More Spirit Than Animal

EPILOGUE

            Some fires never truly go out, but turn to ash and the heat my die but the cinders radiate a vectored breath, the memory may linger and the stench of smoke and fear may permeate. It would take generations to exorcise the global civil war, with battle lines less cavalier and roundhead than grey and grey. Britain's infrastructure hung, suspended, paying lip service to its responsibilities, cheerleading individual tenacity to set things aright.

New leaders came forward, to replace the complacent and the power hungry, the career politicians who rode the Zeitgeist of other men's concerns, slipping between the man in the street and the man at the top. Interpreters of God fell further from view, their church consumed by its own soul, vexed at its arrogance and muddle headed peddling of the myths of a long dead society about a creature that demands worship, speaks in riddles (at least as far as its representatives on earth would have us believe) without ever having made itself known. Only the passing of generations would ameliorate such primitive rhetoric and in the meantime it would fall to the wise and the resilient, the teachers of restraint and conductors of tolerance to light the way. For every night there is always a dawn and a chance to put right the things that kept you awake.

So whither the principles in the immediate aftermath of the new Anarchy leading into the tremulous dawn? The newly empowered, and accumulator of considerable wealth, Colorado Smith with Anais by his side led Elysium into what was a smooth and enriching future. But as the winds changed and the playing field lost its lustre Anais disappeared back into the east, to Europe, they said. There was talk of retribution, with Anais admitting even to herself a soft spot for Peter Rhodes a man she had drawn out and set on the road to what was his own destruction. She had gone to Rudiger some days earlier to learn more of his intense interest in proceedings and how he had inserted himself so easily into Peter's final hours. In conversation he said he would be paying a visit to the father, to conclude all unfinished business, to establish the extent of his guilt and to dispense what justice was still open to him. But it was never to be. Before he went to Colonel Rhodes a confrontation may have ensued between himself and Anais. It cost her they said, whatever she did or said to Rudiger she would leave the stage to lick her wounds. Of Captain Dominic Rudiger there is nothing more to be said.

Colorado Smith took sole ownership of Elysium and it's is fair to say underwent a long bitter journey toward fulfilment. A man not unused to demons he faced them all as he led his business out of the shadow of Peter Rhodes and onto a more commercial footing. Having lived in the slip stream of other men's dramas for so long he underwent a purging of the self, whatever that is. The time had arrived when he would facilitate his own life. Did he make it? Legend has it that he did at least find solace in his own worth and not the grasshopper opportunism that had rendered his true self all but indefinable against the grey values of others.

Leda Records relocated to a customised unit on the West coast of America, in LA, run by Telemann, and was fast becoming one of the most successful label/studios in the world as a thousand new acts across as many genres beat a path to its naturalistic spirit. Music as music, not industry.

The art galleries returned as did the civil display of wanton defilement of public spaces, repainted in a thousand new hues, driving out the grey and the worn. The world's first "Art label" found a rekindled spirit in every western city with a huge pick up in the Far East. Private art centres sprang up, paint ins, festivals of light, art and musical, spiritual love-ins.

Encampments grew out of the rubble of Oxford enriching the spirit and the town encouraging the rebuild of a New Oxford, dedicated to Peter Rhodes the great progenitor of a new age.

And whither Mayor Stone and his Cressida? The pageant of unrelenting rat catching saw his popularity rise and fall in equal measure. Smoking out the leeches, no prisoners now, this was war and the only way out is to lay down your guns and swear allegiance to the flag...Stone's flag. Stoker of blood lust and self beatification or the last lawman standing, it really depended on where you stood and who told you. But the barricades were manned and Lady Liberty took her place waving the flag of a new morning. No-one could argue that the man had not fulfilled his podium promise.

But the long term prospects for a man like John T Stone would be, they said, his just desserts. Sacrificing the family who had been supplanted by a dream and another woman tainted his legend with the shame that a man in his pomp would never see. But a wife sacrificed is a woman biding her time, and as her man milked the crowds and waited for his second term in office Clem Stone brought the hammer down. Corruption in high places, embezzlement and low demeanours which in the face of overwhelming embroidered evidence which someone said fellow councillor David Parish had a hand in, Stone was brought to his political knees and locked away for twenty years.

Twenty years was too long to indulge the art of loyalty so Thalia walked out of Stone Tower, looking for her men in the fog. In effect she self emolliated on the hook of an overweening sense of ambition, her sense of right and wrong up in smoke, the rules of business and survival proven to be a searing myth peddled by men like her father. Leaving for a world of shadows, a million shades of black and grey, she became invisible, a wraith on a foggy plain in the aftermath of battle, where the dead give up the ghost, she walked alone, a line here and a trick there, looking for her Man...he was out there...he had to be out there. The answer and the glory.

She is there still, the bag lady of the Lower Eastside...haunted and red of eye.

Years later, somewhere on the East Asian subcontinent, China probably, a bitter fight broke out between rival gangs claiming to own the original Vermeer's The Concert. Whispers began to leak out of the Orient, as friends of friends spoke of it hanging on the wall of a Triad overlord, a man of virtually no taste but an understanding of the tools of power. When a second claimant entered the market it's fair to say he saw red. Its footprints back to the Sheldonian Theatre were undetectable, covered with all the grace and skill of Apache hunters. Whoever had taken it down from the easel and whoever had spirited it out of the gallery, the image of three musicians, the ménage à trois was stolen for a second time.

Ironically any blood reportedly spilt on the canvas of the copy was not in evidence. In time the two paintings fell into the same hands and in all the wrestling for the right to own which, more blood was spilled, more lies told, more authentications subverted, and men who couldn't even pronounce Vermeer never saw the dawn rise again.

Which identical painting was the ONE? Reality it seems will always be in the eye of the man who says he knows.

And one bright morning in Church Hanborough, Colonel Aaron Rhodes rose and drove to Folly Bridge in Oxford. He hired a row boat just for the day. He clambered aboard lying the long shoulder bag down under the seats and turned to row down stream, following the Thames as far as the red bricked mansion set back among the trees. He moored under the willows at the end of the long lawn and alighted, shouldering the long bag.

Already the wiry Joey was on his way. The Colonel smiled and waved. He slipped the bag to the ground and unzipped it to take up the automatic rifle he had loaded earlier. It was time for that one to one with Zeus himself.

And elsewhere I turned to my companion in the e-type heading West and asked him if he was well. The man in the white panama and the white walrus moustache pursed his lips in reflection and said he was happy to be back out on the road and I said I couldn't agree more.