A Very Persistent Illusion Read online

  L.C. TYLER

  A VERY

  PERSISTENT

  ILLUSION

  PAN BOOKS

  To Keith

  Perhaps the most unsettling thought many of us have, often quite early on in childhood, is that the whole world might be a dream; that the ordinary scenes and objects of everyday life might be fantasies. The reality we live in may be a virtual reality, spun out of our own minds . . .

  – Simon Blackburn

  Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

  – Albert Einstein

  Contents

  1 - A Long Way from Horsham, 18 April this Year

  2 - Neuburg, Danube Valley, November 1619

  3 - Euston Road, 20 April this Year

  4 - Wonderful West Sussex Again, 25 April this Year

  5 - Neuburg, Danube Valley, November 1619

  6 - No Date

  7 - Another Pub, 27 April this Year

  8 - Neuburg, Danube Valley, November 1619

  9 - Great Portland Street Station, 29 April this Year

  10 - No Time, No Date

  11 - Great Portland Street Station, May Day Morn

  12 - Horsham, Saturday

  13 - Sunday

  14 - Heading North

  15 - A Touching Reunion in Ambleside

  16 - Easedale, 5 May this Year

  17 - Fat Dave’s Proof of the Existence of God

  18 - Easedale, 5 May this Year

  19 - On the Road Again

  20 - London, 1752

  21 - In Which our Hero Makes Some Interesting Discoveries

  22 - A Man of Letters

  23 - Niels

  24 - Hugh

  25 - Stockholm, January 1650

  26 - London

  27 - A Bad Day at Work

  28 - A Nice Place, June Or Possibly July this Year

  1

  A Long Way from Horsham, 18 April this Year

  Women have many different ways of showing disapproval, only some of which are immediately apparent to men.

  A brief study of my girlfriend, who you will meet shortly, has revealed twenty-three quite distinct gradations of dissatisfaction. I have been obliged to catalogue them all. At some stage in the future, the Sorensen-Birtwistle Revised Scale of Girl-Rage will take its rightful place alongside the Richter Scale, the Beaufort Scale and other internationally recognized measures of danger. While mine lacks the precision of the Beaufort Scale, it has greater relevance for the man who does not get out much in hurricanes.

  A Number Five, for example, is defined as a noticeable shaking of indoor items, accompanied by rattling noises, but without significant damage to whatever relationship your girlfriend believes you are in. A Number Four, which I sometimes fancifully visualize as dark cobalt storm clouds with blinding flashes of vermillion lighting, has the power to reduce grown men to jelly and can reputedly kill small mammals asleep in their burrows.

  And so on.

  Fortunately, what is currently being pointed in my direction is only a Number Nineteen: a sort of grey swirling mist of discontent that mendaciously promises, from time to time, to part and reveal its true cause and origin.

  Not that I actually need the mist to part and reveal anything. The cause of this Number Nineteen is only too apparent (even to me). We are due at her parents’ house, which is still at least an hour’s drive away, at eleven thirty – and it is currently ten fifty-five according to the clock on the tasteful walnut dashboard of my classic sports car. In some way that will be explained to me shortly, this is All My Fault. The car ahead of us edges another couple of inches in the direction of Horsham and I slip smoothly into first gear and edge right along with it. The car ahead stops and I expertly bring the MG to a halt a fingerbreadth from its rear bumper. Handbrake on. A quick flick of the gearstick and we are back in neutral. Job done. I think she’ll be pretty pleased with that.

  ‘Brilliant,’ she says. ‘Ramming the car in front will save us at least half a second. You know, what I’d really like now is to have to stop and exchange insurance details with an enraged Rolls Royce owner whose car you’ve just run into while trying to gain a fraction of a millimetre in the queue. God, you’re an idiot.’

  ‘Bentley,’ I say knowingly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a Bentley ahead of us. And I quite deliberately didn’t run into it.’

