The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  When Sally burst into the ward early one evening, pursued by an angrily remonstrating nurse, threw a coat about him and led him to the door, she unwittingly offered the eleventh hour reprieve every child in boarding-school prayed for.

  ‘We’re going home,’ she said.

  ‘Please,’ he told her, tightly holding her hand. ‘Yes.’

  28

  Sally had retrieved Edward – she thought of it as a kind of rescue – without discussing the matter with Thomas, her parents, anyone. What she was doing made her so nervous that, if she allowed someone to dissuade her, she could never again find the necessary resolve. Waltham was furious of course, threatening her that having once discharged her husband, she could not have him readmitted, but she found that his anger only stoked up her determination. Once she had Edward in the car, however, and was driving home, the enormity of what she had done dawned on her. She kept glancing across at him, fretful lest he fling open his door while they were moving or become violent, but he merely sat hugging himself and staring with a kind of greed through the dusk at the passing countryside. She had taken the precaution of chatting with a show of professional curiosity with a nurse during previous visits so she knew exactly what medication he was on. If all else failed, she could always approach Dr Richards to prescribe him some.

  She drove back to The Roundel via her parents’ house, leaving Edward in the car while she darted in to collect Miriam. Miriam stirred sleepily as Sally transferred her from her bed to a carrycot, but she was dead to the world within minutes of their returning to the Wolseley. Edward said nothing but he watched his sleeping child for a few minutes before turning back to face the road. Sally took her straight to bed as soon as they were home, leaving Edward walking in the garden. She turned from switching off the light to find him standing in the doorway. She gasped.

  ‘You made me jump,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Is … is she asleep?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sally smiled and touched his chest, gently pushing him back onto the landing as she half-closed the door. To her surprise, Edward took her hand in both of his and pressed it. Then, hesitantly, he put his arms around her and drew her to him. Their movements felt as awkward as those of inexperienced dancers. He smelled strong, feral. She hugged him back, pressing her nose into the base of his neck and breathing deeply against his skin, which was still cold from the car.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  He sighed heavily into her hair, once, twice, and then he began to cry. But this was not like his crying before. Then it had seemed like the expression of an anguish he could not express with words, now it had lost the edge of desperation. Now his sobs felt like the uncoiling of more straightforward, pent-up emotion. Whereas before she had found his tears alienated her, this time she found they gave access to a direct communication. Within seconds, she was crying too, for him, for her, for Miriam, for Dr Pertwee. Leaning against him, she sobbed with relief, heaving up the griefs and tensions that had been choking her. Clinging together in the darkness, they staggered, leant against the wall and eventually slumped to the chilly floor where they sat, clinging, pawing, stroking one another as they fell slowly silent. Sally felt an insidious quickening of her flesh, a kind of sweet inability to get close enough to him, then recognised the under-rehearsed sensation as desire. She turned her head slightly and planted a stealthy kiss on the skin below his ear. Then she realised his teeth were chattering and came to her senses.

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘You’re still in those pyjamas! You’re freezing. I’ll run you a bath.’

  He began the night in the room adjoining hers, pyjamas buttoned up to his neck, blankets pulled up to his chin. The sudden change of scene and withdrawal from sleeping tablets made him restless, however. Several times in the night she woke to hear him pacing about the landing or saw light in the crack beneath their interconnecting door. In the early hours of the morning he crept into her room and slipped with an apologetic mumble into her bed. They did not make love, although several times she felt his erection press her thigh, merely lay close, loin to buttocks, knee to knee-back, his chest against her shoulders, his arm heavy below her breasts. It was as if separation had begun to alter their shapes and they needed to mould themselves to one another afresh.

  She found he liked to shadow her about the house and garden, mutely offering tentative help with her tasks. It was only with Miriam that he held back, for all Sally’s encouragement, but as she fed her, changed her clothes, brushed her emerging curls, he watched intently. Once, when Miriam tossed a toy aside and laughed her laugh of triumph, he looked as though he were about to smile. On one occasion, he spent longer than usual in the bathroom. Suddenly uneasy, Sally ran along the landing and called out to him. Emerging, he nearly smiled again, but contented himself with a sort of snort as he caught the relief in her expression.

