The Age of Anxiety Read online

  Maud laughed. “It should have been. It was the beginning of a new phase for my husband, and for me too. But it was the end of the film.

  “My husband had been standing on the summit of Skiddaw in the Lake District.” She sounded to be on the edge of tears. “He looked down at the glory of Derwentwater and the blue-green hills; it is the most extraordinary spot. The cameras were rolling, and an enormous Klieg lamp behind him was singeing his hair. He was exhausted from two months of solid work. All these extraordinary images and events have since been handed down like folklore among the local people.”

  She described the scene beautifully. I realized that at the time, her husband still lost to her, she had probably been trying to make something poetic out of her loss, as well as open up.

  “So what happened then?” I asked.

  “My husband lost his marbles.”

  Maud went on to explain that the scene in question was to run under the credits to the film. This was itself unusual, as films are rarely shot in chronological order. It was—as they say—a wrap. Shooting over, the crew congratulated each other.

  “One of the crew said that after flying down the mountain in the hang glider, right over the second unit waiting down near the lake in order to shoot him flying low overhead, he was supposed to land and return to the unit in the second unit jeep. The helicopter chasing him could not follow as the light was fading. He disappeared into the gloom.”

  “Where did he land?” I asked. I was becoming increasingly curious to know more. “What did the film crew say?”

  “None of them seemed to know,” Maud said. “They said he would probably have found an updraft and would be flying low, although by this time it was more or less pitch-dark. They said he was an expert by then. He had been practicing of course, but…

  “Naturally there was a boozy celebration gathering held that evening by the film crew in the nearby White Horse Inn at the foot of the hills.”

  Maud quickly looked away.

  “I had arranged to meet him there but he didn’t show up. I quickly realized something was wrong and set off alone to find him.” At that she fell silent, gazing out at the sky for a few moments.

  “Do you believe in coincidences, Mr. Doxtader?” Maud asked as she turned to look at me, searching my face for any sign that I might be an unbeliever.

  “I don’t think they are significant in the way some people do.”

  “Neither do I,” she agreed. She looked down into her lap. “It did seem to me that Paul’s disappearance must have been planned in advance. I suspect the film producers recognized it would make a story that would greatly help the film. I felt no one was taking Paul’s disappearance very seriously and thought they probably knew very well where he was.”

  “But he might have been killed!” I was shocked at the idea that Jackson had been subjected to some kind of stunt. “Surely they would have let you in on this?”

  “Exactly,” agreed Maud. “But one of the crew mentioned that the movie’s insurance was still valid. They seemed rather callous.”

  “Paul was their star,” I said. “They would have needed him for all the publicity surrounding the release, surely?”

  “I’m afraid I thought the worst of them all, but I also had a bad feeling about Paul.”

  “That he had crashed?”

  “Yes, but not in his hang glider. I feared he had crashed emotionally at some point during the filming. He could be a very difficult man. As I say, he was used to being the leader, and making all the decisions in his life and career. He was also used to drinking hard whenever he felt under pressure. It had always been an effective medicine for him.”

  “What are you saying? That he had screwed up the filming in some way?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “My fear was that he had lost the affection of the team around him. Maybe he had started to drink again and they had become tired of him, and were probably all glad to get rid of him.”

  “They surely knew they were getting a tricky old rock star when they hired him?”

  “What do you know about the behavior of the artist who drinks too much? Do you have any alcoholics on your own roster?”

  “Very few of my clients drink. They are intoxicated enough.”

  Maud smiled at this.

  I wanted to talk about myself, to engage her in my story, to draw her into my life and feelings. “I drank and used drugs myself,” I confessed. “I know what happens.”

  Maud did not seem surprised. She smiled once more.

  “I climbed Skiddaw myself to search for my husband.”

  How much she had loved her man, however foolish he was. I was envious of him.

  “I don’t want to make you do another interview”—I smiled, hoping to reassure her—“but what happened next?”

  “Well, I took a room in the White Horse Inn. But I hardly slept. So in the early hours of the next day, as soon as there was enough light, I got up and dressed and visited the local policeman who lived in a nearby cottage. To my great relief he arranged a search party. In contrast to the indifference of the film people, the locals treated it all very seriously. Apparently any soul lost on the fells gets the same response. After two days of searching—the team was getting increasingly worried—Paul was found.”

  “Where? How was he?” What an extraordinary story she told.

  She put up both her hands and seemed to wave them in mid-air, as though impatient with me. “I’m sorry, this is always hard to tell.” She went on: “He had managed to fly about fifteen miles, as the wind was strong, and the hills indeed created lots of updrafts that kept him soaring. When he finally landed, he was alone in the dark. The search party who eventually discovered him were shocked at his condition.”

  “Were you there?” I cut in. “With the team who found him?”

  “I was nearby,” she explained. “I was there shortly after they found him.

  “He was still stripped to the waist as he had been in the film. He was shivering, and at first appeared to be delusional. He’d been sheltering in a shallow cave halfway up one of the mountains. He was a pathetic sight,” Maud went on sadly. Her eyes were now moist, but then she cheered up and began to smile.

