He pushed her away from him. “I’m not drunk. I—I’m lost, that’s all.” And he went swaying off down the street. He heard heels clipping unsteadily in pursuit. A cab cruised up. He fell into it.
“Where to?” the cabby asked.
“Uh—Holborn Viaduct Station,” he found himself answering in a blurred voice. Why Holborn Viaduct? He had never used the station.
“Mono station or the old one?”
“The old one,” Arnold told him, after only a moment’s hesitation.
As the cab sped across London Arnold held his head, trying to reason. Was he on the right track? Had the crazy idea worked? Why had the name of an unfamiliar station risen up before him? Why a station at all? Well, that one was easy; if she had gone away it must be to somewhere outside London, and therefore to a train or bus station. But why Holborn Viaduct? Why not? Boy, he was drunk!
He got out at the station, disdaining the driver’s proffered assistance. Beneath the soaring white towers of the mono station, the old station yard and the dusty booking office beyond were almost deserted. He went up to a map hanging on the wall. It danced before his eyes. It steadied for a moment and a name leaped out at him. He lurched to the only grille open.
“Lower Paling,” he said as clearly as he could manage.
“Last train waiting at platform two,” the clerk told him.
He was wakened by a rough hand on his shoulder.
“Lower Paling, guv’ner. End of the line.”
Arnold rose unsteadily to his feet.
“Lower Paling?” Where the hell was that? What was he doing here? “Oh, Lower Paling. Thanks,” he said, dimly grateful that at least he could not have slept past it. He stumbled out.
The station was tiny and decrepit. Flickering gas lamps competed half-heartedly with the moonlight. It must be some backwater of a line that this was the terminus of. Just where was Lower Paling? Somewhere in Kent—or Sussex, maybe—he guessed.
He gave his ticket up to the porter who had awakened him, and staggered out into the street. It was deserted. A cluster of typical small village shops tailed away into a row of houses, and they into the shadows of trees. No, it was not here, what he was looking for. Would he even recognize it? If, that is, it was a place at all?
Which way to turn, left or right? No use spinning a coin for it; he had to know. But he didn’t know. Whatever crazy urgings had prompted him this far withered and died. Surely, if this weren’t just a drunken adventure, the impulse should be stronger here? Or should it?
He closed his eyes and turned round twice, three times. In his present state that was more than enough to rob him of all sense of direction. He pondered. If Claire had ever come this way, if the road to the sanctuary was here, then he prayed that whatever knowledge he had unconsciously absorbed would turn him in the right direction. He felt a sudden motivation and made a half-turn to his right. He opened his eyes.
He was looking straight back into the station—and into the face of the porter. The face tilted dubiously.
“Are—are you all right, sir?”
“Yes, I’m all right.” But he was annoyed. It was mad, the whole idea. The power had worked all right, but only that primitive sense of mind-awareness which had merely turned him in the porter’s direction.
“You wouldn’t be looking for the other exit, by any chance?” the porter suggested.
“Other exit? What other exit? Where?”
“Why, to the Duncombe Road. Back on to the platform and over the footbridge.”
Then there was a road in the direction he had turned. He thanked the man with incoherent fervency and pressed a coin into his hand. Then he made his stumbling way over the bridge and out onto the road. On this side of the station there was nothing, just an expanse of fields and the road leading away over the crest of a low hill. There was nothing else for it now. He followed it.
Though there was only half a moon, the night was clear and moon and stars gave enough light. The countryside was utterly quiet, except once, as he passed a lonely house, a dog stirred at the ringing of his heels on the flint road. He trudged on. The barking died away.
He went on for miles. He came to a signpost that said Duncombe 15 miles, so Duncombe could not be his goal; there must be a station nearer to it than Lower Paling. In any case, the name of Duncombe had rung no bells in his head. But neither did the two other names under it, Entchley and Millcross. He put the signpost behind him and went on.
He lost count of the number of houses he passed—not because there were so many, but because the intervals between were so long. He smiled wryly to himself. People talked of the spreading of the cities, prophesying that by the year 2000 England would be one vast urban mass. But there were still great tracts of country left, even this close to London.
His head was clearing under the soothing influence of the night breeze, but he was, he realized, getting very tired. None of the houses he had passed was the one he was looking for. He couldn’t just go on, mile after mile, like this, chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. Will-o’-the-wisp—the ignus fatuus that leads travellers’ steps astray. He cursed his mazy mind. When he saw a haystack just beyond a hedge, he turned off the road, burrowed in and laid his weary city limbs to rest.
CHAPTER SIX
He woke, cold and aching, to the morning light. He threshed with his hand. Dust got in his eyes and mouth. He spat and blinked it away and looked at his watch. It was after eight. He crawled from his lair and rose stiffly to his feet. A cold morning mist, like the breath of some subterranean monster, clung to the ground. He shivered. He had no topcoat on. He turned his jacket collar up and dusted the straw and dust from his clothes as best he could. He ran his fingers through his fair hair smoothing it down.
