“My birth mother,” Floss said.
“It’s a wonderful day; we wouldn’t know any of this if you hadn’t fallen from your horse!” Walter seemed excited.
He could have added that none of it would have come to light had Nik not been in the hospital on his last lap. There was a strange air of sadness and joy combined.
BOOK THREE
Chapter 20
This narrator is joined now by his beautiful host here in the hills above Grasse. We grapple over the pen, grab the laptop back and forth, correct each other’s mistakes. She has told me so much of the story I have recounted. She has marvelously described so many of the scenes—and bravely too because in various ways she has not always appeared to be an entirely good soul. Without her I would never have written this book, and I am so glad I have.
And of course, regarding that terrible thing I did, for which I must make amends, and from which I must hope for redemption, Selena is the only one who knows what happened. She is the one who has urged me to write, seeking peace. It apparently all took place at the wedding of Walter and Siobhan.
“I’ve gotten to the bit about what I did at the wedding, darling,” I shouted. Selena was sitting out on the terrace. She came quickly back into the room and stood in front of the French window, the sun behind her, her naked body visible under the transparent white shift she was wearing.
Selena was a luminous woman surrounded by angels and sometimes perhaps demons, all-seeing, potent, and scary, a killer when she was a mere girl, an arch-manipulator of all the men around her.
“I was just saying, I’ve gotten to the rape,” I said to her merrily, as though I were writing fiction and not a confession. “I am about to describe how you saw it and what you told me I did…”
Selena quickly walked over to where I sat, pulled the laptop away from me, sat on my knee, and kissed me long and hard until I gasped for breath.
“Later,” she breathed sexily, somehow combining in the same pregnant word the promise of moral redemption followed later by an evening of great sex. “Everything will come together later. Take a break. Take Bingo for a walk in the woods.”
I’m taking over the fucking laptop, Louis. You take Bingo for a walk. Let me tap away for a while. Now we are firmly in my territory: angels and demons, and the astral plane. But back in the days you describe at the beginning of this story, this would have meant little to you. You may never have suffered from the close-mindedness of some of your peers—those who were certain there were no ley lines, no God, no ghosts, and no astral forces—but if you weren’t thinking about sex back then you might well have been thinking about money. You were so materialistic.
I, on the other hand, have always thought of sex as a function of fate, as an aspect of the force and power of the universe and the will of its physical and spectral agents, whom I can see and feel but are invisible to someone like you.
You wrote down what little you understood about the things I believe. You advised me that whatever each one of us believes, when we speak of such things in the modern world it is dangerous to reveal too much metaphysical faith. You didn’t quite get that right.
You could be the fool. Louis, darling man, you betray yourself with such statements. If you addled your brain and saw and felt some wonderful things, why not own them? Why deny what happened? It’s all brain chemistry in the end, the doubters say. But the real question is what is the chemically altered brain perceiving? Is what it sees not there? Dogs hear things we will never hear. Does that mean they never happened?
One thing you did get right was spotting Nikolai Andréevich’s genius and accepting the fact of his second sight. Of course, I could also see what Old Nik saw. Since my childhood in Ireland, as early as four or five years old, I saw angels in the clouds. My sister Siobhan and my father dismissed it when I spoke of it. In the end I realized I had to keep secret what I saw, what I felt, what I knew. Later I understood that I was part angel myself. I could do things no one else could do. I could persuade people to do what I wanted, just by thinking about it. I could move inanimate objects across a table, but only when I was alone.
But in another way I was hardly ever alone. There were always angels around me. One day they began to whisper to me that I had a spiritual twin, and I should look out for her. As soon as I saw her face, they told me, I would know. The first time I met Floss at school, and we ran to each other and hugged, I knew I had found my twin.
Nik’s drawings were beautiful, and true, but however many he produced he would never be able to reproduce exactly what it was that special people like him—and me—could see. But with Nik came Maud. I remember reading what you wrote about your first meeting:
“For the first time since she arrived in my apartment Maud looked happy, with a happiness I felt I knew. Again, my heart fluttered.”
Oh, for God’s sake, Louis—I wish you’d bugger off with all this “heart fluttering.” You had wanted to fuck her. Roll around on Old Nik’s drawings of angels in heaven, covering them with sweat, with your tongue down her throat. You were transparent. As if, because she was about your age then, you’d be doing some Great Thing by having an affair with her. Ugh. I have to remind myself that back then, when you first met Maud, I only had eyes and designs for Walter. Louis Doxtader? Dirty old man. That’s what I would have said if you ever looked my way. Never would have thought I could fall for you. You were bottom of my list of prospects.
But everything changes. When you first mentioned me in this book I was of course one of the “Collins girls.” But what you did not write was that I was the younger. The prettier. The cleverer. My hair is not red, or ginger, it is dark and lustrous when I don’t bleach it. And I did bleach it, and curl it, and put it into plaits in the hope Walter would notice me and want me. I was the only one who understood Walter at a deeper, spiritual level, the only one who could ever have helped him. I knew what he was going through: I could see the dark angels trying to express themselves through him. I could see the shadows. It wasn’t that the people around him in Sheen were using him as a channel for their anxieties; he was using them. Or the entities that possessed him were.
What am I? What do I see? What did Nik see? What was Walter hearing? I knew Walter would take a long time even to see me. Your wife Pamela—with her fiery red hair and pheromones pouring from her like the overpowering scent from fading lilies—set up your godson, young Walter, to look for a redhead of his own, and my sister Siobhan turned out to be the one. Pamela was such a hot woman, so exciting to Walter, I think, because she was also lost. How could any woman desert her own child the way she left Rain with you? I know why. Only I know why. I made that happen too. In any case, such contradictions in a woman always intrigue men. Of course, now we know that she didn’t leave Rain; she saw Rain fairly regularly.
Anyway, if Walter had been a bit more of a real rock star, he could have had me. Much sooner. He’s no longer number one. You are, my sweetheart. So the first is last, and vice versa.
As I flip back through the pages of this book, I love to read about your relationship with Walter when he was a boy. Reading about this gentle young man makes it a little easier for me to admit that when my sister Siobhan started seeing Walter, I was probably more jealous than even Rain. She was too young for him. At twenty-seven she was still a child really. I was an old soul, and felt a thousand years old.
I am ten years younger than Siobhan, nine years younger than both Rain and Walter. But I feel guilty when I confess that in my heart I put curses on both Siobhan and Rain because Walter loved them, each in a different way. And my curses work. I wanted neither of them to have Walter. He was supposed to be mine. I was supposed to have any man I wanted. I knew how I could hurt them. I would use you.