  ‘When I think of what they might have done to him,’ she told Thomas, as they watched at a window while Edward pegged out nappies to dry, ‘it makes me seethe. I mean, I know he was withdrawn, but I’m sure half that speechlessness was drug-induced.’

  She had no fond belief in the healing power of her love, not now, but she trusted to a peaceful atmosphere, and time. Without her forcing him, he began to offer up shy fragments of conversation; simple discussions of food, flowers, weather. She brought Thomas over often, persuading him to stay overnight, in the hope that his presence might stimulate Edward too.

  Her abiding fear was that the electro-convulsive therapy had somehow damaged his musical abilities. When she wrote to the studio insurers to say that he was out of hospital and should soon be available again for work it was with a certain superstitious dread at the hopeful deceit in her statement. Days later, Jerry rang in great excitement to say that Edward’s score for 4.15 To Bucharest had been nominated for an Oscar.

  ‘Don’t worry about the money. We’ll fly the pair of you out there for the ceremony, just in case. What do you say?’

  ‘Oh Jerry, that’s so exciting!’ she enthused, genuinely pleased, but at the same time tense at the prospect of having her hand forced. ‘I’m sure he’ll be thrilled. He’s asleep now or I’d call him to the phone.’

  ‘So you’ll both come to Hollywood?’

  ‘Jerry we can’t. Not really. I just don’t think he’s up to it yet. Soon, I’m sure, but not just yet.’

  Jerry had made understanding noises and said of course someone else could collect the award for Edward if he won, but she heard behind his words the rustle of fading contracts and impatient ticking of financial clocks. Edward still tended to turn radio programmes off when there was too much talking, but he had begun to listen to records, sitting close to the radiogram on a stool and scrutinising sleeve notes intently.

  He won the Oscar. Jerry rang from California in the middle of the night. She woke Edward to tell him the amazing news but he seemed singularly unimpressed. The studio sent newspaper photographers to picture an actor dressed as a postman delivering the statuette. Edward smiled obediently for the cameras, clutching the thing while Sally stood proudly beside him, Miriam in her arms, and he said a few words to the local newspapermen. Sally’s parents were tremendously proud and Thomas had champagne delivered ‘to wet young Oscar’s head’ but after the fuss had died down, Edward climbed the ladder in his study to set the thing on a high shelf along with the bound manuscript of Job. Sally had begun to fret seriously about money, and was convinced the studio would not pay his salary indefinitely, so the award came as a huge relief, since even in absentia Edward could be seen to be earning his keep. When an American studio rang to enquire about his contractual situation she referred them to Jerry Liebermann, secure in the knowledge that the enquiry would raise Edward’s value.

  Then, one day, she was tugging dirty sheets off the bed when she was surprised by the sound of the piano. She walked onto the landing and looked down. Miriam was strapped into her high chair, her hand
s patting vaguely at the toys before her but her gaze concentrated entirely on her father. Edward was sitting at the keyboard. He played a few simple chords, then a cadence or two. Although the piano needed tuning, he seemed to be relishing the simple harmonic progressions, the resolution of one chord in the more open texture of the one that followed. Miriam banged the tray before her and let out a delighted shout. Edward looked up at her and smiled, truly smiled. Then he walked into his study, came back with a lapful of music books, riffled roughly through them, selected something, dumped the rest on the floor with a bang and began to play. It was a sweet, trilling melody with a burbling accompaniment in the left hand. Miriam shouted again and tossed a teddy towards the piano. Spotting Sally leaning on the landing balustrade, Edward looked up as he continued playing.

  ‘Wouldn’t you know it!’ he laughed, ‘she likes Clementi, of all things!’

