A Dream of Wessex (25 page)

‘You mean the work we’re doing?’

‘Yes.’

She felt she was trapped. And yet ... she didn’t mind that with David.

‘There’s a man called Paul Mason. He’s in charge of the project, and he’s - ’

‘I know. You don’t have to tell me. He’s the one you live with.’

She took both his hands in hers. ‘David, I promise you, I haven’t slept with Paul since I met you.’ ‘

‘But you still live with him.’

‘I have to ... I can’t change it just like that. As soon as the work is over, I’ll move out. It has to wait until then.’

‘You’d better tell me about the work, in that case.’

‘We’ve got a total of thirty-eight people there. In the next few days we’re going to use some equipment that’s at the Castle to create an imaginary future. I don’t know how the machine works; Paul handles all that. I can’t really explain, but all the people there have a sort of, well, a special understanding. I’m not putting it very well. Everyone’s in accord ... it’s like empathy.’

Harkman had been watching her as she spoke. ‘Julia, these people. What are their names?’

‘You wouldn’t know them.’

‘I might. You mentioned Don Mander just now. Is he one of them?’

‘Yes. He’s the only one you’ll know.’

‘Is Nathan Williams there?’

Julia, taken off-guard, said: ‘How do you know Nathan?’

‘I came across the name. Tell me some of the others.’

She gave him a few names, sometimes having difficulty remembering surnames. He recognized only one: Mary Rickard’s. ‘Mary Rickard. The biochemist, from Bristol?’

‘That’s right. But how - ?’

‘What about Thomas Benedict? Or Carl Ridpath?’

Neither name meant anything to her, although the first had a hauntingly familiar ring to it. Harkman seemed puzzled, but pressed her no further. He said: ‘We can’t go to the Castle, Julia.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m scared of what might happen there.’ There was a strange look in his eyes, and he was standing over her in the confined space, blocking her. She felt a tremor of alarm. ‘Listen, Julia ... do you know where we are from? Do you know how we got here?’

‘Of course I do! ‘

‘I don’t mean your background ... something else. Wessex, Dorchester, the Castle! I thought I knew where I was, where I was from. But not now.’ He was speaking quickly, and his meaning was lost on her. ‘Do you remember? When we last met ... what did we do?’

We went on the heath and talked.’

‘Yes, and we made love. There was a storm coming, but while we were there it was warm and dry. Do you remember that?’

‘Yes, David.’

‘And so do I. I remember loving you out there, on the heath.’ He pointed suddenly. ‘Just there, where the refinery is!’

She saw the silver-painted towers, and the fumes and the tanks.

‘We were nowhere near the refinery! ‘

‘Do you remember seeing it?’

For the last six days Julia’s memory of the lovemaking on the heath had been all that she had to help her resist Paul.

‘It was there, David ... but somewhere behind us.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I think so ...’

The refinery was there, it had always been there.

‘And I think so too. I’m not sure, though. I know that the refinery has been here for years, that when Dorchester was rebuilt it was as an oil-port, and that the economy of Wessex depends on the wells here. But do you remember the tourists?’

‘What? Here in Dorchester?’ She laughed.

David said: ‘I was amused too, when I remembered them.’

‘There have been one or two,’ she said. ‘They visit all parts of Britain.’

‘Britain?’ David said. ‘Or England?’

She shook her head. ‘Don’t! Please don’t! ‘

‘Then listen, Julia, try to understand. You say you are working on some kind of experiment to project a future world, so you must see the consequences of that. If it is to work, if it is to have the least degree of consistency, then it must be a whole world, a real-seeming world, one with people you don’t know and events you don’t understand. And if you are to move in that world, you too must be a part of it, with a whole new identity and probably no memory of your existence here.’

‘How do you know all this?’ she said.

‘It’s true then?’

‘Paul says that will happen to us. But it will be only temporary, for as long as the projection lasts.’

