“Then help me to win Walter. Please.”
“I have no intention of actually helping you to win my godson!” I tried to laugh her proposition away, but she faced me with a very determined expression.
“Of course you want Walter and Floss to remain together,” she almost sneered. “You and Floss have a very special bond, don’t you?”
I tried to calm her down. “But I would never stand in your way if they split up and you and Walter were to find love.”
I wasn’t sure I had placated her, but we managed to complete our lunch in a slightly more settled mood.
The thud of a baseball bat hitting a melon. An ax whizzes through the air and strikes a tree trunk. A machete chops at thick, leafy undergrowth. A spade buries its tip into the soil. A blade slashes at the throat of a pig, blood gushes noisily as the animal squeals. A rain begins, of billy clubs, falling onto shoulders, cushions, heads, smashing windows, onto bone, skull, cheekbone, forearm, back of hand. Footsteps fleeing, footsteps following. A chase. A clearing. A cleaning. A cleansing of woodland, jungle, wild animals, human body, and soul. And then the clunk, click, clank of huge switches being thrown, the buzz of brilliance and electrons. Blinded again, by brilliance, the future, by fear, by anxiety, and shame.
Walter told me later that the very next day Selena had summoned him to the same table in the same restaurant. Floss and Ronnie were away at the time on an organized hack, strangely enough in the same area of the Lake District over which Old Nik had wandered like a tramp for many years. What Selena shared with Walter was as disturbing to him as everything she’d told me.
“Ronnie has an entity.”
Walter had laughed and turned to fiddle with his shoulder bag, trying to find his credit card to pay for lunch.
“He’s possessed by a dark spirit that I can only see when he’s walking away from me. It lives around him like a shadow, literally. Ronnie is a good-hearted man in many ways, but he is a fraud.”
Walter said he could hardly believe what Selena was trying to tell him.
Selena crashed on: “Ronnie pretends to be gay, but in fact he’s a full-blooded heterosexual man with a long string of female conquests among the customers at the stables.”
Walter looked incredulous. Ronnie had recently started to wear items of women’s clothing; he especially liked high heels, and had even started to joke about transitioning.
But Selena had not yet delivered her final blow.
“Ronnie and Floss are lovers. Everyone knows.”
Walter’s deepest insecurities had been triggered at that moment.
“They are probably making love right now.”
Walter felt sick. Selena was reinforcing all his most paranoid fears.
“How do you know?” he snapped. “What have you seen? Or is this just gossip?”
“I don’t need evidence,” Selena said quickly, defending herself haughtily. “I won’t listen to tittle-tattle. I simply know.”
Walter had always been determined to keep Selena at arm’s length. He regarded her like a wayward little sister—and perhaps as a bit mad. He and Floss had enjoyed sex only rarely for quite a long time now—and he was only human. He was vulnerable, envious that Ronnie spent more time with Floss than he did.
Selena could see her chances slipping away, so she went further.
“You too,” she had told him confidently. “You also have an entity. I can see it now. This parasitical disembodied soul is expressing itself through you. It’s what is making you feel crazy. It’s coloring and distorting your creativity.”
Walter had not been convinced, but on one level had been longing for some explanation of what had been happening to him.
Selena saw her chance. As she leaned forward, her loose dress opened slightly and Walter said that he could hardly take his eyes from the new voluptuousness of her cleavage and the lustful light in her blue-green eyes.
“Believe me, Walter,” she said. And somehow, the combination of her persuasive psychic magic and the swelling of her pretty breasts gelled; Walter told me later he was seriously afraid he might weep.
Twenty minutes later, the bill settled, Selena took Walter by the hand and led him to her car and drove him to Sheen. Later, separately on different occasions, they both told me what happened next. When they arrived outside the house, she parked carefully in the driveway, sheltered by shrubbery, turned off the engine of her battered old VW, pulled up her dress as though gathering herself to get out of the car, and kissed him deeply, hungrily, passionately. At last she knew for sure she had begun to close the circle that had started its lustful arc back in the bar at Dingwalls fifteen years before. She was about to seduce her number one candidate. Walter flushed, his heart beating; he could probably taste Siobhan on Selena’s lips. I’m sure he was aroused by memories of lips and taste and familiar flesh. They got out of the car and walked into the house.
