But one night the front door slammed with finality and I heard only the faint sound of a dripping tap and the rustle of cockroaches exploring the darkness of the kitchen. Eventually I fell into a fitful sleep but in my dream I began searching the abandoned house.
The furniture seemed neglected and reproachful as if we’d returned after two weeks’ holiday. Already, it appeared to belong to another family. Their bedroom was spartan and vacant like the unused backroom of a rundown hotel.
I had to find them. I felt no emotional attachment but I knew that the school would find out and I would be sent to the hospital, the prison or the asylum. Those were the places I was threatened with when I misbehaved, the three inevitable destinations for those of our family who remained.
I pulled on my clothes and stepped into the street. Although it was past midnight, crowds thronged the pavements and a pale, watery sun lingered behind the rooftops.
I decided to search the coastal wall where we often walked. The tide was out and on the seashore were old men with forks and buckets, digging for ragworm. They stretched to the horizon, hundred upon hundred, spattered with mud and seaweed. As I passed, they stared, heavy-witted and hostile, like cows in a field. One spoke.
“They’re not here. We haven’t seen them for over fifty years—your dad with his spade and his bucket of bait and your mum with her thermos flask. Best look in the houses among the trees.”
That was the first time I had heard the phrase and I misunderstood. Wrongly, I resolved to try the hospital, prison and asylum.
The hospital was small, a place of pain and confinement where I would be sent to have my tongue cut if I lisped. I had been shown the police station, which I knew as the prison, as a warning when I took sweets from the forbidden jar. The desk sergeant named each cell after executed murderers—Christie, Bentley and Hanratty. He had shown me inside the fourth cell.
“This is the Ruth Ellis suite, especially for young ladies like you. Perhaps in time, your name will be remembered here as well.”
But both hospital and police station were in the main street. Only the Victorian asylum, two miles along a country track, was shrouded by trees. It has long been closed, its patients dead or disgorged back into the angry world. Its main block is now a health club for jaded socialites but the porter’s lodge and a few outbuildings remain, lost and crumbling in dense woodland.
In the early 1960s, with Mother, I was a regular visitor, for diverse family members endured brief or prolonged committals. And, every Christmas, we presented Uncle George with a box of crystallised jellies. In 1954, he had swallowed a bottle of aspirins in a vain attempt to escape family life. He remained, permanently confined, until he died in 1982.
I knew the duty nurse and she frowned.
“I haven’t seen them. And your own room isn’t quite ready yet. But have a peep at your uncle. He’s asleep.”
We passed down the familiar corridors, vast and rambling, where hundreds of our townspeople were confined. I felt their communal heartbeat and the murmur of their breathing through the walls.
I peered in. Although asleep, Uncle George’s eyes were wide open and flickering from side to side in fevered ecstasy. The curtains at his open window were billowing for a strong wind blew outside. His cheeks were pink with the blast and his hair moved in rhythm with the curtains. In those crazed barbiturate-fuelled dreams, he was bestriding hillsides, turning into the gale and laughing as it pinched his face.
I returned by a secluded bridleway and it was there, by chance, that I found the house among the trees. It was a nondescript, isolated cottage, hidden by yews and rowans. Through a gap in the hedge I noticed its front door, gaping wide. The rooms were unfurnished and blank, like anterooms or lobbies to secret halls and passages of enchantment. I felt the lure of those inner chambers and strained my eyes to see into their depths. The house was waiting for someone and, when I heard footsteps, I expected to see my parents. But it was Mr West, a near neighbour.
Even as a child, I knew of his sorrows. Mother predicted he was soon destined for the asylum and his usual demeanour was broken and submissive, his clothes unwashed and food-stained. But that night he strode past me confidently, arms swinging, and was swallowed up in the hidden recesses of that strange house.
When I arrived home, I could hear the hypnotic adagio of the Emperor Concerto on the gramophone. They had returned and the crisis was over. The rooms smelled again of pipe tobacco and fried bacon. The familiar bedraggled ornaments were comfortable and relaxed.
Next day the street was agitated with news of Mr West’s disappearance. His family was distraught, weeping for the husk of a man they had despised and mocked.
