He was in no hurry to call in the model-makers. He was now of a mind to have a number of attic-rooms filled each with a racecourse but he supposed that this would disturb the quietness of his suite for many weeks or even for months. For the time being, he was content to experience the subtle differences between room and room: in one room a red-gold hair still lay in the crack between two floorboards from the last days before the last girl-boarder there had gone home to her parents’ property far inland; in another room the hair, if he could have lighted on it, would have been black; the window of yet another room was the only window in all the building from which a person looking out might have seen on a day of sunshine the occasional distant flash of light from the windscreen of a motor-car and might have understood how far away was the nearest main road. (Seemingly, the chief character had shifted the building by the power of his imagination or by a supreme effort of his will; the reader will recall that the original of the building of several storeys was in one or another street of a small town.) Some rooms were distinguished one from another only by the mood that came over the chief character after he had stepped inside and had closed the door behind him. Perhaps the glimpse of the distant countryside that came to him through the sides of his eyes put him in mind of Tasmania or New Zealand, although he had never been to either of those places. Perhaps he felt weak and foolish to be an adult and yet to be devising elaborate games with painted toys. Perhaps, on the other hand, he felt that his life was all of a piece: the imagery that had sustained him as a child could yield still more meaning in his later life. This last-mentioned feeling came to him sometimes accompanied by an image of an old man staring at the shore of a lake or a swamp where a gentle wave was breaking against a clump of rushes. The original of the image was a photograph of the psychiatrist C. G. Jung that had once appeared on the cover of the news-magazine Time. The chief character had read the long article that accompanied the photograph. He had not been able to understand the theories of the famous psychiatrist but he, the chief character, never afterwards forgot his having read that the psychiatrist as an old man had set out to play again his favourite childhood games in the hope of learning about himself something of much value.
The chief character was most likely to bring to mind the building of several storeys during the many weekday evenings when he was alone in his rented room and was trying to write poetry or prose fiction. Instead of writing what he had intended to write, he would draw a plan of the upper floor of his wing of the building and would try to decide which of the rooms there would be the room where he would sit at his desk deciding such matters as the shape of each of the model racecourses, the sort of landscape that ought to be painted as a mural behind each racecourse, and whether or not each dormer window ought to be of stained glass and, if so, what should be the colours and the design of the glass.
I looked back just now at the previous few pages of this work of fiction and found that I have begun to write about the chief character as though he were the chief character of this present work. I have even begun to write as though I were still writing the work that I left off writing more than fifteen years ago on the bustling afternoon mentioned earlier. I have fallen into somewhat the same confusion that the chief character himself fell into when he sat down to write one or another piece of writing but began instead to write about a building that had already been abandoned by the persons who had first imagined it.
I ought to report one last detail from the chief character’s speculating about the upper rooms in the building of several storeys. As a small child, he had heard from the radio on Saturday afternoons many names of racehorses before he had seen even a photograph of a racecourse and long before he had seen any sort of representation of a set of racing colours. While he listened to the radio he knew, of course, that a number of horses far away were contesting a race, but there appeared in his mind a sequence of images derived only from the sounds of the names. He was listening to broadcasts of horse-races when he was still barely able to read simple words, so that names such as Hiatus, Latani, Icene, and Aggressor had for him no meaning. He learned in due course what most such words denoted, but he never forgot how the words had affected him. The name Hiatus, for example, brought to his mind an image of a grey-black bird struggling against winds high in the sky. The name Latani caused him to see a mole like a small black bead on the chin of an olive-skinned young woman. The name Icene gave rise in his mind both to a sight and to a sound: the sight of a long gown of silvery material and the sound of the gown’s trailing across a floor of white marble. When he heard the name Aggressor, he saw the grey-brown side of a steep railway-cutting wet with rain. Later, as a young man who went often to the races, he maintained his interest in the names of horses and took pleasure in the success of horses with names that sounded well or connoted rich imagery. Later again, he could never see in his mind an expanse of green cloth on a floor beneath a dormer window without hearing in his mind one or more name suitable for a racehorse. His hearing the names thus would often persuade him against having the model-makers build their white fences and set in motion their gliding horses and doll-jockeys. The sound in his mind of one or another name would often seem to denote not a mere painted toy and not even an actual straining, staring racehorse but a knot of what he might have called compressed mental imagery or, using the word in a sense particularly his own, meaning. And when he sensed the presence in his mind of this sort of meaning he wanted not to watch model horses gliding across green cloth but to go in what seemed the opposite direction: to search, if possible, behind the scenery in his mind for the further scenery that must have lain there: for the further racecourses and the horses that raced there with names that he had heard already in his mind. But for this sort of searching he would need paper, pens, the means for writing. In his thoughts, he went back to his desk among the bookshelves. The attic rooms, for the time being, were empty. If, for the time being, a young man or a high-class call-girl were to visit him, he might feel again the embarrassment that he sometimes felt when he had to confess that he spent most of his free time sitting at a desk and writing about the lives of invisible personages in invisible places, but he would be spared the task of explaining why he had lately turned to writing about contests between invisible horses and jockeys on invisible racecourses.
If the chief character had had his favourites among the invisible racehorses, one such would have been named King-in-the-Lake. The name would have brought to mind an image of a man lying on the bed of a lake of clear water. The man might have been dead or merely asleep.
Ten years before the image-man in the image-lake had first appeared to the chief character, he had read often the poem “The Forsaken Merman,” by Matthew Arnold. Afterwards, whenever he recalled his having read the poem, he recalled the seeming sound of bells travelling downwards through water and the seeming sight of a certain building in the neighbourhood of the lake. The building was of white weatherboards with a tower where orange-gold bells swung. While he seemed to hear under water the sound of the seeming bells, the chief character saw an image of the view that might have appeared to a man lying on the bed of a lake of clear water. At the centre of the view was a zone of pale-blue sky. On either side of this zone was a narrow band of dark green. Each band was a part of the bank of the lake, where grass and clumps of rushes grew. If ever the chief character had wanted to design a set of invisible racing colours for the horse named King-in-the-Lake, then the colours pale blue and dark green would surely have occurred to him.