanced at the visa, asked how long I had come to Britain for, was told that it was two or three days, nodded and slapped his stamp down on my passport.
I passed through the checkpoint manned by a Dark Other and a Light Other without any delay at all – my Higher Other aura inspired respect.
I felt so worn out after the queue that I didn’t take the express train, even though it went to Paddington, which would have been very convenient for me. I walked out of the airport terminal and turned left, towards the spot where smokers were ruining their health at an appropriate distance from decent people. A little glass isolation cell had been set up outside for the victims of nicotine dependence. But the exhausted passengers and uniformed airport workers still disregarded the rules and smoked in the open air.
I lit up too. Beside me a beautiful young miss with long legs and an expensive aluminium suitcase was slavering over a thin cigarette and swearing on the phone at someone called Peter, who hadn’t arrived in time to meet her. The girl happened to be Russian, but she was speaking English and swearing like a real virtuoso. When she finished talking she shook her head helplessly, then immediately phoned Moscow and started discussing the difference in mentality between Russian and English men with a girlfriend.
I chuckled and set off towards the taxi stand. A long line of tall cabs, including some antiques and some ultra-modern specimens, was waiting patiently for customers.
The hotel Gesar had sent me to was a perfectly ordinary little London hotel, located in Bayswater – a district famous for hotels like that. Or perhaps it was the opposite – infamous for its abundance of cheap tourist accommodation. The hotel didn’t have any signs that were visible only in the Twilight, like the ‘yin-yang’ symbol which traditionally means ‘Others welcome’. I was beginning to suspect that although Gesar had given me a business-class flight, he had economised on the accommodation.
Or was there actually some point in staying in the three-star Darling Hotel that occupied two houses in an old Victorian terrace (white walls, columns at the entrance, single-glazed windows with wooden frames)?
My room was typical for that kind of hotel – that is, small, with narrow doors, a low ceiling and a tiny bathroom. But the bathroom fittings were new, in the European style, and there was a flat-screen TV with a hundred satellite channels, including a couple of Russian channels squeezed in between the Arab and Chinese ones, and a minibar, and an airconditioner. The bed was also surprisingly large and comfortable.
It would do. I hadn’t come here to loiter in my room.
Exactly what I did now was entirely up to me. I could take a stroll round the shops, buy souvenirs and sit over a pint of beer in a pub, putting business off until tomorrow. I could go to visit Erasmus – unceremoniously, without an invitation. I could ride or walk through Hyde Park to Belgravia, where the office of the London Night Watch was located, and ask for their cooperation.
Or I could just phone Erasmus.
I took out my phone. Disdaining all subtlety and cunning, Mr Erasmus Darwin now styled himself in the French manner – as Monsieur Erasme de Arvin. And, when I heard his voice in the handset, I even realised why: he spoke with a slight accent, which any modern person would have identified as French.
In actual fact it was an echo of times gone by. An eighteenth-century accent.
The speech of old Others usually doesn’t differ much from modern speech. A language changes gradually, the new words enter the Others’ vocabulary, they pick up new intonations and only a few individual old-fashioned words or expressions are left. The more an Other associates with people, the more active he is in the Watch, the harder it is to tell his age by listening to him.
But if an Other has kept his association with his fellows and with humans to the minimum …
There was the accent. And the old-fashioned turns of phrase. And particular words … If I had studied English the way normal people do, and not absorbed it magically, I would hardly have understood a thing …
‘Erasme on the line, I heed you.’
‘This is Anton here. I’ve come from Moscow and I really need to see you, Mr Darwin. I’d like to have a word with you … about tigers …’
There was a brief pause. Then Erasmus said: ‘Long have I awaited your call, Antoine. I thought not that you would come from Muscovy, as a Gaul I saw you …’
‘You saw?’ I asked, confused.
‘It is known to you that I am a Prophet,’ Erasmus told me. ‘Come you to me – I shall not seek to thwart fate, but shall receive you.’
‘Thank you very much,’ I said, rather taken aback by such frank benevolence.
‘Nonsense is it to thank me, Antoine. The address is known to you. Take a cab and come without delay.’
Monsieur Erasme de Arvin, retired Prophet of the Day Watch and connoisseur of the intimate life of plants, lived beside a park. Properly speaking, the hotel where I was staying was also located beside a park, but there’s a big difference between Hyde Park and Regent’s Park. They may both belong to the Queen, but the former is noisier and simpler, more popular – as in ‘of the people’. You can find absolutely anything close by – from hugely expensive mansions and luxurious shops (that’s on the Thames side) to cheap hotels and ethnic neighbourhoods inhabited by Chinese, Albanians and Russians (that’s on the railway-station side, where that most likeable of English immigrants, Paddington Bear, once arrived).