  “He was also quite impressive!” She grinned. “He looked like a castaway on an island who is rescued after years of living on coconuts.”

  She paused for what seemed like an embarrassingly long time. At first, I didn’t stir, but our meeting was taking up a lot of my day.

  “Would you like some more tea?” I offered.

  Maud shook her head. She used her right hand to make sideways circles, like someone describing a “movie” in charades.

  “This is the amazing part,” she said. “He told me he had experienced a divine revelation. Triggered by the heat and light from the film lights, and the sheer magnificence of the vista across Derwentwater, he had seen what he described as the ‘Harvest.’”

  My attention was sparked anew.

  Maud went on with her story: “He was extremely specific and very coherent about what he had seen, but he would not be talked down from the mountain.”

  “What did he mean by the ‘Harvest’?”

  “All very strange, but I knew my husband; he had definitely seen what he described. He saw a hundred angels, all in the shadow of one massive angel with wings that stretched from one side of the valley to the other, all flying low over a seething mass of several thousand human souls waiting for guidance and transport to wherever they were destined.”

  “Destined?” I interjected. “Where?”

  “I assumed he meant to some other place: heaven, hell, the astral plane. I don’t really know.”

  I had endured my own awful visions as a result of drug withdrawal, but I had never myself experienced anything quite like what Paul Jackson had felt and seen.

  Maud took out a small handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.

  “I asked him where this flood of human souls were supposed to go, but he said he didn’t know. When
I allowed some skepticism to show, he said angrily that he had seen what he had seen, and he could never be the same again. But I believed him.” She turned to me, almost in an appeal.

  Maud had stayed in her small room above the noisy bar of the White Horse for several months, sometimes spending a morning climbing to her husband’s little cave. It was really more like a cutting in a hillside protected by a tree. On these occasions she took him various items he told her he needed: maps, a tent, a small shovel, a compass, a knife, pencil and paper, a waterproof jacket, a drinking water bottle a huge supply of small plastic lighters of the kind used by smokers, blankets, and a walker’s backpack. He planned to kill small animals to eat, but she also took him food.

  “I sometimes tried to give him money,” she explained. “But he would never accept it.” Perhaps remembering the pain she had felt back then, the impotence and frustration, her face hardened and she suddenly looked older, her lips tight and lined like a smoker’s.

  “I thought he might have begged for money from fell walkers he came across on his walks.” At this memory, she smiled again.

  “Why did you think that?”

  “He sometimes had things in his cave that I knew had not come from me,” she explained. “And in the second week of the second month I gave him a complete collection of Wainwright’s Guides to the Lakeland Fells, and that he did accept. Do you know about Wainwright?”

  I nodded my assent. It is often said that it would take a lifetime to cover all the ground that Wainwright himself had explored in order to produce his famous guides to the entire Lake District; it seemed Maud’s husband had dedicated what remained of the rest of his own life to the task.

  “From the time I gave him the guidebooks,” she declared, “he became much harder to track down.” Maud explained that her eccentric husband lived like a tramp-cum-hermit very successfully for a number of years on the hillside near Keswick.

  “I’d almost given up hope of ever being able to have a normal life with him again.” As Maud spoke of all this her eyes filled with real tears, and I took the opportunity to move to console her, putting my hand on her arm. She dismissed my action, not kindly, with a series of impatient nods, dried her eyes, and continued.

  “Of course I called him Paul, his given name, the name of the man I’d married, but he told me firmly that he was now Nikolai Andréevich. He was living out the character he had brought to life in the film. I must—he said—call him Nik. He insisted that one day the world would understand that the revelation he had experienced had come about as a direct result of his work on the film. He said he had become a new man in those last moments of filming.”

  “Does he still call himself Nik?”

  She nodded. “And I have accepted it. I call him that too.”

  “How did you manage? Did you have anyone to help you?” I tried to imagine how she must have felt alone up in Cumbria, trying to keep communication with her husband open, desperately concerned for him.

  “Three months after the final scene of the film was shot,” she said, “the completed feature was released with the usual publicity fanfares. It was then I realized that even if it had not been planned by the producers, my husband’s wild adventure, his absence, and the story of his mental condition were going to make useful and controversial publicity material.”

  Boyd’s film had been a success. The riddle around the leading actor’s disappearance in the mountains of the Lake District, his visions, and finally his adoption of the elaborated name of the character he had played in the film, all added to the mystique of the project. The PR company spun the story to great effect, but after a successful release the wheel eventually wobbled and stopped, and Paul Jackson was forgotten.

  Eventually Maud returned to London and visited her husband less frequently. Sometimes she would drive all the way to Cumbria only to spend several days wandering the fells herself, never coming across him. Finally, she simply sent packages for him to a policeman she had come to trust, and he would march up to Nik’s cave on his day off and leave them under a pile of rocks.

  “Old Nik,” said Maud. “Like the name of the devil!”

  She was laughing again. Her husband Paul had rechristened himself Nikolai, and the locals and the fell walkers shortened it to the new nickname. He was rarely sighted in the area, but he was seen often enough for Maud to know he was still alive, still holding up his arms to the rising sun at dawn, and again as it set in the evening.

