The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  ‘You could have a whole suite of rooms to yourself. There’s room for your piano and anything else you’d need. There’s a pool. You could use one of the cars whenever you needed. This place is going to get pretty hectic once it takes off. It won’t be exactly restful any more.’

  ‘I know. I confess I was worrying about that.’

  ‘You could come and go as you pleased. I mean, LA can be kind of nightmarish, but there’s always the beach house outside San Francisco if you wanted a change of scenery. I’ve often thought of getting rid of Mulholland Drive and moving up there altogether. The people are a bit more civilised, only it gets kind of damp and cold in winter, not that you’d notice after living here.’ She fell silent, worried she had said too much already, worried she was rushing him. He waited a moment, mulling her words over.

  ‘Is this a proposition?’ he asked at last.

  ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘Only in a way. I mean. It could be. If you wanted it to. Damn!’

  ‘What?’ he touched her hand.

  ‘I hadn’t planned it this way at all.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’d planned on – well, never mind.’

  ‘We should go in,’ he said, ‘and find you something to eat. You’re getting cold.’

  ‘So are you.’

  They stood to go in, and she assumed that this was his way of brushing her proposal aside without subjecting her to the insult of a direct refusal. But then he turned and brushed her face with his hand and kissed her, and suddenly they were sitting down again. At least, he was sitting down, and she was sort of crouched across him. She had kissed numerous men during the course of her stint on Mulroney Park, many of them tanned, rock-bodied creatures nearly twenty years her junior. If the opinion polls were any indication, she had kissed and fondled some of the most desired men in America, and yet those kisses had meant nothing. The men were always worried about their hair, she about her camera angles, and they were always watched by some forty crew members. Sprawled on a bench, in the cold, necking, unobserved, with a man who, however slender, looked every year of his considerable age, she felt a real, keen excitement. So, decades of practice informed her, did he. She thanked God for HRT.

  ‘My studio’s just over there,’ he murmured, holding the back of her neck, sliding his other hand up beneath her coat. ‘That’s where you’ll be sleeping.’

  ‘Mm,’ she managed. ‘Good.’

  ‘We could go there now. Just take a look.’

  ‘Mm. No. Teddy!’

  Remembering where she was and why, she slid off him and stood up, shaking out her coat and frantically tidying her hair. She seemed to have lost her scarf somewhere.

  ‘Please.’

  He stood close to her, hands encircling her waist.

  ‘Later,’ she said. ‘Later, Edward!’

  She took his hands from her waist and slipped her arm firmly through his.

  ‘Edward. Eds. Teddy. Grandpa. Eddy. Dad,’ he said. ‘No-one ever calls me by my real name.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘No. Of course I don’t. It hasn’t been my name since I was a child. It just struck me how funny it was that instead of one name I’ve ended up with six.’

  Myra tugged on his arm.

  ‘I’m famished, Eli,’ she said. ‘And poor Alison will be wondering where we’ve got to. Feed me.’

  The next hour or so were blurred by her anticipation of pleasure. She ate, drank, joined in conversations, was introduced to countless people, but all the time she was thinking about where he was in the room, whether he could see her, whether he was coming back to her side. The blurring made her task easier, somehow. She was every inch the charming, modest patron of the charity. She wowed the impressionable locals with her finely judged blend of glamour and normality. She listened to sweet old ladies’ memories of films of hers she remembered in less detail than they seemed to. She camped it up with groups of boys and queened it among leather-jacketed girls, allowing them to fetch her drinks and light her cigarettes. For the first time in years she drank wine without water.

  Alison introduced her to her mother, Miriam, who she knew full well had always detested her, and Myra turned the full wattage of her attention upon her, watching her melt. She wondered what the uneasily respectable woman would say if she had chanced upon the little tableau her elders and betters had presented on the garden bench earlier. Passing behind her later, it amused her to hear Miriam commenting, ‘Oh but I think she’s beautiful for her age. And you get no idea from seeing her on screen that she’ll be so little! Frankly I’d expected to be terrified, seeing her after all this time, but I wasn’t frightened at all!’

