The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  ‘I’m old as the hills. It’s time you were up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Come on.’

  There was a firmness in her voice, an air of command.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I can.’

  ‘I’ll help you,’ she said. ‘Take my hands.’

  59

  ‘How much is a gill, for pity’s sake?’ Miriam asked, poised over the electric mixer with a bottle of milk and a measuring jug.

  ‘A tablespoon?’ Alison suggested weakly. ‘Two? Why don’t you just add enough to make it all join up in a lump? Otherwise I think there’s a table of measurements and equivalents in the back of that old pink book.’

  Miriam pointed with a floury hand to the shelf of cookery books. ‘This one?’ she asked.

  ‘No. The one with all the cocoa and stuff on it.’

  Miriam winced and took out the book. Alison turned back to the task of trying to cream butter and sugar with too small a wooden spoon. The lumps of butter were simply swishing around spilling sugar over the edges of the bowl occasionally, but she would not give up. She could not. They had started cooking things two hours before. It was still hot outside, and the kitchen, normally a haven of cool from the sunshine, was sweltering with the heat from the oven. Alison had protested that surely only a handful of people would be able to come out to East Anglia for a mid-week funeral.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ Miriam had said. ‘When Reefer’s sister, Polly, managed to OD out at that farm in Wales the place was over-run. It was hell. There wasn’t a thing to eat, so everyone just got blind drunk. If we make it tea rather than lunch, you can freeze anything that’s left over and we won’t need loads of cutlery or plates and things. I can probably borrow a couple of boxes of mugs from the Red Cross and some big teapots. You make some fruit cakes and I’ll do a load of scones. Okay?’

  It had all seemed utterly unnecessary to Alison. She saw no reason why people would want to eat after a funeral – still less have the indelicacy to expect the chief mourners to feed them – but once she started she realised she was grateful for the activity. Weighing sultanas, washing the sticky syrup off glacé cherries, rooting in the larder for spices none of them ever normally used, she found herself remembering girlhood domestic science lessons. She remembered that cherries rolled in self-raising flour before being folded into the mixture were less likely to sink during baking, and that a circle of greaseproof paper lightly pressed onto the surface of the fruit cake before baking stopped it forming a crust too swiftly. The air was perfumed with cinnamon, allspice and hot sugar. Miriam had turned the radio to a rock channel and Alison was amused to hear that her unpredictable mother had found time to learn the words to songs by teenage bands of which she was blithely unaware.

  ‘It feels like Christmas,’ she said.

  ‘Bloody Australian sort of Christmas in this heat.’ Miriam used a clean tea towel to tie the hair up out of her hot face, then turned on the mixer.

  Alison felt the strangest thing about Jamie’s death was his physical absence. The sudden lack of him was as brutal and shocking as vandalism. She had found him. She was grateful for that; it meant that she didn’t have to have the news broken to her. He was lying in an almost orderly fashion, his arms stretched out on top of the covers as though he had reached out for something, then grown tired in the attempt. His eyes, mercifully, were closed. The night nurse usually left at about seven and it was only nine when Alison found him, so he could not have been dead for long. She sat with him for a while, had a brief cry, then remembered to telephone to stop the night nurse coming back. She called the doctor to register the death, and called the gay funeral directors Sandy had tracked down. She cried again, briefly, blew her nose and called Miriam. Luckily it was Francis who answered. It was easier telling him. Then she steeled herself and went to wake Sam.

  His room was still fuggy with sleep, his breathing heavy. She drew the curtains a little to let some light in, then sat on the edge of the bed as he stirred.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t get to sleep until about two.’

  ‘Half-past. Half-past nine. Sam, I’m sorry. Jamie’s gone. I just found him. I’ve called the doctor and Miriam and everything. I haven’t told Grandpa yet.’

