by A. S. Byatt
Two or three nights later she heard the same sound and found him again, tear-soaked in a lit room. The next night she was woken by different sounds, scrabbling, a heavy thump. She listened for sobbing, but there was none. Instead, she heard Marcus’s feet padding on his floor, and then heard his window pushed open. She went to her own window, in the dark, and saw, in the dark garden, Marcus’s square of light on asphalt and black lawn. Then she saw his shadow move on the light and was afraid he meant to jump, or would fall, from the window. But he padded back again, and the light went out. She heard him going cautiously downstairs. She went back to the window and stared into the dark. After a time she made out, at the garden gate, a still hunched figure, rain-coated, waiting, white-faced in moonlight. She waited and watched. Marcus, carrying his shoes, came in stockinged feet across the flowerbeds, a hump or burden silhouetted on his shoulders. Without waiting, touching or speaking the two figures wheeled away into the dark. She went through into her brother’s room. The bed was neatly made, a Biggles book, Biggles in Moonlight, beside the bed. Nothing else. No paper, open drawers nor pyjamas cast aside. The fear that he was sleepwalking persisted queerly in her mind. It was apparent to reason that he was not; that there had been a preconceived signal, a meeting, for which he had been ready.
She did not hear him come back, but in the morning, a little ghastly, he was at breakfast. He drank tea and ate nothing. She said nothing.
Lucas Simmonds’s invention and generalship had blossomed variously and extravagantly. All moments of Marcus’s consciousness, and of his own, were as far as possible docketed and recorded: dreams, visions, periods of meditation, encounters, so that any unexpectedly frequent coincidence could be isolated and concentrated on. They did not know, he observed frequently, where the field of experiment exactly was, so they must cast their net as wide as possible, and make the mesh as small and as diverse in design as possible, so that nothing at all that might be a sign or a message should slip through their clutches.
To someone already harassed by a combination of total recall and uncannily glittering or menacing objects-with-meanings, this could have been, and in many ways was, a covert form of torture. Days he had been able to make into ordered geometric webs of cross-referencing, black and white grids of threaded thoughts that were safe to think as pavement cracks were safe to walk on, now became technicoloured phantasmagoria of carpets, bicycles, laurel bushes, weather cocks, policemen, angels, airmen, all of whom, blue-black, gilded, hyacinthine, glossy-spotted green, might have been heavenly messengers, infernal portents, symbols of the divine Pattern which, stared at, would yield to the naked eye, to his, Marcus’s, stereoscopic visionary eye, their necessary internal structures or simple messages, pullulating with coded forms, molecular, genetic, thermodynamic, which, like burning bush and God’s hinder parts, would speak the keys to eternal truths by which he, Lucas Simmonds, Blesford, Calverley, England, and who knew what else, might be, would be, transfigured and illuminated.
There was, it was true, some form of protection from the horrid brilliance or vanishing deeps of these things and figures in the very fact of having to write them down. Compulsive record-keeping was a partial substitute for the geometric elegances which had protected him from things seen and unseen, before Lucas. Writing about, or even drawing things, neutralised or earthed them in a way Marcus suspected Simmonds could not know, since he suspected that for Simmonds these things had no life or significance before they were set down on paper. Simmonds could draw, professionally, with exquisite scaled detail that made Marcus’s crude mnemonics, gesticulating stick-men, mapped sides of beef or washbasin vortices, look like the scrabbling or urgent invocations of some primitive creature long before Lascaux.
There were two or three days when they both saw significance in the movements of flocks of starlings which whizzed and chittered and flowed across the mussel-shell and pearly skies of that changeable Easter. Marcus tried to pattern with dots and hopping Vs the way the creatures came and went. Simmonds produced a Peter Scott-like colourwashed vision of a realistic flock of birds wheeling against a bank of marestail clouds on a vermilion and speedwell sky. They were quite excited by these drawings as a tracing of Marcus’s flight-paths, rescaled, slid over Lucas’s image to make a complete wheel of Marcus’s interlocking funnel pattern. Lucas lent Marcus a book on the social behaviour of the starling. Marcus watched starlings, shimmering and jerking in the Far Field, stretching and snapping elastic worms, and wished to be let off.
