Пит Таунсенд - The Age of Anxiety

Walter couldn’t help but laugh, but he stifled it quickly. There was nothing funny about what had happened, and it seemed like the most extraordinary tragedy for Maud. But of course he knew exactly what Nik had seen in his beautiful, shining Floss. She had illuminated his final days.

“He kept shouting that he had to see my face again,” said Floss. She was starting to cry again. “My beautiful face; the diamond in my tooth.” She put her hand up to the awful bruise that temporarily disfigured her.

“Nik loved you,” said Walter. “It was the way he wanted to go. In love with my beautiful Floss.”

“Maybe he just loved life and didn’t want to die!” Floss shook her hair, reviving at last.

Maud sat quietly beside Andréevich’s lifeless body. She had stopped asking him questions now; she would never get answers. She could hear Floss and Walter whispering in the opposite bed and guessed they were talking about her husband and his deathbed obsession with Floss, but she didn’t care anymore. Soon they would cover his face and wheel him away. What would she do then? Where would she go?

As Walter passed his wife some tea, his eyes dropped for a moment, and she could see he was ashamed of something; she suppressed a laugh.

“I know that Selena will always be in love with you, Walt,” she said. Her hand on his arm seemed enormously significant to him in that instant. “We’ve been friends for a long time. I know her like a sister. For years we pretended to be twins. Selena says we really are twins, in a spiritual sense. You know what she’s like. I forgive her, whatever she’s said or done. I love her, Walt. I want you to love her too.”

Walter turned to face her and wanted to speak, but Floss put her hands to his lips.

“I can guess what she has been saying.” Floss was smiling. “Ronnie really is gay. When we were kids and even teenagers, he couldn’t really decide. But nowadays he does not ‘do’ women. Never, not at all. He flirts, but that’s all.”

Walter shook his head and pretended not to understand, but Floss went on, explaining what had happened.

“I collapsed in the shower in the box.” She meant the horsebox. “I’d fallen from Dragon earlier in the day. I began to lose the baby and there was some blood. Ronnie came to help me and he was so frightened. Neither of us knew what to do.”

Walter’s face was pale; he didn’t know where to look or what to say.

“What did Selena tell you, Walt?” Floss pressed her husband’s arm and squeezed it tightly; she could see suddenly that he was hiding something.

“She told me that you and Ronnie were in the shower together.”

At this Floss almost burst out laughing. “The shower in the box is too small for one person let alone two! If I drop the soap it’s too narrow for me to bend down and pick it up.”

Walter smiled; he’d forgotten that.

“She said you two have been lovers for years,” he whispered. Suddenly he felt ashamed that he could ever have believed it. “That’s why I delayed coming here for so long. I’m so sorry.”

He could not tell her yet that he had been to see Siobhan, nor that he had slept with Selena, but instinctively he felt she knew.

Floss kissed him and smiled.

“Selena really does live in a world full of angels.”

“Like Old Nik,” said Walter.

“But she smokes too much grass, does too much coke, and tends to gild the lily,” corrected Floss, giggling.

At that moment Floss’s parents hurried into the ward. They had been on vacation in some distant place, and had great difficulty getting home. Walter got up, hugged them both, and made way for them to move to Floss’s bedside to kiss their daughter.

Albert and Katharine Spritzler were in their middle sixties. Albert was, I knew, Austrian, a relatively wealthy maxillofacial surgeon on the verge of retirement. He had practiced at the hospital in the past and brought with him a confidence of purpose that perhaps masked his anxiety about his daughter. He had thick gray hair behind a strong hairline, and handsome features, but life had obviously exhausted him, and he looked tired; he was short but had the innate and natural dignity of a surgeon. Katharine was also fairly small, an English woman who in her youth would have been described as a “rose.” Her once blond hair was now gray, and she wore a fitted gray coat belted at the waist and brown leather buckled shoes. Her eyes were already brimming with tears, but she was smiling. It didn’t seem forced: she was, I realized, one of those people who simply smile all the time.

As they talked, and were reassured, Maud emerged from behind the curtain that hid the body of her husband from view. Her face was tear-streaked, but she was smiling with relief.

Walter went to her, and she fell into his arms.

“I’m really terribly sorry about my behavior,” she whispered. “It’s actually a relief that he is out of his misery at last.”

Floss noticed that her father was gazing at Maud strangely.

“Dad,” she said, touching him on the arm to try to regain his attention. “Do you know her?”

He seemed mesmerized, and went over to join Maud and Walter.

Walter let go of Maud, and Floss’s father took up her hands and looked into her face kindly.

“I think we meet again,” he said. Then he asked her, “In 1976 you gave birth to a baby, a little girl, at a clinic in Bern in Switzerland?”

Floss’s mother Katharine had also moved discreetly to Maud’s side.

“Albert tells me we three have met before,” she said. “In that clinic in Bern? Very briefly, twenty years ago?” She gestured toward Floss, her adopted daughter.

The resemblance between Maud and Floss was uncanny.

“You are our daughter Florence’s biological mother, aren’t you?” Katharine sensed her question was awkward. “Forgive me. I mean, of course, you are her real mother.”

Maud turned and looked at Floss, face-to-face.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I was in Bern in 1976. I remember you both now. Your daughter is my child.”

Maud must have known at that moment—as did we all who were party to the conversation—why her husband had fallen so absurdly for Floss, and that he had never loved anyone before Maud, or since. He had simply fallen in love with Maud all over again; he had seen Maud in Floss, in the delirium and ecstasy of his morphine-induced swoon.

Walter noticed that as Maud spoke the color drained from Floss’s face.

“You are my birth mother?” It was precisely the correct expression in the circumstances. She and Maud both shed tears. “I should have searched for you. I often dreamed of it. I was afraid I would be disappointed.”

Walter tried to comfort Floss. “You’ve had a great life, Floss,” he said. “Brought up by two wonderful, loving people who will always be your true mother and father.”

Incongruously, Floss shook her head. She was not disagreeing, but was unable to take it all in so quickly.

Walter carried on. “Now you are reunited with your biological mother.”

“My birth mother,” Floss said.

“It’s a wonderful day; we wouldn’t know any of this if you hadn’t fallen from your horse!” Walter seemed excited.

He could have added that none of it would have come to light had Nik not been in the hospital on his last lap. There was a strange air of sadness and joy combined.

This narrator is joined now by his beautiful host here in the hills above Grasse. We grapple over the pen, grab the laptop back and forth, correct each other’s mistakes. She has told me so much of the story I have recounted. She has marvelously described so many of the scenes—and bravely too because in various ways she has not always appeared to be an entirely good soul. Without her I would never have written this book, and I am so glad I have.