NINE

  I had arranged to pick up Miss Bernstein at half-past eight. I’d warned her that the only transport I could provide was a scooter, and she’d taken me at my word and changed into jeans and anorak. The outfit didn’t flatter her figure, but neither did it seriously diminish her overall charm. ‘I’ve had supper,’ were her first words. ‘Just in case you were thinking of treating me to another.’

  ‘You overestimate me,’ I grinned. ‘Beer or coffee? Which is it to be?’

  ‘Coffee please.’

  ‘Have you ridden one of these things before?’

  ‘Heaps of times.’

  ’Then you’ll know all about it. The only difference between this one and the others is that I’m driving this one, and there’s nothing except me for you to hold on to. O.K.?’ She nodded and I let in the dutch, swung the machine out into the Codey Road and roared off towards Hampton.

  She was far and away the best pillion passenger I’d ever carried. If it hadn’t been for the pressure of her arms against my ribs I’d hardly have known she was there at all. From time to time I called back to ask if she was all right. ’Fine! she cried, snuggling up against my back like a koala, ‘but you watch where you’re going.’

  We reached the centre of the town in twelve minutes flat, and I squeezed into a non-existent parking place just opposite the restaurant. ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ I said. ‘It’s usually a bit less crowded at this time.’

  She twitched back her hood, shook her hair free and unzipped her anorak. I dragged a comb across my scalp and followed her in. ‘You ought to get yourself a crash helmet,’ she said. ‘It’s silly not to use one.’

  As a matter of fact, I already had one, but for reasons of vanity I’d elected not to wear it that evening. Rightly or wrongly I’d long ago decided that it gave me a middle-aged look. I told her I’d got one on order—a special University model designed by Sir Boden Sponse for impecunious junior members of the academic staff. I doubt if she believed me.

  We found ourselves an unoccupied corner. I ordered two coffees and sat down opposite her. ’What does it feel like being face to face with your alter-ego?’ I asked.

  ’Odd,’ she said.

  ‘In what way particularly?’

  She considered mv question gravely. ‘It’s a bit like meeting a pen-friend for the first time,’ she said at last. ‘You build up an imaginary person from all sorts of odd bits of information and then, when you meet them, you find you’ve got some of the bits back to front and others upside down. You’re even left with some which don’t seem to fit in anywhere.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ’The Seers and Sayers bit for one.’

  ‘Good lord!’ I exclaimed. ‘You don’t mean you’ve read thal’

  ’Of course I have.’

  ‘What on earth did you make of it?’

  ‘I liked it.’

  ‘Well, well,’ I purred, feeling more flattered than I cared to admit. ‘A fan at last.’

  She didn’t even smile. ‘What made you write it?’

  I shrugged. ‘I suppose I’d just got sick to death of phoney intellectualism and all the desiccated twits who’ve set themselves up as arbiters of what literature is about.’

  ’Then the idea of writing it didn’t come suddenly?’ She sounded almost disappointed.

  ‘Actually, in a way, it did. But the opinions I’ve stuffed into it were brewing for quite a time before I decided to commit them to paper.’

  ‘What did make you decide? Can you remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I remember very clearly.’

  ‘What was it?’

  I shrugged. ’As a matter of fact I had an odd dream.’

  ‘I knew it!’ she breathed, leaning forward, her eyes wide and bright with excitement. ‘Please tell me about it.’

  I drew out a cigarette and tapped it thoughtfully on the table top. ‘Have you read The Fall of Hyperion?’ I asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s one of Keats’ poems,’ I said, and scratched a match into flame. ‘I’d been working on it all one afternoon, and I suppose you could say it had excited me more than anything I’d ever read. I reached a point where my imagination seemed to go into overdrive—ideas and images crackling off like electricity: analogies and cross-references streaming out faster than I could scribble them down.’ I blew out the match and laid it carefully in the exact centre of the ashtray.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘Well, for an instant or so everything seemed to fall into place—to become part of an intelligible pattern. It was almost as though I’d struggled up to the top of a mountain and, for the first time in my life, realized that the map I’d been holding in my hand made sense. At that moment I swear I knew what it was all about—not just that particular poem but everything—life, art, the lot. And then it was gone—exactly as if I’d blown a fuse somewhere inside. All I had left was a couple of pages of indecipherable notes—odd names; fragments of quotation; bits and pieces like the debris from an explosion. Never in my life have I felt so frustrated. In the end I flopped out on the bed, face down, and came closer to weeping than I had done since I was a kid.’

  ’That was when you had the dream?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘Well, go on,’ she urged. ’Tell me about it.’

  ‘You really want to hear?’

  ‘Are you shy or something?’

  I shrugged. ’As long as you remember that you’ve asked for it.’

  She nodded impatiently.

  ‘If there was any lead in,’ I said, ’then I’ve forgotten it, but as far as I know there wasn’t. I simply found myself standing looking down a sort of shallow valley—rather like the one Keats describes in The Fall. The light was greyish —a sort of chilly, pre dawn glimmer—but it wasn’t particularly bright in any one part of the sky. Overhead, low clouds were streaming like a river, but, oddly enough, I wasn’t conscious of even a breath of wind. Halfway up the hills, on either side, there w’as a single line of enormous black pillars, so high that their tops were hidden in the swirl of the clouds. These pillars marched on—each about a quarter of a mile apart from its neighbours—right down the whole length of the valley until in the end they looked smaller than matchsticks. I knew I was waiting for someone to join me, but I don’t think I knew who it was.’

