A Dream of Wessex

by Christopher Priest

  Colin Willment was speaking at the moment, describing the last few weeks in Wessex. Normally, Julia would listen to the others’ reports with interest, but today her mind was elsewhere.

  It was still Paul who was distracting her. It frightened her to think that he might have more emotional trapdoors to open under her, but she was calmer now, better able to cope.

  For the moment there was equilibrium. Paul was to join the projection, and she had inner strengths to draw on.

  Colin finished his verbal report in a few minutes, and Mary Rickard followed. Julia knew her turn would come, and so she thought more directly about what she would say. She wanted nothing inadvertent to slip out, especially about David, nothing that would give Paul any more information about her part in the projection than he already had.

  Part of the difficulty was that Don, Mary and Colin were present. How much should be stated, how much remain private?

  Julia wondered if her interest in David’s alter ego was already known to them. Matters of this sort trickled into the consciousness. She knew, for instance, that Colin Willment was ‘married’ in Wessex, just as he was married in reality. She knew also, although she had never been told, that his projected wife was quite different from his real wife.

  It was something she understood on an instinctive level, and one she felt honour-bound not to explore further.

  So although the other participants would already have an inkling that something was developing between her and Harkman, Julia saw no reason to talk about it. If it was being assimilated on an unconscious level, why accelerate the process by drawing attention to it now?

  She waited while Mary talked, not listening to her but organizing her thoughts and memories. Paul was still watching.

  Then John Eliot said: ‘Julia, since we’re interested in David Harkman at the moment, and you were trying to locate him, perhaps you could report next.’

  She hadn’t realized that Mary had finished. She sat forward in her chair, trying to look as if she had been following what she had said.

  ‘Miss Stretton,’ Eliot said to Paul, ‘is the geologist in the team.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Paul said. ‘We’re old friends.’

  It came so unexpectedly, and was said in such an off-hand manner, that for a moment or two Julia hardly realized that Paul had thrown the hand-grenade whose pin he had removed that morning. But she had had time to recover from that surprise, and as the bomb landed she was able to pick it up and toss it back.

  ‘Well, hardly old friends,’ she said, and affected a light laugh. ‘It seems we were at university together. Quite a coincidence really.’

  Mary, sitting next to Julia, said unexpectedly: ‘Mr Mason, you know there’s a rule we have in the project? We discourage relationships outside the projection.’

  ‘Mary, you’re embarrassing Julia,’ Don Mander said.

  ‘Not at all,’ Julia said, suddenly aware that Mary at least had revealed where her loyalties lay. ‘We’re almost strangers to each other. I didn’t recognize Mr Mason until he introduced himself.’

  Eliot, who had been looking from Paul to Julia, seemed relieved by the casual tone of her answer.

  ‘Go on, Julia ... tell us about David Harkman.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell.’ She was trying to avoid thinking of the consequences of what had just happened. Paul had tried to carry out his threat, and it had failed. Would he try again? What would he do next?

  ‘I think I’d been in the projection a fortnight before Harkman appeared,’ she said, talking, making words. ‘You know that the stall is on the harbour, and one evening…’

  She was talking too quickly, trying to get her story out. The censor she had invoked stayed in place, but she was embellishing her report with too many irrelevant details. She didn’t want to seem as if thrown off-balance by Paul, or anyone, and it was a relief to speak of the thing she knew best. By the time she had been talking for about five minutes she was more in control of herself, and kept her story factual and to the point. She described meeting Harkman outside the skimmer-shop, and the next day when he visited the Castle. She described where Harkman was known to be living and working, where the retrievers would have their best chance of finding him. After this, she talked about Tom Benedict, and what had happened to him.

  If the others were aware of the tension she felt they did not show it. They listened with interest, asking occasional questions.

  But Paul was silent, sitting opposite her. He was leaning back in his chair, with his legs crossed, and all the time she was talking his hard eyes never once turned away from her.

  seventeen

  The meeting lasted all day. In the evening, as they walked along the corridor to the dining-room, Paul fell in beside her. John Eliot and Mander were a few yards ahead of them; Mary and Colin walked a few paces behind.

  Paul said: ‘I want a word with you.’

  She stared ahead, trying not to acknowledge him.

  Each table was set for four, and Julia headed for the one she had used at lunchtime. Paul followed, and sat at the same table. John Eliot saw this, and came over to them.

  ‘I expect you two have a lot in common,’ he said, smiling at Julia.

  ‘Old college days,’ Paul said. ‘Which year did you take your finals, Miss Stretton?’

  As Eliot went over to sit at another table with Mander, Julia said softly. ‘You can drop the pretence, Paul. I’m going to tell them.’

  ‘What? Everything? You wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Everything they need to know. I’m not the only one who doesn’t want you here.’

  ‘Tell them whatever you like. Suits me. Are you going to tell them about the money?’

  ‘What money?’ Julia said at once.

  ‘The fifty quid you owe me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ A movement by the door caught her eye, and she turned away from him, her face reddening. It was Marilyn, and Julia waved to her to come to the table.