‘However long that is to be,’ David said. ‘Julia, this afternoon I came across some newspaper files. In those I read that the equipment at the Castle, the very same equipment, was used once before. During the twentieth century. A group of scientists, thirty-nine people, with names .like Nathan Williams and Mary Rickard and David Harkman and Julia Stretton, started a projection of their future. The world they projected was this world ... today, here! ‘

Julia felt as if she was about to laugh again, but the intensity of his expression was enough to subdue her.

‘Do you see, Julia? You and I were in that projection ... you and I are figments of our own imagination! ‘

And then he moved unexpectedly, reaching into a back pocket. He pulled out a limp piece of yellowed paper.

‘This is what I found. It’s genuine, I’m sure it’s genuine.’

She took the paper from him, and saw that there were eight photographs printed at one side. She looked at the bottom, saw herself and David. Saw the others...

She read the text. One of the names stood out for her.

‘Tom,’ she said. ‘It mentions Tom Benedict...’

‘Do you know him?’

‘No, Tom’s dead ... I think ... He ...’

Suddenly she couldn’t remember, and simultaneously she could. There was no photograph of him, but the name was somehow enough. A trustee ... a Wessex Foundation ... it was all buried, laid within her unconscious mind.

‘I can’t understand,’ she said. ‘I know most of these people. They’re at the Castle now, waiting for me.’

‘All of them?’ David said.

‘Not Dr Ridpath. I don’t know him. But the others ... look, here’s Nathan, and Mary. But it doesn’t mention Paul. That’s odd, because he’s the director ...’

Thoughts started and died in the same instant; reactions were immediately supplanted by contradictory instincts. This was her, but it could not be her. It spoke of Tom, but she knew no one of that name. Paul was not mentioned, but how could any report omit him? These people were alive
now
, not a hundred and fifty years ago...

David said: ‘Does anyone at the Castle know of this?’

‘No one’s mentioned it.’

‘Then like you and me they have no memory of it.’

She turned on that. ‘But I’ve known some of them for years! They were all born here. I was, you were! ‘

As she said this an automatic memory came of her mother and father: like a photograph, wordless, motionless. They were there, somewhere in the limbo of her past.

The limbo of her past: it was a phrase she sometimes used lightly, to dismiss her upbringing, to dissociate herself from her background. But did it contain a deeper truth?

‘Don’t you see what this means for you and me, Julia? We don’t belong here, although we think we do. But it’s all we know! There’s no way back.’

Julia, still struggling for a hold on her own reality, shook her head.

‘All I know is that I’m bound to the others. Just as you are.’

‘Not me.’

‘If you were at the Castle you’d feel it.’

‘That’s why I want you away from there. Julia, I’m in love with you ... you’re here and so am I, and I want nothing changed. Don’t you see that? It’s enough for me. Reality is what I have and hold, and that’s you. We can make a life here.’

She moved towards him, and he put his arms around her.

‘I don’t know, David,’ she said, and they kissed. She wanted to relax, to surrender, but there was too much tension, and after a few moments they drew back from each other.

‘I’m all mixed up,’ he said. What are we going to do?’

‘If you believe this piece of paper,’ Julia said, ‘why can’t we go back to the Castle?’

‘Because I’m frightened of it. Ever since I’ve been in Dorchester, I’ve been drawn to the Castle ... it’s been haunting me. I didn’t know why, and then I read that. I wanted things to be understood more clearly, and although I think the paper is genuine it confuses me. I understand it, but I can’t face up to what it implies.’

‘So you want to run?’

‘With you, yes.’

Why, David?’

‘Because I see no alternative.’

She was still holding the newspaper cutting, and it was trembling in her fingers. Rain was dripping from the steps above, and two large drops were spreading through the flimsy paper, like oil in cotton.

‘Don’t you think we should show this to the others?’ she said.

He shook his head, and took the paper away from her. He crumpled it with his fingers, and tossed it on the rain-soaked ground.

‘That’s my answer,’ he said. ‘There’s no alternative.’

