Blue Shifting (15 page)

If anything, I was even happier during these periods of stolen, clandestine passion than at any other time. When ecstasy reaches a certain pitch, it seems that it might last for ever.

~

On the very last occasion that I saw Philomena I left my room well before midnight, my heart beating like a trip-hammer. At noon that day I had seen Madame Duval climb from the roadster on returning from the shrine. Supported by her husband, she seemed in great pain. She held herself stiffly erect, her eyes red with tears – a grief-stricken mourner attending her own funeral. Philomena had followed in her wake. She did not so much as glance up as she passed me in the hall.

When I arrived at the centre of the maze that night, I paced back and forth and rehearsed the declaration I had thought out all afternoon.

Philomena was late. She seemed subdued as she came into my arms, and she pressed her head against my chest for longer than was usual. I wanted to speak, to tell her what I had decided, but my plan was so momentous that I feared she might demur. I would tell her later.

My hands went for the buttons at the back of her dress, but she stopped me with fingers to my cheek. "Not tonight. Please. Let's just lie down and hold each other, okay?"

So we lay beneath the spread of stars and I held Philomena, her head on my chest. I made out the glaze of unshed tears in her eyes.

"It's your mother, isn't it?"

"Please," she begged me to be silent.

"We must talk about it. I know the shrine isn't working. I know you'll be leaving soon-" I wanted to tell her that that was okay, because I had decided to follow her back to Lascaux.

She raised her head from my chest and stared at me. "No, please. Not that. Let's talk about anything, but not that."

Tears tracked down her cheeks, and she fought to keep her lips pursed tight in defiance of her need to cry.

"I don't want to leave here," she whispered then. "I don't want to leave you!"

"But it's okay, Phil." I took her shoulders and shook her gently. "Really, it's okay. You see, I won't let you leave alone. I'm coming with you."

She blinked through her tears.

"I've planned it all. I'll leave here and book a telemass fare to Lascaux. I'll find work when I get there and we'll be together. That's what matters." I sounded desperate, even to myself. Perhaps even then I realised the impracticality of the suggestion.

She pressed her head to my shoulder and wept, her tears soaking my shirt. I smoothed her back, spoke comforting words.

"Philomena?"

She could not bring herself to speak for sobbing.

I had not expected this response. I had thought she would be overjoyed. I let her spend her tears, then whispered, "I'm sorry about your mother, Phil. I understand how you feel."

Her response shocked me. She looked up, anger in her eyes. "How can you understand?"

"I do. My mother-"

"Oh, God!" coming from the lips of a child, the cry seemed at once comic and indicative of great despair.

"Phil..." This in desperation because she had pushed herself from me and dashed to the edge of the clearing.

She turned and yelled, "Leave me alone! I wish I'd never come here! I wish..." but she could not bring herself to finish, and instead dashed off into the maze.

I called after her, "I know how you feel. I know." I wanted to tell her that I too had experienced what she was going through. I had watched my mother drink herself to death over a period of years. I had stood at the bedroom door when the doctor told her that if she continued drinking she would not last six months.

She had lasted a year, though it had seemed like ten.

I understood. I understood Philomena's anger, her unfocused hatred at the world in general, at God, at cruel chance that had dictated her mother should die in this way. I understood her outburst at me. In the self-absorption of grief we sometimes hurt the ones we hold most dear.

The following day my father ensured that I had no opportunity to see Philomena. I still cannot decide if the task he set me was intentionally cruel or just thoughtless. He woke me at dawn, before the Duval's left for the shrine, handed me a scythe and nodded to the field of grass beyond our garden.

"But-" I began.

He told me that the farmer wanted it cut, and that we needed the money. "Start at the back," he said, "and work towards the hotel."

He could have given me the laser cutter, but I suspected then that he wished to add physical distress to my mental anguish.

All day long, under the blistering sun, I toiled in the vast field. I attacked the grass with venom, determined to show my father that his spite would not cause me to surrender. My devotion to Philomena would survive whatever obstacles he chose to put in my way.

