Dalliance

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

As we came out of the theatre after a performance of Schnitzler's Dalliance we wondered out loud whether we would ever see again the strange lights we had noticed some months previously.  As we walked back across Waterloo bridge, we looked up into the area of the sky where they had appeared before.  To our mingled horror and delight, there was the same quivering brightness.

We slowed our steps, our hearts in our mouths and our stomachs in our boots.  We were half-pleased that what we had seen had really been there, that it was reproducible.  But we were also slightly disappointed that, being reproducible, the phenomenon might have a mundane explanation, that we had not been privileged spectators of the dawn of a new age.  It seemed unlikely that UFOs should choose to hover over exactly the same spot of the Thames during a period of some months - and never be noticed.

We walked along the bridge, our straining eyes riveted upon the same indistinct watery light we had seen before.  Again there was no sound of helicopters, just the wind blowing on this slightly cloudy night.  As we stood by the parapet, we noticed a woman who was talking to a man next to her.  Occasionally she glanced in the same general direction as we were looking.  We went up to them.  I made some non-committal remark about the sight and she replied unperturbedly, then went on talking with her companion.  We looked at this man; he too was gazing up at the sky.  And he seemed to have something in his hands.

It was clearly a reel, though the cord was too fine to be seen in the dark.  Simulating a greater sang-froid than I felt, I asked him if he were responsible.  He said yes.  I restrained myself from hurling him into the river there and then, and asked for more details.

He was American, and an inventor.  His brainchild was a kind of kite with a rotor which he claimed could stay aloft with even the merest hint of wind.  It was effectively self-supporting.  It glistened and glimmered as it spun in a light which shone skyward from Somerset House - the reason he had chosen this spot.  I quizzed him on the double occurrence we had seen, and the rapid movement.  He said he sometimes flew two, and that slight movements on the ground could bring about deceptively large ones in the sky.  He was doing this as a publicity stunt prior to the publication of his book on the subject.  So now we knew.

I left very chastened.  I had learnt that however improbable or even impossible it may seem at the time, there is always an explanation.  Those two shocking and cancelling experiences produced by their mixing a kind of vaccine that has inoculated me against all further heretical anti-scientific thoughts.  As a re-confirmed rationalist I am prepared to chant with the rest of the adepts the creed of logical positivism.  But one day something will be discovered that does genuinely lie outside the present boundaries of science.  The latter will then be expanded just far enough to include the new phenomenon.  This leaves us seekers after certitude with a rather elastic kind of dogma, one still with a frightening leeway for perfectly reasonable flirtation with the perfectly unreasonable.

(1986)

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Pravda

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During the interval of Hare and Brenton's 'Pravda' we went out onto the terrace of the National Theatre.  As we drank, we noticed a shimmering in the sky above the Thames directly in front of the building.  "Probably a UFO" we said jokingly, passing back inside to the comforting lights.

When we came out at the end, and walked to the car parked on Waterloo Bridge, we saw not one but two illuminated shapes, both hovering over Somerset House, but at different heights.  Along the bridge, clumps of people were gathered, staring up at the sky.  Passing cars would occasionally slow, winding down their windows to get a better view.  There could be no doubt about the phenomenon's reality.

It was a perfectly clear night: the stars were everywhere visible.  There was no sound on the breeze, so helicopters were ruled out.  Airships had been a common sight that year, but this vague, watery light looked nothing like that.  They were too high for flags or other objects tethered by a rope - and one had just moved even higher.

On closer examination they had the appearance of slowly pulsating or rotating objects.  Sometimes patterns like figures of eight would appear.  Mostly, though, the effect was constantly changing and indescribable.  After a while, we went home, but soon returned, drawn back despite ourselves.  Now there was only one light, much higher.  Shortly afterwards it moved south across the sky.  It seemed very slow; and yet in a few seconds it had disappeared over the horizon.  It was a warm autumn evening but gradually a chill spread down our spines.

Ten thousand years of civilisation and rather fewer of rationalism told us that there had to be a sensible explanation.  Most of the bystanders seemed able to accommodate the sight in their mental universe without difficulty.  Try as I might, I could not share their equanimity.

Yet the alternative to glib acceptance was almost too terrible to name.  UFOs lie so far outside the range of normal experience that they have been banished from serious discourse.  People have been marginalised and branded mad just for countenancing the idea.  Perhaps this is only natural: the implications of visitors from another planetary system would be such as to undercut every treasured assumption of ordinary life.

For example: if they had succeeded in making such a journey, their technology would be unimaginably more advanced than ours.  Demonstrably losing our place as the acme of the universe would be a blow to our sense of self unmatched since Kepler, or Darwin.  Moreover, galactic serfdom - in much the same way as the West has visited and vanquished the Third World - would have to be a strong possibility.

Standing on the bridge was like teetering on the brink of an absurd yet terrifying sci-fi film.  But nothing happened, neither that night or the next day.  There were no announcements, no news.  Everybody went on as normal.  And yet for me those events remained as true as they were inexplicable.

(1986)

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