Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 Page 9

  There were other horses about the place as well, from time to time; horses that were sick or had some bad habit or mental problem. Even his father couldn’t fix them all. But he had a handy bag of tricks and people were always calling to the house looking for remedies and advice. It’s a thing he regrets now, that all that knowledge died with his father and that no one in the family had enough of an interest to continue with the horse side of things. He would have liked to have done it himself, but it was clear from the beginning that he had no aptitude for it at all. He was such a bad rider that his father stopped asking him to do it, and he hardly ever went to the races with the rest of them. But some of them had been good riders – one of his sisters in particular. He has a memory of her riding a blue roan horse around and around their father, trampling a trough into the sodden ground. The horse moved with stiff, jerky strides, its head high and wild, its tail clamped down tight as though it feared something was going to attack it from behind. His father and his sister both spoke to it, a harmonious mantra intoned inside a muddy mandala of their own making. And the horse, as though hypnotised, slowly relaxed and dropped its head and lengthened its stride and lost its fear of attack.

  He doesn’t make it all the way up the hill before he needs to stop for breath. His heart is still racing but its rhythm is stronger now, as though it was just fidgety and needed something more strenuous to do. He walks on to where the path levels out and then he stops again. A few weeks ago he walked up here with her – quite late on a long summer’s evening. There were some people on the grass with a fancy kite, all strings and streamers, and they had the long, long lines stretched between them and were trying to disentangle them. An hour later, when they walked back the same way, the kite people were still there, still winding strings and fiddling with knots. They looked bad-tempered and miserable, and he had laughed his head off as soon as he was out of earshot.

  But now there is no one – just London in its orange veil spread out below him. He hates the lights and wishes someone would switch them off and give him back the stars. It might happen, in some not-too-far-distant energy-strapped future. He hopes so. He has never been afraid of the dark. As a child he often crossed the fields to the village in the dark to take a message to someone, or to collect some bits of shopping from his father when he got delayed in the pub. But this time, when he turns back towards the heath he finds that he is afraid. This is not the benign darkness of Tipperary, where the worst thing he might encounter is a badger out grubbing. This is Hampstead, notorious for its night-time dangers. He glances around him, half blinded by the city lights. What are those dangers, though? Who comes here at night? There were always stories of homosexuals – of politicians and other public figures compromised by being discovered cruising here. But surely not these days, when there are so many easier and safer ways for like-minded people to meet each other. In any event, he is no longer afraid of gay men. Fifteen years of middle-class London has cured him of his indoctrinated homophobia.

  So who else is there to be afraid of? Thugs? Hoods? Highwaymen? Do lads still go out looking for ‘a bit o’ bovver’ or its modern equivalent? Possibly. But what is there for them to prey upon if the good citizens of London town keep themselves and their wallets well away from the place at night? Or do they lie in wait for people like him? Idiots who have lost their way in the hustle and dazzle and have come here in search of the old gods?

  He has walked this path a thousand times, sometimes with her, more often alone. He knows where it goes – in under the trees and up to the top, then down and around past the pools where the dawn swimmers come, summer and winter. He knows all the path’s little tributaries, paved and unpaved, which wind through the more lonely parts of the huge park. He comes here to be alone with the earth and the sky and to sense the long, slow lives of the trees standing around him. It is not a wild place. He has been to wild places and sensed their magic, sometimes sinister, sometimes divine, but this patch of emptiness has long since been sucked dry of its power. It is a flea-bitten mongrel of a landscape, bled to the point of exhaustion by its parasites.

  By day it is, anyway. But perhaps it comes alive at night, draws strength from the darkness, reveals forms of magic he has yet to encounter. He wants to go back, but he finds he has painted himself into a corner.

  On the face of it he has four options. The first one is to visit the pub, but when he flips open his phone and checks the time he finds it is already too late. He will be lucky if he can find one in time for last orders, and even if he does, one drink will get him nowhere. So option two is to find a hotel, book in, then settle in to the residents’ bar. He has a credit card and cash – he could do it, but he has enough self-respect left to dismiss it as a non-runner. It’s the easy option, the get-out-of-jail-free card, and he despises himself for even considering it. He is not so far gone, yet.

  So he is left with two possibilities. He thinks about her again and finds that the shock is finally being absorbed. This time there are no adrenalin spikes and he can view the remembered scene dispassionately. When he does, he sees it more clearly. The pantomime colours added to the scene by his imagination drop away and he sees her as she really is. Still herself – not a hag or a crone but a woman of fifty-six revealed in her true form. He is aware of his love for her, not as a charge that quickens his pulse but as the steady background current that is essential to his existence. He will not leave her, he is suddenly certain of that. But nor is he ready to go back. There is still something at the basis of his reaction that he has not found and identified.

