Down Among the Gods (26 page)

The eloquence of Dionysus. He has the ability, at times, to charm even me.

‘We can’t go on living like this,’ he says. ‘It’s a fantasy. Can’t you see that?’

‘No.’

‘But what are we doing? I’m fiddling around with stones like a kid playing with Lego. You’re gathering quaint little stories for your fictionalised anthropology. What’s the point of it all?’

‘Does there have to be a point?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know that you’ll lose your marbles if you don’t start getting around a bit. That’s the reason I go out to the pub so often. It’s the best way to become part of the community, you know? We can’t just cut ourselves off on our own. We’d turn into a couple of pale crabs, scuttling around in the shadows.’

Jessie listens, slightly breathless, aware of the terrible truth in his words.

‘It’d be different if we had a family. There’d be a reason for it, then. The house would be a home, not just a luxury office.’

The children again. Jessie falls back into conflict. Patrick is silent beside her for so long that she thinks he has fallen asleep. Until he speaks again.

‘But you’re not going to have children, are you?’

Jessie doesn’t answer. She still doesn’t know.

‘You’re not going to have children because you don’t need them, do you? You’ve got what you want, haven’t you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Don’t you? Don’t you see what you’re doing to me? Managing my life?’

‘But I’m not! I’ve done everything I can not to manage your life!’

‘Rubbish. You have me perfectly organised, all set up with pencils and paper in my playroom. Can I go with you into town, mum? Can I have a shilling for lollies?’

‘It’s not like that, Patrick, and you know it!’

‘Yes it is, it’s just like that. Wowee, a surprise for my birthday. A new bike! Look at me for god’s sake. Going around every week in a new set of woollies and fancy rompers.’

There is nothing Jessie can say. After a while, Patrick turns on to his side, away from her.

Hera has been confronted. Even Aphrodite is fast losing interest in this issue.

But she is Jessie’s only defence. The harder Patrick tries to destroy her, the more she loves him. She turns now, desperate to make everything all right, and runs her fingers gently through his hair. But he is asleep.

When misery finally exhausts itself and lets her go, Jessie has a dream. She is in her parents’ house, and it is the way it was in her childhood. Patrick is sitting at the table with her parents, who are alive and well and vigorous. They seem to be getting on well with Patrick, who is at his social best, charming and attentive. Jessie watches from a distance. She is not involved in what is happening at all.

After a while, her sister Maxine comes in and joins the party. She too is at ease with Patrick, and soon all three of them get up and go outside. Jessie knows that all her friends are waiting there, and that everyone is going off for a walk and a picnic. It isn’t until after they are gone that she feels a sense of disappointment at having been left alone.

In the morning she tells Patrick the dream when she brings him coffee in bed. He listens with a reserved curiosity.

Jessie attempts to interpret the dream according to a Jungian method that she learnt during a series of lectures a few years ago.

‘The parents and the members of the family refer to different aspects of myself,’ she says, ‘and the friends, I suppose, represent different stages of development that I’ve been through. You know the way you like different kinds of people at different times of your life.’

‘So what does it mean?’ says Patrick.

‘I think it’s a great dream. My parents wouldn’t have approved of you, in many ways, and I suppose there would be some part of myself that would have been influenced by them, you know? But I think the dream is saying that I’ve accepted you. Every part of me has accepted you, just as you are.’

Patrick smiles and strokes her hair.

If I had hair, even hair like she has, I’d have torn it all out long ago. I have given her the simplest of messages, and look what she does with it. The dream could not have been clearer.

Patrick is taking over her life.

And how. She never sees him take money from the dresser drawer, but it decreases more rapidly as the weeks go by. She despises herself for not standing up to him about it, but despises herself more for desiring to start keeping an account of what he is spending.

The new Frances Bailey has arrived, but Jessie finds that she can’t concentrate well enough to read it properly. She can manage more simple editing as long as she can do it while Patrick is out. But whenever she hears him moving around the house, she becomes tense, afraid that he will call her from wherever he is with some new complaint.

