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Losing his way, Maitland stumbled into a room-sized enclosure bounded by the nettles growing from the wall-courses of a ruined house. Standing in this stony garden, like the dead centre of a maze, he tried to find his bearings. The heavy rain-clouds hung in dense curtains between himself and the motorway. The mud caked across his di
'Maitland…!' he shouted aloud. 'Robert Maitland…!'
He clung to the metal crutch and hobbled from the garden. Twenty feet to his left, beyond a pile of galvanized iron sheets, was the ruined entrance to a basement doorway. Maitland vomited into the streaming rain. He wiped the phlegm from his mouth and swung himself over the stony ground. Worn steps ran down to the doorway, where a narrow entrance led under a tilting lintel into the open air.
Maitland dragged the sheets of galvanized iron towards the steps. Laying them carefully between the lintel and the top step, he built a crude roof, adjusting the sheets so that the slope carried away the streaming rain. He threw the crutch down the steps and eased himself under the roof of his new shelter.
Sitting on the steps as the rain drummed at the metal roof over his head, Maitland took off the di
Maitland listened to the rain striking the galvanized iron. He remembered the house his parents had taken in the Camargue for their last summer together. The intense delta rain had fallen on the garage roof below the windows of the bedroom where he had happily spent most of the holiday. It was no coincidence that when he had first taken Helen Fairfax to the south of France they had gone straight to La Grande Motte, the futuristic resort complex on the coast a few miles away. Helen had quietly hated the hard, affectless architecture with its stylized concrete surfaces, nervous of Maitland's buoyant humour. At the time he had found himself wishing that Catherine were with him – she would have liked the ziggurat hotels and apartment houses, and the vast, empty parking lots laid down by the pla
Through the open doorway Maitland watched the pools of water covering the weed-grown basement into which the first floor had collapsed. A small printing shop had once been here, and a few copper-backed letterpress blocks lay around his feet. Maitland picked one up and examined the cloudy figures of a dark-suited man and a white-haired woman. As he listened to the rain he thought of his parents' divorce; the uncertainties of this period, when he was eight years old, seemed to be replicated in the negative image on the letterpress plate, in the reversed tones of this unknown man and woman.
An hour later, when the rain had ended, he climbed from his shelter. Holding tightly to the crutch, he hobbled back to the southern embankment. His fever continued to rise, and he gazed light-heartedly at the deserted causeways of the motorway.
When he reached the embankment and searched for the message he had scrawled on the white flank of the caisson, he found that all the letters had been obliterated.