Down Among the Gods (24 page)

‘Nothing has bloody well got into me!’ He is shouting now, causing the chickens to pause in their delighted scratchings and look around them in confusion. ‘I just can’t stand being managed, that’s all!’

What has got into him? And what has come over her? Round and round and round. With the return of Dionysus comes the return of Hera. Or was she there all along, lurking in the background, just as he was? One thing is certain, and that is that wherever one of these two is to be found, the other will be found also. If Hera is not already present, Dionysus will produce her. If she becomes too strong in any given situation, he will appear to thwart her. In the muddled architecture of the average human psyche, these two exist in uneasy relationship to each other, that which seeks to control and that which refuses to be controlled. All over the country, all over the world, there are women playing Hera to their men’s Dionysus. There are men playing Hera, too, and women taking up with Dionysus. The gods everywhere are involved in struggle against each other. But there is no struggle more bitter than this one.

Patrick strides into the house and straight up the stairs to the bedroom. Jessie follows, more slowly, and wanders around the kitchen in bewilderment. She tidies things that don’t need to be tidied and tries to remember what she was planning to do for the day. What bothers her most is not what Patrick has said, but the look of contempt that was in his face as he said it. It is happening again, the old nightmare, despite all her efforts.

She makes coffee and brings it up to him as a peace offering. He is lying on the bed, reading a book about permaculture.

‘Ah,’ he says, ‘I was just about to come down and make some.’ He sits up and takes the cup. ‘Thanks.’

Jessie sits beside him and traces her fingers along the veins of his hand. ‘Let’s not fight,’ she says.

He sighs and strokes her back. ‘Forget about it,’ he says. ‘I’ll probably go down to the village in a minute to get the paper. Anything we need?’

‘No I don’t think so. Milk, perhaps.’ She gets up to go and hovers for a moment at the door, as if expecting something more. Patrick smiles, affectionately.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Jessie.

Throughout the day, the mist is intermittent. Several times, Jessie decides to go out for a walk, but each time she gets to the door she changes her mind. The mountains, whenever they come into view, seem hunched and hostile. For a while she sits in the study and looks again at old notebooks, but they start to bring up uncomfortable memories, so she goes into the kitchen and lights the fire. But as she puts the match to the firelighters, she realises that she is only doing it because she wants the house to be warm and welcoming for Patrick’s return. She is making absolutely no use of the space that his absence has given her. With a determination that is almost angry, she goes back to the office and switches on the computer. She has decided to start writing, right now, right here. It doesn’t matter if she has no ideas, no characters, no plot. What matters is to do it and to do it often; every day if possible. Once the time has been given to it and the habit formed, the rest will come of its own accord.

Jessie’s blood is up, and the first words are beginning to form in her mind. But she is not as ready as she thinks she is. When she sits down at the computer, it sends up an unfamiliar message. She stares at it, trying to make sense of its language, then goes through her routine of cures for improbable situations. None of them works. She tries to phone Gregory, who has always been her consultant on technical matters, but he is out of the office. With a sinking heart, Jessie sits back in her chair and looks out of the window. The mist that still surrounds the house begins to feel stifling.

When Patrick conies back in the late afternoon, Jessie is sitting beside the fire. A new notebook is open on her knee, but the pages are all still blank. Patrick is brisk and cheerful. He has only come up to deliver the milk and change into his jeans.

‘Dafydd is going to Betwys to pick up a pony,’ he says. ‘I said I’d go with him. Is that OK?’

‘Of course. You don’t have to ask me.’

‘I wasn’t really asking,’ says Patrick. ‘I was just checking. You might have had other plans.’

She sighs and puts down her pen. ‘What other plans would I have?’

Patrick sits on the arm of her chair and rubs her head, then reaches down to lace his boots.

‘What does Dafydd want with a pony, anyway?’ says Jessie.

‘It’s a mare in foal. He’s going to breed them. He says that they fetch a bomb if they’re registered. He thinks it’s what we should be doing.’

‘Breeding ponies?’

‘Yes. Can you see it? Bringing the kids to gymkhanas in their britches and velvet hats?’

‘No,’ says Jessie, ‘I can’t.’

