INCARNATION (13 page)

‘I’m sorry, David. You’ve got too much to cope with. Why don’t you close the house for a while, come and live with us? You’ll be no good here on your own.’

‘I’ll get by.’

‘You never get by. You’re not self-sufficient. Your mother spoilt you.’

‘Father, there’s something I need to tell you. Please don’t mention it to anyone, especially not Mother.’

‘I never mention anything to her. Here, let’s sit down. I’m tired, standing all day.’

A wooden bench stood in the green shade of a tall ash tree. Two cousins hovering nearby smiled awkwardly and moved away, leaving David and his father alone. They sat down side by side, father and son, both bereft. All David could do suddenly was cry, deep, all-engulfing washes of silent tears that tore his heart. His father sat with him patiently, saying nothing, with one arm round his son’s shoulders. Above them, the birds sang and flew in and out, chirruping as though their hearts would burst.

In the house, in the unlit upstairs bathroom, Elizabeth sat on the toilet with her head in her hands, weeping uncontrollably. She’d been to Sam’s bedroom and found the toy rabbit he’d loved so much when he was three. It had been enough to trigger this crying jag. She held it by the ears, between the fingers of her left hand, a token of her grief, and a reminder that Sam had been lost to her long before death intervened.

Somewhere outside, she heard her name being called. In her absence, her sister Ann had started to show people round, taking friends to Sam’s room, pointing out the spot where he had died. People began leaving after that, one after the other, unable to bear the strangeness of this grief.

The garden emptied too, for no one had the heart to stand in the sunshine watching the ghost of a little boy run and climb and shout among the shrubs and flowers. David, his tears exhausted, watched them go, half-familiar figures moving back to the house. He heard his mother’s voice through an open window, sing-song, intoning an Uighur prayer, very quiet and subdued, locked more and more into the world of her youth.

‘Father,’ he said, ‘I have to leave London tomorrow.’

‘Leave?’

‘I’ve been ordered to Sinkiang. I’m flying to Urumchi in the morning.’

The old man nodded. He understood too little and too much.

‘Will it be dangerous?’ he asked.

‘Yes. It’s not routine. I can’t tell you any more. I shouldn’t really be telling you this much. You must keep it to yourself. If word got out, my life would be in even greater danger.’

‘You have my word, you know that.’

‘I know.’

A cloud passed like a sponge over the sun. David shivered. Up at the house, his mother’s voice dipped and died, and there was silence over everything.

‘David, before you leave, promise you’ll come to visit your mother and myself.’

David tensed. He’d wanted to get clean away, without tears or regrets.

‘Dad, I’m not sure I ...’

‘There’s something I want to give you, David. It may be of use where you’re going.’

‘What is it?’

His father gave him a cat-like look, knowing, yet expressionless.

‘You’ll see,’ the old man said. ‘Promise me you won’t leave without it.’

David hesitated for a moment, then nodded.

‘I promise,’ he said. ‘Now, isn’t it time we went in?’

‘In a moment. I like sitting here. I’ve always liked this garden.’ A leaf fell into his lap, as though bringing notice of the autumn to come. ‘They were Chinese?’

David nodded.

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Han?’

‘Probably, but I can’t be sure. They were able to write characters.’

He told his father about the girl, what they had done to her.

‘It’s meant to be erotic. To write on a naked woman’s body. Was she very beautiful?’

‘Yes. In another setting I would have found it erotic. This was ugly.’

‘It is such a beautiful poem. To put it to such use. He shook his head. David looked at the sky.

‘
Wu yan du shang Shilou
…’ he began.

'"I climb West Tower alone in silence.

While above my head the moon moves like a pickle.

The Yutong tree is lonely,

Bright autumn is locked in a dark courtyard.

You can slice away the pain of separation, but it will not leave you,

For your mind will still be in turmoil. 

Separation is nothing but melancholy. 

Parting lies in the heart like a bitter taste".'

His voice grew still. The cloud still sat on the sun, and a dark shadow lay across the lawn. Autumn was months away, but David could feel it in his heart already, locked inside it for ever.

‘Let’s go in,’ he said. It’s getting cold.’