Julia stared at the little piece of screwed-up paper on the ground. It was already soaking up the rain. She bent down and picked it up again, stuffing it into the pocket of her coat. David made no attempt to stop her. She stepped away from him, and walked out from under the shelter of the concrete stairs and into the drifting rain.

When she left the Castle she thought she had resolved the dilemma. She wanted to be with David more than anything else in her life, and whereas for a time she had seen Paul as someone who would have prevented that, she now knew that if David was with her Paul could be resisted.

It had all seemed so simple, yet David, with his scrap of newsprint, wanted only to run away. That would be denying everything she felt within her, and would resolve nothing.

She looked back at him, standing with his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets, sheltering under the concrete steps, watching and waiting. She turned away.

The newsprint cutting was in her pocket, and she took it out and straightened it. A tear had appeared across it, and it was wet and dirty.

Shielding it from the rain with her body, she read it through. Then she read it again, and then a third time. She tried to ignore the fact that a photograph of herself was staring out at her.

It evoked no memories. Try as she might, for her the cutting was no more than an artefact of the past. But the names couldn’t be avoided ... and there was one in particular.

Thomas Benedict. It was a name from a forgotten past, long forsaken. It reminded her of a hot summer, of laughter, of kindness. It was a memory of the undermind, unattainable by the conscious.

She discarded reason - which disallowed knowledge of Tom Benedict - and responded to the irrational. Soon, there were more memories.

There was a tranquil past; another summer she had known. A time of warm blue weather, of crowds of tourists milling through Dorchester, of a loving idyll with David. There was an inlet by the Castle, where David swept to and fro on a skimmer, and where she lay naked in the sun. There was a stall by the harbour, and the heat would rise from the pavement and expensive yachts would moor at the jetty, and foreigners in strange and colourful clothes would haggle with her over prices.

Thomas, Tom, was there in none of these memories, but he was everywhere.

Then, as if her conscious mind was reasserting itself, she looked again at the words on the newspaper cutting, and she saw the date at the top.

In 1985 a man called Nathan Williams had said: ‘... our minds will seem to experience the projected world ...’

Wasn’t this precisely what she and the others were planning to do at the Castle?

They were seeking to examine a future ... a better world. Their model for it, a fact asserted again and again by all the participants, was the Britain of the late twentieth century.

They looked to a time, one hundred and fifty years in the future, when Britain had
again
become a constitutional monarchy, when Britain
again
was a unified state, when the world was again a keenly competitive place, when the balance of power was
again
between Soviet Russia and the USA, when there were
again
the seemingly insurmountable problems that gave life a challenge and purpose, when technology and science
again
had a vital role to play in the world’s development...

Was this to be a future modelled on a period of the past, and so very similar to it?

Or was it to be the past itself, the actual past on which they were basing their scenario?

David had said: ‘... it must be a whole world, a real- seeming world ... ‘

He had been talking about Paul Mason’s project at the Castle, but it applied to their world of Wessex too. This life was real ... and a hundred and fifty years ago a twentieth-century experiment had set out to create a real-seeming world.

David believed that her life, like his own, was a product of this semblance of reality. And so were the lives of the other participants; they were all of the twentieth century.

If so...

Then she saw it: Paul’s project at the Castle would not take them to an imagined future. It was a homing urge. To enter his projection would take them to the past, to the year from which they started!

She walked back to David, knowing that whatever he now said or did, she would go back to the Castle.

She handed back the rain-sodden slip of paper. ‘David, we - ’

‘I know what you’ve decided,’ he said. ‘I think I have too. I don’t want to stay here, there’s nowhere to go.’

As David returned the piece of paper to his pocket, she said: ‘Do you think you can face up to the implications of that?’

‘I still don’t know,’ he said.

As they reached the top of the second earth rampart, and Julia pointed out the entrance to the underground workings, David Harkman looked across at the plateau that was the top of the hill-fort. He had expected to see some kind of habitation here - houses that the participants used, perhaps - but the grass grew long and was untrampled. There were no houses, no tracks, no people. The clouds, scudding in from the west, low and leaden, seemed no higher than an arm’s length above them.