The Leto Bundle Read online

  But she could not bring Leto back from the darkness where she was plummeting.

  There, as it furled her in its cloudy arms, Leto was moaning.

  The wolf said, ‘The boy’s safe, I’ve kept him safe.’ And then prophesied, ‘She, too, the girl, she’ll survive. And Leto, Leto, come back. So will you.’

  That region is called Lycania today in honour of the animal who came to the aid of Leto in the hour of her death.

  . . . and all wolves shall be sacred to her . . .

  Praise be to God for His signs & wonders.

  . . . holy Leto, patron of mothers in distress, grant us the favour of your protection now and forever Amen!

  8

  ‘People Like You’: The Rise of Gramercy Poule

  From the cover of her first single, Gramercy Poule’s face shimmered, painted with silver-white clouds floating in gold and azure haloes: her forehead, cheeks and chin became a summer sky, in which her eyes, wide-open and startled, stared out, with a swallow in flight applied around each eye, the bird’s beak and split tails substituting for false lashes. The stylist had showed her a postcard of a painting by Magritte and she remembered the blue head, swimming with fleecy clouds, from a school trip to the gallery where it hung. The resulting image seized on public fascination with undersized waifs and their empty, spaced-out heads full of dreams, and intensified the effect of Gramercy’s scratchy ethereal screaming as it hovered and broke and jumped like a needle in a dusty groove. The whimsy of the portrait didn’t convey the impatient irony of the ballad ‘People Like You’, or the desolate spirit in the songs that she wrote for the album that followed hard upon the heels of the first successful singles.

  ‘And Then Some’ was a love lament for a boy she’d been at school with who left her for a friend at a party whom he began French kissing in front of her eyes; the song mimicked the sucking, squelching noises he’d made. It also staged an edgy assault on the dawn of the me-generation, the coming time of the symbiotic explosion of the yuppies on the one hand, and the underclass on the other. Gramercy was neither. Her background was old Bohemia and the Sixties; her mum, Roberta (‘Bobby’) Grace, a former Southern belle who’d done the masked balls at Carnival time in Shiloh’s southern parts before leaving her native land to live with Gramercy’s father just in time for all the brouhaha over miniskirts and Mini-Minors. He opened a restaurant, just off the Avenue where it was all happening then, and called it Medlar’s, after the crooked and dense-leaved tree that grew in its tiny courtyard. It was one of the first informal, eclectic restaurants to throw off the post-war national gloom of boiled ham in onion sauce, and offer a polyglot diet of avocados and clams and garlic and mozzarella. Medlar’s attracted a young, spendy, loud crowd who, men and women alike, wore gladrags and cobalt kohl on their inner eyelids and patchouli oil; they featured in new, excitable magazines and newspaper gossip columns. But like many a sommelier and cook before him, ‘Hatters’ Poule took to drink, and, on the upward slope of the early boom – too early to make a bundle – he sold up to a chain of new pasta cafés, who moved in and lightened and streamlined the tatty, glamorous crush of his original creation. Bobby Grace continued to do shoots of her legs for adverts of the innovatory hose in many lacy patterns and fruity colours for some while after she couldn’t present her face for fashion anymore, but by then she too was chronically cash poor.

  ‘And Then Some’ sold 20,000 copies in the first two weeks after its release, and Gramercy appeared on the telly, for the first time. Her dress of parachute silk cut like camiknickers was slashed and fastened precariously at the shoulder with a chipped pink enamelled nappy pin her mother had kept as a talisman from Gramercy’s infancy, and had given her daughter for luck. She parried the banter of the presenter with a scowl and a sniff, but told him the story of the pin, so that everyone laughed; nobody could remember terry towels. She explained how she was called after the Park where she’d been conceived one summer, and then she launched into karaoke to her own recording while the shadows of the fans’ hands, reaching out towards her like Israelites gathering manna from heaven in the desert, played over the stage and the raking halogen spots multiplied her touchingly fragile figure into leaping wraiths like burning tissue paper.

  Her album ‘Islands in the Moon’ quickly followed the release of ‘Freedom Days’.

