The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘I think you can learn a lot about people from their star sign,’ said one of the girls.

  ‘Yes, you can. What sign are you, sir?’

  ‘I bet you’re Leo, aren’t you, sir? Leos are supposed to be very strong and masterful.’

  ‘Is Scorpio rising in Uranus, sir – or is it just the way your trousers hang?’

  After the lesson was over, Sarah and Norman walked across the playground together on their way to the dining hall. She didn’t talk to him about the lesson much, except to make vaguely reassuring noises and to hint gently that his choice of the Donne poem yesterday hadn’t been very appropriate. He was badly shaken by the experience: the accusation of racism, in particular, had shocked him quite deeply.

  ‘They were just trying to wind you up,’ said Sarah.

  Norman stopped walking and looked at her. The sun was bright on the playground, and his eyes narrowed involuntarily as he said: ‘Do you think so?’

  Sarah nodded. She ran a hand through her hair – the thick, almost shoulder-length grey hair by which Norman was already fascinated – and ended, without noticing it (for she had never noticed it) by taking hold of a clump and tugging at it lightly. ‘You’re doing fine. Really.’ She laughed. ‘You know, we’ve all been through it. When I think about my first teaching practice…’

  They walked on a little further.

  ‘I’ve got a letter for you, by the way,’ said Norman. ‘It’s in my briefcase in the staff room.’

  Sarah’s immediate assumption was that this was a letter he had written himself: that there was something he wanted to say to her, some declaration too momentous to make in person. It was a great relief when he added: ‘It’s from a girl at college who says she knows you. I was talking about you with some friends, and this girl-I don’t know her very well or anything-says that she knew you years ago, when you were a student.’

  The relief gave way to puzzlement. ‘Doesn’t sound very likely. All my student friends are in their thirties now. How old is she?’

  ‘Oh, about twenty, I think. Her name’s Ruby. Ruby Sharp.’

  And now it was Sarah who stopped walking. They had almost reached the doors to the dining hall, and children trickled past them in groups and in pairs, slouching moodily.

  ‘Yes, I did know a girl called Ruby,’ she said. ‘Not very well, but… I know the girl you mean. That’s extraordinary.’ She broke into a smile, and for a moment what she saw, as she gazed ahead, was not the redbrick facade of the science block but something altogether less tangible: a pale, childish face; a shock of red hair; a beach… A pang of recollection shot through her, and her throat was suddenly dry as she said to Norman: ‘And she’s living in London now, is she? Training to be a teacher too?’

  ‘I think she’s doing biology, in fact.’ He opened the door for her, and they were at once assaulted by the dining hall’s clamorous humidity. ‘But she lives in the same hall as a friend of mine, and that’s how I came to… Well, you came up in the conversation, somehow…’

  Sarah found it hard work talking to Norman over lunch. The mention of Ruby’s name after all these years had revived a complex of emotions, not all of them pleasant. And yet there was really no need for it to disturb her: there could be no harm, if she was sensible about it, in being reminded of Mr and Mrs Sharp, the caretakers at Ashdown, and the little red-headed daughter they had sometimes asked her to look after in the daytime while her mother was out at work. Those afternoons spent upstairs with Ruby and Veronica, playing cards or Scrabble: the day at the beach with Robert…

  Yes, it always came back to Robert, and this was always where Sarah began to get angry with herself. Twelve years had gone by, twelve years since she had seen him (she could not count their last farcical encounter at Ashdown, even though that in its way had been the most bruising of all), and yet still she only had to be reminded of him – the tiniest, most incidental detail – for all the old pain to come rushing to the surface. A pain which neither the passage of time itself nor those gruelling months in analysis (and yes, what a waste of money they had turned out to be) had ever succeeded in dulling.

  She was thirty-five, she told herself. She was childless. She was divorced. Wasn’t it time to put that distant, shortlived, not-so-very-significant friendship behind her?

  Her train of thought was broken as Norman asked her to pass the tomato sauce. She watched with unconscious fascination as he mashed it vigorously into his pile of thin, watery potato.

