Murmur Read online

  I knock. The sound awakens sense.

  Home is a force that acts on me whether I will or no, and under its impressive influence I gain mass, inertia, dragging my feet. It needs some great exertion of the will to overcome that force. I’m like a game of tennis played on the seabed.

  June’s free of it. Massless she speeds, a particle of light, while I’m involved in treaclish stuff. Oh God, the prospect of small talk! Torpor. Decisions unmade, futures always merely to be entertained. However much the world ages, deformed by war and entropy, the parquet and the chevrons on my socks point the same way.

  The parlor’s scarcely recognizable, the ceiling and its rose replaced by high arches and braziers. The stone-gray walls, running with damp, have been stripped of their bosky views and photographs of father in Madras. The hands have fallen from the clock, which still clucks with embarrassment above a murky rectangle where once a dresser stood. The books are gone from the glass-fronted cabinet between the bay window and fireplace. Missing: Kipling, Gibbon, and Wells, but also Heyl, Bohm, Kant, and Schrödinger. And Tenney Brewster’s Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know. Nothing so strange as empty shelves, the libraries of dust; or the ironical verdict of our barometer, hanging beside another ghost picture, predicting CHANGE.

  Nothing, except where everything is strange and so familiar. The table, black, immense, carved from a single piece of oak, has been pushed closer to the fire. The damask tablecloth has been removed. That mossy-colored drape now shrouds a large freestanding oval object at one end of the parlor, near to the screen-partition doors.

  The arts-and-crafts armchairs? No more. Two high-backed seats, ornately carved like bishop’s thrones, remain. June sits on one, next to the fireplace, facing the oval shroud. She looks puzzled and wan and turns her head as I enter, smiles with a shy perplexity that says: I ought to know what’s happening. Behind her is the other chair, its sides gripped by an angry little pair of hands.

  The knuckles flush. A sharp voice fills the room with sarcastic ferocity: it is the voice of my brother.

  “—a fantasy or prank, more like, which he has executed with his customary ruthless inconsistency. I looked perfectly normal yesterday.” The hands unflex, then seize the chair again. “It’s typical, Mother. No thought for anyone’s feelings except—”

  “Alec, my dear.” My mother cuts him off. “At last! June said she’d found you loitering on the downs, counting daisies. Such a resourceful girl. I like her very much.”

  Mother looks splendid in a red-lined cape and high collar, her skin moonshine, the cheekbones raised, the teeth one long enamel flash. Beneath the cape she wears a bell-sleeved purple gown with gold ceinture. And when she rubs her youthful hands, they move very convincingly.

  “Pay no attention to poor John. He’s cross.”

  “I’ll be the laughingstock.”

  “Really,” Mother exclaims, not sounding at all shocked. “One never would have thought, at such a time as this—in time of war—the sacrifice of vanity—masculine vanity at that—so very terrible.”

  The hands gripping the chair go white. “It isn’t vanity, it’s pride! A regiment needs solidarity. The ranks have to respect each other. That’s the core of army discipline. I’ve overall command of fifteen hundred men at Sidi Barrani, fifty light tanks, a very difficult chain of supply. And every day the threat of Italian counterattack—”

  “‘We also serve who only stand and wait.’ And cook,” puts in Mother, busy behind the table with a wild array of beakers, flasks, and demijohns. “I’m making one of my potions. An elderflower cordial.”

  “—while my brother, the famous don—what is it? Oh yes. Does something for the FO, that we don’t know about, can’t know about, but which we may be sure comes with a tidy salary, is well supplied, and bloody safe.”

  “Now, John, no bitterness. We’ve been through this.”

  Mother opens an old grimoire beside a glistening retort. She murmurs to herself, “Mummy dust, henbane, cloves … sugar? Lemons? Where do they think we are? I’ll have to improvise.” And then looks up: “Alec, we did ask June what she was doing at the Admiralty and she said it was just statistical. Primarily routine.” She stops. “And … secondarily? Could you enlighten us?”

  June hangs her head. There’s nothing we can say. We only know what we do because we work on the same machine in the same hut. The other huts are separate fiefdoms. We’re none of us allowed to speak about our work—we signed the Act—and yet, of course, I have to give details of how we met.

