Fata Morgana
They told me that his neighbour had raised the alarm. Neighbours may at times be unwelcome when we are alive but at least they might notice when we are dead. Edith seldom spoke to Alan Pickering when he was out in the garden filling up his ‘bird restaurant’ as he liked to call it. They just nodded, said ‘hello’, talked about the weather. He was cheerful and polite enough but made it clear he did not invite interference into his affairs.
Sometimes when she went past at night, she glanced through his sitting room window. The curtains were seldom drawn and she would see him sitting on his sofa, eating from a plate on his lap, watching television. Alone, always alone. He was a recluse and seemed content and happy to stay that way. Edith knew little else about him except that he was a writer of some sort. She’d never heard of his work but that meant nothing as she seldom read much more than the daily newspaper and the occasional magazine. He was always a quiet man, Edith said, but she became aware that not even the faint voices on the radio or television were filtering through the walls of their abutting terraced houses. Normally she didn’t notice these sounds, yet when they were absent she felt their lack, felt too the ominous sense of utter stillness next door. Then she noticed that his bedroom curtains remained drawn and he had not come out to feed the birds for some days.
In the end she called the police. They discovered him in his study. He had taken enough sleeping pills to keel over an elephant, plus half a bottle of gin. He was seated in a comfy chair listening to music till he slid into the unending twilight of death. The CD in the player was Mozart’s Requiem, a fitting piece to slide away with. Beside him was a bundle of printed e-mails. Love letters may have been a better description.
***
When I first heard of Alan’s death, I was deeply saddened. Regretful but not surprised. He had told me, hadn’t he? Told me that this was what he wanted to do. He had no belief in life after death and took the view of the Ancients, that it was honourable to take leave in one’s own way.
‘But there’s a problem since I met you,’ he added. ‘I feel responsible now. I can’t just go ahead as I planned to do because we’ve met, we love each other and that means I have to think of the effect my acts might have on you.’
We were sitting in his study as he said this. He showed me the box full of sleeping pills he had collected.
‘You see, how easy it is? I suffer from insomnia, chronic insomnia. But I hate taking pills unless I’m really desperate. They make one feel so drowsy the day after and I must do my work. I must be clear-headed and awake enough to do my work. My idea was that when the book is finished, I planned to take my leave. There was never anything or anyone else to live for. I have no family, none I want to know anyway. I have some good friends and yes, they’ll mourn me for a while but they’ll soon enough forget. We all end up just a name…nothing but a name on a record somewhere. As for my work, well, it may be recognised better after my death than while I’m alive.’
He looked at me with his habitual intensity. I remember staring back at him, feeling too stunned to respond. He went on rapidly, excitedly. ‘And now you are in my life. Don’t you see? I’m not free anymore. I was so happy the day I made up my mind to end my life. I see it as an honourable way out, Gail. The only way out. There are so many of us around now, getting old, infirm, likely to become bedridden and crazed with senility. In my case, no-one to give a damn one way or another. I’ll end up in some Dickensian institution and rot away in a urine-soaked bed, gabbling nonsense. I don’t want that sort of ending. Some dignity would be good. This promises dignity.’
When he paused at last, I said, ‘Alan, my darling, my love, it’s up to you and your own conscience. You know I have different beliefs.’
‘Oh, you believe in karma and all that rot!’ he said impatiently. ‘Don’t trouble me with all that. It’s all so much nonsense. How can an intelligent and sensible woman like you believe in this?’
‘How can a sensible and intelligent man like you not believe?’ I countered. But I didn’t pursue the subject. I had learned by now that he never listened to my views, that his ideas and opinions had solidified with the years and nothing short of dynamite could shake his stone-carved convictions.
Our strange relationship began apparently by chance. It was only afterwards he told me that he had seen my photograph on the back of my first novel and felt moved and attracted by something he sensed he knew in his own depths when he looked on my features.
‘That was it. I knew at once,’ he said later. ‘I knew it was the face I’d been searching for all my life. When your first e-mail came in, I told myself maybe there’s life before death after all.’
He e-mailed me through my publisher and asked for some information. He was researching material for a definitive biography on his favourite author, Tolstoy. Apparently I had touched on something useful in one of my historical novels and he found my details on the web. His note was friendly, straightforward. I replied with the information he wanted. His reply was more elaborate. He told me a good deal about himself and his work, the books he had written and published how close he had once come to getting the Booker prize.
‘All this isn’t intended to parade my humble achievements,’ he wrote and I smiled, for that was exactly what he was doing. Still, I was impressed by the learned books he had written over the years. I ordered one out of interest. It was beautifully crafted, readable but not enticing or engaging; too unfeeling and literary for my more passionate, romantic tastes. Historical romance couldn’t be further from the kind of scholarly stuff this man wrote. I smiled some more. Yet I sensed in his e-mails an eager manner that betrayed a yearning, poetic loneliness of spirit that reflected something hidden in my deepest self. ‘I would very much like to keep in touch with you,’ he wrote. He included his address and phone number – ‘use it as you please,’ he said. We wrote almost daily after this.
