“It’s quiet,” Uncle Ernie said absently. He was remembering and answered her questions from long habit. His eyes turned to the forgotten book once more, and he said several times, “Gardens are bad: they are yellow and full of dust.”
Something in the way he said it made her angry. She kicked the house and the boom it made thundered hollowly round the solid rock walls of the room. She began to say and do things she knew would make him angry. “Why did you send the birds away?” She stopped and, pressing her arms tightly to her back, she pushed her neck stiffly forward and tried to imitate a sparrow. “When I was small I saw little birds that went like this. And wet things that used to crawl up tree trunks. Then when it was time for bed this is what the big black ones used to shout high in the sky at night.” She made loud shrilling noises and flapped her arms awkwardly.
She calmed down and her voice lost its shrillness. “The man who gave me the box that you took from me couldn’t tell why the sky is always red. Jimmy Esslin made up a song about that,” she added and sang:
“Gardens are poison,” said Uncle Ernie. “They’re bad for the hair, worse for the bone and a danger to little children.” He wasn’t listening.
“Can you tell me the name of the dancing flower again? It had real silk on its wings. My daddy showed me how to hold it so carefully in my hand, just like that!” She held out her hand and showed him how. “It moved if you held it properly and when you opened your hand it danced all around you and then went home.”
“Yellow and dust, bad,” said Uncle Ernie staring sightlessly at the pages in front of him. “Bad it is ... so bad.”
“You told me a lie!” she remembered suddenly.
Uncle Ernie looked up at her.
“That place a long way down the tunnel. The place where you said Mama and Daddy are buried,” she pointed, “they are not there at all. The man from the silver cup told me that you lied. They were in the garden when the big light came the night they vanished. . . . Oh, it was very bright. I saw it through my bedclothes. And they were in the garden when it came and I heard them make a noise just before the windsong came pushing all the houses down. The garden was gone after, and I didn’t see them again. The man said that they burned up with the birds and trees all yellow like the grass. The man said that they were still in the garden only I couldn’t see them.”
“There is no man in the garden. Nobody lives in my garden, gardens are bad.” Uncle Ernie spoke as if he were trying to convince himself.
“You told me a lie,” she said relentlessly. “You told me a big lie.”
Uncle Ernie came to life and snapped shut his book. “To bed with you. The Doctor will be calling early for you in the morning.”
“The Doctor wants to do something to me. I don’t want to go.”
He got cross with her. “Remember what happened to the little girl you played with last year. She went into the garden and stayed in the air. Remember! She didn’t go to the Doctor. Remember what happened to her afterward.”
“I don’t want to go. I want to go home. Jimmy Esslin makes fun of me because of the marks on my face.”
Uncle Ernie began to pack up her toys. “You won’t see Jimmy Esslin. You won’t see him again. He wouldn’t stay out of the air.”
She began to plead with him for the box he had taken from her. “Will you tell me what is in it if I give it to you?” he asked her.
“Nothing!” she answered, her voice too high.
“And what were you doing with it the last time you had it?” Uncle Ernie had wanted to ask her this before.
“Just playing!” she said. “Can I have it with me in bed, now? It’s mine,” she warned him. “The man said it was mine. He said everything I wanted was in it.”
Uncle Ernie considered for a moment.
“Will you go with Dr. Esslin in the morning?”
“Only if you give me back the box.”
He gave her the box. “I’ll be quiet,” she said. “You won’t hear a thing.” She held it tightly.
It was small, black and rectangular and had a concealed lid. She shook it first and then opened it too quickly for him to see how. She showed him the inside. “Look, Uncle Ernie, there’s nothing in it, isn’t it nice?”
He lifted up the doll’s house and took her to the bedroom. She undressed and got into bed still clutching the box. She kissed him and whispered, “Thank you, Uncle Ernie, thank you.”
After he left she got out of bed and started to play again. She crept silently to the kitchen and got some hot water. She went back to her room and unpacked her tea service. Sitting on the floor she made a pot of tea, handling the water and tea grains with elaborate care. She began to chant softly:
Almost happily she repeated this several times. Then her voice became a whisper and she started to coax: “Come out now, come out, Uncle Ernie, come out for your tea.” She was speaking to the box, which was on the floor beside her. Nothing happened, and she raised her voice just the tiniest fraction. “Uncle Ernie, come out for your tea this instant!”
Uncle Ernie shuffled out and she helped him drink the tea. After he had finished she fussed over him for a while and then sent him back.
Then she called the man—the man who had given her the box.
They spoke for a long time and played games with the box. She cried when it was time for him to leave, and wanted to go with him.
He stayed and told her about skies that were blue and suns that were white when you looked at them. He told her about rain that didn’t burn and fruit that grew and was good for the bone. He said that children looked beautiful with hair and she remembered. She was asleep when he left. She had a busy day tomorrow.
Just now, there is no “Ladbroke Grove” here. Some such center somehow always accompanies a “literary quantum jump”—that unpredictable phenomenon that draws in new writers and new readers at the same time, and creates a new level of quality—to meet new critical standards—in its operative area.
We have the writers; we have the markets; we have the readers. But nothing is happening to bring them together. Much of the best work is being done entirely away from the social-professional nexus of “science fiction.” (Witness Donald Barthelme and Harvey Jacobs in this volume . . . Stanley Elkin’s “Perlmutter at the East Pole” in the Saturday Evening Post . . . William Maxwell and Robert Henderson in The New Yorker . . . and how many others that I won’t even hear about till next year or the year after?)
There is no lack of either talent or reader interest. But the combining force is not at work. There are no exchange centers of ideas and criticism. We have had such focal centers in the past; my guess is we will have some new ones soon. Because, for all my description of Ladbroke Grove as the center, it doesn’t work that way. Moorcock’s living-room-office is the place in London now—but the idea sparks are flying between Ladbroke Grove and Oxford; between both of those and the literary magazine Ambit, where George MacBeth and J. G. Ballard publish back-to-back; between MacBeth in London and Redgrove in Leeds, and through them both on BBC-3’s poetry programs, to a whole new audience—while Penguin Books, and, lately, Jonathan Cape have hooked into the process by using good surrealist and nonobjective art for their s-f jackets.
Nor is a central physical meeting place absolutely necessary. John Campbell in 1940 and Anthony Boucher in 1950 each filled the role of host and mixer magnificently. With writers spread out all over the country, they did it primarily by mail—and by providing the most essential meeting place, the pages of a vital, growing magazine.