Down Among the Gods (17 page)

‘Like what? Knitting? I can just see it.’

Jessie was surprised by the strength of his resistance. She hadn’t encountered anything like it in him before. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to say? We could do things together. Play chess, maybe, or Scrabble.’

‘Scrabble!’ Patrick stood up, a look of horror on his face. ‘What are you trying to turn me into?’

He left the room, banging the door behind him and racing up the stairs. He would have slammed out of the house if it hadn’t been dark. The night streets still reminded him of the time when he had really believed that the meaning of existence was a black hat on the back seat of a car.

When Jessie felt that things had been quiet for long enough, she made her way up to their room, but found it empty. Patrick was lying in bed in the spare room with the light out, pretending to be asleep. Jessie went in and sat on the edge of the bed.

‘Compromise?’

‘What?’

‘Leave it here with Gregory until the end of the summer. Then we can talk about it again.’

Patrick turned on to his back, but said nothing. After a while, Jessie sighed and stood up. She had already backed down further than she wanted to. As she moved towards the door, he said, ‘September.’

Jessie stopped and turned back to him, miming intense deliberation. ‘End of September,’ she said.

The door of the house stands open. Before it is a narrow yard, and below that a bare meadow sweeps down for about three hundred yards until it meets a deep gorge cut by a wide, swift stream which runs down from the nearby mountains. Patrick, however, can see neither the mountains nor the trees that line the gorge. The hillside is muffled by cloud.

He bends down and examines the soil he has uncovered. The mist condenses in his hair, drips down his cheeks and gathers around his upper lip. He licks the sweet drops, drinks them, missing nothing.

‘Jessie!’ He waits for a moment, still poking at the soil, then walks up towards the house and calls her again. For the last few weeks he has been swelled by a boisterous enthusiasm which has made him seem larger than before, and more confident.

Jessie comes to the doorstep.

‘Will you come and have a look?’ says Patrick. He waits while she slips on a raincoat, then they walk together across the yard and down the steep bank which drops into the field.

‘I don’t think this is it, but it might do.’ Patrick has spent several hours over the last few days searching for the site of the vegetable patch which he is convinced must have been somewhere close to the house. Their holding consists of six acres of land, divided into two small fields which lie beyond the outbuildings and the long meadow below the house. The land at the back is rocky hillside where the thin soil supports nothing but heather and tough grass, and they passed over the option of buying it.

The old garden was, in fact, outside their land. It used to be at the edge of the heathery moor on the other side of the road which runs down the hill beside the meadow, and it was as black and rich in peat as the bog gardens of Patrick’s childhood. But it is lost now, beneath the young plantation of spruce which stretches for an unbroken mile to the foot of the mountains. Within a few years, the trees will hide the mountains from the house.

‘What do you think?’

‘It looks all right to me,’ says Jessie. The overturned sods look to her like any overturned sods.

‘The soil’s good enough,’ says Patrick, ‘but the stones are going to be a bit of a problem.’ He picks some out to show her, small ones, shaley and sharp. The earth is full of them.

‘It could have been further on down,’ he says, straightening up, ‘but I can’t dig up the whole meadow. In any case, this would be a good place, wouldn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Better if it’s not too far away from the house. Specially when the children are small.’

Jessie brushes aside the imaginary children with a laugh. But Patrick, she knows, means it. He has never wanted children before, but now he does. His lost child is on his mind more and more, and he feels that if he has another, or several others, it might somehow atone for his desertion. He equates childlessness with middle-class boredom, and large, rowdy families with, vitality and excitement. Besides that, he is tired of being an only child. He wants someone to play with.

Jessie has always believed that she would want children, too, given the right circumstances. It seems to her now that the circumstances have never been righter, nor could they be, but something within her is holding back. She has seen the changes that children have brought about in the lives of a number of her friends. Some of them have even become lost to her on account of their increased responsibilities. She is afraid, too, that now she is forty, something might go wrong. She hasn’t forgotten the pear tree dream. But more than anything else, she fears that the arrival of a baby would make it more difficult than ever for her to get down to her writing.

