by Jessica Fox
“You do yoga - it’s the same muscles.” Eve held out her hand and I reluctantly took it. “Trust me.”
*
I stood, dripping wet, in the hall at the top of the stairs, triumphant. I had done it. Today I had been on a great adventure and satisfied a lifelong romantic ambition – riding through the mist-covered hills bareback on a white horse with the ocean roaring close by. Only in those dreams I had been wearing a cape, not fishnets and a mini-dress.
Eve had been an excellent teacher, walking the horse slowly as I felt its muscular body beneath me. Rain poured down, making it hard to see and I had struggled to gain balance at first, tipping from one side to the other. As Eve began to pick up the pace, I had clung to the horse terrified, but slowly began to feel a rhythm. My own muscles quickly synced with the slightest shifts in the horse and, between gulps of fear, I began to feel almost powerful. It was, again, the magic of the festival. Between dishes and authors and chaos, incredible moments bloomed. They had become more plentiful thanks to Eve’s fearlessness and sense of fun.
“See you later, losers.” Eve bounded up the stairs for a bath. Standing alone in the hall, I could hear the water start to rush through the pipes, before the sound of approaching footsteps made me turn.
A man with dark hair, bearing a suitcase and a bewildered expression, appeared at the top of the stairs. He cleared his throat awkwardly.
“Oh, are you just arriving?” I said, aware that my dripping appearance was more appropriate for a rain-soaked lady of the night than the host of a literary festival.
“Yes, hi.” He spoke with a soft English accent, but there was a twinge of American about him. “I’m Thomas, Eve’s friend. Well, not friend exactly.”
“Enemy?”
Thomas blinked at me. I was in complete festival mode and forgot that to someone who had just arrived, we all probably seemed raving mad. “She’s just in the bath, but come in,” I said, finding my manners, and led Thomas into the sitting room. It was empty. All the authors were either hosting events or at them. Thomas’s eyes grew wide, looking from the marble fireplace to the high ornate ceiling, then finally resting on the piano.
“Do you play?” I asked hopefully.
“A little.” Thomas smiled and dropped his bags. He sat on the piano stool. “You said Eve was in the bath?”
“I think so.”
At this, Thomas’s fingers hit the keys with confident determination and he started playing “Rule Britannia”. The cheery sound echoed through the house and up the stairs.
“Thomas! You foul wretch!” Eve’s voice exploded from the upstairs bathroom and Thomas’s smile widened as we heard her splashing in protest.
Chapter 15
“It is quite a three pipe problem.” – Arthur Conan Doyle, THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE: Mystery section, across from the spiral staircase.
When the clock struck midnight there was a lull in conversation. Around the long table, its cloth stained with food and wine, a handful of authors sat, smoking and sipping the last of the wine in a rare silence. The light was low and moody as the candles, now down to their last inches, were dwindling. Everyone was drooping, leaning at augmented angles, fighting off the growing urge to head to bed.
I looked around the room in a drowsy haze. We were having a pipe party. It began when Euan saw a Sherlock Holmes pipe sticking out of my pocket – I had forgotten to leave it on my desk. I would often pretend to puff it while writing – a sensible trick to put me in a thoughtful mood, but more to keep me from eating copious amounts as I worked through my screenplays. Euan proceeded to take out two pipes of his own. Thomas brought a pipe and the room suddenly overflowed with pipes and pipe appreciation.
I had never actually smoked mine, its sole use being as an adult pacifier. But now burnt-vanilla tobacco filled the bowl, and, having puffed away half the night, my throat felt like a charred house. My mind buzzed and was as light as a hot-air balloon.
At the far end of the table sat Eve, pipe in hand, puffing away with grim determination, eyes slanted, looking questioningly at Peter, the author across from her. Peter, a tall, thin, kind man, in his early forties, wrote for one of the major Scottish papers and had recently had a work of short fiction published. He had been one of the few healthy specimens during the festival, abstaining from drink, but now, under Eve’s glare, he obediently picked up a rouge pipe and took a great puff.
