A Quiet Life(62)

‘God, I hope not,’ said Toby. ‘If I don’t get some sleep soon I’ll be good for nothing. It’s not the bombs that make that impossible so much as the guns in the park.’

‘Are you a light sleeper?’ Laura said to Giles. She gave her voice the bland tone that he had mocked in the past. He replied with the characteristic garrulousness that she found so irritating.

‘I’d say I was. But in fact once I’m asleep I’m all right. It’s more that I find it hard to fall asleep. My friend Grey – his work’s all in neurology – came up with an interesting finding. Most people, when they close their eyes, their brain waves immediately slow into a more regular pattern – alpha waves, they are called. For most people that’s automatic: you close your eyes, your brain waves calm down, you open your eyes, they go back to being spiky and jumpy again. But a significant minority of people, if you ask them to close their eyes, their brain waves don’t change. They remain just as spiky and jumpy, they are just as engaged as with their eyes open. And I’m one of that small minority—’

‘Is that such a breakthrough?’ Edward broke in, asking whether it wasn’t just a physical observation of something one already knew by experience, that sometimes it was hard to switch off. Giles began to argue immediately, telling Edward that it showed that people aren’t as in control of their minds as they think they are.

‘But does it show that? It doesn’t show that you couldn’t change it if circumstances were different – we’re not just machines, made to work one way only …’

‘Come on, if it’s in the patterns of your brain waves, then that’s it, you can’t just change those.’

Edward and Giles went on arguing about whether such experiments proved that one didn’t really have free choice. They seemed to believe that they could change each other’s minds if they argued passionately, that Giles could convince Edward that his brain’s patterns were already laid down for him by biology; that Edward could convince Giles that people could be changed by force of will, while Laura remained silent, smoking and looking into the fire. For once, the hated sirens and the descent into the basement came as a kind of relief.

For a long while they lay there, Toby snoring, Giles reading by the light of a small torch, until the raid began and they started to hear distant thumps and explosions and the answering clatter of the guns. As always, Laura felt excessively aware of the fragility of the walls and the ceiling. After an hour or so she crept out of the kitchen. She hoped that the others would assume she was simply on her way to the lavatory, but instead, step by soft step, she made her way upstairs. On the second floor, she shone her torch into the guestroom. Giles’s clothes from the day were folded over a chair – like Edward, he had the boarding schoolboy’s spartan neatness in his blood. She ran her hands over the pockets of his jacket, but there was nothing there apart from a folded piece of paper. Then she saw on the desk a wallet next to a small heap of change, a couple of paperclips, an envelope, and some keys. Clearly, he had emptied his pockets before taking off his jacket. There was a set of keys on a plain brass keyring, and one steel key lying separately. With her handkerchief over her fingers to avoid prints she scooped it up and put it into her pyjama pocket, where it lay heavy against her thigh.

She did not know whether this was the right key, but now she had taken the first step, she went on without considering the alternative. She went back downstairs and stepped into the hall. Yes, the key turned easily enough, and she lifted the lid of the box. If someone came up from the basement now, it was all over, but ever since she had spoken to Stefan about the magnetron she had seemed to be walking down a road with no way to step off. Luckily no one seemed to be stirring. What she saw inside the box made her heart sink. There were stacks of papers in folders, and a long wooden box. She grabbed her handbag from the hall table, and put three folders of papers into it. Immediately, she put the lid down and relocked it, and went upstairs again. She shut the door to her and Edward’s bedroom and pushed a chair against it. Checking the blackout blinds were firmly fastened, she turned on the top light and moved a side lamp onto the table too. Hoping that was enough light, she rested the camera on a makeshift tripod of a stack of books, and one by one she laid out each diagram, each set of equations, and clicked the shutter.

Time slowed. She was moving as fast as she could through each of the three folders she had brought up. She was wearing gloves now, according to the instructions that Stefan had dinned into her, so that there would be no fingerprints, and although they were thin cotton gloves she had bought just for this purpose, her palms were wet with sweat and her forehead beaded. There was no sound in the room but her short breaths and the shutter falling, but the pounding of the guns in Green Park meant she could not hear what was happening in the house. What if Toby was wondering about her absence? What if Ann was coming up to see whether she was all right? What if Giles thought of checking on his box? Yet when the guns suddenly fell silent it was worse, as the sound she was dreading, the sustained note of the all-clear, wailed out.

At least she had finished the folders she had managed to bring up with her. She moved the chair away from the door. But then she heard footsteps on the stairs. Giles, going back to his room. A physical shudder of nausea ran through her at the thought of him noticing the lost key, but carefully she tucked the papers into the waist of her pyjamas and tied a cashmere bathrobe around her. She must look bulky and odd, but as she was going to claim a stomach ache it might be all right to hold her arms around her belly. She went downstairs as insouciantly as she could. But there, on the hall floor, was a gap where she expected to see the box. She was standing in the hall when Edward came up the basement stairs and she looked past him into the kitchen. There was the box, in the basement. Giles must have moved it down there for safekeeping. Had he tried to open it? She felt sweat start on her back under her bathrobe. She went into the kitchen, where there was only Ann now, putting a kettle on the hob.