by John Harwood
Fifteen minutes crawled by, and then a half-hour. The electric lights came on; the windows in the dome darkened steadily; Julia waited in growing apprehension with her thoughts revolving as upon a treadmill. Should she not go to his rooms and see if he was there, to warn him? But warn him of what? To know exactly where and when the danger lay, she would have to see the book… but then the rational part of her mind would rise up in protest, only to be subdued in turn by a vivid recollection of the immense woman bearing the coffin-shaped parcel, so that she sat paralysed between these warring inner factions until an attendant came to inform her that no record of any such volume could be found. Julia returned at once to the catalogue; she could visualise the position of the entry quite clearly, in the top right-hand quarter of a right-hand page, but realised, when it did not appear in the expected place, that she had absolutely no recollection of its surroundings. Because new entries were constantly being pasted in, their order was not always precisely alphabetical, but she searched many pages in either direction without finding what she sought. This, however, only heightened her sense of foreboding. It was black night outside; she could delay no longer, no matter what humiliation might follow. But if she were not home soon, even her husband might become anxious enough to initiate a search. Hastily scribbling a note to say that she would be dining with Marianne, Julia gathered up her things and rushed from the Reading Room.
THE NIGHT AIR WAS DAMP AND STILL, WITH A HINT OF mist about the street lamps, as Julia rang the bell at the street door below Frederick's rooms. There was a long wait, made even longer by the combined weight of foreboding and painful recall, before the door was opened by an ancient porter.
Her apprehension increased with every one of the seemingly endless flights of stairs, and she was obliged to pause even longer than was necessary to recover her breath before she could summon the courage to knock at Frederick's door. All had been silent within; at the sound of her tapping the silence seemed only to deepen; then there was a muffled thud, followed by the sound of rapid footsteps and a clatter of locks and bolts being undone. Almost worse than the dread of what she might encounter was the resurgence of a hope so long repressed, a hope that flared wildly at the first sight of his face, so pale and gaunt and worn, suddenly radiant with an answering joy. She had crossed the threshold and flung her arms around him-feeling at once how dreadfully thin he had become-and kissed him with all the passion of her resurrected love, before the name he was so tenderly murmuring resolved itself as, undeniably; "Lydia".
JULIA DISENGAGED HERSELF AND DREW BACK, SEARCHING the well-remembered face for some sign of recognition. It was, and yet was not, the Frederick of old: unshaven, clad in a crumpled shirt and trousers and a pair of old carpet slippers, with a frayed green dressing-gown over his shoulders, his hair even longer and more disorderly, but lacking its former lustre. His adoring expression did not change, but he seemed to be gazing through rather than at her face. For a moment she feared that he was blind, until he evidently noticed the open door, which he reached out and closed behind her. As it clicked shut, an expression of bewilderment crossed his face; he looked from her-or rather, from the person he evidently saw in her place-to the door and back again.
"It is finished, and you have come," he said in a strange abstracted tone, "but I expected… I thought you would have…"
He trailed off, glancing towards the French windows, which Julia saw were open to the night. Despite the fire burning in the grate opposite, she felt the chill draught from the balcony. She did not want to understand his implication, nor did she wish to believe him mad. Might he be sleep-walking? And if he stood, as it were, in the midst of a dream of Lydia, might he not be woken…? But even as she opened her mouth to cry, I am Julia, not Lydia, the futility of it overwhelmed her. Dreaming or waking, Frederick had given his whole heart to a dead woman, and there was no room in it for the living; that love was ashes, and would arise no more.
Besides, she had somewhere read or heard that sleep-walkers should not be woken abruptly, but coaxed back to bed and watched until they fell into a true sleep, from which they would awaken with no recollection of the previous nights encounters. There flashed upon her the conviction that she understood the omens of recent days, for had she not come to him tonight, Frederick might well have plunged heedlessly to his death. The first thing, therefore, was to close the French windows; no, first get him safely into bed, then secure them.
