Walter quickly looked away. Could she see on his face that he wasn’t ready to give her what she wanted, with or without a fight? I could tell she was ready to fight him, and her expression must have told him that too.
I think I’ve said enough to indicate that in my view Walter had indeed decided he might change his life, but not only as a result of his windfall. My feeling was that he was afraid he had no choice but to change. He was either losing his mind or was under a strain he couldn’t detect. I doubt his first thought would have been the same as Siobhan’s, that he would leave the band. As often happens when important chapters in a man’s life—like strands of delicate silk—start to plait together to make an unbreakable rope, by seeming coincidence, four closely linked events threw Walter back onto his own defensive resources.
The first was what Old Nik had told him when they met and walked together in Richmond Park. I believe Walter had told the old man that he was starting to hear strange things whenever he sat down to write songs; conceivably he even read something to him from the first few soundscape descriptions, words that promised music well beyond the scope of his usual skillset. I think that maybe I was the only other person Walter had spoken to about this. As I have said, whatever Old Nik advised him changed Walter in some indefinable way.
The second was that Siobhan was obviously beginning to frighten him; her desire to help make him great, and perhaps to live through him creatively, was not unwelcome or unusual in a marriage between two people involved in the worlds of entertainment and media, but Walter wasn’t ready for it.
The third was surely the idea that with the money that had just fallen out of the sky he could do more or less as he wished, at least for a few years.
Last, when Siobhan smiled, kissed him, and said goodbye, clearly unsatisfied that he had not answered her question, both he and Selena felt something final in her manner. And yet I think Siobhan sincerely believed that if she went back to Waterford, he would follow. There were few women like her, she was certain of that. Walter had always been intoxicated by her, her mind, her beauty, and her poetry. She couldn’t imagine she would lose him. But she was also proud. If he didn’t follow, she might never come back. Selena knew that about her older sister.
Frank and I saw it too in the bar that night; Selena—without a moment’s hesitation, as though Walter were a baton that had been dropped and must be quickly grabbed and run with, in a race to some finishing line only she could envision—did indeed try to replace Siobhan in that instant without waiting a beat. It was as though for a second time in her life she held a murderous blade, and this time it was Siobhan who would go down for no other reason than that she had married the man Selena—as I learned later—had loved since she was eighteen.
She moved closer to him.
I thought of my poor Rain, who loved Walter too, rather plain-looking compared with the Collins girls, carrying rather more of my genes than were useful when caught up in a contest for a man. She was not cut out to battle against Siobhan let alone Selena and her angels. I must be careful not to place her in the middle of this trio. In the days that followed I would sometimes find myself beginning to hate Walter, just for a moment; it didn’t last, and perhaps I was merely envious. He was still only twenty-nine years old, and had been slow to fall in love, if indeed he had ever fallen in love with Siobhan; I began to doubt it. I also doubted that Siobhan loved Walter properly, unconditionally; there was too much at stake for her, I think. Walter was not just a husband, he was a man, a man among and above the other men Siobhan had known, especially her father. Siobhan wanted a gentle man, a poet, a clever man, who never raised his arm, or even his voice.
When she had gone—some of us had the sense that Siobhan had thrown down her cards, despairing of the hand she had been dealt—her sister saw her chance.
Selena didn’t face Walter, she didn’t meet his troubled gaze; she didn’t try to engage him. She stood beside him at the bar and her hip brushed against him.
He looked down at her and wiped the sweat from his lips. She whispered in his ear, grabbed his arm, and pulled him behind her toward the doors that led to the restrooms.
As we sit watching the sun go down over the mountains beyond Cannes, Bingo barks at a cyclist passing on the road above the terrace. Selena has drunk one too many glasses of rosé. Suddenly she laughs.
“Poor Walter, I really did make a lunge for him.” She went on to tell me what had happened that night.
“I told him I had some great cocaine.”
He followed.
So what she had whispered was not that she loved him, or that she wanted to possess him or delight him, raise him up through the sky filled with angels or fuck him; she knew that anything she said that might reveal her exultant feelings and triumph at that moment would not make him follow her. This was Dingwalls after all. She offered cocaine.
I must try to paint a picture of a scene I did not witness, but I can piece it together from what Selena has told me, and from the gossip that later reverberated around the club. The restrooms in Dingwalls were scruffy but old-fashioned, blue and green fired tiles and cracked and streaked mirrors. Walter leaned against a sink, pulled out a harmonica, and started to play a suggestive rhythm. Selena chopped out some coke, snorted a line, and began to dance seductively. A few other girls came in and didn’t seem surprised to find Walter watching his sister-in-law gyrating.
The girls related the story later. They felt that if they hadn’t been there Walter might have responded sexually. But he did not move, and that made Selena angry.
As he played to her, the girls said, and they agreed he had played wonderfully, she had danced. She had even offered him a blow job. She had fallen to the floor, exhausted, humiliated, and frustrated. The girls and Walter all went to her and tried to help her up.
She pushed them all away, her cocaine high turning bad.
At that point the restroom door opened and one of the bar staff had gestured, tapping his watch. Walter was due back onstage. As he went out to play the second set, the girls, still attending to Selena like courtiers to a princess, heard her curse him under her breath.