Next to Peter sat a couple, her tall, him short, both in black. They were engrossed in a deep, drunken conversation. I peered at the open programme in front of me. Two small square photos of them stared back with a heading below that read “The History of Keys”. Laura, to my left, leaned over to me, bumping heads.
“Ow.” I tried to move away but she grabbed my arm, pulling me close.
“I heard she’s a man.”
I rubbed my head. “Who? Her?”
I looked back to the woman in black. Laura nodded.
Next to Laura sat two other authors, both men in their mid-fifties. They had been arguing about the state of the Middle East and their conversation, heated (especially for this hour of the night) had risen and fallen in volume; they now sat, slumped, in silence. I leafed through the programme to find out who exactly they were. My American ignorance of the UK’s literary elite embarrassed me, but during the festival my cluelessness had been mistaken for confidence. I hadn’t been intimidated by, nor had I pandered to the intellectual giants and I had treated everyone equally, not out of some enlightened state of being – I’d be the first to get tongue-tied – but simply because I had no idea who they were. Euan had suggested I study the programme before the festival began, but I was enjoying my unexpected autonomy.
As my eyes scanned the smoke-filled room, I noticed Euan was missing. He was the only one of our gang who was unaccounted for besides Thomas, who had gone up to sleep.
I quietly slipped out of the sitting room into the dark hall. Fresh air. My eyes slowly adjusted and I took a deep breath. It was significantly cooler out here and I stretched my bare arms out, welcoming the chill. In the soft silence, I could hear Euan’s voice echoing from the kitchen. I couldn’t remember when I had seen him last, and I approached the door, listening to see if I could hear who he was talking to.
“He’s always been like that.”
I turned to see Laura sitting behind me on the steps leading upstairs. In her hands was a full bottle of wine, and as I stared at it, she followed my gaze.
“If I don’t guard it,” she smiled, “those bastards will drink it all.”
Euan’s voice grew louder. Laura looked up, as if her ears too were perked.
“For as long as I’ve known Euan, women have adored him,” she said, as she took a sip from the bottle, before offering it to me. I shook my head, and she continued, “I’ll never forget one year, on Valentine’s Day, when we were at Tesco and he had to buy four different Valentine’s Day cards.”
I didn’t want to hear this.
“One for this girl he was sort of seeing,” she went on, “one for his ex, well, sort of ex, one for this French girl. It was hilarious.” Laura took another swig from her bottle and searched my expression. “Don’t get me wrong, he’s the best man I know. You see, he’s too nice. He didn’t want to hurt their feelings.”
Laura voice faded out and my ears pulsed. All the humiliation I had suffered while with Grant flooded back: the feelings of being worthless and shrinking inside started tumbling through my nervous system again. My heart suddenly went out to those women whom Euan had juggled on Valentine’s Day. I had no right to be angry and I was. I was furious. I needed to calm down. It was none of my business what Euan did or didn’t do. I was just a guest here, nothing more. I needed to breathe, to come back into this moment, to find a distraction.
“Laura, we’re going to do a talent show.” I brightened as if charm alone could sell the idea.
She didn’t look enthused.
“It will be fun, I promise.”
“You’re so American,”
she said as she followed me back into the siitting room, clutching the wine bottle under her arm.
Eve stared at the piece of paper before her. There was a line down the centre and one side read “Name” and the other “Talent”. She blew smoke on it from her pipe, which was, I was impressed to see, still lit.
“I’m not having any part of this. I don’t perform.”
“Why?”
“I’m happy to say, I’m not talented.”
I wasn’t swayed. “The ‘key’ couple are listing obscure trivia, Laura is singing” – Eve shot Laura a “you must be kidding” glance which I pretended not to see – “and Peter is tap-dancing while hammering a nail up his nose.”
This impressed Eve. “What about those guys?”
“Those guys” – I pointed to the Middle East lecturers – “are telling jokes. It would be weird if you didn’t do something.”
