Hotel de Dream (19 page)

“Well well,” Johnny said when this was over. “She's doing her best, I'll say that.”

“It was wonderful,” Melinda agreed. “Better than when she has the Lawrence influence. Don't you think?”

“Oh I can't stand that,” Johnny agreed. He rose briskly from the bed, refreshed from the experience, and held out a hand to Melinda to pull her up.

“I think we better go back to London and find our Cecilia,” he said. “Looks to me as if there must be some arrangement we can come to with her. I mean, if we don't kill her after all, but settle with her in some way …”

“But what about that mad old man?” Melinda said. “He's determined to do her in, he's probably creeping into her bedroom now. She won't believe it, of course.”

“No, she thinks he's a stock comic butler,” Johnny agreed. “It just wouldn't be done for a lady like herself to be knocked off by old Cridge. But we should hurry because he might well bring it off this time. And if she died, then where would we be?”

“Where? I thought we were going to be free,” Melinda cried. “That was the whole point Johnny, surely.”

“Yes. But I have doubts.” Johnny gave a shamefaced smile. “Suppose we weren't free after all. We'd be stuck forever just before the end of the book. In the traffic jam on the motorway … for eternity. Think of that.”

“Yes.” Melinda considered. “And if we were free it might not be the kind of life we wanted. If we made her change the end …”

“So we didn't have to marry,” Johnny said, excited now. “If it was all left with a question mark, you know. Like the other two volumes.”

“And we could choose whether we were going to be politically
involved, or obsessed by each other … or even keen gardeners perhaps …”

“Exactly. Let's go. And let's hope there isn't the traffic there was coming down,” Johnny added grimly as Melinda took his hand and they ran down the stairs. “That's my idea of hell.”

“We haven't annoyed Cecilia enough to deserve that for eternity,” Melinda said in a pious tone. The characters climbed into the Ford Anglia, and by carefully choosing small traffic-free roads, made London and the Westringham Hotel in record time.

That night, as the residents and their victims in the Westringham dreamed—and sleep came to them in a strange fashion, as we shall see—fragments of their dreams escaped into the outside world, where they were ignored or spoken of with contempt and laughter or seen, by the superstitious, and there was an increasing number of these, as portents, omens of evil times to come. The tides, disturbed by the Amazons, did not rise up and engulf the island. But the scientists and the observant members of the population sought in vain for an explanation for the highest flood tide in recorded history, and for the appearance of a moon that was running, so to speak, several days behind schedule; again, because of their inability to explain this, the ranks of the superstitious grew and a great uneasiness made itself felt, though in what ways, apart from the hoarding of food and in coastal towns the boarding up of ground-floor windows, it would be difficult to define. People went about with distracted expressions and with their heads poked forward, looking up suddenly from time to time as if they expected to see something unpleasant but inevitable in the sky. As if to mirror the breaking apart of Mr Poynter's City, friends turned against each other, relationships broke, parents eyed their children with suspicion. The rate of burglary dropped, for it was within their own homes that people stole, and smashed crockery, and expressed their hatred for the world. And, reflecting Mr Poynter's terrible decree that the future
tense should be banned, there was a sense of an absolute knowledge of a limited and predictable future while the past, given the status the future had once had, became infinitely rich, and imagined in a thousand ways, and mysterious. Personal pasts were rewritten, and new crimes discovered, and their perpetrators punished for them. The history of the world was seen at sharply contrasting angles and old battles were relived. Almost anything was taken as a portent, but as the future was so definitely known the portents showed only a variety of past evils. It seemed there was no hope left anywhere: future engagements were planned and then abandoned in the pursuit of a re-interpretation of the past. And the dream of the past was being smashed to pieces on all sides and splintered into nightmare.