I left the flattened area until last. It was dark by the time I came to cut down the grass still standing around our special place. As I swung the scythe and the grass fell to reveal the centre of the maze like a stage upon which great dramas had been enacted, it seemed that I was bringing to an end a special period of my life.

It was late when I finished. There was no light beneath Philomena's door when I climbed the stairs to my room: I had intended to tell her that we would have to meet elsewhere that night.

Just before midnight, I let myself out into the back garden and waited beneath the apple tree. I had so much to tell her, so much to apologise for – I had had no right insisting that I understood how she might feel about her mother. The initial stages of grief are private; only later, when we have distanced ourselves from the bitterest hurt, can we open up and admit that hurt to others.

Midnight came and went. Philomena did not show herself. I cursed myself for frightening her away the night before. I wondered if she hated me for trying to tell her that I understood. Then I rationalised my distress. Clearly she had seen the mown field, and known that we could no longer rendezvous there... But, surely, in that case she would have waited for me in the garden? Like this, with argument and counter-argument, I worried myself well into the early hours, and then cried myself to sleep. When I awoke, dawn was lighting the far horizon, and I knew what I should do.

I crept silently back to the house. I climbed the stairs to the first floor and tiptoed along the landing to room ten. Holding my breath, I knocked lightly on the door. There was no reply. I knocked again, and this time whispered her name. "Philomena, it's me." My heart seemed to be beating loud enough to wake my father. In desperation I gripped the door handle and turned. To my surprise, the door opened. I slipped quickly inside. Dawn light fell between the open curtains and illuminated an empty room. The bed was made, unslept in. Philomena's travelling bag was nowhere in sight.

A hard cold terror expanded in my chest. I wanted to scream denial, but I could not bring myself to articulate my anguish with even a primal howl. It was all I could do to stumble from the room and hurry along the landing to the double room shared by Philomena's parents. I did not stand on ceremony but turned the handle and barged in. The neat bed and absence of personal effects opened a pit of despair in my stomach.

Unable to control my tears, I ran downstairs. I jumped from the porch and stood in the drive. Their roadster was not there. Sobbing uncontrollably now, I sprinted down the driveway between the fields of sunflowers. I had no rational plan – in my anguish at being without Philomena I had to fill my senses with the balm of action. I convinced myself that, if the roadster had broken down, then I still had a chance of rescuing her. It is amazing how we can bring ourselves to believe in miracles when we are sufficiently desperate.

I emerged on the coast road and looked right and left, but the road was empty. I just stood there, staring north through the blur of tears, and in time I was rewarded.

Streaking through the upper atmosphere, a white arc against the blue, was that morning's telemass vector heading for the stars.

~

I returned home, hollowed out and scoured of all emotion. I must have been in shock. I climbed the stairs to my room, closed the door and began the methodical destruction of my sensorama deck, my computer link-up, my music system and then the furniture. If my father heard me, he left me to it – not that I feared his reaction. Had he tried to stop me then, I would have destroyed him too. At last, the room a scene of chaos around me, I fell to the floor and cried. I asked myself how she could have left without telling me, without even seeing me for one last time? She had told me that she loved me, but she had left without a word of explanation. I could not stop myself from accusing her of betrayal.

I somehow managed to get through the day without allowing my feelings to show. To have let my father see how much I was affected would have been to concede victory. He had me paint the front porch, and for ten minutes stood at the foot of the ladder, supervising. He seemed on the verge of offering an explanation, even, it occurs to me now, of telling me that he was sorry.

The very last time I saw my father alive, when I entered the house to tell him that I had finished painting, I found him seated in the darkened kitchen. He had a bottle of brandy gripped in his right hand, and his eyes were glazed. I backed away without alerting him to my presence.

He did not call me down the following morning. When at last I emerged from my room, he was nowhere in the house. I found the empty bottle on the kitchen floor. His roadster was missing from the drive. He had gone off like this two or three times before, always ending up slumped over the wheel of his vehicle on the greensward overlooking the ocean. Each time I had pushed him into the passenger seat and driven the vehicle back home, and the matter had never been mentioned.

