‘Till Burnham Wood shall come to Dunsinane,’ Sir Jack announced for the benefit of the dozen rows in front of him. ‘As the mighty William observed.’
B-Group were twenty yards from the Cave mouth when three arrows whizzed over them and pierced the ground a few feet in front of row AA. Huge applause acknowledged that such precise realism was what a double supplement was all about. Mad Mike looked across at his fellow gymnasts and security men, then back at the grandstand, half expecting a signal, or supplementary instructions from Paul over his headset. When none came, he murmured into his microphone, ‘Red red robin. Time to go bobbing. Forty seconds, chaps.’ He gave an invented gesture to A-Group on top of the Cave. Four of its six members were now poised on straining ropes above the windows, each gauging the depth and distance of his gymnastic arc. Looking down, they were surprised by what looked like the greasy sheen of real glass. At the Embassy the windows were made of low-impact, high-shatter crackle-glaze. Well, presumably Techno-Development had come up with something even more authentic.
Mad Mike and his Number Two now rose to their knees, and each threw a stun-grenade into the Cave. The special thirty-second fuses were designed to stretch dramatic tension; the explosions would be the signal for A-Group to go through the windows. B-Group were still face-down in the dirt, pretending to cover their ears, when they heard another double-supplement chuckle from behind. The two grenades, now down to their final seconds of fuse, were coming back in their direction, followed by three arrows, which landed unnecessarily close. The grenades exploded thunderously among B-Group, who were relieved they were not the real thing. ‘All fart and no fire,’ Mad Mike commented to himself, forgetting his words were going straight into the headsets of each high roller in the grandstand.
To cover his confusion, he rose to his feet shouting ‘Go, go, GO!’ and led the charge over the remaining twenty yards or so of ground. Simultaneously, the four roped SAS men launched themselves out from the rock’s side, aiming their cleated boots at the picture windows.
Later, it was hard to decide who had screamed first: the members of A-Group who between them sustained two broken ankles and eight severely jolted knees on the Cave’s reinforced double-glazing; or the members of B-Group when they saw half a dozen arrows coming in their direction. One struck Mad Mike in the shoulder; another took his Number Two through the thigh.
‘Go, go, GO!’ shouted the recumbent Colonel as his team of athletes and actors gave most realistic flight in the opposite direction.
‘Fuck, fuck, FUCK!’ growled Sir Jack.
‘Ambulance,’ said Martha Cochrane to Ted Wagstaff as unseen hands flipped the Cave windows open and yanked the dangling SAS men inside.
Maid Marian’s dyke bodyguard ran from the Cave and dragged Mad Mike away. ‘Go, go, GO!’ he shouted, valiant to the end.
‘Fuck, fuck, FUCK!’ echoed Sir Jack. He turned to Martha Cochrane and said, ‘Even you must admit you’ve made a complete and utter balls of this.’
Martha didn’t reply at first. She’d trusted Paul to do a better job. Or maybe the choreography had been agreed and then Hood had double-crossed him. The assault had been an amateurish disaster. And yet … and yet … She turned back to the Governor: ‘Listen to the applause.’ Indeed. The whistling and clapping was now modulating into a rhythmical stamping which threatened the bleachers. They’d loved it, that was clear. The special effects had been terrific; Mad Mike, in his wounded heroism, was utterly convincing; any mishaps merely confirmed the action’s authenticity. And after all, Martha suddenly realized, most Visitors would have wanted the Merrie Men to triumph. The SAS might be heroes down at the Iranian Embassy, but here they were a snatch squad ordered in by the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham.
Robin’s Band, like reluctant actors, were pulled from the Cave to take numerous bows. A helicopter ambulance dodged in to transport the Colonel’s Number Two straight to Dieppe Hospital. Meanwhile, Mad Mike himself, bound with thick rope, was displayed as a hostage.
The applause continued. It had definite possibilities, Martha thought. She and Paul would have to talk it through with Jeff. The Concept needed further Development, of course, and it was a pity about the Band’s over-enthusiasm; but cross-epoch conflict clearly had strong Visitor Resonance.
Sir Jack cleared his throat and turned to Martha. Ceremoniously, he placed his tricorne on his head. ‘I shall expect your resignation in the morning.’
Had he lost all touch with reality?