She turns back towards the house which, even at that short distance, is vague in the thick mountain mist. When Patrick called her, she was in the process of sorting out her papers and putting them into a new filing cabinet. Her computer is already set up, and her small library of reference books and dictionaries, but she contradicts Patrick every time he refers to the room where they are as her office. For she is fully determined now to get down to some writing. The room is her study.

‘Well?’ says Patrick.

‘Well what?’

‘Shall I start the garden here or not?’

‘Yes. If you want to.’

‘You don’t really care much about it, do you?’

She steps back to his side. ‘I do,’ she says, ‘but I suppose I see it as your department.’

He looks slightly downcast. ‘I always had the idea that we might work on it together. Some of the time at least.’

Jessie looks at the stony soil and considers. ‘I don’t really know anything about it,’ she says, ‘but I’ll help you sometimes if you tell me what to do. I’d like to.’

He nods and slips an arm around her shoulder. She turns towards him for the full embrace, and for a while they are as still and as peaceful as the mist.

Patrick opens more new ground every day, sifting out the stones through a gravel sieve and scattering them on the muddiest bits of the yard. He cannot believe the pleasure he takes from the feel of the earth between his fingers, the soft, warm clouds that wrap themselves around him as he works. For the first time in his life, he is beginning to feel at home.

‘Jessie!’

Jessie sighs and puts down the manuscript she is reading. She is always just that little bit behind, always just about to catch up, put everything else aside and start on her own writing.

‘I’m working!’ she calls back. Patrick is hanging up his jacket in the hall outside her study. He puts his head around the door. ‘I’m not going to disturb you. I just wanted to tell you that I met Piers Ploughman on the road with his tractor and he says he’ll bring us a load of manure.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call him Piers Ploughman.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, for one thing, it’s not his name. And for another he’s probably never seen a plough in his life. There’s not much ploughing done around here, is there?’

‘I suppose not,’ says Patrick. ‘But whatever his name is, he’s going to bring us a trailer load when he gets round to cleaning out the lambing pens.’

‘Sounds good.’

‘He says it’s organic, apart from the straw.’

‘Apart from the straw?’ says Jessie. ‘But what else is there in a lambing pen that could be anything else but organic?’

‘Shit, I suppose.’

‘How can shit be organic or not organic? That’s ridiculous.’

‘What are you complaining about?’ says Patrick, ‘We’re getting it for nothing after all.’

‘I’m not complaining,’ says Jessie, relinquishing at last her hopeful hold on the manuscript. ‘I’m just trying to work out how he thinks it’s organic.’

‘Does it matter that much?’ says Patrick, picking up the manuscript and leafing through it, losing Jessie’s page.

‘Not to me,’ she says. ‘You’re the one who’s into all this organics, not me.’

‘Don’t you want to be organic, then?’

‘Of course I do.’

Patrick lets out a dramatic sigh. ‘I can hardly tell him to keep it now, can I?’

‘Don’t worry about it. I’m sure it’ll be wonderful manure. Wonderful shit.’

Patrick drops the papers back on to her desk. ‘Coffee?’

‘Only if I’m allowed to drink it in here, on my own, in peace.’

‘Oh, all right,’ he says, sulkily, then kisses her gently on top of the head. As he goes out he starts into a quiet burlesque of himself. ‘Women! I’ll never understand them. Now they want you, now they don’t. “Leave me alone, Patrick,” she says, Yes’m, yes’m ...’

Jessie listens until he gets beyond earshot, into the kitchen. She loves him more every day.

And why not? Patrick is happy. He has never, as far as he knows, been happier in his life. The year moves on. The potatoes have sent up the thick, lush growth that Jessie recognises, and they are already eating their own lettuce and radishes. Food never tasted so good.

Patrick is deeply indebted to Jessie, but this time he is determined to get it right. He will grow all their food and cook wonderful meals with it. And he will expand, one way or another, into the market-place, begin to help with the finances. Within a year or two he hopes to pay her back by earning the living while she gets on with her writing. He is so enthralled by the unexpected turn his life has taken that he is almost tempted to dwell on the circumstances that caused it. But not quite.

