A Sense of Reality Read online

  On the edge of his cup, I remember, was a tea-leaf. He took it on his nail and placed it on the back of my hand. I knew very well what that meant. A hard stalk of tea indicated a man upon the way and the soft leaf a woman; this was a soft leaf. I began to strike it with the palm of my other hand counting as I did so, ‘One, two, three.’ It lay flat, adhering to my hand. ‘Four, five.’ It was on my fingers now and I said, triumphantly, ‘In five days,’ thinking of Javitt’s daughter in the world above.

  Javitt shook his head. ‘You don’t count time like that with us,’ he said. ‘That’s five decades of years.’ I accepted his correction—he must know his own country best, and it’s only now that I find myself calculating, if every day down there were ten years long, what age in our reckoning could Javitt have claimed?

  I have no idea what he had learned from the ceremony of the tea, but at least he seemed satisfied. He rose on his one leg, and now that he had his arms stretched out to either wall, he reminded me of a gigantic crucifix, and the crucifix moved in great hops down the way we had taken the day before. Maria gave me a little push from behind and I followed. The oil-lamp in Maria’s hand cast long shadows ahead of us.

  First we came under the lake and I remembered the tons of water hanging over us like a frozen falls, and after that we reached the spot where we had halted before, and again a car went rumbling past on the road above. But this time we continued our shuffling march. I calculated that now we had crossed the road which led to Winton Halt; we must be somewhere under the inn called The Three Keys, which was kept by our gardener’s uncle, and after that we should have arrived below the Long Mead, a field with a small minnowy stream along its northern border owned by a farmer called Howell. I had not given up all idea of escape and I noted our route carefully and the distance we had gone. I had hoped for some side-passage which might indicate that there was another entrance to the tunnel, but there seemed to be none and I was disappointed to find that, before we travelled below the inn, we descended quite steeply, perhaps in order to avoid the cellars—indeed at one moment I heard a groaning and a turbulence as though the gardener’s uncle were taking delivery of some new barrels of beer.

  We must have gone nearly half a mile before the passage came to an end in a kind of egg-shaped hall. Facing us was a kitchen-dresser of unstained wood, very similar to the one in which my mother kept her stores of jam, sultanas, raisins and the like.

  ‘Open up, Maria,’ Javitt said, and Maria shuffled by me, clanking a bunch of keys and quacking with excitement, while the lamp swung to and fro like a censer.

  ‘She’s heated up,’ Javitt said. ‘It’s many days since she saw the treasure last.’ I do not know which kind of time he was referring to then, but judging from her excitement I think the days must really have represented decades—she had even forgotten which key fitted the lock and she tried them all and failed and tried again before the tumbler turned.

  I was disappointed when I first saw the interior—I had expected gold bricks and a flow of Maria Theresa dollars spilling on the floor, and there were only a lot of shabby cardboard-boxes on the upper shelves and the lower shelves were empty. I think Javitt noted my disappointment and was stung by it. ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘the moit’s down below for safety.’ But I wasn’t to stay disappointed very long. He took down one of the biggest boxes off the top shelf and shook the contents on to the earth at my feet, as though defying me to belittle that.

  And that was a sparkling mass of jewellery such as I had never seen before—I was going to say in all the colours of the rainbow, but the colours of stones have not that pale girlish simplicity. There were reds almost as deep as raw liver, stormy blues, greens like the underside of a wave, yellow sunset colours, greys like a shadow on snow, and stones without colour at all that sparkled brighter than all the rest. I say I’d seen nothing like it: it is the scepticism of middle age which leads me now to compare that treasure trove with the caskets overflowing with artificial jewellery which you sometimes see in the shop-windows of Italian tourist-resorts.

  And there again I find myself adjusting a dream to the kind of criticism I ought to reserve for some agent’s report on the import or export value of coloured glass. If this was a dream, these were real stones. Absolute reality belongs to dreams and not to life. The gold of dreams is not the diluted gold of even the best goldsmith, there are no diamonds in dreams made of paste—what seems is. ‘Who seems most kingly is the king.’

  I went down on my knees and bathed my hands in the treasure, and while I knelt there Javitt opened box after box and poured the contents upon the ground. There is no avarice in a child. I didn’t concern myself with the value of this horde: it was simply a treasure, and a treasure is to be valued for its own sake and not for what it will buy. It was only years later, after a deal of literature and learning and knowledge at second hand, that W.W. wrote of the treasure as something with which he could save the family fortunes. I was nearer to the jackdaw in my dream, caring only for the glitter and the sparkle.

  ‘It’s nothing to what lies below out of sight,’ Javitt remarked with pride.

