He had tried to tell her that he needed to escape, he too needed to fly, to jump from a window and see what he heard as he crashed to earth. He couldn’t find the words. Now she kissed him again and again, repeating that they had been together for fifteen years. In the patterns, the whorls of the lawns, the spirals of the flowerbeds, the planting of the trees, Walter had echoed and celebrated and exalted that number: fifteen. So that day, the occasion of their fifteenth anniversary, with his beautiful wife in his arms, he knew that he had to leave his garden.
In the house they made love and Walter wept. He cried the way a woman might if taken to a new height and stamina of orgasm and cannot contain her emotion or her gratitude; not grateful to her lover but rather to the miracle unleashed in her own body. Then Floss wept too, though her sexual arrival had been more sudden and brief. Sexually then for a moment they had changed chemistry, taken on different elemental names, and swapped roles, his arrow down, hers up.
“I might play the piano again,” Walter said. He lay back on their bed, his chest bare, still moist from shared sweat.
Floss smiled, and tossed hair that had grown long again.
“You could take your harmonica out into the garden tomorrow,” she said with a laugh. “See what happens.”
Walter pulled the pillow from under his head to swipe her, but she was too quick. As she walked naked to the window he gasped at how beautiful she was at the age of thirty-five, how slender and fit, and yet on the edge of being voluptuous. She turned to look back at him and even in the mist of sexual afterglow his breath quickened at the curve of her breast.
“You must do whatever makes you happy,” she said. “I know what you’ve been hearing is not about happiness necessarily, but you need to live. That’s all.”
She ran back and threw herself on top of him and they kissed again.
“Do all men need to make things?” She was laughing. “Walls, holes in the ground, songs about trucks?”
“We like songs about sex best,” said Walter, thinking about Crow and finding his thought quite wrong. “In the band I wrote pretty much everything. I think I was too embarrassed to write anything about sex. A garden is all about sex.”
“What!” Floss laughed. “What do you get up to?”
“I meant birds and bees.”
“You watch insects while I encourage Dragon to cover a visiting Highland mare,” she said as she gathered her hair into a muddled bun.
After fifteen years they were more deeply in love than ever. But Floss told Walter that she suddenly wanted to create something as well. And so both these beautiful young friends of mine, my godson and his wife, had survived a period of suspension, a time they had lived in stasis, riding, digging, staying close to straw and sweat, the earth and fertilizer. Now they were ready to start again.
As Walter and I walked in Richmond Park he confided to me his renewed love for Floss and I was glad. But there was something more I needed to know.
I turned to him, blocked his path, put my hands on his shoulders, and then lifted my right hand to his cheek.
“What did Andréevich say to you?” I asked him as firmly as I could. “Since then you’ve plowed all your creative energy into your garden.”
Walter took out a slip of paper and showed it to me. He had written down what Old Nik had said.
You must learn to wait. The moment will come. Waiting is the black art of creativity, not inspiration. Be ready. Be alert. Always. And then when the moment comes, you will be waiting, and you will have nothing else to do, nothing better to do than to fall in love all over again. As I once was, you are the mirror of everyone around you. You are their conscience and their voice. Look to the future, whatever you see will come about, good and bad, it is inevitable. Look to the light.
“Fifteen years ago,” said Walter, “I wasn’t really ready to accept such an idea.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “And makes good sense. Are you ready now?”
“I’m not sure I’ll ever be completely ready,” he said, smiling wryly. “I’ve never been brave enough to face the job of making real and tangible what I hear.”
Fire. Flames. Crashing timbers. Roaring whoosh of air. Crackling, metal expanding, and creaking. Small explosions. Then a huge and thunderous eruption. The cries of firemen to each other, the beeping and snatching white-noise gasps of their radios. The sweep of the hoses. The sound of the generator in the fire engine. Glass shatters and falls. Occasionally what sounds like fireworks fizz and whizz, but it’s just various bottles of household chemicals exploding and each doing their unique chemical incineration thing. We hear the footsteps of a man, crunching over debris. The kid is alive, he says. A miracle.
Somehow, all that time alone in his garden, building a safe retreat for himself, a kind of spiritual hub around which the suburb of Sheen might have turned, Walter had not understood that he would never be able to shut down his connection with his peers, nor shut out their subconscious thoughts. For fifteen years of creative lockdown he had continued to be steadily filled with their emotions, their rage, fear, shame, resentment, and tendency to judge, their need to try to shift the blame for everything that was wrong with the world, and everything they might have done but had failed to do, failed in their drive to try to right significant wrongs.
He had first become aware of this starting to grind away in him in the months before he had decided to quit the band. Because it was at that time that Siobhan, mistaking his genius for the scrupulous industry of a poet in the making, had forced him to review his creative process, and in so doing he had stumbled upon this second sight of his, that both frightened and appalled him. And so he had run away and hidden. Sometimes when two people love each other, and adore and respect each other as had Siobhan and Walter, one of the pair is left utterly alone. She had known instinctively that Walter had some great mission before him. She had also hoped to support him, encourage and guide him to some extent. But then she had lost him.
Floss, by contrast, rode horses, brushed them, and mucked them out. It appeared she did very little else. She was always awake at sunrise or earlier in winter, and arrived at her stables near Richmond Park at seven in the morning. Sometimes Walter would be awake before she left the house and would be able to share tea or coffee with her. Usually he slept later, until about nine or ten. The rock ’n’ roll time clock was hard to change.
In fact, Floss played a big part in running the house. They had a single helper, a cleaner who doubled as housekeeper and came in every day but weekends, and only for a few hours. She shopped for the couple, and cooked, but did so according to recipes, menus, and shopping lists created by Floss. Floss went to snuggle up to her horses at weekends as well.
In the fifteen years they had been married they had never taken a holiday abroad. Floss entered gymkhanas and won prizes. They had a splendid compact horsebox with camping space that was kept parked at the stable. Walter joked that it would have served well as a bandwagon.
Walter was still not comfortable with horses; there had been the incident when his parents rode up to him on a beach when he was a child and then rode quickly away. This had not exactly traumatized him, but it had made it impossible for him to regard horses as anything other than instruments of escape. His parents had escaped their duty to their tiny son by riding away; was Floss now to do the same? This innate suspicion was always picked up by any Equus he approached; it was not appreciated.