My growing invisibility became a danger to me. When I was fourteen I was knocked down by a car, the driver claiming he had not seen me on the pedestrian crossing. I came close to being badly burned one day at home when I was leaning against the mantelpiece over an unlit gas fire and my father came in and lit the fire without realizing I was there. I remember my feelings of disbelief as it happened, being sure that he was not going to do it; I just stood there while the flame popped into life, and my skirt caught fire. My father only realized I was there when I shouted and leaped away, beating at the smoldering cloth.
Because of these incidents, and others less serious, I developed a phobia about objects and people that could hurt me. Even now I hate walking in crowded streets, or crossing roads. Although I learned to drive a few years ago, I dislike driving because I can never throw off the uneasy feeling that my driving it will make the car itself become unnoticeable. I never swim in the sea, because if I got into difficulties I might not be able to make myself seen or heard; I am nervous on the Underground, in case I am jostled on a crowded platform; I haven’t ridden a bicycle since I was twelve; I’ve always steered clear of people carrying hot liquids since the time my mother spilled boiling tea on me.
Being unnoticed so much began to affect my health. Throughout my teens I was debilitated. I suffered one headache after another, fell asleep at inopportune moments, was prone to every infectious disease that went around. The family doctor attributed it all to “growing up,” or congenital susceptibility, but I now know the real cause was my unconscious attempt to stay visible. I wanted to be noticed, to be thought the same as everyone else, to live an ordinary life. The wish manifested itself by forcing me into visibility. Throughout those late school years I must always have been sliding into and out of invisibility, impinging in varying degrees on the people around me.
The only relief from this strain was solitude. During the long school holidays, and sometimes on weekends, I frequently went off by myself into the countryside. The suburbs were spreading out from the city, but even so it was only a short bus journey south, past Wilmslow and Alderley Edge, to a still undeveloped landscape of farmland and woods. Out there, away from the main roads, I could draw a quiet strength from being on my own, from not having to force myself to be noticed.
It was on one of these trips, when I was about sixteen, that I met Mrs. Quayle.
It was she who first saw me, and she who made the approach. I was only aware of a pleasant-looking middleaged woman walking along the lane toward me, a small dog running at her heels. We passed each other, smiled briefly as strangers sometimes do, and went on in our separate directions. I thought no more about her, but then her dog ran past me, and I realized she had turned around and was following behind.
We spoke, and the first words she said to me were, “Dear, do you know that you have glamours?”
Because she was smiling, and because she looked so ordinary, I felt no alarm, but I suppose that had I known what she was I would have been frightened and hurried away. Instead, the oddness of her question interested me and I walked along with her, chattering inanely about the countryside. I somehow never answered the question then, nor did she repeat it. She shared my love of the country, the wild flowers and the peacefulness, and that was enough. We came eventually to her house, a cottage set well back from the lane. She invited me in for a cup of tea.
Inside, the house was pleasant and well furnished, with central heating, a television set, a stereo, telephone, and other modern fittings. She sat down on the sofa to pour the tea, and her dog curled up beside her and went to sleep.
Then the conversation returned to where we had begun, and she askedme again about my “glamours.” Of course I had no idea what she was talking about, and being the age I was I said so. She asked me if I believed in magic, if I ever had strange dreams, if I could sometimes tell what other people were thinking. She had become intent, and this scared me. As soon as she saw me, she said, she had known that I was possessed of glamours, that I had psychic powers. Was I aware of this? Did I know anyone else like me?
I said I wanted to leave, and stood up. Her manner changed at once, and she apologized for frightening me. As I left she told me to call again if I wanted to know more, but outside in the lane I ran and ran, full of fears of her. The following week, though, I returned to her cottage, and over the next two years I made repeated visits to see her.
I now know that what Mrs. Quayle told me was only a part of the story, and that it was influenced by her own special interests. She once described herself as a psychic, but never fully explained. I sometimes thought she might be a witch, but was always too scared to ask. It was she, though, who awakened me to the true nature of my special condition, and who gave me some idea of the extent and limitations of inherent invisibility.
The glamours she had seen around me, she said, were a kind of psychic aura emitted by those in touch with natural powers. She told me that I could instinctively intensify or weaken this “cloud,” and within this projection from the astral plane my glamours could be worked. She told me of Madame Blavatsky, the spiritualist and Theosophist, who recorded many accounts of productions and vanishings through use of the cloud, and who claimed to be able to make herself invisible. Of the Ninja sect in medieval Japan, who made themselves invisible to their enemies by use of deception and distraction. Of Aleister Crowley, who declared invisibility a simple doctrine, one he claimed to have proved by parading around the streets in a scarlet robe and golden crown while no one noticed him. And of the novelist Bulwer Lytton, who believed himself capable of invisibility and tried to surprise his friends by moving among them before revealing himself. She taught me folklore, such as collecting the spores of ferns, possession of which was supposed to impart invisibility.
I only half believed what she told me, even then. I knew I was not psychic, that I was incapable of magic, but Mrs. Quayle would admit of no other possibility. Because I knew no better I accepted that at least some of it was true.
It was Mrs. Quayle who showed me, with a mirror, that I was invisible.
I had always been able to see myself in mirrors because I looked for myself, as everybody does, and in looking I noticed and saw. But one day Mrs. Quayle tricked me, placing a mirror in an unexpected position beyond a door and following me as I walked toward it. Before I realized what it was I saw the reflection of her behind me, and for two or three seconds, while I wondered at what I was seeing, I noticed no reflection of myself. Then I saw, and understood at last: I was not invisible in the sense that I was transparent, or that I could not be seen, but that the cloud somehow obscured me, made me difficult to be noticed. The effect was the same, explaining to me why most people reacted as if I were not there.
Mrs. Quayle could always see me, even when I was invisible to others—even, that time with the mirror, when I was briefly invisible to myself. She was a funny, singleminded woman, plain and ordinary in every way but the one she claimed. She was a widow, living alone, surrounded by prosaic snapshots of her family, by artefacts of the modern consumer society, by souvenirs of Italy and Spain. Her son was in the Merchant Navy, both her daughters were married and lived in another part of the country. She was a practical, down-to-earth woman who helped me a lot, and who filled my head with ideas and gave me a vocabulary for what I am and for what I can do. We became friends in an odd, unequal way, but she died suddenly, of angina, a few months before I moved to live in London.