The One Who Is Two (Book 1 of White Rabbit)

Cadwallader unlocked the driver's door and then turned back to look at the house.

  In the great scheme of things it wasn't much – a three bedroom detached house in a modern estate on the edge of Rickmansworth – but it had been the centre of his life for five years. He had decorated it himself, he had fitted out the bathroom and installed the new kitchen units. The flower beds he had laid out were flourishing and the Norwegian maple he had planted in the front lawn, and had watered lovingly through two summers of drought, was beginning to look like a real tree, standing clear of its now redundant stake, its trunk thickening and its branches spreading.

  And now what was it, this house that had once been his? Home to a woman who held him in contempt and to two children who were quickly forgetting who he was.

  He scanned the little close of neat suburban homes, each surrounded by a pocket-handkerchief of carefully tended garden, each struggling in vain to proclaim individuality: the grand front doors with brass fittings, the carriage-style porch lights, the mock-Jacobean leaded windows. He remembered how he had come to despise these facile pretensions, how he had felt suffocated by the primness and by the essential vacuity of the place, and how he had wanted to escape from it all, to get away. Anyhow, anywhere, just away.

  And so he had gone. Leaving haus frau Stephanie for the arms an exciting new partner, escaping the suffocating prison of suburban pettiness for the thrilling promise of limitless freedom, he had turned his back on this cosy little world, and at the time that had felt so completely right, his path having the sharp clarity of a spiritual epiphany. Now, however, everything had changed, now this world was turning its back on him as firmly as he had turned his back on it – and that didn't feel quite so good. Because for all its prim cosiness and its smug security, it didn't seem so bad now, not so bad at all; not now that his life was bereft of all vestiges of cosiness and security. Even the dull roar of the M25, the eternal background to life on the estate that had once so irritated him, now sounded more like the purr of a friendly cat.

  Shivering in the brisk wind, he felt the first spatterings of a cold drizzle on his face. He opened the car door, fumbling with his keys. Then, as he slid into the driver's seat, a new misery struck home like a knife wound in the guts. He should have told her today, if only because of the mortgage payments. Soon all that would remain of seven years work would be a few items of obsolete hardware and three boxes of promotional tee-shirts in the company's rather lurid livery. Because somehow, in the midst of a boom in the software linkage systems market, he had managed to drive his once thriving business into the ground.