So although I worried about him, I also believed that he was trying to manage his creative explosions through the work he did as a gardener.
And I knew that he was still hearing something, something remarkable, or disturbing.
Somewhere between the wind and the waves lies the collateral for the second movement. We have heard the fall of a glass cathedral and the collapse of a building like an airport terminal. To lead from the first movement to the second, a voice, almost human, wails a continuous note. The voice, if in fact it is a voice, is racked with pain, is gargling blood and chewing regurgitated flesh. The sweep of the wind, for that is what it is, caresses with broom-like fronds of air stroking over an endless landscape, gently at first, stirring the trees, the leaves, the dust from the woodland paths. Then gusts break up the soothing, hissing breaths, each one harder than the one before. Building to thunderous, house-shaking punches. Punches that, at the very moment they deliver a thrust of pressurized fresh air, knock every last gasp out of the lungs. Then that ancient whistling howl, from eternity: whooooowwwow, whooooooowwwoooow, whoooooooooo. Like an air-raid siren over London in the Blitz, and equally portentous. This tempest can blow us directly into the jaws of hell, fan its flames, and feed its fire. Then the crash of a wave so huge, a tsunami-like wall of water falling onto the wind like a huge hand waving away an insignificant skein of smoke. The earthquake in the first movement has created this terrible wall of water? Perhaps. There is more than one wave, there are more, each more complex, more developed than the last. Crashing, folding, weeping, seeding, sanding, flowing, pebbling, rolling, whooshing, and fading. Receding. The voice that remains now, after the tumult of the second movement, is human, no doubt about it now. It is the voice of a child, a little girl, of about seven or eight years old, and she is singing happily. She is using a language for her song that is completely made up. It sounds like a mixture of French, Italian, Spanish, and some Mandarin Chinese. As she sings we can hear that she is playing with water, and possibly sand, on a beach or in a backyard sandbox. She pours water into the sand, sand into the little container of water, back and forth.
BOOK TWO
Chapter 11
A moment of silence…
While we imagine the fifteen subsequent years during which Walter avoided making music and Floss bred horses in order to avoid making babies.
Can I can bring myself and my family back into the frame again? Rain recovered from losing Walter. She remained friends with him, but it took a long time to forgive Floss; Rain had been interested in horses but—like many teenage girls—had given them up suddenly when boys came along. She continued to work for the BBC as a radio correspondent, but later when she had time off, she often worked at Floss’s stud and sometimes she stayed with me in my apartment in Richmond for fairly long periods.
One evening, the sun going down like a red orb over Heathrow Airport in the distance, we sat at the open window and she sipped a glass of wine. Rain was in silhouette, and something of an aura framed her face, the effect of the sunset behind her. She looked older than usual; my daughter had become a strong-looking and powerfully attractive woman, perhaps not in the Irish sisters’ league, but she had her own special mystique.
“Dad,” she said suddenly, her eyes moist. “You know I don’t hate Siobhan.”
I didn’t really know what to reply. Before I could think of something she continued.
“I don’t hate Floss. I don’t hate Selena and I don’t hate you or Mum.”
“I never thought for a moment that you did.”
“I think you probably did, Dad.” And she was right of course. She continued: “I did dream I would marry Walter, and when he married Siobhan I did hate her for a while. But she has been a great friend to me, and to Mum.”
“That’s good to hear,” I said, sorry that was all I could come up with.
“When Siobhan went back to Ireland and Selena jumped in I fucking hated her too, for a while. God, Walter seemed such a twat, sitting in Dingwalls waiting for women to throw themselves at him. When Floss beat Selena to the punch what really hurt was that, once again, Walter had not sensed that I was there waiting, and always would be.”
“You are like a sister to him.”
“We once kissed, Dad,” she protested. “I remember telling you about it. We were still young, but we kissed for two hours, tongues down each other’s throats. I was in ecstasy. I would have made love to him. He just stopped. It was as though we were playing a game of Monopoly together and he got bored and folded up the board. A few minutes later he was playing his harmonica with his head in that huge plastic bucket that he used to make himself sound louder.”
“Rain, you lived with me, and with Harry and Sally, we were a family, you were like brother and sister. He was blind to that part of you. You will find a man, Rain; you just have to let Walter go.”
“I have let him go.” She nodded her head with certainty. “That’s what I’m saying. I’ve let all the men go. And I don’t hate any of them anymore. Men or women. I especially don’t hate Siobhan. She’s been great to me, and great for me. Do you understand what I’m saying, Dad?”
To be perfectly honest I had no idea what she was talking about. Was she trying to tell me she had fallen in love with Siobhan?
Rain occasionally went to visit her old boss in Waterford for what I took to be consultancy sessions and I had begun to wonder if they were lovers.
I felt quite worldly about all this. I had arrived at a place where I was unruffled, serene, and even rather proud of whatever Rain may have done with her sex life.
So my pride was pricked, and I was caught unaware, and felt a little foolish too, when a few days after our talk in my apartment, I heard from Selena that Rain’s trips to Waterford were not only to spend time with Siobhan, but also to visit her mother, Pamela, who I had been told lived in a convent somewhere in County Wexford.
You will remember that my own affliction, my aberration, my visions, had been seeing what I believed might be the faces of frightening screaming heads in the grain of the walnut headboard of the old French bed, the one Pamela and I had bought a short time before she despaired of me and left me. It was Rain, trained researcher and qualified historian, who had gone out of her way to find out something strange about the journey of the bed itself. What she unearthed helped me to feel that I had not been entirely mad about the visions that I felt emanated from the old bed.
Its provenance was the castle city of Béziers in the south of France; the bedhead had been carved from a massive wooden gate to the city. Béziers had been the home of the gentle Cathars of the Languedoc region, who had refused to convert to Catholicism and brought down the ire of Pope Innocent III in the thirteenth century.
“Dad.” Rain caught my wandering attention. “That bed from Béziers. You know I tried to convince Mum, despite my journalistic skepticism, that your nightmarish response to it had not been caused by drug abuse alone, but also by some intuitive facility you have. You remember, Dad, that the Pope’s military commander, Simon de Montfort, slaughtered twenty thousand occupants of Béziers. Mum is a Catholic. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. At first she thought I was trying to trawl up the bloody history of the Catholic Church to try to break her faith and her vows. When she realized that I was just trying to generate a truce between my mum and dad, she understood.”