  I give her the knowing smile again. She gives me a quick burst of Number Seven, bordering on a mild Six. (Six is more severe than seven on the Sorensen-Birtwistle Revised, for reasons I’ll come to.) ‘God, you’re a idiot,’ she tells me.

  ‘I know. You already said. Twice. But thanks for addressing me as God, anyway.’

  The traffic starts to move. The back of my hand brushes against her bare leg as I push the custom leather-clad gearstick to the left and forward. She pulls her leg away as if she has been stung, and smoothes her skirt down over it. In spite of the rather good God joke (see above), I am not in favour.

  I am therefore unsurprised that there’s one of those funny little lulls in the conversation, as we stop and start and stop and start along East Hill. As we pass Wandsworth Town Hall I say: ‘That snail’s just overtaken us again.’ Then to clarify I add: ‘I said, that snail’s just—’

  ‘God, you’re an idiot.’

  I don’t repeat my God joke because, I feel, if she didn’t find it that funny the first time, then it’s probably not going to do me much good this time either.

  ‘Looks like a nice day anyway,’ I venture cautiously.

  ‘For whom?’ My girlfriend is one of the only people I know who can deploy grammar as an offensive weapon.

  ‘The sun will be out in a moment,’ I say.

  ‘Lunch will be burnt in a moment too.’

  Logically, and I’m sure you will agree with me, this is unlikely. If we are down to eat at twelve thirty (and we always are) it is improbable that her mother would judge things so badly as to have already burned the food by five past eleven. I decide not to point this out. My grandmother always said that it takes two to make a quarrel – but then she never met my girlfriend.

  She checks her watch – a Rolex, a recent present from her parents – and frowns. The only wise course of action for me is to remain absolutely silent until we reach the Robin Hood roundabout. I am therefore mildly interested to hear myself say: ‘So I suppose there’s no point in suggesting sex tonight then?’

  She turns away from her contemplation of the recently endangered Bentley in front and faces me. After a brief but perfectly judged silence, she hisses: ‘What can you possibly think you deserve tonight in view of your conduct so far today?’

  Actually I was planning that the sex should be for both of us, but I go for broke and tell her what I think I deserve.

  There is a stunned pause, and then she punches me unnecessarily hard on the shoulder. ‘Well, we could always try it.’ She laughs. ‘Just as long as you promise never to do it with anyone else except me.’

  I give her the boyish smile.

  She leans across and ruffles my hair, which is fashionably short at the moment. ‘You may be a grave disappointment to me in many respects,’ she says, ‘but that is one thing that I can rely on. Unlike Julian, you don’t play around with other women. Unlike Jimmy, you don’t play around with other men. Uniquely amongst my past and present boyfriends you are not a total bastard. It is your Unique Selling Point. That makes up for a great deal.’

  I wonder if now is a good time to tell her about me and Lucy, but I figure . . . no, probably not.

  ‘What is it,’ she asks me, ‘that makes a man unfaithful?’

  The answer, obviously, is ‘opportunity’. This is, however, information that men have been keepin
g to themselves for hundreds of years, and I am not sure that I would be wise to let it slip out now. So I shrug, which she takes to mean that I am entirely incapable of understanding how any man could be unfaithful, rather than that I just can’t be arsed to talk about it. She reaches out a hand and ruffles my hair again, which is fine because ruffled hair looks quite good on me.

  ‘I’ll give my mother a call to say we’ll be a bit late,’ she says brightly, as if she has just remembered the existence of mobile phones and their various and several uses. She is quite cheerful chatting to her mother and all seems well – though I assume that I could be ‘that moron’, who was late picking her up from her flat in Rosebery Avenue and possibly also the brainless one who has been ‘driving like a total idiot as usual’. She snaps the phone shut, pleased with herself and no longer entirely displeased with me. ‘That’s fine. They’ll expect us around twelve thirty and we’ll eat at one o’clock.’ She checks her watch again, but this time simply to admire the well-engineered piece of Swiss technology and the fine gold and steel bracelet. It is going to be a nice day. She starts to hum a little tune that I don’t recognize, possibly because she is making it up as she goes along. It is at least a happy song and, if it has words, they would almost certainly be about fluffy lambs in the meadow or babies in their cradles. The latter probably. Babies in their cradles occupy an unreasonable and unhealthy percentage of my girlfriend’s waking moments. I listen to the hum carefully to see if I am envisaged as the father of any of the babies.

