Thursday began as an ordinary day as far as Estelle was concerned. Breakfast... Tube... Office... Lunch... And then the sane, sane, simple everyday world began to fade. One moment she was walking along the pleasant tree-lined familiarity of her home town... the next she was involved in a strange translucent sphere and life had turned into a nightmare. Without warning and without explanation she found herself alone in a strange new environment. There were strange stars in the unknown sky above her and the flora and fauna of her new surroundings were disturbingly unfamiliar. Most minds would have yielded to the easy escape of insanity. But Estelle Wilde was made of sterner stuff. She fought back at the strangeness of her new setting and tried desperately to establish a new set of survival data before it was too late. Piece by piece she collected her information and sat down to the mammoth task of answering the great questions. Where was she? How had she been brought there? And why? Above all... was it possible to get home?
Release date:
December 19, 2013
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
151
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ESTELLE woke and frowned a little in the direction of the alarm clock; reliable—far more reliable than she was—thought the girl sleepily, but unwelcome, horribly unwelcome at this hour. She stretched out a hand and sleepily pressed down the cut-off control. The insistent buzzing died away. Its echo moved around the corners of the room as though seeking a strategic retreat. Estelle’s head turned on the pillow. Her long black hair moved like the waves of the great dark Sea of Night. She opened her eyes again unwillingly and looked across at the familiarity of the dressing table. Propping herself on one elbow she drew a deep breath and shuddered a little in the fresh coolness of the December morning. She rolled back the blankets and tinted nylon sheet, rather unwillingly, and swung graceful, feminine legs on to the welcome warmth of the carpet. Her toes crept into comfortable old slippers, which contrasted strangely with the delicate allure of the transparent short nightie that swung deliciously around her beautiful young hips. She reached for her dressing gown that lay folded on the dressing table chair, shrugged into it and crossed to the window. Outside there was a white carpet: not snow but a fine layer of delicately reflecting, refracting ice crystals. Estelle looked at the patterns on the window pane. The ice had traced the lines of delicate foliage. For some reason the pattern on the window reminded her of chrysanthemums. She traced the outlines with her finger. It was too beautiful a morning to go to work, she decided, and yet aesthetic considerations would be unlikely to weigh with the company for whom she toiled, secretarywise, for forty hours each week. The curling foliage patterns on the window fascinated her. She continued to follow them with the top of a dainty, long-nailed, index finger. Estelle wondered whether there were more behind those patterns than the rather mundane theories of orthodox crystallography would allow. Orthodoxy, tradition and common sense were not stored among the virtues in Estelle’s quixotic young mind. Still in her teens, the girl had grown out of late school romance stories recently enough to remember them vividly.
While many of her confrères had been enraptured by visions of film or television contracts and the wild rhythmic appeal of pop groups, Estelle had found her escape from dreary school reality in flights of fancy to stranger realms than those offered by musical insects or trundling pebbles. As she looked at the ordinariness of the wood and glass with which the window was physically composed, she argued within herself that there must be more to it than fibre and silica. A window had to have an inner significance, an innate purpose. A window had to have a soul. She found herself floundering into the grey mists of unintelligibility. The frost patterns had done it. Could those foliage gestalts have been some kind of photographic process? Not photographic in the ordinary sense, of course, not the writing of light, but the writing of vibrations. Was she looking at a frost and glass image of something from another world, something from ‘another bourne of time and space’, beyond the physical reality that was seemingly solid, and yet which science said was not? There had to be another world. This couldn’t be all there was: these three dull, solid dimensions; a line of Shakespeare winged through her mind from some hidden depth of memory:
“O that this all too solid flesh would melt!”
She wasn’t too sure that she had remembered it correctly, but that was its gist. Estelle looked down at the clock and gave a little gasp. Frost patterns, word patterns, romantic dreams of worlds beyond worlds, all dissolved in a holocaust of lateness.
She hurried to the tiny bathroom and splashed rather than washed; flying upstairs again she dressed with breathless haste and flew through into the kitchenette of her miniature flat. Cornflakes spilled into a Swedish-modern plastic bowl like a flood of crinkled coins from a perverted Mint. Milk drenched the gold, dissolving it into a miry bog of gooey, yellow white mud. Sugar descended like badly thrown artificial snow in a provincial pantomime. It sank as snowflakes sink on river banks where there is not quite enough frost to freeze ugly mud and provide a safe anchorage for the miniature white stars. Estelle’s spoon dipped into the milk-sugar-grain sog and her even white teeth made some sort of pretence at catching the mouthfuls as they went through. Any relationship between the frenzied gulping and normal mastication was purely coincidental.
Estelle grabbed her coat and bag; leaving the breakfast things on the table, she pulled the door to behind her and joined the scurrying morning throng in search of the Tube. Her mind was so absorbed by time that she had no really coherent or exact impression of the process by which the routine travelling was carried out. The mist of haste had come down between Estelle and reality. Glimpses and impressions only came through the mist. A friendly brown face at the ticket office smiled, asked the destination, gave the ticket. An escalator with lingerie adverts all down the sides, advance notices of films, exhortations to drink somebody’s wine, or to eat somebody else’s tinned plum puddings carried her to a platform and a milling mob; rush hour was at its indescribable worst: everybody going in the same direction, travelling viciously, unconcernedly. What was it a great theologian had said—she could never remember names—“No man is an island unto himself”—John Somebody-or-other? … But these men were completely insular. They were all islands; each concerned with his own affairs his own lateness, to the exclusion of everyone else.
