The Age of Anxiety

by Pete Townshend

  As they talked, and were reassured, Maud emerged from behind the curtain that hid the body of her husband from view. Her face was tear-streaked, but she was smiling with relief.

  Walter went to her, and she fell into his arms.

  “I’m really terribly sorry about my behavior,” she whispered. “It’s actually a relief that he is out of his misery at last.”

  Floss noticed that her father was gazing at Maud strangely.

  “Dad,” she said, touching him on the arm to try to regain his attention. “Do you know her?”

  He seemed mesmerized, and went over to join Maud and Walter.

  Walter let go of Maud, and Floss’s father took up her hands and looked into her face kindly.

  “I think we meet again,” he said. Then he asked her, “In 1976 you gave birth to a baby, a little girl, at a clinic in Bern in Switzerland?”

  Floss’s mother Katharine had also moved discreetly to Maud’s side.

  “Albert tells me we three have met before,” she said. “In that clinic in Bern? Very briefly, twenty years ago?” She gestured toward Floss, her adopted daughter.

  The resemblance between Maud and Floss was uncanny.

  “You are our daughter Florence’s biological mother, aren’t you?” Katharine sensed her question was awkward. “Forgive me. I mean, of course, you are her real mother.”

  Maud turned and looked at Floss, face-to-face.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I was in Bern in 1976. I remember you both now. Your daughter is my child.”

  Maud must have known at that moment—as did we all who were party to the conversation—why her husband had fallen so absurdly for Floss, and that he had never loved anyone before Maud, or since. He had simply fallen in love with Maud all over again; he had seen Maud in Floss, in the delirium and ecstasy of his morphine-induced swoon.

  Walter noticed that as Maud spoke the color drained from Floss’s face.

  “You are my birth mother?” It was precisely the correct expression in the circumstances. She and Maud both shed tears. “I should have searched for you. I often dreamed of it. I was afraid I would be disappointed.”

  Walter tried to comfort Floss. “You’ve had a great life, Floss,” he said. “Brought up by two wonderful, loving people who will always be your true mother and father.”

  Incongruously, Floss shook her head. She was not disagreeing, but was unable to take it all in so quickly.

  Walter carried on. “Now you are reunited with your biological mother.”

  “My birth mother,” Floss said.

  “It’s a wonderful day; we wouldn’t know any of this if you hadn’t fallen from your horse!” Walter seemed excited.

  He could have added that none of it would have come to light had Nik not been in the hospital on his last lap. There was a strange air of sadness and joy combined.

  Book Three

  Chapter 20

  This narrator is joined now by his beautiful host here in the hills above Grasse. We grapple over the pen, grab the laptop back and forth, correct each other’s mistakes. She has told me so much of the story I have recounted. She has marvelously described so many of the scenes—and bravely too because in various ways she has not always appeared to be an entirely good soul. Without her I would never have written this book, and I am so glad I have.

  And of course, regarding that terrible thing I did, for which I must make amends, and from which I must hope for redemption, Selena is the only one who knows what happened. She is the one who has urged me to write, seeking peace. It apparently all took place at the wedding of Walter and Siobhan.

  “I’ve gotten to the bit about what I did at the wedding, darling,” I shouted. Selena was sitting out on the terrace. She came quickly back into the room and stood in front of the French window, the sun behind her, her naked body visible under the transparent white shift she was wearing.

  Selena was a luminous woman surrounded by angels and sometimes perhaps demons, all-seeing, potent, and scary, a killer when she was a mere girl, an arch-manipulator of all the men around her.

  “I was just saying, I’ve gotten to the rape,” I said to her merrily, as though I were writing fiction and not a confession. “I am about to describe how you saw it and what you told me I did…”

  Selena quickly walked over to where I sat, pulled the laptop away from me, sat on my knee, and kissed me long and hard until I gasped for breath.

  “Later,” she breathed sexily, somehow combining in the same pregnant word the promise of moral redemption followed later by an evening of great sex. “Everything will come together later. Take a break. Take Bingo for a walk in the woods.”

