I Attain my Heart's Desire

riverrun

James Joyce – Finnegans Wake

I was standing on the platform of a railway station. The train was getting ready to depart – steam was cascading from its cylinders and smoke pouring from its chimney. I thought that I would like to get on board, but the guard slammed the carriage door in my face. 'No! You can't go in there. You're not a wizard!'

* * * *

I hovered over a blackened land. Below me, rivers of molten rock glowed in the darkness and in the distance a volcano spurted fire into the lowering sky. The air was full of the sounds of destruction. A tower fell in a cataclysm of stone and smoke. Rescuing eagles came, but they did not come to rescue me.

* * * *

I wanted to go through a Door, which was guarded by a lion and a king in shining armour. The lion seized me with his eyes and his voice spoke in my inner ear. 'No, Peter. You may not pass.'

'But I must! I must go through.'

'No,' said the king, who was also called Peter. 'This is not your story. You must go elsewhere.'

* * * *

Outside the city, buried under the desert for untold millions of years lay a wonderful craft; so fast that it could cross from one side of the Cosmos to the other in the time between the rising and the setting of the sun. A simple command would awaken it and bring it to me, but I did not know the word.

* * * *

I stood at the entrance of an ancient burial mound. Behind its dark mouth lay, I knew, a great and wonderful mystery – one that I longed to discover. But the chamber under the tomb was only ten feet deep, and I could proceed no further.

* * * *

The ships were so old that they had become part of the city, clustering together to form the towers of the citadel that lay at its heart. I knocked at the door of one of them, and the gatekeeper opened a small hatch in it. 'What do you want?' he asked.

'I desire entrance.'

'Are you a member of the Order of Saint Katherine? Are you a seeker of Truth and Penitence?'

'No, I'm a clockmaker.'

'We have no need of clocks. The hours here do not move at a constant, mechanical rate. Time is a variable quantity for those who suffer.'

'Then must I go away?'

'You must. You cannot enter; for those who enter, but are not of our Order, may never leave.'

* * * *

I was writhing in fiery agony. I was bathed in autumnal coolness. I was falling through the sky, for miles and miles. I was shipwrecked in a submarine craft, trapped underneath the Polar ice. I was stranded in a helpless orbit around a far planet. I was tied to the tracks, and a train was coming.

* * * *

I was standing on the bank of the river Isis, in Oxford. To one side of me stood Magdalene Bridge, and the junction of the Isis and its tributary, the Cherwell. Above my head the trees were swaying and the clouds flying in the morning air, and on the river young men and women dressed in brightly coloured blazers and long white dresses were enjoying a holiday, in punts, skiffs and rowing boats. I sat down on the grass and watched them. They were happy for now; free from lectures and essays, tutorials and seminars for this one summer's day. They did not know that they were happy, perhaps. They did not know how lucky, and privileged and carefree they were and they would not know it, until their fortune and favour were taken away and the worries of the world handed over to them instead. Some bargain, I thought; but nevertheless I envied them and wished that I could join them. I wondered what I would do now. Should I try to find Shoe Lane again?

'Hey!' came a loud cry from the jetty by the bridge. I turned. 'You there!'

'Me?'

'Yes, you!' The speaker was a middle-aged man, in a striped shirt, moleskin trousers and a scarlet neckerchief. 'Young lady wants to speak to you! Come on!'

I walked over to the bridge. 'Where?' I asked the man.

'Over there!' He pointed to a punt tied up by the riverbank. In it sat a very pretty girl of around twenty years old. Her head was shaded from the sun by a wide-brimmed straw hat, decorated with white roses, and she was wearing a summer frock of pastel greens and blues. At her feet lay a wicker basket.

I stopped, confused. 'Go on!' said the man. 'It's all paid for. You can thank Miss Silvertongue there for that. Go on! What are you waiting for?'

