The Wine-Dark Sea (41 page)

For some reason, it made her think of the track along which the figures pass when a mediaeval cathedral clock strikes the hour. She expected to see a red-eyed dragon emerge from one of the green tunnels, with a jewelled St. George in pursuit; and disappear into the other tunnel,
eternally
unconquered, though hourly beset. Or perhaps it might be a procession of twelve wise virgins; or of six pilgrims and six temptations. She herself sat at a higher level, observant of all, like the Madonna. It was along tracks such as the one below that all creation ran from darkness to darkness,
everything
from the stars to the rabbits in the corner of an altarpiece; until Copernicus, and Kepler and Brahe, and Galileo began upsetting things. One of the hospitable Swedes had shown her a big illustrated book about Brahe, translating all the captions into better English than the English speak. The
Swedish
family had not appeared to doubt that Brahe and his kind were advantageous.

Out of the forest, as Margaret sat in the hot sun, came not St. George, but a bustling grey-haired woman in a red dress and carrying illustrated papers. Obviously a hotel
resident
, she ascended the steps to the terrace.

‘Good afternoon,’ she said to Margaret, staring at her clothes. ‘You are a newcomer.’ The woman could not have been anything but a lady from England. ‘It is unfortunate that I cannot in all honesty wish you a happy stay.’ Margaret supposed that she was a trifle eccentric, as the English abroad are so often said to be.

‘I’m only here for two nights,’ she said smiling.

‘Really!’ exclaimed the English lady, apparently much surprised. ‘A casual. We get very few casuals nowadays. So much the worse, perhaps. But it’s connected with changing tastes. There’s nothing to do here, you know. Absolutely nothing. What made you come here?’

‘I drove past with some Swedish friends and liked the look of it.’

‘A pity your Swedish friends didn’t tell you that this is not an ordinary hotel. Some of them must have known
perfectly
well. Most people in Sweden know, and a good many elsewhere too.’ She was standing with her hand on the back of the chair on the other side of the table from the chair on which Margaret was seated.

‘But my friends did tell me,’ said Margaret patiently. ‘They warned me it was partly a sanatorium. As a matter of fact, they more or less advised me against coming here. I just didn’t think their reasons were very good. As far as I was concerned anyway. I wanted the sun and I wanted not to have to wear my best clothes all the time. That was all. I wanted a rest. For two days, you know.’

‘I see,’ said the English lady.

‘But won’t you sit down?’

‘Thank you,’ said the English lady. ‘I had better introduce myself. I am Sandy Slater. At least that is what I have always been called. No one has ever called me Alexandra.
Mrs.
Slater, by the way; though my marriage was little more than a
formality
. I was born a Brock-Vere.’

‘I am Margaret Sawyer. I have usually been called Molly, but I like it less than I did. Mrs., too. My husband is concerned with building the new road.’

‘I understand that the new road will make little difference to the Jamblichus Kurhus. The authorities have taken care to keep us at a distance.’

‘Is that a good thing? I imagine that the owners mightn’t think so. One of my Swedish friends actually said that the Kurhus ought to go in more for attracting motorists.’

‘He must have been a very ignorant man,’ said Mrs. Slater firmly. ‘I notice that many of the Swedes are nowadays. If you will forgive my saying so about a friend of yours.’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Margaret. ‘They’re friends of my husband’s really. Or not even that. More business acquaintances. Not that they haven’t been very kind to us. They’ve been quite fantastic. Though that reminds me,’ she continued. ‘For some reason I fell asleep almost immediately I arrived here, which is something I never normally do, and in consequence I missed lunch, though it seems a silly thing to say. I’m beginning to feel rather hungry. Is it possible to attract some service?’

‘Not until four o’clock,’ said Mrs. Slater.

‘But it’s not yet three!’ exclaimed Margaret. ‘This is as bad as England. I shall be
paying
for lunch too, or at least my husband will. He
will
book everything, though I should often prefer to be less tied down.’

‘Clearly,’ said Mrs. Slater in a calm voice, ‘you have no idea what this place is. Why do you suppose it is called the
Jamblichus
Kurhus?’

‘I didn’t know it was until you just mentioned it. It doesn’t seem to be put up anywhere. I suppose he was some nineteenth-century German doctor who invented a patent treatment? So many of them seem to have done it.’

