heart.
So it wasn’t Felicity I dreamed about last night but only someone who looked and sounded like Felicity, and that not for long; someone who, once she had led me into the gray garden in Archangel Place, turned her head and showed me a changed face, the face of someone I can’t name but connect with that time, a face I find it hard to say was a man’s or a woman’s. Before that happened we had been in the House of Stairs together, and from Cosette’s table Felicity had picked up the sheets of paper on which her quiz was typed. Some were untouched, some half-completed. She said, as I never remember her saying at the time, as I would remember if it had happened, “That woman is such a fool, she has identified Huntington’s chorea as a geography book. I suppose she thinks the islet of Langerhans is off its coast.”
Freud’s dream theory has been much ridiculed. But no one disputes the wisdom of his suggestion that in trying to understand our dreams we should write accounts of them as soon as we wake up, keeping pencil and paper beside the bed for this purpose. Felicity’s remark didn’t pain me in the dream as it would have done had I been conscious and she real. I was amused by it in the dream, and hastened to write it down when I awoke. Then I reflected on the rest of the dream, how she and I had gone outside where the plants in the gray garden were taller and more luxuriant than I remember them, where even the flowers were not yellow or white but a metallic, silvery gray. We stood looking up at the back of the house, a tall house of five stories and a basement, but not as tall as in the dream, in which it had become a tower whose pointed top was half-obscured by the lowering London sky.
But the windows were the same. These wide apertures, one on each of the four middle floors, pairs of glazed French doors really, opened onto narrow balconies with low plaster walls. But on the basement floor and on the top the windows were simply long narrow sashes. It wasn’t Mark who came out onto the fourth-floor balcony from the room that was once mine, it wasn’t Bell or Cosette. The figure who stood up there leaning perilously over the wall was a child’s, a child I didn’t recognize but that Felicity knew, that Felicity or the possessor of the changed face she turned to me recognized as one of her own. She began shouting at the child to be careful, to go back.
“Go back, go back, you’ll fall!”
And now I am reading my account of this dream along with Felicity’s remark, which no longer seems so brilliant to me, so witty, as it did at first. Written on the paper too is Bell’s phone number which she gave me when she phoned me this morning, accosting me with her cheerful, “Hallo, there!”
I asked her what I had not been able to bring myself to ask her yesterday. (How much joy do we miss through cowardice?) I asked her why Bell had phoned her.
“Oh, Elizabeth, I thought you knew. Didn’t I say? She wanted your number.”
Joy, indeed. Immediately I reproached myself for feeling such a surge of happiness. I should know better, I should have learned something in all those years, after so many friendships, a marriage, and other loves.
“Didn’t you give it to her?” I realized as soon as I said this that there was no reason why she would have known it. It is a long time since we have spoken, though something to Felicity’s credit perhaps that it doesn’t feel long, that she, maddening woman though she is, has that quality of taking up the reins of friendship and driving merrily along as if no lapse of years had ever been. “No, you couldn’t have. I’m in the phone book in my married name. My publishers wouldn’t give my number.”
“I didn’t try them. Frankly, I thought Bell would be the last person you’d want to be in touch with. After all that happened.”
I realize now, after some hours have passed, that she thinks I was in love with Mark. Maybe others thought so too. That, they
So it wasn’t Felicity I dreamed about last night but only someone who looked and sounded like Felicity, and that not for long; someone who, once she had led me into the gray garden in Archangel Place, turned her head and showed me a changed face, the face of someone I can’t name but connect with that time, a face I find it hard to say was a man’s or a woman’s. Before that happened we had been in the House of Stairs together, and from Cosette’s table Felicity had picked up the sheets of paper on which her quiz was typed. Some were untouched, some half-completed. She said, as I never remember her saying at the time, as I would remember if it had happened, “That woman is such a fool, she has identified Huntington’s chorea as a geography book. I suppose she thinks the islet of Langerhans is off its coast.”
Freud’s dream theory has been much ridiculed. But no one disputes the wisdom of his suggestion that in trying to understand our dreams we should write accounts of them as soon as we wake up, keeping pencil and paper beside the bed for this purpose. Felicity’s remark didn’t pain me in the dream as it would have done had I been conscious and she real. I was amused by it in the dream, and hastened to write it down when I awoke. Then I reflected on the rest of the dream, how she and I had gone outside where the plants in the gray garden were taller and more luxuriant than I remember them, where even the flowers were not yellow or white but a metallic, silvery gray. We stood looking up at the back of the house, a tall house of five stories and a basement, but not as tall as in the dream, in which it had become a tower whose pointed top was half-obscured by the lowering London sky.
But the windows were the same. These wide apertures, one on each of the four middle floors, pairs of glazed French doors really, opened onto narrow balconies with low plaster walls. But on the basement floor and on the top the windows were simply long narrow sashes. It wasn’t Mark who came out onto the fourth-floor balcony from the room that was once mine, it wasn’t Bell or Cosette. The figure who stood up there leaning perilously over the wall was a child’s, a child I didn’t recognize but that Felicity knew, that Felicity or the possessor of the changed face she turned to me recognized as one of her own. She began shouting at the child to be careful, to go back.
“Go back, go back, you’ll fall!”
And now I am reading my account of this dream along with Felicity’s remark, which no longer seems so brilliant to me, so witty, as it did at first. Written on the paper too is Bell’s phone number which she gave me when she phoned me this morning, accosting me with her cheerful, “Hallo, there!”
I asked her what I had not been able to bring myself to ask her yesterday. (How much joy do we miss through cowardice?) I asked her why Bell had phoned her.
“Oh, Elizabeth, I thought you knew. Didn’t I say? She wanted your number.”
Joy, indeed. Immediately I reproached myself for feeling such a surge of happiness. I should know better, I should have learned something in all those years, after so many friendships, a marriage, and other loves.
“Didn’t you give it to her?” I realized as soon as I said this that there was no reason why she would have known it. It is a long time since we have spoken, though something to Felicity’s credit perhaps that it doesn’t feel long, that she, maddening woman though she is, has that quality of taking up the reins of friendship and driving merrily along as if no lapse of years had ever been. “No, you couldn’t have. I’m in the phone book in my married name. My publishers wouldn’t give my number.”
“I didn’t try them. Frankly, I thought Bell would be the last person you’d want to be in touch with. After all that happened.”
I realize now, after some hours have passed, that she thinks I was in love with Mark. Maybe others thought so too. That, they
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