Harry’s look of pride collapsed and he regarded me with disdain. “Some bloody godfather you’ve turned out to be,” he said. “Let’s go and get another drink before you fall over.”
Old Nik and Maud had been invited through me, and they were the only ones who failed to show; Maud sent a message that Nik had been very ill. As I read the fax Selena came up behind me and pinched my bottom. It was such an impudently familiar and unexpected thing for her to do, I didn’t know how to react. She stood beside me and read the note.
“So Old Nik gets ill and you lose your chance to flirt with his gorgeous wife.” She turned to Harry, who appeared quite shocked. “Floss has stolen my man, Harry. Do you know what that feels like?”
Harry looked bemused. We all glanced over at Floss, who was talking to Walter.
Floss had a new front tooth and was smiling proudly, delighted with her nickname at last. The tooth was set with a diamond.
Selena said it was her engagement gem; she had refused to wear a conventional ring.
Floss came over to where the three of us stood holding our champagne glasses, all yearning for something different to drink no doubt, something stronger.
Floss hugged her old friend and commiserated with her.
“I know you loved him, my darling,” she breathed as she released Selena and held her at arm’s length, gazing at her intensely. “But I love you, so much. Tell me you still love me. We are still friends.”
Selena held her belly for a moment and looked pained.
“Are you pregnant?” Floss laughed.
Selena dismissed the question with a wave. She said her work as a healer and her contact with angels often made her feel bloated. There was a price to pay for helping others: if a healer eased another’s pain it sometimes manifested in the healer.
Floss kissed Selena.
“Thank you for being here, my darling,” she said. “I know it’s hard. I couldn’t have faced it without you.”
They went to sit together on a bench in the hotel garden.
Selena was suddenly serious. Their voices were loud enough for me to hear.
“I’ll never have a family,” I heard her say. “Fuck knows what it is I always feel I’m carrying. But it isn’t a child.”
“I know what you’re feeling,” said Floss. “You’re feeling I’ve stolen the man you lusted after for years.” She laughed, throwing her head back as she did so. “Cheer up; it’s my wedding day. Let’s talk about all this again later.”
“Yes,” agreed Selena readily. “So you’re going to be a married woman and do the school run, and shop in M&S and wash Walter’s undies?”
“I want to breed horses, not children,” retorted Floss. “I want to start a stable, and a stud. Our friend Ronnie Hobson—the gay guy from school—he is going to be my business partner.”
“I have always adored Ronnie,” said Selena. “He’ll be a wonderful help. He’s funny and camp, but he’s incredibly smart. And he’s big too. You know he’s won most fights he’s ever been involved in? He won’t abide being teased or insulted about being gay. He’ll keep you safe from all those horny old men at gymkhanas.”
Then, his ears no doubt burning, Ronnie appeared, looking as lean, fit, and bronzed as an Argentinian polo player.
“The girls!” he shouted, and slapped his thigh a little theatrically. “Here we all are again. Together. The three mousquetaires.” They all laughed.
“Floss has been telling me about the new business you’re getting into,” said Selena, seeming to be genuinely happier for a moment.
“It’s going to be perfect,” said Ronnie as the girls made space between them on the bench, and looking back and forth as he spoke. “I am very good with horses, always have been. Floss is a good rider, but we want to build up a stud. Maybe even bring on some thoroughbreds.”
I stood a few feet away. The champagne didn’t seem to be agreeing with me. I was listening to their conversation when Ronnie saw me.
“Come over here, Lou darling!” He was gesturing to me.
I joined them. “Sorry, Floss.” I feigned regret. “I overheard you. So no kids, but foals and colts?”
“That’s it,” confirmed Floss. “Ronnie is my man for breeding.”
Was there a hint of double entendre there? It was strange to hear Ronnie described as a masculine and capable figure. I hadn’t really known the three of them when they were younger, not until Walter’s first wedding. And Ronnie had grown since then, and not just in stature. He seemed stronger and lighter at heart.
