Out of the Sun (6 page)

"If I'd tried to slide them off while handing you the cup, you'd have noticed, wouldn't you? Besides, it's quite hot in here, so they'd probably stick a bit. But not if you simply lift them up and swap them over."

Amanda seemed as genuinely shocked as the audience was genuinely impressed. Harry did not know what to think. But, before he had the chance to ponder the point, Slade had moved on.

"It's OK, Amanda. Your rings are completely unharmed. Finish your coffee. It'll calm you down."

She took the cup from him, raised it obediently from the saucer to drink, then stopped. "It's empty," she said in amazement.

"So it is," said Slade. "Now, what did I do with that?" More applause.

"Never mind. I'll pour you another." Amanda by now resembled somebody in a hypnotic trance. After filling the cup and giving it back to her, Slade ambled over to Mark and Neil. "You can let go now, gentlemen," he said, taking the rope away and handing them each one of the wooden hoops. "It's time for a little healthy competition. The coffee-pot's solid silver. And it's yours if you can toss your hoop over it. Fairground stuff, eh? In fact, a piece of cake. Test the hoops first. Make sure they're solid. Stretch them. Twist them. Bite them if you like." When Mark and Neil had tapped and strained to their satisfaction, he stepped back and waved them into action. "Fire away. Would you like to go first, Mark?"

But priority made no difference. From the far side of the stage, with nerves ajangle, it turned out to be too much for both of them. Mark's fell dismally short, while Neil's went way over the top. Slade retrieved them with eye-rolling expressions of mock disgust, then took careful aim himself, as if intent on showing the audience how it should be done. But what he showed them was rather different. The first hoop flew low and fast through the air, striking the table-leg about halfway up and ricocheting away. "If at first you don't succeed," remarked Slade unabashed, 'try something else." He tossed the second hoop almost nonchalantly. It too struck the table-leg, but did not rebound from it. Instead, it somehow looped itself around the leg and could suddenly be seen rattling to rest round the base. Some people stood up. Others gasped in astonishment. Even Harry was taken aback. He was not at all sure that Secrets of Houdini would contain an explanation of what he had just seen. He was not at all sure it could be explained. But it had happened.

Amidst resounding cheers, Slade discharged the volunteers from the stage, stopping Amanda just as she was leaving and asking her to check her rings again. To her crowning astonishment, universally shared, she discovered they had been switched back to their original positions.

Then the props were removed and the music assumed a frolicsome beat. Two clowns rode onto the stage on mono cycles and completed a couple of wobbly circuits. One of them dismounted, handed his machine to Slade and capered off. A cable was lowered, which Slade clipped to the saddle before standing back to watch as the cycle was raised about six feet off the floor. The same procedure was then followed with the second clown's cycle, except that it was suspended a few inches higher. The two machines now hung about twelve feet apart, with their wheels at right angles to each other. An ominous tone came into the lighting and music as Slade set the wheels spinning. Then the cables began slowly to converge, Slade racing across the ever decreasing gap between them to sustain and accelerate the spin. What would happen when the wheels met seemed obvious: a simple collision of rubber tyre and metal spoke. But Slade was jumping back and forth as if set on some ambitious twist to the plot, head swivelling from side to side, hands flicking at the tyres almost as fast as they were rotating. The music soared, turquoise smoke billowed up at the back of the stage and, suddenly, the two wheels met and came abruptly to rest locked together, tyre threaded through tyre, spoke through spoke.

At first, there was silence. Then, as people realized what had happened, tumultuous applause. When it had died and the bizarrely tangled cycles had been raised out of sight, Slade said: "My great-grandfather never got around to doing that with a pair of penny-farthings. Pity, don't you think?"

The audience agreed enthusiastically. To groans of disappointment, Slade then announced that his hyper-dimensional powers were exhausted for the evening. A few self-confessed tricks with playing cards, handcuffs and white rabbits in black hats were all that remained before he signed off by vanishing from inside a seemingly escape-proof safe, only to reappear in the midst of the audience before springing back onto the stage to take his final bow.

"What did you think, Mrs. T?" Harry asked as the cheers died and they rose to leave.

"Impressive. Truly impressive. But if he really can .. . what did he say ... manipulate objects in higher dimensions ... why bother earning his living in such a demanding fashion? Why not simply help himself to some gold bars next time he's passing the Bank of England?"

