SYLVIE'S RIDDLE

by WALL, ALAN

  All that shit with Owen, yes. You put it so beautifully, Ali. See you next week. '

  *

  When houses closed around most places in Shropshire what you tended to find were a lot of dull, dead Victorian landscapes, incompetent watercolours of flowers, endless hatchet jobs in oils of sundry ancestors, the misshapen avatars from whom the inheritors had inherited. Once or twice Henry had been pleasantly surprised. But he tended to pick up what stuff he did buy from London or other dealers in Birmingham and Manchester He knew what he wanted and they knew what he liked. He wasn't in any case one of those highly active dealers who was always hurtling about the place, but then neither were most other dealers. Not the ones Henry knew, anyway. They were a meditative lot - that's why they'd taken on the job in the first place.

  But there were occasional surprises, and Henry had just had one. He'd been called to a house over towards Welshpool. An antique dealer who didn't want to get lumbered with too many paintings, particularly anything later than 1880, had asked him to come and sort out the pictures.

  A large red-brick house. Its rooms were not so much filled as stuffed. Ragged bookshelves, ancient furniture, crooked pictures all over the walls. It had a curious atmosphere of dusty encroachment, the sense that time was beginning to scent a victory. It was all mostly indifferent stuff; Henry was about to say that he wasn't interested at all, when he spotted it in a corner. It wasn't even hanging on the wall, so it was a fair bet that no one had ever noticed its worth. It was a Ben Nicholson. 1930s. Henry had the eye, at least about things that interested him. He was hardly ever wrong. He looked it over and did a quick calculation. He remembered that the old lady had died. Everything was going to some distant relative, who probably had hardly seen her for the last few decades. No need for any great compunction then.

  'I'll give you six hundred quid for the lot,' he said to the antique dealer.

  'Make it six-fifty.'

  'Split the difference.'

  'Six-twenty-five.'

  'When can you shift it?'

  'Tomorrow. I'll get Martin to come over.'

  'Done.' With that, the antique dealer was on his way. Henry waited until he could no longer be seen before going back upstairs and picking up the Nicholson. Might as well take it with him, but he didn't want anybody noticing. He wasn't sure, but thought he might be looking at the better pan of £I0,000.

  Back in the gallery, he put the picture in a corner and stared at it. He poured himself a glass of red wine, then he thought he would phone Sylvie. He'd been meaning to do it. Now that he and Marie had discovered their compatibility, he wanted to let Sylvie know there were no hard feelings. It all made much more sense. Marie had had her children; she wouldn't be having any more. Henry had managed to avoid having any; what with one thing and another, and he suspected that now was probably not the time to start. But he had been aware that children would have to become an issue sooner or later with Sylvie. She had told him one night about the miscarriage, and then how she couldn't face all the treatment because of Owen's affairs, but at her age she surely wasn't just going to forget about it. In fact, had she let him get further than he did with his proposal that evening, then conception and motherhood would have been pan of his proposition. Such an accommodating fellow, aren't I, Henry thought. But he hadn't got that far, had he? Just as well, perhaps. Or maybe he was rationalising again.

  'Sylvie. Hello. It's Henry.'

  'Henry.' He was genuinely pleased at the warmth with which she said his name. 'Henry, how nice to hear your voice. I've been going to phone you. Can I come over and see you?'

  'Well, yes,' he said. 'When?'

  'How about now? The pizzas are on me.' Henry thought for a moment. Marie had gone to London for two days.

  'All right. There's something I should say. I've met someone called Marie. Well, met her. I met her a long time ago. But ... I can't offer you a bed for the night any more, Sylvie. It could be misconstrued by my new companion.'

  'Well, I must say, you don't hang around, do you?' She had expected this remark to elicit laughter. It didn't. 'Sorry Henry, I was only trying to be provocative. Who is Marie?'

  'She owns the Hilltop Gallery.'

  'Then you have a lot in common. No, don't worry, I shan't need a bed. I'll forgo the wine, and drive back, but I'll bring a nice bottle for you, all the same.'

