The Age of Anxiety

by Pete Townshend

  Can I can bring myself and my family back into the frame again? Rain recovered from losing Walter. She remained friends with him, but it took a long time to forgive Floss; Rain had been interested in horses but—like many teenage girls—had given them up suddenly when boys came along. She continued to work for the BBC as a radio correspondent, but later when she had time off, she often worked at Floss’s stud and sometimes she stayed with me in my apartment in Richmond for fairly long periods.

  One evening, the sun going down like a red orb over Heathrow Airport in the distance, we sat at the open window and she sipped a glass of wine. Rain was in silhouette, and something of an aura framed her face, the effect of the sunset behind her. She looked older than usual; my daughter had become a strong-looking and powerfully attractive woman, perhaps not in the Irish sisters’ league, but she had her own special mystique.

  “Dad,” she said suddenly, her eyes moist. “You know I don’t hate Siobhan.”

  I didn’t really know what to reply. Before I could think of something she continued.

  “I don’t hate Floss. I don’t hate Selena and I don’t hate you or Mum.”

  “I never thought for a moment that you did.”

  “I think you probably did, Dad.” And she was right of course. She continued: “I did dream I would marry Walter, and when he married Siobhan I did hate her for a while. But she has been a great friend to me, and to Mum.”

  “That’s good to hear,” I said, sorry that was all I could come up with.

  “When Siobhan went back to Ireland and Selena jumped in I fucking hated her too, for a while. God, Walter seemed such a twat, sitting in Dingwalls waiting for women to throw themselves at him. When Floss beat Selena to the punch what really hurt was that, once again, Walter had not sensed that I was there waiting, and always would be.”

  “You are like a sister to him.”

  “We once kissed, Dad,” she protested. “I remember telling you about it. We were still young, but we kissed for two hours, tongues down each other’s throats. I was in ecstasy. I would have made love to him. He just stopped. It was as though we were playing a game of Monopoly together and he got bored and folded up the board. A few minutes later he was playing his harmonica with his head in that huge plastic bucket that he used to make himself sound louder.”

  “Rain, you lived with me, and with Harry and Sally, we were a family, you were like brother and sister. He was blind to that part of you. You will find a man, Rain; you just have to let Walter go.”

  “I have let him go.” She nodded her head with certainty. “That’s what I’m saying. I’ve let all the men go. And I don’t hate any of them anymore. Men or women. I especially don’t hate Siobhan. She’s been great to me, and great for me. Do you understand what I’m saying, Dad?”

  To be perfectly honest I had no idea what she was talking about. Was she trying to tell me she had fallen in love with Siobhan?

  Rain occasionally went to visit her old boss in Waterford for what I took to be consultancy sessions and I had begun to wonder if they were lovers.

  I felt quite worldly about all this. I had arrived at a place where I was unruffled, serene, and even rather proud of whatever Rain may have done with her sex life.

  So my pride was pricked, and I was caught unaware, and felt a little foolish too, when a few days after our talk in my apartment, I heard from Selena that Rain’s trips to Waterford were not only to spend time with Siobhan, but also to visit her mother, Pamela, who I had been told lived in a convent somewhere in County Wexford.

  You will remember that my own affliction, my aberration, my visions, had been seeing what I believed might be the faces of frightening screaming heads in the grain of the walnut headboard of the old French bed, the one Pamela and I had bought a short time before she despaired of me and left me. It was Rain, trained researcher and qualified historian, who had gone out of her way to find out something strange about the journey of the bed itself. What she unearthed helped me to feel that I had not been entirely mad about the visions that I felt emanated from the old bed.

  Its provenance was the castle city of Béziers in the south of France; the bedhead had been carved from a massive wooden gate to the city. Béziers had been the home of the gentle Cathars of the Languedoc region, who had refused to convert to Catholicism and brought down the ire of Pope Innocent III in the thirteenth century.

