A Sense of Reality: And Other Stories Read online

  ‘Exploring?’ Wilditch suggested, he thought with cunning.

  ‘There wasn’t much to explore in fourteen acres. You know, I had such plans for this place when it became mine. A swimming-pool where the tennis-lawn was—it’s mainly potatoes now. I meant to drain the pond too—it breeds mosquitoes. Well, I’ve added two bathrooms and modernized the kitchen, and even that has cost me four acres of pasture. At the back of the house now you can hear the children caterwauling from the council-houses. It’s all been a bit of a disappointment.’

  ‘At least I’m glad you haven’t drained the lake.’

  ‘My dear chap, why go on calling it a lake? Have a look at it in the morning and you’ll see the absurdity. The water’s nowhere more than two feet deep.’ He added, ‘Oh well, the place won’t outlive me. My children aren’t interested, and the factories are beginning to come out this way. They’ll get a reasonably good price for the land—I haven’t much else to leave them.’ He put some more sugar in his coffee. ‘Unless, of course, you’d like to take it on when I am gone?’

  ‘I haven’t the money and anyway there’s no cause to believe that I won’t be dead first.’

  ‘Mother was against my accepting the inheritance,’ George said. ‘She never liked the place.’

  ‘I thought she loved her summers here.’ The great gap between their memories astonished him. They seemed to be talking about different places and different people.

  ‘It was terribly inconvenient, and she was always in trouble with the gardener. You remember Ernest? She said she had to wring every vegetable out of him. (By the way he’s still alive, though retired of course—you ought to look him up in the morning. It would please him. He still feels he owns the place.) And then, you know, she always thought it would have been better for us if we could have gone to the seaside. She had an idea that she was robbing us of a heritage—buckets and spades and seawater-bathing. Poor mother, she couldn’t afford to turn down Uncle Henry’s hospitality. I think in her heart she blamed father for dying when he did without providing for holidays at the sea.’

  ‘Did you talk it over with her in those days?’

  ‘Oh no, not then. Naturally she had to keep a front before the children. But when I inherited the place—you were in Africa—she warned Mary and me about the difficulties. She had very decided views, you know, about any mysteries, and that turned her against the garden. Too much shrubbery, she said. She wanted everything to be very clear. Early Fabian training, I daresay.’

  ‘It’s odd. I don’t seem to have known her very well.’

  ‘You had a passion for hide-and-seek. She never liked that. Mystery again. She thought it a bit morbid. There was a time when we couldn’t find you. You were away for hours.’

  ‘Are you sure it was hours? Not a whole night?’

  ‘I don’t remember it at all myself. Mother told me.’ They drank their brandy for a while in silence. Then George said, ‘She asked Uncle Henry to have the Dark Walk cleared away. She thought it was unhealthy with all the spiders’ webs, but he never did anything about it.’

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, it was on my list, but other things had priority, and now it doesn’t seem worth while to make more changes.’ He yawned and stretched. ‘I’m used to early bed. I hope you don’t mind. Breakfast at 8.30?’

  ‘Don’t make any changes for me.’

  ‘There’s just one thing I forgot to show you. The flush is tricky in your bathroom.’

  George led the way upstairs. He said, ‘The local plumber didn’t do a very good job. Now, when you’ve pulled this knob, you’ll find the flush never quite finishes. You have to do it a second time—sharply like this.’

  Wilditch stood at the window looking out. Beyond the Dark Walk and the space where the lake must be, he could see the splinters of light given off by the council-houses; through one gap in the laurels there was even a street-light visible, and he could hear the faint sound of television-sets joining together different programmes like the discordant murmur of a mob.

  He said, ‘That view would have pleased mother. A lot of the mystery gone.’

  ‘I rather like it this way myself,’ George said, ‘on a winter’s evening. It’s a kind of companionship. As one gets older one doesn’t want to feel quite alone on a sinking ship. Not being a churchgoer myself …’ he added, leaving the sentence lying like a torso on its side.