"Frederick," she said, gently taking his arm, "you are very tired, and must rest now."
"Yes, I am very tired," he repeated. "But-you will not leave me, Lydia? Not now?" His voice rose and quavered on the last words.
"No, Frederick," said Julia sadly, "I will not leave you. But you must go to bed now, and sleep."
With that she led him slowly across the room, staying as far as possible from the dark doorway opening onto the night, and along the passageway to his bedroom, now dreadfully stale and disordered. He stood obediently, like a child, while she straightened the bedclothes as best she could and turned back the sheet; like a child he sat on the edge of the bed and removed his slippers and dressing-gown, then immediately lay down and composed himself for sleep. His eyes had closed before Julia had settled the bedclothes about his shoulders, and within the space of a minute the rhythm of his breathing had slowed and deepened. She watched him for a few minutes more, recalling how often and how ardently she had yearned to watch over Frederick whilst he slept. Now her prayer had been answered, and all she could feel was a profound weariness of spirit. His breathing slowed still further; Julia would have liked to open the window, but was afraid of disturbing him, and so turned down the gas and went back to the sitting-room.
SHE HAD MEANT TO CLOSE THE FRENCH WINDOWS IMmediately, but the staleness of the bedroom seemed to have followed her down the passage, and it was not, after all, especially cold; she would close one side and leave the other open for the moment. But on her way over, her attention was drawn to the desk beneath the right-hand window. A lamp burned beside the portrait of Lydia, placed so that it also illuminated a loose sheaf of papers, which were secured by a crystal paperweight Julia was uncomfortably reminded of a votive offering. The uppermost sheet bore two stanzas in Frederick's small, precise hand:
The midnight moth besieg'd the lamp,
The magic casement opened wide;
I heard at last the soft wing-heat
Of my returning bride;
And, as I hand still farther out
Upon the unresisting night,
Saw my beloved hovering near,
Enraptur'd with the gift of flight
The ink looked quite fresh, as if this were the final page of a fair copy which had not yet been put into its proper order. Julia drew out the chair and sat down, meaning to examine the rest of the manuscript, but found herself intimidated by Lydia's cool, proprietorial stare, which in the lamplight seemed unnervingly watchful. She stretched out a hand to turn the pictures eyes away from hers, but as she leaned forward, her foot thudded against something hollow beneath the desk. There was, indeed, scarcely enough room for her feet, and she bent down to see what the obstruction was. A window-box? No; too low, and she had felt it move. But its proportions were somehow familiar. A black, rectangular box, about three feet long: some musical instrument, perhaps? Curiosity impelled her to set aside her chair and draw the thing out from beneath the desk. It proved surprisingly light for its size. No doubt it would be locked; but the first of the three silver catches snapped open when she touched the knob; the other two followed suit, so there could be no harm in raising the lid.
Whatever it contained was, however, concealed beneath a purple velvet covering. Julia was kneeling alongside the box, and as she reached in to draw aside the covering, she overbalanced so that her right hand slid beneath the purple velvet and encountered something hard. There was a flash of white; she tried to snatch her hand away, but something caught it fast with a hot, piercing sensation, and the doll-child sat up and opened its eyes.
The porcelain fingers gripped like the needle-sharp teeth of a serpent; with her free hand, Julia tried to fend the creature off, but it seemed to leap from its box as she recoiled through the French windows and fell heavily against the balcony railing. She felt the creature dragging her over; for one dreadful instant it hung, smiling, in mid-air before its grip upon Julia's hand was broken and the doll-child went whirling down into the void; whole seconds seemed to pass before Julia heard it smash upon the pavement.
