Peter Ackroyd - The house of Doctor Dee

That memory came back to me when I returned to Ealing on the following day. It was a bright and agreeable morning and, as I turned into Melville Avenue, I stepped lightly over the pavement; it was the old children's game — step on a crack, break your mother's back. She was 'working' in the garden, Geoffrey told me when he answered the door. He seemed surprised to see me, and carried on talking nervously as we walked towards the kitchen door. I could see her through the window, bent over some late-flowering shrubs, and realized once more how frail she had become; we looked at each other, and for a few moments neither of us had any expression at all. Then she smiled and, wiping her hands on a piece of tissue, came over to me. 'This is a privilege,' she said. 'Kiss please.' For once I did not feel distaste as I put my lips to her cheek.

'I was hoping to see you in Clerkenwell again.'

'It's a long way, Matthew. And the garden needs me at this time of year. Before the autumn comes.' I looked around at the lawn, the shrubs and the crazy paving: it was all as I remembered it from my childhood, although in those days it had seemed to make up an entire world in which I could conceal myself. 'Besides,' she was saying, 'it's that house of yours.'

'What's wrong with the house, mother?'

At that moment she found something of great interest at the side of the lawn and bent down to retrieve it; it was a piece of broken glass, and she buried it carefully under the soil. 'Let's go inside,' she said. 'I'll make you something nice.'

'You can be very aggravating. You always seem to know more than you say.'

'That's one of my charms, isn't it?'

She tried to be coquettish for a moment, but she did not succeed. Something was troubling her; I suspected, even then, that she knew why I had come. We went into the house and, while Geoffrey made coffee, she busied herself with the preparation of one of the thick cheese sandwiches I had been given as a boy. 'Get that down you.' She sounded almost vindictive. 'You used to love a good sandwich.' I had always detested them, as far as I could recall, but dutifully I began to eat it.

'Oh, that reminds me,' she said. 'I found something in the cupboard.' She was still very uneasy with me, and now seemed pleased to leave the room while Geoffrey stared after her. But she returned almost at once with a large brown envelope. 'I didn't want to keep them.' She hesitated, as if she had said quite the wrong thing. 'I didn't want to throw them away. I think you ought to have them.' I opened the envelope, and there fell upon the table some five or six photographs. In all of them I was alone with my father. In one of them he was holding me up in his arms (I must have been five or six at the time) while in another we were sitting together on a low wall. Some of them seemed quite recent — one, in particular, showed us mounting some stone steps — but curiously enough I had no recollection of their ever being taken.

'He was a handsome man,' I said.

She opened her eyes very wide for a moment. 'Do put them away, Matthew. You can look at them later.'

She had not been able to disguise the distaste in her voice. Geoffrey quietly left the room, muttering something about the car, and we sat together in silence for a while.

'It will be your birthday soon,' she said, running her finger round the rim of her cup. 'My birthday boy.'

'I know about him, mother.'

She put her hand up to her face. 'What do you know?' She sounded angry.

'I know what kind of man he was.'

'And what kind of man was that?'

'I think you probably know, mother.'

I thought she was stifling a yawn, but then I realized that it was a cry or perhaps a groan. 'And all this time I thought you had forgotten.'

'Forgotten?'

'You were so small at the time.' I felt some great upheaval within me, as if I had been turned upside down, and I was a child again. And then, all at once, we were both crying. 'You do know, don't you?' she said. She came over to me, and put her arm around me. 'But I protected you. Your mother was good for something, even then. I stopped him. I only caught him with you once, but I threatened to take him to the police.' I was looking at myself with infinite patience and curiosity: I looked at myself as I walked through the streets of London, I watched myself as I toiled among my books, I listened to myself as I discussed my childhood with Daniel. I had not known myself at all. 'I never left you alone with him after that,' she was saying. 'I defended you.' I was staring very intently at the table — I noticed the grain of the wood, I noticed the knots and stains, and I looked so hard into the heart of that wood that I seemed to be spiralling down within it. I had become part of its vortex. 'He swore that he never harmed you, Matthew. He said that he never touched you. But after that I always hated him.' And then, as I lay at peace with the wood, I realized a truth which, for some reason, had eluded me before — the material world was the home of eternity. One secret had led to another secret, and slowly I was pulling back the veil. 'God help me, there was a time when I thought that you and he —'

'Your own son?'

I listened to her silence for a while, and then I looked up at her. I do not believe I was crying now. 'You're not my son, Matthew. He found you. He adopted you. He said that you were very special. Unique. I had to go along with it, because I knew that I could never give him any children.' Now I recognized the source of her rage and bitterness, even on those occasions when they had been directed against me. My father had slowly destroyed her, just as surely as if he had fed her poison. And what had he wanted from me? What had Daniel called it? Sexual magic? I knew now why I had forgotten my childhood, and so forgotten myself. I knew why there were no people in my memories. I had been lost from the beginning. It was only with unbearable exhaustion that I could look upon that period of my life which I thought to have forgotten, but which in fact had formed me.

For the rest of the morning we talked through everything, and I explained to her what I had discovered about his life in Cloak Lane. She was not in the least surprised by it, and had suspected for a long time that he owned what she called a 'lair'. Even as we talked we became known to each other; it was as if we were strangers who by degrees grew acquainted. It was the oddest feeling: once we saw him clearly, we saw ourselves. 'It was so difficult, Matthew. He was always there, you see. You were his child somehow, never mine. People talk about love, but — ' That was the secret, after all. I had grown up in a world without love — a world of magic, of money, of possession — and so I had none for myself or for others. That was why I had seen ghosts rather than real people. That was why I was haunted by voices from the past and not from my own time. That was why I had dreamed of being imprisoned in glass, cold and apart. The myth of the homunculus was just another aspect of my father's loveless existence — such an image of sterility and false innocence could have come from no other source. Now everything had to be changed.

I rose from the table, and embraced her. 'At least we have some cause to be grateful,' I said. 'We survived, didn't we?'

'I suppose so.'

At that moment Geoffrey came back into the kitchen. 'Have I missed anything interesting?'

'No, darling,' she said. 'We were just reminiscing.'

'That's all right then.' I realized now why my mother had chosen such an apparently average man: he represented the ordinary course of life which she had been denied all those years. Yet what was so ordinary about it, when at last it afforded her happiness? When we start looking for eternity, we find it everywhere. I stood by the kitchen window and, as I looked out towards the lawn, he came over to me as if he needed to comfort me. 'Gardens need work,' he said. 'Come and see your mother's sunflowers.' I looked around for her but she had left the room, and so I followed him down the crazy paving towards the beds of flowers. He suspected that something had happened, I knew that, but he could no more have broached the subject than he could have stripped naked in front of the neighbours. 'You had a talk then, did you?'