  ‘At least we haven’t shocked mother in that way, either of us.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish I’d pleased her, though, about the Dark Walk. And the pond—how she hated that pond too.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Perhaps because you liked to hide on the island. Secrecy and mystery again. Wasn’t there something you wrote about it once? A story?’

  ‘Me? A story? Surely not.’

  ‘I don’t remember the circumstances. I thought—in a school magazine? Yes, I’m sure of it now. She was very angry indeed and she wrote rude remarks in the margin with a blue pencil. I saw them somewhere once. Poor mother.’

  George led the way into the bedroom. He said, ‘I’m sorry there’s no bedside light. It was smashed last week, and I haven’t been into town since.’

  ‘It’s all right. I don’t read in bed.’

  ‘I’ve got some good detective-stories downstairs if you wanted one.’

  ‘Mysteries?’

  ‘Oh, mother never minded those. They came under the heading of puzzles. Because there was always an answer.’

  Beside the bed was a small bookcase. He said, ‘I brought some of mother’s books here when she died and put them in her room. Just the ones that she had liked and no bookseller would take.’ Wilditch made out a title, My Apprenticeship by Beatrice Webb. ‘Sentimental, I suppose, but I didn’t want actually to throw away her favourite books. Good night.’ He repeated, ‘I’m sorry about the light.’

  ‘It really doesn’t matter.’

  George lingered at the door. He said, ‘I’m glad to see you here, William. There were times when I thought you were avoiding the place.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Well, you know how it is. I never go to Harrods now because I was there with Mary a few days before she died.’

  ‘Nobody has died here. Except Uncle Henry, I suppose.’

  ‘No, of course not. But why did you, suddenly, decide to come?’

  ‘A whim,’ Wilditch said.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be going abroad again soon?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Well, good night.’ He closed the door.

  Wilditch undressed, and then, because he felt sleep too far away, he sat down on the bed under the poor centre-light and looked along the rows of shabby books. He opened Mrs Beatrice Webb at some account of a trade union congress and put it back. (The foundations of the future Welfare State were being truly and uninterestingly laid.) There were a number of Fabian pamphlets heavily scored with the blue pencil which George had remembered. In one place Mrs Wilditch had detected an error of one decimal point in some statistics dealing with agricultural imports. What passionate concentration must have gone to that discovery. Perhaps because his own life was coming to an end, he thought how little of this, in the almost impossible event of a future, she would have carried with her. A fairy-story in such an event would be a more valuable asset than a Fabian graph, but his mother had not approved of fairy-stories. The only children’s book on these shelves was a history of England. Against an enthusiastic account of the battle of Agincourt she had pencilled furiously,

  And what good came of it at last?

  Said little Peterkin.

  The fact that his mother had quoted a poem was in itself remarkable.

  The storm which he had left behind in London had travelled east in his wake and now overtook him in short gusts of wind and wet that slapped at the pane. He thought, for no reason, It will be a rough night on the island. He had been disappointed to discover from George that the origin of the dream which had travelled
with him round the world was probably no more than a story invented for a school-magazine and forgotten again, and just as that thought occurred to him, he saw a bound volume called The Warburian on the shelf.

  He took it out, wondering why his mother had preserved it, and found a page turned down. It was the account of a cricket-match against Lancing and Mrs Wilditch had scored the margin: ‘Wilditch One did good work in deep field.’ Another turned-down leaf produced a passage under the heading Debating Society: ‘Wilditch One spoke succinctly to the motion.’ The motion was ‘That this House has no belief in the social policies of His Majesty’s Government’. So George in those days had been a Fabian too.

