Down Among the Gods (16 page)

To overcome the problem of money, Jessie leaves a jar in the kitchen labelled
PETTY CASH
, and both of them draw from it for the household shopping. It pleases Jessie that Patrick doesn’t seem to find it embarrassing. She has no problem about being the breadwinner in the team, and he seems to have no problem with being the housekeeper. Within weeks they have settled into an easy, if unconventional partnership.

But for all that there has, as yet, been no contract made. There has been no ceremony, no exchange of vows, and no test of the solidity of the relationship. They have slid into being a couple, and could, as far as Jessie is concerned, slide out again just as easily. She has no intention of marrying Patrick, or of trying to coerce him into any kind of obligation to her. But she would prefer it if their relationship were on a slightly firmer footing.

Aphrodite has still not been put to the test. But she soon will be.

Probate on Jessie’s mother’s estate is finalised on a Tuesday. The following Monday morning, the money from the Bromley house comes through. Jessie hasn’t really believed in it until it arrives, just like that, a huge, fat cheque in the post. Maxine’s share will have to come out of it, and some estate duties, taxes and solicitors’ fees. But what is left is quite a considerable amount.

Patrick is still asleep. Jessie sits at the kitchen table for a long time, looking at the cheque, then gets out a pen and a notebook and does a rough estimate on the figures. Then she sits for another long time, looking at the papers in front of her while her mind slowly comes around to what it could mean to her life. Finally she gets up and puts on the kettle to make coffee for Patrick, but after a minute or two she turns it off again and goes into the living room. The Tarot cards are in their usual place, on the shelf. She takes them down a little self-consciously, because the one time she suggested to Patrick that she might read them for him he launched into a bitter attack on esoteric mumbo-jumbo and the hippie mentality that embraces it. Even though he calmed down later and made a restitutional speech about people being free to believe whatever they want to, she was sufficiently disturbed by his derision to have steered clear of the subject since then.

But now she needs advice. She listens for a moment before kneeling down on the rug. The house is silent. The cards seem to make a tremendous noise as she shuffles them, and she is struck by the absurd feeling that she is doing something illicit, even treacherous. She stops, angry at the sense of her freedom being restricted in her own house, and it is as though the anger clears the way for the arrival of a calm and determined spirit. Jessie forgets about Patrick’s existence, and deals the cards. She deals them without thinking, this time; a full spread of thirteen cards, each position representing a different aspect of her life. Immediately she wishes that she hadn’t. She can’t remember which place means what, and her book doesn’t have this layout. So she is faced with a jumble of bright images and the key she has for deciphering them doesn’t quite fit. She groans in confusion and is tempted to pick them all up and start again, but she doesn’t.

That much she does know about me. I will usually answer once, but never twice.

The Fool is there again and has somehow or other reversed itself, even though Jessie is sure she put it back the right way up last time. The two of cups is also there, quite central. Otherwise all the cards are different. The only swords to be seen are the four and the seven, and they both represent temporary truce or retreat. There are, however, other cards which augur ill. She manages, somehow, to delude herself into turning The Fool round again, but she can do nothing to avoid the menacing presence of the Moon. It sits at the bottom of the reading, signifying madness and despair, in the one position of which Jessie is quite sure: events yet to come.

She runs her eyes around the rest of the reading, hopeful of goodies, and she finds them. The three of cups is there as well as the two, promising a new nest, and the nine of pentacles, solid and comfortable, a welcome harbour in a storm. It’s enough. She sweeps the cards into a pile and replaces them in the pack, comforting herself with scepticism. Patrick is surely right about all that stuff. It’s a waste of time. She goes back into the kitchen and makes the coffee, her hands going through the actions mechanically while her heart wavers with indecision. Then she lays it out carefully on a tray and takes it upstairs.

Patrick sits up sleepily as he feels her weight on the edge of the bed. He runs a gentle hand down her arm. ‘Coming back to bed?’

‘No. I brought you some coffee. Are you awake?’