THE NEXT MORNING, when Martha opened her office door, Sir Jack Pitman was sitting behind her desk, thumb casually hooked through gilded lanyard. He was on the telephone; or at least, he was speaking into the telephone. Behind him stood Paul. Sir Jack pointed to a low chair drawn up on the other side of the desk. As at her first interview, Martha declined to follow instruction.
After a minute or so, having issued orders to someone who might or might not have been at the other end of the telephone, Sir Jack touched a button and said, ‘Hold my calls.’ Then he looked up at Martha. ‘Surprised?’
Martha did not reply.
‘Well, not unsurprised, then.’ He chuckled, as at some obscure reference.
Martha was almost there when Sir Jack rose heavily and said, ‘But my dear Paul, I forget. This is your chair now. My congratulations.’ Aping some court chamberlain or parliamentary usher, he stiffly held the chair for Paul, then pushed it in under his thighs. Paul, Martha noted, at least had the shame to look embarrassed.
‘You see, Miss Cochrane, you never learned the simple lesson. You remind me of the hunter who went after the grizzly bear. You know the story?’ He did not wait for Martha to respond. ‘It bears retelling, anyway. Bears, that’s rich, excuse my unintended jocundity. It must be a product of my mood. So: a hunter heard that there was a bear on an island off the coast of Alaska. He hired a helicopter to take him over the water. After a search he found the bear, a great, big, wise old bear. He lined him up in his sights, got off a quick shot – peeeeeoooow – and made the terrible, the unforgivable mistake of merely wounding the animal. The bear ran off into the woods, with the hunter in pursuit. He circled the island, he criss-crossed it, he sought bear-tracks up hill and down dale. Perhaps Bruin had crawled off into some cave and breathed his furry last. At any event, no bear. The day was beginning to draw in, so the hunter decided that enough was enough, and made his weary way back to where the helicopter was waiting. He got to within a hundred yards or so of it and noticed the pilot waving to him in a rather excited fashion. He stopped, put down his gun to wave back, and that was the moment when the bear, with a single swipe of its extraordinary paw’ – Sir Jack sketched the gesture in case Martha could not imagine it – ‘took off the hunter’s head.’
‘And the bear lived happily ever after?’ Martha was unable to resist the jibe.
‘Well, I’ll tell you this, the hunter fucking didn’t, Miss Cochrane, the hunter fucking didn’t.’ Sir Jack, rearing up before her, seemed more ursine by the moment, rocking and bellowing. Paul chuckled like a reinstated sycophant.
Ignoring Sir Jack, she said to the newly appointed Chief Executive Officer, ‘I give you six months at the most.’
‘Is that accurate flattery?’ he replied coldly.
‘I thought …’ Oh, forget it, Martha. You thought you’d assessed the situation. Various situations. You hadn’t. That’s all.
‘Pardon me for intruding upon a moment of private grief.’ Sir Jack’s sarcasm was lascivious. ‘But there are a few contractual points to make clear. Your pension rights are revoked as per contract due to your gross misconduct over the incident at the Hood Cave. You have twelve hours to clear your desk and your quarters. Your leaving present is an economy-class, one-way ferry ticket to Dieppe. Your career is at an end. But just in case you are inclined to disagree, the fraud and embezzlement charges we have prepared will lie on the record for future activation, if necessary.’
‘Auntie May,’ said Martha.
‘My mother had only brothers,’ r
eplied Sir Jack smugly.
She looked at Paul, who wouldn’t accept her eye. ‘There’s no evidence,’ he said. ‘Not anymore. It must have disappeared. Been burnt or something.’
‘Or eaten by a bear.’
‘Very good, Miss Cochrane. I’m glad to see you retain your sense of humour despite everything. Of course I have to warn you that were you to make any allegations, public or private, which I might deem harmful to the interests of my beloved Project, then I should not hesitate to use all the powers at my considerable command to discourage you. And knowing me as you do, you will be aware that I would not content myself with merely defending my interests. I would be very pro-active. I’m sure you understand.’
‘Gary Desmond,’ said Martha.
‘Miss Cochrane, you are off the pace. Early retirement was clearly beckoning anyway. Tell her the news, Paul.’
‘Gary Desmond has been appointed editor-in-chief of The Times.’
‘At a generous salary.’
