The House on the Strand (3 page)

"You mean", I said, "that when you tried it on yourself you also went back in time? You saw what I did?"

"Precisely. I didn't expect it any more than you did. No, that's not true, because an experiment I was working on then made it remotely possible. It has to do with D.N.A., enzyme catalysts, molecular equilibria and the like—above your head, dear boy, I won't elaborate—but the point that interests me at the moment is that you and I apparently went into an identical period of time. Thirteenth or fourteenth century, wouldn't you say, judging from their clothes? I too saw the chap you describe as your horseman—Roger, didn't the Prior call him?—the rather slatternly girl by the fire, and someone else as well, a monk, which immediately suggested a tie-up with the mediaeval priory that was once part of Tywardreath. The point is this: does the drug reverse some chemical change in the memory systems of the brain, throwing it back to a particular thermodynamic situation which existed in the past, so that the sensations elsewhere in the brain are repeated? If it does, why does the molecular brew return to that particular moment in time? Why not yesterday, five years ago, or a hundred and twenty years? It could be—and this is the thing that excites me—it could be that there is some very potent link connecting the taker of the drug with the first human image recorded in the brain, while under the drug's influence. In both our cases we saw the horseman. The compulsion to follow him was particularly urgent. You felt it, so did I. What I don't yet know is why he plays Virgil to our Dante in this particular Inferno, but he does, there's no escaping him. I've made the 'trip'—to use the students' phraseology—a number of times, and he's invariably there. You'll find the same thing happens on your next adventure. He always takes charge." The assumption that I was to continue acting as guineapig for Magnus did not surprise me. It was typical of our many years of friendship, both at Cambridge and afterwards. He called the tune, and I danced, in God only knew how many disreputable escapades in our undergraduate life together, and later when we went our separate ways, he to his career as a biophysicist and thence to a professorship at London University, I to the tamer routine of a publisher's office. My marriage to Vita three years ago had made the first break between us, possibly a salutary one for us both. The sudden offer of his house for the summer holidays, which I had accepted gratefully, being between jobs—Vita was urging me to accept a directorship in a flourishing New York publishing firm run by her brother, and I needed time to decide—now appeared to have strings attached. The long, lazy days with which he had baited me, lying about in the garden, sailing across the bay, were beginning to take on another aspect.

"Now look here, Magnus," I said, "I did this for you today because I was curious, and also because I was on my own, and whether the drug had any effect or not didn't matter one way or the other. It's quite out of the question to go on. When Vita and her children arrive I shall be tied up with them."

"When do they come?"

"The boys break up in about a week. Vita's flying back from New York to fetch them from school and bring them down here."

"That's all right. You can achieve a lot in a week. Look, I must go. I'll ring you at the same time tomorrow. Goodbye."

He had gone. I was left holding the receiver, with a hundred questions to ask and nothing resolved. How damnably typical of Magnus. He had not even told me if I must expect some side-effect from his hell-brew of synthetic fungus and monkeys' brain-cells, or whatever the solution was that he had extracted from his range of loathsome bottles. The vertigo might seize me again, and the nausea too. I might suddenly go blind, or mad, or both. To hell with Magnus and his freak experiment... I decided to go upstairs and take a bath. It would be a relief to strip off my sweaty shirt, torn trousers, the lot, and relax in a tub of steaming water primed with bath-oil— Magnus was nothing if not fastidious in his tastes. Vita would approve of the bedroom suite he had put at our disposal, his own, in point of fact, bedroom, bathroom, dressing-room, the bedroom with a stunning view across the bay.

I lay back in the bath, letting the water run until it reached my chin, and thought of our last evening in London, when his dubious experiment had been proposed. Previously he had merely suggested that, if I wanted somewhere to go during the boys' school holidays, Kilmarth was mine for the taking. I had telephoned Vita in New York, pressing the offer. Vita, not altogether enthusiastic, being a hot-house plant like many American women, and usually preferring to take a vacation under a Mediterranean sky with a casino handy, demurred that it always rained in Cornwall, didn't it, and would the house be warm enough, and what should we do about food? I reassured her on all these points, even to the daily woman who came up every morning from the village, and finally she agreed, chiefly, I think, because I had explained there was a dish-washer and an outsize fridge in the lately converted kitchen. Magnus was much amused when I told him.

