“Maybe we asked for it,” said Honora, stopping at the corner.
“Naw,” said Brad, “he’s just a constipated old grump who didn’t get his dish of prunes today.”
“We should be more methodical,” Lee cut in, “if we’re serious about it.”
“Doesn’t matter how serious,” said Ella, flushing, “I can’t dream to order. You don’t turn dreams out like cakes hot from the oven; you have to wait until they come to you.”
“Ella’s right,” said Brad, “what does Burns know about it? We’re the ones making and delivering the goods, he’s just the warehouseman with a pencil behind his ear hassling us about his invoices.”
The post-mortem went on, with Honora and Lee becoming divided from the other two in defence of Burns. Then Lee began to mistrust Brad’s motives and Ella to suspect Honora. It also caused some resentment between Lee and Ella, and neither desisted from tapping home the wedge that they set up between themselves. It seemed at times like these that the dreamwork project had become a vain and profitless obsession.
“Why did you side with her?” Ella asked Lee as they made their way home.
“I didn’t side with her; she was right.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“I just think we shouldn’t play at it.”
“Which means what exactly?”
“I think it needs a serious edge. Some of us aren’t making the effort, and that’s what’s holding us back.”
“And you think I play at it?”
“Sometimes; yes.”
At that Ella turned away and walked off. Lee pretended he was not concerned, a self-deception that lasted five minutes. He thought he could punish her by not running after her. So he went home and got into bed alone, lying sleepless in the shadows, suffering agonies about where she was and what she was doing and whether she was with someone else. Then, after a few days, when he thought she had been punished enough, he went to her, to be readmitted to the scented cave, where he sulked for a few hours until their differences were forgotten. At least for the time being.
NINE
Burns, locking up after his students have gone, anticipates Ella’s question seconds before she delivers it to the others as they dawdle on the street corner only yards away. He shakes his head. Exposing the students to your tantrums won’t help anything—neither you nor them nor the project. It just makes you look as though senility is right behind you, pulling faces and drooling toothless for their entertainment. Anyway, what is it, exactly, that’s eating you?
He returns to his study—a desk at the window and three walls of books on shelves so high he has to keep a footstool to reach the top. Not that he has reason to return to the tough-bound uppermost volumes, or those on the lower shelves for that matter, but the stool gets used by the lady who cleans and keeps house for him three days a week, since he happens to think that dust gathering on the ridge of untouched and out-of-print books symbolizes in too sharp a sense the slouch of old age into weak-mindedness and dotage. So he pays someone to come in and keep his books free of dust and his windows clean, so that the outer condition might at least reflect the preferred impression of the inner. So what’s all this raving at the students, he asks himself.
It is early, still dusk, the students having been chased away by an infantile temperament, by his inexcusable tantrums, who was it this time, yes, Ella, who he hopes will forgive him quickly but who he knows is more sensitive than she pretends. He sits in his chair and takes his notes out of the top drawer, determined to log his observations even if the students are proving restive, but leave them, give ’em a break, they’re young and full of it whatever it is, while he is feeling increasingly tired as he turns the pages and the pencil in his hands begins to scuttle across the blank folio leaves at high speed depositing a fine trace of graphite in erratic bursts of what must be English but looks something like a fusion of bastard Arabic and auto-didactic shorthand, and which for an account of an evening’s research in which nothing is supposed to have happened and nothing is purported to have been done still manages to break across the page like the waves of the sea under a bracing wind.
He scribbles like one in the grip of a spirit, but it’s nothing like that, being only too conscious of anything he might commit to paper and anyway too self-possessed to admit the intrusion of any second authority, from the spirit world or otherwise, to come between him and his outpourings. Tired, tired indeed, but hands still scuttling across the page at speed laying down a pattern of new ideas, complete and half-complete thoughts, perceptions, reminders, references and observations, all of this operating independently and at a level beneath or above his reproach of his own behaviour, where he looks even now for a reason for his irritation and finds, depressingly, none other than that general malaise for which physicians have never found a satisfactory term other than old age.
Burns pauses and gazes out of his open window, blinking at a darkening horizon, dusk leaking from an unseen puncture in the silk and sable canvas, falling with defiant slowness but relentlessly enough, like the minute hand on the clock. He switches on an Angle-poise lamp which throws a ring of yellow light around his notes. He breathes in the sweet air of the summer evening and his hand automatically begins to scuttle back and forth across the white expanse of the page.
Not as if, he reflects, he doesn’t prefer the company of the young students to that of the dry or childish presence of his academic colleagues. Because it is true he does prefer the buzz of youth and always has, three cheers for that, and what’s more always dreaded turning into the crabbed old stick he felt himself becoming. And certainly these four were no worse than any others, and on the contrary he felt a special warmth for all of them, believing,—and perhaps this was the secret of what it was that was actually driving him harder and causing him to want to push them faster—believing, in a way that could never be more than intuitive, that there really might be something happening with these four, something in the chemistry that existed between them, something which he had sensed in the earlier seminars and the close comparisons in the nature of their results, just a spark, nothing rational, not yet anyway, but a spark and a shadow of apprehension—let’s not call it fear—which had surprised him one day on recognizing the undercurrents in their respective commitments to this dreaming business.
And there was another problem, since the project had originally been double-bottomed, a smuggler’s suitcase, the lucid dreaming project the ostensible reason for the seminars (and always a legitimate area for study, the dreaming project, since it was yielding up fascinating data) while Burns’s other interest was a certain interactive study in the evolution and dynamics of the group. This covert study had of course never been made known to the seminar dreamers in the interests of protecting behaviour from the influence of observation, the spy hole staying open as the group reduced to four participants for the same parallel purposes; but now the dreamwork study had begun to eclipse the other. This had also taken Burns by surprise, shocking him in that his impatience with another’s small disinclination towards scientific method had caused him to cancel a whole evening’s work on dream research.
But he knew that the current halt in progress, the vacuum in dreaming, was only a temporary arrest, a block that would be overcome by a little effort, put there by some external factor like the change in dynamics from the original large group to the group of four, or something happening between the four themselves. Whatever the block was, it would dissolve, and dreaming, strong dreaming, would resume. He had, he assured himself once again, a feeling about this group.