‘When the lovers embrace and taste the flower of their years, they closely press and cause pain to the body, and often fasten their teeth on the lips, and dash mouth against mouth in kissing; yet all for naught, since they cannot tear off aught thence, nor enter in and pass away, merging the whole body in the other’s frame; for at times they seem to strive and struggle to do it. They yearn to find out what in truth they desire to attain, nor can they discover what device may conquer their disease; in such deep doubt they waste beneath their secret wound.’ Why on earth would anyone want to put themselves through that?
Some time after Adele left, Bailey decided to go for a stroll. Fresh air kept him alert. But on his way out of the Obediah Laboratories he was dismayed to see Rupert Rackenham standing there in just the same place beside a cypress tree. The Englishman had a cigarette in his mouth and he’d flicked butts in every direction as if sowing a field.
‘Professor Bailey—’
‘Have you been here all this time?’
‘Yes. I really am sorry to pester you like this but, between you and me, I’ve already spent the fee for this article so you’d be doing me an incomparable favour if you could spare so much as a minute and a half to discuss your work.’
‘Mr Rackenham, if you weren’t a friend of Adele’s I would telephone the security guard at Throop Hall and report you for trespassing.’
‘Don’t treat the gentleman that way, Franklin. You always were a well-mannered child.’
Bailey turned, and there was Lucy. For a moment he thought she was another one of these alarmingly vivid recollections that had been invading him all day, except that his recollection of Lucy wouldn’t have had a walking stick, and she wouldn’t have had those spotty subsident jowls, and she wouldn’t have been able to respond when Rackenham said, ‘Are you a friend of Professor Bailey, madame?’
‘Since he was born.’
‘I don’t know this woman,’ Bailey said.
‘Franklin!’ said Lucy.
Rackenham raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t mean to be impertinent, Professor Bailey, but she does seem to know your name.’
‘Anyone could find out my name.’ Last year the State Department had offered to help tighten security on campus to protect the highly classified endeavours of Bailey and Clarendon and their colleagues, but Millikan had refused, saying he didn’t want the Institute to feel like a military base. At the time, Bailey had been relieved, but he realised now how absurd it was that nothing really stood between him and the rest of the world but Mrs Stiles at Throop Hall. Bailey had always done his best to keep his Teleportation Device a secret, but on his long pilgrimage with his father he’d come to realise that secrecy, like kinetic energy, was continuously dissipated — so that a secret kept for ever was not just improbable, like a teleportation device, but inconceivable, like a perpetual motion machine.
‘Have you been here all evening, madame, like I have?’ said Rackenham.
‘Yes,’ said Lucy. ‘They said he won’t see me. But I have to see him. So I waited. I was watching you waiting too.’
‘You must be hungry. I certainly am. Perhaps you’d allow me to buy you a spot of supper somewhere near by? You needn’t worry,’ Rackenham added with a smile, ‘I haven’t any caddish intentions. But we could talk a bit about the disobliging Professor Bailey.’
‘You have no right!’ said Bailey.
‘To do what?’ said Rackenham.
The last thing Bailey wanted to do was invite Lucy into his laboratory, but he didn’t have a choice if he was going to get her away from Rackenham. ‘Lucy, come inside.’
‘I thought you didn’t know her,’ said Rackenham.
‘Come inside,’ Bailey repeated. He took Lucy’s arm and pulled her into the Obediah Laboratories almost faster than she could go with the stick. Then he locked the door behind them. Neither of them spoke until they were back in room 11, when Bailey said, ‘How did you find me?’
‘My granddaughter, she lives in Pasadena,’ said Lucy, panting a little. ‘I came out to live with her last year after I retired. One day I saw you in the street. I knew it was you. Don’t know how I knew — thirty years gone by at least — but I knew it was you. My little Franklin. But I didn’t want to stop you right away. Too nervous. So I got in a taxicab and I followed you. Found out you’re at the Institute. Found out you’re calling yourself Bailey now.’
‘My name is Franklin Bailey and it always has been.’
‘What did your daddy tell you about your mama, Franklin? I always used to wonder what he told you. You remember when she passed on it was right around when she’d had that ruckus with your grandma about your confirmation. Did he tell you your grandma and grandpa did something to her? Did he tell you he had to take you away in case they did something to you too?’
The lock on the door of the chapel. The carvings on the altar like gutters on an operating table. The chalice that was polished almost too clean. ‘You are a senile old woman.’
‘He did, didn’t he? Franklin, don’t you want to know what really happened to your mama?’
‘Nobody knows what happened. She disappeared and she was never found.’
‘She was found, child. She hadn’t been found by the time your daddy took you away. He only waited a day. She was found after that. But you were already gone, so you never knew.’
‘No more of this gibberish, please.’ She was going to tell him that his father had murdered his mother. She was going to tell him that his father had run away because otherwise he knew he’d be caught. She was going to tell him that it was the police that he and his father had been fleeing, not the agents of the Phenscots and the Catholic Church. She was a liar. He knew she was a liar. He knew. He knew. He didn’t know. He’d never known. He thought of Lucretius. ‘These men, exiled from their country and banished far from the sight of men, stained with some foul crime, beset with every kind of care, live on all the same, and, in spite of all, to whatever place they come in their misery, they make sacrifice to the dead, and slaughter black cattle and despatch offerings to the gods of the dead.’
Lucy smiled sadly. ‘Franklin, your mama fell down an elevator shaft.’
‘What?’
‘She was in a hotel and she didn’t have her eyeglasses and the grille opened when it shouldn’t have and she just stepped right into the elevator shaft. Broke her pretty neck. They didn’t notice her down there for a day and a half. Your daddy just jumped to conclusions.’
‘Do you still worship the gods of the dead, Lucy?’ said Bailey.
‘Are you listening to me, child?’
‘Do you still worship the gods of the dead? The gods those priests taught your grandparents about on the island where your people come from?’
‘I’m a good Catholic now, Franklin.’
‘That’s a pity,’ said Bailey. ‘Your grandparents were wrong — there are no gods of the dead — but they still understood more than you could possibly know.’
‘Professor Bailey?’
He looked up. Clarendon stood at the doorway of room 11. When had the Obediah Laboratories turned into Union Station? And then for the first time he wondered whether all this had really happened in just one day — whether, in fact, it wasn’t a week ago that he’d seen the Ford on the roof of Dabney Hall, and two weeks ago that he’d watched Adele in her rehearsal — whether he’d just let the transitions drop from his memory like a cutter down in Studio City. He found it hard to be certain. How was it possible for a person to be in one place, and then in another place, or to be in one time, and then in another time, without ever seeming to traverse the distances between them? ‘Yes, Dr Clarendon?’ he said.
‘I thought we might have that talk now about the trouble I’ve been having with the phasmatometer. But, uh, I see you’re busy,’ said Clarendon, obviously puzzled by the presence of an elderly black woman in Bailey’s laboratory.
‘No, I’m not busy. This lady is just lost. Why don’t you go back to your lab and I’ll come by in a few minutes?’
‘All right.’ Clarendon nodded to Lucy and then left.
‘Who is that man, Franklin?’ said Lucy.
