Dreams of Rivers and Seas

by Tim Parks

  As soon as she was home Helen went to the phone and called the Ashoka.

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Roberts is not answering, madam.’

  ‘But is he in his room?’

  ‘I’m afraid, I cannot know that, madam. Would you like me to leave a message?’

  ‘No,’ Helen said. ‘Or yes. Yes. Please.’ She hesitated. ‘The message is from Helen James. Yes, J-a-m-e-s.’ She waited while the man wrote. ‘The message is: I will not give you my permission.’

  ‘Not give,’ the receptionist repeated.

  ‘Not give my permission.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘DEAR JOHN …’

  He had found the letter on his return. Elaine had picked him up at Heathrow but she was in a hurry, she had a script-reading meeting. ‘Come up for a kiss,’ he insisted. He took her arm. It was late afternoon. We can make love, he thought. He could smell her perfume. His flatmates would be at work. On the table by his bed the airmail envelope with its Indian stamps distracted him. He tore it open.

  ‘Dear John, for some time now …’

  ‘No, I should run.’ Elaine was saying. There were sheets of handwritten paper. ‘It’s Dad,’ he said. He sat on the bed. The whole ride from Heathrow they had seemed further apart in the front seats of the car than sending messages at six thousand miles. ‘It was so sweet of you to say that about us marrying,’ she had twisted her elfish mouth and laughed. Perfume always excited him. Now she asked: ‘Your father? How weird!’

  ‘Dear John, for some time now I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams of rivers and seas, dreams of water.’

  John shook his head. What was this about?

  The girl stood over him in her tight white blouse, head cocked, a lopsided expression of enquiry on her face. ‘What does he say?’ she asked. ‘When did he send it? I should really rush,’ she repeated. She had changed her hair; ringlets held up in a pink band. She seemed more confident, mischievous.

  John checked quickly through the pages. There were eight, closely written on both sides. He had wanted to grab her, to overcome the awkwardness of the car journey by forcing their bodies together in pleasure. He wanted to return to his solid life. Father’s letter confused him. It shouldn’t be here, but he couldn’t ignore it. ‘Let’s meet later,’ she said. She was already at the door. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Dear John, for some time now I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams of rivers and seas, dreams of water. There can be little doubt, even if I only recall three or four of these dreams, that they form, as it were, a sequence. If, for example, one came across them as a number of unrelated cinema scenarios one would nevertheless be obliged to notice that each has, as it were, a familiarity with the other, as people of the same race …’

  John threw the papers down. He stood up and walked through to the kitchen. Why on earth, on his deathbed, had his father chosen to write him this stuff? And in that weird lecturing tone he had. John put on the kettle and called the lab. It was 6 p.m.

  ‘More news than you’d want really,’ Martin said wryly. He was a graduate on work experience. ‘Some Australian university has published something right up our street.’

  John had meant to discuss how the project’s various experiments were progressing. There was a protein they were trying to produce synthetically, genes they were seeking to isolate. Instead he had to hear that a team at the University of Adelaide had found an enzyme that tricked the tubercular bacterium’s ribosome into making false copies of itself.

  ‘Is Simon still there?’ he asked.

  The others were in a meeting at Glaxo, Martin said.

  John put the phone down. The guy who actually rented this flat was a small-time sports journalist, Peter. The place was full of posters of sports stars and pretty models: girls complacent and alluring, young men gritting their teeth in action. Mug of tea in hand, John shuffled back to the bedroom and picked up his father’s letter again. There was something from the bank too.

  ‘The first dream,’ he read, ‘or rather the first I have managed to recall, since it was only when I became aware of what I have called a sequence in these dreams that I decided to go back and look for some controlling logic that …’

  Am I really going to read this guff? John wondered. He felt anxious. Perhaps he could phone Glaxo directly. His father’s handwriting was dramatically but very regularly slanted, as if vigorous thrusts had been determinedly channelled and contained.

