A Dream of Wessex (30 page)

The dress lying on the pile was also damp.

She alone had visited the projected past, and had not been harmed. She alone had returned to reality. Her memories were whole. She was in Wessex. The future, the present, the now.

David pulled open the drawer she had used, and stared inside. For several seconds he didn’t move, but then he said: ‘I think you had better look, Julia.’

‘No, David. No!’

She could see, from where she was standing, that there were two white and naked legs stretched out along the drawer. The rest of the body was hidden by David standing over it.

‘You’re the same as the others, Julia. You lie here and project, and you stand there and are projected.’

‘Close the drawer, David.
Please
!’

He turned to look at her. He was grinning.

‘You’re very beautiful naked,’ he said. ‘Come and see what I mean.’ She couldn’t move, couldn’t turn her head away. ‘David, please close that drawer! ‘

The momentary roguishness on his face had faded, and with a sober expression he put his weight to the drawer and slid it back into place.

‘I don’t understand, Julia. Are you real? Am I?’

‘I can’t think about it any more,’ she said. She felt as if she were about to faint, or to suffer the same loss as the others. ‘We are as real as we think we are. I only know that I love you. Is that reality?’

‘It is for me.’

He went across to her and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, Julia,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have done that ... with the drawer.’

‘I think you had to. We had to know. It doesn’t seem to make any difference.’

‘What shall we do?’ David said. ‘Can we leave here?’

‘Do you want to?’

‘I said,
can
we.’

‘We can do whatever we wish,’ Julia said. ‘We are utterly free, for the moment.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘When I was in ... in the present, I heard that the Ridpath projector was going to be turned off.’

‘It means nothing to me. What effect would that have?’

‘Nobody’s really sure,’ Julia said. ‘Ridpath himself believed that it would kill anyone inside. It’s never been tried.’

Then a stray thought - comforting? confusing? - hovered for a moment like a flying insect. As she left the present, Eliot had said the trustees had instructed him to close the projection. But that was in the world she believed was being projected from here! Would that have any effect here? Where was the present from which Wessex was being projected? Were they the same ... or was the system now closed? Did one world project the other, each dependent upon the other for its own continued reality?

David said: ‘Julia, I think we should leave. I’ve got everything I ever wanted. We’re together ... that’s enough for me.’ Julia, distracted by the uncertainty of her thoughts, felt David’s hand on hers. She shook her head, as if to throw off the intruding notion, then saw from David’s expression that he had taken this as a negative response to what he had just said.

She tightened her fingers around his hand, and said: ‘I’m sorry. It’s what I want too.’

‘Come on, let’s go back to Dorchester.’

She felt a sudden fear about what might lie outside the Castle, and who might be there, but knowing David was consciously neglecting to think about this, she made the effort too.

‘Do you think it’s still raining?’ she said. ‘Should I take the coat?’

‘Is it yours?’

‘No. I borrowed it ... from Marilyn.’

The auxiliary ego Marilyn, the one who had been in the Castle for a time. Marilyn had vanished, but her coat was still here. As she looked at it, Julia remembered that the real Marilyn, the other Marilyn, had a coat just like this.

‘You won’t need it,’ David said. ‘Leave it here.’

They walked together towards the doorway, talking about the coat and the possibility of rain. It was like David straightening his collar: a hold on a plainer reality, a need for the prosaic.

As they stepped into the tunnel, Julia pulled herself away from under David’s arm, and turned to face back into the projection hall. Something had been worrying her, nagging at her.

‘What is it?’ David said.

‘Paul Mason!’ she said. ‘What happened to him?’

‘I told you: he joined the projection with the others.’

‘But no ... he didn’t. I was there. He didn’t return. I’m sure of that... they were waiting for him.’

‘Is he immune too?’

‘No. At least, I don’t think so.’ She grasped David’s hand, gripping it tightly in sudden fear. ‘Are you sure he’s inside the projector?’

‘Of course ... I saw him close himself in.’

‘When was that?’

‘A few minutes after you. Two, three minutes ... I’m not sure.’

