‘Jack,’ I said that night. ‘Jack, tell me about your wife.’ When I was in bed with Jack I forgot all about ghosts.
‘My ex-wife.’ He nibbled my ear as if to muffle the words.
‘Ex in law or in your heart?’ I asked.
‘In the one that’s most important,’ he said. So I knew he was still married.
‘Did you really ask her to come on tour with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Ask me no whys and I’ll give you no becauses.’
My ears were blocked by his fingers, my mouth by his mouth: all my orifices were agreeably blocked up, so for a time the sensations inside me were all-important. But it could not last for ever. These things can’t.
‘What are we going to do when we get back?’
I felt a wary stillness in him. I should not ask. But how could I not ask? Join your life to another’s, and you must know what goes on inside their head, if only in order to dovetail your actions to theirs. Herein lies the penalty of company. To live alone is to be free, but who wants to live alone? I even joined my life to Matthew, rather than be on my own. The cosmos is a kind of company, a never-ending puzzle, but gives the impression of being dreadfully still; judgmental, even – though one knows just what a whirling, buzzing, roaring, dancing maelstrom it is. If all the bits were just moved closer together, stripped of the illusion of immensity, we’d see that clear enough. Listen, folks, it’s just tiny, compared to – compared to what? Alas, we don’t know. All we know is that it’s there, beyond our comprehension, still further, greater patterns made not by divine intent, but by the cumulative chance events of endless aeons.
And of course, since the small echoes the great, and the differences between the world of simple rocks, stones and isotopes and that of living matter are not so dissimilar, save in the latter’s complexity and its capacity to reproduce itself in more or less identical form (the more or less being the crux, of course, ending up in the difference between the amoeba and the giraffe) it should not surprise me that illusion is inherent in what goes on between me and Jack. More (or less) than meets the eye, the nose, the ears, the mouth, the fingertips, or that other sense we traditionally ignore – the sexual responses somewhere inside us; that seventh sense. Because, if you ask me, I’ll tell you that’s what it is, which combines the other six with its own peculiar awareness of meant, meant, meant.
Nature’s way, you may piously say, of stopping my monthly bleeding, my horrid pains, the unseemly tricks me and my Dutch cap get up to, my version of the Thames Tidal Barrier, wilfully barring the onflow of history into the future, crying fuck you all – what about me, me, me? diverting it elsewhere, until the tide ebbs, gives up. Not nature’s way, I say. Illusion.
We don’t talk much, Jack and I: not in the way of exchanging ideas, comparing our particular visions of the world. Rather less than before, I think: before he found me out as Starlady Sandra, she who has the heavens at her fingertips. But I don’t mind. Though I love to have friends, intimates, confidantes, I have never felt the need for what is called ‘intellectual companionship’. Mathematics is a solitary activity: I became accustomed early to keeping my thoughts a private matter between myself and some sheet of paper, or some blackboard, or later some computer. Others were welcome to look in, of course, but could scarcely expect to contribute. Space scientists and astronomers are not on the whole the liveliest people in the world: they tend to see only detail, not the wonder of it all. (I hasten, politely, to say but of course, of course there are exceptions.) Perhaps they are right; stare into the heart of things too long, and be blinded! More prudent to tiptoe round the edges, taking sneaky sideways glances in, pretending not to. Only when I came to preside over Matthew’s dinner table did I meet people who dealt easily and eagerly with ideas, but with a kind of condescension, such a swift, ironic sense of their own superiority as quite gave me indigestion. They made their bread and butter the incoherent of the world, and I didn’t like that. I prefer the Citronella Jumpers, who squabble and rankle all the time with one another, on the simplest level, but have some kind of intuition, a non-verbal wisdom, which they in all generosity love to communicate. What harm can they do? The singers and dancers of this world?
I said to Matthew once:
‘As well sentence a rock to three months’ imprisonment for standing on a footpath and tripping you up, as a man for getting drunk and breaking a window.’
‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘A man has free will, a rock doesn’t. Where is my dinner jacket?’
‘Arguably,’ I said, ‘no man has free will.’
