Part 12 (1/2)

At that moment she found something of great interest at the side of the lawn and bent down to retrieve it; it was a piece of broken gla.s.s, and she buried it carefully under the soil. 'Let's go inside,' she said. 'I'll make you something nice.'

'You can be very aggravating. You always seem to know more than you say.'

'That's one of my charms, isn't it?'

She tried to be coquettish for a moment, but she did not succeed. Something was troubling her; I suspected, even then, that she knew why I had come. We went into the house and, while Geoffrey made coffee, she busied herself with the preparation of one of the thick cheese sandwiches I had been given as a boy. 'Get that down you.' She sounded almost vindictive. 'You used to love a good sandwich.' I had always detested them, as far as I could recall, but dutifully I began to eat it.

'Oh, that reminds me,' she said. 'I found something in the cupboard.' She was still very uneasy with me, and now seemed pleased to leave the room while Geoffrey stared after her. But she returned almost at once with a large brown envelope. 'I didn't want to keep them.' She hesitated, as if she had said quite the wrong thing. 'I didn't want to throw them away. I think you ought to have them.' I opened the envelope, and there fell upon the table some five or six photographs. In all of them I was alone with my father. In one of them he was holding me up in his arms (I must have been five or six at the time) while in another we were sitting together on a low wall. Some of them seemed quite recent one, in particular, showed us mounting some stone steps but curiously enough I had no recollection of their ever being taken.

'He was a handsome man,' I said.

She opened her eyes very wide for a moment. 'Do put them away, Matthew. You can look at them later.'

She had not been able to disguise the distaste in her voice. Geoffrey quietly left the room, muttering something about the car, and we sat together in silence for a while.

'It will be your birthday soon,' she said, running her finger round the rim of her cup. 'My birthday boy.'

'I know about him, mother.'

She put her hand up to her face. 'What do you know?' She sounded angry.

'I know what kind of man he was.'

'And what kind of man was that?'

'I think you probably know, mother.'

I thought she was stifling a yawn, but then I realized that it was a cry or perhaps a groan. 'And all this time I thought you had forgotten.'

'Forgotten?'

'You were so small at the time.' I felt some great upheaval within me, as if I had been turned upside down, and I was a child again. And then, all at once, we were both crying. 'You do know, don't you?' she said. She came over to me, and put her arm around me. 'But I protected you. Your mother was good for something, even then. I stopped him. I only caught him with you once, but I threatened to take him to the police.' I was looking at myself with infinite patience and curiosity: I looked at myself as I walked through the streets of London, I watched myself as I toiled among my books, I listened to myself as I discussed my childhood with Daniel. I had not known myself at all. 'I never left you alone with him after that,' she was saying. 'I defended you.' I was staring very intently at the table I noticed the grain of the wood, I noticed the knots and stains, and I looked so hard into the heart of that wood that I seemed to be spiralling down within it. I had become part of its vortex. 'He swore that he never harmed you, Matthew. He said that he never touched you. But after that I always hated him.' And then, as I lay at peace with the wood, I realized a truth which, for some reason, had eluded me before the material world was the home of eternity. One secret had led to another secret, and slowly I was pulling back the veil. 'G.o.d help me, there was a time when I thought that you and he '

'Your own son?'

I listened to her silence for a while, and then I looked up at her. I do not believe I was crying now. 'You're not my son, Matthew. He found you. He adopted you. He said that you were very special. Unique. I had to go along with it, because I knew that I could never give him any children.' Now I recognized the source of her rage and bitterness, even on those occasions when they had been directed against me. My father had slowly destroyed her, just as surely as if he had fed her poison. And what had he wanted from me? What had Daniel called it? s.e.xual magic? I knew now why I had forgotten my childhood, and so forgotten myself. I knew why there were no people in my memories. I had been lost from the beginning. It was only with unbearable exhaustion that I could look upon that period of my life which I thought to have forgotten, but which in fact had formed me.

For the rest of the morning we talked through everything, and I explained to her what I had discovered about his life in Cloak Lane. She was not in the least surprised by it, and had suspected for a long time that he owned what she called a 'lair'. Even as we talked we became known to each other; it was as if we were strangers who by degrees grew acquainted. It was the oddest feeling: once we saw him clearly, we saw ourselves. 'It was so difficult, Matthew. He was always there, you see. You were his child somehow, never mine. People talk about love, but ' That was the secret, after all. I had grown up in a world without love a world of magic, of money, of possession and so I had none for myself or for others. That was why I had seen ghosts rather than real people. That was why I was haunted by voices from the past and not from my own time. That was why I had dreamed of being imprisoned in gla.s.s, cold and apart. The myth of the homunculus was just another aspect of my father's loveless existence such an image of sterility and false innocence could have come from no other source. Now everything had to be changed.

I rose from the table, and embraced her. 'At least we have some cause to be grateful,' I said. 'We survived, didn't we?'

'I suppose so.'

At that moment Geoffrey came back into the kitchen. 'Have I missed anything interesting?'

'No, darling,' she said. 'We were just reminiscing.'

