A Dream of Wessex

  He said: ‘Hello, Julia. I was told I would find you here.’

  It was Paul Mason. The sight of him was so wholly unexpected that Julia froze in mid-step. She pressed herself back against the wall. Looking at him, seeing his confident, smiling face, Julia wanted to run. She felt a total compulsion to return to Maiden Castle at once, to bury herself in the future for ever.

  eleven

  Paul said: ‘Aren’t you pleased to see me?’

  Everything that Julia had done since her return, and everything that she had thought about, was ejected from her mind by the sight of him as totally and efficiently as the memories of her own life were wiped out by the Ridpath projector. She saw Paul, only Paul, and all that he stood for in her past: the destruction of her pride, of her sense of identity, of her self-respect.

  In the same way that she had been morbidly obsessed with him after she had seen him during her last weekend in London, so he was now someone who by his very existence demanded, and received, her complete attention.

  ‘Are you following me?’ she said, and in so saying recognized in her own voice the sound of paranoia.

  ‘What do you mean, Julia?’ Was his innocent expression feigned?

  ‘Look, Paul, I told you. We’re finished. I don’t want anything more to do with you.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  ‘Then what are you doing here?’

  He smiled, and it was patronizingly reassuring. ‘Not to see you, if that’s what you think. We happen to work in the same job, that’s all.’

  Before she could stop herself, Julia said: ‘You’re not a member of the project! ‘

  ‘I work for the trustees.’

  Julia looked from side to side along the corridor. Marilyn had gone off to beg a lift back to the Castle, and was probably already out of the house. There was no one else in sight, but several doors along the corridor were open.

  ‘We can’t talk here,’ Julia said. ‘Someone will hear us.’

  ‘You haven’t got anything to hide, have you?’

  Julia pushed past him and went into the room he had been in. It was an office, and the desk was cluttered with papers. She recognized what the papers were the instant she saw them: some of the many reports filed by members of the projection during their periods of return from Wessex. These reports were the raw material of the projection, from which the periodic findings presented to the trustees were compiled. To Julia, the fact that someone like Paul Mason could have access to them was the grossest imaginable breach of privacy.

  Paul was standing by the door.

  ‘If you want to talk to me,’ Julia said, ‘come in here.’

  ‘You seem to be the one who wants to talk,’ Paul said, but he came into the room and closed the door.

  ‘Is this your room?’ Julia said.

  ‘It is for the moment. There’s another room coming free this week, and I’ll be moving into that.’

  He meant Tom Benedict’s room. Julia knew without having to be told.

  With the door closed, Paul’s manner changed. In the corridor he had had an air of amused formality, presumably because other people might have passed, but now that they were alone together Julia saw a more familiar Paul, one she recognized from the old days. In a particular sense this sudden change was a relief to her, for it confirmed her prejudices about him; there was always a doubt, when she was not with him, that she had imagined his destructive instincts.

  Paul had walked round the desk, and was sitting behind it. He gave her a knowing look, then picked up two or three of the reports and held them for her to see.

  ‘I’m interested in your dreamworld,’ he said. ‘It sounds pleasantly comforting.’

  ‘Comforting?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s just the sort of escape from reality you specialize in.’

  Paul was never content with an intrusion into privacy; he always had to pass comment sooner or later.

  ‘Look, Paul, it’s a real world.’

  ‘But it is a fantasy, isn’t it? You mould it to your own desires.’

  ‘It’s a scientific project.’

  ‘It was intended to be. I’ve read your reports ... it’s quite an idyllic little place you’ve worked out for yourself.’

  Julia, simultaneously angry and embarrassed, felt again the urge to run from him, but she knew that this time she would have to face up to him. The charge that the project members were indulging themselves in a wish-fulfilment fantasy was one that had been made several times by the board of trustees. It was inevitable when the nature of the project was understood. Of necessity, any projection would reflect the unconscious desires of the participants, and thus become a congenial environment to them. For all that, though, the scientific nature of the work was paramount.

  But for Paul to make this charge, and to make it to her, pitched it on an altogether different level.

  ‘You know nothing about Wessex,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve read the reports. And I know you, Julia. Isn’t it right up your street? Remember all those movies you used to see?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean!’ Julia said, but Paul smiled at her in a sly way, and she knew exactly what he meant.

  There had been a time, about nine months before she left him, when she had felt she could go on no longer. She had been in one of her many secretarial jobs, bored and miserable, and in the evenings when she went back to the flat Paul was there to remind her of her failings and her faults, and the contempt he felt for her was only too clear. One evening, unable to face him, she’d rung him up and told him she had to work overtime ... and went to the cinema instead. The two or three hours of relief had been sweet indeed, and the following evening she did the same. Over a period of three weeks she went, alone to a cinema more often than she went home. And of course Paul had eventually found out. Trying to explain herself, trying to communicate her desperation, Julia had told him why, exactly why, but instead of sympathy she received only more contempt. From that day ‘going to the movies’ had become another phrase in Paul’s unique vocabulary of destructive criticism, a metaphor for her inadequacy to face up to the real world.

