The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(80)

XIX

IN A COTTAGE ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF LONDON, IN Worcester Park, on the exact day Murray had chosen for the Martians to arrive, Herbert George Wells was sleeping soundly in the belief that the day awaiting him beyond the rising curtain of dawn would be the same as any other. He slipped out of bed carefully, so as not to rouse Jane, who was still sleeping beside him, her breath imitating the ebb and flow of the surf. He left the bedroom, had a strip wash, and began his habitual pilgrimage through the house, which was plunged into a dense silence at that time of the morning. Wells liked to get up before dawn, when the world had not yet arisen, and, free of any obligations, creep around the house like an intruder before his working day began. Like a field marshal strutting proudly over the battleground strewn with his enemy’s remains, he surveyed each room, making sure no one had invaded the territory he had struggled so hard to conquer. Everything appeared in order: the furniture was in its proper place, the dawn light was streaming in through the windows at the correct angle, the wallpaper was the same color. The Wellses’ house was far from luxurious, but was bigger than the one they had in Woking and infinitely bigger than the warren they had inhabited in Mornington Crescent. For Wells the steady increase in the size of his sanctums reflected better than anything else the measure of his success. Ranged on a special shelf in the sitting room were his five published novels to date, the palpable fruit of his imagination. The renown those few works had won him in England had recently spread to America. He plucked from the end of the row the copy of The War of the Worlds, recently published by Heinemann, and cupped it gingerly in his hands, as he might a batch of eggs. “The War of the Worlds,” he murmured solemnly in the gloom of the sitting room, “by H. G. Wells.” He liked to whisper the titles of his books, as though somehow that brought them to life. Then he noticed a letter sticking out from between its pages. He grasped it between his thumb and forefinger, as though with revulsion. The letter had arrived well over a month before and was from Gilliam Murray, the person he most hated in the whole world. Yes, he bore that man a deep and abiding grudge, which in Wells’s case was quite an achievement, because from the earliest age he had shown an unerring inability to sustain any emotion, even hatred.

Wells remembered the shiver that had run up his spine when he discovered Murray’s letter in his mailbox, a reminder of the old days when he was plagued by Murray’s invitations to travel to the future. Wells had torn it open with trembling fingers, unable to stop his mind from inventing a hundred reasons why Murray might have written to him, each more alarming than the last, before his eyes finally absorbed its contents. When he had finished reading, he gave a sigh of relief, and his fear gave way to loathing. Murray had apparently emerged from his lair and returned to London, where he had the nerve to ask for Wells’s help for nothing less than to re-create the Martian invasion the author had depicted in his novel. Murray had no qualms in his letter about acknowledging the limits of his imagination, and he hinted at a reward if Wells agreed to help him and even appealed to Wells’s sentiments by confessing that his motives this time were far from pecuniary, and that he was driven by the noblest feeling of all: love. If he was able to make a Martian cylinder appear on Horsell Common on August 1, the woman he loved would agree marry him. Why would anyone devise such an outlandish test? Wells wondered. Had the mysterious woman whom Murray loved set him a challenge she knew he could not meet? But more importantly: did such a woman even exist, or was this all a cunning ruse to secure his aid? Whether Murray’s story was true or not, Wells had decided to refuse his request. He had slipped Murray’s letter between the pages of his novel and thought no more of it until that morning. He loathed Murray too deeply to want to help him, regardless of how much in love the man was or pretended to be. Placing the book back on the shelf, Wells realized that if his story turned out to be true, then the deadline was this very day. Had Murray pulled it off? he wondered with vague curiosity. Had he actually managed to make a Martian cylinder land on Horsell Common? He doubted it. Even for a man like Murray, who could apparently achieve anything, it was an impossible feat.

Wells went into the kitchen to make his morning cup of coffee, assailed by a tormenting thought: had he refused to help Murray simply because he was his enemy? Perhaps it was time he answered the question. No, he reflected, assembling the percolator. Of course not; there had been other equally important reasons. Such as the fact that for the past six weeks he had been a different man. A bewildered, terrified man. A man forced every day to convince himself he had not taken leave of his senses, for, ever since he had entered the Chamber of Marvels in the basement of the Natural History Museum, where the unimaginable was stored, where he had beheld wonders no one knew existed, extraordinary things that made the world a miraculous place, Wells had wondered how he was to live. For days afterward, he had been plunged into a state of confusion similar to the incomprehension he had felt when, as a child, he discovered that the world extended beyond the British Isles, the only focus of the geography class at school. It seemed incredible, but the world did not end at the coast. Beyond it loomed the Colosseum, the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids. Thus Wells had gained a notion of the Earth’s size, just as a visit to the Dinosaur Court at the Crystal Palace to see the plaster reconstructions of, among others, the megatherium, had enabled him to establish its age, the beginning of time, before which existence was a mere euphemism. Thus, from an early age, Wells had believed he lived in the world that was, and always had been, a world whose coordinates in time and space had been carefully mapped out by science. Yet he knew now that those coordinates were wrong, that there was a world beyond the fictitious boundaries that their rulers, who determined what they ought to know about and what not, were intent on drawing up. On leaving the museum, Serviss had told Wells it was up to him whether or not he believed in the authenticity of the wonders in the Chamber of Marvels. And Wells had decided to accept as true the existence of the supernatural, because logic told him there was no other reason why it should be kept under lock and key. As a result he felt surrounded by the miraculous, besieged by magic. He was aware now that one fine day he would go into the garden to prune the roses and stumble on a group of fairies dancing in a circle. It was as though a tear had appeared in every book on the planet, and the fantasy had begun seeping out, engulfing the world, making it impossible to tell fact from fiction.