Part 4 (1/2)

'You never mention such things, either.'

'Ah, but that's different. I am intensely curious about myself.' He looked away for a moment. 'I have almost an obsession about it, which is why I say nothing.'

Even as he spoke, I was thinking of that night when I saw him dressed in women's clothes. I could think of very little else as we talked together: it was as if someone were sitting with him, waiting for the opportunity to break into our conversation. There is a theory that the first human being was androgynous; so when I looked at Daniel, was I looking at some quest for the original state of the world? 'Let me get you a drink,' was all I said. I went out into the kitchen, and looked with something like pleasure at the pile of s.h.i.+ning plates, the gleaming knives, and the shelves neatly stacked with food. In fact I could not quite remember placing everything so carefully, or polis.h.i.+ng the crockery so brightly. But where were the wine and the whisky? The bottles had been moved, and it took me a moment to locate them in a cupboard beneath the sink. I was becoming absent-minded, and I pinched myself very hard before returning to Daniel. 'I wish I had your pa.s.sion,' I said as I poured him his usual whisky.

'But you do. You have a pa.s.sion for some more general past. You have a pa.s.sion for your work.'

'And now you're going to tell me that I'm escaping from myself. Or that I'm avoiding the present.' He said nothing, but began examining his finely cut fingernails. 'Well, you would be right. I can't bear to look at myself. Or look into into myself. I really don't believe that there's anything there, just a s.p.a.ce out of which a few words emerge from time to time. And perhaps that's why I never see people properly. I have never really seen myself.' myself. I really don't believe that there's anything there, just a s.p.a.ce out of which a few words emerge from time to time. And perhaps that's why I never see people properly. I have never really seen myself.'

'I think it's more interesting than that.' He got up from his chair and went over to the wall, tracing a narrow crack in it with his forefinger. 'I suspect that, without realizing it, you are reinventing yourself. It's as if you were trying to create some new family. Some new inheritance. And so you have forgotten your own past.'

I replied more angrily than I expected. 'But what about you? What do you remember?'

'Oh, I remember everything. I remember sitting up in my pram. I remember walking for the first time. I remember hiding under the dining-room table.' He noticed my look of surprise. 'It's not that unusual, you know.' He paused, and once again I could feel the presence of the woman he had become by putting on the red dress and the blonde wig. 'I suppose that nothing has been quite the same since.'

'So you miss being a child?'

'Doesn't everyone? Everyone except you?' He was drinking his whisky too quickly. 'Do you remember that bridge you saw across the Thames?'

'Of course.'

'I have a theory about that. I don't suppose you'd like to hear it?' His usual sceptical, even supercilious, manner had for the moment disappeared.

'Has it something to do with your Moravians, or whatever they were called?'

He pretended to ignore me. 'I think time may be a substance as real as fire or water. It can change shape. It can move to a different position. Do you see what I'm getting at?'

'I'm not sure.'

'That was your bridge. It was a part of time that had stopped.' He helped himself to another drink. 'Have you ever wondered why this area is so peculiar?'

'So you've noticed it, too.'

'It's because all the time has flowed here, into this house, and there is none left outside. You hold all the time in this place.' I was too surprised to say anything at all. 'And there is another theory, as well. That there are some dimensions in which time can travel backwards.'

'So I'm over before I've begun?'

'Isn't that the t.i.tle of a song?'

'I don't remember.' We looked at each other expectantly, and I knew that I had to speak. 'I saw you the other night, Daniel.'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'I saw you in Charlotte Street.'

For a moment he held on to the edge of the chair very tightly. 'I could give you a very good theoretical explanation,' he said. 'There was a group of radicals who used to dress up as a protest against Old Corruption. It's a very ancient tradition.' I looked at him in astonishment, and then I began to laugh. 'I'm glad you can see the funny side,' he said. But he would not meet my gaze, and stared into his drink. 'Ident.i.ty is a very strange thing, Matthew, and I can't begin to explain it. I told you I was intensely curious about myself, but I still haven't really found the clue to the mystery. In that respect, at least, we resemble each other. In earlier times no one gave such matters any thought, perhaps because they were part of an orderly universe '

'Oh no. People have always wondered.'

' but we are so puzzled. Wouldn't it be nice to return to some of the old theories? Soul and body? The four humours?'

'Oh, they never worked.'

'Of course they did. Everything works in its own period. Don't you think that people were cured by medieval doctors, soaking up black melancholy bile with white saltpetre? We could no more use their remedies than they could use ours, but they did work once. That's what you have to remember. Of course some people say that they might work again.' He was paying very little attention to me now, and seemed to be looking at something in the corner of the room. 'I suppose that's why so many are interested in magic. s.e.xual magic.'