  “Dad.” Rain caught my wandering attention. “That bed from Béziers. You know I tried to convince Mum, despite my journalistic skepticism, that your nightmarish response to it had not been caused by drug abuse alone, but also by some intuitive facility you have. You remember, Dad, that the Pope’s military commander, Simon de Montfort, slaughtered twenty thousand occupants of Béziers. Mum is a Catholic. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. At first she thought I was trying to trawl up the bloody history of the Catholic Church to try to break her faith and her vows. When she realized that I was just trying to generate a truce between my mum and dad, she understood.”

  It was good to spend time with Rain and feel closer to her again. She’d been away a long time, on and off.

  A few months later Rain arranged for me to go to Ireland. I was to visit Siobhan and hoped to reconnect with Pamela.

  The trip to Waterford is an easy one when you fly from Heathrow to Dublin, and then take a car down the motorway. You don’t see much of the sea on the way south, so the arrival in Duncannon is especially uplifting. The sea, the sky, Waterford across the estuary. Rain had arranged for Pamela and me to meet at a little café that overlooked the small fishing port at Duncannon.

  I looked at the redhead, wanting to see her as the amazing ginger Wonderwoman I had once known. What I saw was a mother, a concerned and slightly shamefaced one at that. But it was me who went first. I played my hand, which was not a good one. No kings, no queens, no jacks, or aces. Just numbers.

  “Did I fuck things up for Rain?”

  Pamela shook her head, but I could see she didn’t feel entirely happy.

  “You know I did nearly enter the convent, I was almost a nun.” She looked at me as though waiting for me to laugh. “Oh, I know it sounds mad. But it was partly my lust that drove me to it. I’m a Catholic. It was OK making love to you, but you weren’t enough. I’m sorry, Louis. You were my mistake. Rain was our mutual triumph, but I couldn’t stay with you. Not after…” She didn’t complete the sentence.

  “What did I do wrong, Pam?” I sounded pathetic.

  “If you don’t know now you never will, Louis. Let’s just move on, can we? It’s been torture for Rain having to lie to you, to keep my life here secret.”

  Pamela wouldn’t tell me where she was living. Clearly she didn’t want to see me regularly. But despite the discomfort we both felt, we were at least friends again. Rain was delighted of course. She only knew she had gone a long way toward repairing things between her parents; she knew nothing about what had really separated us. Neither did I. Not then.

  Rain then took me to visit Siobhan in her cottage. Rain had stayed with Siobhan maybe once or twice by that time. Whatever enmity had built up when Siobhan had married Rain’s childhood crush seemed to have evaporated.

  It was a charming house. The two ground-floor rooms had been knocked together to make one large space that included the small kitchen at the back on one side of the fireplace. Siobhan had transformed the room into a generous space with two large and comfortable sofas strewn with cushions, and a thick rug on the stone-slab floor that somehow always felt warm. A huge inglenook fireplace had been tacked onto the back of the house when a new staircase to the upper floor had been constructed along the back wall. The house had originally been a farmworker’s cottage, one of three. The other two were closer together and had been combined and converted into a home by Siobhan and Selena’s parents, when times had been better, before Selena was born. Siobhan’s house still looked quite plain from the outside. The windows were modern-looking, of metal and double-paned to provide some resistance to the winter
wind from the Irish Sea less than a mile off and which was visible from her bedroom. The roof was of unpleasant and rather cheap tiles. But Siobhan had coaxed flowers to bloom around the front of the house, partly by planting a high protective hedge of laurel. Some of the plants she had kept in pots, moving them in winter into a basic glass greenhouse at the back of the house. Now most of what she had planted had grown strong and vigorous and had been transplanted into the beds.

  The way the upper floor was arranged confirmed my suspicion that Rain and Siobhan were lovers. There was evidence of two women living together: two sets of clothing strewn around carelessly, and in the bathroom two toothbrushes, one electric, Rain’s preference. Siobhan’s behavior with Rain was affectionate and intimate, like a doting and patronizing aunt perhaps, but also slightly lascivious. At least that’s how it all seemed to me.

