The House of Sleep (7 page)

‘Soup. Just soup.’

‘Just soup? Weren’t you hungry?’

‘They didn’t have much food left. I didn’t fancy either of the main courses.’

‘What were they?’

‘Well, it was either cottage pie, or liver.’

Gregory started to write this down, but paused in mid-word. He looked up, his eyes gleaming. ‘But that’s what you said last night – while you were asleep.’

‘What?’

‘It wasn’t “cottage by a river” – it was “cottage pie or liver”.’ He threw down his pen and laughed, more in triumph than amusement. ‘Sarah, this whole thing was a dream. You
dreamed
it.’

It took just a few minutes to convince her that this was the most rational, the most plausible, in fact the only conceivable explanation; and that was how Sarah came to learn that she was not the victim of delusions at all, but that every so often she was liable to have a dream so real that she could not distinguish it from the events of her waking life; so real, furthermore, that it was capable of wiping these events from memory, so that they had to be remembered through the dream, recovered from beneath the dream, peered at through its cloudy, erasing surface like the original words of a palimpsest.

‘But that explains everything,’ she said. ‘All the weird things that have happened to me. All those misunderstandings…’

‘Because it’s happened before?’ said Gregory. ‘You’ve had this sort of dream before?’

‘Yes. Lots of times.’

He turned to a new page in the notebook, and wrote a heading in his characteristically neat, minuscule capitals. ‘Come on then, Sarah,’ he said, smiling excitedly. ‘Tell me about your dreams.’

∗

Sarah’s relationship with Gregory came to an end eleven months later, in the first days of her postgraduate year. Her sleeping patterns, never very regular at the best of times, had grown more and more erratic during that period, and her dreams had continued to prove unreliable.

Often it was at moments of the most intense emotional disturbance that her dreams became most lifelike and deceptive, and the night she split up with Gregory was a case in point. She had no way of knowing it, but she started to dream very early that night, only a few minutes after she had slipped reluctantly into bed: for she had then fallen, with unnatural rapidity, into a deep sleep which was immediately accompanied by a dream as treacherous as any she had ever experienced. When she awoke the next morning, the substance of this dream was lodged in her mind like a vivid, bitter-sweet memory. She was convinced that the event she had dreamed had really happened.

In spite of Gregory’s pompous, hurtful speech, in spite of the fact that it was Gregory who lay next to her, wheezing heavily in his sleep, it was not Gregory that she dreamed about. She dreamed about Robert, the new friend she had met in the L-shaped kitchen at Ashdown. She dreamed that he was in great distress, and that she was the only person who knew why. She dreamed that Robert’s sister had died.

The next morning, she expected to see him at breakfast in the kitchen; but he wasn’t there. Gregory left for London at about ten o’clock, without saying goodbye, and after that Sarah went on to campus to sit in the library, where she failed spectacularly to get any work done for several hours. She thought about Gregory a little, but more often she thought about Robert, and wondered how he was coping with his terrible news. Probably he would already have gone home: there would be parents to comfort, funeral arrangements to make.

She sat in the library until four o’clock in the afternoon, brooding over this unhappy turn of events. Even now, Sarah
had not quite learned the habit of monitoring her dreams, of keeping a constant watch over the boundaries between her dream world and her real life, and it still did not occur to her that she might have dreamed Robert’s sister’s death. It did not occur to her that Robert’s display of grief over the loss of his family cat, combined with the malicious slogan he had repeated to her – ‘Death to the Sisters’ – might have inspired this misleading fantasy. In any case, she had no accurate recollection of their encounter in the kitchen the night before: it had been entirely displaced by her dream. And while Robert himself would no doubt have been touched to know that she was sitting in the library thinking about him, worrying that his whole future life might be blighted by the premature death of his sister, there was really no need: for he was, at that moment, lying in the bath at Ashdown, with nothing more serious on his mind than a vague uncertainty about where he was going to eat that evening.

Finally, it was a sharp thud on the desk beside her that startled Sarah out of her reverie. Someone had banged three books down and was now standing over her, smiling in an excited, rather self-satisfied way. It was Veronica, the strange, friendly woman from the Café Valladon.

