Edward - Interactive Read online

  Chapter 4 – The Way of the World

  How strange to dream while perfectly wide-awake. It was late on Friday afternoon, when I got back to the flat. Everything was hushed and peaceful and I was just sitting, relaxing. I must have closed my eyes for a moment, I must have channelled all by inadvertence.

  (Past)

  The first thing wasn’t sight but sound. Someone was calling me but there were no words.

  Next there was a little girl, a toddler, maybe two years old, running towards me crying “Dada”.

  Behind her; at some slight distance, stood a girl in her late teens; she was slender and willowy. Her dark, thick hair fell around her shoulders in soft curls; it softly framed the pale, translucent skin of her face. But what really struck you were her eyes; startling, green eyes. She moved not at all, she just stood there watching her daughter. She possessed an ageless look, there was a tension, a sensual vitality; was it something in the curve of her mouth, the way she held her head?

  The scene was in the country. In the middle distance was a large building but it wasn’t the castle I saw that day on the road. This was somehow lighter, more like a large manor house. There was stonework here but brick also, with tall chimneys, and a great oriel window; the effect was altogether different. The girls were barefoot on a soft carpet of grass, there was sunlight and bird song and fresh blossom that made you think of spring.

  The little girl’s blond curly hair bounced as she came running towards me. Laughter lit up her face, love shone from her eyes. Her dimpled bare arms stretched out towards me, I bent down, my own arms outstretched; muscles ready to lift her as I’ve done so many times with my own daughter. Then the whole scene snapped shut.

  It didn’t fade like that vision of the courtyard; it vanished suddenly, like a bubble incontinently burst. I felt such a fool to try to touch an imaginary child. I didn’t know what to do. I stood up and paced the length of the room, as if looking for that lost little girl. I sat down again, flummoxed.

  This was some days after those scenes of Edward’s rescue, in the lull in my channelling, which followed Edward’s leaving the monastery. I shouldn’t have told you about it now. I’ve told it when it happened, but it doesn’t fit with the story yet. I beg your patience, for now I was as bemused by this little girl as you might be.

  The last chapter went pell-mell, I told it without regard to my ordinary life. I kept order in that life, distracting myself with work and business meetings, letting Edward out slowly. I’d managed it, so I thought, so that no one knew what seethed inside me. I must have relaxed my guard, at the end of the last chapter, and this little girl jumped out at me all unexpected.

  Now I had to put all this away, I had a long car drive in front of me. I had to be in Stafford on Saturday, and there remained the rest of the chapter to experience. It’s time to tell you more about my life, and about my weekends.

  Creating a business isn’t easy and I’m not the first person to find it cost a marriage. When things went wrong at home, at that time I needed to open the Peterborough office, there was Frances. She was already training in the Law, I took her under my wing and I put her into my new office. I did a great deal more than that, and lived to regret it.

  She was such an apt student and I saw in her what I wanted to see, I planned to spend the rest of my life with her. When finally I was forced to accept the truth I was shocked, it was like a bereavement; Frances was only interested in her own career. After the care, patience and love I’d given, her selfishness was a slap in the face. I would have liked her to have no part in this story. For the time being it’s enough that we mostly lived apart and I was determined to keep it that way.

  When Frances left Peterborough she went back to our house, and my office, in Stafford. She went in pursuit of her career but she kept her place in my firm and she expected me to come to her for Saturdays and Sundays. It was difficult to avoid; there were all my other commitments.

  I’d flown from Stafford, first for love and now for sorrow at the loss of the very same love. Yet there were still these weekends to pretend all was as once it had been, Frances and I would meet, each Saturday, for lunch at the ‘Lord Nelson’, just two doors away from the office.

  Mornings were leisurely. Clients would come to see me with no particular thought of time, nor did I think of billing that time; they were like old friends and the morning would simply slide off the clock. The afternoons were peaceful, Frances would have gone home and I’d stay to read or wander round the shops or just potter. But first came lunchtime.

  Sitting in the ‘Nelson’, uncomfortable on a hard chair and unhappy in spirit, I listened to Frances, the day after that vision of the little girl and her mother. She was telling me how she could increase my failing business.

  Frances is dark haired, tall, thin and angular, a little younger than I. The more unkind of my friends called her gaunt, but it hadn’t been her appearance which first attracted me, but the quickness of her mind. I’d found in Frances someone frustrated and under using her talents. Her uncle was a senior judge, but she had followed a commercial career, one that left her ill and disappointed. I’d introduced her to the practice of Law and trained her in my office; wondering, it’s true, why her uncle had never done something similar. She was eager to learn.

  This Saturday I sat silent, looking at a plateful of food, suddenly unwanted, as she told me how my business should be run.

  “I only have to be nice to them. I’ll give you more business than your little office can handle. There’s a lot of money in the hunt.”