  He opened the book at random this time and a letter fell out. It had a printed heading, Dean’s House, Warbury, and it read, ‘Dear Mrs Wilditch, I was sorry to receive your letter of the 3rd and to learn that you were displeased with the little fantasy published by your younger son in The Warburian. I think you take a rather extreme view of the tale which strikes me as quite a good imaginative exercise for a boy of thirteen. Obviously he has been influenced by the term’s reading of The Golden Age—which after all, fanciful though it may be, was written by a governor of the Bank of England.’ (Mrs Wilditch had made several blue exclamation marks in the margin—perhaps representing her view of the Bank.) ‘Last term’s Treasure Island too may have contributed. It is always our intention at Warbury to foster the imagination—which I think you rather harshly denigrate when you write of “silly fancies”. We have scrupulously kept our side of the bargain, knowing how strongly you feel, and the boy is not “subjected”, as you put it, to any religious instruction at all. Quite frankly, Mrs Wilditch, I cannot see any trace of religious feeling in this little fancy—I have read it through a second time before writing to you—indeed the treasure, I’m afraid, is only too material, and quite at the mercy of those “who break in and steal”.’

  Wilditch tried to find the place from which the letter had fallen, working back from the date of the letter. Eventually he found it: ‘The Treasure on the Island’ by W.W.

  Wilditch began to read.

  5

  ‘In the middle of the garden there was a great lake and in the middle of the lake an island with a wood. Not everybody knew about the lake, for to reach it you had to find your way down a long dark walk, and not many people’s nerves were strong enough to reach the end. Tom knew that he was likely to be undisturbed in that frightening region, and so it was there that he constructed a raft out of old packing cases, and one drear wet day when he knew that everybody would be shut in the house, he dragged the raft to the lake and paddled it across to the island. As far as he knew he was the first to land there for centuries.

  ‘It was all overgrown on the island, but from a map he had found in an ancient sea-chest in the attic he made his measurements, three paces north from the tall umbrella pine in the middle and then two paces to the right. There seemed to be nothing but scrub, but he had brought with him a pick and a spade and with the dint of almost superhuman exertions he uncovered an iron ring sunk in the grass. At first he thought it would be impossible to move, but by inserting the point of the pick and levering it he raised a kind of stone lid and there below, going into the darkness, was a long narrow passage.

  ‘Tom had more than the usual share of courage, but even he would not have ventured further if it had not been for the parlous state of the family fortunes since his father had died. His elder brother wanted to go to Oxford but for lack of money he would probably have to sail before the mast, and the house itself, of which his mother was passionately fond, was mortgaged to the hilt to a man in the City called Sir Silas Dedham whose name did not belie his nature.’

  Wilditch nearly gave up reading. He could not reconcile this childish story with the dream which he remembered. Only the ‘drear wet night’ seemed true as the bushes rustled and dripped and the birches swayed outside. A writer, so he had always understood, was supposed to order and enrich the experience which was the source of his story, but in that case it was plain that the young Wilditch’s talents had not been for literature. He read with growing irritation, wanting to exclaim again and again to this thirteen-year-old ancestor of his, ‘But why did you leave that out? Why did you alter this?’

  ‘The passage opened out into a great cave stacked from floor to ceiling with gold bars and chests overflowing with pieces of eight. There was a jewelled crucifix’—Mrs Wilditch had underlined the word in blue—‘set with precious stones which had once graced the chapel of a Spanish galleon and on a marble table were goblets of precious metal’

  But, as he remembered, it was an old kitchen-dresser, and there were no pieces of eight, no crucifix, and as for the Spanish galleon …

  ‘Tom thanked the kindly Providence which had led him first to the map in the attic’ (but there had been no map. Wilditch wanted to correct the story, page by page, much as his mother had done with her blue pencil) ‘and then to this rich treasure trove’ (his mother had written in the margin, referring to the kindly Providence, ‘No trace of religious feeling!!’). ‘He filled his pockets with the pieces of eight and taking one bar under each arm, he made his way back along the passage. He intended to keep his discovery secret and slowly day by day to transfer the treasure to the cupboard in his room, thus surprising his mother at the end of the holidays with all this sudden wealth. He got safely home unseen by anyone and that night in bed he counted over his new riches while outside it rained and rained. Never had he heard such a storm. It was as though the wicked spirit of his old pirate ancestor raged against him’ (Mrs Wilditch had written, ‘Eternal punishment I suppose!’) ‘and indeed the next day, when he returned to the island in the lake, whole trees had been uprooted and now lay across the entrance to the passage. Worse still there had been a landslide, and now the cavern must lie hidden forever below the waters of the lake. However,’ the young Wilditch had added briefly forty years ago, ‘the treasure already recovered was sufficient to save the family home and send his brother to Oxford.’