  He said nothing, just stared at her for a few seconds, ascertaining the truth of what she had said, then he threw back the sheet that covered him, walked, naked, into Jamie’s room and closed the door. It was a shock to see him naked in daylight. His legs bristled with thick black hair, stockings of hair almost, which stopped neatly below the pallid muscles of his buttocks. He stayed with Jamie for nearly half an hour while she remained sitting on the edge of his bed, waiting and listening. There was no sound. She imagined him standing, staring, at the bed’s end then climbing on to share its narrow mattress, folding Jamie in his arms. She pictured pink hands against pale, warm lips against cold. When he emerged, he had wrapped himself in Jamie’s green towelling robe, which stopped short of his knees. She left the room to let him dress.

  The studio door was propped open with a wooden chair. Her grandfather had already been up for hours, working at his sequencer. The studio was buzzing with electronic string tremolo and a high, superhumanly high, it seemed, electronic voice.

  ‘Yeats,’ he said, not turning but sensing she was standing in the doorway. ‘I thought something by Yeats might be good for the San Francisco commission. I’ve never set any before. One of the late, mystical pieces, I thought.’

  ‘Grandpa?’

  He turned then, saw her and understood at once. The sequencer continued to buzz for a few seconds, then he reached up and turned it off.

  ‘When did he go?’ he asked.

  ‘It must have been this morning, after the night nurse left. I’ve called Miriam. She’ll be driving here now.’

  He walked over to her and gave her a hug, stroking her hair with his bony fingers. He smelled of coffee and burnt toast. Walking back to The Roundel with her, he kept a hand on her shoulder and gave her another hug, for himself this time, as they reached the top of the steps.

  ‘Do you want to go up and see him?’ she asked. ‘He looks sweet. Rested.’

  He shook his head vigorously.

  ‘No,’ he said, a catch in his voice. ‘I don’t think I could face it. Not just yet. Maybe later. Give me something to do, Angel. I can’t work. Not now. There must be something that needs doing.’

  The door swung open beside them and Sam came out in his leather jacket.

  ‘Sam,’ her grandfather began. ‘I’m so –’

  ‘Thanks, Edward.’ Sam cut him short. He turned to Alison. ‘I’m going out on the bike. I’ll be gone some time. Tonight, maybe. When they’ve taken him away. Okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ she nodded. ‘Sam are you …?’ Terrible thoughts entered her head. She thought of twisted metal, outraged flesh and of the period she still had not begun. ‘You’re not going to –’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he silenced her. ‘Tell Miriam I said hi.’

  Moments later they heard him rev the bike down the drive.

  ‘You were going to give me something to do,’ her grandfather prompted her.

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ Slowly she came to herself. ‘There are loads of people to call. Friends. People he used to work with. It would be easier for you because you don’t know any of them and you can just play secretary without getting into long conversations.’

  ‘Fine. Is there an address book?’ he asked.

  She found Jamie’s little black book by the hall telephone.

  ‘I’ll take it over the way with me,’ he said. ‘To leave you and your mother in peace. Angel, are you sure this is all I can do?’

  ‘Grandpa it’s quite enough,’ she laughed. ‘There are a lot of names in there and as I’m not sure who the important ones might be, you’d better call them all.’

  He was gone for a couple of hours at least. Miriam arrived, shortly followed by the funeral director
s – solemn, courteous women in grey suits. Miriam insisted on staying in the bedroom with them as they worked, breaking down when they loaded him into a white plastic body box and carried him out to their van. They understood exactly when Alison said they’d want everything as plain as possible; no flowers, the cheapest coffin. She assumed he would be cremated but Miriam surprised her by announcing that there was a family plot in the local church.

  ‘Dad bought it when Sally died,’ she explained. ‘Francis and I will pay for a stone.’ Then she laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Angel. There’s still room in there for the rest of us.’

  Guessing that Sam would not wish to be involved in the laying of plans, Alison plumped for a funeral as soon as possible. The suited women consulted their diary and offered Thursday afternoon. Miriam went upstairs to strip Jamie’s bed and air the room, taking an armful of big, late-summer daisies to arrange in a vase on his windowsill.