What indeed? The man handed me a wooden pole, about eight foot long and shod with iron at one end. 'Mind you don't lose it! And remember, there's a wet boat charge. You be careful – no messing about with the cushions!'

I stepped into the punt, holding the quant gingerly in both hands, like a tightrope walker. The man on the shore untied us and threw the mooring rope into the craft. 'Have a good afternoon,' he said. 'Take care!'

'I will,' I replied, wondering how I was going to manage. I made a misstep, the punt wobbled violently from side to side and I was nearly thrown into the water.

'Oh, Peter!' Lyra was almost crying with laughter. 'You do look a sight!'

'I'm sorry,' I said, blushing. 'I've never done this before.'

'Then sit down and give me that thing!' Gratefully I sank into the cushions at the bottom of the punt. Lyra stood up and made her way gracefully past me. She picked up the pole and, with deft movements that defied its weight, pushed us away from the side of the river and into the middle of the stream. The sun shone down on us out of a brilliant blue sky and, all of a sudden, we were alone together.

'How do you do that?' I asked. The quant was solid oak and heavy, and Lyra was so very young and slender.

'It's easy when you know how. Look, the pole spends most of its time in the water, so it's buoyed up by it. And you don't lift it straight up, see, but at an angle, like this.'

'I see. But is it the done thing, for a young lady to wield the pole and a man to lie in comfort on the seats watching her?'

'Oh, it's quite the fashion these days. We're awfully emancipated here!'

I laughed, and lay back on the cushions, facing towards Lyra and the stern of the boat. She had built up a fair turn of speed with very little apparent effort and we seemed to be skimming over the surface of the Isis. I assumed that we were going so fast because we were being carried by the current and I wondered if we would have to turn around before long, ready for the long upstream battle home.

After a while I gave up trying to keep track of the time. It seemed to me that I was no longer part of Time and that, although it still passed, it was not a form of time that I was familiar with. I mean by this that my personal time and the time of the world around me were no longer connected to each other, and that, for example, a single beat of my heart might take as little as a second of world-time, or as much as a year. I would never know the difference, for the only time I was experiencing was my own. Time passed, as I say, but I did not measure its passage. I knew that time was passing because events were now following one another in a more or less conventional sequence, as they had not done up until now. Towns and bridges, fields and woods flew past us, ghostly against a blurring background of blue, green and white. Their time was not mine, or Lyra's.

'When do we have to take the boat back?' I asked, after an immeasurable interval.

'Oh, don't worry about that,' Lyra said. 'We can keep it as long as we like. We're free, you see.'

'Free?'

'Yes! Can't you tell?'

I thought for a moment. Overhead, clouds appeared and disappeared like fleeting wraiths. Our boat's wake trailed behind us. How could that be, if we were being carried by the river-current?

'You mean we're free now. Free for a while.'

'Yes, that's what I mean. We'll stop for lunch in a minute. Are you hungry?'

I hadn't thought about it but, yes, I was. How long had it been since I had last eaten? Lyra steered the punt towards the bank and ran it aground under a stand of willow trees. We found ourselves enclosed within a green tent of shade, protected from the sun and the wind alike. 'Now,' said Lyra, brushing her hair away from her face with both hands. 'Let's go ashore and see what they've put in the hamper for us!' I helped her carry the basket and then went back to the punt for the cushions. There was a tartan rug there too, which I spread out on the ground.

'Tuck in!' said Lyra, with a grin.

Later, when we had eaten our chicken vol-au-vents, ham rolls and green olive salad followed by strawberries and cream, and drunk a golden sparkling wine from tall-stemmed glasses, and were sitting side by side under the trees, I asked the question that had been on my mind all day.

'Lyra… This is a dream, isn't it? It can't be real.'

'Real? What do you mean by real?'

'I mean, it's not like real life. I'm not really free to go boating with you, there's no such thing as a perfect summer's day and you're not twenty years old any more.'