I set off down the track between the sunflowers. I emerged on the coast road and turned right. The greensward was a half a mile away and from that distance my father's roadster was a colourless shape against the morning sky. As I made my way towards the clifftop, I went through what I would tell my father. I intended to leave Earth and make my way to Lascaux, and nothing he could say or do would stop me. The idea had come to me that morning, lying in bed surrounded by the wreckage of my past, but no doubt I had been formulating the plan in my subconscious ever since Philomena's departure.

In the event, I had no need to tell him anything.

The driver's door of the roadster was open, and there was no sign of my father. I found am empty bottle on the seat, and another half full on the grass. It seemed the obvious thing to do to approach the edge of the cliff. I stared down without the slightest emotion, quite prepared for what I knew I would find. If I felt anything, I experienced a quick surge of relief as I made out my father's broken body on the rocks far below, sluiced rhythmically by the oblivious waves.

It did not strike me at the time that the Duval's departure and my father's suicide might in some way be linked. In the years that followed, when I thought over that period in my life, I considered the two events to be no more than a coincidence.

My father's death I came to terms with in time, though not without the guilt and recrimination that counsellors and psychiatrists told me was quite natural. The loss of Philomena, however, had a permanent effect.

~

I stood and retraced my steps through the tall grass. I was still so bound in my reverie of the past that the sight of the house, when I finally emerged into the garden, surprised me. No longer the smart hotel of my childhood, it stood dark and dilapidated against the sunset. A profound sadness coursed through me.

Philomena's laughter echoed in my head.

On the very same day that I discovered my father's body, I was taken to a home in the city where I lived for six months until I was sixteen. The hotel was sold off to pay my father's debts, and what little money remained put in trust until I was twenty. I entered college, studying multi-media, and on graduating found a safe job with translating the classics of literature into sensorama programmes. The job was perfect. I could work from home and minimise my social contacts. I was cosseted from the real world and that suited me fine.

For a couple of years I fully intended to buy passage to Lascaux and find Philomena Duval. At first I could not afford the exorbitant telemass fee, and then when I could, with the help of the inheritance, it came to me that it was not that good an idea after all. It was true that I was still besotted with the girl, but I had sufficient wits to realise that if she still loved me, as she had claimed, then she would have returned to Brimscombe and found me... I often wondered what she was doing now, what kind of woman she had become. I imagined her as cultured and intelligent, working perhaps in the arts and doing well, and still of course stunning in red.

In lieu of winning Philomena Duval, I looked for small, dark girls – red dress optional – with gamin-looks, quick movements and intelligence. I found two or three pale substitutes, and proceeded to court them with all the gauche inexpertise of the loner I had become. And then, when I had won the trust and affection of these innocent girls, a defence mechanism kicked in and I would hurt them, and to a lesser extent myself, by contriving to reject them – and in so doing save
myself
from being rejected.

I had soon developed a fine self-loathing.

~

Now I walked down the garden and paused before the cold house. The sun was going down in strata of burnt-orange and gorgeous scarlet, the very shade of Philomena's dress. The oak beam I recalled from my youth still ran the length of the verandah, but it was rotten now with woodworm and I doubted that it would sustain the weight of my body.

To end my life with sleeping pills was somehow too passive, to shoot myself too violent. It seemed right that I should hang. I looked about for a suitable gallows, and found the perfect place. I made my way to the car for the rope, and then returned to the garden. My pace slowed as I approached the apple tree. It had grown tall and strong in twenty-five years. I recalled Philomena, sitting on the bough and swinging her legs. That same bough was higher now, and stronger, and in that second I knew I should swing from it. I thought back to the boy I had been, and imagined his horror at what I was about to do. He would have seen it as a violation of what had passed between him and Philomena – and perhaps I saw it in the same way now. Perhaps I hated the boy I had been, the relationship that had made me what I was; perhaps I saw what I was doing as a way of destroying not only myself, but the sanctity of what once I had held so dear.