by Patrick Gale
‘You’ll never let this go, Edward-Eli,’ she had warned him. ‘You have this persistent sense of debt that’s positively Wagnerian. We’re both rational people so we don’t believe in curses. The funny thing with curses, though, is the damage they continue to do even if we don’t believe in them. Sometimes the only way to lift them is to suspend your rational dismissal and enter their crazy logic. Maybe all the months and money you’ve spent with me will get you nowhere and you’ll never stop hurting yourself for having been saved, until you save someone else.’
Trapped in a Rexbridge cinema watching the shuffling black and white lines of hollow-eyed concentration camp prisoners, he had been besieged by feelings of guilt and helplessness. Faced with his grandson’s living corpse however, he felt he could do something. Could this, he wondered, be his chance to lift the curse?
Having got the boy away, however, he saw immediately how futile was his impulse to ‘rescue’ him. Driving him out of London, the boy dozing in a blanket oblivious to their wintry surroundings, he was relentlessly reminded of Sally’s mercy mission to snatch him from the Rexbridge psychiatric unit. He imagined that she had felt a similar sense of impulsive daring, a similar fear of risk-taking and of blindly smothering love. He could not save Jamie, however. The ‘rescue’ evinced only a naive belief in the whole-some powers of the countryside over the perfidious influences of the city; the boy was as locked in his sickness as he was in his sickly perversion. Edward knew he spoke to his lover every day – he had occasionally stumbled in on their telephone calls. He was amazed, and sickened that, in full possession of the facts, the boy continued to cling to the very thing that was causing his death. He had initially thought that once they were alone together, he could set about getting to know Jamie properly as an adult, making up for lost time, wringing some meaning from the precious months left them. Instead he retreated to the musical territories they had shared during his grandson’s early boyhood.
‘I’m a coward,’ he told Miriam during her first visit to see how Jamie was progressing. She had appeared with quantities of food which she was packing into the freezer in The Roundel’s kitchen. Jamie was taking an after-lunch doze upstairs.
‘Do you expect me to contradict you?’ Her tone was suddenly abrasive.
Edward shrugged, opting for humour.
‘It would be nice,’ he said hopefully.
‘Well forget it. You were the same about Uncle Thomas.’
‘How do you mean? Thomas and I got on. I could always talk to Thomas.’
‘Exactly. You talked to him, not with him. You always kept him at arm’s length because of what he was and how he felt towards you. It embarrassed you.’
‘Oh really,’ Edward tried to wave her nonsense away with a hand and reach for his coffee. Miriam shut the freezer lid with a muffled bump.
‘Thomas loved you,’ she said. ‘And you could never accept that.’
‘Of course I accepted it. I mean, I couldn’t reciprocate but –’
‘You were relieved when he died and stopped making demands on you. You didn’t even get me out of school for his funeral and he was a better father to me than you ever were.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Yes. Really. Thomas talked with me. He wanted to know what I wanted, what I thought about things, who I wanted to be.’
‘And I didn’t?’
‘You never showed it if you did. You just wrote cheques, and waited for me to grow, like some impatient gardener.’
‘Ah.’ Edward smiled wearily at the table top.
‘Don’t laugh at me. You’re always laughing at me!’
‘I’m not laughing,’ he assured her. She sat heavily in a chair opposite him looking momentarily, strangely, like his mother, her cheeks flushed with irritation, her plump hands restlessly picking at things. She had never looked like Sally. Only Alison looked like Sally. ‘What does all this have to do with Jamie?’ he asked.
‘Everything,’ she said. ‘Your disgust, your fear, are neither here nor there. Just give him some space and show him some respect. I’m learning so much from all this and I think you could too if only you’d let yourself.’
‘I think I’m a little old to start learning.’
‘You haven’t had a serious illness since your early twenties. You’re strong as an ox. Right now, he’s older than you are.’
‘Don’t bully me. You always bully me.’
‘Somebody’s got to.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he insisted. ‘I can’t change the way I feel. You … You don’t like parsnips. I feel uncomfortable around homosexuals.’
‘There’s no comparison.’
‘Of course there is. It’s an irrational dislike. Maybe it’s a race memory. Whatever it is, simple good will won’t make it go away.’
