No, not by Poe. No nasty bleeding diseases. No pit ' but quite a lot of pendulum. In fact, just what it says on the box: mystery and imagination. And Poe is relevant ' but not perhaps in a way that's immediately obvious.
In many respects, we
live the best part of our life in our imagination. Query: is that
'best'� qualitative or quantitative? Pass. Judge for
yourselves. Don't expect me to do all the work for you. What I will
tell you is what I know about myself: that I cry more often over
imagined griefs than real ones. Books and films and music move me
more often, and more deeply, than real life. That may just be because
I've been relatively lucky, or because I'm pretty heartless (these
two possibilities may reinforce rather than contradict one another).
Art is to life as wine is to grapes.
I don't think that's
an irrational point of view. René Descartes, inventor of
co-ordinates, endorsed the power of imagination when he declared that
our ability to conceive of God guaranteed that He (God) existed (and
that René existed, too, of course ' I think, therefore I am,
remember?) Real events leave traces. Imagined events leave traces,
too, though crime scene investigators wouldn't necessarily be able to
find them. For the moment, that's all I'm saying.
Jump-cut to what was
a non-event in one framework, but an event (of some kind ' again I'll
leave you to work out what) in at least one other framework. A person
with whom I was capable of imagining some kind of relationship asked
me to accompany her to look at a house. It wasn't a house for us to
inhabit together, let's be clear about that, though Couldbe's a big
country. I can't remember, now, whether she was intending to rent or
buy. I thought she might be wanting my advice. She was probably just
wanting the security of a male who'd be unlikely to attack her. I
don't usually think of myself in that way ' but then how often do any
of us think of ourselves as others see us?
The estate agent
was my side of the property to be inspected, so she asked me to call
in and pick up the key on the way. No need for directions, she said,
the estate agent will give you a map, and we'll meet at the house. So
efficient at dispensing with the unnecessary. Yes. Pay attention to
the way I phrase things. It always tells the truth, whether I want it
to or not.
I must confess I was
surprised at where she'd chosen. Not my taste at all, and I shouldn't
have thought it would have been hers. You can't build new houses in
the New Forest. That's clear. But there are places round the edge,
scrubby fields used by car-breakers, the yards of coach-firms that
have been taken over, garages surplus to requirement, where you can
do a bit of infill, too small to be ribbon development, more like
floss between what's there already. And the layout resembles one of
those geometrical puzzles with matchsticks, the developer squeezing
as many units as possible into the tiny space, so that they almost,
but not quite, overlook each other, separated by wooden panel fences
that give the illusion of rusticity. 'Forest edge'� is what
the estate agents say. One leg out of the window and clinging on to
the sill, you can probably see a tree.
The entrance to the
development was imposing. Two bijou lodge cottages, single storey,
single chimney, probably only double-roomed, late nineteenth century
to judge by the proportions of the windows, stuccoed to look like
Adam brothers classical, but given away by the damp-stains and mould.
Nice places for those without a cat to swing. Porsche outside the
right-hand one, babywalker outside the left. Perhaps it was a very
modern marriage?
Just past them was a
bollarded traffic-island that forced me left into a road so narrow it
had to be one-way. On my right, in the centre of the estate, was an
unbroken terraced square facing outwards, with inbuilt garages, and
the house I wanted was, I realised within the first few seconds, at
the very far end, all the way round the block, right where I had come
in. So, I drove slowly round the one-way system, reading the names of
the little back-to-back closes on the left: Christie, Blake, Knox
(Named after murderers? Spies?) ' then there was a bit of a view over
a scruffy paddock where an enamel bath offered scummy drinking water
to three nondescript horses who stood aloof in the shade of an
attractive oak-tree on the far side. The terraced houses had no front
gardens, just hard standing for a single modest car. Anyone with a
limo blocked the pavement. Round the corner, past Allingham and Marsh
and Sayers (Footballers? Popstars? Probably just faceless councillors
' not as interesting as the Renaissance Dramatists estate I lived on
once, with Heywood and Massinger and Beaumont and Fletcher ' though I
wouldn't have wanted to live in Webster Close!), and back to the
start, where I crunched awkwardly and selfishly on to the gravel
outside my destination. My companion, when she arrived, would have to
find her own salvation.
