The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(5)
That was my first war. I did not volunteer for my second. I knew it likely that I would soon be conscripted so chose to rely on skills learned in my first life to keep myself alive. In my third life I joined the RAF as a ground mechanic and ran for the shelter faster than any other man in my squad when the sirens went, until finally Hitler began to bomb London and I knew I could begin to relax. It was a good place to be for the first few years. The men who died nearly all died in the air, out of sight and out of mind. The pilots did not really interact with us grease men, and I found it all too easy to consider the plane my only care, and the man who flew it merely another mechanical part to be ignored and overcome. Then the Americans came, and we began bombing Germany, and many more men died in the air, where I only needed to lament the loss of their machines, but more began coming back, shot through with shrapnel, their blood on the floor just thick enough to retain the shape of the footprints that had scrambled through it. I wondered what I could do differently, with my knowledge of what was to come, and concluded that it was nothing. I knew that the Allies would win, but had never studied the Second World War in any academic detail; my knowledge was entirely personal, a thing lived rather than information to be shared. The most I could do was warn a man in Scotland by the name of Valkeith to stay in the boat two minutes longer on the beach of Normandy, or whisper to Private Kenah that there would be a tank in the village of Gennimont which had turned right instead of left and was waiting between the bakery and the church to end his days. But I had no strategic information to impart, no learning or knowledge other than a declaration that Citro?n would make elegant unreliable cars and one day people would look back at the division of Europe and wonder why.
Having reasoned myself so eloquently into this position, I continued once again to have a thoroughly unremarkable war. I oiled the landing gear of the planes which would destroy Dresden; I heard rumours of boffins attempting to design a jet engine and how the engineers derided the notion; I listened for the moment that the engines of the V1s stopped, and for a brief period for the silence of a V2 that had already fallen, and when VE day came I got horrendously drunk on brandy, which I don’t particularly like, with a Canadian and two Welshmen who I’d met only two days before and who I never saw again.
And I learned. This time I learned. I learned of engines and machines, of men and strategies, of the RAF and the Luftwaffe. I studied bomb patterns, observed where the missiles had fallen so that next time–for I felt 60 per cent confident that there would be a next time, all this again–I would have something more useful to serve myself with, and potentially others, than a few personal recollections about the quality of tinned ham in France.
As it was, the same knowledge which protected me from the world was in later times also to put me in great danger and, by this route, indirectly introduce me to the Cronus Club, and the Cronus Club to me.
Chapter 6
His name was Franklin Phearson.
He was the second spy I ever met in my life, and he was hungry for knowledge.
He came to me in my fourth life, in 1968.
I was working as a doctor in Glasgow, and my wife had left me. I was fifty years old and I was a broken man. Her name was Jenny and I loved her and told her everything. She was a surgeon, one of the first female surgeons on the ward; I was a neurologist with a reputation for unorthodox and occasionally unethical–though legal–research. She believed in God. I did not. Much must be said of my third life, but for now let me say simply that my third death, alone in a hospital in Japan, had convinced me of the truth of nothingness. I had lived and I had died, and not Allah, Jehovah, Krishna, Buddha, nor the spirits of my ancestors had descended to take away my fear, but rather I had been born again exactly where I had begun, back in the snow, back in England, back in the past where it had all begun.
My loss of faith was not revelatory, nor intensely distressing. It was a prolonged growth of resignation, one which the events of my life had only reinforced, until I was forced to conclude that any conversations I had with a deity were entirely one way. My death and subsequent rebirth back where I had begun rounded the argument off with a sort of weary inevitability, and I viewed it with all the disappointment and detachment of a scientist whose test tubes had failed to precipitate.
I had spent an entire life praying for a miracle, and none had come. And now I looked at the stuffy chapel of my ancestors and saw vanity and greed, heard the call to prayer and thought of power, smelled incense and wondered at the waste of it all.
In my fourth life I turned away from God and sought out science for an explanation. I studied as no man has studied before–physics, biology, philosophy–and at the last fought with every tool at my disposal to become the poorest boy in Edinburgh university, graduating top of my class as a doctor. Jenny was drawn to my ambition, and I to hers, for the ignorant had snickered the first time she took up a scalpel, until they saw the precision of her cuts and the confidence with which she wielded a blade. We’d been together for ten years in unfashionable but politically pointed sin, before marrying in 1963 in that swell of relief that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis; and it had rained, and she had laughed and said we both deserved it, and I had been in love.
So in love that one night, for no very special reason, and without much very special thought, I told her everything.
I said, “My name is Harry August. My father is Rory Edmond Hulne, my mother died before I was born. This is my fourth life. I have lived and I have died many times before now, but it is always the same life.”