The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  She stopped at the next hamlet: There was a telephone kiosk marooned in a great brown puddle. Her feet were soaked as she dashed across. She fumbled with her change purse as she dialled with numb fingers. She rang The Roundel first, to reassure Edward that she was coming. This was the first time she had left him alone for more than an hour since his return. There was a pair of milk churns on a slate shelf beside the kiosk. She could barely hear the ringing tone above the din of the water drumming on their lids. She let it ring and ring. He didn’t answer. Praying he had not been foolish enough to venture out on her motorbike in the wet, she hung up and dialled her parents to explain that she would be later than arranged in picking up Miriam. She could not get through. The operator calmly assured her that a line was down and that normal service would be resumed as soon as possible.

  30

  The chord circled in the air, a pure, naked triad made to vibrate with a new keenness by the addition of a single dissonance. Holding it in place with the sostenuto pedal, Edward scratched on the manuscript with his pen, the tip of his tongue brushing his upper lip in his concentration. Then, holding the pen in his teeth, he played swiftly through the last four lines he had written and saw at once how they could be improved. Just as he began to write again, the telephone rang. He frowned, hesitated a moment, but managed to ignore its insistent interruption. The terrific wind blew a bedroom window open and set it flapping on its hinges. He knew the rain would be coming in now and staining the floor, but he managed to ignore that too. The seemingly impossible was happening: he was working again.

  It had happened, like so many of the recent alterations in his behaviour, in slow, blurred degrees, perceptible only with hind-sight. At first he had merely played the piano. In his schooldays, his piano teacher never trusted him to practise enough during the holidays and forbade him to play anything in the first days of a new term but meticulous Bach and page upon page of studies. Remembering this, Edward had spent the days following his rediscovery of the piano working on his technique with the guarded determination of an athlete recovering from painful injury. Deep in a box of music he found his dog-eared copy of Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist and began to play daily once through its merciless system of finger-stretching exercises, scales and arpeggios. He permitted himself no flaws, punishing each mistake by returning to the beginning of the study in hand. His teacher would have been proud of him.

  ‘You don’t mind?’ Edward asked Sally. ‘It isn’t driving you crazy?’

  She shook her head, but was unable, as she encouraged him, to prevent a fleeting smile at his ironic choice of words.

  For he had been crazy. He saw that now. Thomas and Sally called it ‘severe depression’. Thomas found him books and poems by fellow sufferers, as though by recognising his symptoms in literature, Edward might place them in some demystifying, historical perspective. As though a man with skin erupted in deadly buboes might be comforted to read Journal of the Plague Year. They called it depression and Edward was content to let them. They could not know of the waking dreams he had suffered, the unspeakable fears that had pursued him. His recovery was still in progress and he shied away from society, uncertain still of how he might behave. He was, however, far enough recovered to be aware of the depths of irrationality he had plumbed. Waking to look around his bedroom without its contents seeming to condemn and threaten him, he felt he could begin to regard what had happened as something slipping away from him into the past, a separate thing, his breakdown. Waking in the darkness, however, from one of the nightmares that still seeped from within him, sour juices from an unhealing sore, he was afraid lest such blessed mornings represented only a brief, fool’s dawn in a night without end.

  As well as the Hanon studies, he taught himself the Goldberg Variations again. He had not played them since his teens and was daunted to realise how strong his technique must have been then and how flabby it had become in the interim. He dissected and reassembled them, one variation at a time, marvelling at the games Bach played, crossing hands, inverting melodies, interweaving three or four lines at a time, spinning sonic illusions in the listener’s mind from the web on the page. He was forcing himself to play through one of the movements towards the end of the set, with a metronome clicking in his ear, when the telephone rang. For weeks, Sally had been answering it, protecting him from the outside world with words like ‘resting’ and ‘studying’, but she was pushing Miriam’s pram around the garden and Edward was at once so relaxed and preoccupied that he answered without thinking. It was Jerry Liebermann.

  ‘Teddy! Good to hear your voice!’

