The Dream Archipelago

by Christopher Priest

  The door was still open.

  I snatched at my pullover, which had fallen to the floor, and I lurched outside. I was holding my wounded, undamaged arm across my chest, as if I were in pain, but it was only a subconscious reflex.

  The long grass swept around me in the wind, and I remembered Seri.

  I needed her. I needed someone I could tell what had happened, someone who might explain, or soothe or calm me. I wanted to see another human being to give the reassurances I could not give myself. But Seri seemed to have gone and I was alone.

  Even as I looked around to find Seri I saw a movement. At the bottom of the slope, near the stream, a figure in black clothes suddenly stood up from the concealment of the long grass. His soutane was caught in the belt at his waist and he was pulling it as he turned, freeing it so it would hang normally. I ran towards him, rushing through the grass.

  He turned his back on me as soon as he saw me and strode away. He took the stream at a leap, then went quickly back towards the seminary across the undulating ground.

  ‘Wait, Father!’ I shouted after him. ‘Please wait for me!’

  I came to the place where the grass had been flattened. In its centre lay Seri. She was naked and her clothes were scattered around her.

  ‘Do you still want to touch me, Lenden?’ she said, giggling. She twisted round so that she raised her knees and parted them. Her laughter became more hysterical.

  I stared at her, disbelieving what I was seeing. In my naïvety I still wanted only human comfort, but the blatant invitation she was making finally broke through my own sense of overwhelming needs. I realized what she and the priest must have been doing.

  I kept a distance from her, waiting for her to calm down, but something about the way I was standing there must have aggravated the madness that had taken hold of her. She was screaming with laughter, having difficulty getting her breath. I remembered that I had her pants in the pocket of my skirt. I found them and threw them at her. They landed on her naked belly.

  That sobered her. She rolled to one side, coughing and wheezing.

  I turned from her and ran away, towards the seminary, towards the house. I sobbed as I ran and the torn sleeve of my blouse flapped around my upper arm. I stumbled when I crossed the stream, drenching my clothes as my feet kicked up spray, and when I was crossing the last patch of rough ground towards the house I slipped several more times. I cut my knee when I fell, I tore the hem of my skirt.

  Bloodied, hysterical, bruised and soaked through, I ran into the house and burst into my aunt’s sickroom.

  My uncle and my father were supporting Alvie above a chamber pot. Her white, withered legs dangled like bleached ropes. Drops of orange urine trickled from her. Her eyes were closed and her head lolled.

  I heard my uncle shouting. My mother appeared and she slapped her hand over my eyes. I was dragged, screaming, into the corridor.

  All I could say, again and again, was Seri’s name. Everyone seemed to be shouting at me.

  Later, Uncle Torm went out on the moors to search for Seri, but my parents and I had already left before he returned and were driving through the evening and night, towards Seevl Town.

  It was the last time I went to Seevl with my parents. I was fourteen. I never saw Seri again.

  We burned my uncle’s papers in the yard behind the house. Charred fragments floated up like tiny patches of black silk, then were whisked away by the wind. Gradually we added to the blaze, carting everything burnable out from the house: piles of old clothes, some wooden chairs and a table, my uncle’s desk. Everything was damp or mildewed and even the wooden furniture burned only slowly. I stood by the fire, watching the flames, watching the cinders funnelling in the wind across the bleak countryside.

  The priests wanted us to take away the furniture we could not burn: an ancient gas cooker, a filing cabinet, a metal table, Alvie’s brass bedstead. It was impossible even to contemplate. A van would have to be brought over from one of the ports, or even from Seevl Town, taking a day or two to arrive. Then there was the cost to consider. I tried to reason with Father Henner’s secretary, but he was adamant. In the end I managed to negotiate with him, to the effect that the seminary would make all the practical arrangements after we had left. I would be sent the bill.

  Bella was standing in the doorway behind me. She must have checked that there was no one from the seminary in the house, because for the first time that morning she spoke intimately and quietly to me.

  She said, ‘Why do you keep staring up at the moors?’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that I was.’

  ‘There’s something out there. What is it?’

  ‘I was watching the blaze,’ I said. As if to prove it I jabbed at the base of the fire, sending up embers and half-burnt scraps of paper. A chair leg rolled out and I kicked it back towards the fire. Sparks flew. Something in the fire spat and a cinder shot across the yard.

  ‘Have you ever walked out on the moors?’ Bella said.

  ‘No.’

  Not to the moors, I thought. Just as far as the tower on that one day. Never further, never up the long scree slopes to the overhanging crag and the high barren plain that lay beyond its crest.

  ‘I keep thinking you must have known someone here. In the days when you used to come. Someone special. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, realizing for the first time that Seri had in her way been special to me. ‘I mean, yes.’

  Bella walked across to me, and stood by my side, staring with me into the heart of the blaze.

  ‘I was right, then. Was it a woman?’

  ‘A girl. We were both teenagers.’

  ‘And she was your first?’