I certainly didn't intend to wait for
her in the car. The horses had had the right idea. It was that
appallingly hot spell last summer, and I rushed into the house, out
of the sun.
The house was stuffy and bare. I didn't dare open
a window ' there might have been an alarm system (I'd seen a box),
and even if there wasn't, I'd probably never have been able to get it
closed again. The back door, though, had a key in it, and it turned,
and let me out into the house's own shadow, which, though small, it
being barely three o'clock, nonetheless covered half the garden.
The heat was like a
hammer. I wanted to lie down. I wasn't going to do it on the patio,
with its pair of terracotta plant mausoleums, its UVcompromised
plastic furniture, and dubious stains that I took for cat-wee. The
shred of lawn was in full sun, but an enormous tangle of brambles
beyond that promised ' what? I don't know ' relief ' escape ' from
the sharp light and the sharp shadows of the sharp buildings. It was,
if nothing else, mysterious. Impenetrable. Which was why I went back
to my car for the secateurs. Yes, of course I carry them with me at
all times! I like going for spontaneous country walks: secateurs (and
wire-cutters) are indispensable (blow the map!) My first girl-friend
was always urged by her mother to keep a pair of secateurs in her
handbag for self-protection ' though clearly they would be the weapon
of absolutely ultimate resort, for practical reasons, there's no
denying that they would have proved an effective deterrent, or,
failing that, preventative in extremis.
There was no sign of
anyone trying desperately to park, no sarcastic note on the
windscreen, so I concluded that my fellow house-viewer had been
unavoidably detained. She couldn't call me on my mobile, because I
don't have a mobile. There's so little real communication between
human beings that I refuse to subscribe to that particular form of
the illusion.
The Sunday papers
were in the car. I had bought them for my insignificant other, I
hasten to add. I picked up the cultural bit, thinking it might give
me something to do while waiting.
The brambles were old and
woody, which made the job easier. Over many years, they had made a
kind of huge dome, inside which there was an old-fashioned wooden
shed. Though hasp and padlock were intact, the wood had rotted round
the screws that held the hasp in place, and it lifted clear without
trouble.
Sheds, I think, are
magical places. Like my head, they're stuffed full of all kinds of
things for which there is no immediate use, and no place anywhere
else, and there's no telling what you may find. This one was quite
tidy, and not especially crowded, (so a little different from my
head), but it contained enthralling objects: a line-marker for tennis
courts, the white paint solid and cracked, a harmonium suffering from
respiratory failure (mice had eaten big holes in the bellows), a
writing desk with a glass inkstand and penholder (the ink long dried
and gone), and a fine revolving captain's chair ' without upholstery,
so spared by the mice.
I have a thing
about chairs like that, which probably comes from never having owned
one. In no time, I was in it and spinning Not all the way round '
that would have been foolish and dangerous. I would have barked my
knees on the cubbyhole desk. Oscillatory movement in the horizontal
plane I find more restful than in the vertical. Rocking chairs, as
far as I'm concerned, just play hell with my knees. My eyes closed.
The cultural bit of the Sunday papers, which I had brought with me
and placed on the desk, was forgotten (as it probably deserved to
be). In a moment, I was away. Where? In my imagination. That's what
dreams are, isn't it
It wasn't, let me
tell you, a place where I wanted to be. There was blood. I saw a
knife slip into a wound that opened in front of it, like an automatic
door. And like a shower when you first turn it on, the blood oozed
out, and then gushed. Sometimes I was doing the stabbing, sometimes I
was doing the bleeding.
Then there was the
blunt object. A candlestick. A paperweight. A bronze bust ' it may
have been of Wagner, but that could just be my personal animosity.
Sometimes I was the perpetrator, with the jarred arm and wrist,
sometimes the victim, feeling the fragments of skull lacerating my
cortex, and the subsequent haemorrhage obliterating my synapses and
all their ability to communicate with myself.
Finally, there were
the poisons. Some sudden, some slow. Arsenic slowly invading,
building up in the hair, after it had done its deadly work in the
body. Prussic acid, with its telltale whiff of bitter almonds
reaching the nostrils too late, after it had already passed the lips
and stopped the breath. I looked down at the body, I looked up, with
sightless eyes, at my murderer ' or murderess.