  Julia went through the motions of introducing her to Paul, but inside she felt a deep, familiar dread. She knew which fifty pounds Paul meant, but it didn’t matter. Not now.

  Paul said to Marilyn: ‘You’ve just saved Julia from an old debt. She owes me fifty pounds.’

  Marilyn laughed. ‘I thought you two had only just met!‘

  ‘He’s joking,’ Julia said, and forced a laugh of her own.

  One day they’d had a row. Why it was that day and that row didn’t matter ... it was just one of dozens. Paul had won an office sweep, and he had come in from work brandishing the winnings. He was talking big in those days, wanted to set up on his own. Julia - it felt like a different Julia now - had spent the day job-hunting, was tired and bitter. An argument had started, the row developed. At the end, Julia had snatched the money from where he’d put it, stormed out of the flat. Stupidly, stupidly, she lost her purse, and with it went the money and her door key. Afterwards, he would only let her in after she wept and knelt outside the door, and he’d pushed her on the bed and possessed her violently. There was a parting shot, there always was with Paul: the worst fifty quid’s worth he’d had. That week.

  Later he told the story for laughs, changing the facts to suit his own vanity. He always told the story in her presence, always got his laugh. After that, whenever money was mentioned, any money, he always somehow equated it with sex.

  The surface of the dining-table was deep-grained, dark- polished wood, and Julia stared at the rush place-mat in front of her, shifting it with her fingers and making the cutlery tinkle. Paul was talking in a friendly way to Marilyn, the fifty pounds wasn’t being mentioned.

  She had never paid it back, never got round to it. She was always broke in the old days, and since then, since leaving Paul, she had put it out of her mind. She could pay it back now, pay it back twenty times and hardly miss it ... but that wasn’t the point. If she offered it to him he would refuse it; if she didn’t he would never let her forget. But of course it wasn’t the money itse
lf. It had become a symbolic debt, the repayment that was due for walking out on him.

  But then, as had happened during the afternoon, Julia felt her spirits rallying.

  The debt was one she did not acknowledge; the money was irrelevant, and if she had ever done one thing in her life she never regretted it was leaving Paul.

  While the first course was being served, Julia noticed Paul eyeing Marilyn’s body. She was a bigger, more bosomy, girl than Julia, .and this evening she was wearing a skinny-thin sweater without a bra. Paul would like that, Paul had a thing about breasts. Even in that he had tried to make her feel inadequate; he used to point out other girls to her, and complain that she was too thin and round-shouldered.

  Her spirits were still high: it suddenly occurred to’ her that the only remaining vulnerabilities were petty and unimportant. A small sum of money, her bust-measurement: were these all that Paul could threaten her with?

  Her sardonic amusement must have revealed itself on her face, because Marilyn suddenly looked away from Paul and grinned at her.

  ‘Do you feel like going out for a drink this evening?’ she said to her.

  Julia shook her head. ‘No ... I’d better stay in. I’ve got to write my report tonight.’

  Paul said nothing, but Julia saw him looking towards her. He was wearing a broad, false smile, and he winked lewdly at her. Marilyn, looking round for some butter, didn’t see. It seemed to be a pointless thing to do.

  Julia said very little during the meal, and as soon as she had had her dessert she excused herself from the table. She went across to John Eliot, who was still eating.

  ‘Dr Eliot, I’d like to rejoin the projection as soon as possible. Can it be tomorrow evening?’

  ‘You’ll be going to Tom’s funeral?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m not sure. You’ve only just been retrieved. We really should leave it for three days.’

  What’s the hurry, Julia?’ Don Mander said.

  ‘No hurry. I feel I’m wasting time here, and the projection is weak at the moment. Even Andy and Steve are out.’

  Eliot said: ‘We’ll need a written report from you, and - ’

  ‘I’m going to my room to do it now. Look, I’m perfectly fit. I’ve got a feeling I’m the only person who can get David Harkman back, and I want to try. We’ve wasted all day talking, and the one thing we should be worrying about is David. How can he have developed resistance to the mirrors?’

  ‘We were just discussing that. Don thinks that Steve must have made a mistake.’

  ‘Then that’s what we’ve got to find out,’ Julia said. ‘When will he and Andy be ready for another try?’

  ‘In two or three days.’

  ‘I want to be in Wessex before then. You made him my responsibility.’

  She turned away from their table before they could answer. Paul and Marilyn were at their table, and she walked past them quickly. She saw Marilyn turn, but she didn’t look back.

  Her room had been cleaned during the day, and the mess she had made in the bathroom had been tidied up. It was cold, so she lit the gas-fire then sat on the floor in front of it, staring at the orange-glowing radiants. Her nails had grown while she was inside the projector, and so she found her scissors and file and began reshaping them, deliberately not thinking about the day.

  When the room had warmed she cleared a space on the table, then set up her portable typewriter and a light.