Living with Patrick has become like living with two different people. At his best, he is more delightful than ever, funny and thoughtful and sensitive. But although he has never come close to physical violence, he is beginning to scare her. His virulent verbal attacks on her and all women are becoming more frequent and there are times when she stays silent for hours, even days, rather than risk saying anything that might provoke him. She is frequently reminded of the eight of swords, the card that represented her past relationships in that first reading all those months ago. She is there again, somehow; oppressed, besieged, on guard.

And it’s not only Patrick that she’s on guard against. There are times when she says things that she doesn’t intend to say, or when something that was supposed to be innocent comes out all wrong and sounds like criticism. When that happens she can understand why he goes out so much. But when he does go out it is almost always to the pub and the sense of relief that Jessie feels at his departure is invariably followed rapidly by resentment at his absence, his spending, and his preference for company other than hers. No matter how often she thinks about it and how hard she tries, she can’t see any solution. She doesn’t know if it is some inherent darkness in Patrick that is causing the problems or whether it is herself, but she does know that any attempts she has made to talk about the things or improve them in any way has only made the problem worse. She feels increasingly helpless, a swimmer against an impossible tide.

And Patrick, too, is lost and afraid. The aerial that Jessie eventually bought can’t get a decent reception up there among the hills, and the television is useless. The mornings have begun to gape at him, all their previous promise lost. If Jessie doesn’t wake him, he sometimes gives them a miss altogether and gets up in time for lunch.

And he cannot account for the way he is behaving. He doesn’t want to be hurtful to Jessie. He loves her and can’t bear to see her face fall yet again as he suddenly loses control. There are times when he longs to reach out to her and ask for her help with whatever it is that torments him, but he is afraid of her scorn. Everything she says seems to eat away at his diminishing confidence. The only way he can escape is to reach for a drink.

He is caught between the devil and the deep, blue sea.

A
PHRODITE, AS MIGHT BE
expected given her nature, has many, many children. With her illicit lover Ares, she bore Phobus, Deimus and Harmonia. Poseidon fathered Rhodus and Herophilus. And then there’s Hermaphroditus, as everyone knows, the result of her union with me. But despite her assumed association with Dionysus, she resisted him for a long, long time.

She did yield, however, eventually. Their son is called Priapus. He is a gardener and carries a pruning knife. He spends a lot of time in pear trees. But mostly he is recognisable by his enormous genitals.

On a clear day in January, Patrick pauses in his work and looks up at the sky. Some elusive and beautiful quality has entered the light. Intrigued, he leaves the building of the wall and goes into his studio.

The drawings on the walls are beginning to curl, just slightly, but apart from that there is no sign of damp. The weak winter sun has been shining against the window all day and the atmosphere in the studio is warm and inviting. The cockerel still has dominion of the drawing board and in the new light, Patrick dares to approach and examine him again. In his mind, the image of the drawing has reduced itself to a most appalling childish mess and he is surprised to find that in actuality it is not so bad. What is wrong is mainly the colour. The chalk pastels were too soft. They have failed to capture the clarity of the live bird and the brightness of the blue-green feathers around its neck. The problem fascinates him and he ponders it for a long time, thinking about different materials and how that marine iridescence might be reproduced. In the end he lets it go but the cockerel is no longer so threatening now that he has discovered what is wrong with it. He takes it down with a sense of liberation and lays it on top of the others. Then he takes out a clean sheet of paper, pins it to the board and begins to draw.

The lines he draws are shorter than the free-flowing ones of the early summer but he soon knows what he is doing and begins to move in on the details. When he stands back an hour or so later he is a little disturbed by the image he has produced, but as far as the quality of the drawing goes, even he can have no doubt.

Satisfied, he locks up the studio and goes into the house. Jessie has also noticed the strange light and has been sitting beside the window in her study looking out across the abandoned wall towards the gorge. Now she hears Patrick come in and tenses, waiting to find out what his mood is. She isn’t aware that she has made an unforgivable omission.

Patrick has decided to celebrate his successful return to the studio. The whiskey bottle is nearly empty so he opts for a quick visit to the pub before dinner. As he changes out of his boots it occurs to him that the new drawing will fit perfectly into the old wooden frame that he found in the feed shed. He decides to go to Bangor with Dafydd one day and get some backing card and glass, then give it to Jessie as a present.

