A Dream of Wessex (24 page)

‘We’re still one member short, Don. Do you have any idea of someone we might approach?’

‘Couldn’t we use your usual procedure?’

‘Oh yes. That’s why I’m asking you. Selection is based on the recommendation of other participants.’

Mander shook his head. ‘I don’t think I’d know anyone suitable.’

They had reached the end of the side-tunnel, and were standing at the corner. A damp draught sprang from somewhere, curling around Mander’s legs. A few metres away the door to the conference room was open, and light and voices spilled out.

‘You understand that I’d like the project to start as soon as possible. Later today, I think.’

‘So soon?’ Mander said. ‘But proposing someone for work as important as this... Would it be only at my suggestion?’

‘The .group will decide. That’s how it is always done. Offer a few names. We’ll know as soon as we hear the right one.’

‘May I ask how?’

‘In the same way that we recognized your name as soon as it was put forward.’

‘I really don’t know many people in Dorchester,’ Mander said.

His solitary private life, which for years he had seen as a psychological bulwark against the strains of his daily work, suddenly seemed a social disadvantage. As he and Paul Mason walked into the conference room, Mander was thinking over his few acquaintances and trying to visualize them here. As soon as each name came to mind, he automatically discarded it.

An open forum session was in progress, a relaxed meeting of all the chosen participants, in which their ideas about the future world were expressed and discussed and eventually pooled. Mander and Paul Mason found two spare chairs, and joined in ... and at once Mander detected a shift in the emphasis of the discussion. Instead of speaking across the room, people turned towards Paul, and it was he who led and shaped. Seen here, in the company of the others, Paul Mason was the obvious leader. The respect they had for him was transparent: he had only to start speaking to bring silence to the others, and if he made a suggestion it found ready approval. In spite of this, Paul did not abuse his position, seeming open to ideas, receptive to the suggestions of others. In all, he considered the discussion with good sense and humour, and Mander found himself admiring his intellect and warming to his personality.

Only one person showed the least resistance to the group’s natural leader, and that was the girl from the stall, Julia. She happened to be sitting opposite Mander, and on the occasions when she spoke he was aware that she was looking in his own direction. Because she was moving against the psychological current of the meeting he began to wonder why. At first he suspected that some conflict existed between her and Paul, but there was nothing of this sort apparent in what she was saying. Later, he observed a momentary look on Paul’s face when speaking to her, and he guessed that something more than a working relationship was going on. That might account for it.

Once, when Mander himself put forward an idea for discussion, it was Julia who responded first, seeming eager to agree with him. He found this pleasant, though oddly puzzling. A few minutes afterwards he made a second suggestion to test her response, and again she spoke first.

There came a break for coffee, and during this Mander noticed that Paul took Julia aside and spoke to her at some length. She smiled and nodded and seemed to be agreeing with him, but Mander noticed that the knuckles of her hand showed white with stress.

Mander used the break to talk informally to as many other people as possible.

One man he was most interested to meet was a former research chemist from York Collegiate, who was presently masquerading as a fisherman in the nearby village of Broadmayne. The man’s name had come to Mander’s notice at the Commission, because his frequent absences from his cottage had aroused the suspicions of a neighbour that he was selling fish for private gain. In fact, some quirk of absent-mindedness had made Mander overlook the complaint, and the papers lay unread in a wire basket on his desk.

When Paul Mason returned to his chair it was clear that the break had finished, and everyone else sat down again. ’Before we can proceed further,’ he said, ‘we must select the last member of our team. Does anyone have any suggestions?’

Mander felt the weight of responsibility on him, but he decided to listen to the others. There was a general discussion of the type of personality deemed suitable for the work, but no names were proposed.

Paul looked in his direction.

‘How about you, Don? Any ideas?’

‘I told you, Paul. I don’t seem to know many people around here.’

No one said anything, but Paul continued to stare at him.

Then Julia said: ‘Somebody at the Commission, perhaps. ..?’

Mander shook his head at once. There was no one there.

