The sanctuary, p.1
The Sanctuary, page 1
Andrew Hunter Murray
* * *
THE SANCTUARY
Contents
Prologue
Book I: Mainland Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Book II: Island Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Book III: Sea-Change Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Andrew Hunter Murray is a scriptwriter and senior researcher for BBC2’s QI. He co-hosts the award-winning podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, which has had 300 million downloads and toured the UK, Europe and USA. He also writes jokes and journalism for Private Eye magazine and hosts the Eye’s podcast, Page 94.
His first novel, The Last Day, was a Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller, and one of the top 10 fiction debuts of 2020.
Also by Andrew Hunter Murray
The Last Day
To M.M.F.L.
Prologue
He has heard for years that this day would come. He always dutifully believed it, repeated the words with the rest of the congregation, but he didn’t seriously imagine it, nor that he would feel such strange pleasure when it did.
He doesn’t have a gun; he’s only fourteen, and slight. His mother has explained that the recoil alone would knock him flat. He was always told there was no need to rush his training. Except now – with the firing outside, and the sand-coloured armoured vehicles crawling forward, the cowardly troops shielded by them pressing ever closer – now he wishes he had one.
Still, he has the next best thing. He’s been down to the kitchens. A knife won’t be missed now, not in the middle of all this. The older men and women are running through the corridors, finding the best positions to return fire, but he has his own labour to fulfil. He walks calmly, with it balanced in his hand.
Back upstairs, he sees the great man. He’s standing behind a column, holding a rifle and glancing outwards, coordinating, shouting. He is alone; there is something about him that is always curiously alone.
If he ran the place, the boy thinks, he doubts whether he would make all the same decisions the great man did. He is not sure, if he was the great man, whether he would hit others so enthusiastically, nor for so long. Although these thoughts are heresy, of course, and the great man is simply acting on instructions from the highest power of all.
The gunfire is much closer now. It has made the day hotter; the individual bullets have warmed the air, agitating it like wasps as they slap the walls. The men approaching the compound are gaining, but the battle is in the balance. Beyond the outer wall, something explodes.
When you are small, and weak, a knife simply requires a sharp point. His mother has shown him this in the kitchens, how a little pressure exerted in the right place can create a great rip in an animal’s side. All you need, she has explained, is the courage to create the first incision, and the rest will follow on. It’s a lesson he likes far more than any the great man has taught him over the years. She has explained, too, how to recognise a moment of opportunity.
The great man is distracted, facing away and glancing out of the window. He laughs as one of the uniformed men outside falls, and bellows to his own followers that they are winning.
It is so little effort, just a few steps, to cross the room towards him, find the right point in his side – free of ribs, just like on a pig – and, with a quick gesture, to bury the blade. One, two, three.
The great man looks down, and drops his gun. He stumbles into the window’s light, and is immediately cut down by bullets from without. His eyes rest on the boy, but they are glazing already, and the boy cannot tell whether the great man sees who did this to him. He hopes he does.
The gunfire from within the compound crackles on, but without the dominant note of its leader, it will not last long. The boy pauses only to wipe a rough cloth over the knife’s handle, removing the fingerprints, then leaves the body and returns downstairs. He walks calmly once again. His mother will be proud.
Book I
* * *
Mainland
Strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
Matthew 7:14
The week I travelled to Pemberley’s island was the week the old king and the last elephant had both died, and although any connection between the two deaths seemed too glib to make, for several days one was hardly mentioned without the other. Two exemplars of their respective species, two mighty symbols of venerability and distinction, that sort of thing. You could write it yourself in five minutes, if you were fool enough or had news to sell.
They died days apart; the elephant went first. Accounts of them drawing their last breath at the same moment were later revealed to be nothing but sensational fabrications, the fevered work of journalists who should have taken up fiction instead. Although looking at what followed, perhaps the double extinction was significant after all.
Once the king went, the eradication of the earth’s largest remaining species was immediately relegated down the news order. Our country had been elderly for decades, and the death of our leader after years of stodgy, comforting inactivity felt important. It was another nudge of the wheel, another change of course sending us off the road into unknown country. Our national subconscious muddled the two; across the country people dreamed of elephants in crowns squeezing through palace gates, or of the old king himself, his skin grey and rugose, his nose warping into a trunk.
I forget the king’s name now, but the elephant was called Nala, and she had been the last of her kind for over a decade. There had been thousands of other extinctions by now, of less memorable creatures, but Nala seemed to be the perfect example of our great carelessness. Some had suggested breeding from her, but the notion seemed freakish, and the proposal was treated as the folly it was.