  Alison called a couple of newspapers to put notices into the next day’s editions, then slipped over to the studio to tell her grandfather the date and time for the funeral, to pass on to the people he was ringing. Seeing him at his desk, little black book in hand, telling somebody, ‘Yes. Jamie. Jamie Pepper. I’m his grandfather. No. He’d been ill some time. That’s right. A merciful release’, she realised that he was probably calling not just friends but all manner of startled married men or fleeting holiday contacts for whom her brother represented only an hour of passionate release, and maybe even less, men who had long since forgotten his name, men who had died. She let him carry on calling, however, working his way solemnly through from A to Z, calling even the ones who were only entered as Christian names and a number. It would have amused Jamie enormously, and might make the funeral less stifling, if the little country church were filled with a wildly heterogeneous crowd all asking one another, ‘So how did you know him?’

  In no time, her grandfather’s calls generated others and The Roundel telephone began to ring. Sandy was among the first, announcing she had already hired a coach to bring friends to the funeral ‘because everyone’s going to want to drink’, then Belgian Agnes called and cried so much that Alison had to hang up on her because tears had become infectious as sneezes. Her grandfather finished his task, and came over to the kitchen. He sat on a stool at one end of the table drinking coffee and watching the great bake-in. Slowly, automatically, he and Miriam began to bicker. He asked where Francis was and sniped at him for not managing to take the day off to be with her. She countered with a squib aimed across his bows at Myra Toye.

  ‘She was on some chat show last night. A wreck of a woman really. Of course she has no pride since she lost her job on that series. Trust her to come back to London with her tail between her legs.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he countered deliberately, ‘I had heard that she lost the job because the actors she had to kiss didn’t like her doing so much work for AIDS charities or the fact that one of her husbands was a promiscuous bisexual.’

  Alison looked up, startled that this first mention of Myra Toye by him in months should be favourable. Miriam, startled merely at the sudden, bald mention of the virus, and worn out by the effort of sustaining bright, ordinary behaviour for the last few hours, had a fit of the shakes and dropped the bottle of vanilla essence she had been holding.

  ‘Shit!’ she hissed. ‘Now look what you’ve made me do! And look, it’s gone on my shoes too!’

  The thick, beige syrup began to spread out from the puddle on the tiles where the bottle had shattered. The room swiftly grew sickly with vanilla. Nauseated at the strength of the smell, Alison plunged a cloth into hot water to mop it up. Miriam stepped daintily away from the broken glass in her stockinged feet, dabbing at her precious suede shoes with a piece of paper towel.

  ‘Ruined,’ she muttered. ‘It’s bound to stain because I hadn’t got around to Scotchguarding them yet.’

  A harsh sound broke from her father, causing them both to look up from what they were doing. Still clutching his coffee in a shaking grip, his whole body was tight with despair, his face grotesque with grief. For a moment they just watched him. Then he let out another sob. Alison dropped the cloth and darted forward to take the coffee from him before he dropped it.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter. Don’t.’

  She touched his shoulder but he swept her hand aside with the sudden violence of a furious child. Her bones ached from the blow. Then, to her amazement, he reached out his arms towards Miriam. No less surprised, Miriam lurched towards him, still holding her shoes, her face becoming a reflection of his, and they fell into each other’s grasp with such violence that his stool rocked beneath him.

  ‘It’s not right,’ he kept saying, ‘I shouldn’t be here any more. Both of them. I shouldn’t be here.’

  Lingering clumsily beyond the knot they formed, Alison sipped the coffee in her hand and found it stone cold. She saw blood seeping out through Miriam’s stocking where she had cut herself, then suddenly was aware of a familiar dragging sensation in her loins and lower back, like the withdrawal of a relentless, surgical fist. Sickened by the vanilla, then dizzy, she reached to steady herself on the back of a chair then heard, rather than felt, herself crash to the floor.

  Emerging from oblivion, she was aware of a sharp pain beyond her nausea. She opened her eyes and raised her head, saw the great, red-brown stain on her skirt-front before she blanked out again.

  How they got her to bed was a mystery but there she was, sheets comfortingly tucked up to her chin, Miriam at her side.

  Her mother stroked her hair. She looked tragic.

