The Age of Anxiety

by Pete Townshend

  By the fire, over wine, they shared the essential details of their respective experiences of the past fifteen years. They had communicated a few times by letter in that time, but there had been no explanations, no recriminations, no melodrama, and none of the old intimacy. Now, face-to-face, Siobhan seemed genuinely interested in what Walter had been doing, whether he was happy, whether Floss was happy, and if she was still close to Selena.

  “It’s a fucking mess, Siobhan.” Walter was not a self-pitying type, but for a second his eyes threatened to fill with tears.

  “You had sex with Selena.” Siobhan had obviously received a call from Selena, who had guessed where Walter might head after their argument.

  Walter did not reply.

  “She’s always wanted that,” Siobhan said with a smile. “Maybe now she’ll grow up and leave you alone. She always wants whatever I have. You should have fucked her years ago instead of building yourself up in her eyes.”

  Walter still said nothing. He was grappling with Siobhan’s bald female logic and trying to put out of his mind that even if she were right, she was talking about her sister, not some unknown groupie.

  “Selena called. She told me what she told you. Do you believe her?”

  “I’m afraid I do. There have been rumors for years about Floss and Ronnie. I used to discount them.”

  “Because Ronnie is gay?”

  “I discounted them because Floss loves me, loves our life and her work, and on top of everything else because she adores Ronnie.” Walter suddenly began to make some sense of the situation. “She wouldn’t hurt Ronnie, or threaten their career together, by having sex with him.”

  “I agree with you. So you don’t believe Selena?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Did she tell you how she knows what happened between Floss and Ronnie?”

  “No, she wouldn’t give me any details. It was absurd. After ruining my life she then said she couldn’t betray her best friend.”

  Siobhan laughed. “Selena played you, Walter, she doesn’t really know any more than you do. Not for sure.”

  “She said there was more going on. She said Floss had a secret. Some awful secret.”

  “Walter,” soothed Siobhan. “Selena is so jealous of Floss it has eaten her up for years. But Floss is maybe her best friend too. She’s so torn. You know that when you and I split up she thought she could move in on you.”

  Walter interrupted, “You left me.”

  “All right,” said Siobhan gently. “Let’s not make this worse. Can I get you another drink?”

  They shared another half a bottle of red wine. Walter did not ask who the man was he had seen as he arrived, and Siobhan did not volunteer anything. Eventually they both quietened.

  Walter found himself gazing at her, hoping she didn’t sense how beautiful he found her.

  Instead, she was the first to stroke.

  “You look good, Walter. You look handsome. All that dirty work has had a good effect.”

  Her barbed humor almost made Walter smile. Did she mean dirty work in his garden, or fucking her sister?

  She went on: “You’ve lost your stringy cheekbones and developed some real muscles. You’ve put on some weight. It all suits you.”

  This opened the way for him. “You look wonderful too, Siobhan. I’m not here to seduce you, but you do look extremely sexy,” he said quite shyly. “Is an ex-husband allowed to say such things?”

  “No, he bloody isn’t.” Siobhan laughed. “And you won’t seduce me, Walter.”

  Siobhan made it clear that in fact there would be no romance, no bed sharing, and the solace of her curves was not going to be available to him. Much of this she said with a smile, but Walter needed to hear it.

  Walter told me when we met back in London that he had decided then and there that the drug that really did it for him was not sex but music. It was something of a revelation for him. It explained why he had managed—for most of his life—to be true to his two wives, and in a very important way to himself and his own ideals. His father and mother had spent long periods of time apart while Harry was on tour, but they had stayed faithful to each other.

  I had to fight back an impulse then to jump in and tell him that back in those days, his mother Sally and I had spent many evenings alone by the blazing log fire, her drinking red wine, me in a heroin haze. I had often thought the only reason we had never drifted into having sex was because my drug of choice made me completely disinterested in physical embellishments to my “Little Mother” heroin jag.

  Back when they were young teenagers, Walter, as Rain had told me, had experimented a little with my daughter, but after thirty minutes of kissing, where she would be breathless, ready to move to some new level, Walter simply felt a light swoon, rested, serene, and deeply happy and at ease.

  So if he had learned that the drug that worked best for him was music, it didn’t seem to me to be providing him with many kicks. He just looked good at what he did, and it appeared to come easily.

  Old Nik had conveyed that when he was ready he would fly higher as his creative work began in earnest. Siobhan had always understood this, and knew that the way she could penetrate Walter most deeply would be through his creative work. She had waited a long time to play this role, the only one that really interested her.

  “You are writing,” she said. “Selena sent me the pages. You know it was me who sent them to your dad?”

  “Yes. Thank you so much. It was an inspired idea. I brought the music he has written.” He pulled his laptop out of his old grab bag. “You still have our old sound system? I can plug it in.”

  Siobhan nodded. Then she laughed. “Yes, play your music, but you know I will always be more interested in the words you write. That will never change.”

  But she listened, and as the room filled with the dark and profoundly disturbing music, the thunder sheets, the bullhorns, the dissonant choirs, and the thrilling and experimental violin solos set against the backdrop of Harry’s church organ imitating both birdsong and nightmares, she was mightily pleased to hear how well her idea had worked.