‘Jamblichus was the one among the seven sleepers who after they had slept for two centuries, went down into the town in order to buy food, tendered the obsolete coins, and found himself arrested. Don’t you remember your Gibbon?’ enquired Mrs. Slater, even more unexpectedly.

‘You mean the
Decline
and
Fall
?
I’m afraid I’ve never had time for it. I have three children to look after, you know.’

Mrs. Slater gazed at her. ‘It’s different here,’ she said weightily. ‘But I knew about Jamblichus before I came here. He’s the only one of the seven sleepers whom most people
can
name. Anyway, places like this used often to be called Jamblichus Groves; even by the unsophisticated. This, my dear Mrs. Sawyer (how odd that our husbands’ names should be so alike), is an establishment for insomniacs. One can hardly call it an hotel, because hotels are primarily places to sleep in. Still less can one call it a cure, because there is no cure.’

‘I noticed a book in my room –’ began Margaret, then reflected. ‘How terrible! Do you mean that
you
suffer from it?’

‘Not as badly as some – including some who are here. I usually get a few hours in the course of a week. Some of the people here haven’t slept for years.’

‘But that’s impossible!’ cried Margaret. She recollected herself. ‘But you mean that they haven’t slept
regularly
for years?’

‘I mean that for years they have not slept at all. Not at all. Never.’ Mrs. Slater seemed still to be speaking quite calmly.

‘But surely,’ enquired Margaret timidly, ‘surely you can’t
live
without
any
sleep?’

‘You can,’ replied Mrs. Slater. ‘In a way. You can live here.’

‘What is there special about here, and why do people who have difficulty in sleeping have to live with other people who have difficulty in sleeping? I know very little about it, I’m afraid, because I seem always to have slept rather well, but I should have thought that living all together would be the very worst thing for them.’

‘When the trouble passes a certain point – a point far short of never sleeping at all, I assure you – the victim is driven out. Sleepers cannot live for long with an insomniac. It is like living with something supernatural: people who are normal come to feel it as a shadow on their own lives. And they come to feel it quite soon. I speak from knowledge. I told you that my marriage was little more than a formality. I am sure you thought that I was born to be an old maid, as so many Englishwomen are, in spite of all the pretences and defences. Whether I am one of that kind or not, it was my inability to sleep that ended my marriage. Marriage – anyway the usual kind of marriage – is one of the things that insomnia makes impossible. One of the many and important things.’

‘I suppose I can imagine that,’ said Margaret, ‘or begin to imagine. But I still find it unbelievable. I’m glad to say I’ve always been a good sleeper myself – though, as a matter of fact, always a little afraid of not being – yet I’ve naturally known people who aren’t. It’s awful for them, as I quite see, but it doesn’t have to be quite as bad as you say. I’m sure it doesn’t.’

‘That is the usual reaction,’ replied Mrs. Slater, still quite calmly. ‘At least, the usual first reaction. The answer is that the people you have known aren’t real insomniacs at all. They are just people who from time to time have difficulty in sleeping as much as they would like to, or think they ought to. It may be a matter of personal psychology, or temporary stress, or even digestion. But, in the very great majority of such cases, it is simply a matter of the person not really needing anything like as much sleep as he supposes – or, more usually, wants. People
want
sleep, just as they want love, or want what they call distractions, or even want death. In purely biological terms, most people sleep far more than they need to. Twice as much, or even more.’

Margaret felt that she herself was incriminated by her admissions and by Mrs. Slater’s didactic stare.

‘The quantity of sleep required to eliminate the poisons from the blood stream is much less than people like to think,’ continued Mrs. Slater. She broke off. ‘You do
know
that that is the physiological function of sleep?’ she asked.

‘I think I learnt it at school,’ said Margaret, caring less and less for the conversation, feeling more and more aware of a threat, but unable to stop listening, or even asking, however empty her inside.

‘As I say, much less sleep is required physiologically than people choose to think. In fact, it is perfectly possible to eliminate the poisons without sleeping at all. Some people, a few people, are built like that.’

Margaret, secure in her steady sleepiness and in all it stood for, had given so little conscious thought to the biology of it that she was in no position to argue.

