Rough Music

by Patrick Gale

  This holiday had been her idea. Inspired by an advertisement in the Sunday newspaper, goaded by a particularly maddening combination of glorious weather and no social prospects, she made her demand over supper and was astonished to hear John accept with the sole proviso that they could not travel before the last days of August and she and Julian would have to cope on their own for the second week. She had spent the intervening weeks in a fever of anticipation. A whole fortnight in a house by the sea, a house without guards, prisoners, the unremitting male gaze! A whole fortnight away from Wandsworth’s dull routine! But now that the adventure was upon her she found herself oddly shy at the thought of having John around her day after day, at the novelty of seeing him in something other than a suit. She knew Julian would let them have lie-ins. She hoped. She hoped for many things.

  The value of marrying young—she could see this now—was that one had few if any points of comparison with which to gauge the success of one’s marriage. But the problem with marrying young was the same. Married at eighteen, a mother at nineteen, Frances was beginning, at twenty-eight, to mistrust what she had taken for an approximation of perfect happiness. During the summer term just past, as well as taking up the piano with a vengeance, she had been filling her sonless hours by helping out at a church kindergarten three days a week for pin money. Her colleague there, and the first friend she had made in Wandsworth independently of John, was Beverly Thomas. Beverly affected astonishment that Frances had married so young. She was not sure, she claimed, that she wanted to marry at all. She was pretty and had boyfriends she liked to discuss in suggestive detail while supervising the paddling pool or sandpit but she claimed to relish her freedom too much to settle down just yet. She was eased in this by a trust fund as well as the Pill and John had suggested, rather cattily, that Beverly’s boyfriends remained keen precisely because there was little threat of her demanding any formal proposals from them. Bravado or no, Beverly’s accounts of her love life inevitably made Frances examine her own, as did the crude magazines she insisted on passing on to her like so many evangelical tracts for a brash new faith. Things Every Man Should Know notwithstanding, Frances had thought she and John were fairly normal. Now she began to realize that something must be wrong.

  Lovemaking seemed to be painful, brief and even frightening. Naturally modest, she had never seen him naked or paraded herself naked before him. She was sure he would be deeply shocked if she once suggested he leave off his pajamas. John always turned the lights out first then stole upon her like a silent assassin. It happened about once a week, with no preamble and no discussion afterward. He usually muttered an apology when he was through, which was nice, and kissed her tenderly. Her mother had warned her that men were beasts and this painful sating of themselves, presumably, was what she had meant. It was not so bad once she got used to it, indeed she would probably have missed it if he stopped. Nonverbal communication was honest because beyond cleverness or guile and in nonverbal terms, he plainly needed her, as a hungry boy needed bread.

  But now, through Beverly and her wretched magazines, Frances discovered that she was meant to be enjoying lovemaking as much as him. She did not betray her simplicity, for she felt far too stupid, as though she had been caught out in ignorance of the proper use of a knife and fork. She listened, however, imbibed, and did her best to practice what she learned. To no avail. She was coming to accept that she was what the magazines called frigid, one of those benighted females who could not enjoy sex. For the next week, however, she would persevere. At the risk of shocking him, she would encourage him to approach her night after night. For she wanted another child desperately, and not merely to please her mother. (Her brothers had sired a bounty of grandchildren.) Purely, selfishly, she wanted a daughter. In the kindergarten she had caught herself favoring the girls over the boys, caressing this one’s ringlets as she beavered over a toy oven, encouraging that one to sit on her lap for a story. If her need could only be assuaged by answering his, then so be it.

  The long journey to Cornwall was mapped out in old market towns. Dorchester, Ilminster, Exeter, Okehampton. Ever cautious and mistrustful of her (actually splendid) map-reading prowess, John always used the AA’s route-charting service. A small sheet of paper duly sent by the organization was now clamped in the ashtray lid. Frances ticked off the still sleeping towns with a pencil as they passed through each. She drove fast, far faster and more surely than John, who had learned to drive on a tank and taken no lessons since. Childishly, she wanted to surprise him with how far they had traveled while he slept. But it was Julian who woke first, mumbling soon after dawn that he needed to spend a penny. Shushing him, she pulled into a field entrance and walked round to release him from the back. As he stood, shivering in his pajamas, to water some cow parsley, at once hunched and self-important, his father’s soft-eyed miniature, she felt her eyes grow heavy. She tucked Julian back into bed, stilling the excitement that threatened to bubble up, so that he might sleep again, then slipped the side door open. John was still sound asleep.

  “Darling?” She caressed his hair and he frowned in his slumber. Watching, Julian giggled. “Ssh!” she told him. “It’s hours before we get anywhere.”

  “Where’s Lady Percy?”

  “Fast asleep. Now ssh. Darling?” John woke with a start then relaxed, seeing her, and she wondered whether, like her, he suffered dreams too disturbing to avow. She smiled down at him, unable as ever to resist the temptation to reach out and smooth away with her thumb the anxious crease between his eyes. “Your turn,” she murmured.

