‘There was such a long pause I wondered whether Mama and Papa were ever going to speak to one another again. Not that I feared they had quarrelled, only we children had quarrels, but they had each fallen into a dream.’ (Rebecca West, 'The Fountain Overflows, 1957 —- opening sentence.)

I have been writing about dreams which can occur, as Rebecca West reminds me, at any point of day or night, at any point in the conversation, at any point you might choose to exit this or that moment. Adults can fall into dream states when they run out of ideas, when they meet an impasse or face a contretemps (certainly something implacably French). My character, Edith Cull, and her counterpart, Dorothy Fortescue, frequently fall into dream states. It is a tried and tested habit. Edith goes to rejoin her life on screen, at the cinema, and Dorothy to her garden and the reflections in her pond. Dreams are a form of daily overflow; what we cannot process on the surface of life must all go somewhere. Our desire, our longing, our hesitations and prevarications, the delineations of our fantasies. Our wish-fulfilments. All writers know this: you cannot write unless you lack something. You write towards that lack and the lack itself is a requirement, an essential supply, a primary resource. And the lack is the space you push your imagined body towards and into as I keep pushing Edith back towards her old suitcase at the back of her wardrobe; and then to the chemist where she goes, provisionally, for supplies of tonics and tinctures; to the cinema to the same seat by the aisle. All three are spaces not quite supplying her with something, so she returns; and all three are reservoirs for unconscious imaginings, for projections. What Edith is really in search of is her own biography, a story to tell others of her own significance, her memento mori. The right words to stir interest and hold our attention. Memorable words, words you might carve on a tomb stone.

Of course, Edith couldn’t say, not in the way she wanted to, the way they do in the pictures. Words slip out there, even the awkward ones; the ones that say, ‘Oh darling, I do love you so!’ That sort, not the sort you say to Mary who would have you trussed up in no time on your own words mixed with hers. Words such as peculiar and poor thing and terribly odd and before long all she would be is a terribly odd thing. Terribly terribly odd.  Mary with her scarf tied briskly around her neck by a gold ring; never too long -- Mary was not the sort to allow anything to flutter on the breeze.

        Instead, she stammered. Stammering is always a usual device when delivering news you are not sure of; news you have only just adopted as your own, news new to you, still being adopted in your own mind; definitely not subconscious, certainly self-conscious, painfully, painfully so.

        ‘Mr. Jarvis is selling indecent things.’

        What do you say, Edith? Mr. Jarvis?

        The chemist.

        Yes, I’m well aware who Mr. Jarvis is. What of him? What do you say?

        ‘Indecent.’ Edith could hear her voice petering out.

        Indecent?

        Yes.

        What do you mean, Edith, indecent?

        Mr. Jarvis.

        What about him?

        Edith could feel the bones in her throat turning dry and stuck. She opened her mouth, but the words did not come out.

        I’ve seen things.

        What sort of things, Edith? What are you saying?

        She froze. He’s selling magazines for men.

        Mary’s mouth opened and closed.

        What sort of magazines, Edith?

        The sort men like.

        What sort, Edith? There is nothing wrong with Mr. Jarvis selling magazines. All sorts of people buy magazines these days. They have subscriptions, all perfectly decent.

        A dry bone. She spat it out.

        ‘The sort for pleasure.’ The bone lay on the ground; she could feel it touching her toe. She rolled it back and forth back and forth. Mr. Jarvis was on the floor, his collarbone, his ear – do ears have bones?

        The sort for men and girls. She sputtered. Men with girls. ‘I imagine they go in the back way . . .’ Now the bone was rolling away. ‘Up and down the stairs, probably at night, but certainly up and down the stairs. I’ve seen them – at least one – she was running away.’

        Who was running away, Edith? Running where?

        ‘Down the stairs . . . the backstairs?’

        What backstairs?

        Mr. Jarvis’s.