  'Then I'll get the pizzas.'

  Sylvie put her notebook in to her bag and threw on her leather jacket. She couldn't be bothered having a shower. She'd been making some decisions on the drive back over from Liverpool, and she did need to make her final notes on the Vo/lard Suite, but she wanted to see Henry too. It made it easier that he'd been the one to phone.

  The music on Henry's CD-player wasn't Thelonius Monk, but Beethoven's Opus III, his last sonata of all. Music seemed to confront silence here. If the two realms ever wanted to meet, whether it was the animal and the human or the angelic and the demonic, this would surely be their background track. It was music for the end of the world. Henry could never hear it without also hearing the river out there rising again. But now he let it play while he contemplated his new purpose and sipped his wine.

  One of the other images of an artist on Henry's wall, apart from the photograph of Picasso with his mirada fuerte, was the

  woodcut of Beethoven that had embellished so many thousands of books. Batt had painted the composer in his middle years, almost bursting out of his skin with energy. Henry was greatly intrigued by this image and its implications. In it Ludwig is almost dementedly intense, surrounded by the debris of his life and trade: scattered coins, conversation-books in which visitors had to write their questions for a man who couldn't hear them, fragments of food, a candlestick, quill pens, a broken coffee cup. There is also the Graf piano, its strings looping out like springs from a burst mattress. He'd wrecked it trying to hear the sounds. What the woodcut didn't show was the chamberpot underneath the Graf, as reported by Baron de Tremont in 1809; the bowl containing the minotaur's faeces, but you can still smell them if you look hard enough and listen hard enough, the way Picasso said he wanted you to be able to smell the armpit of a woman once he'd painted her. Beethoven is oblivious to all the chaos that surrounds him, focused entirely on the string quartet he's now composing.

  What was a sonata exactly? Henry had never entirely managed to work this out. He listened hard to this one as he stared equally hard at the Nicholson. It had to have a theme. The theme was then developed, which was another way of saying that the simplicity it craves is attacked by all the other musical possibilities surrounding it until it fights its way through. En route, by a process of osmosis, it absorbs much of the power of the surrounding forces until by the time it's finished, it's no longer the same as when it started. If the theme's not strong enough, the work fails. Sounds like all the rest of us there then, Henry thought to himself He had to go outside, to make sure the river wasn't rising.

  An hour later she was there. He offered her a glass of wine but she said no, she'd stick with water, having to drive back later. Then they went and sat in the Picasso Room. He'd already put the pizza in the oven.

  'I'm glad about Marie,’ she said. Henry shrugged. So was he, but he didn't necessarily assume it would all go on indefinitely. Take what comfort you can where you find it: that had become Henry's philosophy. 'And I'm glad there are no hard feelings.'

  "Try not to go in for those any more. I'd better check that pizza.' When Henry returned, Sylvie was taking notes with such concentration that he said nothing and went back for the salad. It struck him (unworthily?) that she might have wanted to see the Vollard Suite at least as much as she wanted to see him. Finally she seemed to have what she wanted and sat down to eat.

  'So, what's happening with Owen?'

  'He's moved out. We're getting divorced.'

  'What will happen with the house? I thought you said you couldn't afford it without him.'

  'I can't. I don't know, Henry. It's a very confusing time. And now there's a pro
blem at the Signum too. This pizza's nice.'

  'It's the one I give all my vegetarian ladies. That minotaur in the corner has started giving me a very old-fashioned look.'

  'I suppose vegetarianism wouldn't be very good for business, if you were a minotaur.' They paused and ate until Sylvie spoke again.

  'Thanks for everything, Henry. You were a real help sometimes.'

  'Well, you got me through one or two dull evenings too.'

  'Is that a new painting on the floor?'

  'Early Ben Nicholson. It's been a good day.'

  'Glad somebody's had one.'

  *

  When Sylvie arrived back in Chester later, there was a message for her on her answering machine. It was Patrick Gregory, wondering if he might possibly be able to speak to Mr Owen Treadle. The name meant nothing to her. She phoned him back.

  'He doesn't actually live here any more. Is it about business?'