Eve thought for a second. “I’ll host.”
The night went off with a bang. What had begun as a desperate attempt to distract myself grew into the festival’s first fringe event. By 1am a large crowd had gathered upstairs and the sitting room was suddenly alive again. Thanks to Eve’s hosting skills, everyone was enjoying themselves. Peter, true to his word, hammered a nail up his nose while tap-dancing and unanimously won the heart of the audience. The judges, three intoxicated festival patrons who were scooped off the street on their way home from the pub, to everyone’s surprise, picked the Middle East lecturers as the winners, perhaps impressed after a day of arguing that they possessed a sense of humour at all. The prize given at the end was Ferrero Rocher chocolates that Eve had super-glued into a massive golden pyramid. In what turned out to be an ironic gesture of good will, the winners passed the pyramid around to be shared, not knowing that it was glued together, and watched in horror as everyone clawed unsuccessfully to get their piece of it.
*
“Let’s leave it for tomorrow. I’ll clean up in the morning.” I slouched even deeper into my chair, debating whether climbing the stairs to bed was too much of an effort at this point. It was 2am. Eve, Laura and I sat relaxing in the now empty sitting room. Somewhere between a second wind and pure exhaustion, I scanned the post-talent-show carnage: cups, wrappers, plates, jackets.
Euan, to my surprise, emerged holding juggling clubs and lighter fluid. “I missed it, didn’t I?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Never too late.”
Laura started to applaud. Eve leaned forward and tried to prise some chocolate from the pyramid, which had been abandoned in the middle of the table.
Euan walked over to me, his face wearing signs of emotional exhaustion. “I didn’t want to do this while everyone was here.” I looked away, feeling for the first time the need to guard myself around him.
He stepped back and lit the clubs. They burst into bright flames, and Euan juggled three, easily and rhythmically. I blinked slowly as if my eyelids were shutters, trying to take a snapshot of this moment for my memory. I was in a beautiful Georgian sitting room in a remote part of Scotland, having just hosted some of the brightest minds in the UK, with a fire-juggler in front of me, who I couldn’t take my eyes off.
Chapter 16
“Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.” – Dylan Thomas, UNDER MILK WOOD: Poetry section, right of the fireplace, under T.
Finally I found the Folklore/Mythology section. It was high up on a shelf, tucked away across from Travel and next to Foreign Language. Typically in bookshops, if the section was hidden away in the little corners of bookshelf obscurity, there was a reason.
I peered up to see a nearly empty shelf, with a volume of Greek mythology, Joseph Campbell’s series, The Masks of God, and golden flecks of dust swirling in the space between. My nerdy need to surround myself with a familiar fortress of tomes on “the call to adventure” and “symbolism of the sun gods” would not be satiated by this shelf. Bookless, I felt oddly exposed and vulnerable.
To my surprise, I glanced down to see the Grizzly Bear standing in front of me, stroking his full black beard. He eyed me with intense curiosity, looking amused.
I flushed, annoyed. My rare solitary afternoon had been full of intrusions like this one. There was nowhere to hide during the festival. Every nook and cranny of the house and shop was a hub of activity. Silence was an even rarer commodity than space. The house was constantly humming, a beehive whose buzz of chatter droned on till the wee hours of the morning. I had been in Wigtown now for over two weeks with hardly a moment alone. It had been a welcome change from my tower of isolation in LA, but still, it was a change, and in that moment I just wanted to be by myself.
“Have you found some treasure?” his deep voice rumbled.
“Not yet.”
He remained silent. I hated it when people did that. His lack of a silver tongue was not the soft quiet between two friends, but the mute expectation of an audience member, waiting to see what his entertainment would do or say. I could have ignored him, but the awkwardness compelled me to babble uncontrollably.
“It’s the anticipation of finding treasure, not the having it, which is the thrill for me,” I said pretentiously. My mouth kept on moving, despite being horrified that I had said something so trite aloud. “Dusty books waiting to be discovered, you know, and that kind of thing.” Still, the Grizzly just stared, so I continued. “I had always thought that was what the Holy Grail was all about.”
