This is an old house.
If you were to come here, forgetting about time, and ringing the bell as the afternoon ends, you would find the shop as it has always been—keeping its secrets, offering you something that money can’t buy—freedom just for one night.
You would stand alone in the shop, looking at the suits of armour, the field boots and the wimples and the wigs on spikes, like severed heads. Then I’d be there, smiling at you, waiting. Waiting for the moment to begin.
You say you want to be transformed.
Downstairs, I switched on the screen and watched the familiar blank space surface towards me to be filled. Blank spaces are my domain.
Here’s the story …
The rain was thick as glass. For many days I had eaten, drunk, slept, walked, cased in glass. I felt like the relic of a saint. I felt like an Eastern curiosity. I stared out of the running walls of my prison, able to move, unable to escape.
In the forest every solid thing was changing into its watery equivalent. Whatever I grasped for purchase—root, branch, rock—slipped its hold. My fingers closed on nothing. The leaf-deep forest floor was a moving raft of brown water. The trees were water columns. In the liquid forest, I was the only solid thing and already my outline was beginning to blend with other outlines that were not me. I said my name again and again—‘ORLANDO! ORLANDO!’
I hoped my name would contain me, but the sound itself seemed to run off my tongue, and drop, letter by letter, into the pool at my feet. I tried again, but when I put my hand down into the pool of water, my name was gone.
‘What am I doing here?’
The woman I love rode this way, carried off by horsemen. If I do not find her I will never find myself. If I do not find her, I will die in this forest, water within water.
What’s that up ahead through the trees?
I came to a palace. There were no dogs, no sentries, and the way was open. I ran the back of my hand over my eyes, flicking off the rain, which was lighter now, and bearable. As I hesitated by the great iron gates, I heard her calling my name—‘ORLANDO! ORLANDO!’ I hesitated no longer, and rushed inside the palace, sword drawn, ready for death, ready for life, sensing myself again, knowing my own name.
The palace was deserted. I leapt up the staircase, kicking open doors, shouting, wheeling, pausing, listening. Her captors must have abandoned her here. There was no danger. All I had to do was find her.
Room by room. Stable, courtyard, loggia, dungeon, tower, kitchen, scullery, armoury, library, larders, wine-presses, vaults, chapel, gun-room, tack-room, fishponds, barns, winter closets, summerhouse, servant’s quarters, cell.
I was no longer sure where the rooms ended and I began. I seemed to be ransacking myself. Every door I opened was a confrontation with emptiness. Some of the rooms were furnished. Some were not. All were empty.
Or were they?
After a long time I noticed other figures, swords drawn, as intent as I was on searching the castle.
There was a man who lifted up tapestries—every tapestry every day—some by creeping forward and taking the corner with his finger and thumb, some with a rip or a yell or a stab. I passed him every third day, at noon, on the third staircase. He never glanced at me.
I soon realised that each of us had our own system, devised in fitful bouts of eating or resting. Each of us, solitary, intent, had made the palace into a personal labyrinth. We knew it better than the body of a lover. We knew it better than ourselves. It was ourselves. To each of us the palace had a secret meaning unrevealed to the rest.
And I will tell you a strange thing: whenever one of us turned to leave, wearied and desperate, for the doors were always open and no one was a prisoner here—that man would see, for a moment, a vision of what he sought—his lady, his falcon, his horse, the band of robbers who had fired his house. He would hear a voice, begging him, imploring him, taunting him, so that at the second when he would have abandoned his maze, he returned again, excited, convinced, to search the fishpond, the loggia, the scullery, the closet, the …
I tell you this; the palace was empty. That is, it was empty of what is sought, and filled only with seekers.
There was a day when a different kind of man came to the palace. Like us all, he had been lured there by a vision of his desire. He was chasing a peasant boy who had stolen his horse. When Astolfo came panting up to the palace, he knew at once that it was enchanted. Everywhere he looked, he saw one man, then another, ignoring all the rest, all running like fools down corridors without sense.
Astolfo lifted up the marble step at the main door and the entire palace vanished. Vanished completely.
You might think that would have made him a hero, but enchantment is not so easily dissolved. As we looked in amazement at the empty fields around us, we suddenly discovered in Astolfo the thing we had each sought in vain for so long. Some of us tried to make love to him, others of us tried to kill him. Poor man, he was half-dead of our attentions before he managed to pull out a whistle and blow a sharp blast.
That was the end of it. The note pierced through the last of our deceptions and we saw how it was. We didn’t say much. We hardly glanced at each other as we took our own ways, some to the east, some to the west, some to the mountains, some to their own cities again.
I was the last to leave.
I put out my hand and felt the vanished walls. The palace was gone, or rather, it was no longer outside myself. The stairs, corridors, halls, rooms, the table candles, even the mustard pot I had thrown out of the refectory window, all had folded up again into the hiding places of the mind.
I was alone. Atom and dream.
The screen had dimmed. The room was deep in shadows, there were sounds outside, but I did not recognise them. The world had folded up and I thought we were back on the river again, watching the light-bands of the Friday-night cars. I could see the brown churn of the river and the grey heavy stone going down into it under the quay. It’s always deeper than you think. Nobody gets to the bottom, and sometimes, when the tide is out, there’s a flintlock, or a sword, or an earring, or a piece of Roman tessera, or a story.
Yes, always a story, sieved up out of the river.
A couple of years ago I went down to the Thames at the lowest tide of the century. 19 January 1998. The wide river had shrunk to a thin metal band. I walked down to where the water should have been, and it felt as though the invisible river had closed over me. I thought I was walking inside it.
