The House of Doctor Dee (2 page)

'Haven't you ever heard of the Singer machine, Matty?'

My father had understood nothing of this, but now he leaned over and touched me. 'Something is coming through the veil,' he said into my ear. I could smell the cancer on his breath, and quietly returned to my seat beside his bed. He lay back, and began to talk to someone I could not see. 'Let me brush your coat, good doctor. Do you know this music? It is the music of the spheres.' He gazed around the room, and both of us flinched as his eyes passed over us. 'Do you know these shining lanes and alleys, the river of pearl, and the lighted towers rising into the blue mist?' He was looking at the plastic tubes around him. 'It is as old as the universe, and the city from which you first came.'

'Don't listen to anything he says.' My mother whispered intently to me across the bed. 'Don't believe him.' She got up abruptly and left the room. I glanced at my father and, when he seemed to smile at me, I followed her. We walked down the corridor of the ward; it was painted lime green, and the rooms on each side were decorated in a similar shade. I knew that there was someone lying in each bed but I tried not to look: only once did I glimpse some movement beneath a blanket. No doubt all of these patients were lost in a morphine dream, like my father, and death here was no more than the last stage of a process that was monitored and contained. This was not like death at all. 'It's nice and peaceful here,' she said. 'Everything is well under control.'

I had been so shaken by my father's outburst that I spoke quite freely to her. 'I suppose you'd like piped music, too. They could all be wearing pink pyjamas, and holding balloons.' I was silent for a moment as a nurse passed. 'There is such a thing as holy dying, you know.'

She looked up at me in distaste. 'You sounded just like your father then.'

'And why not?'

'I suppose you'd prefer to be sitting in an old churchyard, like he used to do. Talking about ghosts and all the other nonsense.' I was surprised by this description of him, but I preferred to say nothing. 'Do you love him, Matty?'

'No. I don't know. Everyone uses that word, but I don't think it means anything.'

She seemed curiously relieved by this. 'That's my opinion, too.'

Together we went back into his room, where he was still talking animatedly to someone I could not see. 'Do you smell my decay? It means that my change is coming, and I will be restored. This is your work, good doctor. This is all your work.'

'I wish there was a real doctor here,' my mother said. 'Why don't you call someone?'

My father had taken my hand, and seemed to be gazing earnestly at me. 'Do you feel the light coming through the stone of this wonderful city? Can you feel the warmth of the true fire that dwells in all things?' I could not bear to hear any more of his delusions and, without saying another word to my mother, I took my hand away and left the room. I never saw him again.

But then I inherited everything. More pertinently, perhaps, he bequeathed nothing to my mother; even the Ealing house, in which we had all lived, was given to me. How he must have hated her. Of course I told her at once that she should consider it her home, but this did nothing to allay her anger and bitterness against me. In fact it served only to increase them, since she believed she was being offered something which was already properly hers. She tried to conceal her feelings beneath a loud and vulgar manner, as she had always done, but I could sense her suspicion, her resentment, and her rage. She put me to the test soon after the funeral by inviting her boyfriend – 'the lover', as she called him – to live in the house with us. I said nothing. What could I say? But it was then I decided to visit my father's house in Clerkenwell.

'My darling,' she said to me a few days ago. 'The lover and I were thinking of a new car.' She always adopted what she supposed to be a sophisticated tone, but managed only to sound false and inappropriate.

'What kind of car?' I knew what she expected me to say, but I enjoyed leaving her in suspense.

'Oh, I don't know. The lover fancies a Jag.' That's how she always betrayed herself, with 'fancies' and with 'Jag'; her common vocabulary and genteel manner were perpetually at odds.

And still I did not say it. 'A new model, mother?'

'Oh, darling, I don't know anything about transport. Shall I bring the lover in to explain?'

'No,' I said quickly. I could bear it no longer. 'Of course you must let me pay for it.'

'You musn't do that, darling...'

'Father would have expected it, wouldn't he?'

'I suppose so. If you put it like that. I suppose, in principle, it is my money too.'

