The Blue Tent

by Richard Gwyn

  Put simply, he seemed more suited to the outdoor life, and consequently I didn’t question him continuing to live in the tent, rather than in the house. It made sense. He had lived in his tent for thirty years, by his own account. Alice, by contrast, only ever claimed to have slept in her tent occasionally, on trips abroad or excursions or holidays. The rest of the time, she told me, she stayed at her mother’s place in Devon, or with a girlfriend in France, the daughter of Megan’s best friend, Zoë, whom Alice had met through my aunt.

  If O’Hallaran had moved in, it would have felt like a crowd to me, accustomed as I was to having the whole house to myself, but the subject never actually arose, since O’Hallaran seemed happy with his nomadic lifestyle, and after sharing an evening meal with us, which he would frequently prepare himself – he was a competent if unadventurous cook – he would take his leave and retire to the tent.

  And I continued in my struggle with insomnia, in the armchair in my library, or else stretched out on the sofa in the living room, where I would watch the DVDs from Megan’s collection – Blithe Spirit, The Red Shoes, The Man from Morocco. Sometimes Alice would join me, and we would snuggle up on the sofa together like brother and sister.

  The fact that O’Hallaran was made to feel so welcome was largely Alice’s doing. As she had explained to me in the library, on the night of his arrival, she believed that O’Hallaran was bound to possess a better grasp of the tent’s idiosyncrasies than she herself did. If this were so, I asked her, a week after his arrival, following a late night viewing of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, what had she learned?

  She seems puzzled by the question. Not offended exactly, but veering that way, put out by the directness of my question. Why did I want to know? For the same reason, I say, as I had wanted to know when he first arrived, namely, that I could not get my head around the fact that both of them appeared to be in possession of the tent, which was indubitably the same tent, and yet neither of them considered it strange that the other person claimed to own the tent.

  But I never claimed to own the tent, says Alice. I said it was a gift from Megan, and that I had travelled with it, and that I slept in it. But did I say I owned it? I don’t think so.

  You are being disingenuous, I say: you arrived at the house in possession of the tent, and O’Hallaran arrived in exactly the same way three days later. When we first met, you accused me, if I remember rightly, of coming into ‘your home’.

  That may be so, she says. I was the temporary resident. But my arrival here was distinct in every way from O’Hallaran’s. His long term residency of the tent makes a crucial difference.

  So what have you found out? I say, ignoring her evasions. After all, you spend enough time together in the greenhouse.

  Alice looks at me in a dark way.

  Listen, she says. You’re making too much of this. You’re acting as though there were some kind of conspiracy. There is no conspiracy. I don’t understand how the tent works, and I don’t really think that O’Hallaran does either, even after all these years. It’s a mystery. But we … you, are always wanting rational explanations for everything. Why don’t we just go along with it instead? The tent brought you and me together, and now O’Hallaran has joined us. It’s not likely to be a permanent arrangement, if that’s what you’re worried about. O’Hallaran will be moving on. It’s what he does, it’s in his blood. And I will too, I am sure.

  Something shifts within me again. I cannot bring myself to look her in the eye. You don’t have to, I say. Move on, I mean. You can stay if you want, for as long as you need.

  20

  We assemble on the patio the next evening. It has been wet and overcast for much of the day, but by six o’clock, when we convene for drinks, it is fine, the sky almost cloudless, the sun just beginning its descent beyond the hills to the west. There is a lot of avian activity above the woods, the crows cacophonous around the treetops. I wonder about the crows, the din they make, their horrible communal lifestyle. I turn away. Something about the crows sickens me.

  O’Hallaran has made a ratatouille, which is simmering on the stove in the kitchen. It is now almost three weeks since his arrival. While I have, thus far, been easy-going as to the exact nature of O’Hallaran’s visit, I am beginning to feel uncomfortable about the length of his stay. True, he has been no bother – indeed, as I have noted, he has been most helpful about the place – but his very presence has had the unfortunate effect of inhibiting my relationship with Alice, which, I feel, was developing quite sweetly before she fell ill; before, that is, the appearance or intrusion of O’Hallaran. Besides, for all I know – although he has outwardly been the picture of propriety in this respect – he may have similar ambitions for himself. And he would, if I have read his character correctly, be considerably more forthright in his approach than I seem capable of, in spite of the considerable age difference. (While I am a decade older than Alice, O’Hallaran is almost two decades older than me.) So, since I have no intention of broaching the subject by direct means, I do wonder whether they have met before.