  ‘… begins at the seaside. A wide open beach. Perhaps it is Cromer. Perhaps it is Indonesia, or Goa. I am on holiday with some kind of group, a dozen people who are standing shivering on the water’s edge. I am alone behind them. I decide to show off; I will run past them and plunge into the sea. I change out of my clothes and start to run. As I reach the others, I realise I haven’t put my trunks on. I am completely naked. I race even faster toward the sea, only to find there is no water. The sand stretches away. Without my trunks, I can’t turn back. I come to a small railing, as when workmen fence off a hole in the road. And there is a hole in the sand, full of black, brackish water. I tumble over the railing and into the hole.’

  John drank his tea. Father had always chosen to communicate in code. It was his charm and his downfall. If anyone else had written this, John would have chucked it in the bin without a second thought.

  ‘The second dream is full of mud rather than sand. I am walking …’

  He broke off to read the letter from Barclays. ‘Your current overdraft is £1,487 …’ An interview was required. Why hadn’t his father written something practical about money? Had there really been no life insurance? Or about the past, about their being father and son? Who cared about his dreams?

  ‘I am walking with your mother in the heart of the old town by the river. I say the old town without knowing which. It could be Cambridge, it could be Delhi, or even Angoram. We are disturbed to find there is no water in the river, only mud. I spy a handsome young person sitting on the parapet and he, or perhaps she, tells me he/she is going away to the sea at the weekend. Things are too bad in town now the river has run dry. Turning aside, I see an old newspaper buried in the mud. I dig it out and see the date: 7 August 1945.’

  John drained his tea. Was 7 August a significant date? Dad had been born in 1945, but in January. John flicked through the pages to see if there might be anything more interesting. The regular slant of the very long tops and tails of the handwritten letters created a mesmeric effect, perhaps because they met the shadow writing on the other side of the page in so many right angles. It looked like a grid, or net, or as if one side of the page were cancelling the other out.

  ‘I hardly need to discuss with you, John’ – he found his name at last, just over halfway through – ‘the possible interpretation of these dreams. Whenever patterns emerge in the material we are studying, there is always the temptation to read them as “standing for” this or that, discarding, as it were, the metaphorical aura for the cognitive husk. However …’

  ‘What a pretentious jerk! Dad! You’re dying, for fuck’s sake. Say something real!’

  ‘The third dream …’

  ‘Dreams are ridiculous!’ John shouted out loud.

  He stood up and kicked his suitcase. Father had gone off his head. How did Mum put up with him? Some metastasis in the brain, perhaps. It would have been like Dad to have left going to the doctor until it was far too late; or to have gone to some local healer. He loved that stuff. Probably to drive Mum crazy, to refuse her brand of medicine. Dad never took medicine. But now John remembered his own dream of the odd shoes they had sold him at the airport shop. He frowned. Why had it made such an impression?

  ‘The third dream and the last I shall bother you with is not as sharp as the others. Once again I was with a group of people on holiday, but in particular with a younger person, an indistinct figure, friendly and subordinate, a graceful shadow by my side. We left the others to pitch a tent on a sandy cliff directly above the sea. It was a beautiful place but befo
re we had finished the tide had saturated the sand and the tent was collapsing. We tried to move it, but had to give up. Then we went down to the sea, myself and this younger companion. The breakers were majestic and inviting, but we did not dive in.’

  It was six-thirty. Outside, in Maida Vale, the winter night had fallen so that the black pane of the window gave back John’s reflection. He glanced at his ghostly image and immediately looked away. I should unpack, he decided. There was a lot to do tomorrow. Skipping ahead, he found:

  ‘However, the question I wanted to raise with you in this long and no doubt unexpected letter …’

  Suddenly curious – for there had been no mention of illness, let alone of imminent death – John picked up the first page again. Was there a date? No, it just began, Dear John. Where did I put the envelope? In his haste he had thrown it aside. It was on the floor with dusty slippers and a tangle of computer cables. The postmark was easily legible. January 18th. He thought back. That was the day after his death. But now John realised the address was not written in his father’s hand. It was printed rather childishly. Vale was spelt Veil. Maida Veil.

