by Richard Gwyn
So, I stayed in Riscle long after the castrage had finished, spending my earnings on drink, and passing long hours staring at my small treasure, lost in a terrible melancholy at all these grand and lowly – at times very lowly – worlds, which I could see, but never know.
One late September morning I was sat at my usual table in the Café du Soleil, sipping my third pastis, and beginning to enter that zone of unremitting self-pity familiar to all drinkers of pastis, when an elegant and rather striking woman – a woman in her prime, let’s say – entered the premises, ordered a large café crème, and deposited herself at the table next to mine. Being of a sociable and friendly disposition, in spite of my depressed state, I returned the French greeting, delivered, on her part, fluently, though in an unmistakably British accent, and I asked her, in English, whether she was on holiday. She replied that she had been staying with an old friend and colleague way to the east of Riscle, towards Toulouse, and that she was motoring (yes, she used the verb ‘to motor’) back to Britain, to Wales, though heading first for Paris, where she would be spending a week with other friends. It began as one of those casual conversations that take place between travellers, the lady polite and forthcoming, myself (regrettably) veering towards the sentimental, if not actively lachrymose. You see, the object had rendered in me an acutely distressed emotional state. I had begun to think ever more keenly of it as an animate presence. I doubt whether I would otherwise have responded quite so thoroughly to the lady’s questioning, had not my secret treasure reduced me to this pathetic pass. But when she asked me what was causing me such distress I told her everything; I blurted out that I had found something of inestimable value, something so precious that I barely had time to register my immense good fortune, and yet now it had turned on me, and although I valued it as much as ever, I feared for my sanity.
The lady asked what manner of object I was referring to.
I struggled for a moment. Should I confess to this stranger that I was in possession of what was, in all probability, a fictional, even a literary object? What on earth would it mean to her, or to most people, to be told that I owned an object capable of displaying the entire contents of the universe? But I sensed – and was, it transpired, correct in this assumption – that this lady was not to be confused with most people. She had about her a quickness, softened around the eyes by a kindness and gently subversive humour and was transparently sympathetic to people such as myself; the drifters and the shiftless, the uncommitted, those of us who are led – for good or for bad – by our imaginations, and who resort to reality only when all else fails.
So yes, I confessed to this person, who was of course your Aunt Megan, that I was, albeit by accident – if the concept of accident has any meaning in such a context – in possession of a magic cylinder that contained worlds within it. Her expression changed from one of civil concern for a suffering fellow-creature to one of absolute and undivided attention. Whether as a psychiatrist fascinated by marginal and occult phenomena (as I later discovered she was) or out of simple curiosity, she appeared profoundly impressed by my account of the object for which I had no name, and of the way it had taken over my life, even to the extent of ruining long-standing friendships with my travelling companions.
Megan then suggested that we order lunch. She was hungry, and would be happy to cover for me also. I think, perhaps, she was concerned that, after my fifth pastis, I was going to become hopelessly maudlin and unintelligible; in any case I had not eaten properly for days and I needed some solid fuel inside me, or soakage, as we say in County Cork.
Of course, Megan had the restraint not to ask to see it immediately, but during the meat course (duck, needless to say) I reached into my pocket and showed her the silver cylinder. Just as my erstwhile companions had been, she was transfixed. She gazed intently into its depths for a good long while, and although in no hurry to give it back, she didn’t linger either. Her eyes were alight when she returned it to me, and she appeared to have come to some kind of a decision.
Toward the end of our meal, over coffee, Megan said she would like to suggest an exchange; a gift of something, if not of equal value – for who can value the inestimable? – then at least of considerable interest, and less damaging to a person of my evident sensitivity.
Obviously, I could not help interjecting here, with a sour chuckle.
O’Hallaran ignored my sarcasm, and continued.
She had, in her car, she said, something which also possessed rare and remarkable attributes. Would I be willing to consider accepting from her, in exchange for the burdensome silver cylinder, a tent that she had sewn with her own hands: would I have any use for it?
What, I ventured to ask, was the value of this tent? I mean, other than providing shelter and a degree of simulated domesticity for its owner? I had possessed tents in the past, but was not a great fan. I suffered from a kind of claustrophobia within the tight confines of a tent. I would prefer, I said, to sleep out under the canopy of stars, if you’ll forgive the grandiosity of the expression.
The value of the blue tent is only discernible to its occupant, Megan told me. I cannot advise you in what ways, specifically, it will be of benefit to you. It may cause you to doubt various certainties you have held close all your life, but my guess is that you and the tent will get along famously and, considering the suffering that your mysterious find appears to be causing you, it would be more than a fair swap.
Looking back on it now, it was rather like being offered – by a benevolent dealer, if there ever were such a thing – a wonderful new drug, one which, like the silver cylinder itself, harboured untold mysteries and the promise of ecstatic revelations. In other words, she presented me with the ultimate sales pitch of all the illusory highs bought by countless poor sods of every generation that ever walked the earth.
Did I detect an edge of bitterness to O’Hallaran’s voice?
