by Patrick Gale
Copyright © 2018 Patrick Gale
The right of Patrick Gale to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency
This Ebook edition published in 2018 by Tinder Press
An imprint of Headline Publishing Group
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN: 978 1 4722 0536 0
Cover design by Patrick Insole. Front cover photographs © Robin Whalley/ Alamy (shelter), Yolande de Kort/ Arcangel Images (boy), ARTYuSTUDIO/ Shutterstock (cello case), Volha Pilipchyk/ Shutterstock (seagulls flying), Louise Peck/ Shutterstock (seagull, stationary). Back cover photographs © DMJackson/ Shutterstock (deckchairs) and Russell Binns/ Shutterstock (beach)
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Author
Praise
Also By Patrick Gale
About the Book
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Author’s Note
About the Author
Author photograph © Markus Bidaux
Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight. He spent his infancy at Wandsworth Prison, which his father governed, then grew up in Winchester before going to Oxford University. He now lives on a farm near Land's End. One of this country's best-loved novelists, his most recent works are A Perfectly Good Man, the Richard and Judy bestseller Notes from an Exhibition, and the bestselling A Place Called Winter.
Praise for Take Nothing With You:
‘Absolutely one of his complete best. So many funny and tender and terrific scenes. He hovers between social comedy and apocalyptic tragedy without the move appearing artificial or contrived. Just a wonderful, wonderful read’ Stephen Fry
‘Safe in the arms of Patrick Gale's BEAUTIFUL writing again – I could weep with joy’ Joanna Cannon
‘Sexy, joyous, funny and tender. I relished it’ Sarah Winman
‘Joyous and full of light. I only meant to read a chapter and I greedily gobbled down the whole lot in one go. He is a beautiful and empathetic writer’ Cathy Rentzenbrink
‘A compelling story of how a passion for music can be the gateway to self-discovery, and lead a young teenager to find his tribe. The storytelling is so vivid, you can actually hear the music, and the intense fusion of artistic and erotic exploration will stir up memories for quite a few readers’ Jonathan Dove
‘A fascinating story, gripping, moving and exquisitely written, this is a wonderful gift of a book from one of the best writers working today’ SJ Watson
‘Very well done indeed – brilliantly sustained’ Rachel Johnson
By Patrick Gale
The Aerodynamics of Pork
Kansas in August
Ease
Facing the Tank
Little Bits of Baby
The Cat Sanctuary
Caesar’s Wife
The Facts of Life
Dangerous Pleasures
Tree Surgery for Beginners
Rough Music
A Sweet Obscurity
Friendly Fire
Notes from an Exhibition
The Whole Day Through
Gentleman’s Relish
A Perfectly Good Man
A Place Called Winter
Take Nothing With You
About the Book
Falling in love, just as he's obliged to enter hospital for urgent treatment, Eustace has twenty-four hours in which to reflect on his new happiness, old pains and particularly on his boyhood.
An oddball only child, he lives among a houseful of adults in the seaside care home run by his parents. His life is infused with colour when he begins cello lessons and falls for not only for music, but also his teacher, glamorous Carla Gold, who appears to cast a heady spell over everyone, including his difficult and controlling mother.
On a holiday course in Scotland, Eustace learns the essential lessons of love, friendship, survival and resilience, and discovers that music-making brings release from emotional turmoil, setting him up for life.
Rich with insight, intuition and humour, Take Nothing With You is a stunning portrayal of a boy on the cusp of adulthood, gleaning from those around him both the glories and the complexities of what being a grown up can mean.
For Aidan Hicks
CHAPTER ONE
At an age when he was reassured that life was unlikely to surprise him further, Eustace found, in rapid succession, that he was quite possibly dying and that he was falling in love for the third time. Up to this point he had been a notable survivor geographically as well as medically, a relic almost, having lived his three decades as a Londoner in a white-painted terrace house off Kensington High Street, while all around him sold up, subdivided, reunited and remodelled. The street, prettily lined with flowering cherry trees, went from being artistic, even Bohemian, to being colonized by expatriate bankers. Now, with a smattering of oligarchs and CEOs, it housed more homesick nannies and maids than its Victorian developers could ever have imagined there.
Since turning fifty, he took a circuit-training class twice a week so as not to have to give up cake or wine. Friends said it sounded hot because the instructor was an ex-marine who called it Boot Camp but the reality was cosier than their fantasies: a mixture of men and women, from rounded young mothers to retired plumbers, from buns of steel to daily bun-habit. He was fitter than most, which was entirely down to dog-walking since not even at school had he taken much exercise. But he was not so fit that he could lie on a sweaty mat for a round of reverse crunches or Complete Bastards and not wonder if his heart might be about to burst. Classes took place in a church hall, one of those pockets of self-sustaining parochial life that came to seem increasingly miraculous in affluent central London.