I knew no better then. I blurted out to the crowd that once I had seen him enter the house near the asylum. Mother was angry with me for ‘telling tales’. I realise now she meant informing and sneaking rather than lying. She knew that only in dream could I have witnessed his escape.
Of course they found nothing. The house was now securely locked, apparently left vacant by a woman living overseas. There were no hidden chambers and the rooms were all furnished. The lost ones remembered enough about the insides of people’s houses to compose a convincing facade.
But later that afternoon, when alone, I peeped through the windows. I spotted little anomalies. The bookshelves were lined with cheap paperback cowboy novels, incongruous alongside weighty translations of Greek and Roman classics. The sheet music on the piano was for the violin and the family photographs displayed no common features or likenesses. The rooms had been assembled overnight in haste from jumble sale remnants like a clumsy amateur dramatics stage set. My dream, with its unexpected visit and the vision of Mr West, had provoked the emergency.
*
In my twenties I obtained work, empty and facile, but well-paid. Father was gone. He walked out, one bright Saturday morning in May, carrying his fishing rods and promising a supper of bass and flounders. The rods were found twenty miles away, in a field of ancient barrows, a place of mists and shadows, where ancient peoples slept under hill and stone.
I hadn’t seen Mother for over fifteen years when, one Sunday evening, she knocked at the door of my house.
“We were always a cold family,” she said. “This box, which was my own mother’s, is now yours, with all its secrets and betrayals. You are childless, which I commend, but, when your time comes, bequeath its contents wisely for it contains great gifts and knowledge. I have gathered but a little for you—a handful of sand from a vast beach, which slips through my fingers even as I speak.”
With those brief words she was gone, and I knew I would see her no more. The police, tactful and sombre, brought me the news of her disappearance, two days later. To humour them and ease their stumbling embarrassment, I feigned distress and even summoned tears. But I felt nothing.
*
To my surprise, the box contained no family documents. Its contents comprised loose pages of scribblings and drawings dating back several centuries. The first one I studied read:—
‘In caverns under Chislehurst, Mendip and Creswell Crag, they carve monsters out of stone and labour in ecstatic frenzy, comforted by the dust from their chisels and the drip of buried rivers. Untroubled by the accumulating bones of their fallen predecessors, they fashion Leviathan, Kelpie and Cirein-Croin. Seven herring a salmon’s fill but seven whales a Cirein-Croin’s fill. Pigments of ultramarine, umber, sienna and ochre burn unseen in the darkness of their art.’
The manuscript was dated 1762. Pinned to it was an engraving of a naked sculptor, dwarfed by his creation—a vast sea beast, barely visible in the candlelight. And in the distance, stretching back to the unfathomable vastness of the cave network, were the shadows of other stone monsters and their artists. I remembered one of Mother’s ironic teasing misquotations.
‘Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hammer,
Or his tongue with a brush?’
So, there were houses of refuge underground too, vast tunnels which shel
tered the missing for their remaining span of brief fervour. Their last days were consumed in the passionate fire of their art.
*
Buried among the documents was the poem she would recite in my bedroom, with only the orange night-light glowing palely from the landing. Her face was always in shadow and her voice seemed hypnotic and insubstantial. It remains the most frightening poem I know and, in the darkness, it would send me reeling into nightmare.
It is from the ‘Mother Goose’ collection and I believe it to be centuries old. An old woman goes to market to sell her eggs. She falls asleep on the King’s highway where a pedlar cuts off her petticoats up to her knees. She wakes shivering, her entire sense of soul and identity lost, crying ‘This is none of I.’
Her only hope lies in her little dog at home who will surely recognise and greet his true mistress. She returns at night but the dog barks, rejecting her as a stranger. The poem ends in despair with the forlorn repetition of ‘This is none of I’. Her eggs, petticoats, dog and home are lost and she is left in the darkness, uncertain of who she is.
Over the years, I’ve discussed the poem with acquaintances and they wink and smile in that nasty modern way and say:—
“That pedlar did more than cut her petticoats. No wonder her knees were shaking.”
