Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  It was impossible for anyone but a fairy to keep casting spells without running the risk of being thought something of a fraud, even by her friends, and it was this criticism Petula most often heard made of her, usually in the form of a bogus compliment pertaining to her longevity. Never failing to project her fear outwards, her critics as scared of her intentions as they were her actions, Petula would home in on the slight and wait patiently for a confession. This torture could continue until the confessor had owned up to the absolute opposite of what they had actually said, no context or occasion too public or embarrassing for Petula to renege on her full pound of flesh, as when it came to shame, she had none to lose. Even talk of entering local politics, on a vaguely green-national-Thatcherite platform, was enough to force councillors to grant her planning permission for a giant solar-panelled bantam-coop, and turn down the Council’s bid to build ten new social houses over a grubby acre of field she insisted was the home of some shrewish vole, or stoat.

  Privately she suffered as never before, or at least believed she did, not remembering all of the past, and knowing nothing of what still lay ahead. Trips to the hairdresser were like watching a natural-history documentary; her overgrown hair sprouting like grass from a neglected pavement, its pruning a reversal of the natural order and way of stopping nature from reclaiming its own, for she felt more dead than alive. Years of failing to enjoy things for their own sake, but for what they could yield, led to a strange philistinism at odds with her patronage of the arts, and a boredom with herself almost as great as her fear of being left in her own company. At times Petula’s eyes would go cult-blank as she repeated her dogmas to others, the impression that she had ceased to listen to herself even as she expected others to, difficult to shake. With no clear direction or idea in dominance, it sometimes seemed to her that her paths had thematically crisscrossed into a dizzying headache of ‘anything-goes’, both in her own sphere and the world at large: kaftan dresses mixing with Barbour jackets, invitations to Crufts with the Q Awards, and rugby at Twickenham with London Fashion Week. Returning to never saying no to anything, and requiring everyone else to say yes, was debilitating, and she fought down colds and a flagging immune system with a cocktail of organic remedies, and when they failed, an arsenal of chemical ones; her war-chest of pills and potions packed into the boot of the Volvo, and splayed over the floor of her bathroom. If she was not hosting ‘home-games’ at The Heights, she did not like to spend any longer there than she could help, its role degenerating into a pit stop on a never-ending nationwide tour. During these pauses for breath, Petula observed the signs of her unravelling with a semi-detached horror akin to floating over an operating table. On hot days, to find something to do, she would produce fuming stews and sweating hams that went straight into one of her vast freezers, as she nervously nibbled cheese and biscuits and chain-smoked, a habit that she had come late to, having picked her fingernails to death. On freezing days culinary logic was turned the other way, and Petula would prepare chickpea tuna salads and sorbets that would be thrown away untouched, her staple in all weathers marshmallows and donuts, gorged on until the sink was clogged full of sick.

  Sleep, an activity she had never had much interest in, could no longer be taken for granted simply because she was tired. In the finest traditions of the uncanny, three o’clock in the morning was her witching hour. Whether Petula had gone to bed one or six hours before made no difference, for three was where her day always started, and barring a possible eclipse between the hours of seven and eight, consciousness was her lot from there on in. What she was conscious of was primarily a vision of the world without eyes, its goodness all dug out, that lay beside her like an unanswerable question; her experiences, friends and lovers all sucked into the abyssal throat of the phantom she shared her bed with. If she tried to define a memory, scent or song, it would totter and blur, vanishing beyond her grasp, its disappearance a punishment for daring to set herself against life by absorbing its rewards and ignoring its price: that all counterfeit purchases will be returned in the end with interest.

