Parlour Four Read online

  ‘Shock,’ Mrs Thimble said with authority. ‘You’re suffering from shock. They can take you into hospital for that, and give you the electricity, as like as not. So you’d better have a care.’

  Not unnaturally, this lurid prediction further disturbed her husband.

  ‘Shock to hell,’ he said. ‘But it’s true I don’t feel right in myself. I’ll step out and take a breath of air.’ This was Albert’s common formula when he was prompted to drop into the local. ‘And I’ll let you know what’s what.’

  Mr Thimble hadn’t been gone for ten minutes when a rapid series of quite small explosions announced that his son Harold had got home on his Yamaha. And he burst in some excitement into the kitchen.

  ‘36!’ he said. ‘One of those gas things. The stuff builds up like it might be in the cellar – and there’s a flash and the whole house goes sky-high. Just nothing left of 36. But one poor bugger – or the top half of one poor bugger, it looks like – decorating the chimney-pots of 38.’

  ‘Disgusting!’ Samantha said. She had glanced up briefly from Modern Brides to deliver this judgement.

  ‘Well, just think – only gas!’ There was a tinge of disappointment in Mrs Thimble’s voice. ‘But it’s always happening, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ Harold Thimble said. ‘When it does happen the papers play it up like mad. There’ll be reporters and photographers out there now. But a year can go by, and it doesn’t happen to one in a million houses in the land.’ Harold paused. ‘If that,’ he added, rather as one who has consulted a highly refined computer in his head. ‘Houses struck by lightning, and houses bashed into by runaway Juggernauts: there’s more of them by a long way than there is of those gas affairs. Anyone who doesn’t know that is ignorant.’

  ‘Ignorant yourself,’ Samantha said. Contradicting her brother often came to Samantha rather in the manner of a reflex action. ‘Don’t listen to him,’ she added to her mother, ‘him that can’t as much as get a job to clear dog-shit from the pavements.’

  ‘That isn’t nice, Samantha.’ Mrs Thimble always tried to insist on some refinement in the home. ‘But, Harold, it took your father all funny, and now he’s off to the Leather Bottle.’

  ‘How do you mean, Mum, all funny?’

  ‘Feeling that everything that was happening had happened before. Seeing one of those vulgar photos in his paper as if they’d printed the same one twice. And then the same way with Albion Rovers, and me and some teacups, and then Samantha and Chummy – all like it had been in the past, see? And then—’

  ‘Oh, that!’ Harold was contemptuous. ‘He’s told me about that more than once. He’s susceptible like. Nothing in it.’

  ‘What do you mean, susceptible?’

  ‘Yes, susceptible!’ Samantha echoed, and this time she tossed Modern Brides away from her. ‘Talk English, Harold, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Then I’ll try to explain.’ Harold’s tone suggested the patience of a devoted teacher confronting a batch of ESN infants. ‘There’s your conscious awareness like. Right, Mum?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your conscious awareness. Somewhere inside your head there’s a kind of TV screen, isn’t there? With everything that goes on in front of you showing upon it just as it takes place. You know? And sounds as well, just as on the box. Smells, too.’

  ‘Smells?’ Mrs Thimble queried disapprovingly.

  ‘And touch. Ever heard of the feelies, Mum? You might be putting out a hand and stroking the bloody cat. And there it all is in this consciousness—you know?—all that’s happening in front of you here and now. See? But behind this conscious bit of your mind there’s something else: a kind of lumber-room where you’ve stowed away all the old stuff that’s no longer of use to you.’

  ‘Harold, you’re going a bit deep, aren’t you? You must have been reading a book.’ Mrs Thimble spoke as a nice-minded woman might do if constrained to comment upon some demeaning solitary indulgence.

  ‘Well, I do, Mum. I do read books.’ Harold’s air suggested honest candour before such a charge. ‘There’s no harm in a few books. They’re natural.’

  ‘I’m not against education, Harold. It can be a wonderful thing. Your Uncle Ned – he’s educated. And now with his own business, and something in the bank.’

  ‘This isn’t education. It’s just thinking something out. We’re talking about memory, see?’