  As she listened Siobhan pored over the pages of the nineteen soundscapes that formed the main body of his work since he had emerged from the labyrinth.

  Afterward Siobhan looked up at Walter, and the flash of delight in her eyes told him all he needed to know.

  “You know this is amazing stuff. But as wonderful as it’s turned out as music, all this terror of the future is a kind of arrogance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No one knows for sure what the future holds.”

  “I am just writing what it is I can hear in the air around me.”

  “So you’re like Selena now!” Siobhan smiled, but there was some anger in her voice. “You’re a psychic. You can hear what people around you—the audience—are feeling?”

  Walter brought his eyes up to hers defiantly enough to make it clear he would not back down.

  “You’re not psychic, Walter,” barked Siobhan. “It’s absurd.”

  Siobhan disappeared for a few minutes into the kitchen where she clattered plates, cups, and glasses so loudly that Walter remembered that when they were married this was her way of letting him know she was angry with him. After a while she came back in, holding two cups of black coffee.

  “You don’t know what is happening, Walter. No one does. You may feel you can connect with the anxiety of people around you, but you can’t. Each of us has our own little world. It’s our duty to maintain each other, raise each other up not bring each other down.”

  “So says the foreign correspondent,” said Walter with a laugh.

  “Ah, now that’s different, Walter. That’s truth, not whimsy.” Siobhan believed she knew the difference. She had never faltered like so many of her journalist colleagues and ended up writing fiction, just some excellent poetry. “And you have to accept that the truth about Floss may never be reconciled with Selena’s so-called facts.”

  �
��What?” Walter was confused.

  “Trust her,” said Siobhan. “Until you know for certain. Then when you do know something, you may find it is unimportant to you. That you can survive it.”

  “The rumors…”

  “Who cares if Ronnie is really gay or not? If he’s bisexual then…” She stopped short of adding that he could join the club of which she was a contented member. “If Floss is going to betray you, nothing you can do will stop that happening.”

  Walter knew that his ex-wife was right. He felt like a boy in her presence, as he always had. How strange that this woman might be the one who would reassure him and help him find acceptance of his situation.

  “The stuff I’ve been hearing does make me feel anxious,” he said quietly. “Louis has been bullying me to try to turn it into art.”

  When Walter was telling me about this conversation with Siobhan I was surprised to hear him suggest I had bullied him. Is that what he really felt? Siobhan had defended me.

  “Louis a bully? I doubt it, Walter. And I have no doubt that fucker Frank is trying to get you to re-form the band!” Siobhan laughed again. “Stop worrying, Walter, what you hear is what you hear. You grew up with your head in a bucket playing a harmonica. You’ve always been a strange fellow.”

  “What I’m hearing is not my doing, Siobhan. It comes into my head uninvited. It feels like some manic schizo shit.”

  “Let it come,” soothed Siobhan. “That’s my advice. Accept it.”

  “That’s what Nikolai Andréevich advised,” Walter cut in. “Fifteen years ago, when I first started hearing this stuff.”

  “He’s right, then. Allow some affection for the people around you whose troubles inspire you—they are good people; all people are good people. Fear and art are entangled, sort of intertwined. It’s always been that way. It’s easier for me, Walter. I’m Irish. We know how to kiss the dark. But at last you’ve found some artistic ambition; you have a function over and above those evenings teasing Selena and making all the boys at Dingwalls jealous.” She laughed, and Walter laughed with her, easily, for the first time that evening.

  “Walter.” Siobhan held his hand. “Do you like your father’s music? Do you like what he’s done with your words? Did I do the right thing with this—just once?”

  Walter looked at his ex-wife and smiled. “Oh yes,” he said. “Yes, yes, yes!”

  The sound of galloping hooves on hard ground. Thudding rhythmically, two horses, breathing hard. Jumps. The whip. Faster. Faster. Then splashing through muddy, shallow water. Climbing a hill, until reaching the top the two exhausted horses and their riders stop to survey the sight we cannot see, but that through this soundscape we can hear. A valley, a distant country, made of the sounds we have been hearing in the play so far. This is the sound of the portents of the end of the world, the death and fading of everything, everything good and bad and in between, everything natural and everything man-made, nature and the environment—all of it. Again there is a strange kind of blindness, blindingly, fiercely brilliant and warm. Clumsy, groping, lost—but making it easier to hear, and to be able to focus on what can be heard. Then finally all the most disturbing sounds resolve into the most musical, into the jazz, the fugues, the song of birds. Ultimately the piano, and Walter’s one song for Floss.

  One thing was becoming clear as Walter sat listening to Siobhan discount all his anxieties: she knew him better than anyone, better than any of his friends, no doubt better than I did, and almost certainly better than his parents.

  She was the one who asked the most important question, one he probably would never have framed himself.

  “How well do you think Floss knows you, Walter?”

  “How well do I know Floss?” He was countering, hypothetically now.

  Siobhan leaned forward earnestly. “That’s not the right question.”

  She knew he hadn’t come to see her to consult her about art or religion. He’d brought the laptop containing his soundscapes as an offering to her, in return for some emotional solace and advice.