  And so I offer up our agreed version of the truth, the true-enough outline—the office girls, a natural camaraderie, trips to the cinema on our days off, a shared interest in Fibonacci numbers (“Really?”), chess.

  Mother simpers and purrs. She prefers bridge.

  “Good God, woman!” John shouts. “Can you not tell when someone’s patronizing you? Look at him mumbling! The same old rag. We’re being laughed at by the higher-ups. ‘It’s just statistical.’ ‘We both play chess.’ Oh, I know, everything is on the QT, lives are lost through conversation—but it’s not the secrecy and confidentiality I mind. It’s the superiority, as if we couldn’t hope to understand. We’re being watched, Mother. Ordered about, put in our place.”

  “I’d no idea,” I say, “you suffered by my hands so much.”

  “What would you know about suffering?” The chair jumps forward half an inch. “Last week I pulled a gunner through the hatch of my A9 only to find him missing from the chest upward. He poured on top of me, dear Christ. What do you think happens, Alec, after you make your best guesses and sign your chits for resources? Where does the war go after it has been discussed and plotted on a chart? What happens to the rest of us, the little people, then?”

  A sibling in full spate is always frightening, their anger a surprisingly powerful defense, their deeper impotence equally powerful, absurd.

  John throws the chair aside and stands revealed, arms wide, red-faced, fatigued, weeping with shame and frustration. His toy-sized uniform clings to a pear-shaped build. He is a dwarf.

  It’s not that I don’t know about suffering, but I am bound. What can I do, apart from what I do already, in my own unmentionable realm? Words are forbidden me. That is the real answer, the right one, which I cannot give.

  “John, what is it you want—”

  “He wants a proof,” June says, raising her hands to calm us down. She’s staring at the damask drape, her brows drawn in. “Don’t you, John Pryor? Need some warranty. Convincing proof.”

  He barely nods.

  “Imagine, if you can,” he says, “what it is like to do your best, to serve, to wait for leave, and then to wake one day, back home, to find it’s all an act. You’re not even a man.” He stops. A sob comes out as a failed cough. The little man catches his breath. In pauses between frames, his tears fidget and swell.

  Mother’s eyes glitter by the hearth.

  “You were always the favorite.” John drops his arms, his head. His shoulders slump. “You never had opinions, Alec. You just knew. That’s what you’d say. ‘I always knew the apple in the Bible was both green and red.’” He looks at me. “But can you tell me—do you know what’s going to happen, whether we will win?”

  I play for time. “In general, one can never know …” But John is having none of it. He asks me if I think they’ll come, if I’ve received warning, and I say, “No. But invasion can’t be ruled out. The truth is that it’s probable.”

  Mother inhales the bad news like an idiot’s insult.

  “If that is so, dear Alec, dearest June,” she says, smiling, “and we are, in your routine and statistical opinion, doomed, then perhaps—on your day of troth—you can explain what all of this is for? The struggle and the upheaval?” She bends over the fire to stir her pot, picks up a flask. “‘Dig up the garden, give away your clothes, your furniture and food, your creature comforts, all your raw materials.’” She gestures at our surroundings. “Hardly a day goes by without some new note o
f instruction in the post! Why bother, if we’ve lost the war?”

  “Because it’s still just possible that we will win, and we should all behave as if it were.” My voice is low; it doesn’t echo in the ringing stone-flagged room; its confidence surprises me. “The ‘as if’ is extremely important. The whole of decency depends on it. Of course I can’t give you a proof. The evidence is to the contrary: men are cruel, driven by fear and greed. But it is civilized to suppose otherwise, as if we were fitted for love and loyalty. ‘As if’ is not … complete, but that does not mean it’s untrue.”

  “Against all hope you persevere! How romantic!” When Mother laughs, I can’t help noticing, her jaw moves up and down to give the impression of mirth. “And just a little hard for us to take, I think. The high value you’ve always placed on results, logic, form, the underlying certainties, the way things are—so soon displaced?”