She remained, clinging to the railing, until the worst of the shock had subsided. But the piercing sensation in her right hand did not diminish; one of the serpent-fingers must have lodged in it. Shuddering, she lifted her hand to the light and discovered that the source of the pain was, in fact, a hat-pin, driven deep into the side of her palm. Bunched beneath the head of the pin were several torn folds of white material. Clenching her teeth, she drew out the pin and dropped it over the rail; then she stood up and leaned over to see if she could discern the fragments of the doll by the light of the street lamp below. She was too far up to make anything out, but as she watched, a small figure shuffled into the pool of light and seemed to be stooping over something in the road.
Julia became suddenly conscious of where she was, but vertigo did not follow. She felt she could stay here, leaning on the rail, for as long as she liked. But there was nothing to stay for, and her hand was throbbing painfully. She returned to the sitting room, closed the doors, restored the empty box to its place, and exchanged a final glance with Lydia's portrait. The eyes had lost their wariness; indeed the picture seemed to have faded, to have become simply a photograph of a young woman seeking to make the most of her beauty for the camera. Julia wondered, as she turned away, if she would ever see the poem in print, but it was addressed to Lydia, not to her; all that was left for her to do was to ensure that a doctor would be summoned. Looking in upon Frederick for the last time, Julia saw that he was smiling faintly in his sleep. She left him dreaming of the dead, and went wearily down the stairs to rejoin the world of the living.
I EMERGED FROM THE STORY WITH THE SENSATION OF waking from a dream in which I was Julia, and dreadfully cold, and the Reading Room had slipped its moorings and floated out to sea. The dome was palpably revolving; I could feel the sway of the waves as I struggled up from the depths, only to find that I was already awake, with a burning forehead and a deep, shivering ache in every bone. Walking back to Russell Square tube station, I was shaking so hard I had to clench my teeth to stop them chattering. From amongst the press of bodies in the lift, a desolate male voice announced to the world at large, 'Ah'm not happy. Ah feel bad. Ah'm depressed.' 'Aren't we fuckin' all,' muttered a man behind me. Crammed into our filthy metal cage, steeped in the farmyard stench of sodden clothing, we sank in silence into the earth.
For the next ten days I shivered and sweated and coughed, drifting in and out of dreams in which the doll-child appeared several times. Worst of all was a recurring nightmare in which I pursued a fleeting figure, who might or might not have been Alice, through a maze of deserted streets and derelict buildings. Usually she would vanish; once I cornered her in a blind alley and she turned to me with a face of stone. Outside the rain pelted down upon the icy slush, through which I slithered to the chemist for more drugs, or to the nearest cheap restaurant for another oily Indian meal. The Westland affair fizzled and died. The space shuttle blew up. The Iron Lady went on and on.
Three days before I was due to leave, I thought about taking a train from Waterloo to Balcombe, a village about three miles north-east of Staplefield. The least I could do was see the village and ask around. But as I looked again at the tiny black circle marked on the B2114, all I could feel was 'what's the point?' I tried to summon the old sense of wonder and refuge, but it was like feeling for a lost tooth. Without Alice-by now I had convinced myself that I would never hear from her again-Staplefield was dead and gone.
On my last day, a Saturday, a watery sun came out. I took a bus to Hampstead Heath and walked up to the top of Parliament Hill, where I did at last feel some sense of awe at the great sweep of the city below. But the wind was keen and biting, and so cold my fillings began to ache. I descended to the swimming ponds, shuddering at the sight of the icy green water in which some madwoman was actually swimming. Dodging pushchairs and bicycles, I wandered the muddy gravel paths as far as the Vale of Health, and came back along the boundary road.
I HADN'T IMAGINED I WOULD WELCOME THE HEAT AND glare of a Mawson summer. When I emerged from customs, my mother hugged me as if I had returned from the dead.
'But you're so thin, Gerard. What's happened to you?'
I told her about the flu, and agreed I should have gone to a doctor. There didn't seem to be much else to say. After breakfast we sat with our coffee under a flowering gum in the back yard. Crimson filaments drifted across the lawn; the sky was a dazzling blue. Breathing the dry, pungent scent of eucalyptus, I couldn't help thinking that it was better to be desolate and warm than desolate and frozen.
