Nergal is Mars, said Brady. She was into the astrological explanation of the bombings when I was sidetracked by that name. Where had I heard it before? I googled for it and found a website by Lishtar. In the Mesopotamian Underworld Ereshkigal is ‘the inflexible goddess of the Land of No Return …’ Such splendid names! And Nergal is ‘the stubborn god of War and Pestilences’. I’d heard of those two in one of Brian’s lectures and they’d just been names you hear in a lecture but now they grew big and pushed astrology to one side. ‘Aha!’ I said as it came to me that Ereshkigal and Nergal both lived in me and the two of them lived in Phil also and that’s why nothing was simple.
On Saturday I craved the melancholy sunlight of Claude’s paintings so I went to the National Gallery. I was stood in front of The Embarkation of Saint Ursula, taking in the sadness and goodbyeness of it, the blueness and farawayness of the Claudian waves that were like rollers cranked by stagehands, and remembering what Brian had said in another of his slide lectures. ‘She took eleven thousand Christian virgins with her on a pilgrimage to Rome and on the way back they were all slaughtered by the Huns. I call that a terrible waste of virginity.
‘This subject was painted in the fourteenth century by Tommaso da Modena; in the fifteenth by Vittore Carpaccio and Hans Memling; and in the seventeenth by Claude. Tommaso gives us a William Morris sort of thing; Carpaccio offers a workmanlike and completely prosaic job with pretty costumes; Memling’s version is compact and tidy with pleasantly chunky ships and people cleverly fitted into the space. But only in Claude do we find the great sadness of doomed innocence. The colours and the atmosphere are elegaic; the ships are ships of dreams; the virgins already have a sacrificial look. This picture says it all — the innocence of mortal life embarking always on its deathward voyage.’
‘This world is not a safe place for virgins, is it?’ said the woman who had joined me and Claude. It was Mimi, Phil’s ex.
‘It’s not safe for anyone,’ I said. She was wearing the brooch that I’d seen on Grace Kowalski’s workbench. ‘What’s that in aid of?’ I asked.
‘Do you know what it is?’
‘It’s a scapegoat.’
‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘My ID.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Doesn’t Phil blame me for his failure?’
‘Is he a failure?’
‘Did you ever finish Hope of a Tree?
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Well done you! What’s your opinion of it?’
‘It’s not the most exciting thing I’ve ever read but that doesn’t make Phil a failure. In any case, whatever he is, he’s out of your life now and you can move oh.’
‘Nobody you’ve been married to for twelve years is ever completely out of your life,’ she said. A wistful note there?
‘And now you want him back?’
‘No, but I can’t help wondering how he’s doing under new management. Would you say that you inspire him?’
‘I don’t manage him, and the rest is none of your business. Whether you’re being a dog in the manger or a bitch in heat I’d be delighted if we could agree not to be friends and if you could just bugger off.’
After she’d gone I found myself thinking Brian thoughts. Remembering the times we’d had, the things we’d done. He’d asked me if I could do better and I’d said that maybe I already had. Still, when he wasn’t in courtship mode he was very easy to be with and I didn’t have to break my head trying to work out what we were to each other. Simple is what everybody wants but very few of us get.
9 Phil Ockerman
Max Lesser has some time ago described Diamond Heart [See Her Name Was Lola, Bloomsbury, 2003] and with his permission we borrow from it for the present narrative. ‘Diamond Heart,’ says the brochure, ‘is not a retreat. It is a centre of dynamic calm in which mind and spirit gather energy for the next forward move. On offer are Yoga, Tai Chi, Feng Shui, and Zen disciplines including meditation, gardening, flower arrangement, archery, snooker, and poker. Vegetarian, Kosher, and Halal cuisine. Acupuncture, Reflexology, Aromatherapy, and homeopathic medicine. Tuition in classical Indian music with Hariprasad and Indira Khan. This year we have added writing courses which will be tutored by established novelists, playwrights and poets.’
Diamond Heart has given a new lease of life to the defunct herring port of Port Mackie on the Firth of Moray. The harbour is almost empty, stretching out its arms to the past. The tide comes in, goes out around Kirsty’s Knowe, Teeny Titties and Deil’s Hurdies. The wind sighs in the grasses. The pebbles rattle in the tidewash, the sea-shapen rocks abide. There are plenty of gulls, shags, and cormorants but no herring. Port Mackie now buzzes with new businesses supplying goods and services to Diamond Heart.
Diamond Heart is not cheap. The one thing its varied clientele have in common is that they can all afford it. There are ageing hippies, youthful rebels, stressed-out executives, ex-husbands and ex-wives, broken-down pop stars, actors between (sometimes for years) engagements, and various unemployed of independent means. Cannabis and cocaine are not compulsory. The Diamond Heart complex is made up of dome-shaped buildings (called tholoi in the brochure) overlooking the sea. It has the added attraction of its own myths and legends of which more later.
There were nine people in my group: four men and five women. Three of the women were chronic course-takers with hopeful smiles and it’s-so-nice-to-be-here expressions. The fourth looked dead serious and probably had two or three unpublished novels in her rucksack. The fifth was Constanze Webber. Two of the men looked like course-takers to me and the other two looked serious.
‘Hi, Constanze,’ I said. ‘How’s it going with the music?’
‘Very slowly,’ she said. ‘I’d like to have a go at fiction for a change. I’ve got a couple of ideas for stories but I don’t know how to get started.’
‘I have the same problem,’ said one of the serious men.
‘Me too,’ said one of the female course-takers. ‘I have things in my head but when I try to put them down on paper I can’t get past the first line.’
‘That’s what I’m here for,’ I said.
‘It said in the brochure that Ken Hackett would be doing “The Search for Page One”,’ said Constanze.
‘He’s got flu,’ I said, ‘but not to worry — there’s nothing I don’t know about searching for Page One.’
‘What about finding it?’ she said.
‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘We might get lucky. The most common failing of the inexperienced writer is thinking that you have to begin at the beginning.’
‘Where else would you begin?’ said the dead-serious young woman whose bulging rucksack threatened many pages for me to read.
‘Wherever the thing presents itself to you — the arse or the elbow or the foot. The raw material is showing you that because it’s what you can bring everything out of by working backwards and forwards from it. Look at the opening of Daniel Deronda — it’s not the chronological beginning of the novel; quite a few things have happened and most of the main characters have appeared in the story earlier but not on the page, so from that opening scene in the casino Eliot has to develop people and events around the psychological centre which is the action between Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda. Because that was the beginning.’
‘In media res,’ said she of the serious rucksack.
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘In the middle of things is where you often find the beginning.’
‘How many Is in Eliot?’ said one of the course-takers.