  Wilditch undressed and got into bed, then lay on his back listening to the storm. What a trivial conventional day-dream W.W. had constructed—out of what? There had been no atticroom—probably no raft: these were preliminaries which did not matter, but why had W.W. so falsified the adventure itself? Where was the man with the beard? The old squawking woman? Of course it had all been a dream, it could have been nothing else but a dream, but a dream too was an experience, the images of a dream had their own integrity, and he felt professional anger at this false report just as his mother had felt at the mistake in the Fabian statistics.

  All the same, while he lay there in his mother’s bed and thought of her rigid interrogation of W.W.’s story, another theory of the falsifications came to him, perhaps a juster one. He remembered how agents parachuted into France during the bad years after 1940 had been made to memorize a cover-story which they could give, in case of torture, with enough truth in it to be checked. Perhaps forty years ago the pressure to tell had been almost as great on W.W., so that he had been forced to find relief in fantasy. Well, an agent dropped into occupied territory was always given a timelimit after capture. ‘Keep the interrogators at bay with silence or lies for just so long, and then you may tell all.’ The timelimit had surely been passed in his case a long time ago, his mother was beyond the possibility of hurt, and Wilditch for the first time deliberately indulged his passion to remember.

  He got out of bed and, after finding some notepaper stamped, presumably for income-tax purposes, Winton Small Holdings Limited, in the drawer of the desk, he began to write an account of what he had found—or dreamed that he found—under the garden of Winton Hall. The summer night was nosing wetly around the window just as it had done fifty years ago, but, as he wrote, it began to turn grey and recede; the trees of the garden became visible, so that, when he looked up after some hours from his writing, he could see the shape of the broken fountain and what he supposed were the laurels in the Dark Wa
lk, looking like old men humped against the weather.

  PART TWO

  1

  Never mind how I came to the island in the lake, never mind whether in fact, as my brother says, it is a shallow pond with water only two feet deep (I suppose a raft can be launched on two feet of water, and certainly I must have always come to the lake by way of the Dark Walk, so that it is not at all unlikely that I built my raft there). Never mind what hour it was—I think it was evening, and I had hidden, as I remember it, in the Dark Walk because George had not got the courage to search for me there. The evening turned to rain, just as it’s raining now, and George must have been summoned into the house for shelter. He would have told my mother that he couldn’t find me and she must have called from the upstair windows, front and back—perhaps it was the occasion George spoke about tonight. I am not sure of these facts, they are plausible only, I can’t yet see what I’m describing. But I know that I was not to find George and my mother again for many days … It cannot, whatever George says, have been less than three days and nights that I spent below the ground. Could he really have forgotten so inexplicable an experience?

  And here I am already checking my story as though it were something which had really happened, for what possible relevance has George’s memory to the events of a dream?

  I dreamed that I crossed the lake, I dreamed … that is the only certain fact and I must cling to it, the fact that I dreamed. How my poor mother would grieve if she could know that, even for a moment, I had begun to think of these events as true … but, of course, if it were possible for her to know what I am thinking now, there would be no limit to the area of possibility. I dreamed then that I crossed the water (either by swimming—I could already swim at seven years old—or by wading if the lake is really as small as George makes out, or by paddling a raft) and scrambled up the slope of the island. I can remember grass, scrub, brushwood, and at last a wood. I would describe it as a forest if I had not already seen, in the height of the garden-wall, how age diminishes size. I don’t remember the umbrella-pine which W.W. described—I suspect he stole the sentinel-tree from Treasure Island, but I do know that when I got into the wood I was completely hidden from the house and the trees were close enough together to protect me from the rain. Quite soon I was lost, and yet how could I have been lost if the lake were no bigger than a pond, and the island therefore not much larger than the top of a kitchen-table?