Castle Of Bone (15 page)

The old man returned to the shop very differently. He was almost jovial. “Now what can I do to help?” he asked as if they were favoured customers. They stared at him in surprise, but no one said anything. Jean looked anxiously at Hugh, but Hugh ignored the message. Anna had begun wandering round the shop, picking things up and putting them down again; peering at pictures on the walls; wiping off dust with her fingers where she wanted to examine more closely. She had given the baby to Jean to hold.

“Now then, you must have come for something. You’d better tell me quickly or I shall have to send you away again.” But he said it as if he was joking.

“You know,” said Hugh, “you know perfectly well. The cupboard,” he added reluctantly, the old man looking at him, still with a smile, but without a word. “You’ve got to help. Look, that’s Penn, that baby, he should be the same age as me. But look what it’s done to him.”

“What did you expect? I don’t see why you’re complaining. It’s a fine child.”

“I told you.” Hugh, goaded, was getting angrier. “Just a cupboard to put my clothes in. And just look now.” He pointed at Penn.

“Well and what ideas have you?”

“None,” admitted Hugh.

“He did have one. He said we should all get into the cupboard ourselves. But what good would that do?” asked Jean, rather loud and shrill at first, reducing the volume halfway through, because of the baby sleeping in her arms.

The old man spoke to Hugh. “You have already been inside it.”

Hugh stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“Use your head,” said the old man mildly.

“I wanted to be inside it. I nearly got into it. But I didn’t, otherwise what happened to Penn would have happened to me.”

“What happened to Penn frightened you a good deal more than it frightened him.”

“He’s just a baby now. He wouldn’t understand anything.”

“
You
were frightened.”

“I don’t know.” Hugh spoke with less certainty. But as he spoke a coldness came over him; at first a wave of cold, and then, more swiftly, of heat – panic – which swept through every part of him; he was trembling with fear. He had to sit down for a minute. But there was nothing to sit on except a cane chest, which seemed so fragile under him that he rose almost at once, only to reseat himself, with infinite care this time, as if to show he was not so carried away by terror that he could not recognize the need for care. Yet he had been carried away by terror. Sulkily, unwillingly, he admitted it at last.

“OK,” he said. “I was scared. I was scared some of the time.”

“Where there is no fear there is no decision. It’s because you are afraid that you have to decide, not him.” The old man looked fleetingly, for the first time, at the baby in Jean’s arms.

“You said all that before. It doesn’t help.”

“Then I will help you a little. Let me point out, for instance, that the cupboard is more powerful than you think. In a sense it has drawn you inside itself already.”

“What do you mean?
I
haven’t been inside the cupboard,” he said, afraid all over again.

“I don’t understand either,” said Jean, her voice rising, as if to defend Hugh. The old man ignored her.

“Use your head, boy,” he urged again.

“Those – dreams – I had . . .” began Hugh, reluctantly.

“Dreams. Dreams.” The old man’s voice was infinitely scornful now. “Call them that if you want. If you can only accept definitions, categories, you know already. Dreams!”

“There’s nothing wrong with dreams,” said Hugh.

“Who said there was? Don’t be so touchy, boy.”

“
Me
, touchy?” Yet the matter was suddenly engrossing Hugh.

He asked, slowly. “Was it really some other world. Like Thomas the Rhymer’s fairyland? – like Avalon; something like that? But it wasn’t any more real than a dream; or any less come to that. Just different,” he admitted.

“Why shouldn’t it be different and still real?” said the old man.

“I never said it shouldn’t be different, I never said it wasn’t real,” said Hugh. As he spoke he noticed Jean staring at him, her eyes wide.

“What was wrong with being frightened?” asked the old man.

Hugh said crossly, “You keep changing the subject. You keep on asking me the same questions, and not answering any. We keep on going round and round in circles.”

“Was it so bad?” insisted the old man.

“I wasn’t frightened then.”

“But you were just now?”

“That was just for Penn,” Hugh said.

“Because he did not come out?”

“If I went in, I came out the same. How could I if he didn’t? Anyway what happened to me is beside the point. It’s
him
, Penn, we’re here about.”

“All right, you were frightened. But is that important? If so I suppose, naturally, you want to do something.”

“You talk as if this was an ordinary thing to happen. It’s reasonable enough to want some way out – of a thing like this –” Hugh indicated Penn again. “Of
course
I want an answer.”

“You could call it an answer. The name is unimportant.”

“In which case I’ll call what happened to me dreams. Why can’t you talk sense?” said Hugh, furiously.

(“What’s in a name,” Anna quoted dreamily in what he would have called a very prissy voice, the first time she had spoken since they left the house.) Hugh was angry in part because totally confused. It was like a conversation in a dream in which no comment related or led on to any other.

“We want Penn back at his own proper age,” he said speaking loudly and clearly, as if to an idiot or a foreigner. “I’m asking you for advice not for philosophy.” He was offensive intentionally.

“But you already know. You don’t need advice. You’re only resisting it. You have been into that other world. Now go into it again, but deliberately. And go on into your castle.”

Hugh drew in his breath. “There really is a castle?” he asked slowly.

“Don’t you believe it yet?”

“I didn’t mean it quite like that.”

On a table nearby a chessboard was set out. The kings, both black and white, had faces, the same face of course as all the others. And there were castles – the obviousness of this annoyed Hugh as his gaze fell on them. Yet he still could not stop himself reaching out and picking up one black and one white castle, one in either hand, balancing, turning them, setting them down again. The black castle was slightly the heavier of the two. An ebony castle, he thought, and an ivory castle; a castle of wood and another of bone. “Corny,” he said aloud, still irritated. “Corny. I bet you put them there on purpose. They weren’t here yesterday.”

