Omega

We descended a long underpass, the tunnel barely lit, cat’s eyes blinking on and off at their headlights. Stradling looked cadaverous in the instrument panel’s glow, while Giselle had her eyes closed. No sounds from the rear of the car.

We emerged, and when Owain’s eyes had readjusted we saw that the convoy was drawing up in front of a line of enormous concrete hangars camouflaged with turf. Two of the hangar doors were open and inside each of them stood a white Nimbus, identical to the one we had glimpsed at Northolt.

Broadoaks Court was a 1920s redbrick mansion at the end of a wooded drive. We parked in one of the side bays and walked around to the front, my heart beginning to pump a little faster as we mounted the steps. There was no sign of Rees’s car.

I still couldn’t fathom why Lyneth hadn’t been in touch since the accident. Surely someone must have contacted her by now? Had she taken the girls on holiday somewhere further afield—Indonesia or the Pacific Islands? Perhaps they hadn̻t been able to track her down. But surely she would have phoned over Christmas, at least had the girls leave a message. It might be on the answer phone at home. Strange that Tanya hadn’t mentioned it. I was certain it wasn’t something I would have forgotten.

“All right?” Tanya asked.

“Fine.”

“Liar.”

I couldn’t ask her about it now. Too much else to contend with. How could Geoff tolerate my presence in his house, knowing what he knew? And not only tolerate it but also actively try to assist me in my recovery. Where was he sleeping? In the locked bedroom? I couldn’t recall. It just wouldn’t come.

We rang the bell. It was answered by a middle-aged nurse in a green plastic apron.

Inside, the lobby had the air of a down-at-heels hotel, a threadbare carpet over mulberry-coloured tiles, a scruffy sofa against one wall. Plug-in deodorisers in the wall sockets failed to mask the smell of stale urine and cold boiled potatoes.

The nurse made a phone call. I remembered that the place wasn’t strictly a nursing home but an outlier of the local hospital where patients with age-related illnesses had agreed to undergo clinical trials of new drugs and therapies. So far nothing that had been tried on my father had worked.

Shortly a middle-aged man in tortoiseshell spectacles came down the stairs. Rees and a black woman in her twenties were close behind.

Rees made a beeline for me. By his standards he was smartly dressed in jeans and a putty-coloured jacket over a black top.

“He’s been asking after you,” he said. “We played draughts.”

“Oh?” I replied. “Did you win?”

“This is Keisha.”

She came forward. Good-looking, buried under an outdoors jacket in burnt orange. Her hair was drawn back in a loose ponytail that had the effect of giving her a sober, professional air. We shook hands.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said.

“Likewise,” I told her. “Has he been behaving himself?”

She rolled her eyes in a long-suffering way. “Does he ever?”

Rees had already gone over to talk to Tanya. The spectacled man was Dr Pearce, I recalled, the unit’s manager.

“Rees told me about you,” I said to Keisha. “To be honest, I thought he was making you up.”

“The last time I looked I was real.”

I tried to choose my words carefully. “I hope you don’t mind me asking—but are you really his girlfriend?”

“Well, today I feel more like his chauffeur.”

Tanya and Dr Pearce came over. Rees was talking animatedly to the nurse, who looked a little taken aback by the ardour of his attentions.

“How is he?” I asked Dr Pearce.

I was asking about my father but my eyes were still on Rees.

“He’s been fine,” the doctor said, obviously with reference to my brother, whose case history he knew. “How are you?”

“Bearing up. We didn’t know he was coming.”

“So I gather. No harm done. Professor Meredith was quite taken with Miss Rutherford here.”

“He kept asking if I’d give him a blanket bath,” Keisha said. “My role in life.”

Her tone was fatalistic. It was far more good-natured than my father deserved. He had always had a contradictory attitude towards non-whites, being a severe critic of colonialism while at the same time seeing in the eclipse of the white-owned corner shop a microcosm of national decline. He abhorred what he called tribalism as manifested in everything from team sports to civil wars but was prone to making irritable denunciations of “Rastafarian music” or the inability of “minorities” to adapt themselves to the prevailing culture of the country where they lived.

“Is he lucid at all?” I asked Pearce.

“It’s unpredictable. Your brother certainly kept him stimulated.”

“Until I dragged him out of there,” Keisha volunteered.

“Where is he?”

“In the recreation room,” Pearce said. “He hasn’t been out today. Perhaps you’d like to take him out for some air?”

Pearce was already moving towards the corridor, drawing Tanya along.

“What about Rees?” I said. He was talking avidly to the nurse about golf, a game I was certain he’d never played.

“I’ll keep him out of your hair,” Keisha reassured me.

FORTY-TWO