That morning however, all was quiet. Daniel walked along past closed and shuttered shop-fronts, dismayed by the lack of life and activity. Was it a holiday of some kind? Did that make a difference? It was only when he had walked as far as the jeweller’s and, nosing casually through the glass, caught sight of the time on a large carriage clock in the window that he realised what was wrong. It was only eight-thirty.
In all his days living in Green Lanes he had never been up at that time, never walked along Green Lanes before ten o’clock at the earliest, and consequently had never seen the place asleep. He could not help but find it amusing, a revealing comment on what used to be his unconventional lifestyle.
Rather than return home Daniel decided to continue walking for a while. He made no specific decisions but just wandered where his fancy took him. By nine o’clock he found himself a couple of miles up the road in Wood Green. As he walked he became increasingly aware of a difference in his mood. The cool morning air seemed to hone his senses, and he felt clear-headed and awake; not particularly happy or especially depressed; just clear.
In contrast to Green Lanes, Wood Green High Street was wide awake and ready for business. With nothing better to do, Daniel walked into W. H. Smith and, heading for the magazine racks, began studying the titles. Although nothing in particular caught his eye, he was drawn to the brightly coloured front covers.
However, after ten minutes of gazing at the various titles - studiously avoiding anything connected with photography - he became bored and made his way upstairs to the book department, where he found himself altogether more interested in what was on offer.
It had been a long time since Daniel had browsed in a bookshop, but he found himself suffused with a warm, familiar pleasure as he started to eye the shelves upon shelves of crisp new editions, all lined up neatly one after another, each one a repository of knowledge, information, fantasy or just sheer fun, each volume a gateway to a new - perhaps hitherto unknown - world.
As he worked his way round the department, once again avoiding the few shelves devoted to cameras and photography (lest he start to feel depressed again), he found himself drawn back time and again to two sections. Not surprisingly, the section that interested him most was the travel section.
Before the accident it would have been a rare week when Daniel did not purchase a guide book, travel memoir or coffee-table extravaganza detailing some far-flung corner of the world that he had not yet visited. For Daniel, travel abroad was the greatest gift of all. He had never lost sight of his good fortune in this way; he had made his name as a freelance travel photographer, had deliberately chosen to specialise in this field to enable him to travel the world, and he had never become blasé about it. Although he had visited dozens of countries during the previous ten years or so, there were still hundreds of places to see, countries whose names evoked mysteries and pleasures unknown, cities that tantalised the imagination with promises of adventure and excitement.
Travel, be it with a specific purpose in mind or just for the sheer hell of being in a different place, was for Daniel the essence of what a good life was about. Travel abroad was life distilled to its most potent pleasures; it was nigh impossible to get bored when you were in a strange place, as there was always something new to see, hear, taste, touch, something new to experience, to capture - perhaps with lens and celluloid, or just with a word or flash of memory. Travel abroad was life without the dull bits; it was the edited highlights.
So it was that, even though his interest had been dormant for months, now that he was confronted with the array of tantalising titles - the survival manuals, the adventure narratives, the weighty, large-format tomes with their gleaming colour plates and footnotes - he could not resist them. He stood before the shelves, selecting titles at random and leafing through them excitedly, like a man who has been told that a number of ten-pound notes have been hidden between the pages.
Having sated his appetite for travel books, he meandered over to the fiction section to see if there was anything there that tempted him. Since the accident Daniel had had plenty of time on his hands but curiously, even though he was an avid reader, he had not so much as picked up a novel in all that time, Not even ones recommended by Lisanne who, after all, should know about such things.
He searched row upon row of paperbacks, hoping his interest would be altered by a familiar name or an alluring title, but nothing appealed to him. It was only as he was about to leave the shop that his attention was drawn to the New Titles section. There, among the new fiction was a book with a curiously appealing cover. It was a slim novel called Greek Idyll, by a writer Daniel had never heard of before. The cover showed a water-colour of a deserted beach with golden sand and azure sea; the branches of an olive tree intruded into the scene from the right-hand side, and lying on the sand towards the centre of the picture was an open book, its pages fanned out, The book cast a shadow of what appeared to be a face, but Daniel could not be sure.
Daniel studied the cover for several minutes; it was as if he were being drawn into the picture, The more he gazed at the clear, still sea and the deep blue sky, the more mesmerised he became. At one point he felt sure he could hear the gentle lapping of the waves against the shoreline, and feel the heat pulsing off the dry, shimmering sand.
Then suddenly, with an almost subliminal brevity, a snatch of music, played with brilliant clarity on the bouzouki, filtered into his consciousness with such presence and at such a high volume that he almost dropped the book in surprise.
Still shocked, he looked around him, certain that someone was playing a trick on him, that Greek music was being played over the public address system in the shop. But the music had disappeared as swiftly as it lmd arrived, leaving behind it a strange, deep longing, quite unlike anything Daniel had ever experienced before.
He knew that piece of music, knew that tiny sample of melody; it was the music of his dream from the previous night.
