The Book of Dreams

by Nina George

  Samuel!

  My heart shatters into a thousand pieces.

  The girl slowly withdraws her hands from her face. It is clear now, washed clean by her tears. “Sam asked me to tell you that he knows you were on your way and that he’s waiting for you. He can see you. He can see me too.”

  The girl gets to her feet, takes a deep breath, and jumps with a ballerina’s grace into the dark, star-studded water lapping against the base of the rock. She propels herself with powerful strokes down, ever deeper, toward the dreaming shadowy spirits.

  Then I see something else, another shadow, emerge from the darkness and, with movements reminiscent of a mermaid or a siren, swim silently in the direction of the girl. I kneel down in the swaying boat and try to shout, “Go away! Leave her alone!” at the shadow. I see the floating figure reach for the child’s foot and drag it down toward itself, snaring the girl’s calves in long, dark fingers. Long strands of hair wind themselves like creepers around the child. I see the girl contorting and twitching, but the figure simply entangles her even more firmly, and then the two of them sink down into the dark depths.

  The child doesn’t attempt to break free. She gazes up at me, just as my father did while he was sinking into the sea all those years ago, with his eyes open, looking at me as the deep enveloped him. And I did nothing. Nothing.

  My heart screams with fear, but I have to do it. I breathe in and dive headfirst into the sea. The water is cold, salty, and familiar. Down in the silent depths something is waiting for me. It raises its head and watches me as I attempt to plunge after the child.

  The first cramp I feel in my calf is the cold clasp of a hand. I feel the tug of the undertow, pulling me out into the Atlantic and its thousands of miles of unbroken water.

  The girl gazes at me and I can see her face and her sea-blue eyes merging into the waters beneath her. She has a look of desperation on her face, as if she cannot believe that it is not as she thought it would be. She seems to want to head back to the tiny dot of light above us and above the waves. My lungs and my head are burning. My pulse is hammering against my skull.

  A second bout of cramp. I won’t have enough strength. I dive and dive, and when I can no longer feel my feet, my legs, my lower body, and my face, the creature that is holding the child in an iron grip and dragging it downward turns to face me—and I recognize her.

  Her gaze is a blinking light in the darkness. A moment later I feel the pull. I’m incapable of following them any farther. I must breathe, I must return to the light! Only for a second and then I’ll try again. Again and again!

  I swim up and now I can discern the brightness playing on the surface. My lungs are ready to burst. I need air. I’ll reach the surface any second now. I stretch out my arms, give one last powerful kick with my legs, expending the last of my strength. In a second I’ll be able to take a breath, my fingers are already breaking through the waves…and then they hit a glass barrier.

  Panic! Desperately I try not to open my mouth, but I still do, I can’t help it, I need air. But I swallow only sea, the sea pours into me.

  Help me, Eddie, I beg you!

  Eddie

  Wilder wants me to be part of his world. He discusses his writing and shows his manuscripts to me. He’s introduced me to his mother, a woman who adores professing her love with gestures as well as words—the latter on their own would be too little. She loves to iron her son’s shirts and cook for him. She tells him how beautiful and polite she thinks I am and showers praise on his most recent book. Certain people can add a touch of love to everything they do, as if they’ve tucked it into a small envelope and quietly slipped it to you with a cheeky grin.

  I let him take me along wherever he goes. Sometimes I even forget that I have a life of my own. I bask in his reflected glory and find it intoxicating to accompany him to the kind of get-togethers I’ve always shunned: parties thrown by publishers with five-story headquarters on the Victoria Embankment and offices in New York, Berlin, and New Delhi, and dinners with media-savvy judges and journalists whose opinions fuel nationwide debate—people who live grander, glitzier lives than mine. In their company I can hide away, drink deeply from the cup of life, and find enough distraction that I don’t have time to think of Henri’s inflammation from the catheter or the newest cramp in his instep, and all the manuscripts I don’t read with the necessary care. And Sam, whom I worry about, because he’s growing up far too fast.

