I gazed into the white heart of the fire. It seemed to me I could hear the big clock out in the hall ponderously ticking. The old man cleared his throat.
“The Prince — I know I shouldn’t call him that — will come tomorrow,” he said. “If you are still here perhaps we can have a talk, the three of us.” I nodded, not trusting my voice to work. I was thinking of the dream again, and the departed train. Lost and astray, in an unknown place, alien voices in my ears. Mr. Plomer sighed. “I suppose we shall have to give him lunch. Perhaps Polly will preside. My wife”—he smiled—“doesn’t care for the poets.” He turned and spoke into the shadows beyond the firelight. “What do you say, my dear? Will you stand in for your mother and receive”—he smiled again—“our dear friend Frederick?”
I really must have been asleep for a time, since there was Polly, as I now saw, sitting on the chintz-covered sofa by the door, with the child in her lap. I struggled to haul myself upright in the armchair, blinking. Polly was wearing the same jumper and skirt as before, but had changed from her shoes into a pair of grey felt slippers with bobbles, or pom-poms, or whatever they’re called, on the toes. Even in the dim lamp-light I could make out her tear-swollen eyelids and delicately pink-rimmed nostrils. “He’s coming here,” she said, “tomorrow? Two visitors in a row — Janey will have a fit.” She laughed wanly, and her father went on smiling. She didn’t look at me. The child was asleep. The toppled tower of bricks was at my feet.
—
When I was little — ah, when I was little! — I cleaved to caution, to cosiness. There can have been few small boys as unadventurous as I was in those far-off days. I clung to my mother as a bulwark against a lawless and unpredictable world, a vestigial umbilical cord still strung between us, fine, delicate and durable as a strand of spider’s silk. Caution was my watchword, and outside the shelter of home I would perform no deed without considering its possible perils. I was a regular little regulating machine, tirelessly lining up in neat rows those things I encountered on my way through life that were amenable to my rage for order. Disaster awaited on all sides; every step was a potential pratfall; every path led to the brink of a precipice. I trusted nothing that was not myself. The world’s first task, as I knew well, a task it never relaxed from, was to undo me. I was even afraid of the sky.
Not that I was a namby-pamby, no indeed, I was known for my sturdiness, my truculence, even, despite my want of physical prowess and my well-known and wonderfully laughable artistic leanings. What I couldn’t do with my fists I aimed to do with words. School-yard bullies soon learned to fear the knout of my sarcasm. Yes, I think I can say I was in my way a tough little tyke, whose fear was all internal, a smoking underground swamp where dead fishes floated belly-up and high-shouldered birds with bills like scimitars scavenged and screamed. And it’s still there, that putrid inner aigues-mortes of mine, still deep enough to drown me. What I find frightening nowadays is not the general malevolence of things, though Heaven knows — and Hell knows even better — I certainly should, but rather their cunning plausibility. The sea at morning, a gorgeous sunset, watches of nightingales, even a mother’s love, all these conspire to assure me that life is flawless good and death no more than a rumour. How persuasive it all can be, but I am not persuaded, and never was. In earliest years, in my father’s shop, among those worthless prints he sold, I could spot in even the most tranquil scene of summer and trees and dappled cows the tittering imp peering out at me from the harmless-seeming greenery. And that was what I determined to paint, the chancre under the velvet bodice, the beast behind the sofa. Even stealing things — it came to me just this minute — even stealing things was an attempt to break through the surface, to pluck out fragments of the world’s wall and put my eye to the holes to see what was hiding behind it.
Take that strange afternoon at Grange Hall, with Polly and her parents, and the even stranger hours that followed. I should have made my getaway at the end of that gruesome tea-party — at which I felt like Alice, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare all rolled into one — but the atmosphere of Grange Hall held me fast in an unshakeable lassitude. I was given for the night a servant’s room under the eaves. It was small, and peculiarly cramped. The ceiling on one side sloped to the floor, which forced me to hold myself at an angle, even when I was lying down, so that I felt horribly queasy — it was almost as bad as that garret on the rue Molière where I lodged that long-ago Parisian summer. But then, I always seem to be off-kilter, in rooms large and small. There was a camp-bed to sleep in, set low on two sets of crossed wooden legs that groaned bad-temperedly when I made the slightest movement. Janey had lit a coal fire in the tiny grate — she was a great one for the bedroom fire, was Janey — which smouldered on for hours. I, too, like Polly, felt that I might suffocate, especially as the only window in the room was painted shut, and I woke up more than once in the night feeling as if some small malignant creature had been squatting for hours on my chest. Did I dream again? Don’t they say we dream all the time we’re asleep but forget the bulk of what we dreamed about? Anyway, you get the general picture, painted by Fuseli: discomfort, bad air, fitful sleep and frequent wakings, all to the pounding accompaniment of a headache’s horrible gong. It was still muddily dark outside when I woke for what I knew would be the last time that night, with a searing thirst. Sitting up in that low bed, under the ceiling’s leaning cliff, with my head in my hands and my fingers in my hair, I might have been a child again, sleepless and in fear of the dark, waiting for Mama to come with a soothing drink and turn down the sheet at my chin and put her cool hand for a moment on my moist brow.
I switched on the light. The bulb shed a sallow glimmer over the bed and the balding rug on the floor; there was a cane chair, and that wooden cabinet thing they have in old houses, don’t know what it’s called, with a white bowl and matching jug placed on top of it. How many maids and manservants, long dead now, had crouched here shivering on bleak mornings like this one to perform their meagre ablutions? I got up. I was not only thirsty, I also badly needed to pee; this circumstance, with its skewed symmetry, seemed wholly unfair. I bent down to look under the bed, in the hope there might be a chamber pot, but there wasn’t. I realised I was shivering and that my teeth were clenched — it really was very cold — and I stripped a blanket from the bed and draped it over my shoulders. It smelt of generations of sleepers and their sweat. I went into the corridor, at once groggy and keenly alert. I suspect that at such times one is never as wide awake as one imagines. I couldn’t locate the light switch, and left the bedroom door ajar so as not to lose my bearings. I turned right and shuffled forwards cautiously. As I moved out of the feeble glow from the doorway behind me, the darkness I was advancing into seemed to mould itself clammily around my face, like a close-fitting mask of soft black silk. I reached out and touched the wall with my fingertips, feeling my way along. The wallpaper was that old-fashioned stuff — what do you call it? — anaglypta, strange name, must look it up, heavily embossed and slightly glossy to the touch, the gate-lodge used to be and indeed still is plastered all over with it upstairs and down, between the skirting board and the dado rail, there’s another singular word, dado, my mind is bristling with them today, words, I mean. Here to my left was a door; I turned the knob; no good, the door was locked and there was no key in the keyhole. I moved on. The darkness now was almost complete, and I saw myself being wafted through it as if on air from another world, a substanceless wraith wrapped in a musty blanket. I made out the frame of a spectral window. Why when it’s dark like that do the shapes of things seem to tremble, to waver ever so slightly, as if they were suspended in some liquid medium, viscid and dense, through which weak but super-rapid currents are flowing? I looked out into the night, in vain. Nothing, not the faintest glow from a distant window, not the glint of a single star. How could it be so dark? It seemed unnatural.