They misunderstand. A shrewd old market trader would laugh off even the roughest sexual assault in those brutal years. I would follow her in my dreams as she wandered, lost and nameless, through hostile townships and barren wildernesses. Mother laughed when I told her.
“Oh, she’ll find a place where dogs, petticoats, homes and all the weary bustle of the marketplace are as vain and pointless as a child’s toy, broken in a silly tantrum.”
It is only now that I realise her kindness in preparing me, warning me in advance of an inexorable truth. For the day would come when I returned home and found another family living there, as if I had barely existed.
It began innocently. A few circulars bearing the name ‘Parsons’ were delivered to my house. I tore them up. Then personal letters and holiday postcards arrived. I read them and the Parsons family seemed more bustling and vibrant than my own sheltered crablike ways. I could almost hear their kitchen banter and feel the jab of their elbows as they clumped downstairs. In the evenings, after work, I found my few sticks of furniture had been replaced with sleek leather sofas, reeking of the showrooms. My spare room, left to the wanderings of benign spiders and rainbow plumes of dust, was littered with toys and bright with posters of pop stars.
And one Sunday, returning after a weekend’s conference, in a grey hotel of locked doors and muffled footfalls, I found them in residence. Already, they had made better use of my house than all my years’ occupation. The dank garden, with its stumps of dead chrysanthemums and blighted roses, boasted a child’s swing and trampoline. The rooms seemed animated and sparkling, glad to be rid of me.
The Parsons were very considerate. The few items of clothing and toiletries I needed, were packed neatly into my suitcase and left on the doorstep, together with Mother’s box. And their young daughter was most thoughtful in running down the drive and handing me my china dog. I have lived ever since in the backroom of a shabby hotel on the edge of town. I am comfortable.
The china dog is a cheap trinket, bought for sixpence on a rare spring day of contentment, when I was five. It was always a talisman for me and was originally paired with an equally tawdry black and white cat, playing with a ball of blue wool. I loved them both deeply but the cat was crunched under Father’s heel during a bitter quarrel that flared up over a lost penknife.
*
One afternoon, I returned early to my hotel room. The door was open and the chambermaid stood motionless, facing the window. Outside, mist and shadow rolled across an empty salt marsh. I overheard her say:—
“Alone, I speak, with the lamp at my back, to a sea fragrance that hangs still in the air.”
I had scarcely noticed her before, as she is aloof and solitary. But she turned and smiled, without embarrassment that I had caught her quoting poetry in a faded room, barren save for a cheap china dog on a dressing table. Her words were familiar. I searched Mother’s box and found a collection of poems by Li Shang Yin of the T’ang dynasty. Their imagery is beautiful and startling but I struggled to find any meaning. But then I found a scrawled note in Mother’s handwriting entitled ‘Of Moons and Oysters’. It read:—
‘As the moon waxes and shines full on a vast sea, so the pearl swells within the oyster. And at that time, in wooden houses, rising out of southern seas, they see mermaids whose eyes exude tears of liquid pearl.’
Delicate Chinese watercolours showed isolated houses, constructed on stilts and separated by a huge expanse of ocean. Inside, illuminated only by pale oil lamps, stood solitary men and women, their faces rapt by moonlight and the motion of the sea and its creatures. Each house bore the design of a full moon and its mirror image of a pearl within an oyster. Other watercolours from the same series depicted figures in a hollow stone circle. Mother’s note read:—
‘In cavernous vaults, open to the rolling firmament, they sit, in study and enchantment. And when the stars are gone, they sleep, crouched in shadow, away from the sun that is loved by the roaring crowds. They are beyond the wants of food and drink and they wait only for the glories of the night sky.’
On the grey walls of each mound, a constellation was carved—Orion, Cassiopeia and Lyra. In the night pictures, they glowed like phosphorus and seemed to move across the stone in harmony with the stars in the sky.
And each day, as my train snakes over the rolling landscape, I watch for houses bearing the sign of the stars, the moon and a pearl within an oyster. As tramps chalk secret codes on the dwellings they have visited, do the houses here have runes embedded to guide the solitary ones to glory? Do the caves bear images of sea beasts?
