Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

in disguise, and/or reporters were following the cab… that flash of sun on windscreen some highlight from a camera lens… the plane itself, at last achieved like a magic castle after many tests and ordeals… cramped, belted in. A prisoner in the belly of a throbbing roaring flying horse… blue sky… green-blue-grey land, water, cloud, world passing below… sipping the vodka, not bothering with the food, the niggling lung stirring resentfully despite the medical assurance that enough time had elapsed, and all now should be well… people chattering, their noise smothered by the plane’s own voice… Slipping down into a sort of sleep and thinking perhaps they would crash, perhaps there was a bomb, perhaps… always perhaps…

On the edge of unconsciousness - or alternate awareness, for once asleep he would dream - Nick had recalled Serena’s long narration of Laurence’s burial, a stage monologue unlike the previous one which had revealed her lover as Kitty. At the time, sitting once more in Serena’s ‘cloistered’ flat, Nick had listened dully, not concentrating. Against the tapestry of a coffin entering the ground in the windy icy graveyard of a Saxon church on the Weald, Angela’s appalling uproar, Serena’s misery, (she had not been prevailed on to read anything or say anything during the service), Nick had only seen, heard, the memorised Mrs Franks - on the floor, punching Serena in the stomach, emerging from the bathroom with the bleach and the curious notepad. Serena had forgotten the notepad, it seemed. She did not ask Nick what had become of it. She only paced about, weeping for Laurence, their wonderful brother that they had both hated.

What colour is Kitty’s hair?

Brown. Red or black or blonde…

It was, again, like the cinema and the soundless TV, one drama in the background, another superimposed and dominant.

In the end Serena had gone to bed. Yes, she must have done, since he had fallen asleep in the chair and she, audience lost, stopped her literal sob-story and left him. He however woke at first light. As he went to the spare room for his bag, he was reminded of leaving Jazz after his escort attentions, going quietly out. But it was his sister he was leaving, and he was unpaid.

Serena had said, after the funeral Angela had taken off to some secret hideaway to escape the attentions of the press. Nick had wondered incoherently if the canny Pond might have advised Angela to do this, and how to do it successfully.

When on the plane sleep also closed its lid on Nick, he forgot Serena, and Angela, and glimpsed Pond only for an instant, an unknown man floating in the air.

In sleep, Nick himself is not in the air. He is standing on a cliff path, looking up and through into a cave. There is a twilight of some sort, starless, though a moon is behind his back, he believes, glowing maybe on a sea and casting before him a black shadow. The cave also receives the moonlight and is duly lit. It has some leather armchairs and a mahogany desk, and unappealing books on mahogany shelves. His father’s library.

Nick is not a child in the dream. He is as now he has become, a man in his earliest thirties. Yet Joss Lewis, who is seated in one of the chairs, looks as Nick remembers him from childhood, and then rather more as he had in Nick’s twenties. A paunchy man, sixty-five or fifty, whose face and whose body have succumbed to gravity, subsided.

“Dad?” Nick says, softly. Does he not want Joss to hear him?

And certainly his father makes no response.

Nick climbs up, (it is easy) to the cave-mouth and moves just inside. His shadow vanishes as he does this. Joss’s eyes are open and he appears to be looking into space. He does not appear dead.

Nor, of course, is Joss Lewis dead. After Claudia’s own sudden death, and the equally sudden collapse of - apparently - all Joss’s mundane but lucrative business ventures, Joss had simply withdrawn himself from what remained of his family. None of them had tried either to prevent this, or to make sure of where he took himself. Nick now, in the dream cave, ponders if they had, any of them, ever known. They had had no interest in Joss. Or only Serena had, and hers was of a financial nature. Once the money was no more, Joss had no value at all.

There had been a few letters - or notes? Postcards? News items? Something. Or had there? Does Nick only imagine that?

He reflects on these points quite lucidly in the dream.

But he says nothing else to his father, does not again try to attract his attention. While Joss goes on looking, placidly, stodgily, at nothing, only occasionally blinking as if to prove he remains alive.

The uniformed young woman is speaking, saying they will be landing soon. The cave is gone. The airborne plane growls and bumps like a car on a rutted road, and below lies a new nearness of buildings, a once classical city reproduced as a grubby model. A couple across the aisle are holding hands, between excitement, and nervousness at the descent. But the landing is ultimately smooth. And a while after there is all the rigmarole to repeat, papers and questions and checks and silly alarms and excursions, and waits, and luggage and fuss and intrusion.

On the night he left Serena’s apartment, Nick had stolen down the secluded stone stairway, and emerged on the street. The old London Wall rose darkly out of the sprawl and tower of other architectures. The cab Nick had called was already waiting.

A trio of hotels had occurred to him. He might go to one of these. But then abruptly a wave of panic, almost agoraphobia, had hit him. He told the man he had changed his mind, and gave instead the name of the cul-de-sac.

The cabby was unsure of it. And so Nick must give him directions. This made the panic worse