Three years of marriage, he said, and the dish-washer means more to your conjugal life than the double bed I'm throwing in for good measure. I warned you it wouldn't last. The marriage, I mean, not the bed. I skated over the somewhat thorny topic of my marriage, which was going through a period of reaction after the first impulsive, passionate twelve months, for if it was thorny this was largely because I wanted to remain in England and Vita wanted me to settle in the States. In any event, neither my marriage nor my future job concerned Magnus, and he passed on to talk about the house, the various changes he had made since his parents had died—I had stayed there several times when we were at Cambridge—and how he had converted the old laundry in the basement to a laboratory, just for the fun of it, so that he could amuse himself with experiments that would have no connection with his work in London. On this last occasion he had prepared the ground well with an excellent dinner, and I was under the usual spell of his personality, when he suddenly said, "I've had what I think is a success with one particular piece of research. A combination of plant and chemical into a drug which has an extraordinary effect upon the brain."

His manner was casual, but Magnus was always casual when he was making some statement that was important to him.

"I thought all the so-called hard drugs had that effect," I said. "The people who take them, mescalin, L.S.D., or whatever, pass into a world of fantasy filled with exotic blooms and imagine they're in Paradise."

He poured more brandy into my glass. "There was no fantasy about the world I entered," he said. "It was very real indeed." This piqued my curiosity. A world other than his own egotistical centre would have to possess some special attraction to draw him into it.

"What sort of world?" I asked.

"The past," he answered.

I remember laughing as I cupped the brandy glass in my hand. "All your sins, do you mean? The evil deeds of a misspent youth?"

"No, no," he shook his head impatiently, "nothing personal at all. I was merely an observer. No, the fact was.." he broke off and shrugged his shoulders. "I won't tell you what I saw: it would spoil the experiment for you."

"Spoil the experiment for me?"

"Yes. I want you to try the drug yourself and see if it produces the same effect."

I shook my head. "Oh, no," I told him, "we're not at Cambridge any more. Twenty years ago I might have swallowed one of your concoctions and risked death. Not any more."

"I'm not asking you to risk death," he said impatiently. "I'm asking you to give up twenty minutes, possibly an hour, of an idle afternoon, before Vita and the children arrive, by trying an experiment on yourself that may change the whole conception of time as we know it at present." There was no doubt that he meant every word he said. He was no longer the flippant Magnus of Cambridge days: he was a professor of biophysics, already famous in his particular field, and, although I understood little if anything of his life's work, I realised that if he really had hit upon some remarkable drug he might be mistaken in its importance, but he was not lying about his own evaluation of it.

"Why me?" I asked. "Why not try it on your disciples in London University under proper conditions?"

"Because it would be premature," he said, "and because I'm not prepared to risk telling anyone, not even my disciples, as you choose to call them. You are the only one to know that I'm even thinking along these particular lines, which is way outside the stuff I usually do. I stumbled on this thing by chance, and I've got to find out more about it before I'm even remotely satisfied that it has possibilities. I intend to work on it when I come down to Kilmarth in September. Meanwhile, you're going to be alone in the house. You could at least try it once, and report back. I may be entirely wrong about it. It may have no effect upon you except to turn your hands and feet temporarily numb and make your brain, such as you possess, dear boy, rather more alert than it is at present."

Of course in the end, after another glass of brandy, he had talked me into it. He gave me detailed instructions about the lab, he gave me the keys to the lab itself and to the cupboard where he kept the drug, and described the sudden effect it might have—no intervening stage, but direct transition from one state to another—and he said something about the after-effects, the possibility of nausea. It was only when I asked him directly what I was likely to see that he became evasive. "No," he said, "it might predispose you, unconsciously, to see what I saw. You've got to make this experiment with an open mind, unprejudiced."

