I've noticed that when I write a story I often have my characters lying in bed at one point or another. (Very rarely, I should say, for sexual purposes, I'm still ludicrously prim when it comes to writing about...all that sort of thing...but I'm working on it.) No, more often than not they're sitting on the edge of the mattress mulling things over, or else they've thrown themselves face down in a fit of despair, or they're drifting into sleep, or staring depressively at the ceiling,...that sort of thing. Which is all very well once or twice, but it's becoming an unintentional theme. How embarrassing. I mean, when you consider the potential depths of the sub-conscious, and the self-knowledge that there is to be mined there - Freudian complexes and the rest - it's disheartening to uncover nothing more interesting than: the thing about you, Elizabeth, is you'd rather be in bed.
This reminds me of a dignified party I once went to, and hovered about at, as an undergraduate. Towards the end of the evening I found myself talking to (which is to say, staring red-faced at the feet of) an emphatic don.
"It's a such pity," she said, "That we humans spend so many hours of our lives asleep. Time is short, after all, and there is so much to see and do and learn!"
"Mmm," I nodded, concealing, as best I could, a shudder of alarm. I was new to university, and anxious to conform to received opinion, but still...One has one's standards.
"I had a student, years ago now," she went on, "who simply couldn't bare to waste time sleeping when she might be studying instead. So she used to take a piece of string, perhaps a foot in length, and sit at her desk with one end tied to the back of her chair, and the other end fastened to a strand of her hair. That way if she began to nod over her books she would be yanked awake - rather painfully too. Ha ha! Marvellous!"
"Ye gods," I thought.
She was having you on! You're thinking. But she wasn't. Really she wasn't. If you'd been there, you'd know.
It's not just that I'm lazy. Other writers do it too. Proust opens A la Recherche du Temps Perdu with his narrator in bed, and keeps him there for about six million pages, which is more than I've attempted yet. Mr. Lockwood is tucked up in bed while Nelly narrates Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre is has to swing her feet out from under the covers many a time in order to investigate funny noises in the corridor. Lucy and Mina are always abed when Dracula calls. Tom, in Tom's Midnight Garden, is lying there, wakeful and bored, when the clock strikes thirteen.
So you see? Bed is very happening place to be from a storytelling point of view. The world becomes more manageable - more ponderable - when you're curled up, safe as a rabbit in a burrow. On the edge of sleep you can think your best thoughts, dream your best dreams, and hope to lose yourself. And that's not something you can do with a thirty centimetres of taut string tied to your head.
(Next time: mooching around with a cup of tea as a literary motif.)
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