The Whispering Swarm (38 page)

I knew Molly expected me eventually to divorce Helena. I had a practical reason for being reluctant to do that. I didn't want to risk disinheriting my children. I wasn't sure I wanted a divorce at all. You don't think much in terms of death when you're that age but the episode with Nixer and his men had made me consider it. Something else worried me. When I first met Moll she had appeared a self-confident young woman. Since then she seemed to grow dissatisfied and hesitant, unsure of herself. Was that my fault? Or was Molly hiding something? Maybe another lover who was making her miserable? Or secrets I had not even guessed at? I worried about it. Why had she changed? Had I let her down? I certainly felt a passion for her I did not feel for Helena. But then my love for Helena was also of a different nature.

So I returned to the Alsacia and proposed to Moll that we keep going as we had done. Of course I coated the pill a bit. Nothing was altogether real. I was confident we could conquer what our parents called Common Sense. Those were the days. The golden dream of the endless '60s. We lived a far sweeter dream than anything which followed. It took a lot of energy and willpower, maintaining so many illusions. But we had a lot of energy and I had a lot of willpower. We enjoyed a very energetic few years. Working, fucking, playing so much more determinedly than any predecessors.

Reasonably, I expected Moll to object but she said that seemed fair. I did need to see my children. And she liked what she called ‘playing house' with me. If Helena didn't object, why should she? This response startled me a little. I still wondered if Moll were living the childhood she'd never had, though with someone more congenial than her lost father. I joked that the reason I felt so tired and old sometimes was because she was going through a difficult phase. One day, I added, she'd grow up and leave home. Perhaps she exchanged sweet dreams for my energy. It gave me a buzz when she bit my neck. I'm not saying our private world was entirely dull.

As I saw it, I was doing my best by everyone. Because of Kropotkin, my granny and my uncle Fred, freedom was something I took seriously. It would be years before I learned that not everyone talking about freedom wants the same thing.

Moll was, she said, mine. She didn't want any more freedom than she had. I wasn't altogether comfortable with that! What do you do when someone tells you they don't really want freedom? Try to get comfortable with the idea? I'm pretty sure what my granny would have said.

And how do you deal with that constant murmuring in your head day in and day out? Anticipating it. Wondering sometimes what you could do to stop those voices, that Swarm? Because it only really went away, of course, in the Alsacia. Otherwise it got a little louder all the time.

At first the Swarm grew louder as the day went on, getting worse in the evening. Then it seemed worse at dawn and then increasingly at night. I began to think I would never escape from it. Unless, of course, I gave in and took my whole family back to that damned haven for the hopelessly romantic and emotionally cowardly, where the impulsive point of a poignard could determine if your children grew up with two birth parents or none.

With its violence and uncertainties, the Alsacia really was no place to raise children. I knew by then why parents with young families chose not to live there. Yet even now the place both pushed and pulled me. Ironically, while I lived in the Sanctuary, I often felt safer than in Kensington, where I hardly need worry about anything but the odd deadline. I relished the silence. While I was away from the Alsacia I knew nothing but a sense of loss and the urgent voices of the Swarm. Did the Swarm call me back or was it warning me away? Or telling me something totally different? Why did it never manifest itself in Alsacia? Was I protected from it or was it demanding my return? Or was the Swarm really nothing more than a form of tinnitus? I had long since given up attempts to talk about this with Helena. When I tried to discuss it with Molly, she said she had no interest in theoretical physics.

The fact was I knew of no way of stopping the Swarm or even regulating its volume. I could usually disguise my responses if I was in public when its voice grew impossible to ignore. I could pretend to function as normal. The Swarm rarely raised itself above a loud murmuring. Needless to say, resisting that sound, acting a part, sometimes made me impatient and short-tempered. There were some days, especially when I did not have the company of my kids, when I really did think of going away. Life became too difficult. I profoundly believed suicide to be a selfish act and never seriously contemplated it. In the past I'd always found distraction in passion, gossip, fantasy and research. My curiosity could be satisfied as much by some new revelation in science as by what someone told me in bed. All narrative. All grist for the mill.

