Crow gestured at the club, which was beginning to empty—at filthy black cables strewn over the floor, ashtrays, and empty bottles everywhere. The most precious place on earth.
“You know I met Paul Jackson,” Walter began.
“Andréevich!” Crow spluttered.
“Let me explain, Crow,” said Walter firmly. “You want to know. I want to explain.”
Crow sat back in his chair like a scowling teenager. The back of the chair cracked, for a brief second threatening to topple, but Crow didn’t flinch.
“Old Nik,” agreed Walter. “I met him, yes. Louis did arrange it, because he is his agent now, but I wanted to meet him. I’ve been a fan of Hero Ground Zero since I was a kid. And I was curious. Nik, as he calls himself now, had a breakdown. I feel I’m on the verge of something myself. The pressures I feel are out of all proportion with what is going on around me.”
Crow couldn’t help himself. “Pressure!” He was almost barking, leaning forward, the veins in his neck pulsating. “This isn’t a high-pressure job. It’s fun. It’s easy. We play pub rock while people get rat-arsed, and we get paid for it. We live well. Where’s the fucking pressure?”
“I don’t know, Crow,” Walter said, not rising to the bait. “It might not be coming from what we do here, it might be coming from inside me.”
“So what did fucking Andréevich have to say?” demanded Crow.
“He said something that helped,” replied Walter, but placed his hand on the table, palm down, a firm boundary. “But I don’t think telling you would help you to understand.”
“Fuck!” Crow was barking now. “You are going to stop playing music, aren’t you?”
Walter nodded. “I have to, for a while. My head is swimming at the moment. I feel I’m being taken over, sound, strange stuff.”
Crow stood up, finally really angry, and turned on me again. “You arranged the meeting,” he shouted. “What the fuck were you thinking? What could a washed-up old prog rock star who’s off his fucking head possibly say that would be useful to Walter? He needs a shrink, not another nutter. Jesus!”
Crow knocked his chair over as he stormed out.
Walter and I sat, watching the crew pack the last few mike stands into a flight case.
“I arranged the meeting with Old Nik because I thought it might help,” I said. “It doesn’t matter which path you take, Walter, but you do have to choose. Siobhan wants you to leave music behind you, to work with her on some grand intellectual project. Crow wants you here, playing what he tells you to play. I want to help you with this stuff you hear—because I believe it could lead you to a new level of creativity. I know what I’m talking about. I have seen it happen before with some of my clients.”
I was very shaken by the tense atmosphere Crow had stirred up. I tried to keep my voice low, and spoke into Walter’s ear. I was too rattled, though, to care much who heard what I said. A few stragglers left in the club were looking over at our table.
Walter turned to me. “Nik was up on Skiddaw for fifteen years, did you know that?”
“Yes, I did know that. He produced nearly a hundred charcoal drawings in that time, which are the basis for my business as his agent.”
“I have always wanted to create a maze,” he said. “Do you know how long it takes, on average, for even a very fast-growing hedge to be dense enough and high enough to be more than a parterre? More than just a design? A complex you can lose yourself in?”
I shook my head.
“Fifteen years.”
“You’re stopping work with music for fifteen years? I didn’t even think you would leave the band, although I thought Siobhan was trying to get you to leave. This could be my fault, Crow might be right about that. But the maze sounds great, of course it does, but fifteen years! Walter, you could have a life as a serious artist; what you are experiencing is not madness, not a breakdown, you are connecting with the people around you, with what they are feeling. It’s a good thing.”
Of course, I cared very much about Walter as an artist, and appreciated what he did in the band. Siobhan too wanted Walter to be happy, I think, and although I didn’t really reckon Walter had much of a chance as a poet based on what we had heard in “Freedom on the Road,” the soundscapes showed that he had a poetic and descriptive flair. At that moment Selena came back to the table with Floss. Walter didn’t notice; he was dejected, gazing at his empty beer glass. He was probably wondering why he was feeling so compromised on what should have been a joyful evening. I reached over to him and nudged him so that he would at least acknowledge Floss who stood nervously waiting. He looked up at Floss and his eyes flashed from Selena to her friend, back and forth, stopping long enough to gaze at Floss, without speaking.