  'It is about business, yes.' The voice was quiet and professional.

  She gave him John Tamworth's number. 'You should be able to find him there.'

  Ten minutes later John Tamworth picked up his phone and listened as the voice explained its identity, and the reason for wishing to speak to Mr Owen Treadle. Patrick didn't feel like any more subterfuge. He knew the newspaper piece would be coming out about the Delta Foundation the following Sunday: Now he just wanted to understand something, however fragmentary, about the way human beings behaved with one another Particularly the ones who'd had dealings with his daughter.

  'I can arrange the meeting,' John said. 'Would you mind it being filmed?'

  'No. In fact I might prefer it. Is the filming for any particular purpose?'

  'Not a specified one, yet. We're doing some work on memory and identity. Oh, there's one other thing.'

  'What's that?'

  'Mr Treadle won't know that you'll be coming. So I'll be introducing you in front of the camera.'

  'Suits me.'

  *

  That night Henry had one of his most vivid dreams. The river was rising again. The river was always rising in Henry's dreams. The images had become so specific that Henry felt they could be filmed; now why was that? Was it because he spent his life staring at images, so that part of his brain had grown in power - the way one hemisphere of the human mind grew in size the more we'd used language? Who was he supposed to ask to find out? Sylvie certainly wouldn't know and Marie would merely laugh at him again.

  'They have the new flood walls now, for heaven's sake.'

  Walls against water. Might work for a while. In the dream they had a supply of sandbags. And Sylvie (what was she doing there?) had acquired an information sheet which she placed before him. About all the infections flooding often brings in its wake. The pathogenic organisms one might cautiously expect. The nastiest type of flood water was apparently labelled Category C, which arrived after brownsludging it up from the sewers, sticky with unwanted matter from faeces and urine and the decomposing carcasses of drowned animals. Sylvie was weirdly detached as she explained to him the immemorial traditions of the deluge, and how industry had recently joined in with its own liberal sprinkling of lethal substances. Put all the hazards together and it appeared that everyone needed to be on the look-out for E.coli, particularly the sinister and apocalyptic strain known as 0157. Then there was salmonella, and the protozoa parasite cryptosporidium. There was also that age-old stand-by, cholera. Not forgetting Weil's disease. This apparently made its merry way through life by means of water contaminated by rats' piss, the Chardonnay of the damned. 'It's all one long litany of delight, isn't it, Henry?' Sylvie said, in a tone of insouciance which enraged him. He was locked in the immoveable paralysis of dream-rage. 'I daresay the minotaur's faeces are in there too. He's certainly roaring today, isn't he? Is that pizza ready yet?'

  But dreaming Henry had no time for pizzas. He was already heaving the paintings upstairs, except that now he wasn't in Shropshire any more. He was in Florence in the middle of the 1960s. He stood above the Arno, for he seemed to be walking on water, and all around him he could see a town full of antique beauty drenched with the present's raging filth. He was shouting up to the Ponte Vecchio: It's going to take months, it might even be years, to scrape all the mire from those faces. Saints, madonnas, whores. And he knew with a thump in his heart that some of these things, things made through years of craft and devotion, would be lost for ever. So many things he loved.

  Anyone peering across the river that night at 2 a.m. would have seen the figure of a small well-rounded man, his white pyjamas flapping in the breeze, peering down at the Severn as though he had dropped something, or someone, in it. Henry had awoken from his dream, and had gone out to reassure himself once more about the currents that raged around him.

  Duet

  Owen was out walking the walls. It was too early in the day for there to be many people out there yet. He liked it that way. As he walked he dodged the human vomit and the canine faeces, grateful only that it wasn't the other way around. Then he stopped opposite the warehouse and stared. He sometimes thought John imagined that shaping words into structures was easy. Because you didn't have to frame them and focus them, John seemed to think they were merely given. Perhaps they were; it wasn't as though Owen had ever made any up. He found them in dictionaries, in poems, on other people's lips. But he couldn't simply write them down like that, could he? He had to place them in their constellations, or they had no significance.