He does, though, in some ways, explore it through his art. He settled in the end for an architect’s drawing board, and it stands now at an angle to the large front window, catching two kinds of light and allowing him to keep an eye on his crops as he works. He has the feeling that everything he has done before now has been constricted, as though he has always been drawing on small pieces of paper, and just in the corners. Now he wants to be expansive, to move around and use the whole length of his arms. He tries not to know what he is going to draw, and sometimes the results are surprising. Strange figures emerge, their outlines angular or balloonish or inverted. Sometimes the mountains appear, or the crag behind the house, or fern-like carrot leaves, or the free fall of Jessie’s hair. As soon as he knows what he is drawing, he moves in on the detail. And in detail, he excels.

But there are times when what begins to manifest itself on the page produces a sense of apprehension. At those times, Patrick tries to change the emerging lines into something else which never quite works. He is as much afraid to draw from the darkness in his life as he is to look into it. And until he learns, he will never produce his best.

But there is plenty of time. Patrick is still pulling out of the struggle for survival that followed his departure from King’s Cross. And he has already come a long, long way. He has allowed Jessie as far into his life as he is able to go himself, and everything he tells her meets with the same understanding and forgiveness. The more secure and content Patrick becomes, the more the causes for regret diminish and he can allow himself, selectively, to admit more memories. He has told Jessie about the woman who taught him to cook and to appreciate good wine and good coffee, and he thinks of her now with affection more often than scorn. He has told Jessie as well about his days as a motorcycle messenger in London, and the succession of women that he lived with during that time. If he hasn’t told her yet about the child, by now seven or eight years old, that he has never seen, it is because he has not yet come far enough to be able to face the circumstances which led to that particular upheaval. There is still a long way to go.

Jessie listens to his stories without jealousy. In some ways they are comforting. The fewer mysteries there are in Patrick’s life, the more willing she becomes to trust him. She knows that he has come through some sort of crisis and is emerging not only intact, but more delightful all the time. If she is not threatened by the facts of Patrick’s polygamous past, it is because she believes that he has at last found what he has been looking for all his life. She believes that she is it.

And in a sense she is right. Patrick has found what he is looking for, even if he didn’t know what it was before he found it, even if he still does not quite know what it is. He is about as far away from Dionysus as he has ever been in his adult life. But Jessie doesn’t know that. Patrick has never talked to her about drink. If he doesn’t drink now it’s because he doesn’t feel like it. She has no reason to suspect that things have ever been different. It’s an understandable mistake, and one that is of no consequence. The mistake she is making that is a lot more serious is to believe that the power which keeps Patrick beside her belongs to herself.

Z
EUS, THE ENORMOUS, OVERBEARING
father of us all, keeps the rest of us in line up on Mount Olympus. He is the hurler of thunderbolts from the blue, bearer of power which is without association, unrefined and blatant, never quite comprehensible.

There was a conspiracy once, to depose him. It was led by Hera, who was infuriated by his infidelities. All the Olympians except Hestia, the gentle goddess of the hearth, got together and knotted him up beyond reach of his thunderbolt, leaving him helpless. There was, naturally enough, a lot of discussion about who would succeed him, and this was overheard by a sea-nymph called Thetis. She foresaw a civil war developing on Olympus and sent for Briareus, who untied all Zeus’ knots at once with his hundred hands.

Zeus cut up rough. He chained Hera up in the sky with anvils hanging from her ankles and wouldn’t let her down until all the Olympians had vowed never to rebel any more. We did, all twelve of us. But one of the gods had not yet taken his seat among the ruling twelve. He has it now, though, on the right hand of Zeus, and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. His name is Dionysus.

The mountains are grazed throughout the summer so their grassy slopes are bare all year round. The faces that the nearest ones show to Jessie and Patrick’s house are angular and grim with slides of scree. On the other side they drop away more gently, and it is from there that most of the tourists who visit the area climb them. But the stonier routes are not as forbidding as they look. By August, Jessie has climbed the four that lie within walking distance of the house. Three of them she climbed with Gregory during the week that he spent with them in July.