Small wonder that I
woke breathing fast and sweating ' mentally, not physically induced
symptoms, be it said. Imagination has, I hope, some limitations. And
then I heard the calming sound of summer.
The old-fashioned
push-mower is the closest thing we still have to the scythe, without
the latter's disturbing symbolic associations. Its regular muted
clatter, with those pauses as the pusher turns and takes another run
at the thing, are like the rocking of a cradle for the somnolent
adult, like the weary labour of a medium fast bowler set, on a sultry
afternoon, against a pair of stonewalling batsmen who are playing out
time.
Hang on a bit, I
thought. There are no gardens round here big enough to get up that
kind of run. I know. I've driven round them all. These are strimmer
people, with the shrill noise when the plastic line runs out and the
low growl when it gets caught round something.
I opened my eyes.
Before closing them, I had registered the fact that whoever built the
shed had plonked it slap against the rear fence, and, moreover, the
wrong way round. There was a window over the desk at which I sat, and
it had a fine view of planks two inches away. That hadn't worried me.
As a child on shopping expeditions, I'd wandered round kitchen
displays in big stores, with a view of the garden from the sink that
was painted on a piece of hardboard. I'd been in plays where the same
was true of the view down the fjord, or the cherry orchard. But now,
where the planks of the fence had been, there was a view, over grass,
through tennis court netting, and across a winding driveway, towards
a red-brick mid-nineteenth century house. And in the foreground,
behind a mower, a red-faced, grey-moustachioed man, with a knotted
handkerchief on his balding and slightly sunburnt head, stared,
open-mouthed and apoplectic, straight at me.
I attempted
communication, as you do, even when you suspect it may be futile (I
also work as a supply teacher, remember). I moved to the
glass-windowed door beside the desk and rattled its handle. But the
door was apparently locked, for nothing happened. I tried to shout,
but I don't know what words came, and I doubt if he heard me.
It mattered little in
any case, because at that moment the planks reappeared and I found
myself shouting furiously at a fence, and rattling the handle of a
door that could barely have opened more than an inch.
I needed a drink. It
was probably to my benefit that the house offered nothing but water,
and no vessel to hold it beyond my own cupped hands. That way, I was
generally cooled, and in the continued absence of the woman in the
case I thought I had better go and retrieve the cultural bit of the
Sunday papers, and calm myself down.
I stepped through the
brambles with some trepidation, but the shed was still firmly planted
against the back fence, as I could see before I entered, since I had
left the rear door open in my flight. The newspaper section, however,
was not on the desk. On the other hand, there was reading matter on
the floor, beside the desk, that had not been there before. It looked
as though it had been pushed under the glass-windowed door ' though,
clearly, that was impossible. Nonetheless, I picked it up. It was The
London Mercury for July 1934. I took it with me back to the house,
carefully replacing the hasp of the lock and re-inserting the screws
into their rotten holes.
Interest annihilates
surroundings. Unaware of the heat, or the discomfort of sitting on a
bare floor, leaning against a wall (as in bookshops I have risked
thrombosis, kneeling in the cramped space between the shelves, to
read just one more page and then just another after another after
that, and fallen over when I tried to stand up and my legs refused to
work) I looked through the table of contents for a clue as to why
this sudden apparition should be relevant to my present
circumstances. And I found it. Believe me, not all hunts for clues
are so immediately successful.
The name of one
of the authors of articles in the periodical was the same as the name
of the one-way street that ran all around the new development, and in
which the house I sat in was situated. Coincidence? Synchronicity? I
did not think so. And I was right.
Mr - 'Freeman' shall
we call him? Why not? - Freeman, then, was, it seemed a famous author
of detective fiction. He had written a series of books called The
Colour Mysteries. A long and successful series, each one with an
appropriate dust-jacket. It had apparently reached heliotrope by way
of aquamarine. terracotta, viridian and burgundy ' way beyond the
canonical seven, certainly. A boxed advertisement beside Mr Freeman's
article indicated that Herbert Jenkins, publisher, would be happy to
furnish copies of all these to discerning readers. However, all this
laudable literary activity had come to an abrupt stop as the result
of an event which the article described in some detail.