If the rate of ordinary crime dropped, admissions to mental homes, already overcrowded with the sad and drugged witnesses of the power of conflicting dreams, went up a hundredfold in these days. On the Wednesday night, when Mr Poynter closed his eyes and Miss Scranton fell asleep on her feet like a statue and Miss Briggs drifted through the gateway of the City in search of her monarch—and Tapp and Mr Rathbone and Mrs Routledge and Cridge and Johnny and Melinda were pulled in after them to their inescapable doom—ambulance men went on strike and asylums closed their doors in the face of the mass of the hallucinated and the distressed and the mad. Faces were seen dangling from streetlamps—women's faces, with matted hair and bloated cheeks. Across the night sky, dancing like wisps across the great blackboard, hieroglyphs of pale cloud spelt out a fateful message to the initiated. Traffic lights gave secret signs, and in the carless streets crowds collected to decipher their meaning. Stone men marched the pavements. A silent mob stood round Buckingham Palace which, it was rumoured, had been abandoned by the Queen and left to rot and cobweb. Remembering their past beliefs, small armies grew and faced each other in paralysed animosity at every crossroads. The whine of the
police sirens drew mass confessions from the crowd, and people threw themselves on their knees and begged to be put out of their misery, to be taken to a quiet place and incarcerated there. Not that there was any noise in the streets of London that night: only the agonised, inner screaming of brains invaded by other brains, of falling and fading dreams and the sense of chaos that comes after. Some thought the tides had come up, and saw sheets of water where there was none on the black asphalt. Others saw the monarch on the empty, dark balcony of the palace—like a falling meteor, glittering and then gone. Money turned damp and worthless in wallets and pockets and people threw it on the ground so it lay like sweet wrappers. There was a feeling of expectancy—and the knowledge that there was nothing to expect.

Just before midnight, as more and more people packed the streets and the crowds stood in dense silence—like black banked clouds come down from the sky to press on pavements and gutters and buildings, to create a pressure that could only be resolved by storm, a great rumbling made itself heard somewhere in the distance. At first it was taken for the sound of tanks, and a low groan escaped from the crowd. A million imaginations saw the slowly moving wheels of armoured trucks; a picture, composed by numberless artists, of the forthcoming massacre hung for a second like a giant film screen above the heads of the crowd. The sound grew louder, but no trucks appeared, and in a sibilant whisper the information was conveyed that even on the outskirts of the city there were no trucks to be seen. Then some great demolition scheme was envisaged, and as the rumbling increased in volume the people saw yellow cranes, and the ball that swings into the sides of houses and the fragile, vulnerable walls with rosy wallpaper and cracked washbasins that stand exposed before the next onslaught from the machine. They saw their own houses fall, and heard the sharp meeting of the cannon ball and the outer wall, the trickle, like shifting sand, of dropping plaster as the inner walls subsided. Heads turned,
and the horizon was scanned for the cloud of dust that rises into the air and hangs there in place of houses when a street is rased to the ground. But there was none; and soon the whisper went round again that the bulldozers and cranes were lying idle in their yards. Panic swept the crowd, and by the time the sound was recognised as thunder an undertow was dragging it to west London, where the streets were already packed with people. The clouds seemed thicker there, and the noise deafening over the crumbling crescents and curved motorways. The clouds piled up and crashed over the Westringham Hotel and the surrounding streets. When they parted, before gathering force to run together again, a flat black sky could be seen and a thin moon, and cloud women with knotted, wispy limbs dancing on the starless expanse. Eyes, and tresses of hair, and sinewy cloud arms rose and fell above the blanket of thunder cloud. The crowd sighed and pushed further into the streets and stood staring up at the threatening sky. The panic had ebbed away, there was only a sense of watching and waiting. The battle of the clouds began to die down a little, and the first drops of rain fell on the crowd. A window on the first floor of the Westringham opened and a man looked out. Without knowing why, the crowd gave a great shout. The man's head went in and the window closed. The crowd surged round the Westringham, and then stopped. Again, there was a sense of waiting. The rain began to fall more heavily on the crowd.

