The Aerodynamics of Pork

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Why?’ repeated Seth.

  ‘I’ve just been attacking Peter in the nicest possible way about sycophancy to professionals and neglect of the younger generation. I won. I’m inviting myself to dinner tonight. You can play me the Brahms, and if it’s more than just OK, you’re going to play it half-way through my recital tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh but J …’ he began to protest.

  ‘Look. If you can’t accept a favour gracefully, I’ll get Sophie Pollock to come and recite some Rupert Brooke.’ He laughed. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘thought you’d see the light. Are those really strawberries?’ So saying, she joined the queue, some way from the back.

  Seth’s mind was a blank except for Brahms. He turned with a broad grin to Mother as they walked towards the garden.

  ‘Well, that’s put the colour back into your cheeks,’ she said. ‘No, I promise, cross my heart, that I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘How dreadful. I didn’t even say thank you. I was too excited.’

  ‘She hasn’t heard it yet, you know. She may decide it’s just OK.’

  ‘Beast!’ he retorted. ‘Seriously do you think it’s up to scratch?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I’m only a teacher, and not even yours at that. I think it’s marvellous, but then you’re my son.’

  An hour later, he was sitting, tuning up, when Bronwen entered the nave, head and shoulders above her companions. She walked slowly so as to be left behind and, catching Seth’s attention, jerked her head impassively to show that they had to talk. He glanced across and saw that Mother was discussing some matter with a cellist to her rear, then rose and went to his violin case on the pretext of rubbing some more rosin on his bow. Bronwen stood briefly beside and murmured:

  ‘He’s coming to see you tonight. He’s coming late, so for God’s sake put a light in your window and don’t fall asleep.’ He could ask nothing since she carried on towards the rostra. The rehearsal passed quickly. Peter was concentrating his criticism on the chorus, unaware that his leader was far away, being discovered tastefully arranged in a gloomy chamber of a lighthouse. On the way home, Seth sat readily in the back of the Volvo to be allowed to dream a little longer, while Jemima asked for Evelyn’s advice on various matters without waiting to hear it. When they arrived at La Corveaurie, Evelyn went to get hot and bothered in the kitchen, while Seth and J said a brief hello to his sister – who had barely arranged herself in time – and withdrew to the music room. J sat at the old Steinway, playing what she could of the accompaniment, but stopping from time to time to concentrate on Seth. She was pleased, even excited. The Bach solos had given her some idea, but she had entertained little inkling of just how much progress he had made. Over the moussaka and cheerful red plonk, she said as much.

  ‘Now, now,’ Mother restrained her. ‘Don’t go swelling his head. He still has a great deal to learn, don’t you, Peake?’

  ‘Yes, Mamma.’

  ‘How soon do you start at the College?’ his godmother asked him.

  ‘September.’

  ‘Do you know, I first fell in love at that place? He was a deep and utter dish. He was at RCM with me and his sis was at RADA and they shared a wee flat off Baker Street, up in the attics. So romantic. He was a trumpeter and he played in secret with a jazz band. Frightfully sexy!’

  ‘Why in secret?’

  ‘He’d have lost all his credibility if people had known. He led a sort of double life; vaguely scholastic director of a mediaeval ensemble by day, hot syncopator and macho man by night.’

  ‘How could you bear to keep him a secret?’ asked Seth. ‘Didn’t you want to tell all your friends?’

  ‘Not on your nelly!’ Jemima looked quite shocked. ‘I was leading a double life too. In those days nice gels didn’t do it. At least, they didn’t talk about it. I think we were supposed to sit primly on the shelf, thinking of other, purer things until some beastly man came along and took us horribly by surprise – all within the sanctions of holy wedlock, of course.’

  ‘What about you, then, Ma?’

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be in charge of his spiritual welfare,’ Evelyn growled.

  ‘Only in the event of your being gathered, thank the Lord. Seth, don’t go asking your mother questions like that. I’ve always nursed a ranking suspicion that she was one of the really good gels.’

  ‘More salad, J?’

  ‘I was reading the other day,’ said Seth, ‘that Deirdre Comstock’s novels sell even better in the Latin countries than they do over here and in the States.’