I was beginning to reconsider him, and if not exactly warming to him, at least regarded him with rather less hostility than before. Not on account of his ludicrous tale, but because of his vulnerability in the telling of it. All of which might have been a part of the blarney, of course – but I was, at the very least, willing to give him a chance.
So, I say to him, what happened next?
Well, she paid for the meal, and then took me out to her car. A grand old Mercedes convertible, not the Estate, which I see you have inherited. Better suited to the sun-kissed roads of the south, wouldn’t you agree? She opened the boot and pulled out the tent in its beautiful bright embroidered bag. I am not a sentimental man, you understand. I have an emotional streak, particularly when I have taken drink, but I immediately recognised the tent as a thing of beauty. I told Megan that I wanted to pitch it right away, and asked if she would be willing to help me. She replied, rather mysteriously, I thought, that the tent needed to become accustomed to its new owner, and that while she would be happy to do as I asked, she thought it better if I set things up myself, so that the tent ‘shed her traces’, and ‘absorb the personality’ of its new owner. And then, she suggested, without a hint of embarrassment, that it might ‘help things along’ if we slept in it together for a night or two – and she was using the term ‘slept’ in its colloquial as well as its literal sense: the tent needed to loosen its adherence to Megan’s preoccupations and moods, since, she explained, this was a very personal kind of tent, and treated everyone who entered it in a very different manner. The whole point of the tent, she explained to me, its raison d’être, was that it would, eventually, find its own destiny; it was not bound to a single individual forever, but would, in the meantime, help shape the destiny of whoever owned it – meaning, for now, I guessed, myself.
And time has proved her right. It is now over thirty years since I acquired the blue tent from Megan. I have travelled everywhere with it. I might even say the tent has taken me along with it, wherever it has travelled. Mine has been a curious existence. I heard of Megan’s death only two weeks ago, but I hastened her
e, to pay my respects in whatever way I might. It seems that doing so has proved rather more complicated than I envisaged. The tent, I may as well confess to you, has been playing up for a while now. The nearer we got to its place of origin the more disorienting became its whims and its curious little deceits. I thought I had better pitch camp here and find out what was going on.
And now, I say, do you know what is going on?
That, says O’Hallaran, is difficult to answer. Although, I appreciate, that is what you are most concerned to know. I understand your distrust of me, and I also understand from what you said last night that your friend Alice was also in possession of a tent, a very similar, if not identical tent. But as for finding out why the tent behaves in the way it does, what the tent thinks even– though clearly I do not mean this in any literal way – that is quite beyond my understanding. It is a measure of the tent’s independence that it sometimes takes decisions that seem entirely perverse. Having been introduced to the tent by its creator in the manner that I did, I have come to accept its ways, but that is not to say I have not encountered the occasional setback. A couple of times the tent has taken offence at the particular spot I have chosen to pitch camp, and has moved – either with me in it or not – to a distance of many miles. You can perhaps imagine my vexation on waking within sight of the walls of Sarajevo, beside the humble Miljacka, having camped down, the night before, on the banks of the mighty Danube. But worse still was the time the tent simply took off without me. I spent three months tracking it down, pitched on a remote peninsular by the Black Sea. It was not a pleasant experience retrieving it.
I can imagine, I say, although really I cannot.
I’m content, for now, to indulge O’Hallaran. But the idea of a tent taking off of its own volition seems utterly insane to me, like a story from The Thousand and One Nights.
18
Over the next few days, O’Hallaran immersed himself in the daily activities, such as they were, at Llys Rhosyn, pottering around and making himself useful. In other words, he settled in, without actually moving in. He helped out enthusiastically with Alice’s gardening projects. The two of them busied away in the greenhouse, planting seeds and cultivating tomatoes, while O’Hallaran, ruddy son of the soil, dug up the adjoining vegetable garden with a plan to planting rows of potatoes. You invite an Irish tramp to pitch his tent in your garden and sooner or later you’ll all be on a diet of salted spuds, he joked, oblivious to the fact that I had not in fact invited him to do anything of the kind. From where I worked in the library, attempting to decipher my aunt’s arcane texts, I would frequently hear peals of laughter emanating from the greenhouse. I assumed the two of them were sampling Megan’s crop of wacky baccy. I could picture them lighting up and puffing away in there, oblivious to any worries. What a felicitous turn for O’Hallaran, I thought, to wind up at a remote country estate with a lovely young woman and a limitless supply of ganja. But in this respect, I probably did the fellow an injustice. True, I endured the occasional stirrings of jealousy as I imagined them cavorting among the tomato plants, but I did not seriously consider O’Hallaran a threat in this respect, and I intuited that any expression of possessiveness towards Alice on my part would meet with her disapproval. Indeed, I resigned myself to O’Hallaran, as one might to the weather, or a cough.
I had changed. I was curious, and realised I had even been rather bored by my solitary existence. I was willing to tolerate O’Hallaran. I wanted, I think, to see what was going to happen next. Because, almost in spite of myself, I had become convinced of the intrinsic mystery of the tent, I was at least willing to be taken in by its mythology. As long as the blue tent was pitched there, almost anything might occur. So I watched and waited.
