I
From the moment I first learned to talk, I felt I was being tricked out of something. I remember it still - the memory is clear and indisputable: I am standing in the garden, and Mother is saying the word rose over and over, reciting it like a magic spell and pointing to the blossoms on the trellis, sugar-pink and slightly overblown - and I am listening, watching her lips move, still trying to disconnect the flower from the sound. I was already too old to be learning to talk - maybe two, or getting on for three. For a long time, I refused to speak - or so Mother told me: though I appeared intelligent in other ways, I had problems with language. She had even gone to the doctor about it, but he had told her such things happened, it was quite normal, I would learn to talk sooner or later, in my own time, and I would quickly make up the ground I had lost. He was right. When I did begin speaking, it was a kind of capitulation, as if a tension in my body had broken, and I spoke my first word that afternoon, the word rose, meaning that pink, fleshy thing that suddenly flared out from the indescribable continuum of my world, and became an object.

The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony. But if words distance us from the present, so we never quite seize the reality of things, they make an absolute fiction of the past. Now, when I look back, I remember a different world: what must have seemed random and chaotic at the time appears perfectly logical as I tell it, invested with a clarity that even suggests a purpose, a meaning to life. I remember the country around our house as it was before they built the new estates: a dense, infinite darkness filled with sheltering birds and holly trees steeped in the Fifties. I remember the old village: children going from house to house in white sheets, singing and laughing in the dark, waving to us as our car glided by. I remember those months of being alone here, after Mother died. At night, when the land was quiet and still, I would take off my clothes and go naked from room to room, then out into the cool moonlight, wandering amongst the flower beds like an animal, or a changeling from one of Mother's fairy stories. The garden is walled on all sides; no one could see me, and the house was so far from the village that I would hear nothing but the owls in the woods, and the occasional barking of foxes out on the meadow. Sometimes I wondered if I was real - my body would be different, clothed in its own sticky-sweet smell, a smell like sleep, laced with Chanel No. 19 from Mother's dressing table.

When I was a child, Mother would come into the bedroom and tell me stories. It was a ritual she performed, without variation: I had to go up to bed, and she would follow five minutes later. I would hear the clock strike nine as she climbed the stairs. Sometimes she brought a book, but quite often she told me the stories out of her head. Whether she made them up, or had them by heart, I couldn't say, but she never once hesitated or faltered. I had the impression, then, that she knew every story that had ever been told, and all she had to do was think of one for a moment, and every detail came flooding into her mind, instantly. It was Mother who told me the story of Akbar: how he built the Dumb House, not for profit, or even to prove a point, but from pure curiosity. Nobody knows how long it stood, or what happened to the children who were locked inside with their mute attendants. Nobody knows because the story of the Dumb House was only ever an episode in another, much longer story, an anecdote that had been folded in, told in passing to illustrate the personality of Akbar the Mughal, the dyslexic emperor whose collection of manuscripts was the richest in the known world. Later I realised that most of the details of the story were embellishments that Mother had added herself, to spin out this single episode that I liked so much. In fact, the original story of the Dumb House was simple and fleeting. In that version, the Mughal's counsellors were debating whether a child is born with the innate, God-given ability to speak; they had agreed this gift is equivalent in some way to the soul, the one characteristic that marks out the human from the animal. But Akbar declared that speech is learned, for the very reason that the soul is innate, and the soul does not correspond to any single faculty, whether it be the ability to speak, or to dream, or to reason. Surely, he argued, if speech came from the soul, then there would be only one language, instead of many. But the counsellors disagreed. While it was true that there were many languages, these were simply the corruptions of the original gift, implanted in the soul by God. They knew of incidents in which children had been left in isolation for years, or raised by animals: in such circumstances they had created a language of their own, that nobody else understood, which they could not have learned from others.

