The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Has he been doing time?’ Sandy asked when Alison described the quiet charm of living with him.

  ‘Of course not,’ Alison told her. ‘I’m not a total fool.’

  But it was only as she denied it that she saw that he probably had been in prison. It would explain his reluctance to have her involve him with the police – especially if he were still on parole – and his inability to find a better job. It would explain his tough self-sufficiency, and the armour of discretion he wore over his emotions, much as going to boarding school had done to Jamie. She felt foolish at having taken for unworldliness the symptoms of institutional abuse. In her weaker moments, she also felt shame at the prurience with which she now imagined the extent of his criminality. She felt fear, too. He had already showed himself to be violent, albeit in a good cause, and she wondered how long it would be before she witnessed that violence again. She determined not to tell him her assumptions about his recent past. If there was any purpose in their paths crossing, it was that she could discreetly help him to make a fresh start. She pictured Miriam and Francis’s horror if she had hinted at any of these suspicions.

  She reached the bench at the far end of her stepfather’s garden and sat squarely, glaring across the lawn at his fatuous house and waiting for her anger to evaporate in the still air. It soon would; she had always been reliably even tempered, quick to speak her rage – which she seldom did – quick to forgive. The dogs slumped to the grass on either side of her legs, faithful without encouragement. She petted one, rubbing its long, silky ears between her fingers and scratching its chest. It was as far removed from Amos, the scruffy adopted stray of her childhood as ‘Henchley Manor’ was from The Roundel. It was so maddeningly typical that Miriam, who had given open house to any number of more or less criminal men throughout her youth and had even conceived children by two of them, should now react towards her daughter’s simple act of grateful hospitality with querulous alarm. There was always the possibility, of course, that a mother’s intuition had prompted her to guess that the hospitality was not quite so simple as Alison would have it appear.

  At a fierce two-finger whistle, Alison looked up to see Jamie waving to her from the terrace. The dogs bounded away towards him. He bent to pet them then looked back to her, tapped his watch, jerked his head towards his car and grinned. She held up a thumb in agreement and stood.

  ‘So do I get to meet him?’ he asked as he swung the car up on to the Bow fly-over. ‘Mr Strong-and-Silent?’

  ‘Jamie, he’s just my lodger, all right?’

  ‘If you say so.’ He grinned across at her and accelerated through some lights as they were turning red. He allowed the music to swell up between them for a few moments; listening religiously to the entire Top Forty every Sunday evening was one of his eternal teenage habits. He would still be wearing jeans and baseball boots in his fifties, she sensed, and, damn him, he would still have the figure to get away with them. ‘But I do want to meet him,’ he added. ‘Can I?’

  ‘Of course you can,’ she sighed, weary of his teasing and wondering, with a trace of apprehension, what he and Sam would make of one another.

  ‘He won’t run away or anything?’

  ‘Jamie!’

  ‘I’ll be good,’ he assured her. ‘Promise.’

  He turned up the radio for a song they both liked and wound down his window to take a better look at the pale torso of a cyclist who had stopped to peel off his Lycra top at the roadside.

  Sam wasn’t there, however. Adept at reading her house’s atmospheres, Alison could tell it was empty as soon as she crossed the threshold. She laughed the disappointment off, telling Jamie her lodger must have heard him coming, but after he had driven off, excusing himself for some, urgent, unspecified assignation, she examined the house more carefully. She saw that Sam had taken the previous day’s shirt with him, although it would still be damp. The spare jeans were gone, and a loaf of bread, and a pint of milk. She knew then that he might not be coming back, knew too with a spasm like the shivers that heralded an infection, that she wanted him.

  Alison was not a woman to lose control. She sank to the point of sitting on his tidily made bed, touching his pillow and moping like a lovelorn teenager, then checked herself on the safer side of folly. She spent the evening reading manuscripts and the next few days gathering information on the coming season’s fiction titles for a sales conference, and putting in extra hours doling out advice and calm on the helpline.

  Sam came back on the Thursday night, just as she was preparing for bed. She was unreasonably glad and could not help letting it show and when, four days later, he disappeared again, she was unreasonably miserable. Sitting at the kitchen table over the remains of a bottle of wine, she forced herself to draw up her emotional accounts, listing Sam’s good and bad points in two conflicting columns. She was happier having him around occasionally, she concluded, than not having him around at all. She kept the L-word at bay by emphasising to herself the absurdity of attempting to build a romance upon a one-sided interest in a man who had restructured his whole life so as to keep it clean of domestic intimacy. When he returned, she tried cultivating the stoic self-sufficiency of the sailor’s wife. It worked.

  During a long evening of reading while Sam ploughed a deliberate furrow through all her Mahler symphonies, he twisted around on the sofa beside her so as to stretch his legs out over a neighbouring armchair and rest his head in her lap. At first she found she could only pretend to read, every cell of her being focused on the sensation of his body warmth against hers. Her hand tensed with the temptation to caress rather than merely hold. Then, forced to reread a paragraph her eyes had only scanned, she found herself drawn back into the story and her body became as relaxed as his. The second time this happened, she found it the most natural thing in the world to throw a sisterly arm across his chest and continue reading as though his unexpected gesture of affection were no more than a restless cat’s passing bid for attention.

