“It really doesn’t matter.”
George lingered at the door. He said, “I’m glad to see you here, William. There were times when I thought you were avoiding the place.”
“Why should I?”
“Well, you know how it is. I never go to Harrods now because I was there with Mary a few days before she died.”
“Nobody has died here. Except Uncle Henry, I suppose.”
“No, of course not. But why did you, suddenly, decide to come?”
“A whim,” Wilditch said.
“I suppose you’ll be going abroad again soon?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, good night.” He closed the door.
Wilditch undressed, and then, because he felt sleep too far away, he sat down on the bed under the poor centre-light and looked along the rows of shabby books. He opened Mrs. Beatrice Webb at some account of a trade union congress and put it back. (The foundations of the future Welfare State were being truly and uninterestingly laid.) There were a number of Fabian pamphlets heavily scored with the blue pencil which George had remembered. In one place Mrs. Wilditch had detected an error of one decimal point in some statistics dealing with agricultural imports. What passionate concentration must have gone to that discovery. Perhaps because his own life was coming to an end, he thought how little of this, in the almost impossible event of a future, she would have carried with her. A fairy-story in such an event would be a more valuable asset than a Fabian graph, but his mother had not approved of fairy-stories. The only children’s book on these shelves was a history of England. Against an enthusiastic account of the battle of Agincourt she had pencilled furiously:
And what good came of it at last?
Said little Peterkin.
The fact that his mother had quoted a poem was in itself remarkable.
The storm which he had left behind in London had travelled east in his wake and now overtook him in short gusts of wind and wet that slapped at the pane. He thought, for no reason, It will be a rough night on the island. He had been disappointed to discover from George that the origin of the dream which had travelled with him round the world was probably no more than a story invented for a school-magazine and forgotten again, and just as that thought occurred to him, he saw a bound volume called The Warburian on the shelf.
He took it out, wondering why his mother had preserved it, and found a page turned down. It was the account of a cricket-match against Lancing and Mrs. Wilditch had scored the margin: “Wilditch One did good work in deep field.” Another turned-down leaf produced a passage under the heading Debating Society: “Wilditch One spoke succinctly to the motion.” The motion was “That this House has no belief in the social policies of His Majesty’s Government.” So George in those days had been a Fabian too.
He opened the book at random this time and a letter fell out. It had a printed heading, Dean’s House, Warbury, and it read, “Dear Mrs. Wilditch, I was sorry to receive your letter of the 3rd and to learn that you were displeased with the little fantasy published by your younger son in The Warburian. I think you take a rather extreme view of the tale which strikes me as quite a good imaginative exercise for a boy of thirteen. Obviously he has been influenced by the term’s reading of The Golden Age—which after all, fanciful though it may be, was written by a governor of the Bank of England.” (Mrs. Wilditch had made several blue exclamation marks in the margin—perhaps representing her view of the Bank.) “Last term’s Treasure Island too may have contributed. It is always our intention at Warbury to foster the imagination—which I think you rather harshly denigrate when you write of ‘silly fancies.’ We have scrupulously kept our side of the bargain, knowing how strongly you feel, and the boy is not ‘subjected,’ as you put it, to any religious instruction at all. Quite frankly, Mrs. Wilditch, I cannot see any trace of religious feeling in this little fancy—I have read it through a second time before writing to you—indeed the treasure, I’m afraid, is only too material, and quite at the mercy of those ‘who break in and steal.’” Wilditch tried to find the place from which the letter had fallen, working back from the date of the letter. Eventually he found it: “The Treasure on the Island” by W.W.
Wilditch began to read.
5
“In the middle of the garden there was a great lake and in the middle of the lake an island with a wood. Not everybody knew about the lake, for to reach it you had to find your way down a long dark walk, and not many people’s nerves were strong enough to reach the end. Tom knew that he was likely to be undisturbed in that frightening region, and so it was there that he constructed a raft out of old packing cases, and one drear wet day when he knew that everybody would be shut in the house, he dragged the raft to the lake and paddled it across to the island. As far as he knew he was the first to land there for centuries.
“It was all overgrown on the island, but from a map he had found in an ancient sea-chest in the attic he made his measurements, three paces north from the tall umbrella pine in the middle and then two paces to the right. There seemed to be nothing but scrub, but he had brought with him a pick and a spade and with the dint of almost superhuman exertions he uncovered an iron ring sunk in the grass. At first he thought it would be impossible to move, but by inserting the point of the pick and levering it he raised a kind of stone lid and there below, going into the darkness, was a long narrow passage.
“Tom had more than the usual share of courage, but even he would not have ventured further if it had not been for the parlous state of the family fortunes since his father had died. His elder brother wanted to go to Oxford but for lack of money he would probably have to sail before the mast, and the house itself, of which his mother was passionately fond, was mortgaged to the hilt to a man in the City called Sir Silas Dedham whose name did not belie his nature.”