  He hadn't been expecting this filming business, but he had started it off hadn't he? And they had always had an agreement between them: wherever it takes us, that's where we go. It had usually been the other way around, with Owen pushing John further than he might have wanted to travel. Now their roles had been switched. He couldn't simply walk away, though that was very much what he would have preferred to do. He stared down at the canal. They had filmed its surface as though it were Deva, the mighty river, the local home of the goddess. It wasn't, of course, but the tight focus shot didn't let you know that. All it told you was that here was enough water for you to drown in. Enough mystery to make a play out of He turned back. John had told him that today could be the last session with him sitting in front of the lens. He had also told him it might be a little different. Owen had a feeling that the change would not necessarily be a pleasant one.

  When he arrived back he was surprised to see not one but two chairs set before the window.

  'Someone else is joining us,' John said, fiddling with his camera. 'I'll introduce you when we start filming. '

  Owen was already sitting in the chair when the doorbell rang.

  He had thought about it. It would be Sylvie, wouldn't it? His memory would be indicted for going absent without official leave by the person it had most affected over the years. But when John came back into the room it was with a man, someone Owen had never seen before. John took the visitor's coat and led him over to the other seat, and only when everything was in place, and the camera was once more running, did he speak to Owen.

  'Owen, the man sitting next to you is ... '

  'I'd prefer to introduce myself, if you don't mind.' John nodded, to indicate he should go ahead. 'Mr Treadle, my name is Patrick Gregory.' He waited a moment for that news to sink in, then continued. 'Alex Gregory's father' At this point Owen's eyes shifted from the man sitting beside him to John Tamworth's face. He had underestimated John. He'd always told Sylvie that his colleague's fatal weakness was a lack of ruthlessness at the sticking-point. If that had been true before, it didn't seem to be so any more.

  Everything was in focus now. Anything once soft in outline had hardened. Patrick Gregory had opened the black notebook he was holding.

  'Six months ago you made a film with my daughter; including a scene of such violence that she never got over it. This diary of hers makes it clear that this one scene changed her life for ever Leading in fact to her death. I'd like to read you some of the extracts.' And Patrick started reading out Alex's words. He didn't need to date
them, because the pattern they formed was an unmistakable one of trauma and retreat.

  'I really wish I could talk to Isabelle Huppert about how she coped with the scene in Cimino's Heaven's Gate when the men rape her. How did she cope with that, the humiliation, her legs apart, blood all over her thighs? She looks terrified. But she fights back, and she must have known what was coming. I can't believe she didn't know what was coming. If I'd known what was coming I could have coped too, and in this film I didn't get to fight back. I only got to drown. Was it so important, Owen, to make sure you had my look of terror, fresh from the factory, to do that to me?'

  Mr Gregory stopped then and stared at Owen, but Owen said nothing, so he started reading out the next passage.

  'That time in Llandudno when we were filming Time's Widow, and you kept saying the take was no good, there wasn't enough grief in my face, then you finally set the shot up and walked across and whispered in my ear, "I'm leaving you, whether you're pregnant or not, pussy." That gave you a wrap, didn't it? What exactly do you think it gave me?

  'You told me all I had to do was trust you. You said if I trusted you then everything would come out right. So I trusted you and everything came out wrong. I can't sleep at night without seeing those boys coming at me in those uniforms you put them in. I can see their eyes, feel their hands on my thighs. They weren't gentle hands, Owen. None of it was made any gentler because it was going down on film, you know. It was real. Was it worth it?'

  Patrick Gregory read out the final passage he had chosen.

  'I won't go to a psychiatrist. I don't believe in that type of medicine. People with their little rational machines poking about inside your head, inside your memory, trying to make adjustments to the mechanism. I've found a way out of this. I'm going away. When I come back I'll be free from everything that Owen Treadle and his world represent. When I come back I'll have the same look of serenity as Lady Pneuma. And for the same reason. '

  He closed the book then, and John moved the camera slowly from his face to Owen's. If Owen had been an actor he could have been a good one, John thought, but he wasn't acting now.