As usual, there had been nothing to the dream. Abby, aged three and a half or four, sat in the sandbox that Aaron had built for her in the yard of their house in Berkeley, the house on the quiet street that they had lived in for several years until they had moved to the commune in Texas when Abby was five. The child sat shirtless in the warm sunlight, dribbling sand from an old soup ladle into a series of discarded yogurt tubs and Styrofoam egg cartons. A small black cat, one of the neighborhood animals that Anne chased off because it liked to use the sandbox as its cat tray, sat on one corner of the box, watching the concentrating child. Ana, or Anne, was in turn keeping her eye on the cat, not wanting to break into Abby's serious experiment by shooing the animal away, but also not willing to have it pee in the sand. She was weeding the flower bed that ran along the side fence, tossing clumps of grass and Oxalis into an old bucket and glancing up from time to time to be sure the cat had not ventured down from its perch, when she became aware of a man standing half hidden by the shrubs in the front of the yard, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the browned, half-naked child with the sun in her gleaming tumble of coal-black hair.
Ana came gasping awake, cold with terror and choking on the protest caught in her throat, a cry that she had to stand up and move into view and chase the man off but she couldn't because she was waking up now, and she could not reach back into her sleep to save Abby.
She lay still until the silence of the house overcame the pounding of her heart, and then swung her legs over the edge of the lumpy mattress and put face in her hands, trying to think if she had actually seen that man. There had been just such a threatening stranger while they lived in Berkeley, a situation that involved meetings of the local parents and police. She remembered clearly how reluctant they had all been, good Berkeley radicals all, to call in the police department over a problem they felt they ought to be able to deal with themselves, and how a core group of the mothers had finally forced the issue by pointing out that it was they who were usually alone with the kids during the day, not the fathers, so the decision was theirs to make, and they wanted the police. And regular uniformed presences had done the job, at least locally and temporarily, for the man had moved on, taken his disturbing and disturbed watching self away to haunt another neighborhood.
She had not thought of that episode in years, had not even thought of the Berkeley house for a long time. What would Maria make of the dream? she wondered, beginning to feel angry. She knew damn well that what she was feeling here in England was the same helpless rage she'd felt then, the same feeling of threat and oppression and the need to take some kind of action to protect a child. Why the hell did she need a dream to tell her all that?
She raised her head and looked at the bright shaft of bluish light that came through the gap in the curtains. Her first night in the room she had barely noticed it, one more strangeness among all the others, but the house was surrounded by brilliant floodlights. Presumably intended to keep away intruders? Tomorrow she would borrow a clothespin or a safety pin to close the gap so it wouldn't disturb her again.
The light cut diagonally across the foot of her bed and showed her the thin coverlet, the worn braided rug that reminded her of Dulcie's colorful efforts, left behind in Arizona for safekeeping, and her book, reading glasses, and wristwatch on the bedside table. It was not even three A.M., but Ana's body was trying to tell her that despite the position of the hands on the watch face, it was actually time to be awake and having some kind of meal. She wondered idly if Dulcie, too, was awake and begging Jason to play with her or find her something to eat.
She lay back down for a while, staring at the bare room. She had left the window open when she went to bed, and as she lay there she became aware of a heavy, sweet smell on the night air, the rich odor of the roses that grew in the bed below, underlaid by the dank fragrance of vegetation that arose out of the surrounding jungle. Ana had never much cared for heavy floral fragrances and had been known to remove pots of blooming narcissus from a room to an external windowsill. She found herself thinking about the Arizona landscape, its spiky shapes and small, waxy leaves, with an affection that verged on longing. What she wouldn't give for a boojum tree. There had been a similarly scented rose trained on an archway leading to the herb garden in Utah, she remembered, an annoyance due to the bees it attracted and the thorns that snagged at the unwary passerby—but she was not thinking about the past now; she would think about something else. Dulcie's church mice, perhaps.
It was no use. The whispering ghosts of memories continued to paw at her mind and her inner clock showed no signs of turning over and going back to sleep, so in the end she got up, pulled on jeans, a sweatshirt, and the pair of Chinese cloth shoes she wore as house slippers, and walked down the hall to the bathroom. She took care not to flush the toilet, a massive water closet that must have been the latest in sanitation technology when it was installed at the turn of the century but which roared its presence throughout the house when the chain loosed its eight-gallon tank of water.
She went down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor kitchen, turned on a small light over the stove and clicked the switch on the electric kettle, then began sorting through the nearby cupboards for tea bags and edibles.
The electric kettle had come to a boil and turned itself off before Ana had assembled mug, tea bag, and milk, its speed reminding her that Britain functioned on 220 current rather than the American 110. She poured the water over the tea bag, which instantly turned the water so black the milk did not make much headway even when she had fished out the sodden, scalding bag. Tea, too, was stronger here, it would seem.
She found cheese and a packet of something called digestive biscuits, which looked like round graham crackers and turned out to be a good foil for the cheese. She longed to go outside to eat, away from this house of turmoil, where she could breathe the clean, unscented night air and search for the moon, but she thought of the dogs and reluctantly decided not to risk waking the house with their barking a second time.
Instead, she took her mug and her plate and wandered through the downstairs rooms, her way lit by the shafts of cool light from outside. The dining hall was too big and empty to have much appeal for a solitary diner, so she went on, through a corridor, past a sitting room with a dark television set in the corner and on into the main entrance, a marbled expanse of pillars and stairways, shadowed and mysterious. The rustle of her clothing sent whispers crawling off into the reaches overhead. Not a place to crunch and slurp, she decided, and continued her search for a friendly corner.
The dining room/ballroom on the one side of the house was mirrored on the other side by a room of similar size and shape. This one seemed darker despite the bright patches from the windows, because the walls were panelled with wood. It was also the first room in the manor house that did not echo emptily, for the simple reason that the walls held tapestries and the floor had carpets. The change was soothing, but as Ana walked farther in she saw that the soft floor was practical as welclass="underline" Probably originally a gallery to display the family portraits that the industrialist would have commissioned, this large room was now the Change meditation hall.
Unlike the Arizona version, this room made no attempt at circularity. The far end of the room had a dais with a cushion for the meditation leader and a fireplace at his back—the only similarity she had seen to the Arizona compound, come to think of it. She climbed on the dais to examine it as best she could in the uneven light, but found it unexceptional, except perhaps for the locked door at the back of the raised area. She wondered if this, too, led down to an alchemical laboratory, but she had no urge to investigate. Not until she knew the community a whole lot better than she did now.