  ‘In a sense. There was nothing really between us then. We were too young.’ I was trying to visualize Seri from an adult viewpoint, something I usually found difficult. She had left such an impression on me that it was as if my knowledge of her was frozen in time. ‘What she did was … wake me up.’

  Thinking of Seri, being with Bella, had made me remember. Not only about the catastrophe with Seri but also about the search I had been drawn into during the years that followed. It had taken me a long time to discover that the knowledge I sought was impossible for me to learn.

  I thought back to the people I had known and loved in some of those years. There were men as well as women, but many more women than men if I made mental lists and counted the names. I had only been to men in desperation, when loneliness reached a seeming crisis. I sought but I did not strike: when I was close enough I was invariably the passive lover, the recipient of passion, stealing it secretly from other people’s actions. I envied other people their lack of inhibition, their frankness. They excited me with their relish in caressing my body, of holding me, of penetrating me. I moved from one partner to the next, determined that the next one would be different, that I would not repeat old mistakes and then I would take the initiative and be an active, loving partner. In that sense Bella Reeth was no different from any of my other lovers. I had not in fact changed. Before Bella I had thought a few years’ abstention, a gaining in maturity, could have cured me of the irrational fears. I should not have allowed her to put me to the test. I had been weak, thinking that the return to Seevl would in itself be a kind of passage from past to future, that in the process I would emerge renewed. I had been misled by Bella’s youth, her pretty body, her unassertive manner. These had drawn me once again to loveless sexual activity, shorn of feelings. The years had gone by while I waited and I had not known that I had started to dry, that I was becoming a husk.

  ‘I’m only trying to understand,’ Bella said.

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘We’re completely alone here,’ she said. ‘No one can hear us. Speak honestly to me.’

  ‘I am, I think.’

  ‘I would like to see you again. What about you?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said, prevaricating.

  ‘I can travel freely when I’m not on duty. Let me visit you
in your home.’

  ‘If you’d like to.’

  It seemed to satisfy her but she stood beside me with her hand on my arm. The fire glared at us, burning our faces.

  I didn’t know what she wanted. What was it she saw in me? Surely she had friends of her own age? I, a frigid woman, entering middle age, already lonely and unfulfilled, largely bereft of close friends. I was so many years older than Bella. I tried to imagine what her personal life must be like. I had asked her hardly anything about herself. The brother – I knew she had a brother. Parents still alive? She must have friends, and some of them must be ex-lovers or even would-be lovers. How did she live when not in uniform, when not on police duty, when her hair was not pinned back? I could so easily imagine her with a group of friends on her nights off, dining out, going to parties, drinking too much, using personal slang and knowing each other and going to clubs that I would probably not like. Even during wartime there must be a life of that kind in Jethra that could be lived. Maybe that was untrue, that she was as solitary as she said. Anyway, I had nothing like it, by choice. I was usually alone. I had many grey hairs appearing, my breasts had started to sag, my belly to bulge, my waist was full, my thighs were thick. I spent most of my time alone in my apartment, or at the school, teaching, marking, coping with the school’s paperwork, then at home again with the music I listened to, the books I read, but mostly with my memories. I was to Bella the older woman, more mature and presumably more experienced, yet it was she who pursued me, she who took the initiative, she who made the love.

  If it had been anywhere else or at any other time – not on the way to Seevl, not on Seevl itself, not in Alvie’s bed – would it have been any different?

  For me the failure was inevitable, as were the excuses I could find.

  The real excuse, if there was any at all, lay out there under the crags of Seevl’s moors.

  That morning I had risen before Bella was awake and climbed from Alvie’s bed. I went to the window. From there I had been sure I should be able to see the dead tower where the incident with the animal had happened, but I looked and I had not been able to see it. The seminary gardens were still much as I recalled them, as was the view across to the high, limestone crag. I had always been able to see the tower from this window, but there was no sign of it now.

  Bella was right. All that morning, as I worked through my uncle’s papers, as I tried to decide about the furniture, as I argued with Father Henner’s secretary, I had been glancing over towards the moors, wondering where the tower had gone.

  There must be a rational explanation. It had been demolished, it had fallen down, or even that it was not in the direction I remembered.

  Or that it had never been there. I could not think about the significance of that.

  Bella was still holding my arm, her shoulder pressing gently against me. We waited until the fire burned down low. There was an old broom in the yard, so worn that virtually all the bristles had fallen out or rotted down. I used it to sweep the charred pieces of wood and the ashes into a smaller, neater heap. They flared up briefly, would probably go on smouldering for hours, but the fire was now effectively safe.

  Bella returned to the house and in a minute emerged with our bags. She carried them by herself to the car and began to stack them in the tiny luggage compartment at the back. I stared at the back of her severely stockinged legs as she bent forward into the car, her skirt stretching across her backside, and I was thinking how easy it would be to let go of the past, to fall in love with a lonely, attractive young woman like her, to make a decision and act on it.