It began with an
account of J.W. Dunne's theory of time that I can spare you, the nub
being that past, present and future exist simultaneously, but we
normally experience them separately and in the traditional order.
Under certain circumstances, however...
The rest of the
article explored a particular set of these circumstances.
'Ever since I was
fortunate enough to acquire my present residence on the edge of that
vast tract of woodland, moorland, rough pasture and bog which
rejoices in the anachronistic and misleading appellation of the New
Forest...
No. I can't take
it. I've done so once, and I don't want to again. Let's take the
style as read, and cut to the chase.
Mr Freeman had been
in the habit of doing his polychromatic writing in a summerhouse in
the grounds 'just beyond the tennis-courts, far enough from the house
that no mere idle curiosity would think it worthwhile to venture to
disturb me, yet not so far but that, on occasion...'� - yes,
thank you very much! At a desk in that very summer-house those
highly-charged and brightly coloured scenes had come into being which
had won him countless readers the length and breadth of the Empire,
and wherever else English may be spoken, however she is spoken, and
regardless of whether we think of it as English, or Australian, or
South African, or... It's a little pervasive, I'm afraid, not exactly
addictive, but certainly hard to stop when you've started.
But that's hardly
surprising in my case, is it? Because I'd had full-on contact with
the place where his imagination had conceived all those terrifying
scenes of vicarious cruelty. He hadn't been alone, mark you.
Everybody did it in England in the 1920s and 1930s: poets and
mediaevalists, translators of Dante and Catholic priests ' they all
wrote whodunnits. Studiously ignoring the real violence and evil in
the world, they invented their own. Let's be understanding. There are
so many puzzles in life we can't solve, that we like to invent ones
we can. Let's remember the Pont cartoon of the little old lady
reading in bed, surrounded by wraith-like scenes of mayhem and murder
' but also by the figures of Holmes and the good old British bobby.
But something had
stopped it. Something had stopped him from going down to the
summerhouse, and somehow his imagination didn't work as well anywhere
else. He had seen ' not something nasty in the woodshed, like Aunt
Ada Doom a couple of years before, but something almost inexplicable
in the summerhouse. And this bit I really have to quote:
'The chrononaut was
evidently trapped somewhere on his endless voyage from past to future
and back again. His face, twisted in a rictus of despair, bore
eloquent witness to all his manifold sufferings, and a soundless cry
of anguish tried to escape his dry, cracked lips. Time, through which
he travelled, had not spared him, for a beard not unworthy of
Robinson Crusoe sprang in uncombed tangles from his haggard features,
while his bloodshot and sunken eyes...'
No! I've had enough!
I shampoo it and brush it every day! The bastard! He carries on by
assuming that my shirt has rotted off my back. I was, needless to
say, wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt of the type formerly known as
Aertex ' not exactly Ralph Lauren, but good enough. I had no trouble,
I'm afraid, recognising myself from his description ' not least
because of a classic English detective story by G.K. Chesterton, 'The
Man in the Passage' from The Wisdom of Father Brown, in which the
reverend father, unlike other more distinguished persons, is able to
recognise his own reflection in a mirror.
He knew, of course,
that I was from the future because of the culture supp. that I'd left
behind, though what he made of it, I dread to think. Actually, at the
time I did dread to think, because I remembered the Ray Bradbury
story where one crushed butterfly in the Palaeozoic changes the
world. But I went into the garden and listened: from the left, one of
the Grand Prix ' Imola, I think, or it might have been the German;
from the right, Eastenders Omnibus; from over the fence, MTV. Nothing
changed there, then.
Given the time, I concluded that I'd lost
this particular game of Find the Lady and headed for home, where the
answerphone told me that the idiot estate agent had confused her with
someone else and given me the key to completely the wrong property.
She'd gone to see the right one with the apologetic young man and...
Anyway, who cares? It
was only on the way home, to my shame, that I understood the street
names ' all crime-writers, suggested by the link with Freeman on
whose grounds the estate had been built. Whoever thought that up
really was on my wavelength, and I'd have been better off with him,
or, hopefully, her..
And as for poor
old Freeman... Well, I didn't have any way to tell him that I wasn't
travelling through time any faster than he was, any faster than we
all are, on our separate journeys to the same goal.
Except. Except, of
course, in our imagination.
11.30-16.30 18.x.2006