Owain ran hard on the spot, pounding the carpeted floor, while soldiers in gas masks and jungle camouflage came swarming out of landing craft onto a tropical beach. Melodramatic music accompanied the action. I understood that this was a patriotic movie, a recent release set in the 1980s and produced by the Cinema Véritié studios in Cannes. It was plain to me that both the hardware and the figures, though superficially realistic, were digital images. It was, in effect, a computer-generated cartoon.
Owain wasn’t really concentrating on the action. He kept running as if in flight from something, his exercising not merely a means of keeping fit but also of banishing both thought and memory. Yet he couldn’t escape them. They were as insinuating as the fog.
He flung himself to the floor and began doing press-ups. I could feel the tendons tighten in his arms and neck. I tried to stop him but was completely ineffectual. On the television screen a battle was raging and soldiers yelled stilted phrases at one another. More explosions, exchanges of gunfire, the music swooning into a maudlin tenderness as one of the principals lay dying.
Lying on his back, hands locked behind his head, Owain began to twist and turn, to push his head towards his knees. I found the rigour and relentlessness of his movements wearying. Machine-gun fire issued from the jungle, and there were glimpses of the enemy’s blacked-up faces—or at least their fanatical eyes: they lacked any distinct racial characteristics. I was sitting on my hospital bed in a shirt, jeans and black shoes. I flexed my toes in them, preparing to stand.
Owain kept rocking and jerking until his breaths came deep and hot. Finally he switched off the set before slumping back and closing his eyes, blood pulsing at his temples.
The ticking of the mantelpiece clock infiltrated the silence. Slowly the sweat began to cool on his body, while the dankness of the outside air became palpable. Owain didn’t move and his mind remained almost resolutely blank, attuned only to the extended rhythms of his body.
Tanya walked in and started talking to me while rummaging in her shoulder bag. She wore a denim jacket over a navy roll-necked sweater. One of my overcoats lay on the bed.
Owain was at his sink, swallowing water from a pewter stein. A souvenir from his time in East Prussia. He’d also served in North Africa and Aden before his transfer to the Special Operations Corps. Steadily rising through the ranks, just like his father had done. An efficient, dependable soldier destined to go far, to emulate him. And now it was all turning to ashes.
Springing to his feet, he closed the windows. He disliked fog. It reduced the world, closed everything in. If you couldn’t see something it was all too easy to imagine that it no longer existed. He’d first thought that as a boy. Things happened when you weren’t around. People were killed, houses sealed off, you never saw them again. All you saw was a box in which dummy versions of them lay. Too much of life had to be taken on trust.
I was plodding down a hospital corridor, the overcoat draped over my arm, Tanya holding my elbow. We were leaving. They’d set me free!
His uncle’s Daimler, driving across an open space through a sleety blizzard. Sir Gruffydd and a stout man in tweeds sitting in the back, the field marshal bemoaning the loss of the old British Army regiments following the consolidation of the Alliance armed forces in the 1980s. The other man replying that it was inevitable, given manpower losses and the spersal of forces on the fronts. He was Sir Henry Knowlton, the Secretary of State for Defence.
The car’s heater was turned up full, filling the confined space with the smell of warm leather and menthol from Knowlton’s impregnated handkerchief. He had a head cold. Technically he was the other civilian member of the JGC alongside Carl Legister, but he had formerly been an air marshal. An old friend of his uncle’s, pleased that the RAF had retained a degree of independence as well as its old name. Both had been ennobled by the last civilian government, mere months before the JGC took over.
Through the sleet I could see a Shrike jump jet squatting on the runway. It was ready for take-off, its engines frenziedly whining. The car’s driver was Giselle Vigoroux. Owain had a sense of being contained within the closest thing he had to a family.
Another car, a nimble Yaris, something rockabilly on the radio, the scent of Tanya’s perfume. She swung us around a corner, trailing a BT van. Grassy spaces on one side, a dowdy garage on the other, bargain cars parked on its cramped forecourt. The line of traffic came slowly to a halt. Up ahead was a set of lights.