‘At least try. For me.’
‘All right,’ he sighed. ‘For you. For my poor neglected daughter, I’ll try.’
‘Thank you.’
She smiled. He was fobbing her off. If he told of the churning revulsion he felt when he saw one man hold another’s hand or confessed that no number of documentaries could rid him of the gut belief that this disease was a direct result of puerile self-indulgence, she would probably pack her son into her expensive car and drive him off to Essex. Coward or no, he badly wanted Jamie at The Roundel. For there were other things he could not tell her – for all his bluff dismissals, he did recognise that he had failed her as a father. He could not tell her that the bewildered, helpless love he felt for her children was the only chance he had to redeem that failure. He was a man, after all, with all a man’s foolish, unfashionable pride.
Miriam became calmer. She poured herself a cup of coffee and reached into her shopping basket for a packet of chocolate biscuits which she opened between them.
‘I meant to tell you at the time,’ she said, ‘But I was so het up. I never spoke to Venetia Peake. I mean, of course I spoke to her but I never told her all those silly things about alcoholic nannies and parcelling me off to school, truly I didn’t. I think she got an Old Girls list from my year and tracked some people down. Josie Forbush or someone. Someone with a grudge.’
‘I did wonder,’ he confessed. ‘It was kind of you to protect me.’
Miriam made a small, non-committal noise in her throat and ate another biscuit.
‘She’s called, you know. Myra,’ he told her. ‘She’s called several times. I’ve only answered once.’
‘What does she want?’
He thought a moment.
‘I don’t know. I think perhaps she’s curious. She’d like to see me again. See how I’ve aged.’
‘That would be a shock for her, given the way she looks.’ Miriam looked across and saw that he was serious. ‘Don’t you want to see her?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘But it might be fun.’
‘Miriam, you can’t have it both ways. I thought Myra was meant to be the bugbear of your childhood dreams and a Hollywood monster.’
‘She is. She was. But still, it might be fun.’
‘I thought you found geriatric romance grotesque.’
‘Who said anything about romance?’ Miriam looked alarmed. ‘You could just see her. That’s all.’
‘So you could brag to Francis’s friends about meeting her?’
‘Not at all. God you’re so unfair sometimes! I wouldn’t even want to be there. Of course I wouldn’t. You could just meet for lunch, in London. She comes over to shop sometimes. I read it in a magazine. Now she could set you right on a few things; she does a lot of work for AIDS charities. Honestly, Dad, it might be fun. A trip down memory lane.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Edward trusted the glance he threw her was sufficiently withering.
54
As the recuperative fortnight at The Roundel turned into three weeks, then four, Jamie abandoned any pretence of an intention to return to London. After the crowded uneventfulness of his time in hospital, his days and nights in the old house were of
a meditative monotony that soon became sweet to him. He rose when he felt ready – often not before mid-morning – took a long bath, went for a walk, lunched with his grandfather, slept again, read a book, ate supper with his grandfather and retired early. He spent hours just sitting. In his overcrowded childhood he had not appreciated how full the house was of good places to sit. He would begin to read or listen to a programme on the radio, find his attention drawn to the nearest window, and become peaceably transfixed by the unpeopled, unchanging view across ploughed fields silvered with frost, the river steaming slightly, or into the smaller landscape of the garden. Alone, or almost alone, for the first time in his life, he came to appreciate stillness and the space it gave for thought. Sitting in silence, he found that thoughts came to feel as distinct as speech so that sometimes, after sitting for a long while, he was not sure whether he had merely thought something or spoken it aloud to the empty room.
He did not spend hours with his grandfather. The knowledge that he was working in a room nearby was often company enough. The distant sounds of his synthesiser and sequencer, producing now the noise of a full symphony orchestra, now the intimate tones of a madrigal ensemble, was the aural equivalent of a comforting nightlight. When they were together, his grandfather often played them music rather than risk tiring Jamie with conversation. Jamie had not heard so much music since he was a teenager. They listened to whole operas at a sitting, whole cycles of string quartets. As in his childhood, music became their safe lingua franca.
