Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series (69 page)

This was about as decent an entrance as I was going to get, and I caught it in a death-grip.

‘What place? Where are we?’

‘Eastbourne, of course. Where do you think?’

‘But it can’t be, it’s—’

‘But it is,’ said the man emphatically. ‘It’s
an
Eastbourne, a limited Eastbourne, true, but the real thing nevertheless. It may only extend for a half a mile radius from hereabouts, but within that boundary it’s Eastbourne all right.’

‘But...’ I pleaded, without having anything in particular to tack onto the single word protest.

‘My theory,’ said the man, pressing on regardless, ‘is that the photograph did it. Biffo—he’s the one whose escape we’re celebrating, the one who swapped with you—Biffo says he had his picture taken, just the instant we were all caught. The picture “captured his likeness” as they say, and at the same it captured all us too—the passers-by, the people in the hotels and restaurants, the whole surrounding area.’

‘But...’

‘Your favourite word, that, isn’t it?’ said the man with a wry smile. ‘Anyway, the theory fits the known facts so it’s no good you complaining. We were caught in a moment of time, in a bubble universe, frozen and perpetuated in the chemicals and energy lattice of a photograph. We don’t get old or die. We can’t even kill ourselves. And things don’t run out, they mostly just stay as they were. Like out on the seafront, for instance, where the picture was taken, nothing changes at all. Elsewhere, out of sight in the picture, there’s dust and decay. Fortunately, in Eastbourne we’re used to that but, I must admit, I am bored now, very bored—very very very bored.’

He paused and ran his hand through the area where his hair must once have rolled.

‘Can you imagine,’ he went on, now with passion in his voice, ‘what it’s like for an educated man here? What it’s like to just have back numbers of the
Eastbourne Herald
to read? Oh, and about one tenth of the public library. The bookcase devoted to gardening and botany, to be precise. I ask you, can you imagine that?’

Not being much of a reading man myself, it didn’t sound too agonising but I put on a sympathetic face.

‘Well,’ said the man, with just a touch of nastiness in his voice, ‘you’ll get a chance to find out in the decades to come. You’ll become an involuntary expert on carnations and cacti like me. You’ll be able to recite the last available
Eastbourne Herald
by heart. I mean, what a waste! Do you know who I was?’

‘No, but I expect you’re going to tell me.’

‘All right, I will. I was the Astronomer Royal, working at the Hurstmonceaux observatory near here. I had international prizes, I had the honour of being presented to their majesties, I was at the height of my profession... and then I came into Eastbourne for a stroll and a cup of tea one Bank Holiday Monday. Now I read silly books about polyanthuses and peonies. And reread them and reread them and reread them and reread them...’

He lapsed into bitter silence.

Seeing before my eyes what panic would make of me in fifty or so years’ time, I gathered my remaining mental strength together. Treat it like a tricky corporate take-over or a dodgy share issue, I told myself. Look for the angle, the handle to turn this thing around.

‘Don’t dry up,’ I said to the sometime Astronomer Royal, sinking down in my seat to try and catch his eye. ‘What about this Biffo chap? What about escape?’

The Astronomer Royal applied himself to the champagne bottle before answering. A frothy wayward trickle found its way down his starched shirtfront.

‘Biffo’s the only one who has,’ he said at last. ‘He got out once before, substituted himself for some chap from a little village...’

‘Binscombe?’ I suggested. ‘A man called Windsor?’

‘Maybe, perhaps, the name rings bells but there again we don’t go much on names here, not any more. Also my memory’s not so good now... too full of bloody data about planting and pruning techniques.’

‘But this Biffo really did escape?’

‘Oh yes. Ironic really, considering it’s his picture got us all in this mess. You see, he reckoned that if you stayed just where the photograph showed you to be, if you were precisely in accord with it as often as you could be, then you might just be able to seize someone who was looking in. Biffo said it was all a matter of patience and will, nothing to do with logic and science. If photographs capture life, he said, then surely the life within could interact with life outside—they being interconnected in some unfathomable way. That’s what the Buddhists maintain, I believe. You know, the universe as an interconnected whole, every part, however distant, affecting every other part. Do you follow?’

I nodded. ‘Modern physics is coming round to that notion,’ I said without enthusiasm. ‘I read about it in the
Independent
.’

‘Ah well,’ said the Astronomer Royal sadly, ‘maybe so. But in my day, we thought differently. Biffo got laughed at about his ideas. I told him I couldn’t see any scientific method in the theory—which there isn’t—but it turns out he was right. As you can imagine, that hasn’t done wonders for my standing in this community.’

I was underwhelmed with sympathy, as the Astronomer Royal clearly noted. He gave me a sulky look and pressed on.

‘Very taken about willpower and trials of strength was Biffo. He had all sorts of notions about that sort of thing, said that’s what led him to join Moseley’s crowd.’

‘How nice for him.’