That was one clear difference between Nala and His Majesty – the old king had his replacements, the glassy-eyed children he had produced late in life. To see a facial feature – a look in the eye, the twist of a smile – repeated from one generation to another is greatly comforting. It tells us our ancestors have survived, if only in ghostly, half-glimpsed fragments. The young princess who took the old king’s place had the same smooth manner as her father, the same high cheekbones, and that was good enough. And so the country stumbled on, surveying its dimming reflection in the mirror with anxiety and vanity alike.
I didn’t pay much attention at the time. I was working that week. My notebook, left in the city, will have a one-line record of the fact. It has probably been torn or burned or mulched by now, but if not, the week will appear on the final page: two dates, a sum of money, a phone number, and a name. Bywater.
I finished the Bywater commission in five days flat; more fool me. Another day would have paid for a week’s living back in the city, but I couldn’t bear to drag it out any further than necessary. Apart from anything else, I was coming home to Cara. I even found myself hurrying over the final brushstrokes, and heard Anthony in my head chastising me for it. As it happened, that wasn’t the reason the job ended badly.
The Bywaters’ Village was one of the most exclusive in the country: a huge service settlement outside the walls, great beauty on display within. The sittings had taken five days; days that stretched out even as I sat through them, trying without success to lose myself in my work. I’d offered the family the option of working from photographs, but I could tell in my initial interview they would be the kind of clients to insist on what they considered the full experience.
They were a family of three – father and mother, him a decade older than her, and their son. The father was a type common in these places: tall, broad and vicious. He was wide-shouldered, with a breadth just on the turn, a suggestion of jowl beginning to make itself known above the collar of the shirt. The kind of client who makes you relieved you’ve brought enough paints to mix a decent quantity of pink. His work was something in the city. I loved that phrase. By then, most people who worked in the city didn’t.
It was Mrs Bywater who’d come up with the – to her – rather daring idea of having the family painted. My work was not exactly fashionable, but it had somehow outlasted the new technologies, as faith in them waned. There was an eternal quality about my medium, or so most clients thought, and I was loath to remind them of the thousands of portraits lost across the centuries, torn or binned or carelessly dismantled, their frames used as firewood. The older way of doing things had somehow survived into our own age, and I wasn’t going to correct anyone deluded enough to think my work might last.
It was more often the wife than the husband who commissioned me, but it was closer to half and half than you would think. It did, however, tend to be mostly groups of at least two. The few single people I painted tended to be receiving their portrait on behalf of an ins
I preferred single portraits despite that tension; maybe because of it. They produced an agreeable sense of struggle – the subjects’ resistance and awkwardness matched against my determination to capture their features, and the slow process of making sure it happened, stroke after stroke. Pemberley, of course, my final portrait, was the perfect example.
The Bywaters, though, had presented all the difficulties I least enjoyed working with, and none of those I treated as a challenge. Mrs Bywater was the opposite of her husband, physically. It was as if two average people had pooled their assets – the size, the colour, the movement – then divided them unequally. Where he was broad, she was slight. Where he was pink, she was pale; and while he treated the sittings with a bovine stolidity, she made the constant quick movements customary to the unnerved or the disappointed. A difficult client.
The son was sixteen, and clearly was at the exact age where he simultaneously craved his parents’ approval and wanted nothing to do with them. He hunched himself in the foreground like a folded deckchair, and looked off to the side.
After each morning’s sittings, I withdrew to a small timbered office at the end of the garden to work on the details. I was in the office when Mrs Bywater brought me tea and the news of the old king’s death. It hadn’t been unexpected, but it was a shock nonetheless – a storm wave glimpsed from a distance, no less destructive when it hits. She asked me what I thought would happen, and I childishly replied that the family would probably just carry on with the next generation, an option not open to poor Nala.
Mrs Bywater pursed her lips, and for the rest of the week her expression in the sittings as she looked towards me was one of mild distaste. I allowed a little of that look into the final painting; not enough to lose my fee, but enough for honesty.
I’m sure they were a family like most others. But the root of their urge to be painted – not for the sake of art, not to engage with the process, but simply for another image of themselves – gave me the feeling I had in all my least happy commissions, the feeling of sheer unimportance from the wrist upwards. I may as well have just bought them a mirror.
On the last morning, I came into the studio at the end of the garden to see the son trying to prise off the cover I had fitted over the canvas, to keep clients from looking at work before it was complete.