  The airmiles and the gold credit card

  The car alarm and the burglar lights

  In your ‘Desirable Country Residence’

  But you don’t know you have all you need here and now

  In your mind, in your dreams

  Freedom Days/Billy Blake

  You say you want to have it all

  But you don’t know you have all you need, here and now

  Freedom Days/Billy Blake

  You never know what is enough

  Unless you know what is more than enough

  I want to live freedom days

  Gramercy Poule could keen like a banshee and howl like a stuck pig, said some of the reviewers, or she could whisper, so close to the mike, that you could feel her hot breath corroding your ear. She was the queen of the sad people, said one writer, while another raved that her voice was like spider’s silk, so fine but so strong that, on a single sudden rise in pitch to a fluting, winged dominant (something Gramercy had found in the sweet soul ballad singers, like Marvin Gaye), it could lift a man right out of his boots as high as you wanted to go. And there, at the very top of her range, you’d feel this unbelievably intense sorrow pierce right through your head and turn into joy. The tide song ‘Islands in the Moon’, plus a baker’s dozen of other numbers, including ‘Telling It Slant’, ‘Don’t Buy It’, ‘Bivalve’, ‘Wearing My Whiteface’, ‘Webs of Shelob’, ‘What Does Your Navel String Say’, ‘Wodewoses on Fire’, ‘Going Down Down’, made the charts and a fortune, and Bobby Grace, who wasn’t short of money through any improvident tastes of her own, took charge and built up, in those spiralling years of money markets and city bonds, a significant portfolio of investments for her only child.

  Gramercy hated the sight of her credit ratings: she went on blasting against greed and grabbiness, against youth success and youth money, targeted by new magazines called Ego and new colognes called In Your Face.

  Property was also recommended: years of moving and decorating followed. Bobby Grace had strong ideas about paint colours and curtain materials, and mother and daughter fought. Monica, who settled in as Gramercy’s manager after bitter fallout with her first, interceded between them, and Gramercy bought another small house for her mother, not so near that she could call round on foot for a bottle of wine, but not so far that she couldn’t come quickly in an emergency. There were no emergencies, but a whirligig of photo shoots, interviews, meetings with agents, fashion designers, visagistes, record company officials over on the redeye, dates in local clubs and venues up and down the country, shopping sprees, tours, clubs, parties. Gramercy told the stylists and the press all about the zabaglione in Medlar’s, for a long time her favourite and only food, about her pet rat who had been eaten by the cat in the next door flat in the mansion block and how she had been there and seen it happen, the tail flicking between the cat’s jaws, about the poets who inspired her lyrics. The reporters wrote down that she would declare that poets were the legislators of mankind, and described her experiences with drugs almost as they happened. She answered questions about what her songs were about as well as she could: she had books, she told her audience, and she wanted to have lots more of them. Her spirit guides were Blake, of course, and Mary Shelley and Tolkien – and, yes, Emily Dickinson. She’d like to wear white all the time, as Emily had. But she drew back from full confession when she saw that her audience was jibbing. Her reputation as rock’s latest kook became tinged with a certain jocular scepticism about her throwback hippie tastes among the almost exclusively male comradeship of the music press: she was really weird, it was generally agreed, weird and pretentious. Some said she took herself much too seriously for
a teen rock star. Others drooled: ‘Check out that incredible gurgle-cum-squeal at the end of “Bivalve” – you’ll wonder what you’re doing that you’ve never heard a woman make that noise!’

  Sometimes when Gramercy’s head was thick and her eyes were spinning and the veins in her arms and legs felt as if the blood had turned fizzy, she’d look in the mirror and make faces the photographers had never seen. She’d screw up her nose and eyes and grind her teeth and pull her mouth to her ears like a child playing monsters and utter deep groans as if an alien baby were straining inside her wanting to be born. That way she could feel, for a moment, that she still had some secrets. But sometimes, her expressions made her cry: she had no idea she could look so ugly and evil and it frightened her, in her cups, that she was apparently an unknown quantity, even to herself.