  I’m taking over the fucking laptop, Louis. You take Bingo for a walk. Let me tap away for a while. Now we are firmly in my territory: angels and demons, and the astral plane. But back in the days you describe at the beginning of this story, this would have meant little to you. You may never have suffered from the close-mindedness of some of your peers—those who were certain there were no ley lines, no God, no ghosts, and no astral forces—but if you weren’t thinking about sex back then you might well have been thinking about money. You were so materialistic.

  I, on the other hand, have always thought of sex as a function of fate, as an aspect of the force and power of the universe and the will of its physical and spectral agents, whom I can see and feel but are invisible to someone like you.

  You wrote down what little you understood about the things I believe. You advised me that whatever each one of us believes, when we speak of such things in the modern world it is dangerous to reveal too much metaphysical faith. You didn’t quite get that right.

  You could be the fool. Louis, darling man, you betray yourself with such statements. If you addled your brain and saw and felt some wonderful things, why not own them? Why deny what happened? It’s all brain chemistry in the end, the doubters say. But the real question is what is the chemically altered brain perceiving? Is what it sees not there? Dogs hear things we will never hear. Does that mean they never happened?

  One thing you did get right was spotting Nikolai Andréevich’s genius and accepting the fact of his second sight. Of course, I could also see what Old Nik saw. Since my childhood in Ireland, as early as four or five years old, I saw angels in the clouds. My sister Siobhan and my father dismissed it when I spoke of it. In the end I realized I had to keep secret what I saw, what I felt, what I knew. Later I understood that I was part angel myself. I could do things no one else could do. I could persuade people to do what I wanted, just by thinking about it. I could move inanimate objects across a table, but only when I was alone.

  But in another way I was hardly ever alone. There were always angels around me. One day they began to whisper to me that I had a spiritual twin, and I should look out for her. As soon as I saw her face, they told me, I would know. The first time I met Floss at school, and we ran to each other and hugged, I knew I had found my twin.

  Nik’s drawings were beautiful, and true, but however many he produced he would never be able to reproduce exactly what it was that special people like him—and me—could see. But with Nik came Maud. I remember reading what you wrote about your first meeting:

  “For the first time since she arrived in my apartment Maud looked happy, with a happiness I felt I knew. Again, my heart fluttered.”

  Oh, for God’s sake, Louis—I wish you’d bugger off with all this “heart fluttering.” You had wanted to fuck her. Roll around on Old Nik’s drawings of angels in heaven, covering them with sweat, with your tongue down her throat. You were transparent. As if, because she was about your age then, you’d be doing some Great Thing by having an affair with her. Ugh. I have to remind myself that back then, when you first met Maud, I only had eyes and designs for Walter. Louis Doxtader? Dirty old man. That’s what I would have said if you ever looked my way. Never would have thought I could fall for you. You were bottom of my list of prospects.

  But everything changes. When you first mentioned me in
this book I was of course one of the “Collins girls.” But what you did not write was that I was the younger. The prettier. The cleverer. My hair is not red, or ginger, it is dark and lustrous when I don’t bleach it. And I did bleach it, and curl it, and put it into plaits in the hope Walter would notice me and want me. I was the only one who understood Walter at a deeper, spiritual level, the only one who could ever have helped him. I knew what he was going through: I could see the dark angels trying to express themselves through him. I could see the shadows. It wasn’t that the people around him in Sheen were using him as a channel for their anxieties; he was using them. Or the entities that possessed him were.

  What am I? What do I see? What did Nik see? What was Walter hearing? I knew Walter would take a long time even to see me. Your wife Pamela—with her fiery red hair and pheromones pouring from her like the overpowering scent from fading lilies—set up your godson, young Walter, to look for a redhead of his own, and my sister Siobhan turned out to be the one. Pamela was such a hot woman, so exciting to Walter, I think, because she was also lost. How could any woman desert her own child the way she left Rain with you? I know why. Only I know why. I made that happen too. In any case, such contradictions in a woman always intrigue men. Of course, now we know that she didn’t leave Rain; she saw Rain fairly regularly.