  Edward hesitated a moment. Fat, rich, cigar-thickened, the sound conjured up in an instant an environment he had fled and barely contemplated since. He pictured Jerry at his sham-Louis Quinze desk in his sham-Rococo office, where the latest from his stable of starlets was languidly checking her seams in a mirror. Jerry’s voice cut in on his imaginings.

  ‘So the Oscar-winner’s back in the land of the living.’

  ‘Er, yes. I think so.’

  ‘You think so? Same wicked sense of humour.’ Jerry chuckled richly. ‘We’ve missed you, you know. Listen, Teds, are you ready to work? I’ll tell you why. I’ve got a project. Something new. Very daring. Very … modern. But the music’s going to be an integral part. You heard of Schnitzler?’

  ‘I’ve heard of Schnitzler.’

  ‘Well that’s one better than me. Anyway, it’s an adaptation from Schnitzler, but modern dress. Very sexy. And like I say, the music is going to be very up front. We’re even calling it Theme and Variations.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Nice, isn’t it? Classy. But we need the kind of score people talk about afterwards, something they can play on the radio, and only you will do. What do you say? We miss you, Teds. Don’t disappoint us.’

  So Edward found himself working again. But this time Sally intervened and insisted he work from home until it was absolutely necessary to visit the studio.

  ‘And even then,’ she told Jerry, ‘if he’s not up to it, he’s coming straight home.’

  They celebrated with the bottle of champagne Thomas had sent in honour of the Oscar. This led to them making love again for the first time since Miriam’s birth. And since Edward’s encounter with Myra … He was so nervous he came almost immediately.

  ‘Honestly,’ she assured him. ‘It doesn’t matter. Really.’

  But he could sense her frustration and when they woke the next morning to find that, by some miracle, Miriam was content to gurgle to herself in her cot, he managed to hold back for a little longer.

  ‘It’s like learning all over again,’ he explained, frantic now at the thought of what he had imperilled and so nearly lost. ‘I love you so much. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Hold me.’

  ‘Ssh. I’m here.’

  The renewed lovemaking, faintly alarming at first for one whose life had been temporarily rearranged so as to be as unexciting as possible, began to irradiate Edward’s uneventful days with a kind of glow. His experiences with Myra, buried behind the wall of his breakdown and its treatments, now seemed aberrations, almost a part of his illness. He looked at Sally, at The Roundel, at music with a new fascination. The lovemaking altered entirely his reaction to his child, too. Watchful respect tinged with fear lest he do something wrong was swept away by little surges of physical delight in her presence. Emboldened by Sally, he carried her around with him until impatience made her fractious. He showed her how to bang the piano keys, and sat by her high chair encouraging her – to Sally’s irritation – to clink her spoon against her bowl or clap her little food-smeared hands together in wild, spontaneous rhythms. He made Sally show him how to wash her and change her nappies, astonished at the huge turds such a tiny animal could produce. He even tried to annotate musically the noises she made, weaving them into his score for Theme and Variations as a personal memento. Whenever Sally had to go out, even briefly, she still took Miriam wi
th her rather than leave her alone with him. This was never discussed. He remembered enough to understand her motives perfectly, however, and connived in the pretence that it was because he needed peace and quiet to work.

  Sally moved back into his bed permanently, establishing Miriam’s nursery in the room next door. He woke from a nightmare one night to find her arms about him.

  ‘You were screaming,’ she said. ‘I was frightened.’

  ‘There’s something I should tell you,’ he heard himself begin. ‘Something I’ve done.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Her kind, expectant face in the lamplight was so utterly reassuring that he only just pulled back in time from a spontaneous confession. He could not tell her about Myra. It meant nothing and would only hurt her needlessly. He had to tell her something, though. She was waiting. He wanted instead to explain about his sister but, just as he had found himself explaining away a nightmare as being about ‘trains’, so he now found himself owning up instead to a long forgotten crime he had committed at school. There had been a boy, a third son, Wykeham Minimus, a weakling whom everybody teased as a matter of course, a matter of honour even. As a fellow victim, Edward had won a small measure of valuable esteem in his oppressors’ eyes by a piece of inspired cruelty.

