Harold was, enough still in the dream, enough awake to roll over the humps that kept him flat on his back, reach for the notebook and pencil on the shelf beside the bed, write down some key words in spaced capitals that he knew, from experience, would be decipherable in the morning and jog his memory as to the dream.
He then realized Polly was sitting up in bed, knitting. It would take him awhile to get used to her short hair.
He raised himself to a sitting position, moved the bolsters that kept him in the most conducive sleeping position for lucid dreaming, rearranged his pillow against the wall that served as a headboard in the window alcove, reached into the basket under the bed and got out his own knitting. Then he turned on the lamp above his head and looked along at Polly, facing him, her back against the other wall of the alcove. They seldom knit anything in the night that was complicated and required closely following a pattern. It looked like she was knitting on a square for a crazy quilt; the beauty and charm would be in the texture of the natural-coloured wool. He was knitting a tube in muted colours, milk paint tones, which Cass would sew – he couldn’t handle a needle and thread worth a darn – into a rug. He thought it would be some time before she would get around to it with the new baby – what was her name – oh yes, Benita.
“Was I snoring?” he asked Polly. Sometimes, if something was bothering her and preventing her from her usual deep sleep, his snoring would irritate her and she would knit to relax, or take herself off to some other bed in the house. When she was going through menopause she would trot outside and often end up in his cottage.
“A bit, but it wasn’t bothering me. A good dream?”
“I don’t know. I’ll know in the morning.” He didn’t, like some people did, like to share his dreams. At least not when they were fresh. He preferred to spread them out, observe them in daylight, perhaps capture them in his dream journal. But, in all the years of keeping that journal, he had never once looked back at it. He figured it would keep him amused in his old age.
“Want some warm milk?”
“No, thanks.” she said a little too quickly and Harold wondered if his last concoction of milk with cinnamon and rosemary in it had been less well received than she had let on at the time. “I’m knitting away the insufferable.”
She peered at him over the top of her reading glasses to let him know she was almost there, that she was working it out on her own. He reached over and touched the hump of her foot under the covers. She reached over and touched his in return. He felt a flicker of desire but she had removed her hand and gone back to knitting so he did the same.
How he wished he needed reading glasses. Wryly he realized he resented his still perfect vision. He would watch his wife and several of his contemporaries perch glasses on nose and make interesting facial expressions as they looked down at words or projects, then up at a person or a scene. He thought it incredibly attractive. And when they actually took off the glasses and propped them in their hair, or let them fall from a cord onto their chest, he was breath-held with envy. Polly did not suspect this. He supposed he could buy a plain lens pair, if such a thing existed, and join the crowd. He just kept forgetting to.