SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (17 page)

'Remember the agreement. No questions. Drink it.' So she did. And he was right, it did make her feel better almost immediately, though there was obviously some spirit in it. She didn't care. They started to talk. Soon their drinks were finished. She offered to buy a round but that would have involved the disclosure of what she was drinking, so he got it instead. By the time she had finished the second glass she felt considerably better; in fact quite lively. She now joined him in a glass of white wine. Red wine was Henry, Shropshire, the Riverside Gallery, minotaurs and pizzas. White seemed freer of any unwanted heaviness. Half-way through it she remembered she hadn't eaten all day.

'Let's go down to the Everyman,' he said, which suited her because it always had vegetarian quiches and various salads. As she came through the door on to the pavement outside she stumbled slightly, and he put his hand on her back to steady her. Then he kept it there. He was almost a foot taller than she was, taller even than Owen. A good rudder if a girl needed guiding.

'What were those drinks? Am I allowed to know now?'

'Vodka and water. Still water. Delicious isn't it? Cleanest drink on earth.' In fact they'd both been doubles. At the Everyman he ordered a large carafe of white wine. They ate; they drank; they talked. Sylvie was soon asking herself how she had missed this character. The Signum had a relationship of affiliation to the University.
All sorts of things involving the awarding of degrees, valida
tion of courses, entry require
ments, and there was a fair deal of coming and going between them.
She'd heard of Tom, heard that he was a very well- informed scientist, with a tremendous following at his lectures. Though what was it Alison had said about him? She couldn't be bothered thinking about it. For the moment, as he seemed to connect with all her main concerns, she found herself growing livelier and livelier. They really would have to start seeing more of each other; he filled her glass again.

'I'm not sure what the impact of the things you're talking about has been in science. We still tend to be all too trusting of images. I try to point out to my colleagues that whatever the

Hubble images are they're certainly not snapshots in space - these are constructed photographs. A lot of construction goes into them, and I often wonder if the aesthetic constraint isn't at least as strong as the observational one. But you were talking about how modernity subverts itself. Duchamp' s urinal. Dada.' Sylvie took another sip of her drink before replying.

'I'm intrigued by things a little nearer to home. In fact, things around the corner. How in the 60s these new stars were first put on pedestals and then tried very hard to throw themselves off them.
Magical Mystery Tour
didn't really come off. But have you seen
Don't Look Back
or
Eat the Document?'
He shook his head. 'I've got copies of them at the Signum, one of them not strictly legal, but never
mind
. There was a resistance to absorption in the corporate world of advertising and promotion, which can still shock. It did seem at one point as if Dylan would simply explode. The commodity that exploded.' She smiled at her own phrase, which she had never used before. 'When Godard made
One Plus One,
he wouldn't play the whole of the song, which pissed the Stones off, though he pissed them off anyway. But I can understand why. It's a pretty terrible film looking back, Godard at his nastiest, but he didn't want to fulfil expectations in that way.'

'So what happened?' He was filling her glass again. Why did she not always drink white wine? It hardly seemed to have any effect on her at all.

'It didn't work.
It seems that the image, even when it's subverting itself, still manages to reinforce its transcendent reality at the same time.
This was one of Euland's greatest fears. He said that the power of self-critical analysis can never keep up with the amplification of the modern image. We have created a culture in which we are overwhelmed by our own images, and there seems to be no escape. We're trapped inside the corridors of our own endless gallery of images. '

'It sounds like a labyrinth.' She started laughing.

'You're right, Tom. It sounds like a labyrinth. Though don't ask me who's the minotaur and who's the virgin.' At which point he put his hand on her thigh. And she left it there. No rules any more. She was going to have to make up a new set quickly.

'Are you married, Tom?'

'Getting divorced.'

'That makes two of us.'

'We could share notes. Don't believe everything you hear about me, by the way. '

'Do you have somewhere to go?'

'Not my house. My wife a
nd child are there. Things are
getting sorted out, but not quite yet.'

'Well, we certainly can't go back to the Signum.'

'Why not? I heard you stay over there sometimes.'

'By myself. With Hamish lurking around ... God, I can't even bear to think about it.'

'We can be quiet.'

Sober, Sylvie would never have done it, but she was far from sober. The two double vodkas on an empty stomach, then all the wine, probably more than a litre, since Tom had been more attentive to her needs than his own. Plus the odd sense of exhilaration as it occurred to her more and more vividly that she was free. She had told Owen to go and it seemed that he'd done as he was told. And she had not spent the night with Henry, because he had accepted her farewell, and put her in the spare bedroom instead. So she wasn't sleeping around, was she? If anything, she was doing the opposite of that. She owed no one anything and she'd been not far off a nun for the last few years. And she did like Tom. Something about both his intellect and his body appealed to her this evening.

As they left the pub she spotted Lionel, wet-headed and
solitary.

'Out chasing women?' she asked him.
'Au contraire.'

Five minutes later they made their way up the creaking steps of the Signum, tiptoed down the corridor, and shuffled in to Sylvie's room with only the mildest of giggles.

