The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Terry, taking a cautious sip of his scalding hot chocolate. (He never drank coffee, because it kept him awake.) Then he scowled. ‘We’re meant to be going for a drive this afternoon. A day out, sort of thing.’

  ‘Sounds nice.’

  Terry shook his head. ‘Waste of time. There’s a Douglas Sirk film on BBC 2, as well.’ He looked up at Robert hopefully. ‘You wouldn’t like to come with us, would you? There’s plenty of room for three. It might liven things up.’

  Robert had been on excursions with Terry and his girlfriends before. The prospect of listening to several hours’ worth of mutual sniping held little appeal.

  ‘No, thanks,’ he said. ‘You know how it is, when you’re with a couple… I’d only be in the way.’

  ‘No, but it’s different with me and Lynne,’ Terry insisted. ‘We’re getting on really well together at the moment. No arguing, just lots of… companionable silences. You wouldn’t feel uncomfortable at all.’ He stood up and searched through his pockets. ‘I wouldn’t mind something to eat. You haven’t got any money, have you?’

  Their collective resources came to little more than three pounds, as it turned out, and Terry thought that he would need most of that for petrol. However, with a conspiratorial look around the Café, he said, ‘Don’t panic,’ and from a bookshelf above the adjacent table he fetched an old hardback copy of Great Expectations. Opening it carefully, he said; ‘Look at that – page two hundred and twenty.’ Inside was a ten pound note.

  Robert was impressed. ‘When did you put it there?’

  ‘About six months ago,’ said Terry. ‘When I was a little more flush. I had a hunch it might come in handy: go and get a couple of sandwiches, will you?’

  Shortly afterwards Lynne arrived, while Terry was downstairs in the toilet.

  ‘He asked me to come with you today,’ Robert told her, ‘but I don’t think I will. I don’t like to intrude.’

  ‘Oh, please come,’ she insisted. ‘Honestly, we could do with having someone else around: we’re getting on so badly at the moment. We don’t seem to have anything to say to each other.’

  ‘Where are you going, anyway?’

  ‘Just up the coast. I know it’s a bit damp now, but the forecast said it was going to be bright and sunny later.’

  After they had been driving through wet mist for some two hours, the rain turned torrential at about three o’clock; and that was when Terry discovered that his windscreen wipers didn’t work. They pulled off the road and stopped in a layby. Lynne offered round a packet of Polos which was all that they had in the way of provisions.

  ‘This is great,’ said Terry. ‘This is so much better than sitting in my room watching Written on the Wind.’

  Robert wiped away the condensation from his back window and peered out at a bleak stretch of coastline, murkily visible through the thick rain. He said: ‘I think I’ve seen that, anyway. Over-the-top melodrama with Rock Hudson as an oil tycoon. Sort of tacky ’fifties version of Dallas.’

  ‘Well, yes, that is how someone like you would describe it,’ said Terry dismissively.

  ‘And what does that mean, exactly?’

  ‘The true cinéaste,’ said Terry, ‘knows that Sirk is one of the most important directors ever to have worked in Hollywood. Even a basic psychoanalytic reading of his films makes it clear that he had a profound understanding of the sexual neuroses underpinning the American dream.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Robert, turning back to the window.

  ‘Does it never occur to you,’ said Lynne, addressing but not looking at her boyfriend, ‘that you’re looking for something in these films that isn’t really there?’ There was a bitter, jaded edge to her voice.

  ‘I’m not saying that his films are perfect,’ said Terry. He thought about this statement, and began to elaborate, in his best trainee-lecturer style: ‘It’s possible to conceive of a perfect film, of course. That’s not to say that it would be pleasant or uplifting. It might be the most depressing film ever made. The important thing is that its vision would be consistent, and flawless. I’m convinced that such a film exists. What I’m doing at the moment is acquiring the skills with which to search for it.’

  ‘Like trying to remember the perfect dream,’ Robert prompted.

