The Happier Dead (30 page)

But he could not quite believe the words with which he comforted himself. A memory came back to him of meeting Miranda that morning in the upstairs rooms. What had she said to him?
What about the deaths of those you love?
It echoed back to him like a prophecy that offers no guidance, but reveals its truth in the wake of the disaster. Maybe the day before she had been a businesswoman, but the sudden falling away of the comforting illusions of the spa was both symptom and cause of a change in the old rules. In London he had seen the same thing, the city unmaking itself, the skin of civilisation peeled back to reveal the passions, raw and glistening. With her artificial world coming apart at the seams, Miranda might be capable of anything. He had to find them.

He pushed open the front door of the headmaster’s lodge, and a wave washed over his boots. The whole of the court was flooded. The water in the river was spilling over, flooding its banks and the school beyond. With the Victorian Gothic buildings, and the water rising above the height of the ground but not yet the stairs and doorways, St Margaret’s had become a sudden Venice, with placid little canals running under the stone archways.

Although the illusion of sky and distance had dissolved, and the sunshine with it, elements of the weather system persisted within the spa – a strong wind, almost tropical in its warmth, ruffled the rising surface of the water, and rain was falling on one half of the court, so that a clear line separated the new square lake, with one half bubbling under a rainstorm, and the other rippling under the zephyr. The rising water had found odd things to play with, and a bunch of balloons floated on the surface. From an open window on the second floor a regular fall of handwritten notes came fluttering down, blown by the breeze across the clear part of the water, then borne quickly down by the weight of the rain. The record Oates had heard on his way in was still playing somewhere, only the earthquake must have knocked the stylus into a scratch, as the saccharine chorus were singing over and over in a maddening chant.

The people in this landscape were a mixture of St Margaret’s original inhabitants and the crowds latterly gathered around the outside of the dome. Men and women in modern clothes were stumbling through the entrance to the courtyard, which meant Avalon’s perimeter had been well and truly breached. Whether they were rioters bent on smashing the spa, refugees seeking shelter, relatives hunting loved ones, agents of the Mortal Reformers come to complete their handiwork or a volatile combination of all these constituents, the moment they came through the gatehouse into the main square they stopped. Their intentions simply washed away in the rain. Like children from a warm land seeing snow for the first time, they stood overpowered by the strangeness of the scene.

The effect on those who had been staying in St Margaret’s was quite different. The management in its meticulous fostering of a youthful dependency had unmanned its guests. The initial shrill of complaint had been stifled with the rapid deterioration of circumstances. No waiter had come to cower beneath the recriminations of the customers, and with this proof of abandonment, the students were acting without any internal restraint.

Some of the guests had snapped back into command, and realising the dangers of being trapped in an overturned bowl filling with water, they were heading for the exit, where they met the press of invaders forcing their way in from outside. But a remarkable number of the guests were delighting in the chaos. They were playing in the warm rain, hanging out of the windows and hallooing in delight across the lake.

To his amazement, Oates saw a group of new-young which included a prominent actress and a footballer he recognised, but could not place, carry one of the punts from the river out through the door by the refectory, like a savage hunting party shouldering their canoe down to the banks of a jungle river. They were dressed only in their night things, boxer shorts and t-shirts. They dumped the boat in the waters of the court. Behind them came a new-young man with his arms full of wine bottles and a wheel of cheese, evidently looted from the kitchens, and the whole crew jumped into the punt and pushed off from the steps.

The scene before him in combination with his fear for Harry was almost more than Oates could bear. He felt his connection to reality, which had grown more tenuous with every moment of the last twenty-four hours, threaten to snap completely. He felt he might go mad.

He was familiar with the psychological effect of adrenaline shading into panic. Appearing first as an itch at the back of the mind, a spreading numbness would overtake the sense of self. You could do a terrible injury to your mind in that state, and not feel it until later. You could abandon a friend in trouble, run away from a battle or kill a man, and in the moment there would be no relationship between the action you took and the type of man you knew yourself to be. It was only later, when the panic receded, that you would be left to reconcile the thing you had done with the fact that you were the doer.

Oates had heard a friend describe it as feeling like you were an actor in a film, and that was half right; he would have said an extra in a film. You were not the leading man in these moments, but a bystander, rushed into the background to rhubarb whilst the real action took place somewhere else. In this respect, he almost found the state of panic to be closer to objective reality than normal life. After all, you couldn’t have seven billion actors all rightly believing they had been cast as the main part in the same movie. Someone must be wrong, and at that moment Oates felt it might be him.

The scene before him created a grotesque harmony with these sensations, for it looked like nothing so much as a film set. The visible struts in the ceiling with their glaring artificial lights were like a studio hanger, the gorgeous buildings a set, the weather effects and costumes like nothing so much as themselves. There was even the actress in the punt, playing the part of herself gone mad as a teenager. Only there was no director, and no one to shout cut. No beginning or end to the scene, only the endless, merciless imperative to perform. A voice broke out above him, like the word of God in its indifferent calm, coming from everywhere and nowhere, louder than any voice he had ever heard.

“This is an emergency announcement. Would all students and personnel please make their way to the evacuation points. This is not a drill. This is an emergency announcement…”

He set out from the door of the headmaster’s lodge into the court. He stumbled with his first step, having underestimated the depth of the water. Already the cobbles were invisible beneath the surface. When he first set out, he was unsure of where to go, but when he looked up he knew. There, on the roof of the buildings of the court, standing on the lead sheeting above the level of the red brick battlements, he could see two silouettes. They could have been statues, for they were motionless, looking out across the dome. One was a slender young woman, and by the hand she held a child.

