Gramercy heard Phil had moved in with someone they both knew, slightly, in the business. George Rodriquez, who had a house in West Hollywood and specialised in ambient music. He’d made a success of it, too: ‘Sounds of Sunshine and Water – The Voices of the Rainbow’ stayed in the general CD charts at around number fifteen for months on end.
‘They’re moving into the animal niche now,’ said Gramercy, doubtfully. ‘He and Rodriquez are working on therapy for your pet with behavioural problems – that’s the new project. Music to soothe your doggy’s nerves . . . sessions to get in touch with your moxie’s inner child—’ Bobby Grace was snorting at the end of the line. ‘By the way,’ Gramercy continued. ‘Do you think Phil’s really gay? Deep down?’ She dropped this in lightly, though the possibility had suddenly seemed a solution to many aspects of their struggles.
‘Oh please,’ said Bobby Grace. ‘What’s the matter with him? Do we have to listen to this shit?’
She made no comment about Phil’s sex life.
Gramercy missed Phil; she began dreading going to bed, for insomnia plagued her, bringing with it a train of ghosts of missed chances, lost times.
‘You should go easy on the drugs,’ said Bobby Grace. ‘I know you can’t stop working at night, but you’ve gone and wrecked your hypothalamus, upset all your Circadian rhythms, turned night into day and day into night. And I’m not turning spiritual. This is mother’s common sense. Stick to herbal teas – but check the labels, in case they’re wake-up tonics.’
But Gramercy couldn’t; besides, if she went to bed drunk or stoned, she could sleep for a few hours before the phantoms sidled in and their gibbering and squeaking began.
There were so many aspects of their lives together that had blurred; in the small hours, splinters of memory returned to pierce her and she gathered them, trying to fit back together the mirror that suddenly he had walked through to leave her. She hadn’t paid enough attention to what was happening. Gramercy Poule wasn’t yet thirty, but she felt she had arrived at old age, with a lifetime’s riches behind her and nothing in front of her except memories, and so many of those were fragments and blur, or had completely vanished into the swirling smoke of their rapt intimacies or the blue fug of the venues she played.
For a while, she smoked and drank more, ate ice cream from the tub, and turned over the press cuttings books Monica kept up to date to see if she could recall what had happened, who she had been, then.
She produced another album, ‘Mandragora’. The critics praised the new, smoky timbre of her voice, the flutes and jew’s-harp and celeste on the backing, the surprising shifts of key, and discerned a folk influence from the moors in the long, meandering, broken storylines of her songs. ‘Spoor’ was written for Phil: she chanted a list of the bits of the body that she loved (‘. . . nail, wrist, vein, pulse, knuckle; curl, nipple, skin, throat . . .’), whispering it hoarsely into the mike, as if it were a lullaby crooned gently into his ear to make him shiver. Her audiences sang along with her, hypnotically, swaying to the heartbeat of her bass guitar. But when she listened to it now, she realised it sounded cold and oddly menacing, as if she was an anatomist taking him apart.
One day, on the telephone, Gramercy tried her mother, again: ‘Do you think it wasn’t just me – but something else?’
‘Darling, if you’re asking me if you were the problem, you know what I think. The answer’s no. Of course not.’
‘No, I mean, what about Phil, his . . . sexuality – did it, did he seem . . . sexy to you?’
‘Oh, well, he never came on to me, if that’s what you’re asking. No worries there. I’d say, aside from that, he seemed pretty normally weird to me.’
Gramercy wanted to say to her mother, ‘Sex was never a big thing with us . . .’ But she felt a fool not to have noticed that their babes-in-the-wood cuddles spelt danger. Phil never complained, never asked for more; she hadn’t wanted more – it was a relief to her that he was so different from the howling, lurching and slavering cocksmanship that the music business promoted as the red-bloodedness proper to the male. She’d felt that their love was . . . well, loving; ‘Phil’s my best friend,’ she’d tell the press. ‘We tell each other everything, and what’s more, we often don’t need to say anything because we know each other so well we understand without words. We’re psychic – like dogs, you know, waking up as soon as their master turns the corner of the street on his way home. A sixth sense.’