  I pictured her on horseback, absorbed in the trappings of chasing a fox. I saw her turning even that pastime to venal ambition, simpering to certain sorts of farmer and social climber.

  “‘The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.’”

  I murmured it with more unkindness to Frances than to fox hunters. Mine is not the oldest profession in the World, yet. I’d no wish to prostitute it to her fantasies.

  She left shortly after, bitter at my rejection. At least it was a relief when she went.

  I think she resented the distracted way I dismissed her proposal. You see, I’d been thinking about that little girl at the beginning of the chapter, she so reminded me of my daughter. Was there a correspondent to Frances? If so I had yet to meet her. When first we came together I’d a sense we’d known each other always. How wrong I was; at least I was blessed with a good and loyal staff, to keep track of her.

  From an easy chair, I studied the depths of a glass of whisky, turning it slowly in my hand. If only Frances could believe in the goals I took for granted. I’d given all I could, but what when you’re able to give no more or when you no longer want to? What when the one you love plays power games and mistakes giving for weakness?

  It wasn’t just this sucking up to these hunting friends that wouldn’t do; I no longer had a taste for the game.

  Everything around me had been the child of my own invention; the office, Frances’ position in it and even my project with Sarah. And what of her? I wondered if her ambitions were any better than Frances’. I conjured Sarah in my mind’s eye, balancing her against the shallow success Frances so much sought. She turned and turned with the whisky in my glass, her affectations weighing against her.

  One of the few bright points, the few highlights of these weekends, was Angharad. It was at this time she came to take a greater, almost protective, interest in me. Her invitations took in my daughter, for Debbie has a gift for acquiring people and Angharad’s daughter was about the same age. On this occasion there was a houseful, and so it was, that Sunday afternoon, I found myself debating the Universe.

  A digression dear reader, if you want you can skip a few pages, for those who want the first part of the key to how all this works, read on. Here’s something you don’t find in a novel, it’s a novel novel. The novelty is to reveal what lay in my mind.

  John was Angharad’s son in law, a part time university lecturer, a research physicist and altogether
a bright young man, a man of hard science and facts. It pained me to hear him so dismiss Angharad’s sensitive care for all living things and her abiding faith in spirit.

  John actually said, if you can’t touch it, or test it in the laboratory, it doesn’t exist; if he so dismissed Angharad’s beliefs what would he make of my visions?

  “What about Art, Religion and Philosophy? Or is Religion just ‘the opiate of the masses’?”

  “These are just responses to what we see; Man’s attempt to make sense of the World, ideas he invented before Science.”

  A tired answer to a tired question; but even plants and the very rocks of the Earth have souls (don’t take my word for it, read Giordano Bruno). I wouldn’t leave it there.

  “We live in the material universe; we place ourselves in it by co-ordinates of length breadth and height. These dimensions describe all of space; together with a sense of ‘When’ they’re our entire reference in the Space/Time continuum. And you would say that’s all there is to it?”

  “In ordinary Space, yes.”

  “But you see Space and Time are just part of our World.”

  John laughed. I had, after all, spoken nonsense.

  “Physics gives the laws for all of space. Find something that doesn’t obey these laws and you’ve gone outside Space/Time. Start with Entropy; Newton’s law that all concentrations of energy break down.”

  John nodded.

  “According to this rule, the more energy is concentrated the faster it dissipates. So, at the very start of the Universe, with all energy squeezed together; you have the unimaginable explosion of the ‘Big Bang’ when everything flew apart. This was the first example of Newton’s law. Because of it, anything you can make, anything you find in nature, always loses energy. We can never put things back together again; we can never go back in time. The law prevents us concentrating the energy again as it used to be.”

  “Yes.” - John was on safe ground here.

  “We only seem to beat this by putting things together, organising and make things; we can take iron ore and turn it into steel and turn the steel into motor cars: but everything we do takes energy from elsewhere, and the more we build something up the more energy it takes and the more it decays and breaks down.”

  John beamed, as at a stupid child.

  “That’s right; of course it all happens on a very big scale.”

  “In the end it means universal decay; personal death in the short term and cosmic death in the end. And yet this isn’t our experience in Art, Philosophy or Religion; in the mind and in nature, everywhere we’re surrounded by teeming life.

  Haven’t you noticed this, John?”

  I don’t know if he’d have answered, I gave him no chance.

  “According to Darwin’s theory of ‘Natural Selection’, the forms of life always grow stronger. According to Tielhard de Chardin, the great Jesuit anthropologist, Life as a whole always grows more organised. It gets stronger, more organised until it engulfs the World. The very opposite of Newton’s law.

  The same is true for our systems of Society, our Laws and culture, even your precious Sciences. They all grow stronger with the passage of Time. I could show you this on a graph.”

  And I did, dear reader, you can see what I drew, pointing out the gradients dictated by Newton; they apply to Life as much as Matter, but in reverse.