“Now leave him be,” said Annabel Pringle, as Ingels recognised her from her picture on the cover of the catalogue. ”They’re new to exhibiting, you see, you can’t blame them. I mean, this whole show is my idea but their enthusiasm. Now I can explain the principles as you go round if you like, or you can read them in the catalogue.”
“The latter, thanks.” Ingels hurried into the maze, opening the typed catalogue. A baby with an ear-trumpet, which was 2: Untitled. 3 was a man throwing his nose into a wastebasket, and Untitled. 4: Untitled. 5, 6, 7—Well, their paintings are certainly better than their prose, Ingels thought. The incense unravelled ahead of him. A child playing half-submerged in a lake. A blackened green-tinged city shouldering up from the sea. A winged top hat gliding over a jungle. Suddenly Ingels stopped short and turned back to the previous painting. He was sure he had seen it before.
22: Atlantis. But it wasn’t like any Atlantis he’d seen pictured. The technique was crude and rather banal, obviously one of the primitives, yet Ingels found that it touched images buried somewhere in him. Its leaning slabs of rock felt vast, the sea poured from its surfaces as if it had just exploded triumphantly into sight. Drawn closer, Ingels peered into the darkness within a slab of rock, beyond what might be an open doorway. If there were the outline of a pale face staring featurelessly up from within the rock, its owner must be immense. If there were, Ingels thought, withdrawing: but why should he feel there ought to be?
When he’d hurried around the rest of the exhibition he tried to ask about the painting, but Annabel Pringle headed him off. “You understand what we mean by associational painting?” she demanded. “Let me tell you. We select an initial idea by aleatory means.”
“Eh?” Ingels said, scribbling.
“Based on chance. We use the I Ching, like John Cage. The American composer, he originated it. Once we have the idea we silently associate from it until each of us has an idea they feel they must communicate. This exhibition is based on six initial ideas. You can see the diversity.”
“Indeed,” Ingels said. “When I said eh I was being an average reader of our paper, you understand. Listen, the one that particularly interested me was number 22. I’d like to know how that came about.”
“That’s mine,” one young man said, leaping up as if it were House.
“The point of our method,” Annabel Pringle said, gazing at the painter, “is to erase all the associational steps from your mind, leaving only the image you paint. Of course Clive here wouldn’t remember what led up to that painting.”
“No, of course,” Ingels said numbly. “It doesn’t matter. Thank you. Thanks all very much.” He hurried downstairs, past a sodden clown, and into the street. In fact it didn’t matter. A memory had torn its way through his insomnia. For the second time that day he realised why something had looked familiar, but this time more disturbingly. Decades ago he had himself dreamed the city in the painting.
II
Ingels switched off the television. As the point of light dwindled into darkness it touched off the image in him of a gleam shooting away into space. Then he saw that the light hadn’t sunk into darkness but into Hilary’s reflection, leaning forward from the cane rocking-chair next to him, about to speak. “Give me fifteen minutes,” he said, scribbling notes for his review.
The programme had shown the perturbations which the wandering planet had caused in the orbits of Pluto, Neptune and Uranus, and had begun and ended by pointing out that the planet was now swinging away from the Solar System; its effect on Earth’s orbit would be negligible. Photographs from the space-probe were promised within days. Despite its cold scientific clarity (Ingels wrote) and perhaps without meaning to, the programme managed to communicate a sense of foreboding, of the intrusion into and interference with our familiar skies. “Not to me it didn’t,” Hilary said, reading over his shoulder.
“That’s sad,” he said. “I was going to tell you about my dreams.”
“Don’t if I wouldn’t understand them either. Aren’t I allowed to criticise now?”
“Sorry. Let’s start again. Just let me tell you a few of the things that have happened to me. I was thinking of them all today. Some of them even you’ll have to admit are strange. Make some coffee and I’ll tell you about them.”
When she’d brought the coffee he waited until she sat forward, ready to be engrossed, long soft black hooks of hair angling for her jawbone. “I used to dream a lot when I was young,” he said. “Not your average childhood dream, if there is such a thing. There was one I remember, about these enormous clouds of matter floating in outer space, forming very slowly into something. I mean very slowly … I woke up long before they got there, yet while I was dreaming I knew whatever it was would have a face, and that made me very anxious to wake up. Then there was another where I was being carried through a kind of network of light, on and on across intersections for what felt like days, until I ended up on the edge of this gigantic web of paths of light. And I was fighting to stop myself going in, because I knew that hiding behind the light there was something old and dark and shapeless, something dried-up and evil that I couldn’t make out. I could hear it rustling like an old dry spider. You know what I suddenly realised that web was? My brain, I’d been chasing along my nervous system to my brain. Well, leave that one to the psychologists. But there were odd things about these dreams—I mean, apart from all that. They always used to begin the same way, and always about the same time of the month.”
“The night of the full moon?” Hilary said, slurping coffee.
“Funnily enough, yes. Don’t worry, I didn’t sprout midnight shadow or anything. But some people are sensitive to the full moon, that’s well enough documented. And I always used to begin by dreaming I could see the full moon over the sea, way out in the middle of the ocean. I could see the reflection resting on the water, and after a while I’d always find myself thinking it wasn’t the moon at all but a great pale face peering up out of the ocean, and I’d panic. Then I wouldn’t be able to move and I’d know that the full moon was pulling at something deep in the ocean, waking it up. I’d feel my panic swelling up in me, and all of a sudden it would burst and I’d be in the next dream. That’s how it happened, every time.”
“Didn’t your parents know? Didn’t they try to find out what was wrong?”
“I don’t know what you mean by wrong. But yes, they knew eventually, when I told them. That was after I had the idea my father might be able to explain. I was eleven then and I’d had strange feelings sometimes, intuitions and premonitions and so forth, and sometimes I’d discovered they’d been my father’s feelings too.”
“I know all about your father’s feelings,” Hilary said. “More than he knows about mine.”
Soon after they’d met, Ingels had taken her to see his parents. She’d felt his father had been too stiffly polite to her, and when she’d cross-examined Ingels he’d eventually admitted that his father had felt she was wrong for him, unsympathetic to him. “You were going to let me tell you about my dreams,” he said. “I told my father about the sea dream and I could see there was something he wasn’t saying. My mother had to make him tell me. Her attitude to the whole thing was rather what yours would have been, but she told him to get it over with, he’d have to tell me sometime. So he told me he’d sometimes shared his father’s dreams without either of them ever knowing why. And he’d had several of my dreams when he’d been young, until one night in the mid-twenties—early 1925, I think he said. Then he’d dreamed a city had risen out of the sea. After that he’d never dreamed again. Well, maybe hearing that was some kind of release for me, because the next time I dreamed of the city too.”