Again Julia spoke. She said: ‘Don, I’m sure you can think of someone.’

Paul glanced at her sharply as she said this, and Mander noticed that her hands were clenched tightly across her lap. Once again he was sure that she was suppressing some deeper tension.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said. He thought of Commissioner Borovitin, of Cro, of.one of the clerks in the front office he sometimes lunched with. ‘There’s only ...’

‘Who, Don?’

‘An historian from London, doing some research here. David Harkman.’

Someone said: ‘He’s the one! ‘

It was as if a draught of cool fresh air had swept into the stuffy room. Julia laughed, as if with relief, and Mander felt for the first time a true sense of empathy with her, with everyone on the project. David Harkman was right, he was the missing participant. With him, the project would be complete.

People were talking across the room, and several got up from their chairs.

Only Paul Mason was unmoving, looking silently across the room, first at him, then at Julia. Mander stared back at Mason, and noticed a wildness in his eyes, a fanaticism, that had not been there before.

The memory of Paul’s angry face haunted Julia as she hurried down the last of the Castle’s ramparts, bending her head against the rain. Paul, smiling reasonably; Paul, suggesting that Don Mander should go to find Harkman; Paul, standing by the door of the conference room as if to hold it open for her, while actually trying to block her way without the others seeing.

She had defied him, though, and she had done it with silence.

‘Why not let Don go, Julia?’ No answer, Paul. ‘How will you recognize him, Julia?’ No answer, Paul. She alone in that room had detected the undercurrents of his apparently pleasant manner: for the first time in the three years he had lived with her at the Castle, Paul suspected her of something.

No answer to that, Paul, because this time, the first time, there was cause.

The others were hypnotized by Paul, just as she had been hypnotized’ by him when he arrived at the Castle ... but all that had changed for her since David.

She ran through the long grass, wetting her feet and legs, and came to the concrete sea-wall that enclosed the shore at this point. Julia could feel Paul’s influence fading, to be replaced by a joyful anticipation of David.

After the confined and damp surroundings of the tunnels, the open air smelled fresh and clear, but it was only relative. In spite of the wind and rain, there was the usual dirty haze in the air, muting the landscape with a mottled grey film and saddening the grass and trees.

She had borrowed a raincoat from Marilyn, and as she walked along the puddled, rust-streaked concrete wall, Julia thrust her hands deep inside the pockets, trying to keep warm and dry.

The tide was going out. As the sea receded it left its usual scum at high-water mark: a black smear of oil-spillage, drift-wood, plastic containers, the bodies of sea-birds and fish. There was always a smell of acidic chemicals during an ebb-tide, as if the sea, on drawing back, laid bare the new noxious compounds and poisons it had itself created by reacting with the mud and grit of the filthy beach.

Ahead, through the veils of dismal rain, Julia could see the source of much of the bay’s pollution: the unloved town of Dorchester: oil-town, spoil-town, used and usurer.

At Victoria Beach the pipelines came ashore, four dead metal worms crawling out of the sea, and where they crossed the seawall there was a military guard-post. Julia passed through unchallenged, and she glanced down at the black welded pipes, which, where they rose from the sea, created an artificial breakwater, making the waves sluice greasily along the channels between them. There were only two sentries in sight: one standing on the parapet of the sea-wall, his rifle slung over his shoulder, the other waiting by the doorway of the guard-post. Both soldiers were staring out into the bay, watching the constant traffic of lighters and diving-ships and helicopters, swarming like jungle vermin through the flooded forest of drilling-rigs and platforms.

Inland from the sea-wall, the four parallel pipelines turned together towards the refinery that dominated the landscape behind Dorchester: a bizarre agglomeration of rust-red and silver, towers and gantries and cables, lights and flames and fumes, white-painted storage tanks standing in lines across the countryside, modem tumuli rich in fossil deposits.

Julia, thinking of David, remembered the lovemaking on the heath.

