S I XT E E N
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but, waking, no such matter
—Shakespeare
Honora was not seen on dreamside again. It was obvious to the other three that she had made a conscious decision not to return there. It must have taken some struggle. Entry into dreamside had once required considerable discipline and effort; now they were caught in an undertow which delivered them there unasked, and not to be drawn there whenever they slept required serious resistance.
Ella had her suspicions about what was happening. She sensed that Brad Cousins was in some malevolent way responsible, though she was unable to guess why. And he wouldn't be drawn.
"What happened between you two?" she asked for the fifth time. They sat in a pub with ultraviolet strip lighting and a jukebox belting out Motown classics. Brad offered a shrug.
"Don't try to dismiss the question, Brad."
"I'm not trying to dismiss the question, I am dismissing the question."
"Something happened on dreamside that's made her cut herself off from us, and I know it's something you did."
"How do you know that?"
"Because you've the guts of a sewer rat."
"Ease up Ella," said Lee, bringing in the beer. "Tell us what happened when you went to her room."
"She was in there. I know it. She pretended she wasn't. I even shouted that I knew she was there, but she wouldn't open the door and she wouldn't speak to me." She jabbed a finger dangerously close to Brad's face. "He's responsible."
"It's been nearly five weeks," said Lee.
"You know what it's about, don't you Brad?"
"Get off my back. Go and ask her for Christ's sake."
"No, I'm asking you." Ella turned to Lee. "Honora won't speak to us, so we've only got this reptile to tell us."
Brad suddenly slammed down his pint glass sending a tide of beer cascading across the table. Lee and Ella jumped back. "Why don't you get a muzzle on that rabid mouth of yours, jealous bitch." He stormed out of the bar, slamming a foot into the jukebox and bouncing the stylus into silence.
"You asked for that," said Lee.
Ella had actually paid three unanswered visits to Honora's room. Each time there had been a light on and a radio playing, but Honora had consistently refused to respond. They never saw her around the university campus and she didn't attend lectures.
Visits to dreamside were never quite the same again. There was a marked down-turn in the excitement of just being there. The sense of expectation had died. Before, the place had always been seeded with the scent of honeysuckle. Now it was flat and perfumeless, and troubled by underlying anxieties more felt than understood. They never referred to this anxiety, and the more it went unspoken, the more it grew. Without saying anything, they found themselves resisting the powerful undertow that had been taking them unasked for so long. They were shocked at the effort required to stay away, but eventually their visits thinned out, then dried up completely.
In waking time, things started to go badly for Ella and Lee too. Perhaps this deterioration in their relationship caused the dreamside sag. When it came down to it, the best part of their romance had been conducted on dreamside, and sometimes, now, they were at a loss with each other's ordinariness.
One afternoon Lee looked at Ella, and where he had formerly seen an exotic priestess, there was now a girl with scuffed shoes and hastily applied lipstick.
Ella woke up one morning, and where she had once lain with a young warrior bearing a flaming torch into the dark labyrinths of the psyche, she now found herself in bed alongside a boy with a fluffy beard, who hadn't much to say for himself.
Problems were compounded when Brad "confessed" to Lee that he and Ella had, on occasion, successfully conducted their own dreamtime rendezvous. Lee was genuinely shocked. It had never occurred to him that other dreamtime activities might have been going on in his absence.
"It's a lie," Ella protested, "and it's ridiculous."
"Maybe that's what he meant when he called you jealous."
"I don't believe I'm hearing this! You take in any lie that ape comes out with, and you don't believe a word I say! How can you do that to me?"
Lee let the idea niggle him. Ella was livid. They argued, ridiculously and histrionically, but most of all badly. After that they didn't see each other for over a week.
Lee made the first conciliatory move, driven by some news he had heard in the union bar.
"She did what?" Ella went white.
"She took a load of pills. They had to pump her stomach."
"Oh God! Can we go and see her?"
"Apparently she's already gone home."
"What? Ireland home?"
"Yes, Ireland home."
"When did all this happen?"
"Four or five days ago."
"But what about her course?Her exams?" Lee only shrugged. "Why did I know that something like this was going to happen? We never paid enough attention to her. We were too wrapped up in ourselves."
"Yes."
Ella sat down and began to roll a cigarette. "Please stay with me tonight," she said, without looking up. "I get frightened at night and I'm having bad dreams."
Lee nodded. "You know I want to stay with you."
They made friends again, and made love again. The news about Honora made them vulnerable, and for a while they were gentle with each other.
The day after Lee broke the news, Ella got Honora's home telephone number from the university registrar. Honora's father answered, asked who it was and went to fetch his daughter. He came back on the line to tell her that Honora wasn't well enough to come to the phone, but that she was much better and thank you for calling.
Lee, on going to find out how much Brad knew, discovered that he had cleared out of his bed-sit without notice. It had been some time since he had turned in for a lecture, and none of his fellow medical students had seen him in weeks. Lee got Brad's landlady to unlock the door of his room. She stood over him, shaking her keys and listing complaints against student tenants while he inspected the abandoned room. There were a number of medical reference books and a shelf full of sci-fi paperbacks; a battered mono record player and a handful of scratched and sleeveless albums; an oil-fired roadwork lantern, a police bollard and the amber dome from a Belisha beacon, plus other trophies and street paraphernalia which for some reason he felt happy to keep in his room; and a few clothes, though all the decent stuff had gone along with his suitcase and bags. There was nothing there he wasn't better off without. Lee told the landlady differently, but he knew for certain that Brad wouldn't be coming back.
With two of them gone, it didn't come as a complete surprise to Lee, when, towards the end of the spring term, a pink handwritten envelope appeared in his room one morning. It had been shoved under the door sometime during the small hours:
Dear Lee, I still love you but I've got to get my head straightened out. Remember that holiday we planned for the Greeks Islands, before every thing got heavy? That's where I'm going, I don't know for how long. Maybe I will come back\ after that and finish my degree, though it's pointless at the moment—/ haven't done a stroke of work since I met you and we got mixed up in the dreaming. I haven't got the guts to face you with this, which is why the letter. You're a good man and there will never be any forgetting the things we have done but I've got to get out of it. I'm crying while I'm writing this. I meant that about still loving you. Finish your studies, at least one of us should. Ella
Though it was half-expected, Lee was devastated. The four of them had been isolated from the rest of the university, and now he was left completely alone. Honora had been carried out on a stretcher; Brad had bolted; and now Ella had run away to hide. It was exactly a year since he and Ella had come together. He knew he would never get over her.
Like a good boy he stayed at the university and completed his studies. From the end of that term he lived like a monk, got his head down and caught up on a year's neglected reading. He worked hard and was awarded a respectable but undistinguished degree.
He didn't expect to see the others again. Three postcards from Ella arrived in the first couple of months. They showed pictures of brilliantly whitewashed houses against an improbably blue sky, classical temples and definitive Mediterranean sunsets. On their reverse sides were tightly written, difficult-to-read messages with excited descriptions and introspective diversions, all thoroughly impersonal. But Lee kept the postcards and pinned them on his wall close to his pillow as if they would act as a charm against bad dreams and a remedy for spoiled memories. No more arrived.