'It's very rude to remark on a lady's age. I'm not going to tell you anything if you talk to me like that.'

'Why not?'

'Because you don't deserve an answer!'

'Oh!' I stood up. 'You're just making fun of me!'

'Shush, Peter, shush. Do sit down. I want to look at you.'

'Look at me? What on earth do you want to look at me for?'

'Peter, don't you know? Don't you know, even now?'

'Know what?'

'All that time. From the first time I saw you, in my rooms, standing in the doorway holding my mantel clock. The funny way you looked when you saw me. The light on your face. The way your hair flopped over your eyes…'

'It was wrapped up in string and brown paper…'

'The clock, yes. Of course it was.'

'Lyra…' My mind was confused by wonder. 'Are you saying that… that you loved me too, all along?'

'Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying.'

'Oh… Oh you've no idea how much I wanted to…'

'It was the same for me.'

'But what about Will? How could you love me without betraying Will?'

'We made an agreement, the day we parted, that if either of us found somebody special we would not let our old love stand in the way of fulfilling a new one. It was part of the agreement we made; to live the best lives we possibly could even though we could never be together again.'

'But you did see each other again.'

'It was too late by then. All we did was hurt everbody; you, ourselves, and John and Judy Parry.'

'Arthur told me not to tell you about how I felt. He said you would have to send me away if I did.'

'Oh, but it was so impossible! I was thirty years older than you. We would have lost everything, both of us. The world would never have allowed us to live together.'

'It would have been worth it, just the same.'

'Perhaps. Yes, it would.' Lyra shook her head. 'Peter, I want you to promise me something.'

'What is it?'

'Promise me that you will remember the agreement that I made with Will. Do not let an old love stand in the way of a new one. And Peter…' She gave me a girlish smile.

'Yes?'

'We are not in the world now; and this is not a dream.'

A great and giddy hope rose in my heart. It threatened to choke me with joy.

'We are free, just as I told you. Oh! Come here, you big silly!'

I lay down next to Lyra and held her close to me. The sun shone, and the trees danced in the wind, and we were safe in our secret house of verdant willow.

* * * *

Later, we lay together on the cushions in the bottom of the punt, paying little attention to our surroundings, and let the current sweep us downstream. The river carried us dozens of miles, I think, past Abingdon and Wallingford and Benson and other places unknown to me. We did not see those towns go past, nor did we consciously navigate our way through the bridges and locks that should have barred our passage, but nevertheless as the afternoon drew slowly on we eventually came to a place that I recognised. A bridge of grey stone crossed the river, linking the flat meadows on the left-hand-shore with the slipways, hotels and shops on the right. At the town end of the bridge was a crossroads, with a tall church tower to one side. The main street, I knew, went directly uphill from there and one could, if one wished, catch a train to Aldbrickham from the railway station which lay a few hundred yards to its left.

The church clock struck five as we drifted under the bridge. Lyra stood up in the stern once more and used the pole as a steering oar, manoeuvring us to a mooring position in front of an hotel named after an angel. There were many other boats moored there; of all sizes from rowing boats to day-launches, from cabin-cruisers to great riverboats with seats for hundreds of passengers.

'Off you go now, Peter.'

'Go? Are you sending me away already?' I looked at my feet.

'I will never do that, love, but there's something that you must do. Something very important.' Why did Lyra seem so sad? What sudden pain had stabbed her?

'What is it?'

'I will not tell you. You will know it when you find it. Go ashore now, Peter, and walk around the town until you have found what your heart desires.'

'I have already found that.'

Lyra laughed again. 'I know, Peter.' She lifted my right hand to her lips. 'I'll wait for you here. Take as long as you need.'

