He woke with a sense of shock. He had no idea who he was. Or where he was. Or who this woman was, sleeping so peacefully beside him.
Oh God. Did he want to know who he was? Would it be an unpleasant surprise?
Later, when he told his doctor, he would estimate that this blankness, this disorientation, this absence of self, probably lasted less than a minute, maybe not even thirty seconds. At the time it seemed like an age.
What he also realized later – and this he didn’t tell his doctor, couldn’t tell his doctor, couldn’t tell another human being ever – was that he had experienced, in that brief moment, the first intimation of doubt. To most of us, plagued as we are by doubt, this may seem incredible, but men like this man – I feel it would be impolite, in a curious way, to give you his name before he himself has remembered it – manage to live without feeling any doubt at all, do things that would be impossible if they felt even a shred of doubt. Garibaldi, Hitler, Colonel Gaddafi, could they have done what they did if they’d had doubts? Not that I am putting our still unnamed hero in that category.
He felt something that he had not felt in his life for a very long time – real alarm. This was extremely disconcerting. He was always so completely in command of himself, prided himself on not needing an alarm clock because his body did what he told it to do; he was always in control, people thought him a control freak.
Well, that was something. That was a piece of knowledge about himself. He was a control freak. But today he was a control freak out of control. He was breaking into a sweat, he could feel the wetness of panic all over his skin.
Memory came back to him in small bits. Somebody calling him Gordon. He was Gordon somebody. This narrowed it down, but it really didn’t help all that much. Then from nowhere, in the utter darkness of the bedroom, there flashed into his mind a vivid memory of Mr Forbes-Harrison, his maths teacher, calling out, in a grim yard behind a grim school on a grim, grey morning, ‘You, Coppinger, where do you think you’re going?’ to which he had replied, to his own astonishment, as well as Mr Forbes-Harrison’s, ‘To the very top, sir.’
And with that ‘sir’ there came the thought that he hadn’t called anybody ‘sir’ for a very long time. People called him ‘sir’ now. He wasn’t just Gordon Coppinger. He was Sir Gordon Coppinger.
Now complete awareness flooded in, astonishing him. He was a great man and a rich one. He was a financier and an industrialist with a finger in many pies, ‘not all of which are steak and kidney’, as he used to say only too often, to prove that he still had a sense of humour, though many people thought it proved that he hadn’t. He owned the twenty-six-storey Coppinger Tower in Canary Wharf. In his huge and luxurious yacht, the Lady Christina, based in Cannes, he gave holidays every summer to men of power and influence.
He was a patriot and a philanthropist. He had created the Sir Gordon Coppinger Charitable Foundation, which supported many good causes. He owned the Coppinger Collection, which housed many masterpieces. The football team that he owned played at the Coppinger Stadium. It was time to get up.
Or was it? Not quite yet, perhaps. He knew who he was now, but he still wasn’t sure where he was. The darkness in the room was absolute, which suggested that he was at home, in the vast master bedroom, with its thick gold curtains and its thermal blinds. But suggestion wasn’t enough. He needed to know.
The question of where he was had no great importance in itself, beyond the necessity of finding a light switch or risk walking in the blackness straight into a row of wire coat hangers in some hotel bedroom, as had happened to a friend of his. Make that an acquaintance of his. He didn’t do friends. But until he knew where he was he couldn’t be sure of the identity of the woman who was sleeping so quietly beside him.
If it was a woman. But that had all been a very long time ago, and, surely, if it was a man, after all this time, he would have remembered. No, it was a woman. Her gentle breathing was unmistakably female.
Just occasionally, the soft breathing became a faint, whistled, wistful snore, as if she was thinking, Surely my life should be happier than this? No man’s snore could come with so many fancy adjectives attached to it. Male snores were loud, or beery, or catarrhal. Male snores were simple.
Were these slight snores Lady Coppinger’s? He wasn’t sure. Was he in the master bedroom of Rose Cottage, the cottage being ironic, and the rose reflecting Her Ladyship’s greatest interest? Or was he in a hotel? Was this woman Francesca? Or Mandy? Please let him not be in Mandy’s flat. He sniffed. No, he wasn’t in Mandy’s flat. There was a faintly unpleasant smell of stale humanity in the room, but Mandy’s flat smelt of drains – distant drains, but unmistakable.
How could he ever have been so unwise as to go to bed with a woman called Mandy? Few names had more baggage attached to them, few names screamed ‘tabloid press’ as much as Mandy. He had been lucky to get away with it this long. Mandy must go.
He was wide awake now, and shocked by the timidity of his thoughts. Her name was half the point of Mandy. The risk was everything. Was he going soft? He felt for his prick. Yes, he was, but that wasn’t what he’d meant.
He tried to remember the events of the previous evening, but they stubbornly refused to come. Had he made love? He didn’t think so. That suggested, but didn’t prove, that he was with his wife. The fact that he couldn’t remember also seemed to indicate, but again didn’t prove, that he’d endured an ordinary Sunday evening at home.
Yes! They’d been watching the Antiques Roadshow. He’d said, ‘Bloody morons, they’ve had it for thirty-five years and they haven’t even noticed the maker’s name’; she’d told him to shut up in a very unladylike tone; he’d said, ‘I wish he’d break that fucking vase over Fiona Bruce’s head’; she’d said, ‘If you’re going to be unpleasant leave me alone’; and then not half an hour later she’d ticked him off for not wanting to watch Downton Abbey with her. Downton Abbey! He’d explained that life was too short to bother with things that hadn’t happened to people who’d never existed. She’d shouted, like a fishwife – was that fair on fishwives, if such people still existed? – that he was ruining her Sunday evening.
Yes, he was at home.
Lady Coppinger had watched Downton Abbey; he’d trawled the Net looking for references to himself, while slowly sipping a large glass of the sixteen-year-old Lagavulin and wondering from what revolting bottle Jack was seeking oblivion at that very moment, under some bridge or in some dark alley. Then he’d slipped quietly into bed beside Her Ladyship, planted the obligatory kiss on her cheek so softly that it could not possibly arouse her, switched the light off and gone straight into guiltless sleep, while she’d read a bit of some soppily romantic book by some much-loved authoress who in real life had been such a frightful snobbish bitch that she’d have been drummed out of Dudley with disdain.
He was at home with Christina. A cocktail of relief and disappointment swept over him, and suddenly he recalled the date and realized why he had felt that this was an important day. It was 31 October. Halloween. His wife’s birthday.
Yes, he had married a witch.
No, he hadn’t married a witch. That had been their little joke. It wasn’t a joke now. She hadn’t been a witch when he’d met her. She’d been as lovely and as full of promise as the dawn. She hadn’t been a witch when he’d courted her, proposed to her, married her. She had been his innocence. He had turned her into a witch. He had fucked his own innocence.
He didn’t like these thoughts, and