Later, Walter decided that maybe, after all, Selena had been correct about him being taken over by some kind of jinn. For as he reached his orgasm, swimming in the genuine loving adoration that rained down on him from Selena’s entire body and being, he suddenly felt nothing.
“Oh God,” he gasped. “I’m sorry.”
It was as though his orgasm had been hijacked, stolen, completely erased.
“My darling,” cooed Selena, holding Walter’s sweat-covered face in her hands. “What happened?”
In what should have been the afterglow of their illicit passion, the morphine-like swoon that Selena had felt, Walter clumsily blurted out the truth.
“Not what I expected,” he said. “I’m so sorry, but for a moment there I felt as if I’d left my body.”
“That sounds amazing!” Selena didn’t really grasp what Walter meant, but was beginning to understand something wasn’t right from the frightened expression on her lover’s face.
And then Walter said something so unexpected, so badly timed, so brutal, that it quite took away her breath.
“How can you cheat on Floss like this?”
Walter’s question was not so much an accusation as an outburst of real curiosity; or was it that entity inside him? Much depends on whose version of events I might believe. Selena, Walter knew, adored Floss. But his question shocked him as much as it did Selena at such an intimate postcoital moment, and he realized he still felt rather disembodied.
Selena could easily have turned the absurd question back on Walter. He was cheating on his wife after all. Instead she brought her face close to his, held him, and looked deeply into his eyes.
“We are all cheating now. Floss isn’t just cheating on you with Ronnie.” She was angry and turned to gulp some wine and light a cigarette. Her breasts swung as she flopped back on the pillow blowing smoke into the air. How breathtakingly beautiful she must have been at that moment.
“What do you mean?” Walter’s heart had started beating again, overtime. “There’s someone else? Another lover? It isn’t just Ronnie?”
Selena shook her head. “Not another lover. Floss has kept something from you. It’s so important, and she’s kept it from you for the entirety of your bloody marriage.”
“What do you mean?” Walter was on his feet now. His body was lean and muscular, and at the age of forty-five his face still handsome and rugged. But his expression was that of a young boy who had seen a ghost. He didn’t smoke and had never been much of a drinker, but at that moment he whirled from side to side, as though looking for some prop that would see him through the moment. There was none.
“She’s my friend,” said Selena. “It’s not for me to say. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
She suddenly lunged at him, starting to cry, the impact of what she’d done beginning to sink in.
“I love you, Walter,” she spluttered. “I always have. You know that. I am the one you should be with. Floss is whoever she is, I can see why you married her, but you two are not the same. She’s never here. You need someone different—”
Walter interrupted. “An
Irish girl?” He was laughing, but there was a manic element in his eyes. “I think I tried that one!”
Walter pulled on his blue jeans, furious. His mind was filling with flashes of realization that popped up like newspaper headlines. Hypocrisy, manipulation, gossip, and intrigue. She had already betrayed her friend. How could he know whether any of this was true?
“Please”—he was almost screaming now—“please don’t tell me you got all this secret information from your damned angels.”
When that was precisely what she began to do, he abandoned all hope that he might get any sense out of her. He pulled on his T-shirt, buttoned up his jeans, slipped on some soft shoes, and ran from the house, leaving her lying in the bed that he had only ever shared with Floss.
This was not what Selena had hoped for, but now she accepted that what had happened was inevitable. She had waited for what felt like her entire life to make love to Walter. Sometimes her own power frightened her.
Months later, Selena gave me her version of what had happened that day. She had asked herself how the extraordinary love that she’d felt for Walter for so many years could have become transmogrified into such vengeance.
