It was good to spend time with Rain and feel closer to her again. She’d been away a long time, on and off.
A few months later Rain arranged for me to go to Ireland. I was to visit Siobhan and hoped to reconnect with Pamela.
The trip to Waterford is an easy one when you fly from Heathrow to Dublin, and then take a car down the motorway. You don’t see much of the sea on the way south, so the arrival in Duncannon is especially uplifting. The sea, the sky, Waterford across the estuary. Rain had arranged for Pamela and me to meet at a little café that overlooked the small fishing port at Duncannon.
I looked at the redhead, wanting to see her as the amazing ginger Wonderwoman I had once known. What I saw was a mother, a concerned and slightly shamefaced one at that. But it was me who went first. I played my hand, which was not a good one. No kings, no queens, no jacks, or aces. Just numbers.
“Did I fuck things up for Rain?”
Pamela shook her head, but I could see she didn’t feel entirely happy.
“You know I did nearly enter the convent, I was almost a nun.” She looked at me as though waiting for me to laugh. “Oh, I know it sounds mad. But it was partly my lust that drove me to it. I’m a Catholic. It was OK making love to you, but you weren’t enough. I’m sorry, Louis. You were my mistake. Rain was our mutual triumph, but I couldn’t stay with you. Not after…” She didn’t complete the sentence.
“What did I do wrong, Pam?” I sounded pathetic.
“If you don’t know now you never will, Louis. Let’s just move on, can we? It’s been torture for Rain having to lie to you, to keep my life here secret.”
Pamela wouldn’t tell me where she was living. Clearly she didn’t want to see me regularly. But despite the discomfort we both felt, we were at least friends again. Rain was delighted of course. She only knew she had gone a long way toward repairing things between her parents; she knew nothing about what had really separated us. Neither did I. Not then.
Rain then took me to visit Siobhan in her cottage. Rain had stayed with Siobhan maybe once or twice by that time. Whatever enmity had built up when Siobhan had married Rain’s childhood crush seemed to have evaporated.
It was a charming house. The two ground-floor rooms had been knocked together to make one large space that included the small kitchen at the back on one side of the fireplace. Siobhan had transformed the room into a generous space with two large and comfortable sofas strewn with cushions, and a thick rug on the stone-slab floor that somehow always felt warm. A huge inglenook fireplace had been tacked onto the back of the house when a new staircase to the upper floor had been constructed along the back wall. The house had originally been a farmworker’s cottage, one of three. The other two were closer together and had been combined and converted into a home by Siobhan and Selena’s parents, when times had been better, before Selena was born. Siobhan’s house still looked quite plain from the outside. The windows were modern-looking, of metal and double-paned to provide some resistance to the winter wind from the Irish Sea less than a mile off and which was visible from her bedroom. The roof was of unpleasant and rather cheap tiles. But Siobhan had coaxed flowers to bloom around the front of the house, partly by planting a high protective hedge of laurel. Some of the plants she had kept in pots, moving them in winter into a basic glass greenhouse at the back of the house. Now most of what she had planted had grown strong and vigorous and had been transplanted into the beds.
The way the upper floor was arranged confirmed my suspicion that Rain and Siobhan were lovers. There was evidence of two women living together: two sets of clothing strewn around carelessly, and in the bathroom two toothbrushes, one electric, Rain’s preference. Siobhan’s behavior with Rain was affectionate and intimate, like a doting and patronizing aunt perhaps, but also slightly lascivious. At least that’s how it all seemed to me.
At the top of the staircase the entire floor opened up. A massive double bed, again strewn with cushions, took up one end of the room and had been raised on a plinth so its occupants could see the view of the distant estuary while lying back. The bathroom was a part of the bedroom, the tub in the middle at one end, with an open shower tray to one side, and a small toilet in a semi-enclosed area to the other with a sink where I’d spotted the toothbrushes.
Of course, I would have felt very uncomfortable interrogating my own daughter about her sexuality. Rain was no great beauty, I suppose, but she had a very good figure, and a strong presence, lovely eyes and a wide mouth. I knew from her mother Pamela that some men’s sexual insatiability is unequal to that of certain women. We blokes literally run out of blood, we fail to swell after a time; such troubles are never a problem for a healthy woman. Rain was not Pamela, but may well have wanted more than she got from her first few male lovers.
As I looked around the bedroom, the inevitable question to my daughter was on my lips: Have you found someone, at last, that doesn’t stop?
Siobhan joined us, as if to deflect my rather tacky curiosity, and as I looked up after bending to look out at the sea, she was standing with her arm linked with Rain’s.
The message I received, right or wrong, had at the time been very clear.
Your daughter is mine now. This is where we sleep, and roll, and spoon, and sometimes things go much further.
Fifteen years had passed. Fifteen years earlier, Floss had walked into Dingwalls very soon after Siobhan had walked out. Walter had met Floss and married her. In the interim I had sold painting after painting, making the most money from Old Nik’s extraordinary, visionary work. Walter worked in his garden, the maze becoming ever more dense as the years passed. Floss grew her equestrian business with Ronnie into a hugely lucrative concern. Ronnie and Floss spent a lot of time together, which was still the subject of some gossip, born back in the days when they ran the riding stable in Sheen. But with their later venture, one lucky thoroughbred colt they entered into a race at Newbury won by a mile and was sold for stud for several million pounds to an Arab from Dubai. The colt’s progeny went on to become winners themselves. As Walter’s money ran out, Floss’s filled the void.
Walter still contacted me occasionally and we got together to catch up a few times over that period. He said that from time to time he tried to make music based on his writings from the days when he started hearing the anxious thoughts of the front-row audience at Dingwalls. But he rarely heard the kind of disturbing sounds he’d heard back then. He was beginning to get out and about too, getting to know some of his neighbors. Sometimes he had a chat with the Iraqi fellow who ran the local convenience store. His name happened to be Hussein, which he told Walter was incredibly common among Muslims.
In the autumn of 2011 Walter came to visit me to ask what I thought he should do to celebrate his fifteenth wedding anniversary. I recommended flowers and he ordered them by phone.
“Fifteen years! That’s lovely,” cooed the woman in the florist’s. “So what have you been up to in your retirement? Don’t you miss the band?”
“Yes, I do miss it, but I’ve moved back to my first career. I’m a garden designer. It’s inspiring. Creative.”
“I hope you still do music,” she insisted.
“I still hear it!”
Politely fielding the woman’s questions, Walter laughed, ordering the pale pink peonies that he knew Floss adored. But as he put the phone down, he seemed to feel a wave of anxiety sweep over him. He asked if I would spend an hour with him.