  ‘It was quite straightforward really,’ he told Sally, turning his face from the lamp’s accusatory glare as he lay in her arms. ‘He was known to be homesick and I had noticed that his voice was peculiarly bovine, especially when he was upset. So, one night when he was up late on bog duty –’

  ‘Bog duty!?’

  ‘Er. Yes. It was his night to clean all the lavatories. All the junior boys were meant to do it. There was a roster. But some were forced to do it more than others.’

  Sally snorted with disgust. Edward went on.

  ‘Anyway, while he was up late cleaning the lavatories, I took the photograph of his mother from the little frame beside his bed, tore it up and replaced it with a big picture of a cow from a condensed milk label. When he came to bed I made a mooing noise until he noticed the photograph frame. After that everyone did it to him all the time. Whenever he spoke, even in classes, they mooed.’

  ‘How horrible.’

  ‘Yes. He became extremely withdrawn. There were worse things. Done to other boys by other people. Arms were broken. Once someone was even killed, with a rifle – which was passed off as an accident, of course. But this was my thing. I don’t know why I should suddenly have remembered it.’

  ‘Do you want me to absolve you?’

  Edward examined his conscience for a moment, thinking about Wykeham Minimus, then about his sister, puffed up, senseless. Then he thought of Myra, reapplying her lipstick by the light of a burning match.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was only young after all. I just wanted you to know.’

  ‘Little boys are horrible.’

  ‘Yes. Usually.’

  He had finally managed to tell her about his sister that morning, before she left to meet Miss Bannerjee, forcing her to sit down and listen when she was hurrying about getting Miriam ready to go to her parents. He sat her on the sofa beside him and held her hands. He told her about the hospital, about how fat and simple-minded Miriam had become. He told her about her tattoo, the scar on her skull and what it signified. Tears sprang into her eyes and she held him to her, gently rocking him as she did their baby.

  ‘I killed her,’ he said.

  ‘It was a heart attack,’ she insisted. ‘The doctor said so.’

  ‘No. No,’ he said, shaking his head but she silenced him, staring urgently, closely, into his face as if reassuring an irrationally frightened child.

  ‘Edward you mustn’t blame yourself. You mustn’t! You’re just feeling guilty because it was her and not you.’

  ‘No. You don’t –’

  ‘Edward listen to me: it was beyond your control. You were not to blame. They sent you to safety, you didn’t choose to go. You were only a boy, for Christ’s sake. Just be glad she was set free. She must have suffered so dreadfully. Think what memories she must have been carrying inside her! The dreams! No-one should be kept alive in such a state. It was inhuman.’

  ‘But I killed her!’ he insisted.

  ‘No, Edward. No.’ She refused to believe him with such calmness that he was almost persuaded. ‘But if you had, it would have been an act of kindness.’

  ‘So,’ he asked, thinking now of how Myra had led him so firmly into the dark by the hand. ‘Do you absolve me?’

  ‘Ssh. Don’t be silly.’ She held him again, avoiding his staring eyes and softly chuckling at her response to his previous confession. ‘You didn’t do anything. It was a heart attack. You might have wanted to put her out of her misery but, effectively, she killed herself.’ She pulled back, looked at him and kissed him softly on the lips. ‘I really must go,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve got to get there before Miss Bannerjee has to catch her train back to Dorset. I won’t be too long. You’re sure you’ll be all right?’

  ‘Sure.’ He gave her a wry smile. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  He was straining his eyes to read what he was writing in the gloom. He reached up to turn on the standard lamp. Nothing happened. He checked it was plugged in. It was. Irritated at the interruption, he tried the overhead light with no more success. He turned towards the kitchen stairs to check the fusebox but froze at the top of them, gasping. In the hours he had spent at the piano, listening to the heavy rain on the windows, the basement had filled with water. The murky brown tide reached almost to the kitchen ceiling. A bizarre assortment of displaced articles floated around the third step down and was mounting to the second even as he watched; corks, a cabbage leaf, the bread board. Amazed that he had heard nothing, Edward dashed across the hall and tugged open the front door, letting in a gust of rain and wind that almost blasted the door from his grasp.