  I ask him, as this has not been clarified since our interview over breakfast on the first full day of his visit, whether or not he had any further dealings with Megan, since meeting her in the Café du Soleil in Riscle in, when was it, nineteen eighty something?

  He takes a drink and smacks his lips in a vulgar fashion.

  I’m afraid I did not, he says, much as I would have liked to. Other than during the first few days following our exchange of goods, as it were. And he winks, the scoundrel.

  He takes a long slurp of his drink, a Château Margaux. Alice has uncovered several cases in the store-room off the kitchen. What on earth is she doing, making available an almost unlimited supply of top quality wines to an individual accustomed to, and quite happy with, plonk or rough cider? My mood is not the best. I fear the evening is not getting off to a good start.

  But the two of you – I gesture at Alice – had not met in all those years?

  No, says O’Hallaran, I never had that pleasure, until this occasion.

  And you, I say to Alice, feeling like a police interrogator, Megan never spoke to you of a Mr O’Hallaran?

  Oh no, she says. Nor did I have any notion of his existence. She takes a puff of her roll-up, and leaning her head back, exhales, seemingly bored by the drift of my questions.

  I have a suspicion they are both lying.

  Don’t be like that, I say. I’m curious. After all, you are guests here, and turned up within a couple of days of each other. It’s intriguing.

  Quite so, she says, as all coincidences are. My dear, you seem so uptight. You are anguishing unnecessarily about the tent. Unlike Megan, who always took things as they came.

  No, I say. That’s where I think you’re mistaken. Megan might have given the impression of taking things in her stride, of being terribly laid back and so forth, but in fact I believe she planned everything out in great detail before deciding on anything of consequence.

  Really? says Alice. What makes you think that?

  Well, her library for one thing. I do not think her library is the creation of a person who left anything at all to chance.

  Go on, she says.

  Much of my aunt’s library consists of works by ancient alchemists, some of them in English, many in Latin, along with countless commentaries by scholars written in English, French, German, Spanish. There is also a substantial section of works in Arabic. I wasn’t even aware Megan knew Arabic. Did you know she could read Arabic? (Alice did not.) When I first arrived at Llys Rhosyn, there was a handwritten note on the desk, addressed to me, and left there by Megan. I quote from memory, having pondered its words a thousand times over the past year: One book opens the other. Read many books and compare them throughout and then you get the meaning. By reading one book alone you cannot get it, you cannot otherwise decipher it.

  Well, she says, that’s deep, but what does it mean, beyond the idea that everything is linked?

  It refl
ects a way of thinking around things, I say. It sums up an attitude, a modus operandi. It says you cannot make any useful decisions or reach any valid conclusions until you have examined a problem from all quarters and come to an informed opinion. It also means, by extension, that you should not trust one person’s judgement without putting it under scrutiny, and comparing it with the opinions of others: compare them throughout and then you get the meaning. It also, incidentally, convinced me that I needed to read every book in the library – in the languages I could read, at least – before deciding what I was going to do next. With my life, that is. So that is what I am doing. In fact, that is all I do. It is what I am engaged in doing. Reading every damn book in the library. Not just the alchemical esoterica, although there appears to be a surfeit of that. But the library is extraordinarily laid out: I seem to know, by a series of clues laid down by the book I am reading at any time, which volume I must read next.

  Alice is silent for a moment. Maybe she is wondering how shefitted into Megan’s larger scheme of things, whether my aunt had applied the same principle to the running of her life, her friendships – and her protégée – as she had to her library. It was impossible to tell, from studying Alice’s face. She might equally have been puzzling over her tomatoes, and how to protect them from bugs without using nasty chemicals, or wondering whether Foxy would make an appearance at our table tonight. I have to admit that I was devoid of any certainty regarding what Alice thought. There was a shifty quality to her facial expressions, which had begun, I am certain, the night that O’Hallaran arrived. Or was this my invention; an expression of my insecurity, or paranoia? How could I possibly pretend that I had learned how to read Alice in the three days I had known her before the arrival of the wretched O’Hallaran?

