Uncle F had a fancy woman.  Well, that figures. Look, thanks for collating all that stuff.  Do we have anybody on the ground I can contact?

Lady called Marion Craston, an L5 from GCM. She's at the bedside too. Well, there or thereabouts. In case he changes his will or something, I guess, but also just to have a co. presence too, most likely.

(Gallentine Cident-Muhel- London, Genève, New York, Tokyo — are our lawyers.  Wholly owned.)

Thanks. We have a number for her?

I called Marion Craston at the hospital in Leeds.  She wasn't much help; the epitome of lawyerly obfuscation.  Basically she confirmed what I already knew.  The line was very clear and I could hear that she was still clicking and tapping away on a keyboard as she talked, sort of absentmindedly, to me.  This I did not appreciate.

After I hung up I sat for a few seconds thinking about calling GCM and getting her replaced with somebody else, then decided I was upset and possibly just taking it out on her.  I had done the same sort of thing myself on occasion (though not when the person I was talking to was a couple of levels above me in the corporate hierarchy; I'd always given them my full attention).  But what the hell; one could be too severe.

'Hi again.  So, want my analyst's number?'

'No, I do not.  Listen, more tribulations.'

I told Luce about Uncle F.

'They have autos without seat-belts?  Jesus .  I suppose it was a right pea-souper, oi, guv'nor?'

'Will you stop that?  The poor old bastard's at death's door and all you can do is come on like Dick Van Dyke.'

'Okay, I'm sorry.'

'The car's a classic.  Or was.  That's why it didn't have a seat-belt.'

'I've said I'm sorry.  Don't go all prickly-Brit defensive on me.  But why does the old guy want to see you?  Were you that close?'

'Well, fairly.  I was like a daughter to him.  I guess.'

'Yeah, like a daughter in the close-knit, down-home, swigging- moonshine-on-the-porch and whistling-Dixie sense.  This is still the old geezer who used to grope you up, right?'

'Is this some new Valley phrase or are you in some continuing and pathetic attempt to sound British confusing grope and touch up?'

'Answer the question.'

'Look, we've been through all this.  He's my Uncle Freddy who sometimes gives me an affectionate pat on the butt.  End of story.  He's a nice old guy and now it sounds like he's dying six thousand miles away from me and I've got to wait ten hours before I can even start heading to his bedside and I idiotically thought I'd call you for a little understanding maybe but instead —'

'All right!  All right!  So long as you're sure he never abused you.'

'Oh, not that again.  I'm hanging up.'

'No!  You've got hang-ups!  Hello?'

In my dream, in the depths of that cold night, the east wind blew.  Mihu, the Chinese servant who looked just like Colin Walker, Hazleton's security chief, cracked open a window in the eastern wall of windows, and the Queen Mother complained of a draught, so the canopy on that side of the bed was dropped.  In the night, while the Queen slept, he went out on to the terrace. for a while, then slipped back into the chamber and opened the western windows, which led out on to the terrace — the Queen stirred and muttered in her sleep, but did not wake — then, while Josh Levitsen and the little lady-in-waiting looked on, Mihu/Walker opened the eastern windows to let the wind in.

The lowered side of the bed's canopy acted as a giant sail, bulging like a dark purple spinnaker and making the whole framework of the bed creak and flex.  The Queen Mother woke up groggily just as the bed started to move.  The giant statues with the frayed shining armour stared down, their tattered gold leaf whispering wildly in the gale blowing through the long room; a gibbous moon flared in the cloudless night sky, pouring through the space and scintillating on the tiny strips of tinkling leaf as they tore and lengthened and ripped away and went flying through the moon-dark room like shrapnel confetti.

The bed began to move along its rails.  Mihu/Walker decided it wasn't moving fast enough, and put his huge hands on the east side of its frame, and pushed.  Contained within a blue-glittering cloud of golden flakes, the bed rumbled along its tracks and out into the night.  The Queen Mother screamed, the bed's wheels hit the end of the tracks, but there was nothing there to stop them.  The wheels clattered down on to the stones, striking sparks; the bed's canopy, loops and folds and curtains all flapped and snapped and fluttered in the golden-seeded breeze.  Still picking up speed, wheels and the Queen Mother still screaming, the bed hit the terrace wall and crashed on through, tipping momentously into the black gulf beyond.

Somehow Mihu/Walker's hand stuck on to the bed and he could not let go, and so he went with it, and Uncle Freddy — trapped in the bed by straps and tubes and wires — screamed as he fell into the night.

I woke from that one with the sweats.  I checked my watch.  Twenty minutes since the last time I'd looked at it.  After that it was a relief to lie and worry about everything.

Uncle Freddy.  Suvinder.  Stephen.  Stephen's wife.

In a bizarre, horrendously guilt-making way it was a relief to have something to have to do.  I remembered the feeling I'd had when I'd flown back alone from my Italian school trip, knowing that my mother was dead.  The tears did not come and I just felt numb, surrounded by layers of insulation that even seemed to muffle the words of people.  I recalled the noise the jet made as we flew over the Alps, all feathers of white spread over the land far below.

I was having problems with my ears and gone slightly deaf.  The stewardesses were kind and solicitous, but I assumed they must have thought they were dealing with a half-wit from the way I had to keep asking them to repeat things.  I really couldn't quite make out what they were saying.  There was a roaring in my ears, a compound of the jet's engines and the air tearing past the fuselage and the effects of the pressure on my inner ears.  That more than anything else was my insulation, the thing that kept everything at bay.

Then, more than now, you were isolated in a plane.  Nowadays you can make calls from your seat phone; then, once you were up in the air, that was it.  Aside from the very unlikely possibility of a caller persuading Air Traffic Control or somebody to patch them through to the flight deck, once you took your seat you weren't going to be disturbed.  You had that time, that interval between the responsibilities that the ground beneath your feet implied, to detach yourself from things, to take an overview of your life or just whatever problems ailed you at the time.

It struck me only then that maybe that was why I always felt good on planes, why I liked them, why I slept well on them.  Shit, did it really go back to that flight from Rome to Glasgow and that roaring in my ears, that strange, numb knowing that I was cut adrift from my mother for ever, and wondering what would become of me?  I knew I hadn't really worried — or at least I hadn't worried that my biological father would come and reclaim me for himself and the life I thought we'd left behind — but I did get that detached, Now what? feeling, that impression that everything was going to change and I would too.

And so I kept myself awake all the way through the night thinking this sort of thing, wondering if Uncle Freddy was going to live, and if he didn't whether I'd get there in time before he died, and what it might be — if there was any specific thing — that was so important he was calling for me and not anybody else, and should I let Hazleton let Stephen know about his wife and her lover, and would the Prince, despite all he'd said, hate me for turning him down, and had it all been set up by the Business as the ideal way of tying Thulahn tightly to us, and how else were we going to do it, and should we do it, did the people in the place deserve or need or want to have all that might happen to them happen?