Barbara looked sympathetically deflated at this and Abbey shot her a look of profound irritation.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Barbara. “Is there any change?”
“I’m not sure there’ll ever be.”
“Have a drink,” Abbey said quickly. “Join us.”
I sat down, poured myself a glass of wine and asked Barbara how she was getting on at the office.
“You know how it is. More files than we know what to do with. Even the Norbiton annex is running out of space now. And Peter’s been acting funny.”
“No change there, then,” I said, and Barbara laughed dutifully.
“They keep sending me down to the mail room.” The pudgy girl leant over to me. “That lady down there, the fat, sweaty one. She gives me the creeps.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “I remember. But how are you?”
As Barbara chattered on, Abbey curled back into her seat and gulped sulkily at her wine.
“I had the most wonderful evening the other night with your Mr. Jasper,” Barbara said.
A shiver of suspicion ran through me. “You did?”
“Lovely man. So attentive.”
I felt troubled by this, though I was uncertain why. “Are you seeing him again?”
“Definitely,” she said, with just a touch too much certainty. “Hopefully…,” she added.
Abbey yawned, then gaped in fake astonishment at her watch. “God. Is that the time?”
“What a tedious woman,” she said, the moment poor Barbara had gone.
I was in the kitchen, putting the kettle on. “Wouldn’t call her tedious.”
“Clearly she finds you fascinating.”
“Sorry?”
“Coming all the way here just to drop off your scrap-heap of a bike. It’s embarrassing.”
“I thought it was a nice gesture.”
“Nice gesture?” Evidently, this suggestion was absurd. “I think she’s after you.”
I could hear the kettle boiling. “What do you mean ‘after’ me?”
Abbey folded her arms. “I can see it in her eyes.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why would Barbara be interested in me? Anyway, do you want a coffee or not?”
Abbey stalked from the room. “Good grief,” I muttered. “Surely you can’t be jealous?”
My only answer was the slam of her bedroom door.
I was giving serious thought to knocking on that door, to taking Abbey in my arms and confessing that I was falling for her in the most hopeless, overwhelming kind of way (and that I wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in Barbara), when the doorbell began to clamor for my attention.
The driver from the Directorate slouched on the threshold. “Fetch your coat,” he grunted. “The Prefects want a word.”
I made as much noise as I possibly could in retrieving my coat and preparing to leave the flat, but Abbey didn’t emerge from her bedroom and I was too proud to tell her that I was going.
Barnaby had Radio Four playing in the car, some piece of late-night esoterica with a couple of professors spatting crustily over the early works of H.G. Wells.
“Academics,” Barnaby spat as we drove past Tooting Bec station and began the usual protracted escape from south London.
“But weren’t you one of those once?” I asked mildly.
“Yeah,” Barnaby said, his voice bristling with an even greater than usual distillation of belligerence. “Difference is — I knew what I was talking about. Still would, as a matter of fact, if those bastards hadn’t set me up. If they hadn’t concocted that farrago of-”
“Where’s Jasper tonight?” I asked, eager to avoid another venting of the Barnaby spleen. “Where’s Steerforth?”
The driver grimaced. “Too chicken. Couple of nancy boys, the pair of them.”
“I don’t believe they’re cowards,” I said quietly. “It’s just Hawker and Boon. They’ve got a way of making you feel afraid.”
A grunt from the front seat.
“Have you ever met them?”
“No,” he said, although I could tell by the way he said it that he was lying.
I was about to ask more but Barnaby turned up the volume on the radio as high as it could go and refused to answer any further questions for the duration of the journey.
The phalanx of reporters and photographers who often loiter and preen outside Number Ten in daylight hours had long since retired to bed, and those who were left — the soldiers, the guards, the plainclothes policemen — all parted before me without the slightest murmur of a challenge and I marveled again at the skeleton key effect of the words “the Directorate.”
This time I had walked into Downing Street alone. Barnaby still sat in the car outside, gloomily turning the pages of
If anything, the sense of oppression, of walking blithely into the gingerbread house, felt even stronger this time. I moved through the library, stepped behind the painting and descended into the depths, past the silent gallery of freaks and ghouls, and tiptoed along the twilight corridor until I reached the final cell, the dreadful resting place of the Prefects.
The guard, his hands white knuckled around his gun, nodded brusquely and I think I was able to detect, buried somewhere deep in his mask of military indifference, a flicker of concern, the merest suggestion of compassion.
Inside, the Domino Men were waiting, their gnarled, hairy legs swinging to and fro in their deckchairs. Everything seemed identical to my last visit, the room as pitilessly stark as before — except for one peculiar addition.
There was an ancient television set in the center of the circle, cranked up far too loud. I heard the blare of canned laughter, the squeak of poorly delivered wisecracks, the silken voice of one of our most prolific character comedians, but it was only when I recognized the tremulous soprano of my nine-year-old self that I realized with a jolt exactly what it was that those creatures were watching.
On-screen, my younger self walked onto a set which always wobbled and delivered my catchphrase to cyclones of tape-recorded mirth.
Hawker and Boon were staring sullenly at the television, like it was a lecture on photosynthesis which they were being forced to sit through in double-period science.
The smaller man groaned. “Dearie me.”
Hawker shook his head sorrowfully. “I’ve got to be honest with you, old top.”
“Got to be frank.”
“It ain’t the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Let’s be candid here, Mr. L. It’s about as funny as cholera.”
“It’s about as funny as…” Hawker thought for a moment, then sniggered. “A nun with leprosy.”
A dirty smirk twisted Boon’s features into something rubbery and grotesque. “And we should jolly well know.”
I moved before them, careful to keep outside the circle.
“Why are you watching that?” I asked, as I caught the familiar plonk and grind of the theme tune.
“It really is a clanger, isn’t it, sir?”
Hawker switched off the television, his lips pursed in a moue of distaste. “What a turkey, sir! What a tip-top stinker!”
Boon passed his hand to and fro in front of his nose, as though washing away an imaginary pong. “Phew!”
“Coo-ee!”