  There were necklaces and bracelets, lockets and bangles, pins and rings and pendants and buttons. There were quantities of those little gold objects which girls like to hang on their bracelets: the Vendôme column and the Eiffel Tower and a Lion of St Mark’s, a champagne bottle and a tiny booklet with leaves of gold inscribed with the names of places important perhaps to a pair of lovers—Paris, Brighton, Rome, Assisi and Moreton-in-Marsh. There were gold coins too—some with the heads of Roman emperors and others of Victoria and George IV and Frederick Barbarossa. There were birds made out of precious stone with diamond-eyes, and buckles for shoes and belts, hairpins too with the rubies turned into roses, and vinaigrettes. There were toothpicks of gold, and swizzlesticks, and little spoons to dig the wax out of your ears of gold too, and cigarette-holders studded with diamonds, and small boxes of gold for pastilles and snuff, horse-shoes for the ties of hunting men, and emerald-hounds for the lapels of hunting women: fishes were there too and little carrots of ruby for luck, diamond-stars which had perhaps decorated generals or statesmen, golden key-rings with emerald-initials, and sea-shells picked out with pearls, and a portrait of a dancing-girl in gold and enamel, with Haidee inscribed in what I suppose were rubies.

  ‘Enough’s enough,’ Javitt said, and I had to drag myself away, as it seemed to me, from all the riches in the world, its pursuits and enjoyments. Maria would have packed everything that lay there back into the cardboard-boxes, but Javitt said with his lordliest voice, ‘Let them lie,’ and back we went in silence the way we had come, in the same order, our shadows going ahead. It was as if the sight of the treasure had exhausted me. I lay down on the sacks without waiting for my broth and fell asleep at once. In my dream within a dream somebody laughed and wept.

  7

  I have said that I can’t remember how many days and nights I spent below the garden. The number of times I slept is really no guide, for I slept simply when I had the inclination or when Javitt commanded me to lie down, there being no light or darkness save what the oil-lamp determined, but I am almost sure it was after this sleep of exhaustion that I woke with the full intention somehow to reach home again. Up till now I had acquiesced in my captivity with little complaint; perhaps the meals of broth were palling on me, though I doubt if that was the reason, for I have fed for longer, with as little variety and less appetite, in Africa; perhaps the sight of Javitt’s treasure had been a climax which robbed my story of any further interest; perhaps, and I think this is the most likely reason, I wanted to begin my search for Miss Ramsgate.

  Whatever the motive, I came awake determined from my deep sleep, as suddenly as I had fallen into it. The wick was burning low in the oil-lamp and I could hardly distinguish Javitt’s features and Maria was out of sight somewhere behind the curtain. To my astonishment Javitt’s eyes were closed—it had never occurred to me before that there were moments when these two mig
ht sleep. Very quietly, with my eyes on Javitt, I slipped off my shoes—it was now or never. When I had got them off with less sound than a mouse makes, an idea came to me and I withdrew the laces—I can still hear the sharp ting of the metal tag ringing on the gold po beside my sacks. I thought I had been too clever by half, for Javitt stirred—but then he was still again and I slipped off my makeshift bed and crawled over to him where he sat on the lavatory-seat. I knew that, unfamiliar as I was with the tunnel, I could never outpace Javitt, but I was taken aback when I realized that it was impossible to bind together the ankles of a one-legged man.

  But neither could a one-legged man travel without the help of his hands—the hands which lay now conveniently folded like a statue’s on his lap. One of the things my brother had taught me was to make a slip-knot. I made one now with the laces joined and very gently, millimetre by millimetre, passed it over Javitt’s hands and wrists, then pulled it tight.

  I had expected him to wake with a howl of rage and even in my fear felt some of the pride Jack must have experienced at outwitting the giant. I was ready to flee at once, taking the lamp with me, but his very silence detained me. He only opened one eye, so that again I had the impression that he was winking at me. He tried to move his hands, felt the knot, and then acquiesced in their imprisonment. I expected him to call for Maria, but he did nothing of the kind, just watching me with his one open eye.

  Suddenly I felt ashamed of myself. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ he said, ‘my prodigal, the strayed sheep, you’re learning fast.’

  ‘I promise not to tell a soul.’

  ‘They wouldn’t believe you if you did,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be going now,’ I whispered with regret, lingering there absurdly, as though with half of myself I would have been content to stay for always.

  ‘You better,’ he said. ‘Maria might have different views from me.’ He tried his hands again. ‘You tie a good knot.’

  ‘I’m going to find your daughter,’ I said, ‘whatever you may think.’

  ‘Good luck to you then,’ Javitt said. ‘You’ll have to travel a long way; you’ll have to forget all your schoolmasters try to teach you; you must lie like a horse-trader and not be tied up with loyalties any more than you are here, and who knows? I doubt it, but you might, you just might.’

  I turned away to take the lamp, and then he spoke again. ‘Take your golden po as a souvenir,’ he said. ‘Tell them you found it in an old cupboard. You’ve got to have something when you start a search to give you substance.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I will. You’ve been very kind.’ I began—absurdly in view of his bound wrists—to hold out my hand like a departing guest; then I stooped to pick up the po just as Maria, woken perhaps by our voices, came through the curtain. She took the situation in as quick as a breath and squawked at me—what I don’t know—and made a dive with her bird-like hand.