It was a reasonable question, to which Harry was still trying to think of an answer when they reached the aisle, where a nervous-looking young man in evening dress was waiting to buttonhole them. "Mr. and Mrs. Brancaster?" he asked doubtfully.

"Certainly not," said Mrs. Tandy.

"But close friends of theirs," put in Harry. "Here on their behalf, you could say."

"Oh, well, in that case ... I suppose it might still be all right if .. . You see, Mr. Slade was hoping the Brancasters could join his party for supper after the show."

"Why, yes," said Harry. "They mentioned it to us. Remind me where it's being held."

"La Chasse-Maree. In Beak Street."

"Of course. Well, thanks. We'll go straight there."

"What can you be thinking of, Harry?" demanded Mrs. Tandy as the young man hurried away. "We are not friends of the Brancasters. And it could prove to be extremely embarrassing when that becomes obvious. As I'm sure it will to a man of Mr. Slade's talents."

"I know," said Harry, winking at her. "In fact, I'm counting on it."

NINE

Harry did not blame Mrs. Tandy for backing out of the rest of the evening's entertainment. Gate-crashing a late-night supper party, after all, had not featured in his original invitation. Besides, it was way past her bedtime, Neptune would be expecting his sardines and, secretly, Harry preferred to go it alone.

After seeing her off in a taxi, he walked unhurriedly round to Beak Street, judging Slade would need to shower and change before joining his guests. La Chasse-Maree turned out to be one of Soho's classier and least garishly lit establishments, a French fish restaurant with blue-washed walls and everything from lampshades to ashtrays cunningly disguised as sea-shells. The Slade party were immediately identifiable as the glamorously dressed dozen monopolizing the bar to whom champagne was being liberally dispensed. Harry needed to do no more than nod and smile at a waiter to find himself included in the hospitality.

"One of his best, wouldn't you say?" enquired a tall long-nosed brunette between heavy-lidded draws on a cigarette. "I mean, he was really there tonight."

"Actually, it was the first time I'd seen him on stage. It was quite a revelation."

"Would be. I'm Tina, by the way."

"Hi. I'm Harry."

"How'd you come to know Adam, Harry?"

"It's complicated. But not as complicated as higher dimensions. I'm not sure I understand what they're all about."

"Explain higher dimensions to Harry, Malcolm," she said, pulling a loud young man away from the nearest conversation.

"You're not into them?" asked Malcolm, flicking his hair out of his eyes.

"Are you?"

"Not like Adam. But I get the picture."

"And what is the picture?"

"Well, it's an extra way of seeing, isn't it? Like parts of the spectrum ordinary humans can't detect. Like if we only existed in two dimensions, say length and breadth, we couldn't see height, could we? And we wouldn't understand what had happened if something was picked up and put down again rather than slid forwards or sideways. It would disappear and reappear somewhere else like .. . like magic."

"Like the hoop on the table-leg?"

"Yeh. And the wheels. Adam says it's easy to thread all those spokes together when you know how. Like shuffling cards. It's just .. . what he does."

"Course," put in a burly red-faced man who had overheard them, 'it makes no difference whether Malcolm's in two dimensions or three or bloody seventeen .. ." He slapped Malcolm hard on the head with the theatre programme. "Things still tend to fall on him from a great height." The walls of the restaurant seemed to rock with his guffaws. Then, with merciful abruptness, he stopped laughing.

The reason was the arrival amongst them of Adam Slade, magician and hyper-dimensionalist. Strolling through the door in black suit and open-necked red shirt without any apparent effort to stage a grand entrance, he nevertheless drew people's gaze instantaneously. Then the cheers and welcomes rang out. The crush at the bar parted before him like the Red Sea before the tribes of Israel. And Harry found himself, to his great surprise, standing at the elbow of a human phenomenon.

"Brilliant show, Adam," said Tina as she moved in for a kiss.

"Thanks, darling." Slade gulped down some iced mineral water.

"Shattered?"

"Yeh. But I'll soon bounce back with my friends here to revive me." He noticed Harry for the first time and frowned slightly. "Do I know you?"

That's Harry," said Tina. "Bit of a sceptic, I reckon."

"The name's Barnett," said Harry, smiling defiantly and offering his hand, which Slade studiously ignored.