Sex had a live current of hatred running through it: sometimes Gramercy wanted that, the harsh weight of a man humping and nearly smothering her, forcing his cock between her lips as he straddled her. It was always afterwards, that kind of encounter, behind the scenes, in the backwash of a concert, dark and nameless and angry, a fan goaded to stud status by her reeling and keening body’s exhibition on stage. But she never expected those kinds of afterwards to have a sequel. Those bouts were purgative, the violent debasement necessary to bring her back to equilibrium after performing her public masquerade of desperation, fury and everlasting love. She hadn’t wanted anything like that from Phil.
But Gramercy was beginning to remember, bit by bit.
One summer night, she was coming into the kitchen from the conservatory that gave on to the garden at Feverel and she saw Phil moving near the animal sheds and the birdcages. There was nothing unusual about this, but something about the set of his spine made her notice his manner; he looked intent, not as if he were finishing up the routine evening feed and settling the creatures down for the night. When he didn’t re-emerge, she went down the garden to the end to find him, but in the doorway she stopped and turned back without greeting him or even letting him know she was there. He was leaning over the rabbit hutch, muttering to the big meek animals as they lolloped after the vegetable parings he was tossing into their pen, a bit of carrot and some cabbage leaves, a few shreds of outer lettuce, and his words, which Gramercy couldn’t hear, caressed them softly; then he reached in and grasped the biggest one, the buck, seizing him by the ears and burying his face in the soft speckled fur on the animal’s belly. She hung back; there was some unbreachable intimacy between the man she lived with and the absurd, oversize, trusting coney that he was fondling. It came to her that Phil had been concealing his unhappiness from her. She saw him all at once as a small boy, who’s lonely and without friends, stuck out at some school in the country. But her pang of sympathy with his state turned quickly into savage disappointment. Phil was left at Feverel on his own when she was working, but he had always said that was what he wanted – not to traipse in her wake, form some redundant appendix to her entourage on the road – to work at his own projects in quiet and solitude under the shoulder of the moor. He had not shown her affection, or even a need for affection for so long she could not last think of a time when he nuzzled her or plunged himself blindly into her as he was now doing – rubbing his whole face in the jack rabbit’s pelt and pressing it so hard to his throat and chest that she could see the creature struggling against his captor.
Then Phil was opening his shirt and, holding the animal away from him with one hand, he was encouraging, with gurgles and grunts, its strong hind legs barbed with sharp nails, as they thrashed against his chest; he then flung himself down in the corner of the shed with the mutely writhing animal; its lip was lifted to bare teeth, which, Gramercy noticed, were as long and yellow as old piano keys, but Phil held the head away as he rammed the rest of the creature against his crotch, unbuttoning his flies with his free hand.
She turned away, and would have liked to hoot. Doing it with a rabbit!
But she didn’t. She withdrew silently, as forlornness excavated a gaping hole where her heart and liver lay: she couldn’t really find it funny that Phil was taking refuge with his animals. We’ve drifted, she thought, drifted miles apart.
She tried to make love to him that night, nicely, slowly, calmly, but he lay mutinously clenched against her. His skin was repellent in its chilliness, putty-like and limp and he brought his leg
s up to cover his genitals as she tried to coax him to respond to her caresses. She was trying to keep focused, in the dark of their bedroom, on the sharp, clever utopian dreamer she loved, with his long hands, and his slim pelvis and his funny, endearing, crane-like gait, as if his knees were double-jointed and he was wearing invisible stacked heels; she could see his face, moulded in shadow turned away from her approaches, mutely stuffed into the pillow as she had done herself as a child when assailed by a hundred nameless causes of fury and misery and misunderstood-ness.
‘Phil, please—’, she was pleading with him. Any chance of the blessed relief of sex, the skies lightening after thunder, fled as her voice swelled with disappointment and reproach and bafflement. ‘Please let’s try . . . to talk, at least.’
‘Why?’
‘What do you mean, why?’ She was limping. ‘Because we’re not . . . talking.’
