The House of Sleep (11 page)

First-time visitors to the Café tended to expect something quintessentially Gallic and sophisticated, all
café noir
and
pain au chocolat.
Instead they found heavy pine tables and benches, old milk bottles thick with candle wax, and walls covered with antique nautical instruments and row upon row of hardback and paperback books purchased from jumble sales. They found almost inedibly chunky oatmeal cakes, slices of granary bread with cheddar cheese and honeyglazed ham, and huge mugs of black coffee and sweet aromatic tea. They found a perpetually dim, cavernous interior, with Slattery sitting behind the counter and never rising to his feet to serve the next customer until he had finished the latest sentence of whichever philosophical volume he was then immersed in. And they usually found, it has to be said, something more vibrant in the way of social and intellectual life than this thin, pasty, earnest-looking film student, who glanced up when Robert entered and signalled his greeting by pushing out his three-quarters-empty mug, grunting, ‘Same again, will you?’ and returning to the contemplation of his papers.

Robert had not seen much of Terry this term, and noticed, when he came back to his table with the refilled mug, that he looked if anything even more unhealthy and bloodless than usual. His eyes were puffy, and as he scribbled away manically on his notepaper he would have to pause every twenty or
thirty seconds in order to let out an enormous yawn which would momentarily suspend the operation of all his other faculties. Terry – as Robert had come to know during their two years’ friendship – abhorred sunlight and could only really be happy in one of three locations: the inside of a cinema, the Café Valladon itself (where the habitual gloom suited him down to the ground) and, best of all, within the darkened interior of his own bedroom, which is where he would, by choice, spend most of the day: for it was Terry’s claim, during this period of his life, that he needed an absolute minimum of fourteen hours’ sleep, without which he was good for nothing. Not that he found sleep in any way a relaxing experience, or even that rest was his primary object whenever he sought it out. The business of sleeping was, in his case, tantamount to setting out on a nightly quest, and it was this, presumably, that accounted for the hungry and careworn look which haunted his endlessly tired eyes. For Terry was plagued by dreams: dreams, he insisted, of nearparadisal loveliness; dreams of sun-dappled gardens, heavenly vistas, ambrosial picnics and perfect sexual encounters which somehow combined physical ecstasy with prelapsarian innocence. Dreams which took on the quality of the most pristine and idealized childhood memories, which were beyond the inventive powers of the most fertile, accomplished and assiduous fantasist. Every night he was visited by these dreams. Every night they seduced and tormented him: this much, at least, he knew. But at the same time he was never able to supply any specific details, because it was their peculiar characteristic, every morning, to slip from the reach of his grasping memory in the few fatal seconds it took him to regain consciousness. Terry was addicted to his dreams: they constituted the purest, most vital, most precious part of his life, and for this reason he spent at least fourteen hours a day pursuing them through his sleeping mind. But it maddened him that he was able to remember only the most teasing fragments, so that he could never describe them to anybody else, or take comfort from
their memory when he was awake. Every so often, it was true, tiny shreds and scraps of a dream would suddenly bob to the surface, and he would write them down as quickly as possible, on anything that came to hand: so that it was not uncommon for his lecture notes on (for instance) constructions of femininity in
film noir
to be punctuated by cryptic phrases such as ‘the smell of roses; the warm breath of a lion’, or ‘a valley; a woman; thistledown’, or ‘naked, between the branches of a pear tree’. But this was small recompense; not nearly enough, he felt, to compensate for the terrible knowledge that he was being offered nightly visions of a better world which was fated to dangle forever out of reach.

‘You look dreadful,’ said Robert as he sat down.

‘I feel it. You look pretty dreadful yourself, if it comes to that. What are you doing here, anyway?’

‘Looking for someone. And you?’

‘Waiting for Lynne.’