Her confession, and her question to herself, made me look back at my own life. Had I ever loved Pamela, truly? Or had it all just been about how sexy she had been when she was young? I was young then too, all testosterone and libido. I could forgive myself if I had never loved her, but when I asked myself the question, what was so sad was that I didn’t know the answer.
Selena had seen Walter, wanted him, and remained fixated on him for the rest of her life. But I wondered if she could be certain she really loved him.
I had never experienced such certainty about Pamela, about any woman.
I think Selena really did offer herself to Walter unconditionally, but his indifference to her drove her to extreme measures. In any case, he was not entirely indifferent to her. I believe he was as attracted to Selena as she was to him; he simply had some way of controlling what he felt. He was not obsessed by her as she was with him—and yet she could exert power over him. That suggested some vulnerability in him that was not entirely sexual.
Behind all of Walter’s artistic complexity was a man, just a man. And that man would have been close to a saint if he had been able to resist what few men since the dawn of creation have ever managed to successfully and completely repress—the lure of the sister. To his credit he had resisted Selena until now. The problem was that Selena saw his resistance as evidence of how much he valued and respected her; indeed she regarded his resistance to her as evidence of his love for her. She may well have been right. So in my view, whatever he had done, he could not have resisted Selena forever. And the people around him, the chatterers, would have condemned him as a predator, a cheat, a liar, an adulterer of the worst kind. I can’t get completely inside Walter’s mind. I can’t tell you quite what he was feeling as he ran from his house leaving Selena—both triumphant and uneasy—swooning in her best friend’s marital bed. But when we met, when he eventually came back to London, he did describe the events of that afternoon with Selena.
I have a fairly good hunch that by sleeping with Selena he had realized that he did in fact love her almost as much as she had always loved him. And yet, if he was a man like me, I can hazard a guess that the love he discovered—and then had to acknowledge—did nothing to reduce his old love for Siobhan, or his love for Floss.
Men, although not all, can love many women; you don’t have to travel too far back in history to find that this is true. Neither are all women innately monogamous or instinctively sexually loyal. It is all down to convenience. Men want to have certain women entirely to themselves. Certain women are willing to sign up for that deal if they are sufficiently exalted and protected. At the basest level, men want to exert power; women want evidence of that power and their ability to channel it. Selena was not so much a new woman as one who had taken up the blunt weapons usually employed by men. She was not a feminist in any sense, but she understood real power. Is any of this love?
Selena would have shared Walter with Siobhan; she would certainly have shared him with Floss. Walter, just like any man, would have been unable to share any of them with anyone else.
Had I consistently given my godson bad advice at every vital crossroad of his life? Had I made a similar mistake when I had suggested back in 1996 that Walter, suffering from distracting and disturbing sounds in his head, should meet Old Nik? Did I make a similar mistake sending Crow and Hanson to hear his new compositions in early 2012? It seemed that perhaps his father, whom I had cast as a man who had been unable and unwilling to help his son, had in fact contributed so much more than I had.
If I had guided my godson clumsily, I had done so sincerely and specifically in the matter of his art, and only that.
Of course that is not entirely true: I had hoped that when Walter first met Old Nik he might see that his marriage to Siobhan had been a mistake. I hoped he would see that not only was he destined for greater things than Dingwalls, but also greater things than writing a few nifty poems that only two or three hundred people on the planet would ever read. I had often asked where Walter’s father was while I played God, but Harry had been there all along.
Bingo looks up at me now as I write; at least for my beloved collie I am a reliable god of sorts. Bingo certainly taught me the value of waiting. He waits constantly for an opportunity to work. Catching a ball of discarded paper that I toss toward the basket qualifies as a matter of vital importance, and he always catches it elegantly and efficiently without fuss in midair and quickly returns it to my feet. He stares at the ball, with shifty glances sideways in my direction, without moving his head. His art is 50 percent in the catch, 50 percent in the alert but patient waiting for the next throw. Sometimes the collie’s waiting weighs on me, a distraction. Is it possible to wait when someone or some animal is waiting as you wait? So it was with Walter. Having advised him to learn to wait, and now at last—after years of labyrinthine gardening—to act, I had thrown a ball, tossed out a challenge that was rapidly becoming too complex for him to negotiate, and too intimidating a problem for me to act as guide. I would be no help.