Occasionally he overdid it, especially if he found himself sharing circuit stations with one of the fitter, sexier men and was driven unconsciously to compete. He was used to waking with a stiff calf muscle or a wrenched shoulder, and assumed that the mild discomfort in his neck was just another such sprain. The ex-marine was ingenious in regularly throwing new exercises into the mix, so it was nothing strange for a new muscle to complain at being rudely rediscov
ered. The discomfort persisted, however. It was not quite a sore throat, more like the sensation of strain after mistakenly swallowing too large a bite of hard apple. He fancied there was a persistent dryness in his mouth as well but, having irritatingly developed an allergy to tree pollen in his forties, he wondered if this were simply a bad reaction to early summer or the polluted London air.
Eustace was not one of nature’s doctor-botherers, a reaction to having grown up in a household in which to be written a prescription was more validation than misfortune. It was a deep-seated reaction, too, to his having survived the eighties and nineties almost unscathed; like many in his position, he made no attempt to hide his scars, but preferred not to dwell on the claws that had left them.
He bore with the throat discomfort, sucking painkilling lozenges when he remembered, until he was due for a routine check-up. He then brought it to the nurse’s attention in case it turned out to be some form of thrush. She took a good look, said there were none of the infection’s usual signs but took the customary throat swab for analysis and made a note of his symptoms. He often joked that he had never been so healthy as since Gwyn made him HIV positive; he received far more medical supervision than most men his age and the analyses of twice-yearly blood tests meant he was highly unlikely ever to have one of the late diagnoses that were so often the lot of doctor-shunning men.
The falling in love was Naomi’s fault. To say she was one of his oldest friends was misleading, as it implied friendship of a long duration. In fact they had briefly been friends in circumstances of some intensity, as cello students in their distant childhoods, then rediscovered one another when he contacted the Royal Academy in search of a cellist to play at his lover’s funeral. In the interim she had enjoyed a stratospheric career as a performer, playing the Elgar concerto at the Proms in her late teens and releasing a string of prizewinning recordings before overwhelming performance anxiety abruptly caused her to retire.
‘Naively I thought I could just kick the concert habit and do a Glenn Gould, record in studios, but nobody wants the girl they can’t see,’ she explained the first time they went for a catch-up-on-our-lives drink together. ‘And, hell, I needed to break down a bit, become a proper woman, grow hips, all that stuff, and the record company wanted this nervy little pipe-cleaner girl who couldn’t stop throwing up.’
Instead she followed the example of the great teacher they had briefly shared and reinvented herself as someone who trained musicians but no longer performed herself. She taught at the Academy but also took on a series of much younger, less ambitious pupils, many of whose parents had no idea she had briefly been something of a star. He loved how the adult Naomi looked. She had retained much of her beauty but nerviness had been replaced with generosity, edginess with naughty wit and he was touched that he seemed to fill a sibling-shaped hole in her life as she did in his.
Her friendship, based on their almost identical ages, overlapping childhood experiences and the fact that they had, in different ways, gone through emotional battlefields and rebuilt themselves was of such help to Eustace, as he worked his way through the hard labour of mourning, that he soon found the perfect way of stitching her into the fabric of his life.
He lent Naomi his beautiful sitting-room for her private teaching two days a week in exchange for her minding and walking Joyce while he caught a train to visit the woman she called ‘your depressingly indestructible mother’. Quite often Naomi stayed over because there was room, they enjoyed cooking together and they always had too much to talk about. It had been during a long evening of do-you-remember that she first made him play her cello to her and the almost animal joy of it came back to him. She lent him a spare instrument so they could have fun playing De Fesch and Bartók duets together. Then she found him one to buy and coached him for his audition with a local orchestra.
They didn’t often play duets after that unless they were drunk. Eustace found the memories stirred up by playing alongside her almost too much and they were not all of things he found he could share, even with her. As for the orchestra, they agreed that she might occasionally help him with fingering a passage but that he would never subject her to one of its performances. Amateur music making was all about enjoying the pleasure of rehearsals and minimizing the pain of concerts. It wasn’t a bad orchestra – this was central London, after all, and many of the players were highly trained teachers of their instruments and they had an excellent conductor and hired the best soloists they could afford. Each season began for him with high hopes, however, and ended in the cruel reminder that, for all their professionalism, they sounded like an orchestra that rehearsed for two hours a week, not thirty.
For reasons she couldn’t be drawn to explain, Naomi lived in an ex-council tower block in an ungentrifiable pocket of North London she called ‘a bit stabby’. She claimed she was visually illiterate but knew his house would reassure the parents of children who came to learn with her there.