My nature is to be warm and friendly and this is how I responded in my replies. My nature is also flirtatious and teasing and this too was how I engaged with him. I never imagined it was to be more than a pleasant correspondence. Perhaps I already felt the strange compulsive pull between us and tried to keep things light and flippant. I see now that this was not the attitude to take with Alan. He was a lonely, inspired and highly sensitive individual, with a peculiar emotional fragility. E-mails flew between us, drawing us deeper and deeper into each other’s psyche. I loved his expressive way of writing, the interesting things he had to say, the knowledge he possessed. I had to ignore a certain patronising style he occasionally employed towards me. But the differences then seemed nothing to the good things we shared. Poetry, myths, music, quotes, feelings, ideas – all food for the Gods.
What really sealed it for me was when he said ‘Don’t be sad for me. I am alone, though emphatically not lonely.’ I knew exactly what he meant. Who could be lonely when they could write and lose themselves in an imaginary world?
‘I write primarily for me,’ he added. ‘I write so as to make sense of my experience and understanding of the world, to make myself laugh, to entertain myself.’ These were my own feelings too. We were neither of us young and fame was no longer important or even desirable.
‘I have a gut feeling, Gail, that we’d enjoy meeting and talking to each other enormously,’ he declared and I agreed. His letters gently hinted that his feelings for me were becoming more than mere friendship. I gave out similar hints. I thanked him for some music he sent me and waxed lyrical. ‘Thank you, sweet Orpheus for the pieces of music you sent me.’ He seemed open then to new ideas and I felt a joy in pouring forth my own philosophies with eloquence, feeling that he listened even if he did not always understand.
‘My love,’ was his response, ‘you are totally amazing in every way. As you are and always will be inaccessible – I honestly don’t believe we shall ever meet – I cannot say you are a gift from the gods. More like a punishment a la Tantalus. Are you making me fall in love with you? Not fair.’
I suddenly realised that we were in love with one another. The realisation was like a bursting open inside. The heart, the mind, the body flew open like a flower in the sunshine. This was he. The man of my heart and soul whose beautiful image was always within me. He was as yet a mirage, a ghostly lover whom I had not met. He refused to send me a recent photo, telling me it would frighten me away, as if my love was that feeble. ‘I am the ugliest brute you ever clapped eyes on,’ he joked. I told him over and over again that it wasn’t the outer man that mattered but the inner man that I loved and recognised but I don’t think he ever believed me. His self-doubt was far too great.
Alan sent me a CD of Wagner’s opera, The Flying Dutchman. As I listened to the storm-tossed music, I knew that, like Wagner’s heroine, Senta, I wanted to be with Alan forever. He was the unknown stranger, the haunted Flying Dutchman, cursed to roam the seas forever unless a woman’s true love could release him. I wanted to give him life and hope, reverse the fate that hovered like a shadow of presentiment between us. In his turn, Alan opened his heart totally to me.
‘I am so full of you,’ he wrote, ‘I have only to see your name on the screen and something rises within me, engulfs my heart.’
At last we decided to meet. I had in my mind’s eye a photo on the back of his first book taken nearly thirty years ago where his eyes looked wary, gentle and thoughtful. Time and laziness on his part had not been kind. He was not in good shape, his belly now overhanging his trousers. His eyes were harder, sharper and not kindly any longer. I felt dismayed but sensed beneath his chatter and efforts at entertaining me a deep shyness and anxiety. I longed to warm him, to dissipate his fears with loving kindness.
‘Oh, Gail,’ he said later. He took my hand in his and kissed the palm. ‘I love you so much, it hurts.’
It was the most amazing experience. Had it come too late?
We met a few more times but slowly things began to change between us, the mirage already dissipating like a morning mist. Alan became distracted, irritable, confused, thrown out of his routine by our encounters. It was as if he couldn’t bear the chaotic intensity of what he felt. Nor could he face the painful fear of abandonment which he was convinced lay just around the corner. He doubted my sincerity all the time. He wanted life to be orderly and predictable unto death; by now his ‘work’, as he called it, obsessed him as much as I did. The sudden shift of attitude drove me away in despair. Yet, his last words the night before we parted were, ‘I love you. Believe nothing else.’
I believed him. However, as I gazed out of the train window at the fleeting countryside, I knew I would never come that way again. It was impossible for us to be together. I loved him sincerely, I still do. I will always be faithful to the volcanic love that erupted between us but knew I could never live with this man. No-one could. He was utterly self-absorbed, fanatical at times. We were a part of one another but too alike and at the same time too different.
There was something Wagnerian, destructive, self-immolating in our love for one another. There was no way it could survive in reality. It was a Fata Morgana, a mirage floating in the skies, reflected in the seas, a dream, an inner ghostly figure without existence. Like the Flying Dutchman, Alan sank with his ship back into the depths of unconsciousness. Unlike Senta, I have no wish to follow him there just yet. For some of us, life goes on despite the lost illusions.
Perhaps in another life? Who knows?