by Richard Gwyn
So she would be better off here with us then, says Alice. She is inspired, on a mission. She says again: Carla would be better staying here with us. Here at Llys Rhosyn. No possible harm can come to us here, all safe together. And she hugs the child, who, if I am not mistaken, looks rather worried at her carer’s sudden change of mood, from one of motherly concern to protective zeal.
Wouldn’t we be breaking the law? I venture. Wouldn’t it be safe to assume that the child belongs to somebody? That he, or she, has parents?
Why would you assume that? says Alice. What makes you think this is a human child?
31
From this point on, I need to act for myself, to stop the others from taking over my life … or attempting to steal from me. My bedroom, the library storeroom; where else have they been searching? And, of course, if I had been vigilant from the start, if I had been just a little more observant, and less fixated on the tent, I would have recognised that this has been going on all along. But because none of the characters in my story were in an outright manner dangerous or malicious, because I trusted them, befriended them, was attracted to and even (probably, possibly, perhaps) slept with at least one of them, it does not occur to me that Llys Rhosyn has become a house of thieves, a place of shadows …
It is only a matter of time before the child falls asleep in Alice’s arms. Since it is approaching midnight, it is decided – the women decide – that rather than put her to bed on the sofa in the living room, or in one of the spare rooms, where she (I may as well go along with this) might wake up alone and afraid, Carla will sleep with Alice and Gabrielle in their large double bed. I agree to this, as it suits my emerging plan. Keep them together. O’Hallaran bids us all goodnight and sets off, I assume, for the tent, while I explain to Alice that I need to speak with her, alone, in the library. Alice nods, quite solemnly, and hands the sleeping child to Gabrielle, who ascends the stairs to their bedroom.
In the library I sit at my desk, in the red leather chair. Alice seats herself directly in front of me on the desk itself, swinging her legs.
First things first. I show her the photograph I found in the storeroom – of myself as a young child.
Alice exclaims out loud, as though in surprise. Then she smiles, without displaying any confusion; frankly, as though far too easily relieved of her initial display of amazement; as though surprise were the response that I required rather than one that she genuinely experienced.
Do you not find it strange, I ask, that the child who appeared in the woodshed is, or would once have been, to all appearances, my double?
Alice shrugs, and looks away.
And why wouldshe find it strange? This is the woman who not so long ago uttered the words: What makes you think this is a human child?
I know what you’re all looking for, I say to her, after a while. Ever since O’Hallaran told me his story about finding something in the maize field, the silver cylinder that he gave to Megan in exchange for the tent. Is that why he came here? Is that why you came?
Wearily, she says: O’Hallaran isn’t anyone, you know.
What do you mean by that? I ask.
Well, she says – and I anticipate another demonstration of her alarming logic – it is quite clear to me, at least, that O’Hallaran is not who he says he is. Why then should he be anyone at all?
But that doesn’t make sense, I say: everyone has an identity, a personal history.
Alice remains silent.
After a while she says: No, everyone doesn’t, don’t you see?
Why, I ask, did O’Hallaran tell me the story of the Aleph? It was virtually the first thing he told me. Why would he alert me to the fact that he knew of its existence? He needn’t have.
I’ve no idea, Alice replies. You’re the one in charge.
And then: Is that what it’s called? An Aleph?
She returns to swinging her legs beneath the table, and begins to whistle a sad tune, her eyes raised dreamily to the wooden beams that straddle the library ceiling.
As I watch Alice, I have a sense that she is less tangible, less real to me, than at any time since arriving at my house. She is drifting away. In order to reassure myself, I lean forward and touch her cheek with my hand, just as Gabrielle had touched mine, before telling me that they (she and Alice) would ‘look after me’. I wonder just how they envisaged doing that.
Alice is pliant, unresisting. There is anabsence about her, which I cannot explain away by her apparent indifference to the evidence provided by the photograph, by her inability to answer my questions. Something is diminishing in her; her substantiality is breaking down. She is fragmenting, becoming less solid.
She slumps forward, but I catch her before she falls, lift her from the desk and carry her across the library to the fireplace. She is almost weightless, her arms around my neck. I settle her gently in Megan’s green armchair.
I know that I have to return her, return all of them to the place from which they have come; the other world from which the tent has disgorged them; the other world that the Aleph has made visible to me.
Aleph. The first letter of the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets. The Aleph: a small and miraculous cavity or portal that displays the entire substance of the universe, and all possible worlds.
32
They will drive me insane, I know they will, unless they have already done so. My home has become the haunt of drifting or devious spirits over whom I have no control. I must put them out of the way, these hungry ghosts. I must dream them away, dream them out of existence, back to their own world. To dream, perchance to sleep.
And afterwards, I must write it, somewhere. Yes, I will write it all down, afterwards. Write it, and check it over at my desk in the library, check it through again and again, to make sure the story is recorded exactly as it took place. There at my desk facing the carved fireplace. Otherwise, how can I be sure to remember them in the months and years to come? How else to ensure that the I who tells these things will record them as they happened and will not be swayed by the passing of time into a particular manner of telling things as they are not? The longer I delay, the more likely it is the story will shift its contours and belong to someone else. How do I know I will even be the same person who remembers these things?
