Breakthrough, p.21
Breakthrough, page 21
Rachel and led her down the roughly terraced slope to the overgrown mound at the bottom.
Overhead the sky was deepening to indigo and the sunlight was stretched out across the distant mountaintops like a vast, golden pelt. Rachel lay back on the grass among the flower-tasselled bushes, on what had perhaps once been the altar of Los, and she reached up her arms to me. ‘Are you disappointed?’ she whispered.
I did not bother to answer, and I knew she did not expect me to.
When, eventually, we climbed back to the rim of the bowl the sun had already vanished, and stars, white as snowflakes, were pricking through the sky. Camp-fires twinkled and blazed in the upper valley, and the sounds of a guitar and of someone singing came drifting down to us. Rachel suddenly shivered violently in my arm, pressed her face into the crook of my shoulder and clung to me with all her might. ‘What’s the matter, nudnik?’ I murmured.
She gulped. ‘I’m just so happy, I’m sad.’
I kissed her and said the things you do say when you’re in love, and then we wandered slowly back to the camp.
TWENTY-NINE
And there it must end, if indeed it can ever be said to end anywhere. Nine months and eleven days later, at one o’clock in the morning, our daughter Barbara was born, and there is no doubt in either of our minds as to the exact moment when she was conceived. On the whole, Rachel had a fairly easy time of it—if having a first baby can ever be said to be easy—and the instant Babbit appeared in the world her mother telegraphed the news direct into my mind. At moments of crisis she has been reaching me in the same way ever since. I offer no explanation: I have none to offer.
At this point it would no doubt be dramatically appropriate to be able to reveal that our children have inherited something of their mother’s extraordinary gifts; it would also be tampering with the truth. The facts are that up to six months ago neither of them had manifested the slightest sign of supranormal ability, and even now I am still a long way from being convinced that they are in any way different in kind from their friends. They are both imaginative, reasonably intelligent and, we think, happy. Babbit looks like Rachel and Roger looks like me, which is at least preferable to the other way round. But just recently I’ve found my scalp beginning to tingle apprehensively whenever one of them pipes up over breakfast, ‘I had ever such a funny dream last night.’ However, with one possible exception, such dreams as they have retailed to me have been wholly unremarkable, and I make no bones about saying that I hope they stay that way.
I have tried hard to avoid shutting the door on Dumps, if only for no better reason than that he lives on so vividly in my own memory. He was so far and away the most remarkable man I have ever known that I cannot bear to think I may never meet him again. Yet the fact remains that it is now over twelve years since I last set eyes on him.
Rachel is still genuinely convinced that he is around somewhere, but her conviction cannot be said to stem from any process of rational deduction.
Which brings me to ’the one possible exception’ I have already mentioned regarding our children’s psychic inheritance. Since it provided me with the initial stimulus to embark on this whole account, I am probably giving it more weight than it deserves, but, nevertheless, I can’t help feeling it would be a mistake to omit it.
One evening last May I came home late from a Faculty meeting and was greeted by Rachel with the news that half an hour earlier Babbit had come downstairs and announced that she had just had a dream about Dumps. Since Babbit had never seen Dumps and could have known of him only through hearing us talk about him, I thought at first that Rachel must have misunderstood her, but she insisted she hadn’t.
Next morning I tackled Babbit on the subject. How, I asked, had she been so sure it was Dumps she was dreaming about, since all she had ever seen of him was a couple of photographs?
‘I just knew, Daddy.’
‘But how did you know?’ I persisted. ‘Did he tell you?’
’Of course not,’ she said scornfully. ‘It wasn’t a talking dream at all. You see I was standing in this sort of place—a sort of garden with big dark hills all round—and I looked up into the sky. And all at once, high, high over my head I saw an enormous great white bird all lit up as if searchlights were shining on it. And behind it were millions and millions and millions of stars.’
‘Well,’ I said, when she seemed to have finished, ‘what did it do?’
‘It just flew on slowly,’ she said dreamily, ‘like this’—waving her arms gracefully up and down—‘slowly, slowly, and in the end it got smaller and smaller and sort of melted away. And then I woke up.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘You woke up. Yet you came down and told Mummy you’d dreamt about Dumps. Now how on earth did you manage to get Dumps out of a big white bird and a million stars?’
‘But it was him’ she cried. ’The bird was him! Oh, Daddy, it was the most beautiful, wonderful dream I’ve ever had in my whole life!’ And with that she closed her eyes and sighed ecstatically.
I shrugged and looked across at Rachel, and she shrugged and looked back at me. It didn’t make sense of course, yet in a strange way it did seem somehow poetically apposite. And many times since then, when I’ve been reliving my memories of him, I’ve found myself remembering that image of Babbit’s of the solitary white bird winging its lonely way on and on into the unknown darkness under a roof of millions and millions and millions of stars. True, it may not have been Dumps exactly, but I can’t help feeling he would have acknowledged at least a spiritual kinship.
THE END
Richard Cowper, Breakthrough
