A Dream of Wessex

  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 ignor
e 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.

  twenty-five

  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.

  He looked towards the east, across the bay with its clustered drilling-rigs and wells. It looked dark and cold, fouled by man and his endeavours.

  ‘I wanted to swim there once,’ he said, and Julia looked at him in surprise. ‘There used to be a sport here, sometime in the past, I think. People would ride on motorized boards, and try to stay on top of the Blandford wave. When I came down here I was interested in trying it.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Julia said. ‘And the wave is just a large rip-tide. You couldn’t ride on it.’

  ‘I’d like to have seen it, though.’

  ‘Come on, let’s get inside,’ she said.

  He followed her down the slope, trying to rid himself of a dreamlike memory: the swell of the wave beneath the board, the high-pitched whine of the engine, the white thunder of the collapsing breaker ... but it had an elusive quality to it; at once remembered, but not in his experience.

  The long grass brushed wetly around his trouser legs as he followed Julia, and he shivered. He had been out in the rain for more than an hour, and he was wet through. This open wind-swept place seemed to offer no promise of warmth or dryness.

  There was no door to the concrete construction. It stood open, and the wind funnelled in. Pools of dirty water spread over the floor, and much mud and rubble lay about. Julia led the way down a flight of steps.

  Walking through the rain, she had tried to explain why she was so adamant about returning to the Castle. She talked of a way back to the twentieth century ... but neither of them had any emotional link with that past. They were both of Wessex.

  Harkman had his own reason, though, and it had been the one that persuaded him there was no hope in trying to escape. Maiden Castle still exerted its power over him. As long as he lived he would feel its compulsion.

  Now he was in the very place that summoned him. Here was the focus of the invisible, radiating source that beckoned him. And, like a reaction to the body of a much-coveted woman suddenly bared before him, he felt a simultaneous sense of fulfilment of long-held desire, and a vague disappointment now that the mystery was removed. The tunnel at the bottom of the stairs was cool, and ill-lit. There were doors on each side, all of them closed and apparently locked. There was litter on the floor: discarded pieces of paper, a few bottles, fragments of broken mirrors, a pair of shoes. The walls were clad in concrete, but there was a pervasive smell of soil or clay.

  ‘You’ve been down here for the last six days?’ he said.

  ‘It’s better in the conference room,’ Julia said.

  ‘The whole place is damp.’

  ‘We don’t come here for our health.’ They had reached a door by the end of the corridor, and Julia held him back. ‘David ... you’re going to meet the others. Are you going to show them the newspaper cutting?’

  ‘What do you think? Should we?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’m convinced that this is the way back to the twentieth century, and if I’m right and it’s where we came from, then we’ll understand when we arrive. Do you think anyone will be expecting us there?’

  ‘I can’t answer that.’

  He made a move on, but Julia caught his arm again.

  ‘You’re going to meet Paul in a moment,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to make a scene, are you?’

  ‘Is there any reason why I should?’

  ‘No,’ she said, and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You know what I said, and you know what I want.’ Still holding his arm, but gently now, she opened the door behind him. ‘This is the conference room.’

  Harkman walked in, looking around, expecting to find it full of people ... but it was empty. The lights were on, and it was warm and slightly stuffy. Many books and printed papers were scattered over the tables, and used cups and saucers had been left on the floor next to the chairs. Someone had left a jacket hanging from a hook on the door.

  Harkman said, wryly: ‘Do you suppose they heard we were coming?’

  Julia looked around the room again, as if searching would find.

  ‘I only left two hours ago,’
she said. ‘They must still be here.’

  ‘In one of the other rooms?’

  ‘They’re never used. They must have all gone to the projection hall.’

  He followed her, down a side-tunnel towards a doorway, through which bright light was pouring, and as they went into the hall beyond Harkman felt the heat from the lamps glaring down on him. Holding out his hand to shield his eyes, Harkman looked around the room, but it was several seconds before he noticed that someone was waiting: at the far end of the hall, standing beneath one of the clusters of lights, was a man.

  He said nothing to them, but watched as they walked in.

  On Harkman’s left, running for the length of the hall, was a bank of large drawers, painted grey. In the centre of the room, and, for some reason, at the place where the beams of several lights converged, was a large pile of discarded clothing, Harkman thought, whimsically, that it looked like the scene of an orgy that had been interrupted by a police-raid.

  ‘Is that you, Paul?’ Julia said, narrowing her eyes against the glare of the lights.

  The figure made no movement or sound for nearly half a minute - during which time Harkman stepped forward, to be restrained by Julia’s hand on his arm - but then at last he came slowly forward.

  ‘They’ve all gone,’ he said. ‘The project has started.’

  ‘Already?’ Julia said, in evident surprise. ‘But you were going to wait - ’

  ‘I had all the people I needed. No point delaying.’

  Julia glanced up at Harkman, and he saw a strange fear in her expression.

  She said: ‘Paul, I’ve found David Harkman. You remember, Don Mander proposed him?’

  ‘David Harkman, is it?’

  ‘David, this is Paul Mason, the director of our project.’

  ‘Mason?’ Harkman extended a hand, but Mason ignored him and looked at Julia.

  ‘So this is the David Harkman that’s so valuable to my project? Well, it’s no good, we’ve started and it’s too late for anyone else.’ He turned away, and went to stand beside the cabinets. He reached back with both hands, and pressed his palms against the smooth metal. ‘I don’t know you, Harkman. Where are you from? What do you want here?’