Пит Таунсенд - The Age of Anxiety

Amoment of silence…

While we imagine the fifteen subsequent years during which Walter avoided making music and Floss bred horses in order to avoid making babies.

Can I can bring myself and my family back into the frame again? Rain recovered from losing Walter. She remained friends with him, but it took a long time to forgive Floss; Rain had been interested in horses but—like many teenage girls—had given them up suddenly when boys came along. She continued to work for the BBC as a radio correspondent, but later when she had time off, she often worked at Floss’s stud and sometimes she stayed with me in my apartment in Richmond for fairly long periods.

One evening, the sun going down like a red orb over Heathrow Airport in the distance, we sat at the open window and she sipped a glass of wine. Rain was in silhouette, and something of an aura framed her face, the effect of the sunset behind her. She looked older than usual; my daughter had become a strong-looking and powerfully attractive woman, perhaps not in the Irish sisters’ league, but she had her own special mystique.

“Dad,” she said suddenly, her eyes moist. “You know I don’t hate Siobhan.”

I didn’t really know what to reply. Before I could think of something she continued.

“I don’t hate Floss. I don’t hate Selena and I don’t hate you or Mum.”

“I never thought for a moment that you did.”

“I think you probably did, Dad.” And she was right of course. She continued: “I did dream I would marry Walter, and when he married Siobhan I did hate her for a while. But she has been a great friend to me, and to Mum.”

“That’s good to hear,” I said, sorry that was all I could come up with.

“When Siobhan went back to Ireland and Selena jumped in I fucking hated her too, for a while. God, Walter seemed such a twat, sitting in Dingwalls waiting for women to throw themselves at him. When Floss beat Selena to the punch what really hurt was that, once again, Walter had not sensed that I was there waiting, and always would be.”

“You are like a sister to him.”

“We once kissed, Dad,” she protested. “I remember telling you about it. We were still young, but we kissed for two hours, tongues down each other’s throats. I was in ecstasy. I would have made love to him. He just stopped. It was as though we were playing a game of Monopoly together and he got bored and folded up the board. A few minutes later he was playing his harmonica with his head in that huge plastic bucket that he used to make himself sound louder.”

“Rain, you lived with me, and with Harry and Sally, we were a family, you were like brother and sister. He was blind to that part of you. You will find a man, Rain; you just have to let Walter go.”

“I have let him go.” She nodded her head with certainty. “That’s what I’m saying. I’ve let all the men go. And I don’t hate any of them anymore. Men or women. I especially don’t hate Siobhan. She’s been great to me, and great for me. Do you understand what I’m saying, Dad?”

To be perfectly honest I had no idea what she was talking about. Was she trying to tell me she had fallen in love with Siobhan?

Rain occasionally went to visit her old boss in Waterford for what I took to be consultancy sessions and I had begun to wonder if they were lovers.

I felt quite worldly about all this. I had arrived at a place where I was unruffled, serene, and even rather proud of whatever Rain may have done with her sex life.

So my pride was pricked, and I was caught unaware, and felt a little foolish too, when a few days after our talk in my apartment, I heard from Selena that Rain’s trips to Waterford were not only to spend time with Siobhan, but also to visit her mother, Pamela, who I had been told lived in a convent somewhere in County Wexford.

You will remember that my own affliction, my aberration, my visions, had been seeing what I believed might be the faces of frightening screaming heads in the grain of the walnut headboard of the old French bed, the one Pamela and I had bought a short time before she despaired of me and left me. It was Rain, trained researcher and qualified historian, who had gone out of her way to find out something strange about the journey of the bed itself. What she unearthed helped me to feel that I had not been entirely mad about the visions that I felt emanated from the old bed.

Its provenance was the castle city of Béziers in the south of France; the bedhead had been carved from a massive wooden gate to the city. Béziers had been the home of the gentle Cathars of the Languedoc region, who had refused to convert to Catholicism and brought down the ire of Pope Innocent III in the thirteenth century.

“Dad.” Rain caught my wandering attention. “That bed from Béziers. You know I tried to convince Mum, despite my journalistic skepticism, that your nightmarish response to it had not been caused by drug abuse alone, but also by some intuitive facility you have. You remember, Dad, that the Pope’s military commander, Simon de Montfort, slaughtered twenty thousand occupants of Béziers. Mum is a Catholic. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. At first she thought I was trying to trawl up the bloody history of the Catholic Church to try to break her faith and her vows. When she realized that I was just trying to generate a truce between my mum and dad, she understood.”

It was good to spend time with Rain and feel closer to her again. She’d been away a long time, on and off.

A few months later Rain arranged for me to go to Ireland. I was to visit Siobhan and hoped to reconnect with Pamela.

The trip to Waterford is an easy one when you fly from Heathrow to Dublin, and then take a car down the motorway. You don’t see much of the sea on the way south, so the arrival in Duncannon is especially uplifting. The sea, the sky, Waterford across the estuary. Rain had arranged for Pamela and me to meet at a little café that overlooked the small fishing port at Duncannon.

I looked at the redhead, wanting to see her as the amazing ginger Wonderwoman I had once known. What I saw was a mother, a concerned and slightly shamefaced one at that. But it was me who went first. I played my hand, which was not a good one. No kings, no queens, no jacks, or aces. Just numbers.

“Did I fuck things up for Rain?”

Pamela shook her head, but I could see she didn’t feel entirely happy.

“You know I did nearly enter the convent, I was almost a nun.” She looked at me as though waiting for me to laugh. “Oh, I know it sounds mad. But it was partly my lust that drove me to it. I’m a Catholic. It was OK making love to you, but you weren’t enough. I’m sorry, Louis. You were my mistake. Rain was our mutual triumph, but I couldn’t stay with you. Not after…” She didn’t complete the sentence.

“What did I do wrong, Pam?” I sounded pathetic.

“If you don’t know now you never will, Louis. Let’s just move on, can we? It’s been torture for Rain having to lie to you, to keep my life here secret.”

Pamela wouldn’t tell me where she was living. Clearly she didn’t want to see me regularly. But despite the discomfort we both felt, we were at least friends again. Rain was delighted of course. She only knew she had gone a long way toward repairing things between her parents; she knew nothing about what had really separated us. Neither did I. Not then.

Rain then took me to visit Siobhan in her cottage. Rain had stayed with Siobhan maybe once or twice by that time. Whatever enmity had built up when Siobhan had married Rain’s childhood crush seemed to have evaporated.

It was a charming house. The two ground-floor rooms had been knocked together to make one large space that included the small kitchen at the back on one side of the fireplace. Siobhan had transformed the room into a generous space with two large and comfortable sofas strewn with cushions, and a thick rug on the stone-slab floor that somehow always felt warm. A huge inglenook fireplace had been tacked onto the back of the house when a new staircase to the upper floor had been constructed along the back wall. The house had originally been a farmworker’s cottage, one of three. The other two were closer together and had been combined and converted into a home by Siobhan and Selena’s parents, when times had been better, before Selena was born. Siobhan’s house still looked quite plain from the outside. The windows were modern-looking, of metal and double-paned to provide some resistance to the winter wind from the Irish Sea less than a mile off and which was visible from her bedroom. The roof was of unpleasant and rather cheap tiles. But Siobhan had coaxed flowers to bloom around the front of the house, partly by planting a high protective hedge of laurel. Some of the plants she had kept in pots, moving them in winter into a basic glass greenhouse at the back of the house. Now most of what she had planted had grown strong and vigorous and had been transplanted into the beds.