Dr Harold Masters, collector of tales, fables, legends, limericks, jokes and ghost stories, Professor of Oral History, off to the coast with his wife and best friend to deliver a lecture on fact and fiction, was firmly convinced that he could persuade anyone to tell a story. Not just something prosaic and blunted with repetition, how granny lost the cat or the time the car broke down, but a fantastic tale spun from the air, plotted in the mouth and shaped by hand gestures. All it took, he told himself and his pupils, was a little imagination and a willingness to suspend belief. Peregrine Summerfield disagreed with him, of course, but then the art historian was a disagreeable man at the best of times, and had grown worse since his girlfriend had left him. He made an interesting conversational adversary, though, and Masters looked forward to seeing him tonight.
Thank God we persuaded him to come out and spend the weekend with us, he thought as he left his taxi and walked on to the concourse at Paddington Station. Peregrine had suggested cooking dinner for the doctor and his wife this weekend, but his house doubled as his studio and was cluttered with half-filled tubes of paint, brushes glued into cups of turpentine, bits of old newspaper, pots of cloudy water and stacks of unfinished canvasses. Besides, they were bound to argue about something in the course of the evening, and at least this way they would be on neutral ground. Or rather, running over it, for they had arranged to meet in the dining car of the train.
Masters spent too long in the station bookshop quizzing one of the shelf stackers on her reading habits, and nearly forgot to keep an eye on the time. Luckily the dining carriagewas situated right at the platform entrance, and he was able to climb aboard without having to gallop down the platform.
'Darling, how nice of you to be on time for once.' Jane, his wife, kissed him carefully. 'I felt sure you'd miss it again. Perry's not made it yet, either. I bribed the waiter to open up the bar and got you a sherry. God, you're soaked. I thought you were going to get a taxi. Do you want me to put that down for you?' She pointed to his dripping briefcase.
'Um, no, actually, I've something to show you.' Masters seated himself and dug inside, removing a handful of yellowed pages sealed in a clear plastic envelope. 'Thought you'd beinterested in seeing this. I might include it in the lecture.'
Jane had hoped for a little social interaction with her husband before he plunged back into his ink-and-paper world. Concealing her disappointment, she accepted the package and slipped the pages from their cover. She was good at masking her emotions. She'd had plenty of practice. 'What's it supposed to be?'
'It was found in a desk drawer in a Dublin newspaper office when they were clearing out the building. Miles passed it to me for verification.'
With practised ease, Jane slipped the yellow pills into her cupped hand and washed them down with her sherry. 'You really want me to look at this now?'
'Go on, before Perry gets here,' pleaded Masters. He was like an irritating schoolboy sometimes; he would hover over her, driving her mad if she didn't read it straightaway. Reluctantly, she perused the battered pages.
'Obviously it's meant to be a missing chapter from Brain Stoker's Dracula, revealing the fate of Jonathan Harker. But if it was real, it would have to be part of an earlier draft.' Jane tapped the pages level. 'The quality of the writing is different, too coarse. It wouldn't fit with the finished version of the book at all.' She studied the pages again. 'It's a fake. I think it's pretty unlikely that Bram Stoker would write about oral sex, don't you? The ink and the paper look convincingly old, though.'
'Damn.' Masters accepted the pages back. 'You saw through it without even reading it properly. Miles went to the trouble of using genuine hundred-year-old ink, too. It's his entry for a new course we're starting called "Hidden Histories".'
'Did you really expect me to believe it was the genuine article?'
'Well, I suppose so,' he admitted sheepishly.
'Honestly, you and Miles are as bad as each other.'
'Well, I believed it,' he moped. 'But then, I always believe the stories I'm told.'
Jane smiled across the top of her glass. 'Of course you do. Remember how convinced you were that the Hitler diaries were real?'
'I wanted them to be real. To learn about the inside of that man's brain, didn't you?'
'No, Harold, I didn't.' She looked out of the window. 'We're moving. I hope Perry got on board.'
'Jesus, that was a close thing. I wasn't expecting it to leave on time.' Peregrine Summerfield was standing beside them, attempting to tug his wet tweed jacket away from his body while a waiter pulled ineffectually at a sleeve.
'Perry, you're getting water over everything.'
'I was trying to choose a paperback. Nearly missed it. On Hallowe'en, too, that would have been an omen, eh? It's pissing down outside. Hallo, darling.' He kissed Jane. 'The tube smelled like an animal sanctuary, all wet hair and coats. Anyone ordered me a drink? What have you got there?' He pointed at the plastic-coated pages on the table as he sat down beside Masters' wife.
'Something for my lecture on fact and fiction.'
'Oh?' Summerfield thudded down into his chair and eagerly accepted a drink from Jane, carefully guiding the sherry glass over his beard.
'Yes, it purports to be – well, it's actually – '
'Jane, you're looking bloody gorgeous, as ever,' Summerfield interrupted, 'beats me how you do it on a shitty night like this. What's on the menu apart from their god-awful watery vegetables, I wonder? Let's see if we can get one of these pimply louts to open some wine, shall we?'
He made a beckoning gesture at Masters. 'Come on, then, I know you're dying to tell someone about your talk tomorrow. What have you got planned for these poor students?'
'I thought I'd talk about how fact and fiction have switched places since the war.'
'What do you mean?'
'Well, you have to look at the history of storytelling. For me, one of the most important dates in the last century was the 28th of December, eighteen hundred and eighty-one.'
Summerfield gave a shrug. 'Why?'
'On that day the first public building was illuminated with electricity for the first time ever, at the Savoy Theatre.' Masters leaned forward conspiratorially. 'Just think of it. With the click of a switch, twelve hundred electric lamps cast darkness from the room. The myths and mysteries of the past were thrown aside by the bright, cold light of scientific reason. No more shadows. No more hidden fears. No more cautionary tales of bogeymen and ghouls. And in the week of the winter solstice! As if man was determined to prove the dominance of light over darkness!
'Fiction once involved the telling of tales by candlelight. With electricity to help us separate fact from fiction, everything was clearly designated. Before the advent of television life was simpler. You went to work, you came home, you listened to the radio, you read a book; it was hard to mix your home life with your fantasy life. Now, though, the lines are blurred. People have phoney job titles and meaningless career descriptions. They spend their days lying to each other about what they do for a living, trying to make their work sound more interesting than it is, then they go home and watch gritty, realistic soap operas on TV. No wonder their kids are confused about what's real and what isn't. People write to soap stars as if they were real characters. And with so many companies spoon feeding us entertainment, no wonder we're losing the power to create our own fantasies. No wonder that we're not believed even when we've achieved the fantastic. Inexplicable mysteries occur every day, in every life. It's how we choose to read them that defines us as individuals.'
'Oh please,' Summerfield exploded, 'you might as well ask me to believe in Roswell, Area 51, crop circles, Nessie and all that Fortean stuff. You want to believe in the paranormal because you secretly think there has to be something more to the world than just this.' He pointed out of the window. It had grown dark outside. They had already left the suburbs. A glimmer of buttery light showed above the brow of a passing hill.