Or not for some years.
He married the Denver girl (she was Jewish, from Calgary in Canada) but the marriage did not last. She left Billing and was last seen heading in the direction of California with a bespectacled tax accountant. Billing returned to England for a short while and tried to write more music. But the gift, such as it was, had gone.
One miserable night, when he was without inspiration or wife, he had his recurrent dream. As usual, mysteriously, it was a week or so before he even recalled he had had it. With ordinary dreams, such things never happened.
He had been travelling endlessly down a road when two people had come to greet him and take him to their modest home. A log fire awaited him. Although the dream never allowed him to enter the house, he understood that its purpose was to comfort him.
Billing returned to his temporary job, encouraged, searching again for a magic tune.
Notes sounded in his head. He scribbled them down. But they were imitations, spurious noises, mere jangle. The words he wrote, too, were nothing but fake emotion. He could bring to them neither sincerity nor style.
Although he rejected both the music and the words, they still came to him at that time, pressing themselves on his attention, until he jotted them down merely to be rid of them. Protest as he might at this burden, he could not escape from it.
‘Who was I when I had talent?’ he cried aloud. ‘Who was I? Was I happier then? Why do I have to write down this rubbish now? Who is transmitting this nonsense to me?’
Through the mazes of silence in his head, an answer came back. ‘Wilfred Wills.’
Wilfred Wills was a hard rock group enjoying current success. The name was enigmatic and terrifying to Billing in his nervous state. It came bounding in on a strong beat at all times of day. He left a pile of three hundred and twenty unusable songs with his agent and flew back to the USA. Wilfred Wills followed, steel guitar, steel eyes, stealing his brain.
Everyone he knew in his old American haunts had gone – had taken refuge in new habits, new partners, or New Orleans. Billing decided he was in a bad way, but at least the terrible Wilfred Wills voice ceased operations during the daytime. It returned in the small hours, rumbling through his brain like an old Mack truck.
Impelled by Wilfred Wills, he began to travel.
In a Boston bar he encountered a woman quietly weeping into a daiquiri. Her name was Mary Sarkissian. She wept, she told him, not for her own problems but for those of others. She was a psychoanalyst who constantly became involved with the sorrows of her clients. Billing, signing on as a client of Mary Sarkissian, was soon involved with her.
Mary Sarkissian was a dark young woman of slight build, with delicate, braceletted wrists and a pensive expression well suited to her trade. He loved her, as he had loved almost every woman he had met since the age of six. Mary loved him and spoke eloquently of his English innocence which rendered him so vulnerable, and which she set about correcting, vigorously.
He doted on Mary, on her pensive lips, on her sad Armenian wit. He had never been more happy. The noises had gone from his head. The music was in his body and hers. He found courage enough to tell her of Wilfred Wills. She had her own little noise, she told him, a phrase from a Jefferson Airplane number she sang over and over, ‘When the truth is found to be lies …’
‘Is that aimed at me?’ he asked once.
‘The very question the last passenger pigeon asked.’
More bars, more daiquiris. Obliquity he could take. Besides, she smiled so mysteriously and the United States was blossoming round them. Until one day when he found Mary weeping not for their problems but for those of others. Another man with another puzzle had arrived in her outer office and her inner life.
‘She liked to swank a bit.’ Alice’s laconic verdict on his mother, his late mother, Florence Juliet Billing, née Jones. As he collected what possessions he had and made his way back, to England and across London to the family lawyers, his mother’s memory hung over him like a cloud. Over the streets and squares, cloud hung like memory.
The lawyers lived in the City. The old wartime bombsites were being built on. Everywhere was concrete, brick, glass, in stupendous amounts. This was not America. The scale was too pokey. Equally, it could not be London, not the London he knew. He was floating, drifting, out of touch. The red double-decker he caught was a period-piece, bearing Billing away into regions unknown to man.
‘She liked to swank a bit.’ He repeated the words on the bus until they went to a kind of tune … Alice had the germ of insanity in her. Perhaps the tune her words conveyed had the power to transmit that germ to others. He shivered, wondering if she had infected him. The dome of St Paul’s, grey as an old oyster shell, slid between two tall glass slices of building like an immense diseased breast. He turned away in his seat, so as not to catch further glimpses of the disquieting sight.
The lawyers would disclose – or impose – his mother’s will. Billing saw this as his last encounter with her unpredictable changes of mood which had so alarmed him as a boy.
‘She liked to swank …’ Mad Alice’s reference to his mother’s hypocrisy, to that character trait which could transform her from an otherwise loving person into a harpy. His father’s early death had encouraged the trait. After coming into a little money, Florence Juliet Billing had been able to indulge her streak of pretension more freely. He recalled how sugar-sweet she would be to friends, only to fly into a rage as soon as their backs were turned, accusing them of falseness, envy, malice – all the defects from which she herself suffered. On these occasions, something in Hugh cried with terror, to fancy that she must in reality hate him too. Nothing could be trusted, no friendship could be permanent, in the face of such treachery.
He stepped from the bus and walked down London Wall, cool in the morning breeze. He saw again that vision of his father falling off the ladder. It happened for ever. The suburban garden in sunlight. He in short trousers. Running in fear. But … at that crucial point, at the moment when his father struck the concrete path, had little Hugh Billing been running towards the disaster, or had he been running away? Memory always failed at that point. It was a source of torture. However many times he tried to recall what had happened, down came blankness, as if it were he who had died.
Dismissing his malaise, Billing continued to hum to himself. ‘She liked to swank a bit – to be frank, a bit too much … And so this coarse Hèlène was porcelain to touch …’
Then the possession of a son with successful records to his name had increased his mother’s … instability.
Of course, Billing’s sister June, now also part of that great blank, had been odd. Perhaps her wish to set the world, including her brother, severely, pedantically to rights, had derived from a fear of her mother’s pretensions. There was the early case of the biology exam question, ‘Describe the function of the leg in relation to the rest of the human body.’ To which young June had replied, ‘The question is incorrect, since a normal human body sustains two legs.’ Sustains. A nasty word. June had long sustained herself on such arid distinctions.
The lawyers, Messrs Grimsdale & Grimsdale, were friendly in their professional way, despite the fact that Billing entered their offices bearing an orange back-pack to which a miniature stars-and-stripes was sewn. They sat him at a table which had been polished every morning for eighty-five years, almost smiled and read his mother’s Will to him.