* * *
Exploding stars. War. Distant explosions, cries of pain and horror. German soldiers. French. British. Afghan. Iraqi. American voices. Holocaust, apocalypse, war, terror. Planes diving, shooting. Tanks maneuvering. Rockets screaming. Engines. Marching boots. Running, scuffling, skidding. Falling walls. Children’s voices. A correspondent reports on a mobile phone. Data sounds from the past-present-future, so ticker tape, Morse, mobile phone sounds. Closer explosions. More cries of pain. Cries of triumph. Victory parades. Cheering crowds. Then an even bigger explosion, a massive one. The fall of radioactive rain. More cheering. More crying. Distant speeches across a crowded city square. Dictators, peacemakers, pacifists, warmongers. The sound of families pleading with their loved ones, do not go, you will never come back, my duty, my duty, my duty, my religion, no God but God, the only savior. More explosions. Bells ringing. Rising to an incredible cacophony. Then a single bell, mournful.
From the shameful bed he had shared with Selena it seemed to Walter that there was only one place he could go. Floss and Ronnie had driven the horsebox to the hack in the Lake District, so the Volvo he so rarely used was at the back of the house. He had grabbed the laptop containing his father’s recordings of the soundscapes he had been hearing, picked up the car keys, a credit card, and started driving toward Wales. Over the next ten hours he passed through Holyhead, over the Irish Sea to Dublin, and on by road through Wicklow to Wexford. Then from Waterford to Duncannon.
When he later described to me his arrival at Siobhan’s father’s cottage he invoked a scene that could have been the setting for one of Constable’s paintings of gloomy and portentous cottages. He stood outside the building, a sepulchre to Siobhan’s father, the drunken bully, as the sun sank behind gusts of wood smoke from the chimney. As he moved toward t
he front door it opened, and in the shadows a man wearing a beret, gray jacket, and high-necked dark blue sweater emerged. Before Walter could see his face he turned to kiss Siobhan on the cheek, then mounted an old bicycle and rode through an arch of roses to the footpath and the road back to town. He didn’t acknowledge Walter. He may have heard the Volvo.
Siobhan smiled at him as she walked out into the dimming light, her red hair still luxurious, her blue-green eyes glinting, her teeth the spectacular white he remembered. The first thing he noticed was that her bosom, always generous, was larger; like her sister she had blossomed. Still fresh from the lascivious entanglements of his time with Selena, and connecting again with his body for the first time since he left Sheen, he felt a lustful continuum. Siobhan swayed toward him, her arms outstretched.
“Hello, Walter,” she said. Her voice was as beautiful as ever, as sonorous and lilting. He felt a jealous pang as he realized her voice sounded smoky and tinged with the huskiness of sexual afterglow. Who was that man he had seen?
How could she look so young? Walter was forgetting that once a man knows a woman she remains for him almost frozen in time, unless she is tragically struck down by illness or too much smoking, food, or booze. Siobhan looked the same to him. He had imagined she would be wrinkled, with a belly, her hair full of gray. Of course she was subject to all those changes, but Walter could see little evidence of them in the evening light.
“Hiya, Siobhan,” he said. “Sorry to drop in like this. Not feeling so hot.”
He had not seen his first wife for over fifteen years. She looked the same. She looked better in fact. This was not what he expected.
“So you came to me.” Siobhan laughed. “Am I your mother now?”
Damn these Collins girls, he thought; he had indeed hoped for a maternal shoulder—advice, skepticism, and pragmatism. Instead he was plunged straight back into the romantic mist Siobhan had always emanated around her, and he knew his visit might be a mistake.
The Age of Anxiety Page 16