  I had the start of her down the passage and the advantage of the light, and I was a few feet ahead when I reached Camp Indecision, but at that point, what with the wind of my passage and the failing wick, the lamp went out. I dropped it on the earth and groped on in the dark. I could hear the scratch and whimper of Maria’s sequin dress, and my nerves leapt when her feet set the lamp rolling on my tracks. I don’t remember much after that. Soon I was crawling upwards, making better speed on my knees than she could do in her skirt, and a little later I saw a grey light where the roots of the tree parted. When I came up into the open it was much the same early morning hour as the one when I had entered the cave. I could hear kwahk, kwahk, kwahk, come up from below the ground—I don’t know if it was a curse or a menace or just a farewell, but for many nights afterwards I lay in bed afraid that the door would open and Maria would come in to fetch me, when the house was silent and asleep. Yet strangely enough I felt no fear of Javitt, then or later.

  Perhaps—I can’t remember—I dropped the gold po at the entrance of the tunnel as a propitiation to Maria; certainly I didn’t have it with me when I rafted across the lake or when Joe, our dog, came leaping out of the house at me and sent me sprawling on my back in the dew of the lawn by the green broken fountain.

  PART THREE

  1

  Wilditch stopped writing and looked up from the paper. The night had passed and with it the rain and the wet wind. Out of the window he could see thin rivers of blue sky winding between the banks of cloud, and the sun as it slanted in gleamed weakly on the cap of his pen. He read the last sentence which he had written and saw how again at the end of his account he had described his adventure as though it were one which had really happened and not something that he had dreamed during the course of a night’s truancy or invented a few years later for the school-magazine. Somebody, early though it was, trundled a wheelbarrow down the gravel-path beyond the fountain. The sound, like the dream, belonged to childhood.

  He went downstairs and unlocked the front door. There unchanged was the broken fountain and the path which led to the Dark Walk, and he was hardly surprised when he saw Ernest, his uncle’s gardener, coming towards him behind the wheelbarrow. Ernest must have been a young man in the days of the dream and he was an old man now, but to a child a man in the twenties approaches middle-age and so he seemed much as Wilditch remembered him. There was something of Javitt about him, though he had a big moustache and not a beard—perhaps it was only a brooding and scrutinizing look and that air of authority and possession which had angered Mrs Wilditch when she approached him for vegetables.

  ‘Why, Ernest,’ Wilditch said, ‘I thought you had retired?’

  Ernest put down the handle of the wheelbarrow and regarded Wilditch with reserve. ‘It’s Master William, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. George said—’

  ‘Master George was right in a way, but I have to lend a hand still. There’s things in this garden others don’t know about.’ Perhaps he had been the model for Javitt, for there was something in his way of speech that suggested the same ambiguity.

  ‘Such as …?’

  ‘It’s not everyone can grow asparagus in chalky soil,’ he said, making a general statement out of the particular in the same way Javitt had done. ‘You’ve been away a long time, Master William.’

  ‘I’ve travelled a lot.’

  ‘We heard one time you was in Africa and another time in Chinese parts. Do you like a black skin, Master William?’

  ‘I suppose at one time or another I’ve been fond of a black skin.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d win a beauty prize,’ Ernest said.

  ‘Do you know Ramsgate, Ernest?’

  ‘A gardener travels far enough in a day’s work,’ he said. The wheelbarrow was full of fallen leaves after the night’s storm. ‘Are the Chinese as yellow as people say?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a difference, Wilditch thought: Javitt never asked for information, he gave it: the weight of water, the age of the earth, the sexual habits of a monkey. ‘Are there many changes in the garden,’ he asked, ‘since I was here?’

  ‘You’ll have heard the pasture was sold?’

  ‘Yes. I was thinking of taking a walk before breakfast—down the Dark Walk perhaps to the lake and the island.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Did you ever hear any story of a tunnel under the lake?’

  ‘There’s no tunnel there. For what would there be a tunnel?’

  ‘No reason that I know. I suppose it was something I dreamed.’

  ‘As a boy you was always fond of that island. Used to hide there from the missus.’

  ‘Do you remember a time when I ran away?’

  ‘You was always running away. The missus used to tell me to go and find you. I’d say to her right out, straight as I’m talking to you, I’ve got enough to do digging the potatoes you are always asking for. I’ve never known a woman get through potatoes like she did. You’d have thought she ate them. She could have been living on potatoes and not on the fat of the land.�
�

  ‘Do you think I was treasure-hunting? Boys do.’

  ‘You was hunting for something. That’s what I said to the folk round here when you were away in those savage parts—not even coming back here for your uncle’s funeral. “You take my word,” I said to them, “he hasn’t changed, he’s off hunting for something, like he always did, though I doubt if he knows what he’s after,” I said to them. “The next we hear,” I said, “he’ll be standing on his head in Australia.”’

  Wilditch remarked with regret, ‘Somehow I never looked there’; he was surprised that he had spoken aloud. ‘And The Three Keys, is it still in existence?’

  ‘Oh, it’s there all right, but the brewers bought it when my uncle died and it’s not a free house any more.’

  ‘Did they alter it much?’

  ‘You’d hardly know it was the same house with all the pipes and tubes. They put in what they call pressure, so you can’t get an honest bit of beer without a bubble in it. My uncle was content to go down to the cellar for a barrel, but it’s all machinery now.’

  ‘When they made all those changes you didn’t hear any talk of a tunnel under the cellar?’