Oates tried to run across the court, but with the water reaching up to his thighs he had to jump with each step to reduce its drag. He crossed the line from the dry half into the storm. As he tasted the rain, he found it faintly chlorinated. All around him the other denizens of the dissolving world pursued their own chaotic plans, but they paid no attention to Oates, and he paid no attention to them. He knew that Miranda must see him coming, and he kept his eyes away from her, fixed on the water in front of him. He knew somehow that she would not do anything whilst he looked away. Whatever was to happen on the roof, it would be for his benefit. He made for the opening into the stone staircase closest to her position, which was about twenty metres from the gatehouse.

The room into which he came on the top floor was a classroom with the ghost of a chalk equation still haunting the blackboard. He opened the little casement window, and squeezed his body out onto the roof. The run through the water and the climb up the narrow stairs had squandered his puff. He raised himself panting to his feet, standing high above the spreading riot. He had doubled back on himself in climbing the stairs, and had bisected once again the border of the storm. Where Oates stood, he was quite dry. Miranda, only perhaps ten feet away, was whipped by the wind and the tropical rain.

She was facing out over the court, looking down in the direction of the churning river and the swallows spiralling up in their giant cage. Harry stood beside her, holding her hand without the slightest sense of danger, his eyes widening in an effort to take in the meaning of the world below. She did not turn to look at Oates when he finally clambered to his feet.

Confronted with her profile, he was struck again by her extreme beauty; yet she no longer seemed young to him. She seemed in fact to have stepped out of age altogether, to have become an avatar for some quality as old as time. The symbols and ideas in her had swollen like tumours, pushing her humanity out through the pores. The instant he saw her, he was dismayed; if she was no longer human, there was no hope of dissuading her from an inhuman act. As he stood there, Harry sensed his presence and turned. He beamed at him, but made no attempt to leave Miranda’s side. Oates waved, and his son waved back with his free hand. He was about to start moving towards them across the roof when Miranda spoke. She did not shout, but raised her voice so that he would hear her through the storm.

“Do you know, I haven’t left this place in four years? I haven’t seen it without the sky in three. It’s almost more beautiful, don’t you think? You can see the genius of it, the wonder of the engineering. Really perfect technology hides itself. You never know it’s there, until it goes wrong. I’d forgotten this was under everything. I’d forgotten how much I missed it.”

“It’s over, Miranda.”

She shook her head.

“It’s falling apart. We need to get you out of here.”

“It doesn’t matter, Inspector. This place has served its purpose. We can discard it.” She gestured with her hand out over the water, her fingers taking wing and lifting at the wrist into a glorious future.

“Then let the lad go.”

She shook her head again, sincerely regretful that such a thing could not be done.

“It’s alright Dad. I’m not scared anymore. It’s amazing.”

Miranda swung fondly on the little arm.

“Then take me,” Oates said, “I’ll jump off this bloody roof myself.”

“That’s not enough, Inspector. Now, I asked for a clever policeman, and that is what I got. Can you understand why?”

“Harry, wouldn’t you like to come back with your dad?”

Harry nodded, but made no move to come back to Oates. He was transfixed by the scene in the court below. The three of them stood, a frozen tableau in the cold and shadowless light of the dome. Again, the voice from the heavens intoned the evacuation.

“If you just let him come to his dad, I’ll have your bloody Treatment. If that’s what you want, you’ve got my word…”

“It doesn’t work like that, Inspector. As I explained to you, the process has to be voluntary. Do you think I want to do this? I have to set you free.”

Oates remembered the way that Chris Rajaram had mentioned, almost in passing, that the Tithonus Effect could amount to psychosis. Miranda must be one of the oldest women who had ever lived. She had been an early adopter of the Treatment she had herself helped to develop. Charles had said she was a student doing her doctorate at Cambridge before he was born. That could make her over a hundred. Clearly the operation of her mind was disturbed, but she was not insane. There was cold, hard rationality in her, untempered by any empathy.

He tried to think about her like any other criminal, to reconstruct her thought process from first principles. He thought back to everything he knew about her. In their very first interview in the spa, she had tried to recruit him to her vision. He had disappointed her with his failure to understand. She had chosen him because… because of his suffering. And he had disappointed her because he bore it. He had not wanted to escape his life, he had not wanted to lengthen it. He had just wanted to live it. It was not enough for Miranda, but why?

It was his stoicism that had violated her principles. It was that fragile part of him, alcohol under one shoulder, his family under the other, limping along, which endured a day like this one and still looked forward to the next. She had fallen out of love with life, and yet she could not conceive of herself as having failed. She could accept her ennui only insofar as she could convince herself that this was a basic operation of the human condition. She needed to feel that her weakness was not personal, but universal. By refusing her gift, Oates had threatened the logic by which she justified to herself the desiccation of her passions and her morality. He could bear his ageing, and his suffering. The thought of his death was not so offensive to him that he would pay the price of oblivion in exchange for immortality. But her soul’s logic would bear no exceptions – having once failed to recruit him, the only recourse was to increase his suffering until it became unbearable. That was where Harry came in. Harry and the edge of the roof. The dawn of this understanding must have shown in his face, because Miranda smiled at him. It was the sad smile of a parting couple, of two people united by their shared knowledge of something both unsought and inevitable.

He looked down at Harry. Harry held on to Miranda’s hand in absolute innocence, whilst his great intelligence worked its way through the apocalypse consuming the school, and his compassion encompassed the actors. Oates could imagine his thoughts, and the questions he would be formulating to confound his dad and all the philosophers. In that instant the sense of unreality was banished. He knew one certain thing. He loved his sons. All the rest of the world could warp and change. His senses and his memories might betray him, his principles collapse, the whole of England could become a TV show. But his love for his son was real. It was a thing that existed outside of him. An objective presence standing by his shoulder. It would exist after he was dead. It would exist when he was no longer there to feel it. He would die for it.