‘Excuse me. Please don’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the picture isn’t ready. I still need an hour or two to finish it.’
He gave me an impassive look just like his father’s, then moved to the next corner of the cover and started working it free.
‘Could you please stop that?’
He paused, and looked at me with amusement. The precious artist, in his home, telling him what to do.
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘Thirty-three.’
‘My dad says you want to live in a place like this. He said you never will. If you’re not here by twenty-five, you’ll never make it in, he says.’
That made me angry. ‘Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to live anywhere near a young man like you. Will you just leave it alone?’
He wasn’t quite confident enough to challenge me physically, and as I stepped towards him, my fists balled in annoyance, he moved back, wide-eyed, raising his hands in innocence. A pantomime gesture.
‘What’s this?’ The boy’s mother was behind me in the doorway.
‘Your son was interfering with my picture.’
‘He threatened me, Mum. He said I’d better leave it alone or else.’
All of which explains how I found myself leaving the Bywaters’ compound, unpaid, and escorted by Village security to the gate.
If they could get over the row, I thought, the family would be happy with the result. They would get what they had asked for, barring the finishing touches – a glimpse of their younger selves, a sliver of eternity to hang in their front room. No matter what joys or sorrows followed, the painting would keep them fixed in a time of relative youth and possibility. The pictures I produce are not meant to be nostalgic, but they almost inevitably end up being so for their subjects. ‘How young I was,’ clients would say to me, the few times I saw them again. ‘How little I knew.’
These were the thoughts that occupied my attention as I made my way through the Village’s gatehouse, bid the security team farewell and passed onto the service road outside. They faded to insignificance as a new thought replaced them: I was finally free to return to Cara. Our life together was about to begin.
It was a morning of crystal skies and unwarranted warmth, the latest in a long line of such mornings, and each new day dawned with no change in the blue colour of the sky. Only the land beneath it changed, the open grasses yellowing to straw and the trees bowing their branches in mourning for their dearly departed friends, the clouds. A hot spring.
The queue outside the Village this morning was long, even though I left after ten. Seeing it gave me a feeling of relief at having been in the Village’s hostel – some clients would have kept me outside the walls in the service hub. Like the majority of my subjects, the Bywaters had seen me as an artisan, which earned me a little more respect than the average support worker.
The line looked much the same as all the queues outside these places: the young outside the walls, waiting to serve the old (plus their occasional fortunate brats) within. Building teams in their hi-vis jackets, smoking the final guilt-free fags of the day; a cadre of tired-looking women I guessed must be cleaners; a huddle of chefs with tattoos on every spare inch of skin. Half a dozen schoolteachers, smartly dressed, kept themselves apart.
One of the builders, a thickset man in his thirties, had sat down against the wall to sleep. He could have been hungover, but it’s likelier he was overworked. He looked beaten. If I’d had more courage or creative impetus, I’d have stopped to sketch him. But I was suddenly in a hurry, and didn’t want to risk a confrontation. Cowardice always was a weed scattered through the underbrush of my character. Anthony told me it would stop me becoming a great artist, although if he could have seen my final painting, he might have recanted.
Neither the queue nor my cowardice nor the Bywaters mattered, though, because I was on my way home to Cara, and she was on her way home to me. I knew when her coach was scheduled to arrive back in the city. I would be there two hours earlier – long enough to tidy our home until it looked as good as the day before she left. I would have something cooking by the time she got back, something full of comfort: a stew with crusty bread on the side, or the better brand of chicken. I wanted her to know we would be comfortable together, that she could safely imagine growing old with me.
The coach to the city was a cut above the usual. It served the Village itself, not the satellite dwellings of the workers, which meant better seats and suspension, a more amiable driver, a happier experience in every way. I took out Cara’s last letter to me to read. It had come through two weeks ago, before the Bywater trip, and although it was short, I could not help taking it with me to reread in the evenings. It had ended:
I’ll be back on the fourth, sometime in the late afternoon. Knock off work in advance, won’t you. I want to have your full attention when I tell you about this place. I think it’s on the brink of something entirely new. I think I am too.
I wasn’t concerned by her brevity, of course, but it was a noticeable change. Her first notes from the island had been several pages each: long paragraphs interrupted by sketches, extra observations and footnotes crammed in at the sides, the ink blotching here and there as though too eager to get out of the pen. Even in those letters, and in her one phone call, she hadn’t told me too much about her work on Pemberley’s island – commercial confidentiality – but her first notes had been full of life, and love for me. That seemed to have been draining away.
