But it was not until the next month that he could honestly say that he started to think about any of these things.
On 4 March David dreamed. This was not in itself unusual. He dreamed as much as the next man, the usual intermittent cocktail of machine-like anxiety or amusing but forgettable trivia. On the fourth of March he dreamed of something different. He didn’t know what it was; could not, when he awoke, remember. But he was distracted as he sat with his first cup of the day, feeling as if some recollection was hidden just behind a fold in his brain. He stood, stared out of the window, and did not move even after Amanda had come down after her shower.
She rummaged in the cupboard, looking for a new box of her current brand of herbal tea. “What are you thinking about?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Why have we got so many olives?”
“Hmm?” He turned to look at her. The memory felt neither closer nor further away. She held up a jar of green olives.
“There’s three of these in there.”
“You didn’t buy them?”
“No.” She held the jar so he could see the labeclass="underline" Waitrose own-brand. He always did the Waitrose shop, and did it alone. Supermarkets made Amanda irritable.
“Then I must have bought them.”
“You don’t like olives.”
“I know.”
Ten minutes later she was gone, off to work. David was still in the kitchen, sitting now with a second cup of tea, no closer to remembering his dream. All he could recall was an atmosphere of affectionate melancholy. It reminded him of another dream from five or six years before. This had been of his college, of returning there alone and walking the halls and corridors which had shaped three years of his life, back when the future seemed deliciously malleable. In the dream he’d met none of his friends from that period, and had notably not encountered the girl with whom he’d spent most of that time. The dream hadn’t been about them, but about him. It was about absence. About some distance he had travelled, or perhaps had failed to come, since those days: a period now backlit by its passing, at the time merely the day-today. The dream he could not now remember had something of this about it too, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t about college. It wasn’t about anything he could recall.
It was enough to nudge him into awareness, however, and at the end of the day he sat in the living room, after Amanda had gone upstairs, and thought back over the previous couple of months. He considered the missing (4), the drinks without a name, remembered also standing one afternoon in Soho Square and gazing at the shapes of the buildings that surrounded it, as if they should mean something more to him than they did. At the time each of these non-incidences, these failures to mean, had seemed distinct from each other, distinct from anything at all. Now they did not. Once gathered together, they referred to a whole. There was something on his mind, that was clear. He just didn’t know what it was.
It was then that he tried connecting them with the start of the year, with the feeling of something beginning. Though in general a level-headed man, David was sometimes surprised to find himself prey to rather New Age notions. Perhaps this year, this 2004, was trying to tell him something. Maybe some celestial timepiece, some combination of shadow and planetary sphere, had reached its predetermined mark. Perhaps 2004 was the year of…
He couldn’t make the thought go anywhere, and soon zoned out into watching the television screen. It showed a crazy-haired old gent tramping around an undistinguished patch of countryside. He couldn’t remember selecting the channel, and with the sound off it really wasn’t very interesting. Was it worth turning the sound up? Probably not. It increasingly seemed to him that television was being created for someone else. He was welcome to watch it, of course, but it was not he whom the creators had in mind.
As David left the room he passed one of the bookcases, and paused a moment when a book caught his eye. He took it down, opened it. It was a first edition of Conjuring and Magic by Robert Houdin, published in 1878, bought some months before at a stall in Covent Garden. He’d told himself it was merely an investment — at fifty pounds for a vg+ copy, it was certainly a bargain — but actually he’d bought it in the hope that going back to the classics might help. In fact, it had yielded no better results than the small handful of cheap paperbacks he’d desultorily acquired over the last few years, since he’d realized that a little magic was something he’d very much like to be able to do. The problem with magic, he’d discovered, was that there was no trick to it. There was practice, and hard work — and the will to put these things into practice. Even buying the little gewgaws of the trade didn’t help. All but the most banal still required sleight of hand, which had to be acquired the old-fashioned way. If you learned how a trick worked, all you actually gained was confirmation that it required a skill you didn’t have and lacked the time and energy to acquire. Learning how a trick worked was the same as being told you couldn’t do it. You gained nothing, and lost everything.
He flicked through the book for a few moments, admiring the old illustrations of palming techniques, and then put the volume back on the shelf. It wasn’t worth even trying tonight. Maybe tomorrow.
Instead he went into the kitchen and ate half a jar of olives while he waited for the kettle to boil.
David dreamed a few more times in March, but remained unable to take anything from them. All he was left with the next morning was absence and the unnameable smell of open water. An absence, too, was what he felt during most of the last weekend of the month, which they spent down in Cornwall. It was the third time they’d taken a romantic mini-break in Padstow. Both previous occasions had been great successes. They’d walked along the craggy coast, bought a couple of little paintings which now graced the bathroom, enjoyed a superlative dinner in Rick Stein’s restaurant (having taken efficient care to book ahead). Good, clean, adult fun. This time David couldn’t seem to get into it. They did the same things, but it wasn’t the same, and it wasn’t merely the repetition which made the difference. Amanda was in good form, braced by the wind and the sky. To him they seemed merely there. In some way it all reminded him of an experience he’d had a couple of weeks previously, during a meeting at work. A creative powwow, with, as it happened, the clients with the potato-headed boss. There had come a point when David had found himself talking. He had been talking for a little while, he realized, and knew that he could keep going for as long as he wanted. The other people around the table were either his employees or clients gathered to take advantage of his keen design brain, his proven insights into the deep mysteries of corporate identity. Their gazes were all on him. This didn’t frighten him, merely made him wonder if they were in fact listening, or rather staring at him and wondering who he was, and what he was talking about. They were all nodding in the right places, so this seemed unlikely. Presumably it was only David, therefore, who was wondering these things. And wondering too whether it was ever worth speaking, if no one wanted you to stop.
On the second evening in Padstow they paid their tribute to the god of seafood. Amanda seemed happy, perky in a new Karen Millen and smelling faintly of expensively complimentary shampoos and unguents. David knew that it was remarkable that a woman of thirty-seven should look so good in fashion tailored for the young and slim, and was glad. Not delighted — because, to be honest, he had grown accustomed to Amanda looking good — but glad. The food was predictably excellent. David ate it. Amanda ate it. They talked of things in the news and in the papers. They were benignly tolerant of the next table, which featured two well-behaved but voluble children. Neither had anything against children. They didn’t have any because it had been discussed, seven or eight years before, when David was launching the business and Amanda had just switched companies and embarked on the route to her current exalted position in publishing. At the time it would have been a mistake to complicate their lives, or might have been a mistake. It was then still more or less appropriate, too, for Amanda to make that amusing joke about not needing children just yet, because she was married to one. David did little to sustain this idea now bar an occasional hangover and a once-in-a-while good-humoured boisterousness, but having children wasn’t something they discussed at the moment. Maybe later.