He yawns. ‘Depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On what you want me to do.’

Jessie sighs and lies down beside him on top of the covers.

‘Something’s wrong,’ he says. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to ask you something.’

Patrick is wide awake now, and Jessie can hear the anxiety in his voice. ‘What do you want to ask me?’

Jessie screws up her courage. ‘I don’t suppose you’d fancy living in a cottage in Wales?’

Patrick relaxes back on to the pillow and slowly lets out his breath. ‘Say that again?’ he says.

‘I’ve got the money from my mother’s house. I always had this idea that if I could afford it, I’d like to live in the country, in the mountains preferably. What do you think?’

Patrick stares at the ceiling, doing his best to ward off the sense of excitement which is trying to get a grip on him. He has learnt that the best way to avoid disappointment is to expect nothing, either from himself or from others. But if this were real, it could be the final break he needs, to get away from the vacuum of the inner city. The place doesn’t matter. It is his dream of Ireland, of hills and hollows, gentle contours, land to be worked.

‘Are you joking?’ he says.

‘No. I haven’t decided yet. It’s just an idea.’

‘It’s a good one,’ says Patrick. ‘A bloody marvellous one.’ He sits up and reaches for his coffee, then changes his mind and runs his hand through the soft richness of Jessie’s hair.

And as the day goes on he allows a new optimism to take root. While Jessie is at work in her office, he goes out into the garden and clears the leaves off the rough lawn which he has created with the hedging shears. It doesn’t take long, and afterwards he looks around for something else to do. But the garden is small and easily kept. He has already tidied up everything he can. The autumn sunshine is weak, but the sky is clear and it is too pleasant out there to waste. He is afraid that if he goes inside again he will fall into the despondency that has become all too familiar over the last weeks.

Despite the windless air, a few leaves fall even as he stands there, and he picks them up one by one and brings them to the dustbin that Jessie has bought for compost. On his way back, he stops to look at the sundial. It has lost the menacing quality he perceived on the night of the dinner with Gregory. A few days after that, he took away the temporary props, set stout supports into holes that he chiselled in the base, and lashed them to the column with tarred rope. The job satisfied him more than anything else he has done since he came, and he sees the sundial now as the focal point of the garden. As he stands there looking at it he knows, suddenly, how he will spend the afternoon. Inspired, happy, he goes into the house and borrows Jessie’s pencils.

T
HERE ARE TWELVE SEATS
on Olympus, and many times that number of candidates for them. Since there are no elections as such, most of the posts are decided by sheer force of influence, and despite the constant arguments that go on, changes are rare. They do happen, however. When Dionysus came along, for example, Hestia resigned in his favour. More recently Ploutos, the god of wealth, has deposed Hephaestus, the smith god, patron of crafts and skilled trades. There’s a bit of a row going on about that. Being blind, Ploutos got himself hitched up to a dreadful spectre by the name of Poverty, and wherever he goes, she drags along at his heels. There have been many attempts to separate them, but none have been successful, and the argument continues, about whether they are occupying two seats or one.

And new gods are born every day. Most of them get little more than a sniff of power, but occasionally one comes along whose rise is meteoric. The Church was one of those, and I came within an inch of losing my seat to her, before she began to disintegrate from internal pressure. More recently we have seen the arrival of Technossus. His mother, Athene, goddess of reason and patron of science and mathematics, has long had a close relationship with Ares, the god of war. Throughout history she has aided him in the development of engines and armaments, but it wasn’t until the early part of this century that he finally persuaded her to get into bed with him. Everyone up here was amazed, since Athene had been chaste since time began. But we had seen nothing, yet. Technossus grew so fast that he reached maturity in next to no time, whereupon Athene jumped into his bed. The result of their incestuous union was Telecom, the young god of information, and there is no doubt that he has inherited his father’s rapid growth.

Gods die, too, though it is rare. The first to go was Pan. Dear old Pan. Everyone loved him. I can see him still, that sprightly old goat-footed chap with his bushy beard and his set of sweet pipes, dancing among the nymphs and satyrs, greening the world around him, creating bucolic bliss.