I walked from one end of the town to the other, past the antique shops and the brewery, the restaurants and the furniture stores. The streets were busy with afternoon shoppers, hurrying to make their last purchases before the shops shut, but they never noticed me. I slipped past them as if I were invisible; a ghost. I did not know what I was looking for, but I trusted Lyra and I was content to wander about this prosperous, busy place until I found what I needed to find, or it found me. However, as the afternoon wore on I realised that, although the town had many things to offer, none of them seemed to be for me so, as the last of the shoppers gave up their quests, and queued up at the autobus stops ready to return home and show their trophies to their families, I began to make my way back to the boat. Perhaps Lyra was wrong, and I would not find what I was looking for today. Perhaps I would have to try again tomorrow. As I walked down a side-street which led down to the river, I found myself standing outside an antiquarian bookshop. The windows of the shop were full of books large and small, brightly-coloured and plain, old and new. It seemed to me that I would like to buy a book, so I walked up to the door (it was set in the side of the building, by a driveway) and opened it. Inside it was like so many of the other sellers of old books that I had visited – full of closely packed wooden shelves of clothbound and paperbound volumes, folio, quarto and octavo. It reminded me of Jim's old workplace; Bigsby and Jarrett in Shoe Lane. Perhaps it was a little tidier than that… I made my way to the back of the shop. I had to climb a shallow step to get there.

There was no counter, just a table standing in front of yet more shelves full of books. A woman was sitting at the table, wearing a long dress of black velvet and bent over a large book; a ledger or catalogue. She looked up as I approached, and I saw that she had fair hair gathered in a knot and wore a pair of wire-framed glasses perched half-way down her nose. 'Hello,' she said. 'Can I help you?'

She had a pleasant voice – rather reminiscent of the posh lady who had bought the Vienna Regulator from us in Oxford, but much friendlier. 'Yes, please. I'm looking for a book.'

She smiled. 'There're lots here to choose from. What kind of book did you have in mind?'

'A story book, I think.'

'Ah, yes. They're the best, aren't they?' She smiled once more, and I suddenly found myself liking her very much indeed. 'Is there any particular story that you'd like?'

'Yes, there is. I wonder – do you have The Clockmaker's Boy, by Peter Joyce?'

'Hmmm. Just a moment.' The woman put the tip of her tongue to a finger and turned the pages of her book. 'Let's see... Joyce, Joyce. I've got lots of James Joyce. Too much, really. Yards of him. Look!' She pointed to a shelf above the window. Hundreds of identical, red-covered volumes were lined up on it. 'I wish the Finnegans would wake up and walk out of here!'

'Doesn't anybody want to read them?'

'They think they do, but when it comes to trying it they find they can't. It's so dense and long, you know. You might enjoy this one, though. It's all short stories.'

She handed me a slim volume from the shelf by her elbow. 'Dubliners,' she said. 'Gosh, that's such a nice book. Go on, have a look.' I took it from her. 'Try the last story; The Dead. It's beautiful. So poignant, so true…'

'No, I'm sorry,' I said handing the book back to her. 'I don't want to read about the Dead just now.' The woman looked disappointed, and I felt briefly guilty for letting her down. 'Is it one of your favourites?'

'It's my very favourite.' She sighed. 'Anyway, it was Peter Joyce you were looking for, wasn't it?' She pushed her glasses up her nose and turned to the next page of the catalogue. 'Ah! Here it is! The Clockmaker's Boy. It's listed in here. But it's terribly rare, you know. Only one copy was ever printed. I could try to get it for you…'

'No, that's all right. Have you anything else by him?'

'Yes! There's just one.' She brightened up. 'It's over here.' Brushing past me in a rustle of velvet, she took a wooden step-ladder from its place beside her table and stood it next to the shelving. I watched her as she climbed up it and reached to the back of a previously hidden row of books. 'Here it is!' She smiled again at me, aware that I was looking at her, and passed a hand-written exercise book down to me. I opened it at the first page and read:

'You all right there, son?'

I looked up. 'Yes, thank you Goodsir.'

'You were in dreamland.' My questioner was a middle-aged man, wearing a brown suit and bowler hat. He could have been a farmer, or a country doctor.