  ‘Oh, don’t get him started on his dreams, for God’s sake,’ said Lynne. ‘I’ve had it up to here with his dreams. You’d think he was the only person who ever had dreams at all.’

  ‘I hardly ever dream, these days,’ said Robert.

  ‘I do, all the time.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, I dream of having a ten-minute conversation with Terry where he doesn’t mention Ingmar Bergman. But that’s just my little fantasy.’ She pondered. ‘Oh, I don’t know… silly, trivial dreams… A couple of nights ago, for instance, I dreamed I was lying in a hospital bed next to Winston Churchill. He was eating a bowl of peas and every so often kept flicking one at me. Then the hospital turned into my grandmother’s bungalow and all these firemen appeared, singing the theme song from Hello, Dolly.’ She could see that Terry was not impressed. ‘Don’t look at me like that. We can’t all have the most profound dreams in the world.’

  ‘I’m not saying anything.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you go out and try to get those wipers working, anyway? Do something useful for a change.’

  Muttering angrily, and pulling his jacket tightly around himself as if this might somehow ward off the rain and the cold, Terry climbed out of the car and spent several ineffectual minutes pulling and prodding at the windscreen wipers in a half-hearted fashion. Car maintenance was not one of his strong points.

  ‘I had a dream about a hospital once,’ Robert said, in the meantime. ‘In fact it’s about the only dream I can remember. I must have been about nine or ten… I’m in this very arid landscape, very hilly and dusty. And there’s this woman, a middle-aged woman, in a nurse’s uniform, and she’s standing by the side of the road, pointing: pointing off into the distance. There’s a big building somewhere ahead of us on the road – that’s what she’s pointing at. I can see it faintly, and I know it’s a hospital. Some sort of military hospital, actually. And just behind her there’s a notice. She’s standing in front of it so I can’t read it all.’

  ‘Do you know what it says?’ Lynne asked.

  ‘No. There’s just one word, but I can’t see what it is. That’s the maddening thing. All I know is that it’s in a foreign language.’

  ‘Does anything else happen in the dream?’

  ‘No. That’s it.’

  Lynne pondered these details. ‘Is the nurse telling you to go to the hospital, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

  ‘Well, I think you should have that dream analysed. If you can still remember it after all these years, it must be trying to tell you something.’

  Terry opened the door and flopped wetly into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ he said; after which they all fell silent, listening to the intermittent drone of passing traffic, the hiss of tyres against wet asphalt. Robert thought it was the most depressing sound in the world: it reminded him of family holidays in Devon, his mother and father bickering in the front seats, drinking flasks of coffee in a fogged-up car in some seafront car park, the weather dismal even in July. In the evening they would eat at a cheap local restaurant, his father would get drunk on wine and spirits and his mother would have to drive them all back to the cottage or boarding house. He had a sudden, vivid recollection of his father urinating against the wall of some bed and breakfast place late one evening, the landlady thrusting open a sash window on the second floor and shouting down at him. ‘I’ll call the police!’ she had threatened finally, but his father merely guffawed. ‘I am the police!’ he had called back; and the next morning they were leaving anyway.

  Terry tried switching on the radio, but the only things he cou
ld find were some opera and a football commentary. Soon he switched off and yawned; then turned to Robert, asking: ‘Who did you say you were looking for in the Café this morning?’

  ‘I didn’t. It was someone from the house.’

  ‘Oh.’ Something about the way he said it must have aroused Terry’s interest. ‘Male or female?’

  ‘Female. No one’s seen her for about a week. I’m a bit worried about her.’

  Lynne had been gazing out of the window, rigid with boredom, taking no part in this conversation. But now she roused herself and said: ‘Her name wouldn’t be Sarah, by any chance, would it? Sarah Tudor?’

  Robert sat up sharply in the back seat. ‘How did you know that?’

  She smiled with satisfaction. ‘Just a hunch.’

  ‘You don’t know her, do you?’ Robert asked.

