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      ‘But how are you feeling?’ Clement asked.

      Her hand sought his, and then she looked at him through cloudy eyes. ‘Fucking awful, darling,’ said Green Mouth.

      She was returning to reality. He summoned the hostess for some more champagne.

      Monday morning. Home again. Shoes off time. Safe. Secure in the Victorian brick wilderness of North Oxford. Their square-windowed house in Rawlinson Road was shielded from the gaze of passers-by by an enormous horse chestnut tree which some absent-minded builder had forgotten to destroy while he had the chance, possibly during the celebrations attendant on Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.

      The hired chauffeur stacked their luggage in the hall and left.

      Sheila went into the front room and reclined with care on the sofa under the lace-curtained window. Her green lipstick and eye shadow had been removed in the toilet of the 747. She now looked merely pale, merely enervated, merely English.

      ‘Are you going to make us a cup of tea?’ she called.

      Clement was taking the cases upstairs.

      ‘Good idea. Hang on a moment.’ Michelin, who lived with them, was out.

      The time was 10.50. Or alternatively, 5.50, New York time.

      His head rang.

      In their bedroom, he set down the cases and opened one of them. In it, approved by Customs, lay Green Mouth’s latest prize, the High Homeric Fantasy Award, sculpted in fibre glass.

      To please her, possibly to revive her, he took it downstairs and placed it on a table before her. She smiled wanly.

      ‘Oh, that!’ said the Top Priestess of Epic Fantasy. It is magnificent. It consists of a bust of Homer with two little cupid wings sprouting from his grey locks, just above his ears. This is no mere ha flim-flam. This is a literary award, bestowed by earnest young judges of the various sexes. On the back of the revered Greek story-teller’s head are etched the titles of the ten Kerinth novels and the one collection of short stories, with their dates of publication.

      What’s more, this award is electronic. Inside the skull is concealed a lithium battery smaller than a dime. Clement switches on. Homer’s blind eyes light up. The wings flap at a dignified pace. Homer nods.

      Sheila smiled. ‘Wonderful, but … tea?’

      He brought her tea in her Libra mug, accompanied by two Hedex, and sat on the edge of the sofa clutching his own mug.

      ‘You could go up and lie on the bed.’

      She nodded, clasping the mug between stubby fingers, looking down into the tea. ‘I wonder if Michelin made any biscuits.’

      After they had sipped for a while in silence, she yawned and looked rather sullenly round the room, as if to orient herself.

      It was not a remarkable room, except that successive owners had spared the elaborate Victorian fireplace, before which an electric fire now stood. Sheila had chosen a blue, green and gold decor, and had not pushed the green too heavily. The wallpaper was a dark blue, the chairs and sofa were green and gold. Gold birds fluttered in the folds of blue and green curtains. A large rococo-framed gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece. To the left of the fireplace stood a glass cabinet housing some of Sheila’s awards for fiction, including the International Otherworld Fiction Award sculpture of Tazz riding a mazoom. In the bookcase to the other side of the fireplace, above the sets of Dickens, Galsworthy, and Dornford Yates, her own books were on display, with Brute of Kerinth, the first in the series, facing outwards into the room.

      Postcards from all over the world were ranged along the mantelshelf, like illustrations from other people’s lives lived under bright blue skies. Photographs of Green Mouth mixing with important people hung framed on the wall behind the door. Beneath them was a small eighteenth-century side-table bearing a large Chinese vase converted into a table-lamp. Similar conversions involved the mock gas brackets which projected from the wall over the fireplace. The white leather rhino which served as a footrest – present from a grateful and enriched publisher in Germany – had never seen the forests of Sumatra.

      The stillness in the room was also in a sense man-made. The Winters had had all the windows double-glazed, to shut out noise from the street.

      To the rear of the room, by a curtained archway leading through to the conservatory, a music stack with discs, records and cassettes waited in an alcove. There hung an enormous gouache, painted for a bygone dust jacket, of Gyronee, Queen of Kerinth, standing bolt upright with a spear and a sort of dog, gazing into the purple future.

      Beyond the queen stood a bureau at which Sheila often sat to answer her fanmail. Her study suite was upstairs on the first floor. Clement’s little study was up another flight, on the second floor, under the eaves that pointed in the direction of the University.

      ‘Back to reality,’ she said, setting down her mug. ‘I suppose Michelin is in Summertown shopping.’

      ‘She’ll be back soon. Shall we have a snort of something?’

      ‘Shall we? Just wine for me.’

      ‘Wine it is.’ He went through to the kitchen and uncorked a bottle of Mouton Cadet, whistling as he did so.

      Michelin had collected up the mail and piled it on the dresser. As he put the corkscrew back into the drawer, Clement looked it over. Most of the letters were for Sheila, addressed to her under her famous pseudonym; most of them came from the United States. Sorting casually through the collection, he found some bills and a small package addressed to him. He recognized his sister Ellen’s writing.

      The package was registered. Evidently Michelin had signed for it. He frowned, but made no attempt to open it just yet. Like Sheila, he felt a reluctance to allow the real world back in: the world of bills. On Kerinth, bills were never presented or paid; no one worked, except peasants. Sisters, if they sent packets, sent them by hand – probably by a messenger on a telepathic erlkring. The messenger would arrive in a lather, perhaps seriously wounded, and the packet would contain something portentous. A lover’s heart, perhaps, as in The Heart of Kerinth.

      Was Ellen sending him something equally vital?

      He suppressed such questions, left the package on the dresser, and went back into the front room to Sheila, carrying the bottle and two glasses.

      After the first glass, she fell asleep. He spread a tartan rug gently over her. He stood regarding her. With her eyes closed she looked characterless, despite the noble nose and noticeable chin.

      Taking the opportunity, Clement went quietly upstairs to his study. There his dead brother’s papers awaited him, stacked on the desk, tumbling out of boxes on the floor; the mortal remains of Joseph Winter in folders and old brown paper bundles. For all practical purposes, Joseph in death had taken over Clement’s study.

      When Sheila had made her remark, commonplace enough, about coming back to reality, she had spoken, Clement thought, with contempt as well as resignation. Reality for him meant something different, something with the texture of puzzlement, for to enter his study was to feel himself entangled in the affairs of his late brother.

      Some time soon, he would have to drive over again to his dead brother’s flat. It was two months СКАЧАТЬ