“Fuck you, Walter!” she said, her lipstick smearing as she wiped her mouth. “You’ve missed the best sister again, you fecking English twat!”
She struggled to her feet, wobbling a little on her high heels. She lit a cigarette and looked in the mirror, and for a moment anyone watching might have sensed what she could see.
Indeed, the room around her was full of what looked like winged creatures. This is what she told me she saw in the cigarette smoke, in the clouds, in the dust thrown up from the sawdust-covered dance floor. She held her belly as though expecting a child. She cradled herself. No one understood. She turned, shook out her hair, and walked proudly from the restroom out into the club.
Walter was at the bar drinking down a long glass of water, the club manager now nervously looking at his watch.
Selena walked straight up to him and kissed him on the side of his face, forgiving him, and reclaiming him for the benefit of anyone who might be watching.
There was hardly a single woman in the room who hadn’t watched her take Walter into the Ladies and was gripped by whatever might happen next. They had seen him hurry out looking sheepish and heard about their little performance from the girls who had caught them together. Siobhan had left only fifteen minutes before.
What slags Selena and Walter were!
That’s what they were thinking.
For Selena, looking around at the envious women in the club, it was a brief moment of careless triumph that echoed—whenever she looked back on it—over and over again so annoyingly that it seemed more like a bad dream than a conquest.
For seconds after that moment, Selena’s prospects with Walter were dashed.
Indeed her sister Siobhan’s marriage was dashed in any case, even if she wasn’t about to blow it up. Even my daughter Rain’s future as her possible replacement was dashed.
Into the c
lub walked a girl I hadn’t seen since Walter and Siobhan’s wedding some two years before. I mentioned that at the wedding Selena had fluttered around me for a while, and I had been diverted.
This was the girl who had diverted me.
We called her Floss.
Chapter 7
Florence Agatha Spritzler was twenty when we all saw her walk into Dingwalls just as Walter was starting the second set of what would turn out to be his last performance with Big Walter and His Stand. He would probably remember her—if he remembered her at all—as the gawky eighteen-year-old friend of Selena’s who hung out with her at his wedding to Siobhan a little over two years earlier.
She looked around and spotted Selena at the bar and hurried over to her side, no doubt so she could feel established safely somewhere in the heaving crowd.
They embraced, laughing, friends from school in Acton from the age of twelve, a few years after the Collinses had landed in London. They seemed completely at ease together. It was Selena who had christened her Floss.
The nickname had begun of course as Flossie—after Florence—but taken on its rather dental spin when Floss blackened one of her front teeth falling from a pony when she was fourteen. The damaged tooth was perhaps equal to the deliberate flaw the Persian carpet maker weaves into his rugs so they do not attempt to challenge God’s perfection. With a bright white set of teeth she would have smiled more readily, and if she had done so she would have set the room ablaze. Her natural blond hair used to be quite long, but I learned later that she had had it cut very short just the day before.
I remembered her arriving at the wedding; that was before whatever drugs I had decided would improve the day narrowed my vision like a black curtain slowly closing on a brightly lit stage, then blacked me out completely. She was swinging her hair as she walked, which had been an eye-catching feature about her; maybe she felt it helped to detract attention from her mouth. Her nose had a slight upward tilt, and her bright blue eyes set off her classic good looks. She was youthful, and most certainly English, a rose. I say this because her surname was Spritzler, making some people wonder if she might be German. In fact she had been adopted at birth from a convent in Switzerland by Albert, a very capable Austrian surgeon, and his English wife Katharine.
When they were young teenagers, while Selena ran around like a hippy claiming to heal her friends’ chakras with angelic powers, Floss learned to ride, and her affluent adoptive parents—relieved at first that she had stumbled on a normal, well-brought-up girl’s pursuit—bought her a young thoroughbred colt and a transport box so she could compete in dressage events and gymkhanas. Selena and Floss were best friends who felt centered in the hub of the same wheel. As young teenagers they had been wild, and sometimes had much older boyfriends, but together they were extremely strong, resilient, taking nothing too seriously, laughing at men who found them attractive, intoxicated simply by each other’s sense of humor and what appeared to be shared silliness. Beneath the surface they were not silly at all; they both had deeply held ambitions. They each felt they knew what was in the future.
Selena was certain she would depose Siobhan and marry Walter; her angels would guide him to her. I learned later that Floss, not wanting to compete, knew for certain she would never marry a man who wanted to spend his life playing in a band in pubs. She would marry a man who would at least be willing to live close to the greenbelt of London, near Richmond or Hampstead where she could have horses and ride every day, perhaps run a stud. So her future husband would need money. In her mind she envisioned a banker, a stock exchange trader, or a very capable Queen’s Counsel. She knew she might not be posh enough to hook such a man, but she also knew her parents had a wide circle of friends in the medical world, so maybe she would meet a rich young plastic surgeon.
There were other possibilities. For instance, Floss seemed interested in Frank Lovelace. She was whispering to Selena and gesturing in our direction along the bar where I stood with Frank.
I felt sure she must remember and recognize me, and I waved, but she seemed focused on Frank.
