So I fixed a meeting and in September Maud and Nik turned up at the flat where Walter got to meet his childhood hero.
“My husband, Nikolai.” Maud ushered Old Nik into the light-filled living room that served as my gallery. His once golden hair was now completely gray, white in places but now long, curly, and luxurious. I guessed that Maud had persuaded him to start washing it. He had a scruffy beard. As he looked around the room and saw some of his own work displayed, his eyes widened in surprise and he was suddenly very attentive. His expression was wary; he was on alert, it seemed.
“I am glad to see you again,” I said. We shook hands, and his grip was weak. I turned to Maud. “Thanks for this, Maud. Walter will be here soon.”
When Walter arrived he sensed Nik was frail, and took charge, taking his arm and standing with him to look at the paintings. They spoke quietly together, but I overheard some snatches of their conversation. It seemed Old Nik had become something of a pedant. He was correcting almost every reminiscence Walter brought up.
“No, no, no,” I heard Nik say firmly. “It was May twenty-seventh. That’s when we did Batley Variety Club.”
“That was recorded at De Lane Lea, not Olympic.”
“No, we never played in Hungary or Czechoslovakia.”
“We were managed by Carlton Entertainments. Our production manager was a little snot called Frank.”
“Maud’s work? You must ask her.”
At this I turned to Maud. “Yes, what was your work? Do you still work?”
“I looked after my husband’s affairs at home, his studio, his clothes, his archive, and so on. Frank Lovelace looked after the road work.”
Walter looked over to me and grinned. It was fun to imagine Frank as a young runner, fetching cups of tea for Old Nik, and hailing taxis for him.
“You two can stay here and talk if you like,” I offered. “I’ll take Maud to Richmond Park, it’s a pleasant day.”
“No.” Walter turned to Nik, tilting his head to invite an answer. “Will we go to the park? It will be good to get some air.”
As Walter guided Old Nik out to the lobby and stood by the lift, Maud and I caught each other’s eye. There were two generations of rock star, both regarded by their fans as inviolable, powerful, arrogant, successful, and potent. We knew that both of them shared the same difficulties with fame. As the lift doors closed on the two musicians, Walter raising his hand to wave, they looked for a moment like father and son.
It was a weird moment for me. I felt a little jealous. I had wanted to be the one who unlocked the box for Walter. I knew that Andréevich would help, and I had introduced them. But I felt I might be losing Walter.
What would happen between them? Maud and I chatted about all kinds of things, but we both knew that in our minds we were asking the same questions.
What was Old Nik saying to Walter?
What was Walter saying to his hero, what was he asking him? How were they getting on?
What useful advice could the old rock star turned film star possibly pass on to the young, deeply rooted, humble, and practical pub rock artist who was my Rain’s dear old school friend Walter?
What had Old Nik learned from his visions?
Would anything that passed between them break the link between Walter and Siobhan that I prayed was loose enough already to fail, opening a way for Rain to tell the fool she loved him, and always had? That might be too much to ask for.
One thing was certain with the benefit of hindsight: from the day of his meeting with Andréevich, Walter began to turn his back on his old life.
Chapter 4
As I awoke this morning, sixty-seven years old, I asked myself what I most wanted for my birthday present.
What first came into my mind was so absurd that I find it hard to share it here. I wanted to change one thing in my past, something I had done of which I was terribly ashamed. Yet if I had been able to grant myself that wish, this story would have no ending. Indeed, there would be no story to tell.
But let me give away a single picture here. It is a wedding. A pub rock wedding. The wedding. This was the wedding that, because Harry was really not well-off, was paid for entirely by me. Godfather me, in godfather role. So in a sense this was my wedding as much as it was the joining of Walter and Siobhan. There were flowers, there was good food, but the crowd was small. The solemnities were over and we were in a garden somewhere. There was music and Walter was on the stage with the Stand. There were pretty girls. Two in particular come to mind. Selena and her old school friend Floss. Floss, the one with a blackened front tooth? There were other very pretty girls. Crow’s wife Agneta was one of them and her posse of gorgeous blonde buddies from Gothenberg became a blur of feminine intoxication.
“Make sure you bring some decent gear, Lou,” Crow had instructed. “Agneta likes that Bomber gear.”
Crow meant the horse tranquilizer, ketamine. I was the presiding tranquilizer-in-chief at the wedding of Walter and Siobhan, so it isn’t surprising I don’t remember much about it. But I have been told by my host here in France that I did something very, very bad. Something she alone witnessed. She urged me to come clean. And so I agreed to write, to try to explain, to try to unravel it all. That’s why I’m here. For myself as much as anything else. I wish my life was as simple as Bingo’s. I ruffle his head. Waiting his entire life to catch a rolled-up ball of paper, he is the exact opposite of tranquilized: sharp, alert, growing older like his new master, but never ready to give up.
As I looked from the window of my aerie, it was as if the entire world were bathed in cloud or mist. I could barely see the road that runs past this house down to the valley. In such gloom I could not write a word. Bingo ate his breakfast eagerly, and tried to cheer me up, but as I walked him around the garden I began to feel damp. Damp and incomplete.
Happily, a little later, the sun broke through and I sat at my desk. Bingo seemed thrilled that I was in motion, albeit merely with my pen and paper.
Does it matter that the tale I recount is now all about me when in fact I promised it would be about my young hero Walter and his hero Old Nik? Today I turned sixty-seven! Laugh. Cry. A billion souls have passed this way before. Hence, Old Nik’s hosts of harvesting angels perhaps? For this is the one-way traffic of being alive; at the end of this road is death, sweet or agonizing, welcomed or dreaded, it is inevitable.
To understand the tragic and transcendent events that followed, you need to understand the Irish dimension to this story. So let me take you back to Waterford where Siobhan and her little sister Selena grew up in the care of their father Michael.
Selena was the most beautiful girl at that wedding. She went to the wedding with eyes only for Walter, but now she waits for me upstairs.
She has told me all about their childhood. Michael’s wife, her mother, mother to the two girls, had died when Selena was born and Siobhan had been just ten years old. Her father Michael was too worn out to be a single parent. He was a drinker and a bully, a man with a great and grand heart. But he had no understanding that a punch from him—one that might propel an adversary from one end of the public bar to the other, and where that adversary might crash laughing, ready to bounce back with an equal blow of his own—such a punch might kill a young child. He did not know his own strength; neither did he know when drunk that his elder daughter was not his wife.
In even more unhappy times, having run with their father from Waterford to West Acton in west London to impose on kindly relatives and attend better free schools (free of priests at least), tragedy struck. One evening in 1984 eighteen-year-old Siobhan wiped the blood from her lips, sucked on a tooth that had been temporarily loosened, and glared fearlessly at her father. I picture him standing, swaying slightly, holding his bruised right fist still clenched, his temper—having risen—now wavering before him. And, as I imagine it, he saw and felt it as though it were a sheet of shimmering ice or glass stretching out across the small, neat sitting room. He could hardly see his elder daughter standing defiantly before him.