Hopping between a variety of lovers was no longer really an option. I received nothing from it except discomfort. On the plus side you picked up a lot of good stories, sometimes at the expense of your friends. On the minus side it was a strain trying to remember names and addresses, let alone all the rest. And most people are conventional. Boring, even. Deeply predictable. I'd tried every other strategy but the fact was I couldn't hold work together unless my life was orderly and without deception. To work well I needed a routine. Adventures were experienced before and after a book. Only rarely did I allow anyone to interrupt. That was how it was. I warned Molly, as I had warned everyone else, that life with writers was worse than boring, even when you were one yourself. Moll seemed to think that reasonable and didn't mind much even when the sex got fairly routine. In the main she enjoyed a life given to creativity. She had a fine draughtswoman's eye and was a good painter. Her taste frequently echoed mine. We enjoyed many of the same things in poetry and painting. With her youth and enthusiasm she gave me a great deal. We laughed together a lot. She seemed as happy and content as I was. She loved me, she said. I loved her. I wrote love letters on her skin in Magic Marker. She didn't have to write back, but she did. She had proven her love. That had impressed me. And I had obviously proven my love for her. So that was okay. Emotional life in balance. Good. We were safe enough for a little rock and roll.

I think we were all doing our best. I might have been better if the Whispering Swarm had allowed me a few more days and nights off, just a few extra hours to think, but I gave my children a pretty secure life. They needed all the stability and clarity and loving I could give. In spite of the noise and the mysteries, the books got written. Sometimes I caught the Swarm's rhythm, almost like liturgical singing, and wrote along with it. When I appeared on stage I made up chants and songs incorporating the Swarm. If I told the kids a story I could sometimes include the murmuring. I think after a while the rhythm of the Swarm actually defined my style.

Those were in my defiant days. In my relatively few depressed days I couldn't get off my backside. I just sat in my favourite easy chair with my head full of voices while I smoked and wouldn't respond to food or entertainment. I demanded peace and quiet from people who were already creeping around me. They had no wish to antagonise me. I was the breadwinner and I was barking.

Slowly I began turning into a tyrant. I knew it, of course, subconsciously. I wasn't behaving according to my own ideals. If I took a step back, I could see I was becoming a bit of a monster. My old friends didn't come round as much as usual. Sad at being unable to see my children casually I had without noticing sidestepped into genuine melancholy.

At about this time, and not merely as a matter of pride, Helena began to think in terms of strategy. She probably suspected I wasn't alone in my retreat. She had seemed reconciled to this while it gave her some peace from my worst outbursts. Increasingly, I was reluctant to return to the Alsacia, even though it meant relief from the Whispering Swarm. The old me was coming back. And Helena wanted the old me back. And maybe a bit more besides. At that time I saw none of this. I thought everyone in the harem was happy.

We should have known better, but Moll was that much younger and made me younger, too, somehow. Helena didn't believe in altruism, not really, because, she reasoned, all men were unreliable on some level. If it weren't for lust and romance no sane woman would ever cloud her brain long enough to reproduce.

So far, however, we were both reluctant to bring matters to any sort of head. Our arrangement gave us all a little breathing space. That summer, Helena took the girls to stay in Devon with her friend Di. I went off to the Alsacia, glad to be free, if only for a little while, of the Whispering Swarm.

 

29

MRS MELODY

Then, one morning, there came a knock at the chamber door and there she stood, beaming like the sun and smelling like Kew Gardens, her carpetbag apparently of the same dark material as her long overcoat. A huge, white, knitted tam-o'-shanter sat on her expertly hennaed curls. Her outfit would look eccentric to any age. I had answered her knock because Molly was downstairs practising on the piano in the private bar. ‘Blimey!' I said.

‘So this is the romantic slum you live in.' She stared past my shoulder with approval. ‘Exactly where I'd shack up with Chopin, if I'd had the chance.'

‘Oh, God,' said Molly, coming up from downstairs.

‘Darling, I'm taking you and your young man to lunch.'

