Пит Таунсенд: The Age of Anxiety

“I arrived back in London, went to the office, saw the ring on Siobhan’s finger, and asked a friend who was the unlucky man. She told me, ‘Siobhan married her boyfriend. Your friend Walter?’”

Rain had been away in Afghanistan with a BBC unit traveling with a US-supported mujahideen patrol on and off for two years, documenting the anticipated end of hostilities in the region.

Of course I on the other hand knew Walter was married and had been at the wedding on June 25, 1994.

“Why didn’t you let me know, Dad?” Rain had tears in her eyes. “I should have been there, at Walter’s wedding. He was like my brother.”

I knew that what she really meant was that Walter was her passion; she should have been his wife. She must have known it would not have been feasible for me to contact her while she was on patrol with the mujahideen. I had been completely smashed at the wedding. I remember almost nothing. I had woken up the next day feeling like death and quickly tried to forget all about it.

As Rain sat, miserable—she had good reason to be upset—I stopped what I had been doing, poring over some accounts. I regarded my offspring intently as if for the first time. She was quite beautiful at that distraught moment. Her hair—cut short—was strawberry blond. Her skin was slightly freckled, pale, and always sensitive to the sun. She had very little of my mother Claire’s beautiful Jewish coloring, but she had inherited her maternal grandmother’s strong bone structure. Rain was not the image of her mother; neither was she the image of me—lucky for her, as I am no oil painting. Rain’s mother, my long-lost wife Pamela, had been pretty enough, and extremely ginger. I don’t use that word pejoratively, I can assure you. I was a sucker for the look. It would be absurd to call her a redhead; Pamela was ginger, and delightfully so when she was young. Her appearance matched her personality. She was excitable, unpredictable, and capricious. Spicy.

So it was a shock to me that, when Rain was born, Pamela suddenly decided to become celibate. Oh, and also to become a Catholic. Up until that time she had been, to put it as politely as I can, almost a nymphomaniac. She had been legendarily ginger: hot. As a young husband prior to Rain’s birth I sometimes felt as if I had landed in paradise. No man could have wanted more from his wife, sexually speaking.

I need you to know that women found me attractive. Some women still do. I’m a strange-looking man in some ways, a mix of racial stereotypes, the Aryan with the Jew. But it’s worked well for me. I am middle height, with brown eyes, jet-black hair that I usually wear long, and although I’m getting thin on top, I have enough up there to pass for a man a little younger than my years. Not bad, for I’ve never looked after my body or my face. The one thing I find that occasionally causes some women to shrink away from me is my beard. It isn’t long, and I don’t always sport it, but I prefer wearing a beard—I feel my chin is a little weak. When I look in the mirror I don’t often shout, You handsome devil, go get ’ em as I splash on the cologne, but it has happened a few times. My face has the appearance of being wider at my forehead than it should be, but that’s because my chin is small. I’ve painted a strange picture of myself, but Pamela often used to call me cute or gorgeous. When we made love and our faces were close together in the half-light, I would call her beautiful—because that was how she looked then. She would call me handsome. I assumed she was telling the truth. But we were never a family who exalted the notion of high self-esteem, and Rain didn’t think of herself as the beautiful woman she had become. Men fell for her—but Walter always treated her like a sister.

Suddenly, as Rain sat—clearly seething, and the air buzzing with her beauty, the room sizzling with her abruptly evident but frustrated sexual energy—I saw her mother in her.

“Come on, Rain,” I said. “My godson has married a fan, that’s what she was.” I tried to laugh, but I was winging it.

This caused an even wilder display of irritation from her. “Siobhan is super-smart, Dad. If she was a fan, she was also being secretive with me. They must have decided to get married on a whim. How could you have been at the wedding and not let me know?” She exploded, jumping to her feet, banging her palms onto her thighs so hard they probably bruised.

I didn’t want to face the fact that I really didn’t remember very much at all about the wedding. I had a dim recollection of giving some drugs to Siobhan’s younger sister, Selena, who was there with her pretty friend Floss.

“Siobhan is actually older than me, Dad! Walter has married my fucking boss!” She had started to pace the floor, then stopped and, whirling around, slapped her hand on her forehead. “Jesus! I reckon Siobhan packed me off to Afghanistan for two years while she did the dirty deed.”

Then Rain slumped again, and there were real tears.

Of course I did have influence in Walter’s life and career. Rain knew this very well. I was Walter’s chief mentor, his guiding light. Perhaps partly because he had seen me at my worst, and seen me recover, he listened to me. I could have helped him to see that my daughter was in love with him—if only I myself had noticed.

But I hadn’t spotted Walter and Rain as potential lovers. I had missed a beat. To me they would always be a couple of kids playing in the garden in a paddling pool, or digging in the sand on the beach at Clacton. Being a single father is difficult for many obvious reasons, but I made it all even harder for myself by being an addict. The drugs didn’t stop me functioning. They numbed some pain, but also my senses; I hadn’t been entirely alert to what was happening between these two lovely kids right under my nose. They loved each other, but Rain had gone further and fallen in love romantically.

Rain would have been about ten or eleven when Pamela and I were attempting to hold our marriage together. I was using heroin as a way to survive my unrequited sex drive for the ginger-fuck-fest-wife I had once enjoyed. One day in a very strange period in which I was trying to get off the smack, we decided—the ginger-fuck-fest-wife and I—that we needed a larger, wider bed.

“You want to sleep farther away from me,” I mumbled pathetically, adding something I didn’t mean. “But I want to sleep farther away from you too.”

“Ha!” exclaimed Pamela. “You think this is a game.”

“No,” I corrected her. “I do think a bigger bed would be a good idea for us. We’ve been married for a long time now. I know women get bored with their husbands. Maybe even find them irritating. Do I keep you awake?”

“You don’t snore, if that’s what you mean.” Pamela laughed. “You don’t fart; you don’t say other women’s names in your dreams. Truly, Louis, why do you think I want a bigger bed? So I don’t have to have sex with you? Don’t you think I can fend you off if you come too close to me? You’re such a dope. I’ll always love you, Louis. I want to give you what you need, but something has changed in me. It’s massive, Louis. I wish this hadn’t happened, but it has.”

It didn’t occur to me to try to process what Pam signaled by her use of the adjective “massive,” but then heroin tends to dull anxiety. I simply hovered between smacked-out insouciance and self-obsessed withdrawal. For Pam it must have been like living with a cuddly sheepdog that occasionally wakes up to chase a mosquito.

We found a sort of warehouse in Hampshire that sold old French beds, and drove out there to select one that suited us.

We agreed on a hugely overbuilt and oversize double bed that had a high walnut headboard and footboard. The headboard was richly grained, and in the rather dim light in the corner of the warehouse where the bed had been positioned, it seemed quite attractive. It was when the deliverymen assembled the bed in our sunny bedroom that I noticed something quite strange. The wood grain on one side of the headboard seemed to be more richly incised than on the other. It was as though one side had been persistently polished by some obsessive soul throughout the hundred and fifty years of its life in a grand farmhouse somewhere in France.