The Long Utopia

‘And wherever you cross over, do you always find the forest?’

‘Only ever tried it in London, and Kent, where I grew up. Yes, forest.’

‘And the deiseal side?’

‘The same.’

‘Well, the forest is the thing, everywhere you go, in England at any rate. Some of my own ancestors – for the trait has been passed down the generations, and preserved in family legend, though not written down since one distant aunt was burned as a witch – some of ’em called themselves woodsmen, you know. One of ’em ran with Robin Hood. No wonder the Sheriff of Nottingham could never catch those outlaws.’

Luis snorted. ‘Hood’s a figure from story. A ballad.’

‘If you say so. But tell me – if you do cross further, what then?’

That confused Luis. ‘Don’t know what you mean, sir.’

Hackett goggled at him. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? You’ve grown up able to take this first spin of the Waltz, but it has never occurred to you to take the second, or a third? To dance on, into yet another world, and another?’

Luis frowned. No, it had never occurred to him to try. ‘To what end?’

Hackett shook his head. ‘So you have no curiosity at all, not a grain of the explorer – why, Captain Cook must be turning in his grave to hear it. I did wonder if the stage name you chose reflects your true character. Elusivo, from elusive, or to elude – it comes from a Latin root meaning to play, you know.’

‘Does it? Wasn’t aware.’

‘Sums you up, though, doesn’t it?’

‘Well, what of it? What is one to do with such a gift as this but to keep it hidden – to make a little profit – to play, if you like?’

‘Oh, what an unimaginative chap you are, Valienté. I myself thought that way, as a boy, but grew out of it. And as I’ve been implying, many of my ancestors had better ideas. How about a spot of burglary? Or spying, or assassination, or …’ Hackett stepped up to him boldly, all traces of his nausea gone. ‘How about serving your country?’

An alarm like the whistle of a steam train went off in Luis’s head. He extemporised. ‘I’ve no idea what you mean.’

‘Of course you haven’t. Let me explain. But first – how about those oysters? Let’s pop back and eat.’

The food at the oyster-house was indeed very fine, and Luis would have been happy to play along with shadier characters than Hackett for the benefit of a free meal.

Eating with a fellow always built up a certain degree of trust, Luis had observed before – especially if said fellow was doing the buying. They spoke of little as they ate, and by the time the empty shells had been stacked up and another round called for, they were, in a curious way, allies. Not friends exactly, but with a bond. Allies, each knowing that the other could disappear at any time, but each consoled by the fact that so could he.

Luis took a mouthful of porter and asked, ‘So – the Waltzers. How many of us?’

‘I know of fifteen,’ said Hackett. ‘Extant, that is, and then there are the records from the past, fragmentary as they necessarily are even within my own family, and fading into legend and outright spoofery the further back you look. We are rare, we Waltzers, Luis, as rare as a two-headed calf, and generally about as welcome. And often, I suspect, we don’t breed true, so the talent must pop up and vanish again with the secret going to the grave with the bearer. Even so I assume there are many more in the world. Recently I found two in Margate, in the course of a brief holiday.’

‘May I ask, a holiday from what, sir? I think I know all the escapologists and similar showmen in the city and I don’t recognize you.’

Hackett cleared his throat. ‘Well, I am no showman – not to denigrate your chosen course in life. I am in the fortunate position of having independent wealth. My father died when I was a nipper, but I inherited a decent trust fund on my majority – and then had the wit to invest a chunk of it in railway shares, and the fortune to pick the right stock.’

Luis said nothing, but cringed inwardly. His own father, by comparison, had backed the wrong horses in the mania of railway building that had followed the opening of the famous Liverpool & Manchester line, and had left his family destitute. He regarded Hackett bleakly. Fortune, he thought, follows the already fortunate.

‘As to what I do with my time,’ Hackett went on, ‘I regard myself as a scholar, without affiliation to any particular body, though I have presented papers to the Royal Society and the Royal Institution among others. I have been particularly intrigued by the great treasury of information brought back by the bolder naturalists, from those who voyaged with Cook whom I mentioned, to more recent fellows like Darwin – have you read the volumes of his account of the voyage of the Beagle? Who knows how much, in the decades to come, we might not learn of the operation of the divine life-sustaining machine that is the Earth?

‘And of course that scientific curiosity of mine has been turned on my own strange abilities, and those of my family and the rest of our scattered, furtive community. How has our peculiar faculty come about? What is it we do? Where are these enigmatic forests we visit? What is the meaning of it all? And what must we do with this strange gift? Tell me, Valienté, when did you first become aware of your own talent? Do you recall?’

‘Vividly. I was being chased by a bull – it’s not much of a story, to do with a couple of us scrumping apples where we shouldn’t have been, I was no more than six – when suddenly I found myself, not in a farmer’s field looking at a bull, but in a dense forest staring at something like a wild pig. Screamed the place down, then suddenly found myself back, but the bull had lost me. The whole episode had the quality of nightmare, and such I thought it was. Took me a while to find out how to do the thing purposefully.’ But he had needed to develop his prowess when his stepfather had thrown him out, not many years after that incident of the apples – not that he intended to tell Hackett about that, if he didn’t already know.

Hackett produced a pipe; he filled it, tamped it, lit it before speaking again. ‘Six, eh? I was older – but then I suspect your talent is rather more developed than mine. I found it when I was about sixteen. I was at school, and in the arms of the headmaster’s wife. I need not elaborate, but when it became necessary that I leave rapidly, and I found the window locked – well, I left anyhow, only to find no window and no headmaster, or wife, or school, or rugger field. Nothing but oak and ash trees, and swamp, and my own bewilderment.’ He flicked an empty shell on the table between them. ‘After that, I’m sorry to say, as an impudent young man I thought that the world was my oyster and I took what pearls I could find. Unlike you I was always impeded by the deuced nausea, but there are ways to combat that. As you might expect, no boudoir was secure. To the ladies of my acquaintance I was never less than a gentleman, but a persistent and rather omnipresent one. And of course money was no problem; no strongroom could exclude me.

‘As I grew older I became sated, and I matured – and after one or two close shaves with various forms of authority I learned to become rather more discreet. There was one irate father with an antique of a blunderbuss … Then, of course, I came into money of my own, and as a man of affairs I became respectable. And terribly pompous probably, as most reformed rakes are – you can judge for yourself. But I never forgot my origins, if you like.’

‘How do you find us? I mean those of us who can – um, Waltz.’

‘Generally, just as I found you: hiding in the open. I admire your artistry, sir. Your tricks might just possibly be very clever illusions, they could be done by smoke and mirrors, or a bit of mesmerism, or some other subterfuge. You are smart enough to be extremely good but not impossibly good. Even a very observant and highly sceptical witness can go away from the show believing he has seen through your tricks, and feeling pleasingly self-satisfied as a result, while understanding nothing of the reality of your abilities. But I, who am like you, could see through the flummery.’