I stood on the doormat, conscious of my boots.

"Just wipe them and come on in," she said, laughing. "I'm not house-proud, unlike my mother."

I sat at the kitchen table and glanced through the door to a room full of books. I pointed. "Like reading?"

"I love books," she said, handing me a big mug of real coffee. "I teach English, and the miracle is that it hasn't put me off reading. You?" She leaned against the Aga, holding her cup in both hands.

We talked about books for a while, and I think she was surprised at my knowledge.

Once I saw her glance at my left temple, where the implant should have been. I felt that she wanted to comment, to question me, but couldn't find a polite way of going about it.

The more I looked at her, and the more we talked, the more I realised that I found her attractive. She was short, and a little overweight, and her hair was greying, but her smile filled me with joy.

Romantic and inexperienced as I was, I extrapolated fantasies from this meeting, mapped the future.

"How often do you visit your mother?" I asked, to fill a conversational lull.

"Four times a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday."

I hesitated. "How long has she been ill?"

She blew. "Oh... when has she ever been well! She had her first stroke around ten years ago, not long after we moved here. I've been working part-time and looking after her ever since. She's averaged about... oh, a stroke every three years since. The doctors say it's a miracle she's still with us."

She hesitated, then said, "Then the Kethani came, and offered us the implants... and I thought all my prayers had been answered."

I avoided her eyes.

Elisabeth stared into her cup. "She was a very intelligent woman, a member of the old Labour Party before the Blair sell-out. She knew her mind. She wanted nothing to do with afterlife, as she called it."

"She was suspicious of the Kethani?"

"A little, I suppose. Weren't we all, in the beginning? But it was more than that. I think she foresaw humanity becoming complacent, apathetic with this life when the stars beckoned."

"Some people would say she was right."

A silence developed. She stared at me. "Is that the reason you...?"

There were as many reasons for not having the implant, I was sure, as there were individuals who had decided to go without. Religious, philosophical, moral... I gave Elisabeth a version of the truth.

Not looking her in the eye, but staring into my empty cup, I said, "I decided not to have the implant, at first, because I was suspicious. I thought I'd wait; see how it went with everyone who did have it. A few years pa.s.sed... It seemed fine. The returnees came back fitter, healthier, younger. Those that went among the stars later, they recounted their experiences. It was as the Kethani said. We had nothing to fear." I looked up quickly to see how she was taking it.

She was squinting at me. She shrugged. "So, why didn't you...?"

"By that time," I said, "I'd come to realise something. Living on the edge of death, staring it in the face, made life all the more worth living. I'd be alone, on some outlying farm somewhere, and I'd be at one with the elements... and, I don't know, I came to appreciate being alive."

Bulls.h.i.t, I thought. It was the line I'd used many a time in the past, and though it contained an element of truth, it was not the real reason.

Elisabeth was intelligent; I think she saw through my words, realised that I was hiding something, and I must admit that I felt guilty about lying to her.

I thanked her for the coffee and made to leave.

"How much for the work?" she said, gesturing through the window at the repaired wall.

I hesitated. I almost asked her if she would like to go for a meal, but stopped myself just in time. I told myself that it would seem cra.s.s, as if she had to accept the invitation in payment. In fact, the coward in me shied away from escalating the terms of our relationship.

"Call it fifty," I said.

She gave me a fifty euro note and I hurried from the house, part of me feeling that I had escaped, while another part was cursing my fear and inadequacy.

I found myself, after that, visiting my father on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. Sunny View seemed a suitably neutral venue in which to meet and talk to Elisabeth Carstairs.

I even found myself looking forward to the visits.

About two weeks after I repaired her wall, I was sitting in the lounge with my father. It was four o'clock and we were alone. Around four-thirty Elisabeth would emerge from her mother's room and we would have coffee in the library.

I was especially nervous today because I'd decided to ask her if she would like to come for a meal the following day, a Thursday. I'd heard about a good Indonesian place in Bradley.

I'd come to realise that I liked Elisabeth Carstairs for who she was, her essential character, rather than for what she might represent: a woman willing to show me friendship, affection, and maybe even more.

We had a lot in common, shared a love of books, films, and even a similar sense of humour. Moreover, I saw in Elisabeth a fundamental human decency, perhaps born out of hardship, that I detected in few other people.

"Who're you, then?"

"Ben," I said absently, my thoughts miles away.

He regarded me for about a minute, then said, "You always were b.l.o.o.d.y useless!"

I stared at him. He had moments of lucidity: for a second, he was back to his old self, but his comment failed to hurt. I'd heard it often before, when the sentiment had been backed by an ability to be brutal.

"Dry-stone walls!" he spat.

"Is that any worse than being a bus driver?" I said.

"Useless young..." he began, and dribbled off.

I leaned forward. "Why don't you go to h.e.l.l!" I said, and hurried from the room, shaking.

I sat in the library, staring out at the snow and shaking. I wondered if, when my father was resurrected and returned, he would have any memory of the insult.

"h.e.l.lo, Ben. Nice to see you."

She was wearing her chunky primrose parka and, beneath it, a jet-black cashmere jumper.

"You don't look too good," she said, sitting down and sipping her coffee.

