“I had a very good dream last night. I dreamed I was lying in this very large grand fourposter bed with crimson hangings, and sitting on the end of it, on a carved post, was a huge eagle. It was chained up but screaming. And hanging on the other bedpost was a basket full of pieces of meat. And I knew I had to get up and feed the eagle, but I couldn’t move. And as I was lying there, a whole flight of little flat paper angels dressed in red and gold flew past the window.”
“Hugo darling, what a wonderful dream. What an extraordinarily classy dream. How like you to have a dream like that! What do you think it means?”
“I think it has something to do with those pink plastic hands, and something to do with Prometheus and his vulture, but I haven’t worked out the connection yet. If thine right hand offend thee, cut it off and feed it to the eagle, do you think? Something along those lines?”
“You are wonderful, Hugo. I never dream anything poetic or mythological. I just dream about having babies and not having fed the cats, or the goldfish or the dog which I haven’t even got. My dreams are so obvious. Just matemal-anxiety dreams. Occasionally I vary it by dreaming a child is falling out of a window. But that’s about it. Do you think it means that I never really wanted children at all, and wish they’d all the or starve to death?”
“I don’t see how it could mean that, do you? ”
“But nowadays, when I dream I’m pregnant, which I do so boringly often, I feel so relieved when I wake up and find it’s not true. What does that mean?”
“It means the time for children is over.”
“How clever you are, how well you put it. The time for children is over.”
“It is time for the next thing, whatever it may be.”
“For you, the next thing is Bagdad. Will Mujid’s addresses be any use, do you think?”
“We shall see. One has to be so careful. Not to compromise people.”
“How strange it all is. I kept thinking, while I was in Romley, that I was going to find out something really interesting about myself. But I didn’t. It wasn’t there, after all. Or if it was, I couldn’t see it. I shall stop looking. The past is the past.”
“If only it were,” said Hugo.
Kate smiled, faintly.
“I had another letter from Peter this week,” she said. “Here, look at this one.” She fished it out of her bag.
Hugo looked; the letter, in Peter’s anonymous cut-out style, read: WOMEN LIKE YOU WALK AROUND ASKING FOR TROUBLE. RAPE IS TOO GOOD FOR YOU.
“Not very nice, is it?” said Kate. “But what can I do? There’s nothing I can do. And yet I kept on thinking that maybe he would forgive me, maybe we would understand one another, maybe we could cut through all this crap and speak to one another. But it’s not possible. The past is the past. It can’t be put right.”