The Womb of Time Read online

  Chapter One

  Faint and Visionary Colors

  Halsted thought that there was a certain murky irony in the fact that the automobile that broke down seven miles short of Dunwich was a Ford. It was not a Model T, but it was rectangular in shape and black in color: the form and appearance for which the public of his homeland had been supposed to settle, rather than paying more for the subtle and evanescent privileges of style. The Great American Public had defied Ford’s expectations in spectacular fashion, but here in utilitarian England, cars really did seem to be mostly rectangular and mostly black, and they seemed to break down a lot.

  The unhappy driver evidently saw no irony in the event, but merely an occasion for gloomy melancholy. The Ford was the instrument of his living, and it had let him down, and that was all there was to it. He probably did not think of the vehicle as an American car, or of “Ford” as an actual person. As Halsted waited by the roadside for the despondent driver to peer under the hood, however, in the hope that some improvised repair might be possible, he was acutely conscious of the fact that he was an American from New England attempting to reach one of the strangest, remotest and most troubled parts of Old England in an American car, and that a Ford automobile had let him down. It seemed an ominous combination of circumstances.

  Because Halsted was an academic, who had done his research scrupulously before setting out from his temporary abode in Oxford—in the Bodleian Library, no less—he was also conscious of the fact that the car must have broken down almost at the exact point at which one of the three Roman roads that had once converged upon the ancient sea-port of Sinomagus ended, just as the other two had ended, seven miles short.

  Although the matter of the Roman roads was certainly puzzling, Halsted was not at all sure that the apparent mystery was anything more than a subjective phenomenon: a phantom of his American, opium-confused eye. He had not taken any opium, of course—it seemed to be much more difficult to get one’s hands on laudanum in England in 1935 than it had apparently been in 1821—but he felt nevertheless that he was bound to dwell in the fog of its confusion while he was in dogged pursuit of the shade of Thomas De Quincey: not the poet’s posthumous shade, which had been freed from its fleshy envelope when old and reputedly wise in 1859, but the shade of the younger individual who had penned his “Confessions of an Opium-Eater” while teetering on the brink of desperation.

  The driver finally raised his head from the despairing inspection he had carried out beneath the hood—or the “bonnet”, as he called it. The Englishman’s face wore such a hangdog expression that Halstead felt a pang of sympathy for him. After all, the driver’s tragedy really was greater than his own.

  Dusk was already falling, and there was so much cloud in the sky that the impending darkness was bound to be Stygian. It would be direly difficult for a man on foot to stay on the unlit road, and Halsted had no intention of attempting to walk the remaining seven miles. Nor had he any intention of leaving his suitcases behind in the car, in the hope that they might follow at their leisure, at the whim of circumstance.

  “If yew’d care to wait here, zur,” the driver eventually said, reluctantly. “Oi’ll walk to the farm we passed half’n mile back. Farmer moight take yew on to the Hidden Crown on his tractor.”

  “His tractor?”

  “Better that than a haycart, zur—mark my words.”

  “If that’s the best you can do…” Halsted said, with a sigh.

  The driver immediately set off along the straight and lonely road, heading directly into the blood red aura that the sunset had left behind. He was trudging rather than walking, but Halsted could not find it in his heart to begrudge the poor fellow a certain weary ponderousness in his step. It suited the location as well as the occasion, for the surrounding countryside seemed flat and thoroughly drab, as if suffering from a deadly combination of exhaustion and ennui.

  The end of summer was some way off, according to the calendar, but in agricultural terms, the climactic harvest was about to descend upon the crops that had been swelling for months, and were now lying heavy upon the sullen earth. At the summit of their ripeness, the barley and the beets seemed, in some strange fashion, already to have begun to decay; somehow, they appeared to be passing from being not-quite-ripe to overripe, never having attained a transient moment of perfection. Halsted couldn’t be sure whether it was the landscape that was imposing the impression on him or the other way around; since leaving America, the scene of his crushing disappointment in love, he had tried to feel, think and act as if he were a person making a new start without undue baggage, but he suspected that all the resentful feelings he had tried so hard to efface were still there, lurking beneath the surface of his intentions, ready to surface again if provided with the correct stimulus.