Without reflecting further, he took the book to the cashier’s desk, handed over five pounds in coins, and watched the sales assistant eamestly as she rang up the price. He felt oddly excited and yet on edge, as if he were in some way stealing the book, or at least procuring it under false pretences, rather than making a perfectly legal purchase.
Consequently, fired up by the small but potent adrenalin rush brought about by this misplaced sense of danger, Daniel found himself slightly agitated that the sales assistant did not respond to his purchase with greater interest, excitement or urgency. Having rung the price up on the till, she simply put the book in a paper bag, tore the receipt from the till and handed it to him together with his penny change. She did not smile once, nor intimate that anything out of the ordinary had occurred. The paper-bagged book lay on the cashier’s desk. She did not pass it to him, but went on to serve the next customer.
Disappointed, Daniel lifted the book from the desk and left. He had hoped she might at least say something to him; so far that day a number of curious things had happened, and he badly wanted someone else to acknowledge that it was indeed a day with a difference, that something new, strange, uncertain, was happening.
But it was not to be. The entire transaction had been completed without either of them saying a word. Not even a greeting. Daniel sighed, pretended it didn’t matter; what were words, after all? What did it matter if the plain-faced young girl hadn’t said ‘Good morning’ or ‘That’ll be four pounds ninety-nine pence’ or even ‘Thanks’ when he had handed over the money? It made no difference.
Still, he could not help thinking that some sort of intimation would have been appropriate. Something odd was happening, but, without confirmation or acknowledgement from someone else, he feared it might all be down to a sudden overactiveness of his own imagination.
By the time he had walked back to Green Lanes the shops were all open and normal business activities reigned, Although he had lost enthusiasm for the idea, he decided he had better purchase what he needed to cook the meal he had promised Lis
anne. He still wasn’t sure why he had made such an atypical offer. All he knew was that, ridiculous as it sounded, for some reason he was destined to make moussaka.
In a grocery store he bought a pound of aubergines, a tin of chopped tomatoes, a couple of large onions, several large potatoes, a pound of minced lamb and a huge hunk of feta cheese. He was pretty sure that Lisanne had all the necessary herbs and other bits and pieces back home. What else went into a Greek moussaka?
There were dozens of cookbooks at home but Daniel was loth to use them. He cooked - or so he told Lisanne shortly after they first met - by instinct, which was why he never looked at cookbooks. This was, in fact, only partly true. Daniel did cook by instinct, and did so remarkably well. But the reason he never looked at cookbooks was that he was too lazy to follow recipes. All that measuring and weighing and making sure you had exactly the right ingredients; it was too mechanical and, for Daniel, detracted from the fun of it all.
For Daniel, cooking was akin to painting or drawing or writing; it was an artistic, creative pursuit, motivated by inspiration, and not a chemistry experiment involving so many cubic centimetres of this added to so many grams of that and heated at such-and-such a temperature until it changed colour. As a result, while he was a dab hand at anything that involved rice, pasta, meat or cheese, his occasional forays into baking had resulted in unmitigated disaster.
Daniel spent a short while nosing around the shelves in case anything else took his fancy, but after five minutes of investigation his only additional purchases were a pint of milk and a few bulbs of organically grown garlic. Satisfied that he had everything he needed, he returned home.
Back in the familiar environment of the kitchen, Daniel unpacked the groceries, made space in the refrigerator for the meat, milk and cheese, then, as much by reflex as genuine desire, filled the kettle and switched it on. Since the accident, ‘tea-drinking’ had become a major pastime, vying with ‘watching television’ and ‘staring into space’ for the number-one spot.
Killing time had become a major preoccupation for Daniel since he had been rendered jobless; each day drifted past him slowly, as if it refused to acknowledge his presence, disallowed his participation. He had tried to occupy his time with reading, writing letters, doing crosswords, but after the first three months he had lost enthusiasm. Now he wandered through the days like a zombie, a man without purpose, without direction, often to be found waiting pitifully for Lisanne to return from work to break up the monotony of his otherwise featureless days.
The water boiled vigorously, filling the room with misty clouds of water vapour. Daniel made himself a mug of tea, going through the motions unconsciously, like a programmed automaton. It was only as he was stirring in the sugar that he became aware of his actions and, in that same moment, he was overwhelmed once more by the world-weary sadness that had dominated his life for half a year.
It wasn’t the tea, of course; it was the knowledge that for six months most of his life had been played out in this way, going through the motions, barely aware of what was going on. It was as if he wasn’t really there at all, but just an observer, unable or perhaps unwilling to participate in his own life.
A sliver of bright light from somewhere behind his head distracted him. He turned to see that the morning sun had risen from behind the trees and was now filtering through the windows of the living room, illuminating it with a bright, optimistic aura. Hope and optimism had been decidedly thin on the ground of late.