  “I wondered,” said Maud, “if he was still seeing the hosts of angels he had spoken about. Were they still ushering legions of lost souls? Was he seeing souls passing on to the next life?”

  “The next life?” I couldn’t hide the incredulity from my voice. Whatever each one of us believes, when we speak of such things in the modern world it is unwise to betray too much metaphysical faith.

  I found Maud attractive and intriguing, but she seemed oblivious to my interest in her and I’m afraid my patience was really starting to grow thin. Our meeting was overrunning the time I had allowed for it.

  “Interesting. But how,” I asked, I feared quite rudely when I looked back later, “how does any of this concern me?”

  Maud explained that having lived rough for fifteen years, a few weeks prior to calling me, her husband had walked into the public bar of the White Horse Inn in the Derwentwater valley.

  “He announced that he had come down from the mountain for good.”

  The first thing Maud knew about her husband’s return to the normal world had been a message that he was in a police cell in Keswick. The local people had become fond of Maud, and by reputation and gossip of Old Nik as well.

  “The story was that one afternoon Nik appeared in the doorway of the inn. His hair was long and curling, afire with the light behind him.”

  The Lake District in Keswick had been enjoying the quiet part of its season; spring was slow to set in and it should have been cold and rainy. That afternoon was an exception. The bar was populated by a few locals, a number of professional-looking walkers with the usual thick socks tucked into their boots, and a group of rather trendy-looking teenagers surrounding a gaudy, noisy, electronic gambling machine.

  “My husband was lucky.” Maud glanced around my living room, her eyes flitting along the carefully hung paintings. She shook her head sadly and turned back to me, looking me in the eye again. “From the point of view of the people in the bar he must have appeared to be a strange old man. But one of a group of young farmers standing around the buzzing and burbling machine had recognized him from his days as a rock star, and as Nik roared that he was thirsty, they bought him a pint—really strong local beer—and he drank it down in a single throw.

  “By the time the local policeman arrived to calm him down he was preaching hell and damnation.” Maud laughed. “He hadn’t had a drink for years, and was accusing the young farmers of trying to poison him. He was shouting that he would fly away; fly away back from whence he had come.”

  I summoned the memory of insanities of my own for a moment. No doubt, in the ramblings of the freshly repickled alcoholic, Old Nik saw stars, frogs, goblins, and probably fire-breathing devils with pitchforks.

  Maud traveled north to rescue her old man the same evening, and after a brief appearance in court for disturbing the peace he was released. Then, following a brief roundup of his possessions, spread all over a dozen hiding places in the Lake District, she brought him home to their house in Chiswick. The one item she left behind was his hang glider.

  Despite his latest vision, it seemed that—at last—he had remembered who he really was, and had been all along.

  “I still wanted to call him Paul of course,” Maud recalled. “But even our close friends started to call him Old Nik, despite his youthful-seeming suntanned body and his lovely, long curly hair, which was still almost golden.”

  Maud caught my eye as she said this. I must have looked skeptical again, for she looked down at the floor shyly and seemed slightly ashamed.

&nbs
p; “I’ve had visions,” I said suddenly, wanting to bring her back to the present. “I think I understand what Nik saw, or thought he saw. My visions were induced by drugs, but I saw extraordinary things.” I wanted to tell her about screaming faces I had seen in an old bedhead, while I was still married to Pamela. It was a long story. I took a breath to begin, but as if by this confession of sympathy I had qualified myself to be worthy of the moment, Maud unrolled the waterproof tent groundsheet she had brought with her, and I gazed at the first of her husband’s magnificent drawings. I was astounded.

  I greedily flipped through the sheets: there were at least twenty, and Maud said there were dozens more. Each one portrayed with breathtaking precision a single freeze-frame of Old Nik’s vision of the angelic Final Harvest.

  “This work is extraordinary,” I spluttered. “It’s stunning stuff. Imagine—if he could really see what he’s depicted here—what that means!”

  She told me that Old Nik had spent a number of his years while living rough making the drawings; that they were rolled up and stored in the cave where he had often sheltered. “They were a complete surprise to me,” she continued. “Paul had always been a competent artist. Ex–art school like so many of his rock-star peers, but he’d never drawn more than a few simple portraits for family birthday cards in the past.”

  I was gratified that none of the sheets was signed, because I knew immediately and instinctively that Nikolai Andréevich was a better moniker for an Outsider Artist than Paul Jackson. Nikolai Andréevich, I mused silently. Born while filming the story of his own rise and fall. Everyone in the world of Outsider Art should be gratified he had gone mad in the process.

  It is a cliché to say it—and I am ashamed that such a bald notion passed through my mind as I surveyed the exquisite pencil and charcoal drawings before me—but I heard myself whisper. “Maud,” I said, my voice barely audible and quavering a little with excitement. “You and I are probably going to make a lot of money!”

  For the first time since she’d arrived in my apartment Maud looked happy, with a happiness I felt I knew. Again, my heart fluttered.