Thomas isn’t well. You’ve no right to shove your way in here. I hate you.’
‘Well, hate or not, I want to talk to Thomas.’
She couldn’t say he wasn’t there, because I could see him. Inside, the Haciendas were open-plan with rooms at odd angles to each other, which explained the odd-angled exteriors. The front door led into an angled off-shoot of the main room, which had no ceiling where one would expect it, but soared to the rafters. Windows one couldn’t see out of let daylight in at random points in the walls. Horrible, I thought, but that was only, as Mr West would say, my opinion.
Thomas rose to his feet from one of the heavily-stuffed armchairs brought from the bungalow, old comfortable chairs looking incongruous in all the aggressive modernity. There was no carpet on the woodblock floor; Thomas’s shoes squeaked on it when he moved.
‘Come in, old chap,’ he said.
‘We don’t want him,’ Berenice objected.
Thomas was looking haggard and I was shocked. I hadn’t seen him, I realised, for quite a long time. All youth had left him, and I thought of him as he had been at eighteen or nineteen, laughing and good-humoured, coming for weekends and making Serena giggle.
Twenty years on, he looked middle-aged, the head balder than when I’d last taken his photograph, the ginger moustache less well tended, the desperation all-pervading. Norman West’s assessment of early breakdown seemed conservative. It looked to me as if it had already happened. Thomas was a lot further down the line to disintegration than Gervase.
Ferdinand, he confirmed in answer to my question, had told him about Malcolm’s will and about Malcolm’s wish that I should try to find out who wanted to kill him. Thomas couldn’t help, he said.
I reminded him of the day old Fred blew up the tree stump. Ferdinand had mentioned that too, he said. Thomas had been there. He remembered it clearly. He had carried Serena on his shoulders, and Fred had been blown flat.
‘And do you remember the time-switches we used to make, with wire on the clocks’ hands?’
He stared, his eyes gaunt. After a long pause, he said,‘Yes.’
‘Thomas, after Gervase and Ferdinand left Quantum, did you or they make any more of them?’
Berenice interrupted,‘Dear Thomas couldn’t make a time-switch to save his life, could you, darling?’ Her voice was pitying, sneering, unkind. Thomas sent her a haunted look but no protest.
‘Someone gave Robin and Peter a Mickey Mouse clock with white plastic-covered wires stuck on it,’ I said.‘Very bright and attractive.’
Thomas shook his head helplessly.
‘In the rubble at Quantum, they’ve found a clock hand stuck onto some white plastic-covered wire.’
‘Oh, my God,’ Thomas said miserably.
‘So what?’ Berenice demanded.‘Dear Thomas does over-act so.’
‘So,’ I said,‘someone who knew how to make these time-switches blew up Quantum.’
‘What of it?’ she said. ‘I can’t see Thomas doing it. Not enough nerve, have you, darling?’
Thomas said to me,‘Have a drink?’
Berenice looked disconcerted. Asking me to have a drink had been for Thomas an act of rebellion against her wishes. There hadn’t been many of them, I guessed. I accepted with thanks, although it was barely five-thirty and to my mind too early. I’d chosen the hour on purpose, hoping both that Thomas would have returned from his day’s wanderings and that the daughters would stop at their grandmother’s house on their way home from school.
Thomas squeaked across the floor to the kitchen, which was divided from the main room only by a waist-high counter, and began opening cupboards. He produced three tumblers which he put clumsily on the counter, and then sought in the fridge interminably for mixers. Berenice watched him with her face screwed into an expression of long-suffering impatience and made no move to help.
‘We have some gin somewhere,’ he said vaguely, having at last found the tonic, ‘I don’t know where Berenice puts things. She moves them about.’
‘Dear Thomas couldn’t find a book in a library.’
Thomas gave her a look of black enmity which she either didn’t see or chose to ignore. He opened another cupboard, and another, and in his wife’s continued unhelpful silence finally found a nearly full bottle of Gordon’s gin. He came round into the main room and poured from the bottle into three glasses, topping up inadequately from a single bottle of tonic.
He handed me a glass. I didn’t much care for gin, but it was no time to say so.