  “Quite the reverse,” I say. The fire’s cold flames are tassels rising in my mother’s black pupils. Her skeletal physique is ivory in a cave, her cape billows; the glass she holds, the clothes she wears, all saturated with ideal color—the grain of which is, on inspection, rather coarse. “Logic and math are beautiful but they are far from being certainties. I don’t believe there is a realm of truth. And if there is, well, I prefer this one, with all its faults and inconsistencies.” Expressionless, June’s eyes hold me. “And mathematics, it turns out, is one of them. Logic permits no absolute predictability. Some things are true that cannot be proved to be so. There’ll always be statements or questions in a system or a world, like ‘I’m lying,’ or even ‘Who will win the war?’, no one can settle in advance within that system’s rules.”

  “Very cunning.”

  “Or merely fair.”

  “Fairness!” Mother throws back her head and roars. “I wondered when we’d get around to that!” A chill enters the room. “Fairness!” The light behind her skin fades momentarily; the flesh wattles. “Even your grasp of it, dear son, is enfeebled. Fairness is not logic. It has no human property.” She grins. “I know! Try this. Fairness is absolute indifference.” One of her teeth is going gray. “I hardly needed to fix poor Snow White,” she mutters. “Time alone did that for me—revealed the Prince for what he was, a frighteningly limited minstrel.”

  “Don’t listen to her, Alec,” June cries, forcefully. “Oh, Mrs. Pryor, try to understand. I love your son for what he is. Don’t be jealous. It’s no one’s fault, I know, but you and John, you’re both—you can’t help it—you’re just a pair of badly drawn cartoons!”

  “Impudent girl!” the sorceress shrieks. “John is trivial. Half of a man—a sketch of sibling rivalry. But I—I am the transcendent original! The Lilith of Cartoons!”

  The room heaves. Every bottle on the table shakes.

  “I am the bold outline, betrothed weakling, whose incomplete spaces resound with Law. I am the single rule, the cellular automaton, the one line on a pane of acetate that moves with repetition, multiplies, and springs to life. Draw me! Draw me again! And every time I’m drawn, you’ll find I grow in deep complexity, until the frame of making splits and I am no mere image but the Great Queen, self-aware symbol of light!”

  John mumbles something about changes to the script.

  June blinks. “I wondered what had happened to the other dwarves.”

  “Silence!” my maddened mother shouts. “They’ve been erased! I tired of their routines. The stairs, the stammering, the fairy-tale suburban house. There’s only so much business with the dishes one can take.”

  The thrill of earthquake fades away. The glasses cease to chink.

  “And what about Snow White?” I ask, from the doorway.

  “The cordial.” June speaks slowly. “The Sleeping Death. It’s meant for me.”

  Mother looks down, thin eyebrows arched, and swills the liquid, calmer now.

  “Well, I can see why you’d think that. Fiancées have a heightened sense of destiny, and marriage is a sort of sleeping death, if you’ve a brain. Let’s see—Monday: rations, cupboards, cleaning. Tuesday: laundry. Wednesday: ironing, silver. Thursday: bed linen and the lounge. Friday: planning the meals for the weekend. Saturday: intimate relations with your spouse. That’s Snow White’s fantasy …”

  “Bright people often pine for domesticity.”

  “Perhaps. But Snow White never struggles with the idea. She never doubts. She knows her Prince will come. When Snow White sleeps, she trusts she’ll wake up at the touch of love’s first kiss. Alas, you feel doubt peeling at this vision like the silver flaking from a pier glass. She isn’t you. We’ve left behind the old story.”

  With one swift motion, Mother hastens to June’s side, leans forward, and pulls back the damask drape. A baleful basalt mirror glares at us, its one eye deep and black. The glass is void, perpetual night.

  “Where am I?” June cries out. “Oh, Alec—make her stop!”

  No image forms in the crystal’s abysmal depths, and Mother sets her potion down the better to caress the mirror’s stand: wooden cascade of coils and whorls.

  “This is a shaman’s glass, my child,” the Queen whispers. “This is the first, the one Mirror of Creation. It shows you what is missing from your picture of the world. And what is that, d’you think?”

  “No, no …” June stares at me.

