The night was still and the gentle bobbing of the boat soothed Viola
off to sleep. She was lying on a straw-strewn floor in the cook’s storeroom,
wrapped in a pile of hessian sacks, exhausted from the day’s scramble.
She slept deeply and she dreamt, but
this time the dream was different. It almost felt as if it belonged to someone
else.
She was walking along a long driveway bordered with poplar trees. It
was a windy day and her hat kept blowing off. Every time that she ran through the poplars to
pick it up the driveway shifted, so that when she returned to it was facing in a
completely different direction. After a while she got bored with this and decided
that she would just sit down on the grassy verge and wait. However, each time
that she made this decision she seemed to find herself walking in the middle of
the driveway again. It was the logic of dreaming.
She stood still and tried to make out
what was at the end of the road. This would normally work as her eyesight was
so good, but here all she could see was a vague smudge of blue in the distance
where the poplar trees appeared to meet. It might have been the sea.
She trudged on and became aware that
there were birds tweeting in the trees. Theirs wasn’t much of a song. Out of a
jumble of chirrups and squawks came some sort of unified noise.
‘for-too,
for-too, for-too’
It was very annoying. What sort of bird
would make such a sound? All the birds were small, grey and drab, which
surprised her. She thought that they should be green.
***
The dream girl was often close enough to touch, but never close enough
to grasp. Celia had been chasing her along the strand for what seemed like
days, but could equally well have been just a few minutes. The sand and the sea were now endless; there
was no bordering heathland and no hinterland. It was just a spit of land
getting increasingly thinner.
Every now and then the dream girl would
run further ahead and turn round to address her.
‘Hurry up’ she would say, or ‘we’ve
still got a long way to go’
Celia found it exasperating, but for
some reason she couldn’t ever stop running. It was the logic of dreaming.
‘What am I running for?’ she would ask,
and the dream girl would smile and say ‘if you catch me, I’ll tell you’, but
she never could catch her.
They ran on, just inches apart, as the
path of sand grew narrower and narrower. Celia had a vague hope that at the end
of the sand, where the sea surrounded them and there was nowhere else to run,
that she would catch her. But then the Dreamgirl was gone and in her place sat
a little blue sailing boat, almost the same colour as the azure sea.
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