A few days later I left London and drove to Cornwall. The house was aired and ready—Magnus had briefed Mrs. Collins from Polkerris, the small village below Kilmarth—and I found vases filled with flowers, food in the fridge, and fires in the music-room and the library, although it was mid-July; Vita could not have done better herself. I spent the first couple of days enjoying the peace of the place, and the comfort, too, which, if I remembered rightly, had been lacking in former times when Magnus's delightful and somewhat eccentric parents were in command. The father, Commander Lane, had been a retired naval man with a passion for sailing a ten-ton yacht in which we were invariably sea-sick, the mother a vague, haphazard creature of great charm who pottered about in an enormous broad-brimmed hat whatever the weather, indoors and out, and spent her time snipping the dead heads off roses, which she grew with passion but with singular lack of real success. I laughed at them and loved them, and when they died within twelve months of one another I was almost more distressed than Magnus was himself. It all seemed a long time ago now. The house was a good deal changed and modernised, yet somehow their engaging presence lingered still, or so I had thought, those first few days. Now, after the experiment, I was not so sure. Unless, having seldom penetrated the basement in those early holidays, I had been unaware that it held other memories.

I got out of the bath and dried myself, put on a change of clothes, lit a cigarette, and went downstairs to the music-room, so called in lieu of the more conventional drawing-room because Magnus's parents excelled at playing and singing duets. I wondered if it was still too soon to pour myself the drink I badly needed. Better be safe than sorry—I would wait another hour.

I switched on the radiogram and picked a record at random from the top of the stack. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 might restore my poise and equanimity. Magnus must have mixed up his records the last time he was down, however, for it was not the measured strains of Bach that fell upon my ears, as I lay stretched on the sofa before the log fire, but the insidious, disquieting murmur of Debussy's La Mer. Odd choice for Magnus when he had been down at Easter. I thought he eschewed the romantic composers. I must have been mistaken, unless his taste had changed through the years. Or had his dabbling in the unknown awakened a liking for more mystical sounds, the magical conjuring of sea upon the shore? Had Magnus seen the estuary sweeping deep into the land, as I had done this afternoon? Had he seen the green fields sharp and clear, the blue water prodding the valley, the stone walls of the Priory graven against the hill? I did not know: he had not told me. So much unasked on that abortive telephone conversation. So much unsaid. I let the record play to the end, but far from calming me it had the opposite effect. The house was strangely silent now the music had stopped, and with the rise and fall of La Mer still lingering in my head I walked through the hall to the library and looked out of the wide window to the sea. It was slatey grey, whipped darker in places by a westerly wind, yet calm, with little swell. Different from the more turbulent blue sea of afternoon glimpsed in that other world. There are two staircases descending to the basement at Kilmarth. The first, leading from the hall, goes direct to the cellars and the boiler-room, and thence to the door into the patio. The second is reached by passing through the kitchen, and so down to the back entrance, the old kitchen, scullery, larder and laundry. It was the laundry, reached by the second staircase, that Magnus had converted to a laboratory. I went down these stairs, turned the key of the door, and entered the laboratory once again. There was nothing clinical about it. The old sink still stood upon the stone flagged floor beneath a small barred window. Beside it was an open fireplace, with a cloam oven, used in old days for baking bread, cut into the thickness of the wall. In the cobwebbed ceiling were rusty hooks, from which in former times salted meat and hams must have hung.

Magnus had ranged his curious exhibits along the slatted shelves fixed to the walls. Some of them were skeletons, but others were still intact, preserved in a chemical solution, their flesh bleached pale. Most were hard to distinguish—for all I knew they could have been kittens in embyro form, or even rats. The two specimens I recognised were the monkey's head, the smooth skull perfectly preserved, like the bald pate of a tiny unborn child, with eyes dosed, and, next to it, a second monkey's head from which the brain had been removed, and which now lay in a jar near by, pickled and brown. There were other jars and other bottles that held fungi, plants and grasses, grotesquely shaped, with spreading tentacles and curling leaves.