It occurred to Estelle that each one regarded himself as the only live human being on the Circle line that morning; everyone else was a sack, an anthropoid sack, but a sack nevertheless: something to be shoulder charged and elbowed and trodden savagely out of the way. Rush hour was an obstacle race; the prize was punctuality. Your fellow passengers weren’t competitors: they were merely obstacles. You dealt with them as though they were inanimate things.
The train lurched and rattled; angry people—angry with themselves, angry with their jobs, angry with the train—shouldered, pushed and crowded. Estelle couldn’t see the destination boards. The train stopped, she alighted, carried along by an alighting crowd. Another escalator … more adverts. She wondered idly whether anybody ever took any immediate notice of adverts, or whether—as was so brilliantly argued in “The Hidden Persuaders”—the impacts were largely subconscious. The escalator stopped, and there was sudden consternation, then it re-started and she found herself being pushed off the top like a component reaching its goal on an enormous conveyor belt on a factory assembly line. Life in London, she thought, had turned into a sort of assembly line.
It would be very nice to be at home for the weekend. It suddenly came to her, like a flash of inspiration, that tomorrow was her bonus day off. It was a long weekend, a golden Friday adding its glitter to the attractions of Saturday and Sunday. Her mind went to Braintree and the pleasant ordinariness of weekends at home, away from Tube trains, offices and alarm clocks. She thought of Troze Avenue, its trees, its quiet, old houses, peaceful and calm. Braintree was a kind of Paradise compared to the rush and bustle of the metropolis. She reached her office, opened the door, smiled at the senior clerk, nodded at one or two of the other typists, took off her coat and went to her desk. The day’s routine was awaiting her in her basket. She started work on the mail, opening, sorting … It was all there, it was all waiting.
Envelopes made their way into the waste paper basket, but even as she read the business jargon on the sheets they had contained her mind went off on an allegorical course. What was the purpose of it all? What was the significance of it? The life of the envelope, she thought, was a strange, rather sad thing. It guarded its letter from A to B. It was collected, sorted, done up in a bundle or a sack, thrown into a train, and carried for miles, re-sorted, delivered, and then, having finished the course, fought the good fight and run the straight race, it was crumpled and thrown into a waste paper basket, from where it might be salvaged and re-pulped to make a fresh envelope; re-incarnation, she thought? Or it might be burnt. But, according to Newtonian physics, its matter could neither be carried nor destroyed, it would pass, like a paper gnostic, back to the great ocean of all things, its carbon and hydrogen forming strange new gaseous products. She forced her attention back to the printed word, sorted the mail and took it to the respective departments where it belonged.
The morning got underway. She filed, typed, took dictation and answered routine questions, dealt with phone messages and watched the clock. It was lunch time. When she got outside the frost had gone. The pavements were damp and brown with an unpleasant London mud, a trodden mud, a pavement paste, worn from the shoes of countless multitudes. She heard her own stilettos tapping among the mud, like the beaks of predatory birds fishing molluscs and tiny crustaceans from the banks of a tidal estuary.
She reached the little restaurant where she was accustomed to lunch. A fat, swarthy gentleman with an enormous moustache, a white coat and pudgy hands beamed as she came in. The restaurant was about a quarter full.
“Gooda morning, senorita!”
As far as Estelle could gather, Antonio’s grandparents had left Italy before the First World War, but his accent was designed to give the impression that he himself was freshly come from the culinary magnificence of Naples itself. Estelle ate her ravioli with enthusiasm and began sorting out a plate of icecream and tinned fruit which had been rather misguidedly billed as a sundae. She parted with her luncheon voucher and nodded to Antonio as she left the little restaurant. He looked hopefully at her, as though the whole of his livelihood depended upon her patronage.
“See you tomorrow, yes?”
“No, not tomorrow, Antonio.”
“Oh, dear, you like-a your lunch, no?”
“Of course!” she smiled. It was undeniably flattering to see his concern. The restaurateur looked at her inquiringly.
“It’s just that I’m due for a day off tomorrow,” explained Estelle. “I’m going home to Braintree.”
There was a look almost of relief on the Italian’s round, pleasant face.
“Then it is on-a Monday that we shall-a have the pleasure of serving you again, huh?”
“Yes, all being well,” she smiled.
He bowed and waved as she made her way back to the street. There were a few minutes to fill in after lunch, and Estelle strolled along the familiar shops before going back to her office. Christmas decorations varied from the tawdry to the exciting, whimsical and well-designed. The old cliché about the commercialization of Christmas came to life in Estelle’s mind. But didn’t people get what they asked for? she wondered, whether the asking were objective or subjective, whether it were conscious or subconscious. If by their very attitude to life the majority of consumers gave producers and retailers the impression that all they wanted was glitter and an appeal to their grosser commercial instincts then who could fairly blame producers and retailers?
Estelle found herself looking below the tinsel: the stereotyped sentiments on the cards; the plastic holly; the imitation mistletoe. She tried to think of a Child in a stable, but it was almost impossible to equate the thought with plastic holly berries. It was corny, but would that stop it from being true? she thought. A glance at her watch told her it was time to go back to work. The afternoon passed in much the same way as the morning. Filing, typing, idle chat between bouts of intense activity, somehow, thought Estelle, there has to be more to life than this! There has to be more than work and tinsel, letters, typewriters, people with inane conversations. It s. . .
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