Underneath my feet, at every step, there was a hard crunching. Nervously I dipped my fingers into the silt and uncovered a handful of round balls, with the filmy look of a retina. They were bottle stoppers, the marbles used as bottle stoppers in the nineteenth century. I put them in my pocket, little capsules of the past, and walked on.
Perhaps this is how it is—life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.
A freak tide like this one uncovers more than we bargained for. Explanations drain away. Life is what it really is—a jumble, a chance, the upturned room of a madman. Out there I can see a fridge with its door off, and a coil of barbed wire, and a shopping trolley someone shoved off the bridge. I can see the heavy anchors patina’d with rust and decorated with barnacles. There are the rotten wooden pilings of old London—the driven stakes where the boats used to tie up. Now the pilings look like plugs of tobacco, brown and crumbling and moist.
Underneath there, for sure, will be the broken barrel of a pistol and a cache of oyster shells. There’ll be a clay pipe and a billiard ball, and a bundle of abandoned clothes. The end of one identity, the beginning of another.
Explanations drain away. History is a madman’s museum. I think I know. I think I understan
d, but it’s all subject to the tide.
Night. The screen is sleeping but I can’t. I pick up my coat, go out of the door and walk down to the Thames.
The tide will be out.
In the middle of the river there’s a light. I think I can get to it, past the hospital bed with its rubber castors missing, past the sea chest, still padlocked. Past the baby’s cot and the armful of beer glasses. Here I go, negotiating the chip wrappers and the grinning broken glass. Here I go, wading into the water now, too far out.
The light is there, but it’s not shining down, it’s shining up. It’s in the silt, in the red of the river, making a vertical shaft from the bottom to the surface.
This is a dirty river. Centuries have been pumped into it. This is the past pumped through time and taken out to sea. Mammoths used to drink from the shallow sandbanks. This is a Roman river, an Elizabethan river. This is the route to the Millennium Dome.
I dipped my hands in the water. Liquid time.
And I thought, ‘Go home and write the story again. Keep writing it because one day she will read it.’
You can change the story. You are the story.
No date line, no meridian, no gas-burnt stars, no transit of the planets, not the orbit of the earth nor the sun’s red galaxy, tell time here. Love is keeper of the clocks.
I took off my watch and dropped it into the water.
Time take it.
Your face, your hands, the movement of your body …
Your body is my Book of Hours. Open it. Read it.
This is the true history of the world.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Jeanette Winterson lives in London and the Cotswolds.
Books by Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
The Passion
Sexing the Cherry
Written on the Body
Art & Lies
Art Objects (essays)
Gut Symmetries
The World and Other Places
The PowerBook
Lighthousekeeping
Tanglewreck
The Stone Gods
The Battle of the Sun
ALSO BY JEANETTE WINTERSON
ART & LIES
A train hurtles through the future with three passengers on board: a disillusioned surgeon named Handel, whose humanity has been sacrificed to intellect; a woman artist named Picasso, cast out by a family that drove her to madness; and the lesbian poet Sappho, who has propagated her subversive gospel through centuries of censorship and exile. Out of their interwoven stories comes an impassioned, philosophical, and daring novel that burns with phosphorescent prose on every page.
Fiction/Literature
GUT SYMMETRIES
One starry night on a boat in the mid-Atlantic, Alice, a brilliant English theoretical physicist, begins an affair with Jove, her remorselessly seductive American counterpart. But Jove is married. When Alice confronts his wife, Stella, she swiftly falls in love with her, with consequences that are by turns horrifying, comic, and arousing. Vaulting from Liverpool to New York, from alchemy to string theory, and from the spirit to the flesh, Gut Symmetries is a thrillingly original novel by England’s most flamboyantly gifted writer.
Fiction/Literature
WRITTEN ON THE BODY
The narrator of Written on the Body has neither name nor gender; the beloved is a married woman. And as Winterson chronicles their consuming affair, she compels us to see love stripped of clichés and categories, as a phenomenon as visceral as blood and organs, bone and tissue—and as strange as an undiscovered continent.
Fiction/Literature
THE POWERBOOK
Ali writes stories on e-mail for anyone who wants them. She promises “freedom just for one night”—but she does not do so without a warning: the story might change you. Ask for an epic love story and you will get one, but Ali will be cast in it, too, and the lines between the real and the imagined may blur. Plucking characters from history and myth as well as her imagination, Ali journeys through time and stops in London, Paris, and Capri, all the while weaving stories that question the boundaries of cyberspace, the human heart, and the novel.
Fiction/Literature
ART OBJECTS
Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
In these ten intertwined essays, one of our most provocative novelists proves that she is just as stylish and outrageous as an art critic. For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us. Whether she is writing about the demands paintings make on their viewers, the subversive “autobiography” of Gertrude Stein, the ghettoization of gay and lesbian writers, or the origins of her own defiant love affair with language, Winterson continually reminds us that the term “art objects” denotes not only things but acts. Art objects to the lie that life is small, fragmented, and mean; it instead proclaims the opposite. And so does Winterson’s wise and fiery book.
Criticism/Literature
THE WORLD AND OTHER PLACES
With language as dazzling as the wondrous visionary landscapes they evoke, these seventeen works transport the reader to worlds in which sleep is illegal, the lives of lonely department store clerks are transformed by fairies, the rich wear coal jewelry on an island of diamonds, and the living laminate their dead. Here is a universe where rooms go missing, women give birth to their lovers, and the young contemplate God’s creative powers through pet tortoises. These beguiling stories, by turns startlingly passionate and cannily satirical, chart an extraordinary writing career.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70236-5
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Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook
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