'That's all right then.' I realized now why my mother had chosen such an apparently average man: he represented the ordinary course of life which she had been denied all those years. Yet what was so ordinary about it, when at last it afforded her happiness? When we start looking for eternity, we find it everywhere. I stood by the kitchen window and, as I looked out towards the lawn, he came over to me as if he needed to comfort me. 'Gardens need work,' he said. 'Come and see your mother's sunflowers.' I looked around for her but she had left the room, and so I followed him down the crazy paving towards the beds of flowers. He suspected that something had happened, I knew that, but he could no more have broached the subject than he could have stripped naked in front of the neighbours. 'You had a talk then, did you?'

'Yes. We did.'

'That's good.' We walked slowly down the path, admiring each shrub and plant in turn, until we came to the sunflowers, which were growing beside a rubbish heap near the back of the garden. 'It's amazing how they grow out of all this muck and dirt,' he said.

'I don't think they do. Not wholly.' He looked at me in surprise, but said nothing. 'Why do you think they are called sunflowers?'

'Because they always face towards the sun.'

'No. They are the sun.'

'I can't follow you there.'

'You mean you don't follow the son?' I muttered this under my breath, and he had not heard me.

'I know what would interest you, Matthew. You know that I'm working on the new London extension?' He had told me on many occasions how he was acting as a surveyor for the development of an eastern 'corridor' into the city. 'The other day we were plotting the course of the old river Soken, just to make sure there was no danger of subsidence. It runs from Waltham Forest down through Bethnal Green and Shadwell. Do you know where I mean?' I nodded, although I was hardly listening; I was looking up at the window of my mother's bedroom. 'We were inspecting some old sewers which ran into it, when we came across something.' Now he did have my attention, and we sat down together on a wooden bench at the side of the lawn. 'We found some narrow tunnels, somewhere between Wapping and Shadwell. Of course I a.s.sumed they were built at the same time as the sewers, but then I realized that they weren't in alignment with them at all. Not at all. So we decided to walk down one of them it was wet, and slippery, and smelly, but we're used to that. And then we came across the strangest thing.' My mother waved from her window, and I waved back. 'We came out into an open s.p.a.ce, and there were some old stones there. One looked like a fragment of a pillar, and one like a paving stone. You know, it was worn smooth. And then there was a piece of archway, just lying on the ground. What do you think of that?' I thought only one thing: a buried city had been discovered. Something from the past had been restored.

At that moment my mother's cairn terrier came das.h.i.+ng out of the house to greet us with its strident bark. I had never really paid much attention to the dog before, but now I was able to see its brightness and fierceness. It was a creature of the fire world, in this garden of water and earth. But was there some place where the elements might be reconciled where ghosts and real people, lost cities and present ones, my past and present lives, my mother and myself, could be reunited in love? Geoffrey picked up the little dog, and excitedly it licked his face. 'It's time for me to go,' I said. He was about to rise and leave the garden with me, but I put my hand upon his shoulder. 'No. Stay with the dog. I'll just find mother.'

She was waiting for me in the kitchen and, for the first time, we shook hands. It was the strangest gesture, and yet somehow it was appropriate. Then I kissed her on the cheek. 'I'll be back,' I said.

I left the house, and was walking down Wulfstan Street when the first wave of feeling hit me. Something had risen within me, and dashed me against the brick wall of a front garden. I knew that I was struggling on the surface of some emotion more voluminous and powerful than anything I myself possessed. It filled me, and then after a few moments it was gone. I was still leaning against the wall, and now I put my hand up to my face. After a while I turned the corner into Braybrooke Avenue and started walking towards Ealing Broadway. This was the place of my childhood, which I had once despised and rejected, but now I felt oddly contented and even joyful. I saw a girl helping an old man across the road, and I could hear someone singing in the distance. It was then, I suppose, that I began to pity my father.

THE CHAMBER OF DEMONSTRATION.

'H.

AVE YOU PURIFIED yourself, Mr Kelley? You know well that whosoever attempts this and is not pure shall bring upon himself the judgement.'

'I have abstained from coitus for one day and one night. I have refrained from gluttony. I have washed all, and I have cut my nails.'

'Go forward then, and enter. This place is holy.' And so we proceeded into our secret study, our scrying room or chamber of demonstration, bearing with us the crystal, which with all due reverence I placed upon the silken cloth. 'Sit down at the table of practice,' I said, 'and hold yourself in readiness for anything that might be seen or heard.'

'No harder task is there, Doctor Dee. This work consumes me.'

'Well, you are whole yet.' I stood beside him in my customary place, since it has not been given to me to have visions in crystallo. in crystallo. 'Is there anything that you see as yet?' 'Is there anything that you see as yet?'

'Nothing. Nothing appears in the stone, not even the golden curtain.'

'The stone is its natural diaphanite?'

'It is so.'

'Then we must wait faithfully, knowing ourselves to be entrusted with a great power. We have learned much and will learn yet more.'

'I see the golden curtain now,' Kelley whispered after a little time. 'It hangs very still within the stone. No, it moves. It seems to be far backwards, and the stone is clear between the curtain and the forepart. Under the curtain I see the legs of men up to the knees. Now all remains still.'