  My concentration was waning. I put it down to lack of sleep, of course; but then I put most of my intellectual failings down to lack of sleep. And lack of sleep can’t be responsible for everything. And then, in my hazy, fuddled way, I have what seems like a revelation: that I have lived inside the library this past year just as O’Hallaran has lived inside his tent, and, just as the library was a text – a series of texts – so was the tent. The only difference, and it was no small matter, was in how to read them, the texts and the tent. At that moment I have another one (another apparent revelation) and ask O’Hallaran:

  If you’ve had the tent for so many years, it must have suffered the occasional damage; wear and tear. Tents get torn. Have you needed to repair it, ever?

  The tent is very strong, says O’Hallaran. But it came with a repair kit that Megan presented me with that first day in the Gers. Strips of strong blue treated fabric, neatly folded in a blue canvas bag. Just in case, she said. The repair kit itself was inserted into a zipped pocket on the outside of the blue bag. All of it, but all of it – tent, bag, pockets, as blue as a baboon’s arse. The fact is I’ve never had to repair the tent. It has never been torn, even when it disappeared for a month. Immaculate it was, when I found it that time, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Why, says O’Hallaran, do you ask?

  Well, I say – certain that in his previous account the tent had turned up near the Black Sea – I’m wondering whether the tent has consciousness. I’m wondering whether any damage to its surface structure causes malfunctioning of some kind. Or whether it has some self-repair mechanism, like a living organism.

  Sheesh, says Alice. A living organism. A breathing Tardis. Brilliant!

  I look at Alice closely. I cannot decide whether or not she is taking the piss. Now, why would she do that?

  O’Hallaran chuckles. I like it, he says. I’ve actually wondered the same thing.

  Lying bastard. He knows! At least, he’s had thirty years to think about it without pretending to humour my wild guesses. And yet he continues to chortle away, maddeningly.

  I acknowledge that my sentiments regarding O’Hallaran are by no means straightforward. Part of me wants to befriend him, to accept him willingly into the household, even, heaven forbid, in my brighter moments, under Alice’s influence, I think of starting a small community: some would tend the land, planting vegetables and cultivating fruit trees (we have a small apple orchard, which Alice has tentatively suggested supplementing with cherry and plum); others, like myself, would study arcane texts and pursue a more intellectual, or spiritual agenda. In the evenings we would meet up on the patio and discuss the day’s progress, or gather around the fire in winter. Like monks, or nuns. Or monks and nuns.

  But who am I kidding? When have I ever wanted to live like that?

  Am I being infected by some hideous hippy virus, some kind of delusion of a sharing, communal idealism? Is the appearance of O’Hallaran (and of Alice, let’s be fair) just the beginning? Have I opened the gate to some kind of gathering of the happy clans to Llys Rhosyn? An influx of weirdos, who will talk to plants, use healing crystals, and believe a woodlouse may be someone’s grandmother? Is this something that Megan actually planned, and set up in advance of her death, having befriended numerous waifs and strays in the course of her lifetime? And who knows: from O’Hallaran’s account, she possibly had sex with other drifters like himself?

  And what about the other, antisocial side of me, the personality I am struggling to hold in check? The side of me that wants to smash O’Hallaran’s skull in with a shovel and ravish Alice among the tomato plants?

  Which side am I most afraid of?

  I have no idea what my face is doing, but Alice is peering at me strangely. She has rolled a cigarette and is proffering it in my direction. No, not a cigarette, a medium-sized joint. She pushes it towards me. Go on, she says, have a little smoke. It might help you relax. You look all tense.

  God knows, you’d be tense, I think, if you had just glimpsed what was passing through my interior field of vision … but instead I accept the thing, mainly because she has caught me unawares and I have no ready reason to refuse. Besides, I don’t want to look uncool, a lightweight, in front of O’Hallaran.

  Although I suggested to Alice that I was no stranger to the weed, it was a lie. A good decade has passed since I last had a smoke, and even back then, in the loom of youth, I was never a connoisseur. I am a lightweight, which is why I don’t drink, either. I get confused and disoriented far too easily on those rare occasions when I drink anything stronger than lemonade, and I come out in a rash, literally. And smoking, Christ, even smoking a cigarette sends my head all over the place. As for weed, I start thinking things that no sane person should be allowed to think, and saying things that no one should ever say, unless they want the world to lock them up and throw away the key.