She was following the long curve of Victoria Beach, seeing the grey ribbon of the sea-wall turning towards Dorchester on its bayside hill. The wind came across the heath, drenching her with drizzle. She was out of breath from hurrying, drawn towards the town because of David, repelled by it because of what it was. Leaving the Castle was like escaping from some dungeon; not the twilight incarceration of the tunnels, but the uncanny psychological embrace Paul put around her. When she was with him he managed somehow to exclude David from her life, as if he knew ... but not until a few minutes ago, when Mander had uttered his name, had Paul ever had the least intimation of David’s existence.

Now, almost as if it were against Paul’s will, but with the emphatic support of the others, David could join the project.

She started to run, her feet splashing in the puddles that cratered the causeway at the top of the wall.

Then: ‘Julia!’

The wind took the word, but she recognized David’s voice at once. He was close but she couldn’t see him, and something made her look out to sea, towards the skeletal rigs black against the drizzly sea, orange fireflies of burning waste-gases jetting from their heights.

‘Julia, down here! ‘

She turned at once, laughing, and saw David running towards her on the land side of the sea-wall. She called his name, feeling again a sensation she had had at the Castle when she heard Don Mander speak his name: it did not contain the man, nor any words the love.

He reached the bottom of the wall below her, looking from side to side for a way up to her. On the seaward side the wall had been smoothly angled, with a concave lip to turn back storm-waves, but on the other side the builders had left it rough and perpendicular. In certain places concrete steps, like those built against harbour walls, had been placed against the face, but none were anywhere near.

‘Along there!’ she called, pointing back towards the Castle, knowing that where the oil pipelines went through the wall there were several places where access to the top could be gained.

He ran at once, and she ran too, keeping abreast of him and looking down.

He reached the bottom of the first flight of steps, and took them two at a time. Panting and laughing she went into his arms, and they kissed as if it had been six years, and not six days, since they had seen each other. She felt his lips, cold and wet from the rain, against her face and neck, and his hair, when she put her hand against it, was dewed and crisp.

‘What are you doing out here?’ he said, drawing back from her. ‘I thought you’d be at the Castle.’

‘I’m looking for you,’ she said, and tightened her hold on him, pulling him down so that their faces nestled side by side. She kissed his ear, felt the wetness of his hair against her forehead. ‘Come to the Castle, David. It’s all changed now. They want you there.’

He said nothing.

‘David? I told you: it’s what you were asking for.’

He moved back from her and stood by the edge of the seawall, looking across the miserable, rain-swept country towards the refinery.

‘I don’t want that,’ he said. ‘Not any more. And I don’t want you there.’

She stared at him uncomprehendingly, then took his hand. ‘It’s
right
, David. It’s right that you should be there. Paul, Don Mander ... all the others. They need you. I’ve come to find you.’

‘Just because the others want me?’ he said, glancing at her.

‘No. I came ... because I can’t stop thinking about you, and you wanted to live with me at the Castle.’

‘Or the alternative. Live with me away from the Castle. In Dorchester, anywhere. Not there.’

‘David, I have to go back.’

She said it quietly, scared of the same impasse they had reached the last time they were together. She could face up to Paul if David was with her ... he mustn’t let the fear of that prevent him from going.

Another squall of rain swept across the wall, and they both turned their backs to it. David was wearing his office clothes, and they were soaked through. He looked so cold and depressed; she went to his side, put an arm around him.

‘David ... let’s go back to the Castle. Just to get out of the rain. We can talk there.’

‘No, we’ll talk here. I don’t want to go to the Castle.’

‘You were going there just now.’

‘To find you and take you away.’ He pointed down at the base of the wall on the land side. ‘Let’s get out of the wind, Julia. For a few minutes.’

The rain had laid a sheen of wet over his face, and she could see the darkening of his collar against his neck. ‘All right.’

She followed him down the concrete steps, and as soon as they were below the level of the wall the sound of the sea lessened. At the bottom they sheltered under the steps.

David said: ‘Tell me what’s been happening at the Castle.’