‘Nor can I. But it might be worth considering, all the same. We don’t really have enough land for sheep or cattle.’

He tightens his lace and stands up, then hesitates in the middle of the room like a ship suddenly becalmed.

‘Are you off straight away, then?’ says Jessie.

‘Yes. I’ll bring the bike in case I’m home late.’

‘You’ll go for a pint, then, afterwards?’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘No. Be careful in the mist, though, won’t you?’

‘It’s only there for the first hundred feet or so. The valley’s quite clear.’

‘See you later, then.’

But still he waits. When Jessie looks up to see what he’s doing, he is just standing there looking at her. ‘Is something the matter?’ she says.

‘No.’

She turns back to the fire, and after a minute she hears him behind her opening the drawer of the dresser. It is the first time, she realises, that he has ever taken money from it in her presence.

That night Jessie lies awake, trying hard not to listen for the sound of Patrick’s bike climbing the track. She sees no reason why Patrick shouldn’t do as he pleases, and is appalled by the idea that the two of them should be everything to each other and have no independence. She is glad that Patrick is making new friends and getting such a lot out of life. But for all that she cannot shake off a sense of betrayal that grows stronger with every passing day. And no matter how much she despises herself for it, she cannot shake off the anger that she feels at having lost him, somehow, to a world of drink and male camaraderie that she can never join. When he comes in she pretends to be asleep, but lies awake long after he begins to snore and is awake again before him in the morning.

She has breakfast on her own, and then, as happens more and more often these days, she goes out to feed the chickens. The wire that Patrick put up hangs slackly across the yard, a shabby obstacle to be crossed every time she goes out to the new freezer or the tool shed. On weekdays they take it down in the mornings until the post has come, then put it back up and let the chickens out. Jessie stands beside it for a minute or two, wondering what particular insufficiency in Patrick it represents, then decides that she has had enough of it. Inspired, she unhooks it from its moorings at the feed-shed side and swings it round so that it runs along the top of the bank above the garden, between the pigsty and the gatepost. She fetches tools and cuts another piece of wire which she ties across the gate, making it chicken-proof, then fetches the car and parks it in the gap where Dai Evans usually turns, between the studio and the feedshed. Feeling well satisfied, she closes the gate, puts the tools away, and lets out the chickens for their breakfast.

The wire is the first thing that Patrick sees when he gets up and looks out of the bedroom window at the day.

‘Jessie!’

His voice makes her jump slightly, and a small puff of flour explodes from the bowl in which she is mixing dough.

‘What did you put that wire there for?’ he says, as he comes into the kitchen, barefoot, buttoning his shirt.

‘Good morning, Patrick,’ she says.

‘Good morning. Why did you move the wire?’

‘Because I thought it was a better place for it. It keeps the chickens out of the garden and it doesn’t block the yard.’

‘And what’s Dai going to do? Now he’ll have to open the gate every time he comes with the mail.’

‘So what? He has to get out of the van anyway. Now he doesn’t have to bring it into the yard at all and he can turn much more easily outside the gate.

For a moment Patrick glares at her, then he says, ‘But it’s ugly, Jessie. It spoils the view.’

‘It’s not going to be there for ever, is it? It’s only for the time being.’

‘Listen. There was wire there when we came, remember? We took it down because it looked awful. Now you’ve put it back up again. I don’t see the wisdom in that.’

His tone is indignant, as though Jessie had moved the wire just to insult him.

‘You can get rid of it as soon as you’ve finished fencing the garden,’ she says. ‘It’s not going to do any harm for a day or two.’

‘I’m moving it now,’ he says. ‘I’m not looking out of my studio window at that.’

Jessie stares at her hands, still mumbling away at the dough on their own. She knows she shouldn’t say it. ‘You’re never in your studio these days, so how can you look out of the window?’

There is a silence, during which, for the first time, Jessie is afraid of him. Then he says, in a voice that is suddenly, horribly calm, ‘Sorry about that. I’m not living up to your expectations, am I?’

Jessie tries the computer again, but it is still on strike. Listlessly she flicks through a typescript on the desk. It is an easy one, and not urgent. It can wait. With a sickening feeling, Jessie realises that the work has failed to live up to its promise. It has no power to draw her mind away from the problems she is having with Patrick. The relationship with him is as central to her life as were the failed ones of the past. And now it seems to be heading in exactly the same direction as they did.