Daniel grabbed his mug and the paper bag containing the new book, and walked through to the living room. He put the book and the mug on the coffee table then went across to the record racks beside the hi-fi. He ran his forefinger along the spines of the record covers, and selected ‘The Köln Concert’ by Keith Jarrett.
Daniel was no reactionary, neither did he suffer from any especial technophobia, yet despite the onward march of progress that threatened to consign the vinyl record to the dustbin of history, he had yet to make the transition to compact disc, with all its supposed advantages of fidelity and convenience.
Daniel had grown up with the vinyl record, and his teenage years had been dominated by the newest releases from the great rock bands of the seventies, Since his early teens Daniel had always possessed a stereo system of one kind or another, the earliest being a birthday gift from a well-to-do aunt. He had grown up understanding the importance of high-fidelity music reproduction. As soon as he had been able to afford it, he had started to customise his hi-fi, adding, exchanging, replacing, tweaking, all in order to obtain the maximum enjoyment from his treasured record collection.
But it was the records themselves with their black sheen, colourful centre labels and extraordinary covers that Daniel coveted the most. If there was one thing above all others that put him off the current digital medium, it was the way the packaging had shrunk so dramatically that CD covers could simply not compete with the masterpieces of cheap art that had once graced the covers of LPs.
And then there was the whole ritual that revolved around the actual playing of a record. There was something deeply satisfying about the procedure, something of the nature of a religious rite to it. Even now, years later, he still derived a strange pleasure from the process.
Daniel eased the first of the two records out of its paper inner sleeve, removed all traces of electric charge from its surface with an anti-static gun, then placed it carefully on the deck and eased the stylus on to the revolving disc. He tumed on the amplifier, adjusted the volume and, satisfied that he had everything as he wanted, sat down on the sofa and allowed himself to be drawn swiftly into the melodious, extemporised piano playing. The opening refrain, as familiar to him as his own name or the sight of his face in the mirror, caused a deep, satisfying shiver of pleasure to pulse through him.
He loved this music, perhaps more than any other. Like the best travel experience it meandered and shifted, never wholly certain, so it seemed, of which direction it was taking, but every now and then breaking through in a flourish of extravagance to produce the most moving and delightful of phrases, like the perfect views glimpsed from a moving train.
Daniel listened to the music ebb and flow, uninterrupted for several minutes, until, calmed by its gentle rhythms, he found himself in a state of deep relaxation. He reached over, took his new book, Greek Idyll, out of the paper bag and allowed his gaze to drift back and forth across the cover, focusing here and there when something took his interest. Daniel knew nothing about the contents of the book, but he was greatly attracted to the cover. It was wonderfully evocative; the use of water-colours, the delicate application of hue and tint, the clever manipulation of light and shade. Once again, Daniel became aware of how well the artist had captured that sense of summer, of heat and stillness; it seemed to radiate from the picture with startling verisimilitude.
Daniel studied the scene carefully. There was no longer any doubt in his mind; the shadow cast by the open book on the sand was certainly a face. The features were not delineated with any particular definition, but he could make out the hairline, the sunken eyes, the Roman nose and the point of a beard. Daniel examined the line that separated the sand from the sea. It was an inviting (though, now that he looked more closely, slightly disturbing) scene; it asked questions of the viewer. Whereabouts was this beach? Was it on an island? Who does the book belong to, and where is that person now? What is the book about, and why has it been left open on the sand? Why does it cast a shadow of a face?
Daniel searched the opening pages for some information about the author, Robert Jameson, but could find no photographs or biographical notes.
Having nothing better to do (or to be more accurate, having nothing at all to do), Daniel embarked upon the first chapter. He still wasn’t really interested in reading fiction, and even if he had been it was unlikely he would put his efforts into a book by a complete unknown. It was unlike him to make an impulsive purchase based on, of all things, a cover, but the front cover of Greek Idyll had lured him in, an
d there now seemed no alternative but to continue.
The first chapter was narrated in the first person, and its initial themes, its setting and to a degree its main character seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of John Fowles’s The Magus, though lacking the latter’s finesse and cleverly crafted intrigue. Daniel read the first chapter with a gnawing sense that he was being taken for a ride. His interest dwindled swiftly and, finding himself unaccountably tired, he put the book to one side and allowed his eyelids, already heavy with sleep, to close.
What a pity, he thought as he tuned out of the world of letters and into the world of sounds. Jarrett’s ingenious and delightful improvisation was embracing him once more with delicious wisps of melody and rhythm. He had thought, for just a moment, that something extraordinary and enticing was about to happen to him; the curious coincidence of spotting the book with its Mediterranean setting had caused a frisson of excitement and identification when he saw it in the bookshop that morning, as if he had been meant to find it just then. For a few moments it had reverberated with some sort of sympathetic vibration, a sense that there was more here than met the eye. And yet, within minutes of starting to read the opening chapter, Daniel found himself once more disappointed and distressed. The world, he sensed, was not about to provide him with the meaning or excitement or pleasure that he craved and that had been absent from his life for so long.
Daniel's Dream Page 4