  ‘That abominable creature with the white coiffure and all the rocks and poodles?’

  ‘Yes. Apparently, her ideals of the sexes – chaste, withdrawing women, and slightly, but not too rakish men – appeal to their sense of how things should be.’

  ‘Stupid Roman Candles!’ Jemima ladled scorn, ‘I think that woman’s disgusting. And she makes a fortune out of it, to boot. Catholic, of course.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said her schoolfriend, ‘that some of them really believe in the justice of those absurd ages of consent. I mean, imagine not being allowed to get married before you’re twenty-one!’

  ‘Is that still the rule in Italy?’ queried Jemima, ‘I thought it was only in China now.’

  ‘No, I think so,’ Evelyn said, ‘so by the time the man gets the poor thing, he’s only got two images of woman in his mind – the saint who has been waiting for him all this time, and the tart he’s been visiting in the interim.’

  ‘Oh, Bath Olivers – delicious!’ said Jemima, tucking in.

  ‘When do you think girls ought to be allowed to have sex then?’ asked Seth. Evelyn frowned at her plate for a moment.

  ‘I think,’ she lied, ‘ideally, they should be allowed to as soon as they want to – providing they have passed some kind of contraceptive knowledge test.’

  ‘What about the parents?’

  ‘They aren’t having the sex.’

  ‘Yes,’ said J, ‘but they might beat the poor little things up when they got home. Lovely Brie, darling!’

  ‘Well, if the little girl knows that they won’t like it, I suppose she should be careful that they don’t know. I mean, there’s no point in being pious about it. What they don’t know can’t harm them. As long as she knows how to avoid getting preggers.’

  ‘Well what about the poor little fags?’ Jemima asked suddenly, in no particular direction, and making her godson’s heart lurch in its progress.

  ‘The what?’ asked Evelyn.

  ‘Fag, darling, faggot. It’s New York slang for a gay man.’

  ‘Oh, I wish they wouldn’t use that word!’ Mother went on. ‘It used to be one of my favourites.’

  ‘But you can’t say homosexual,’ wailed Jemima, ‘it sounds too like something people bring home from one of those warehouses in the back of the car, and put together themselves. “The Home-O-Sexule – a new concept in living.’”

  Seth snorted. Evelyn continued.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I thought we’d made it all terribly easy for them. Hasn’t the law made it legal now?’

  ‘Yes, but my dear, only the laws have changed, not the attitudes, and only after they’re twenty-one! Personally I think it’s inhuman.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ dared Seth, ‘they thought that leaving sex until they were that age might put as many as possible off the idea, like enforcing celibacy on to young Italians to interest them in the Church.’

  ‘As far as I can see,’ said his godmother, ‘it can only screw the little darlings up. I mean, not only do they go so mad with frustration that they spend hours in gyms and discothèques working off their excess energy, but they have to spend the crucial years of their emotional development feeling that they’re a pack of crinimals. I mean criminals. Strong plonk this, Eve. Sainsbury’s?’

  ‘No. M & S, actually.’

  ‘Seth, just think,’ said J, ‘the day after tomorrow you’ll be free to marry Sophie Pollock!’

  ‘Not without my permission, which
I refuse, in advance, to grant him.’

  ‘Oh Mamma, mayn’t I? Please?’ joked Seth. Then he thought of Bronwen and felt a little sad. Evelyn stood.

  ‘Yes,’ she mused aloud, ‘it is cruel, very cruel, but the law’s the law I suppose. Who’s for coff?’

  The topic was dropped.

  When Mother looked into his room before going to bed, Seth was sitting at the table by the window writing letters. She pulled the curtains for him and kissed him on the head.

  ‘Don’t stay up late. Tomorrow’s an important day, young man,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t. I must just write to some friends from school.’ She turned to go. ‘Ma?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Who’s a lovely girl!’

  ‘Who’s a wunderkind!’

  ‘G’night.’

  ‘Sleep tight.’ And she was gone.

