‘Sixty-nine.’
‘Sixty-nine? I’m now minus thirteen. And I’m changing my letters. Where’s the bag?’
‘I’m sorry, Daddy, but please may I be excused?’
‘Oh don’t go up now, darling. We’ve barely started. Stay and have a lovely warm hot chocolate at least …’
A minute later Henry said, ‘What would you, Bugger? I’m trying to keep her spirits up and it’s exhausting her. And me. And when I try to draw her out …’
‘Write to her, sir,’ said Brendan. ‘Write.’
The King stayed up late, listening to the Irish Sea. Ewelme stood on the north-western tip of the Welsh peninsula, at the end of a mile-long single-lane causeway. Its situation, together with the infallibly dreadful weather, deterred all intruders — and indeed all visitors: no one who had stayed at Ewelme ever willingly returned. Henry, at his desk, in his overcoat, felt his ears vibrate as the tower bell sounded the quarter-hour. The wind was committing murders in the night, sudden abductions, terrible smotherings …
My dearest sweetheart,
My soul hurts for you, it truly does. I have never seen you so deeply low. Even after Mummy’s accident, the energy of your youth somehow seemed to carry you onward. Now you sleep sixteen hours a day and hardly eat anything. (And when you are awake you’re curled up with the Koran, or the Upanishads or the Targum or God knows what.) I do wish you’d agree to have a chat with Sir Edward, if nothing more.
My darling, I don’t know exactly what is troubling you. I know roughly what is troubling you. While you are in all things the chief sufferer, this ignorance is very heavy for your father. Rather than agonising about something in particular, I find I’m agonising about everything. I dare not close my eyes for fear of what I may see. I implore you to tell me what actually happened in the Yellow House, my dearest (who surprised you there?). And I earnestly do believe that you will feel the benefit. And if you had some sort of a romp with one of those pretty Arab boys, what of it?
The vultures. Our official position is that the material is faked. You and I are aware that the material, at least in part, is not faked. I was less confident than Brendan. None the less, there has been no rebuttal, let alone refutation, which is presumably in the enemies’ power. This is very much to the good (it has quietened things down a bit). Brendan says their silence reflects a certain incapacity on their part. And there is another fairly encouraging likelihood, which I will tell you about if you will only talk to me.
I have just read this through, and it’s such a curate’s egg! ‘Good in parts’ — albeit thoroughly rotten. I yearn to express the unconditional love and sympathy I feel, but I just sound selfish and pompous. It’s my poor character!
Sweetheart, my one, my only jewel, I beseech you: let us be in this together. I want to reach out and physically take some of the weight from your shoulders. Remember. It’s we two now.
5. February 14 (1.10 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: How’s our Flight Engineer?
First Officer Nick Chopko: Out cold.
Macmanaman: He can coax the computer along, I’ll give him that. I’d have killed it and gone to direct law … You know the rooftiles they have in England? Sheets of grey slate?
Chopko: Like machetes.
Macmanaman: This one, you could see it coming. Rennie thought it was a dead bird. It just twirled into him. Here.
Chopko: Jesus.
Macmanaman: … Royce Traynor was only ever going to fly CigAir when he was in the condition he’s in today.
Chopko: Dead.
Macmanaman: Dead. For him it was like a mission. Rennie said there was nothing — repeat, nothing — he liked more than telling someone to put a cigarette out. He’d get up in the middle of the night and call a cab if there was a good chance of telling someone to put a cigarette out. And get this. Rennie smoked a pack a day for forty-three years without him knowing. He would have killed her. Killed her. I think she did it to have something on him, to stick it to him. Why don’t people leave, Nick? Why don’t they just leave?
Chopko: I don’t know either.
Macmanaman: Addictive personality … I don’t like it up here. It’s too thin up here. I don’t like the physics of it up here. The difference between max and stall is just a couple of knots. It’s like a slide on black ice. Ask for three seven oh. Wait. The windshear: feel it’s moving around in back of us. It’s like … Uh, put everybody down, Nick. And the girls when they’ve secured the carts. This is my third time and I can feel it coming. There’s clear air [clear air turbulence] out there. I can feel it this time.
Four minutes later Flight 101 dropped a thousand yards at the speed of gravity: thirty-two feet per second per second. The coffin of Royce Traynor leapt from the floor of Pallet 3 and smashed into its ceiling. After a beat it smashed back down again. It landed corner-first on one of the canisters marked HAZMAT. There was an atrocious sneeze of thick pink liquid, then a steadier, seeping flow. After twenty-five minutes the dominant pool of thick pink liquid would begin to fume.
* * *
6. Apologia—1
Joseph Andrews was in his office, upstairs. Two sloping sheets of glass formed an isosceles triangle with the floor. You could see every freckle, every nostril hair … He held a microphone in his hand: buxom, corded, the mike of a bygone crooner. The pause button gave a little click whenever he freed it or engaged it.
‘[Click.] I want to tell you me story. Man to man. Let you be the judge. Let you be the judge … [Click.] … Gaw, where do I …? Go on then. Go on. [Click.]
‘I had such a reputation for enduring pain that when the prison dentist offered me an injection I felt pretty much duty-bound to chin him.
‘So he’ve gone off to see his dentist. And then of course the screws done me in the Strong Cell. Par for the course. Me cheek was out here. When the dentist come back [click] with his fucking jaw in a sling [click] … Well. They took a right liberty. I was in a straitjacket with me head in a clamp and me mouth wedged open with a sawblade. Ooh and that dentist, he’s give me abscess a right going over. Dear oh dear. They was watching to see if I’d flinch but I never. [Click.]
‘[Click.] There ain’t a form of punishment meted out in His Majesty’s Prisons that I’ve not took. Bread and water, deprivation of mattress, Refractory Block, PCFO. In the hospital wing they’ve give me the Blinder and the Crapper. They slip it in your coffee. The Blinder ain’t so bad — you just go all legless like. But the Crapper … you can kill a man in a week in that manner. I’ve had the Cat and the Birch. It’s a fallacy that I used to whistle while they was giving me the corporal. But on the thirteenth stroke I used to do a lovely yawn, and he’d come in with a will on the final five. Trying to make you cry out. No chance. The Birch is worst. It’s more uh, detrimental to a man’s dignity, being as how it’s on your arse. I mean you got some man on your shoulders, for the Cat. But it’s just a baby, your arse is.