“You’re Floss,” he said, holding out his hand, then getting to his feet. “You were at the wedding.”
“That’s me,” she replied. “It was a good day.”
“You’re the rider girl, yes?”
“Right again.” Floss tossed the missing blond hair she had sported the day before, now cut short. It was a strange but delightful action.
“Do you ride?” she asked. “Ever had a pony?” She looked at Selena to share the joke, to make it clear that she, being a girl among girls, was teasing him a little. But Selena was starting to look furious.
“Not me,” Walter said. “My parents used to ride, but I am a bit frightened of horses, always have been.”
“We shall have to fix that.”
Flashes of golden light make the sound of cymbals and gongs, brief and splashing. A tower made of thin metal girders wavers in a powerful breeze. A young woman gasps. The entire world around her is vibrating. Another building falls. This time it is a building made of metal, girders, bells, tubes (like those from xylophones), tautened wire, tightened strings of cable, booming sheets of hanging aluminum sheeting, walls made of cable-stretched skins of exceedingly thin metal membrane wavering and vibrating with the gently moving air. As it collapses, the mixture of metallic sounds is cacophonous and shocking—a far more disturbing noise than the collapse of the glass cathedral. At one point one of the long, ringing, shining stainless-steel tubes, tipping slowly from upright, falls against one of the thin membrane walls and begins to tear through it; the noise is excruciating, teeth-rattling, spine-curdling. All this is punctuated by the enormous low-frequency thuds of huge steel girders collapsing and the rising whine of cables being stretched to their limit, twanging, flipping, spinning, whirring and whipping, and then finally breaking. When a really large sheet of plate metal begins to lean, breaks free of its popping restraining bolts, falls and hits the ground, the noise it makes is quite unusual. A clean sound, without the anticipated deep thunder. A kind of open-mouthed barking sound, slowed down by some digital device: arrrwraaannggargh. Drawn out too, as it has landed on top of a girder and is almost perfectly balanced, the girder the fulcrum of a wobbling seesaw of a massive, rollingly unstable metal plate as big as a ship.
Siobhan went back to her family home in Waterford that night. She had missed the moment when Floss had usurped her and, without even really trying, had ousted her and stolen her husband. Siobhan also missed the moment when Walter fell in love for the first time with a girl who was perhaps his equal in some ways. It would always look to all of us that this moment had happened to Siobhan as though in a scene “offstage,” a side event that would turn out to be life-changing and humiliating for the great Irish beauty Siobhan was taken to be, and felt herself to be.
The cottage was in Duncannon, a village with a few fishing boats and a rather romantic old fort. The area was quiet, and felt real. Technically in County Wexford not Waterford, but Waterford was the nearest big town. Although she had been shocked by the money thing with Frank, she felt perhaps that this might mean she and Walter could spend some time together at last, and she could get her husband away from the bar at Dingwalls, the creepy women hanging around, Crow’s miserable and negative controlling whining, the Hansons’ obvious ambition.
She also wanted to get her man away from me for a while.
And then there was this floozie Floss. Selena had called her about Walter meeting her again at Dingwalls, and described how obviously taken with her he had been. Weeks later. But had Siobhan experienced even a moment of doubt? I think she believed she would draw Walter back to her. She sat in Duncannon writing a letter as a couple of logs she’d found crackled on the fire. The window was open to the garden, a vixen cried from the copse across the road, and an owl hooted. There was no phone, and no email. She didn’t even have a radio or TV in the house. She planned to spend her time trying to write poems. In one sonnet she had started she would allow herself to complain to Walter—who was quickly becoming a mere phantom in her immediate daily life—about the way he had wasted his talent helping to sell cars and trucks rather than describing his love for her.