Sam, Alison and Miriam paid visits. When Sam came, Jamie’s grandfather acquired an unforeseen engagement in London and left the two of them to spend the weekend in bed and luxuriate in one another’s company. When Alison came, she interrupted Jamie’s routine with the brief imposition of her own habitual weekend behaviour – quantities of newsprint, coffee, convenience food, fitful attempts to tame the garden. Miriam worked in the garden too. She no sooner laid eyes on Jamie than emotions welled up in her she had to channel into practical action rather than give them voice. She would barely be through with hugging him in greeting before she was reaching for the gardening gloves or moaning that Alison had lost the secateurs again. Jamie was almost hurt by this. She did much the same on the telephone. She had no sooner got through and asked how he was before she started saying things like, ‘Well, darling, I better go and feed Frank. You know how he is. I just wanted to hear your news …’
Worried, on her second visit, that Jamie was still not gaining weight, she began by riling his grandfather with an inquisition as to what the two of them had been eating. Then, seized by a sudden inspiration, she pulled on some gloves and marched with a hefty fork to the ruined greenhouse that leant against the wall in the most sheltered corner of the garden. She returned a while later with a big plant in her hand, its glossy leaves drooping and browned slightly with the effects of frost. It was a lone, self-sown survivor of the commune’s long-lost marijuana crop, unspotted by the local constabulary, and spared Alison’s occasional weeding forays, first by her ignorance and then by its authoritative size. Confident yet righteous, as though she were arranging flowers, Miriam dried its leaves off in a low oven, then donned an apron to bake the unappetising results into a double batch of gingerbread which had an aftertaste of bonfires. Packing half the batch into the deep freeze, she explained that her latest watercolouring pupil at the hospital had assured her the herb did wonders for suppressed appetites, while ginger counteracted nausea.
‘It’s not for fun,’ she assured Jamie. ‘It’s strictly medicinal. Your sister’s not to have any and you’re to eat one a day. And you’re not to tell your grandfather. He’d only be shocked.’
Jamie couldn’t help noticing that his mother had slipped a handful of the leaves into her handbag and wondered if she were regressing or merely pursuing a small nostalgic indulgence. The gingerbread worked, up to a point, and he began to put on a little weight. Sometimes it made him so stoned that, far from giving him a hunger rush, he just sat for hours feeling other-worldly and forgot to eat altogether. Once he fed Sam a slice, thinking it might be fun to stay in control while Sam relaxed beside him, but Sam relaxed to the point where he started crying and couldn’t stop.
When Sam’s job on the Wandsworth site came to an end, he brought the Volkswagen down, filled with extra clothes and possessions from the flat.
‘You don’t want to go back there,’ he asked. ‘Do you?’
‘Not much,’ Jamie admitted. ‘Do you mind?’
‘I can’t live there without you, that’s all,’ Sam said and it was understood that a new phase in their life together was beginning. After trying out various beds, they moved to a larger room that faced south. Jamie’s old room, with its narrow bed and small, barred window, now had all the monastic connotations of a sick room, and he would only return there occasionally to lie alone when he was sleeping badly or wanted to nap in the daytime. He refused to let the flat. It was important to him to keep the possibility open that they could always jump in the car and drive up for a wild weekend if they felt like it. But they never did.
Sam hated to be idle for long. It made him restive and short-tempered. Tidying out the mess of dried-up paint tins and rotting boxes of carefully stored newspapers and jam jars so as to make room in the garage for Jamie’s car alongside his grandfather’s, he unearthed an old black motorbike, complete with mildewed side-car. It looked like a museum piece.
‘It was Sally’s,’ Jamie’s grandfather told him. ‘My wife’s. I thought we got rid of that years ago.’ He touched the worn leather seat, ran a finger through the clogged cobwebs that had clouded the speedometer. ‘You can tinker with it if you like but I doubt it still goes after all this time.’
Challenged, and glad of a project, Sam took the thing apart, made a few trips into Rexbridge for spares and tools and began lovingly to reassemble it. One of the bedrooms became briefly toxic with paint fumes. One end of the kitchen table, covered in newspaper, became littered with filthy engine parts he was gradually wirebrushing back to an approximation of their old glory. With the first days of spring, his work was finished. Jamie was staring out of an upstairs window at the daffodils that seemed to have coloured the garden’s winter palette overnight, when he was startled by what sounded like a rook-scarer exploding followed by the revving of an engine. He came out of the front door just as his grandfather emerged from the studio, to find Sam performing a lap of honour around the house, grinning like a child with a new toy.