“That girl was at Walter’s wedding,” I almost had to shout in Frank’s ear; the music was suddenly rather loud in the bar. “Looks like you might have pulled.”
“Florence Spritzler,” said Frank. “I know her. Friend of Selena’s. Horsey girl. Doesn’t come here much.”
He sauntered over and started to chat to her. His manner was cocksure, overconfident, really quite irritating.
I was fifty-one, and Frank was probably only just past forty, but damn—he was just as much too old for her as I was.
I was deeply jealous. I felt absurd, ridiculous, and reminded myself that my days of drinking, drugging, and chasing women half my age were now behind me. Even so, I wanted to be in Frank’s place, close to her, to make her smile despite her blackened tooth.
In the months to come I got to know her. There was something careless about Floss, something impetuous and daring that promised adventure. But if she wished she could eat you alive. There was a determination and tenacity about her. Charming, but intensely focused on whatever was in her mind, and to whomever she was addressing or listening to.
Yes, the fact is I found her diverting.
I hardly noticed at first when Crow pulled at my arm. Walter and the rest of the band were already onstage and ready to restart.
I turned to face Crow.
“What have you done to Walter?” Crow’s deadpan face was only a few inches from my own. “He’s been hearing strange sounds.”
“I’ve tried to help him,” I spluttered. I admit to being slightly frightened of Crow.
“Why have you always tried to fill his head with all that New Age shit?” Crow was almost spitting.
“That is not what I’ve done,” I protested.
Crow wasn’t listening. He started to poke my chest with his index finger, and it hurt. He had powerful, bony, guitar player’s fingers. “This band is all I’ve got, Louis. Don’t fuck it up.”
Walter called him from the stage.
“I’ll speak to you again later,” said Crow as he turned to go onstage. “And I’ll kill fucking Frank as well. This band is not about money, or art, it’s about truth.”
Crow left me, still muttering, and stalked in his Doc Martens like an angry catwalk model to the stage and picked up his guitar.
Chapter 8
The last show at Dingwalls by Big Walter and His Stand would quickly pass into legend. I’d never heard the band play with such ferocity. They played their closing number, their Ford song, as though trying to smash it into the ground, to destroy it, to make it unusable.
Freedom on the road, never ready to arrive,
Won’t deliver this load, I’ll just keep on with the drive.
A few thirty-plus women at the front pretended to be teenagers, aroused by the metaphors. They were perhaps imagining a man who might give them enough time to orgasm at least once, and half screamed.
Crow looked more and more livid and Frank started to look ill at ease; I’d told him Crow had said he would kill him, and as soon as the song ended Frank left discreetly.
I had found a table to one side of the stage and sat there with Selena. I couldn’t see Floss; she had been speaking to Frank most of the evening, and I suspected she had left with him, maybe meeting him outside.
I started to bang my glass on the table with such irritation that I cracked it. I was jealous!
Selena noticed and laughed. It was the right response to my absurdity, but how could she know what I was thinking?
As the band’s two crew members were putting away the guitars, Walter came to say goodbye. He stood uneasily as Selena tapped the empty chair beside her.
“Amazing show, Walter,” I said.
Walter nodded, not modestly, but agreeing and accepting the compliment.
Crow walked up. “Walter.” I could tell he was about to give an order. “Sit. I need to talk to you. We all need to talk.”
Walter sat, not me
ekly, but with respect, I think. Crow demanded it, and attention; I had personally never seen him in a rage, but his temper was legendary and it was clear he had something to say.
I made to stand to leave them to it.
“Please stay, Louis.” This was another order. He turned his fierce gaze to Selena. “Selena, you stay too.”
Before Crow could say anything more, Walter spoke. “You’re wrong about all this, Crow,” he said calmly. “This is not Louis’s fault. It’s true that ever since I was a kid he’s drummed into me how madness and art can be combined—but I never took any notice. I just thought he was a bit mad, and so were most of his clients.”
Crow opened his mouth to speak but Walter put up his hand. “Let me finish, Crow,” he said gently. “Whatever Louis has taught me, or tried to teach me, has never stopped me loving this band, or what we do. It’s as important to me as it is to you.”
Crow looked from me to Selena.
“Selena hasn’t affected my decision either,” he said, putting his hand on her arm. She shook her hair, got up, and walked away.
Crow and I both waited.
I broke the silence. “What decision?”
Walter shook his head. Then he nodded. “I need to tell you more about Frank’s deal. He’s sold one of my songs to Ford to use in a commercial for one of their huge trucks in the States. On the back of that he’s sold my entire catalog. So it’s a lot of money and Siobhan, well, she thinks if we have money I should leave the band—because we can afford it. But it’s not just about Frank’s deal and the money. I’ve been worrying for a long time now, and my mental health is not good.”
Crow looked grim. This was the end, he knew it was, he could read Walter well; after all, they were old friends. “Can you at least try to explain what’s happened,” he pleaded, some of his anger revolving briefly into petulance. “What do you plan to do? Are you really leaving the band? What’s the matter with your mental health? Just because you’ve got some cash you’re going to leave the fucking band? You just said it was important to you. Do you know what this all means to me?”
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