At the same time he embarked on a detailed investigation of Marcus’s visionary, or psycho-somatic, or spiritual history. This entailed a manner very different from the nervously questing attempts to partake of Marcus’s vision. During these investigating sessions they sat on each side of a table. Marcus related what came into his memory, and Lucas wrote it down. In this way he elicited a detailed description of the spreading, the mathematical landscape, Ophelia and the broken wreaths, the forbidden aspects of certain articles of plumbing and architecture, the closing graph-paper cage of ether and asthma.
Marcus did not exactly like Lucas’s manner during these interrogations, as he secretly thought of them. Trusting anyone was for him such an unaccustomed experience that he tried to make it total, to accept this one authority as he had rejected all others. There were other reasons for trust, which will be described later. He accepted the marked shifts in Lucas’s personality as a probable necessity of the new discipline, or of being close to anyone which he had always avoided. Had he thought about this, which he did not, he might have concluded that he was used to mercurial shifts of shape and temperament from living with Bill. He was in any case no judge of personality, and had no precise words to label the shifts with.
He saw the differences as different faces. The geometrical-meditation Lucas-face was a rounded square, with ruffled pale hair curling and flaming from it cheerily, large eyes, and a variegated and animated mouth, usually open, but not fixed in length or angle. It was a red face, and drops of sweat shone on it. The interrogation face was considerably longer, darker, browner, more fixed, with a pursed blob of mouth, narrowed eyes, slicker darker hair and a general air of contemptuous anger. The first Lucas pleaded to be told what he saw. The second barked imperious gnomic questions, tapped teeth perpetually with a pencil, and answered little more than “hmn” or a faintly Germanic “So” to offered information. This second Lucas occasionally asked about Bill or Winifred, or whether he remembered his birth, or if he had “fantasies” or “experimented with himself.” He got, Marcus assumed, little joy of these questions, since Marcus chose not to talk about relationships, presented a blank face of incomprehension when asked about them, and since Lucas himself would not be more explicit about the nature of the fantasies or experiments he wanted to know about, Marcus was able to assume a bland innocence, or ignorance, when the subject arose. This increased the acidity in the tone of interrogatory-Lucas, who appeared to believe Marcus was being wilfully naughty. Occasional skirmishes on this topic usually ended with the resumption of some other, more acceptable Lucas-face, so Marcus provoked and stonewalled them, as he came to understand the game, with increasing skill.
There was a third Lucas – at least a third – whose presence considerably complicated the activities of the other two. This one first appeared when they had been having trouble with a series of shared pictures of mown grass, which could not have happened accidentally – two people in March do not, as Lucas excitedly pointed out, do not both see fields of hay lying every which way unless it’s meant. If not accidental, they were nevertheless resistant to interpretation or development, and finally Lucas declared they were tired and could have tea. Tea-making Lucas, and later coffee and cocoa-making Lucas, were the third face, cheery, normal, cocked attentively for gossip, solicitous and gentle. This Lucas provided huge sticky fruit cakes, cucumber and sardine sandwiches, toasted teacakes and chat to match. Barrow Minor’s acne, VE’s shocking O Level prospects, the bad moral influence of Edmund Wilkie, the laxnes
s, in these latter days of his incipient fame, of Alexander Wedderburn. Cosseting, gossip and affection, he offered Marcus, honey, milk, apples and nuts, a kind of perpetual smiling beano which later extended into a dormitory feast.
