The Aleph, he said, was buried inside an abandoned  research tool the size of a small star: and recently the thing it most asked for was her. The assistant stared at him, then down at the suitcase.

‘Is it in there?’

Gaines shook his head. ‘It thought for a week, then it asked for a police detective on a planet no one had ever heard of.’ ‘I don’t understand  what I was looking at.’

‘For now,’ Gaines said, ‘we think it’s wise to keep the two of you apart.’ He closed the suitcase. ‘Given the weirdness of this.’ He added, in a kind of aside: ‘When we use the word “constructed”, we don’t rule out the idea of self-construction.’ Then he said:

‘We had some trouble finding you from the description it gave.’

10 Down to the River

TEN

Down to the River

Anna Waterman  got up early and walked through  Wyndlesham village to the downs. She preferred  the village empty. Just after dawn at that time of year a soft, grainy light warmed its pantile roofs, flint facings and herringbone  brick garden paths; the only thing moving was a cat.

From  behind  Wyndlesham  church  she  took  a muddy  lane, then steepening chalk paths up through  hawthorns  to where the remains of a second village, long abandoned, lay like a geographical feature, a series of intimate  sunken bays floored with sheep-cropped turf. Stands of elder had overgrown the old walls. What presented itself at first as a chalk bank, cut deeply by the footpath, suddenly revealed ends of Georgian brick. Anna loved that sense of enclosure, and then, as you walked further up the hillside, the way everything opened again suddenly to wide grassy re-entrants, long ridges dotted with isolated hawthorns and patches of burnet rose. She loved the  way the  wind  opened  everything  out  and moved it along.

By the time she reached Western Brow, the sun had come out. Skylarks went up and down like elevators in the clear air; though the curve of the downs obscured it, she could smell the sea; northwards the Low Weald stretched away towards London, scattered with villages in the morning haze – Streat, Westmeston, St Johns Without,  then  Wyndlesham  itself, built  around  a bend  on  the B2112 not far from the Lewes Road. The village would be awake by now. Sought after because it was close to the Downs but out of their shadow, Wyndlesham was the sort of place where, even in these harsh economic times, everyone kept a pedigree Australian cattle dog. On the walls of The Jolly Tinker you could examine tinted  reprographs  of  Victorian  farm  labourers,  their  impressive facial hair  and  rural  machinery;  but  at Sunday lunchtime, only brand managers, retired CEOs and bankers of every stripe, especially investment bankers who had made their money before 2008, could afford to drink  there. Their SUVs saw only trophy mud; their wives, though  they rode well, in tight little jodhpurs and shiny boots, did not come from riding families.