'You'll have to leave early. Before Hamish is up and about.'

'I'll go first thing.'

So much of sex is politeness. That was in one of Owen's scripts, she remembered, but she could never remember which one. Tom was very polite at the beginning. Decorous, responsive, making sure she liked each stage. She did. His body, taut and agile, was such a change from Henry. A lot more like Owen, in fact, though less angular, less ... she didn't know less what. Then he became less polite, but by then that was what she wanted him to be. She called out his name in the darkness.

When she woke up, he had already gone. There was a note on the table.
I'll phone you. Love, Tom.
She remembered who and where she was briefly, and then decided she had better get back to Chester before she remembered any more. She wanted a quick shower. She stepped out on to the corridor and saw Hamish sitting on a wooden chair, reading a book. He looked up at her, unsmiling.

'Ms. Ashton, as I believe you are now called, I think you and I need to have a serious talk at some point about the nature of this institution.' She could think of nothing at all to say, so walked in silence down to the bathroom.

The Motel Route to Wisdom

The book that lay open on the floor next to the makeshift bed where Alex Gregory slipped in and out of consciousness recounted the long travail that had been Lady Pneuma's life in America when she first proclaimed her gospel: the motels, the manicured greensward rising to the shopping mall, diners with their burgers, fizzing drinks, heavily-gutted men draped in white aprons. A world shaped into a prophylactic against her seminal words. She spoke at length about cars. Cars, the endless lines of cars in their liturgical processions, back and forth to the mighty urban shrines. For what? The flashing shrines with their truckloads of secular treasure. Moloch and Mammon, in a dizzy waltz, with a neon Christ perched on the top, a shining decoration, no more, his crucified body curving now like a dollar sign.

Science she proclaimed a degenerate form of art, which had replaced song with measurement and had forgotten in any case that all counting ended in infinity. Its humble function had been to describe our location; instead it had usurped the sacred wisdom. Good and evil, she explained, are recently invented categories, brought in to explain why all the causes cannot cohere; and thereby enable us to fathom why there is contrariety and tension in the force-field of the world. What Pneuma had noted more and more in her study of the goddess was that she who gives birth also slaughters. Astarte, Medea. But these are the takers of flesh,
even the eaters of flesh; they
enter the flesh of the gods and are entered by it. Not so with Mary. She is entered once and once only, by the Spirit. It is air itself then that enters her, and the god who then exits.

It was a Taoist doctrine that evil, seeing its own image in the mirror, would promptly destroy itself, unable to countenance the horror that was its own identity. One day Pneuma had looked in the mirror and found nothing there at all; no engrossed dark matter. Then she knew the real journey had begun. But it had still taken the intervention in her life of Hermann Gebler to launch her world-wide movement. Gebler was technically her husband, though as she explained in her introduction, this term could be no more than a flag of convenience, given that any possibility of fleshly union had already been transcended. It was Gebler who had seen her charismatic potential; he who had formed the Delta Foundation, published
The One True Elemental,
and gone on to produce the videos, arrange the elusive tours, distribute the hagiographic vignettes. Her book was dedicated to him, and the goddess.

This book lay face-down on the floor as Alex's body began its emaciated journey into hypothermia. She was seriously weakened now by four weeks of inanition. She was also radically dehydrated since she had drunk nothing for three days. When she occasionally surfaced into consciousness she felt a sharp dryness in her throat which would have made her retch, but there was nothing inside her to retch with. Her chest had a stone weight upon it. She felt as though each organ inside her were being eaten by acid. Could this finally be the beginning of enlightenment?

Doll's House

Sylvie was hoping she didn't have to see Hamish again for a while. She needed a little solidarity. So when she heard Alison's door open, she waited two minutes then slipped across quickly to see her.

'Hello Sylvie. How's things?'

'A bit complicated really.' Sylvie was staring at the large poster which Alison had pinned to her wall. It showed a gleaming sculpture by the Italian artist Rembrandt Bugatti. Alison had been to the exhibition in London a few years before.

'Rembrandt Bugatti. Now there's a name to make you pause.'

'Bet you can't think of anyone else with the surname of a famous artist followed by a famous car?'

'Bacon Rolls?' Alison smiled; Sylvie didn't. Alison was three inches smaller than Sylvie, who wasn't very tall herself. This meant that Alison was the only person in the Institute Sylvie could look down on. Alison was even more hunched than normal. All the tension in her body, in her life, seemed to congregate in the middle of her shoulders. Her head seemed to be trying to disappear into her spine. Sylvie constantly had the urge to get hold of her by the neck, and pull her upright in a single jerk. There now, that's better, isn't it?

'So what's going on?'

'You won't get angry with me, will you?'

'No.'

'Promise?'

'
I
promise.'

'I
told Owen
I
want a divorce.'

'Why should
I
get angry with you for that? The only question there is why it took you so long.'

'That's not all. Do you remember the bloke
I
mentioned to you in Shrewsbury - the one with the Picassos?'