  ∗

  Ruby had done her best to keep the letter brief and polite. She was not sure how Sarah would react, being approached by someone she had known so fleetingly, so young, such a long time ago. It was almost like writing to a stranger. She carefully stressed that it was only the memory of Sarah’s former kindness towards her, and the odd coincidence of hearing her name spoken by Norman, that had prompted her to get in touch. She had no other specific reason for writing; no agenda. Even so, she half-expected never to receive a reply.

  But Sarah was charmed by the letter, and that very afternoon she sent back a note via Norman, enclosing her telephone number and suggesting that they should meet, perhaps go out for a meal. Which is how Ruby came to find herself travelling to North London only a few days later, one Monday evening, and making her way towards Sarah’s house through the unfamiliar streets with a pencilled address clutched in her hand.

  It was easy enough to find: the first house in the street when you turned in from the tube station. It was a small, neat end-terrace: two storeys and a basement, with boxes of ivy and salvia outside the front bay window. Ruby was ten minutes early, so she walked past the house and carried on up the hill for a few hundred yards, savouring the evening sunshine and the hint of modest adventure attendant on visiting this new part of London, so different from the busy but featureless area where her own hall of residence was located. She liked the steepness and narrowness of the streets, the tall houses, the tree-lined pavements, the sense of traffic being held at bay. There were few private cars on the road, and no buses or taxis. It was almost silent.

  Silence pervaded, too, the first few seconds of Ruby’s and Sarah’s reunion. Neither woman seemed able to speak.

  ‘My God, it is you,’ said Sarah finally; then explained her initial uncertainty by adding, ‘Your hair…’

  ‘Oh.’ Ruby laughed, and touched it, as if she had momentarily forgotten that it was there. ‘Yes, of course. A slight image change.’

  Ruby’s hair used to be flame-red. Now it reached to her shoulders in fine black strands.

  ‘I did this a year ago,’ she said. ‘People don’t warm to redheads, for some reason. It was just something I noticed.’ Then, eagerly: ‘Yours looks great. I love grey hair, when it’s worn like that. When it’s worn young.’

  Sarah smiled, and said, ‘Well, come in.’ Then they both broke into delighted laughter, and hugged.

  Sarah had been watching the news on Channel 4. Now she turned the volume down and went to fetch a bottle of Frascati from the fridge. Ruby sat on the sofa in front of the television, but found that she couldn’t settle. She began to look around the sitting-room, which ran the length of the house and was decorated neutrally, in creams and whites. There wasn’t quite enough furniture to fill the available space. The front and back gardens were small, plain, well kept, and the house itself seemed clean and attractive, but Ruby found it heartless. It was not what she had been expecting.

  ‘I was so surprised when I got your letter,’ Sarah began. She sat opposite Ruby and leaned forward in her armchair, shivering slightly, feeling absurdly ill at ease. ‘I’m amazed you remembered me at all, let alone my name.’

  ‘I never forget things,’ said Ruby. ‘I’m very retentive that way.’

  Sarah could see that Ruby was distracted by the television, so she flicked it off with the remote control, and put on a CD of piano music instead: Bill Evans, a third anniversary present from Anthony (and one of the few she had ever liked). She doubted if it was to Ruby’s taste, but t
hought it might help to lighten the atmosphere.

  ‘I went up to Ashdown again the other day,’ Ruby now said, abruptly.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Not to go in, you understand. I just went up and looked at it from the outside. There are no students there any more. It’s been turned into a clinic, where they look after people with –’

  ‘– with sleep disorders, yes, I know.’

  ‘Oh. Who told you that?’

  ‘My GP, actually.’ Sarah sipped her wine. She knew she was drinking it much too fast. ‘He offered to refer me there.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ asked Ruby, and realized this sounded too forward. ‘I mean, if you don’t mind me asking…’

  ‘Well, if I start answering that question,’ Sarah said, ‘we’ll have got on to the story of my life very quickly. I think we’d better eat first, don’t you?’

  ‘The story of your life’s exactly what I want to hear,’ said Ruby, following her to the front door. ‘I haven’t seen you for twelve years, after all.’

  ‘But why, Ruby? Why should it matter to you?’

  Because you gave me some of my best memories, she answered, simply.

  Sarah was very touched by this. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They were good times, I think.’ As they set off down the main road, she asked: ‘How are your parents, by the way?’

