Her barbed humor almost made Walter smile. Did she mean dirty work in his garden, or fucking her sister?
She went on: “You’ve lost your stringy cheekbones and developed some real muscles. You’ve put on some weight. It all suits you.”
This opened the way for him. “You look wonderful too, Siobhan. I’m not here to seduce you, but you do look extremely sexy,” he said quite shyly. “Is an ex-husband allowed to say such things?”
“No, he bloody isn’t.” Siobhan laughed. “And you won’t seduce me, Walter.”
Siobhan made it clear that in fact there would be no romance, no bed sharing, and the solace of her curves was not going to be available to him. Much of this she said with a smile, but Walter needed to hear it.
Walter told me when we met back in London that he had decided then and there that the drug that really did it for him was not sex but music. It was something of a revelation for him. It explained why he had managed—for most of his life—to be true to his two wives, and in a very important way to himself and his own ideals. His father and mother had spent long periods of time apart while Harry was on tour, but they had stayed faithful to each other.
I had to fight back an impulse then to jump in and tell him that back in those days, his mother Sally and I had spent many evenings alone by the blazing log fire, her drinking red wine, me in a heroin haze. I had often thought the only reason we had never drifted into having sex was because my drug of choice made me completely disinterested in physical embellishments to my “Little Mother” heroin jag.
Back when they were young teenagers, Walter, as Rain had told me, had experimented a little with my daughter, but after thirty minutes of kissing, where she would be breathless, ready to move to some new level, Walter simply felt a light swoon, rested, serene, and deeply happy and at ease.
So if he had learned that the drug that worked best for him was music, it didn’t seem to me to be providing him with many kicks. He just looked good at what he did, and it appeared to come easily.
Old Nik had conveyed that when he was ready he would fly higher as his creative work began in earnest. Siobhan had always understood this, and knew that the way she could penetrate Walter most deeply would be through his creative work. She had waited a long time to play this role, the only one that really interested her.
“You are writing,” she said. “Selena sent me the pages. You know it was me who sent them to your dad?”
“Yes. Thank you so much. It was an inspired idea. I brought the music he has written.” He pulled his laptop out of his old grab bag. “You still have our old sound system? I can plug it in.”
Siobhan nodded. Then she laughed. “Yes, play your music, but you know I will always be more interested in the words you write. That will never change.”
But she listened, and as the room filled with the dark and profoundly disturbing music, the thunder sheets, the bullhorns, the dissonant choirs, and the thrilling and experimental violin solos set against the backdrop of Harry’s church organ imitating both birdsong and nightmares, she was mightily pleased to hear how well her idea had worked.
As she listened Siobhan pored over the pages of the nineteen soundscapes that formed the main body of his work since he had emerged from the labyrinth.
Afterward Siobhan looked up at Walter, and the flash of delight in her eyes told him all he needed to know.
“You know this is amazing stuff. But as wonderful as it’s turned out as music, all this terror of the future is a kind of arrogance.”
“What do you mean?”
“No one knows for sure what the future holds.”
“I am just writing what it is I can hear in the air around me.”
“So you’re like Selena now!” Siobhan smiled, but there was some anger in her voice. “You’re a psychic. You can hear what people around you—the audience—are feeling?”
Walter brought his eyes up to hers defiantly enough to make it clear he would not back down.
“You’re not psychic, Walter,” barked Siobhan. “It’s absurd.”
Siobhan disappeared for a few minutes into the kitchen where she clattered plates, cups, and glasses so loudly that Walter remembered that when they were married this was her way of letting him know she was angry with him. After a while she came back in, holding two cups of black coffee.
“You don’t know what is happening, Walter. No one does. You may feel you can connect with the anxiety of people around you, but you can’t. Each of us has our own little world. It’s our duty to maintain each other, raise each other up not bring each other down.”
“So says the foreign correspondent,” said Walter with a laugh.
“Ah, now that’s different, Walter. That’s truth, not whimsy.” Siobhan believed she knew the difference. She had never faltered like so many of her journalist colleagues and ended up writing fiction, just some excellent poetry. “And you have to accept that the truth about Floss may never be reconciled with Selena’s so-called facts.”
“What?” Walter was confused.
“Trust her,” said Siobhan. “Until you know for certain. Then when you do know something, you may find it is unimportant to you. That you can survive it.”
“The rumors…”
“Who cares if Ronnie is really gay or not? If he’s bisexual then…” She stopped short of adding that he could join the club of which she was a contented member. “If Floss is going to betray you, nothing you can do will stop that happening.”
Walter knew that his ex-wife was right. He felt like a boy in her presence, as he always had. How strange that this woman might be the one who would reassure him and help him find acceptance of his situation.
“The stuff I’ve been hearing does make me feel anxious,” he said quietly. “Louis has been bullying me to try to turn it into art.”
When Walter was telling me about this conversation with Siobhan I was surprised to hear him suggest I had bullied him. Is that what he really felt? Siobhan had defended me.
“Louis a bully? I doubt it, Walter. And I have no doubt that fucker Frank is trying to get you to re-form the band!” Siobhan laughed again. “Stop worrying, Walter, what you hear is what you hear. You grew up with your head in a bucket playing a harmonica. You’ve always been a strange fellow.”
“What I’m hearing is not my doing, Siobhan. It comes into my head uninvited. It feels like some manic schizo shit.”
“Let it come,” soothed Siobhan. “That’s my advice. Accept it.”
“That’s what Nikolai Andréevich advised,” Walter cut in. “Fifteen years ago, when I first started hearing this stuff.”
“He’s right, then. Allow some affection for the people around you whose troubles inspire you—they are good people; all people are good people. Fear and art are entangled, sort of intertwined. It’s always been that way. It’s easier for me, Walter. I’m Irish. We know how to kiss the dark. But at last you’ve found some artistic ambition; you have a function over and above those evenings teasing Selena and making all the boys at Dingwalls jealous.” She laughed, and Walter laughed with her, easily, for the first time that evening.
“Walter.” Siobhan held his hand. “Do you like your father’s music? Do you like what he’s done with your words? Did I do the right thing with this—just once?”
Walter looked at his ex-wife and smiled. “Oh yes,” he said. “Yes, yes, yes!”
The sound of galloping hooves on hard ground. Thudding rhythmically, two horses, breathing hard. Jumps. The whip. Faster. Faster. Then splashing through muddy, shallow water. Climbing a hill, until reaching the top the two exhausted horses and their riders stop to survey the sight we cannot see, but that through this soundscape we can hear. A valley, a distant country, made of the sounds we have been hearing in the play so far. This is the sound of the portents of the end of the world, the death and fading of everything, everything good and bad and in between, everything natural and everything man-made, nature and the environment—all of it. Again there is a strange kind of blindness, blindingly, fiercely brilliant and warm. Clumsy, groping, lost—but making it easier to hear, and to be able to focus on what can be heard. Then finally all the most disturbing sounds resolve into the most musical, into the jazz, the fugues, the song of birds. Ultimately the piano, and Walter’s one song for Floss.