  In the meantime I am desperately trying to get all thoughts of Lucy out of my own mind, because they do not belong there today and I must avoid calling my girlfriend (whose name is not Lucy or anything much like it) Lucy.

  ‘Virginia,’ I say, carefully practising her name, ‘Virginia, do you know what I think?’ Suddenly I realize that I’ve said this only to practise her name and I have no idea what comes next. But I need not have worried.

  ‘Yes,’ she interrupts cheerfully, ‘since there are a very limited number of things you think about, I almost certainly do know. There is probably nothing about you that would surprise me in the slightest, and today that suits me just fine. Does that cover whatever question you were about to ask?’

  ‘Yes, Virginia,’ I say, practising again, while simultaneously looking straight ahead at the traffic, as recommended in the Highway Code. ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘Moron,’ she says affectionately. She places a hand lightly on my shoulder and kisses me in a way that she imagines will not distract me from the road. Lucy again flashes into my mind and I stray briefly and illegally into the bus lane.

  There are, in fact, many things about me that Virginia does not know. For example:

  a) I still read both Viz and Loaded, and have a stash of them on top of my wardrobe.

  b) For about four terms when I was in the Third and Fourth Form, I supported Tottenham Hotspur and actually nagged my father into taking me to a couple of matches at White Hart Lane.

  c) I have increasing doubts about whether she exists.

  If she knew about a) she would merely take it as further proof of my immaturity and a possible contributory cause to my inability to develop a meaningful adult relationship – with anyone in general, but also with women less generally and with her in particular. Should I happen to blurt it out at some point (not likely), or should she take to snooping on top of my wardrobe (very likely), it would not lower me one jot in her esteem because, in this respect, the dial is sadly hovering only just above empty. On the other hand, b) represents dangerous knowledge, which must be kept from her at all costs. There would, when you think about it, be little point in raising c) with her.

  I give her a sideways glance. Sometimes I look at her and feel I am seeing her for the first time (rather as you are now): the dark, silky, shoulder-length hair, the fine even features, the delicate but determined jaw line. There are one or two freckles on her cheek. From this angle you can’t quite see the eyes, but they are brown and, at levels Twenty and below (Sorensen-Birtwistle Revised), warm and reassuring. You can’t see her legs either, but they are the sort of legs you get if you do exactly the right amount of exercise to get good legs. You would take all that in and assume that she must have been school captain and captain of lacrosse, and you’d be dead right. She was. All of those things.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘No reason,’ I say. ‘I just like looking at you.’

  She seems pleased by this and I decide to risk a little music. I give the dial a quarter turn and the radio bursts into life.

  ‘What is that rubbish?’ she demands.

  I identify the band in question. I tell Virginia the names of the individual band members and who the lead singer played for last year.

  She gives me a pitying elder-sister look. ‘Why do you still find it necessary to know stuff like that?’

  ‘I’m young enough to take an interest,’ I say. ‘I like what bands are doing now.’

  ‘I’m not and I don’t,’ she says. ‘Anyway, they sound like the Cheeky Girls to me. Are you sure they’re not?’

  ‘I am and they don’t,’ I retort.

  But I turn the volume down so that it is just a background hum – a cool background hum, obviously, as befits a classic British sports car with a genuine leather gearstick cover.

  ‘Did you book the hotel?’ she asks suddenly.

  ‘Naturally,’ I say. ‘Usual place. One of the rooms with a sea view.’

  ‘If we do what you suggest we do tonight,’ she says, ‘we won’t have much time left to look at the sea.’

