(for this, much thanks). Instead she was thinking of signing up for a course in aromatherapy.
‘I have to think of ways of making a living,’ she said. ‘I’m on my own now.’
‘Well, not exactly,’ as I said later to Cass, ‘bearing in mind Martin’s renting the flat for her, and that Fraser family money.’
But Fleur was enjoying herself, I could see that. There was a definite air of nobility about her.
‘I married so young,’ she said, a hand on her chest now and faintly tragically.
‘What?’ as I said to Cass. ‘Like she’d been given in marriage at thirteen to some European crown head.’
‘Of course, I realise it’s going to be hard at first,’ Fleur said, ‘paying my own way and everything, strange too after all our years together.’ She gave me one of those flat-faced challenging looks, the sort you get from government ministers in unsound regimes when they’re shamelessly rewriting history for the cameras. ‘I’m just so looking forward to having time to myself,’ she said, ‘to being on my own.’
‘Un-bloody-believable,’ I said, reporting it. ‘This from the woman who used to shiver at the mere thought of it.’
‘I can’t tell you,’ Fleur said, ‘how much I’m looking forward to being single.’
‘How dare she?’ I said. ‘Calling herself single.’
‘Well, I suppose she is.’
‘Not at all. She’s just claiming the title.’
But the final outrage, as far as I was concerned, was still to come. I was crossing the road from the Avalon Centre, glad to be getting away from her, when suddenly there she was again, beside me.
‘I feel wonderful,’ she said, thrusting her arm chummily through mine, making me feel like I’d been caught by a stalker. She flung her head back, face to the sun in a grand flamboyant gesture. ‘Ah … freedom,’ she said, and there it was, the final insult, the ultimate profanity.
Freedom.
My lodestar. My guiding light. Appropriated by Fleur as part of her new-found persona.
There’s a name for fear of freedom. I found it on Peter’s list. It’s eleutherophobia. A fancy word for the fear of it, but no mention – mark you – of a term for the terror of losing it.
‘I just want to feel free,’ I said to Nathan one night, not long before the end.
He said, ‘It’s just a word, Riley.’
I said, ‘I just want to do what I want to do, that’s all … go where I want to go… live the life I want to live.’
In the silence the air conditioner clattered while somewhere in the distance, a mah-jong piece was slapped down heavily on a table.
He said, ‘I’m not trying to tie you down. That’s not what love’s about, Riley.’
I don’t know why I went travelling. All in all, I could have just stayed at home. Waited for all that bead-and-bangle hippy shit to come walking up the High Street.
Still the facts of the case are that in 1972 I did what it seemed at the time like half the country was doing, at least those of my age and inclinations. I bought a large orangey-red rucksack with a steel frame that bit into my back and rose up over my head like the beak of some giant bird, packed it full of toilet rolls and soap and shampoo and salt tablets, although not all the other weird stuff – mosquito netting and the malaria pills – which Tommy, with his war service in India, insisted I’d be needing.
Some said we did this thing because of a war, others because of a lack of one. Whatever. I did the same as everyone else anyway, went on the Hippy Trail, joined that crazy, grand, absurd, pretend peace and love diaspora.
It was the day before I left Nepal for Bangkok when it came to me, that thing about freedom. I’d hired a bike, cycled out of Kathmandu. I was lying down on the grass verge with the scent of the pines in my nostrils, the wheels of the bike still whirring and clicking beside me.
As I stared up into the crystal-blue canopy above me, I thought about everyone back home and, in particular, I thought about them working and I felt a deep, satisfied sense of pleasure that I was here doing nothing.
I thought, this is what freedom feels like. And the revelation seemed so real and so true I could have reached out and touched it.
It seemed to come right out of the heart of all that blueness.
* Still, if you’ve done the West Country tour, which I’ll warrant more than a few of you have, you won’t have too much trouble identifying it.
* Even though those who know say all this is just early spin-doctoring on the part of the abbey.
† Previously, you may recall, Millington’s Café where Aunt Fran shamelessly stole Uncle Hugh from my mother.
* Nettles for Health, Your Aura and You, Chakra Cleansing for Beginners, Mysteries of the Tarot, etc., etc., all Demeter Press, available from the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre, Hocus Pocus and by mail order.
I guess I should go back to Bangkok now. Because that’s what writers do, isn’t it? When they want the past and the present to collide in their head. They go back to the scene of the affair. Which is what I should do – hole up in some backstreet hotel, beat out the story on an old upright Smith Corona with the sounds of the city outside the window, and the sun slanting through the dirty dusty Venetian blinds and making patterns on the wall, all of which would remind me conveniently of Nathan’s hotel room and our afternoon lovemaking sessions. Except that I don’t remember us making love in the afternoon, and anyway I can’t go back because I never go anywhere now. For one thing I can’t fly.
‘Can’t?’ Archie’s look was curious over the top of his glass as the hubbub of Fergie’s party rose and fell around us.
‘No.’ I could feel myself growing defensive. ‘Look, it’s no big deal. I just don’t like flying, that’s all.’
He said, ‘No one likes flying, Riley.’
Being an aviophobe (thanks, Peter) or if you prefer it a pteromerhanophobe, isn’t the only thing that keeps my feet on the ground. The other reason I don’t travel is that I can’t afford it. Not a problem that afflicts the former, now reformed Frau Goebbels.
A week on from the phobia clinic opening I met her in the High Street. She was all Nike-ed up on her way to the gym. In training. For her holiday. Seems she’d done another rethink, this on the aromatherapy course. Now she’d signed up for one of those heavy-duty hi-adventure holidays, white-water rafting, hang-gliding round Everest or something. In Hocus Pocus, where she dragged me for a coffee, she thrust a brochure in my face. It was full of bronzed surfer types with very white teeth doing exciting things in lifejackets and baggy shorts and very black sunglasses.
‘Ah, bless,’ as I said to Cass. ‘And Martin, the poor mutt, still thinks she’s coming back to him.’
I know this is what Martin thinks on account of the fact that he told me. I bumped into him by chance a few days later although ‘bumped into’ is scarcely the right term. Alerted by the merry strains of the accordion and seeing the knot of visitors in the Market Place, and thus the lie of the land, I leapt into a shop doorway. But too