Song Of Time (22 page)

IT’S BEEN SUCH A LONG DAY. Even the breakfast, which—still reeling from wine and the midnight rush of Paris—I took with Adam in my dressing gown, was hard work, and Adam looked a little frail himself. Perhaps he’d drunk more of that wine last night than I’d realised. Or perhaps it’s something else. “I’ve an appointment,” I told him as he topped me up with extra coffee which I knew I couldn’t afford to drink. “In Bodmin. It’s just a routine thing. A car will be coming, so it’s probably best if you keep out of the way.”

“At a clinic?”

“Clinic? Why do you say that?”

He shrugged—it was more of a shiver—as he put down the coffee jug. “Just something I thought you mentioned last night.”

“I suppose it
is
a clinic,” I conceded. “I’m having…various kinds of treatment. After all, and as you’ve probably noticed, I’m not exactly young. I get tired easily. I have these…Dizzy spells. I need to watch what I drink and eat. I have to pace myself, take rests in the afternoon.”

I’d said too much—Adam had on what I think of as his guilty boy expression—but I felt angry with him, or with someone. It’s the closest he and I have come to any kind of conflict, and it seemed to linger even as I went upstairs to dress, and then sat waiting for the car. It arrived at the gate, which I’d left shut to save it getting any glimpse of Adam, with predictable machine punctuality at bang on ten o-clock, and sat there on its fat tyres, looking pleased with itself with its little motor panting steam. Had I locked Adam inside Morryn this time? Was that the right or the wrong thing to have done? These were questions I pondered as I moved off inside its plastic bubble, but for the life of me couldn’t work out.

Another fine late August day, and the rowans inland along the winding valley were in extravagant fruit. Half of Lostwithiel is covered in some kind of ivy: a lost village in a lost valley, finally living up to its name. Hawks floated. The empty windows of the castle stared down at my passing. The Cornish countryside is so
wild
these days but Bodmin, or at least in its centre, is still fully inhabited, and remains resolutely granite-grey. I gazed around the market square as my car left me, telling myself, despite the sudden hammering of my heart, that I’ve long known this place. Here was the café in the Tudor guildhall where I’d often lunched with old friend Daisy, back in the times when being alive was something we both took for granted. It was just opening for the day’s business, and offering what looked like the same menu chalked on the board outside. Funny how some things last, how others go away…

There are, I suppose, many names for the building which resides on St Nicholas Street, although the reassuringly municipal words PUBLIC HALL are still carved into the granite lintel above its entrance. Climbing in three floors by tall windows and heavy ironwork to a many-browed roof, the clinic yawned dour and grey as I stood outside its railings, but no dourer and greyer than many other of Bodmin’s main buildings. Inside, there’s always a pleasant bustle. People were at work, coming and going. The air smells of well-polished old wood and big floral displays, and dust streamed with sunlight from the big windows which overlook the reception area.

There isn’t a desk in Liang Ho’s office—not a real one, anyway. In fact, it isn’t recognisably any kind of office, for people work differently nowadays, but, like him, it retains a businesslike air. There are two chairs, and there’s never any question as to which one Ho sits in, and which is for you. As I settled myself, I imagined the suited accountant or solicitor who probably once used to work here.

He smiled and leaned forward, tapping together the tips of his perfectly manicured fingers as if in impatient prayer. “So nice to see you again. You’re looking like your real self.”

“Actually,” I said, taking stock. “I
do
feel a bit better.”

“No problems with the treatments?” He was just being polite; news of anything amiss would have been transmitted to him already from this thing in my skull.

“None at all. It’s been a goodish week. But…hard work.”

“So—what have you been doing?”

“I suppose pretty much what you suggested. I’ve been thinking about the past.” He broadened his smile. “That’s excellent.”

“Well…” The phrase I’d just used—
hard work
—came back to me like a sour burp. For isn’t that exactly what Daisy Kornbluth once said? “…it’s been rather odd, to be honest. I’m a bit of a hoarder. I’m not good at throwing things away. But going through everything with ah— with Morryn, has been a far more vivid experience than I expected.”