  ‘And then?’ she breathed intensely. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Well, eventually I got fed up with waiting and began to walk slowly up the valley. There was a path made of some sort of marble or crystal, and I followed this. I remember I kept stopping and looking back over my shoulder to see if someone was coming.

  ’The path climbed a bit, and at last I found myself approaching the crest of a sort of low, saddle-shaped ridge which spanned the valley at its upper end. I began to hurry, anxious to see what was on the other side. By then the path had grown into a shallow flight of steps, and I remember that I stumbled once or twice before I reached the top and could look down on the other side. When I did I found myself gazing into a huge, terraced amphitheatre—it must have been all of half a mile across, and it seemed to have been made out of the same sort of stone as the path. Right at the bottom of the bowl was a circular dais with three sets of steps leading up to it. There wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere, though the amphitheatre could easily have held a couple of hundred thousand.

  ’Oddly enough, I seemed to know exactly what I had to do. I took one last look over my shoulder and then set off down the gangway. When I reached the flat area between the first seats and the dais I knelt down and pressed my hands over my eyes. Then I bowed forward until my forehead touched the stone. I did that three times, and as I felt the coldness of the stone for the third time I seemed to sense a sort of inaudible murmur of approbation. I opened my eyes, but I still couldn’t see anyone, so I stood up and began to walk slowly towards the dais.

  ’The moment my foot touched the bottom step I heard a faint hiss, which changed, almost instantly, into a tremendous roar, and just above my head I saw the whole rim of the dais erupt into fountaining jets of pale, emerald-green flame. The flame was practically transparent; through it I could see the far tiers of the amphitheatre rippling like water and the columns on the hillside wriggling like bits of black seaweed. I knew I had to step through that ring of flame and out on the other side, but I knew too that something had gone wrong—that someone should have been there with me. I felt despair creeping through me like hemlock. As I reached the top step my foot faltered. I cast a last anguished look back the way I had come, and there was nothing; no one. I was to be alone. And at the moment of crisis my nerve failed me. I swung round and was about to run back, when I seemed to hear a voice right inside my own head jeering: “Too late. Too late, Haalar.” I flung out my arm as if to ward if off, and my right hand and part of my arm went into the flames. It was like plunging into ice water. I shut my eyes and jumped—not through the flames, but outwards and down on to the crystal floor.’

  ‘And then?’ she asked.

  ‘I woke up. I found I’d been lying across my right arm and it was all pins and needles. But the dream had been so fantastic and yet so real that I got straight up off my bed and wrote it all down. That’s why I’ve been able to remember it so clearly.’

  She gazed at me thoughtfully. ‘Have you ever wondered what would have happened if you had gone through the flames?’

  ’Often. When I’d scribbled down all I could remember I went over the parallel section in The Fall of Hyperion and, with certain modifications, my dream fitted the outlines of the archetype pretty well. Only I never reached the point where I could question the goddess. I don’t suppose I’d have had a clue what to ask her, anyway.’

  ‘And Seers and Sayers?’

  I shrugged. ‘I suppose you could say it was an attempt to exorcize the ghost of that dream. It seemed obvious enough that the two experiences w’ere related, and so I set about trying to decipher my notes. I never wholly succeeded, but I discovered enough during the process to encourage me to go ahead and turn it into a book.’ I laughed. ‘In a sense it would be true to say that if it hadn’t been for that weird dream I wouldn’t be here now. Dream begets book; book begets job, job begets—well, leads to you.’

  She patted a hole in the froth of her coffee with the bowl of her spoon and then drew the bubbles back again. ‘You’ve never had a dream like it since then?’

  ‘It’s hardly the kind of thing I’d have been likely to forget if I had.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone else about it?’

  ‘Never. Believe it or not, I’ve normally got a thing about boring other people with my dreams.’

  ‘But say you did dream it again, do you think you’d do the same thing?’

  ‘Run away, you mean? How should I know? But I don’t kid myself I’m a hero—not even in my own dreams.’

  ‘But—’ she began, and then hesitated.

  “‘But” what?’

  ‘Well, say the other person had been there—in your dream, I mean—the person you were supposed to meet. Would you have done it then? Just suppose.’

  I laughed. ‘How far can we stretch this? I had that dream over four years ago. For the week after I’d had it I ate nothing but cheese for supper and went to sleep with The Fall of Hyperion open under my pillow’. Net result—nightmares and indigestion.’

  She smiled. ‘So you did want to go back?’

  ‘I suppose I must have done. I think I felt I’d let someone down—myself maybe. But that’s no reason for me to suppose I wouldn’t behave in exactly the same way in similar circumstances.’

  ‘Do you think you’d recognize the place if you saw it?’ ’That’s one thing I am sure of. I’ve never seen anywhere like it in my life.’

