Soliloquy for Pan

by Beech, Mark

  “I never knew him when he was alive, not really. I was too young. So I can only know him like this; know him through what others remember.” Peter made a gesture towards me. “So with each story I see another facet.” When Peter glanced across the table for a second I saw the child in him looking back, hesitating as if that last word sounded wrong to him.

  “Facet” did seem such a fanciful word for a man who wanted to be seen as being unrefined. It was another element that didn’t ring true. That is not to say he was ever ignorant. He’d loved books when he was younger and his vocabulary had always been ahead of most boys his age. He’d been a dreamer and like many bright children when institutionally restrained or neglected they seek stimuli in other, usually prohibited ways. I didn’t know who his latest peers were but he’d become accustomed to pretending to be a Philistine. Perhaps it was camouflage helping him to blend into the world of men. There was something unconvincing about his bravado, as if he might at any moment give the game away.

  “School wasn’t for me. Animals; I always knew they would be my future. I just wanted to get out there in the Fields and get my hands dirty. I made some friends in farms you see.” He had a wistful smile on his face I found hard to fathom.

  As far as I could glean, he’d started out as a farmhand and after serving time in some kind of veterinary apprenticeship, took up the duties of an inspector of livestock or some such. He had at times even worked in zoos. It wasn’t clear if he was still in that line of work, saying that he didn’t want to bore me with the details. At any rate, he was on leave, or taking a break for a while.

  “I like that work, it allows me to witness the whole gamut; from birth to death. I feel like I’ve played some part in the cycle. I’ve seen the cage from both sides, you could say.”

  Thankfully it didn’t seem to matter too much if I followed what he said that closely. And to think I’d been expecting to be interrogated only to find myself as his confidant.

  “Want another? Do we have time?” He gestured at the bar behind me. I only nodded my approval, having become so accustomed to silent assent that evening. He returned promptly with a drink in each hand and a distant look in his eyes.

  “You know I’ve not come to talk about me but to ask you about him.” I felt that I was suddenly smiling across a minefield. To my relief he continued without expecting any response.

  “My father didn’t leave much; books of course and a diary that my mother gave me to read only last year, yet nothing else. I’ve read the diary. It wasn’t that bad. I mean, I can see why some might think my father had lost his marbles. The diary follows his obsession... I think you knew about it; his interest in mythology. When he had his breakdown these things... they say these ideas fuelled his confusion. Anyhow, I don’t expect you to remember everything Mr Hurst but in the end he believed he’d travelled to far-flung places and brought something back with him... a treasure... an artefact.” The lad’s astute observations were further proof that he was hiding his true sensibilities. I realise now that my suspicions didn’t go far enough.

  “Well yes in the end I think your father had reached the point where he could no longer distinguish between actual events and his... well, his fantasies, let’s say. His sense of his own life became muddled. He began to reinvent his past, to select and idealise aspects of it. He started to think that he was at the centre of a plot... to believe he was being persecuted. I suppose you could call it a perverse sort of wish-fulfilment... compensating for... I’m sorry. It’s been so long since I last spoke about it... about your father.” I realised I’d been gushing. I tried to continue tactfully.

  “Though he did travel, I’m sure, before he met your mother, when he was younger. He’d seen something of the world in the armed forces and again in a stint with the merchant navy, I believe. That was long before I knew him though. I’m convinced that the memories of his travels were the basis of some of his delusions later... sorry, there I go again.”

  “No, please go on.” Peter offered me a smoke but I declined. I recall that he was so attentive that he placed a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it.

  “As for the artefact you mention, yes I recall something of the sort but it was an invention of his, I’m sure. An early warning sign that no one took heed of. We all just thought it was another of his eccentricities until it was too late. I seem to recall that he’d read about the thing in an article and talked about reconstructing it, although I don’t think I ever saw it let alone held it. I don’t know. I doubt that it actually existed. I should have taken more of an interest I know, yet by then I think I’d started to subconsciously distant myself. Tension was in the air. He’d become quite abusive by then, verbally I mean. It was a long time ago, Peter, you have to understand. And these things happened in very fraught times. It drove us all a bit crazy. Sorry but it did.” It was then that I noticed the glazed, defeated expression in the lad’s eyes and realised he may have already drank far more than I first thought.

  “So the photographs he had were just hoaxes, then.” He ran his fingers through the black fleece of his hair, suddenly irritated and slurring his words. He looked everywhere but at me, finally lighting his cigarette.

  “Photographs? I don’t know. Photographs of what?” I found myself placing my glass on the table between us.

  “Of the artefact... the figurine,” His spirits lifted at my curiosity. “Well that’s what it looks like to me but he describes it as a reed-pipe in his diary, a kind of flute I mean. I suppose it could be both. Sometimes in his diary he describes it as a restoration project. He had a special name for it; a name taken from Greek mythology, you must remember, you read his diary too; he called it the syrinx. He talked about it as his great discovery.”

