Chapter Six
By lunchtime I am hungry and cold and I need to pee. From my bathroom window it looks as if the whole world is lidded with rooftops and hinged with back doors and fire escapes, as if it were one big higgledy-piggledy doll's house. I can see the top of Luigi's back room and the dark metal staircase down which you could escape if there was a fire. Below a gray concrete roof is the back door of the Indian restaurant. I can see a guy standing there, puffing urgently on a cigarette, constantly looking around as if he's about to get caught. I can see alleyways and small, uneven courtyards; but mostly there are rooftops and chimneys, red brick and concrete, and it suddenly seems more like a three-dimensional puzzle out there. How is it possible to fit so many buildings into one small space? I think, not for the first time, about how many people there must be around me all the time, even though it often seems as if I am entirely alone. I wonder what it would be like to "telepath." Would it make you feel less alone, or would the loneliness somehow become worse?
I cook some Puy lentils for lunch; then I go back to the sofa and balance my bowl on my lap as I continue reading about Mr. Y, and his search for the fairground doctor. By the time Mr. Y gets to the fair-ground the following day, the whole thing has disappeared, including the doctor and his curious potion. Poor Mr. Y. He was so certain that he would be able to return to this world-of-minds that he didn't bother to investigate everything while he was still inside it. He asks around and finds that most of the fairground people have moved on to a site just beyond Sherwood Forest. But when he gets to the site and finds the fairground, he can't find the doctor. Indeed, when he asks people if they have seen this "fair-ground doctor," most of them are perplexed and assure him that there is no such man.
Once he is back in London, Mr. Y becomes increasingly obsessed with the questions posed by his adventure. Had he, in fact, been given the ability to read minds (or, as he puts it, "to telepath"), albeit only briefly? Or did the doctor simply give him a strong sleeping draught? He doesn't know, and does not have any way of finding out. But he becomes inclined to believe that he did in fact read the mind of William Hardy. Indeed, he is able to locate and read the exact book from which Hardy learned of the Pepper's Ghost illusion, and finds that his "memory" of it (from reading it via Little Will) is exactly correct. Knowing that a man cannot have a memory of a book he has not read, he concludes that something supernatural happened to him that evening at the Goose Fair. But he simply does not know what this was. In the absence of any proper explanation, he does a good Victorian thing and starts labelling and classifying the parts of the new world he has encountered. The name he gives to this other world is the Troposphere, which he derives by taking the word "atmosphere"—a combination of the Greek words for "vapor" and "ball"—and replacing the unknown vapors with something more solid: the Greek word for character, tropos. It takes Mr. Y more time to conceive of a term for the journey itself, but eventually he names it Telemancy: tele from telos, meaning distant; and mancy from manteia, meaning divination. In his mind this was divination at a distance, and he badly wanted to do it again.
At this point in the narrative we begin to learn something of Mr. Y's business affairs. His drapery shop, located in the East End of London, used to be a very successful enterprise but now it seems to be failing, and soon he has to let several of his assistants go. A rival has set up shop just around the corner from Mr. Y, and his business is booming. The proprietor of this rival business, Mr. Clemency, is roughly characterized in the novel as a shifty, spiteful individual who seems to enjoy the misery he heaps on Mr. Y, and believes that his method of making clothes—locking his workers in a small, hot back room and paying them hardly anything—is superior to Mr. Y's old-fashioned ways. Mr. Y soon has two obsessions: Telemancy and revenge, and he thinks that if only he knew what had been in the potion given to him by the doctor, he could concoct it himself and revisit the landscape of the Troposphere. Once there, of course, he would visit the mind of Mr. Clemency. He admits, with some shame, that he intends to blackmail his rival if he can find a way to do so.
Meanwhile, his business continues to deteriorate. On top of this, his father is taken ill and his usually meek wife becomes vexed and anxious. Mr. Y can't cope with everything, and so neglects his father and shouts at his wife. He is clearly rushing headfirst down the slope of his own ruin, but he can't see this. Instead, he burns a lamp each night and reads Materia Medica and herbals that might give him some clue as to what the mysterious mixture was. He finds none. But the world of the Troposphere, particularly the calm landscape on which he rode the horse, beckons him like a drug to which he has become profoundly addicted.
The light is fading outside my kitchen window and I look at my watch. It's just gone four o'clock. I've got a reading lamp in my bedroom, so I go and get that and plug it in behind the sofa and then place it on the windowsill. That's better. I can aim it directly at the pages of the book. One lamp can't use up too much electricity, surely?
At about half past five I hear the sound of the door downstairs, and then the dissonant tinkle of Wolfgang's bicycle bell as it scrapes against the wall. Although I really want to finish reading my book, my eyes are hurting and I haven't spoken to another human being for hours. So when there's a faint tap on my door a few minutes later, I call out that it's open, and get up to make coffee.
Wolfgang comes in and sits down awkwardly at the kitchen table.
"Good day?" I say, although his posture should answer the question for me.
"Ha," is all he says, putting his head in his hands.
"Wolf?"
"What is Sunday for?" he asks. "Tell me that."
"Um ... church?" I suggest. "Family? Sport?"
The coffee hisses and I take it off the gas ring. I pour a cup for each of us and sit down at the table facing Wolf. I offer him a cigarette and then light one myself. He does not respond to my suggestions, so I try to think of some more. Without meaning to, I effortlessly transport myself back to Mr. Y's 1890s world, and summon up half-finished coloring-book images of women walking through parks in hobble skirts, children playing with hoops, and vague dot-to-dot trips to the seaside involving parasols and slot machines, although I don't think they had slot machines until the turn of the century. It's an after-church, afternoon world that I can't even begin to understand. I try to think myself back out of the 1890s.
"Sex?" I suggest instead. "Reading the papers? Shopping?"
"Ha," says Wolf again, sipping his coffee.
"What happened?" I ask.
"A weekend with Catherine's family," he says, with some disgust.
"It can't have been that bad," I say. "Where did you go?"
"Sussex. Country house. And it was very bad..."
"Why?"
He sighs. "Where to begin?"
I think of the Odyssey. "Try the middle," I suggest.
"Ah. The middle. OK. In the middle, I run over the dog."
I can't help but laugh, even though this is obviously not funny.
"Is the dog OK?" I say.
Wolfgang looks sad. "He is now lame."
I sip my coffee. "How exactly did you run over the dog?"
Wolfgang doesn't drive: thus the bicycle.