The House of Doctor Dee (25 page)

I think I was spitting at her. 'Not in my eyes,' she said. 'Be careful of my eyes.'

Then I thought I heard another voice whispering to me. 'Why did you call me?' I left her and, wiping my mouth with my hand, climbed the stairs. I managed to find my own bathroom, and washed myself as quickly as I could before putting on some clothes. When I returned to the basement, she was gone. I was now so drunk that I could hardly remember what had happened, and I staggered out of the house in search of someone else – some other woman, or girl, to continue the ritual I had begun. Everything had changed, and the houses towered above me as if I were lying down on the road. I found myself in various places without knowing how I had reached them, and I held conversations with people who seemed to disappear without warning. I was inside a pub, or night-club, leaning against a video game which spun and danced before my eyes. Then I found myself crouched in a urinal with the piss running down my legs. There was an old man there. He leaned across me, and put part of me in his mouth. I lay back, and laughed. Enough. It was complete. This was the night when I discovered the truth about my father.

I was lying in my own bed the following morning. I do not know how I had reached it, and could remember nothing of the previous night except moments preserved in the ambergris of shock or surprise; yet I felt curiously peaceful, as if I had rested for a long time. Then, as I turned to sleep again, I knew that there was someone lying on the bed beside me. There was a figure there, breathing softly in the light. I thought for a moment that it was Mary, somehow still inside the house, but it was my father. He was smiling at me. I groaned deeply, and he was gone. When I woke up I was lying, fully clothed, upon the stairs. The door was open and somehow, in my drunkenness, I had found my way back to the old house. But now the place disgusted me, and I could hardly bring myself to climb the stairs to my room.

I knew then that it was time to visit my mother; it was time to explain to her what I had discovered from Daniel, although I suspected that she had always been aware of her husband's clandestine life. But how was it that I had never noticed her distress, or ever thought of comforting her? The prospect of taking her in my arms disturbed me, even now, more than I cared to admit.

There are times, after heavy drinking, when all customary perceptions are destroyed and the world seems very clear. That was why I could now see my mother so simply. I suppose that I had never really looked after her, because I had never looked
at
her properly. I had never tried to understand her life, and so she had remained for me the same cut-out, throw-away character to whom I responded in the same casual way. I had never recognized the pain within her life, or cared to understand the nature of the long marriage which had formed her; but, more importantly, I had never bothered to love her. No doubt that was why, over the years, she had become so brisk and distant with me. It was a way of defending herself against my indifference.

I told Daniel that I recalled nothing about my earliest childhood but, as you must have gathered by now, that was not entirely true. I once read an article about an Italian who had emigrated to America when he was very young, but who, for the last few years, had painted nothing but the streets and houses of the village from which he had originally come. That in itself is easy to explain; what was surprising was the fact that, according to the photographic evidence, his paintings were accurate in every detail. After an interval of some thirty or forty years, he perfectly remembered the shape of every house and the contours of every lane. In the same way, when I look back upon my own childhood, I can still see very clearly the streets and houses that surrounded me then. I observe the small white villas of Wulfstan Street, the row of red-brick council houses in Erconwald Street, the scout hall at the top of Melitus Street, and the small park beside Braybrooke Avenue. But in my imagination there is never anyone there. Even when I remember my own house as it seemed when I was a child, there is no one anywhere within it. As far as I can remember, there are no people at all. No. There is one thing. Once my mother had taken me on her knee, when I was still quite young, and had started crying: I had walked out of the room without saying a word.

That memory came back to me when I returned to Ealing on the following day. It was a bright and agreeable morning and, as I turned into Melville Avenue, I stepped lightly over the pavement; it was the old children's game – step on a crack, break your mother's back. She was 'working' in the garden, Geoffrey told me when he answered the door. He seemed surprised to see me, and carried on talking nervously as we walked towards the kitchen door. I could see her through the window, bent over some late-flowering shrubs, and realized once more how frail she had become; we looked at each other, and for a few moments neither of us had any expression at all. Then she smiled and, wiping her hands on a piece of tissue, came over to me. 'This is a privilege,' she said. 'Kiss please.' For once I did not feel distaste as I put my lips to her cheek.

'I was hoping to see you in Clerkenwell again.'

'It's a long way, Matthew. And the garden needs me at this time of year. Before the autumn comes.' I looked around at the lawn, the shrubs and the crazy paving: it was all as I remembered it from my childhood, although in those days it had seemed to make up an entire world in which I could conceal myself. 'Besides,' she was saying, 'it's that house of yours.'

'What's wrong with the house, mother?'

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 glass, 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. 'God 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? Sexual 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 glass, 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 assumed 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 space, 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.