“Thank you, little sister,” Walter teased.
“I fucking hate it when you call me that, Walter,” spat Selena. “But you should be celebrating. Frank told me about the big deal with Ford, and the rest. Selling all your old music. You could retire, darling.” She looked at Siobhan with a dark grin and added, “He could write poetry.”
Siobhan looked grim as she fixed her husband with an intense stare. Everyone at the bar heard what she said.
“Is this true?” She suddenly seemed less intoxicated. “Have you really let Frank sell your catalog?”
Walter nodded. “It’s a fucking lot of money too, Siobhan.”
“How did Selena know about all this before me? I am your fucking wife. I’m fucking fuming, to be honest.”
Walter began to explain aspects of the deal that he himself had only just found out, that Selena seemed to know about the deal before he did. But Siobhan was looking down at the floor of the bar. A few too many drinks had softened her before, but now she was sober, in the heat of a building rage, her violent father’s genes pushing to the surface.
“So you will leave the band?” This was more of a statement than a question.
Walter didn’t answer, but turned away and waved at the barman for a top-up.
Siobhan pulled him round to face her squarely and demanded an answer.
“Will you quit the band? Will you give up this fucking shithole? Can we start a new life, work together on a poetry book or something? What about the help you promised me to write a book about Selena and me being brought up by our dad? We thought it might make a play. Bloody hell, Walter, it would be so great to get out of this…” She didn’t finish.
Walter quickly looked away. Could she see on his face that he wasn’t ready to give her what she wanted, with or without a fight? I could tell she was ready to fight him, and her expression must have told him that too.
I think I’ve said enough to indicate that in my view Walter had indeed decided he might change his life, but not only as a result of his windfall. My feeling was that he was afraid he had no choice but to change. He was either losing his mind or was under a strain he couldn’t detect. I doubt his first thought would have been the same as Siobhan’s, that he would leave the band. As often happens when important chapters in a man’s life—like strands of delicate silk—start to plait together to make an unbreakable rope, by seeming coincidence, four closely linked events threw Walter back onto his own defensive resources.
The first was what Old Nik had told him when they met and walked together in Richmond Park. I believe Walter had told the old man that he was starting to hear strange things whenever he sat down to write songs; conceivably he even read something to him from the first few soundscape descriptions, words that promised music well beyond the scope of his usual skillset. I think that maybe I was the only other person Walter had spoken to about this. As I have said, whatever Old Nik advised him changed Walter in some indefinable way.
The second was that Siobhan was obviously beginning to frighten him; her desire to help make him great, and perhaps to live through him creatively, was not unwelcome or unusual in a marriage between two people involved in the worlds of entertainment and media, but Walter wasn’t ready for it.
The third was surely the idea that with the money that had just fallen out of the sky he could do more or less as he wished, at least for a few years.
Last, when Siobhan smiled, kissed him, and said goodbye, clearly unsatisfied that he had not answered her question, both he and Selena felt something final in her manner. And yet I think Siobhan sincerely believed that if she went back to Waterford, he would follow. There were few women like her, she was certain of that. Walter had always been intoxicated by her, her mind, her beauty, and her poetry. She couldn’t imagine she would lose him. But she was also proud. If he didn’t follow, she might never come back. Selena knew that about her older sister.
Frank and I saw it too in the bar that night; Selena—without a moment’s hesitation, as though Walter were a baton that had been dropped and must be quickly grabbed and run with, in a race to some finishing line only she could envision—did indeed try to replace Siobhan in that instant without waiting a beat. It was as though for a second time in her life she held a murderous blade, and this time it was Siobhan who would go down for no other reason than that she had married the man Selena—as I learned later—had loved since she was eighteen.
She moved closer to him.
I thought of my poor Rain, who loved Walter too, rather plain-looking compared with the Collins girls, carrying rather more of my genes than were useful when caught up in a contest for a man. She was not cut out to battle against Siobhan let alone Selena and her angels. I must be careful not to place her in the middle of this trio. In the days that followed I would sometimes find myself beginning to hate Walter, just for a moment; it didn’t last, and perhaps I was merely envious. He was still only twenty-nine years old, and had been slow to fall in love, if indeed he had ever fallen in love with Siobhan; I began to doubt it. I also doubted that Siobhan loved Walter properly, unconditionally; there was too much at stake for her, I think. Walter was not just a husband, he was a man, a man among and above the other men Siobhan had known, especially her father. Siobhan wanted a gentle man, a poet, a clever man, who never raised his arm, or even his voice.
When she had gone—some of us had the sense that Siobhan had thrown down her cards, despairing of the hand she had been dealt—her sister saw her chance.
Selena didn’t face Walter, she didn’t meet his troubled gaze; she didn’t try to engage him. She stood beside him at the bar and her hip brushed against him.
He looked down at her and wiped the sweat from his lips. She whispered in his ear, grabbed his arm, and pulled him behind her toward the doors that led to the restrooms.
As we sit watching the sun go down over the mountains beyond Cannes, Bingo barks at a cyclist passing on the road above the terrace. Selena has drunk one too many glasses of rosé. Suddenly she laughs.
“Poor Walter, I really did make a lunge for him.” She went on to tell me what had happened that night.
“I told him I had some great cocaine.”
He followed.
So what she had whispered was not that she loved him, or that she wanted to possess him or delight him, raise him up through the sky filled with angels or fuck him; she knew that anything she said that might reveal her exultant feelings and triumph at that moment would not make him follow her. This was Dingwalls after all. She offered cocaine.
I must try to paint a picture of a scene I did not witness, but I can piece it together from what Selena has told me, and from the gossip that later reverberated around the club. The restrooms in Dingwalls were scruffy but old-fashioned, blue and green fired tiles and cracked and streaked mirrors. Walter leaned against a sink, pulled out a harmonica, and started to play a suggestive rhythm. Selena chopped out some coke, snorted a line, and began to dance seductively. A few other girls came in and didn’t seem surprised to find Walter watching his sister-in-law gyrating.
The girls related the story later. They felt that if they hadn’t been there Walter might have responded sexually. But he did not move, and that made Selena angry.
As he played to her, the girls said, and they agreed he had played wonderfully, she had danced. She had even offered him a blow job. She had fallen to the floor, exhausted, humiliated, and frustrated. The girls and Walter all went to her and tried to help her up.
She pushed them all away, her cocaine high turning bad.