  She was, of course, getting older; that was all, she sometimes hoped, it was or could be. Petula would repeat this homily as daylight reassuringly brightened the deathly gloom of her bedroom, nature’s circuitry kicking into life with the loud hawking of crows and Jazzy’s hacking cough. With characteristic tenacity Petula kept plying the common-sense solution to her wobbling secret life of night-doubts and day-dread, throwing half an hour with the Two Ronnies and a packet of custard creams at the problem; the novels of Dan Brown and Ben Elton providing backup, the lower the artistic merit of her comfort aides, the greater the safety on offer. Towering above all of these was the level-headed constancy of Broadcasting House, its audio blanket covering every room, Petula’s mind protected from the accusatory emptiness of silence so long as she could hear the received pronunciation of Radio Four blaring from all six of her radios.

  For days she would survive in this way until it was time to go again – to host another function or attend another party, to keep going as only she could, as this was no less than what her sanity required of her. There was no other dynamic that could force Petula to accept and compromise with situations and concepts not of her own making, or rescue her from her bleak imaginings, than the social whirl that was gradually killing her. Only public life, played out to the painful utmost, limited and restricted her to the real, keeping the hour of three o’clock hidden in that gloaming corner of the psyche it belonged to, while to the world she continued as tiringly and (nearly as) triumphantly as before.

  Encouragement was not hard to come by, and there were still enough devotees cheering her on, who saw her as their leader, enabling Petula to make minding their business her job. With the omnipresence of a writer of the future who only gave interviews and didn’t write books, her flower-arranging ‘firm’ a pretext to enter and organise anything from corporate events to weddings, Petula spread her advice like fertiliser, nowhere safe from its energy and spite. And for those few who dared escape her there were always her famous rages to look forward to; over the phone to local tradesmen, at the openings of gastro-pubs she had not been invited to, and down the long thin corridors of The Heights on her own and drunk out of her mind, raging at still not having got anywhere in life, her achievements as mystifying as the questions asked by the silence she wished to drown in valedictory shouts.

  Meanwhile Regan continued to make as little of her life as her mother seemed to have made as much, or at least so she believed, as Petula truly confided in nobody and laughed away her daughter’s suggestions that she might be overdoing it, or resemble anything less than ecstatic good cheer. When asked how she was doing, Regan never made any comment more revealing than ‘Alright,’ sometimes going so far as to offer ‘I’m okay, pretty good,’ which she wasn’t, yet the alternative, to tell the truth, would have left her tongue-tied in search of where to start.

  The decade after Jeremy’s death passed too quickly in her own company, only slowed by her interminable pilgrimages home to fulfil her role as Petula’s loyal dauphine, the weaker their actual intimacy grew the tighter her mother tied their formal knot. With the exception of six weeks in Swaziland teaching Aids orphans how to count, Regan was never away from The Heights for longer than three weeks at a time. Even this separation was reduced by Petula ringing every other day and reading aloud from her engagement diary, Regan’s patience rivalling a nodding dog that could no longer take the benefits of mutual masturbation for granted, their phone calls an exercise in testy submission.

  Regan’s home was an old property of the Montague family in Kensington, the top floor of a dinky mews house decorated with a set of Howard Hodgkins an obsessive gallery owner left her in his will, having overdosed in the ladies’ toilets at Stringfellows after she had refused his rash offer of marriage (Petula had unwisely offered the man some hope on her daughter’s behalf, rectifying her mistake by not making a second and mentioning it to Regan). There was little else in the
flat to show who was living there: one of Jazzy’s creatures, a bow-legged faun with its maker’s sad smile, balanced on its hind legs, tactfully hidden behind a photograph of Regan and Petula taken at Astley and Eager’s civil union on an otherwise bare white mantelpiece. Below it sat a cream hi-fi, surrounded by stacks of intelligent-house CDs, Regan’s living quarters a tidy duplicate of her student dwellings in Cambridge; her personality blended into a pale invisibility, the only objects to fall outside its pallid character the floating particles of dust missed by the cleaner and a pair of carefully tended window boxes that offered a tender reminder that Regan might wish to exceed the terms she had set for herself.

