On Monday morning, I took three decisive steps:

– I made two copies of the manuscript, and sent one of them to the editor who had once been responsible for publishing my novels.

– I sent another copy to the Peacock Press, in the hope that it would either earn me another instalment of salary (which I hadn’t been paid for three years) or alternatively so horrify Tabitha, when she saw it, that she would cancel our arrangement and release me from the contract altogether.

– I placed the following advertisement in the personal columns of the major newspapers:

INFORMATION WANTED Writer, compiling official records of the Winshaws of Yorkshire, seeks information on all aspects of the family history. In particular, would like to hear from anyone (witnesses, former servants, concerned parties, etc.) who can shed light on the events of September 16, 1961, and related incidents.

SERIOUS RESPONDENTS ONLY, please contact Mr M. Owen, c/o The Peacock Press, Vanity House, 116 Providence Street, London W7.

And that, for the time being, was all I could do. My burst of energy had in any case turned out to be temporary, and I spent the next few days mostly slumped in front of the television, sometimes watching Kenneth Connor scuttle in fear from the beautiful Shirley Eaton, sometimes watching the news. I became familiar with the face of Saddam Hussein, and started to learn why he had recently become so famous: how he had announced his intention of absorbing Kuwait into his own country, claiming that according to historical precedent it had always been an ‘integral part of Iraq’; and how Kuwait had appealed to the United Nations for military support, which had been promised by both the American President, Mr Bush, and his friend the British Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher. I learned of the British and American hostages or ‘guests’ who were being detained in hotels in Iraq and Kuwait. I saw frequent re-runs of the scene where Saddam Hussein brought these hostages before the television cameras and put his arms around the flinching, unwilling child.

Fiona dropped by two or three times. We drank cool drinks together and talked, but something about my manner must have put her off, because she usually left to go to bed early. She told me she was having trouble getting to sleep.

Sometimes, lying hotly awake at night, I could hear her dry, irritable cough. The walls in our building were not thick.

2

At first there was little sign that my strategy would bear fruit. But then suddenly, after two or three weeks, I got telephone calls from both publishers and managed to fix up two appointments for the same day: the Peacock Press in the afternoon, and, in the morning, the rather more prestigious firm which had once been pleased to consider me one of their most promising young writers. (Long years ago.) It was a small but well-respected imprint which had run its business, for most of the century, from a Georgian terrace in Camden, although recently it had been swallowed up by an American conglomerate and relocated to the seventh floor of a tower block near Victoria. Something like half of the personnel had survived the change: among them the fiction editor, a forty-year-old Oxford graduate called Patrick Mills. I arranged to meet him shortly before lunch, at around eleven-thirty.

It should have been a simple enough journey. First of all I had to walk to the tube station, which meant going through the park, across the Albert Bridge, past the fortress-like homes of the super-rich on Cheyne Walk, up Royal Hospital Road and into Sloane Square. I stopped only once, to get myself some chocolate (a Marathon and a Twix, if memory serves). It was another viciously hot morning, and there was no escaping the palls of thick black smog which issued from the backsides of cars, trucks, lorries and buses, hanging heavy in the air and all but forcing me to hold my breath whenever I had to cross the road at a busy junction. But then, when I arrived at the station and rode down on the escalator, as soon as the platform came into view I could see that it was absolutely packed. There was some fault with the service and there couldn’t have been a train for about fifteen minutes. Even though the line at Sloane Square isn’t deep, the steady downward motion of the escalator made me feel like Orpheus descending to the underworld, confronted by this throng of pale and sad-looking people, the sunlight which I’d just left behind already a distant memory.

… perque leves populos simulacraque functa sepulchro …

Four minutes later a District Line train arrived, every inch of every carriage filled with sweating, hunched, compacted bodies. I didn’t even try to get on, but in the pandemonium of people fighting past each other I managed to manoeuvre my way to the front of the platform in readiness for the next train. It came after a couple of minutes, a Circle Line train this time, just as full as the last one. When the doors opened and a few red-faced passengers had forced their way out through the waiting crowd, I squeezed inside and took my first mouthful of the foul, stagnant air: you could tell, just from that one taste, that it had already been in and out of the lungs of every person in the carriage, a hundred times or more. More people piled in behind me and I found myself squashed between this young, gangly office worker – he had a single-breasted suit and a pasty complexion – and the glass partition which separated us from the seated passengers. Normally I would have preferred to stand with my nose up against the partition, but when I tried it that way I found there was a huge slimy patch, exactly at face-level, an accumulation of sweat and grease off the back of the earlier passengers’ heads where they had been rubbing up against the glass, so I had no choice but to turn round and stare eyeball-to-eyeball at this corporate lawyer or swaps dealer or whatever he was. We were pushed up even closer after the doors closed, on the third or fourth attempt, because the people who had been standing half in and half out of the train now had to cram themselves inside with the rest of us, and from then on his pallid, pimply skin was almost touching mine, and we were breathing hot breath into each other’s faces. The train shunted into motion and half the people who were standing lost their balance, including a builder’s labourer who was pressed against my left shoulder and was wearing nothing on top except a pale blue vest. He apologized for nearly falling on top of me and then he reached up to hang on to one of the roof-straps, so I suddenly found that my nose was right inside his moist, gingery armpit. As unobtrusively as I could I put my fingers up to my nostrils and started breathing through my mouth. But I consoled myself, thinking, Never mind, I’m only going as far as Victoria, one stop, that’s all it is, it’ll be over in a couple of minutes.

But the train was already slowing down, and when it finally came to a standstill in the pitch dark of the tunnel I reckoned that it had only travelled three or four hundred yards. As soon as it stopped you could feel the atmosphere grow tense. We can’t have been there for more than a minute, perhaps, or a minute and a half, but already it seemed like an eternity, and when the train started crawling forward there was visible relief on all our faces. But it turned out to be short-lived. After only a few seconds the brakes came on again, and this time, as the train shuddered to a decisive halt, it was with a terrible sense of finality. At once everything seemed very quiet, except for the hiss of a personal stereo further up the carriage, which grew louder as the passenger in question took her headphones off to listen for announcements. In no time at all the air had grown unbearably warm and clammy: I could feel the uneaten chocolate bars turning to liquid in my pocket. We looked around anxiously at each other – some passengers raising despairing eyebrows, others tutting or swearing under their breath – and anyone who was carrying a newspaper or a business document started using it as a fan.