7

In the watches of the night Albert and Sheila returned to him in strange bemonstered versions, Sir Reginald and Lady Margaret, laughing madly, rode deeper and deeper into the wildwood. His idea for the novel soon lost its élan, sooner even than usual, slipping down into the dark and fetid pit where the botched, unfinished shapes of his imagination stirred and crawled and coupled with the blurred shapes of memory to breed a new race of monsters.

In light, uneasy sleep he saw black people dancing on the deck of a ship to a slow and melancholy African rhythm of drums and tambourines, their forms distorted and rippled as if by waves of heat. They stooped, uncurled themselves, reached up with their arms. The dream was soundless but he saw the fingers on the drums, sensed from the wavering movements of the dancers the insistent pulse of the music. They were dressed in what he knew to be calico, but the colours were red and blue. They made shifting patterns against the pale glow of the sky.

The lines of dancers parted ceremoniously to show Sheila in a cream-coloured suit, black stockings, high-heeled shoes and a perm exactly like Jennifer Colomb’s. She was reclining on a chaise-longue in the pose of Madame Récamier. Albert was there too in the guise of a yokel, in huge poison-green wellingtons and a cap from under which wisps of hair escaped in a sweaty, bucolic fashion. He saw now that they were in a classical portico which was flooded with water – Sheila’s chaise-longue was floating. He waded towards Albert and they engaged in a protracted dumb show of mutual courtesies as to who was going to undress Sheila. In the end Benson found himself doing it. The jacket of Sheila’s suit now resembled the tunic of a guardsman buttoned right up to the neck but he did not bother to undo it. With an exciting singleness of purpose he directed all his efforts towards her lower half. He lifted up her skirt, revealing the long legs in their black silk stockings. Already, however, as he tugged at the sumptuous knickers – scarlet, trimmed with black lace – he had a sense of something terribly wrong. There is always a price-tag, ancestral voices said, and then they were in a dark, cluttered place and he saw that Sheila did not have a vagina at all but a cock and balls of impressive proportions and when he looked at her face it was big-chinned Carter in a wild, yellow wig, looking triumphant and sly as he did when he felt he had scored a point.

The shock of this discovery, like a change in pressure, sent Benson rising helplessly towards the surface of consciousness through shoals of flickering images. Waking was accompanied by acute anxiety. That triumphant smile of the hermaphrodite, was it telling him something? His prose bedevils my days, by night he poisons my dreams. And he owes me for three sessions.

It was pitch dark in his room. He saw from the luminous dial of his alarm clock that it was twenty past three. He was wide awake now and knew from experience he was unlikely to sleep again. He switched on the bedside lamp, got out of bed and padded through to the living room. Gomer Williams’s book on the Liverpool privateers was in its place on the shelf. The passage about dancing was near the beginning. How long since he had read it? A month at least – the dream had been slow to ferment. Benson put on his glasses and after a minute or two found the passage.

When feeding time was over, the slaves were compelled to jump in their chains, to their own music and that of the cat-o’-nine-tails and this, by those in the trade, was euphemistically called ‘dancing’. Those with swollen or diseased limbs were not exempted from taking part in this joyous pastime tho’ the shackles often pulled the skin off their legs. The songs they sang on these occasions were songs of sorrow and sadness – simple ditties of their own wretched estate and of the dear land and home and friends they were never more to see. During the night they were often heard to make a howling, melancholy noise, caused by their dreaming of their former happiness and liberty, only to find themselves on waking, in the loathsome hold of a slave ship.