  Anyway, if Walter had been a bit more of a real rock star, he could have had me. Much sooner. He’s no longer number one. You are, my sweetheart. So the first is last, and vice versa.

  As I flip back through the pages of this book, I love to read about your relationship with Walter when he was a boy. Reading about this gentle young man makes it a little easier for me to admit that when my sister Siobhan started seeing Walter, I was probably more jealous than even Rain. She was too young for him. At twenty-seven she was still a child really. I was an old soul, and felt a thousand years old.

  I am ten years younger than Siobhan, nine years younger than both Rain and Walter. But I feel guilty when I confess that in my heart I put curses on both Siobhan and Rain because Walter loved them, each in a different way. And my curses work. I wanted neither of them to have Walter. He was supposed to be mine. I was supposed to have any man I wanted. I knew how I could hurt them. I would use you.

  My childhood and teenage counselors told me that a woman who has come to control her father—however she has managed it—will always have a distorted view of her power over men. That was certainly true for me. I had stopped my father raping my sister by plunging a knife into his body. When my blade entered his right side from behind, and the icy sheet, the shining plane before him turned red, and the spectacular pain made him feel as though he were roaring even though he could make no sound, he lost sight of my older sister Siobhan entirely. She gasped as our father fell and—where he once had stood with blind rage in his eyes—there I stood, eight years old, holding the long kitchen knife smeared with our father’s blood. I was reminded later that I blamed the angels: they made me do it, that’s what I said.

  I grew up knowing only that my mother had been an angel born at the moment of my birth and her mortal passing. I knew that angels never die, are ever present, invisible, guiding, loving, observing.

  Of course, without a living mother I loved Siobhan more than might be normal. She was the principal star in my firmament, but I still thought she was too dyed-in-the-wool for Walter. Too demanding. Too bossy. Too redheaded. Too fecking Irish and literary. Despite all her feminine strength, she was another girl who wouldn’t even be in this story were it not for me.

  When you were struggling—trying to withdraw from heroin and get clean, trying to save your marriage by accepting the sexual distance Pamela suddenly demanded, and were seeing faces in your old French bedhead—Louis darling, you were seeing real faces, real people, locked in history, imprisoned in the terror and pain of the past, unable to get free. Their screams were real. They needed someone like me to help them escape. You needed me. Pamela was a bitch. You might wonder if she was waiting for a reason to leave…

  At Dingwalls, as Siobhan went back to Waterford, convinced that Walter would follow her, and I first made my pitch for him, offering him cocaine and the chance of a blow job, Louis, you were so right. No one understood what I saw or what I felt.

  No one understands today, not even you, not even now that we live together and I look after you and teach you and tease you and try to make you happy. You still don’t entirely believe me. I have to show you where to look for those angels, how to see them, and how to find the angel in your own heart and soul. The angels don’t care if we are good or evil. They love us whatever we do.

  Do you remember soon after, when Floss walked into Dingwalls to catch up with me, her best friend, do you remember what happened? You do remember, I know. You were smitten by her as were all the fucking wet-eared men in the club. I always know what you’re thinking, sweetheart. You wanted to speak to Floss, to check out whether she might notice you were alive. You’d thrown yourself at her like an old idiot at Walter and Siobhan’s wedding.

  Did you think she would remember you? Remember the bloody low-grade horse tranquilizer you shared with us? I didn’t care much, not that night at Dingwalls. I was still intent on Walter. Louis, this is a good story I think. The hard men who like rock music and think all women are vague, romantic, and unfocused will especially enjoy it. But you are telling a story here about five of the most extraordinary women ever gathered in a book like this. You make Maud into a kind of middle-aged sex object; you obviously long for her and you don’t know why. And yet she is loyal, smart, and determined. She irritates me, because you adored her, but I respect her. She knew exactly what to do with Andréevich’s art. She was playing you.