He started to walk on. No sense in going back in the direction of Lower Paling. His memories of the night before were confused, but he remembered why he had come here. He also remembered that he must have walked miles from the station. Roads, even in the country, did not go on for ever. He must come to somewhere soon. Besides—
But no—this had been an insane excursion. It had no direction. Its goal had no existence; it was only a drunken dream.
A bus passed him going in the opposite direction. A car and a lorry passed, going his way. He thumbed both of them, but neither stopped. He trudged on. The sun was dispelling the mist and meagrely warming his bones, when he reached a village. He turned a bend in the road, clustered by thick conifers, and there, suddenly, it was. A board, staked by the roadside, told him that it was Entchley. It comprised a few houses, a shop, a filling station and a pub. It looked utterly deserted. He went up to the pub. It wasn’t open yet, so he went to the private door.
A woman with orange hair opened up and looked at him suspiciously when he asked if she could supply breakfast. He must look pretty disreputable, he realized. She admitted him, with obvious reluctance. But she served him a handsome breakfast of bacon and eggs and fresh country bread. After it, he felt considerably better. And after he had paid for it, the woman’s manner thawed. She let him use the phone to call his office and the bathroom to freshen up. By then the bar was open.
He prefaced a drink with a couple of exalgins. The joint effect stopped the dull aching in his head. The pub was a typical village inn, with dark brown panelled walls, decorated with horse brasses and racing calendars and fly-spotted sporting prints, relics of a vanishing age. There was nothing here to remind him of Claire. The village had woken no buried images. All the same, he bought the landlady a drink and asked her if she knew of a Miss Bergen.
The landlady shook her head. “We’ve only just taken over here.”
There was nobody else in the bar to ask. He had one more drink and consulted a bus timetable hanging on the bar wall. He found that he had another twenty minutes to kill. The sun was shining warmly now, so he decided to walk around the village. It was on a slight rise. He walked up it. The dusty road narrowed between stone embankments planted with tall fir trees so that it was like walkin
g through a tunnel of dark green.
And suddenly it fell into place. His heart began to pound. He knew which way to go. On for two hundred yards, then turn left down a narrow path, lined with rhododendron bushes. And there—visible through the gap in a broken and peeling white fence—stood the sanctuary. As he looked at it, the dim and barely grasped memory sharpened and fused with the actuality, and he knew that this was the place.
It was an old farmhouse, long and rambling. It had sunk and twisted under the burden of years, so that it seemed to merge into the ground at each end. Its red tile roof, overgrown with patterns of lichen, had been patched with tiles of odd shapes, semicircular and diamond. Its walls were of rusty grey stone.
He squeezed between the broken palings and stumbled through the waist-high grass. He knocked at the door. There was no immediate answer. From the comer of his eye he thought he saw a curtain flutter. He turned, but there was no movement. Then he heard the sound of footsteps inside, and the door creaked open.
A girl of about eleven stood there. She had dull eyes and a pouting mouth. Her fair hair was long and untended, her dress faded and ragged.
“May I see Miss Bergen?”
The girl shook her head.
“Is she in?”
Again the girl shook her head. Arnold felt a twinge of sympathy.
She was a deaf mute. No, she couldn’t be deaf, she had obviously heard his knock. Or was she merely being shy or obstinate?
“Can you speak?” He enunciated deliberately.
The girl shook her head again.
“Can you hear?”
She nodded.
“Good. Now, Miss Bergen does live here, doesn’t she?”
The girl hesitated this time before shaking her head. A look of wariness had crept into her dull eyes.
Arnold reached out and gripped one thin arm. “You know you’re telling a lie.”
The child squirmed. “No, no,” she cried out.
His hand dropped from her arm as the truth impinged. The girl had not cried out.
She did not try to escape. She stood there, plainly knowing that her unspoken cry had been recognized. Her eyes widened, but a message came from her as clearly stated as a voice.
“You can do it as well, then? I thought Miss Bergen was the only one who could hear me.” A smile flickered on her face illuminating it, showing that she was really a pretty child beneath the mask of suspicion.
“You were telling a lie then.” He, too, spoke mentally.
But the girl was romping mischievously in his mind like a child going through the pockets of a benevolent uncle. It was like a green explosion in his mind. He was suddenly aware of all the freshness of childhood—its innocence, its dreams, its raw wonder of vision. He knew now how, day by day, the miracle of existence faded and faded. Because here it was all new, all bright. It was all the more poignant because of this child’s disability. Trapped in the prison of her dumbness, she had been led forth into the day.
Or could it be that Claire and he both were the ones who had been led forth? It was incredible, but—was it this child who was the generator of the power? But no, he could read the answer in her mind. The shock of delight when it had been awakened in her by Claire was too new.
Utterly confused, he thrust her from his mind. He found he could do that. But he could feel the resulting hurt in her.
“Just a moment,” he pleaded aloud. It was too naked. This child had no barriers about her new-found talent.
He had to think. This meant that both he and Claire had the power—and that both could use it with another person. So far, with Vic, he had only reached a rudimentary stage. But Claire had obviously reached full contact with this child, so that he could communicate with her immediately. It changed the entire picture—but it made it even more urgent that he find her. He opened his mind to the girl again.
“Please,” he pleaded. “Where is Miss Bergen?”
The child’s mind answered him. “She went away.”
