The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(91)
“Yes, and the backhanded way in which you did that! No seeking permission, no extra studies, no tuition at all, from what I can see. It’s not how these things are done!”
I stared at Constance and wondered if, in her way, she wasn’t quite, quite mad. Not a neurological madness, not a disease of the mind, but rather a cultural madness, an infection of expectations which corrupted her perception of what should be and what actually was. Under any other circumstances I would have been praised as a genius, an unmitigated hero and quite possibly a model for social reform in stodgy times; but to Constance all these things made me a rebel. I wondered what she would make of the twenty-first century, if she would have wept when the twin towers fell. Was it a world she would have been able to comprehend?
“Are you asking me to stay?” I queried.
“You’re a young man,” she retorted. “If you want to abandon your father and go off to a place where, I personally feel, you’ll be quite unsuited to the life, then of course that’s entirely your decision!”
What would this conversation have been like, I wondered, if I was only eighteen years old? Now, in my eight hundred and forty-ninth year, it was almost funny.
I informed her I would consider my position most carefully.
She sniffed some empty words in reply and dismissed me with a wave.
I made it to the end of the corridor before I burst out laughing.
Chapter 67
Being an undergraduate again brought back memories.
Memories of Vincent, mostly.
Of better times.
When World War Two broke out and I was called up, I managed to get myself assigned to military intelligence. By 1943 I was working on Allied deception plans, agonising about whether cardboard tanks needed to be fully three-dimensional scale models, or if a well painted cut-out, adjusted for the position of the sun, could do the job of confusing a reconnaissance pilot. By 1944 I was so involved with my work that my heart would genuinely skip a beat whenever I heard rumours of a scout plane which had made it over the Kent coast before we could fully deploy our models, or which had come a little too low over one of our fake camps. Vincent was briefly forgotten about until in April 1944 a group of visiting Americans, come to inspect one of our phoney landing strips, asked me entirely casually if I had any models of the new jet fighters ready to deploy.
The question caught me so by surprise that it was one of the few moments when I actually doubted my own memory. A jet fighter this early? I knew the jet engine was under development, and tests were being conducted on the technology, but for actual deployment in battle? If such a thing had been even considered, it was in no record of the war I’d read, nor in no life during the war that I had lived, and I had dabbled in some senior positions with access to sensitive information in my time. I made some vague remarks and quickly took our visitors on to explain to them how our radio operators were working round the clock to generate as much radio traffic as possible in Kent between the large numbers of fictional units we’d stationed there, and how we’d be grateful if the US Army could issue us with a wider range of suitable call signs. The meeting done, the visitors adjourned, and I was left to ponder the great mystery of the throwaway question. In the guise of an eager official seeking to do a good job, I sounded out a few contacts in the American air force, looking for information on this new jet engine so that I might better deceive our enemy into thinking we had it, or didn’t have it, or whatever it was government policy dictated was the lie of the moment. A few replies drifted back from the ether. Yeah, it was a project some of the boffins were working on, wasn’t it? Sorry, Harry, not really my thing. Had I talked to any of the chaps down in Portsmouth? Maybe they’d have something more. Getting nowhere, I nearly let the matter drop altogether, until in December 1945, visiting a friend in hospital in Folkestone, he shook me warmly by the hand, exclaimed how pleased he was to see me and asked me if I’d heard about his new kidney. He even showed me the scar from the operation, which impressed me greatly not least as the first organ transplant operation wasn’t due to happen for another five years.
Chapter 68
The world was changing, and the source of the change was America.
In another time such flagrant and obvious corruptions of the normal passage of things would have brought the Cronus Club tumbling down on their creator’s head like the walls of Babylon atop a heretical priest. But the Clubs were not only weakened, but in this life–the second since the massed Forgettings inflicted on its members–hundreds of members were coming into an awareness of who and what they were as though for the very first time. Previously the Clubs had had to process one new member each every century or so, but in this new world the survivors were swamped.
“We could do with your help, Harry,” Akinleye said.
Remarkable Akinleye, who had chosen to forget and who, through luck more than anything else, had managed to escape Vincent’s clutches when he came after us all, was taking charge. Aged sixteen years old, she was juggling duties in London, Paris, Naples and Algiers, marshalling survivors and caring for the newcomers only just beginning to learn what they were. “I’ve got kalachakra kids committing suicide; I’ve got kids in mental institutions, adults getting God, adults not understanding why they shouldn’t kill Hitler, and, Harry, I’ve only been doing this for four lives that I can remember myself. You’re one of the lucky few who hasn’t lost control. Help me.”