  ‘Memory, Harold?’

  ‘This lumber-room. Every now and then you rummage in it—you know?—and fish out something you need again. Like it might be whether you’ve already fed the bloody cat.’ Harold Thimble was given to derogatory references to Chummy. Chummys at this point in time – he would say – are no longer content to feed decently on scraps, but daily devour out of tins stinking stuff equivalent in cost to quite a number of cigarettes.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about, Harold.’

  ‘I’m on about this thing of Dad’s. Believing something’s happening all over again. Of course it isn’t. It’s really happening for the first time now. Only it has slipped unnoticed past this first screen—consciousness, we’ve called it, haven’t we?—and gone straight into the lumber-room. And then bounced back like.’

  ‘Bounced back, Harold?’

  ‘But not before it’s collected a bit of dust, you might say. There it is, arrived in your consciousness all right, but wrapped in a whiff of the past. Which is why you kid yourself it has also happened before. That’s déjà vu.’

  ‘That’s what, Harold?’

  ‘Déjà vu is scientific.’ Harold gave his explanation not without a hint of condescension. ‘It’s from this Latin, and means “seen already”.’

  Mrs Thimble, although she hadn’t quite followed her son’s exposition, was impressed by his learning. When she spoke again it was to say ‘I see’ in almost a humble fashion. But at this point, rather surprisingly, Samantha broke into the discussion sharply.

  ‘But, Harold,’ she said, ‘you haven’t heard the whole thing. There was that about the dirty photo, and about Albion Rovers, and about me and Chummy. But then he said, “Now there’s going to be a terrible crash”.’

  ‘So what, kid?’

  ‘When he said that about the crash, Harold, what he knew was going to happen—to happen again, he meant—hadn’t happened at all. Or it hadn’t unless I’m quite barmy, and Mum too. “Now there’s going to be a terrible crash,” he said. And almost directly after that, the big bang came. So it’s a different thing, isn’t it? There hadn’t been anything to slip by into your lumber-room, and then bounce back all dusty-like into the front of his head.’

  ‘It’s a special case.’ Harold’s confidence had discernibly faltered, but he recovered himself at once. ‘Dad was having this ordinary piece of déjà vu, like sometimes comes to everyone—’

  ‘It hasn’t to me,’ Mrs Thimble said with some asperity. ‘There’s no such carryings on in my head, Harold.’

  ‘You won’t ever have noticed, Mum – not being an introspective type. But that’s not the point. The point is that Dad was having this ordinary spot of déjà vu, when suddenly on top of it came a jab of precognitive experience.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Precognitive experience. Suddenly seeing a bit of the future.’

  ‘Like it might be Samantha’s horoscopes, or your Auntie Flo’s tea-leaves?’

  ‘That’s all just superstition, Mum. Precognitive experience is science. Only I wouldn’t say science has got it quite taped yet. It’s a sight less common than your old déjà vu. They go hunting for it in universities and places.’ Harold’s eyes suddenly lit up. ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘There might be something in it for Dad.’

  ‘Something in it, Harold?’

  ‘In a newspaper, say. With a photo of the two of you, Mum. And it could be built up like.’ Harold’s enthusiasm mounted. ‘Front page stuff! “My life with a time-traveller.” Thousands of pounds in it, there might be.’

  ‘Harold Thimble, this is a re
spectable family that doesn’t get itself in the papers, whether with photos or not. Precollywobbles and what have you! What next, I ask? I’ll thank you to get on your feet and open a tin for Chummy.’

  ‘Bloody cat,’ Harold said. He had sprung to his feet, but was making for the door. ‘There’ll be reporters out there still, and I’m going after them. It’ll be in the later editions in the morning. You’ll see.’