‘I’m asleep. It’s late. I’m tired.’
She tried to turn him to face her, but he was balled up to resist her; she began clambering over his body so that she could look into his eyes. Always look into your lover’s eyes, the phrase from the old sex manual she’d read when she was trying to find out about all this, floated back into her mind.
‘Phil, we must talk.’
‘I’m not the insomniac round here. I need to sleep. I want to sleep. Now.’
A wave of fury rolled over her; she plunged towards him, pushing her mouth on his, to kiss him, to force him to kiss her in response. His lips hardened into the bite of a vice, but, before he clamped tight, she touched his tongue, soft and floppy and damp, like a flannel slimy with soap, as it fled hers.
He pushed her away, his arms that had lain so bonelessly, like the limbs of a victim of a wasting paralysis, lifted her off him, as once he had lifted her so easily when they used to run around in the house, playing their children’s games.
He was shouting, ‘Leave off, for fuck’s sake, Gramercy. Just leave off.’
This was terrible, this was the plain where there is no water, the tundra where not a blade grows, the howling icecap where cryogenic gales drive away polar bears, even, the deserts of the heart, the dried up crevasses of harlots’ cunts: she was sobbing, she was pounding him with her hands.
‘That’s it, beat me, go ahead,’ said Phil. ‘I’m just a wife, an old-fashioned wife you can beat up. You and your life have turned me into a housewife, circa 1955 – except I don’t sing as I go around dusting.’
‘That’s not true,’ Gramercy wept. ‘You chose to stay down here, you offered to look after things while I toured and recorded and . . .’
‘No, you’re doing exactly what suits you. Your life would be no different without me. I make no difference. You hardly notice whether I’m there or not. You know, Gramercy, I once painted bright green spots on my cheeks, with some of the paint left over from the conservatory, and you never noticed them. I did it for fun, to make you laugh, but when you walked in you didn’t look at me, so I kept them all day and you never reacted. So I wiped them off with white spirit – and then you just giggled and said, “What’s that smell – have you been sniffing stuff?”’ He turned to her, now, more kindly, put out a hand to her face, sleepily. ‘You can’t help it, girl. That’s the way you are. Go to sleep now. Try to sleep now.’
She did, eventually, after she’d had a slug of malt and two cigarettes and half a tub of chocolate chip ice cream, crying downstairs in the kitchen as through the windows she saw the first light touch the edges of the purple-brown bracken on the moor, where ruined walls enclosed land that had been abandoned, after the struggle to farm that forbidding terrain proved too great even for the desperate men and women who hoed it and dragged out thousands of stones.
Perseverance, wept Gramercy. I must show perseverance.
Days later, she alluded to the episode she’d witnessed in the hutches, making a clumsy attempt to chaff Phil about the stink that hung about him when he came back to the house from the sheds.
‘That buck rabbit,’ he responded, without missing a beat. ‘He sprays all the time – anyone and anything. He’s ferocious, out of control. He’s weird.’
Though some of the animals had died, and others escaped, when Phil left the sanctuary he’d made was overflowing with the original foundlings and acquisitions, plus an aviary full of birds of all kinds, some missing one digit on one claw, some with lesions on their ceres through infestations of parasites or similar problems, others whole but now too tame and fat to set loose.
Gramercy advertised for homes for them; she asked about in the pub for local zoos who might be interested; Monica put up a notice in the local shops and sub post offices, at Feverel and farther afield. They needed someone to come and help Gramercy look after the refuge, now that Phil had gone away.
5
A Scrap of Scarf
In the tree-lined suburb of St Maure, lying alongside a canal much painted by the Impressionists, the headquarters of FemMédecs occupied a zigzag brick-and-stone turn-of-the-century villa ornée; it had been left to the society by a handbag and luggage manufacturer as a memorial to his beloved daughter, a pioneering female paediatrician who died of leukaemia before she was thirty. Doctor Séverine Martin, stationed for a period at home in order to recoup her strength after a prolonged stint in another war zone, called in on the offices to pick up her mail; though meant to be resting, she’d attended an international conference on the uses of poisons in contemporary warfare. She found several messages from one Steve Catnach, a journalist whom she’d first come across during the siege of Tirzah twelve years before, and who’d covered the agency’s work on and off ever since. He was writing a cover story for the weekend magazine of The Fanfare, and he wanted to interview her about recent developments – if she was free, he added tentatively, he could give her dinner.