  As though secure in her sexual neutrality, he began to stay for longer stretches, disappearing less often. He even planted some autumn crocus bulbs in her patch of untended garden and built a makeshift barbecue with some stolen bricks and an oven shelf retrieved from a skip. She decided the time had come when he could safely be introduced to her brother.

  37

  Jamie did not normally go on marches. He never had, in fact, since he had been of an age to choose not to. He was not a political animal. He resented, perhaps, dim memories of hours spent on protests for peace, marches against racism and smoke-ins for the legalisation of cannabis in a scratchy, home-made papoose as a baby and then on various bearded men’s shoulders as a small boy. In some ways, Alison had taken up where Miriam had left off. She relished playing her brother’s conscience, cajoling him, hectoring him to pull on some sensible walking shoes and take to the streets in support of this or that beleaguered cause. Sometimes he had almost gone as far as joining her but had been diverted on the way by a challenging glance or casual smile.

  ‘Something came up,’ he would tell her later.

  ‘I bet it did,’ she would jeer, but she never stopped trying. He suspected that she preferred him to be a backslider as it reinforced her own, strong, sisterly role.

  For once, however, she had caught him at a good time. Or rather, a bad one. He usually enjoyed his work, relishing its combination of austerity and glamour. He gained a dubious thrill from the occasional reminders that the dry pages of five, six, even seven digit figures he spent his days laconically juggling on his computer screen represented lifetimes of personal savings – gambled in a game where there was no moderation, where the losses and gains were regularly of a size to cripple or corrupt. He loved the ugly scenes when some hot-cheeked Name or other burst in to protest at an especially cutting demand for money, as though Jamie and his colleagues had hoodwinked them, disguising a casino as a building society.

  ‘There is always a high element of risk, Sir,’ the members’ agent told them. ‘We d
eal in risk, Madam. No syndicate ever promises a sure return.’

  His own money was paid each month into a high interest account or used to purchase unit trusts. Francis sniffed out the best deals for him – something Jamie never told Alison lest she pour scorn on his duplicity. He enjoyed the vertiginous, glossy surfaces of the building where he worked, especially when its hypocrisy was punctured by his recognition of some crisp-suited executive, spotted on a previous evening at a more openly louche establishment.

  Recently his work had begun to lose its charm, however. His previous boss, a sweetly crusty, ex-cavalry type, with fly-away eyebrows and a pipe had retired to amuse himself with a rare breeds farm in Hampshire. There had been three candidates for his position, of which Jamie’s least favourite had proved successful. Nick Godfreys had made his fortune writing computer software while still a schoolboy, and had become the youngest Name in Lloyd’s history. He did not need to work and everyone suspected he had bought into the syndicate only because it amused him to make a better job of caring for his own money than Jamie and his colleagues could. He had the sex appeal of a newt but, because of his self-made wealth and extreme youth, the tabloids had elected him a people’s hero and, by extension, a worthy sex symbol. They tirelessly ran stories charting his on-off engagements to a succession of aristocrats’ and government ministers’ daughters, their inexplicable, laddish affection for ‘Naughty Nick’ increased, if anything, every time he successfully sued them for libel. Somewhere after his second million, Godfreys had, rather greedily, Jamie thought, claimed Jesus for his own personal saviour. Unconvincingly jocular with most of his colleagues, he made no attempt whatever to conceal his distaste for Jamie. Jamie’s job was secure, for the moment at least, but, in the name of financial expediency, Godfreys had swiftly begun to make life uncomfortable for him, and Jamie could no longer risk the slightest infringement of office policy. Lunch hours were curtailed, telephone calls logged, workloads increased and the secretarial staff halved, forcing him to share his secretary with four colleagues. Four times, Godfreys had carefully humiliated him by querying his calculations in full hearing of the others. With comforting reliability, Old Eyebrows had been dimmer than any of them.

  The morning Alison telephoned – even receiving a personal call was now an infringement of the new order’s code – Godfreys had just walked through the office handing out invitations to an engagement ball he was throwing at his house outside Westmarket.

  ‘You don’t have a girlie, do you, James?’ he asked in an insinuating manner as he dropped a stiff, white envelope on to Jamie’s blotter.

  ‘Not at the moment, no,’ Jamie told him. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well try to rustle one up to bring with you, will you? Someone pretty enough to fool people? Not that bull dyke you brought to the last Christmas party. People talk, you know, and it upsets me.’

  Jamie felt his face burn as Godfreys walked on. He caught his secretary smirking at him. Then Alison called to insist he come on that year’s Gay Pride march.

  ‘Just this once,’ she wheedled. ‘It’s more important now than ever, Jamie.’

  ‘But why are you going?’ he asked her, a hand over the mouthpiece as Godfreys strolled by again.

  ‘Solidarity,’ she said. ‘And pride. My friends make me proud, but you don’t, and I’m fed up going on your behalf year after year.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘It’s not rabidly political in any case,’ she swept on. ‘There’s even a gay Tory group from Wimbledon and – What?!’