“Were you and Floss ever an item?” I was amazed to hear the question come out of my mouth.
The three of them laughed, but it was Floss who came to my rescue.
“Ronnie would have been my first love if he hadn’t been gay, and I love him still, platonically. With Selena, he’s my best friend.” She put her arm around Ronnie’s shoulder. “I hope that Walter and I can be friends the way Ronnie and I have always been.”
Then, turning to me and looking up into my eyes, she said something that touched me deeply.
“And Louis, I’ve always really liked you too.” She obviously didn’t want me to feel left out of their little trio. “I’m off soon on my honeymoon. Look after these two for me.”
“Well.” I could feel my face was flushed. “Thanks for that. I’ll try. And good luck with the stud. I’m sure it’ll be a lot of work to get going, but you two seem the right couple for the job.”
“Will it be expensive?” Selena asked the pertinent question.
“Walter has money now,” Floss explained. “He has agreed to help set us up.” Floss saw that Selena was looking distracted.
“Don’t be jealous,” she pleaded, reaching out and holding Selena’s hands in her own.
“Don’t be daft!” Selena dismissed the idea. “Just don’t hurt Walter. My sister was a complete bitch to him. She was an intellectual snob. It was as though Walter was never good enough for her. You must know—I realize this is not the right moment, but Walter was terribly shaken when Siobhan left him. He was deeply hurt. He looks tough, but he isn’t. You know I tried to help him. I saw it all coming but I was the wrong person. The little sister, dammit. Floss, make him happy. He deserves it.”
Not long after our conversation ended and Floss had gone off to find Walter, suddenly cameras whirred all around. Confetti filled the air. Floss looked stunning. The diamond in her front tooth glinted, but as her hair shone and her eyes sparkled, such synthetic adornments were of little consequence. As I’ve said, Walter seemed lighter, and settled; he had a new dignity. They got into a massive limousine, waved through the lowered windows, and were gone in a cloud of dust thrown up from the gravel drive.
Chapter 10
I was probably the only person close to Walter who had some inkling of the reason for his absolute withdrawal from show business once he was married to Floss. Many of his friends looked to her for an answer, citing the rather elite life she led riding and breeding horses. But I knew that Old Nik had said something that had triggered a reaction in Walter, even frightened him.
At his home with Siobhan, Walter had always had a small studio with a piano and recording equipment. Now in his new house with Floss, he kept only the piano, and he played it rarely. Music, once such an enormous part of his life, fell into the sidelines of his days. Walter didn’t even listen to music anymore. What was so strange about their home, and I was invited there only occasionally, was that they had no television, no music system, not even a radio. Instead they had a small cinema in the cellar, where they watched movies on DVD. If you tried to get Walter to discuss a movie, he would pretend to remember nothing much. The only interest he spoke about with enthusiasm was his garden.
After their marriage Walter and Floss had rented a five-bedroom thirties house in the leafy part of Sheen, within walking distance of Richmond Park and just a pleasant stroll away from my apartment. I visited as often as I was allowed. There were riding stables by several of the gates into the park,
which suited Floss well, and Walter had chosen a property with a garden, laid mainly to utility lawn surrounded by a few mature trees needing surgery, that the owners were delighted for him to bring to life. The house was set back on a road that was fairly quiet even at rush hour. When legions of local mothers collected their kids from the various schools in the neighborhood, there were occasional snags, but Walter had no reason to venture out. In any case, he rode a scooter. Floss used their big Volvo 4x4 to get to and from the various stables she used, or walked through the park to the one nearest their new home. Walter had few distractions. Planes flew low overhead on their way to Heathrow, but he quickly got used to their noise.
He had found his home with Siobhan in South Ealing more amenable in some ways, he told me. He had liked the variety of ethnic types who lived there, whereas in Sheen Walter felt entirely surrounded by the British middle classes.