  She met Miriam’s husband too. His eyes kept starting from his head at things he saw in the crowd around him. Evidently drinking heavily so as to cope with it all, he had had enough to become gushing and indiscreet. Swaying slightly as he talked, and spraying her lightly with crumbs of the vol-au-vent he was eating, he confided that Miriam faithfully watched her every film and series episode when she knew there was no-one but him in the house to catch her at it.

  ‘Recently she’s even started boasting about the times you came with Edward to visit her in boarding school. But you never did, did you?’

  ‘Whatever helps her through the night,’ Myra replied lightly and, after a moment’s pause, he laughed.

  What she saw of the house was bizarre; a big almost perfectly circular double height hall with a landing running around outside the first floor rooms to form a gallery and, high overhead, a glass dome. She saw no more than this because one of the first laws of saving energy while party going, she had learned long before, was to remain in one area and let other people do all the walking. Paper streamers had been looped through the old wooden banisters and waved to and fro in the warm air rising from the guests. A log fire was burning in a big grate. She saw Sam standing alone, staring out of a window on to the darkness and watched Alison approach with a pregnant woman’s rolling gait, touch his arm and offer him a drink. He shook his head, she touched his arm again and walked away but as she left his side, he gravely gazed after her for a few seconds before another guest approached, with Sandy, and drew him back into conversation. As Alison climbed gingerly on to a stool above everyone’s heads and clapped her hands for silence, Myra found Teddy at her side again. Under cover of the people pressing forward about them to listen, he took her hand, squeezed and released it, all without catching her eye. She had only recently seen photographs of Sally when the biography had gone to press, but they had been amateur, unrevealing snaps. Teddy had said, however, that Alison strongly resembled her. Listening, Myra studied the girl, looking for the dead doctor who had never really been her rival yet, in a sense, would always be. Alison was thin, long-legged. She was not beautiful, certainly, but there was luminosity about her and a set to her brow and chin that suggested bravery and determination. Wrapping her in imaginary chain mail, picturing a wind-flapped banner in one of her arms and a golden sword in the other, Myra saw her as Saint Joan. She was not a born public speaker-her voice wavered with nerves and she tended to swallow the ends of her sentences – but she would learn, simply because she now had to.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Alison said. ‘Friends. I won’t bang on, because this is meant to be a party, not a rally. Just two things. I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Myra Toye, our honorary chairwoman and, to quote this morning’s Guardian, our dea ex machina.’ She was briefly interrupted by loud cheers and whistles. ‘Miss Toye may not realise it, but simply having her name on our letterhead, quite apart from her widely publicised presence at the performance of Job the other night, is already doing wonders for the seriousness with which the various health authorities and our larger sister charities are taking us. Mulroney Park’s foolish loss is our priceless gain. There’s now no question that, along with the money from the sale of Jamie’s Saxon statue to the Sadlerian, we’ve raised enough capital for the builders and decorators to move in and start work next week.’ More c
heers. ‘Our first guests have clearly already started spreading the word among their local social services networks, even though they were staying here under pretty rough and ready circumstances, and we now have booking requests stretching as far away as next Easter. The problem now, of course, is manpower.’

  ‘So try womanpower!’ somebody shouted and there was laughter.

  ‘Whatever,’ Alison said with a smile to the shouter. ‘We’re going to need more volunteers. The more volunteers we have, even for mundane things like picking guests up from the station, ironing pillowcases or helping in the garden, the more flexibility we will be able to offer. We’re not rich. We can’t afford to pay anyone beyond the skeleton staff we already have. So if you live in the area, do, please, spread the word. Now. Enough speechifying. Thank you, thank you for all your work and support and MONEY, and thank you, Grandpa, for giving us Job –’

  ‘And thank you Jamie! a boy called out.

