The House of Sleep Read online

  Although too ashamed to admit it even to her closest friends or family, Sarah became convinced that she was the victim of delusions: vivid, uncontrollable flights of the imagination which at first she had no reason to connect with her dreams (since the dreams she could remember usually had little to do with reality, but tended, like everyone else’s, towards the grotesque and fantastic: she often had nightmares about snakes, for instance, and even worse ones about frogs). It was only that morning on the terrace, with Gregory’s help, that the truth had suddenly come to light. And although Sarah had been upset by their argument the night before, in another sense she was grateful for it: because it was this argument, and its strange consequences, that had finally unlocked the door of the mystery.

  The trouble had begun the previous afternoon, when Gregory told Sarah that they were both invited out to a birthday dinner being given at a local restaurant (yet to be decided upon) by a fellow medical student: someone called Ralph, whom Gregory himself did not, it seemed, know particularly well. Sarah asked if she had been included in this invitation by name, and Gregory was forced to admit that she hadn’t: as far as he was aware, Ralph didn’t know that they were lovers, and had merely told Gregory that he could bring along a friend, if he wished. That figures, said Sarah. Gregory asked her to explain this remark: and she told him that she used to be friendly with Ralph until an embarrassing episode that had taken place a few months ago, following which they hadn’t spoken.

  ‘You know that fish restaurant down by the harbour?’ she said. ‘The Planetarium?’ (It was called that because of the domed ceiling over the main dining-room, on to which a local artist had recently painted a large nocturnal skyscape.) ‘Well, he invited me there once. Just me and his parents, who were down for the weekend. God knows why I was singled out for this honour: I think he may have had a bit of a crush on me. Anyway, it was a Saturday night, and it was very crowded, and towards the end of the meal, just as we were having coffee, I started to feel really ill. I mean really ill. I think it must have been the mussels. I went to the loo and thought I was going to be sick but nothing happened: so then I went back upstairs and everyone was getting ready to leave, and I was still feeling really terrible, but still, we got our coats and then we all stood on the restaurant steps saying goodbye. His parents were going back to their hotel in town, you see. Anyway, there we all were, chatting and saying goodbye, and then suddenly I knew I was going to be sick. Any second. And sure enough, right in the middle of the conversation, without any warning, I just buckled over and threw up all over the steps and the pavement. There it was, my entire meal, splashed all over the steps of the restaurant for everyone to see. And the amazing thing was, Ralph and his parents never stopped talking. I mean, that’s real breeding for you, isn’t it? They just carried on as if nothing had happened. The only thing Ralph’s mother did was to pass me a Kleenex, so I could wipe my mouth. And then they just chatted on for a couple more minutes, arranging what they were going to do the next day, and then they kissed him goodnight, and then his father leaned over to kiss me goodnight, and just as he did that it happened again, I suddenly felt sick and before I knew what was happening I was throwing up all over the steps again, only this time half of it went over his father’s trousers and shoes as well. And still, you know, they never batted an eyelid. Never said a word. And then his parents thanked him for a lovely evening, or something, and off they went in one direction, and we went off in another, and all he said to me was, “Are you O K now?” in this really cold tone of voice. So then we got into a taxi and went back on to campus, and we didn’t even kiss goodnight or anything. I got the impression he thought the whole thing was quite funny, in a nasty sort of way, because his parents were posh, and I wasn’t, and he thought I’d given an amusing demonstration of how the lower orders behaved in front of their betters.’

  ‘No, you’re doing him an injustice,’ said Gregory. ‘I don’t know Ralph very well, but I’m sure he’d never take that kind of attitude.’

  ‘Then why has he never spoken to me since?’

  Gregory had no answer for this, but spent most of the next few hours reassuring Sarah that it was safe for her to come out to the dinner. At a quarter to eight, all the same, when they arrived outside Ralph’s hall of residence on campus, she was still expressing doubts.

  ‘What if he’s taking everyone to the same restaurant?’

  ‘What if he is?’