  ‘… unexpected letter is that in our dealings with the world and each other it will be necessary to consider the whole system, everything, and above all to avoid becoming locked into the general process of polarisation at work in society, a process itself subordinated …’

  John did not even try to make head nor tail of this. His eye slid down a couple of paragraphs.

  ‘In New Guinea it is believed that character traits in families skip a generation: father and son have opposed traits, while grandfather and grandson are alike. Certainly you have more in common with your grandfather than I do. Like you (and your mother for that matter), he was very practical. And I and my brother were similar in differing from our father, yet opposed in the ways we differed. My brother’s death, as you know, came very much out of an ugly triangle of incomprehension between himself, the girl he wanted to marry and your grandfather, a triangle in which each followed his own bias to the extreme.

  ‘What I would like to suggest about these dreams, then …’

  The phone rang. John was at once relieved and disappointed. In his weird way, perhaps Dad was at last getting close to saying something. There was one more page to go.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Southwood, this is Neville Ingrams from Open Technologies, a software house specialising in databank management. As you may know—’

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Southwood is out at the moment,’ John said, ‘I can’t …’ Then he asked, ‘Elaine?’

  ‘I beg your pardon? My name is Neville Ingrams.’ There was a brief pause. ‘I was hoping we might be able to interest you in a package of programs aimed at increasing …’

  But Elaine burst out laughing. ‘I did get you for a moment, though! I did!’

  ‘God, for a moment, yes. I really thought it was a man.’

  Her voice changed. ‘Anyway, I’m just calling to say I can’t make it later.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘There’s a sort of cast get-together, you know, after the script reading. I’d better socialise.’

  ‘What about later later?’

  ‘It’ll go on pretty late, I think. You should sleep. What was in the letter?’

  ‘I don’t care how late,’ John said. ‘Just come over when you’re finished.’

  ‘I’ll see.’ She seemed to hesitate: ‘The package we are proposing, Mr Southwood, would allow you to coordinate all your manifold activities, business, social and family, in real time, introducing an intelligent and autonomous organising—’

  ‘I have a present for you,’ he interrupted.

  ‘Mmm, in that case! What?’

  ‘Come over and find out. Or better still pick me up and take me to your place. Or I’ll walk over there.’

  Putting the phone down, John again returned to the letter and found he was reading the last lines:

  ‘… about balance between basic elements, water and earth, or creation and dissolution, while the emotional tone is established by this shadow companion (is the young person setting off for the sea in the second dream the same as the companion in the third? And are both of those figures stand-ins perhaps for you, John, or my brother, or anyway some figure I desperately need to complement my nature, as he/she perhaps …’

  The letter ended in mid sentence, in mid parenthesis.

  John stared. Desperately. The word was unexpected. Desperately was definitely not Dad. He went back and forth through the pages to see if he had misplaced one. No. They were in order. Anyway, this sentence broke off halfway down the page: some figure I desperately need. Dad hadn’t finished the letter. So why had he sent it? Or maybe he had decided not to finish it and not to send it. Writing desperately had stopped him. Or remembering his brother, which made him think of his own death. But then who had mailed the thing? Not Mother.

  John studied the envelope again. Perhaps it was a practical joke. In the years when Albert James still wrote to his son, at school, he would occasionally claim that he and Helen had discovered some bizarre, as yet unclassified animal, with seven legs perhaps, or two heads, or that they had ‘collected’ some curious ceremony that involved the chief men of this or that tribe dancing on stilts. He would make elaborate drawings. He would offer long analyses of the evolutionary history of the beast he had invented. ‘I like to see if you know when I’m playing, John,’ he would say if his son was disappointed.

  Surely, John thought, staring at the last sentence of the letter – surely you don’t play when you’re dying. Elaine, for example, would hardly make a funny phone call like that, if she thought she was fatally ill.