I hoped for Shelley, Byron in your pen
I longed for you to rise to meet your star
The songs you wrote moved drinks across the bar
Why would you waste fine words on drunken men?
And wasting once, go on to waste again?
No sonnet to Siobhan, how could you mar
Our love with elegies to some fast car?
For money? What can those in love dare spend?
You’ve sold your talent; then your soul is sold.
You’ve championed commerce—why? So you’ll be “free”?
I love you, and I’ll always tightly hold
The hope that one day you might dream with me
To Waterford! I’m gone! I’ll take my heart.
I can’t stand by and watch you lose your art.
Pretty good, she thought. She’d used the old romantic Italian rhyming scheme for the sonnet, sometimes used by the sixteenth-century English courtier Sir Philip Sidney, although the modern Irish poets Heaney and Muldoon would always be her real passion. A friend who was a junior editor at Faber & Faber had suggested she write more sonnets; they were becoming popular again. As yet she had not been published, but she felt sure it would happen soon. She thought about completing the sonnet now and including it in her letter. She’d challenge Walter to put it to music and he would try, and probably fail. She smiled, it was pleasant mischief, but she demurred; Walter was probably lost to her for the time being. There would be no point. She had to be patient. He would come to her, eventually. If he did not come, she would divorce him. But he would come, she was sure of it. There was no woman as potent as she was, and if there had been such a woman, she herself would have wanted to possess her.
Chapter 9
It would become clear to us all that Siobhan had overplayed her hand with Walter when she went home to Waterford. She had intended to challenge him. He had decided to quit the band, but he had also decided to quit art in any form. Had she allowed him simply to fade away for a while and find out what would work for him, their marriage might have been saved. Siobhan had never really bothered to investigate whether Walter’s meeting with Old Nik had driven some kind of wedge between them or what the deeper causes of their breakup might be. She seemed completely insouciant as far as I could tell.
I wrote to her with sympathy, expecting her to reply angrily for my encouraging Walter to honor his creative dark side; instead she responded philosophically. She wrote that she intended to leave her job at the BBC; she was fed up with world affairs, politics, and research. Walter had given her some money, and they had sold their little flat in South Ealing, so she felt secure, at least for a while. She was going to write poetry herself, the now famous Sonnets.
She also asked about Rain, how she was, and how she might feel about the possibility she might soon divorce Walter? As I read these questions my intuition kicked in. I had a hunch Siobhan might be asking on behalf of Pamela rather than herself. Pamela must surely want to know how Rain was coping, whether she was happy.
In the letter, Siobhan said she knew the nunnery Pamela had entered. She said it was very strict and visitors were not allowed. Something about this expression felt disturbing. She used the word “nunnery” in a way that made it sound as though my ex-wife had started work in a bordello or something. There was an irony there I couldn’t quite place. Did Siobhan know where Pamela was living? Neither Rain nor I had heard from her for years.
Walter’s wedding to Floss that autumn was a light and carefree occasion. Walter seemed younger. He’d lost his rangy look, his tan had lightened, and he appeared happy and excited. There was something else too: he seemed as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. I thought I knew what that weight had been, and I wasn’t sure I approved of what he had done, nor did I think it was necessary. He had decided not to make music again, nor would he write songs or poetry nor do anything that might be regarded as “art” for fifteen years. He later explained that it was fifteen years after Old Nik had had his vision that he returned to normal life. Walter intended to do the same. In any case, I felt what had happened was a significant aspect of what made him an artist in the first place; he had always been special, someone to whom the audience had responded positively. He unlocked their feelings. I’d told him he tapped into their collective psyche. He had money; he could start a new life.
There were cheerful wedding bells of course, the chatter of the guests, cake, and all their friends and families were present. There was no music and no dancing. Walter had wanted a less bawdy occasion for his second marriage.