  She worked for two hours, trying to present an objective account of all she had seen and done in Wessex. The verbal accounts were useful, but their effectiveness was limited to those people who heard them. The written reports were the only way of communicating with the other participants.

  And that reminded her that she had her own reading to do: several reports would have accumulated in the last three weeks. She would have to go over to Salisbury in the morning for the funeral, and she would see if she could travel in Marilyn’s car, and read them on the way.

  In her report she described David Harkman’s projected appearance in detail; they knew where he was for the moment, but there was never any certainty they wouldn’t lose him again. The description was important. She remembered the pallid, waxen David Harkman she had seen in the mortuary before she went to Wessex last time, and the difference she had seen in the man she met. Pale, yes, but from working in offices, not from the weird half-life of the projector. She thought of the slim, muscular body riding the skimmer, and the easy, athletic walk across the quay.

  She also described the disappearance of Tom Benedict in as much detail as she could recall; this was difficult, because the amnesia she had suffered directly afterwards had made the incident vague. She remembered his hand holding hers under the sheet; she remembered the cool white ward, and the officious woman with the child.

  There were the same omissions in this written report as she had made in the afternoon. Feelings, mostly, and hopes. She wrote about the affinity she had detected with David Harkman, and with Tom Benedict, the sense of recognition when Andy had held the mirror before her eyes ... but this was well known to them all. What she omitted were the things that mattered to her, that were as private to her as the whole projection was to them all. Moments like those few seconds on the quayside when she had seen David Harkman walking towards her, and she’d caught her breath and felt her nipples hardening under the coarse fabric of her dress. Or down at the creek when she had agreed to go to David’s room, with Greg a short distance away ... and she had seen Greg falter in his stride, she had made Greg look away until she could agree.

  To write of Wessex was to be reminded of it, even if for her it was only a partial account. It was always like this. In the hours following a return, one’s real life intersected with the projection, and memories became confused.

  Wessex became an obsession, a waking dream, a constant yearning. It had given her the first real function in life, and Wessex had become her first reality.

  All that went before Wessex seemed like a half-hearted rehearsal for an improvised play. Wessex was the play, and it dominated her personality as a strong character will dominate a good actor.

  Only Paul, and all that he stood for, had as powerful an influence on her. And that had been a destructive, selfish influence; it was right that she should put it behind her.

  Wessex was real, and it seduced her, in the same way that Paul had once seduced her. It grew around her, adapting to her personality. It was an unconscious wish come true, an extension of her own identity that totally embraced her; the perfect lover.

  She stared at the sheet of typewritten paper, thinking how the words only described the surface-qualities of the experience. It was true what John Eliot had said that morning; the reports were no longer observations of anything functional to the project. Now the true experiences were held back, recycled through the unconscious to the further enrichment of the projection.

  Like a genuine and deeply felt relationship, the fundamental truths need never be stated.

  Julia decided she had finished her report, so she turned the last sheet out of the typewriter and separated it from the carbon-copy. She read it through, making a few small corrections, then laid it aside.

  It was still fairly early in the evening, and she wondered for a moment if she should look for the others. They had probably gone into Dorchester for a drink. But Paul would be with them, and anyway the months inside the projection had taken away her taste for alcohol and cigarettes.

  She tidied the desk, then went into the bathroom and undressed and washed. Afterwards, wearing her dressing-gown, she sat again on the mat in front of the gas-fire and stared blankly into the flames. She wished she had a pack of cards; she felt like a game of patience.

  Then the door opened and closed, and Paul was there.

  eighteen

  Julia said: ‘Paul, go away.’

  He walked across the room, sat down in the armchair. ‘I thought I’d drop in to say goodnight. We haven’t had much chance to talk today.�
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  ‘I’ve nothing to say to you. I told you this morning: I’ve finished with you for good. I’m happy now.’

  ‘So you say. That isn’t what John Eliot says about you.’

  A trout snaps at bait without knowing what it is; Julia recognized it, couldn’t resist it. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He thinks you’re over-tired. Been projecting too long. He wants you to take long leave.’

  ‘Paul, you’re lying.’ She closed her eyes, turned her face away. ‘For God’s sake, get out! ‘

  She heard him tap a cigarette against the side of a packet, then a match struck. When she looked back at him he was holding the match vertically so that the flame burned high. He blew it out with a long funnel of smoke, then flicked the match with his nail so that the black end flew away. He always did that, and she wondered how many thousands of times he had done it in the six years she hadn’t seen him.

  ‘Do you have an ash-tray?’ he said, curling the match in his fingers.

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  He dropped the match on the carpet. ‘Such will-power. You used to smoke more than me.’

  ‘Paul, I don’t know what you’re doing in here, nor what you want, but it isn’t going to work. I don’t want you here, I don’t want you in the project, I never want to see you again! ‘

  ‘The same old paranoia,’ he said. ‘I’m handy to have around, aren’t I? Without me you’d have no one to blame for your shortcomings.’

  She moved so that she turned her back towards him. Where were the inner strengths she had found during the day? Had they been a delusion?