*
My hotel borders bleak marshland at the end of a long lane housing an abandoned industrial estate. In my two years of residence, I have been the only guest, eating alone in a large dining room and retiring early to bed along winding corridors of flaking plaster and black linoleum.
It is a hinterland between the empty noise and bustle of the town and the solitude of the mud flats. At dusk I can see the grey shapes of the bait diggers at low tide and am soothed to sleep by the sound of foghorns. The landscape is fluid, shifting between mud, fog and water. Sounds of seabirds, ships’ sirens and the rumbling pipes and timbers of the building, blend and echo in the corridors. My choice of this desolate place had always seemed fortuitous and coincidental. But one evening, whilst idly reading Mother’s cryptic notes, I found the reference ‘The Inn of the Marsh Lands—Where the Scenes are Changed’.
The interiors of the other grander bedrooms had always puzzled me. I am the only resident. But my room, dark and utilitarian, is barely larger than a broom cupboard.
Early one November evening, after the unvarying Thursday meal of hashed meats and tinned peaches, I sought out the remotest landing. The first door I tried was unlocked. The room was piled high with the matching furniture, books, ornaments and pictures of an entire house. I sensed the owner’s tastes and could picture her—early sixties, fastidious, chintzy, with a fondness for light romance and country pursuits.
The other rooms held their own distinct character—a slovenly bachelor’s dusty and beer-stained possessions or the homely clutter of a young couple with toddlers. They smelled of the stereotypes they portrayed. Here were kept the inner facades and stage props for the hidden houses.
*
In my bedroom the chambermaid was waiting.
“Another guest is expected tomorrow evening,” she said. “Your room will be needed. But I know you have made plans, for nothing here happens by chance.”
I was surprised and worried. Evidently, the hotel had only the one room available for guests, who, by their very nature, were reclusive. The chambermaid saw my alarm.
“You will know by morning,” she
said. “For I have been told that your room is ready now at the other house.”
I knew my time had come. The words of my mother, spoken over twenty years ago, returned to me. ‘Bequeath its contents wisely.’ On impulse, I opened her box and read aloud the poem about the woman who walked to market and returned in the darkness, crying ‘This is none of I.’ The chambermaid listened intently, without smirking, as the others had done.
“It happened exactly so,” she said. “One evening I walked home from school. I was sixteen. My family no longer knew me. It was as if I had never existed. The rooms of that house bore no trace of me. I walked into the night and found my way to this hotel. Here, I arrange the scenes, matching ornaments, books and pictures for imaginary people whose lives I know better than my own. But I have no knowledge of the houses about which you speak in your dreams. My room is adjacent to yours, and nightly I hear of moons, oysters, the watchers of stars and sea monsters, carved by dreamers underground. But I have never left the walls of this building in all my three years’ service. I see only the shift of mud, sea spray and mist, and the shapes of the bait diggers in their hundreds at low tide.” She smiled. “I will leave you to sleep now.”
On my dressing table, my china cat, with her ball of blue wool, had returned, fifty years after being crushed under Father’s heel. I recognised her at once from the missing flecks of paint around her ears. The chambermaid had found her and restored her to me.
The girl reminded me of the old Chinese men, carved on the piece of lapis lazuli, in Yeats’ poem. They look down from the mountainside, insouciant and shining, their eyes glittering as civilisations rise and fall, while below, the tragedians rage and stamp their feet in vain.
The delicate sculpture, fashioned by Callimachus, who made stone breathe and shimmer, survived but one day before riot smashed it into dust. Marble statues and tawdry china cats alike are crushed underfoot and moulded anew.
*
That night, in my agitation, I dreamed I walked again through the landscape of my childhood, searching for my last refuge. I passed the hospital and, through the frosted windows, saw the shapes of children, constrained in their beds as if wrapped in shrouds. The police station was deserted, its rooms the home of foxes and lush vegetation. The once-potent names of dead murderers, chalked on cell doors, were fading into distant memory. At the old asylum, through modern plate glass, I saw the shadows of the health-seekers, cavorting and frolicking in futile convulsions. ‘Your room is ready now,’ the girl had said. I remembered the duty nurse from nearly fifty years ago and our walk down the long passages to visit Uncle George.
Dadaoism (An Anthology) Page 5