The old man picked up the white castle now and stroked and held it cupped between his hands. “In the castle you can try to decide. You will see what the choices are, as they are, not as you see them now.”

Hugh was observing the way the castle trembled in his hands. They were knotted, with huge blue veins, very old, very shrivelled hands. He was such an
old
man, he realized, and felt an inconvenient, disconcerting sympathy and pity; which made him feel guilty at his own impatience. Age made you ramble as the old man had seemed to ramble. And yet always within his words there had been this uncompromising edge.

The sleeping baby in Jean’s arms pursed up its lips with its usual sucking sound. Hugh looked from him to the old man and back again, drawing in his breath at the likeness between them; the way both appeared withered, flesh narrow over bone. Almost for the first time he could see a progression between birth and youth and age; not as unlinked stages – like snapshots, or separate beads on a string – baby, child, youth, young man, middle-aged then old, man – but as one steady progression from each stage to the next. That would be his own progression. He had never related it to himself before, or only vaguely, not with this total, piercing comprehension. Growing old was the worst of it. One day he would be pitied as he pitied this old man. How could you bear it, he wondered.

“Do I wait . . .” he began angrily, but the inconvenient pity for the old man overtaking his fear and rage, he repeated much more gently, “Do I have to wait till I dream again?”

“It is
not
a dream.”

“So you keep saying.” Hugh was angry again. “But what else do I call it?”

“Go into the cupboard. Don’t wait for it to pull you, enter of your own will. Then your power will be greater and its the less.”

“By myself?” asked Hugh.

“Don’t be more stupid than are. All four of you. Of course.”

“Do I have to go?” Jean looked more terrified than ever. “I couldn’t go.”

“Especially you. It has less power over you.”

“Oh
please
,” Jean said. “Oh
please
, oh
please
.”

“Must
I
go?” asked Anna.

“Is it dangerous?” asked Hugh.

“You wear me out with questions,” he answered querulously, almost whining. When asked outright for pity, Hugh stopped feeling it. “You’d better tell us, you must,” he said, growing angry again.

“
Must?
Of course it’s dangerous; use your wits. Making choices always is.”

“Choices? What choices?” asked Hugh.

“Those have to be chosen too,” said the old man.

“We only want Penn back at his proper age, that’s all we want.” Jean was crying now, tears pouring down her cheeks. She had to give the baby to Anna to hold, so that she could hunt for a handkerchief.

“Do you? How easy you make it sound.”

“Is that all you have to say?” asked Hugh. The old man indicated his weeping sister. “Maybe it is easier for her than it is for you or for her” – here he indicated Anna; or maybe he was indicating Penn. “That’s all I can say. Isn’t it enough?”

The old man’s voice was more querulous than ever. He sounded very tired. There was a silence in which all three of them looked at each other and away again, and from which the old man, who had for a moment seemed to forget their existence, suddenly swung round on Anna and the baby and let loose at them a flood of words, his voice stronger than it had been all morning. They listened to him bewildered and amazed.

“Of course I look ordinary. What do you expect? All of us were ordinary in most respects. Everything is ordinary, how would it be tolerable otherwise? – dying, loving, being born, it’s all dirty sheets and bowls of water, it’s where to find breakfast and where supper, eating and drinking and pissing and weeping. No matter how long you live for, it always is like that and it always was; except sometimes, occasionally, in a moment. Just for a moment. And I’ve not much time left for that, and what time there is you’re wasting.”

They watched him, mute; Hugh was almost holding his breath. The old man’s voice had wandered towards the end. Now it hardened again.

“Go away all of you. You’re wearing me out. I need what strength I have and I need what time. What you do now is up to you; you have the one chance that’s all, just as I had, you can use the thing as you like. Go away and do it. Go away.”

Hugh looked back as they filed out. For a brief moment before the door was slammed on them and the bolts noisily drawn, he saw the old man’s face, very pale and as if hanging in mid air, his body lost in the gloom, and beyond him all the other faces, carved or painted or engraved, from the chess kings of ebony and ivory to the brown-spotted prints on the walls. The blind white head was in a corner. He had not noticed it this morning, not till now, but it too, he realized, bore the same features as the rest.

“What was it all about? All that last bit?” he asked Anna as they started up the hill. They had dropped behind Jean, who was no longer crying but walking silently and very stiffly for her, and whispered to each other, almost as if they preferred her not to hear. (In Hugh’s case he might have been afraid of frightening her still more than she was frightened already; even though the old man had hinted that she had less reason to be frightened than anyone else.) “He seemed to be talking to you, Anna,” he said, “Particularly.”

“Didn’t you see all those faces?” Anna asked. Hugh knew what she was going to say next; had known it all the time; had not wanted to know. “They were all the same face. They were all of him only younger, some younger than others.”

Hugh sighed. He tested Anna. “But they all came from different times. There was a Roman head and an eighteenth century print and a mediaeval . . .”

“He had the cupboard; that’s the point,” said Anna. “Perhaps it wasn’t a cupboard always. Perhaps he made it into a cupboard, or someone did.”

“But then why . . . ?” pressed Hugh. Anna interrupted him. “I was thinking how ordinary he looked if it worked like that; if he’d been alive so long. He must have picked up my thought.” She smiled tentatively at Hugh. Hugh, lightly, touched her on the arm. And a moment later touched her arm again. “Now it’s up to us. Now it’s our turn,” he said.