  He waited for the shutting of her door then drew back the curtains again and, having scrumpled up the bogus letter, pushed the light right up against the glass. Then he waited. And waited. The room started to feel cold because he had been sitting still for so long. He gazed at his reflection in the window-pane, made clearer by the brightness of the light, trying to pout his lips and suck in at the same time to form a miraculous cheekbone where puppy fat still lay. He tapped out the Brahms with his left fingers in the pool of light on the table top. He tried blowing bubbles with his spit. He hoped he smelt nice. He cut his nails. He cleaned out his ears with a cotton wool bud. He sat and twined the hair of his fringe while he started to reread Rebecca. And then he fell asleep.

  His first thought when he woke was that someone had knocked at the door. In a moment of terror at the idea of Roly standing, horribly visible, on the landing, he ran over to open it. No-one. Another pebble struck the window. He opened it and peered down. His slightly, but not too rakish man was standing in the road. Behind him the silver charger, circa nineteen-thirty, stood waiting in the moonlight.

  The night was mild and clear, and the roof of the MG was folded back. Roly sped away as soon as Seth sat down.

  ‘I thought you’d never come.’

  ‘I nearly didn’t; I’d fallen asleep.’

  ‘So I gathered. Where shall we drive, Sir?’

  ‘Show me your lighthouse.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that, nowhere else is open.’

  Seth laughed. All he could think was how much he loved Bronwen and how heartily Jemima would approve.

  ‘Do you want some music?’

  ‘Yes, please … or is it anti-social?’

  ‘We’ve passed the last house now – only cows and sheep, and they won’t mind.’

  ‘What’s the choice?’

  ‘Let’s see. Well there’s You, the Night and the Music on the radio, or a cassette of some Wagner.’

  ‘Not Tristan?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  Roly clicked the cassette into place in the new-looking machine, and there was Brangaene singing from her turret top as the lovers abandoned themselves to untrammelled ardour in the bower beneath. Seth groaned with pleasure and lay back on his seat, the wind in his hair. By the violet light of the dashboard, he could see a wide smile on the driver’s face.

  ‘Don’t tell me it’s your favourite bit?’ Roly asked over the roars of music and engine.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Not very subtle, but you’ve room for growth.’

  ‘Arrogant monster! Where’ve you been for the past few days?’

  ‘Where’ve you been all my life?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Seth nonchalantly, ‘sleeping, ageing, things like that.’

  ‘Wretch!’

  ‘All right, all right, I admit I’ve been waiting for a moment like this all my life.’

  ‘Have you really?’

  ‘Well, I can’t help it if you’re one of my clichés, can I?’

  ‘For the past two days I’ve been doing my damnedest not to clap eyes on you. I’ve even been working at night to avoid rehearsals.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You know very well why, Jail-bait. Don’t fish for compliments, it’s Harrovian.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Then Bronwen came stalking around to the lighthouse last night, tiddled as a coot – said she’d brought the flask along with her in case it turned nippy on the cliff-tops. Before she settled down for a coma on my sofa, she gave me a long lecture on Carpe Diem.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Living life for the here and now in case it suddenly comes to an end. She said that Modern Youth had too much respect for authority and that the essence of genius, whether artistic, philosophical or mechanical, was a total lack of faith in anything beyond the bounds of one’s own impulses. Then she passed out. Oh yes. And we talked about you a bit. That’s why I’m here.’

  Brangaene shrieked and Mark’s hunting party arrived.

  ‘Oh, I hate this bit,’ said Seth sharply, ‘it all goes wrong and I hate it. Can I turn it off?’ He pressed a button and the tape clicked out again. The radio came on in its stead with some black woman crooning Stormy Weather.

  ‘That’s much better,’ he said, and lay back once more. They turned off into a field and bumped along a track.

  ‘Look,’ said Roly.

  Seth looked and saw the lighthouse. The moonshine was bright after the narrow lane. Seth saw how the track ran down to some railings at the cliff-edge. Beyond that, out on the rocks, stood his lover’s tower. Roly parked the car. As he got out, Seth saw that the field stood on the tip of a peninsula. Penfasser’s street lights shone far off to the left. Darkened Saint Jacobs was tucked away somewhere in between.

  ‘Why haven’t I seen this before?’ he asked.