She deflected the small, tired flicker of lust she detected in this invitation and asked him instead to come to the office at lunchtime; they would go round the corner to a small place she liked in the neighbourhood, where the canal transport workers stopped for their midday meal; they could eat well there, and talk undisturbed.
It was, Ella reflected later, a sudden burst of unusual good humour on the part of destiny that brought her and Phoebe to Dr Martin’s office the same day as this journalist from Enoch. Steve Catnach seized on them: they became his story, the one that would make his mark on a paper to which he had just transferred, rather expensively, from a rival organ and consequently needed to justify his salary to the rest of the writing staff who, at the daily morning meetings, had little loving kindness for his contributions.
Ella had slowly worked her way west, leaving the desolation of Tirzah three years after the end of the siege, and attaining, through many vicissitudes, some partial security in Pontona in the heart of the continent; there for nearly eight years, she established herself among the thousands of clandestine workers, many of whom were waiting, like her, to move on. For she never lost sight of her twin goals: first, of finding Dr Martin and holding her to her promise, and second of reaching Enoch, where they would surely track down Phoebus and be united again. By dint of patient enquiries in furtive hotel telephone calls, banking on rich clients paying by credit card and not noticing the odd extra charge, she’d traced FemMédecs’ regional rep, and found out that Dr Martin was indeed now back in her native country, between tours of duty to trouble spots. With the money Luigi had paid her for the valuables that she came across in her hotel work (that singer’s sweaty nightie, dinged sandals and silver tights, bagged at the knee and stained at the foot, had fetched quite a sum, and Luigi hadn’t cheated them out of it), Ella and Phoebe went to the immense vainglorious temple of travertine that was Pontona’s central railway station and got seats – one adult, one child – on the night train going north. They gambled on eluding the frontier checks. At the first cry in the speeding night of ‘Documenti! Documents!’, Ella pushed Phoebe above the sleeping freight of the train into the luggage rack, and covered the girl with someone
’s coat (Phoebe’s body was so slight, it disappeared); Ella herself squatted down behind the luggage, where it was heaped at the end of the carriage, pulling a sports holdall on top of her. She’d had plenty of practice eluding guards, and could keep her nerve.
Now, in springtime St Maure, after a continuous journey of three days from Pontona, with the money from Gramercy’s things running very low, she told the receptionist, ‘Please say that I am the woman Dr Martin knows from the siege of Tirzah and I have my daughter with me, the girl with no skin . . .’
The young male receptionist looked glazed and began shaking his head wearily. Ella took out the scrap of scarf, with the silver threads now tin-like in their tarnish, the weft threadbare. ‘Show Dr Martin this, please.’ He looked at the poor scrap dubiously, but Ella pressed it on him. ‘Just this little thing, please.’
To the young man’s surprise, Séverine Martin uttered a cry when she saw the scarf, and tears sprang to her eyes so that her glasses misted up and she took them off to wipe them as she exclaimed, ‘They’re here! Where?’
She flew from her office and found Ella and Phoebe in the reception area, sitting across from Steve Catnach who had just arrived and was waiting to announce himself.
‘Docteur Martin,’ he said, getting to his feet and putting out a hand to shake hers.
‘Excuse me for a moment,’ she said, waving to him as she passed him by, to take Ella by the shoulders and look at her through her tears and kiss her. Then she turned to Phoebe.
‘You’ve grown!’ she said, though the girl was still puny. Then Séverine Martin sighed, and passed her hands over her eyes under her glasses, saying, ‘I never thought I’d find you – that you’d find me. After I was taken out – by air ambulance, you know – I was unconscious, from . . . hunger, and you . . . I didn’t know what had happened to you. I tried to find out, but there was such confusion. Nobody knew.’
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