by Patrick Gale
Anne Tyler
Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel Proust
The Flint Anchor
Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Collected Stories
Saki
If you weren’t a writer what job would you do?
If I weren’t a novelist and couldn’t be a psychotherapist, I can imagine being very happy as a jobbing gardener. Nothing fancy, just mowing lawns and pruning rose bushes. Farmer’s spouse is a pretty wonderful position too, though. We have a herd of beef cattle and I love working with them.
About the Book
The Writing of The Facts of Life
by Patrick Gale
MY PREVIOUS TWO novels, Little Bits of Baby and The Cat Sanctuary, had been published by Chatto&Windus, which was then ruled by publishing doyenne Carmen Callil. In her characteristically outspoken way Carmen let it be known that my writing was never going to amount to anything unless I wrote something big, preferably a family saga, since family dynamics clearly interested me and big novels were then going through something of a renaissance.
The book that resulted, The Facts of Life, was originally to have been three books. (Novel sequences were then also going through a, rather briefer, renaissance …) I had wanted for a long time to write a novel that dealt with the AIDS epidemic then threatening to engulf so many of my friends but I had repeatedly put it off. I didn’t want to write something crassly exploitative and I was also wary of writing something that would end up being read only by a handful of gay readers. I wanted straight readers to understand and I wanted to offer gay readers and readers who felt they were most at risk from the virus some crumb of fictional comfort. My idea was to ground my AIDS narrative in a historical context by making it just one part of a trilogy of interlinked novels about ‘dirty’ diseases. The first volume was to have focused on Edward and TB, the second on Miriam and the cluster of venereal infections to which the Pill exposed women of her generation, and only the third on Miriam’s two children and AIDS. In practice Miriam’s story threatened to become a comedy, which didn’t feel comfortable. For several years I had been volunteering first on a London AIDS ward and then at the extraordinary Bethany respite centre for AIDS patients and their families in Cornwall and I found I was increasingly taken up by the parallels I could see emerging between Edward’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and my own as a survivor of AIDS, both of us besieged by similar irrational guilt. So I ended up ditching the three-novel idea and – bearing in mind Carmen’s suggestion of a big fat book-combined their material in a single two-part narrative structure.
* * *
‘I found I was increasingly taken up by the parallels I could see emerging between Edward’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and my own as a survivor of AIDS, both of us besieged by similar irrational guilt’
* * *
Looking at it now, I can see that it remains, basically, two novels in one set of covers. I took a long time to write it and I was not a happy person at the time, with my private life in turmoil, my finances in a parlous state and my professional and emotional security at an all-time low. Years later, writing Rough Music, I was so much happier that I found the confidence to take narrative risks, weaving two narratives together where The Facts of Life left them entirely separate. (I also had a much tougher editor by then, which helped.) But I stand by it, for all that bits of the second half have – thanks to the wonders of the antiretroviral drug treatments developed since publication – come to seem as much like scenes from a period drama as the whole of the first half.
I like the way the first half is melodramatically cinematic and the second, soapily televisual. And I like, even love, the fenland setting. One of the several sorrows that formed a background to the novel’s genesis was a relationship I attempted with a chap who divided his time between the East End and a beautiful, unheated cottage near Wisbech. For months it seemed I was either waiting miserably by a phone that never rang or shivering around his cottage, feeling badly in the way. If anything convinced me to prolong my humiliation as long as I did, it was the landscape out there, that weird, haunted landscape, with its vast horizons, sinisterly imprisoned waterways and extraordinarily grand churches.
The Roundel was an exercise in pure wish fulfilment on my part. It does exist, in a way, though with a different name and in a completely different landscape. A La Ronde lies on the outskirts of Exmouth and is now in the care of the National Trust, but it is very much the Georgian house that I describe, complete with its labour- and heat-saving circular structure, and its odd history of having been designed by spinsters for the use of spinsters. I had the great good luck to be shown round it, months before the National Trust subjected it to the inevitable tidying away of all the ugly but fascinating accretions of its history, by the last of these indomitable Parminter women. I’ve never forgotten the way she turned from showing me the pictures her bored, respectable ancestors had made with their own hair to proudly displaying the practical jerkin she had made from rabbits she had shot and skinned herself. I suspect elements of her crept into my portrayal of Dr Pertwee …
Read On
Have You Read?
Other titles by Patrick Gale
The Whole Day Through
When forty-something Laura Lewis is obliged to abandon a life of stylish independence in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester, it seems all romantic opportunities have gone up in smoke. Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional yardstick by which she has judged every man since.
Are they brave enough to take this second chance at the lasting happiness which fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the need, instilled in childhood, to do the right thing?
Notes from an Exhibition
Gifted artist Rachel Kelly is a whirlwind of creative highs and anguished, crippling lows. She’s also something of an enigma to her husband and four children. So when she is found dead in her Penzance studio, leaving behind some extraordinary new paintings, there’s a painful need for answers. Her Quaker husband appeals for information on the internet. The fragments of a shattered life slowly come to light, and it becomes clear that bohemian Rachel has left her children not only a gift for art – but also her haunting demons.
