She didn't seem to have heard him, but continued playing and singing the sad, beautiful song. Quite taken with it, Harker found himself moving closer, and then a floorboard squeaked and Eve glanced back over her shoulder.
When she saw him, the music stopped abruptly.
'Hi,' he said, and she turned back to the piano, still for a second.
Then she hammered the keys and yelled at someone named Jack to hit the road.
'Who's Jack?' Harker asked, but she ignored him. The only other occupant of the room was a young African woman, who was giggling a little.
He wasn't getting any reaction from either of them, so he brought out the big guns. Reaching inside his jacket, he placed a small gold box on the top of the piano, and stood back.
Eve faltered a little when he moved close to her, but stopped altogether when she saw the little box. It was tied with a green ribbon.
The music dying away, she reached for the box, then pulled her hands back.
'Lucille?' she said to the African woman. 'Do you see a box of chocolates on the piano?'
'Yes, I see it. And the cocoa is very rare in England, is it not? It has to be imported. I think they must be very expensive.'
Damn right they'd been expensive. Harker had a feeling Eve wasn't the sort to be won over easily. He could use force if he wanted to, but he'd prefer to use Ogilvy & Kent, who had at one time supplied chocolates to the King.
'And do you see a lying, sneaky, scum-sucking weasel standing behind me?'
'A weasel?' Lucille peered at the floor. Harker stifled a laugh.
'A man,' Eve spat, 'in an army uniform.'
'Ah. I am all comprehension.' Lucille squinted. 'I think he is a major,' she offered.
'Dammit,' Eve muttered, and turned to face him, her face sullen. 'I was doing well ignoring you, but it's impossible to ignore chocolate.'
Harker grinned at her. She didn't return it.
'Of course, it's entirely possible that it's a hallucination. I'm hallucinating chocolate. If I can hallucinate an entire city, I can hallucinate chocolate.'
'Smell it,' Harker said. Eve ignored him.
'What are you doing here?' she asked, as if she owned the place.
'I came to see you.'
'Bearing chocolates. Which, as Lucille has kindly explained to me, are very hard to come by in this country, and it's all jolly expensive.'
'It is,' Harker said.
'So you must want something. Unless, possibly, my insanity is catching and it's infected poor Lucille, too.'
'Well, I'm sure I'm here, if that's any help.'
'No,' Eve said. 'It's not.' She stood up abruptly, grabbing the chocolates and shoving the piano stool back into his leg.
'You sing really well,' he said, limping slightly as he followed her out of the room.
She ignored him.
'And play. You play well. The piano.'
'Well, there's no guitar here,' Eve said shortly.
'What was that song? I don't know it.'
Eve gave a mirthless laugh. 'There are little old men in Outer Mongolia who have never even seen a radio, let alone heard one, who know what that song is,' she said.
'Are there? Well, I ain't a little old man in Outer Mongolia,' Harker said cheerfully.
'No. And yet you don't recognise one of the most famous songs of the most famous band the world has ever seen.'
Harker darted round her to open the first set of doors before she could. She didn't appear to appreciate the courtesy. Stalking through, she snapped, 'That was Yesterday, by the Beatles. And the fact that you don't know it, that no one knows it, only confirms what I've become totally sure of in the last few days.'
'What's that?' Harker asked, following her up a staircase. She still favoured one leg slightly.
'That I've had a complete mental breakdown and I'm imagining everything around me.' She paused, looked again at the hideously expensive box of chocolates, and handed them back to him. 'Including these.'
Harker was stunned. So stunned that she was almost at the top of the stairs before he caught up to her.
'Eve,' he said, 'are you serious?'
'No,' she said, 'I'm mad.'
'Mad as in angry?'
'That too.' She started off down a wide corridor that had once been decorated with rich wallpaper and many large portraits. Now, the paper was peeling, and had many large, dark squares where the portraits had once been.
'Because I brought you here?'
'Score one for the Major.'
Harker tried to figure out what she meant, and gave up. 'Look, it's not a bad place,' he said. 'They feed you okay, don't they? And you can use the grounds.'
'Sure, the food's great. Only it involves no tea, coffee, chocolate, rice, pasta, or anything else that's not indigenous to this country. I mean, haven't you people heard of citrus fruits?'
'Yeah, coffee's at a premium,' Harker said. 'The army's restricted it to officers only.'
'So you get all you want?'
'Well, not all I want,' he said, smiling at her. She didn't smile back. 'And, hey. You have a piano to play.'
'Whoopee,' Eve said, and shoved a door open. Her bedroom was small, part of a large room that had been cheaply subdivided. It had half a window, and that half was crisscrossed with bars. She stomped to the foot of the narrow bed, opened the locker there, and pulled out a familiar bundle of khaki fabric. His greatcoat.
She held it out to him, but Harker didn't take it.
'Yours,' she said, as if he might have forgotten.
'You can keep it if you like,' Harker said generously, wondering if he was going to be able to cadge another one before the winter set in. Probably not.
'No,' Eve said shortly, holding it out further. 'Thank you.'
'I didn't come for my coat,' Harker said, gently.
She faltered a little, then pushed the coat further towards him. 'Then what did you come for?'