  ‘I said I’ll come.’ He glanced across at his secretary, challenging her to smirk. ‘I’ll come,’ he repeated, and felt himself committed.

  Crossing town on the Piccadilly Line, he stopped reading the overhead posters and looked about the carriage, noticing something strange happening. He never rode the Underground without spotting at least one or two gay people, either by some obvious piece of subculture uniform or by a covert glance or discreetly clasped magazine or novel, but always they were in a minority of two or three per carriage. Now the social chemistry of the train was changing visibly. More and more noticeably gay groups were climbing on board – lesbian couples with toddlers holding their hands, hip young politicos with sideburns and fierce-sloganned tee-shirts, chattering groups with picnic baskets, a big leather guy who looked as though he could break your neck with one slap of his palm, but paraded his humour and soft heart by bringing along his dalmatian in a matching leather jerkin and red bandanna. As they neared Leicester Square, the straight people on board were gradually being eased into the minority. Some of them enjoyed the free cabaret and murmured to each other or smiled their approval, others looked distinctly unnerved and Jamie realised that moments like this one probably rearranged far more people’s perceptions than the actual march.

  The concentration of gays and lesbians when he emerged onto the pavement was still more dizzying, even though they were streets away from the assembly point. A bunch of young women growled down St Martin’s Lane on Harley Davidsons and were greeted with whoops and whistles by some appreciative elder sisters who were climbing down from a Welsh coach. Jamie counted ten same-sex couples openly holding hands. A policewoman held up the traffic to let another chunk of the crowd cross the road. She smiled when a lesbian blew her a kiss and Jamie felt an impulse to laugh out loud. The long, excited queue for a cashpoint machine on the Strand might have been calculated revenge for years of tediously boy-girl advertising imagery plugged by the banks. The only woman in a skirt was dressed like Annie Oakley and looked as if she could have lassooed a prize bull, never mind a bullock, with one hand. She caught Jamie admiring her and raised an unplucked eyebrow before snatching her wad of cash and striding on southwards.

  Alison was just where she said she would be, with her friends by the Embankment Garden bandstand. One of them blew a whistle to get his attention, then Alison waved and came over to meet him. She had on a big pink tee-shirt which introduced herself as REGRETTABLY HETERO – presumably the sexual equivalent of holiday insurance on such an occasion. She ran the last few yards between them and threw her arms about him.

  ‘I’m so glad,’ she said.

  ‘Me too,’ he admitted. ‘I think. It’s weird. How’s it feel to be in the minority for once? Oh. I forgot,’ he added as they approached her little gang. ‘You immerse yourself all the time anyway.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she sighed, caressing one of his biceps quizzically. ‘My life is a Uranian festival.’

  He felt unusually protective towards her as she said this, and slipped an arm across her shoulders.

  As they came to greet him, he recognised some of her friends from her last birthday party in Bow. There was Sandy, who ran the helpline, Sean and Nick, who were so very married it would be no surprise to find one of them pregnant, Belgian Agnes and the thin one with the glasses. The thin one was pushing a man in a wheelchair who was skeletal and obviously very sick. Jamie instinctively averted his eyes. He looked over to where a tall man in a crimson shirt was coming across the grass from the ice cream van, his fingers twined around a clutch of cornets. Melted ice cream ran in streaks across his sunburnt hands. He looked like a Michelangelo angel who had been given a haircut with blunt nail scissors.

  ‘And Jamie, I don’t think you’ve met Guy,’ Alison pointedly introduced him to the man in the wheelchair. Jamie shook his hand, which felt like paper-covered bone. ‘And this is his buddy, Steve.’

  ‘We’ve met before,’ said Steve.

  ‘’Course we have,’ said Jamie. ‘Hi.’

  He shook Steve’s hand too, then glanced back, irritated to find he had lost sight of the man in the red shirt.

  ‘And this, after all these weeks, is Sam. Sam, here’s my brother, Jamie.’

  Jamie turned and managed to hide his surprise. Sam wasn’t ready to be introduced, occupied as he was with handing out ice cream cones without dropping any. He gave Jamie a grunt as he licked the backs of his hands clean.


  ‘Didn’t you want one?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Dropped it,’ he said. ‘Someone’s dog’s got it.’

  ‘Oh but –’

  ‘No. no. This’ll do me.’ He indicated his sticky hands.

  An abrupt surge of whistling and banshee whoops warned them that the march was setting off. The column of demonstrators stretched from Hungerford Bridge to Temple Station and there were still ribbons of people hurrying to join it from all directions. Leaving the gardens, Jamie was confronted with crowd barriers blocking off the pavement from the road. The nearest opening was guarded by a bullet-headed man with a walkie-talkie and clipboard. Steve pushed Guy past him, followed by Agnes, Billy, Jamie, Sean and Nick. The bullet-headed man blocked the way, however, confronted with Alison and Sam.

  ‘What are you?’ he asked, as though this were the most ordinary question.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Alison replied, laughing.

  ‘Put her down as a gay man,’ Nick called out. ‘Make her day.’

  ‘What are you?’ the steward repeated, undrawn by their good humour and choosing to ignore Alison’s tee-shirt.