  And it was – although not with quite the prominence that Harold Thimble would have liked. There had, after all, been that torso up among the chimney-pots, and several less drastically unfortunate persons were in hospital, so the early reports had to be given a sombre cast. ‘Horror’ and ‘holocaust’ attracted a good deal of large type, and there was a useful woman who had said, ‘I was bathing the baby’. But one enterprising young reporter had got ‘Plumstead Plumber’s Premonition’ past his sub-editors (plumbing being the elder Thimble’s professional activity) and had fixed up an interview with the whole family for the following day. To this Mr Thimble was at first reluctant to agree. He wouldn’t – he insisted with reasonable conviction – know what to say. And, anyway, what was there in it for him? Would the paper run to a tenner? For less than a fiver he just wouldn’t do it. And that was flat.

  With this unpromising simplicity of mind Harold had only a few hours in which to deal, and the result was undeniably a credit to him. He not only got his father to do as he was told on the spot, but also got into his head at least the rudiments of larger things to come. Albert Thimble just had to remember enough. The business of the big bang hadn’t—had it?—been any mere flash in the pan. It only happened to be the most spectacular instance of a strange power that he had always known himself to possess. Even as a kid, Harold insisted. Wasn’t that right?

  Albert supposed that, yes, it was. He was doubtful about it at first, and even cast a mistrustful eye on his insistent son. But soon he was remembering one funny thing, and then another. These were muzzy convictions, and at first he knew them to be so. But he had always been secretly in awe of Harold’s intellectual endowments, and even believed that it was mysteriously on account of them that the boy found it difficult to hold down a job. For years Harold must have been noting and remembering small but significant instances of those hitches in the temporal flow of things which he himself had forgotten about. And now Harold was saying there was money in it – and money very remote from the world of fivers and tenners and small jobs on drains and taps conducted on a cash-on-the-nail moonlighting basis. At first Harold didn’t emphasise this aspect of the matter in any alarming way. But as his father softened up (for that is the expression we must use) he leant on it more heavily. So when the interview – the first interview – took place it didn’t go too badly. There was even a photographer present, who for some reason took pictures of Samantha fondling Chummy. In this there may have been a designed suggestion that Samantha partook in some way of her father’s supernormal powers. Witches go in for cats. When the young reporter did rather more poking about Mrs Thimble’s kitchen than was quite polite, it may well have been in the hope of coming on a broomstick.

  It was Mrs Thimble who was a bit of a snag. ‘Respectable’ remained her key word. They’d always been respectable in Number 14, and this just wasn’t. She would have liked to say that it was all nonsense too. But this she found she couldn’t do. She was at bottom a clear-headed woman, and if the fact didn’t often appear it may have been because she had frequently found the endowment disadvantageous in domestic situations. She very much disliked the brouhaha being created by Harold and acquiesced in by his father. But she didn’t lose sight of the fact that something very strange had really happened in Number 14 when there had been that nasty incident in Number 36.

  Quite a batch of articles was concocted about the Plumstead plumber’s second sight. As these soon included what purported to be reminiscences not only on his own part but on the part of his children as well, a lot of money came in – although it was not, indeed, quite on the scale hopefully anticipated by Harold. And, of course, the affair lasted no time at all. Even so, it allowed for what was to be the fateful interposition of Dr Cudbird.

  Dr Cudbird was a Reader in Parapsychology, and had been given his job by a sceptical university as being himself the most comprehensively sceptical of the people who had put in for it. But he was a conscientious man, open to weighing even anecdotal material, and not averse to field-work. When a piece of nonsense turned up even in the most vulgar of the public prints he went and had a look at it. Or if he didn’t go himself he sent Kidder, a young man – perhaps unfortunately named in the circumstances – who was called an Assistant Lecturer, and who constituted under his chief the entire strength of the Department of Psychical Research. (The old lady who put up the money had insisted on ‘Psychical Research’, the word ‘parapsychology’ not having been invented when she had begun to interest herself in poltergeists and table-turnings.)

  ‘You’ve been keeping an eye on those Thimbles?’ Cudbird asked his junior colleague. ‘They’re still actively on the map. The latest is their having an unaccountable cat. “The Case of the Unaccountable Cat”. It sounds like the title of an old-fashioned detective story.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not up with the cat.’

  ‘It has only just entered the dramatis personae. Name of Chummy. It sees things in corners. More commonly that’s dogs.’