  “It is the mind doing the picturing, my dear. The mirror shows you what you cannot ever grasp. And seeing it brings you impossible material knowledge of who you are—the workings of another’s ingenuity.”

  June’s eyes are full of angry tears. I cannot reach for her.

  “How did I get here?” she wonders. “How did I know the way—Alec?” She turns. “How did I know that you lived in this house?”

  “A good question,” the Lilith of Cartoons declares. “You got here first. As if …”

  “… as if I followed instructions. Was drawn.” June smooths her hands across her lap, touches her arms. “But I am not a slave. I’m not a line drawing, like you. Who ordered this? Who gave me … my choices?”

  A silence like the heart of the forest descends. The hand-less clock omits to tell more time. And, looking at her feet, June sees—as can we all, now, with astonishment—her double, not in the mirror, but upside down exactly where she sits. Doing a headstand on the floor. The ghost of the snicket. It is as though she sat on the calm surface of a lake and summoned up her reflection to join her in a playing-card reality.

  “Who knows but we may all be charged with orders in our sleep?” My mother’s voice alters. “Who served the Queen and found a way to honor life? Who mimicked slavery and knew freedom? None but the Forester. None but Snow White’s divided assassin. I bade you go about your daily work, to plant your larch and pine. I bade you kill the Fair One underneath an oak and set the fair heart in a box. But you were weak, deliberately so. You let your quarry go.”

  “If I’m the Forester,” June says, “who is Snow White?”

  The Queen’s hands age. She reaches for the flask of cordial. She pauses, with the foaming beaker halfway to her lips; John waddles to her side. Their comic lineaments begin to sag. Celluloid skin wrinkles, fills in.

  The sleeping death, yes, for the apple and Snow White. But before that, the Great Queen brews an elixir of cunning and disguise from elder wood, the bony limbs of a trustworthy tree. It makes her ancient, wise, and just. She comes for Snow White in that guise. She comes for me.

  Mother and brother share the draught. They drink.

  They put on weight, flesh, comfortable solidity. Within seconds, the woman at the head of the French-polished table, telling June about the vanity mirror (“Italian, you see. Not valuable. But with this rather fetching stand—it was my aunt’s. I couldn’t bear to throw it out.”), is the epitome of taste. She pities June. She talks loudly to quell dislike. John occupies the bay, holding a cup and saucer to his lips. He bows his head and lifts his finger to his moustache, coughs. Says, once, beneath his breath, “Sorry.” June’s back is to the firepla
ce. She looks across at me. Her color rises with abandonment.

  I feel myself outside the room.

  I see a lady sitting all alone.

  Here is a double strife: the sleeping death of duty—expectation, manners—and the waking inner life.

  *

  Dear Alec,

  I suppose the point of Hamish & co. trailing you everywhere, and asking you about Nomads and secret societies, is the fear that you will be manipulated. Someone is worried you will “talk” to foreign intelligence—an agent got up as a muddled, married ex-fiancée, say—without realizing it. And I can only assume that is why, last week, I received a visit from a pair of gentlemen advising against further telephone communications with Mr. Pryor and asking me a lot of impertinent questions about our friendship. Our new phone, and the one call not to have come from my deaf father—intercepted!

  Ours is a party line, of course, and the neighbors could have been listening—only I heard no clicks, so it must have been done professionally, and we said nothing of any value, as far as I am aware. But they caught it all and were very interested in the talk about reflections and the riddle. I’m trying to sound lighthearted, but naturally it has made me anxious. That’s why I am sending this via Max, for hand delivery.

  You would have been grimly amused, re the unthinkable, by my conversation with the elder of the two intelligence officers, who began by saying, “We know that you appreciate the sensitive nature of your work for GC&CS,” to which naturally I replied that I didn’t know what he was talking about. We, or rather he, then got swiftly via G. Burgess to a lofty statement concerning individuals at risk of compromise by friends. And I said that if it was Mr. Pryor to whom the gentleman was referring, my understanding of the affair was that you had already been convicted of G.I.—which must surely lessen the risk of “compromise” if not remove it altogether—and that we were mathematical friends only with no record of joint employment, which the officer must know to be true.