Touched at the trouble Sam had taken, Jamie’s grandfather dismissed his suggestion of selling it off to a collector and said his efforts had as good as purchased it. He declined Sam’s offer of a thank-you ride so Sam took Jamie out, covered in a rug and tucked down in the sidecar. Jamie would have felt safer riding pillion, wrapped around the driver, but the seat was far too small for two. Bouncing along, his head on a level with Sam’s waist, convinced they would be stopped any minute for not wearing helmets, he was terrified the sidecar would become detached somehow and hurtle off into a dyke or a field below the road. Here, he thought, was yet another reason for respecting his dead kinswoman. Relieved to be returned home in one piece, he was afraid to hurt Sam’s feelings by refusing to go out again. Sam divined his fear, however, and spared him, buzzing out on his own into Rexbridge or off around the fenland lanes whenever the unstirred atmosphere at The Roundel made him long for sensation or he felt himself beginning to brood.
‘It goes faster with no-one else on board,’ he enthused.
‘I don’t want to know,’ said Jamie, and bought him a magnetic St Christopher to stick on the petrol tank. He also bought him a helmet and, for further protection, gave him his big leather jacket, bought in an ultra-macho biker store in New York but never previously worn on anything faster than the 31 bus to Earl’s Court. Sam’s excursions brought Jamie relief too, used as he had begun to grow again to the pleasures of solitude, but he liked it when Sam returned, cheeks pink and cold. The feel of him bulked up by the jacket occasionally
stoked up his testosterone levels so depleted by drugs and infection.
Sam made enquiries around local building contractors but there was far less building going on there than in the city, and firms were far stricter about who they employed and the terms on which they employed them. Jamie’s grandfather paid Sam to build him some new bookshelves then, satisfied with his handiwork, asked him to repair the studio’s guttering. Miriam found him work next, repointing the walls of the older house.
‘I know it’s Alison’s responsibility really,’ she apologised, ‘but poor Angel barely earns enough to buy clothes and food and it would be criminal to let the place fall apart.’
Sam was grateful for the money and happy to do work which didn’t take him away from Jamie. Jamie viewed their intervention ambivalently, however. He felt sure they were only paying up so they could somehow negate the problem of Sam being his lover by turning him into a kind of estate handyman. When he shared his doubts, Alison told him not to be so paranoid.
‘The work needs doing,’ she said reasonably. ‘It’s nicer to pay somebody we know and love than have your peace and quiet invaded by a load of strangers with noisy radios and friends in the villages they can gossip to.’
‘So you are embarrassed by us. You’re trying to keep us quiet now!’
‘Jamie. Think a little.’ Alison sat on the arm of Jamie’s chair and stroked his hair off his face. ‘Does that honestly seem likely?’
‘Suppose not,’ he conceded, after a moment, but his doubts remained.
‘As a matter of fact,’ she went on, ‘I’m not as poor as Ol’ Big Hair seems to think. When she’s paid for the repointing – which she should have paid for years ago in any case – I’ll see if I can get Sam to fix some of those rotten windows upstairs.’
Jamie was loath to admit it, but he was jealous sometimes of the place Sam had begun to carve, in his own right, in his family’s heart. If he was dozing upstairs and Miriam or Alison rang, he would lie there listening to the bluff ease with which Sam now took their calls and chatted with them, resenting it and not knowing why. Now that his grandfather could no longer avoid Sam indefinitely, the two of them had begun to talk as well, sporadically. Their relations were not helped, however, by Sam reasserting his rights to much of Jamie’s time his grandfather had been enjoying alone. Jamie’s grandfather plainly resented the change, but could not voice his resentment without openly recognising the reason why Sam had a prior claim on Jamie’s time. They were stiff with one another and uncomprehending. His grandfather affected to find Sam’s Plymouth accent impenetrable, while Sam claimed the other’s ‘German’ manner was forbidding.