SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (7 page)

'And then see them in some sort of ritual. Like going to the cinema and waiting for the lights to go down, is that what you're saying? Or watching Dylan up on stage: wasn't he another of your images?'

'He was Hamlet dressed in black, telling all the merrymakers to stop making merry. And Lennon: don't forget Lennon. My paper on the iconography of the Beatles for the Institute got me into all this in the first place. Went down well in Liverpool.'

'Why them?'

'Because they really got started underground, in a place called The Cavern, wearing those animal skins we call leather jackets, and because when Brian E
pstein was stopped dead on the
pavement outside, it wasn't because the sound they were making was more sophisticated than the ones he'd heard before, but because it was more primitive.
I
suppose primitive here means finding and expressing a form. Primitive means escaping what Brancusi said realism had become by the beginning of the twentieth century: "a confusion of familiarities". It was what primitivism offered to artistic form that led Picasso to these shapes on your walls. '

'But how can you ever tie all thus stuff together?'

'I can't as yet. That's why the book stays unfinished. But
I
think you'll find, when it does get tied, that it will be through lenses and constellations.'

'Which lenses did your man from the Upper Palaeolithic use then?' She put down her glass, and pointed both her index fingers, one to the left eye, one to the right.

'And are we in the labyrinth here then?'

'Certainly looks that way from the images on your walls, Henry.'

'The Riverside Gallery. Home of the Shropshire minotaur.

Featuring the famous Knossos take-away pizza. '

'And there must have been the odd boatload of virgins brought here to sate your appetites, surely.'

'I fear you exaggerate.'

'Maybe at least an occasional evening of rumpy-pumpy with a local Shrewsbury slapper?' Henry put down his glass and looked grave.

'There are no slappers in Shrewsbury, my dear. All the womenfolk about these parts are fragrant and cultured, little Mary Archers one and all, but without the vulgarity of the attendant husband.' By now Sylvie had finished all she could eat of the pizza, and was concentrating on her wine. It was very nice; no one could fault Henry's taste in wine. But what about his taste in women?

'Don't mind me asking, Henry, but you did say you'd been married three times.'

'I had three very successful marriages, yes.'

'What's that like?
I
mean, I've only ever done it once, and
I
find myself getting curious as to what the experience might be like on the occasion of a repeat performance. Does it get any easier?'

Henry had now finished his pizza, and re-filled his glass from the bottle. He held the bottle up beckoningly, but Sylvie shook her head. Never could keep up with Henry's intake.

'I wouldn't say easier, no. It's probably a bit like parachute-jumping: you grow more aware of the perils each time you do it, but that doesn't necessarily stop you. I'm not sure I'd trust memory here, if
I
were you.
I
certainly don't. But let's be chronological. My first wife and
I
were completely unsuited. But neither of us were to know that at the time, were we? She worked in one of those high-rise offices, where money sub-divides itself into fresh-faced zeros; it was a sort of high-tech perch, and she was a raptor surveying the bright new world below. They called it London in those days. She was so efficient that by the end
I
felt
I
couldn't even sleep in her presence without provoking her to fury. She would explain to me in the morning how untidily
I
slept, how raggedly
I
dreamed, what a noisy somnambulist I'd become, grunting and groaning and casting all the sheets around.'

'Like a minotaur.'

'Like a minotaur, staying over in the guest room of a convent.

They're famously light sleepers, particularly when there are virgins around.

'By the end even her cooking seemed to reproach me. She'd serve up these perfect little lasagnes, with a sprig of the neatest herb you've ever seen. Fennel,
I
seem to recall, straight out of the culinary clinic. Swiss greenery. The cleanest of all possible greens. I felt the meals should be eating me rather than the other way round. Lovemaking was simi
larly tidy, strictly time-
tabled.
Try not to make too much noise, Henry. This
is
a terraced house, after all. Can't you stay in one place for more than ten
seconds, for
heaven's sake?'

'So you got divorced.'

'Yes, that was very neat too, if recollection serves.'

'What happened next?'

'What happened next was Laura. Ah Laura. Mad as a bloody hatter.' He took a deep drink of his wine for solace, and smiled briefly at the absurdity of life. His own and, if she was reading him aright, everyone else's too.

'So what attracted you then?'

'Erotomania, that's what. There were two Lauras; one in bed, one out. The one on the mattress could make you forget the other one for hours at a time, even days. Years of training as a trumpet-player meant that she had developed a particular gift for
embouchement
... But forgive me, I didn't mean to become indelicate ... '

Play your cards right and you might have a trip down memory lane later, Sylvie thought. She felt, to borrow a phrase, that she owed him one.

'So was that the marriage that ended badly?'

'No, I seem to recall it ended rather well. It was the beginning and the middle bits that were awful. Eighteen months of non-communication, punctuated by bouts of uncontrolled Dionysian frenzy on our lavender silk sheets. Still, it could have been worse. She might still be here.'

Instead of me, Sylvie thought. 'And the last one?'