"Never heard of you."

"You surprise me. I mean, if you have all these additional dimensions of perception, isn't it obvious who I am? Can't you call on one of them to work it out?" Harry had not planned to antagonize the man, but, desperate to hold his attention, he seemed to have lapsed into doing precisely that.

"Spare me the effort."

"All right. I'm David Venning's father."

"I don't think so."

"It's true. Why else would his mother have told me about your dinner date with him last month?"

"I don't know. And I don't much want to know."

"But I want to know. About how he was that night. About what was on his mind."

"I came here to relax. Not to be interrogated."

"Understood." Harry tried another grin, but it did not seem to be infectious. "Perhaps we could meet tomorrow."

"I have a better idea. Phone my agent on Monday."

This has nothing to do with your agent."

"Really? Well, I happen to know David's father died nearly ten years ago. Which makes you an impostor. And probably a journalist. Thought this charade would get you an exclusive interview, did you? For the sort of paper that would employ you, I should think it would be a real scoop. Except it isn't going to happen."

"I can assure you '

"Don't bother."

"I only want to know what you and David talked about over dinner. It's hardly a state secret."

"No. But it was between him and me. And it's going to stay that way."

"My son's in a coma, Mr. Slade. Has been since the night he had dinner with you. He took an overdose of insulin and nobody seems to know why. Surely you can see '

"What I can see is an uninvited guest creating a disturbance at a private party. If you were really David's father, you'd know I told his mother everything I could. You wouldn't have needed to come here and give me a hard time. Which means your story's just an excuse. One that isn't going to wash."

"Looks like you've been rumbled, Harry," said Tina.

"You can walk out of your own accord. Or I can ask a couple of my friends here to throw you out. They keep themselves pretty fit." Slade prodded Harry's paunch. "But they can always use some extra weight-training."

Harry grimaced. "I'll go quietly."

Thought you would."

"But David won't. If that's what you were hoping." It was a hollow threat, based more on anger than suspicion. Yet the mere saying of it made Harry's exit seem, at least to him, less like a headlong retreat than a strategic withdrawal. "I'll make sure he doesn't."

TEN

A mild grey Sunday afternoon of light traffic and scant custom had given Harry ample opportunity to review what he had so far achieved and might yet attempt on his son's behalf. The more he thought about it, the more futile his efforts seemed destined to be. And the more misdirected. Hope Brancaster had probably been right. Depressed by a series of career reverses, David had deliberately taken an overdose of insulin and was now in an irreversible coma. There had been no foul play. There would be no miracle cure. It was as simple as that.

It was not even difficult for Harry to see through his own reluctance to accept such a conclusion. A son might give some purpose to an otherwise feckless life. To discover that purpose only for it to be snatched away again was too much to bear. Hence the digging for secrets; the probing for mixed motives and flawed accounts. So far, he had turned up nothing beyond the usual grab-bag of human weaknesses; nothing any more discreditable than his own role in the tragedy. So, why add to Iris's agonies of mind by hounding overworked doctors and hunting down lapsed friends? Why not simply accept what everybody else had already realized and Iris was well on the way to understanding: that David must be allowed to die?

Because of all Harry had missed, of course. The sleepless nights and playful days; the beaming baby and the sulking toddler; the growing boy and the full-grown man; his aspirations and achievements; his humours and his honours: everything that made and marred him. The life, in short, of David John Yenning. The thirty-three years he and Harry had shared on this planet without meeting. The bond that had never been broken because it had never been forged. It was a hard lesson and a worse penance. Once before, he had said to himself: "This is the worst, Harry, the least and lowest' But it had not been. Because this moment had still been lying in wait.

A pick-up truck drew into the forecourt. A curly-haired man in jeans and lumberjack shirt clambered out and began filling her up. A racing-green Jaguar pulled in behind him. Harry felt dismally grateful for the flurry of custom. Any interruption to his solitude, however short-lived, was to be welcomed. But the Jag moved on past the pumps and coasted to a halt by the air-line. Typical. They were not even going to buy a pint of milk, let alone a gallon of petrol. Then he realized who was sitting in the passenger seat, staring at him through the drizzle-spotted window: Iris. Her face was grey and expressionless, her gaze directed straight at him but somehow unfocused. She looked tired and drained and close to some unmarked limit of tolerance.