  She unzipped a pocket in her anorak and took out two folded pieces of paper, one of which she passed across to me. I opened it and spread it out flat on the table. A single glance was sufficient. ‘Well, I’m damned!’ I breathed. ‘Where on earth did you get this?’

  ‘I came across it in The Telegraph about a year ago,’ she said.

  ‘Where the devil’s “Hyphasis”? I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘It’s somewhere in Asia Minor. No one seems to know much about the temple except that it’s around five thousand years old. It was only discovered in ‘sixty-two. That’s an imaginary reconstruction.’

  ‘And the other?’ I asked, nodding at the paper she still held.

  She passed it across. ‘I found that in a copy of Country Life.’

  The second was, if anything, even more astonishing. It was a small, sepia reproduction of an oval painting—a panoramic landscape, sketched apparently from some point higher up the valley, so that the spectator appeared to be looking back over the amphitheatre and on down the valley to where, far off, the two lines of pillars converged in perspective. Not only were the architectural details identical with those of my dream but the artist had somehow succeeded in capturing the same, weird, dreamlike atmosphere with the clouds streaming endlessly overhead and the lonely columns striding out into infinity. The printed caption underneath read: ’Imaginary Landscape’ by John Martin (1789-1854).

  I pushed them slowly back across the table to her. ‘If you knew all about it, why did you let me go on?’

  She folded the papers carefully, stowed them away in her pocket and drew the zip across. ‘I wanted to find out what had happened to you,’ she said. ‘I had to be sure it was you.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘I think I was the person you were waiting for,’ she said simply. ‘I suppose I’ve been looking for you ever since.’

  I stared at her, and then I glanced round the room, and finally, surreptitiously, I slipped my hand under the table and pinched my leg hard.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she smiled. ‘You’re not dreaming.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I retorted.

  ‘Because if you were we wouldn’t be here.’

  I lit another cigarette and found my hands were shaking. ‘Now listen,’ I said quietly. ‘Are you seriously trying to tell me that when I had that dream in i960 you were there}’

  She shook her head. ’Oh, no. I didn’t have it till last August. But don’t you see, for me it was the same? I waited for you’

  I grunted incredulously. ’Obviously someone slipped up on the timetable. What did you do?’

  ’Everything you did—up till the end.’

  ‘You mean you went-?’

  She nodded. ‘Right through and out on the other side.’

  ‘Well, what happened?’

  ‘I woke up too,’ she said.

  ‘I’m expecting to do the same any moment now,’ I muttered. ‘Did you feel anything—any different}’

  ‘No, not really. A bit tingly perhaps, but that soon wore off. I just turned over and went back to sleep again.’

  ‘But you remembered it in the morning?’

  ‘It was already a bit vague and hazy by then, but as soon as I saw that painting in Country Life it all came back. It was then I began to wonder who I’d been meant to meet.’ ‘You dreamt it just that one time, did you?’

  ‘No, that’s just it. I’ve been back there four times since then. Once last January and three times since I took those tests. The last time was the day before yesterday—the night before, that is. I woke up crying.’

  I inhaled deeply and let the smoke drift away. ‘So that was what you meant by “aloneness”.’

  She nodded.

  ‘And so you went to see Dumpkenhoffer?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘Not because you were scared?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I suppose it seems funny, but I never once thought I might be going round the bend. Maybe it’s because I’m round it already.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Well, about the dream and how I kept on going back. And about the feeling of aloneness. I showed him those pictures.’

  ‘What did he make of it?’

  ‘I don’t think he knew what to make of it. He asked me the sort of questions psychiatrists are supposed to ask— about my childhood and so on, but he soon saw we weren’t getting anywhere. He seemed to think it was all tied up in some way with those tests. That’s what made me ask him about you. You see I knew something had happened that evening, but I wasn’t sure what it was.’

  ‘It hadn’t occurred to you that I might be your missing link?’

  ‘Yes it had, but I didn’t know how to make sure without doing something wrong.’

  ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘Well, like trying to reach you when I shouldn’t.’

  ‘But who on earth’s to say whether you should or shouldn’t, except you yourself?’

  She looked rather uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘So yesterday evening was the first time?’

  ’The first time I’ve tried to do it,’ she corrected.

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘Oh-ho. Then there have been others?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

  ‘Recently?’

  She nodded miserably. ‘I couldn’t help it. Honestly, I didn’t even know for sure if it was you.’

  ‘Good lord,’ I murmured. ‘Would this have been at night by any chance?’

  She glanced down quickly at her hands, but not before I’d seen the blood rush into her cheeks. I confess I felt a shade uneasy myself. ‘I’m sorry.’ she whispered.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded, still avoiding my eyes. ’Twice.’

  ’For long?’

  ’Oh, no!’ She was aghast. ‘Just a second or so. I swear it! ’

  I remembered something. ‘But this morning, just after I met you in the Annexe, you told me about that Nineteenth-century Literature course and your reasons—my reasons I should say—why you might want to see me.’

  She looked up and smiled. ‘Yes, that’s right. But you see, by then I knew it was you.’

  ‘You mean you just sort of popped over before breakfast?’

 

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