‘Thought-provoking, sensitive, humane … by the end I had laughed and cried and put all his other books on my wish list’
Daily Telegraph
Rough Music
As a small boy, Julian is taken on what seems to be the perfect Cornish summer holiday. It is only when he becomes a man – seemingly at ease with love, with his sexuality, with his ghosts – that the traumatic effects of that distant summer rise up to challenge his defiant assertion that he is happy and always has been.
‘Hugely compelling … Rough Music is an astute, sensitive and at times tragically uncomfortable meditation on sex, lies and family … a fabulously unnerving book’
Independent on Sunday
Tree Surgery for Beginners
Lawrence Frost has neither father nor siblings, and fits so awkwardly into his worldly mother’s life he might have dropped from the sky. Like many such heroes, he grows up happier with plants than people. Waking one morning to find himself branded a wife-beater and under suspicion of murder, his small world falls apart as he loses wife, daughter, liberty, livelihood and, almost, his mind. A darkly comic fairy tale for grown-ups.
‘The book is one of [Gale’s] best: a fluently constructed narrative underpinned by excellent characterisation. Running through it all is the theme of redemption; and the hero’s journey from despair to hope makes a stirring odyssey for the reader’
Sunday Telegraph
A Sweet Obscurity
At nine years old, Dido has never known what it is like to be part of a proper family. Eliza, the clever but hopeless aunt who has brought her up, can’t give her the normal childhood she craves.
Eliza’s ex, Giles, wants Dido back in his life, but his girlfriend has other ideas. Then an unexpected new love interest for Eliza causes all four to re-evaluate everything and sets in motion a chain of events which threatens to change all their lives.
‘Gale’s most questioning, ambitious work. It amuses and startles. A Sweet Obscurity is worth every minute of your time’
Independent
The Cat Sanctuary
Torn apart by a traumatic childhood, sisters Deborah and Judith are thrown back together again when Deborah’s diplomat husband is accidentally assassinated. Judith’s lover, Joanna, the instigator of this awkward reunion, finds that as the sisters’ murky past is raked up, so too is her own, and the three women become embroiled in a tangle of passion and recrimination.
‘The Cat Sanctuary is a book with claws. It has a soft surface – a story set in sloping Cornish countryside, touching on love, families and forgiveness, delivered in a gentle, straightforward prose-but from time to time it catches you unawares. Scratch the surface, suggests Gale, and you draw blood’
The Times
If You Loved This, You Might Like …
Other fiction touching on AIDS and bereavement, suggested by Patrick Gale:
A Home at the End of the World
Michael Cunningham
A three-edged love affair between boyhood friends Jonathan and Bobby and Jonathan’s eccentric New York roommate, Clare, spirals off in a direction none of them could have predicted.
The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket
John Weir
One of the first and best American novels to come out of the gay community’s AIDS crisis.
The Magician’s Assistant
Ann Patchett
When her gay best friend-cum-magician-employer and his adorable lover die, Sabine is left with no job, a spookily well-trained rabbit and a lot of questions about the past he always kept secret from her. The tough answers lie in a journey to Nebraska, unexpected love and a lot of snow …
Was
Geoff Ryman
Ryman weaves together the stories of the young Judy Garland, the wretchedly abused girl who is the unwitting inspiration for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and Jonathan, a young gay man dying from AIDS and convinced that the film he has watched every Christmas holds the answers he needs … Extraordinary stuff.
Night Swimmer
Joseph Olshan
Olshan’s elliptical response to the AIDS crisis was this elegiac novel about a man obsessively haunted by memories of a lover who drowned during one of their regular moonlit swims together. Ten years later, is he man enough to take a second chance on happiness?
Find Out More
USEFUL WEBSITES
www.galewarning.org
Patrick Gale’s own website in which you can find out about his other books, read review coverage, post your own reviews, leave messages and contact other readers. There are also diary listings to alert you to Patrick’s broadcasts or appearances and a mailing list you can join.
www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-alaronde
The National Trust’s webpage devoted to A La Ronde, the model for The Roundel.
www.tht.org.uk and www.crusaid.org.uk
The websites of the Terence Higgins Trust and Crusaid, the UK’s two chief AIDS charities, where you can both learn more about AIDS and HIV, support the charities and even find out how to become a volunteer like Belgian Agnes!
