Afterlife by Colin Wilson

she feels foreboding at hearing the name of the swindler, she is inclined to wonder if it is some form of telepathy with her husband. She even wonders whether, as primitives believe, the name itself could have linked her with the swindler telepathically — then has to regretfully admit that this is impossible because it was an assumed name. She is unwilling to accept the obvious — if equally baffling — explanation that she recognised the swindler’s name because, in some sense, the fraud had ‘already happened’. That is to say, her experience was an example of what Professor Joad once called ‘the undoubted queerness of time’. And in spite of her own abundant experience of ‘clairvoyance’, Rosalind Heywood was the sort of person who was unwilling to believe in the ‘undoubted queerness’ of anything. She had a strong Victorian prejudice in favour of order and tidiness.
    There is, of course, one other possible explanation of her ‘precognition’ — which she is equally unwilling to entertain: that the information came to her from a ‘spirit’. Yet she has just told an anecdote that brings her face to face with that possibility. In the early days of the Second World War, she tried using an ouija board, consisting of a pointer, on which the operator rested his fingers, and a semicircle of cards containing letters of the alphabet. When a doctor friend asked her to demonstrate the board, she decided to rule out the possibility that her unconscious mind was dictating the message by sitting on the floor under the table, with her fingers resting on the pointer above her head. The doctor noted down the message, and told her that someone called George had warned Frank to drive with exaggerated care for the next two days. Frank was Rosalind Heywood’s husband, and his brother George had been killed not long before. The doctor was not even aware thatFrank was his hostess’s husband. At this time, she explains, she was extremely sceptical about the possibility of life after death (in spite of the experience in Washington with ‘Julia’ — another example of her reluctance to join the ranks of the ‘believers’), and was inclined to wonder if her own unconscious mind was pulling her leg. With considerable embarrassment, she passed on the message to her husband. The next day he told her: ‘If I hadn’t driven with extreme care, as you asked me to, I should have had no less than three major accidents today.’
    But then, although the ‘spirit’ explanation might provide an acceptable alternative to precognition in the case of the swindler — presumably a friendly spirit would know he was a swindler — it still fails to explain how brother George knew in advance that Frank was in danger of having three car accidents during the next forty-eight hours. Here, as in the case of her youngest son’s foreknowledge that someone was going to ask him to find a certain street, we have to fall back on Joad’s ‘undoubted queerness of time’.
    Is it possible, considering Rosalind Heywood’s experience as a whole, to discern some pattern that might help to provide a basic explanation?
    She herself provides one interesting clue. She seems to have had an unusual susceptibility to beauty. As a child, she spent some time in India. She describes her father pointing up to the snow on the mountain tops:
    ‘Look, children, there are the Snows.’
    For a long time we could not see them. We had not looked high enough. Then at last, towering against the cobalt sky, we saw Kanchenjunga, white, shining, inviolate, all but the highest mountain in the world. I could not — and cannot — formulate what moved me almost beyond bearing in the Hills. It was as if some wind of the spirit blew down on the childish creature and touched something in it awake, so that it could never be quite childish again …
    Back at home in England, she often cried when remembering the Hills. Years later, at a dinner party, she sat next to a Tibetan