States of Man

Gareth Cadwallader

States of Man

New Stories

WriteSideLeft

September 2019

Copyright © 2019: Gareth Cadwallader

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the authors

ISBN: Print: 978-1-9161011-0-4

ISBN: eBook: 978-1-9161011-1-1

ISBN: Audiobook: 978-1-9161011-2-8

Compilation & Cover Design by S A Harrison

Photo by Steve Hunt

Published by WriteSideLeft UK

www.writesideleft.com

Contents

Prologue: The Rise and Fall of John Holms

The Fall 1984

Probable Assault

The Real Thing

Rainfall

Closing the Gap

The Abuser

The Fall

Christmas Cards

The Minotaur’s Apprentice

Epilogue: The LOOP

About the author

Also by Gareth Cadwallader

Watkins & Co–a novel

Prologue: The Rise and Fall of John Holms

Peggy stood on the balcony of the hotel room in Avignon and, with a stamp of her foot, threw her wedding ring into the street below. Laurence had been raving up and down the Riviera for two weeks solid and she couldn’t—wouldn’t—take any more. She felt sure he’d had a premonition about John Holms and that was why he’d reacted that way. But then it was the only way he knew how to react to anything. In a café overlooking the rocky coastline he had smashed up all the tables and chairs, throwing bottles and glasses through the windowpanes. In St Tropez, he’d stood her on a table-top and torn her clothes off in front of all the diners. He’d started hitting her, bruising her face; he’d never done that before. Days and sleepless nights of continuous drinking only made him angrier—about everything. He took her clothes and set them on fire on the beach below their house in Pramousquier where they’d gone bathing naked with John and Dorothy when they’d first met them. He held her on the floor until she sobbed so hard she could no longer resist and then stood on her and stamped his feet all over her. All this she’d put up with before in one way or another. He was just a child. But then he pushed her down the concrete steps of the house.

‘My God! You could have killed me!’ she screamed at him.

He turned away and slammed the door behind him. And she ran through the woods to the cabin where they were staying to find John and Dorothy and demand that they take her away. She sent them ahead to Avignon, booked and paid for the train and a hotel room for them.

Laurence was glad to see them go; he saw it as his victory. He’d had a terrible fight with John, trying to knock his brains out with a pewter candlestick. John was a big man, and an athlete, who’d won the Military Cross and was quite capable of subduing Laurence, but Dorothy had been traumatised. She was convinced Laurence was going to kill them all. As soon as Peggy saw Laurence was at work in his studio, she bribed the gardener to drive her to the station and caught the train to Avignon. Of course, when Laurence discovered she was gone he was perfectly capable of extracting the details from the gardener and came after them. Dorothy saw him coming down the main street like a gunfighter. She was in a panic. She insisted the three of them shimmy down a drainpipe and escape down the alley behind the hotel.

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Peggy loved to dance with John. That’s how it had started. He was so tall she could nuzzle her head against his chest, just below his heart. He could move each muscle independently; he could hold her head perfectly still against him while dancing with his hips and shoulders. On the first night, she’d ended up dancing on the table, just as when Sylvia Plath would be ‘stamping and he was stamping’ when she first met Ted, and screamed to herself, thinking, ‘oh! to give myself crashing, fighting’ to him. That was what had set Laurence off. He didn’t even know that John had pressed her against the stone walls of the restaurant and kissed her.

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John had been living with Dorothy for almost a decade. He’d spent a year in agony drawing her away from her previous lover, carrying a handgun to use either on himself or the other man—he was never sure which. The emotional drama exhausted him— permanently. From the moment he’d won her, decisions were beyond him. He’d never got around to marrying her; never got around to telling her he’d fallen out of love. She was his best friend, but he’d lost all interest in her, sexually speaking. She lived in a perpetually frantic state of trying to reignite his interest. Even so, when Peggy arrived in Avignon, Dorothy had no idea that she was already John’s lover.

Some friends of Dorothy’s wrote to say they were travelling over from England and would she join them during their stay in Paris.

‘Oh, you must go,’ John said.

The lawyers were still fighting over the terms of the divorce and custody over the two children, and Peggy was restless and depressed. As soon as Dorothy left, Peggy and John decided to get away. They toured around the Var and Midi. They took a train through a blizzard to Vienna where the city was frozen and there was no coal. They stayed in bed the whole time.