‘Correct, Miss Cochrane. Cynics say that everyone has their price. I am less cynical than some I could mention. I think everyone has a proper sense of the level at which they would like to be remunerated. Is that not a more honourable way of looking at things? You yourself, I seem to remember, demanded certain salary conditions when you first came to work for me. You wanted the job, but you named your price. So any criticism of the estimable Mr Desmond, whose journalistic record is second to none, would be pure hypocrisy.’
‘About which you …’ Oh, forget it, Martha. Let it go.
‘You seem to be leaving a lot of sentences unfinished this morning, Miss Cochrane. Stress, I expect. A long sea voyage is the traditional remedy. Alas, we can only offer a short Channel crossing.’ He pulled an envelope from his pocket and tossed it in front of her. ‘And now,’ he said, placing his tricorne on his head and drawing himself up less like a rearing grizzly than a ship’s captain pronouncing sentence on a mutineer, ‘I hereby declare you persona non grata on the Island. In perpetuity.’
Responses came to Martha’s mind, but not her lips. She gave Paul a neutral glance, ignored the envelope, and left her office for the final time.
SHE SAID GOODBYE to Dr Max, to Country Mouse, to the Pragmatic Pagan. Dr Max, who sought neither happiness nor salvation. Did he seek love? She presumed not, but they hadn’t exactly discussed it. He claimed he wanted only pleasure, with its beautifully etched discontents. They kissed cheeks, and she got a whiff of cloned eau de toilette. As she turned to go, Martha suddenly felt responsible. Dr Max might have constructed his own shiny carapace, but she saw him at that moment as something vulnerable, innocent, decorticated. Who would protect him now that she was gone?
‘Dr Max.’
‘Miss Cochrane?’ He stood before her, thumbs in the pockets of his eucalyptus waistcoat, as if expecting another student question he could biff around.
‘Look, you remember when I called you in a couple of months ago?’
‘When you were planning to sack me?’
‘Dr Max!’
‘Well, you were, weren’t you? An h–istorian acquires a certain nose for the mechanisms of power in the course of his studies.’
‘Will you be all right, Dr Max?’
‘I imagine so. The Pitman papers will take a lot of sorting. And then of course there’s the biography.’
Martha smiled at him, and shook her head rebukingly. The rebuke was self-directed: Dr Max needed neither her advice nor her protection.
In the church of St Aldwyn she gazed at the lottery-line numbers. No jackpot this week, Martha, yet again. She sat on a dank, initialled petit-point hassock and seemed almost to sniff the wet light. Why was she drawn here? She didn’t come to pray. There was no neat spirit of repentance. The sceptic come to heel, the blasphemer whose cataracts dissolve: her case did not replicate the old clergy-pleasing story. Yet was there a parallel? Dr Max did not believe in salvation, but perhaps she did, and felt she might find it among the remnants of a greater, discarded system of salvation.
—So, Martha, what are you after? You can tell me.
—What am I after? I don’t know. Perhaps a recognition that life, despite everything, has a capacity for seriousness. Which has eluded me. As it eludes most people, probably. But still.
—Go on.
—Well, I suppose life must be more serious if it has a structure, if there’s something larger out there than yourself.
—Nice and diplomatic, Martha. Banal, too. Triumphantly meaningless. Try again.
—All right. If life is a triviality, then despair is the only option.
—Better, Martha. Much better. Unless what you’re meaning is that you’ve decided to seek God as a way of avoiding antidepressants.
—No, not that. You misunderstand. I’m not in a church because of God. One of the problems is that the words, the serious words, have been used up over the centuries by people like those rectors and vicars listed on the wall. The words don’t seem to fit the thoughts nowadays. But I think there was something enviable about that otherwise unenviable world. Life is more serious, and therefore better, and therefore bearable, if there is some larger context.
—Oh come on, Martha, you’re boring me. You may not be religious, but you’re certainly pious. I liked you more the way you used to be. Brittle cynicism is a truer response to the modern world than this … sentimental yearning.
—No, it’s not sentimental. On the contrary. I’m saying life is more serious, and better, and bearable, even if its context is arbitrary and cruel, even if its laws are false and unjust.
—Now this is the luxury of hindsight. Tell that to the victims of religious persecution down the centuries. Would you prefer to be broken on the wheel or have a nice little bungalow on the Isle of Wight? I think I can guess the answer.