  It came rushing back to me. I could picture his father in a series of photographs presenting something to the camera, something indistinct in his hands. I had almost entirely forgotten he had even given one of the photographs to me as a keepsake during his last days. The photograph had been so indicative of his decline that I’d pushed it to the back of my mind. Yet I always knew I had the photograph tucked away inside a book, carefully misplaced.

  “Yes of course, how could I have forgotten?” I lied. I had gotten rid of so many reminders of the friendship I’d had with Lampton, yet for some reason I’d allowed that photograph to survive. The other things I’d associated with him had become too painful to retain; books, essays, newspaper clippings, birthday gifts, were all discarded, returned to his widow or donated to the local charity shop. There were things though that could not be so easily disowned, memories that he occupied as if some particle of him survived and lived on through me. Was that what his son was doing; hunting for these vestigial traces while they existed, before they were completely eroded or overwritten? Part of me wanted to demand that he let the memory of his father die too.

  “Yes of course,” I said, “I can dig it up from somewhere but these things are never what you imagine them to be. It’s just a fuzzy picture of your father... but holding a figurine, or a flute? I don’t know about that. If it was anything at all then it was just a stone or piece of bark or something along those lines. He collected all manner of curios after all. Junk some would say. Yet I do recall there was an object that was of particular interest to him. Your father insisted it was something significant that he’d found but that’s when he was ill.” His gaze told me I was touching a raw nerve again so I changed tack. I wanted to appease him yet also casually discourage him from reading too much into it.

  “You can of course see for yourself when you visit, tomorrow perhaps, in the evening? A bite to eat; my wife Dorothy’s a fine cook. And I’ll find that picture for you.” His expression brightened. “That’s fine then.” I said, “Let’s say six o’clock.”

  2.

  In my search the next day I knew I’d be unearthing more than the photograph. God I remembered the days and weeks after his death how I tried to trace Lampton’s last movements. What had I expected to achiev
e? I could no longer comprehend the state of mind I must have been in back then; compelled to follow some kind of desperate pilgrimage. I’d take the No.43, that old green trolleybus he loved so much, and sit wondering what he’d thought that final day, trundling along avenues lined with frosty hedgerows. The frantic pace of my thoughts at times gave way to moments of euphoria. That had become my ritual. After half a dozen trips the ‘bus driver no longer looked puzzled, although he gave the same complaint of how he wasn’t really meant to stop there any more on that stretch of road and didn’t I know I’d have to return home on foot!

  On one occasion, perhaps the third or fourth, the driver asked, “Not find it yet?”

  “Find what?” I replied defensively.

  “Whatever it is you’ve been looking for?” He’d quipped as he pulled up and nodded at the doorway of the bus. As I stepped down the driver casually remarked, “Of course you know that fella was found down there, in the canal I mean? Lived there like an animal in his last days. Done himself in they reckon. Not that long ago. You must have heard about it. It was in all the papers. Well, the local one.”

  I’d only nodded and smiled in response. Had I smiled to spare the driver from hearing the whole tragic story, or to conceal my fear that I was losing my senses? At any rate I didn’t want to admit to any association with the sorry tale. In those days things like that were still shocking and affected communities for years to come, ours had been no different; people took news of the suicide badly. Back then they thought of it as a curse, believing that it tainted the reputation of a place or people, even contaminating them with bad luck. Of course for youths the canal became a place with a particular kind of morbid allure. Once the story faded from the local press the name remained. Kids still called it Lampton’s Canal or Lampton’s Bridge or even Lampton’s Well, although there was no well there and never had been.

  It had been a public path once that had fallen into disuse after the war. A lonely spot encompassed by irregular copses between which one could spy the ribs of distant fields. How the bridge had survived I don’t know. The train platform it once served was ruined and the track on the embankment above the canal overgrown. I suppose a place that had once been a vital industrial link couldn’t help but have a melancholic atmosphere once abandoned. Yet it was more than that. I recall that the place always seemed to attract detritus; on my visits there I’d stumble across partly identifiable things in my path; rusted machine parts, tools, workman’s boots or gloves or goggles and the like. Things were always finding their way to the surface there. Even on bright days there was an aroma of damp and rotting leaves in the perpetually shaded trail along the canal. What signs of others I’d find on the way, for instance a rope swing on a nearby tree only served to thicken the air of neglect. As the iron bridge loomed into view I’d always feel the same dread in the pit of my stomach. On the path by the canal itself I’d examine the water’s edge and think that perhaps in a moment of communion with the place I would find a trace of Lampton there looking back at me through my own reflection.