That had become her story; my father had left her nothing, but 'in principle' it was all hers. I understood now why he had disliked her so much, while as a superstitious Catholic he had refused to leave her. Geoffrey, 'the lover', had come in. I suspected that he had been waiting outside until the financing of the new car had been satisfactorily resolved, but he was not about to bring up the subject now. He was a very ordinary man, with one saving characteristic – he knew that he was ordinary, and was always implicitly apologizing for the fact. He was a surveyor who worked for one of the London boroughs; he had an awkward, diffident manner and seemed to fade still further in the company of my brightly clad mother. The strange thing was that both of them seemed to enjoy the situation.

But why was I thinking about these people, as I sat in the house at Clerkenwell? They were no more than phantoms conjured up out of my weakness, their voices less real to me than the shape of this ground-floor room and the texture of its thick stone walls. Here, at last, there was a chance of freedom. I could leave that terrible house in Ealing which had hampered me and injured me for the last twenty-nine years – for the whole of my life – and come to a place which had, for me at least, no past at all. I heard myself talking into the air in my sudden exaltation: 'Let the dead bury their dead.' But even as I said it, I did not know what I meant by it.

Then I noticed something. The shadows within the room seemed to fall at a curious angle, as though they were not properly aligned with any of the objects that created them. And there came upon me a curious fear – that there were, somehow, shadows where no shadows should have been. No, they were not shadows. They were patterns in the dust, caught suddenly in the changing light of that summer's evening. So had my father come here secretly, and entered this room? Had he sat, like me, with his head bowed? And hadn't he once told me that dust was simply the residue of dead skin?

I might have stayed there all evening, gradually enshrouded in darkness and shadow, but I shook myself out of my trance. I had left my suitcase in the hallway and, in the gathering dusk, I collected it and slowly climbed the stairs: there was a bedroom on the first floor, with a bathroom beside it, and I began to unpack my clothes as neatly as if I were in the house of a stranger. But I was so tired that I was hardly able to complete even this minor task. I lay down upon the bed and, closing my eyes, found myself walking along Cloak Lane. I had imagined everything; I had not yet entered the house which my father had left for me. It had four doors, the first of which was black, the second as white and as transparent as crystal, the third was green, and the fourth red. I opened the first door, and the house was full of black dust like gunpowder. I opened the white door, and the rooms within were pale and empty. I opened the third door, and there appeared a cloud of water as if the house were a fountain. Then I opened the fourth door, and I saw a furnace. Before I could move or do anything, I heard a voice close by me distinctly saying, 'You are utterly undone, my little man.'

I sat up, for a moment convinced that the voice had come from somewhere within the room, until I realized that I must have slept and dreamed. But the brief rest had left me unsettled; the room was not cold on that summer's evening, but somehow coldness had entered it while I lay asleep. I got up from the narrow bed and switched on the electric light, hoping that it might dispel the ghost of my unease, but it spread too much brightness; the room must have been built in the early nineteenth century, and this was the wrong kind of light.

I woke up the next morning, feeling more hungry than I had ever been in my life before. But even though I had brought no food with me, I was still reluctant to leave the house: for some reason I was afraid that I would never be able to find it again. I lay upon the bed and waited. But who, or what, could I be waiting for? I was not going to wall myself up here like some sixteenth-century monk, however strong the temptation, and I roused myself at last. I had woken upon the bed fully dressed, and conceived a horror for the clothes I had slept in: so I took them off and laid them carefully in a corner. Then I washed and dressed again, before hazarding the outer air. I retraced my steps down Cloak Lane, but I could not resist looking back at the old house. It was mine now, I knew that, but I turned because I had the strangest fear that it might already have disappeared.

I approached Clerkenwell Green, carefully skirting the grounds of the church, and looked about me. Once more the area seemed empty, somehow bereft, and as I walked down Jerusalem Passage towards the Clerkenwell Road I could see only boarded-up buildings, closed offices and tattered advertisement hoardings that no doubt concealed patches of waste ground. There was no evidence of a supermarket, or even a grocery, and it was as if the whole district had been separated from the rest of the city. I paused for breath beneath the remains of St John's Priory, but it was not until I had gone through Charterhouse Square and the congerie of narrow streets around Smithfield that eventually I came to a shopping precinct. What did I need? Bread. Soup. Cheese. Milk. Butter. Fruit. What people have always needed.