  “I don’t want to lose Floss the way I lost you,” he said sadly.

  “You never had me,” she scoffed, but with a kind smile. “Not in the sense you have Floss today.”

  “I must ask you a question.” He was feeling embattled. “Who was the man at the door when I arrived?”

  Siobhan smiled conspiratorially. “Why assume the person you saw was a man?”

  Walter surrendered. Siobhan might know him, but he hardly knew his first wife, and at last realized how wonderful that was. He was her friend, she was wise and knew him well, and could advise him without conditions. She had never taken anything from him, never chided him, and never tried to constrain him. She had only ever pressed him with her passionate conviction that he had potential as an artist.

  They drank two more bottles of red wine, and when she nudged at the fading embers of the fire with a poker and then kissed him and climbed the stairs to her bed, Walter realized that all he had learned by coming to see his ex-wife was that this time he could not turn back.

  He lay back on the luxurious sofa, his head surrounded by cushions and the scent of the woman he still loved and respected, and perhaps the additional contrasting scent of a man or woman he might never know, and drifted into a deep sleep. It had been a long, long day.

  Chapter 17

  The long days turned into the better part of a week. Walter lost track of time. No landline phone. No radio. No television. No internet. For two days he let his mobile battery go flat. He didn’t leave the cottage.

  He was awakened one morning by Siobhan, holding a cup of tea and gently shaking his shoulder.

  “Walter,” she whispered. “Wake up. Something has happened.”

  Walter pulled the blanket over his legs and sat up, rubbing his eyes like a child.

  “Floss has had an accident.” Siobhan held out the cup and Walter took it, slow to wake up completely. “You must go to London immediately. Call Selena. She called your mobile. I charged it up for you last night.”

  Walter descended into a panic unlike any he had experienced in his life. His heart pounded but still did not seem to pump enough blood to his brain to stop him feeling dizzy. He held his breath for thirty or forty seconds at a time. The feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach almost prevented him thinking rationally; it was as though his body had taken over his brain.

  Siobhan passed him his mobile phone and ordered him to call Selena. He realized that having to make the call was partly to blame for the intensity of his panic.

  “What’s happened?” he demanded, spilling the tea on the blanket as he dropped his cup. “What kind of accident?”

  “I don’t know the details, Walter,” said Siobhan firmly. “Selena just called, crying and upset. Phone her.”

  Walter’s mind began to race as he threw the mobile phone aside and pulled on his jeans. Selena was, as usual, at the center of things. This thought made him angry. He spoke aloud. “She always seems to know so much more than anyone else about what Floss is or isn’t doing.”

  He heard his own voice and was embarrassed for a moment. He asked himself questions silently instead, preparing them for Selena. Had Floss fallen? Or had she and Ronnie had a road accident in that bloody awful horsebox?

  However frightened he was of finding out what had happened, he was dreading having to speak to Selena. Why did he have to confer this power on her? He had hoped simply to put her out of mind, and to refuse to face the gossip she shared about Floss and Ronnie. And what was the lifelong secret Floss had kept from him?

  Siobhan—now holding his phone out to him as he pulled on a T-shirt—had successfully refocused him on the importance of his work, the absurdity of imagining that relationships, love, sex, marriage, divorce, and even death mattered when art was on the table. Now, all she had done to steady him and settle him was blown away. He saw that it had always been so; Siobhan could be, and would always only be, his creative mentor or amanuensis. She could neve
r go any further in her ministrations. She loved him, that was clear enough, and had immense respect for him, but it was the younger sister who probably better understood his connection with the darkness in his mind, in his aural world, in his soul.

  He took breath after breath and handed the phone back to Siobhan.

  “I can’t do it.” He was finding it difficult to breathe.

  She dialed Selena for him and gave him the receiver.

  Selena wasted no words. “Floss is in the critical care ward at Ealing Hospital.” She was weeping.

  “Tell me what happened, Selena,” said Walter. “Please stop crying. You didn’t do anything to Floss, did you?”

  This seemed to galvanize Selena. “Don’t be so fucking stupid, Walter. She fell off a fucking horse, a week ago. I only just found out. Ronnie tried to call you.”

  “Sorry,” Walter said meekly. “He left a message but I missed it. How is she?”

  “I understand she suffered some kind of stroke while in the ambulance.”

  Walter was amazed at his detachment. As his heart slowed to normal he knew that hearing this news from Selena was probably a good thing. She had, after all, been the one who told him that Floss had been unfaithful to him, possibly for years. He had generated such an emotional distance now through Selena that he almost felt as though he were listening to a report of a tragedy in some far-off place, unconnected to him. It wasn’t that he felt no sympathy, nor was it that he didn’t care; he had been tempered, hardened, by what Selena had told him about his wife’s affair, and even more hardened by his own lapse with Selena.

  Selena broke the silence. “Are you OK?”

  “I’m trying to work out why I’m shaking so much, but I don’t feel anything.”

  “What are you doing with Siobhan?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Selena,” he shouted. “What does it matter?”

  “There’s something else, Walter,” Selena said quietly.

  “There always is with you, isn’t there?” Walter was afraid of what she might be about to say. “More secrets?”