Aug 21
I’ve worked steadily. I finished the panels and glazing in the tower roof and it stands empty. No purpose has revealed itself. Why did I build it?
I go in and stand and look around and wonder what it’s for. An orgone accumulator? A meditation chamber? A folly? At present, simply an empty space.

‘What are you intending to do with the ceiling of the tower?’ Richard had asked.
‘Decorate it.’
‘May I?’
‘I’ll have to think about it.’
Alone, again I felt threatened, but now more intensely; for now not just my living space but my sanctuary, my empty room was to be invaded. I walked around it. I stood in it, alone. I said to myself, again:
‘What is the purpose of this place?’
I touched the rough stone, ran my finger along a smooth rib, looked at the sky through one of the triangular windows, and answered myself, again:
‘I don’t know.’
‘So its purpose isn’t to remain empty?’
‘Its purpose is to find its purpose.’
‘Didn’t you say the walls of the tower must connect and not separate, unite and not divide, be a medium not a barrier?’

Richard had come into my life unasked and unexpected, an intruder.
On my own I had sometimes imagined people here, even yearned for it, had conversations, imagined a touch … but they were imagined, phantasms that would disappear on command, their existence dependent on my attention. Richard was a real, physical presence. He got in the way, he confused me – my attention kept hitting him, like a bat’s radar on a moving figure in its cave. I began noticing things I’d got used to – the loose floor board I habitually stepped over, the fault in the pump that meant it had to be primed for each use. As I showed him round I saw faults in the work I’d done, excused things I hadn’t done, explained how things would be in the future. He looked and listened, this tall, self-possessed, confident, sophisticated representative of the outside world. Then he said:
‘Kris, I don’t know why you keep telling me what you haven’t done – look at what you have done. This place – you’re doing it.’
‘Do you mean that?’
‘I do. See what most of us do in a year, eighteen months. I’m envious.’
‘It’s time to water the garden.’
‘Do you want a hand?’
‘No, thanks. You – make yourself at home.’

The familiar task, the sluicing water comforted me. As I watched and listened to him moving round the house, I began to think it was okay having someone else in the house. When I got back to the house he had laid out the food he’d brought – expensive pâté, sesame-seeded bread, chocolate, brandy – exciting food for me. When I put Blood on the Tracks on, he almost staggered and said ‘oh shit, I’d forgotten this….’ We talked a lot, that first evening.

Richard is the brother of Suzie, a college friend of Jane, now married to Clive, her school sweetheart, who was an undergraduate in the department where I did my post-graduate thesis, one of the group I kept in touch with during my two years in the wilderness. I met Jane at Clive’s party, and the following month went to live with her in London. I haven’t seen any of them since. Clive and Suzie are on holiday in Spain and plan to pick Richard up on their way home. He had been at art school in the same city, but I had never met him.

‘Wasn’t it exciting, being an art student in the late Sixties?’
‘If you didn’t want to be a painter. There was music, dope, sex. Students were taking 365 photographs of a plaster head and calling it A year in the life of …. Making four hour fixed camera movies. Forming bands. Wearing “I am an Artist” placards. Making boxes full of mirrors or old socks. Robbing stores dressed as superheroes. Pouring treacle into official filing cabinets. Bricking up corridors. Their very own Play School. And the teachers were the worst of the lot – repressed wartime kids, I suppose, growing their thinning hair long, playing along, screwing around, not believing their luck.
‘I wanted to paint and draw, learn how to handle materials, paint real faces, real places – like Vermeer, like Cézanne, like Freud. “Tradition is dead, Mr Jones!” they’d scream, “we’ve erased history, surpassed the past. Paintings are decorations on the walls of the tombs of the dead – we have smashed the walls, broken through, we are alive, we are free!” I was pretty lonely.
‘One lecturer was sympathetic. He got me to Greece on an obscure scholarship in my last long vacation. I saw and felt so much – almost too much, the place so rich and vital. I found myself painting less and less.
‘One day I went for a walk. I came round a headland. The sea was still and blue and as solid as lapis lazuli. Set in it was a steep, jagged rock, the image of Mont St Victoire, pink and white limestone, with little patches of dusty green vegetation, shining in the sunlight. A boy, brown and clean limbed, was standing at the top, on the pinnacle, very still. Suddenly he dived off. I watched him plunge down through the air, clean as a picked bone, waited for him to smash to pieces on the solid sea – he entered it like a javelin, there was a small white splash, then the sea closed over him, the ripples spreading slowly and inevitably towards the farthest shores. For a long time nothing moved. Then he burst up through the surface with a splash, shook the water from his head, diamonds in the sunlight, and began swimming and turning and leaping like a dolphin, whooping like a Red Indian. I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach. And suddenly everything burst into life – the chanting chorus of cicadas, the clear threads of bird song, the smell of herbs in the heat, the sun scintillating on the sea, the far hills like carved smoke …. I walked back in a daze, crawled into bed, stayed there for three days. And then I knew I couldn’t do the dip Ed, become a teacher and Sunday painter, live in hopes – my life had to be painting.

