“What do I know about it?” she said. “It’s nothing to do with me.” She was clearing the table in the dim rationed light beyond the fire, not looking at either of them. Suddenly Ingels saw her as he never had before: bewildered by her husband’s dreams and intuitions, further excluded from the disturbingly incomprehensible bond between him and her son. All at once Ingels knew why he’d always felt she had been happy to see him leave home: it was only then that she’d been able to start reclaiming her husband. He took his coat from the hall and looked into the dining-room. They hadn’t moved: his father was staring at the fire, his mother at the table. “I’ll see you,” he said, but the only sound was the crinkling of the fire as it crumbled, breaking open pinkish embers.
IV
He watched television. Movement of light and colours, forming shapes. Outside the window the sky drew his gaze, stretched taut, heavily imminent as thunder. He wrote words.
Later, he was sailing through enormous darkness; glinting globes turned slowly around him, one wearing an attenuated band of light; ahead, the darkness was scattered with dust and chunks of rock. A piece of metal was circling him like a timid needle, poking towards him, now spitting flame and swinging away. He felt contempt so profound it was simply vast indifference. He closed his eyes as he might have blinked away a speck of dust.
In the morning he wrote his review at the flat. He knew he wouldn’t be able to bear the teeming aisles for long. Blindly shouldering his way across the floor, he found Bert. He had to gaze at him for a minute or so; he couldn’t immediately remember what he should look like. “That rewrite you did on the TV review wasn’t your best,” Bert said. “Ah well,” Ingels said, snatching his copy of last night’s Herald automatically from his desk, and hurried for the door.
He’d nearly reached it when he heard the news editor shouting into the telephone. “But it can’t affect Saturn and Jupiter! I mean, it can’t change its mass, can it? … I’m sorry, sir. Obviously I didn’t mean to imply I knew more about your field than you. But is it possible for its mass to change? … What, trajectory as well?” Ingels grinned at the crowd around the editor’s desk, at their rapt expressions. They’d be more rapt when he returned. He strode out.
Through the writhing crowds, up the steps, into a vista of beds and dressing-tables like a street of cramped bedrooms whose walls had been tricked away. “Can I speak to the manager, please,” he said to the man who stepped forward. “Brichester Herald.”
The manager was a young man in a pale streamlined suit, longish clipped hair, a smile which he held forward as if for inspection. “I’m following a story,” Ingels said, displaying his press card. “It seems that when your warehouse was a theatre a room was leased to an astronomical group. We think their records are still here, and if they can be found they’re of enormous historical interest.”
“That’s interesting,” the manager said. “Where are they supposed to be?”
“In a room at the top of the building somewhere.”
“I’d like to help, of course.” Four men passed, carrying pieces of a dismembered bed to a van. “There were some offices at the top of the building once, I believe. But we don’t use them now, they’re boarded up. It would be a good deal of trouble to open them now. If you’d phoned I might have been able to free some men.”
“I’ve been out of town,” Ingels said, improvising hastily now his plans were going awry. “Found this story on my desk when I got back. I tried to phone earlier but couldn’t get through. Must be a tribute to the business you’re doing.” An old man, one of the loaders, was sitting on a chair nearby, listening; Ingels wished he would move, he couldn’t bear an audience as well. “These records really would be important,” he said wildly. “Great historical value.”
“In any case I can’t think they’d still be here. If they were in one of the top rooms they would have been cleared out long ago.”
“I think you’re a bit wrong there,” the old man said from his chair.
“Have you nothing to do?” the manager demanded.
“We’ve done loading,” the man said. “Driver’s not here yet. Mother’s sick. It’s not for me to say you’re wrong, but I remember when they were mending the roof after the war. Men who were doing it said they could see a room full of books, they looked like, all covered up. But we couldn’t find it from down here and nobody wanted to break their necks trying to get in from the roof. Must be there still, though.”
“That has to be the one,” Ingels said. “Whereabouts was it?”
“Round about there,” the old man said, pointing above a Scandinavian four-poster. “Behind one of the offices, we used to reckon.”
“Could you help find it?” Ingels said. “Maybe your workmates could give you a hand while they’re waiting. That’s of course if this gentleman doesn’t mind. We’d make a point of your cooperation,” he told the manager. “Might even be able to give you a special advertising rate, if you wanted to run an ad on that day.”
The five of them climbed a rusty spiral staircase, tastefully screened by a partition, to the first floor. The manager, still frowning, had left one loader watching for the driver. “Call us as soon as he comes,” he said. “Whatever the reason, time lost loses money.” Across the first floor, which was a maze of crated and cartoned furniture, Ingels glimpsed reminiscences of his dream: the outline of theatre boxes in the walls, almost erased by bricks; a hook that had supported a chandelier. They seemed to protrude from the mundane, beckoning him on.
The staircase continued upward, more rustily. “I’ll go first,” the manager said, taking the flashlight one of the loaders had brought. “We don’t want accidents,” and his legs drew up like a tail through a trapdoor. They heard him stamping about, challenging the floor. “All right,” he called, and Ingels thrust his face through drifting dust into a bare plank corridor.
“Here, you said?” the manager asked the old man, pointing to some of the boards that formed a wall. “That’s it,” the old man said, already ripping out nails with his hammer, aided by his workmates. A door peeked dully through. Ingels felt a smile wrenching at his face. He controlled himself. Wait until they’ve gone.
As soon as they prised open the office door he ran forward. A glum green room, a ruined desk in whose splintered innards squatted a dust-furred typewriter. “I’m afraid it’s as I thought,” the manager said. “There’s no way through. You can’t expect us to knock down a wall, obviously. Not without a good deal of consultation.”
“But there must have been an entrance,” Ingels said. “Beyond this other wall. It must have been sealed up before you got the building. Surely we can look for it.”
“You won’t have to,” the old man said. He was kicking at the wall nearest the supposed location of the room. Plaster crumbled along a crack, then they heard the shifting of brick. “Thought as much,” he said. “The war did this, shook the building. The boards are all right but the mortar’s done for.” He kicked again and whipped back his foot. He’d dislodged two bricks, and at once part of the wall collapsed, leaving an opening four feet high.
“That’ll be enough!” the manager said. Ingels was stooping, peering through the dust-curtained gap. Bare boards, rafters and slates above, what must be bookcases draped with cloth around the walls, something in the centre of the room wholly covered by a frame hung with heavy material, perhaps velvet. Dust crawled on his hot face, prickling like fever. “If the wall would have collapsed anyway it’s a good job you were here when it did,” he told the manager. “Now it’s done I’m sure you won’t object if I have a look around. If I’m injured I promise not to claim. I’ll sign a waiver if you like.”