'Pull the flapper down, won't you, son. They're ringing the bell.'

I'd completely missed hearing it, preoccupied as I was with the news I had received that morning. Hanging down by the side of the window was a green cord with a brass handle attached to its end. I reached up with my right hand, tugged hard on the handle and with a creak the orange flapper flag which was fixed to the outside of the railway carriage was pulled down into its socket, indicating to the guard who was standing on the platform that all the passengers in our compartment were safely aboard; luggage, children, daemons and all.

'Time and Peter Joyce,' the woman said. She had descended the ladder and was standing next to me. 'It's unfinished, of course.'

'Unfinished?'

'Yes. He died. The explosion – it was in all the papers.'

'So he's one of the Dead too…'

'Yes, I'm afraid so.'

'How does the story end? Where did he get to?'

'Take a look.' I tried to open the book at the last page, but its leaves were stuck together and I could not separate them.

'I can't read it. Can you?' I handed the book back. She took it from me – our fingers touched – and opened it. 'Yes, I can. But–'

'Yes?'

'I'm not going to. Here, you keep it.'

'How much is it? You say that this is the only copy you've got. Is it very expensive?'

'No more than you can afford.'

I reached into the pocket of my trews. 'I have a little money. What is the price?'

We were standing very close to one another. 'The price,' she said, 'is a kiss.'

The punt was still moored by the side of the river, next to the bridge. Lyra was waiting for me, sitting on a green-painted bench on the jetty eating an ice-cream cone, her legs swinging to and fro beneath her. She was ten or eleven years old. An overwhelming urge to confess what I had done swept over me. 'Lyra,' I said, 'I am ashamed. My name is Peter, and I have denied you.'

'I have forgiven you.' She took a bite at the chocolatl bar that stuck out of the top of the cone.

'You know what I have done?'

'The lady who keeps the Books has told me.'

'How? I have only just left the bookshop.'

'All the same, she has told me.'

'And you don't mind?'

'Shush, Peter. Do you have your Book with you?'

'Here it is.' I showed Lyra the exercise book.

'Come on then. It's not far.' She finished her ice-cream and leapt into the punt. I looked around for the quant, but Lyra shook her head. 'Don't worry about the pole, Peter. We won't be needing it. Jump in!'

I stepped into the boat after her, and she untied the painter. Straightaway we began to move. The punt left the shore, passed under the echoing arch of the bridge and proceeded back upstream, driven by an unseen and silent force. Lyra lay on her front in the bows, looking ahead. I sat behind, wondering where it was that we were going, and whether it would be the end of my travels or just another stopping-off point. As the punt skipped over the water, and the boat-houses and meadows to either side fell behind us I found that I could not shake the feelings of guilt that had possessed me as soon as I had left the bookshop.

'Lyra?'

'Yes?'

'It's not as easy as that, is it?'

'What?'

'Forgiveness.'

'Why do you say that?'

'What happened in the bookshop – how could you forgive me so easily?'

'Did I say it was easy?' Lyra turned around and faced me. She was an elderly woman now; seventy or eighty years old, with a deeply lined face and hair altogether white. 'It was not.'

'It seemed to cause you very little pain.'

'I have been in constant pain all day.'

'Because Pantalaimon is not with you?'

'That is one reason, yes.'

'Why did you forgive me? Was it because what we did – under the willow trees – meant nothing to you?'

'It meant everything to me.' Lyra was fifteen, fresh-faced and serious.

'Then…'

'But did you not know? Is it not prophesied? I am Eve. I am mother of all. Does not a mother forgive her children the pain they cause her, every day of her life?'

I could not bear to look at her. The light was too bright.

'Do not worry, Peter. Everything will work out for the best in the end. And look! We have reached our destination!'

The boat had come ashore on a small grassy island, not far from the riverbank. On it stood a building of white marble columns under a broken pediment. It was a temple.