  Shocked, Myra touched Teddy’s hand again. Alison faltered, blanched, but used the interruption brilliantly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding, the catch in her voice clearly genuine. She drew a breath, unconsciously clasping a hand to her unborn child. ‘Yes. Thank you, Jamie.’

  She was helped down off her stool amid warm applause, then clambered back on to it to add, ‘Oh. Yes. Mrs Sheldon says to add that more coffee’s on its way for those that want it, and the bar has moved back to the barn where the band is waiting for you to start dancing again, now that you’ve all learned how it’s done!’

  There was a short flurry of autograph hunters after all. Teddy watched, with wry amusement in his eyes, as Myra borrowed a pen and signed the scraps of paper held out to her.

  ‘I had no idea it was really you,’ one woman exclaimed. ‘I thought my husband was pulling my leg.’

  ‘Didn’t recognise me without the gold lamé, huh?’ Myra cackled, briefly donning her Mulroney Park character and raising a little ripple of pleasure from her devotees.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ asked the parson, who had earlier confessed to being a closet authority on British costume dramas from the ’forties and ’fifties.

  ‘My dear,’ Myra told him, mockingly stooping her shoulders, ‘I’m going to plant vegetables somewhere and grow old with dignity.’

  She stepped graciously away towards Teddy and the fans knew better than to follow.

  ‘Good speech,’ she told him. ‘But what the hell’s a dea ex machina?’

  ‘A good fairy,’ he said, relieving her of her empty coffee cup. ‘Properly speaking, it’s the goddess who intervened at the end of some Greek dramas to make everything right. Like Athena at the end of the Oresteia.’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t asked.’

  ‘Are you going to fade out on us now to get your beauty sleep?’

  ‘Are you mad? I want to dance!’

  ‘Oh good.’

  The hall was emptying rapidly as guests hurried out, exclaiming against the cold breeze, eager to return to the fun in the barn. Myra held him back with a gentle pressure on his sleeve.

  ‘Teddy I’m not really a goddess, you know. This face is held together by little more than good will, and I get ladders in my stockings like everyone else.’

  ‘I know.’ He smiled. ‘I remember.’

  ‘You remember too much,’ she told him.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked, seeing her turning back.

  ‘I left my coat,’ she said. ‘Go on. I’ll catch you up. Go dance with Alison.’

  ‘Myra Toye, I love you.’

  ‘Oh poo. Go on.’

  She pushed him gently out of the door and walked back across the hall. She had seen, Teddy had not noticed, the boy, Sam, standing alone back at the window where she had watched him earlier, half hidden behind the curtain. His forehead was leant against the glass. He watched the last few guests, Teddy among them, walk down the short gravel drive, out of the gateway and across the road to the barn. The wind was lifting. A gust caused the coloured lightbulbs to swing quite violently between the trees. The house was quiet now, though hot and airless from the recent crush. Water splashed into a sink and some helpers talked brightly as they stacked plates down in the kitchen.

  ‘Aren’t you coming to dance again?’ Myra asked.

  He stayed exactly where he was, only shook his head slightly.

  ‘You were good at it.’

  ‘Not really my thing,’ he muttered.

  ‘But you seemed to be enjoying it.’

  He waited a moment or two then said, ‘I hadn’t meant to.’

  She stepped up beside him, pushing aside the curtain a little so that she too could look out at the night.

  ‘God these stars!’ she exclaimed softly. ‘Enough to break your heart.’

  ‘And don’t tell me the pain doesn’t last for ever,’ he said suddenly, pursuing his own track of thought. ‘Because I know.’

  Myra turned, leaning her back on the window to face into the room, as though guarding him from sudden approaches. She wondered whether to tell him Alison loved him, but bit her tongue. There was time enough for him to notice. Time enough for matchmakers to interfere once the mysterious child was born. There was always time.

  ‘When my third husband died – George – I didn’t want the pain to stop,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘It was as though if I stopped hurting I would have stopped loving him.’

