— Yes, something. I’m getting something. Fred. A nice guy. Little guy, dark hair, liked poetry.
— You studied poetry with him at school.
— Did I know you at that time?
I tell him about Fred. Then I try to explain to him how it was when he and I went everywhere together, spent all our time together, read the same books, even dressed in the same clothes. I tell him how I worshipped him, though I leave this worshipping ambiguous, because I don’t want to embarrass him by bringing up the subject of sex: there’s something in his fragile body and his demeanour that forbids me even joking about it — as if he was a monk or a saint. He’s touched and interested, listening to my stories. Some of it does come back to him as I talk: mostly places, and some people. He remembers that he had to leave in a hurry because someone was looking for him; he says he often used to get into that kind of trouble. Before his illness, he says, his life was a mess and his perceptions were clouded and obscure. He has wasted so much time. I want to insist that he hasn’t wasted it, nothing’s wasted; but then I shut up because it surely is wasted if you’ve forgotten it, if it’s just gone. Anyway, Valentine isn’t really listening to me now, he’s holding forth with a new urgency as if he’s found his way on to a well-worn track which interests him more than a past he scarcely recognises.
— You’ve got to use your time, he says. — That’s what I’ve learned. I think of my illness as a gateway into a new more authentic life. More disciplined. Not ‘use’ time: that’s not the right word — as if time could be digested through the machinery of production and consumption. That’s the mistake we make. You’ve got to inhabit time fully, dwell inside it, every minute of every hour — which mostly we dissipate in false consciousness. If you learn to dwell in every minute then the spirit will make itself at home in you, you’re opened up to knowledge of the truth.
I’m not thinking that he’s completely crazy as he comes out with this. Partly this is because while he’s saying it I seem to be in the presence of the old Valentine, excitable and convinced. But partly his words seem like the answer to an intimation which I have sometimes too. Visiting old churches in the country with Mac, a horrible urge comes over me to fall on my knees and pray: though I’d never really do it while Mac was with me. Instead I tease him with my sceptical remarks and he instructs me on the history and architectural features of the place. Mac’s not the kind of religious person who gives way to transports, though he climbs up into the pulpit to check whether they’re using his beloved King James Bible. But I’m half wishing all the time that I was alone and could yield to this heaviness dragging me down, this longing to fall on my knees and supplicate something, I don’t know what. It feels for a time as if the something is the only real thing and all the rest is fake.
— So, is that what you do in here? I say to Valentine. — Inhabit time?
He thinks, he says. Sometimes he sits and thinks for hours. He reads, he writes. When I ask if he gets any exercise, he says he walks for hours at night across the Downs and through the city. — I don’t sleep much. It’s probably another consequence of the drugs. So I walk instead.
— I wish I’d had your solitude.
It’s true that sometimes I’ve imagined a life lived for contemplation and inward striving with ideas. I explain that I haven’t had time for these, even if I’d wanted them, because I’ve been wrapped up in caring for my children and family, and I’ve always gone out to work. I’m overstating somewhat; because I did have that time when I studied for my degree, and gave myself over to literature for three whole years. And the truth is that I’m only working part-time now, and I could leave my job if I wanted to. Mac cooks most of our meals, we have a cleaner. If I stayed at home I could have as much time to contemplate things as I liked.
— The exterior life is just a shell, Valentine says. — It’s a distraction.
— Well, you’re lucky. You’re lucky you don’t have to go out every day to a distracting workplace.
For a long time this blocked him, he admits, this perception that reflection and solitude were privileges reserved for a few. Eventually he realised that the block was inside himself, he was using it to excuse himself from the effort of change. The gracious thing to do was to accept the beauty of the opportunity if it was given. I ask him what it is that he’s writing, whether it’s poetry, and he says it’s sometimes poetry, but that he’s also working on a book which brings together ideas from the Platonic tradition with aspects of Hindu and Sufi thinking, about an unseen reality behind the surface of things. That’s extraordinary, I tell him, because I’ve been reading about those mysteries, too. And I explain about Triptolemos and the sheaf of corn. Valentine gets quite excited, he knows a lot about the cult at Eleusis, the latest thinking about its rites, the initiates conducted in search through the darkness, culminating in Demeter’s reconciliation with Persephone. I joke that this is proof that we are twins after all, even if he has forgotten all about me. Separated for thirty years, we’re still thinking in tandem. I don’t enquire whether he’s got any plans for publishing his book. Something tells me that it’s not that kind of project, with a fixed end in sight and a plan for its promotion in the outside world.
— You never wrote to me, I say. — You didn’t even tell me you were going. I waited to hear from you. For months I expected to get a letter.
What he does then is to take my two hands in his and hold them, looking into my face intently, searching me. The touch of his hands is the same as it was when we were young, it brings back the past and at first all the old electricity seems to flow out of him and into me, and the tears that pricked into my eyes downstairs when I thought he might be dying come flooding back. And then the next moment there’s a flood of resentment too, because he hasn’t asked me any questions about myself, or what’s become of me: how many children I’ve got, who my husband is, what I do for a living. Isn’t he even in the least interested? Why must the world of real things always be relegated to second place, as if it was a lesser order, as if everything abstract was higher and more meaningful? I’m seized by the impulse to force Valentine into relation with my real life. I’m on the brink of telling him my children’s names and their dates of birth, to see whether he notices anything. But just then we’re interrupted by the commotion of the supermarket delivery arriving downstairs and Hilda’s voice raised imperiously, directing operations.
— Oh, it’s spider-woman, Valentine says, dropping my hands. — Here she goes.
— I think she was worried they might not turn up.
— You don’t know what she’s like. She’s aiming to stop me finishing the book. She blocks it. Her spirit blocks it. She crouches down there in the shape of a black spider. I sometimes imagine that she isn’t really my mother, she’s been taken over by a demonic force. I can’t write if I have to think about her.
I’m frightened now. I calm down because I’m frightened.
I think I ought to go.
I don’t know if he’s being funny or not. Perhaps he’s just exaggerating his paranoia, sending his craziness up for my benefit in the same deadpan way he used to do when we were teenagers. But in any case I stand up and make excuses, pretending I have an appointment to get to. Valentine doesn’t protest, and when I say something stupid and false about how we ought to keep in touch, he just smiles the funny remote smile he used to use against my parents, as if he could hardly hear them when they spoke to him. I don’t kiss him in farewell, I don’t touch him again; something in the way he stands apart from me forbids it.