I shrugged. "I'm fine."

"Some days he's worse than others, right? Don't tell me. Mum's having one of her bad days today."

More than anything I wanted to tell her that I cared nothing for my father, but resisted the urge for fear of appearing cruel.

We chatted about the books we were reading at the moment; she had loaned me Chesterton's Tales of the Long Bow, Tales of the Long Bow, and I enthused about his prose. and I enthused about his prose.

Later, my coffee drunk, I twisted the cup awkwardly and avoided her eyes. "Elisabeth, I was wondering... There's a nice Indonesian restaurant in Bradley. At least, I've heard it's good. I was wondering-"

She came to my rescue. "I'd love to go," she said, smiling at me. "Name a day."

"How about tomorrow? And I'll pay."

"Well, I'll get the next one, then. How's that sound? And I'll drive tomorrow, if you like."

I nodded. "Deal," I said, grinning like an idiot.

I was working on a high sheepfold all the following day, and I was in good spirits. I couldn't stop thinking about Elisabeth, elation mixed equally with trepidation. From time to time I'd stop work for a coffee from my Thermos, sit on the wall I was building, and stare down at the vast, cold expanse of the reservoir, and the Onward Station beside it.

Ferrymen came and went, delivering the dead. I saw Richard Lincoln's Range Rover pull up and watched as he unloaded a container and trolleyed it across the car park and into the Station.

At five I made my way home, showered and changed and waited nervously for Elisabeth to pick me up.

The meal was a success. In fact, contrary to my fears, the entire night was wonderful. We began talking from the time she collected me and never stopped.

The restaurant was quiet, the service excellent, and the food even better. We ate and chattered, and it seemed to me that I had known this friendly, fascinating woman all my life.

I could not see in Elisabeth the lonely, loveless woman that Jeff had described; she seemed comfortable and at ease. I feared I would appear gauche and naive to her, but she gave no indication of thinking so. Perhaps the fact was that we complemented each other, two lonely people who had, by some arbitrary accident, overcome the odds and discovered each other.

Elisabeth drove us back through a fierce snowstorm and stopped outside her converted barn. She turned to me in the darkness. "You'll come in for a coffee, Ben?"

I nodded, my mouth dry. "Love to," I said.

We sat on the sofa and drank coffee and talked, and the free and easy atmosphere carried over from the restaurant. It was one o'clock by the time I looked into my empty mug and said, "Well, it's getting on. I'd better be..."

She reached out and touched my hand with her fingers. "Ben, stay the night, please."

"Well... If it's okay with you."

"Christ," she said, "what do you think?" And, before I knew it, she was in my arms.

I had often wondered what the first time would be like, tried to envisage the embarra.s.sment of trying to do something that I had never done before. The simple fact was that, when we undressed each other beside the bed, and came together, flesh to soft, warm flesh, it seemed entirely natural, and accomplished with mutual trust and affection-and I realised that I'd never really had anything to fear, after all.

I was awoken in the night by a bright flash of light. I rolled over and held Elisabeth to me, cupped her bottom in my pelvis and slipped a hand across her belly.

The window overlooked the valley, the reservoir, and the Station.

High-energy pulse beams lanced into the stratosphere.

"You 'wake?" she murmured.

"Mmm," I said.

"Isn't it beautiful?" she whispered. Shafts of dazzling white light bisected the sable sky, but more beautiful to me was holding a warm, naked woman in my arms.

"Mmm," I said.

"I always keep the curtains open," she whispered. "I like to watch the lights when I can't sleep. They fill me with hope."

I watched the lights with her. Hard to conceive that every beam of energy contained the newly dead of Earth.

"Elisabeth," I said.

"Hmm?"

"Have you read much about the Kethani?"

She turned to face me, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against my chest. She stroked my face and lightly kissed my lips. "Just about everything there is to read."

"Something I don't understand," I said. "Millions of humans die, and are taken away and resurrected. Then they have a choice. They can either come back and resume their lives on Earth, or they can do the bidding of the Kethani, and go among the stars, as explorers, amba.s.sadors..."

"Or they can come to Earth, live a while, and then leave for the stars."

I hesitated, then said, "And we trust them?"

"We do now. At first, millions of us didn't. Then the reports started to come back from those who had died, been resurrected, and gone among the stars. And the stories they told, the accounts of a wondrous and teeming universe..."

I nodded. "I've seen the doc.u.mentaries. But-"

"What?"

"What about all those humans who are..." I tried to think of a diplomatic phrase, "let's say, unsuited even for life on Earth. I mean, thugs and murderers, dictators, psychopaths."

My father...

"Hard to imagine Pol Pot or Bush acting as an amba.s.sador for an enlightened alien race," I said.

She stroked my hair. "They're changed in the resurrection process, Ben. They come back... different. different. Altered. Still themselves, but with compa.s.sion, humanity." She laughed, suddenly. Altered. Still themselves, but with compa.s.sion, humanity." She laughed, suddenly.

"What?" I asked.

"The irony of it," she said. "That it takes an alien race to invest some people with humanity!"

She reached down and took me in her fingers, and guided me into her. We made love, again, bathed in the blinding light of the dead as they ascended to heaven.