‘I got a job as a milkman, bought a tiny back-to-back for £300 in an area students avoid, put skylights in the roof and made the attic into a studio. I saw hardly anyone from college days. I worked. I drew. I drank in the corner pub. All I wanted to do was to draw the reality of things, their living presence, their actuality, without reference to anything else. To feel, to taste, to enjoy – and then to make marks on paper that said something about what I was seeing: back streets and cleared sites, the ruined abbey by the trash-filled river, flowers in a dustbin, drunks, tarts, children grievously damaged or miraculously untouched. I worked and worked. It was beginning to happen.
‘Then one weekend I went home to see my parents. It was a grey winter day, dead leaves under bare trees, misty perspectives, the park empty. Except for a girl on a swing, flowing hair, flying silk, Isadora at the circus.
‘I want to draw you,’ I said.
‘No, but you can take me out,’ she said, sweeping past me, on the bladed pendulum, up into the pearly sky.
‘I may not want to.’
You may have no choice.’ 
‘One of those absurd conversations that either stop things dead in their tracks or start things going, depending …. Suddenly everything was different. My life looked narrow and mean. Here was a real person, lively, unpredictable, out of control. I felt very protective of her, saw her potential. She was bright but ragged, always heading for the edge. Lovely, of course. And when she turned towards me …. I focussed her interest on art, for which she did have talent. I got her to work enough through school to get a place at my old college.
‘She lived with me and I taught her all I knew. She was full of energy, perceptive, undisciplined. As I took her to galleries and films, introduced her to books, showed her Paris, Amsterdam, gradually she matured.
‘I was drawing less and less, but I was happy. I began to think of the future and re-applied for the dip Ed course. And then she brought home Blood on the Tracks. What a title. To say that she was leaving. And left. She took three years with her, wiped it away, there was no going back.
‘Look Kris, I’ve spent months on the Med, “sitting by the flesh-pots, eating bread to the full” etc. I’ve got soft. I need to be worked. I’ll do anything.’
The next day we started the house roof, stripping the heavy flag lausses, to replace them with the local red tiles.

There was no rational reason to exclude him from my tower. He is a fine artist. But there were emotional ones: ‘this is mine, and only mine’.
But sometimes you need to let people into your life. The  question – is this the right person? Will he defile my inner sanctum? Or bring to it a necessary energy? Will he despoil the tower? Or help me to discover its purpose? It was another day, and a singular incident, before I could say ‘go ahead.’ Immediately I felt lighter.
He set to at once, looking through my books, walking round the farm and the places around, talking to me, sketching.

Aug 27
And now it’s time for a last look at the ceiling of the tower.
But first I remember Richard’s last evening here. Before our last supper of the murdered chicken. The door to the living room was closed. I was reaching for the handle when Richard said:
‘Wait – look through the keyhole first.’
‘What the ….’ I looked into a room transformed.
Sunlight streamed in through the windows, there were carefully wrought, richly-coloured rugs on the floor, exquisite paintings on the walls, extraordinary vases of exotic flowers, and a table piled high with the stuff of royal banquets: capon and sturgeon, pomegranates and pineapples, peacocks and venison. The centre piece was a swan carved from ice. And sitting opposite each other, glasses raised, smiling – Richard and me.
‘By what magic is this thing done?’ I breathed, falling to my knees. ‘By what sorcery…?’
‘Shall I say?’
‘No – let me wonder.’ I gazed tenderly at the soft bloom on the surface of the purple grapes, the light illuminating the room like the inside of a pearl, the look of fellowship on the faces of the two friends as their glasses touched …. Only the stillness of the candle flames told me that this was a scene of enchantment.
‘It’s a marvel.’
‘Let me look – gosh, yes, it is rather good. Do you want to see?’
‘Do I have to?’
‘No.’
‘Okay – show me.’
‘It’s a perspective box – a perspectyfkas in Dutch. They were very popular in the seventeenth century. There’s a rather fine one by Van Hoogstraten in the National Gallery.’
‘You mean it’s a painting?’
‘Look.’ Reluctantly I climbed to my feet. He pulled open the door to reveal a box on a stool. There was an eyehole level with the keyhole, and a lamp shining into it, and everything I had seen was painted on the box’s inner surfaces, the right-angles of the box compensated for in the painting and a new perspective, that of the actual room, created.
‘It’s brilliant. You’re a genius. But you’re not going to destroy this one…!?’ He smiled:
‘No, not this one. With this I’m out of the pool, back in the stream. Working on it has restored my faith in the value of lies and the truth of illusion. It’s all a matter of viewpoint, isn’t it? Enough. I’m starving. Let’s eat.’