  Phil told her not to worry. ‘We all contain multitudes,’ he said. ‘I are others,’ he added. ‘That’s the contemporary version – plural, not singular.’ He was studying philosophy and politics, and sometimes, when the whirl of her life set her down for a week, Gramercy wished she could leave her life and join his.

  It had been Monica’s idea that Gramercy needed a place to hide away, she said, humming. Bobby Grace supported her warmly, since the market in country houses was quiet, but would soon follow the urban explosion, in her opinion. Monica stressed the importance of a good rail connection; Bobby Grace wanted other kinds of connection. When the house of the late Sir Mervyn Feverel-Orbe, Bt., was advertised, under his name, in the Sunday papers, Bobby Grace immediately organised an appointment with the estate agent.

  ‘You met him once, darling. He was in the restaurant with . . .’ she mentioned a couple of names Gramercy had vaguely heard. ‘Mervy was really droll, I can tell you. Very very tall and very very thin, with a pink or blue Sobranie dangling from his long long fingers and a swooping, drawling mad cutglass voice. But he was brilliant, too, musical and artistic and – well, you know, he collaborated with all the greats, the Ballets Russes in the old days, Constant Lambert and the Sitwells. He’s old world, a last trace of true dandiness, of Oscar Wilde and that whole universe that’s gone out with the Dodo and martini cocktails and White Russians drinking tea from silver cups in the Café de Paris.’

  ‘You gave me his fairy tales,’ Gramercy said, sulkily, as she always felt when her mother grew excited. ‘Ballet stories.’ She sounded contemptuous – why did she sound contemptuous?

  ‘But I thought you loved them . . .’ Bobby Grace caught herself when she saw Gramercy’s look of rebelliousness. ‘Anyhow that’s neither here nor there. So: “Prestigious manor house, mentioned in the Domesday Book, the seat of Sir Mervyn Feverel-Orbe, Bt., whose family have lived on the estate since the sixteenth century.” Fabulous! Just think of that! “Set in spectacular scenery on the edge of Fellmoor. 6 reception, 6 bedroom, I bathroom . . .” (typical!) “Orangery” – Orangery! – “Magnificent views of the Nine Maidens, secluded 4 acres, orchard, mature borders and beds” Hah! i.e. overgrown and weed-choked “ . . . walled kitchen garden.” No mention of heating. “2 barn, garden sheds.”’

  ‘I’ll rattle about in there.’

  ‘No you won’t – estate agents always exaggerate. Six reception probably includes a cubbyhole under the stairs and a bootroom with one of those panels of enamel bells saying “Valet de chambre” or whatever in Gothic script.’

  Bobby Grace was even more delighted with the house itself, when she returned from a reccy with Monica, even though the Domesday mention turned out to be a mere ‘bothy’, of which a doorway and lintel remained in one of the several dilapidated outhouses in the garden where the cucumber vines had burst through their glass frames and borage, grown to spice the summer wine, ran rampant, buzzing with bees.

  For five years after she bought it, as the renovation made slow progress under Bobby Grace’s tight financial control, Gramercy felt like a visitor in her own house; nobody understood how to cook on the electric cooker or the oil-fired Rayburn, stoves with their own time signatures, so differently paced from the quick gas burners of the city.

  But Phil liked it there, and, after he finished his course and began writing a film script, he stayed down in Feverel Court. Gradually the rooms grew untidy and comfortable, with his books and his jumpers and CDs and videos strewn about in a companionable tangle. He and Gramercy made a deal: she would pay for everything (or rather Monica would see to the bills being paid) and Phil would line up help from the village and round about to reconstruct the garden and maintain the house and keep the larder stocked with beer and rum and coke and wine and ready-to-cook meals and the freezer with ice cream (Gramercy’s staple); he’d collect her from the station, and take her back when she had to return to the city; he’d score her dope locally and feed the ginger cat whom they acquired when he sauntered into the orangery one afternoon and mewed to break your heart. Phil called him Poly, because he had a damaged eye from a scrap. ‘He must have lost his territory,’ Phil surmised, ‘To some young Turk who nearly gouged out his eye and turned him into a ghoul, a Cyclops! Poor old tom cat, past his prime.’