'What?'

He seemed embarra.s.sed, almost furtive, for a moment. 'Nothing. I was really thinking about my interest in what you saw. I have never understood it properly. Sometimes I feel as if I'm excavating some lost city within myself. Do you know what I mean?' He got up from his chair, and started pacing around me. 'Why does everything have to be so secret, so deeply buried? It's like the sealed window upstairs.' He stopped. 'I'm sure there must be a sealed window here, aren't you?' He began walking around the room again, even more agitated than before. 'We think that there must be some secret part of us which is made of gold. Which does not rust, and which is not corrupted. Do you know the quotation? And yet, if we found it, it would probably be fool's gold.' He went over to one of the old walls, and ran his delicate hand across its mottled stone texture. 'When I dress up, I must look a fool. And yet it is part of me. It gives me the strangest pleasure. It is like s.e.x, without having s.e.x. I don't understand it at all.'

I did not want to hear any more about his concealed life, and I tried to divert him. 'Is it true what you said about the radicals?'

He turned round and faced me. 'Oh yes. London breeds strange habits. In the eighteenth century a group of Marjories, as they called themselves, started fires at Tyburn and burned down the gallows. That's why the executions were switched to Newgate.' He smiled now, and went back to his chair. 'I'm afraid I'm much more docile.'

I sensed that he was still holding something back but, as I said, I did not want to get too close to the source of his obsession; it would have been too painful, too extreme. He sensed my nervousness, and waved his hand in the air as if he were dismissing the subject. 'Now,' he said, 'in real ghost stories they always explore the attic of the old house.'

'But there is no attic.'

'Oh. What about the bas.e.m.e.nt?'

'We've done the bas.e.m.e.nt already.'

'That's true. A room under the stairs?'

'Non-existent.'

'I think you will find at least a cupboard.'

We went into the hallway and there, as he predicted, was some hollow panelling just beneath the staircase; I had not noticed a small catch on the side, but Daniel knelt down and unfastened it at once. It was almost as if he had not needed to look for it. 'How did you know it was there?' I asked him.

'There is always a cupboard under the stairs. Haven't you read Lady Cynthia Asquith?' But at that moment I realized he knew this house very well. 'Ah,' he said, more quickly now. 'Pipes. I wonder if you get your water from the old Fleet River. That would account for your behaviour.'

'What behaviour?'

'h.e.l.lo, what's this?' He pulled out, with some difficulty, a wooden box with a black cloth laid across it. I turned away as he uncovered it. 'Toys,' he said. 'A child's toys.' I closed my eyes for a moment. When I turned round again, he was taking out a small cardboard fish with a tin hook attached to it; there was a glove puppet beside it, and a spinning-top. I picked up a small book, the pages of which were made from some kind of s.h.i.+ny cloth. 'I remember this,' I said, looking at the letter 'D' which had a child climbing upon it.

'What?'

'I do remember something about my childhood now. These are my toys. But what are they doing in this house?'

At that moment there was a loud knock upon the front door, and both of us were so startled that for an instant we clutched each other. 'Matthew! Matthew Palmer! Where's my little sprout?' It was my mother, calling through the letterbox, and in my dismay I quickly brushed the toys back into the cupboard and closed it: I did not want her to see them in my hands. Daniel stood up, and seemed unaccountably nervous as I went over to the door; my mother offered me her cheek to kiss, and I could smell the Chanel upon her skin. It was the same perfume she had used when I was a child. 'The lover is parking,' she said. 'He'll probably never get here.' I introduced her to Daniel, and she looked at him with the strangest mixture of curiosity and distaste. 'Haven't I seen you before?' she asked him.

'Not as far as I know.'

'But there's something familiar about you.' She seemed puzzled. 'It will come to me in a minute.'

Geoffrey suddenly arrived in the hallway, and Daniel took advantage of the temporary confusion to leave. Once again he seemed embarra.s.sed, and my mother watched him go with a somewhat grim expression. I noticed then how old she had become; she had lost weight, and her right hand shook slightly. 'Now,' she said. 'Do show me and the lover around.'

I went to the door and watched Daniel as he opened the gate and, without looking back, hurried down Cloak Lane. It suddenly occurred to me to walk around the side of the house: I looked up and there, on the top storey, was a window sealed with brick. He had known about it, just as he had known about the cupboard under the stairs. It was clear to me now that he was acquainted with this house, and might even have been deliberately leading me towards my old toys. But how was such a thing possible? How could he have known?