No mention of finger drums or tambourines or calico; and nothing in his dream about shackles. How had he got from there to Albert and Sheila? Water must be the connection, he thought, water and cargoes: from ocean to flooded portico, from sailing ship to chaise-longue …

He was beginning to feel cold. His scrapbooks were before him, stacked at the side of the bookcase. He picked one out at random and returned to bed with it. By the light of his bedside lamp he read: A man confessed to strangling his wife and cutting her up with an axe more than twenty years ago after the discovery of a human skull in May, a jury was told yesterday. But the skull dated from 410 A.D. A picture of the bald, disconsolate strangler, unlucky enough to have a Roman woman’s skull in his garden as well as his wife’s. A picture of President Carter with a blind smile on his face, surrounded by bulky, unsmiling security men, like an ecstatic lunatic under strong guard. His vast fortune all but spent, Edward James, the eccentric exile, is putting his collection of surrealist and other art up for auction so that he can continue building his ‘Garden of Eden’, a mouldering array of fantasy architecture in the Central Mexican jungle. Picture of white-bearded James with a parrot on his shoulder. Demoniac forces of violence and evil have been let loose in Britain since the war, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, warned last night. The head of England’s legal system dismissed the idea that unemployment or poverty have caused the new wave of violence, robbery and rape.

Loose English that, Benson thought bemusedly. From the head of England’s legal system. The senile sage was pictured in legal drag – gown and wig – disagreeably evoking the recent dream. Sri Lankan army personnel are extracting the eyes of Tamils killed in clashes with troops and sending them to eye banks for export, a Tamil group said yesterday. No picture of eyeless Tamils. Picture of Deborah Lester-George, a model, at an auction of theatrical ephemera in Shaftesbury with a rubber skeleton that fetched thirty-five pounds. Deborah and the skeleton smiling at each other. She has a hand over his crotch.

What are the roots that cling? Benson asked himself, turning over the pages. Or is it clutch? His depression grew as daylight began to seep into his room. COPYCAT DEATH OF A SOAP OPERA FAN. FIREMEN SNARE YOUNG CROCODILE IN PARIS SEWERS. MAN SHARES BED WITH GIRL’S CORPSE.

What could have led him to select these things, cut them out, paste them in, compile these dossiers of absurdity and misery and crime? Somewhere in this sickening welter there must be a thread, a pattern of meaning. He strove to retrace his intentions, the purposes of the man who had wielded the scissors. But it was hopeless. Faces and print in the lamp light, the girl with acid-scarred face, Mrs Thatcher in beaky profile, blindly smiling Carter, corpses and rubble in Beirut – the cumulative effect was silence. Blight of silence lay over faces and words, over all the pages of his industry. And somewhere behind the silence something worse waited …

Unable to bear it any longer, Benson scrambled out of bed and went to make himself some coffee. Then, though it was still early, he decided to do his exercises. These he had taken up since his block, with the idea of fending off death through enhanced bodily vigour until he could somehow get going again. He always observed a strict, obsessive sequence, increasing in violence, feeling his heart labour, watching his effortful face and pale, flailing limbs in the wardrobe mirror.

At ten past nine, with a sense of defences crumbling, he phoned the University History Department and asked to speak to Alma Corrigan. She arrived just as the phone was ringing and sounded breathless. Yes, she remembered who he was. No, she couldn’t see him that evening, not even for an hour. Nor tomorrow either. She had too much to do. She was leaving on Wednesday for Oxford for a three-day conference. And when she came back? Well, she would be busy, there were essays to mark, a Ph.D thesis to look at …

Benson pressed a hand against his agitated heart. You may be the Muse, he wanted to say. You may be my salvation. How is it you have time for Ph.D students and yet none for me? “Just one question,” he said. “Are you trying to put me off? If so, just tell me and I won’t bother you again.”

There was an appreciable pause, during which he had to control his breathing. Then he heard the slightly metallic voice say, “No, not exactly.”

“Well, then. Since I have made my application in due and proper form I think I should be granted an interview.”

“Yes,” she said. “All right. So long as you don’t imagine you’re on any kind of short list.”

They arranged to meet the following Tuesday, after her return from Oxford, for a lunch-time drink at the Cambridge Arms. But before that meeting could take place Benson had come upon Killer Thompson and heard him singing in the street.