‘I thought I’d find you here,’ she said. ‘I brought you something to think about.’

The books’ titles were
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir,
Sexual Politics
by Kate Millett and
The Sadeian Woman
by Angela Carter. Two of these Sarah had read already.

‘Give them a try,’ said Veronica, ‘and then come and talk to me. You’ll find me in the Café most days, especially in the afternoons.’

‘Thanks,’ said Sarah. She was too surprised to add anything else.

‘You’re welcome,’ said Veronica. As she vanished into the darkness between two stacks of books, Sarah was left with an impression of her long, supple back.

∗

The bath-water was getting cold as Robert completed the task of shaving. As usual, he had left his least favourite part – the throat, and in particular the Adam’s apple – until last. The water, cloudy with soap and the grime from his body, was now also prickled with little black hairs. He rinsed his razor under the tap, attempting to dislodge the final recalcitrant shavings. “Wind howled around the walls of Ashdown as he sank further into the cooling water: at least it protected him from the fiercer chill of the bathroom, which was, absurdly, by far the largest and loftiest room on this floor of the house. He ran the razor over his cheeks again, dreamily: then he lifted a leg out of the water and examined its thin, pipe-cleaner whiteness with distaste. The hairs lay lank and flat against his shin and thigh. After a thoughtful moment he placed the blade of the razor just above the knee, and began to scrape. Soon he had cleared a little bare patch, about two inches square.

He found shaving his legs absorbing at first, then merely mechanical. He stopped concentrating on the soft abrasive motion of the razor, and let his mind begin to wander in random patterns. First of all he thought about Muriel. Robert’s family had kept three cats during his lifetime, but she had been his favourite: the sweetest-natured, and the most affectionate. Even so, he was shocked – and somewhat ashamed of himself – to think how visibly affected he had been by the news of her death yesterday. He was sure that Sarah had noticed him crying when he talked to her in the kitchen. She probably despised him already. That was always what his father used to tell him, whenever he cried: ‘If a woman ever sees you like that, she’ll despise you. No woman likes a man to be weak. You want respect. Nobody respects a cry-baby.’ He could hear these words now, spoken in the only tone he could remember his father ever using towards him: scornful, unforgiving.

Sarah had not seemed to despise him, though. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed, after all: she might have been too wrapped up
in her own problems. That had been a peculiar story, about the man insulting her in the street. He hoped she wasn’t still worrying about it. She had nice eyes: metallic, pale blue, bordering on grey. Ambiguous eyes, warmly inviting and coolly intelligent at the same time.

He was not using a safety razor, and now a sudden shaft of pain from somewhere in the region of his calf made him flinch. He had nicked himself quite badly: a trickle of blood flowed into the bath-water. Shaving his legs wasn’t the relaxing, pleasantly mindless business he had assumed it would be, then: a modicum of concentration was required. Even so, there was something deeply satisfying about it, some fundamental quality of Tightness. He had never seen the point of hairy legs. He had always asked his previous girlfriends for their opinions on this subject, and had been astonished to find that they considered them attractive. Just as well, really: but he couldn’t help regarding it as an inexplicable lapse of taste.

He had nearly finished, now: just the ankles to do, and they would be a stretch. He would give himself a little rest first. He lay back in the grey water, now thick with dark hair, and stared for a while unfocusingly at the cracked and begrimed wall tiles. They reminded him of the showers at school, and that was another nasty memory: communal showers, all that teasing, and furtive comparison…

Robert had been in the bath for more than an hour: enough time for Sarah to have left the library, caught a bus from campus and arrived back at Ashdown, anxious to wash her hair. There was no lock on the bathroom door. The trick was to put the towel-rail up against it, but Robert, being a new resident, had not discovered this yet. That was how she came to burst in upon him unexpectedly, without even knocking.