This extension was because of the mastery of time and space. At first, as Lucas took Marcus’s days in hand, his nights got worse. If there was something comforting about sharing his troubles about untouchable objects, especially when the sharing was followed by tea and crumpets, he paid for this with nightmares. Some of these he told, like the one in which he had been set spinning, in the centre of space, and flowing from his fingers had been spun threads which made him into a swastika, then into a mechanized cocoon, at the centre of a looser web which both held space together and stifled him. Others, like the one in which he was hanging most painfully wrong way up from a tall steel nail and was about to be able to rise, again and again, and again and again was beaten down by Lucas, he did not tell. Lucas said adverse influences were attempting to break through at night as they put the days increasingly under control. Lucas said discipline, self-control, were the answer to almost everything. Marcus must learn to wake himself at regular frequent intervals, to prevent anything, or anyone, controlling his valuable consciousness without his consent. When he woke himself, he must write down what he had been dreaming. Marcus tried this. He woke to find himself wet with tears, and worse, and physically prevented from lifting a finger to write anything. He dreamed of vessels, retorts, beakers, decanters, full of liquids spirituous and volatile, which exploded, smoked and splashed. Lucas got excited again and claimed that he too had dreamed of glass containers, but that they had remained stable and filled up slowly. He said that if they watched at night, as they watched in the day, they could gain control … Marcus dreamed of a peacock, shrieking hideously, banging a glass container on a rock like a thrush with a snail. Lucas said that was very hopeful indeed, that was really very hopeful, he was quite sure that the peacock was some kind of alchemical symbol, that maybe the cracking glass was the egg breaking. Marcus said thrushes killed snails and ate them. Lucas said that Marcus was like a snail, he hid in himself and would not look out at the world only he could see, dammit. Marcus said that snails that looked out got eaten even faster than dormant ones. He produced a pale smile after this almost-joke, and Lucas said, “Good old chap, keep your pecker up, and I’ll be at your garden gate tonight as sure as eggs is eggs and retorts is retorts, and we’ll watch and pray together and come through, you see if we don’t.”
The first night, Lucas’s spattering stones on the window coincided with the explosion in Marcus’s head of a tun of dark vinous stuff which clouded everything, when let out, like octopus-ink. He got up in a hurry and rushed blindly out in raincoat and pyjamas, cannoning into his friend, who put out a hand and steadied him. Marcus was mad.
“Don’t do that. Don’t ever make a noise like that again. Don’t ever crash like that, or I’ll … If you can’t think me awake, or vice versa, the whole thing’s no good.” Lucas patted his chest, his shoulder, his upper arm, and made soothing and apologetic noises. He walked Marcus back to the school across the dark Far Field, steadying his weaving steps where it was uneven, ushering him, gripping his arm, into the dark channel beyond the railway bridge behind the Masters’ Garden. He gabbled excitedly into Marcus’s ear that the Far Field was indeed a field of force, he had felt it distinctly himself, he was sure the earth moved.
When they came to the cloistered Pantheon, where there were lights, he let go Marcus abruptly, and passed his hands several times through his hair, pushing it into its sunny aspect. He opened various glass doors with keys and trotted along dark corridors, past the familiar formitories and vermitoriums, finally opening the door into his own little brightly hot bedroom, placed in the opposite turret to Alexander’s, furnished not dissimilarly, but set out with Simmonds’s own pictures and things. These included several rather well-made photographs of ships at sea, furrows following free, and several others of sea-gulls in ploughed fields, a large dim print of Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross, in the position over the hearth where Alexander’s Danaide crouched, two glass tanks of newts and Canadian pond-weed, and a reproduction of a Tibetan mandala in a museum in Durham. The room smelled sporty, an intrinsic smell of rubber soles, sweaty socks and shirts, damp wool and mud which was so familiar to both of them that neither remarked it, but Marcus was subconsciously reassured by it. In front of the hearth Simmonds had a Swedish woven rag rug in jolly primary colours, scarlet, lemon, Cambridge blue. In his chairs he had rather small hard square cushions in the same colours, but different cloths. They were clearly chosen to match the rug, or vice versa, and the match was unsuccessful enough to trigger off a perceptual disturbance in Marcus, who kept glancing from one to the other in an attempt to find some relationship of balance or tone between them, though they were too similar for any discordia concors, if not similar enough to be easy on the eye. This problem was temporarily eliminated