  The subject of his research, Thomas De Quincey, had written about that too, in an essay on “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain”, which likened the human mind to a piece of vellum that had been scraped clean of writing in order to be re-used, but retained sufficient imprint of all its previous texts to reveal them once again, if treated with ingenious chemistry. As he stared at the landscape, however, desolate in spite of its manifest fecundity, Halsted could not help reflecting that the microcosm of the human brain, in that respect, was merely mirroring the macrocosm of the world, in which things supposedly erased by time were never entirely lost, remaining ever-legible—but not ever-comprehensible—to eyes equipped with the appropriate intellectual chemistry.

  For which we should be thankful, he added, silently, else history and learning would be impossible, and mythic poetry meaningless.

  As a literature professor, Halsted didn’t know quite enough about the history of painting to know whether he was too far north and east to be in “Constable country”, but he certainly couldn’t see anything in his immediate surroundings to delight a painter’s eye, in spite of the spectacular coloring of the light, still tinted by the recently-vanished sun. The crowded beet-fields seemed uncomfortable and oppressed; the hedgerows were so overcrowded with greenery as to seem solid and inert. They were, to be sure, still busy with the fluttering of invisible birds, but the evening songs sounded oddly plaintive and dispirited as they diminished by degrees while the darkness gathered.

  Halsted wondered whether De Quincey had felt the same as he had passed this way in a coach a hundred and fourteen years before—or whether he would have, if his coach had broken down, perhaps because one of the horses had gone lame. The American could not imagine that the landscape had changed a great deal, except for the telegraph poles lined up along the road and the electricity pylons cutting across the fields at an angle. The hedges would be much the same, and the crops in the fields at exactly the same stage of development, indolently expectant of the imminent massacre. De Quincey would have been even more exhausted than he was, though, and far more desperate in mind and body—and would probably have been drugged up to the eyeballs…

  Unless, of course, the poet’s laudanum bottle had been as empty as his purse, leaving him in the clawed grip of withdrawal…

  Halsted shivered in sympathy. Sometimes, he thought, I try a little too hard to identify with the authors I read and study—but that’s what real reading is all about. That’s what literature is supposed to do: allow us to identify with other minds, escape from the prison-cells of individual consciousness and see the world as others once saw it, in the hope that one day, if we can accumulate the wisdom of a sufficient number of sufficiently fine minds, we might glimpse reality in all its glory…

  At the end of the day, though, he simply didn’t know whether or not De Quincey’s medicine-bottle had been empty on the evening of August eleventh, 1821, any more than he knew whether or not the hired coach in which he
and his newly-struck acquaintances had been traveling had broken down somewhere between Colchester and Dunwich. The Wychelow letter had been somewhat lacking in detail, and had given no clue to such fascinating trivia.

  Before the publication of the Wychelow letter a year earlier, Halsted and every other De Quincey scholar in the world had believed that, when De Quincey had gone on the run from his York Street lodgings in London in order to dodge his creditors, he had spent the next fortnight hanging out in coffee houses—coffee houses in coaching inns, because they were the only ones in which he could get credit, by virtue of being a regular traveler between Grasmere and the capital. The text of the letter—which was dated August thirtieth, 1821, and signed by one Alfred Wychelow, vicar of St. Peter’s, Earley—had, however, revealed that Wychelow and a fellow antiquarian, Stephen Paston of Caister, had invited the destitute poet and journalist to accompany them on an expedition to the coastal village of Dunwich, in Suffolk. It had been there, at an inn called the Old Forge, that De Quincey had spent the greater part of the middle weeks of August 1821, in the company of the two antiquarians.