  ‘Oh yes, I know her all right. She lived just down the corridor from me in my first year. We all got to know Sarah.’

  Robert wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by this, but he didn’t like the sound of it.

  Terry asked: ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘Quite small,’ said Lynne. ‘Quite skinny. Pale blue eyes. Always wears a denim jacket. Blonde hair, medium length, quite short: a bit like straw.’

  ‘It’s nothing like straw,’ Robert protested.

  ‘It’s exactly like straw: that’s why they call her Worzel.’

  ‘Who calls her Worzel?’

  ‘Everybody does: after Worzel Gummidge, the scarecrow. Of course,’ she added, ‘that’s only one of her nicknames.’

  Already dreading the answer, but unable to stop himself, Robert asked: ‘What are the others?’

  ‘Well, some people call her Sarah Spew, after a famous incident where she went to a restaurant and threw up all over the other guests. Some people call her Gregory’s Girl, because she used to go out with this obnoxious guy called Gregory. And some people call her Rip van Winkle, because she has this charming habit of falling asleep when you’re talking to her, if she doesn’t find you particularly interesting.’

  Robert frowned. ‘That might not be her fault,’ he said. ‘There is this condition, I think –’

  ‘But most people,’ said Lynne, who hadn’t yet finished with the litany of nicknames, ‘most people just call her Mad Sarah.’

  His heart sank even further. ‘Why’s that, then?’ he asked, unnecessarily.

  ‘Because she’s completely mad. She comes up to people and claims to have had conversations with them, and done things with them, and all the time she’s just inventing it all. She’s completely barking.’

  This had gone far enough, Robert decided. ‘I don’t believe that, actually.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Lynne. ‘That’s why I thought it might be Sarah you were looking for: because I saw her just a couple of days ago, and she was talking about you. She was saying all sorts of things, and I bet she was making half of them up.’

  In spite of himself, he was excited to hear that Sarah had not forgotten him in the last week, that she even considered him interesting enough to discuss with her friends. ‘Why, what did she say?’

  ‘Well, she said that your cat had died recently and you were really upset about it.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘And then that you sat up half the night with her on the terrace in the freezing cold, talking about the meaning of life.’

  ‘We did, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘And she’s been going round telling everyone that you’ve got a twin sister.’

  There was an expectant silence. Terry turned and looked at him, facetious, challenging. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘You’re not going to try and tell us that that’s true, are you?’

  Robert returned his stare. He was conscious, too, of Lynne’s eyes upon him. ‘As a matter of fact it is,’ he said.

  Terry was briefly – very briefly – dumbstruck. He looked from Robert to Lynne, from Lynne to Robert, trying to decide if this was part of some elaborate joke. ‘I’ve been to your house,’ he said. ‘I’ve met your family. You don’t have any brothers or sisters.’

  ‘What else did she say about her?’ Robert asked, ignoring Terry for the time being.

  Lynne said: ‘Well, according to Sarah, you had a twin sister called Cleo, but your parents couldn’t afford to bring up both of you, so they gave her away for adoption when you were just a few days old and you’ve never seen her since.’

  Robert said nothing, although his expression suggested that he was occupied with some reluctant, intensely private train of thought. Terry registered this and was determined to prise the truth out of him.

  ‘Well – is she lying? Is she making it up?’

  ‘Of course not. How could anyone invent something like that?’

  ‘You’ve got a twin sister called Cleo, and you’ve never told me about it?’

  ‘Why should I? It’s not as if I’ve ever met her.’

  ‘You’ve known me for two years – we’ve been friends for two years – and you’ve never told me that you had a twin sister. And yet you meet some weird woman, and you get talking, and five minutes later you’ve poured out the whole story to her?’

  ‘She’s not a weird woman. There’s nothing weird about her.’

  Lynne snorted at this, and said: ‘Anyway, Terry, you do know Sarah Tudor. She’s the one who’s started that… you know, started that – thing, with Ronnie.’

