CHAPTER NINE
The night before their attempt to repossess the holy relics James had another dream, vividly remembered as usual, for only a few minutes after he woke up.
It was in a dimly-lit alley under an arch in a back quarter of London’s West end. He was with a girl, an olive-skinned girl with a wonderful cascade of dark hair down to her shoulders. The girl was against the wall. He approached her. They kissed one long, interminable liquid kiss. Ocean waves, midnight lagoons, unending strands flashed before his mind. The girl pressed her body against his. He had never quite been kissed like this before. It was as if he had taken the cap of a bottle off, a bottle under extreme pressure. He gazed into her bottomless eyes. The umbrella which she had placed to one side against the wall fell down. “I’m like that umbrella,” she remarked. Above them the interstellar sky of a new year was slowly gyrating into new solstices as yet unknown. Still, her body pressed even more against his. Still the sky was moving. Her eyes, her infinite eyes caught the glint of a gas-lamp. Across the yard from the arch a cat slinked on the cobbles. A curtain moved almost imperceptibly behind the balcony window on one side.
He was now standing at a bus-stop near Trafalgar square. It was already early morning and already light on this frosty January morning. He was shivering with cold. He hoped the bus would arrive soon. The cafe behind was still shut and would remain shut. The square was deserted. He thought of the night he had spent. The party in the mansion of the lost domain. Revellers dressed in fantasy robes: from musketeers to buccaneers, from wolves to cats. In his everyday clothes he had described himself dressed ‘as a poet’. ‘The kiss stolen from the girl by the master of ceremonies at the start of the grand staircase as he pressed her against the balustrade another long, unending kiss, as he looked on in helplessness. The angry father in her basement flat on the square as the daughter was returned in the small hours. “We elders have been swept by the wayside.”
That was the end of that. The sublime vision, the attainability of the unattainable vanished like an opium reverie. The hard winter morning partly slept on a bench in St. James’s park where he was awakened by an inquisitive police officer. All gone, all, all gone.
He had woken up. It was still dark. Next to him Helen was tossing and turning. Suddenly she whispered to him:
“I can’t get to sleep, darling. Are you awake too?”
“Yes I am. Look, are we really going through with this?”
“Of course my sweetheart, of course. Why, do you doubt me? You know I don’t.”
And searching for each other’s embrace they fell asleep once more in the prelude to the unknown morning.
Another dream. She was there again in it. The girl of the mews arch. The girl of the cascading hair and the fathomless eyes. This time she was leaning out of a large window which gave a view of a large perpendicular-style chapel, overwhelming in its regal splendour and almost ridiculously placed when contrasted with the mundane domesticity of the little provincial street which ran below the window. The girl still leaned out, further and further. James thought she might actually fall down among the shoppers in the street below. He took his camera out and took a snapshot of her. Where was that snapshot now he wondered? Then he remembered he had torn it up like performing a definitive action against an impossible a seemingly impossible attainment: the girl: the girl had now changed her appearance. Now longer the ingenuous beauty of the dark passageways of Knightsbridge she had now transmuted herself into the cosmopolitan executive of the international airwaves. Sophisticated make-up adorned her face, accentuating her classical features and making them both more immediate and remote. An elegant couturiered dress enfolded her sinuous body. None of his other female acquaintances had been as sophisticated looking as this one. As he escorted her into the front quadrangle of the college to which the chapel belonged he felt a thousand eyes looking at them – a thousand eyes which seemed to express “how long will this last?”
It was unfair; his last days at the college – if not the last day. He had told her: “I’m going away, going east.” As much as he had wanted to see he again he felt unable to face the possibility of defeat in the re-burgeoning relationship between him and her. His escape to the orient was indeed an escape from her: he had fallen in love too much with her to want to face involvement and the sadness and recriminations any end between him and her might bring. She was too precious to undergo that kind of karmic encirclement. For James, nothing ventured was everything gained: like a prize model vehicle, never removed from its cellophane and cardboard box, never played with, never regularly handled for fear the dust and time’s corruption might decrease its value, destroy the very thing he wanted preserved above all others.
After a night spent in the mid-point between sleep and awakening both James and Helen felt they could have done with more sleep. All the same they felt ready to face the mission which faced them on this day: the mission of liberation of the slave-labourers of Mersea and the emancipation of the eastern kingdom from the corrupt machinations of the dark lord Mortan.
The eyes of the conspirators were on the two as they got ready for their journey in the underground vaults: leading eyes, saddened eyes, hopeful eyes.
“May God protect and preserve you,” said Tamara as she embraced Helen and James in a flood of affection. Simon, John and Ashley assented in her wise “It’s been good knowing you,” said Ashley. “May we continue to have that pleasure when you return safely and successfully?”
At this moment Alfred the cat suddenly appeared from behind the fire as in knowledge that he too was to play an important, if not the most important part in the conspirators plans. He appeared well-fattened – the night must have been more than full of scurrilous mice and rats – and purred loudly in his satisfied appetite.
The first part of the journey was straightforward: they would follow the main vaulted passageway for about three hundred yards until they came across a shaft of light – the same shaft that gave light from a section of the town’s main square. They walked swiftly but carefully keeping their eyes and ears open for any strange or unexpected sound.
It was after they had passed the shaft of light that they thought their lives and their mission prematurely ended.
They had begun the second part of their journey, a slow ascending way to the top of the citadel through the subterranean passage, their cloaks brushing away the innumerable cobwebs that attached themselves to the massy pillar when they heard a distinct sound, the sound of a woman in pain. This sound was quickly succeeded by other sounds of other women, some laughing, others groaning, one even screaming, in pleasure or pain – it was hard to distinguish.
“What under earth is going on?” exclaimed James. At that precise moment invisible hands laid themselves on his shoulder and he turned round just in time to see Helen being violently led away from him by a group of grey-hooded persons.
