we all sleep.
On and on through the afternoon, and it’s on this long flat stretch of time that I have my first dream, in full colour and rich visual depth. The line, the stated border, between dreaming and waking is vague. No fences or fire break in the trees. Only vacant sentry huts mark the crossing. I begin indistinctly in this new land, as a tyro must, with a formless mass or mess of wavering, ill-lit shapes, people and places dissolving, indistinct voices in vaulted spaces singing or speaking. As I pass through, I feel the pain of unnamed, unreachable remorse, a sense of having left someone or something behind in a betrayal of duty or love. Then it comes beautifully clear. A cold mist on the day of my desertion, a three-day journey on horseback, long rows of the sullen English poor in the rutted lanes, giant elms looming over flooded meadows by the Thames, and at last the familiar thrill and din of the city. In the streets the odour of human waste as solid as house walls, yielding around a narrow corner to the aroma of roasted meat and rosemary and a drab entranceway I pass through to see a young man of my age in the dark-beamed gloom at a table pouring wine from an earthenware jug, a handsome man, leaning in across a smeared oak table, holding me with a tale he has in mind, something he has written or I have, and wants an opinion, or to give one, a correction, a point of fact. Or he wants me to tell him how to go on. This blurring of identity is one aspect of the love I feel for him, which almost smothers the guilt I want to leave behind. Outside in the street a bell tolls. We crowd outside to wait for the funeral cortège. We know this is an important death. The procession doesn’t appear, but the bell keeps ringing.
*
It’s my mother who hears the doorbell. Before I’ve drifted upwards from the novelty of dream logic, she’s in her dressing gown and we’re descending the stairs. As we reach the last run, she gives a cry of surprise. I would guess the midden has been cleared while we slept. The bell sounds again, loud, hard, angry. Trudy is opening the door as she shouts, “For God’s sake! Are you drunk? I’m going as fast as—”
She falters. If she has faith in herself she shouldn’t be astonished to see what dread has already let me see: a policeman, no, two, removing their hats.
A kind, fatherly voice says, “Are you Mrs. Cairncross, wife of John?”
She nods.
“Sergeant Crowley. I’m afraid we have some very bad news. May we come in?”
“Oh God,” my mother remembers to say.
They follow us into the sitting room, rarely used and almost clean. If the hallway hadn’t been cleared, I think my mother would have been an immediate suspect. Police work is intuitive. What remains, possibly, is a lingering smell, easily confused with exotic cooking.
A second voice, younger, with brotherly solicitude, says, “We’d like you to be sitting down.”
The sergeant breaks the news. Mr. Cairncross’s car was reported on the hard shoulder of the M1 north-bound, twenty miles from London. His door was open, and not far off, on a grassy embankment, he lay facedown. An ambulance came, resuscitation was attempted during the race to hospital, but he died along the way.
A sob, like an air bubble in deep water, rises through my mother’s body, rises through me, to burst into the faces of the attentive police.
“Oh God!” she shouts. “We had the most awful row this morning.” She hunches forward. I feel her put her hands to her face and start to shiver.
“I should tell you this,” the same policeman continues. He pauses delicately, mindful of the double respect owed to the heavily pregnant bereaved. “We tried to contact you this afternoon. A friend of his identified the body. I’m afraid our first impression is suicide.”
When my mother straightens her spine and lets out a cry, I’m overcome by love for her, for all that’s lost—Dubrovnik, poetry, daily life. She loved him once, as he
On and on through the afternoon, and it’s on this long flat stretch of time that I have my first dream, in full colour and rich visual depth. The line, the stated border, between dreaming and waking is vague. No fences or fire break in the trees. Only vacant sentry huts mark the crossing. I begin indistinctly in this new land, as a tyro must, with a formless mass or mess of wavering, ill-lit shapes, people and places dissolving, indistinct voices in vaulted spaces singing or speaking. As I pass through, I feel the pain of unnamed, unreachable remorse, a sense of having left someone or something behind in a betrayal of duty or love. Then it comes beautifully clear. A cold mist on the day of my desertion, a three-day journey on horseback, long rows of the sullen English poor in the rutted lanes, giant elms looming over flooded meadows by the Thames, and at last the familiar thrill and din of the city. In the streets the odour of human waste as solid as house walls, yielding around a narrow corner to the aroma of roasted meat and rosemary and a drab entranceway I pass through to see a young man of my age in the dark-beamed gloom at a table pouring wine from an earthenware jug, a handsome man, leaning in across a smeared oak table, holding me with a tale he has in mind, something he has written or I have, and wants an opinion, or to give one, a correction, a point of fact. Or he wants me to tell him how to go on. This blurring of identity is one aspect of the love I feel for him, which almost smothers the guilt I want to leave behind. Outside in the street a bell tolls. We crowd outside to wait for the funeral cortège. We know this is an important death. The procession doesn’t appear, but the bell keeps ringing.
*
It’s my mother who hears the doorbell. Before I’ve drifted upwards from the novelty of dream logic, she’s in her dressing gown and we’re descending the stairs. As we reach the last run, she gives a cry of surprise. I would guess the midden has been cleared while we slept. The bell sounds again, loud, hard, angry. Trudy is opening the door as she shouts, “For God’s sake! Are you drunk? I’m going as fast as—”
She falters. If she has faith in herself she shouldn’t be astonished to see what dread has already let me see: a policeman, no, two, removing their hats.
A kind, fatherly voice says, “Are you Mrs. Cairncross, wife of John?”
She nods.
“Sergeant Crowley. I’m afraid we have some very bad news. May we come in?”
“Oh God,” my mother remembers to say.
They follow us into the sitting room, rarely used and almost clean. If the hallway hadn’t been cleared, I think my mother would have been an immediate suspect. Police work is intuitive. What remains, possibly, is a lingering smell, easily confused with exotic cooking.
A second voice, younger, with brotherly solicitude, says, “We’d like you to be sitting down.”
The sergeant breaks the news. Mr. Cairncross’s car was reported on the hard shoulder of the M1 north-bound, twenty miles from London. His door was open, and not far off, on a grassy embankment, he lay facedown. An ambulance came, resuscitation was attempted during the race to hospital, but he died along the way.
A sob, like an air bubble in deep water, rises through my mother’s body, rises through me, to burst into the faces of the attentive police.
“Oh God!” she shouts. “We had the most awful row this morning.” She hunches forward. I feel her put her hands to her face and start to shiver.
“I should tell you this,” the same policeman continues. He pauses delicately, mindful of the double respect owed to the heavily pregnant bereaved. “We tried to contact you this afternoon. A friend of his identified the body. I’m afraid our first impression is suicide.”
When my mother straightens her spine and lets out a cry, I’m overcome by love for her, for all that’s lost—Dubrovnik, poetry, daily life. She loved him once, as he
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