  The front steps, like the basement ones, were almost all submerged. The shrubberies on either side of the drive were nowhere to be seen. An already sparse landscape had vanished beneath the brown flood waters and their swirling cargo. In a dusk advanced by storm clouds, he could make out the barn roof and treetops and thought he could see people moving against the lowering sky on the tower of St Oswald’s. A barge lit with hurricane lamps moved slowly across what had yesterday been a ploughed field.

  ‘Hi!’ he called out, waving his arms, ‘Over here. Help!’ But the wind snatched the words from his lips and he realised he was probably invisible in the gathering darkness. He watched in terrified fascination as a small wave unfurled from the skin of the flood and rushed towards the house, gaining bulk as it came. Edward cried out as it broke over the steps around him. He lost his balance, falling heavily backwards onto the drenched floor. Another wave was gathering as he scrambled back to his feet and ran to slam and bolt the door.

  Spurred into sudden action, he raced around, seizing objects and furniture at random and carrying them up to the landing and bedrooms. Music, books, pictures, candlesticks, a mirror, an armchair, the standard lamp; the little they had amassed. Water began to lap over the top of the kitchen steps and under the front door, sending weird ripples through the rugs before he snatched them, dripping, out of harm’s way. Gasping with the effort, he propped the piano up on books already ruined by water, one leg, and one book at a time, until it was nearly a foot clear of the great puddle that now covered the floor. Then, sweating from his labours despite the bitter cold and his soaked shoes, he retreated upstairs.

  Huddled by a bedroom window, he found himself retracing the route between The Roundel and his parents-in-law, anxious for some memory of a gradient that would lift their house and his child clear of the flood. Wenborough was close to a canal. They would surely have taken early refuge on a passing boat. They would be fine. And Sally? Aware that he was beginning to whimper, he checked himself, roughly clearing his throat.

  31

  Sally had stopped twice more to try telephoning but now the line to The Roundel was also down. She had
no option but to keep driving. For all she knew, the road behind was blocked by now and more policemen in waders would have been posted. It was getting dark and even with the headlamps on full she had to screw up her eyes and peer over the steering wheel like an old woman to see where she was going.

  A part of her was excited by what was happening. As a local schoolgirl, she had been told time and again how the countryside of her birth had been won from the sea. Like many children before and since, she had marvelled at the thought of fish and whales swimming where she climbed trees, of seaweed uncoiling where wheat now waved. She had walked on the top of Sedwich Dyke with friends, peering down into the eerie depth of water it held back and tossing in stones to hear the hungry plopping sound as they were swallowed up in peaty blackness. She had imagined the excitement of climbing onto roofs to escape flood water, the fun of rowing past secretive neighbours’ bedroom windows and peering in. And as an adult there were many times when she had scared herself witless on the way home from the chest hospital by imagining a great wall of water in inexorable pursuit of her motorbike.

  At first it did not seem to be a real flood. She imagined Sedwich Dyke had burst and covered a road, but that the water had swiftly dispersed into the surrounding fields and waterways with no harm done. Then she twice drove the car through puddles which turned out to be deep as fords, and offered prayers as she felt the engine splutter. When she saw a terrified horse frantically pounding its bloodied way through a fence to vault out of a flooded field where ducks now swam, when she saw a family bicycling in the opposite direction, backs laden, faces white, a chill of comprehension made her shudder so badly it caused the car to swerve.

  Many of the fenland roads were built from filled-in, redundant canals and so ran along high banks, along unnaturally straight routes. This was one such. When it joined another to make a T-junction, she had to scrabble for her torch and consult the map, briefly disoriented. She faced a decision. One fork led back to her parents’ village and Miriam, the other, on to Edward and The Roundel. She flicked off the torch, tossed it aside and began to drive towards Wenborough then bumped to a halt, flung the car into noisy reverse and backed swiftly to the junction so as to turn and drive on to Edward. It was simply and unsentimentally decided. Miriam was with her parents. Edward was alone.