  The timing was significant, historically speaking, because it was on the twenty-second of August that De Quincey had delivered the manuscript of the first version of “Confessions of an Opium-Eater” to his friend and publisher John Taylor, the co-proprietor of The London Magazine. The publication of that essay, in the September and October issues of the magazine, had caused something of a sensation, and had launched De Quincey—somewhat belatedly—on the road to enduring fame. It now seemed that at least part of the manuscript, and perhaps all of it, had been written in Dunwich, at the Old Forge Inn.

  Although the letter had been published in an obscure English periodical, the news had not taken long to reach the more elevated groves of Academe, and had then spread like wildfire through the community of scholars interested in the English Romantic Movement. Some had condemned it as a hoax, on the grounds that initial enquiries had suggested that there was no Old Forge Inn in Dunwich, but more persistent investigations had revealed that the establishment in question had simply changed its name, and was now known as the Hidden Crown—a ploy presumably motivated by the hope of cashing in on the legend that Dunwich had been the location of one of Three Holy Crowns whose supernatural duty it was to keep the English nation safe from invasion. The Dunwich crown was rumored to have been lost in the Great Storm of New Year’s Day 1287, which had destroyed half the then-existent town, partially blocked the mouth of its harbor, and initiated a long terminal decline. The loss apparently did not prevent treasure-hunters from turning up at intervals in the last pathetic remnant of the once-great town to hunt for the crown, either at low tide or whenever a storm brought a new slice of the ever-eroding cliff crashing down on to the sandy beach.

  And I’ll be joining them tomorrow, if I ever get to Dunwich, Halsted reflected, a trifle bitterly, searching for something far less substantial than an early Medieval crown—so I have no grounds at all to think of them with contempt.

  ∴

  When the twilight became too dim for comfort, and the last hint of redness in the sky had given way to purple and grey, Halsted got back into the car and sat down on the back seat, although he left the door open to let in the sultry air. No sea breeze was evident this far inland, but closing the door would have given him a sense of imprisonment to add to the neurasthenic tension that already seemed to be creeping into his flesh and his bones. It was easy to imagine that the morbid sky and torpid fields had begun to absorb him into their general desolation, or infect him with the seeds of their own incipient decay.

  Who needs opium to excite the imagination, he thought, when one has a sensitive soul? Then he laughed at his own pretentiousness. There had never been anything amiss with the sensitivity of Thomas De Quincey’s soul, nor his wit; it had been the unfortunate sensitivity of his flesh that had driven him to addiction, as it had driven Coleridge before him.

  In the absence of opium, Halsted deliberately tried to calm himself with meditation, instructing his limbs to relax by degrees and endeavoring to cultivate a sense of inner peace: a placid detachment from all the ills of incarnation. As soon as he felt that peace was within his grasp, though, he was rudely interrupted by the deep and raucous growl of a tractor’s engine.

  The tractor had been hitched to a small box-cart, in which the Ford’s driver was standing up, as if in parodic imitation of some ancient Greek warrior stationed behind his warhorse and his charioteer. When the driver got out, Halsted hoisted his suitcases into the cart, one by one, and then followed them.

  “Thanks,” he said to the farmer, trying as best he could to sound genuinely grateful.

  “Awright, zur,” the farmer replied, laconically. “Least oi c’n do.” Halsted deduced that what the man was leaving unsaid was that he would rather spend half an hour transporting a stranded American to an inn in Dunwich than offer him a bed for the night in his own home, as the unwritten laws of hospitality might otherwise have required him to do.

  The tractor got under way again immediately, hurrying to make the most of the last lingering penumbra of the twilight, but it was heading for the darkest part of the horizon and the clouds were blotting out the starlight, so it seemed to Halsted that they were heading into the maw of a tunnel, away from the light at its further end. They had gone no further than a hundred yards before the farmer switched on the vehicle’s single headlamp, whose spear-like beam picked out the road and its peripheral hedgerows with merciless precision, unwavering because of the straightness of the road.