I did not say any of this out loud, of course, because if I had, they would not have come with me. There’s a difference between thinking things and saying them. If they had known what I knew, if they had read my thoughts, they would never have accompanied me into that night, in the coldest hour, the hour of the wolf, although we have no wolves here, in the Marches, nor in the hinterland, though we had them once, the legend of Gelert vouches for that, and we will have them again, of that I am certain, when our civilisation commits itself to oblivion and all the old savagery returns, but not now, not right now, we have only foxes and the occasional dog, whose life is short.
With this in mind I took Keto the sheepdog to his run and locked him in. I fed him some chopped liver and he settled easily, licking my hand and wagging his tail. I did not want him running around the place, getting under our feet while I carried out my plan.
I started on Alice, of course, otherwise it could not have worked. When I returned to the library I was demanding and insistent, in a way that convinced her that what I was about to do was crucial to the safety of us all. There was no need at all to plead or cajole.
So we went upstairs, Alice and I, and we told Gabrielle of my plan. I had the impression then that she would have done anything for Alice, that she loved her, which was something that I could almost understand, as I had experienced a glimmer of that love myself; but then my feelings have never been clear in that regard. I have always found love to be such a complicated issue. Gabrielle collected the child Carla from the bed. She did not make a sound, wrapped in a shawl, and the two women brought her downstairs, and followed me through the kitchen into the garden; it was a cold night, the stars were visible above the valley, the woods rising like a m
antle to the side. I stopped before the tent, unzipped the flap, expecting to be met by the smell of the fox, but the tent was empty, that is to say O’Hallaran was not at home. However, the blanket was still warm, he was not far off, he had wind of us, and I knew what to do, I knew that if we followed my plan he would not be able to stay away, unless of course he had already fled; but why, or how, could he flee without the tent? Where could he possibly go?
So I settled down with Alice to one side of me; she was willing now, because I had won her over before leaving the library; because she trusted me, or because she trusted the tent; because she worshipped Megan and the blue gift my aunt had bestowed on her; or because she was nothing without me, she was whatever I saw, whatever I chose to see at any particular moment, whatever the story, whatever the reason; but I had done with reason, so she lay down beside me anyway; and Gabrielle was willing too, and the child in its shawl, the strange miasma that may or may not have been a human child, who had no choice in the matter, she lay down with us, all four in a row beneath the big blanket we had brought from the double bed in Alice’s room, and we waited.
Before daybreak, with the dew rising on the grass outside the tent, I heard him moving outside and then saw his shadow, although even without moonlight he constituted a shadow; I hadn’t zipped up the flap, so confident was I that he would return, but I knew he would take his time. In the end he didn’t make us wait too long.
I was wondering when you’d come, I said.
Well, he said, it was written from the start.
Was it? It wasn’t just my story, it was yours too. Though for a while, as you must have guessed, I didn’t know what to believe.
You shouldn’t believe anything, he said.
I don’t, I said, where you are concerned.
He let that settle for while. No one else made a sound. I had the feeling that Gabrielle was exhausted and wanted to go to sleep, and that Alice was rather sad.
So here we all are, he said, finally, – cosy as hell.
Aren’t you going to join us? I asked him, trying to keep it civil.
Do I have any choice? he said.
This matter of choice was still a problem for him, even after telling me the whole thing was a done deal from the outset.
But O’Hallaran knelt, lifted the edge of the blanket, and crawled under. Gabrielle and the child Carla pulled closer to me on my right side. They seemed almost welded together. I drew them towards me and felt them slipping gently inside my body. O’Hallaran took their place beside me. I could feel oblivion begin to swamp me, an opiate sleep infiltrate my senses, a fatigue so profound that I could barely resist it, but I had not finished yet. With my arm around O’Hallaran I pulled him in also, could feel him merge into my right side, slide beneath my ribs. It hurt me, it must have hurt him, but he succumbed. And then, to my left, I sensed Alice closing in, her hair, her fragrance, her warmth, and I turned to kiss her, but she was already dissolving, a vague presence on my left side that settled on my chest and vanished inside me, close to the heart.
Then I slept.
At some point in the night, or the early morning, though I have no memory of it, I must have left the tent, I must have crept back into the house, up the stairs and into my own bed, the bed I so rarely ever sleep in, because it is there that I awaken.
I look at the clock on my bedside table: seven o’clock. It is evening and I have slept through the entire day. But I couldn’t care how long I have slept. I care about only one thing. I leap from the bed and hurry to the window.
Drawing aside the curtain I look out onto Morgan’s field, and the valley beyond. Of the blue tent there is no sign.
I have the Aleph in my hand, feel its weight, its terrible gravity, so disproportionate to its size; I breathe on its tiny screen, polish it gently with the sleeve of my shirt, and place it on the bedside table, where now it will be safe.
Note:
The poem that appears in Chapter 23 is from the French of Jean Follain, in the author's translation. The original, ‘Art de la guerre’, was published in D’après tout, Paris, Gallimard, 1967.
Parthian, Cardigan SA43 1ED
www.parthianbooks.com
First published in 2019
© Richard Gwyn 2019
ISBN 978-1-912681-58-7
Editor: Susie Wild
Cover design by www.theundercard.co.uk
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