But I enjoyed walking among the shelves of this Smithfield supermarket: the sandwiches in their sealed wrappers, the salads packed in cellophane, the plastic containers of milk and orange juice, all seemed to glow in the artificial light. I lingered among the chilled foods, and took particular delight in the cabinets of frozen goods where slices of plaice and breasts of chicken lay beneath a white covering of frost. Then there were the shelves of pickled vegetables and fruits, the rows of tinned peas and tomatoes, the piles of packaged bread and crumpets. I was at peace with a world which afforded so much bounty, and began to enjoy living at the very end of time. Just as I left with my carrier-bags, a wind started up among the green litter-bins and the black plastic sacks filled with rubbish; scraps of newspaper and discarded wrappers flew around the gaudily painted precinct, and I looked for my way home.

I managed to find a taxi but, since the driver could not enter the one-way streets near Cloak Lane, I left the cab on the south side of the Green near a small printing works. I was beginning to understand the geography of this area now, and had no difficulty finding my way back to the old house. I had opened the gate and was about to walk down the stone path when I stepped back in alarm: there was a man in a dark coat bending over by the side of the path among the weeds and thistles. He had his back to me, and seemed to be tying his shoelace, when suddenly without looking around he hurled himself sideways as if he were trying to knock me violently to the ground. But nothing happened. He had melted away, or somehow melted into my own body.

Of course I realized at once that this was my own foolishness – I had seen a shadow which moved, no doubt the shape of a large bird which had suddenly flown upward. But I was still shaken, even by my own delusion, and hurried towards the door. When I came inside the hall, I realized that the right leg of my trousers was torn; there was a wide gash there, just as if it had been made with a knife, and I must have ripped it when I stepped out of the taxi. Suddenly and unaccountably I became very angry – angry at myself, angry at my own fear, angry at the house for so unnerving me. After a few minutes I went into the kitchen, and arranged the groceries neatly upon their shelves. There was something about this house which demanded order. But I had no appetite now, and sat looking at the brightly coloured packets and bottles as if I did not know what they were.

Now all is done; bring home the child again. There was a steady knocking, which seemed to be coming from inside the room. I arched awake, with a confused noise something like a cry, and found myself still sitting in the kitchen; but I was in a different chair, and the noise was growing louder. I was so bewildered that I looked around to make sure no one was in the room with me, knocking against the wall with a clenched fist and grimacing at me; but then, as the sound echoed around the silent and sparsely furnished house, I realized that there was someone at the front door. I hesitated still. I went over to the sink and dashed some cold water against my face; then, very slowly and cautiously, I walked down the hall. Daniel Moore was standing on the path outside, looking up at my bedroom window as if he had known where to find me.

'You're wet,' he said.

'I know. I was asleep.'

He looked at me curiously for a moment. 'I couldn't reach you on the phone.'

'That's because it's not connected.'

How can I explain Daniel? He was a professional researcher, like me, and we had seen each other so many times in the British Library, the National Archive Centre, the newspaper collection at Colindale, and elsewhere, that we began to talk. There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward. I must admit that I enjoy the sensation. One client might want me to investigate some eighteenth-century deeds, while another might need information on a nineteenth-century toolmaker, but for me the pleasure is the same; it is as if I were entering a place I had once known and then forgotten, and in the sudden light of recognition had remembered something of myself. On certain occasions this had a curious but no less pleasurable sequel: I would look up from the books or documents I was reading, and find that the immediate world around me had become both more distant and more distinct. It had become part of the continuing historical process, as mysterious and unapproachable as any other period, and I gazed around me with the same delighted attention that I would give if I suddenly found myself within a sixteenth-century scene. If my work meant that I often viewed the past as my present, so in turn the present moment became part of the past. I have always tended to keep my real feelings to myself, so I had never discussed any of this with Daniel Moore. He would have listened to me with his usual dry attention, his bright eyes resting upon my face, before moving on to some other topic. In any case he saw his work in a different light; it was for him, I suspect, simply an inconspicuous job which he could pursue in solitude. 'I presume,' he said, 'that, as usual, I'm too early?'