Cloud Atlas

“You are a publisher? Or you were, Mr. Cavendish?”

“Am. My office is in Haymarket.”

“Then what,” queried Ernie reasonably, “are you doing here?”

Now, that was the question. I recounted my unlikely yarn to date. Ernie and Veronica listened the way sane, attentive adults do. Mr. Meeks nodded off. I got as far as my stroke, when a yelling outside interrupted me. I assumed one of the Undead was having a fit, but a look through the crack showed the driver of the Jupiter red Range Rover shouting into his mobile phone. “Why bother?” Frustration twisted his face. “She’s in the clouds! She thinks it’s 1966!?.?.?. No, she’s not faking it. Would you wet your knickers for kicks??.?.?. No, she didn’t. She thought I was her first husband. She said she didn’t have any sons?.?.?. You’re telling me it’s Oedipal.?.?.?. Yes, I described it again. Three times.?.?.?. In detail, yes. Come and have a go yourself if you think you can do better.?.?.?. Well, she never cared for me either. But bring perfume.?.?.?. No, for you. She reeks.?.?.?. What else would she reek of??.?.?. Of course they do, but it’s hard to keep up, it just .?.?. trickles out all the time.” He mounted his Range Rover and roared off down the drive. Sprinting after it and nipping through the gates before they swung shut did cross my mind, then I reminded myself of my age. Anyway, the surveillance camera would spot me, and Withers would pick me up before I could flag anyone down.

“Mrs. Hotchkiss’s son,” Veronica said. “She was a sweet soul, but her son, ooh, no. You don’t own half the hamburger franchises in Leeds and Sheffield by being nice. Not a family short of a bob or two.”

A mini-Denholme. “Well, at least he visits her.”

“And here’s why.” An attractive, wicked gleam illuminated the old lady. “When Mrs. Hotchkiss got wind of his plan to pack her off to Aurora House, she crammed every last family gem into a shoe box and buried it. Now she can’t remember where, or she can remember but isn’t saying.”

Ernie divided up the last drops of malt. “What gets my goat about him is how he leaves his keys in the ignition. Every time. He’d never do that out in the real world. But we’re so decrepit, so harmless, that he doesn’t even have to be careful when he visits.”

I judged it poor form to ask Ernie why he had noticed a thing like that. He had never spoken an unnecessary word in his life.

I visited the boiler room on a daily basis. The whiskey supply was erratic, but not so the company. Mr. Meeks’s role was that of a black Labrador in a long-lived marriage, after the kids have left home. Ernie could spin wry observations about his life and times and Aurora House folklore, but his de facto spouse could converse on most topics under the sun. Veronica maintained a vast collection of not-quite-stars’ autographed photographs. She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman. I could say things to her like “The most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid” and, safe in her ignorance of J. D. Salinger, I felt witty, charming, and yes, even youthful. I felt Ernie watching me as I showed off, but what the heck? I thought. A man may flirt.

Veronica and Ernie were survivors. They warned me about the dangers of Aurora House: how its pong of urine and disinfectant, the Undead Shuffle, Noakes’s spite, the catering redefine the concept of “ordinary.” Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured.

Thanks to her, I ruddy well bucked my ideas up. I clipped my nasal hair and borrowed some shoe polish from Ernie. “Shine your shoes every night,” my old man used to say, “and you’re as good as anyone.” Looking back, I see that Ernie tolerated my posturing because he knew Veronica was only humoring me. Ernie had never read a work of fiction in his life—“Always a radio man, me”—but watching him coax the Victorian boiler system into life one more time, I always felt shallow. It’s true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.

I cooked up my first escape plan—one so simple it hardly warrants the name—alone. It needed will and a modicum of courage, but not brains. A nocturnal telephone call from the phone in Nurse Noakes’s office to the answering machine of Cavendish Publishing. An SOS for Mrs. Latham, whose rugger-bugger nephew drives a mighty Ford Capri. They arrive at Aurora House; after threats and remonstrances I get in; nevvy drives off. That’s all. On the night of December 15 (I think), I woke myself up in the early hours, put on my dressing gown, and let myself into the dim corridor. (My door had been left unlocked since I began playing possum.) No sound but snores and plumbing. I thought of Hilary V. Hush’s Luisa Rey creeping around Swannekke B. (Behold my bifocals.) Reception looked empty, but I crawled below the level of the desk commando style and hoisted myself back to the vertical—no mean feat. Noakes’s office light was off. I tried the door handle, and yes, it gave. In I slipped. Just enough light came in through the crack to see. I picked up the receiver and dialed the number of Cavendish Publishing. I did not get through to my answering machine.

“You cannot make the call as dialed. Replace the handset, check the number, and try again.”

Desolation. I assumed the worst, that the Hogginses had torched the place so badly that even the telephones had melted. I tried once more, in vain. The only other telephone number I could reconstruct since my stroke was my next, and last, resort. After five or six tense rings Georgette, my sister-in-law, answered in the kittenish pout I knew, Lordy, Lordy, I knew. “It’s gone bedtime, Aston.”

“Georgette, it’s me, Timbo. Put Denny on, will you?”

“Aston? What’s wrong with you?”

“It isn’t Aston, Georgette! It’s Timbo!”

“Put Aston back on, then!”

“I don’t know Aston! Listen, you must get me Denny.”

“Denny can’t come to the phone right now.”

Georgette’s grip on her rocker was never exactly firm, but she sounded buckarooed over the rainbow. “Are you drunk?”

“Only if it’s a nice wine bar with a good cellar. I can’t abide pubs.”

“No, listen, it’s Timbo, your brother-in-law! I’ve got to speak to Denholme.”

“You sound like Timbo. Timbo? Is that you?”

“Yes, Georgette, it’s me, and if this is a—”

“Rather rum of you not to turn up at your own brother’s funeral. That’s what the whole family thought.”

The floor spun. “What?”

“We knew about your various tiffs, but I mean—”

I fell. “Georgette, you just said Denny is dead. Did you mean to say it?”

“Of course I did! D’you think I’m bloody doolally?”

“Tell me once more.” I lost my voice. “Is—Denny—dead?”

“D’you think I’d make something like this up?”

Nurse Noakes’s chair creaked with treachery and torture. “How, Georgette, for Christ’s sake, how?”

“Who are you? It’s the middle of the night! Who is this, anyway? Aston, is this you?”

I had a cramp in my throat. “Timbo.”

“Well, what clammy stone have you been hiding under?”

“Look, Georgette. How did Denny”—saying made it more so—“pass away?”

“Feeding his priceless carp. I was spreading duckling pate on crackers for supper. When I went to fetch Denny he was floating in the pond, facedown. He may have been there a day or so, I wasn’t his babysitter, you know. Dixie had told him to cut back on the salt, strokes run in his family. Look, stop hogging this line and put Aston on.”

“Listen, who’s there now? With you?”

“Just Denny.”

“But Denny’s dead!”

“I know that! He’s been in the fishpond for absolutely .?.?. weeks, now. How am I supposed to get him out? Listen, Timbo, be a dear, bring me a hamper or something from Fortnum and Mason’s, will you? I ate all the crackers, and all the thrushes ate the crumbs, so now I’ve got nothing to eat but fish food and Cumberland sauce. Aston hasn’t called back since he borrowed Denny’s art collection to show his evaluator friend, and that was .?.?. days ago, weeks rather. The gas people have stopped the supply and?.?.?.”

My eyes stung with light.

The doorway filled with Withers. “You again.”