Wilditch nearly gave up reading. He could not reconcile this childish story with the dream which he remembered. Only the “drear wet night” seemed true as the bushes rustled and dripped and the birches swayed outside. A writer, so he had always understood, was suppose to order and enrich the experience which was the source of his story, but in that case it was plain that the young Wilditch’s talents had not been for literature. He read with growing irritation, wanting to exclaim again and again to this thirteen-year-old ancestor of his, “But why did you leave that out? Why did you alter this?”
“This passage opened out into a great cave stacked from floor to ceiling with gold bars and chests overflowing with pieces of eight. There was a jewelled crucifix”—Mrs. Wilditch has underlined the world in blue—“set with precious stones which had once graced the chapel of a Spanish galleon and on a marble table were goblets of precious metal.”
But, as he remembered, it was an old kitchen-dresser, and there were no pieces of eight, no crucifix, and as for the Spanish galleon . . .
“Tom thanked the kindly Providence which had led him first to the map in the attic” (but there had been no map. Wilditch wanted to correct the story, page by page, much as his mother had done with her blue pencil) “and then to this rich treasure trove” (his mother had written in the margin, referring to the kindly Providence, “No trace of religious feeling!!”). “He filled his pockets with the pieces of eight and taking one bar under each arm, he made his way back along the passage. He intended to keep his discovery secret and slowly day by day to transfer the treasures to the cupboard in his room, thus surprising his mother at the end of the holidays with all this sudden wealth. He got safely home unseen by anyone and that night in bed he counted over his new riches while outside it rained and rained. Never had he heard such a storm. It was as though the wicked spirit of his old pirate ancestor raged against him” (Mrs. Wilditch had written, “Eternal punishment I suppose!”) “and indeed the next day, when he returned to the island in the lake, whole trees had been uprooted and now lay across the entrance to the passage. Worse still there had been a landslide, and now the cavern must lie hidden forever below the waters of the lake. How
ever,” the young Wilditch had added briefly forty years ago, “the treasure already recovered was sufficient to save the family home and send his brother to Oxford.”
Wilditch undressed and got into bed, then lay on his back listening to the storm. What a trivial conventional day-dream W.W. had constructed—out of what? There had been no attic-room—probably no raft: these were preliminaries which did not matter, but why had W.W. so falsified the adventure itself? Where was the man with the beard? The old squawling woman? Of course it had all been a dream, it could have been nothing else but a dream, but a dream too was an experience, the images of a dream had their own integrity, and he felt professional anger at this false report just as his mother had felt at the mistake in the Fabian statistics.
All the same, while he lay there in his mother’s bed and thought of her rigid interrogation of W.W.’s story, another theory of the falsifications came to him, perhaps a juster one. He remembered that agents parachuted into France during the bad years after 1940 had been made to memorize a cover-story which they could give, in case of torture, with enough truth in it to be checked. Perhaps forty years ago the pressure to tell had been almost as great on W.W., so that he had been forced to find relief in fantasy. Well, an agent dropped into occupied territory was always given a time-limit after capture. “Keep the interrogators at bay with silence or lies for just so long, and then you may tell all.” The time-limit had surely been passed in his case a long time ago, his mother was beyond the possibility of hurt, and Wilditch for the first time deliberately indulged his passion to remember.
He got out of bed and, after finding some notepaper stamped, presumably for income-tax purposes, Winton Small Holdings Limited, in the drawer of the desk, he began to write an account of what he had found—or dreamed that he found—under the garden of Winton Hall. The summer night was nosing wetly around the window just as it had done fifty years ago, but, as he wrote, it began to turn grey and recede; the trees of the garden became visible, so that, when he looked up after some hours from his writing, he could see the shape of the broken fountain and what he supposed were the laurels in the Dark Walk, looking like old men humped against the weather.
PART TWO
1
Never mind how I came to the island in the lake, never mind whether in fact, as my brother says, it is a shallow pond with water only two feet deep (I suppose a raft can be launched on two feet of water, and certainly I must have always come to the lake by way of the Dark Walk, so that it is not at all unlikely that I built my raft there). Never mind what hour it was—I think it was evening, and I had hidden, as I remember it, in the Dark Walk because George had not got the courage to search for me there. The evening turned to rain, just as it’s raining now, and George must have been summoned into the house for shelter. He would have told my mother that he couldn’t find me and she must have called from the upstairs windows, front and back—perhaps it was the occasion George spoke about tonight. I am not sure of these facts, they are plausible only, I can’t yet see what I’m describing. But I know that I was not to find George and my mother again for many days . . . it cannot, whatever George says, have been less than three days and nights that I spent below the ground. Could he really have forgotten so inexplicable an experience?
And here I am already checking my story as though it were something which had really happened, for what possible relevance has George’s memory to the events of a dream?