  In his diary Lampton repeatedly commented on the place’s qualities of seclusion and unease. It provided all of the necessary conditions for his needs, whatever they were it remained unclear. He remarked on the satisfaction he found in the sense of a world having come to a standstill; the disused stretches of track on the embankment and the silence of the waterway. And if his diary could be believed he’d concealed the labours of his work there, the artefact Peter was so preoccupied with, although I never did locate its hiding place. I realised later, after I’d finally come to my senses, that I had never expected to truly find what I was looking for. But that was then.

  Had I been slowly losing my mind and all the while justifying my actions? Reason is not such a stranger to madness as so many would have us believe. An obsessive plan can easily arise from the compulsive momentum of deranged thoughts, if anything the irrational can enrich Reason, deepening it, fuelling it, providing it with inventive methodologies and vice versa. Plotting then is not necessarily a sign of being compos mentis. In Lampton’s case it took the form of a restless search, a quest you could be tempted to say. That is what Lampton described in his last months, yet only in his diary. If he had confided in me I would have immediately raised the alarm, however I was too late, he’d been swept away by those invisible currents. I still have the notes I made, although I should have gotten rid of them years ago. There’s no excusing the way I’d returned to them, once seeking an answer yet later only to satisfy a morose urge, yet not only that. Lampton’s widow had taken the original diary, and for all I knew at that time had done what she said she would; destroy it without reading a single word. She’d confided in me about the quandary she’d been in; whether to keep the diary as a legacy to her son, as an aid to explain the full story, or to simply burn it without knowing what it said. She’d given it to me to read first in the hope that I might be able to advise her. Yet how could I have told her? Should I have left the diary intact instead of removing and retaining those salient sections? Did I have the right? Why had I kept them; to remember his voice? Or did they have some greater hold over me? In the end I’d suggested she should destroy the diary, advice that she’d obviously disregarded.

  I find it difficult to believe Lampton was capable of having an affair. He just wasn’t that kind of man; even if he’d had the time and inclination I doubted his gifts as a lothario. If there’d been another woman then she was never named in his diary. Nor were there any specific accounts of furtive moments spent with a lover, yet he’d been keeping secrets all the same. He’d thought it necessary to conceal his visits to the secluded canal. It was always as though he was waiting there for someone to show up. Yet in his diaries these visits only culminated in detailed descriptions of perceived phenomena; the observation of strange reflections and currents in the canal’s water, the whisper of the wind through reeds or its low howl under the bridge. He even described how he had tried to translate those sounds into an approximation of human words. He said he had been lured there not by a lover but by portents. In that ordinary wilderness littered with debris he had found signs that led him to an epiphany. Lampton had been watching and listening... waiting for auguries that might herald the return of something or someone. Yet still, no other person was named. His diary however was kept in such a way as if he wanted to invite suspicion, as if this sense of mystery and longing was vital to starting a rumour, no—much more than that; to invoke the myths that obsessed him. He’d left evidence behind because that was all part of his mania; he wanted to leave a trail or invitation for others to follow him and thereby perpetuate the ritual. And in a way he lived on through those whispers. What part the photographs played in this game of seduction remained unclear. Yet the diary documented one thing for certain; the sorry decline of a man. So was it wise to allow his son access to such a thing?

  I’d never shown anyone else the pages I’d removed and the notes I’d made of Lampton’s diary, not even my wife Dorothy. They’d nearly ended up on the fire on numerous occasions. Of course they revealed nothing specifically, not in terms of naming names or detailing an affair for instance yet they inferred something far worse in a way. The missing pages suggested that Lampton was willing to risk everything he had in life; his marriage, his son, his friends... his sanity in pursuit of that secret obsession.

  And how was I supposed to prepare for Peter’s visit? What was I thinking of! Perhaps I thought that by having him on familiar territory I would be able to control him more effectively. I had hoped that under such circumstances, as a guest in my home and in the company of my wife and daughter, he was less likely to ask awkward questions.

  Young Lampton turned up so late we had begun to think he would never show. The meal my wife had taken hours to prepare was ruined but Dorothy’s frustration instantly dissolved into sympathy when Peter arrived soaked to the skin. He stood there in the hallway, the downpour outside half-drowning his apologies until I closed the door. He did seem genuin
ely embarrassed when he told his sorry tale, warming himself by the fire. He was down on his luck and while he’d wanted to give a different impression by buying me drinks the previous evening, he had been unable to pay his bill at the Mayview and agreed to do menial jobs as recompense at the last minute, hence his lateness. Dorothy rescued some of the vegetables and served him a fry-up with corned beef. From my armchair in the corner I pretended not to see how he wolfed down the meal as if he’d not eaten in days. I suspected that he was still wearing the same shirt from the day before, as having just admitted he’d checked-out from the B&B I noticed he had no luggage, only a satchel with hardly anything in it. I made a mental note for later and while we were settling in front of the fire, Dorothy making small talk to put Peter at his ease, I thought it was time to spring a few questions on him that had started to bother me.