  I live in two separate worlds—one internal, one external. Outwardly I pretend to listen, put on my “Aha?” face, and nod when I feel it is appropriate to do so. But inside I am with Henri.

  In the street I have learned to recognize those people who are caught between two different realities. They look without seeing. They no longer perceive the beauty of the world around them, and, focusing entirely on their sorrow, they are walled up inside themselves. I seek out and hold their gaze and for an instant I forget my shame about my own mask.

  I may be physically present, but my thoughts and my feelings are at the hospital. As I take a sip of expensive chilled Sancerre white wine, with a feigned smile on my lips and my head tilted to suggest that I’m listening to the immensely sophisticated conversation, it happens: all of a sudden Henri’s there, very loud and incredibly near.

  Help me, Eddie, I beg you!

  For one magical split second, I even have the impression that I can see him. At the end of the table, over in the shadows on the other side of the room. His face is twisted into a grimace, a picture of absolute panic. He’s drumming on the glass coffin lid.

  No, Edwina. You’re so tired you’re hearing voices. Don’t pay any attention to them!

  Help me, Eddie, I beg you! A second time I hear Henri loud and clear. It has nothing to do with the wine: I’ve only just taken my first sip.

  I must get out of here right now.

  “Excuse me,” I mumble, shoving my chair backward. The legs screech on the floorboards and the chair topples over with an embarrassing crash of lacquered wood on parquet floor. On all sides of the long white-clothed table in the publisher’s spacious dining room the monologues abruptly cease. The publisher interrupts his merry anecdotes, the artist breaks off his well-considered opinions, and the critic stops making studied quips. Everyone stares at me, half expecting terrible offense to be caused, half shocked by the unfolding scene.

  Wilder, who has been engaged in a secretive conversation with his publisher about his new book, turns to me. “Everything okay, Eddie?”

  Breathe in, breathe out!

  He picks up the starched napkin that fell from my lap as I leaped to my feet. “Edwina?” he asks again, his gaze more intent now.

  I must get out of here. I place one foot in front of the other and walk out of the warm, jovial, candlelit dinner party, my bearing restrained and upright so that nobody thinks that I might be drunk or angry or crazy.

  Breathe. Breathe in, breathe out.

  The heels of my pumps echo on the floorboards because everyone’s attention is on me as I leave the room. Their eyes are burning holes in my back, and I suddenly feel overdressed.

  Out in the hallway I quicken my pace, snatch my leather jacket from the coat stand, and hurry down the stairs, feeling nothing but the smooth handrail against my palm. I’m running now.

  I can’t stand this any longer. I cannot sit next to Wilder, repeatedly glancing at my damn mobile under the table, waiting for Nurse Marion to send me her nightly status report on Henri’s pneumonia, kidneys, and fever. Every evening she announces his temperature; every evening she tells me if his position on the margins of life has changed. It hasn’t so far. But she’s three-quarters of an hour late today. What if Henri’s dead?

  As I dash down the stairs from the third floor and race through the entrance hall of the Kensington town house, I hear Wilder calling down to me over the clatter of my heels on the black-and-white t
iles.

  “Eddie?”

  I heave open the heavy eight-foot-high wooden door and, with a deep breath, suck London’s cool, roaring, fume-filled, rain-soaked air into my lungs.

  Wilder doesn’t deserve any of this. Not my lies or the fact that I get drunk when I’m with him to forget another man for a few hours. He should never be any woman’s second choice, and yet I wish that he’d take me in his arms so I might confess everything at last. Still, it has only been forty days: some women have affairs that last for years. I’ve no idea how they manage, but obviously they do.

  Help me, Wilder. No, I can’t expect that of him. Briefly I rest my finger on the host’s doorbell. I can’t see the camera, but I know it’s peering out from behind the black glass ball next to the buzzer, and that upstairs Wilder can see me.