  As Head of Entertainment Law at the William Morris Talent Agency, Regan was in a job she sometimes thought she must have been in training for since the age of six. Here she observed other people’s more interesting affairs, there to draw the line when they could not, amend errors they had not noticed, and facilitate the more exciting progress of those better suited to the limelight, lessons well learnt through her life as Petula’s understudy. Her sweat-less aptitude to cut very quickly through what other people regarded as complicated problems, and the pace at which she could attack administration others found too dense to decode, combined with a cybernetic memory for tedious detail that could outperform any computer, meant her boss’s job was hers in less than three months of enrolling as her assistant; Regan’s lack of a law degree was no impediment to making the niche hers for life, should she wish to travel no further than the top.

  Professional success was not deliriously satisfying, as she would sometimes imply, to excuse not having a husband or children yet, nor a total disappointment, as her friends tended to conclude when they saw her leave a party early looking listless, withdrawn and flat. Regan’s embrace of neutrality was deliberate, at times seeming like the grownup version of her schoolgirl ice-queen persona. But these efforts to dull her sensibilities and exist in unconsidered blankness were fated to fail, despite appearances. Like her mother she could not help but consult her extremes, bobbing about in a state of sometimes painful happiness, or, more often, unhappy pain, her occasional jouissance never vivid enough to count as complete, while her inattentive self-neglect was too refined by habit for her to notice the agony she was in – clues like sleeplessness and inexplicable crying fits easily dismissed as natural phenomena connected to being a woman in a city in the early twenty-first century.

  To remain in attendance to Petula meant maintaining an element of eager infantility – a need to fake interest in her mother’s doings, feign childlike delight at trifles and wide-eyed innocence at reheated gossip – that Regan found increasingly unnatural as her twenties wore on into her thirties. It was only possible to continue with the deception by making a studious effort to pretend to be simpler and less intelligent than she was, in a way her mother could still find charming and becoming, if not entirely believable. As the years began to impersonate eternity, computational responses and disingenuous enthusiasm replaced strained but genuine points of contact and conversation; Petula not minding a bit so long as Regan remained obedient in her outward comportment. For Regan, doubt had become an article of faith, and for all her talk of how wonderful her weekends at The Heights were, it was always a deliverance to leap into her Punto and hit the motorway back to London; solitude as welcome to her as it was repulsive to Petula. Regan could no longer ignore, at these times, how the entire routine was wearing her down, her smile pepped up by Botox treatments so that it could hold even as the rest of her drooped, the world never seeming so large and unexplored, nor her future such a prison of predictability, than when making the journey back up the M1 to Yorkshire.

  Her cry for help came while fighting off a Maltese shipping-magnate friend of her mother’s in the library one evening. Hoping that he could enjoy a post-dessert squeeze with this skinny tease, he discovered Regan staring emptily at a volume of Boswell’s letters to Johnson, his lusty advances tipping her over into a gruesome sobbing mess. Having scratched the hand he lay amorously on her thigh, and fractured the finger he ventured up her skirt, she warned him that she was in the process of having a nervous breakdown and that it would be best if he returned to the dining room for coffee and brandy. This had the effect of assuaging his vanity, and taking pity on Regan he arranged, and paid for, an expensive course of psychiatric help; she rewarding his kindness by showing up for dinner at The Caprice, but withholding the businesslike hand job he’d hoped might be thrown in as an encore.

  The Harley Street sessions themselves produced no breakthroughs, Regan sticking to the public script of her life, much to the psychiatrist’s frustration. The opportunity to talk and think about herself divorced from her life’s strict narrative struck her as a perverse trick she could not see the purpose of, the neat sterile rooms too like her flat for her to feel that she had entered a disinterested atmosphere. After the five weeks and ten sessions had run their course, she refused the advice and option to book any more, diplomatically claiming that she did not have the money for this kind of indulgence as she had some outstanding dental work to pay for.

  But that was not quite that. The not-too-delayed consequence of failing to open up was behaviour altering. Regan suddenly stopped acting altogether and simply accepted her mother as a sullen ox would the branding iron. Gone were her gushing questions, thoughtful appraisals of non-problems, and the mechanical shaking of her head whenever Petula made another insightful contribution to conversation. Meals passed without Regan paying attention to anything much, never giving the impression she would prefer to be somewhere else; rather that she would be happiest if she could be nowhere at all.

