– which the girl who’s singing now fills with such longing, such loneliness, only amplified by the crackling of the phone, that even parents who view BETHani with suspicion or disapproval (often coloured, in the case of the dads, by a shameful fascination) find themselves swept up by its sentiments – sentiments that, separated from their r’n’b arrangement and grafted onto this melancholy spiralling music three hundred years old, reveal themselves as both heart-rending and also somehow comforting – because their sadness is a sadness everyone can recognize, a sadness that is binding and homelike.
And the sun don’t shine and the rain don’t rainAnd the dogs don’t bark and the lights don’t changeAnd the night don’t fall and the birds don’t singAnd your door don’t open and my phone don’t ring
So that as the chorus comes around once more, you can hear young voices emerge from the darkness, singing along:
I wish you were beside me just so I could let you knowI wish you were beside me I would never let you goIf I had three wishes I would give away two,Cos I only need one, cos I only want you
– so that for these few moments it actually seems that Ruprecht could be right, that everything, or at least the small corner of everything that is the Seabrook Sports Hall, is resonating to the same chord, the same feeling, the one that over a lifetime you learn a million ways to camouflage but never quite to banish – the feeling of living in a world of apartness, of distances you cannot overcome; it’s almost as if the strange out-of-nowhere voice is the universe itself, some hidden aspect of it that rises momentarily over the motorway-roar of space and time to console you, to remind you that although you can’t overcome the distances, you can still sing the song – out into the darkness, over the separating voids, towards a fleeting moment of harmony…
And then – just as manly hands throughout the Hall move clandestinely to brush away rogue tears – something happens. At first it’s hard to detect what it is, other than that it’s wrong, very wrong. Heads recoil involuntarily; a spasm of distress flickers across Father Laughton’s cheek, as at some transcendental tooth-ache.
It’s the song – it appears to have somehow bifurcated; that is to say, it continues on as it was, but also and at the same time in a different key. The result is viscerally, nails-across-a-blackboard ugly, but the musicians do not seem to have noticed, and continue not to notice as the song does it again, so that there are now three versions playing at once, in different keys – and then another, and another, like parallel-universe Canons somehow gathered into the same auditorium, getting louder all the while. Wildly you look to either side of you, wondering if you’re going mad, because this surely is what madness must sound like. Everywhere you see hands pressed to ears, faces shrivelled up like snails retreating into their shells. Now as the layers mount on top of one another, some supra-song begins to loom above them, a song of all possible songs, something not so much heard as felt, like the awful oppressive atmospheric weight preceding a storm or other impending catastrophe. The volume soars; still Ruprecht et al. play on impassively. The engineer at the sound-desk regards his levels in horror; and now the Automator staggers out from the wings and into the waves of ineluctable noise, which has now achieved the status of unthinkable, impossible, no longer remotely discernible as a song; he lurches over the stage, like a man in a hurricane, only to be assailed, just as he reaches Ruprecht, by a peal of sonic energy that is like nothing on Earth –
*
Howard had driven to Seabrook at full tilt – his hand, bound clumsily in a huge swollen mitten of linen bandage, screaming every time he had to change gears or apply the brake, making him scream along with it – without knowing quite what he would do when he got there. The vague plan he had in his mind, of unmasking the coach in front of a gasping audience, followed by a Hollywood-style punch-up, Howard and Tom mano a mano, had, he knew, some serious holes (how could he fight with an injured hand? How could he fight a disabled man?); still, for the moment he preferred to leave these to one side, instead racing ahead to the aftermath, in which he arrived at Halley’s door, bruised and bloody from his encounter, but – as she would recognize instantly – inwardly restored. She would quieten his burbled apologies with a finger to the lips; she would smile that smile he had missed so much – so bright and strong, like a kinder, warmer cousin of light – and take him by his good hand inside to her bed.
All these fantasies had been summarily squashed by the Automator. Ever since, Howard has been in the Ferry, trying to stoke up the remnants of his anger – ‘He hit me! The fucker actually hit me’ – sufficiently that he can… that he can what? Take the coach behind the swimming pool and teach him a lesson, like they were both fourteen years old? And then everything would be peachy, the world restored? Too late: reality has indelibly set in again. So he abandons his plans and just drinks. The pain in his hand provides an excellent excuse. It is excruciating, and has extended itself to colonize his entire body; everything pounds at him, like clumsy fingers on a piano – the laughter and grumbling of the other drinkers, the beauty of the beautiful lounge girl, the hideous carpet, the miasma of body odour… and now a familiar hound’s-tooth jacket.
‘Ah, Howard, wasn’t expecting to find you here…’ Jim Slattery pulls up a stool, motions to the lounge girl. ‘Mind if I…?’
Howard makes an indifferent gesture with his good hand.
‘Didn’t make it to the concert?’
‘Sold out.’
‘Yes, indeed, even those of us with tickets – that is to say, there was a group of late arrivals from KPMG, Greg asked me if I wouldn’t mind… Didn’t bother me, of course, especially if it gives me the chance of a snifter without herself being any the wiser – cheers.’ The clink of glass causes Howard to wince, and the wince to set off a chain of small agonies. ‘Good lord – what happened to your hand?’
‘Caught it in a mousetrap,’ is the tight reply.
‘Oh,’ Slattery says equanimously. He sips at his drink, swirls it around his mouth. ‘I heard you’d been in the wars lately. That is to say, not just with the mice.’
‘Rodents of one kind or another,’ Howard says; then reflecting, he adds glumly, ‘mostly brought it on myself, though.’
‘Oh well. Things will come round, I’m sure.’ Howard merely grunts at this; the older man clears his throat and changes the subject. ‘You know, I came across something the other day that made me think of you. An essay by Robert Graves. “Mammon and the Black Goddess”.’
‘Ah, Graves.’ Howard, who feels that the poet has something to answer for in his present situation, smiles sardonically. ‘Whatever happened to old Graves?’
‘Well, I daresay you know most of the story – married after the war, moved to Wales, tried to live the domestic life. Didn’t last long, as you can imagine. He got himself mixed up with a poetess, an American named Laura Riding, and took off with her to Mallorca, where they set up shop with her as his muse. She was as mad as a hatter, by all accounts. Ran away with an Irishman, named Phibbs if I recall.’
‘Some muse,’ Howard remarks bitterly.
‘As a matter of fact that fitted Graves’s conception of things pretty neatly. The muse is an embodiment of the White Goddess, you see. If she settles down with you and starts a home, then she loses her powers. Becomes merely a woman, so to speak. Which means no more poetry, which in Graves’s eyes was almost as bad as death. If she deserts you, on the other hand, then you find another muse to inspire you, and the whole circus starts all over again.’