SERGIUS: It’s a little more complicated. We were very close, real twins, to the point where we often seemed to share thoughts, and if anything happened to the other when we were apart, both of us felt it. So she was naturally devastated when I died, particularly as it was her fault, and when she wanted to ask my forgiveness, it didn’t seem silly to try and contact me via our shared thoughts as we used to when I was alive. Well, we got a dialogue going in her mind, but she was never sure if it was real or she was just making it up …
GEOFF: And was it real?
SERGIUS: How should I know? I wasn’t sure either if the dialogue I thought I was having with her was real or just my imagining. I mean, when you’re both alive and can meet to exchange notes, you can cross-check, right? But with me down here, her up there, how could either of us tell? Unless of course, we got a sign.
SAM: A sign? Oh, God preserve us from signs!
STUFFER: Aye, one thing I’ve learnt in politics is any bugger looking for signs is sure to find ’em, and there’s none of ’em to be trusted!
SERGIUS: You may be right, Councillor. Certainly once she started looking they came thick and fast. In fairness, you’ve got to understand her psychological state. It wasn’t just guilt at my death that was screwing up her thinking. It was the way her whole life had been stood on its head. Her acting career had been all she ever thought of before the accident, but after she recovered, she gave it up completely. What she told people-indeed what she told herself-was that she did it out of revulsion against the artificialities and pretences of the stage. In fact it was rather more basic. You see, she found she could no longer remember the words!
DICK: But she always had a marvellous memory for quotation.
SERGIUS: Off the stage, everything was fine, near perfect recall. But once she trod the boards, it all went.
BROSE: How awful! I once recall drying up when I was playing Mirabell opposite Dame Judi at the Garrick …
PERCY: Oh, do shut up, Brose, and let the man finish. The sooner we get across this dreadful river, the sooner we’ll be released from this most embarrassing position.
SERGIUS: Thank you, Mr. Follows. You should understand, Mr. Bird, it wasn’t just her learned lines that went, it was all vocabulary. Can you imagine what it’s like to be in a world devoid of words? Where nothing you see has a label? Nothing you feel can be expressed? Nothing you think …well, in fact, you can’t think! This is what going on the stage meant for her. This is why she became a librarian, so she could spend her life in places where they treasured words and kept them stored safe for future generations. But all the time she wanted my forgiveness. She had a memory of me lifting her from the driver’s seat of the wrecked car and laying her on the pavement, then reaching up to pluck a spray of cypress from a tree overhanging the churchyard wall and placing it on her breast and whispering a loving reassuring word in her ear before going to take my place by the driver’s door so she wouldn’t be blamed for the crash.
DICK: That rings a bell …
SERGIUS: Indeed. I expect you’re thinking of one of your friend Mr. Penn’s translations which he used to leave lying around in what was always a vain effort to engage Rye’s affections. It’s from the poem which begins “All night long when dreaming I see your face …”
DICK: That’s right. How does the last verse go?
A word in secret you softly say
And give me a cypress spray sweetly.
I wake and find that I’ve lost the spray
And the word escapes me completely.
SERGIUS: Well remembered. Pity Rye’s memory didn’t work as well. She got thrown out of the car and I was in no state to get out after her. I just slumped across into the driver’s seat and died. And it wasn’t a churchyard wall we hit, but a garden wall, and the nearest thing to a cypress tree in it was one of those ghastly leylandii hedges. But Rye had such a powerful false memory that when she read this particular effort of Mr. Penn’s, she immediately saw it as one of these signs she was always looking for. There were plenty of others. You yourself bear some responsibility in this, Mr. Dee. You made her aware of that game of yours, Paronomania, and she worked out for herself long before you told her what was the significance of the third tile rack bearing the name Johnny. Here, it seemed to her, was a perfect example of bringing someone back to life through the power of words.
DICK: But it was never like that with Johnny …I refuse to accept any responsibility here …it’s only a game …was …
SERGIUS: Of course it was. With Rye, too, it was only a game to start with. But before we leave your game, Mr. Dee, you should be aware that in fact its very name was one of the most significant triggers of her subsequent course of action. In the beginning was the word, remember? And the word in this case was PARONOMANIA.
DICK: I don’t understand. How could a name …? Ah …
SERGIUS: I think you’re getting there. After all, you too are a wordman. That’s right. Try rearranging the letters.
DICK: Oh God …Paronomania …Raina Pomona! But I can’t be blamed for an anagram!
SERGIUS: Why not? You have taken power from words and their construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction all your life. The man who splits the atom must bear some responsibility for all that springs therefrom, surely? Dear Rye saw in these and many other small signs evidence that I was trying to show her a path which would lead to direct communication with me.
GEOFF: By killing people? Don’t get it, old boy.
SERGIUS: That was still to come. The nearest thing to an unmistakable sign came the day the shelf collapsed during the grand tour of the library. Most of you were there, which of course seemed significant later on. You remember the occasion, Mr. Dee?
DICK: Indeed. It was quite comic really the way everyone scattered as the books came tumbling down.
PERCY: I didn’t think it was comic. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.
BROSE: Not even now, dear boy.
PERCY: This hardly counts as life, does it? So there!
DICK: But what …oh yes. It was the OED. All twenty volumes. What a crash they made! And it was this that …?
SERGIUS: Yes. Rye didn’t see an accident. She saw all the words in the language come flying off the shelves to send the great and the good of Mid-Yorkshire into undignified flight. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The path to communion with me must, she felt, lead through all these words, but how? So many, so very many …how to traverse such vast distances …she needed a chart to show her the path …and then it came to her …what if the OED was her chart …what if the limits of each volume were signposts …? A to Bazouki …BBC to Chalypsography … but how? And now she told herself, or imagined she heard me telling her, that messages to and from the dead require messengers, and for these messengers to be efficient, they must leave her living and come to me dead. These ideas were all swirling madly in her mind, and might still have come to nothing had she not driven out that fatal morning, and broken down, and saw you come bowling merrily along the road, Mr. Ainstable.