I approached the basement with some caution, with the momentary fear that my mother had glimpsed a mouse or even a rat. I shook the handle as loudly as I could, and then opened the door. 'Come down here,' I told her. 'This also has been one of the dark places of the earth.'
I don't know why I said this: she managed to laugh, but I suppose I was pleased by the horror that passed over her face. She followed me down the stairs, but when she reached the last of them and stood within the basement itself, she looked around in fear. 'There is something here,' she said. 'It's just as if it were in the corner of my eye, but it's not in my eye. It's here.' Then, roughly pushing past Geoffrey, she retreated back up the stairs.
He turned to look at her in astonishment. 'It's not like your old mum,' he said. I conducted him around the basement, while explaining Daniel's theory that this was once the ground floor of a house which had gradually sunk into the earth. He was particularly intrigued by this, and went over to look at the marks above the sealed door. 'They're not made by a surveyor,' he said. 'They don't mean anything at all.'
I suddenly felt very tired, and turned to leave. Reluctantly he followed me up into the hall, where we found my mother sitting on the stairs. 'What has the lover been telling you?' She tried to sound light-hearted, but quite failed to do so. There was an expression upon her face, at once preoccupied and vindictive, that I had never seen before.
'I was giving him a surveyor's judgement.'
'I wouldn't talk to him about judgement, if I were you.' She was brushing something off her sleeve, with a look of disgust. 'It might frighten the little sprout.' Now she stared down at me, with the same look. 'They say that beetles thrive on dirt. Is that why you've got so many of them? This is a filthy house. Something happened here, didn't it? Something smelling of filth and shit. I can smell your father here.' I was climbing the stairs, in order to help her, but she put her arms out to ward me off. 'You smell of him too,' she said. 'You always did.' Now she got up, and gazed at me with such ferocity that I expected her to hit me. I put my hand up to shield my face, and she laughed. 'Don't worry,' she said. 'Your father is still looking after you, isn't he?' She went down to Geoffrey, who took her arm and led her gently out of the house without saying anything.
I was so shaken that I went up to my room and lay on the bed, looking at nothing in particular. What had suddenly aroused all this anger and madness? I went over to the window; they were standing at the bottom of Cloak Lane. Geoffrey had his arm round her; they were talking quietly together and looking back at the house with something like fear.
I took a bath at once, and scrubbed myself clean with an old-fashioned brush I found there. Then I lay in the water as I would lie upon a bed, but there was so much mist and steam around me that I seemed to be lying in some tube of opaque glass as the water poured over my face and limbs. And, yes, it was a dream, since I put out my arm and touched the glass with my barely formed fingers. I struggled to get up, and a more terrible sensation overwhelmed me: what if it had been that creature she had seen here? What if something in the basement had goaded her to fury? I stepped carefully out of the bath, and wrapped a towel about me as gently as if I had entered some other kind of dream.
*
On the following morning I left for the National Archive Centre in Chancery Lane. I had often worked in that dark building just opposite Carnac Rents, and I had often been comforted by it; its familiar echoing presence, its subdued lighting, its muffled sounds, its scarred wooden desks, seemed to protect me and lead me towards my true self. Most of the old parish registers and ratebooks were now on microfiche, but I still preferred to consult the bound volumes which had been placed in the Blair Room. The staff knew me well enough to let me wander there at will, and a quiet protracted search guided me to three leather-bound volumes which contained the records of the parish of St James, Clerkenwell, in the sixteenth century. I could hardly lift them from the shelves, and when I held them in my arms I savoured the stink of dust and age. It was as if I were lifting down corpses wrapped in their shrouds. And of course this was precisely what they contained — names, signatures, the long-dead set down in lists, lying one upon another just as they might have been buried under the ground. I am accustomed now to the peculiarities of sixteenth-century script, but even so it was hard to decipher some of the words scratched in an ink which had faded to the lightest brown.
A door opened behind me, and I could hear the footsteps of one who was coming closer to me. I did not turn round, but waited. 'Let me tell you an interesting story, Mr Palmer.' I knew the voice of Margaret Lucas very well; she was the archivist in charge of the Blair Room, a thin, almost skeletal woman who dressed in the most vivid colours. She also had a habit of saying the most extraordinary things — largely, I suspect, because she had no confidence in herself. She concealed herself from ordinary attention by always being surprising. 'Have you read Swedenborg, by any chance?'
I turned round, and tried to smile. 'I don't believe I have. No.' All the time my hands were lying across a deed written on parchment; I could feel the texture of the paper beneath my fingers, and it was like earth baking in the heat of this modern city.
'Oh, have you not? I happen to be something of an admirer. Dip into Heaven and Hell, and everything will be explained. But this is the point I'm getting to, Mr Palmer.' She had come round to the side of my desk, and I saw that she was wearing a purple two-piece outfit, with a scarf of bright blue loosely wrapped about her meagre neck. 'Swedenborg tells us that, after death, the human being is taken to the society where his love is.' I did not know what she meant and so great was my eagerness to carry on with my work that, without thinking, I had looked down again at the names in the old parish records. She did not seem to notice. 'He says that each of us goes to a house and to a family — not the same ones we possessed on earth, not them at all, but to the house and the family that correspond to our ruling passions. Whatever we wished for on earth we shall find after death.'
She was silent for a moment, and I was not sure how to reply. 'That's quite a coincidence,' I said. 'I'm looking for a house and family too.'
She examined the volume for a moment. 'In that case, Mr Palmer, I suggest you try the churchwarden's accounts first. You'll find them at the back.' The pages were heavy enough and as I turned them, year by year, it was as if I were uncovering the dead; in the sudden revelation of each page, I brought their names blinking into the light. 'There is a curious story attached to this, you see.' Margaret Lucas was still standing over me. 'There was a young man who used to come to the Blair Room a great deal. Did you ever see him? Short, and rather fat. Very shabbily dressed. His name was Dan Berry.' I shook my head. 'He used to do what you're doing now. Going through the registers and accounts. At first I thought he was a researcher, but it turned out to be something more private. He had a small notebook, and I could see that he had written down certain names. He told me that they were his ancestors. But not in the sense that you and I would mean it.' I stopped turning the pages, and looked up at her. 'He told me that the names came to him in dreams.'
'That is a mistake,' I said, 'a researcher would never make.'
'I'm not someone who believes in madness, Mr Palmer. I believe people can lose their normal identity for a while, but that is all. They simply regress. Now our friend Dan Berry was convinced that they were the names of his true family.'
I still had my hand upon the ancient register, with the corner of a page curled up between my fingers. 'How did he know?'