‘Argue away,’ he said. ‘But where is my masonic apron? Put your drunk in prison and he won’t do it again.’
‘Computer studies prove a period of imprisonment makes no difference one way or another,’ said I. ‘If you put rocks in prison you could still earn your living and the warders do without all that nasty smelly slopping out.’
‘You are impossible,’ he said. ‘Save this kind of thing for your programme. Hand me my tie. No, not that one, you fool. The dress tie, not the bow.’
And so on. In other words, he wasn’t properly concentrating. Alison, my good friend, suggested he didn’t concentrate because I was a woman, but I don’t think we have to look as far as that. Most people would rather just go on doing whatever it is they’re doing, bother the sense of it, let alone the morality.
Jack and me; separate, trying to be one. ‘Ask me no whys,’ he says, ‘I’ll give you no becauses.’ ‘Jack,’ I say, ‘what will we do when we get back?’ Jack the wild trumpeter, leader of the Band, husband of Anne, father of Frances, lover of Starlady Sandra, astronomer and media hack! ‘Jack, Jack, what will we do when we get back? Where will we go? What’s to become of us?’
‘Do about what?’ says he, a man of few words, but offering a warning. Think too much about the future and you’ll have no present at all. You’ll live your life tomorrow, never today; be dead before you know it. Song of the wanderer, the nomad, the traveller, dweller on this stretch of the road, self-righteous as all such songs are. I’m right to live as I do: you’re stupid: and here are the words to prove it. Listen to them! How they sing!
‘We have to live somewhere,’ I say, persisting, and he sighs.
‘Women are all the same,’ I feel him say, though do not hear. ‘Must have their pots and pans, their washing machines.’
‘I’d love this to go on for ever,’ he says. ‘But it can’t. I have things to do back home.’
‘What?’
‘Gigs,’ he said. ‘A wedding, a funeral, a fête. The usual things. Except the funeral. That’s not usual. Not much jazz at funerals. Piano player. Dropped dead over the keys, playing “Body and Soul”. In the wrong key. Mind you, it’s tricky. Three chord changes. But he was never much of a musician. And there’s every Monday at the Bell. That’s in Cardiff.’
‘A lot of travelling.’
‘Yes. Now I know who you are, do you still want to tag along?’ There’s a trace of anxiety in his voice, just a trace.
‘Do you mean because I am who I am, or because you know who I am?’
He laughs and holds me closer. He’s not slow, this Jack the mad trumpeter. Agile enough in the head. But he doesn’t reply.
‘Of course I want to tag along.’
‘That’s settled then,’ he says, relief in his voice. But how he hates to be held to plans, confined by the patterns of other people’s expectations. Of course, nothing is settled at all. I am used to rotas, work schedules, menus, lists of guests, Christmas cards received and returned (Matthew’s era), production dates, and the certainty of knowing where I am going to lay my head each night and, what is more, having a clean nightie. Look, I would like to know where I am going to live.
Even Godfrey the Goatherd, he of the vibes and the rural crafts, with whom I spent five wretched years, understood the necessity of having a roof, albeit one that was thatched, and with an ancient thatch, in which insects of every kind sported and worked out evolution’s particular plan for them. Wooden-top Cottage (I ask you!) was eighteen miles from Manchester University, which meant a tedious daily drive for me, but Godfrey couldn’t stand living in cities, and his general view was that if I insisted on pursuing my career that was okay by him, but since he was happy enough to support me, there was no real necessity for me so to do. (Happy to support me he might have been; but he earned barely enough to keep himself in vegan foods, let alone me. One of his theories was that if pushed we could live on grass, like King Nebuchadnezzar.) Work, he said, was a replacement activity: better for me to give up and live next to nature, in tune with the seasons.