‘Possibly. They attracted a lissom crowd of aristocratic gels I’m told. Anyhow, he spent day after day, stock still out on the prom, just as depicted in that dashed picture. You’ve got to hand it to him, he kept it up long after we all lost patience. You see, he maintained that if you achieved stillness, sometimes—just sometimes, mark you—you could sense an observer, a person in the real world looking in. And then, if you pounced, not literally of course, and the person was a weaker... well, soul, to use a phrase, an inferior life-force, then an exchange, an escape, could be effected.’

‘With all due respect to present company, naturally,’ I said dryly, repressing a desire to deprive this Astronomer Royal of his ears.

‘What? Oh yes, well, no offence intended. It was Biffo’s theory, not mine.’

He paused and peered gingerly down into the champagne bottle as if it were a rifle.

‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘when all’s said and done, it did work, didn’t it?’

‘So it seems.’

‘Naturally, everyone has an occasional go now. Now that they know it’s possible. But no one else has been successful. I reckon the photograph’s been stowed away and rarely sees the light of day—presumably by this... What did you say his name was?’

‘Windsor.’

‘…Windsor chap. And what a misery
he
turned out to be. I hope you’re not going to be like him.’

I ignored that in favour of a more vital question, the bitter flavour of the expected response to which was already invading my mouth.

‘And just for the record,’ I said, ‘I don’t suppose dear old Biffo, with all his iron will and can-do spirit, ever said how he got recaptured the first time?’

‘No, you’re right. Not a word.’

My spirits hit bottom—and then kept on going down, beyond the world, into everlasting freefall.

I got up to leave, having absolutely nothing more to say to the Astronomer Royal. However, he altered my plans by calling me back.

‘I say, chappie, before you go, I wonder if you could tell me something?’

I shrugged.

‘Well, it’s like this. Before here, before I got caught, I was working on a research project, up at the observatory. I was looking at gravitational perturbations in the orbit of Neptune, searching for the presumed ninth planet that caused them. We were going to call it Minerva... or maybe Pluto. Did I discover it?’

For the first time he looked fresh faced and eager, a pale shadow of the enthusiast he must once have been.

Desire strove with conscience, and won a first round knock-out. With glee I told him no, he hadn’t—and watched him subside back into despair.

*  *  *

Out on the prom, the ‘sun’ was still shining and people were still sauntering by, just as though it really were a holiday and not just another damn period of phoney light. The words of a Tom Robinson song were squatting in my head and wouldn’t depart when asked:

‘All day today, just excuse for tomorrow.

Tomorrow just something to do.’

Mr Disvan, if he were here, would doubtless tell me the lines were derived from a psalm or somesuch, and I’d moan about him not allowing anything under the sun be new. And he’d go on to say that phrase itself came from Ecclesiastes... etc, etc. How much I would have given at that moment to hear that annoying, soft-spoken voice again, telling me I was wrong about everything. But now my wishes were like the proverbial pagan’s prayer; they ascended into nothingness and were of no matter. Nothing was to be the in-word from now on. Nothing mattered in this place, because this
was
nothing.

Out to sea I could now detect, a fair way out but still distinct, the wall of nothing, that ended this silly little universe. It circled round and cut through the cliffs, the fields and streets and houses, shearing through the public library no doubt, before heading back out into the water to complete the useless sphere. I hadn’t noticed it before. Now I couldn’t notice anything else.

Many times in the past, I’d felt that life and the cosmos were just too complicated. There was just too much information input. That had now all been sorted out for me, but I didn’t feel very grateful.

The depressed policeman was also still in position, perched dejectedly on the railings between prom and beach. I caught his eye as he lifted his head from his hands. In the expression, unbeknown to me, apparently occupying my face, he evidently saw a kindred spirit.

‘I know,’ he said sullenly. ‘Ghastly, isn’t it?’

*  *  *

Accustomed as I was to Bali and the Maldives, even a short holiday in Eastbourne would have been bad enough. The thought of eternity there put my adrenal glands into overdrive and sustained a bubbling sea of panic and anxiety on whose edge I permanently tottered.

On the surface, life was not too bad. My room at the Grand was all it might be, the food and drink were inexhaustible (though pointless) and the ‘night-life’, when people could raise the energy, frenetic. After a fashion, society, a sort of 1920s in amber, staggered on.

And yet, and yet... permeating everything that was done or said, was a virulent virus of despair, a weariness bred of the sure knowledge that none of this was real. It led some to cast themselves in the sea or leap from the roof of the hotel, but they came to no harm. The aimless passers-by did exactly that, and the would-be suicide had to get on up and go into the years ahead. I know because I was one of them.

Then, one day, sitting on the prom, reading the yellow and brittle
Eastbourne Herald
of 23/3/29 for the umpteenth time and holding back a desire to scream, a coach pulled up alongside me.

There was nothing unusual about that as such. This was, after all, a holiday town and holidaymakers often travelled in coaches. I resumed my bleary peruse of ‘Scoutmaster on grave charges.’

But... there were few enough cars in this Eastbourne, and even fewer coaches. There were no modern coaches at all, none with
‘Pothecary and Sons Ltd of Binscombe—we’ll get you there in style’
painted along the side. I looked up.