  ‘Dad died a few years ago…’

  ‘Oh no…’

  ‘… but Mum’s fine, absolutely fine. She runs a boarding house now.’

  It was only a short walk to the restaurant, which, being new, seemed to be experiencing a certain number of teething troubles. They decided it was warm enough to sit outside on the terrace, and were immediately besieged by waiters, who competed among themselves to take their order, and then delivered the first course with alarming haste.

  ‘What were we saying?’

  ‘You were going to tell me how you knew about Ashdown,’ Ruby prompted. ‘And this was going to involve telling the story of your life.’

  Sarah ground some pepper on to her soup, and asked: ‘Well-do you know what narcolepsy is?’

  ‘Yes, roughly,’ said Ruby, surprised. ‘It’s when people fall asleep all the time during the day, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s it, more or less. Well, I’ve got it.’

  ‘Oh.’ Ruby had no idea what this meant, in practice. ‘I’m sorry. Is that serious?’

  ‘It’s certainly a nuisance.’

  ‘And the clinic would have… helped you with it, would they?’

  ‘Possibly.’ Forestalling further questioning, Sarah said: ‘There were two reasons why I didn’t want to go. One is that I couldn’t afford the fees, and the waiting list for NHS patients is nearly two years. And the other –’ smiling, a little severely ‘–the other is that it happens to be run by this guy called Gregory Dudden, who was at university with me.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ruby, hesitantly.

  ‘Gregory and I… have a history,’ said Sarah. ‘He was my boyfriend for a while. My first boyfriend, in fact. You know, it was one of those student things that seems to make sense at the time, and then a few months later you look back and ask yourself… what was I thinking of?’

  Ruby continued to nod, although this explanation seemed to lie outside the realm of her experience. ‘So… so what does it mean, then, that you’re narcoleptic? How does it affect you?’

  ‘It’s changed a bit, over the years. The main thing is that I sleep very badly at night, and can’t help falling asleep during the day. That’s been happening for almost twenty years now. There are other symptoms as well, but they’ve been getting slightly better recently: the cataplexy, for instance.’

  ‘Which is…?’

  ‘That means that if I laugh a lot, or get too excited about something, I lose muscle tone. I’m conscious, but I go into a kind of faint. I can feel it coming on, but there’s nothing I can do about it. All sorts of things can make it happen: anger, joy, frustration…’

  ‘It sounds like more than a nuisance,’ said Ruby. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Well,’ Sarah shrugged, and tried to sound offhand, ‘it’s cost me a job or two over the years. Falling asleep in class is supposed to be something the kids do, not the teacher.’ She refilled their wine glasses: hers was empty, Ruby’s almost full. ‘The thing is, they only managed to diagnose it about three years ago. A lot of GPs are only just learning about it. The first doctor I saw didn’t have a clue. He made me go and see a shrink.’

  ‘What sort of shrink?’

  ‘A Lacanian psychotherapist.’

  Ruby was out of her depth again. ‘They didn’t lock you up or anything, did they?’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ said Sarah, apparently quite amused by this idea. ‘I suppose it wasn’t a complete waste of time. At least he made me realize why I don’t like people touching my eyes.’

  ‘Your eyes?’

  ‘Yes. I’m very sensitive about them.’ Sarah gently pushed aside her soup bowl, only half-finished. ‘I’m sorry, I’m probably shattering all your childhood illusions about me. I must seem like a mass of neuroses.’

  ‘No, not at all, I…’ The waiter, who had been hovering by their table, now cleared their dishes away. Ruby waited for him to leave. ‘So, what else should I know about you? Did you get married?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Been there, done that. His name was Anthony. An academic.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He left; a while ago. Found someone else.’

  ‘Oh.’ Again, Ruby found herself saying: ‘I’m sorry.’

  Again, Sarah shrugged. ‘These things happen.’

  ‘You know, it was probably just a fantasy of mine-one of those childhood illusion things – but I always hoped you were going to marry your boyfriend from college.’

  ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘You know: Robert.’

  Sarah’s laugh was short and forced. ‘Robert? He was never my boyfriend.’