  I hear the crackle of Wilder’s voice over the interphone. “What’s going on, Eddie?”

  “I…”

  I should let you go, but I can’t because I need your arms around me at night. I need you as my lover so I can cope with Henri. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I love you and yet I don’t love you.

  My feelings for Wilder used to be clear and pure. A fresh start, a different man, new emotions unlike those I had had for Henri. Not as fiery, not as confusing. Just good feelings. Honest feelings.

  But then Henri came back—more or less. Rather less, but still more than ever before. All of a sudden, those two sets of emotions were in conflict. Two kinds, two colors, two weight categories. Or were they?

  “Edwina?”

  “Wilder.”

  Good old Wilder. How much I love being with you. How deeply I am caught up with Henri. You do know I was never a woman for two men?

  “Would you like me to come with you?” he asks.

  His warmth. His closeness. His intelligent, warm eyes in that famous face with the laughter wrinkles that has been staring out from so many posters on bus stops since he recently won his second literary award. His hands that work such wonders with me, whatever they’re doing. A feeling of being on the same side of life. And yet…

  I stare into the fish-eye camera. In its reflection my eyes look brighter than in reality. I can see a thousand white lies in them. And that is the only reason I shake my head.

  Silence. Then Wilder says, “I’ve been through times like this. You can’t be with or behave with other people any longer. You have to get out or else you’ll choke to death or rage at everyone because you feel pressure from all sides to behave, adapt, and belong. To act properly.”

  Breathe in, Eddie, and breathe out.

  “I’ll justify it to the others as a quintessential moment of literary quirkiness. After all, they almost expect us to be peculiar!”

  My body is longing to run and move. I’m cold, but I want this cold—it’ll keep me awake and remind me to breathe.

  Wilder’s words flow out of the interphone into the darkness. “I can live without you, Edwina Tomlin, but I don’t want to. I want to go through life by your side—now, tomorrow, for as long as possible. I love you.”

  I’ll never forget this moment when, for the first time, he tells me that he loves me. He can see me as he declares his love to my image, whereas I have no idea what he looks like as he pronounces those words.

  I should now gaze at the lens and say that I love him too. It is now that he most deserves to hear it—and I the least. I kiss the index and middle fingers of my hand and silently tap the camera.

  I run and run and at some stage I take a taxi. I weep the whole way home. I hate Henri. I love Henri.

  I love Wilder. I must let him go.

  I can’t do it. I cannot bear to be alone again, without loving and being loved, without touching and being touched.

  * * *

  —

  Back home, I take my phone and sit down in Henri’s chair. I’ve taken to having a drink as covertly as I make my daily visits to the Wellington. Just a little tipple, I think, but I know I’m fooling myself, all the time. I’m struggling to keep everything together, while every thought and fiber of a different me is at the hospital, waiting to hear Henri’s voice again.

  But there’s nothing to hear. Nothing at all. I don’t know what he’s doing on the other side of that barrier of skin and silence. I hate this half-dead man. I’d kill him if he were alive.

  I call the speed dial number 1. Someone picks up after seven rings, and I hear a hoarse voice on the other end of the line.

  “Hello, Mrs. Tomlin. Can’t you sleep? Neither can Henri,” Nurse Marion says.

  He’s alive! I’m so incredibly relieved that instead of greeting Marion I start to sob.

  “What’s wrong, Mrs. Tomlin? Is everything all right? Are you crying?”

  “I thought he was dead,” I whisper when I’m finally able to speak.

  “No, no. Nowhere near. People don’t die so quickly, least of all your Henri. He’s a fighter, and he has unfinished business to take care of. It’s good that you’re thinking of him. Thoughts give patients strength too, you know. Are you still planning to come tomorrow and stay for a fortnight?”

  “Yes, of course,” I say.

  “Excellent. That’ll be good for him.”

  I don’t ask what Nurse Marion means by “unfinished business,” nor do I consider how I’m supposed to manage everything.