  ‘We can always leave the curtains open while we do it,’ I say. ‘It takes a lot to shock the good folk of Brighton.’

  I should explain that, along with always eating at twelve thirty, another family tradition is lying shamelessly to Virginia’s parents. As with so many ancient and much-loved customs, its origins are unfortunately lost in the mists of time. At some point in the past, however, we started sneaking away after tea to spend the night at a seedy hotel on the Brighton seafront. Rationalizing our actions, the logic seems to be as follows: Virginia refuses to share a bedroom with me at her parents’ house on the grounds that they would be shocked at our sleeping together while still unmarried or even demonstrably committed. To avoid any of the possible complications arising from this basic starting point (e.g. running into Virginia’s mother while sneaking from one room to another at three o’clock in the morning) we make some feeble excuse for not being able to stay over and drive off, plausibly London-bound, before doing a U-turn onto the M23 and heading south to Brighton for a late dinner and a double bed overlooking the English Channel. The following day we stroll on the beach or over the South Downs and then have lunch at some quasi-rustic pub before driving back to London. As Virginia points out we are, in our little routines, like an old married couple, a remark to which I don’t usually risk a reply. Of course, it is all completely unnecessary. Far from worrying about any hanky-panky under their white crocheted bedspreads, Virginia’s parents would, I am pretty sure, be perfectly happy if we did it quite openly on the kitchen table, just so long as grandchildren resulted from the act. Nor would they be greatly troubled to know that we had simply called in for lunch with them on our way down to Brighton, which is not an unreasonable destination for a spring weekend break. From their point of view, the entire subterfuge is without value of any kind. But it seems to have some value for Virginia. It may be something to do with her name, which, like mine, is a hard one to live up to. Or perhaps she just wishes to see herself still as Daddy’s (or possibly even Mummy’s) Little Girl, whose parents really ought to be shocked at such behaviour in one so young. If so, it must be an illusion that she has cherished for many years and is therefore all the more valuable for being a bit of an antique.

  The sad fact is that I am Virginia’s Last Chance. After the Julian and Jimmy disasters she has invested a great deal of time in trying to shape me into a suitable father of her unborn
children. If she were forced to accept that the project had failed, rather than that it was just over-running on time and budget, then motherhood would recede into the improbable distance. This cruel imbalance in our relationship is something that I exploit only when I really have to.

  Her parents too appear to see me in much the same light, in that they are invariably pleasant to me, even to the extent of actually seeming to like me. If at any stage in the next fifty years I decide that I’d like parents-in-law, I’ll be quite happy to settle for them.

  ‘Thank goodness it’s the weekend,’ says Virginia, mercifully interrupting my thoughts. ‘I can’t stand work at the moment. How is it with you?’

  ‘With me?’ I feel a completely unreasonable pang of guilt, tinged with blind panic.

  ‘How’s that new assistant of yours? What’s her name?’

  ‘The new one?’

  ‘Durrr! That’s what I said, dumbo. The new one.’

  ‘Er . . .’ But I’m just stalling for time. There’s no way out and the bad men are coming to get me.

  ‘You must know the names of your own staff,’ she says with a despairing shake of the head that does not entirely rule out the possibility that I don’t know any of their names. I’m a rat in a trap. What do I say next? Do I lie or tell the truth? Lying is usually best but . . .

  ‘Lucy,’ I say with an honest and open smile. ‘She’s called Lucy.’

  A Porsche carving us up as it swerves across lanes to make the next exit enables me to change the subject of conversation, and I am thus able to leave Virginia to her thoughts, which I’m sure are very interesting for her.

  But only if she exists, of course. Only if she actually exists.

  2

  Neuburg, Danube Valley, November 1619

  The waiter knocked at the heavy oak door of the chamber. From the other side of the door came a muffled and accented response: ‘Go away.’ The waiter opened the door and said by way of apology: ‘Ham.’