FOUR
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
—Wordsworth
This wasn't what he had wanted at all, scuttling around trying to track someone down without knowing if he was dead or alive, emigrated, gaoled, dropped out, socially elevated or just erased from the face of the earth; trying to find a character whose company he couldn't abide and who under normal circumstances he would cross vast deserts to avoid.
Brad Cousins. Where the hell are you now?
The trail was erratic. Ella had already exercised her powers by obtaining—against university policy—an original home address and telephone number in Sale, Manchester. It led to an odd phone call.
"Mr, Cousins? My name is Lee Peterson. I'm an old ... friend of your son, from university days. I'm trying to get in touch with him." The line started crackling. "Do you know where I could get hold of him?"
"Nope."
"No idea?"
"I don't ask; he don't tell." Lee could hear the man's asthmatic breathing.
"Would Mrs. Cousins know?"
“She might; but she'll not tell; she's been dead six year since."
The line was beginning to break up.
"Where was he last time you heard?"
"Saudi . .. Germany. .. Yugoslavia. .." He pronounced this last with a J.
"Can't you give me an idea?"
At last, and with an air of crushing disinterest, the man yielded the name PhileCo, a Midlands pharmaceutical company his son had worked for some time ago. From PhileCo the unpromising trail led through four drug companies, for which Cousins had been a sales rep in less than as many years. It ran cold with a West Country firm called Lytex, where a chatty personnel officer admitted that, yes, the man had been an employee of the company representing their product to GPs in the region, but that after a few months of mediocre returns he had stopped weighing in for work. Lee emerged from the conversation with an address in Cornwall.
He made careful preparations, packing a double change of clothes, a set of brushes, a travel shaver and a gift manicure set. A manicure set? He wondered when he had become so fastidious.
He took the train to Plymouth, and spent the journey sipping weak tea and gazing gloomily at the landscape. In the carriage window he had three or more ears, multiple eyebrows and chins to spare. He almost liked himself better that way.
His thoughts turned to Ella. Their reunion had plunged him back into the morass of his adolescent longing. He didn't know whether to blame that on the dreaming or on Ella. He had hoped that his greater maturity would do something to defuse the excitement he felt in her presence, but just thinking about her made his cheeks burn.
She was a witch, he had decided. Or at least a mesmerist or a spellbinder of some kind. It was Ella, after all, who had led him into this whole bizarre situation. All she claimed to want was an end to the dreaming. Yet he knew that Ella was notoriously unclear about her own state of mind. She was not as in control as she liked to appear, and he knew that, behind her assertiveness, she would be depending on his support.
Her behaviour back at his flat had been ambiguous to say the least. She seemed to be signalling that she wanted intimacy, and yet she had kept him at arm's length. Then she had climbed into his bed half-way through the night, and he had had to pretend to be asleep to avoid making love to her. But at least since she had come his nights had been undisturbed by the repeated dream awakenings.
At Plymouth, Lee hired a Cavalier from a lady in an orange costume and lopsided orange lipstick (which made him think of Ella again). It was already late afternoon.
Dusk was settling. He drove out of town and crossed the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall, heading towards Gunnislake. By the time he reached the village it was dark, and then he got hopelessly lost looking for his turn-off. Eventually he found it—hardly more than a dirt track—and arrived at two isolated cottages. One slouched in semi-derelict condition with a collapsed roof and broken windows; the second was in only slightly better shape. A bare light bulb was burning in a downstairs room.
He drove his car as close as he could to the front door. On a wooden plaque on the wall, weather-split and almost completely effaced, Lee could just about discern the word Elderwine, He sighed, less than happy that he'd found the place.
He switched off the engine and killed the lights. He sat for a moment, hoping that someone would appear. Then he got out of the car and went to the door. No one answered his knock. He tried again, waited, and pushed at the handle. The door swung open; a pile of unopened envelopes lay on the mat. They were addressed to Brad Cousins. Lee went in.