She meets Patrick at midday over hot bread and butter in the old kitchen.

‘I’m thinking of going to London for a few days,’ she says.

‘Oh?’

‘The computer has gone down. I’m going to take it with me and see if Gregory can sort it out.’

‘Can he fix them?’

‘Sometimes. Depends what the problem is.’

‘Good for him. There’s more to Gregory than meets the eye.’

The bread breaks as Jessie cuts it. The innards are spongy and steaming. Patrick loads them with butter which slides around as it liquefies.

‘Go easy,’ says Jessie. ‘You’ll give yourself a heart attack.’

‘Rubbish,’ he says. ‘That’s yesterday’s theory. Tomorrow’s will be that it’s a cure for cancer.’

Jessie laughs and takes her plate of bread over to one of the fireside chairs. ‘Do you want to come?’ she says.

‘To London?’ He hesitates, momentarily unsure about the prospect of being alone in the house. He has had some unsettling recurrences of his old fears recently. ‘I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘There’ll be nothing for me to do there, really, will there?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. We could go to a play or a film. Look up some people.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

He pours tea and brings it over to her chair, then sits in the other one. For a while they eat in silence, then Patrick says, ‘Will you be driving?’

‘I’ll have to. I won’t be able to take the computer on the train.’

‘That’s great,’ he says. ‘It means you can bring back the TV.

The bread seems to stick to the roof of Jessie’s mouth. Abruptly, from nowhere, another argument is rising and, dimly, she sees more of them forming behind it, like lines of dark waves rolling in towards the rocks.

‘Can we talk about it later?’ she says.

‘Ah,’ says Patrick, ‘I see. There’s something to talk about, is there? I thought you said September.’

‘I said we’d talk about it in September.’

‘That’s not what I remember.’

Jessie puts down her plate, the bread half eaten.

‘Still,’ Patrick goes on, lifting his eyebrows playfully, ‘it’s after September, isn’t it? Let’s talk about it.’

Jessie feels as though she is being backed into a corner. ‘What do you want it for?’ she says. ‘You haven’t missed it, have you?’

‘Not much, but I will in the winter. There’s nothing else to do around here.’

Jessie has tried so hard not to mind, but the words come out despite her. ‘I hadn’t noticed you having trouble filling the time. You spend most of your life in the pub.’

‘I don’t, as a matter of fact,’ says Patrick, ‘but I will if you want me to.’

Jessie stares at him. Calmly, he mops up melted butter with his last crust of bread and pops it into his mouth. He takes his time to chew it, then slaps his hands together to shake off the crumbs and leans back in the chair. ‘It’s your decision,’ he says. ‘Your TV, your house.’ He smiles at her sweetly. ‘Your man.’

Jessie looks down into her tea, unable to believe what she has heard. She is struck by a forceful memory of the ambivalent feelings she had towards him when they first met, and the sense that he was somehow dangerous. What is happening has begun to frighten her.

Patrick stands up and takes his plate and cup into the kitchen, then goes out through the back door behind the studio into the yard, but he has no purpose in being there other than to escape. He no longer understands Jessie. One minute she is as she always was, warm and understanding, and the next she is cold and critical, seeking to control him. He doesn’t know which of those images is the real one, and it confuses him, brings up an anger inside that speaks with its own voice to the extent that he often doesn’t know what he is saying until after he has said it. It is all too familiar, and the outcome all too inevitable.

To keep his mind off the problem, Patrick spends most of the day clearing out the feed shed, and he brings Jessie the dusty treasures that he finds there: a goose-feather hearth brush, a hand-made bird cage, a rough wooden picture frame. Later he cooks, and resists the temptation to go down to the pub. But as they sit by the fireside that evening and read, little is right between them.

Jessie leaves for London the next day with the computer wrapped in a blanket and strapped into the passenger seat of the car. For the first part of the journey, rain pounds out of a sky so dark that a lot of drivers are using their sidelights, but at Shrewsbury, where Jessie stops for lunch, it lets up and the rest of the journey is dry.