Epilogue
Myra had learned relatively early in life that it was a delusion to believe that age was entirely chronological. Stasis was ageing, as was too much belief in duty or one’s own importance to others. Having children was ageing also, presumably because it demanded all three. After her years in California, the English felt old to her. This was not just because they put less faith than Angelenos in plastic surgery. There was a certain immobility about them, and a horror of change. She disliked the phrase ‘You’re as old as you feel’ – which seemed bossy and judgemental – but she had long since bitten through to its kernel of truth. She had stayed young because she had never held on to anything, not even to her nationality. With each divorce she had lost friends. With each marriage she had found new ones. She had been burgled times without number. Jewellery, jobs, religions, houses, men and telephone numbers; they all slipped through her fingers with time. She enjoyed what she had when she had it, but she would no more try to keep it by her side than she would think to live on only one lungful of air. She had never sunbathed, she drank at least a litre of water a day, she had never given birth and she always slept eight hours in every twenty-four, without a pillow. The only plastic surgery she had purchased, beyond a few little tucks around the eyes that she regarded as no more than routine maintenance, had been breast implants after the humiliation of her third divorce, and these had caused such an uplift in her popularity among casting directors and public alike that she had never regretted them.
Myra took upheaval as the opening, not the slamming shut, of a cosmic door. Her last-minute excision from the series had been a shock, a horrendous betrayal, but where some of her contemporary rivals might have let it drive them into a downward spiral to the detox clinic, here she was forming her own production company. She had recently camped her way through new recordings of Peter and the Wolf and Façade. Now she was negotiating with a sweet pair of pop musicians, young enough to be her grandchildren, to perform a sultry speaking role on their new hit single and appear in its promotional video.
Seeing Edward again, however, had proved a rudely chronological jolt to her survivalist philosophy. For a start, his participation in the research for her biography had surprised her. She had given him little thought over the years beyond what was required to remember his birthdays. She had always recalled their affair with a vague fondness as she imagined he did. She assumed that he, too, would have passed on to pastures new by now. She had no idea that he would still feel rancour towards her, much less that he would have hoarded her every scribbled billet doux to keep the emotion alive. The revelation of the affair had brought her a new distinction. The other members of what she privately referred to as The Dino Club – as in Palaeontology, not Dean Martin – had only affairs with athletes and other actors to boast of, or the occasional president or minor royal. Composers, like painters, were in a different league. To be an acknowledged muse was to gain a more exalted immortality than that of the commonplace, celluloid variety. Her agent had been extremely impressed by the new angle, and had been all for hiring a publicist to hatch up stories of a romantic rekindling of the now prestigious flame. She had scotched that idea, of course, and coolly defused any rumours she found circulating among her neighbours up on Mulholland Drive. But her surprise at the importance with which Teddy still invested her, albeit as a monster in his past, made her newly interested in him. She listened to the discs of his new music, not always with understanding, but not without pleasure either. She read profiles of him. She tried, without success, to catch him on the telephone and found that her failures – polite conversations with his granddaughter and the tantalisingly brief sound of his voice on his answering machine – only fed her curiosity. Several months after her return to London, she was shyly approached by his obviously pregnant granddaughter at an AIDS benefit in a West End theatre, any hesitancy she displayed about the honorary chairwomanship was feigned with difficulty.
Teddy had aged far more obviously than she, but she expected this, indeed welcomed it, in a man. When she had first known him, she had felt very much the older, more sophisticated lover, at pains to hide her vulnerability to the casual promptness of his lust. Even had her career not demanded it, she would have had to make the break with him sooner or later; if she had waited for him to tire of her, it would have left the kind of wound that never would have healed. Now, curiously, she knew the situation to be reversed, now that they had sat face to face across a restaurant table, now that she had felt him hand her, once again, into a London taxi. He was spry, dapper ev
en, but it was obvious he felt himself the older of the two, and she was attracted by her power to enchant, indeed to wound him.
But wounding was the last thing on her mind. What had bothered her throughout her fitting, her second meeting with her agent and the young pop stars, and an incognito visit to her parents’ graves in North London, and what had struck her afresh as she had made her entrance into the Opera House foyer and let him lead her to sit beside him, was that he made her want to age at last. He made her want to let go, stop making the effort, put down roots. He made her want to become an Englishwoman again.
‘I wonder,’ she found herself saying aloud, as the hairdresser worked on her in her hotel room in preparation for the fundraising party at The Roundel, ‘should I let the blonde go finally? Let the white come through? What do you think?’
‘If we did it very, very gradually,’ he said judiciously, standing behind her shoulder to look at her face in the looking glass, ‘it could be very stylish, even flattering. We could leave the cut exactly as it is, but just let in a long streak, like so.’
‘Not just yet, though,’ she added hastily. ‘Maybe next month.’
She had pulled herself back, but the brink was closer now, she had peered over the edge and she suspected that the fall would be sweet and relaxing, like the long silent falling that recurred in her dreams.
Ordinarily she would have used her driver for the evening, maybe even paid her dresser to travel with her, but Teddy had suggested she stay beyond the party, for the whole weekend, and she wanted to keep her options open. She was late leaving London. The only half-way decent car available had a stick-shift gearbox and she had some difficulty remembering how to drive with such a thing. Alison’s invitation gave crystal clear directions for finding the house, however, and a little map, so at least Myra was spared the indignity of having to stop to ask for directions and end up autographing road atlases.