We went to the Cheddar-in-Chancery because Mrs Melody wanted some ‘good old-fashioned English food.' I wouldn't have seen that as a recommendation in the 1960s, although in the nineteenth century English food had been generally thought better than French. Rules and the Cheddar were our nearest posh restaurants in those days. The Cheddar's proprietor had a penchant for collecting monkeys. They were chained to stands but could deliver a vicious bite if you got close enough. The food was always reasonable and the wine list well above its station. The place was popular with theatrical people. There were Italian Commedia Harlequin, Pierrot and Columbine murals all over the place and we generally got a great table because I had been going there since I was seventeen. Apparently they knew Mrs Melody, too. They treated her with the same pleasure with which they treated me and anyone who happened to be with me. She acted as if she were taking favourite children out for a feed at the school tuck shop. I apologised for not inviting her to stay as long as she liked because we had no spare room. She took it like a sport. She smiled carefully. She said it was her fault. ‘I'll make it up to you, I promise, darling.' She spoke of a trip she was making to the Holy Land. She would stay in London, camping on ‘that horrible sofa' of ours. She would be no trouble and she would be flying to New York tomorrow. After that she was going to Jerusalem. She shepherded us up the stairs to the restaurant's ‘private' floor.

Descending just as we ascended, a handsome older man in an expensive silk suit recognised Mrs Melody and, with a delighted smile, came towards her. ‘My dear Freni!' She was a little disconcerted by this. She smiled sweetly and tried to get away from him as gracefully as possible. She seemed relieved he was leaving. She made telephoning gestures at him before he left. She laughed about it at the table.

‘He doesn't have my number. What would it matter if he did?'

‘He's very good looking. An old boyfriend?' I asked.

‘Oh, not even that.' She offered her daughter a passing frown as if asking why I was so inquisitive.

I apologised, explaining myself with a joke. ‘I'm a novelist, you know. We always ask too many questions.'

I already knew her first name, though I still called her Mrs Melody. ‘Wasn't Freni one of the three Zoroastrian muses?' I lit her cigarette for her. I was genuinely curious. Zoroastrianism seemed such an exotic, romantic and actually rather attractive religion. Had her parents followed the old Persian faith? Many still did in some parts of India and the Middle East. ‘I suppose your own mother and father—?'

She showed a hint of irritation and made an evasive remark. ‘Michael, could you order another bottle of that delicious claret?' She ate and drank with great relish, having at least one bottle of the '57 St Emilion to herself and treating us to another.

I tried to catch the waiter's eye. ‘Which one?' I asked. ‘Painting? Sculpture? Or oratory?'

She knew what I meant and laughed in spite of herself. ‘Astronomy,' she said.

Molly broke in, an odd look in her eyes. ‘Didn't I tell you?'

‘What?'

‘Mum's a famous astronomer.'

That was a rather big bit of one's mother's CV to leave out. I flashed a question at Moll.

‘In Iran,' said Mrs Melody. ‘I know the shah isn't popular with young people, but it's my native country. And my job does give me certain visiting privileges at Cambridge.' She looked up at me from under long lashes, her expression mildly sardonic.

If she expected me to challenge her, I couldn't. What I knew about astronomy filled a page and a half or so in
The New Scientist.
Try as I might, I had developed no interest in the heavens. I fell asleep during a press showing of
2001
and Arthur Clarke, with whom I saw it, wasn't a bit offended. He told me how much money it had earned in Chicago in its first week. Ever since then, any giant spaceship which takes forever to cross the screen during the credits for whatever protracted space opera it is has sent me off to the Land of Nod in an instant. I really didn't like space. Space bored me. Space was a distraction. Cute robots left me cold and they'd never dueled with light sabres better than in
Planet Stories,
the greatest of all the 1950s science fiction pulps. Time, however, was an entirely different mess of fish. Past, present and future in any order related closely to human affairs. Life is short but it needn't be dull.
And then you die.
Maybe a few times. Space just confirmed how insignificant you were. Or not. I don't care if I'm a specimen and some superior intelligence is observing this solar system through a microscope. But Freni Melody made it interesting. ‘We are rare in having the power to observe our environment as well as living in it.'