Prologue
It isn't what you know or don't know: it's what you allow yourself to know. I understand this now. I'm on my way home, in a second-class smoker from Victoria. I stare out over the network of roofs, shining with rain. The train wheels click into a canter. I have to change on to the branch line at Ashford, but that's a long way yet.
It turns out that I knew everything. All the facts were in my head and always had been. I ignored them, because it was easier. I didn't want to make connections. I've begun to understand that I've been half-asleep all my life, and now I'm waking up. Or perhaps I'm kidding myself, and it's like one of those nightmares where you push your way up through sticky layers of consciousness and think you've woken. You sweat with relief because it's over. You're back in the waking world. And then, out of the corner of your eye, you see them coming.
I dream that I'm back at Stopstone. It's night, and I'm huddled in bed. At last I manage to tip myself over the border into sleep, and it's then that my door bursts open and my brothers crash into the room. They pull the bedclothes off me. They don't need to tell me not to cry out. One grabs my feet and the other grips me under the shoulders, drags me half off the bed and then lets go and takes hold of my wrists instead. They swing me and my shoulders burn. I'm afraid they will pull my arms out of their sockets. I can smell the sweat of them. It's stinky, like grown-up sweat. They lug me to the window. I see that the sash is right up and I don't know how they did that. They push and shove until they have bundled me on to the sill. Now they are each holding one of my arms. The terrace is below me, two floors down. They will drop me and tell everyone that I was sleepwalking. They say nothing but they work together. There is a push in my back and I scrape over the sill and dangle from my brothers' hands. Now I hear them counting: 'Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two…'
Soon it will be over. Perhaps I will fly. Perhaps they will let go of me and I will fly over the grass and the dark trees and the lake and they will never see me again. But my animal breath pants out of me and urine trickles down my leg.
'… one…' They shake me, as if they want to shake me wide-awake in case I miss any of what they are doing to me. Perhaps they want me to cry out now, but I can't.
'BLAST-OFF!'
I never went beyond that in my dreams. I woke in my cell.
I never spoke about it to anyone but Giles. I opened myself to him. I don't even know whether I trusted him or not. The word didn't apply. There was nothing Giles didn't know about me. Nothing in me that he couldn't touch.
I'm not sure about love. What it is, and what it means. But now I think that nobody is sure. Instead, we conspire to convince one another. That winter afternoon in my digs on the Madingley Road. Giles was sitting on my bed, reading. Every so often he would turn to me. He didn't smile. He would take me in, and then he would go back to his book. I was sure then.
Once the train reaches Ashford, I have to change on to the branch line. There is a little train to the coast. There are any number of stops before it reaches the last one. East Knigge. Lily, and the children.
I've got some time yet. I tell myself I'm going home, although I've never seen the place before.