when Simmonds, in order to create a homely or intimate atmosphere, switched off all the lights but one, a large table-lamp made from a carboy with a dark honey-coloured shade embellished with swarms of little commas, or organisms, or curved pins, in black, which swirled in aspiring tear-shaped clouds towards the upper rim which they never touched. This lamp made a pool of dark yellow light on the hearth and reduced the cushions to shadows of colour. Simmonds sat in the hearth, where he had a gas-ring, and made cocoa, producing milk from an earthenware cooler, water from a kettle, mugs and spoons. He gave Marcus chocolate digestive biscuits and urged him to keep his strength up. He took off his own macintosh and flannels and was discovered to be in striped pyjamas: he wrapped himself in a manly navy-blue dressing-gown and offered Marcus a blanket to throw round his shoulders. While they drank the cocoa he talked: about the photographs, and his experiences in the Navy, a meandering series of reminiscences about machine-oil, comradeship, discipline in small spaces, the contrasting vastness of the night sky, the majesty of floating icebergs, the horror of seal clubbing, the community of penguins, the force behind the adaptation of organisms to extremes of heat or cold, the human skill involved in inventing hulls of ships to sail under ice. Marcus, drowsed by the fire, the rug wrapped round him, the hot cocoa and the effect of attention, nodded and jerked awake. Simmonds observed this, and was all solicitude. Marcus should curl up in his bed, in his bedroom, just curl up and sleep. He, Simmonds, would watch, would watch him, would wake him if he showed any sign of agitation that might betoken a dream, would record it for him, and in this way they would fulfill their duties, the requirements of their task, and Marcus would be safe and rested. It didn’t matter about himself. He would sleep it off later, would pop into bed when he had seen Marcus home. It was the holidays, he had nothing to do, he could afford it. He would get Marcus up at dawn and see him back across Far Field. They would see the dawn come up together, that would be nice, and maybe illuminating, strictly illuminating, in view of the position the Sun held in the Plan, its loose entelechy, the moment of mystery there had always been for Man at the point of his first daily contact with it, so strange and familiar, didn’t Marcus think? Marcus did not think, he nodded and swayed, and Lucas took him by the shoulders and propelled him into the bedroom, watching intently as he climbed into the narrow bed and curled his body into its usual knot, in the hole left by Lucas’s body, earlier, in the sheets.
Here, he dropped off immediately. Dropped off was an accurate description; he felt himself plummeting pleasantly through feathered dark down and down, in a kind of free fall that he knew, safe in that dark, was a dream suspension which would have no event, no end. Usually, when he found himself in dreams wrong way up he was tormented by intermittent intellectual assessments of his situation, the realisation that he was unprovided with moscan equipment or suckers for roof-walking, that there must be a hard bottom to the well or funnel he was descending so casually. But here he felt safe. When he woke to Lucas’s dawn-shaking, he was informed almost grumpily that he ha
d slept so sweetly that Lucas had seen no cause for disturbing him. But that it was to be hoped that they would do better on a subsequent occasion.
As, of course, they did. So well, that Marcus began to suffer seriously from sleeplessness. Like Lucas’s other ministrations the providing of warmth, cocoa and bed turned out to exacerbate problems akin to those from which he offered temporary shelter or relief. If the firm grasp of Lucas’s hand under his elbow guided him in one piece, neither spread, nor shattered, nor very much afraid, across Far Field; if, concentrating on the intellectually tiring and frequently pointless or obfuscating spiritual exercises, he was no more invaded by seas of light or supersonic trumpets, a series of methodically broken nights, no matter how lovingly accompanied by material sustenance and spiritual cheerfulness, began to act on him like nights in a brainwashing cell. There was a cold, harsh light behind his eyeballs, even in the dark. He saw stars, not celestial, but physiological. He heard rushing winds, not Aeolian, but like radio interference crackling in his proper eardrums. What do you see, What do you see, the various voices wheedled, sang, threatened, begged, warmly awaited. Nothing, he hoped to be able to answer, and in his soft sleep honourably could. But the soft sleeps were so short.
So it was that Stephanie found him the third time, spreadeagled on the stairs at five in the morning, his face wet as before, his shoes and socks glistening with dew and slivers of grass beneath his pyjama-legs. Her first thought was to get him out of the way of Bill. Her second was that he now was scarecrow thin. She shook his shoulder, gently. He said, no, no, no, no, no, on a rising protest, and began to judder and jerk, all over, so that she had to grab both his armpits to prevent him falling downstairs. He began to mutter:
