Down Among the Gods (19 page)

The money in the drawer of the Welsh dresser, however, dwindles very slowly. Apart from the newspapers and provisions he buys in the village, there is no need for Patrick to spend money. All his needs are met.

But now there is this motorbike. He is no longer confined to the security of dependence. He has his own mobility, and somehow that obliges him to move back out into the world and encounter it again. The bike is more than a birthday present. It is a symbol of responsibility. And worse.

Patrick sighs and straightens up. ‘Thanks, Jessie. You shouldn’t have.’

She kisses him lightly and leads him inside. From the cupboard where it is hidden, she produces his birthday cake and a card. It is the funniest one she could find, and Patrick laughs as well as he can. But it’s a poor attempt. Within, he has already seen, lies the trap.

The only document that Patrick has owned in the UK is a driving licence, which he got for showing his Irish one. Since the day he left art college, he has called himself Patrick Robinson. The name on the licence, before he burned it, was Robert Fitzpatrick.

Patrick has never signed on the dole, never been hospitalised, never taken on work that required a social security number. The motorbike he rode in his messenger days belonged to a friend who had lost his nerve. On the one occasion that Patrick was pulled in by the cops for speeding, he gave his friend’s name and got off with a warning. He does not have a criminal record. What he has is no record at all.

And he wants it that way. Jessie, he is sure, would have no problem with his change of name. She would laugh, it would be just another idiosyncrasy to be proud of. It is not Jessie that Patrick is worried about.

It is Zeus; the vague and unpredictable manifestation of authority.

Patrick stares at the change of ownership form in his hand. It is a simple form, but even the few details it requires are more than he is willing to divulge. He will never be registered, listed or numbered. He will never be identified, systemised or data-coded. He refuses, point blank, to be counted.

Along with the form there are three blank cheques, all with Jessie’s signature. One is for the tax, one for the insurance, and one for the replacement of his lost driving licence. She is pleased with herself. She has thought of everything.

But Patrick is falling prey to a rising fury. Jessie is still glowing with pride and vicarious pleasure. He gives her the best smile he can and goes back out to the yard. She follows him and stands at the door watching as he goes over to the bike and looks at it. After a while, he takes the helmet from the wall, and Jessie thinks he is going to go for another ride. But after a moment of hesitation, he pushes the bike across the yard, into the cow-shed and out of his mind.

H
IPPOLYTUS WAS A PRIEST
in the temple of Artemis, a pure-minded man and celibate. He was also, unfortunately, extremely beautiful.

Aphrodite, the goddess of desire, was vexed. She was not vexed by his purity of mind, nor by his beauty, but by his virginity. She cannot abide it when mortals fail to succumb to her power. So she set her cap at Hippolytus, using the young Queen Phaedra as her mortal vessel.

Poor Phaedra, infatuated, mesmerised, possessed in fact, pined into sickness for love of Hippolytus. Unfortunately, by one of those wonderful Greek ironies, Hippolytus was her son-in-law, which made him pretty strictly out of bounds to her. She would have wasted herself into an early grave rather than give in to Aphrodite’s scheme were it not for the kind-hearted interference of her maid.

Be warned. With the best will in the world, it doesn’t do to interfere in people’s lives. The worse mess someone is in, the more certain you can be that they are under the strong influence of one or another of the gods. At best you will cause the kind of trouble that Phaedra’s maid did. At worst you will get yourself mangled in the middle, blasted by the meeting of two opposing forces. It’s better, on the whole, to stay out of it.

But the maid, believing herself to be acting in the best interests of all concerned, went and told Hippolytus. He blew his top, in public, too, pouring such scorn over the female of the species that no one could have been left in any doubt about his feelings in the matter. Least of all poor Phaedra. She had no choice left but to put an end to herself. For all her effort in withstanding Aphrodite’s influence and for all it had cost her, the goddess still won the final hand.

We generally do.

Infuriated by the stubbornness of Hippolytus, Aphrodite induced Phaedra to write a suicide note claiming that Hippolytus had violated her.

He had, in a sense, with his outrageous condemnation of her and all of her gender, but psychological violence has never succeeded in attracting the same kind of retribution from the authorities as plain, old-fashioned rape. The king responded accordingly, and with a bit of help from Poseidon, contrived to do away with his son.

There was, of course, a great deal of posthumous remorse and exoneration, but the death of Hippolytus has neither been forgotten nor forgiven. Artemis lost a beloved devotee and is well aware of whose fault it was. ‘I’ll wait till she loves a mortal next time,’ she said, ‘and with this hand, with these unerring arrows, I’ll punish him.’

The bike is still in the cow-shed a week later when Jessie drives into Bangor to meet Lydia at the station. The roads are wet with recent rain, but the dense cloud has begun to break up and the sun is shining through the gaps. The tourist season hasn’t yet come to an end and the popular resorts are snarled up with traffic so the journey takes a lot longer than Jessie expected. When she pulls up outside the station, Lydia is waiting, sitting on her bag and reading a novel.

‘Glad you could make it,’ says Jessie as Lydia throws her bag into the back and drops into the passenger seat. ‘I half expected you to get overrun with work and call it off.’

‘No,’ says Lydia, ‘I won’t give this up in a hurry. But I have to go back on Thursday.’

‘Thursday! But that only gives you two days!’

‘Better than nothing.’

Jessie stops at the farm supply shop on the edge of town and loads up the back of the car with fenceposts and chicken wire.

‘What are they for?’ says Lydia.

Jessie finds a gap in the traffic and accelerates out on to the road. ‘The hens. We have to keep them out of the garden. They’re scratching up all the seedlings.’

‘Hens,’ says Lydia. ‘I find it hard to picture you in that setting, you know? The country life, out in the yard at dawn with your apron on and your bucket in your hand.’

‘I wouldn’t bother then, if I were you. It’s nothing like that.’

‘I didn’t really think it was. But what are you going to do with the wire? Fence in the hens or the garden?’

Jessie shrugs. ‘We’re not sure, yet.’

Lydia watches the scenery as they leave the outskirts of the town behind them. The mountains loom above them on either side, bleak but strangely beautiful. There has been another heavy shower, but the sun is blazing so strongly now that Jessie has to shield her eyes against the glare from the road, and the landscape all around them is steaming. Trekkers in brightly coloured cagoules and sturdy boots are moving in small groups along the well-worn mountain paths.

‘You’ll be delighted to hear that there’s a new Frances Bailey on the way,’ says Lydia.

‘Hmm,’ says Jessie, ‘delighted.’

‘It sounds good, from the synopsis.’

‘They always do.’

‘You don’t have a serious problem about it, do you?’

‘No,’ says Jessie, changing down into third. A few cars ahead of them she can just see the back of a caravan which sways slightly after each bend. ‘Actually, it’s great, the way it’s going here. If I’d realised how easy it was going to be, I’d have done it years ago.’

‘Doing any writing of your own?’

Jessie shakes her head, her buoyant mood deflating slightly at the uncomfortable reminder. ‘I will, though, soon.’

‘I’ll be looking forward to seeing it, then,’ says Lydia, returning her attention to the scenery. To Jessie’s relief, the car with the caravan pulls in at the viewing point at the top of the next pass and the traffic begins to move more freely.

They drive in silence down the side of the mountain and into a narrow, wooded valley where anglers in faded waxed jackets replace the multi-coloured climbers. Then Lydia says, ‘And how’s the kept man getting along?’

Jessie has prepared herself for this. ‘Useful,’ she says. ‘Possibly more so than most kept women.’

Lydia laughs.

She softens a little towards Patrick after that. During the last months that he and Jessie were in London she avoided him assiduously, but now she is pleasantly surprised by the difference between her preconceptions and reality. The house is full of the smells of cooking, and the table in the old kitchen is laid. There is a large bunch of wild flowers in the middle of it, and another one in the spare room where she is to sleep. When Lydia admires them, Jessie shrugs. ‘I didn’t pick them,’ she says.

Patrick is in good form. He has successfully avoided thinking any more about the motorbike on the old assumption that if left alone, the problem will work itself out. He has confined the chickens to barracks and spent a satisfying week in the neighbouring fields and woods, cutting gorse and fallen branches of oak and ash for firewood.