  ‘So it is.’

  ‘At least they haven’t yet disembowelled the creature and consulted the entrails. Haruspication may pass current in the Edgware Road, but it hasn’t reached Plumstead.’ Dr Cudbird paused on this, but Kidder gave no sign of having recognised an elegant reference to the muse of T.S. Eliot. ‘Those Thimbles are clearly out to squeeze their lemon till the pips squeak,’ Cudbird continued on a more colloquial note. ‘Go and have a look, before they drop out of sight.’

  ‘Would there be much point in it?’ Initially, at least, Kidder saw no satisfaction as likely to result from a pilgrimage to Pipkin Grove. ‘It’s clear that a lot of hocus-pocus—’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Cudbird interrupted impatiently. ‘But it’s our business to show that we do investigate. And investigation ought not to stop short in face of an element of fraud or absurdity. There’s always the argument that investigation itself tends to inhibit the play of genuinely paranormal forces, and that the psychical mediums and all their kidney tend then to take to cheating simply to keep their end up.’

  ‘And the cash flowing in. Yes, I know.’ Kidder was inclined to resent his chiefs frequent enunciation of professional platitudes. ‘But of course I’ll make a recce if you want me to. After all, our own cash has to keep flowing in as well.’ This was a reference to something uncomfortably probationary in the status of the Department of Parapsychology. There were persons powerful in the councils of the university who would happily have seen that dotty old lady’s intentions unobtrusively betrayed, and her benefaction diverted to more orthodox academic activities. ‘So I’ll give those Thimbles a short, sharp go-over, and report back.’

  And a few days later Kidder did report.

  ‘There’s this elderly couple,’ he said. ‘A plumber and his wife. Too thick to invent much, I’d say.’

  ‘Unusually stupid?’ The Reader in Parapsychology went in for brisk queries.

  ‘They certainly wouldn’t shine in any I.Q. test. Of course, they are in a bewildering situation. Thimble seems out of his depth and in a bit of a funk. There’s a shade more sense in his wife. They’re both insistent that the queer thing did happen. So is the daughter, an empty-headed girl who does hairdressing. The son, Harold Thimble, wasn’t present in the old home when the explosion occurred, but he had plenty to say. Rather clever, Harold is – and with a bit of reading to him. Chattered about déjà vu. He even knew to call it a type of paramnesia.’

  ‘You think that suspicious?’

  ‘Well, it can be read as that. But since the thing happened—’

  ‘If it did.’

  ‘
Quite so. I was going to say he’d quite naturally have been taking a dekko at the textbooks and little dictionaries. Harold’s out of work. He may be a public library type. But he didn’t know the term “concatenate paramnesia”.’

  ‘As it occurs only in an obscure paper of your own, Kidder, that is not markedly to the young man’s discredit.’

  ‘The phenomenon’s obscure, too. But it certainly exists. Several déjà-vu impressions come huddled rapidly one after the other. And – just occasionally – there immediately follows what I call the converse persuasion. One switches from thinking “This has happened before . . . and now this . . . and this” to thinking “And now here’s what’s going to happen”.’

  ‘And has it ever been certainly known to?’

  ‘I rather think not. You see, it’s very rare, very fugitive—’

  ‘And totally insusceptible of experimental verification?’

  ‘Well, naturally. But I’m convinced—’

  ‘Just where was Harold Thimble when the explosion took place?’

  ‘Cruising round on his motor-bike, he says.’

  ‘And how had it affected his father?’

  ‘Albert Thimble was naturally pretty upset, and he said he’d go out and get a breath of air. Actually, it’s known he went round to a pub, and talked about the thing rather incoherently.’

  ‘And he’s done a good deal of talking since?’

  ‘Certainly he has. To journalists, and much under his son’s eye. That element of fraud and absurdity has arrived, all right. If I ever write up this thing, I think I’ll call it the phase of remunerative confabulation.’

  ‘Very pretty, no doubt. But you’re too fond of giving names to things, Kidder. Savages go for it, thinking they get power over the unaccountable that way. But it’s delusive.’