in Wandsworth: the constant fretting over minor gibes, over their place in the hierarchy. 
The rules might be more civil in this circle than in Wandsworth; but the struggles, he 
began to understand, were fundamentally the same. All power games of one kind or another. 
He was pleased to have no part in them.
    Besides, his mind had more important issues to mull over. For one thing, there was 
Charmaine. More out of curiosity than passion, perhaps, he had begun to think about her a 
good deal. He found himself wondering how her body looked seven years on. Did she still 
shave the thin line of hair that ran down from her navel to her pubes; did her fresh 
sweat still smell so pungent? He wondered too if she still loved love the way she had. 
She had shown more unreserved appetite for the physical act than any woman he'd known; it 
was one of the reasons he'd married her. Was it still so? And if it was, with whom did 
she slake her thirst? He turned these and a dozen other questions about her over and over 
in his head, and promised himself that at the first opportunity he'd go and see her.
    The weeks saw his physique improve. The strict regime of exercise he'd set for 
himself that first night began as a torment, but after a few days of punished and 
complaining muscles the exertion began to bear fruit. He got up at five-thirty each 
morning and took an hour-long run around the grounds. After a week of following the same 
circuit he altered the route, which allowed him to explore the estate at the same time as 
exercising. There was a great deal to see. Spring hadn't arrived in force yet, but there 
were stirrings. Crocuses were beginning to show themselves, as were the spears of 
daffodils. On the trees, fat buds were starting to split; leaves were unfurling. It had 
taken him almost a week to cover the estate fully, and to work out the relation of one 
part of it to another; now he more or less had a grasp of the arrangement. He knew the 
lake, the dovecote, the swimming pool, the tennis courts, the kennels, the woods and the 
gardens. One morning, when the sky was exceptionally clear, he had circuited the entire 
grounds, hugging the fence all the way around the estate even when it threaded its way 
along the back of the woods. He now reckoned he had as thorough a knowledge of the place 
as anyone, including its owner.
    It was a joy; not just the exploration, and the freedom of running miles without 
someone looking over your shoulder all the time, but the reacquaintance with a dozen 
natural spectacles. He loved being up to watch the sun rise, and it was almost as though 
he was running to meet it, as though dawn was for him and him alone, a promise of light 
and warmth and life to come.
    He soon lost the ring of flab around his middle; the divide of his abdominals showed 
again: the washboard stomach he'd always been so proud of as a younger man, and thought 
he'd lost forever. Muscles he'd forgotten he had came back into play, at first to make 
their presence felt in aching, then to simply live a glowing, ruddy life. He was sweating 
out years of frustration and showering it away, and he was lighter for it. He was aware, 
once more, of his body as a system, its parts correspondents, its health dependent on 
balance and respectful usage.
    If Whitehead noted any change in his manner or physique, no comment was made. But 
Toy, on one of his trips up to the house from London, immediately registered the change 
in him. Marty noted an alteration in Toy too, but for the worse. It wasn't plausible to 
comment on how weary he looked Marty felt their relationship wouldn't yet allow for such 
familiarity. He just hoped Toy wasn't suffering from something serious. The sudden 
wasting of his wide face suggested a devouring somewhere in the man's innards. The 
nimbleness in his step, which Marty put down to Toy's Years in the ring, had also gone.
    There were other mysteries here, besides Toy's decline. For one thing, there was the 
collection: the works of the great masters that lined the corridors of the sanctuary. 
They were neglected. Nobody had dusted their surfaces in months, perhaps years, and in 
addition to the yellowing varnish that dimmed their fineness they were further spoiled by 
a layer of grime. Marty had never had much taste for art, but given time to look at these 
pictures, he found his appetite for it good. Many of them, the portraits and the 
religious works, he didn't really like: they weren't of people he knew or events he 
understood. But in a small hallway on the first floor that led to the extension that had 
been Evangeline's suite, and was now the sauna and solarium, he found two paintings that 
caught his imagination. They were both landscapes, by the same anonymous hand, and to 
judge by their poky location they were not great works. But their curious amalgam of real 
scenery-trees and winding roads under blue and yellow skies-with totally fanciful 
details-a dragon with speckled wings devouring a man on that road; a flight of women 
levitating above the forest; a distant city, burning-this marriage of real and unreal was 
so persuasively painted that Marty found himself going back and back again to these two 
haunted canvases, finding more fantastical detail hidden in thicket or heat-haze each 
time he went.
    The paintings weren't the only things that whetted his curiosity. The upper floor of 
the main house, where Whitehead had a suite of rooms, was entirely out-of-bounds to him, 
and he was more than once tempted to slip up when he knew the old man was otherwise 
engaged, to nose around the forbidden territory. He suspected Whitehead used the top 
story as a vantage point from which to spy on his acolytes" comings and goings. That went 
some way to explaining the other mystery: the sense, he had, running his circuits, that 
he was being watched. But he resisted the temptation to investigate. It was perhaps more 
than his job was worth.
    When he wasn't working he spent much of his time in the library. There, if he felt 
curious about the outside world, were current issues of Time magazine, The Washington 
Post, The Times, and several other journals-Le Monde, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, The 
New York Times, which Luther brought in. He would flick through them looking for tidbits, 
sometimes taking them down to the sauna and reading them there. When he tired of 
newspapers, there were thousands of books to choose from, not, to his delight, all 
intimidating tomes. There were plenty of those, the assembled classics of world 
literature, but beside them on the shelves were tattered, well-thumbed paperback editions 
of science fiction books, their covers lurid, the copy on them paradigms of excess. Marty 
began to read them, picking those with the most suggestive covers first. There was also 
the video. Toy had supplied him with a dozen tapes of boxing highlights, which Marty was 
systematically viewing, rerunning favorite victories to his heart's content. He could sit 
all evening watching the matches, awed by the economy and the grace of the great 
fighters. Toy, ever thoughtful, had also supplied a couple of pornographic tapes, handing 
them across to Marty with a conspiratorial smile and some comment about not eating them 
all at once. The tapes were copies of storyless loops, anonymous couples and trios who 
threw off their clothes in the first thirty seconds and got down to the nitty-gritty 
inside a minute. Nothing sophisticated: but they served a useful purpose, and, as Toy had 
obviously guessed, good air, exercise and optimism were doing wonders for Marty's libido. 
There was going to come a time when self-abuse in front of a video screen was not going 
to be satisfaction enough. Increasingly, Marty dreamed of Charmaine: unambiguous dreams 
set in the bedroom of Number Twenty-six. Frustration gave him courage, and the next time 
he saw Toy he asked to be allowed to go and see her. Toy promised to ask the boss about 
it, but nothing had come of it. In the meanwhile he had to be content with tapes and 
their stage-managed gasps and grunts.
    
    Systematically he began to put names to the faces that appeared most regularly at the 
house; Whitehead's most trusted advisers. Toy, of course, was regularly in evidence.