“Morryn?”

“It’s my house.”

“Have you heard of Matteo Ricci?”

I shook my head.

“He was a Jesuit traveller to China who developed a way of remembering the characters of Chinese script. He imagined a huge building filled with many rooms, and in each room he placed a memory, and furnished the rooms with objects which would trigger the correct associations. He soon became able to wander at will along corridors, taking turns or ascending stairways, and was thus able to locate whatever information he needed. He termed this creation a palace of memory. It’s a technique which has been widely used since.”

“That’s what I’m doing? Making a palace of memory in Morryn?”

“Of course, the crystal is co-operating. But you’ve probably already found how certain objects trigger certain memories.” Ho shrugged. “But don’t take the term
objects
too literally, Roushana. The rooms in a palace of memory needn’t just be filled with things. The trigger can be anything. A smell, a taste, maybe a mixture of senses…With you, of course, a melody. They can all lead you into new ways of remembering.”

“So I’ve found.”
Of course, the crystal is co-operating;
another sour burp. “But you can’t bring back
everything
, can you? And how can I ever be sure that the way I think things happened was how they really did?”

“Ah—the fallacy of truth! Of course, there can be no such thing as certain knowledge. We all have our own illusions,
delusions
about the past. Some things are bound to be painful, perhaps so painful that we really have no wish to revisit them. But you shouldn’t worry. This isn’t supposed to be some impersonal history—it’s the reflection of your true nature which counts.”

With the same professional ease that the solicitor who probably once sat in this room once asked his clients about their wills—not that people need to make wills now, as many lawsuits have established the rights of the dead to continue to own property—Ho then moved on to ask me if I’d had any thoughts about the details of my passing.

“No more than I had before.”

“Have you told anyone? Friends? Colleagues? You have children, yes?”

“I haven’t told anyone.”

He nodded and smiled some more. “And the arrangements?”

“No ceremonies. No fuss.”

“Of course. There’s no need for anything to take place but the process of passing itself. And that can occur almost anywhere. Here in Bodmin, of course, but in virtually any location. If you wished to pass on from a hilltop, for example, a little notice would be necessary to construct the necessary field. But if you’d come in today and told me that you’d decided that you were ready, it could be done here right now.”

I let that thought sink in. “But what if I
wasn’t
ready, Ho? I mean, there’s so much of my life I haven’t yet explored.”

Ho tapped his fingers. “It’s simpler than that, Roushana. If you feel you’re ready, you
are
. The things you take and the things you leave behind, they’re simply expressions of what you are. All that’s then required is letting go—a mere effort of will.”

“You make it sound frighteningly simple.”

“Yes.” Briefly, Ho permitted his smile to fade. “Frightening, and simple. It’s both of those things.”

Then, just as I was preparing to leave, he announced, “Oh, and there’s someone else who’d like to see you today. I mean, if you have the time?”

Ho led me to a door at the far end of a whitewashed corridor. Bowing slightly, and smiling once more, he opened it for me, and stepped back to let me in.

As I entered, as he left me and the door snapped shut, I felt an inner CLICK—a sense of some deeper intrusion—although the room inside seemed perfectly pleasant. There were oak-panelled walls, antique tapes-tries, a few elegant scraps of minimalist modern furniture which didn’t seem remotely out of place, but, even before I’d fully absorbed the identity of the person who occupied it, I knew it couldn’t be real. Everything was just a little too intense—the colours, the sunlight, the sense that you could count every thread of those seemingly ancient tapestries, the sheer glow of the air—too obviously
authentic
. The real world, especially when you get to my age, simply isn’t this clear.

Dressed in a close-fitting white blouse and a well-tailored mid-length skirt, and giving every impression of having been waiting for some little time, the image of Blythe Munro was standing beside the polished slate fireplace. She looked just as I remembered her—pert and pretty and young.

“I don’t want to die yet,” I told her.

“Of course not. No—of course.”

“You
are
dead, though, aren’t you?”