  I take a couple of quick puffs, to save face, and pass the damn thing on to O’Hallaran.

  You know, he says, taking a slow drag, you could almost become self-sufficient here at Llys Rhosyn, if you put your mind to it. Everything you could ask for. Good soil, timber aplenty. You could convert to solar, for a start. Grow whatever you cared to. And if you wanted meat, these fields are thick with rabbits. Hopping about like there was no tomorrow.

  I yawn, extensively. It irritates me that people like O’Hallaran always have to remind you of the potential for Edenic solutions, because they are never going to have responsibility for those decisions themselves, only give their ill-informed opinion, garnered from long years of living off others and doing sod all of any consequence. I heave a big sigh and nod my head. I realise I am going to have to say something boring in response, to keep the conversation going. It’s what people do.

  I’m sure, I say, that one might. One would need a certain amount of capital to get started though. Blah blah. Miraculously the joint has come back to me. I inhale more deeply, burning my tongue, and hand it back to Alice, which was apparently the wrong thing to do, as she passes it on to O’Hallaran without taking a puff. Have I offended the protocol of the shared spliff? This is why I hate these gatherings. How on earth did my alcohol-free cocktail hour turn into cannabis corner? Why do I let these things happen? Or, I think, with a sh
udder, maybe she hasn’t taken a drag because she’s afraid I have some vile contagious disease, and she doesn’t want to take the risk. Maybe that is why she won’t kiss me properly either. I have a patch of dry skin at the corner of my mouth, a slightly sore spot. She must think it is a Herpes, acquired through my having had carnal relations with some beast of the field, because I have so clearly not had sex with a woman for such a long time, it must be etched on my face, it must be tattooed across my forehead: pussy-free zone. Wait a minute. Did I say that last bit or think it? If I thought it then no one will have heard, will they? Will they? So, did I say it or think it? Saying things and thinking things are different. People cannot hear your thoughts. I’m sure I only thought it. In which case why is Alice looking at me in that way? Perhaps I did say it. Oh God.

  O’Hallaran is suggesting we eat outside, since it is such a pleasant evening. I concur with a kind of grunting sound, such as a pig might make. No idea how that noise escaped my mouth. Consciousness has detached itself from my vocal chords, my trachea, my tongue, my lips. The latter feel as though they have been plastered onto my face by accident, by some slap-happy infant sculptor. The thought appeals to me and I suppress a violent desire to laugh out loud. I touch them, my lips. I put my hand to my mouth. I trace my finger along the upper lip and feel the soft down of my facial hair. I have not shaved for several days, but this is not a planned moustache, only self-neglect. I draw my middle finger slowly along the lower lip. It feels dry. I realise with horror that this rubbing of my lip, this gentle stroking back and forth, might look obscenely suggestive to any onlooker, unconscious though it is … But why am I doing this weird thing in front of Alice? What are my eyes doing, I wonder, as I unwittingly caress my lips? I pull my hand away and stand up too quickly, knocking over my drink of orange squash, and hurry into the kitchen, ostensibly to help O’Hallaran bring in some plates and cutlery, but really to get away from Alice before she sees through me completely, sees what a foul and lecherous creature I am. She calls after me that I have spilled my drink; yes, I call back, I’ll fetch a cloth. In the kitchen I go over to the CD player and pretend to be choosing a disc. I find some jazz from Megan’s collection, Bud Powell, and slip it on. O’Hallaran is collecting the saucepan with the ratatouille onto a tray along with dinner plates, a basket of bread, salt and pepper. I pick up a bottle of wine from the table, and fill an empty carafe with water from the tap. The water here is good. Soft water, from the hills.The room spins towards me, then recedes. I suffer an overwhelming desire to burst out laughing again, but manage to contain it. I pick up a corkscrew, a jar of mustard, the breadknife, and load them onto another tray. Must look useful in front of Brendan O’Hallaran. That’s it. Brendan. That shall be his name henceforth, whether he likes it or not.