  Even if the sky had been clear, there would have been almost no moonlight—the moon had been new the previous night, even though the once-in-a-century low tide was still more than thirty-six hours away, perversely refusing to correspond with it exactly. Halsted had tried to figure that out, but had failed. He could understand well enough that there were two low tides a day, whose depth was determined by a complex series of cycles, in which the most important were the lunar cycle and the year, which brought the solar tide and the lunar tide into phase every twenty-eight days or so. Ultra-low tides required that phasing effect to align not merely with the particular point on the Earth’s surface at which the tide was to take effect, but also with the axial tilt of the planet. Those optima, it seemed, only came into near-perfect synchronization once every hundred and fourteen years, give or take a few days, at any particular point on the Earth’s surface. A mathematician or an astronomer could doubtless have explained exactly why, but to an English scholar and belated Romantic, it was pure astrology: the workings of blind fate, signaled and symbolized by the position of the heavenly bodies, orchestrated by the harmony of the spheres.

  The two antiquarians who had picked Thomas De Quincey up in some London coaching-inn on August tenth, 1821, had been visiting Dunwich in order to witness the lowest tide the town had experienced since the beginning of the eighteenth century, which had been due to occur shortly before noon on August twelfth. There had never been a tide as low in more than a century—but there would be another one in two days’ time, in the late morning of August sixteenth, 1935, and that one would not be matched again until mid-way through the twenty-first century. It had been providential that the Wychelow letter had come to light just in time, and that Halsted had already taken sabbatical leave, in the wake of his broken engagement, in order to spend the summer at Oxford in the very same year as the minimum. For once, the stars had been working overtime in generating fortunate coincidences, at least in respect of Halsted’s location in the world of Academe.

  He did not, of course, expect anything particular to come about as a result of the unusually low tide. The extra hair’s-breadth of the sea’s descent could not be expected to reveal anything that common-or-garden low tides left concealed, even if the hair’s-breadth in the vertical dimension turned out to correspond to several strides in the horizontal dimension. The ever-changing topology of the sea-bed made far more difference to the serendipity of its meager revel
ations than the amplitude of the tides, and Halsted already knew that there was almost nothing of the Norman port, or its Roman predecessor, to be found on the sea-bed. The buildings lost in the Great Storm and during the long attrition since exacted by the sea had almost all been made of wood, and even the few made of stone had been crumbled into rubble as they fell from the top of the continually-decaying cliff, transforming themselves as they fell into anonymous boulders and fragments. The fairy-tales about churches still standing beneath the waves, whose bells could be heard chiming when the stars were right, were pure nonsense—although Thomas De Quincey had turned that nonsense into prose-poetry in another of his opium-dream essays, “Savannah-la-Mar”.

  In fact, Halsted’s preliminary research had assured him, all the Dunwich churches reclaimed by the sea in the last seven hundred years had been falling into ruin before the ground supporting them had collapsed, and any bells they contained had been removed in advance. It was doubtful in the extreme that any of those unexpectedly destroyed on New Year’s Day 1287 had possessed bells, but if any had, they would have been buried in silt long ago. The human scavengers who hunted the Suffolk shoreline at low tide were allegedly far more likely to find the bones of mammoths or the gnarled roots of antediluvian trees, left over from the Ice Age when the entire North Sea had been dry land, than they were to find any substantial relic of the town that had been the sixth largest in England before disaster struck.

  Halsted had had several opportunities to observe the taciturnity of English country folk since his arrival in Oxford, via Southampton, a few weeks earlier, but he eventually came to feel that the Suffolk farmer was taking it to extremes, so he took it upon himself to break the silence momentarily by saying: “The harvest will be good this year, it seems.”

  “Mebbe,” the other replied, out of the gloom, without any conspicuous enthusiasm. “Barrin’ bad weather. Doan loik the luke o’the cloud, though. Summer storms doan amount t’much, but steady rain’s a bouger.”