‘Jessie?’ he calls from the hall.

‘Yes?’

‘When’s your birthday?’

‘October,’ she calls. ‘You missed it.’

‘Did I?’ he says, peering quizzically round the door. ‘What a shame.’

She smiles, relieved, off guard. ‘Why? What are you up to?’

‘Oh, nothing. I’m just nipping down to the village. Don’t cook, will you? I want to do the mackerel.’

‘All right.’

He goes into the old kitchen and over to the dresser. There is nothing in the drawer apart from a handful of loose change.

Patrick walks into Jessie’s study and stands thoughtfully on the Persian rug in the centre of the room.

‘Are we bankrupt, sweetheart?’ he says.

‘What?’ says Jessie.

Patrick’s voice is mock gentry, comical, but extremely threatening. ‘It was bound to come sooner or later, I suppose. We shall just have to sell the silver, that’s all.’

Jessie’s mind is flitting like a trapped bird, seeing nothing clearly, neither the enemy nor the way out.

‘You may put away the car, Bradshaw. Madam has decided I shall not be needing it. And you may tell Elsie to light the fire and set up the Scrabble.’

‘Oh.’ Jessie lets out a long-held breath. ‘Is there no money there? Do you need a few quid?’

‘A few quid? We don’t deal in few quids, do we, dear? Don’t we deal in nobler currencies? In art and literature and ideals? Nothing so base as few quids, surely? Or evenings in front of the TV, or shitty nappies.’

‘Oh, leave off, Patrick, will you?’ She gets up and goes into the hall for her shoulder bag. The money is there. She has just forgotten to take it out. He is suddenly friendly, himself again.

‘Am I spending too much?’

Jessie sighs. She can retreat, lie, tell him that of course he is not, or she can tell the truth and bear the consequences.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You are. But what can I do about it?’

‘Just what you have done, I suppose,’ he says. ‘Don’t leave it lying about.’

‘What, ration you, you mean? Give you pocket money?’

‘Why not? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Yes, you would. Another way to control me.’

‘Patrick, I wish you could hear yourself, sometimes. There’s no middle ground with you, is there? It’s all or nothing. There’s never any room for negotiation. You’re spending too much money, yes. But I don’t want to control you.’

She walks into the old kitchen, the bag in her hand. ‘Sometimes I think it’s what you want, though. Someone who will take responsibility for you. The way you’re behaving these days, it’s obvious that you don’t know how to take responsibility for yourself.’

Patrick has been waiting in the hall but now he follows her into the room and stands behind her. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘I thought we’d get round to that one, sooner or later. It always comes up.’

‘What do you mean, always?’

‘With women! I’ll never understand them. First of all they’re all over you and you can do no wrong. Then all of a sudden you’re not good enough. They’re trying to change you into something else.’

‘I’m not trying to change you, for god’s sake. I liked you the way you were. If there’s any changing going on, you’re doing it all by yourself. I don’t understand what’s happening.’

‘What way would you like me, Jessie? Out in the garden in my wellies? Sitting beside the fire every evening, smoking a pipe? Would that make you happy?’

Jessie stands with her back to him, feeling absently around in the bag. ‘I don’t care what you do, Patrick.’

‘But you do, don’t you? You manipulative bitch. You fancied me as an artist, didn’t you? I’m surprised you didn’t get me a beret and a smock. You’re wrong, I’m afraid. I’m not an artist. I never was and I never will be. And I’ll never be happy up here on Mount Olympus, either.’

‘Go, then.’

Dusk is falling. The magic light has gone and the gloom has settled back in around the unlit fire. The drawer of the dresser stands open like an outstretched palm.

Patrick is trembling slightly. For a moment they stand silent, their eyes averted from one another.

It is an opportunity, if only they knew. In moments like this, as the gods regroup, mortals have the chance to be friends, to retract ill-directed blame and reveal their own form of love. But it requires the rarest and most painful of the human qualities to do this. It requires honesty.