  ‘Well, that would just be so embarrassing, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I can’t help thinking you’re making a bit much of this, Sarah.’ They were climbing the staircase by now.

  ‘That’s easy for you to say. The point is that I know, I just know, that this whole thing has become a big joke with his friends. I can just imagine him telling them all that story and having a big laugh about it. It’ll be a standing joke with them.’

  ‘That is nonsense,’ said Gregory emphatically. They had arrived in Ralph’s corridor. ‘I am training to be a psychiatrist, Sarah. A specialist in the workings of the human mind. And if I know anything at all about human nature, I can guarantee that he won’t have mentioned the matter to another soul. All this is just another example of your paranoia and persecution complex.’ Stopping outside Ralph’s room, he snatched down a note that had been pinned to the door, and read it aloud. ‘Ralph’s friends,’ he read. ‘Meet eight-thirty, at The Vomitarium.’

  And it was at this point that Gregory’s and Sarah’s versions of events started to diverge; although it only became apparent the next morning, when Sarah awoke, quite early, to find that Gregory was no longer lying in bed beside her. She got up and drew back the curtains. Looking down, she saw him sitting on the terrace, staring out to sea, wearing his thick blue greatcoat which he had buttoned up tightly.

  Sarah pulled on some clothes and went down to the kitchen, where she made two mugs of coffee. She carried them outside, gaining access to the terrace through the French windows in the television room.

  ‘Here you are,’ she said, putting his mug down on the table next to the notebook in which he had been writing. ‘You look freezing. Is anything the matter?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said, sipping the coffee gratefully. ‘In fact, I had a terrible night’s sleep last night.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. You kept waking me up.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Sarah.

  ‘You kept me awake. You were somniloquizing.’

  ‘I was what?’

  ‘Somniloquizing. Talking in your sleep.’

  ‘I don’t do that.’

  ‘Well, last night you did.’

  ‘Really? What was I saying?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ He gave a massive, elongated yawn, and frowned. ‘Something about a cottage by a river, I think.’

  ‘How peculiar.’

  ‘Very.’ Slowly, the coffee began to revive him, and he asked: ‘So, how did you enjoy yourself yesterday, in the end?’

  ‘It was all right,’ said Sarah, after a rather surprised pause.

  ‘I liked Harriet, I must say,’ Gregory prompted.

  ‘Harriet?’

  ‘Yes. Amusing girl, I thought. Made the evening go with a bit of a swing.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  Gregory glanced at her; an impatient look. ‘Harriet. Ralph’s new girlfriend. You were sitting next to her all evening.’

  ‘Sitting next to her? Where?’

  ‘At the restaurant.’

  Sarah blew along the surface of her coffee. She decided that he was playing some boring game. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Look,’ said Gregory, exasperated. ‘It was just a remark. I don’t have to be punished for it, do I – just for saying something complimentary about another woman?’

  ‘Well, since I’ve never met the woman in question, I’m scarcely in a position to comment.’

  Gregory turned on her. ‘I’m talking about last night, Sarah. I’m talking about the woman you sat next to, an
d had a conversation with, all evening.’

  Without another word Sarah stood up, turned, and disappeared from the terrace, leaving Gregory to glower and sip his coffee, sulkily assuming that he had breached some unspoken piece of boyfriend-girlfriend protocol. When she came back about ten minutes later, she looked worried and apologetic. She slid carefully into the seat beside him and said:

  ‘This is going to sound very strange, I know, but I have no memory at all of going to the restaurant with you last night. I have my own memory of what happened, and it’s completely different.’

  Gregory watched her intently.

  ‘For the last few years, ever since I was a teenager, every now and again I’ve had these peculiar experiences. I remember things differently from how they happened. I imagine things. I make things up. I don’t know how it happens. I’ve never told anybody about it. You’re the first person. I’m telling you now’ – she looked at him, and her voice began to quiver –‘because I trust you. Because I love you.’