We were, all of us, mortified to learn of his death, and it was I, of course, who got stuck with the job of breaking the news to the world of mortals. I was so bereft that I lost all my love of the ambiguous, and bawled out the news in plain language to the first mortal I encountered, a fisherman heading for Italy by way of the Island of Paxi.

‘Thamus,’ I yelled, ‘are you there? When you reach Palodes, you must spread the news that the great god Pan is dead!’

And he did. Pan is dead, but not forgotten. His template remains in the human soul, and people still search for him among the few areas of the world that have not yet been claimed by Demeter or Technossus or Ploutos. None find him.

But Dionysus can do a fair imitation. He uses certain substances to help him, chief of which is found in an innocuous-looking little mushroom called
psilocybe.
Its effect, however, is fleeting and leaves its users as sensually inept as before, but with a longing for Pan which is greater than ever.

Only children really know how to experience life with Pan, and then only before their parents have managed to remove their ability to see ghosts. Only children can lie in Pan’s arms and laugh as the grass licks their faces, then return later, find the same blades of grass, and lick them back. Only children can hear the real sound of Pan’s pipes in the trees. My pipes were a fraud. My pipes make music. Pan’s made the world come to life.

And for all that, for all the power that he had, he was never seen on Olympus, but lived his life on earth, in Arcadia, among mortals. That is why they loved him, love him still above all of us.

That was the problem, I suppose. He was simply too good to be true.

Everyone remembers Pan. Not everyone knows that he is dead.

It is late April and the builders have finally finished their work and gone. Patrick is out on the land, turning over sods with a spade. Behind him is a low, two-storey house, freshly whitewashed. It is old and the walls, built with whatever stone was available, bulge here and there. The slated roof has a substantial sag, but it is there because the huge beams which support it were put in unseasoned, and warped as they dried. There are no leaks. And there are remarkably few sharp edges.

At one end of the house, a small, lean-to dairy used to stand, and beside it, with a separate door, was a privy, which consisted of a wooden box with a hole in it. Anything that went through that hole fell into the stream which dives straight down the grassy crag at the back of the house and runs underneath the yard. Jessie and Patrick loved that privy. It was one of the things that originally drew them both so strongly to the house. But the surveyor declared the whole lean-to unsound, and in the course of discussions about how to rebuild, it became transformed into a studio for Patrick. It stands now the full height of the house, with large windows looking out over the valley and glass panels in the roof giving light from the back.

Patrick was intimately involved with its design. It has a new floor of irregular flags, waste from the derelict quarry on the other side of the crag. It has an open fireplace which backs against the house and shares the main chimney. As the masons were rebuilding the stone walls, Patrick persuaded them to leave a few stones out of the inner course, so he has a number of niches, like little shrines, where he can keep his materials. He doesn’t want shelves or drawers in there. He hasn’t even decided yet what kind of a surface he wants to work on. The space is wide and bright and totally free of clutter.

And it has succeeded, as Jessie hoped, in taking Patrick’s mind away from the issue of the television. When she first mentioned that she didn’t intend to bring it with them when they moved, he stared at her in disbelief. ‘But what will we do in the evenings?’

‘Loads of things. It’s going to be summer soon. You can work in your studio, for one thing.’

‘What, twenty-four hours a day? I’ll have to wind down now and then, you know.’

‘But we’ll be in the country. We’ll be out working in the garden or walking, or calling in on people.’

‘Calling in on who?’

‘We’re going to meet people, aren’t we? Get to know the neighbours?’

‘And what about winter? It gets dark at four o’clock in the winter.’

‘But there’s hundreds of things to do. What did people do before they had TV?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Drank a lot, probably.’

Jessie laughed. ‘We can do loads of things, Patrick. It isn’t going to be like London. We can have people in for dinner or sit by the fire and read.’

‘Oh, great.’

‘Well, what do you want? You could take up some kind of hobby if you really need something to do.’