‘But ...’ Julia looked at David in despair. ‘But Paul
didn’t
return,’ she began again. ‘I’m certain of that. The doctors were waiting. There was just you to return, and Paul.’

‘Then he’s trapped inside, like I was.’

David pushed past her, ran back into the hall.

Something inhuman in her made her say: ‘Don’t let him out, David! ‘

‘If he’s trapped, I’ve got to. This is his drawer, isn’t it?’

‘I think so, yes ...’ She hardly dared look.

David pulled the drawer, and she saw pale legs stretched inertly out, the feet slightly splayed. As the chest, and then the face, came into sight, Julia started to tremble and she leaned against the tunnel wall. The inhuman instinct was still there: a desire for dreadful revenge on Paul for all those years of humiliation, to slam the drawer closed with him inside, to trap him forever inside the cabinet, alive or dead.

David was bending over the body.

‘Is he alive?’ Julia said, her fist clenched over her mouth.

‘He’s breathing ... his eyes are closed.’

‘Is he projecting?’

‘I don’t know ... you’d better look.’

She had been unable to look at her own body inside the drawer, and she was unable to look at Paul. It was he who had dominated all her adult life, first by his presence and then by his absence. He had dominated the projection, he had destroyed.

Now there was a primal dread in her: that she would never be free of him.

‘Close the drawer, David.’

‘Not until you tell me what’s happening to him.’

‘Are his eyes moving? Flickering ... under the eyelids?’

‘A little, yes.’

‘Then he’s projecting.’

David continued to stare at the unconscious body of the man, and seemed uncertain of what to do. Julia waited in the tunnel, but David kept the drawer open.

‘Close it, David. Please.’

‘But if you say he didn’t return to ... to the past, where is he projecting to?’

‘For God’s sake!’ She turned from the tunnel wall, ran into the room. She pushed David aside, and put her hands on the front of the drawer. Then she saw Paul’s face.

She paused, realizing that he was indeed projecting. She had been impelled by fear: the idea that he might be lying there pretending, waiting to take some new form of retaliation against her. But her paranoia was unfounded: Paul was as deep inside the projection as all the others. He could not escape; there was no way back.

She stared down steadily at him, gaining strength. She knew she would never see him again, never ever. Looking at him thus, directly and unflinchingly, she pushed against the drawer, and it closed.

David was watching her face, perhaps beginning to realize the order of her fear of Paul. She looked back at him, and forced a smile.

‘I’m sorry, David ... I had to do that. I thought he might sit up again, and start threatening us. Like he did before.’

David took her hand. ‘I don’t ever want to know what Mason did to you.’

‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ she said, and she knew that this time she could say it and know it was true.

‘Let’s get outside,’ David said. ‘I’ve had enough of this place.’

They walked out of the projection hall, leaving the lights burning.

Halfway down the main tunnel, Julia said: ‘He didn’t return to the present. He really didn’t.’

‘Then where is he?’

‘In the future? All by himself?’

Paul alone believed in a second projection; Paul alone failed to realize, on an unconscious level, that the future he was planning was actually the past; Paul alone believed in the future as a reality.

As they reached the bottom of the lift-shaft and began to climb the stairs, Julia wondered what any world of Paul’s making would be like; one which he alone imagined, and in which he alone exercised unconscious will. Would he take an image of her along with him, an auxiliary ego of his own? Or would he make the world itself auxiliary to his own ego? Would anyone exist in that world who would resist him, who wasn’t subservient to his will, who wasn’t the butt of his malice and destructive criticism?

Julia felt she had lived once before in that kind of world, and knew it well. But that was in the past.

The rain had stopped, but the wind was chill. When they reached the top of the earth rampart, Julia and David paused to look down across the bay towards Dorchester. It was a heavy, clouded night, and the town itself was mostly in darkness. Only the harbour was brightly lit; white arc-lamps flooded the port with brilliance, because it was never still. Throughout the nights the endless business of the oil-rigs was conducted, with supply-ships and lighters moving to and fro across the bay.