  Once Feverel Court was up and running, Bobby Grace found life in the country dull. In the city, she bought outfits she had never been able to afford before, not even at the height of her modelling career, and, as she told her daughter, had a string of beaux, as she still called them in her Southern way.

  ‘Don’t you worry, though,’ she told Gramercy. ‘I’m not going to let any one of them move into my life and take it over. Not after what I went through with your father.’

  So Bobby Grace withdrew, with pride.

  ‘Darling, you don’t need me any more. I feel I’ve really achieved something! Isn’t that what mothering is about? I’m really proud of you. Just stick to your guns ’n’ roses and keep flying.’

  She and Gramercy still spoke on the phone every day that they could, though sometimes, when Gramercy was on tour, they missed each other. Then they would talk longer the next day. At the time, her mother liked Phil.

  So Phil and Gramercy played house together, and were happy. They were comrades, Phil said. They smoked together and drank together; they made each other up with different faces late at night; they nuzzled into each other’s smells in the late mornings when they woke; they quarrelled with sudden storms of tears from Gramercy and furious scowls and sulks from Phil – over money, mostly; they spread out maps of places near and far and planned adventure voyages they never made; they talked about friends who had come to stay and played sardines and murder in the dark with them, and laughed uproariously as they slagged them off when they had gone; they raged at the papers and the music press and the film industry and swore to overturn the whole set-up; they cut out words from tabloid headlines and magazine articles for Gramercy to pin up in her music room and prompt her lyrics; they thrashed out the plotline of Phil’s movie and took parts in turn but kept finding they were just parodying golden oldies they’d watched in the afternoon. They dissected Bobby Grace and left her in shreds, then called her up and pressed her to come over; they wondered about Hatters, who was living in a tropical watering hole, but who turned up now and then and embarrassed them in the pub by shouting about his fabulous connections and amazing entrepreneurship. Monica tried to hang around close enough to prevent him asking Gramercy for money – Gramercy was under sentence of death from her mother if she gave her father anything at all. They also discussed what could be done about Phil’s parents, Charles and Vivienne, who sometimes came to visit, bewildered and mannerly, from the ruined rain-swept wastes of a northern town. Then they drank some more and smoked some more and kissed and cuddled; they were babes in the wood and they were going to make all the difference through her music, through his writing. They were going to change the world, Phil said, and Gramercy believed him.

  9

  Kim to Hortense; Hortense to Kim

  Subject: Leto Bundle

  Date: Tues, 19 May 199- 00:36:09 +0100

  From: kim.mcquyyconnect.com>

  To: Dr Hortense Fernly

  Dear Dr Fernly

  You were kind enough to give me your card after your talk today. I’m a schoolteacher (at Cantelowes primary) so we do school outings to your Museum when we can. That’s how I first saw the Leto tomb, and got interested in the bundle inside.

  If you have more info about the writings from the tomb, PLEASE point me in the right direction to read them, so that I can put out what’s relevant on my website – http://www.hswu.org. If you had time to visit it, I’d be glad to hear what you think.

  Thank you for your talk.

  kim mcquy

  P.S. The frogs were a revelation. Hadn’t noticed them before, carved on the inside like that. Do you know this poem? I found it last night on the web @www.dsh.concretepoetry.com

  Frog

  Pond

  Plop

  I was reminded of it by your story:-)

  Subject: Re: Leto Bundle

  Date: Thurs, 21 May 199– 09:14:16 +0100

  From: Hortense Fernly

  To: kim.mcquy

  Dear Mr McQuy, If you would like to make an appointment with the National Museum Archives, I’d be happy to arrange for material connected with G: Skipwith 673/4.1841 to be put out for you. Their number is 580–9000 ext542. If this interests you, let me know when you are able to come. I am here at the National Museum most days.

  Yours,

  Dr Hortense Fernly

  PS If the frogs interest you, you might take a look at Meeks’ translation of Misc. Mss. Gr. Fragments 16–23.

  Subject: Re: Leto Bundle

  Date: Thurs, 21 May 199– 22:19:07 +0100

  From: kim.mcquy