  Secretly redirecting phone calls from home to my mobile so Wilder doesn’t notice while he’s on his reading tour.

  Ralph, Andrea, and Poppy.

  Our books and the book fair.

  Life and death.

  Sam.

  And Madelyn.

  It feels as if I’m leaping from one stepping-stone to the next with no shore in sight. As if I have more balls in the air than I can juggle. When will I finally get there? When will I drop the first ball that brings all the others crashing down after it?

  Sam’s being very brave, and I have to make sure that I am too—for his sake. So there’s no way I’m going to tell Henri’s son that sometimes I can’t go on. But I cannot go on, I really can’t. Not one inch farther.

  I breathe in and out and then I get to my feet and carry on.

  I take another long swig of Talisker. Nurse Marion once said that she could feel that Henri was close at night, as if he were encased in a cocoon of rubber, and his vital functions seemed robust. She could determine his “sleep architecture.” Another of those expressions you learn on the brink of death: sleep architecture.

  I wish I could go back to being myself. However, for some inexplicable reason I know who I am when I’m with Henri.

  I hear footsteps coming up the spiral staircase toward me.

  “I have to go,” I say.

  Nurse Marion’s voice is urgent now. “Henri’s very restless tonight. He’s recovered from the pneumonia and all his broken bones have healed, but I’ve given him something against the pain as well as opiates to calm his anxiety. Nevertheless…he seemed very unhappy today.”

  I wish I could crawl into his world and join him.

  “It was something about his posture,” Nurse Marion continues. “I don’t know if you can understand, but over the years I’ve learned to tell how my dreamers are feeling from their position in bed. Henri was seriously unhappy, as if…I don’t know. Has something happened?”

  The footsteps are close now.

  “Eddie? Is everything all right?” Wilder stands blinking at the top of the stairs.

  “Yes, I’m having a whiskey.” I hang up and put the phone down on the table.

  He walks slowly toward me and looks me straight in the eyes. “Eddie,” he whispers once, then again, “Eddie.” He brushes a few strands of hair from my face. Lowering his voice even further, he says, “We need to talk about Henri.”

  Sam

  The stage is dark. Voices and a tinkling of glasses are audible throu
gh the theater’s closed doors. As I walk down the aisle toward the stage, past rows of red folding seats, the crystal lights on the walls begin to glow and so do the curved balconies of the boxes. I thread my way past the orchestra pit and up a small flight of stairs onto the stage, slip through a gap in the drawn curtains, and then grope my way through the dimly illuminated spaces and corridors in the wings.

  I know she’s here. I can sense her presence. Opening a door, I find myself in a dressing room. There’s a line of mirrors along the side wall, each with spotlights on both sides and a leather revolving chair in front of it. The dressing room is full of women and girls at various stages of dressing up and having their hair and makeup done. I walk past the revolving chairs. No one pays me any attention, and I’m not visible in any of the mirrors.

  Maddie’s sitting in the last chair, and a woman is combing her hair and pinning it up into a tight bun. Maddie’s wearing makeup that makes her eyes look huge.

  “Hi, Sam,” she says quietly, her gaze ricocheting off the mirror and straight into my heart.

  “Hi, Maddie,” I answer, and it’s then that I realize I’m dreaming.

  When she’s ready, the silent woman helps her put on her costume and as she steps out of the dressing room into the dark corridor, a nutcracker sprints past.

  “I’m going to dance the part of Marie,” she explains, speaking without moving her lips. “Do you know the story of The Nutcracker? Marie turns twelve, meaning she’s no longer a child but not yet a woman. She’s in between, you see, Sam—like me.”

  She scurries ahead of me along the corridor that leads to the stage. I can see she’s gasping for breath and sense the nervous flicker of her fear. The narrow corridors are never-ending, and we lose our way. She starts to run and has to flatten the airy white flounces of her tutu against her body to prevent them from scraping along the dark walls.