—And another thing —
—But you didn’t answer my last point.
—Well, you might be wrong. And another thing. An individual’s loss of faith and a nation’s loss of faith, aren’t they much the same? Look what happened to England. Old England. It stopped believing in things. Oh, it still muddled along. It did OK. But it lost seriousness.
—Oh, so now it’s a nation’s loss of faith, is it? This is pretty ironic stuff coming from you, Martha. You think the nation does better if it has some serious beliefs, even if they’re arbitrary and cruel? Bring back the Inquisition, wheel on the Great Dictators, Martha Cochrane proudly presents –
—Stop. I can’t explain without mocking myself. The words just follow their own logic. How do you cut the knot? Perhaps by forgetting words. Let the words run out, Martha …
Into her mind came an image, one shared by earlier occupants of these pews. Not Guilliamus Trentinus, of course, or Anne Potter, but perhaps known to Ensign Robert Timothy Pettigrew, and Christina Margaret Benson, and James Thoro-good, and William Petty. A woman swept and hanging, a woman half out of this world, terrified and awestruck, yet in the end safely delivered. A sense of falling, falling, falling, which we have every day of our lives, and then an awareness that the fall was being made gentler, was being arrested, by an unseen current whose existence no-one suspected. A short, eternal moment that was absurd, improbable, unbelievable, true. Eggs cracked from the slight concussion of landing, but nothing more. The richness of all subsequent life after that moment.
Later the moment had been appropriated, reinvented, copied, coarsened; she herself had helped. But such coarsening always happened. The seriousness lay in celebrating the original image: getting back there, seeing it, feeling it. This was where she parted company from Dr Max. Part of you might suspect that the magical event had never occurred, or at least not as it was now supposed to have done. But you must also celebrate the image and the moment even if it had never happened. That was where the little seriousness of life lay.
She placed new flowers on the altar and took away last week’s, which were crusted and fragile. She pulled the heavy door awkwardly shut, but did not lock it in case there were ot
hers. For thine is the wigwam, the flowers and the story.
3: Anglia
WITH A SERIES of wristy, metallic swipes Jez Harris sharpened his scythe. The vicar owned an ancient, petrol-driven Atco, but Jez preferred to do things properly; besides, the slewed headstones were planted in a deliberate clutter, as if to defy any mechanical mower. From across the churchyard, Martha watched Harris bend down and tighten his leather knee-straps. Then he spat on his palms, uttered a few invented oaths, and began to attack the couch-grass and rosebay willow-herb, the cornflowers and the straggling vetch. Until the weeds grew back again, Martha would be able to read the incised names of her future companions.
It was early June, a week before the Fěte, and the weather was giving a false impression of summer. The wind had dropped, and slow bumblebees nosed through the scent of baked grass. A silver-washed fritillary exchanged carefree flight-paths with a meadow brown. Only a hyperactive chiff-chaff, scavenging for insects, displayed an intrusive work-ethic. The woodland birds were bolder than they had been in her childhood. The other day Martha had seen a hawfinch crack a cherry-stone right at her feet.
The churchyard was a place of informality and collapse, of time’s softer damage. A cloudburst of old-man’s-beard concealed the perilous lean of a flinty wall. There was a copper beech, two of whose tiring branches were propped with wooden crutches, and a lych-gate whose circumflex roof leaked. The licheny slats of the bench on which Martha sat complained even at her cautiously applied weight.
‘The chiff-chaff is a restless bird, which does not form in flocks.’ Where had that come from? It had just entered her head. No, that was wrong: it had always been in her head, and had taken this opportunity to flit across her mind. The operation of memory was becoming more random; she had noticed that. Her mind still worked with clarity, she thought, but in its resting moments all sorts of litter from the past blew about. Years ago, in middle age, or maturity, or whatever you called it, her memory had been practical, justificatory. For instance, childhood was remembered in a succession of incidents which explained why you were the person you had turned out to be. Nowadays there was more slippage – a bicycle chain jumping a cog – and less consequence. Or perhaps this was your brain hinting at what you didn’t want to know: that you had become the person you were not by explicable cause-and-effect, by acts of will imposed on circumstance, but by mere vagary. You beat your wings all your life, but it was the wind that decided where you went.