The cocktail party at the Westringham had not ended; it had changed, to Mrs Routledge's pleasure and bewilderment, to an infinitely superior party somewhere else. Just as Johnny and Melinda and old Cridge, who had fought their way through the crowds to the entrance of the hotel (Cridge muttering with disappointment and clutching his exercise book: on a night like this there was not a publisher to be found in London), appeared at the door, the walls of the dining room widened and grew taller and panels of a plum-coloured brocade fringed with gold braid stretched out over them, obscuring the soup stains incurred by Mrs Routledge throwing a cup of Heinz tomato at Mr Routledge when he had been too reasonable with her, and the grim shadows of grease and damp, that danced from cornice to dado on the walls nearest the kitchen. The plastic ferns on the residents' tables grew to the noble proportions of potted palms. A chandelier, descending like a small galaxy from the ceiling, threw a flattering light on Mrs Routledge's face and bosom, which she saw now was encased in a blue satin off-the-shoulder gown; and the guests, also improved in appearance by the lighting and the rich surroundings, seemed all of a sudden more relaxed and animated, as if the change of ambience had given them a new lease of life and they were prepared to stay at the party all night. Mr Rathbone, who had broken away from a long conversation about the economic crises facing the country with Mr Poynter, was in the midst of presenting a piece of paper to his hostess when the decor changed its tone. He stopped, puzzled and irritated by the
disturbance, but decided to finish his sentence nonetheless. After his unpleasant experiences in the Palace that afternoon, he had determined to pay less attention to outward appearances, and simply get on with the matter in hand. These tricks were clearly sabotage, and probably the work of Marcus Tapp, who was at present mercifully unconscious on two chairs in the corner: when the business with Mrs Routledge was done Mr Rathbone had every intention of calling the police and getting him sent to prison for treason and a host of other crimes as well.

“So as you see Mrs Routledge,” Rathbone concluded, “you have a six months' notice to quit the premises. Here is the document. Redevelopment commences in January. And now I must say goodbye and thank you so much for your kind hospitality.”

“I'm afraid you must have made a mistake!” Mrs Routledge hardly recognised her own voice, it was so deep and gracious and seemed to match exactly the panels of brocade and elegant French antique furniture now ranged against the walls of the salon. “My name is Lady Kitty Carson, you know. I believe we have had the pleasure?”

At this point Cridge came up with a sparkling glass dish containing almonds. Mrs Routledge saw to her amazement that he wore tails and a white tie so clean and starched that it looked like an invitation card freshly laid around his neck; his hair was shining and carefully combed, with a side parting that gave him an almost military air. So miracles were possible after all! In her haze of gratitude, Mrs Routledge reflected that the Lord was good: you only had to pray for something long enough and it was yours. She bit into an almond and was repaid by a twinge of pain from one of Lady Kitty's unknown cavities. Despite this she continued to smile coquettishly up at Mr Rathbone, an epigram ready and waiting on her lips and all the grandeur and magnificence of the apartments giving her the confidence she had so long needed to capture this elusive man.

“My dear Lady Kitty!” Mr Poynter was at her side, and with him Mrs Houghton. It seemed that the change in the party had brought the couple together again—Mrs Houghton's arm was linked with Mr Poynter's—and a gold band gleamed on her fourth finger. Only Miss Scranton, who was still in the dowdy clothes of the Westringham party, glowered over by the kitchen door; and Johnny and Melinda, anxious to talk confidentially to their author, did not appear sufficiently appreciative of the evening their hostess was giving. She turned her smile on Mr Poynter—and as Mr Poynter was becoming increasingly obsequious, the first signs of flattery and gallant manners appeared obligingly on Mr Rathbone. He shrank a little, as if to show he no longer thought himself larger than anyone else in the room; he took his hand, which had been jingling small change in his pocket in an insolent manner, sharply away from it, as if to show he would only play with notes of big denomination in future, if he played with money in the presence of a lady at all; his teeth spread out across his lower jaw in the semblance of a carnivore come at last face to face with his prey. Mrs Routledge shuddered in anticipation, and spoke directly to Mr Poynter.

“I'm so terribly glad you could come! Unfortunately, there is a nasty thunder storm brewing up, or we could have had drinks in the garden. But never mind!”

Cridge chuckled at this, giving the impression that his mistress had been witty again, and a low murmur of laughter passed from Mr Poynter to Mrs Houghton and on to Mr Rathbone. Mrs Routledge bridled, and then looked modest.