It all happened in a rush. Sarah screamed in shock and mortification but Robert screamed in agony, for he was in the middle of shaving his left ankle, with his leg raised high in the air. When the door crashed open his hand had slipped
and the twin blades of his razor gouged deeply into the leg, twice, at right angles, leaving a double scar that would stay with him for the rest of his life, like French quotation marks. And this time the blood came in more than a trickle: it jetted out and flooded the bath-water, turning it strawberry-pink in what seemed to be no time at all. Sarah stared at him, appalled, transfixed, and for a moment he thought that she was even going to rush to his help; but he managed to forestall this by shouting: ‘It’s all right! It’s all right! I was shaving, that’s all.’

‘I’m sorry, I – I’ll come back when you’ve finished.’

She made for the doorway but paused when she got there. She was shielding her eyes and looking away. ‘Are you O K ? I mean, do you need any help? There’s a First Aid box in the cabinet.’

‘Thanks. I’ll be fine. Just – just leave me to it, will you?’

She stepped out of the room, but paused again in the corridor. ‘I thought you would have gone home,’ she said, quickly, enigmatically, and then disappeared.

Robert did not waste any time pondering the meaning of this remark. He climbed out of the bath and staunched the flow of blood from his ankle with toilet paper, then bandaged it tightly. He was dripping wet and very cold. He dried himself with his small, threadbare towel, and limped back to his bedroom.

Sarah came to find him a few minutes later, just as he had finished dressing. She had washed her hair and combed it out, but not dried it, and it looked darker than he remembered from the night before, mousey even. For some reason he was touched by this: or perhaps he was already approaching that vulnerable condition of the heart where even the smallest and most mundane details take on a luminous, transfiguring quality. Whatever the cause, he felt his chest tighten as she sat down on the bed opposite his desk, and found himself, for a moment, completely incapable of speech. Even breathing was difficult at first.

‘Is it still hurting?’ she asked.

‘Oh… just a bit. It’ll be fine.’ He hoped she wasn’t going to ask him why he had been shaving his legs in the first place.

‘I didn’t mean to… well, I’m sorry if I disturbed you. People usually put the towel-rail up against the door, you see.’

‘Oh. Right. Well, that’s what I’ll do, then: next time.’

Sarah nodded. This was not proceeding at all as she had hoped. She wondered how they were possibly going to reestablish the easy, trusting atmosphere of last night’s conversation.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I just came to see that you were OK, really. You know, you looked pretty… upset last night, and I wanted to know that you were coping.’

‘Coping?’

‘Well, yes: it must be very hard for you.’

He summoned the courage to look at her now, pricked by curiosity at the note of genuine, tremulous concern in her voice. What was going on here, exactly? Did she really think he was the kind of man to be laid flat out with grief for days over the death of a cat? Did he appear that pathetic? Unable to tell, from her question, whether she was patronizing him or simply making fun, he said guardedly:

‘Oh, you know, it’s not such a big deal, really. I’ll get over it.’

How very male, Sarah thought, to be putting on this bluff display of resilience. Did men really believe that they weren’t allowed to show their feelings, even when discussing the death of someone close to them – almost as close, in this case, as it was possible to be? She saw how tense and anxious he was in her presence, how uncomfortable at the thought of having this husk of insensibility peeled back, revealing the softer, truer nature underneath. But she knew that it was in both their interests to persist.

‘When I said that I thought you’d gone away,’ she went on, ‘I meant that, you know, the funeral must be soon.’

‘Funeral?’ said Robert.

‘For – I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten her name…’

‘For Muriel, you mean?’

‘Yes. For Muriel.’

He shrugged, laughing uneasily. ‘Oh, I don’t think we’ll be making that much of a fuss over it,’ he said. ‘That would be a bit over the top, don’t you think?’

Taken aback for a moment, she mumbled: ‘Well, whatever you all think is… appropriate.’

‘I mean, when this has happened before,’ said Robert, ‘we haven’t bothered with a funeral or anything.’

‘This has happened before?’ she asked, horrified.

‘Twice, yes.’

‘Oh God, Robert, I just… don’t know what to say. That’s awful. To think that lives can be so… blighted, and yet –you carry on, somehow.’

‘Well, I must say, Muriel’s is the hardest to take.’ He sat forward, nearer to her, and rubbed his hands, warming them at the flame of her sympathy. ‘I was closest to her, I suppose.’

‘Yes, I can imagine.’