Omega

My father was one of those men who aspired to old age as though youth was intrinsically disreputable. During the academic year we lived in a house near Balliol College, where he had a professorship. The rest of the time we made our home in the village of Bishopston, outside Swansea. This was where I’d first met Lyneth. Our romance, if you could call it that, always had an air of being a leisure-time activity, with treks to secluded coves and chaste kissing on the gorse-and-bramble heaths.

My father kept near-identical studies in both places for his work. I remember once, when I was about eight, finding the heavy oaken door ajar. I can’t recall whether we were in Oxford or Swansea, but the same rules applied: neither Rees nor I were allowed inside except on his express instructions. On that particular day I just couldn’t resist: I wandered in.

The room was filled with dark bookcases and antique furniture. It smelt musty and male. Half drawn curtains shaded everything. I didn’t dare put on the light.

My father always worked in longhand at a pedestal desk, a lanky man perched on the edge of his office chair, scribbling notes and scrutinising documents with his reading glasses gleaming in the lamplight. Grey-haired and meticulous in his habits, he was old to me even then.

I clambered up into his chair and peered at the unfathomable piles of paper there. I tried to mimic his posture, but as I did so the chair began to roll out from under me. I grabbed the desk, upsetting a pile of papers, which scattered on the floor.

I did my frantic best to tidy them and put them back on the desk in a semblance of order; but I knew my efforts would be futile. I crept out of the room and closed the door, saying nothing to Mrs Bayliss, our housekeeper. When my father returned home that evening it was only a matter of minutes before he emerged from his study and began demanding to know who had been interfering with his documents.

I owned up immediately, making a determinedly cheerful attempt to explain how I’d tidied everything up. He just stared down at me in a controlled fury, and when I was finished his bony fingers encircled my wrist and he propelled me into the study, closing the door behind him and turning the key in the lock. Wwereut saying a word, he snatched a slipper from under the desk—a buff tartan slipper that to me had hitherto symbolised indolent adult comfort. He bent me over his crooked legs and proceeded to slap my trousered bottom a precise and emphatic ten times.

He didn’t speak once, not even when he thrust me blubbering out the door. Nor was the incident ever spoken of again.

I was lying on a trolley, being wheeled into a room that looked like an operating theatre. Two nurses hoisted me and laid me face-up on another surface. Slowly it began to move forward towards some kind of metal tunnel just big enough to accommodate my body. I could hear the drone of the motor, sense its vibrations. I had the panicky idea that I was a corpse about to be deposited down the chute of a crematorium. They’d pop me into the tube, tip it up and I’d slide to oblivion.

In I went, moving deeper down until only my head protruded. It stopped.

A female Asian doctor loomed over me. She was smiling and appeared to be saying something comforting. It came to me that I was wearing one of those hospital gowns, an absurdly comforting thought. If they were going to dispose of me, surely I would have been naked.

“Wait,” I yelled. “Where’s my wife? Where are my children?”

I couldn’t hear anything emerge; but the doctor turned towards me.

“Hamley’s,” I said passionately. “Has anything happened to it?” I had awoken with a renewed anxiety that perhaps the store had been destroyed, that Lyneth and the girls were dead.

“An explosion,” I persisted. “Are they alive?”

I felt as if I was talking at the top of my voice. The doctor looked a little perplexed. It was plain she couldn’t hear me. I was still locked in; probably not even my lips were moving.

“Try to relax,” she told me. “There really is nothing to be concerned about.”

Easy for you to say, I thought; you’re not the one who keeps lurching between worlds. I was unable to control or even anticipate the transitions. The latest episode had been by far the most intensive, as though Owain’s life was exerting an increasingly seductive pull.

I could see my face in a slanted mirror just inches away. Everything looked normal: no cuts or bruises, all my hair in place. I managed to grin at myself—a small but defiant upturn of the lips. For some reason I started thinking about my mother. I had few memories of her apart from her death. Another thing my father never talked about.

I was moving again, being drawn right inside the tube. I closed my eyes, trying to summon my mother’s face and failing. Rees had driven himself crazy in later years with the conviction that she had deliberately killed herself and that our father was to blame.

ELEVEN