Akbar listened. When the counsellors had finished speaking, he told them he would test their hypothesis. He had his craftsmen build a mansion, far from the city: a large, well-appointed house, with its own gardens and fountains. Here Akbar established a court of the mute, into which he introduced a number of new-born babies, gathered from the length and breadth of the Empire. The children were well cared for, and were provided with everything they could possibly need, but because their attendants were dumb, they never heard human speech, and they grew up unable to talk, as Akbar had predicted. People would travel from all over the kingdom to visit the house. They would stand for hours outside its walled gardens, listening to the silence, and for years to come the mansion was known as the Gang Mahal, or Dumb House.

Mother would come to the bedroom and tell me this story in the evenings. Naturally, her version was different; she barely touched upon the controversy over the innateness of language, or the nature of the soul. Instead she described the Gang Mahal in sumptuous detail: the orange trees in terracotta pots, the jewelled walls, the unearthly silence. I lay in bed listening, watching her lips move, intoxicated by her perfume. I used to wonder what had happened when those children grew up; how they thought, if thought was possible; if they ever remembered anything from one moment to the next. There are people who say speech is magical; for them, words have the power to create and destroy. Listening to Mother's stories, I became enmeshed in a view of the world: an expectation; a secret fear. Even now, nothing seems more beautiful to me than language when it creates the impression of order: the naming of things after their true nature; the act of classification; the creation of kingdoms and genera, species and sub-species; the designation of animal, vegetable or mineral, of monocotyledonous plants, freshwater fishes, birds of prey, the periodic table. This is why the past seems perfect, a time of proportion and order, because it is immersed in speech. For animals, memory might reside as a sensation, a resonance in the nerves, or in the meat of the spine. But for humans, the past cannot be described except in words. It is nowhere else. What disturbs me now is the possibility that language might fail: after the experiment ended so inconclusively, I cannot help imagining that the order which seems inherent in things is only a construct, that everything might fall into chaos, somewhere in the long white reaches of forgetting. That is why it is imperative for me to begin again, and that is why Karen was sent here, after all this time, to fulfil her true purpose.

II
In the early evenings, we watched television. I had set it up in her bedroom and we would watch it together: we liked American shows, especially the ones where people were spontaneous and natural in a quite unsentimental way, the shows that are broadcast between four and seven in the evening, half-hour situation comedies that centred on clean-living families with clever children in neat, middle-class suburbs. I think this was Lillian's idea of heaven: a boy cycling along a wide empty street in the early morning, tossing newspapers on to front porches; old men sitting on a veranda at dusk in Saratoga Springs or Boise, Idaho; women making pies in wide kitchens, surrounded by dogs and precocious children. It was the houses we enjoyed, as much as the people; each room was a character in its own right. We loved them for the space and the impossible light, the suggestion of woods, just a short walk away, deer in the shadows, coyotes in the hills.

These houses always contained at least three children. They were wise, and sometimes too clever for their own good; they were always learning small lessons; they always had the best lines. Lillian chose the programmes we watched, but I liked it when they did things together, en famille, things they had evidently rehearsed and perfected over years, little routines, dance steps and songs, sequences of strange, ritualised movements which suggested an infinite self-regard, a bottomless appetite for appreciation. That was their strength, of course: they were appreciators. They appreciated themselves and they were learning to appreciate other people. The routines were there to say to the audience: look at us, look how easy it is to be honest and free and spontaneous, to take nothing less than the best, to meet the world on your own terms. Even when the hard lesson had to be learned, or some tricky situation had to be resolved, they were always ready: the twelve year old in the stripy shirt and baseball cap, the girl with freckles and a winning grin, the boy who had tried to duck responsibility - they would gather themselves up to say what had to be said, to do the right thing, to sacrifice their own wishes to the greater good. This was what democracy meant. Lillian and I would sit watching in silence, with involuntary smiles on our faces, happy for a while that the world could seem so right, the way it was supposed to do at Christmas or during childhood holidays, when everybody worked together and tried really hard.

