“Like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill,” Alice says. She pulls a shawl over her thin shoulders. “Just to watch it roll back down again.”
“I dream it again and again.”
She leans to him and strokes his temple. “Dreams are good for us, Jake. Even bad ones. Ride them. Do you know how? Focus on the jars, say, or the woman, and say, This isn't real, this isn't real. Let one part of you step out of the dream. Remember you're its master, and not the other way round.”
He sees his daughter blink her lilac eyes. When they reopen they are blue. With her head caught just there they are blue-green.
“And the woman gets older,” he says. “She starts young and—” He gestures curves with his hands. “In the end she's old. She looks like a fucking plank of wood.”
Alice smiles, seeming surprised.
“Your mother was afraid of growing old. Your mother was not afraid of anything but growing old. She was—” He frowns and seeks his train of thought. “Was she old?”
Alice is pensive. “ Fifty-three. That's not old.”
She engages his eyes for a moment with a look that is worried, that is sympathetic, that borders on suspicious. He smiles to distract her and, returning the smile, she retrieves her hair from the wind and sets it in place behind her ear.
“Alice, I'm afraid I have a disease. I have Alzheimer's.”
She brings her hand to her mouth; on anybody else the gesture might show gossipy surprise, but on her it seems only to press back any words that haven't had time to be considered.
Eventually she takes her hand away. “I saw something in your eyes, before. You aren't yourself. I knew something wasn't right. I thought you just seemed lost, because of Helen.”
“I am lost.”
The relief, to have told her, is so immense that he is heavy and warm with it.
“How long have you had it?”
“Two years,” he says, though he is not at all sure of this. It isn't a lie; it is his best shot at the truth.
“So what does it mean? Can you manage?”
“Yes, for now. I have — that other lady. She helps out.”
“Eleanor?”
“Is that definitely her name? It doesn't seem right somehow—”
Alice takes a careful sip from her drink and puts the cup down.
“I haven't told Henry,” he says. “Just you.”
“Why not Henry?”
“Because I have to look after him.”
She crawls the two or three feet to him and puts her hand on his cheek.
“Then I'll look after you. Don't worry, I'm here. You see? I'll make sure you're all right.”
Her look is all Helen's; capable sympathy. Somebody who knows how it works. He clasps her hand and swallows a grief that has welled in his throat.
“It's my brain, Alice, I feel like all my wires are being unplugged one by one. No, not even in an order, just unplucked. I need to keep it all together. I have to stash all the documents in one place quick before they blow away, do you understand? You could help.”
“I'll take time off work, come for a fortnight or so and we'll go through everything you need, I'll read up on it and we'll go through everything.”
“When will you come?”
“Let me organise it—” She takes her hand from his cheek and sits back on her heels. The poet is wandering towards them in his own world, concentrating, his hands translating some train of thought; he seems to be calculating something. Alice looks across at him and then back, then presses her palms on her thighs.
“Jake, is it bad timing to say this now? Me and Seth are going to have a baby.”
For the moment he is shocked. A flock of birds lifts from nowhere and crowd the sky as if they, too, are shocked. They stain the air with prime colour and beat their wings. He sees, behind the birds, the poet receding again, scanning the brickwork of the derelict building. Alice? His child? Having a child? How extraordinary and miraculous that this could happen. He finds a stone in his palm, wonders where it came from, and pushes its reassuring shape into his coat pocket.
“Everything will be all right,” she nods. “I'm going to look after you.”
“You are really having a child?”
“Yes, Jake, really.”
“Buddy Holly,” he grins, gripping her knee. He is — yes, he recognises this feeling — he is exulted.
“Eureka,” Alice breathes. She tips her head back in gentle laughter and draws her hands into a prayer.
Waking confused, he turns to the woman, to Eleanor. Quite dislodged, she seems lying there — plucked from old time and put into new. She doesn't belong; he doesn't belong. Vertigo, he feels like he has vertigo. Is he still at the bus station? Has Alice's bus not come yet?
No, he is somewhere familiar. The room is half lit through the single curtain drawn across the French windows and he hears birdsong. He sits up and frowns into the pixellated light, gripped now by elation, and now by a morbid disappointment that quickly becomes anger. By the bed is his book he has so struggled to read these last weeks. He fails to remember what it is about, but picking it up it falls open at pages on the restoration of an Edwardian school, and a photograph of a small — what is the word. People with signs refusing to allow the bulldozers in.
Was all of it a dream? Is the dog real? Did he feed her the lamb, and has he ever fed her lamb, and has he ever even fed her at all? I bet I have killed her, he thinks. In the dream he was fighting for a building and it felt so good to have a cause, a corner. Where is his corner? He searches out the shapes and objects of the bedroom and finds them momentarily unfamiliar. Where is Alice? Where is his corner? Which is his war, which side is he on?
As he lifts himself from the bed he realises that the illusions of his sleep have spread to every edge. There was no such time on the grass with Alice, with the poet. He may have been to the bus station or he may not have, it may have been today or five years ago, because time is not considerate enough anymore to make itself clear.
There is no poet. There is no grandchild coming. No Alice. There is only now. Now! Like a punch in the face. And now again. Now is so endlessly small and inadequate. Now there is the urgency to get up, get out, get away from Eleanor, shoo away the heartbreak of the dream with a coffee, some water— he is so thirsty — maybe a mint julep. Drown it. He is breathless with trapped tears. He has never dreamt so vividly. He wishes never to do so again.
STORY OF THE CUTOUT SOLDIERS
In the next room Helen was saying goodbye to the members of her Bible group, who slipped out through the French doors of the study and appeared in the garden with their King James's tucked under their arms. Then he heard his wife call out, “D, you've forgotten your notebook,” and some chuckles and the clean, succinct contact of young lips on young cheek.
D, she called the man, and yet to call somebody by their initial seemed too familiar for a Bible group. Then he considered that the only other person Helen might have called by their initial was God himself. D was honoured indeed. What was he? Devil, Dream? Was he drastic and disastrous? He tried idly, over his shoulder, to get a view of him through the window but the man had gone.
When Helen came into the living room this is how he was, his neck craned as he fluttered his hands over the piano keys. Henry sitting stoically in the crook of his arm.
“What's that you're playing? Is it ‘Three Blind Mice' or something?”
“It was meant to be Debussy.”
Helen laughed and then put her hand to her mouth.
“It's difficult one-handed,” he said.
“I know. All my life is one-handed.”