  Gregory pursed his lips: for a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. Instead he picked up his pen, then opened his notebook again and flicked eagerly to the first blank page.

  ‘But this is fascinating,’ he said. ‘You mean you have no recollection of coming to the restaurant? Sitting next to Harriet? Singing “Happy Birthday”? Ordering monkfish?’

  Sarah’s brow began to furrow. ‘I don’t know… It’s familiar… Faintly familiar… But there’s another memory – a much stronger one.’

  ‘A kind of alternative memory?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘This,’ said Gregory, scribbling furiously, ‘is fucking brilliant. Something like this doesn’t fall into your lap every day of the week. So what do you think happened last night?’

  Sarah’s recollection coincided with Gregory’s only as far as the moment when they discovered the note pinned to Ralph’s door. After that, she claimed, they had had a violent argument, at the end of which she had refused to come with him to the birthday meal: Gregory had gone alone, while Sarah had made her way to Jonah’s, which was a popular self-service restaurant on campus.

  ‘When did you get there?’ asked Gregory, still writing everything down.

  ‘I don’t know – about eight?’

  ‘And how long did you stay?’

  ‘Quite a while. There was nothing else to do. About an hour.’

  ‘And what did you eat?’

  ‘Is any of this really necessary? Does it have any relevance?’

  ‘Everything is relevant. It’s vital that we establish just how specific this… hallucination was. Now, what did you eat?’

  ‘Soup. Just soup.’

  ‘Just soup? Weren’t you hungry?’

  ‘They didn’t have much food left. I didn’t fancy either of the main courses.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘Well, it was either cottage pie, or liver.’

  Gregory started to write this down, but paused in mid-word. He looked up, his eyes gleaming. ‘But that’s what you said last night – while you were asleep.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It wasn’t “cottage by a river” – it was “cottage pie or liver”.’ He threw down his pen and laughed, more in triumph than amusement. ‘Sarah, this whole thing was a dream. You dreamed it.’

  It took just a few minutes to convince her that this was the most rational, the most plausible, in fact the only conceivable explanation; and that was how Sarah came to learn that she was not the victim of delusions at all, but that every so often she was liable to have a dream so real that she could not distinguish it from the events of her waking life; so real, furthermore, that it was capable of wiping these events from memory, so that they had to be remembered through the dream, recovered from beneath the dream, peered at through its cloudy, erasing surface like the original words of a palimpsest.

  ‘But that explains everything,’ she said. ‘All the weird things that have happened to me. All those misunderstandings…’

  ‘Because it’s happened before?’ said Gregory. ‘You’ve had this sort of dream before?’

  ‘Yes. Lots of times.’

  He turned to a new page in the notebook, and wrote a heading in his characteristically neat, minuscule capitals. ‘Come on then, Sarah,’ he said, smiling excitedly. ‘Tell me about your dreams.’

  ∗

  Sarah’s relationship with Gregory came to an end eleven months later, in the first days of her postgraduate year. Her sleeping patterns, never very regular at the best of times, had grown more and more erratic during that period, and her dreams had continued to prove unreliable.

  Often it was at moments of the most intense emotional disturbance that her dreams became most lifelike and deceptive, and the night she split up with Gregory was a case in point. She had no way of knowing it, but she started to dream very early that night, only a few minutes after she had slipped reluctantly into bed: for she had then fallen, with unnatural rapidity, into a deep sleep which was immediately accompanied by a dream as treacherous as any she had ever experienced. When she awoke the next morning, the substance of this dream was lodged in her mind like a vivid, bitter-sweet memory. She was convinced that the event she had dreamed had really happened.

  In spite of Gregory’s pompous, hurtful speech, in spite of the fact that it was Gregory who lay next to her, wheezing heavily in his sleep, it was not Gregory that she dreamed about. She dreamed about Robert, the new friend she had met in the L-shaped kitchen at Ashdown. She dreamed that he was in great distress, and that she was the only person who knew why. She dreamed that Robert’s sister had died.