'You.'
She stared at him a moment, then burst out laughing. Throwing the coat down on the bed, she shook her head and said, 'Okay, I'm mad. What's your excuse?'
'You're not mad,' Harker said, despite the evidence.
'Yes, I am,' Eve said, as if he was being silly. 'I think London has skyscrapers and an ethnically diverse population. I think Britain is one of the richest countries in the world, thanks to the empire the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution. I think the last battle to take place on British soil was against the Scots in the eighteenth century, and that we won both world wars, and that every home in Britain has electricity, and TV sets, and computers and DVDs and' Her voice, having wound itself faster and higher, suddenly broke off. Shook her head. 'And clearly, none of that is actually real, so, you know, I must be mad. It's okay, I've come to terms with it. Last few days weren't pretty, but I'm okay now. Happy in my insanity.'
She sat down on the bed, and stared determinedly at the wall.
Harker sighed, and pulled the locker around to sit on in the absence of a chair. Eve avoided his gaze.
'I can get you out of here,' he said, and saw her fingers twitch. 'Look, the only reason you're in here is because the army thinks you're a spy.'
'Because you think I'm a spy,' Eve said sulkily.
'No, I don't.' He wasn't sure what he thought she was mad probably was about right but he really didn't think she was a spy. 'Look, Eve, I need you.'
She snorted.
'You said where you come from, every house has a computer.'
'Well, not every house, but ... yeah. Most. Lots.'
'Right. So you're familiar with them? Know how to work them?'
'Of course I do,' Eve said.
'Right. Well, that makes you pretty unique around here.'
She snorted again. 'Having a passport makes me unique around here,' she said.
'Ye-es,' Harker said doubtfully. 'Look, I need someone who knows how to use a computer. It'll get you out of here. It might even get you a pardon.'
At that, she gave him a sharp look. 'Why? What do I need to be pardoned from?'
Harker wasn't sure, but he knew the army would think of something. Besides, Wheeler had hinted strongly that honours and promotions would be given to anyone who aided the war effort in such a gigantic way, and he figured that ought to include Eve, too.
'Eve, I can set you free,' Harker said, going out on a limb somewhat, but it didn't get the response he expected.
Eve just shrugged tightly, her eyes once more avoiding his, and said, 'What's the point? I don't have anywhere to go.'
Eve leaned back against the wall, her eyes stinging a little at the prospect of her life going on like this, day after day. If anything, it might actually be worse than the stinking, graffitti'd concrete block she'd been living in before. No TV. Not even any electricity. The lamp by her bed ran on oil, for goodness sake.
The last few days hadn't been pretty. Well, that was by way of being a colossal understatement. She'd been shown to her room, where she'd alternately sat and stared at the wall, sobbed until her eyeballs ached, and screamed that she'd had enough and could this just be over now please. No one listened. No one came.
The staff had offered her food. They'd told her to read whatever she wanted in the library, to walk in the grounds. They'd told her, basically, to come to terms with it, and Eve had wondered briefly if everyone else here felt the same as her.
Maybe everyone in St James's was a victim of the same practical joke. Maybe they'd all drunk from the same water and were having the same hallucination. Maybe they were all mad and she was just the latest to come down with the delusion. Some sort of imagined grandeur. But no one else seemed to understand a word she spoke. The ones who'd heard of computers and TVs and trains were the ones who belonged in other countries. Nobody at all had heard of the British Empire or the Industrial Revolution.
Nobody had heard of Eve Carpenter, of Grrl Power, of a pop star's fall from grace.
She'd spent three years being a cautionary tale. Three years of jeering and snapped photos that ended up in Where Are They Now? features in magazines. Three years of ignoring the world around her.
It had occurred to Eve in the last slow, sleepless hours before morning that the world she knew and everything in it could have turned into this in the last three years, and she wouldn't have noticed.
'Do I have any choice in this?' she said after a while, during which Harker had been admirably silent.
'Sure. You can stay here until the war is over.'
'I'm not sure I'll live that long,' Eve said, because at this rate she was going to die of frustration in about a week.
'Or you can come with me. It'll be fun,' Harker said, and actually seemed to mean it.
'What will?' she said, turning to look at him. 'You haven't actually even said what you want of me yet.'
Harker grinned in a way she was sure she'd have been more susceptible to if he wasn't a bastard and she wasn't mad, and said, 'I want you to help me capture a computer and use it.'
'Capture? What, do they breed in the wild here?'
'I don't know,' Harker said innocently. 'Do they?'
'Oh, for' Eve looked down at her hands, which were in the same ugly state they'd been in since she stopped getting regular, expensive manicures.
Do you really want to spend the rest of your life just existing? she asked herself. A life which, if Harker's side loses the war, and it doesn't look incredibly likely that they'll win, probably won't be all that long?
What war? she replied to herself. None of this is real! It can't possibly be!
In that case, what have you got to lose?
'What the hell,' she said. 'I'm in.'
Harker gave her a more genuine smile, the sort of smile he'd given her when she thought he was just another soldier, and stood up. 'Right then,' he said. 'Get your coat'
'Your coat,' she corrected him.
'we're leaving.'