“If that’s how you choose to put it. Do you want me to stay?”

“You need my permission?”

Blythe glanced around as if to take in this room. Outside the window, I noticed, the view wasn’t of Bodmin’s roofs and monument hill, but of some pretty glade. The trees, the grass, were like this room: they all had that same impossible glow. “I do, actually.”

“I suppose I might once have admitted to Ho that it could be a help to speak to someone—but why
you
, Blythe? I mean, it wasn’t as if we ever liked each other.”

“As I say, if you want me to, I’ll go.”

“You may as well stay, I suppose. But I have to tell you that I’m not convinced you’re really the Blythe Monroe I once knew.”

“That’s okay. After all, what you think doesn’t decide the truth.”

“You’re right—I’m dying, and no one ever asked me what I thought about that, either.”

“I’m sorry, Roushana. I truly wish there were other reasons for me to be here.”

“And yet here you are.”

Making a small game of it, she pretended to study the long fingers which had once struggled to master the cello. “Undeniably. Would it help if I told you something about my life?”

Dead or alive, I suppose, this is how it still goes. You meet someone again after a long time, and you swap useless stories as you wonder at how little or how much they’ve changed. Do the dead have cocktail parties? Do they have school reunions? Do they brag and lie just like us living? But I simply listened as Blythe told me about her life, how she’d become a lawyer just as she’d said she would, although expert systems were taking everyone’s place by then, and concepts such as civil liberties—the whole idea that every human being has some individual merit—were on the wane. To compensate, she got involved in several high-profile human rights cases.

Our lives had passed so close.There was a professor we’d both met in Paris, she’d even attended a civil rights conference at which I’m sure Claude had spoken, and had been to a Yellowstone benefit he and I once gave in London’s Festival Hall.

“I almost sent you a note backstage to reintroduce myself, but in the end I decided not to, although I followed your careers. I always felt that we were on the same side.”

I had to laugh. “And you really think you’re the same person, now?”

“Of course not. But I’m still Blythe—that’s the whole point.”

“How do you pass the time?”

“At the moment, I’m passing it by talking to you.”

“After that?”

“I do other things.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing it.”

“But doesn’t it offend you—the ghoulish way we living insist on calling you the dead?”

“There are prejudices. We’ve had to fight for our rights just as any other group must.”

“And now you rule the world.”

“We simply protect our interests.”

“How long have you been this way, Blythe? How did you die?”

“That’s something only the living ask.”

“You’re not going to tell me, are you? Am I being impolite?”

“I know it seems like a vital question. But, it isn’t, believe me. What’s important is what lies beyond—what lies ahead.”

I stared across at Blythe—and Blythe gazed back at me, or the dying, wizened creature I’ve become. She still bore, I was almost sure of it, the same clean, mild scent of flesh and flowers which had always possessed the air around her. She still had that bouncy head-girl—no it was
deputy
head—let’s-get-on-with-things attitude. I could see her now, so vividly that it hurt, emerging into our back garden as I lay out on the rug with Leo.
Oh Roushana…
This, the slow thought crept through me, both reassuring and eerie, really is Blythe Munro.

“Remember that time,” I asked her, “when I came in on you and Leo in his bedroom?”

She gave a mock-cringe. “We felt so much worse about that for you than we did for ourselves.”

“That was the way you both always were! It was far too much for any ordinary kid to live up to.”

“But you
did…
” Blythe tilted her head and looked at me with a sort of compassion. “We never did know each other, though, did we? We were like cats circling around Leo as if he was our territory. But it was no contest—Leo was always yours.”

“Do you still blame me for his death? You did, didn’t you? You’re the only one who thought I could have done something to stop him.”

“But what could you have done, Roushana? You forget just how strong-willed and stubborn Leo was. And how young you were.”

Something flared. Even now, I thought, she’s prepared to patronise me. “And what did you really do,” I snapped, “with all those years you had alive? Did you have lovers, hates, passions, children? Or was law just a suitable alibi—something you could pretend to be doing instead of having a proper life when you had blood in your veins instead of digits and light?”