And Elizabeth sat in her pale bathroom, that she had decorated years ago with her own hands, and felt the weeping subside, but not the pain. To live the life she lived, she had no choice but to fight down all feelings of tenderness or pity. She could not admit, even to herself, that a part of her still loved David, that little Sam had meant everything to her, and that Maddie awoke in her maternal instincts nobody would have guessed she had. And because part of her also hated David and pretended indifference to Sam, and despised Maddie for her weaknesses, she was able to bottle her other feelings inside and go on being the hard bitch she thought the world wanted her to be.

I
t was raining heavily by the time David reached the clinic. Everything was depressingly familiar: the tree-lined avenue, the drive up to the main house, the door with its discreet plaque. He rang the bell, and listened to its notes fading on the evening air. All round him he felt the weight of understated opulence. His life with Elizabeth had never quite accustomed him to real luxury. She’d always mocked him for it, good-naturedly at first, in recent years with genuine spite.

He’d met her shortly after finishing his degree, at a reception in the Chinese embassy. The Cultural Revolution had been officially over for a few years, but its effects still lingered, particularly within institutions like the diplomatic corps. The reception had been the first event in the embassy for years at which outsiders had been present. David’s father had been invited, one of several academics who the Chinese hoped might breathe a little life back into their universities after their long closure. He’d brought David in order to introduce him to a Uighur professor who had somehow survived the worst of the purges.

And Elizabeth? She’d been there with the rest of her expensive clan: Laurence, her older brother, groomed to be head of the family firm; Bernard, a younger brother, recently made a director, with responsibility for foreign sales; and their mother, Cassandra, head of the firm, a monster at seventy-five, with a captivating smile and eyes that would have frozen steel.

He ought to have taken his cue from the mother. But at twenty-two he’d found her fascinating and charming. And Elizabeth had knocked him off his feet. At twenty, she’d been beautiful, funny, and winningly sad. They didn’t make women like her where he came from; in fact, they didn’t make women like her anywhere else on earth. He spent most of that evening with her, and before they left asked her out. Now, nearly thirty years on, he could still taste the pleasure of that moment when she’d said yes.

Soft footsteps crossed the hall, and the door swung open. A young woman in a nurse’s uniform smiled at him.

‘Mr Laing?’

He nodded and stepped inside. It smelled familiar.

Rose was waiting for him in his office on the ground floor. Everything in the room was exactly as it had been three years earlier. Row upon row of hunting prints on the back wall, a wide mahogany desk against the window, a tall blue-and-white vase in one corner that David had explained patiently was not Ming Dynasty, but Ching. Rose came forward with a smile on his slim face identical to that of the nurse.

He was a small, dapper man with wiry white hair brushed back behind a high forehead, as if to convey strength and intelligence. David found him affable enough, and immensely skilled at his job; but he could never quite like him. The doctor held out a pale smooth hand and took David’s, as though reaching for a fragile ornament.

‘How’s Maddie?’

‘Maddie is fine. The hysteria has calmed down a great deal, and the drugs are slowly modifying her other symptoms. It won’t be fast, but we’ve started to make progress. I started her on lithium yesterday. Just 200 milligrams, but I’d like to move her up to 800 or 1,000 in the next couple of weeks.’

‘What about psychotherapy? If she’s stabilizing ...?’

Rose shook his head sharply. His neatly packed little skull seemed to vibrate. A thin strand of hair fell away from the central pile.

‘Many of my patients see psychotherapists. I have an excellent man for hypnosis, he gets good results. But I would not recommend either approach for Maddie under any circumstances. Psychotherapists have to dismantle someone’s personality before putting it back together again. I think Maddie is too fragile for that. It might not be possible to rebuild her once she has been taken apart. Let me do what I can with the drugs. They’ll give her whatever support she needs to do what she must do.’

‘Can I see her?’

‘Of course. But not for long. Your wife was here earlier.’

‘Elizabeth? What the hell? You know what we did today?’

‘Yes. I’m very sorry. Your wife was … not well when she arrived.’

‘She’d been drinking?’

‘Oh, yes. But it wasn’t the drink. Her grief expresses itself in … unhealthy ways.’

