The Blue Tent by Richard Gwyn

Author:Richard Gwyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-912681-58-7
Publisher: Parthian Books
Published: 2019-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

19

There was a significant difference in the way I treated my two visitors. I had invited Alice to sleep in the house within twenty-four hours of making her acquaintance. O’Hallaran, on the other hand, never received such an offer. Nor, I think, would he have accepted.

Put simply, he seemed more suited to the outdoor life, and consequently I didn’t question him continuing to live in the tent, rather than in the house. It made sense. He had lived in his tent for thirty years, by his own account. Alice, by contrast, only ever claimed to have slept in her tent occasionally, on trips abroad or excursions or holidays. The rest of the time, she told me, she stayed at her mother’s place in Devon, or with a girlfriend in France, the daughter of Megan’s best friend, Zoë, whom Alice had met through my aunt.

If O’Hallaran had moved in, it would have felt like a crowd to me, accustomed as I was to having the whole house to myself, but the subject never actually arose, since O’Hallaran seemed happy with his nomadic lifestyle, and after sharing an evening meal with us, which he would frequently prepare himself – he was a competent if unadventurous cook – he would take his leave and retire to the tent.

And I continued in my struggle with insomnia, in the armchair in my library, or else stretched out on the sofa in the living room, where I would watch the DVDs from Megan’s collection – Blithe Spirit, The Red Shoes, The Man from Morocco. Sometimes Alice would join me, and we would snuggle up on the sofa together like brother and sister.

The fact that O’Hallaran was made to feel so welcome was largely Alice’s doing. As she had explained to me in the library, on the night of his arrival, she believed that O’Hallaran was bound to possess a better grasp of the tent’s idiosyncrasies than she herself did. If this were so, I asked her, a week after his arrival, following a late night viewing of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, what had she learned?

She seems puzzled by the question. Not offended exactly, but veering that way, put out by the directness of my question. Why did I want to know? For the same reason, I say, as I had wanted to know when he first arrived, namely, that I could not get my head around the fact that both of them appeared to be in possession of the tent, which was indubitably the same tent, and yet neither of them considered it strange that the other person claimed to own the tent.

But I never claimed to own the tent, says Alice. I said it was a gift from Megan, and that I had travelled with it, and that I slept in it. But did I say I owned it? I don’t think so.

You are being disingenuous, I say: you arrived at the house in possession of the tent, and O’Hallaran arrived in exactly the same way three days later.

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