  Though Petula noticed this decrease in attentiveness, amounting almost to a polite sulk, if not entry into a post-self, she could not pretend it displeased her. Regan was unaware of it, but her shocking beauty, enhanced by looking extremely pissed-off, was still as big a draw amongst Petula’s male guests as her cheesecakes were to their greedy children. So what if she was not having the time of her life? Regan’s mute petulance amused Petula, while frightening her just enough for her to hold her even more closely in her maternal armlock.

  Intimidatingly remote behaviour, however frostily gorgeous, saw to it that Regan was appreciated at a distance more than enjoyed up close by men of her own age, and by the time she reached thirty, she still had not enjoyed a relationship that had lasted longer than three months. Eligible men would go off her after short and passionate courtships, for the same reasons she would go off them if she beat them to the chase, her brief dalliances a race to see which party could terminate the affair first. It was chilling how the reactions of her suitors mirrored her own, irrespective of the difference in their personalities; their rejection of Regan utterly practical and without spite or passion, her being dumped no more than an expression of rational taste – an exact reflection of how little they meant to her in reverse.

  Regan could not decide whether she was as dull as she found them to be, or as she once overhead an ‘ex’ say, ‘It’s never like you’re in the same room with her, even when she’s sat on your lap.’ Had she contrived to become a missing person in the company of her lovers? As ever, it seemed to her that she was paying for an earlier mistake that had become a first-order tragedy, the kind that neither she nor mankind could do anything about (her mother and the continuing violence in the Middle East were examples of two others), lest she identify its source. In this case she accepted a notion that had haunted her for years: that her rejection of Mingus had permanently undone her so far as becoming a spontaneous and natural sexual actor was concerned. Mingus was so persistent a feature of her emotional memory that she no longer cared whether she was paying undue emphasis to him or not, as even if she was mistaken, the frequency with which she dredged him up from the past, and her excitement at remembering their brief union, bestowed a creation myth on what might otherwise be a causeless penny-dreadful. At its most basic, nothing else had felt as right as the idea of them together; a teena
ge construct that had survived unchallenged into her thirties, her swift glimpse of transcendence defining that time of her life in honeyed sepia – her leggings, the laces of her trainers, the emerging breasts that never grew any bigger, Vanilla Ice, the first Gulf War and Twin Peaks – all signifiers hanging above the trap door she wished to plunge through, waking naked by the lake and impaled on his shivering thinness.

  It was on a morning when she had been considering memory’s buried treasure more than normal, inspired by a dream the night before in which she was a nurse in an institution and Mingus a needy patient, that Bronwyn Robinson, a high-maintenance Australian popstar with highly contrived reputation for being low-maintenance, her bubbly candour and saucy sincerity the work of her publicists, rang the office and brought Regan’s inertia to an end. Robinson wanted to pull out of the Welsh and Northern Irish legs of her tour and fly straight to New York the following week, missing the tedious (for her) party William Morris had arranged for their staff that she was due to sing at, in order to attend a hot and much-talked-about show at The Gagosian by a rising star of the art world, a young Englishman known simply as ‘The Magus’. Regan had been busying herself suppressing a book by Robinson’s embittered ex-manager, Timothy Tinwood, who was himself facing charges related to child-sex scandals dating back to the Seventies, in which he claimed that his protégé was a plastic surgeons’ pin cushion, show-room airhead and selfish martinet, who had stolen his ideas and other people’s songs. Regan’s work in keeping this libellous tract away from the shops had endeared her to the star as a woman of some use, and to show that she was not completely without gratitude for their work on her behalf, Robinson had insisted William Morris be represented on this trip by Regan, who practically alone in the office had never knowingly heard one of Robinson’s songs all the way through, and cared nothing for her renown.