John was the first person Peggy had ever met who considered it perfectly normal to spend all day reading and all night drinking and talking about what he’d read. She was a woman of leisure because she had inherited a vast trust fund of imperial dollars, whereas he was idle through inability to decide what to do. Though he did nothing, his taste and judgment were universally regarded as perfect. He entranced her by reciting hours of poetry he knew by heart. He could talk all night about his ideas for writing fiction or criticism, but he’d invariably exhausted his interest by the time he sat at his desk with a pen in his hand. He was like a giant king of a fairy people who lived on vaporous ambrosia breathed out of the air—and copious quantities of alcohol.

Once, when Peggy and John were staying in Paris, Dorothy surprised them in bed together. She stood at the end of the bed and screamed and beat Peggy on the soles of her feet with a toilet brush until they both collapsed weeping. John, who had fled the room, returned to make peace. Dorothy had decided to return to England, where she was believed by one and all to be the long-standing Mrs Holms. She couldn’t go back unmarried; she would be a pariah. She hounded John, insisting that he marry her.

Peggy’s divorce from Laurence hadn’t come through yet—a few months later, she’d have married John at the drop of a hat and put an end to this nonsense.

After weeks of vacillation, John suddenly caught a train back to Paris and married Dorothy before he could change his mind for the hundredth time. His father, who disapproved of his son’s idleness, gave him a very modest annual allowance of a few hundred pounds that he and Dorothy had been getting by on for years. Now he arranged to transfer it all to his new wife...and live off Peggy’s vastly greater income.

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Dorothy also wanted John to edit her biography of the man, obscure then and now long-forgotten, away from whom John had seduced her. She’d been waiting for his comments since before they’d met Peggy. It was driving her mad. John was depressed about not having even started the task when, in truth, he had nothing else to do. To galvanise himself, he promised an article to a journal in London, and proposed to Peggy that they take a long trip with Dorothy’s manuscript and his own plan to finally write something.

Peggy’s mother had always bought her a new car every year. They’d been driving around the Continent in a gorgeous Delage, but now they bought themselves a Citroen and headed north on a thousand-mile circuit through Germany and Scandinavia. In the back seat they had Peggy’s daughter and maid, and her mongrel bitch, Lola, stretched across the sill of the rear window. Perhaps they thought Norway and Sweden would be as dense with Citroen garages and stocks of spare parts as they were with forests. They drove up the coast shuttling from ferry to ferry, driving up wobbly planks of wood to board the little boats, and on unmade tracks across farm fields, stopping to open and shut gates. They drove for hours without seeing another vehicle, much less a Citroen dealership. They travelled, as they lived, heedless of consequences. But the only accident that occurred was Lola getting pregnant in Trondheim.

Sitting in bed for two days next to Peggy in her red negligee, John finally read through Dorothy’s manuscript. To Peggy it felt like a triumph, to have coaxed him into action, and even more so to finally shake off the lingering presence of Dorothy in their relationship.

It didn’t turn out that way. When Dorothy opened the package containing her manuscript, the first thing that fell out was a red feather from Peggy’s knickers. This only served to open a new and more resentful phase in Dorothy’s campaign to make John as miserable as she was. 

On their way back to the South, John hit on the idea of staying for a while in Bavaria. He felt he could get to grips with the article he’d promised to write. In Munich, they bought a phonograph and lay in bed listening to music or went out to the opera. He never wrote the article.

They lived in a permanent state of boredom and restlessness. Peggy put John’s inanition down to the fact that he never met his intellectual equal. For several years they seemed to follow Picasso around, without ever meeting, triangulating between Paris, the South of France and eastern Spain. Peggy shared his fascination with the bullfight, and they lived as ‘strangers to premeditation’, just as his friend Jaime Sabartes described Picasso, ‘his whole entity being restless.’ Once John drove Peggy into Spain for a day trip and they enjoyed themselves so much they stayed for ten days—with no luggage.

John’s character combined perfect aesthetic judgment with chronic indecisiveness. They spent months looking for a perfect house to rent in Paris. They signed a lease on a house which John found too noisy. They lined the walls with cork, then