  Paul never forgot; the vocabulary was still intact, and it spoke across the years she had been free of him.

  ‘You’ve always run away,’ Paul said. ‘You even ran away from me.’

  ‘It was all you deserved.’

  ‘You used to say I was the most important person in your life. Remember?’

  ‘I thought it for about a week.’

  The first week. Those first deadly days when she had trusted and admired and loved him, or so she thought. The days when she had confided in him and talked frankly about herself, and at the same time was unknowingly sowing the seeds which would grow into the poisonous plants that he would be forever reaping.

  ‘You can’t run away again. You made the mistake once ... but you know how you depend on me.’

  Anger prevailed. ‘My God, I don’t need you! I’ve finished with you as completely as it’s possible to be free of anyone. If I never see you again, I won’t give a damn! ‘

  ‘I seem to have heard that somewhere before.’

  ‘This time it’s final. I’ve got my own life.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Your little escapist fantasy. How I admire you.’

  Julia turned away from him, and went to the door, the fury trembling in her.

  ‘Still running, Julia?’

  As she turned the handle, she paused. Looking back at Paul she saw that he was at ease, and smiling. He’d always enjoyed peeling back the skin to expose her sensitive nerves, then picking at them with his fingernails.

  ‘I don’t need to run from you any more. You’re nothing to me.’

  ‘So I see. Then we’ll test that in the projection.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’ll see how your unconscious reacts to mine.’

  She stared at him with a new horror. ‘You’re not going into the projection! ‘

 
‘No, no, of course not. How could I have ever thought you would allow me to upset your life.’

  Of all the various weapons at his disposal, sarcasm was the one most blunted by over-use.

  Julia said: ‘Paul, so help me I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you go nowhere near the projector.’

  He laughed as if to diminish the power she invoked. ‘I suppose the trustees have no say in the matter. I’m answerable to them, not to you.’

  ‘I’m a full participant. If I don’t want you to join, I can stop you.’

  ‘Against the majority vote of the others, naturally.’

  There was a way ... she knew there was a way.

  ‘I can stop you, Paul,’ she said again.

  In the early days a tacit agreement had been reached by all the participants. The nature of the projection was so delicately determined by the unconscious minds of the participants that its balance could be upset by the reactions of one personality to another. From the start they had all agreed: no relationships outside the projection. No affairs, no forming of liaisons, no cliques. Personal animus would be resolved one way or another before the projection began, or one or both of the parties would resign. With the same delicacy as they had created the nuances of the projected world, the participants had achieved this somehow. They stayed of accord, they stayed of a mind ... but outside the projection they lived their own lives, and met only to discuss the work.

  Paul was waiting, smiling at her.

  ‘There’s a rule we abide by,’ she said. ‘I have only to tell the others what you are to me, and you’ll be out.’

  ‘So you would tell them you still fancy me?’

  ‘No, you bastard. I’ll tell them how much I loathe you. I’ll tell them what you’ve done to me in the past, and I’ll tell them what’s happened today. I’ll tell them anything ... just to keep you out of Wessex.’

  Paul’s smile had vanished, but his eyes held the same expression they had held all along: a narrow, calculating look.

  ‘I suppose that knife could be made to cut two ways,’ he said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘It could be used on you as much as me.’ He stood up quickly, alarming her, and she stepped back. Her hand was still on the door-knob, but she hadn’t the strength to turn it. ‘I’ve worked for a long time for an opportunity like this. I’m in this because it’s my chance, and I’m going to take it. Nothing’s going to get in my way, certainly not some frigid little bitch who’s spent half her life blaming others for her own weakness. You can find somewhere else to hide. If it’s between you and me, then it’s going to be me.’

  Julia said, summoning her last reserves of strength, knowing she could stand no more of this: ‘I’m already established. You won’t be allowed in.’

  ‘Then we’ll put it to the test. See what the others think. Who’s going to tell them? You or me?’

  Julia shook her head miserably.

  Paul said: ‘And while we’re talking about that, shall we also mention your friendship with Benedict? Shall we tell them how you got your job?’

  ‘No, Paul!’

  ‘So we know what to tell the others. That’s fine by me.’

  Julia felt she was going to faint. In the last ten minutes every single one of her deepest and most intimate nightmares had come to pass. She had known Paul was ruthless, she had known he was ambitious; she knew everything and more about the chemistry of destruction that worked between them, but she had never realized that the three could combine to such spectacularly explosive effect. She let out an uncontrollable low moan of misery and despair, and turned away. Paul, sitting down behind his desk, was grinning again.

  As she let herself out of the office, she heard him rustling through the personal reports that lay on his desk.

  twelve

  Although it was after one o’clock in the morning, the cafes and night-clubs of Dorchester were full, and the streets were thronged with people. It was a warm, stuffy night, a storm threatening. Music and voices competed on the patios of the cafes, and the open doors of the bars and night-clubs released a hot, aromatic radiance: music, body-heat, tobacco-smoke, glowing lights, like the open gates of a boilerhouse. People danced and sang and shouted, their faces shining, their thin clothes sticking to their bodies.