I look up at the ceiling panels of the dome. The dragon and tiger entwined together. Exact crystal forms. A spiral staircase, a coffin, a risen figure, the legend: “the badge of innocence and the band of friendship”. A dark wood, illuminated by a flash of lightning. A tree in sunlight, so real that I have to check that I’m not seeing it through a window. It’s good. When he’s famous I’ll receive awed visitors, retale anecdotes; it’ll become a place of pilgrimage, like the Schwitters barn at Ambleside. When I’m dead they’ll remove it to Albi, install it in a museum.

But I’m no nearer knowing what this place is for, or what elements I need to add to enable, in the alchemical alembic, the transmutations, the distillations to begin. Perhaps it exists to one side, an obsession that allows the real work to be done, as Bergman obsessively planned his staging of The Magic Flute while he was actually making his great films …? Judgment is all. And decision.

Sept 3
I arrange, rearrange, clean, wash, tidy, cook, wait. Will they, Gabrielle and Simone, come? At five o’clock I suddenly decide to make up a bed in the tower, which I frantically do, sure they will arrive at any moment. Just as I’m ready to give up, they arrive.

Sept 10
Gabrielle stayed for five nights, nights of the full moon.
In the tower, three vases of autumn vegetation – auburn, bearded, full – that she picked. And on the wall the hanging she had appliquéd assiduously on the fourth day, the sun and moon carefully balanced. Her contribution completing the tower.

I’m writing this in the tower, on a desk I made from a thick slab of sawn chestnut wood and two wine barrels. I like its roughness. While I was cutting wood one morning she placed the decorations. The rain hushes onto the glass above my head.

She has been gone two days. Rain is falling, the water is running again across the cobbles. Everywhere there is movement and flow; but I want to hold it all still, in the stasis of the heatwave summer, until I understand …

 We undressed each other by star light, stroking and kissing each other’s hot skin. Her hair was black and heavy, her skin soft and pale – how light she was, how easily I lifted her – and the light shone in her eyes and on her teeth as she laughed her delight. Then she became quiet and serious, head down. We held each other, our bodies contoured together, a long meeting of skin and skin, the beginning of a melting. Then we slipped into the white bed.

How calmly she slept, like a child. Dawn came softly.

As the waves of light filled the dome with light, she looked around – at the rock walls, the diamonds, the windows, the paintings – and declared:
‘This is our “fossiure a la gent amant”.’
‘ Our Cave of Lovers? You like the Tristan story?’
‘I love it. I love their crazy love.’ The French r, so beguiling. Amour fou, crazy love: as evocative, as thrilling, in both languages. We spoke our own language, a mixture of both. 
‘But they love only because of a potion.’
‘Oh that’s just an image, a way of excusing an unsanctioned passion. Anyway, as an image it rings true – sat across a chess board on a hot day on a long sea voyage, you share a drink and – wham.’
‘But the effect wore off after three years.’
‘And that’s right. Love, passion, that intense, all-consuming thing, can’t last. It’s a madness. You have to decide whether you have other reasons for staying together when the effect wears off, or whether you move on.
‘I love that moment when Mark comes upon them asleep in the woods. He’s ready to kill them – then he sees they’re lying just a little apart, with Tristan’s sword between them. Then he knows the crazy love is over and he can take Yseult back to wife again, so he doesn’t have to kill them. That’s how it should be.’ All this said with certainty, as if it was obvious, logical, incontrovertible, entirely without notions of guilt or shame, shockingly un-Anglo-Saxon. Wonderful.
‘But it all ends tragically,’ I persisted. She pulled a face:
‘Because of possessiveness, and jealousy. Which is why Tristan’s wife tells him the sail is black. And why Mark chops down the rose and the vine that grow from their graves and entwine. But three times he chops them down, and three times they grow again.’