‘That’, said Mrs. Slater, ‘is the plight of the true
insomniac
. He is one who has little need for sleep at any time; or none.’

‘I suppose there might be certain
advantages
,’
said Margaret.

‘That is often the second reaction,’ said Mrs. Slater. ‘There are no advantages; or at least not by the standard of the world outside. The man or woman who in the true sense cannot sleep is a kind of troll, as they call it here. Life is so made that without sleep only a troll can endure it. The sleepers have no alternative to driving us out.’

‘I’ve heard the word, but I’ve never quite known what a troll is.’

‘Those who are kept out. The unearthly and mysterious, as people say,’ replied Mrs. Slater. She seemed to speak with some slight relish.

‘Is lack of sleep as disastrous as
that
?’

‘Even the most normal people teeter all their lives along a narrow line between good and evil; between impulse and judgement, as we may say. Sleep does two things for the normal person. It gives him constant, long periods of respite from the conflict. It also enables his impulses to find a certain fulfilment in dreams, especially his most lawless impulses. You doubtless have dreams of that kind, Mrs. Sawyer?’

‘Sometimes,’ said Margaret.

‘Think for yourself what life must be like for one who has neither dreams nor tranquillity. Such a life is unendurable, and those condemned to it must become trolls, as I just said.’

Margaret produced a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her trousers and offered one to Mrs. Slater.

‘No thank you,’ said Mrs. Slater. ‘When we cannot sleep, the narcotics soon cease to have power over us. All of us here have to live with reality for twenty-four hours out of
twenty-four
… This is not a place for a holiday, Mrs. Sawyer; still less for a rest. None the less, I so much hope you won’t go.’

The smoke from Margaret’s cigarette rose perpendicularly in the still, warm air. Through it, she had been quietly
inspecting
the aspect of Mrs. Slater. Margaret could see neither horns nor tip of tail, neither exceptional wrinkles nor even unusually tragic eyes. Mrs. Slater’s eyes were not happy eyes, but her total appearance, eyes included, was unreservedly typical of her age, type, and station. She might have been the Acting Vice-Chairman of a Woman’s Institute in East Sussex.

‘What is everyone doing now?’ Margaret asked.

‘They are resting,’ said Mrs. Slater. ‘At night the
insomniac
is at his most active. No kind of repose is possible. But much rest is needed when you do not sleep, however hard it is to find. In the afternoon most of us can at least stop moving about. Some persuade themselves that this cessation of
movement
even amounts to a kind of sleep.’

‘What about you?’ asked Margaret. ‘I’m not keeping you from your rest, am I?’

‘No, Mrs. Sawyer. I was restless this afternoon in any case. In so far as the idea of rest has any meaning for people like me, I have been restless all day.’ Whatever Mrs. Slater’s plight, Margaret was, among other things, beginning to find her continuous self-pity as jarring as her paradoxes were unconvincing. She had noticed before that a person’s troubles, the pity the person has for those troubles, and the pity a second person feels for the first person, are all independent from one another. ‘Perhaps I have been restless today,’
continued
Mrs. Slater, ‘because I knew that a stranger was coming.’

‘I shouldn’t think that’s very likely,’ said Margaret.

‘Many of us here acquire such foresight,’ said Mrs. Slater. ‘It is likely that we should, when you think about it. It’s another of the reasons why people dislike and fear us, and drive us out. All the same they’re not above sneaking back to us when they’re in trouble themselves. They creep back during the night in search of our guidance. I have always thought that the Witch of Endor was one of us.’

While Mrs. Slater had been speaking, an elderly couple had come out of the building and sat down in silence at a table on the other side of the terrace. They were followed almost immediately by another similar couple, who seated themselves at the next table but one to that occupied by Margaret and Mrs. Slater.

Margaret could not help asking a question.

‘These couples … Are
both
of them sufferers?’

‘Yes,’ replied Mrs. Slater; ‘but they are not couples in the usual sense.’ She spoke in a lowered voice, as if she had been intercepted in the drawing room of a private hotel at Eastbourne. ‘They are merely unhappy people who have found another unhappy person. Most of us remain alone. It makes little difference really. Though now, of course, Mrs. Sawyer, I have found
you
.’
Mrs. Slater did not smile. Margaret wondered whether it would have been any better if she had smiled.