This was my manor. Up in my flat that doubled as a gallery on Richmond Hill, I became a familiar figure in the area to young trendy people interested in the Outsider Art that celebrities were starting to collect. I held my exhibitions in various local buildings, such as the White Lodge in Richmond Park and Orleans House on the River Thames. In fact there was a large Swedish community in the area, and a fair representation of Japanese and Asian business families. However, Walter, with no children at school, would have little occasion to meet them, and wasn’t really aware of his neighbors in the usual ways. So he lived among them but, unlike me, at a distance. Walter was rather isolated, and deeply involved in creating his complex garden maze using faux hedges of woven willow rods and various creeping plants rather than the slower-growing yew.
The overall mood of the area was one of gentility under assault. Bordered by a few housing estates and hemmed in between Richmond Park and the railway line to Waterloo, its position on the South Circular Road meant that the traffic in Sheen could sometimes be an annoyance. But without needing to take part in the school run Walter and Floss could pick and choose when they traveled. It seemed to most of their friends that they lived a peculiarly quiet life.
Crow Williams retained the band name and continued to work the pub circuit, playing many of the old songs written by Walter. He rechristened the band the Stand, but it became known, and billed, as Crow Williams and His Stand. As he was not about to adopt any kind of gimmicky Walter-inspired posing onstage, there were some disappointed customers. But he surprised everyone by taking over the microphone and proving himself a good singer. He also wrote decent songs. Given the chance, he would complain a little about Walter’s defection, partly because he felt Walter was missing out on the pub rock ethic that was like bread and water laced with nectar to Crow.
On one subject Crow could be prone to outbursts that shattered his otherwise super-cool demeanor: the Hansons had insinuated themselves into Andréevich’s affections and obtained permission to use the defunct band name Hero Ground Zero once used by Paul Jackson. They were on the verge of filling stadiums with their extremely ambitious progressive rock that veered into baroque classical music and artful jazz. Three of the original band were included, despite their age; they gave the revived band dignity. Crow, the only one left in the Stand’s original lineup, was appalled, and said so.
“Why would anyone even bother digging up that old Hero Ground Zero bollocks?” He remained friends with the Hansons, especially with Steve with, whom he’d grown up, but he was always scathing, even to his face. “It isn’t new. It isn’t even fuckin’ old. It’s rambling, self-indulgent, self-glorifying, and egoistic.”
Selena meanwhile became a professional healer and worked in specialist clinics set up in the NHS with the sanction of Prince Charles. Despite this dignified role, she still appeared to be crazy to most of her friends. No man had ever taken her on, despite her prettiness, except for a wild night, or at best a wild week. I think she often felt lonely, and was one of the few of their old friends who saw Walter regularly and that was because she remained so close to Floss. But whenever she could, when she had access to Walter alone, discreetly behind Floss’s back, she would remind him that she would always love him, and would always be willing to take him. Of course it was years later that I learned all this from Selena, but I had always wondered what Selena’s motive for visiting Walter had been. It wasn’t obvious, it didn’t seem to be about trying to seduce him, not then. I believe that maybe she simply wanted to be near him occasionally. And no doubt she missed Floss, her childhood friend. She put on a little weight as the quiet years passed, and her angelic references became increasingly bizarre.
“Yesterday I realigned the universe,” she once said to me in passing, looking as though it had been as tiresome as doing the laundry. “I was one of a thousand angels conscripted for the job. It isn’t easy being me.”
But on the other hand she really did seem to help people when she set her mind to it, whether it was with hospice care, emotional or creative blockages, or even mundane medical problems like back pain.
She decided that Walter was creatively blocked, and was always trying to persuade him to allow her to spend time with him as a healer. I came to accept that she simply wanted to help, just as I did.
Of course I knew Walter was not really blocked; he simply blocked anyone who wanted to draw him back into his old musical world, or into art in any form. I had helped so many visual artists to break through their mental problems and become successful artists that I felt I was failing Walter in some way. But Walter was a musician and that was not my area. Yet there were famous musicians in rock and pop who had done such amazing work, either because they were mentally wobbling or because of stress, or drugs, or whatever pressed them into new and extraordinary worlds.