  The next morning, she expected to see him at breakfast in the kitchen; but he wasn’t there. Gregory left for London at about ten o’clock, without saying goodbye, and after that Sarah went on to campus to sit in the library, where she failed spectacularly to get any work done for several hours. She thought about Gregory a little, but more often she thought about Robert, and wondered how he was coping with his terrible news. Probably he would already have gone home: there would be parents to comfort, funeral arrangements to make.

  She sat in the library until four o’clock in the afternoon, brooding over this unhappy turn of events. Even now, Sarah had not quite learned the habit of monitoring her dreams, of keeping a constant watch over the boundaries between her dream world and her real life, and it still did not occur to her that she might have dreamed Robert’s sister’s death. It did not occur to her that Robert’s display of grief over the loss of his family cat, combined with the malicious slogan he had repeated to her – ‘Death to the Sisters’ – might have inspired this misleading fantasy. In any case, she had no accurate recollection of their encounter in the kitchen the night before: it had been entirely displaced by her dream. And while Robert himself would no doubt have been touched to know that she was sitting in the library thinking about him, worrying that his whole future life might be blighted by the premature death of his sister, there was really no need: for he was, at that moment, lying in the bath at Ashdown, with nothing more serious on his mind than a vague uncertainty about where he was going to eat that evening.

  Finally, it was a sharp thud on the desk beside her that startled Sarah out of her reverie. Someone had banged three books down and was now standing over her, smiling in an excited, rather self-satisfied way. It was Veronica, the strange, friendly woman from the Café Valladon.

  ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ she said. ‘I brought you something to think about.’

  The books’ titles were The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, Sexual Politics by Kate Millett and The Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter. Two of these Sarah had read already.

  ‘Give them a try,’ said Veronica, ‘and then come and talk to me. You’ll find me in the Café most days, especially in the afternoons.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Sarah. She was too surprised to add anything else.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Veronica. As she vanished into the darkness
between two stacks of books, Sarah was left with an impression of her long, supple back.

  ∗

  The bath-water was getting cold as Robert completed the task of shaving. As usual, he had left his least favourite part – the throat, and in particular the Adam’s apple – until last. The water, cloudy with soap and the grime from his body, was now also prickled with little black hairs. He rinsed his razor under the tap, attempting to dislodge the final recalcitrant shavings. “Wind howled around the walls of Ashdown as he sank further into the cooling water: at least it protected him from the fiercer chill of the bathroom, which was, absurdly, by far the largest and loftiest room on this floor of the house. He ran the razor over his cheeks again, dreamily: then he lifted a leg out of the water and examined its thin, pipe-cleaner whiteness with distaste. The hairs lay lank and flat against his shin and thigh. After a thoughtful moment he placed the blade of the razor just above the knee, and began to scrape. Soon he had cleared a little bare patch, about two inches square.

  He found shaving his legs absorbing at first, then merely mechanical. He stopped concentrating on the soft abrasive motion of the razor, and let his mind begin to wander in random patterns. First of all he thought about Muriel. Robert’s family had kept three cats during his lifetime, but she had been his favourite: the sweetest-natured, and the most affectionate. Even so, he was shocked – and somewhat ashamed of himself – to think how visibly affected he had been by the news of her death yesterday. He was sure that Sarah had noticed him crying when he talked to her in the kitchen. She probably despised him already. That was always what his father used to tell him, whenever he cried: ‘If a woman ever sees you like that, she’ll despise you. No woman likes a man to be weak. You want respect. Nobody respects a cry-baby.’ He could hear these words now, spoken in the only tone he could remember his father ever using towards him: scornful, unforgiving.

  Sarah had not seemed to despise him, though. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed, after all: she might have been too wrapped up in her own problems. That had been a peculiar story, about the man insulting her in the street. He hoped she wasn’t still worrying about it. She had nice eyes: metallic, pale blue, bordering on grey. Ambiguous eyes, warmly inviting and coolly intelligent at the same time.