‘Such as?’

‘She wasn’t alone. She had someone with her, a - well, what I would call a guru. Perhaps I’m not being accurate. Perhaps he’s a shaman, or a channeller, or whatever. You know what I mean. Long robes. A peculiar hat.’

‘Oh, Lord. I think I’ve heard about this man. He does the rounds. Elderly widows, young girls. Tell me you didn’t let her take him up to Maddie.’

'That’s what she wanted. She claimed he could “set her chakras” right. I told her, he was free to do what he liked, but he wasn’t going within fifty yards of your daughter.’

‘I don’t suppose she was any too keen on that.’ 

‘There was a little confrontation, yes. But she saw sense in the end.’

‘And did she see Maddie?’

‘Yes, for a few minutes. I left the guru with Tim Bowles, my assistant, and went upstairs with her.’

‘Did she say anything ...? I mean, did she mention Sam or the funeral?’

‘No. Absolutely nothing. I was there the whole time. I thought it best. Mrs Laing seemed … not quite in control.’

‘What about Maddie? How did she handle it?’ 

‘Very well, considering. Look, why don’t we pay her a visit? She often talks of you. I told her you were coming today.’

More than anything, David disliked the clinic for its suffocating silences. Everything seemed shut in behind walls and doors and drugs. All the cries of grief and howls of pain, all the tears and sobs of pure misery were blocked up, shut down, concealed. There were no rattling trolleys, no slamming doors, no whistling orderlies, no televisions blaring: just white-clothed nurses moving in rubber shoes across thick carpet, doors that opened with a soft hiss at the press of a button, and every so often the quiet passage of a doctor in a dark suit and pastel tie, come to minister in silence to the manic and deranged.

As he paused to open the door of Maddie’s room, Dr Rose turned to David.

‘Forgive me, but I need to know. When I spoke to her yesterday, Maddie said you … I don’t know how to put this. She suggested you had killed people. That this was in some way connected to your work. I told her you were a civil servant, that it was highly unlikely you would go round killing people. But it seems to distress her, and I need to get at the root of it. Is there any connection? Perhaps you work for the Ministry of Defence?’

He’d never told her; she’d guessed from chance remarks he’d made, from hints and clues. It had been just before her boyfriend, Zheng Juntao, had been killed, and somehow the two events had locked together in her mind: her father’s career in intelligence, and her lover’s disappearance.

‘I must be certain this is covered by your obligation to confidentiality.’

‘Of course.’

‘All I can tell you is that Maddie is telling the truth. I think she’s frightened I may be killed in the same way. What happened to her brother was connected. I work in a very dangerous trade.’

‘And your departure tomorrow?’

He hesitated. Too much depended on this trip for anyone to know about it.

‘I’m going to Scotland,’ he said. ‘To train some new employees. To put them through their paces. Unfortunately … I won’t be able to make any phone calls. Perhaps you can help me with that.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

He pressed a red button on the wall, and the door slid open.

‘Call me when you want out,’ he said. ‘You know the routine.’

David stepped inside, and the door sighed shut behind him. Maddie was sitting in a comfortable armchair beside the bed. She looked up and, when she saw who it was, broke into a broad smile.

‘Come in, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask them to give us tea. Why didn’t you bring Sam along?’

Part III

Sinkiang Province, Western China

T
he plane dipped through the burnt air like a diver shearing water. There were no clouds, but layers of hot, swelling air tossed the fragile casing with its human cargo like a paper cup in a high, incautious wind.

They came in low across the Turfan Depression, the second lowest place on the earth’s surface. David looked through the window. Below him, an expanse of green tumbled away to the horizon. Then, abruptly, the land lifted and they were flying across a desert of stone. At an angle ahead of them, the Huozhou Shan hills shimmered like crimson flames against the blue air. And then, as the plane banked in its descent to Urumchi, through the window opposite he caught sight of the Tien Shan range, white-topped and lyrical, its peaks swirling like jade dancers among veils of cloud and mist. The Heavenly Mountains. He’d climbed there several times, almost died in a blizzard once on the slopes of Pik Pobedy, slap on the border with what had been the USSR.