  I took the house key to Father Confessor Henner’s office and left it with his secretary. Walking back through the seminary grounds, alone, I made one last attempt to locate the dead tower. I retraced the way Seri had taken me that day of the last visit and found the gate in the high wall that led outside the grounds. It was unlocked and opened readily, so I went through.

  Immediately, what I could see with my own eyes was starkly different from my memories. I distinctly, vividly remembered that the rough ground outside came up as far as the wall of the grounds, and once through the gate one entered a trackless waste of undulating ground covered in long grass. But now I saw that beyond the gate was another yard and two or three decrepit buildings that looked as if they might have been stables in years gone by. I had no memory of them at all. They hadn’t been there that day. I crossed the cobbled yard but there was no way through the ancient constructions. I walked to the end, found a passage that led to the back, but beyond the stables was a paved yard and a long flight of steps down to more buildings. The view of the moors seen from here was quite different from anything I remembered.

  I went back into the main seminary grounds, looking for another way out through the surrounding wall, the way that Seri had led me that day. The wall was solid and old, with no other gates on this side. I walked around, found no others.

  I went back to the wing of the building where Seri had made a hideout in the basement. That I also remembered clearly, but the hideout too, when I looked, was no longer discoverable. Where I remembered steps down to a half-hidden hatch there was just a concrete path leading past the doors and windows at ground level, a path that looked as if it had been in place, untouched, for many years.

  Could everything have been rebuilt, changed around, in the two decades since my last visit? Everything looked solid, enduring, permanent.

  I headed round to the other side of the building, thinking that perhaps in my memories I had somehow reversed the layout of the place.

  On my way to the front of the building I passed our rented car. Bella was standing beside it, leaning back against the metal bodywork.

  She said, ‘Lenden—’

  ‘A few more moments,’ I said. ‘There’s something I’ve got to work out.’

  The front of the building was built so that it looked down a shallow slope: there were no grounds or gardens here. There was a drive, several parking places, a concrete hardstanding, a disused outhouse of some kind. But no encircling wall, no gate, no access to the wild moorland I remembered so clearly. The front of the seminary faced a shallow valley. There were moors visible a long way to one side, but the dominant view was across open pasture to a distant vista of the sea.

  ‘Lenden?’

  Bella had walked up behind me.

  ‘All right, I’m ready to leave,’ I said, and set off towards the car.

  ‘Are you going to tell me about it?’ she said, following.

  ‘Not now. I’m still not sure.’

  ‘You mean you’re not ready. What you keep saying to me.’

  ‘It’s not about being not ready,’ I said. ‘It’s about being not sure. Everything I am, that I have been as an adult, began here at the seminary. I gained my identity here. If I hadn’t come back I would still feel that I had that identity, but now it’s gone. I’m not sure of anything.’

  In the car, driving slowly down the hill to find the road that led back across the island to Seevl Town, Bella’s hand brushed against my knee.

  ‘But something else happened here once, didn’t it?’ she said.

  I nodded, then because I realized she was looking at the road and would not have seen that, I laid my hand on hers and squeezed it lightly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The girl you mentioned?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So it was a long time ago.’

  ‘Twenty years at least,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure what it was. I think I might have imagined it. This is what I meant. Everything seems different now.’

  ‘I was just a child, twenty years ago,’ Bella said.

  ‘So was I.’

  But as we drove back across the dreary moors, I fell into introspection again.

  I wanted to ask Bella to turn the car around and go back to the seminary. I should have found out the truth about the tower, what it was, why it had been built, what it was supposed to mean, why it had been removed since my last visit. I shou
ld have confirmed my memories, made sense of them in adult terms. Because I had not they were still unresolved and the haunting of that day would remain. I thought again about Seri, Seraphina. Bella obviously wanted to know about her, but there was nothing I wanted to say. Nothing I could say, in fact. The only sure thing I knew about Seri was the mystery she had created when she ran away from home, years and years ago. Where had she gone, and where was she now? Was she too surrounded by uncertainty?

  We drove on, halting for lunch in the same house as before. We were going to be early for the ferry and Bella asked me if I would like her to stop the car somewhere in the lonely countryside, so we could be alone together again before we returned to Jethra. I said no, still locked in my past. She had not unshaped me from the pattern.

  We talked, though, and we made plans. In the car, waiting on the harbour for the ferry to come in, sitting in the saloon of the ship, we made our plans for future meetings. I told her the dates of weekends in the near future when I should be free and when she might visit me. She gave me an address; I gave her mine. We made no firm arrangements, but parted on the quay at Jethra and I have not heard from her since.

  The

  Cremation

  •

  It was the first time Graian Sheeld had been to a private cremation. In his own country cremations were unusual, performed for technical reasons of some kind, available only by court order. All ordinary family funerals were interments and burning a body was held to be shocking. What you grow up with you accept as standard. In his short time in the islands he had already noticed, without taking a special interest in the subject, that there were several large burial grounds on other islands in the Dream Archipelago and until today had assumed the practice of burying the dead was widespread and normal. What happened at Corrin Mercier’s funeral therefore surprised him.