There was no choice but to agree with the story, although the details, as I remembered them, remained sharply-etched in my mind. I decided that there might be reasons why the various authorities would go to some length to keep the whole case quiet. I decided that I would go along with their explanation, although I resented their approach: all that I required was for somebody to say that I was not mistaken, albeit that it couldn’t be officially admitted.
After my release from hospital I moved back with my mother to our old family house in Edgeware. She nursed me unfailingly, and from the outset I knew how wrong I had been to blame her for Corrina’s death. She had lost weight and a great deal of her spirit since the accident. I burst into tears when I saw the photo of me and Corrina framed by her bedside. Holding her responsible was too easy; if I had not found an excuse, my mother would not have been driving Corrina to work the morning she hit black ice and crashed.
My father visited several times. On his first evening we were alone in the front room and I made reference to Hopper, Candy and The Dark Return of Time. When he appeared to be confused by my remarks I pressed him, giving specific details; dates and addresses. But still he insisted that nothing of what I claimed had ever happened. He was my one potential ally, but he refused to help me.
When I had recovered ninety percent of my health I told my mother that I wished to visit Paris. She didn’t know why, but my father did. He sent me photographs of rue Andre Gill and the south side of the rue St Vincent. Although the streets looked familiar, neither Candy’s building nor Hopper’s house seemed to be standing. Of course, where Candy lived had been destroyed by fire and would have been rebuilt, but where Hopper’s house should have been there appeared to be tall trees and a wild garden.
Nevertheless, I insisted on travelling to Paris, and my mother was adamant that she would accompany me. Together, on a brilliantly blue summer day, we flew from Heathrow to Charles de Gaulle airport. It was strange being back in the city; the familiarity of it all seemed to validate specific memories that others wanted to deny.
When we were unpacked, my mother and I walked over to Bennett’s British Bookshop and I found it almost completely unchanged. As I wandered around the shelves I recognised more than half of the stock, and the books on the poetry shelf did not appear to have altered at all since I had re-arranged them nearly three years before. I was seeking evidence, but it was not to be found: in the crime section, although there were several books by Ruth Rendell, there was no first American edition of A Demon in my View.
We ate at the café in Le Bateau-Lavoir. It was a mixture of Parisians and tourists and was busy but friendly. We did not talk about what had happened to me, but reminisced about the days when we had all lived together in the house in Edgeware. It was another existence that we discussed, made all the more remote by geographical distance.
‘You had a happy childhood, didn’t you?’ asked my mother, and I was upset to see in her eyes just how much she craved that reassurance. I told her that I had.
My father paid the Patron with the startling beard, and we parted in the tree-filled, prettily-illuminated square. It was a beautiful night, and I told my mother that we could go back to the hotel by walking down the rue Des Saules. She was chattering away, as she often does after a few glasses of wine, and was content to let me take her along rue St Vincent.
I stopped outside Hopper’s house and took out of my pocket the photograph my father had sent me. My eyesight wasn’t good, but I had studied the photo before and knew that somebody had done a very professional job of taking the house out of the image and replacing it with trees. With modern technology anything image can be faked, but there, in rue St Vincent, the evidence was before me. My mother was becoming tiresome, though. She wasn’t interested. She wanted to know whether it was a private or public garden in front of us, and pointing upwards she asked if the birds were crows, rooks or ravens. It was as though she couldn’t see what was before her very eyes.
Contents
Contents
Publication Information
THE DARK RETURN OF TIME
PART ONE I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
PART TWO I
II
III
EPILOGUE
The Dark Return of Time Page 12
