‘Yes, I think so. Could you just clear one thing up? Won’t take a minute.’
‘What?’
‘Then I can forget about it. Tell me exactly how it happened in there. I shall always sort of wonder about it if I don’t know exactly.’
‘Well, he’d just been saying something about people had the right not to be disturbed in their own private houses, and then he stopped and got up, much more quickly than he usually does, and he was staring.’
‘What at?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing. He was looking towards the door. Then he called out, and Jack asked him what was the matter and was he all right, and then he fell against the table and Jack caught him.’
‘What did he call out?’
‘I don’t know. It wasn’t a word or anything. Then Jack and I, we started moving him and then you came back. He didn’t seem to be in any pain. He just looked very surprised.’
‘Frightened?’
‘Well … a bit, perhaps.’
‘Only a bit?’
‘Well, a lot, actually. He must have been feeling it coming on, you know, the cerebral thing.’
‘Yes. That would frighten you all right. I see.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ Joyce squeezed my hand. ‘You couldn’t have done anything about it even if you had been there.’
‘No I suppose I couldn’t.’
‘Of course you couldn’t.’
‘I forgot to tell Amy where … that he’s in his room.’
‘She won’t go in there. I’ll see to it in the morning. I’ll have to go to sleep now. These bombs really knock you out.’
We said good night and switched off our bedside lamps. I turned on to my right side, towards where the window was, though nothing could be seen of it. The night was still very warm, but the humidity had fallen off a good deal in the last hour. My pillow seemed hotter than my cheek as soon as the two touched, and formed itself into a series of hard ridges and irregular planes. My heart was beating heavily and moderately fast, as on the threshold of some minor ordeal, like going into the dentist’s surgery or getting up to make a speech. I lay there waiting for it to make one of the trip-and-lurch movements it had made ten minutes earlier and perhaps a couple of dozen times during the day and evening. I had mentioned this phenomenon to Jack, who had said, condescendingly rather than impatiently, but in any case quite emphatically, that it was not significant, that my heart was merely giving itself, every so often, an extra and premature signal to beat, so that the beat after that was delayed, and might seem stronger than normal. All I could say (to myself) was that at times like the present the bloody thing certainly felt significant. After a minute or two of waiting, there came the expected quiver, followed by a pause prolonged enough to make me draw in my breath, and then a small punch against the inside of my chest. I told myself it was all right, it was nerves, it would go off as it always had, I was a hypochondriac, the Belreposes would be taking over any minute, it was natural, it was egotistical. Yes: already calmer, easier, steadier, more comfortable, cooler, slower, quieter, drowsier, vaguer …
What was before my closed eyes was the usual shifting pall of dark purple, dark grey and other dark that was never quite different enough to be given the name of any other colour. It had been there all along, of course, but now I started looking at it, knowing what would happen when I did, but unable not to, because it was simply the next thing. Almost at once a dim orange-yellow light came up. It illuminated something that had the smooth, rounded and tapering qualities of a part of the human body, but without any guide to scale it was impossible to tell whether I was looking at leg or nose, forearm or finger, breast or chin. Soon a greyish male profile, nearly complete, its expression puzzled or brooding, drifted diagonally in front of this and blotted most of it out. The upper lip twitched, grew suddenly in size and began drifting slowly outwards, swelling at a reduced rate until it was like a thick rope of intestine. Another orange light flared up irregularly in the lower part of my field of vision and played on the intestine-like form from underneath, showing it to be veined and glistening. The face had tilted away out of existence. When the orange glow had faded, there was a kind of new start: shivering veils of brown and yellow appeared and vanished quickly, to reveal a gloomy cavern of which the walls and roof were human, but in a distant sense. No component was identifiable, only that unique surface quality, half matt, half sheen, that belongs to naked skin.
These apparitions grew, swirled and evolved for a time I could not measure, perhaps five minutes, probably not more than thirty. Some of them were surprising, but this was always part of their nature, and none, so far, was surprising in a surprising way. They were even beginning to slacken, become constricted and hard to discern. Then a rumpled sheet of brown flesh shook itself convulsively and started to concertina in towards the middle. Longitudinal shreds ‘became distinguishable, turned olive-green in colour and could be seen as the trunk and branches of a young tree, the sort that has many stems growing more or less vertically and parallel. This was a novelty in a hitherto exclusively anthropoid universe, a comparatively soothing one. The tree-shape continued the shaking, twitching motion of the fleshy mass that had given birth to it. Slowly, its limbs and minor appendages coalesced into what— by the lax standards of verisimilitude at present in force—were good approximations to a man’s thighs, genitals and torso up about as far as the breast-bone. Higher than this, there was nothing identifiable for the moment. The various members retained their vegetable individuality, continuing as closely-packed amalgams of bough, twig, stem and leaf. I was trying to remember what drawing or painting this structure resembled when I heard a noise, distant but not unrecognizable: it sounded like the snapping of greenery and minor branches made by a man or large animal moving through dense woods. At the same time, a shift of illumination began to reveal an upper chest, a throat and neck, the point of a wooden chin.
I clapped my fingers over my eyes and rubbed them fiercely: I had no desire to see the face that topped such a body. In a flash, literally in a flash, everything was gone, noise and all. I pretended to myself that I had heard something from outside; but I knew that that snapping sound had come from inside, again in the most literal sense. Just as I was never in any doubt that what I ‘saw’ with my eyes shut was not really there, so I knew that what I had just ‘heard’ was not real either. Tomorrow I might feel appalled at the prospect of a regular, or sporadic, aural addition to these nightly appearances; at the moment I was too tired. When I closed my eyes again, I saw at once that the show was over: all intensity, all potential had departed from the messages of my optic nerves, and the dark curtain before me stirred more feebly with every breath.
I had now come to the outer edge of sleep. As I had known it would, jactitation set in. My right foot, my whole right leg, jerked with a local violence, my head, my mouth and chin, my upper lip, what felt like the whole top half of my body, my left wrist, my left wrist again, moved of their own accord, once or twice with the prelude of a disembodied, watery feeling that advertised their intention, more often quite unexpectedly. I was returned to momentary wakefulness several times by what I assumed to be similar convulsions, though I could not locate them, and once by a triple shaking of the shoulder so like the intervention of one arousing a sleeper that, if I had not quickly remembered disturbances as acute in the past, I might have been alarmed. Finally, images and thoughts and words came from nowhere in particular and were all mingled in some other thing that gradually had less and less to do with me: pretty dress, excuse me you’re wanted on the, you ought to realize, very good soup, if there’s anything I can, long time ago, be all very dusty, not to agree on the way he, moment she was there and the next, water with it, over by the, darling, tree, spoon, window, shoulders, stairs, hot, sorry, man …
2: Dr Thomas Underhill
At ten o’clock the next morning I was in the office finishing the day’s arrangements with David Palmer.
‘What about Ramon?’ I asked.
‘Well, he’s done the vegetable dishes—quite good, really, in parts—and I’ve put him on the coffee-pots. No complaints so far. From him, that is.’