Behind the town, spreading untidily across the heaths, the refinery was at work, throwing up a pall of smoke that glowed orange from the floodlamps beneath it. Connecting the refinery to the sea, the pipelines crawled in parallel lines, their path floodlit for security. Out in the bay, the dozens of drilling-rigs could be seen, standing squarely in the sea as far as the horizon; lights flared whitely and randomly on the superstructure of the platforms, lights for working by, lights for navigation. Seen from the Castle, the rigs looked like a stationary armada, lying-to offshore, waiting for the tide before sailing in to invade.

Beyond all this, beyond the bay and the town, the Wessex hills lay black against the night horizon.

‘Let’s wait,’ David said, and he sat down on the wet grass. Julia sat beside him, oblivious of the cold and wet. She snuggled under his arm, drew warmth from his body.

Time passed, and they did not move. The ground seemed less cold after a while, as if it were they who were warming it. Julia, reaching round with her hand, found that the grass had dried.

‘I’m not cold now,’ she said.

‘Neither am I. I think the wind has dropped.’

It had slackened to a gentle breeze, one that barely touched them, one that was warm from the day.

‘Where shall we live, Julia?’

‘I suppose it will have to be Dorchester,’ she said. ‘It’s the only place I know.’

‘We’re completely alone now?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

Some time later, David pointed out that the orange flame above the refinery, the torch of burning waste-gas, was dying down. Soon it went out, and around it a cluster of floodlamps were also extinguished. For a long while there seemed to be no reaction within the refinery, and normal work went on.

‘Look at the pipeline, David! ‘

The floodlamps above the four great pipelines were going out, one after another, those nearest to the refinery dying first. To David and Julia it appeared that the pipelines were slowly shrinking away from the refinery, drawing back into the sea whence they had come. As the last of the pipeline floodlamps was extinguished they saw that in the bay the rigs were turning off their lights, systematically and without haste. Soon only one rig was visible: the large supply-platform in the centre of the bay.

Piece by piece the refinery was vanishing into the dark of the night; lights and flares went out, and with them disappeared the tanks and pipes and gantries. In the town, the arc-lamps of the harbour dimmed quickly. The supply-platform was soon the only light showing; it too vanished in time.

Overhead, the clouds were clearing, and the stars came out.

Dorchester, dark and silent, remained on its hill. Its streets and buildings were unlit, the harbour was still.

For a long time nothing more happened, and Julia, still held in David’s arms, began to doze. It was warm and comfortable on the rampart of the Castle, as if its glowing life was radiating from within. There was a smell of flowers in the air, a heady, summery smell, anticipating day.

Suddenly, far away, there was a loud explosion, and the sound of it echoed to and fro across the bay, from Purbeck Island to the Wessex Hills, seeming to zig-zag across the funnel-shaped bay.

Julia, stirred by the noise, said: ‘What was that?’

‘The cannon at Blandford. The tidal bore is coming through.’

It was too far away, and the night was too dark, for them to see the wave, but they both had the same feeling about it: that the incoming tide was refreshing and renewing the waters of the bay, flooding it from the north with the weight of the ocean behind it, cold and clean and alive.

Coloured lights flicked on in Dorchester, the lights that were strung in the trees along the front. They reflected in the sea, which was calm and still, as yet undisturbed by the flooding tide.

Street-lamps came on in Dorchester; windows and doorways became squares of golden light. The harbour moved again: yachts and cruisers, bobbing at their moorings. Across the silence of the bay Julia and David heard music and voices. A group of people were laughing, and as the lights above Sekker’s Bar came on, they could- just see that the tables on the patio had been cleared away, and that a large crowd was dancing and jostling in the warm night air.

They both slept after this, secure on the Castle rampart, holding each other.

They woke about an hour after dawn, when the sun was still low over the English hills: a brilliance of yellow in a clean, azure sky.

Holding hands, Julia and David went down into Dorchester, and walking along Victoria Beach, where the white sand was showing again as the new tide receded, they heard the muezzin calling from the mosque.

Later, as they walked along Marine Boulevard, looking at the cafes and stalls shuttered for the night, they saw the fishing boats coming across the empty bay towards the harbour, heavy with their catch.