Strangely enough, though, Lillian's favourite programme was the news. She would cry when she saw children starving in Africa, or bodies lining the streets of shanty towns in South America, but she never missed a single broadcast. She seemed gifted with an infinite capacity for sympathy: she felt for others at random, from the baby with the hole in her heart to the hundreds or thousands killed in the latest natural disaster. Most of all, she was a sucker for the human interest story. One evening, we watched an American hostage being released. For a time it looked as if nothing would happen: the cameras were all bunched together, filming each other in what looked like a hotel conference room, perhaps recently and hastily reclaimed from a convention of self-improvement junkies, or air-conditioning salesmen. Suddenly, the man appeared: a tall, bearded, suitably gaunt figure, surrounded by uniformed men, looking uncomfortable and out of place in his plaid shirt and trainers. He was blinded for a moment by the cameras, but he kept gazing out into the crowd, as if he expected to see a familiar face - a friend, or a wife, or a daughter. He had probably been briefed about what to expect, but I imagine something else had taken over as he walked free, a basic need to mark the moment, to celebrate or ritualise it somehow. Then he sat down and began to answer questions. What he said meant nothing; it was just that speech was the one celebration that remained to him, the pleasure of speaking and being heard, of speaking his own language and having people pay attention, instead of spitting on him, or striking him in the face with a rifle butt. That was what caught my attention every time: not so much the elation of the freed man, or the anguish of the victims, or the joy and guilt of those who had survived, but the fact that it always happened in public, amongst strangers, amongst people who were only doing their jobs, reporters and soldiers and cameramen, or the merely curious, who have drifted into the frame, distracted for the moment from their own lives. I was always amazed at how easily they talked about what had happened to them, the hostages, the victims, the survivors. I was always amazed by their need to speak, and by the way they adapted their speech to suit what was demanded - the snappy phrase, the truism, the cliché.

The hostage had been a captive for three years. Most of that time, he had been held in a small room, with no natural light; sometimes he had been forced to wear a hood, sometimes he had been beaten; no one had spoken to him for the first eighteen months, and he had been forbidden to speak. If he asked questions he was beaten. He had never seen the faces of his captors, they had worn masks or hoods when they brought his food. Sometimes that had heartened him: it allowed him to think they were afraid he would be able to identify them some day, when he was freed. But then again, he thought, the masks might be there for another reason entirely. Perhaps they were a means of distancing the terrorists from their prisoner, to avoid any human contact so that, when the time came to shoot him, they could do so without compunction. The hostage hadn't known he was to be released until his captors left him at the corner of one bombed out street and another, a few days before the press conference.

As I watched, I wondered what he had thought about during the three years of his captivity. At first, I imagine, he had missed his family, his own house, his bath, his kitchen, his bed. Then, perhaps, he thought back on his home town, his first lover, days he had enjoyed, moments that shamed him. I imagined him examining his life, letting it run in his head like an old movie, a movie he had seen once before but hadn't watched with such close attention to detail. Perhaps there were moments, during those weeks of self-examination, when he felt liberated, able to make peace finally with his dead, or understand the motives of those who had hurt him years before, for no reason. Surely he would have learned something about himself during those weeks. Yet, just as surely, he would have moved on to something less coherent, a disjointed sequence of vague memories and half-thoughts, and I wondered if, by the end, he had elected to be changed by his experience, or whether he had come back determined to have his old life back, just as it was. What had he missed? What had he promised himself in the dark hours when he knew for sure that he was going to be killed? What had he promised in the moments of hope, when he believed he would be released? I wanted to know. I imagined myself in his position, thinking of the pleasures to come: the smell of new books, the taste of coffee, snow on a pine tree, birdsong. These were the pleasures I imagined for him, but his imagined pleasures would have been different and, for that moment, I wanted more than anything to know what they were. Most of all, I wanted to know how he had talked to himself in his captivity, what he had said, and how he had said it, what linguistic choices he had made. I wanted to know if he had ever suspected himself of deliberately creating a lie, the myth of an ordered life, using words and silences to make things tidy and neat and clean. Surely, that would have been inevitable. Under such circumstances, an ordered illusion is necessarily preferable to the chaotic truth of the world.

I glanced at Lillian. She was gazing at the close up of the man's face with an awed expression, but for once, she wasn't in tears. She looked happy. She looked inextinguishably happy.

From The Dumb House, published by Jonathan Cape, May 1997.

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Last modified: 11 June 1997