White Corridor

15

“I detest motorways,” Bryant complained for the third time as he attempted to realign his overcoat buttons. “How on earth are you supposed to know where you get off?”

“There are several absolutely enormous signposts along the way,” May pointed out.

Bryant squinted through the windscreen. “Did I miss Taunton?”

“You slept through Taunton and Exeter,” said May. “We’re about to come off the M5 onto the A38. Why this spiritualists’ convention has to take place in such a remote corner of the country is beyond me.”

“It’s an area perfectly attuned to the mysteries of the netherworld,” replied Bryant. “You clearly have no historical appreciation of the countryside.” This was a bit rich coming from a man who only left central London to attend funerals, and complained bitterly every time he did so. “There’s not much traffic, is there?”

“The journey’s taking longer than I thought. Sensible people have probably been listening to the weather forecast. The Devon and Cornwall Police have been issuing warnings to stay indoors for the past hour. Damn, I’ve missed a sign now,” May rubbed his forehead wearily. “I was looking out for Buckfast and Ashburton.”

Snow had been falling fast and hard for more than two hours, blotting the pallid sky and sheening the grey, half-empty road. Across the light woodland, a village spire flickered through falling flakes.

“I’ll map-read for a while.” Bryant dragged the ancient guide out of his overcoat and leafed through it without recourse to his reading glasses. “I knew you would eventually need me to get us there.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you for years, Arthur, but we so rarely get the chance to talk like this. Where did your fascination with the occult and alternative religions start? I mean, all that stuff you believe in, psychogeography, pagan cabals, astromancy, witchcraft and predestination, where did it all come from? You’re from sensible working-class East End stock. I’m sure your mother didn’t have time for such things.”

“That’s the paradox,” said Bryant, popping a Milk Bottle into his mouth and chewing pensively. “East-Enders are a prosaic but superstitious lot. My father would never bring a budgerigar into the house or put his boots on the bed, or take photographs of babies, or hand a knife to a friend, or touch a Welshman…‘

“Wait, what were those things supposed to signify?”

“Well, all house birds except canaries were considered bad luck because sailors left them at home while they were at sea. If they didn’t return to claim them, the birds acted as reminders of lost husbands. Boots on a bed meant a death in the family, because that was how you chose the burial boots, by laying them out. Photographing babies was tempting fate when they were so likely to die before the age of two, and knives cut friendship.”

“And not touching a Welshman?”

“Oh, he just couldn’t stand them. Take this next exit.”

“Are you sure? I thought we were supposed to stay on the motorway until it ended.”

“You wanted to bypass Totnes.”

“No, I said the A38 did that anyway.”

Earlier they had glimpsed the pale ribbon of the sea, but now to their right was the bleak vastness of Dartmoor, where the frosted roads dwindled into twisting corridors of hedge, and coasting winds could buffet snow into mazelike drifts. The dark hills had faded beneath an unblemished whiteness of freshly ironed tablecloths. Fat snowflakes almost blotted out the slate sky.

Bryant had been a good passenger for most of the journey by dint of the fact that he had been asleep, but now he was wide-eyed, aching and fidgety with boredom. “It was difficult not to seek alternative meanings in our house,” he continued. “My devout grandmother lost all three of her sons in the Great War, and my aunts lost their children in the flu pandemic that followed. Then, just when we all seemed to be recovering in the intervening years, my uncles were drowned at sea and we were bombed out of the family house in Bethnal Green. Where did our devotion to God get us? If you ask such questions as a child and don’t receive any satisfactory answers, you start to look for other means of proof.”

“So you attend spiritualists’ conventions. A bit outmoded isn’t it, all that table-rapping?”

“Every street in London once housed a woman with so-called special powers, someone to whom the neighbours Would turn for traditional remedies and health predictions,” said Bryant, pensively sucking his sweet. “It was a strictly matriarchal network, of course. Mothers brought their babies around and wives would ask for advice on aches and pains, allergies, sexual health and marital problems. Often the wisdom they received was based on sound psychological sense, and the kind of conservative values that required everyone to remain in his or her rightful place before the advice could work. Many of these superstition-based remedies were rendered nonsensical by the changing times, but some are still with us. And of course other, more alternative services were also offered: the psychic comforting that followed bereavement, predictions and palliatives linked by the searching-out of signs and symbols. My grandmother used to read tea leaves for the local ladies, and told them she saw angels. The tradition went back hundreds of years, and only came to a proper end in the 1970s.” Bryant paused for breath while his partner increased the speed of their windscreen wipers.

“Nowadays, increased awareness of mental and physical health means that the spiritual urban mother-figure has all but disappeared in Western society. Meanwhile, technology has supposedly given us the means to gauge psychic energy. I don’t believe in the supernatural, just the untapped power of the mind. Look in the papers; we read about tiny women lifting cars off their loved ones and boat people surviving without water, and don’t think it odd. Extreme situations can make heroes of us all.”

“Just because you trace your beliefs to your grandmother doesn’t mean you should still believe what she told the neighbourhood.”

Bryant shrugged. “I have to. She was so often right, you see, and she insisted that I, too, had her gift. Which I believe to this day.” He tapped his map. “Next left.”

“I really don’t think we’re supposed to turn off yet,” May anxiously pointed out.

“The A3 8 takes us in a sort of horseshoe, but we can cut part of it off. We should be able to make up some lost time.”

It was against May’s better judgement to take practical advice from his partner. Arthur’s kaleidoscopic manner of determining complex solutions to simple problems could prove disastrous. Perhaps because he wasn’t concentrating hard enough, perhaps because he was worried about the rapidly increasing intensity of the snowfall and reaching their hotel before night, he listened and acted accordingly, forgetting for the moment that Arthur was reading from a map printed before the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.