Oct 12
My two tasks completed – the tower, the house roof. A form given to each of my visions. But to what end? The summer is over but nothing is resolved. Chance allowed to unfold until the moment I choose to intervene, to make a decision.

Back at the house from apple-picking. I light a fire in the house, light the stove in the tower. I pin up, in the tower, Jane’s painting of a longhaired figure – male? female? – flying a kite. I eat an enormous meal, play Desire, get very drunk, go to sleep in the dark in the tower.

The next day the world has disappeared. I hear noises, people moving around, but I can see nothing. A dense fog all around, the world blotted out, this place lost in the clouds.
I sit at my desk, surrounded by evidence of Richard, Gabrielle, Jane; alone. There is a pile of paper at my right hand, an empty space at my left. I take a sheet of paper and write “1999” at the top, then commence to write.

Oct 19
The pile of paper on my right is gone, the empty space on my left has filled with a manuscript, “EUROPE 2000”.

I write: ‘His foot slipped again and he almost fell. He swore. Everything around him was dark and indistinct, but the sky was still full of light; the dusk hour, entre chien et loup, the time of transformation. He did not want to reach the lip, leave the valley, climb out onto the plateau, had to, was there.
‘Behind him lights moved urgently back and forth in the community below; and along the valley, advancing, ordered and implacable, more lights. He thought of Miller, his clear blue eyes troubled, puzzled that it had come to this; of McGregor’s fierce preparations, his murderous mantraps; of Leah, fiery and energetic, sharpening yet another blade; and of Rachel, calm, stroking her belly reflectively, the urgent cells dividing and multiplying within her, the form taking shape, another future. He had wanted to stay, share their fate, have a hand in it.
“‘This isn’t your place to fight,” Miller had said. “You’ve more journeys yet before you face your moment. You have a purpose – go and seek it. Take what you have learned here. Use it well.“
‘He had felt exhilaration when Miller had said that. Now he felt only desolation. All around him the black featureless plateau and the blank grey sky, two daubs of paint laid on by a pitiless hand. But now he must move, before the two merged, became a directionless one. He heard cries from the valley, but didn’t turn around. The wind blew cold. He shivered. He held up the crystal pendulum in the shelter of his body, stilled himself, observed its tremblings and, with a deep breath, set off in its appointed direction, striding out.”

I put down the pen. I read the last page, then pick up the pen and write:

“THE END”

I put the sheet on the pile at my left hand and cap the pen with a snap. Hands clasped behind my head, I lean back in my chair.
Above me a triangle of blue is slowly covered with white and slowly revealed again. A thin branch, sunlit on one side, shadowed on the other, trembles. The leaves are yellow, beginning to curl. The world has returned. And I have returned to the world.

I feel the wall of the tower, the shell of the dome around me. For a week it has protected me as I softened to formlessness to write what I have just finished. Now I must leave it, to find out what has happened to me in this week.

I open the door, shiver, close it. I look around, at the glowing stove, the sturdy stone walls, the painted panels, the space where the blank sheets were and the place where the pile of blackened sheets now is. I sigh. I was happy here. I put the pages into an old Research Department file marked “EUROPE 2000”, its contents then a computer simulation, now a novel. Or a foretelling …? – and place it in the middle of my work table. Then I go out, hopefully to find myself coming back.

Oct 23
I sat in the tower for a long time, trying to remember how I felt a month ago. I looked at “EUROPE 2000”; I don’t know what it is, but I will carry it with me, a sort of talisman. And I don’t know what to do.

Oct 30
The sky is lightening, colouring, the grey turning to yellow and peach and pink. At the rim I turn and look back. The sky explodes vermilion and crimson, red engulfs La Balme, the new red roof glows: and at the centre of La Balme, glittering and shining, a cut ruby in flames, containing the flames, is the tower’s wondrous faceted dome.

And now is the moment, if I dare. I close my eyes. I reach out and pick up that ruby; I hold it and put it into my mouth, feel it fill my mouth, hot and sharp – too hot the red, too sharp the faceted surface! I want to spit it out. No! – swallow, swallow, gulp it down this thing so hot and hard, searing and tearing, swallow it down to the tan t’chien, the midpoint, the centre … And there it detonates, explodes through me. At last.
I open my eyes cautiously. The world is still there.

I set off in my appointed direction, striding out.