‘I’d like to do something physical,’ Lydia says as they sit down to a late lunch. Patrick has cooked the first baby carrots and a few of their own new potatoes as a treat.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ says Jessie, ‘I’ve every intention of getting you up the mountains. You may wish you’d kept your mouth shut.’

‘I’m on for the mountains all right,’ says Lydia, ‘but I meant something more manual. Like making hay or throwing sheep around or something like that. Maybe I could help you build your chicken coop?’

‘What chicken coop?’ says Patrick.

‘Aren’t you building a chicken coop?’

‘Are we?’ says Patrick to Jessie.

‘I got the wire,’ says Jessie. ‘Isn’t that what we’re going to do with it?’

‘Is it?’ says Patrick. ‘We couldn’t do that to them, could we? Now that they’ve learnt how to walk?’

‘Don’t listen to him, Lydia. They always knew how to walk.’

‘Yes. But not very far.’

‘How far do they have to be able to walk to lay free range eggs?’ says Lydia.

‘At least to the village and back, I’d have thought,’ says Patrick.

‘So we’d better put the wire around the garden, then?’ says Jessie.

Lydia helps herself to more fish. ‘Can I help you with that, then? Bang in staples and things?’

‘Damn,’ says Jessie.

‘What?’

‘I forgot the staples.’

She goes to get them after lunch, from the hardware shop in the nearby town. While she is gone, Patrick and Lydia start to knock in posts. Lydia is extremely impressed by the garden, but she says nothing about it to Patrick. She has repudiated the feminine habit of boosting male egos to such a degree that she can no longer praise men for anything. She and Patrick are coming to like each other none the less, and they work well together.

‘What kind of stock will you keep?’ she asks him.

‘Yes, that’s the next decision, I suppose,’ he says. ‘I fancy goats myself, but the farmers maintain that they knock down the walls.’

‘What about Jessie? What does she want?’

‘Jessie ...’ he hesitates, then decides that it’s safe. ‘Jessie lives in her head most of the time. I think that if I came home with a camel she wouldn’t really notice.’

Lydia nods ruefully, and laughs.

When Jessie comes back, the three of them work together on the fence until they run out of posts and pack in for the day.

Patrick, to his surprise, feels much less excluded from Jessie by Lydia’s presence than he did by Gregory’s. He lights a small fire in the old kitchen that evening, and stays up to chat much longer than he ever did when Gregory was around. Even so, he decides not to go along with them the following morning when they set off up the mountain, and walks down instead to buy the papers and pay a call on Dafydd.

The day is similar to the one before: bright sun interspersed by dark cloud and showers.

‘This is the life,’ says Lydia, as she kicks through puddles in the Wellingtons she borrowed from Jessie.

‘Really?’ says Jessie. ‘Would you fancy it?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Lydia. They cross the wooden stile at the end of the plantation and begin to climb across the sheep-shaved heath beneath the line of rugged peaks. Jessie considers herself fitter than she has been for years, but Lydia is matching her step for step, despite her sedentary lifestyle. It takes them under two hours to reach the first summit, and as they rest at the top, Lydia looks across at the others.

‘Shall we take in another one?’ she says.

‘Maybe,’ says Jessie. ‘Would you really live like this, if you could?’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, like we do. Here in the mountains.’

‘If I could, perhaps, I’d live in the mountains. But not like you do. I’d never go for that cosy turtle-dove set-up.’

‘I don’t understand what you have against men,’ says Jessie, unpacking the flask and sandwiches.

‘I don’t have anything against men,’ says Lydia, ‘but I have a lot against women who set aside their own lives on account of them.’

Jessie’s abdomen lurches with a sudden discomfort. ‘Go on,’ she says.

Lydia reaches for the jam-jar of milk and unscrews the lid. ‘Well, there are a lot of women who don’t feel complete unless they’re involved in a relationship. Why should they feel like that?’

‘Conditioning, I suppose.’ Jessie pours tea into two plastic cups and Lydia adds milk.

‘Perhaps; perhaps not. But you’ll find that a lot of those same women are just as helpless inside a relationship as they were before they were in one.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ says Jessie, unwrapping sandwiches.

Lydia looks up as the sun disappears behind an untidy cloud. ‘I think we’re going to get wet again,’ she says.

‘We’ll soon dry out once we get moving. But tell me more about these helpless women, will you?’