  ‘I thought he was queer,’ Sam said, and she heard an edge of cruelty in his voice. ‘I read the book,’ he added.

  ‘He liked it both ways,’ she said. ‘He had a lot to give. I knew about the others. It didn’t touch me. He loved me too. He loved me so it hurt when I looked at him. The pain’s gone now but I swear if he walked through that door now I’d still crumple at the knees. I never loved anybody as much.’

  ‘Not Eddy?’

  She stopped to think.

  ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Not even Eddy.’

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘He’s down there now. Waiting for you.’

  ‘Where?’ She turned and Sam pointed to where Teddy was standing outside the barn, caught in the light spilling through its half-open door.

  ‘He’ll catch his death out there,’ she said. ‘The idiot.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to dance without you,’ he told her. ‘You’d better go and rescue him.’

  She stood there, feeling the cold radiate from the window-panes, watching Teddy stamp his feet and rub his hands together. Then her breath misted the glass and hid him from view.

  About the Author

  PATRICK GALE was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962. He spent his infancy at Wandsworth Prison, which his father governed, then grew up in Winchester. He now lives on a farm near Land’s End. As well as writing and reviewing fiction, he has published a biography of Armistead Maupin, a short history of the Dorchester Hotel and chapters on Mozart’s piano and mechanical music for H.C. Robbin Landon’s The Mozart Compendium. His most recent novel is The Whole Day Through. His new collection of short stories, Gentleman’s Relish, is published this year.

  Visit the website: www.galewarning.org

  Author’s Note

  Warmest thanks

  to Pippy Ennion, the Curé d’Arsenal, Dr Frank Heibert, Jonathan Dove, Madge, Patrick, Simon, and to everyone at Bethany, for letting me plunder their memories and expertise.

  To Michael and Moira, for all those frosty weekends in Norfolk.

  To Jonathan Warner and Charlotte Windsor, for their patience.

  To Alan Hollinghurst and Barry Goodman for their rigorous proof-reading.

  And to Fingal, for the walks on the beach.

  P.G.

  1.7.94

  Praise

  From the reviews of The Facts of Life:

  ‘A monumental feat of imagination, achingly true and beautiful. I’d be hard pressed to recall the last time a novel so totally captivated me’

  ARMISTEAD MAUPIN

  ‘It is impossible to put The Facts of Life down. A rural English block
buster. Beautifully done’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘A wonderfully readable family saga. Fifties movie stars, waspish dons and wise old women make up the supporting cast in a novel that is as straightforward as it is otherworldly – like reading Iris Murdoch without the puzzles’

  Independent

  ‘Imbued with a generosity of spirit towards all its characters. A memorable achievement’

  The Times

  ‘Well written, unerringly true and very moving, the book reveals Gale to be an unabashed romantic and a novelist of increasing accomplishment’

  Scotland on Sunday

  ‘An extraordinary blockbuster of a novel. Always fluent, Gale manages to be both brutal and witty’

  Time Out

  ‘Gale’s best and most complex novel. Gale is both a shameless romantic and hip enough to get away with it. This reads, page by page, like a superior gushy blockbuster, but has, as part of its form and subject, a sober consideration of the place of sentiment and rigour in life and art’

  New Statesman

  By the Same Author

  The Aerodynamics of Pork

  Kansas in August

  Ease

  Facing the Tank

  Little Bits of Baby

  The Cat Sanctuary

  Caesar’s Wife

  Dangerous Pleasures

  Tree Surgery for Beginners

  Rough Music

  A Sweet Obscurity

  Friendly Fire

  Notes from an Exhibition

  The Whole Day Through

  Gentleman’s Relish

  Copyright

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.4thestate.co.uk

  This Fourth Estate edition published 2009

  First published by Flamingo in 1995

  Copyright © Patrick Gale 1995, 2009

  PS Section copyright © Rose Gaete 2009, except ‘The Writing of The Facts of Life’