  ‘What?’ Alison asked her suspiciously.

  ‘Angel you’ll feel woozy because they had to give you a shot to kill the pain.’

  ‘Did I lose it?’

  ‘What?’

  Brought up short by her mother’s confusion, Alison forced her mind to focus.

  ‘Sorry. What happened?’

  ‘You fainted and fell on to your broken coffee cup, which cut through the top of your thigh. You bled like mad. It was really scary. We thought you’d cut into an artery or something. Gramps called Dr Marshall who gave you some stitches and the shot.’ Miriam laughed softly. ‘He gave me some sedatives too and they’re really strong.’ She began to cry spasmodically then managed to control herself enough to ask. ‘What do you mean lose it?’

  Alison paused for a moment.

  ‘I’d have thought that was obvious,’ she muttered.

  Miriam stared, gave a little gasp then hugged her and started to cry again.

  ‘You’re not to tell anyone,’ Alison said. ‘Not yet. I will when I’m ready, okay?’

  Miriam sniffed, pulled back and looked at her again.

  ‘How long has it been?’ she asked.

  ‘Weeks,’ Alison admitted. ‘Six. Eight. I was well overdue. When I saw the blood I thought – you know how shock can do it sometimes … For a moment I thought, “Thank God”’.

  ‘Oh poor Angel. And you kept it so quiet. Whose is it? Have you told him yet?’

  Alison shook her head firmly.

  ‘You needn’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s no-one you know. Someone very nice but no-one who matters. Don’t worry. I’m just following the family tradition. I’ll be fine.’

  Her mother smiled, a little smile flat and caved-in from trying to express too many things simultaneously. Eager to be rid of her, Alison had no difficulty closing her eyes and feigning exhausted slumber.

  60

  Edward clicked a few buttons on his computer, scanned a menu on the screen, then selected the latest entry and pressed Play. The studio filled with the sounds he had assembled for the Yeats setting; lower strings – no violins – coloratura soprano and a great bank of metal percussion instruments. A melody had been circling in his head over the days since the chaotic, crowded funeral, and this was his first chance to sit down at a keyboard to try it out.

  He cleared all the sounds save the weird electronic ‘soprano’, then
swung his chair around to face the keyboard and, after two false starts, fed the melody in. He pressed Play again, then got up and walked the length of the long, high room listening critically. He smiled, suddenly recognising the melody. It bore more than a passing resemblance to Dancing in the Dark, a song he had used to dance to with Sally. For a moment he sang along with the electronic voice in his hoarse baritone, rediscovering preposterous words he had not heard in years.

  ‘We’re waltzing in the wonder of why we’re here. Love passes by. It’s here and gone.’

  Could those be the words? Sally had preferred more vigorous dances, but she had allowed him his weakness for romance. He walked back to the computer, stopped the sounds and altered the melody on the keyboard, changing its rhythm entirely but retaining its restless, yearning quality. Then he reprogrammed the sequencer, scrapping the coloratura soprano in favour of a counter tenor. The piece was becoming his memorial to Jamie, he realised. Miriam and Francis were giving a headstone, he would give this.

  It was all over now. The boy was dead and buried under a mound of peaty soil and already rotting flowers. A solicitor had called to go over the will. Jamie had left everything to Sam except for some money he had set aside for his sister. Sam had seemed shocked at the sudden change in his fortunes. What had he expected, Edward wondered, to be cast out on the street? Now it was all over. Having shown she had some depth of feeling after all, Miriam had done the disappointing inevitable and gone back to her husband. Alison had driven back to London abruptly, as soon as the funeral gathering had gone. When Edward asked her if everything was all right, she claimed she needed to spend a weekend putting her life in order before returning to the office on Monday, but he sensed she was troubled by something she preferred not to discuss. He found he loved her more than he was able ever to show, she looked so painfully like Sally, particularly over these last weeks. Her collapse in the kitchen had scared him. At the sight of the blood on her dress, he had dithered hopelessly and had to be shouted at by Miriam into helping carry the poor girl to bed.