Lynne was Terry’s latest girlfriend. He had a habit of drifting in and out of relationships, none of them lasting more than a month or two: women who initially found him interesting were soon, it seemed, put off by his eccentric sleeping habits and his single-minded obsession with cinema. (On a bad day he was quite incapable of conversing on any other subject.) Terry himself rarely noticed when any of these relationships had gone into decline, and always professed himself surprised and baffled when finally confronted by the irrefutable evidence that they had been terminated: the sudden disappearance from his wardrobe, say, of all his girlfriend’s clothes, or his dawning realization, emerging into the mid-afternoon sunshine from the blackness of some screening room in the university’s Film Department, that it was more than a week since he had last seen the woman who was supposed to be sharing a room with him. Whether something like this was about to happen with Lynne, Robert had no idea. He merely asked a non-committal question:

‘How is she?’

‘Fine,’ said Terry, taking a cautious sip of his scalding hot chocolate. (He never drank coffee, because it kept him awake.) Then he scowled. ‘We’re meant to be going for a drive this afternoon. A day out, sort of thing.’

‘Sounds nice.’

Terry shook his head. ‘Waste of time. There’s a Douglas Sirk film on BBC 2, as well.’ He looked up at Robert hopefully. ‘You wouldn’t like to come with us, would you? There’s plenty of room for three. It might liven things up.’

Robert had been on excursions with Terry and his girlfriends before. The prospect of listening to several hours’ worth of mutual sniping held little appeal.

‘No, thanks,’ he said. ‘You know how it is, when you’re with a couple… I’d only be in the way.’

‘No, but it’s different with me and Lynne,’ Terry insisted. ‘We’re getting on really well together at the moment. No arguing, just lots of… companionable silences. You wouldn’t feel uncomfortable at all.’ He stood up and searched through his pockets. ‘I wouldn’t mind something to eat. You haven’t got any money, have you?’

Their collective resources came to little more than three pounds, as it turned out, and Terry thought that he would need most of that for petrol. However, with a conspiratorial look around the Café, he said, ‘Don’t panic,’ and from a bookshelf above the adjacent table he fetched an old hardback copy of
Great Expectations.
Opening it carefully, he said; ‘Look at that – page two hundred and twenty.’ Inside was a ten pound note.

Robert was impressed. ‘When did you put it there?’

‘About six months ago,’ said Terry. ‘When I was a little more flush. I had a hunch it might come in handy: go and get a couple of sandwiches, will you?’

Shortly afterwards Lynne arrived, while Terry was downstairs in the toilet.

‘He asked me to come with you today,’ Robert told her, ‘but I don’t think I will. I don’t like to intrude.’

‘Oh,
please
come,’ she insisted. ‘Honestly, we could do with having someone else around: we’re getting on so badly at the moment. We don’t seem to have anything to say to each other.’

‘Where are you going, anyway?’

‘Just up the coast. I know it’s a bit damp now, but the forecast said it was going to be bright and sunny later.’

After they had been driving through wet mist for some two hours, the rain turned torrential at about three o’clock; and that was when Terry discovered that his windscreen wipers didn’t work. They pulled off the road and stopped in a layby. Lynne offered round a packet of Polos which was all that they had in the way of provisions.

‘This is great,’ said Terry. ‘This is so much better than sitting in my room watching
Written on the Wind.
’

Robert wiped away the condensation from his back window and peered out at a bleak stretch of coastline, murkily visible through the thick rain. He said: ‘I think I’ve seen that, anyway. Over-the-top melodrama with Rock Hudson as an oil tycoon. Sort of tacky ’fifties version of
Dallas.
’

‘Well, yes, that is how someone like
you
would describe it,’ said Terry dismissively.

‘And what does that mean, exactly?’

‘The true
cinéaste
,’ said Terry, ‘knows that Sirk is one of the most important directors ever to have worked in Hollywood. Even a basic psychoanalytic reading of his films makes it clear that he had a profound understanding of the sexual neuroses underpinning the American dream.’

‘Blimey,’ said Robert, turning back to the window.

‘Does it never occur to you,’ said Lynne, addressing but not looking at her boyfriend, ‘that you’re looking for something in these films that isn’t really there?’ There was a bitter, jaded edge to her voice.

‘I’m not saying that his films are perfect,’ said Terry. He thought about this statement, and began to elaborate, in his best trainee-lecturer style: ‘It’s possible to conceive of a perfect
film, of course. That’s not to say that it would be pleasant or uplifting. It might be the most depressing film ever made. The important thing is that its vision would be consistent, and flawless. I’m convinced that such a film exists. What I’m doing at the moment is acquiring the skills with which to search for it.’

