David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

So there we sat. I wished I had brought something to read. At least I had a seat, and I wouldn’t have given it up for Helen Keller. The evening was lemon blue. Trackside shadows grew monolithic. Commuters sent calls to families on mobile phones. I wondered how that dodgy Australian magistrate knew what flashed through the minds of the shark-eaten. Lucky express trains with nonmissing drivers shot past. I needed the loo, but it didn’t bear imagining. I opened my briefcase for a bag of Werner’s toffees but came up with Half-Lives — The First Luisa Rey Mystery . I leafed through its first few pages. It would be a better book if Hilary V. Hush weren’t so artsily-fartsily Clever. She had written it in neat little chapteroids, doubtless with one eye on the Hollywood screenplay. Static squealed in the speakers. “This is a passenger announcement. SouthNet Trains regrets that as a suitable driver for this train cannot be located we will proceed to Little Chesterford station, where a complimentary coach will transport passengers on to Cambridge. Those able to are recommended to make alternative travel arrangements, as the coach will not reach Little Chesterford station [how that name chimed in my memory!] for … an unknown duration. Further details can be found on our website.” The train crawled a mile of twilight. Bats and wind-borne rubbish overtook us. Who was driving now if there wasn’t a driver?

Stop, shudder, doors open. The abler-bodied streamed off the train, over the footbridge, leaving me and a couple of taxidermist’s castoffs to limp in their wake at quarter speed. I heaved myself up the steps and paused for breath. There I was. Standing on the footbridge of Little Chesterford station. Ye gods, of all the rural stations for a marooning. The bridle path to Ursula’s old house still skirted the cornfield. Not much else did I recognize. The Sacred Barn of the Longest Snog was now Essex’s Premier Fitness Club. Ursula had met me in her froggy Citroën that night during reading week in our first term, right … on this triangle of gravel, here. How bohemian, Young Tim had thought, to be met by a woman in a car. I was Tutankhamen in my royal barge, rowed by Nubian slaves to the Temple of Sacrifice. Ursula drove me the few hundred yards to Dockery House, commissioned in Art Nouveau times by a Scandiwegian consul. We had the place to ourselves, while Mater and Pater were in Greece holidaying with Lawrence Durrell, if memory serves. (“Memory Serves.” Duplicitous couplet.)

Four decades later the beams of headlights from executive cars in the station car park lit up a freak plague of daddy longlegs, and one fugitive publishing gentleman in a flapping raincoat striding around a field now lying fallow for EU subsidies. You would think a place the size of England could easily hold all the happenings in one humble lifetime without much overlap—I mean, it’s not ruddy Luxembourg we live in—but no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters. Dockery House was still standing, isolated from its neighbors by a privet fence. How opulent the building had felt after my own parents’ bland box of suburbia— One day , I promised, I’m going to live in a house like this . Another promise I’ve broken; at least that one was only to myself.

I skirted the edge of the property, down an access road to a building site. A sign read: HAZLE CLOSE—HIGHLY PRIZED EXECUTIVE HOMES IN THE HEART OF ENGLAND. Upstairs at Dockery, lights were on. I imagined a childless couple listening to a wireless. The old stained-glass door had been replaced by something more burglarproof. That reading week I’d entered Dockery ready to peel off my shameful virginity, but I’d been so in awe of my Divine Cleopatra, so nervous, so eyeballed up on her father’s whiskey, so floppy with green sap that, well, I’d rather draw a veil over the embarrassment of that night, even at forty years’ remove. Very well, forty-seven years’ remove. That same white-leafed oak had scratted at Ursula’s window as I attempted to perform, long after I could decently pretend I was still warming up. Ursula had a gramophone record of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in her bedroom, that room there, where the electric candle glows in the window.

To this day I cannot hear Rachmaninoff without flinching.

The odds of Ursula still living at Dockery House were zilch, I knew. Last I heard she was running a PR office in Los Angeles. Nonetheless, I squeezed myself through the evergreen hedge and pressed my nose up against the unlit, uncurtained dining room window, trying to peer in. That autumn night long ago Ursula had served a blob of grilled cheese on a slice of ham on a breast of chicken. Right there—right here. I could still taste it. I can still taste it as I write these words.

Flash!

The room was lit electric marigold, and in waltzed—backwards, luckily for me—a little witch with red corkscrew curls. “Mummy!” I half-heard, half-lip-read through the glass. “Mummy!” and in came Mummy, with the same corkscrew curls. This being proof enough for me that Ursula’s family had long vacated the house, I backtracked into the shrubbery—but I turned once more and resumed my spying because … well, because, ahem, je suis un homme solitaire . Mummy was repairing a broken broomstick while the girl sat on the table swinging her legs. An adult werewolf came in and removed his mask, and oddly, though not so oddly I suppose, I recognized him—that current-affairs TV presenter, one of Felix Finch’s tribe. Jeremy Someone, Heathcliff eyebrows, terrier manners, you know the chap. He took some insulation tape from the Welsh dresser drawer and muscled in on the broomstick repair job. Then Grandma entered this domestic frieze, and damn me once, damn me twice, damn me always make it nice, ’twas Ursula. The Ursula. My Ursula.

Behold that spry, elderly lady! In my memory she hadn’t aged a day—what makeup artist had savaged her dewy youth? (The same one who savaged yours, Timbo.) She spoke, and her daughter and granddaughter giggled, yes, giggled, and I giggled too … What? What did she say? Tell me the joke! She stuffed a red stocking with newspaper balls. A devil’s tail. She attached it to her posterior with a safety pin, and a memory from a university Halloween Ball cracked on the hard rim of my heart and the yolk dribbled out—she’d dressed like a devilette then, too, she’d put on red face paint, we’d kissed all night, just kissed, and in the morning we found a builders’ café that sold dirty mugs of strong, milky tea and enough eggs to fill, to kill, the Swiss Army. Toast and hot canned tomatoes. HP Sauce. Be honest, Cavendish, was any other breakfast in your life ever so delectable?

So drunk was I on nostalgia, I ordered myself to leave before I did anything stupid. A nasty voice just a few feet away said this—”Don’t move a muscle or I’ll mackasser you and put you in a stew!”

Shocked? Jet-assisted Vertical Ruddy Takeoff! Luckily my would-be butcherer was not a day older than ten, and his chain saw’s teeth were cardboard, but his bloodied bandages were rather effective. In a low voice, I told him so. He wrinkled his face at me. “Are you Grandma Ursula’s friend?”

“Once upon a time, yes, I was.”

“What have you come to the party as? Where’s your costume?”

Time to leave. I edged back into the evergreen. “This is my costume.”

He picked his nose. “A dead man digged up from the churchyard?”

“Charmed, but no. I’ve come as the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“But it’s Halloween, not Christmas.”

“No!” I slapped my forehead. “Really?”

“Yeah …”

“Then I’m ten months late! This is terrible! I’d better get back before my absence is noticed—and remarked upon!”