The Grizzly shifted. He seemed interested. “The Holy Grail?”
I could tell his big brain, filled with knowledge and books and things not yet written, had finally found something with which to entertain itself. He waited, wanting me to say more, but I had always felt self-conscious talking about mythology. I was not Joseph Campbell, nor Sir Frazier, and my arms were empty, with no books to use as shields.
“It occurred to me,” I continued tentatively, “that the Holy Grail is not the treasure but the dream, like the carrot before the horse. It’s the impulse that gets you off the couch and propels your journey. The problem arises when you don’t allow your dream to change. In that case, if you seek it, hopefully you won’t find it.”
“Why?”
“Well, that would be a mid-life crisis, wouldn’t it? You finally get what you want, but didn’t realise that the journey to getting it has informed who you are, so the grail you once dreamed about, that was supposed to bring perfect happiness – whether a car, house with a white picket fence or dream job – is, most likely, not going to make the current you feel fulfilled.”
The Grizzly Bear’s mouth twitched. It could have been a smile but it extinguished quickly. “I should be leaving.”
Leaving? I looked at him like a leaf falling in August, an unwanted harbinger that autumn was on its way and things were ebbing and fading away. All of a sudden I didn’t want this conversation to end. I didn’t want any of it to end. Although craving some solitude, tired and overworked, I wanted to drag my feet in the sand, to slow time down, to make it last longer.
The Grizzly Bear stretched past me, his powerful arms easily reaching the first Joseph Campbell book high on the shelf.
“So this is your Mr. Campbell?” His bushy eyebrows were raised, as he held The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology in his paws.
I could feel my heart growing for the Grizzly Bear. “It’s very good.”
His thick fingers took out a slip from the front cover. The series was a first edition, £235 for each book.
“On your recommendation, I’ll take it. ” He looked at me, closing the book. “It had better be good.”
I lingered at the bottom of the stairs, looking through the doorway as the Grizzly Bear made his way to the front of the shop. I could hear t
he distant murmur of the “key” lecture, given by the couple from the pipe party, echo from the main tent and I watched the shuffle of more customers, aglow with the late-afternoon light, pouring in.
Euan looked up from the counter, sipping on a glass of champagne. The Grizzly Bear dropped his luggage down with a large thud and slid the Campbell volumes onto the counter. “I’m getting these because of the American.”
Euan smiled. “She’s bossy, isn’t she?”
The Grizzly Bear shook his furry head. “She’s rare.”
Euan, with his angelic halo of ginger curls, glanced over at me.
*
The sitting room was a chorus of conversation. This Saturday was the pinnacle of the festival, the last full day and traditionally the most decadent, a literary mardi gras. Happy writers, agents and speakers occupied every chair and leaned against the walls, their clinking glasses echoing off the large windows and high ceilings. I should have been attending to the litter of empty teacups and plates, but instead I sat down in the closest empty chair and grabbed a half-full glass of wine. Glimpsing the end of my adventure had drained me of the will to be helpful.
Suddenly a hand landed on my shoulder and a bathing suit fell into my lap. Eve stood next to me. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. We’re going swimming.”
In my mind, everyone has their own personal super-hero’s ability, and this was Eve’s. She knew exactly when and what to say to motivate people and get them out of the labyrinth of their own thoughts.
In the hall, Laura emerged from the kitchen, holding a refreshed glass of wine. “Swimming?” she said, eyeing the bathing suit in my arms, “Excellent.”
“Swimming?” Euan clambered up the lower stairs, two at a time, with the familiarity of someone who had done this too many times to count. Euan’s house these past ten days, from his kitchen to his sitting room, had been completely taken over for the festival. I searched his face for strain but saw none. He, in his typical generous way, looked quite at ease sharing so much without ever asking anything in return. “Let’s go.” He reached the top landing just in time to miss a playful swipe from Eve.