‘Like trying to remember the perfect dream,’ Robert prompted.

‘Oh, don’t get him started on his dreams, for God’s sake,’ said Lynne. ‘I’ve had it up to here with his dreams. You’d think he was the only person who ever had dreams at all.’

‘I hardly ever dream, these days,’ said Robert.

‘I do, all the time.’

‘What about?’

‘Well, for one thing, I dream of having a ten-minute conversation with Terry where he doesn’t mention Ingmar Bergman. But that’s just my little fantasy.’ She pondered. ‘Oh, I don’t know… silly, trivial dreams… A couple of nights ago, for instance, I dreamed I was lying in a hospital bed next to Winston Churchill. He was eating a bowl of peas and every so often kept flicking one at me. Then the hospital turned into my grandmother’s bungalow and all these firemen appeared, singing the theme song from
Hello, Dolly.
’ She could see that Terry was not impressed. ‘Don’t look at me like that. We can’t all have the most profound dreams in the world.’

‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘Well, why don’t you go out and try to get those wipers working, anyway? Do something useful for a change.’

Muttering angrily, and pulling his jacket tightly around himself as if this might somehow ward off the rain and the cold, Terry climbed out of the car and spent several ineffectual minutes pulling and prodding at the windscreen wipers in a half-hearted fashion. Car maintenance was not one of his strong points.

‘I had a dream about a hospital once,’ Robert said, in the meantime. ‘In fact it’s about the only dream I can remember. I must have been about nine or ten… I’m in this very arid landscape, very hilly and dusty. And there’s this woman, a middle-aged woman, in a nurse’s uniform, and she’s standing by the side of the road, pointing: pointing off into the distance. There’s a big building somewhere ahead of us on the road – that’s what she’s pointing at. I can see it faintly, and I know it’s a hospital. Some sort of military hospital, actually. And just behind her there’s a notice. She’s standing in front of it so I can’t read it all.’

‘Do you know what it says?’ Lynne asked.

‘No. There’s just one word, but I can’t see what it is. That’s the maddening thing. All I know is that it’s in a foreign language.’

‘Does anything else happen in the dream?’

‘No. That’s it.’

Lynne pondered these details. ‘Is the nurse telling you to go to the hospital, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

‘Well, I think you should have that dream analysed. If you can still remember it after all these years, it must be trying to tell you something.’

Terry opened the door and flopped wetly into the driver’s seat.

‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ he said; after which they all fell silent, listening to the intermittent drone of passing traffic, the hiss of tyres against wet asphalt. Robert thought it was the most depressing sound in the world: it reminded him of family holidays in Devon, his mother and father bickering in the front seats, drinking flasks of coffee in a fogged-up car in some seafront car park, the weather dismal even in July. In the evening they would eat at a cheap local restaurant, his father would get drunk on wine and spirits and his mother would have to drive them all back to the cottage or boarding house. He had a sudden, vivid recollection of his father urinating
against the wall of some bed and breakfast place late one evening, the landlady thrusting open a sash window on the second floor and shouting down at him. ‘I’ll call the police!’ she had threatened finally, but his father merely guffawed. ‘I am the police!’ he had called back; and the next morning they were leaving anyway.

Terry tried switching on the radio, but the only things he could find were some opera and a football commentary. Soon he switched off and yawned; then turned to Robert, asking: ‘Who did you say you were looking for in the Café this morning?’

‘I didn’t. It was someone from the house.’

‘Oh.’ Something about the way he said it must have aroused Terry’s interest. ‘Male or female?’

‘Female. No one’s seen her for about a week. I’m a bit worried about her.’

Lynne had been gazing out of the window, rigid with boredom, taking no part in this conversation. But now she roused herself and said: ‘Her name wouldn’t be Sarah, by any chance, would it? Sarah Tudor?’

Robert sat up sharply in the back seat. ‘How did you know that?’

She smiled with satisfaction. ‘Just a hunch.’

‘You don’t know her, do you?’ Robert asked.

‘Oh yes, I know her all right. She lived just down the corridor from me in my first year. We all got to know Sarah.’