  It doesn’t matter to him that he might be less attracted to her sexually. Sometimes he is tempted to blame sex for his creative decline – the literal as well as metaphorical spilling of his seed might be responsible for depleting his vital energy. He found their tantric experiments awkward and frustrating, but not so the celibate phase. He thinks of the schoolgirl outfit with the same mild sense of embarrassment that it produces when she puts it on. He knows that she devised the game to revive her own flagging sexual drive, but he wonders now whether there was more to it. Did she feel obliged to do it for his sake? Out of fear that he might look elsewhere if she didn’t provide for his sexual needs? He is not in principle averse to prostitution, though his two experiences with it in his younger days left him feeling ashamed and far from satisfied. Nor is he immune to the attractions of other, usually younger women. But the idea that she should prostitute herself because of a misguided belief about his needs appals him. He ought to have told her that on the first occasion that she dressed up. He should have said he wasn’t into that kind of thing. Instead he went along with it, to humour her. But it isn’t such a big deal for him – hasn’t been for years. He deplores the modern dogma that insists a strong sex drive is essential to life. He has spent large parts of his life sublimating his desires, sometimes out of choice and sometimes out of necessity. Either way, he finds it easier and easier as time goes on. If they never have sex again, he will still stay.

  There is the other thing, the thing he finds does matter, about how her changed appearance will reflect upon him when they appear in public together. He recognises the feeling for what it is – an absurd relic of male pride, a throwback to primitive displays of chest-thumping and strutting. The understanding doesn’t make the feeling go away, but it does show him a goal towards which he can begin to work.

  But it’s still not all. There is something else that he has not put his finger on. The shock has passed but there is something which profoundly disturbs him. His fear is that if he goes back to the house now he will pour oil on troubled waters; make his apologies and adjustments; settle back into comfortable patterns without ever discovering what the thing is. Looking into the darkness of the wooded patch ahead, he knows that he is as close to that elusive state of ‘home’ as he has been for years. Much as he fears what is in there, he can’t return until he has invest- igated it.

  {23}

  She wanted, she came to understand, to do something
for someone else. Throughout her working life she had crossed the street to avoid Big Issue vendors or beggars with dogs. She had looked straight through gaunt young people who approached her with hard-luck stories or outstretched hands. She often thought of setting up some charitable standing orders but she never found the time to read the ads in the papers, and chuggers were the only people in the world whom she permitted herself to swear at.

  By the time she arrived at this new juncture in her life, gifts of money were no longer the answer. It was too easy and it would not fulfil the deeper need that emerged. She wanted full-scale engagement in something that would make a difference to society, and she set about searching for it with her customary vigour.

  She spent hours, mostly after midnight, searching the internet for volunteering opportunities. Locally there were adult literacy programs, hostels for the homeless, charity shops, environmental groups and societies for the disabled and the elderly. Further afield, there were more possibilities. She was amazed to discover that there were schemes for ‘midlife gap years’, which could be spent counting tigers or saving bats or monitoring the health of coral reefs. You could teach English practically anywhere in the world – to Tibetan refugees in Ladhakh, to street children in Brazil – or you could help to build houses or bridges or schools practically anywhere in the world, all provided that you had the time to spare and the money to pay. It interested her to discover that she could find no opportunities for overseas volunteering that didn’t require her to pay for the privilege. This rocked her back on her heels a bit – not because she couldn’t afford it, but because it revealed how widespread her particular condition must be. It appeared that the midlife crisis was as inevitable as the knitting of the cranial sutures and the onset of puberty; a fact that was one-up for her analyst and one in the eye for her. She had thought herself unique, and that her sudden desire to give something back to the world was evidence of progress on her path to self-discovery, and of the incredible nobility and generosity of that newly revealed self. But the more she trawled the internet the more convinced she became that this particular phenomenon arose not so much from an innate desire for individuation as from middle-class boredom and guilt.

  She soon came to realise that a gap year was not what she wanted, and nor was a few hours a week of hands-on volunteering in London. She had skills, developed over thirty years, and he agreed that there must be a way in which they could be used that would suit her needs as well as the needs of others. But for a long time, that was as far as they could get. If there was a project that fitted the bill, she wasn’t able to find it on the internet.

  She had no alternative but to take the advice of her analyst and of her friends, and wait. She remembered how Elsinore had come about – the availability of the building coinciding with her development of the idea – and she put her faith in the same thing happening again when the time was right. In the meantime, she gave some attention to other, more subtle changes that were happening in her life.

  Her body was the first concern. As long as she had put the right things into it and onto it, it had always pretty much taken care of itself. Aside from the occasional walk across town, or with him on the heath, she took no exercise at all. Her nervous energy kept her weight down and her GP had always given her a clean bill of health. But now, post-menopause, all that was changing. She had to be more careful about what she ate. She began to skip lunch again, and it worked, or at least she stopped putting on weight. The trouble was, it wasn’t just about weight anymore. Her body was changing. What fat she had was redistributing itself in ways she did not like at all. Her skin lost its translucent glow and began to sag. Her hands in particular upset her. Sometimes she caught sight of them, bony and wrinkled, and if she wasn’t on guard she was struck by the impression that they belonged to somebody else. She bought into the promises of manufacturers and lathered herself with skin creams. She joined a gym in Bloomsbury, where she could nip out for forty minutes between lunch and high tea at Elsinore. It was good for her fitness and good for her state of mind, but it made no impression at all on her skin or the relentless slippage of her flesh. She couldn’t cross-train her way back to youth.