‘Don’t you remember?’ she said, when he teased her about this. ‘It wasn’t just the lessons that were special but the place where they happened.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, thinking back to a beautiful, shabby house in Clifton where nothing mattered so much as art. ‘You’re so right.’
To his horror, it was only after Gwyn had dumped him that she admitted how ghastly she had found him.
‘If you’d succeeded in moving him in,’ she said, ‘I’d have stopped coming round. He clearly answered some masochistic need in you, but it wasn’t a side to you I liked to see encouraged.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’ he asked, horrified at how close he might have come to losing her.
‘That’s not what proper friends do: they love whoever their friends love. If they can. And keep supportively schtum if they can’t.’
And yet, the falling in love was Naomi’s fault. She had little patience with any signs Eustace gave of pining since becoming single again. She cajoled him into downloading a dating app to his phone by way of healthy distraction having had, she claimed, startling successes with its heteronormative equivalent. It was a brutally frank business. Vital statistics were loaded, from height, weight, age and furriness to itemizing the depressingly reductive types the user favoured. Rebelling by instinct, Eustace began by ticking every box only to get soundly told off when hairless ladyboys or latex-wrapped control freaks came on to him and, through increasingly aggressive questioning, obliged him to admit that they would never have been a match.
He limited his range a little but he soon found, as countless other men must have done, that being set free simply to chat, flirt and lead one another on opened up a world of possibility from which inhibition would have cut him off entirely in a dinner party or bar. He chatted with men who wanted him to dominate them then, through some accidental reference, would find himself discussing Pablo Casals recordings with them or how best to nurture a tibouchina urvilleana through the winter, sex sidelined by far more nourishing interests.
Nothing about his meeting of Theo was promising: Theo was twenty years younger, he was in the army and he was pretty. Pretty would normally have put Eustace off – he tended to be drawn to men with rough edges, evidence of wear and tear, a bit of heft or receding or departed hair. He had always found prettiness poignant, doomed as it was to pass, and outright beauty utterly daunting. His possibly unfair assumption was that beauty went with a need for reassurance whereas imperfect men would be grateful for the attention and accordingly generous. However, the desert camouflage and boots, the occasional sweat patch or glimpse of an enormous and unambiguous gun about his person seemed to balance out Theo’s puppyish looks. As did his fearless persistence.
‘You forget there are two of us making choices here,’ Theo texted when Eustace had felt obliged to post a suggestion that he would usually have gone for grizzled sergeant major over smooth-skinned captain. ‘But our names are impossible together. We sound like cat breeders.’
‘I was nicknamed Stash at school,’ Eustace admitted. ‘An
d Sluice.’
‘I think I can cope with Eustace.’
Theo spent several days after that pretending he wasn’t really a rufty-tufty soldier at all but the company’s cook, whose pride and joy was his cake decorating and pastry-making. He sent photographs of a succession of birthday cakes for the officers and men, each camper than the last, each bravely greeted by Eustace with another compliment. Finally he confessed that the pictures had been random finds off Google to test and alarm. He was actually a fairly senior officer doing something clandestine. There was sand, though, and date palms, and once a glimpse of spectacular ruins that looked like, but couldn’t have been, Palmyra. He also admitted he had landed his job because of his two degrees in Arabic.
At this point they stepped away from the app and on to Skype, because Eustace pretended not to believe him about the Arabic. Goaded to prove it, Theo chatted away in a surprisingly deep voice, while shaving topless, and driving Eustace wild by refusing to speak a word of English before grinning, reaching out to the shelf above his sink with a soapy finger and hanging up.
It was a short step to texting one another images or bulletins from their wildly contrasting days. Eustace introduced Theo to his whippet, Joyce, to his cello, to Kensington Gardens and to the assembling ladies of the orchestra’s cello section in exchange for meeting a tank full of sweaty squaddies, a scorpion and a full moon reflected in an oasis. Then Theo happened to Skype while Eustace was having supper and, amused, went to fetch his own tray of food and can of Coke. And so they slipped into the comforting habit of weekly supper dates. They made a point not only of regularly eating together but downloading the same books to read or, when army broadband permitted, watching the same television programmes simultaneously, Eustace on the sofa with Joyce, Theo sprawled on his bunk.
The move from text to video allowed Eustace to latch on to, and collect, the little imperfections which only made Theo more endearing: the small chip off one of his incisors, the way his thick eyebrows didn’t quite match, a slight tendency to stutter when he was excited as though his thoughts outran his tongue. And the intimacy of their conversations threw up intriguing parallels between them – less than perfect childhoods, an unfashionable tendency towards monogamy, a belief that dogs were sent to teach us how to love.