This occasion was the first for many years on which I had an opportunity to speak with Walter’s parents, Harry and Sally Watts. We had been in contact, but my business was doing well and I was busy. Harry was still in high demand too.
By the time we stumbled into each other I was slightly drunk. I should not have taken alcohol. I had sworn off it for years since Pamela had walked out on me, but I was a little dizzy. What I can remember is vague.
Harry had put on weight. I imagined his arse must look rather ridiculous when he sat on the wide organ stool, shifting from side to side. He had lost a little hair, his skin was rather red, and he looked as though he might have become a bit of a boozer. He looked his age. What were we both now? Fifty-one?
Sally, though, still looked pretty good. She was wearing one of those bosom-enhancing uplift dresses women only get out at weddings to try to outshine the bride, made of stiff material that cupped her breasts like offerings. She smiled like a film star, her cleavage and her perfume distracting me.
“How lovely Florence is,” said Sally proudly. “Do I remember her from the other wedding?” She laughed. “I shouldn’t mention that, should I, Louis? You were flirting with both the younger girls, weren’t you? Selena of course and Florence! Did you ever tell Walter? Shall I? Ha ha!”
My face must have revealed my anxiety; we were at my godson’s wedding, for heaven’s sake!
She laughed again. “Don’t worry, Louis, I won’t say anything. I remember once it was you and me who were flirting. Before Harry of course.”
I couldn’t remember flirting with the girls. I’d seen them since at Dingwalls several times and they’d said nothing about it. So now I decided I just had to suffer Sally’s teasing, although I took some comfort from the fact that she and I shared some secrets too. It was true that she and I had flirted and come close to being lovers when we were younger—and not only before Harry. Occasionally afterward too. It had always felt normal, human, and natural to feel that attraction—old friends who survived the sixties should always consider wife-swapping surely? Even if like me they were usually too smashed to rise to the possibility.
Then she changed tack, hardening slightly.
“How is Siobhan? We liked her very much you know.”
“Siobhan is getting along,” I said, aware that I sounded rather drunk. I hadn’t really had very much to drink, but—Christ!—I was actually swaying. “We exchange letters occasionally.”
“You are as rat-arsed as Florence was,” said Sally, impishly switching back to a topic she had no doubt sensed made me highly
uncomfortable. “You remember that, Louis? At Walter’s wedding to Siobhan?”
What was she getting at? Harry laughed, perhaps hoping to lighten the mood, but I knew Sally pretty well, and there was undoubtedly a real barb in her words. What a fucking cow she was being!
“What could possibly be wrong with an eighteen-year-old girl, playing bridesmaid, getting a little drunk at a friend’s wedding?” My voice was slurred, but part of me felt the need to defend Floss.
Harry changed the subject. How strange it was, he said, that Walter should marry such a horsey girl.
“Sally and I have always been enthusiastic riders,” he said. “Especially when Walter was a little kid, but at an early age he developed an aversion to horses that bordered on the pathological. You must remember that, Louis. Rain loved horses of course.”
Later, with Sally safely engaged at a distant table with Rain, catching up on the gossip, Harry sat with me.
“I’ve never understood Walter’s commitment to this pub rock stuff. I thought it was a teenage phase. At least it’s turned to gold for him. But what is he going to do next? I wonder if he’ll go back to horticulture and tree surgery? No bloody money in gardening, that’s for sure.”
“He’s been doing some very interesting writing, I know that.”
Harry looked away for a moment, musing almost as if he were talking to himself. I could barely hear what he said. “Might he become a serious composer at last?”
“He might surprise us all,” I replied. “Especially you, Harry. He could come up with something that advanced the entire way words and music are presented, something really futuristic and audacious.”
Harry’s eyes gleamed. “You mean something scientific?”
“No,” I said. “A presage. Some kind of sign or signal. It might take as long as fifteen years to gestate, but I believe it will come.”
The Age of Anxiety Page 9