        I see. But Mary did not. She did not see what Edith saw.  She had not been to the pictures as Edith had. She had not been on screen as Edith had for so long now it was her whole life. Mary was not a connoisseur of pictures. She did not know the plots; she had no scripts. She did not know that people run away when they are ashamed; when they are detected by another man, a snooping man, a man who comes back at just the wrong moment to discover them. There are many such interfering sorts, and they typically arrive at the most inopportune moment; just when the champagne is out, the glasses chinking, the engagement going forth, the proud father giving his speech, the envious mother looking on, the brother grinning sardonically hoping for it all to blow up. Just then. There is a long tradition of unfortunate arrivals, excruciating exits and entrances. Bachelors; lodgers; colleagues with a special favour, a flat lent, a flat taken; maiden aunts with gifts and prophecies; maiden aunts with God and sin eager to deliver; godfathers with whisky; single men wrapped in silk cravats with supercilious airs; a young doctor, hasty and curious, inquiring, a detective. His hat tipping backwards and forwards against the wind, against the rain, to hide his face.

        ‘Good evening, Madam? I have come to ask a few questions.’

But Edith wasn’t ready; she didn’t have enough to tell. Not on Mr. Jarvis, not on herself, and life was running out. Where were her materials? What was her script? How would she carry on?

        Edith went scrabbling over the rocks. She went back to her flat on the twelfth floor and began looking and looking, she began hunting, and the trail of her hunt became narrower and narrower and more and more desperate. What did she have? Where were her facts? On herself? On him? Life is but a dream. No, she had an archive: at the back of her wardrobe was her blue suitcase. Pull out the contents. Tear it apart. This was her life:

A blue suitcase fading around the rim, the zip a little stuck and saggy.

Note cards covered in pine trees from unknown places. California? Edith turned it over. Scotland. Scots Pines. Provenance unknown? Perhaps the stationer’s in the arcade. Perhaps the church sale some years ago. Faded, never sent. A torn sticker stuck to the envelope at the front. ’10 pence.’ The sum was humiliating.

Letters. A few from Meg, all dated, all ten years ago or more, some twenty. Edith turned them over. All saying the same thing. ‘Father is much the same. He spends most of his time in his study poring over his texts. Pliny is still his favourite. He has few visitors, only the curate, who keeps changing . . . now takes three sugars in his tea . . . I need to find a chimneysweep but Father won’t hear of anyone replacing Old Stewart so we’re done for and the whole house may go up in flames . . .’

Postcards. A few from Jonny hastily written. Edith couldn’t remember the details; and she couldn’t remember the person she had been much upon receiving them. She looked for her face, but it was a blank my lord and Jonny’s handwriting was a scrawl. ‘I’ve met some fine chaps.’ Edith stared at the word, ‘chaps’, an odd choice of word for Jonny, not his at all. Borrowed, found.

Three old pocketbook diaries with a few squares filled in: ‘hymns 104, 238, 449.’ She must have given up after a while. Hymns were hymns after all and they were noted on the ledger in the aisle; there was no need for this; her handwriting looked despondent, spotty, hesitant.

A set of calendars – Edith counted six– showing rural scenes with young animals. Ducks caught swimming in a village pond; lambs frisking in fields; a stag and a deer staring off into the distance. Grey and brown with flecks of green, a spark of yellow here and there, but the photographs were grainy and worn — another church sale. Almost all of them were blank. Edith flicked through and found a few scattered birthdays, but all known to her: Meg’s, Mother’s, Father’s, Jonny’s, her own – a lonely set of dates. Meg and hers fell together in April as though neatly planned, one early in the month, one late.

A small red notebook marked ‘Shopping.’: a list of household necessities: lightbulbs, dishcloths, soap, detergent, tea, biscuits. Edith had created separate columns for each: Provisions, Household – and then something else – Holidays. Edith puzzled. What had she meant? She did not take holidays.

Nothing to go on, and Mr. Jarvis was mentioned nowhere, not even on her shopping list. Why would he be? The chemist was the most ordinary of places; somewhere she went to buy Epsom salts, soap and cough tincture, lavender sachets to line her drawers and aspirin for her throbbing muscles, her aching head, her tired heart. (POND LIFE: A STORY OFF BIOGRAPHICAL EXTINCTION)