Dreamside (12 page)

"Why
did you side with her?" Ella asked Lee as they made their way home.

"I didn't side with her; she was right."

"That's the same thing."

"I just think we shouldn't play at it."

"Which means what exactly?"

"I
think it needs a serious edge. Some of us aren't making the effort, and that's
what's holding us back."

"And you think I play at
it?"

"Sometimes;
yes."

At that Ella turned
away and walked off. Lee pretended he was not concerned, a self-deception that
lasted five minutes. He thought he could punish her by not running after her.
So he went home and got into bed alone, lying sleepless in the shadows,
suffering
agonies about where she was and what she was doing
and whether she was with someone else. Then, after a few days, when he thought
she had been punished enough, he went to her, to be readmitted to the scented
cave, where he sulked for a few hours until their differences were forgotten.
At least for the time being.

N
I N E

But to withdraw one's steps and to make a way out

to
the upper air, that's the task
that is the labour

—Virgil

Burns, locking up after his
students have gone, anticipates Ella's
question seconds
before she delivers it to the others as they dawdle on the street corner only
yards away. He shakes his head. Exposing the students to your tantrums won't
help anything—neither you nor them nor the project. It just makes you look as
though senility is right behind you, pulling faces and drooling toothless for
their entertainment. Anyway, what is it, exactly, that's eating you?

He returns to his
study—a desk at the window and three walls of books on shelves so high he has
to keep a footstool to reach the top. Not that he has reason to return to the
tough-bound uppermost volumes, or those on the lower shelves for that matter,
but the stool gets used by the lady who cleans and keeps house for him three
days a week, since he happens to think that dust gathering on the ridge of
untouched and out-of-print books symbolizes in too sharp a sense the slouch of
old age into weak-mindedness and dotage. So he pays someone to come in and keep
his books free of dust and his windows clean, so that the outer condition
might at least reflect the preferred impression of the inner. So what's all
this raving at the students, he asks himself.

It is early, still
dusk, the students having been chased away by an infantile temperament, by his
inexcusable tantrums, who
was it
this time, yes, Ella,
who he hopes will forgive him quickly but who he knows is more sensitive than
she pretends. He sits in his chair and takes his notes out of the top drawer,
determined to log his observations even if the students are proving restive,
but leave them, give 'em a break, they're young and full of it whatever it is,
while he is feeling increasingly tired as he turns the pages and the pencil in
his hands begins to scuttle across the blank folio leaves at high speed
depositing a fine trace of graphite in erratic bursts of what must be English
but looks something like a fusion of bastard Arabic and auto-didactic
shorthand, and which for an account of an evening's research in which nothing
is supposed to have happened and nothing is purported to have been done still
manages to break across the page like the waves of the sea under a bracing
wind.

He scribbles like one
in the grip of a spirit, but it's nothing like that, being only too conscious
of anything he might commit to paper and anyway too self-possessed to admit the
intrusion of any second authority, from the spirit world or otherwise, to come
between him and his outpourings. Tired, tired indeed, but hands still scuttling
across the page at speed laying down a pattern of new ideas, complete and
half-complete thoughts, perceptions, reminders, references and observations,
all of this operating independently and at a level beneath or above his
reproach of his own behaviour, where he looks even now for a reason for his
irritation and finds, depressingly, none other than that general malaise for
which physicians have never found a satisfactory term other than old age.

Burns
pauses and gazes out of his open window, blinking at a darkening horizon, dusk
leaking from an unseen puncture in the silk and sable canvas, falling with
defiant slowness but relentlessly enough, like the minute hand on the clock. He
switches on an Angle-poise lamp which throws a ring of yellow light around his
notes. He breathes in the sweet air of the summer evening and his hand
automatically begins to scuttle back and forth across the white expanse of the
page.

Not as if,
he reflects, he doesn't prefer the company of the young students to that of the
dry or childish presence of his academic colleagues. Because it is true he
does prefer the buzz of youth and always has, three cheers for that, and what's
more always dreaded turning into the crabbed old stick he felt himself
becoming. And certainly these four were no worse than any others, and on the
contrary he felt a special warmth for all of them, believing,—and perhaps this
was the secret of what it was that was actually driving him harder and causing
him to want to push them faster—believing, in a way that could never be more
than intuitive, that there really might be something happening with these four,
something in the chemistry that existed between them, something which he had
sensed in the earlier seminars and the close comparisons in the nature of their
results, just a spark, nothing rational, not yet anyway, but a spark and a
shadow of apprehension—let's not call it fear— which had surprised him one day
on recognizing the undercurrents in their respective commitments to this
dreaming business.

And there
was another problem, since the project had originally been double-bottomed, a
smuggler's suitcase, the lucid dreaming project the ostensible reason for the
seminars (and always a legitimate area for study, the dreaming project, since
it was yielding up fascinating data) while Burns's other interest was a certain
interactive study in the evolution and dynamics of the group. This covert
study had of course never been made known to the seminar dreamers in the
interests of protecting behaviour from the influence of observation, the spy
hole staying open as the group reduced to four participants for the same
parallel purposes; but now the dreamwork study had begun to eclipse the other.
This had also taken Burns by surprise, shocking him in that his impatience with
another's small disinclination towards scientific method had caused him to cancel
a whole evening's work on dream research.