Godfrey the Goatherd ‘worked with’ young male schizophrenics and somehow managed to contain my confusion and distress before and after Robin died. That’s why I moved in with him. I came to be sceptical about the ‘working with’, which seemed to add up to sitting around in the company of what even he called ‘weirdos’, drinking wine, smoking marihuana, reading R. D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, and occasionally offering the kind of advice one drunk, high man will offer another – for which he was paid a small salary by the Social Services. But he seemed to do no better or worse with the young men than did the more orthodox psychiatrists; the clients lapsed in and out of babel in just the same exhausting way, earnestly buttonholing both the sane and the insane, just as loosely connected to reality as ever, but at least, and for the most part, in the same kind of amiable, hazy daze as Godfrey himself. Sometimes violence and horror erupted, but not often. There was a lot of leading in and out of the goats which lived in the fields at the back, and which often got out to munch the forbidden plants which grew under my kitchen windowsill, and sometimes I would come back from the University and find goats as well as men sitting on the broken sofas of the living room.
‘Mad,’ I wept, once, as I made them all borage tea to sip, goats included.
‘You mustn’t say that,’ Godfrey said, gently taking me by the hand – he had a beard and soulful eyes: Pedro the guitarist and he are much alike, now I come to think of it – ‘these people must not be called mad. Theirs is the true experience. You do yourself no good, or them, by using these labels.’
‘Nor them, you,’ I said, and wept some more. I very seldom cry but I was weak; I had recently had another abortion, through which Godfrey held my hand, deploring the while my rejection of the life force – but not sighing too loud, in case I changed my mind, for even he could see the inconvenience of my being pregnant. He did not understand my determination not to propagate, which I rashly attempted to explain to him, for he saw insanity as a blessing, not a tragedy. But we needed my small salary as junior lecturer to help support the dope-smoking, borage-sipping, goat-keeping habits of himself and his coven of patients. I was a year into my doctoral thesis, too – a mathematic model of sexual selection: how height and weight in humans is affected by polygenes, leaving out diet and other environmental variables. (Large groupings of genes, each one of which will have an infinitesimal effect on the growing organism, but which together add up to something significant, are known as ‘polygenes’.) Those were the days in which I was having to work late into the night on my thesis, and, what was more, by candlelight. Godfrey felt that electricity had something to do with the increasing amount of mental disturbance (or whatever it was that was so described): one had to be careful in our contemporary society. Since he also felt that the colourings and preservatives put in food could affect the mental processes, and was heartily laughed at, loudly, at the time, by nutritionists, it is perhaps too early in the world’s history to declare him wrong about electricity.
Where was I? Oh yes, my concluding conversation with Godfrey. I wept, as usual. He was benign and fatherly.
‘Mad!’ I wept.
‘Don’t say that,’ he rebuked, ‘these people are as sane as you, probably more so.’ (Or words to that effect.)
‘I wasn’t talking about them. I was talking about you!’ I remember saying, through my tears.
He breathed in, hard, rolled his big brown eyes upwards in the attempt to forestall wrath and said:
‘Poor Sandra, you’re tired! Why don’t you give up this silly work of yours, and help me with something really worthwhile!’
It was shortly after this that I left. But I continue to hold Godfrey in some esteem. He and his kind pulled up the blinds, as it were, on those long dark lonely corridors of madness: made it almost a sign of grace, a gift from God, to have madness in the family. The blinds have been lowered a little since, of course: the mad are grouped with the socially inadequate, and certainly not admired any more, as they were in the sixties and seventies; their asylums are closed and they are left to stand about on street corners, occasionally gibbering and erratically jerking, and from time to time raping, strangling or mutilating a passer-by; but they are not hidden, strait-jacketed, to be a source of secret shame and disgrace.
My stepfather Simon died of cancer of the stomach when I was twenty. Cancer was then a word still scarcely spoken: a hushed whisper: a misfortune: yet another source of family disgrace. But little by little, as madness came out of the closet, so did cancer. The dying crawled out of their back rooms to sit at the family table, and guests even came to tea: and Nancy Reagan told the world she had cancer of the breast. Some things change for the better.
So good for Godfrey the Goatherd, say I, and may his herds flourish, and his dope grow strong and green, but not with me. No. After Godfrey I lived with my Professor for a little; and then, when that broke up, on my own, until in a moment of weakness, after all the business of the hard-rock little Planet Athena, I married Matthew.