I continued not to sleep. I continued failing to acquire the minimum requirement for sleep in adult humans. I continued to experience the passage of night and day as a cranky experiment in staying awake. I had no idea of, had forgotten the simple beauty of, a refreshing night’s slumber. I was confined to the downstairs, apart from trips to the bathroom and occasional sallies to my bedroom for a change of clothes. I had long since given up even attempting to sleep in the room in which I had first installed myself, the poignantly misnamed ‘master’ bedroom. It remained silent and empty, my clothes carefully folded away in the wardrobe, a pair of slippers dutifully placed at the edge of the bedside table, the bed linen undisturbed.
There was something else, which I found hard to articulate, but all the more distressing for that reason. At first I thought I was being neurotic, but it was almost as if I were becoming the outsider at Llys Rhosyn. After all, the other two had a common bond as guardians of the blue tent, whereas I had no such credentials. If for them the blue tent had served as a home, for me it had merely been a portal for their respective appearances. As my insomnia persisted, blighting my capacity for rational thought, I was not sure who was a part of whose story; who, as it were, had slipped into the folds of whose fiction. And at the centre of all this confusion lay the blue tent. As I had learned when waking inside it last time, before O’Hallaran’s emergence, there was a sinister side to the tent, and it made me afraid. My curiosity about the tent became tinged with paranoia.
Within a week of his arrival, to my consternation, O’Hallaran had befriended not only Alice, but our neighbourhood fox, that curious little scavenger, the one whose passage across the lawn and down the drive I had happily been observing throughout the spring.
In the evenings, we took to sitting out by the big French windows leading from the library, with an aperitif: wine or cider for Alice and O’Hallaran, water or fruit squash for myself – I told them I had an allergy to alcohol, which was true, after a fashion. With the coming of summer, Alice informed me, taking an aperitif al fresco was a civilised thing to do. It was while we were sitting on the patio that O’Hallaran had taken to calling out to the fox as it passed by on its evening sortie, picking its way down from the woods, pausing at the edge of the lawn where the trees began, lifting a forepaw or cocking its head to one side, checking out the territory.
Foxy, he would call, in his benign drawl (the choice of sobriquet was typically inane) and the fox would stop in its tracks, sniff the air, and – to my astonishment, the first time it happened – wander over to where we were sitting in the hope of being thrown some titbit or other; an olive, a piece of salami, a few potato crisps. O’Hallaran would continue to speak to the fox, coaxing and uttering endearments, until it actually came up to us, placed its front paws on the table edge in the manner of a circus dog, and nudged the wooden bowl of crisps onto the floor with its snout, scattering the contents, which it then picked off, item by item.
I had, as I have mentioned, admired the fox from a distance, had envied him his regular patrols of the grounds, had even, I now realised, wished for his companionship, or some kind of kinship with him. He was, after all, my nearest neighbour. But I had lacked the practical sense or initiative to simply call him over and offer him some crisps.
And there were other ways in which O’Hallaran provoked my jealousy: not, I must emphasise, in any way that reflected badly on him – only on me. He had a way of getting things done simply and effectively, which I have never been capable of. His facility with manual work, the fact that he could fix things, the catch on the larder door, which had never closed properly – a perennial irritation which, however, I would never have thought of repairing, or been able to – and the discovery and use of a well, of whose existence I had been vaguely aware, but had never bothered to investigate or utilise. O’Hallaran had uncovered the well, and had set up a primitive pulley system whereby a bucket could be lowered and water brought up for use in the adjacent kitchen garden, thereby saving multiple trips to the kitchen or the acquisition of a garden hose. These small practical achievements were apparently a matter of instinct for O’Hallaran. What was worse, he set about them with a modesty and accomplishment that never drew attention to himself. He was, on the contrary, unobtrusively useful, something I
have never been.
At Alice’s request, and with my approval, O’Hallaran constructed a fenced area near the vegetable patch, which provided a kind of run for the dog whenever he became too excited, or demanding of attention. Fortunately, this was not often necessary, as under Alice’s supervision the young sheepdog seemed to be happy and obedient, and she quickly had him housetrained. His limp had gone and his name shortened from Ketamine to Keto, which was only to be expected. But if we were eating outside, we would sometimes put him in the run. It was from this vantage point that he observed the first visit of the fox to the table; barking at first, but then merely curious, and eventually complacent, as though accepting Foxy as one of the furnishings in this benevolent new life away from Morgan’s more Spartan regime.
The days became weeks, and the spring turned to summer, and almost without my noticing, I found myself living in a kind of chaste ménage à trois with my uninvited guests, the dog thrown in.
I continued to watch and wait.
19
There was a significant difference in the way I treated my two visitors. I had invited Alice to sleep in the house within twenty-four hours of making her acquaintance. O’Hallaran, on the other hand, never received such an offer. Nor, I think, would he have accepted.