  ‘Mainly because it was so badly placed, but also the footpath stops a long way back. Bronwen was both foolish and trespassing. The last mile and a bit is all Trenellion land and there are rock-falls every year. Not safe for walking at night.’

  ‘I know the path by the church, but only in the other direction, towards Pendarth Point. No, you go first so I can see where to walk.’ Seth followed Roly down the steps that led across the rocks to the lighthouse. ‘Why isn’t it working?’

  ‘No need anymore. There’s no heavy shipping around here now, only the local fishermen, and they know their way. Anything further out to sea uses the buoys and bells. In bad weather the light-boat goes out, in any case. I think this was a companion folly to the mine.’

  ‘Rather like shoving a lamp-post in your front garden.’ But Roly was too busy unlocking the door.

  ‘Mustn’t stay long,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to get back to catch some sleep before your big day.’

  ‘News travels fast,’ said Seth as his hopes foundered.

  ‘Yes. Peter Grenfell came to dinner at Trenellion tonight – that’s where I’ve just come from. He mentioned that there was to be “a slight change” in the first night programme.’

  ‘Will you come?’

  ‘Will you be good?’

  ‘You can tell me afterwards.’

  There was a space at the bottom of the tower’s staircase filled by a mass of fruit boxes, coats, oilskins and seaside paraphernalia. There was a strong smell of paraffin.

  ‘This is the hall,’ said Roly, as they started up the stairs. ‘It gets washed out by the sea about fifteen times each winter. I’ve got to whitewash it for them before I go.’

  ‘I’d love to stay here in mid-January.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘No. I love thunder and rain, as long as I’m safely indoors. Does anyone stay here then?’

  ‘No. Jane and Lachlan usually leave it empty. They move all the rubbish from the hall upstairs, out of the wet, and lock and nail up the door. It gets quite a beating from the surf – even though it’s on the inland side of the tower.’

  ‘Oh, but it’d be marvellous! You could lie in bed and pretend to be out on the Atlantic, only without the danger of throwing up.’

  ‘Mad. Quite mad.’

&
nbsp; They turned another bend in the stairs and came upon a surprisingly large room. For all the snugness of sofa, bed, cooker and a few books and maps, there was still a pleasing sense of incongruity.

  ‘Sorry about the mess. Even bachelors gay can get a bit squalid.’ Roly tugged a handful of bedclothes into place.

  ‘No, no,’ Seth muttered aimlessly. ‘God, what a view!’

  ‘Good, isn’t it? Lachlan knocked that window out. There used to be a dreadful porthole affair which was too claustrophobic. Of course, they have to put a shutter over it in winter. The surf reaches right up.’

  ‘Could it smash glass this thick?’ Seth admired the moonlight on the waves.

  ‘Not on its own, maybe, but there are pieces of driftwood and pebbles it can hurl up. Also I suppose the salt would rot the frame eventually.’

  ‘I want to come down here one winter. Bronwen says that she has to board up all her windows too. Apparently even slates get pulled down. She says it’s like the Blitz.’

  Seth could hear himself prattling. He wished he could find the conviction to fall silent. While Roly carried a few things over to the sink and tidied up in a vague fashion, he sat on the sofa. There were clothes discarded all over it. An old, thick cardigan was draped by his shoulder. He sat back and took a luxurious sniff while his host’s back was turned.

  ‘Sorry, it’s bloody cold in here. It’s being on the sea and having only the one window – it never really warms up. I’ll put the stove on.’ He turned and made towards the paraffin heater by the sofa.

  ‘No, honestly, I’m fine,’ Seth fibbed.

  Roly reached out and touched his hands as they lay in his lap. The movement was brisk, like a doctor’s, so that Seth had no time to react.

  ‘Liar,’ he said. ‘You’re freezing.’ He crouched, opening the little door, and lit the wick.

  ‘That’s what the smell was when we came in,’ Seth said. ‘I love it. We used to have one of those in the bathroom at home in winter.’

  ‘Getting up for school when it was still dark?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Seth smiled at the shared recollection.

  ‘Bung some music on. It’s behind you. Do you want some brandy? All I’ve got, I’m afraid.’