Syd Barrett had simply taken too many drugs—and, sensitive artist that he was, he eventually broke down. Nevertheless, we were all the beneficiaries of his talent and his wild mind. His early work with Pink Floyd had been sublime and anarchically adventurous.
Peter Green had been a founder of Fleetwood Mac before they became so huge and one of the greatest blues players of the sixties. He simply found success was not what he wanted, nor could he cope with it. We used to see him wandering the streets near my gallery in Richmond, his fingernails allowed to grow so long that he could not play guitar.
Syd and Peter had dropped out of the music business and never made it back in.
Walter worried me, and I found him frustrating too. I felt that he was on the brink of some kind of useful madness, some kind of visionary capability, something close to the Asperger’s syndrome so common among my Outsider artists, but, as I say, I was concerned I was failing him by being unable to help him take the next step.
I also felt that part of Walter’s journey, in an odd way I didn’t fully understand, was that his memory had sharpened. When I went to their house he would lead me around the extraordinary garden he had created in suburban Sheen, and list flowers, plants, shrubs, insects, birds, butterflies, worms, beetles—extinct and extant: the list was never-ending. Quite apart from the maze the garden itself was a complex and evolving design, with spirals and alleyways and cul-de-sacs and vistas that were infinitely and finely detailed.
In a way he had cheated by making dense trellises on which he grew climbing plants, which defined and provided density in the maze several years before the slower-growing hedges caught up. The climbing plants also filled the air with perfume and the garden with spring color. Finding oneself lost in the labyrinth was never claustrophobic or unnerving; when it happened to me I wanted to remain lost for hours, and finding the way out always felt a bit deflating. If I could have transformed Walter’s garden into a painting, it would have been magnificent.
So although I worried about him, I also believed that he was trying to manage his creative explosions through the work he did as a gardener.
And I knew that he was still hearing something, something remarkable, or disturbing.
Somewhere between the wind and the waves lies the collateral for the second movem
ent. We have heard the fall of a glass cathedral and the collapse of a building like an airport terminal. To lead from the first movement to the second, a voice, almost human, wails a continuous note. The voice, if in fact it is a voice, is racked with pain, is gargling blood and chewing regurgitated flesh. The sweep of the wind, for that is what it is, caresses with broom-like fronds of air stroking over an endless landscape, gently at first, stirring the trees, the leaves, the dust from the woodland paths. Then gusts break up the soothing, hissing breaths, each one harder than the one before. Building to thunderous, house-shaking punches. Punches that, at the very moment they deliver a thrust of pressurized fresh air, knock every last gasp out of the lungs. Then that ancient whistling howl, from eternity: whooooowwwow, whooooooowwwoooow, whoooooooooo. Like an air-raid siren over London in the Blitz, and equally portentous. This tempest can blow us directly into the jaws of hell, fan its flames, and feed its fire. Then the crash of a wave so huge, a tsunami-like wall of water falling onto the wind like a huge hand waving away an insignificant skein of smoke. The earthquake in the first movement has created this terrible wall of water? Perhaps. There is more than one wave, there are more, each more complex, more developed than the last. Crashing, folding, weeping, seeding, sanding, flowing, pebbling, rolling, whooshing, and fading. Receding. The voice that remains now, after the tumult of the second movement, is human, no doubt about it now. It is the voice of a child, a little girl, of about seven or eight years old, and she is singing happily. She is using a language for her song that is completely made up. It sounds like a mixture of French, Italian, Spanish, and some Mandarin Chinese. As she sings we can hear that she is playing with water, and possibly sand, on a beach or in a backyard sandbox. She pours water into the sand, sand into the little container of water, back and forth.
Book Two
Chapter 11
A moment of silence…
While we imagine the fifteen subsequent years during which Walter avoided making music and Floss bred horses in order to avoid making babies.
The Age of Anxiety Page 10