But he knew
that the current halt in progress, the vacuum in dreaming, was only a temporary
arrest, a block that would be overcome by a little effort, put there by some
external factor like the change in dynamics from the original large group to
the group of four, or something happening between the four
themselves
.
Whatever the block was, it would dissolve, and dreaming, strong dreaming,
would resume. He had, he assured himself once again, a feeling about this
group.

Burns's
hand stops its mechanical movement across the page, and he drops his blunted
pencil. He coughs, recovers, and presses a thumb and forefinger to his tired
eyes. Always, and always at night before concluding his notes, he thinks, in an
abstracted tender way, of his wife Lilly. It has been over a decade since she
died, leaving a huge absence in his life, and one which he has only ever filled
with
a devotion
for work of the kind he used to
reserve for her. He leans back in his chair and breathes deep the sweet night
air carrying in the scent of the trees and bushes outside his window, and he
thinks of her as she always was, and smiles to himself to think that if she
were alive now she would come in and put her hand through his hair and her arms
around him and reproach him for letting the students tire him so; and he would
confess to her that he'd been irritable with them for no apparent reason, and
she would find an excuse for him and tell him that the students ought to be
grateful anyway for receiving the attentions of such a good man. Many evenings
after working like this in his study, and even more frequently of late, Burns
rewards himself with thoughts of his dear wife, and never allows himself to
consider his reveries an expression of loneliness.

Burns
shaves his pencil and writes a conclusion to his notes, hand moving more slowly
across the page now as exhaustion steals over him. Then a trace of a woman's
perfume comes into the room, one he recognizes, and he's dimly aware of a
presence behind him; and then a voice, sweet with loving care and lilting
gently, like the point where song takes over from verse, but saying only what
he so often hears now, always the same question which so lovingly framed
commands the answer it seeks, "Isn't that enough work for tonight, L.
P.?"

"Yes,
my love," and he obediently puts down his pencil and returns his notebook
to the top drawer of his desk.

Shadows
thicken outside. Burns gets up and lowers the sash window, fastening the clasp
at the top. On his way out he switches off the light. Talking to myself, he
thinks with a brief smile, those kids will think me more senile than then they
already do, and he closes the study door behind him.

T
E N

Our dreams are a second life
—Gerard de Nerval

Then something astonishing
happened. It was the morning
of
their next scheduled meeting with Professor Burns.
Near the waking moment, with the darkness peeling away, the flakes of light
stealing between blinds and through the partings in dreams, Lee was lying asleep
in his own room away from Ella, dreaming vividly and with clear control. In the
dream he looked down at his hands and remembered, with absolute clarity, the
appointment. There was a whisper from somewhere, a message:
Do it.

With ease
he dissolved his surroundings and found himself in the park, standing by the
cherry tree close to the tennis courts where he and Ella had had their first
sexual encounter. The place was absolutely still, cocooned in the grey light of
a false dawn. A mist hung around like wisps of cotton, as if trailed by a wind.
The air seemed unbearably tense. Lee could feel, physically feel, the dawn
about to crack, to split the light and open up a terrible, joyous new day.

He
waited. He had no sense of impatience. In the distance, taking shape through
the mist, or perhaps just from the mist at the end of the path, he could see
someone walking towards him. It was not Ella but Honora. She seemed somehow
uncertain, hesitant. Then, as she got nearer, he realized he was mistaken. It
was not Honora after all, but Ella. Ella had found her way to him! They were
going to meet.

When
Ella reached him, she smiled and stretched out a hand to touch his cheek; she
was not shadow, nor phantom, but flesh and blood, warm and vital. He could feel
the palm of her hand against the coolness of his cheek. He was gripped by a
rage of excitement; he wanted to embrace her and shout. But at the same time he
was caught in a kind of paralysis that inhibited and slowed his every move. His
limbs were locked, his muscles contracted, the air around him congealed and
thick, inhibiting movement and constraining all action, though his brain raced
and his skin crawled, and a fist squeezed inside his belly. He wanted to shout,
This
is it! We did it! This is the meeting! But something
happened to the breath that contained his words, and instead, in a voice that
hardly seemed his own, he said:
 
There are more things in heaven and earth
than are dreamt of in your philosophy
. Ella smiled back at him, wordlessly,
unmoving. They stood like that for some time, without discomfort, and then the
dream dissolved.

Lee
woke with a dull headache but with the dream clear in his mind. Shivering with
excitement he pulled on his clothes and ran the full distance to Ella's house.
Before hammering on the door, he leaned against the wall, panting heavily,
trying to recover his breath, still shaking with anticipation; praying that
Ella would confirm that the rendezvous had taken place and yet terrified that
she would prove that all he had experienced was delusion cupped in a dream. He
found the front door of the house ajar, and went through to Ella's room.
 
Inside he found Ella already dressed, sitting
cross-legged on her mattress bed and writing in a book.
 
She got up.

"I
left the front door open for you."

"So,"
said Lee, "you were expecting me."

"There
are more things in heaven and earth . . ."

 
Lee released a triumphant roar and took hold
of Ella, the two of them dancing around the room in an ecstatic jig. He ran out
into the yard, leaping and punching the air like a Cup Final goal scorer,
then
returned to Ella for further acclaim. "You
summoned me!"

"I
did?" said Ella.

"You
called me; it was your doing! I heard you. You did it!"