  At the top of the staircase the entire floor opened up. A massive double bed, again strewn with cushions, took up one end of the room and had been raised on a plinth so its occupants could see the view of the distant estuary while lying back. The bathroom was a part of the bedroom, the tub in the middle at one end, with an open shower tray to one side, and a small toilet in a semi-enclosed area to the other with a sink where I’d spotted the toothbrushes.

  Of course, I would have felt very uncomfortable interrogating my own daughter about her sexuality. Rain was no great beauty, I suppose, but she had a very good figure, and a strong presence, lovely eyes and a wide mouth. I knew from her mother Pamela that some men’s sexual insatiability is unequal to that of certain women. We blokes literally run out of blood, we fail to swell after a time; such troubles are never a problem for a healthy woman. Rain was not Pamela, but may well have wanted more than she got from her first few male lovers.

  As I looked around the bedroom, the inevitable question to my daughter was on my lips: Have you found someone, at last, that doesn’t stop?

  Siobhan joined us, as if to deflect my rather tacky curiosity, and as I looked up after bending to look out at the sea, she was standing with her arm linked with Rain’s.

  The message I received, right or wrong, had at the time been very clear.

  Your daughter is mine now. This is where we sleep, and roll, and spoon, and sometimes things go much further.

  Fifteen years had passed. Fifteen years earlier, Floss had walked into Dingwalls very soon after Siobhan had walked out. Walter had met Floss and married her. In the interim I had sold painting after painting, making the most money from Old Nik’s extraordinary, visionary work. Walter worked in his garden, the maze becoming ever more dense as the years passed. Floss grew her equestrian business with Ronnie into a hugely lucrative concern. Ronnie and Floss spent a lot of time together, which was still the subject of some gossip, born back in the days when they ran the riding stable in Sheen. But with their later venture, one lucky thoroughbred colt they entered into a race at Newbury won by a mile and was sold for stud for several million pounds to an Arab from Dubai. The colt’s progeny went on to become winners themselves. As Walter’s money ran out, Floss’s filled the void.

  Walter still contacted me occasionally and we got together to catch up a few times over that period. He said that from time to time he tried to make music based on his writings from the days when he started hearing the anxious thoughts of the front-row audience at Dingwalls. But he rarely heard the kind of disturbing sounds he’d heard back then. He was beginning to get out and about too, getting to know some of his neighbors. Sometimes he had a chat with the Iraqi fellow who ran the local convenience store. His name happened to be Hussein, which he told Walter was incredibly common among Muslims.

  In the autumn of 2011 Walter came to visit me to ask what I thought he should do to celebrate his fifteenth wedding anniversary. I recommended flowers and he ordered them by phone.

  “Fifteen years! That’s lovely,” cooed the woman in the florist’s. “So what have you been up to in your retirement? Don’t you miss the band?”

  “Yes, I do miss it, but I’ve moved back to my first career. I’m a garden designer. It’s inspiring. Creative.”

  “I hope you still do music,” she insisted.

  “I still hear it!”

  Politely fielding the woman’s questions, Walter laughed, ordering the pale pink peonies that he knew Floss adored. But as he put the phone down, he seemed to feel a wave of anxiety sweep over him. He asked if I would spend an hour with him.

  We went for a walk together in Richmond Park, and I tried to comfort him. At the same time what he told me filled me with an excitement that I found hard to contain; after the fallow period of fifteen years, in which he had concentrated on gardening while Floss got on with her equestrian business, Walter was now hearing music again.

  The soundscapes were back. Was Walter now going to return to the music business?

  What I heard him tell the woman from the flower shop was that he was doing some creative work at home. Up until that moment he had convinced himself that was precisely what he was not doing. By gardening he had felt he was avoiding creativity and art, dealing only with the soil and the elements.

  As Walter began to describe what felt to him like a crash, I began to fly a little. After all, I live by the madness of others, and my own madness had yet to be redeemed.