  After weeks of cracked mumbling, it was a shock to hear him using his full voice. Sally smiled encouragement but said nothing, frightened he might stop, but he played solidly for over an hour. It was as though his musical language and interest in his daughter had burst simultaneously through a soft wall in his mind like a flashing spring of new water. He tried piece after piece, testing Miriam’s reactions, although her gurgles and shouts were probably as much a reaction to her father’s sudden vivacity as to the harmonies he was producing.

  After dealing with the washing, Sally threw open the door to the garden and began to sweep the steps in the wintry sunshine. Behind her, Edward continued to play, Miriam to shout, oblivious of the arrival of the postman. He brought an electricity bill and a late holiday postcard from her parents, who were already back from visiting friends at Hastings. There was also a thin envelope with a Dorset postmark. Frowning at the unfamiliar writing, her heart telling her in advance of its contents, Sally tore the letter out and sat on the steps to read the news of her old friend and second mother’s death.

  29

  Sally swore on discovering she had left her umbrella behind when dropping off Miriam with her father. She switched off the wind-screen wiper and peered out across Westmarket’s broad main street to the imposing entrance of the Grand Hotel. The torrential rain showed no sign of slackening up. She turned up her raincoat collar, tucking the tails of her headscarf well down inside it, braced herself, and opened the car door. Her coat was drenched almost to blackness before she could even cross the road and she arrived in the hotel lobby as inelegant and crossly shuddering as a waterlogged cat. Above the quiet chink-chinking of tea things in the dining room, a violin played sentimental melodies. Sensing the eyes of staff and guests on her, as they padded about the thickly carpeted lobby, Sally shook as much rain as she could from her coat, untied her clammy scarf and ran a comb through her hair. She looked about her.

  Miss Bannerjee was reading the Telegraph on a corner sofa, her legs stretched out before her. She wore shiny, bright-buckled patent leather sandals, merely a few inches in length. The newspaper almost hid her; it was only a tell-tale flash of canary yellow silk, as she smacked the wrinkle from a page, which caught Sally’s eye and stopped her walking straight past.

  ‘Miss Bannerjee?’

  The paper was lowered and Miss Bannerjee’s eyes were at once wide with concern.

  ‘But you’re soaked. I’ll get us more tea. Waiter! Another pot please. And brandy. My guest must have a shot of brandy. With perhaps a splash of Stone’s ginger wine.’

  A brief fight with the waiter ensued, in which he insisted that such things could not be served at such a time. Miss Bannerjee won the day by raising a voice as shrill as her clothing was exotic and invoking the cause of Medicinal Purposes.

  Warmed with brandy, her coat and scarf despatched to the hotel’s bowels for drying, Sally sat back in an armchair to face the executor of Dr Pertwee’s estate.

  ‘Your letter mentioned the will,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so worried about it, I didn’t like to tell my husband. Is there some problem about The Roundel?’

  ‘Absolutely none. The legal papers confirming Alice’s adoption of you and the deeds to the house are still in the safekeeping of her bankers in Rexbridge. They merely await your collection. As she had expected, her relatives in Surrey kicked up something of a stink. They came to Corry for the funeral and when they saw that you weren’t there and then heard the terms of the will, which stipulates that your daughter is to inherit the house after you, they had you down as something of a gold-digger –’

  ‘But I couldn’t possibly have got there!’ Sally protested. ‘I explained at the time; my husband –’

  Miss Bannerjee raised both her small palms to calm her, clattering silver bracelets on her wrists.

  ‘Of course you couldn’t. And I made it quite clear to them. Anyway, as Alice had predicted, they seemed perfectly pacified with her legacy of jewellery – far more valuable than the house and much less bothersome to maintain. However there was one thing she wanted held back for you.’

  ‘But she’d given me so much already,’ Sally sighed. She had no use for valuable jewellery and dreaded anything which might further antagonise the mysterious Surrey cousins.

  Muttering to herself, Miss Bannerjee heaved a big, old-fashioned leather brief-case on to the sofa beside her and thrust an arm through its brass-studded maw. She groped for a moment then raised her eyebrows and brought out something wrapped in royal blue spotted silk.

