The Tyrant's Novel Read Free Page B

forgiven, and had no trade in television now.
    I am working on the stage at the moment, my wife told Mrs. Douglas.
    Indeed, she and a small group of her friends were rehearsing Tennessee Williams's
The Glass Menagerie.
It would be played in a warehouse for two nights, before an invited audience. My wife would earn nothing from playing Laura.
    But I had no complaints. My wife was my wife. I had come through the war with nothing worse than eczema of the hands and a vague loathing. As for the matter of Great Uncle, caution drew its veil. I saw the two women, the pool keeper's aunt and my wife, look at each other out of their haunted eyes. Such eyes were Great Uncle's gift to our nation's splendid women.
    Actors are mysterious people, and, as I said, my wife, Sarah Manners, had indeed taken on the symptoms of severe headaches. The attacks were regular, although they improved when her small theater group was at work, particularly during rehearsal. But the complaint, and the diminishment of appetite which accompanied it, made her seem gaunter than she had been when she was a famous and ample television goddess. Great Uncle, by his intrusion in the script, reduced her to the haunted girl he meant her to play, but we had been to the best doctors, and they said it was no more than a phase, that people often passed through a peak of migraine in their lives and emerged from it with a clearer head. One even suggested that the chemicals released by pregnancy would prove to be the cure. Although my wife was willing, we had not been fortunate in that regard.
    So here I give you, through this one encounter with Mrs. Douglas, what it was to live with Great Uncle on one's shoulder. He had the power to make water soft, and if for an hour it turned hard, that was soon amended. He had the power to separate dead sons from their mothers. Having served in the Summer Island campaign, I know that to be the truth. And he had the power to bend actors according to his imagination, whether they consented or not.
    Every second Thursday, we still dined at Sarah's old producer's, Andrew Kennedy's, house. Andrew had been promoted to head of the National Broadcasting Network, and so was a man to reckon with. Yet I knew also, because he told me once, that though middle-aged and with a wife and three grown children, he had considered at the time of his promotion becoming an escapee, fleeing north into Istria and seeking asylum. But on a late summer's evening, as one sat around his swimming pool in the midst of his five acres of ornate and devoutly tended garden, one could understand why he might have inhaled, taken his new post, and decided to stay another winter. In the spring he could review whether he really wished to travel as a nobody, by truck, hidden amongst cargoes, over the final border where he would declare himself a refugee, a man adrift, a man with no resources but those he carried by suitcase or in his pockets.
    These days, Andrew met with Great Uncle at least once a week, and chatted with people in the outer office both before going in and after leaving. People were, of course, very careful not to say too much, but even the most wary bureaucrats and Overguard gave away something more than they intended. That, combined with what he observed himself, made Andrew Kennedy increasingly hopeful that Great Uncle might die. He put what I can see now was too much hope in the possibility. But he knew that, as well as other aspects of age, such as short sight and the need to have frequent recourse to black hair dye, Great Uncle had persistent hip and back problems—by all reports a slipped disk—which made it painful for him to walk even in the office. He was getting paunchier too, a fact he disguised with tailoring and a corset when he appeared in his military uniform.
    It was at one of his meetings with Great Uncle that Andrew Kennedy had been given the helpful suggestion that Sarah should be turned into the grieving victim of the Others. Great Uncle had