  ‘No? But that time on the beach…’

  ‘I was seeing someone else then. A woman, actually. Her name was Veronica. Robert… just happened to be with us that day. I can’t even remember what he was doing there.’ Noticing Ruby’s look of bewilderment, she added: ‘It gets more and more complicated, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not shocked or anything,’ said Ruby. ‘One of my friends from school’s bisexual. Or says she is.’

  ‘I’m not sure I believe in that word,’ said Sarah. ‘Or any word which takes something complicated and tries to reduce it to a formula. Besides –’ wiping lipstick from the rim of her glass ‘–it’s not really about sex. Not for me, anyway: that’s not what I’m looking for. It’s funny, you know, everyone seems to think it gives you twice the choice: but it doesn’t work out like that, somehow.’

  ‘Has there been anyone since Anthony?’

  ‘Not really. I think Norman may be nurturing one or two fantasies in that direction, so that’s a little bridge that may have to be crossed soon.’

  ‘You say he was just a friend,’ said Ruby; quietly now, and slowly, choosing her words with caution, ‘but I think Robert really cared for you. There are things he said to me on the beach that day-and I know I was only young – but I can still remember them…’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re dragging up something that happened twelve years ago,’ said Sarah, her voice suddenly tight. ‘I told you: Robert was a friend, nothing more, nothing less. And if he cared for me so much, why did he drop me like a stone as soon as we left university?’ There were other things she could have said, on this subject, but Ruby looked downhearted enough already. ‘Anyway,’ she finished, more gently, ‘how could you possibly remember anything he said to you, all these years on? You were only eight or nine.’

  ‘I’ll never forget that day,’ said Ruby. ‘That amazing sandcastle we built together – I dreamed about it for weeks afterwards.’

  ‘That’s right…’ Sarah began to smile again, faintly, as this memory returned to her. ‘You called him the Sandman
, didn’t you? We both did, for a while: it was our name for him.’

  ‘It was so sunny. So still. Just the loveliest day…’ Ruby looked Sarah full in the face now; earnestly, brimmingly. ‘I’ve always wanted to pay you back for it, you know: both of you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  Ruby sensed that she had said too much: so she joked, ‘Apart from anything else, I got a bicycle out of it.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Don’t you even remember that? That was one of the best pieces of advice anyone ever gave me. You told me how I could persuade my parents to give me a bicycle.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Well then, I’m not going to remind you,’ said Ruby, affecting a pout.

  They were hungry again, by now. After the speedy arrival of their first courses, the waiters seemed to have disappeared en masse, and Sarah had the distant intimation of some unknowable crisis brewing in the kitchens.

  ‘You make me feel old, Ruby,’ she said, with a sigh.

  ‘Me? But you’re surrounded by kids every day – why should I?’

  ‘I don’t know… Because it’s so long since I last saw you, and you’ve changed so much in the meantime.’

  ‘You’re not old, anyway. Mid-thirties isn’t old.’

  ‘My life’s half over.’

  ‘So the better half’s still to come.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Are you going to carry on teaching?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose,’ said Sarah, without much enthusiasm, as a harassed-looking waiter finally brought them a mushroom risotto and a chicken tagliatelle, which he deposited with perfunctory apologies. ‘I can’t say that it’s much fun at the moment, to be honest. Half my colleagues are either taking early retirement or seeing stress counsellors twice a week. Just when we’ve nearly killed ourselves implementing one new set of guidelines, the government springs something different on us. We spend so much time preparing for inspectors, and writing reports on the kids, and writing reports on each other, and setting budgets and balancing books, I’ve almost forgotten why I wanted to teach in the first place.’ Ruby was staring at her across the risotto. It occurred to Sarah that she was probably giving her the most depressing evening of her young life. Pricked by this thought, she added: ‘And then every so often, you know, something happens – some new challenge comes up, and you think to yourself, Yes, I do want to be doing this, this is worthwhile. Like – well, at the moment for instance, there’s this girl in my class… very quiet and shy – it’s often the quiet ones – and there’s some… sadness about her, some secret she’s holding in. And to know that I’m the only person who might be able to reach her…’ Hearing herself worry aloud about this, she was ashamed to think how much of the evening she had already spent dwelling upon her own problems. ‘Anyway, Ruby, isn’t it time I found out something about you?’