'The last one was Eleanor, God bless her. A lovely woman, who gave me all this. All this and more.' Henry faltered. For the first time, she sensed some real pain beneath the seeming insouciance.

'Not tempted by misogamy then, Henry?'

'Might be, if I knew what it was.'

'Detestation of the honourable estate of matrimony. '

'No, not at all. Not sure how soon I'll be doing it again myself, you know, but I wouldn't want to put anyone else off. One of life's intriguing journeys. Might you be planning another little trip, by any chance?'

The journey down into the delta, she heard herself saying silently, without really thinking it. Owen's terminology, that. Go away, Owen. Two things never failed Owen, however often his memory did: his words and his prick.

Later they stood in front of the image of the minotaur blinded, and being led away by the girl with the shining face. Ten minutes later, Henry undressed her lovingly, but she couldn't escape the notion that he might be close to tears. This seemed to happen whenever Eleanor was mentioned. Even as he made love to her, she could sense them maybe welling up behind his eyes. It was touching in a way. He couldn't escape his memories, could he, any more than she could escape hers? Afterlives. Maybe they should both book some amnesia lessons with Owen. How to forget Eleanor; how to forget Owen. Owen Treadle: Purveyor of the Waters of Lethe. Therapeutic treatments. By Appointment Only. Let's kill the afterlife of the image, folks.

Murmuring, sighing, barking, thumping. He was struggling somewhere in the empty corridor of his dream, this minotaur to whom she had been delivered, and he had woken her. She couldn't bear it, his hairy entanglement in the filaments of his own desire, past and present. How many dead wives was he clawing away at over there? And had it been any better while they'd been live wives? He thrashed at the pillows.

Pugilistic, demented. She began to see his first wife's point:

Henry was a seriously untidy dreamer. She only stayed all night occasionally. And so she put her arms around him, turned him round gently, coaxed him. Felt the full weight of his bull belly upon her. By the time he arrived inside her, he was barely awake, but quelled now all the same, the riddle in his body and his mind solved, however momentarily, as he slumped back into a silent sleep, limbs flung uselessly about her. And once he'd slipped back down his foxhole, Sylvie herself started to weep. Silently and very gently.
Lachrymosa.
Looks like our evening has been themed, Henry, with pizzas and tears, and now I've been left to do all the blubbing for both of us. Outside, the rain was an animal, desperate to get back inside the earth, its myriad puny horns demanding entrance. She knew that the rain would enter Henry's dream, swelling the mighty river of discontent inside him, and drowning whatever it encountered.

Wolf Morning

Owen had driven back from the coast. How that car of his throttled and howled. He had woken with a hunger that had no memory attached to it; a primeval hunger that had never before tasted food. An appetite innocent of everything except its own brute force. He had asked for two breakfasts, one after the other. He had tried to make a joke of this with the landlady, and had smiled his winning smile, dark eyes glinting with mischief, but she had not smiled back. Instead she had looked at him as though she knew something dark about him that he might not know himself. Something darker than either his hair or his eyes. Something that cancelled his smile. The word Alex might have entered his mind momentarily then, but he wouldn't let it in. He still had a gift for closing his mind, when required. Sylvie knew that, well enough.

He parked the car outside the house and went in. After making himself a coffee he found the shelf Sylvie had mentioned. He looked along the titles. These were his works, weren't they? The television films he had made with Johnny Tamworth, the films he wrote and Johnny directed, and yet he would be surprised by them, all the same. Some videos, some DVDs. Down in the cellar there were film cans. He remembered.

Loving Every Minute.
Five minutes later he was sitting in an armchair with a coffee in his hand, staring at the television screen. The opening of the film stretch
ed out one single take, like a
tightrope of gum that wouldn't snap, however far it pulled from the teeth that held it. Pupil of the right eye zooming out in millimetres to take in brow, forehead, cheek (a woman, then), glass, table, torso (a woman finely modelled, well-endowed), bar, crowd (to whose haphazard constellation inside the solitary cell of thought she seemed no more related than a fly to the pattern of the wallpaper it traverses). And all the while the voice, low, sardonic, cracked, charged equally with eroticism and melancholy, speaks in mono tones, equable and despairing.
I
created het Owen thought. Am
I
God, then? Listen as she speaks, my creature.

'I remember the day well because it was my birthday. It was also the first time my husband ever hit me. And, to be honest,
I
was glad of the attention: it had been a long time since he'd concentrated so forcibly on his wife. For years what
I
had done, what
I
had been, had not been important enough for him to lash out like that.
I
hadn't deserved so much expenditure of his precious energy. Even as I nursed the bruise, anaesthetizing it with another large whisky (and how many did that make on this particular day?) I congratulated myself on once more holding him inside my little circle of light.

'A woman doesn't want to focus a man on her profile; she wants to blind him with her dazzle, believe me. Blind, in chains, how mightily the fellow rattles. Close the cage door then and lock it, a cage woven from earthshine and grief. You have a key in your hand now.'