'-were you too ill to do anything at all, dear?' my mother was saying.
The only thing I could think of was my walk on Hampstead Heath. Idly watching a pair of rosellas as I talked, I was unprepared for the outburst.
'How could you be so reckless, Gerard? You might have been murdered!'
Her forehead was beaded with sweat, though it had been dry a moment before.
'It was a Saturday afternoon, Mother. There were people everywhere.'
'People get dragged off those paths, all the time. And never seen again. I've read about it. Anything could have happened to you.'
I tried to reassure her, but she would not listen, and shortly afterwards she said she was going inside to lie down.
c/o Penfriends International,
Box 294, Mount Pleasant PO,
London WC1
31 January 1986
Dearest Gerard,
I'm so sorry, I've only just got your letters (the ones you wrote while you were here) because I've been in hospital. Don't worry, everything's fine now-wonderful in fact. There's a real chance that in a couple of years' time I'll be walking again! I've been on Mr MacBride's waiting list-he's a neurosurgeon-for ages, and I thought it would be months more, but then he had a cancellation on New Year's Day and they whisked me off to Guy's Hospital in an ambulance. Only I didn't know where you were staying because your letter from Mawson with the hotel address in it must have been delayed in the post-it was waiting with the others when I got back yesterday.
I would have written much sooner, only there were complications with the dye they injected into my spine for the X-rays-God, those endless hours lying in the scanner, trying not to move, or even breathe-anyway I got terribly sick and spent two weeks on a drip because I couldn't keep anything down. I had a monster headache that never stopped, and my eyesight went so blurry I thought I was going blind-this often happens, apparently, with spinal injections-it's almost back to normal now. I thought of you all the time but I was just too ill to write.
I would have told you about the tests only I just couldn't bear to raise our hopes-you know how superstitious I am-until I knew for certain there was something to hope for. And there is, there truly is. Mr MacBride is working with a new laser technique for splitting healthy nerves to replace the damaged ones, and he thinks that in a year or two-it just needs one more breakthrough with the lasers, he says-he'll be able to operate with a ninety per cent chance of success!
This must go now to catch today's post; I've told them to send it express. I'm so sorry about the mix-up with letters and that you had such a miserable time in London-I'll make it up to you, I promise.
More, much more, tomorrow.
I love and adore you with all my heart, and I'm longing to hear from you.
Your invisible lover
Alice
If Alice had told me then that I would have to wait another thirteen years… but it was never going to be thirteen years, only 'another year or two at t
he most'. And the longer I waited, the more I had to lose by not waiting just a few months longer. Alice finished her degree with the Open University and took up teaching English by correspondence to disabled students. Somewhere around the five-year mark, she promised me that we would be together after the operation, even if it failed. Then why not now? 'I want to run into your arms,' she would say, 'and now that we've come so far, please, please can we wait just a little longer?' By the time I persuaded her to go on to email, we had exchanged over four thousand letters through Penfriends International.
I had a life, of sorts, and friends, up to a point. But never any real intimacy; sooner rather than later, every friendship ran up against the wall behind which Alice lay hidden. So long as I keep her secret, I would tell myself, she will be healed, we will be together. As in those fairy tales in which all will be well so long as a certain question is never asked, or a prohibition disobeyed. Never enter my chamber during the hours of darkness.
In all this time, my mother and I kept to our undeclared agreement: she didn't ask about Alice, and I didn't ask about her past. It never seemed worth moving out of the house because I never meant to wait thirteen years. Everyone at the library assumed I was gay, but too timid to leave the closet-at least that was what I assumed they assumed. Quiet, polite, still living at home with his mother, never seems to go out, never talks about himself: no one, I imagined them saying, could possibly be that boring. Not even Gerard. I went on working at the library and staying at home with Mother, while the longed-for breakthrough in microsurgery shimmered on the horizon, always just another year away.