I dreamed that I crossed the lake, I dreamed . . . that is the only certain fact and I must cling to it, the fact that I dreamed. How my poor mother would grieve if she could know that, even for a moment, I had begun to think of these events as true . . . but, of course, if it were possible for her to know what I am thinking now, there would be no limit to the area of possibility. I dreamed then that I crossed the water (either by swimming—I could already swim at seven years old—or by wading if the lake is really as small as George makes out, or by paddling a raft) and scrambled up the slope of the island. I can remember grass, scrub, brush-wood, and at last a wood. I would describe it as a forest if I had not already seen, in the height of the garden-wall, how age diminishes size. I don’t remember the umbrella-pine which W.W. described—I suspect he stole the sentinel-tree from Treasure Island, but I do know that when I got into the wood I was completely hidden from the house and the trees were close enough together to protect me from the rain. Quite soon I was lost, and yet how could I have been lost if the lake were no bigger than a pond, and the island therefore not much larger than the top of a kitchen-table?
Again I find myself checking my memories as though they were facts. A dream does not take account of size. A puddle can contain a continent, and a clump of trees stretch in sleep to the world’s edge. I dreamed, I dreamed that I was lost and that night began to fall. I was not frightened. It was as though even at seven I was accustomed to travel. All the rough journeys of the future were already in me then, like a muscle which had only to develop. I curled up among the roots of the trees and slept. When I woke I could still hear the pit-pat of the rain in the upper branches and the steady zing of an insect near by. All these noises come as clearly back to me now as the sound of the rain on the parked cars outside the clinic in Wimpole Street, the music of yesterday.
The moon had risen and I could see more easily around me. I was determined to explore further before the morning came, for then an expedition would certainly be sent in search of me. I knew, from the many books of exploration George had read to me, of the danger to a person lost of walking in circles until eventually he dies of thirst or hunger, so I cut a cross in the bark of the tree (I had brought a knife with me that contained several blades, a small saw and an instrument for removing pebbles from horses’ hooves). For the sake of future reference I named the place where I had slept Camp Hope. I had no fear of hunger, for I had apples in both pockets, and as for thirst I had only to continue in a straight line and would come eventually to the lake again where the water was sweet, or at worst a little brackish. I go into all these details, which W.W. unaccountably omitted, to test my memory. I had forgotten until now how far or how deeply it extended. Had W.W. forgotten or was he afraid to remember?
I had gone a little more than three hundred yards—I paced the distances and marked every hundred paces or so on a tree—it was the best I could do, without proper surveying instruments, for the map I already planned to draw—when I reached a great oak of apparently enormous age with roots that coiled away above the surface of the ground. (I was reminded of those roots once in Africa where they formed a kind of shrine for a fetish—a seated human figure made out of a gourd and palm fronds and unidentifiable vegetable matter gone rotten in the rains and a great penis of bamboo. Coming on it suddenly, I was frightened, or was it the memory that it brought back which scared me?) Under one of these roots the earth had been disturbed; somebody had shaken a mound of charred tobacco from a pipe and a sequin glistened like a snail in the moist moonlight. I struck a match to examine the ground closer and saw the imprint of a foot in a patch of loose earth—it was pointing at the tree from a few inches away and it was as solitary as the print Crusoe found on the sands of another island. It was as though a one-legged man had taken a leap out of the bushes straight at the tree.
Pirate ancestor! What nonsense W.W. had written, or had he converted the memory of that stark frightening footprint into some comforting thought of the kindly scoundrel, Long John Silver, and his wooden leg?
I stood astride the imprint and stared up the tree, half expecting to see a one-legged man perched like a vulture among the branches. I listened and there was no sound except last night’s rain dripping from leaf to leaf. Then—I don’t know why—I went down on my knees and peered among the roots. There was no iron ring, but one of the roots formed an arch more than two feet high like the entrance to a cave. I put my head inside and lit another match—I couldn’t see the back of the cave.
It’s difficult to remember that I was only seven years old. To the self
we remain always the same age. I was afraid at first to venture further, but so would any grown man have been, any of the explorers I thought of as my peers. My brother had been reading aloud to me a month before from a book called The Romance of Australian Exploration—my own powers of reading had not advanced quite as far as that, but my memory was green and retentive and I carried in my head all kinds of new images and evocative words—aboriginal, sextant, Murumbidgee, Stony Desert, and the points of the compass with their big capital letters E.S.E. and N.N.W. had an excitement they have never quite lost. They were like the figure on a watch which at last comes round to pointing the important hour. I was comforted by the thought that Sturt had been sometimes daunted and that Burke’s bluster often hid his fear. Now, kneeling by the cave, I remembered a” cavern which George Grey, another hero of mine, had entered and how suddenly he had come on the figure of a man ten feet high painted on the wall, clothed from the chin down to the ankles in a red garment. I don’t know why, but I was more afraid of that painting than I was of the aborigines who killed Burke, and the fact that the feet and hands which protruded from the garment were said to be badly executed added to the terror. A foot which looked like a foot was only human, but my imagination could play endlessly with the faults of the painter—a club-foot, the worm-like toes of a bird. Now I associated this strange footprint with the ill-executed painting, and I hesitated a long time before I got the courage to crawl into the cave under the root. Before doing so, in reference to the footprint, I gave the spot the name of Friday’s Cave.
2
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