  Peter, the sports journalist, came home, then Jean-Pierre, John’s French room-mate. There was small talk. Peter’s young girlfriend was there with a bottle of vodka. She was Romanian. As usual they were arguing. Petra liked to flirt. She was pretty. Jean-Pierre played along and poured drinks. He was a big boy with a compulsive laugh. In the absence of mixers they stuck the electric whisk in a can of peeled tomatoes. John was glad he had an English girlfriend you could feel at home with. There were no barriers of language and culture. And she wasn’t a flirt either.

  ‘Did you ’ave any faan in India,’ Petra asked, ‘Mr ’andsome? Did you ’ave any nice dark spicy Indian girls?’ She tried a belly-dancer’s wriggle.

  ‘The poor guy was going to his dad’s funeral,’ Peter protested.

  Leaving the others in the kitchen, John went to unpack. The elephants were in a plastic bag with dirty socks and underwear. He put them on the bedside table. The largest had lost part of its trunk. The smallest now looked very crudely carved. Why did I buy them? he wondered. ‘Three elephants, sir, not one.’ John sat and studied the things. He could hardly give them as a gift until he had glued the trunk back on. How did it break? Elaine would ask.

  ‘Phone for you Johnny!’ Jean-Pierre called.

  He hadn’t heard. They brought him the cordless.

  ‘How did it go?’ Simon, the research team leader, was respectful. ‘Your mother surviving?’ Then the man explained that, yes, Glaxo seemed to be going a little cold. They were asking for concrete results before the funding renewal. It wasn’t so much what the Australians had published as some forthcoming rationalisation of departments in different countries. ‘We should get together tomorrow to see what we can offer in the way of work in progress.’

  It was ten o’clock. Without putting his coat on, John walked out of the flat. ‘I’ll be at your place,’ he texted Elaine.

  A January wind had begun to nag. It was a long haul up the Edgware Road and into West Hampstead. The clothes he was wearing were too light. Suddenly, he saw his father, balding and lanky, shambling naked across empty sands. There came a sharp feeling of sadness, even shame. My brother’s death came out of an ugly triangle of incomprehension. Why had Dad brought up that ancient story? John’s grandfather had been famous for his work in genetics. John had never read the book he’d written. Was Dad
trying to tell me something about my career: that while he needed Grandfather’s qualities as a corrective, I needed his? As he/she perhaps … needs me. That was how he had meant to go on. Like a hole in the head! Then John realised his father must have broken off the letter precisely because he was unable to write that, unable to write the words needs me. The tears rose to his eyes. Some figure I desperately need. A graceful shadow. Why couldn’t the man speak openly?

  ‘I’ll be very late,’ Elaine’s message came back. ‘Stay home.’

  John walked on. He rang one of four bells. A girl called Frances let him in and there was Elaine’s other flatmate, Nancy, watching a debate on population migrations. The two girls argued with the television, legs tucked under them on the sofa. They were bulky, hostile presences. ‘I’ll wait for Elaine in her room,’ he said.

  All round her bed there were posters of actors and actresses. John didn’t know their names, but it was obvious that they were dressed up to act. They were not the kind of people you could really mix with or talk to. ‘Elaine is the one,’ he muttered.

  He took off his shoes and lay on the bed. The pillow had her smell. He buried his face in it. Vaguely he was aware of Frances and Nancy talking in low voices in their bedroom. His mind began to wander. Then, in the complete dark, he was suddenly on his feet and lurching to his mother’s room, the heavy stone elephants in his hand. ‘Albert!’

  John sat up, disoriented.

  A diesel was ticking over in the street. Feeling fragile and slightly sick, he went to the window. Elaine was standing by a car in yellow street light, her skirt blowing against her legs. She leaned into the car, laughed. He loved the way she was very conscious of herself, yet seemingly natural too. He loved the way she needed his encouragement, she needed him to tell her she was beautiful.

  ‘I waited,’ he said from the darkness.

  ‘John!’ The girl started and snapped on the light. ‘Shit, you frightened me, I told you not to!’