  Only the sound of the sea, breaking against the concrete seawall, gave a cooling presence, a reminder of the wind.

  Coloured lights were strung along the trees in Marine Boulevard, and these, with the golden, hissing glow of the gas-lamps against the sides of the buildings, cast an attractive multi-hued radiance over the passers-by.

  David Harkman walked slowly down the Boulevard towards the harbour, his right arm resting lightly on Julia’s shoulders. She held herself close to him, and her head rested against his chest; the nearness was a shadow of their earlier intimacy.

  She seemed small against him, for his arm could pass right around her back. He felt very tender towards her, because she had been with him all evening, from the moment she knocked on the door of his hostel room. Their evening had been simple: they had gone to the harbour to move his new skimmer to the mooring he had rented earlier in the day, and after that they had eaten a meal at Sekker’s Bar. From there they had returned to his room for the rest of the evening. They had been awkward with each other at first, neither of them wanting to talk about the strange link they both felt, but afterwards this mutual understanding had been acknowledged in an unspoken, physical way. Their lovemaking had been affectionate and passionate, exhausting them both.

  Even so, as they walked in the humid night Harkman felt that the bond was weaker. It was not just that they had consummated the sexual desire, nor that mysteries had been dispelled. He had felt it as soon as she arrived: the intangible bond between them had been untied.

  As they strolled along the Boulevard, Harkman realized that already the memory of their lovemaking had the same quality to it as those memories of his life before he had applied for the Dorchester posting. He remembered the fact of what they had done together, but the memory of it was remote.

  Even as he thought this, Harkman knew that it was neither fair nor right. He had felt and experienced, had lived the moments.

  He suspected and feared that it was a shortcoming in himself, an inability to feel, and he tried unsuccessfully to put it from his mind.

  Julia was warm under his arm, and he could detect her heart beating against the side of his body. It was a clinical observation, like a test of reality.

  When they reached the harbour, they went down the concrete steps together, and he helped Julia into her boat. They kissed briefly, but with passion.

  ‘Will you come again?’

  ‘If you’d like me to,’ she said.

  ‘You know I would. But only if you want to.’

  ‘I’ll come ... tomorrow, I think.’ She was standing unsteadily in the boat, holding his hands as he balanced on the edge of the steps. She said: ‘David ... I do want to see you again.’

  They kissed once more, then at last Julia settled herself at the back of the boat, started the engine and in a moment had steered away across the harbour. The water was black and calm, and the coloured lights hanging on the far side reflected back from the surface in perfect symmetry with themselves. As her boat churned up the water, the wake sent the colours flashing and colliding.

  Harkman stood on the harbour wall at the top of the steps until he could hear the engine no more, then walked back through the town.

  It was odd how memory seemed to detach itself from experience; already, the sight of Julia’s boat heading out across the black, multi-coloured water seemed distant from himself. It was as if there were a false experience in memory, one given to him. It seemed that he had been walking alone through the Boulevard all evening and into the night, with entirely spurious memories appearing in sequence to supply the false experience.

  Memory was created by events, surely?

  It could not be the other way around.

  He h
ad said nothing of this dilemma to Julia, although he had been aware of reality reshaping itself behind him all evening.

  The meal at Sekker’s: a remarkably good sea-food casserole, with wine from the north of France, it had been the most delicious meal Harkman had had since his arrival. Julia said she had never eaten at Sekker’s before. Small incidents were memorable: the waiter who had given Julia a rose; the four musicians who had deafened everyone on the patio until being asked to leave by the head waiter; the uproarious party at the next table, with six States Americans dressed in Arab robes and singing campus chants. The meal had happened; his stomach could still feel its weight.

  And yet, even as they left Sekker’s, Harkman had had a nagging sense that the memory of it was false.

  With Julia, too: as they’d made love Harkman had a sudden insight that her arrival in his bed was spontaneous, that she had always been there, and that the events leading up to the moment were there only in implanted memory.

  Afterwards, the sex itself became a memory, the drained, relaxed hour that followed being in its turn the only reality.

  And now, as he walked back towards the Commission hostel, Harkman thought of the whispered departure from the harbour, and the boat crossing the smooth black water, as events created by memory.

  It was as if Julia had not been there, that she did not exist except as some palpable extension of his own imagination, which, like a childhood ghoul, had substance only as long as he concentrated on it.

  He reached the hostel and made his way up to his room, careful not to meet any of his colleagues from the Commission. They all appeared to be in bed, for the building was silent.

  He washed and undressed, and pulled back the crumpled covers of the bed. There, on the lower sheet, was a small damp patch of deeply intimate memory. Harkman stared at it thoughtfully, knowing that it was as real to him as all his other recollections of the evening; as real... and as remote from memory.

  As he lay naked in the bed, waiting for sleep, the patch of damp was against his back, cold and sticky.