  Life was passing her by, and she was condemned to endless, boring days and evenings, manufacturing smiles at Elsinore. She was desperate to throw it all in and jump ship, but until there was some sign of another vessel, she couldn’t do it.

  {24}

  He walks forward. The path enters the trees, but they are not quite as he remembers. They are sparser, for one thing, and they are mangy, half their leaves fallen and the remainder thin and limp. He can see both the sky and the lights of the city between them. It is a slight disappointment.

  The path descends again, briefly, then climbs on, passing an empty bench on one side and a circle of them surrounding a tree on the other. There is another copse ahead, and this is the one he remembers; the one he has been expecting. It has more trees, closer together, and there is rough grass and undergrowth between them. There is a little dirt path as well, worn by the feet of walkers, which branches off to the left. He nearly always takes this one. It passes the remains of a painted cast-iron fence, long since fallen and partly submerged in weeds, which always has him wondering what it is doing there. Presumably all this was farmland once, commonage, perhaps. He always means to find out about the history of the heath, but as soon as he leaves it, he always forgets.

  When the little path comes into view he hesitates. It leads into a deeper darkness and he can’t see far along it. He suspects it is safer to stay on the tarmac, but he can’t be sure, because that it presumably what the hoodlums will all be expecting. He laughs; surprises himself with the sound. If it’s safety he’s concerned about, what is he doing out here in the middle of the night? And where did that word appear from? Hoodlums. Or should it be hoodli? Hoodla?

  It is raining again, but not heavily like before. It is a kind of rain that isn’t common in London, so light that it’s not much more than mist. It permeates clothes gradually but doesn’t drench them. It doesn’t send rivers down the neck, but gathers quietly in the hair and rolls down the face in warm drops, like tears. At home in Tipperary his neighbours would call it, or the day that brought it, ‘soft’. It is Irish weather for an Irishman’s journey.

  He sets foot upon the path and experiences an immediate sense of rightness, or righteousness, or of something bordering on elation. This is it. This is the way. This path will help him to solve the riddle that so disturbs him. It is the soul’s way home, to that lost place within him where integrity and poetry linger in chains like an imprisoned princess.

  The path, so ordinary by day, is numinous by night. It is the realm of Hermes and Athene, of Pan and the púca. Above all, it is the tramping ground of Fionn and the Fianna, hunting their magical prey through the forest. This very hill might break open and reveal the golden halls of the sidhe, forever alive within it. A gentle, intermittent wind breathes among the branches. The dying leaves seethe, fall silent, seethe again. The sound is like lazy breakers on a calm shore. The name of the land he is in flits across his mind and is gone before he can catch it. But it is significant. He pauses to concentrate, to summon it back. There is the slightest of sounds behind him; the briefest rubbing-together of two hands, or the quick scratch of a soft brush on the hearth. There is barely time for him to become aware of it. There is no time at all for him to turn and look.

  {25}

  She gave up on her search for a better life and began to sleep more, going to bed when she came in from work instead of sitting up half the night in front of the computer. On some mornings she was amazed to find him waking her with coffee, instead of the other way round, and he was ridiculously pleased about it, as though she was a stubborn adversary who had finally conceded his point. But it frightened her. She believed that sleeping was a sign of illness or depression, that her body was betraying her and practising for that other, longer sleep. He told her she was being melodramatic, and that she had thirty
years of lost sleep to catch up on. Her analyst agreed with him and told her to go with it, and to keep a close eye out for dreams.

  She did have some, waking sometimes with a sense of urgency because something was going on that she needed to witness and record, but on those occasions when she could identify some strand of a dream, she was always convinced that it was meaningless, and was embarrassed to write it down. Then, one morning when he was away at a festival in Berlin, she had a dream so vivid and frightening that it woke her. She had killed several people and concealed them in her wardrobe, but it was impossible that they could stay hidden, and the police were at the door. The dream was so vivid that it took her a moment or two to realise that it wasn’t actually happening, and the relief, when it came, was enormous. Still she didn’t write it down, but she didn’t forget it either. When she came home she opened her wardrobe, which was a vast affair, built along an entire wall of her bedroom. There were indeed corpses in there. The clothes were a clear reflection of the state of her life over the years she had worn them. There was nothing wrong with them, except that they were no longer her. She didn’t know who it was that she had become, but she knew these clothes no longer represented her.

  She ran her fingers along the tightly packed hangers and began, tentatively, to pick out some she no longer wore. Initially it was painful, facing the prospect of parting with them. They were like old selves, with their own particular history and memories. But the further she went, the easier it became, until, suddenly, a landslip occurred in her head. The careful thinning became a virtual clear-fell. The hangers rattled in the vacated space, a sound she hadn’t heard since she first moved into the house. The bed disappeared beneath the growing heaps of discards. She moved on to the coats next, and then to the racks and drawers and shelves built in to the right-hand section. New heaps appeared on the floor, of bags and shoes and boots and belts and scarves.