  “I hear what people are thinking,” Walter said quietly as we slowly walked along the sandy bridle path near Richmond Gate, where Floss occasionally rode Dragon, her favorite Highland pony. Not a good horse for dressage, but sporting an extravagantly long “blond” mane, just like she had once worn. And he could jump pretty well.

  “Walter,” I reminded him, “you spoke to Nik about all this, not to me. You explained what you were hearing to him.”

  “Every morning I walk to the main road to buy milk and a chocolate bar from my friend Hussein,” he said. He smiled his handsome grin and looked at me, pausing for a moment. “Got to keep my energy up.”

  He produced a sheet of paper. At first sight it looked like a kind of manifesto with short paragraphs. He handed it to me.

  “Is this for me to keep?” I was pleased to be trusted again. It had been a while.

  Walter nodded. “My face is familiar enough locally, to people who saw me perform, or know my face from the papers fifteen years back, or documentaries on the telly—whatever—and they chat to me. They seem to feel I am a friend. It’s wonderful in a way. It makes me feel as if I live in a small village. Or I overhear them talking to Hussein. Later, I write down what they say. Sometimes, before they speak, I can already hear and feel what they are concerned about, I can hear it as sound. Everyone is worried, Louis. Frightened.”

  “Fear is the normal human condition, Walter,” I said, turning the page over. “So this writing is not a description of what you’ve been hearing?”

  “What I hear is much harder to describe. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to compose music that comes close to it; some of these paragraphs connect with what I hear and some don’t.” He tapped the page I held in my hand as he spoke.

  We crossed the busy road and walked toward Petersham, and then in Richmond Park sat on a bench that allowed a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral eight miles away in the City, just visible through the haze. I began to read. The title of the page was written in longhand, using an old-fashioned pen: “The people behind the soundscapes”; the rest was printed from a computer.

  I worry about the planet, this strange weather.

  When I wake up I feel my dreams must have been disturbing, but I can remember so little.

  I find it so hard to reconcile the gentle Christian beliefs I know you’ve all been taught with the violent demands of the hardline Muslim clerics at our local mosque. Why should my kids have to face all that intimidation, those threats and censure? They haven’t done any wrong, at least not yet.

  How can music and dancing be wrong? Surely they are expressions of the heart?

  Where have all the sparrows gone? When I was a child there were thousands of them, ev
erywhere.

  Robots will take over the world; I know they will.

  Hurricanes. When will this wind cease?

  Why can’t things just remain as they were? Why is there always someone who wants to change things?

  “It’s incredibly sad, isn’t it?” I looked over to Walter, who was gazing into the distance, his strong, handsome profile belying the fragility of his mind. “Who are they, all these frightened people you have as acquaintances?”

  Walter did not reply.

  “Do any of these inspire music?” I said, trying to imagine what Nik would have made of all this.

  “Read the first one,” Walter said. “Read it aloud, and then close your eyes and see what happens.”

  It was a strange instruction, and I felt a little embarrassed as I began. “I worry about the planet,” I read haltingly. I gave a small cough to clear my throat. “This strange weather.”

  At this I looked into the sky. It was a bright autumn, a bit of blue, a few clouds, the sun hiding somewhere. I continued reading aloud.

  “When I wake up I feel my dreams must have been disturbing, but I can remember so little. I find it so hard to reconcile the gentle Christian beliefs I know you’ve all been taught with the violent demands of the hardline Muslim clerics at our local mosque. Why should my kids have to face all that intimidation, those threats and censure? They haven’t done any wrong, at least not yet. How can music and dancing be wrong? Surely they are expressions of the heart?”

  Walter looked at me; I looked back. I understood why a devout and extreme follower of Islam would turn his back on music, even proscribe it, but both of us would find it hard to believe music was an expression of evil.

  “Who said this?” I asked.

  “Funnily enough it was Hussein himself, who runs the shop.”

  “Not a radical, then.” I smiled.

  “No, but he is sincere, devoted to God.”