Free A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest Page A

loveless man who used her body. In the Castle community Greg seemed to be one of the more popular people - and when Julia was not suffering his physical attentions she found him amusing and pleasant company - but he too had this paleness to his character that was a constant frustration to her. Sometimes, when she was alone with him, Julia wanted to shout at him or scream at him or wave her arms ... anything to elicit some kind of positive response.
    There were the others, though, and they were here at the Castle, and in Dorchester and the surrounding countryside.
    There was Nathan Williams, who played a great part in organizing and shaping the community; some said he had been at the Castle when the community was first formed. There was a woman named Mary, who was one of the potters. There was Rod, who worked on the fishing smack owned by the Castle. There was Alicia, one of the teachers. There was Tom Benedict.
    Sometimes, while she was working on the stall in Dorchester, Julia would see local people passing the harbour ... and she would detect that with them, too, there was this certain affinity. For a long time she had felt it was a talent, an uncontrollable clairvoyance. She had wondered if she had powers of telepathy, or something similar, but there were never any other kinds of manifestation. Just an empathic understanding, a recognition.
    Ignoring it, as she had tried to do for some time, it became less important, but meeting David Harkman had reminded her that it was a real and inexplicable fact of her life. Although with David there was another thing, a sexual charge, a physical desire, an emotional tension.
    ‘Is that you, Julia?’
    Tom spoke very weakly. His eyes hadn’t opened. She squeezed his hand gently, under the blanket.
    ‘I’m here, Tom. Don’t worry. There’s a doctor coming from Dorchester.’
    ‘Don’t let go ...’
    She looked around. She and Tom were alone in the infirmary; summer was a healthy time for the villagers. But she wished there were someone with them, a trained nurse ... or Allen.
    Through one of the windows she could see children running around, playing and calling to each other with shrill voices. School had finished for the day, evening would soon be here.
    She never detected the affinity with any of the children, although she liked them, and the teachers at the school were always glad of her help. She saw the children as a milling, diminutive presence: noisy, quick-moving, demanding of time and energy. But as David Harkman had said of his career, and as she felt about her own past, the children were a fact, not something she had any feeling about.
    One of the women in the village had given birth a few weeks before, and Julia had seen the mother and child soon afterwards. It had been like a classic portrait of healthy motherhood: the woman sitting up in bed in the infirmary, her hair tangled, a cardigan pinned around her shoulders. The child cried in her arms, pink and damp and very small. The mother’s eyes were bright and tired, the bedclothes had been straightened over her. Nothing had gone wrong, no worries: mother and child doing well. Julia had never known a crisis for any of the village people; there were ‘flu epidemics, and the children passed measles and mumps to one another ... but she had never known anyone fall and break a leg, nor was there ever a pregnancy that went wrong, nor did anyone ever die violently. There was a graveyard at the western end of the Castle compound, but the few deaths that occurred happened quietly, unobtrusively.
    It was a sheltered, undangerous place; the harsher realities of life seemed as if they were postponed.
    Then, as if contradicting the thought, Tom groaned, and his head turned restlessly.
    Tom was different, though, Tom recognized the affinity. He had always been at the front of the stage for her; a leading player, not a member of the chorus. This analogy had often occurred to her as if it would solve the puzzle, but all it ever did