  And Robert would later remember the moment he first heard this name: how an immediate premonition had visited him: the awareness, at once, that he was in freefall, plummeting towards a limitless chasm. He knew for certain that all the hopes he had been building up over the last week – he had thought them so vague and insubstantial, but suddenly recognized them, now, as concrete monstrosities – would come to nothing. Panic engulfed him.

  ‘Oh, you mean it’s her?’ Terry was saying. ‘That’s who we’re talking about? Of course I’ve met her. She was sitting at our table the other day when Ronnie and I were having an argument.’

  ‘Quite small…’ Lynne prompted.

  ‘Quite thin, pale blue eyes, denim jacket, blonde hair a bit like straw. And completely off her trolley.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Lynne. ‘You noticed that as well, did you?’

  ‘Mad as a hatter, we all thought. Ronnie had been coming out with all the usual stuff about men being rapists and wife-beaters, and then this girl – who none of us had been talking to, or anything – suddenly broke into the conversation and said she agreed. Then she got up and left, practically knocking the table over in the process.’

  ‘I’m in love with her,’ said Robert.

  Terry and Lynne turned in their seats, as one, and regarded him mutely. Neither of them queried his statement, but making it had given Robert such quick, unexpected pleasure, such a sense of release, that he decided to repeat it anyway.

  ‘I’m in love with her,’ he said. ‘I think she’s wonderful. I think she’s the most lovely and beautiful person I’ve ever met.’

  Terry was stunned into silence: he had never heard Robert say anything like this before. Lynne just shook her head disbelievingly and looked out through the windscreen again. ‘Well, that’s a novel point of view,’ she conceded.

  ‘When you say that she’s been with this man called Ronnie,’ Robert continued flatly, ‘I assume you mean that they’re having an affair?’

  ‘I didn’t say that she’d been with a man called Ronnie. That’s not what I said.’

  For a fatuous instant Robert clutched at these words, thinking that perhaps he’d heard wrongly the first time, that perhaps everything was still going to be all right.

  ‘I thought–’

  ‘You really have picked a good one here, Robert. You’ve really excelled yourself.’ Then Lynne explained, patiently and not unkindly: ‘She’s having an affair, but not with a man. Ronnie is female. It’s short for Veronica.’

  The chasm opened again:
twice as wide, and blacker than he would have thought possible.

  ‘But you told me that she’d been going out with a guy called Gregory,’ he said; tumbling.

  ‘Well, now she’s going out with a girl called Veronica.’

  It was Terry, at last, who took it upon himself to spell the thing out: ‘She’s a dyke, Bob.’

  Robert looked to Lynne for confirmation; as if hoping, even now, that this was some cruel male fantasy his friend was spinning for him. But Lynne simply nodded. ‘As of Monday,’ she said.

  The rain had almost stopped, by now. Terry turned on the ignition. ‘And I still cannot believe,’ he added, ‘that we’ve been friends for two years, and you’ve never told me about your twin sister.’

  He checked his mirror and flicked on the indicator, easing the car out into the road in the direction of the breaking clouds, the pale faltering sunshine.

  ∗

  The day after her long conversation with Robert, on a warm but blustery Friday afternoon, Sarah had wandered into the Café Valladon and noticed Veronica sitting with three other women; had halted in the doorway, uncertain how to proceed; had seen Veronica detach herself from the group and approach her, a smile of recognition and welcome lighting up her face; had felt the touch of a hand on her forearm, and found herself guided towards a separate table, where it appeared they were to have a tête-à-tête. She had taken the books out of her canvas rucksack and explained that she had not managed to look at them all; Veronica had apologized for dumping them on her in that way, with the implication that her reading in certain areas was somehow deficient; it had been a crass thing to do, little more than a ploy, really, to make sure of seeing her again. Veronica had gone behind the counter and fetched some coffee (Slattery being in the thick of one of those protracted and mysterious absences which seemed to interfere so little with the smooth running of the Café). And then they had begun to talk.