“When?”
“This morning early. She left a note for my mother.”
“Do you live here? What is your name? Sally? Do you live here, Sally?”
“Yes. My mother looks after the place.”
“Can I see her?”
“She’s out working in the village. She has to go out to work.” The image of a father flickered in her mind, but it was dark and faceless.
“Did Miss Bergen say on the note where she was going?”
“No. I suppose she’s gone to London.”
“Thank you, Sally.” He turned to go.
“Why are you going?”
“I have to.”
“Will you be coming back?” she pleaded with him.
“Yes.” He felt the child’s doubt. “If Miss Bergen will let me. That s a promise, But I have to find her first.”
And he fled from Sally and the disturbing questions she provoked.
He had missed the bus, but he thumbed a lift back into Lower Paling and caught the next train back to London. Would he always be missing this elusive girl? He had started out the night before in Holborn—and had had to go back to Holborn. His mad notion had proved right—now he had to go back to London. It was the only other place he knew where to look for her. But perhaps she had a third place. Perhaps she had hideaways all over the country to safeguard her precious integrity!
That rather far-fetched thought assumed a disquieting substance of reality when he reached Craven Yard and found that she was not there. My God, he thought, was it always to be like this—arrivals, departures, passing each other down corridors of frustration?
Not knowing what to do or where to turn next, he went to the nearby stereo theatre. It wasn’t his usual meat, but he felt that he had to escape, if only for an hour or two, from his perplexity. He could still lose himself in the sheer technical marvel of stereo. He. knew enough about it, too, to feed his wonder.
The projection was from the rear, not the front as in the old movies. There was no film in this process, either. The image was on tape—he had a momentary vision of his companion of the night before; it might be her plump hand that was feeding this epic into the tube. The tape bore a multiple image which was fed into the complex gun of a vast cathode ray tube. Each part of the image fluoresced on its relevant plane of the three-dimensional matrix which was the screen.
He sat in the cradling dark and watched unfold a subterranean romance, all about a hydroponics farmer and what happened when he came upon the ruins of Atlantis. It was basically hokum, but the photography was brilliant in its actuality, so that he was absorbed into it. And then a train of thought started in his mind that disturbed him. He thought of the progress of the motion picture, from the flickering black-and-white images of Edison and Friese-Green to this. All made possible by men who had served their genius, working themselves to exhaustion, often in poverty, to bring a dream to life. And here he sat, possessing a power that made the stereo, for all its technical marvels, seem like a toy by comparison. He felt an odd shame, because he had not had to work for it.
He could not fight down the feeling, so before merman got mermaid, he left the theatre and went home.
He entered the hall of the bachelor block where he lived.
A figure rose from an armchair.
“At last,” Claire said simply. “I’ve been waiting here all day.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
He showed her up to his flat, doing his best to control his agitation.
The flat, never the height of tidiness, had become even more disorganized in the past few weeks. He felt her amused disapproval. He put the percolator on and, as it heated, scurried around, stuffing books away, smoothing covers, straightening pictures. The litter on his desk he swept straight into a drawer. He grinned at Claire as he passed her on his way back to the kitchen. She smiled slightly, shaking her head at him.
He came back with percolator and cups on a tray. She was surveying his few prints.
“They’re mostly only print
s,” he apologized. “But artists’ prints. Original lithographs.”
“I hope I can see that.”
“Sorry. The one you’re looking at is an original, though.”
“Your precious Denton Welch.”
“No.” He was ashamed of his petty joy. “It’s a Cecil Collins.”
“Collins? Oh yes. Same camp, different occupant. Three triangle-headed goblins on a hill! I ask you.”
“What’s wrong with that? I like it. Coffee?”
“Thank you. Well, I don’t. It’s simply romanticism gone to seed.”
“You’d prefer romanticism in full flower?”
“That was a necessary historical development, produced by conditions which no longer obtain. Sugar? Yes, two please. But why the hell people should go chasing it in this day and age is beyond me. Exploring reality is enough of a job for one lifetime.”
“You don’t explore it—you dissect it.”
“I don’t—I isolate it.”
“What’s the difference? Besides, myth and dream are just as much a part of reality.”
“Only a subjective reality.”
“Subjective?” He was scornful. “A word—like hair-splitting between dissecting and isolating.”
“You once analysed words,” she gibed.
“Only to test them, to be able to use them better, to convey—”
He faltered.
“To convey what?”
“I don’t know what. Does an artist know just what he’s saying? There’s always an extension beyond the word, the shape.”
She pouted disdainfully. “The poet driven on by his daemon? Never. The artist should always know exactly what he’s doing. It doesn’t always come off—they’re failures of execution, but not of purpose. Not to know what you’re trying to say—that’s the height of irresponsibility.”
He strove to justify himself. “What I was trying to say wasn’t always explicit in one poem, If I had any world view it was just what we’re talking about now. To me the analytical drive is a deathly one. I believe you can analyse away all the meaning of life. I believe that psycho-analysts are bad for people. What earthly use is it for a man to have his impulses isolated—” he chose the word deliberately—“and have them all laid out on a white aseptic tray, all neatly labelled?”
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