  ‘There,’ she said, placing it with a clunk on the table between them. She poured them more tea. ‘From Alice. A final legacy.’

  Sally lifted the bundle to her side of the table. It was surprisingly heavy. She unknotted the silk and folded it back to reveal a layer of yellowed newspaper. Peeling that aside she found a carved stone figure. It was female, with sharply conical breasts and an exaggerated lap, broad enough to bear up twins, or even a grown man. The hair was wound up underneath a crude crown, the eyes were inscrutable slits and the full mouth was pulled back in what could have been a smile, could have been a growl. The stone was icy to the touch. Sally shivered involuntarily.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘She’s no beauty, certainly,’ said Miss Bannerjee, ‘but there’s a vigour to her. I’m afraid I couldn’t resist taking a closer look on the train here.’

  ‘I’ve never seen her before.’

  ‘Alice had been keeping her in storage. She brought her out – perhaps with a view to ensuring she reached you – and had her on her bedside table throughout her last illness. She’s an Anglian princess. Or a goddess, perhaps. She was dug up in the peat during excavations to build The Roundel apparently. So she really belongs in the house. Look at the strength of those arms! Blessings in one hand and cruel destruction in the other, I should say. Alice’s family had always kept her quiet in case the place was invaded by bossy archaeologists. The Surrey cousins made no mention of her during their scavenging, so I can only assume that even they don’t know of her existence.’

  Sally set the figure back on the table to look at her for a moment then felt compelled to pick her up again, feel her small density, chill and weighty in her hands. Repelled as she was, she could not help admiring the passive force with which the carving asserted its ancient identity over the scene of genteel cake-slaughter.

  ‘I’ve no doubt that she’s worth a great deal to a museum or a specialist buyer,’ Miss Bannerjee added firmly, ‘but Alice was adamant that she shouldn’t be sold.’

  ‘But of course,’ Sally agreed. ‘I wonder what she’s called.’

  ‘Oh, deities are far more potent when they’re nameless. Think of the tremendous difference in his worldly standing when Jehovah became simply God! That was cheating, really; using a generic mopped up the too-specific opposition.’

  ‘Whatever shall I do with her?’

  ‘Shut her in a broom cupboard? Honour her with flowers? It really doesn’t matter. She’s only a lump of stone.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sally laughed. ‘Of course she is.’

  But even though she knew Miss Ba
nnerjee’s words to be entirely rational, she couldn’t help registering a shaft of discomfort at their flippancy. She noticed too the insistence with which they each acknowledged the statue’s gender; she was firmly a She, not an It.

  Sally began the drive home with the statue, furled in its wrappings again, on the passenger seat beside her. Then she found herself unnerved by the way it rocked whenever she turned a corner, so she stuffed it into a pocket of her coat. Hidden in layers of cloth, it rested between her thighs.

  The rain, which had barely stopped for three days, remained insistent. Whenever a car or van turned into her path, she would drop well back to avoid the great wash of spray sent up over her windscreen. The Wolseley was a venerable machine whose wiper could barely clear the water before the screen was awash once more. Twice the rain became so torrential that she was forced to pull over, unable to see the road ahead. She passed through Rexbridge, fighting down the temptation to take shelter in Thomas’s comfortable house, and set out, instead, towards her parents’ cottage at Wenborough. She was barely into the fringes of the fens when she found the road ahead blocked by the surreal sight of a policeman in waders, vainly trying to shelter under a black umbrella. He flagged her down and she cranked down her window.

  ‘Sorry, Miss,’ he shouted through the downpour. ‘You’ll have to find another route. The road up ahead’s blocked.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘Flood. It’s the high spring tides. Sedwich Dyke’s burst its bank.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Where are you trying to get to, Miss? You don’t want to go too far in this. That car doesn’t look like it could handle much.’

  ‘Not far,’ she lied, winding up her window. ‘I’ll find another route, maybe via Methwold. Thank you, Officer.’