  And my sister! God knows she wasn’t merely some hippy from the Emerald Isle who wanted her husband to transform himself into James Joyce or Seamus Heaney. She saved my life and I saved hers. Our father was a broken bully, God rest his soul, and I mean that. Siobhan brought me up; she was my mother. And at the same time she brought herself up through college and university and ended up running a department at the BBC. You know, Louis, Siobhan may not have been on the front line of the world’s troubles like your daughter Rain, but we had seen plenty of trouble. And Siobhan felt it all deeply. I do believe Walter was a weakness for her. He represented an escape route, back to Ireland, to poetry.

  Pamela, your wife, although she was a bitch, does not deserve to be described as a “nymphomaniac” just because she liked sex with you for a while. I only met her a few times, but what a fantastic and potent woman she was. She didn’t leave Rain behind as a matter of convenience, or to give you something to do. She left Rain because she too had a breakdown; right under your nose. You were so full of your own dark visions you didn’t even notice. Pamela had a revelation too, and one day you will come to understand its nature. She came out. It was so simple that you missed it.

  That brings me to the teenyboppers. Ringo Starr called early Beatles fans that. Teenyboppers. At Walter’s wedding Floss and me and Ronnie, we were the teenyboppers. We were running around playing at being bridesmaids. Yes, even Ronnie! We were fantasizing about the day we would be married and have bridesmaids of our own. We were young, eighteen years old but really immature, and I know we looked and behaved as though we were much younger.

  Louis, you can’t imagine how strong our friendship was back then. How much can one hurt someone else? Is there any point in hurting a person one doesn’t deeply love? Floss and I have hurt each other; we may never go back to where we were, but we will always be soulmates. If we’ve hurt each other it is a measure of our love. Yes, Floss loved horses. I see angels. Don’t imagine that makes us dizzy birds.

  So Floss arrived at Dingwalls. I was a bit sad; I admit that. Do you know what I was thinking when I watched Walter’s eyes fix on my best friend Floss?

  I was thinking that I was an angel, and I conferred with angels. To you men, all of you there that night, that part of me did not exist. I wanted to shout out to
you all: “Bury me, stone me, for I know that not one of you will ever marry me!”

  Oh, Louis, reading this makes me rather sad all over again. You write about my love for Walter with the detachment of an academic biographer. You can’t imagine how desolate I was feeling around those times. I hardly ever managed to see Walter, or give him any help. I rarely saw Floss. I felt shut out completely. When your best friend gets married they have less time for you. But Floss married the man I loved, who had first married my older sister, and always treated me like a bit of an irritation. I started to become normal, as you rightly say. Not good. Normal is not good, Louis. Normality was not what I was born to.

  Do you remember when I told everyone about Ronnie? I never cared whether he was gay or not, or that he liked to wear high heels and borrow our bras sometimes. Ronnie had a blurred black monkey sitting on the back of his fekking upright Prussian neck! I could see it.

  After Walter had played the stuff his father wrote to Steve Hanson, do you remember writing in this book about our lunch at the Caprice, saying that I could be difficult to read? You said that you could see my obsession with Walter was strong, and wondered why I was turning to you? It was almost as though I were giving you a warning, to prepare you for something terrible I could see ahead.

  Oh God! This is so hard for me to write, my darling. It’s all true; everything I said at that lunch. I was still obsessed by Walter, and still in love with him like a teenager. But I asked you to lunch because I needed help. I can “see” what others can’t see. Whether that means I’m psychic or barmy makes no difference. Maybe I can just read people, sense their moods, and then some synesthetic mechanism kicks in and makes peculiar connections.

  Walter was in terrible trouble. He loved Floss. No question. But why did she leave him alone so much? Why did Walter trust Ronnie? No one else did! But I also wanted to see you, my darling Louis, and to be with you. I’d realized how you were trying to help. You were being so kind. And you had always been on my list after all. Gorgeous old muffin.