  BLUE HOUSE

  Will’s mother was playing patience in the conservatory, dimly aware of her husband tidying away lawn clippings beyond the open door. The air was thick with the unsummery richness of roasting beef and potatoes. She dealt card upon card for several minutes before realizing that the reason it was not coming out was that she had only four aces. Then she remembered that there was no ace of squares and saw that she was having one of what she and John had taken to quaintly calling her bad days. She shuffled the cards back together. She knew there were only four suits. Of course she did. Wherever had the idea of a fifth one come from? It was characteristic that rather than despair or seek to tidy the problem away, she confronted it head-on and asked questions of it. As she had done with dreams since reading the Jung book Will had given her for her fiftieth, she looked for significance in her misreadings and spontaneous fabrications.

  “Square,” she asked aloud. “Why on earth square?”

  “What?” John had come in and was obediently wiping his shoes on the mat. The tang of mown grass he brought with him cut through the smell of roasting meat.

  “Cards,” Frances told him, adding, “nothing,” when she saw his worried face. She could never look at him without thinking how unfair it was that he, twelve years her senior, should be aging so well when she was aging so disastrously.

  “You’re having a bad day, aren’t you,” he said. “Cup of tea?”

  “Why not? I’ll get it.”

  “No no. Stay put. I’m there.” He paused on his way to the kitchen to ask, “Is supper meant to be cooking now?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s barely five.”

  “Oh hell!”

  “Could you turn it off and start it again later?”

  “I suppose so. Not really. Oh hell.” She heard him proceed to the kitchen, open and close the oven, then turn it off.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” he called back. “Don’t worry. You can finish it off when Will gets here.” He filled the kettle, humming to himself, and stayed in the kitchen. He would be leaning against the sink, washing his hands in that slow, methodical way he had. When she next saw him, his fingers would be as clean as a surgeon’s.

  She saw tears splash on to the card table and wiped crossly at her cheeks with her blouse. “Don’t worry,” she repeated.

  “What?” he called back, hearing as sharp as ever.

  “Nothing.” She was hot. She ne
eded air. She thrust herself upright, ignoring the twinge in her dodgy knee. “I must go swimming tomorrow. It helps my knee. Nothing hurts when I’m swimming.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She strode into the garden and down to the Bross so she could stand in her favorite place, out on the landing stage, and fume.

  How could he say not to worry? She was like a woman fallen in quicksand and people kept telling her not to worry. Never mind, they said. It doesn’t matter really. She called them by the wrong name or turned up to lunch a day early and they said honestly it couldn’t matter less. As though she might be anxious that she had given offense or caused inconvenience, when all that was on her mind was that her brain was sliding into terminal, premature decline.

  Some memory loss she could cope with. She had long ago accepted that memory was like a pair of hands and could only carry so much at a time; you forgot something but that left space for you to pick up and remember something else. Besides, Sandy had taught her that, like an obsolete computer, she retained a stolid but still functioning search mechanism. “When you can’t remember a name,” he said, “pretend your brain is a librarian and send it off in search of it then get on with something else and don’t fret. It may take a while but then suddenly it’ll come up with what you were searching for.”

  What she could not bear was the deterioration in her powers of reasoning.

  She had suffered the stroke out of the blue, while buying shoes. She was trying on a pair which pinched slightly. She bent over to see if she could loosen them at all then suddenly felt dreadfully sick and faint and keeled over, toppling a whole rack of the things she had clutched at for support on her way down. She lay on the floor, convinced she was about to be sick, feeling as though she were the center around which the shop was slowly spinning. There was a terrible fuss. Sales assistants trying to make her sit up and put her head between her legs. Customers offering advice. When she found she could not speak and that her right side refused to move, she gave up, assuming she was about to die and distantly amused because she happened to be wearing brand-new Marks and Sparks underwear Poppy had helped her choose.

  Death apparently had other treats in store for her however, for she came round in a hospital room with her family all about her, wearing a strange nightdress and with the tight shoes she had been trying on and had not paid for tucked under a chair. The paralysis passed and her speech returned in hours. Everyone assured her she looked just the same but she was convinced one side of her face had slackened. “What would you know?” she told Poppy. “You just see an old woman. But when it’s your own face you can tell. I look drunk, I tell you.”

  It was more depressing than frightening. Overnight, although she was only sixty, she became someone people worried about. Her independence felt curtailed by the concern of others. In the past, “Do you think you should?” had always goaded her on to do the inadvisable. Now the question planted a small, prickling doubt. Little by little, blunder by blunder, it became apparent that the stroke had hastened into motion a process she did not care to name, even when she could remember its medical title. Some days she was fine but on others it was as though she had been force-fed cooking sherry in her sleep and woken sozzled. She would call her husband Mervyn or call Will Mary. Her body clock would go briefly haywire so that she found herself preparing for bed when they had just finished lunch. Worst of all were the panic attacks, as unexpected as they were vindictive. She would become quite dissociated from herself.

  “Who’s that woman in the bed with us?” she had once asked John in a tone of quiet concern.

  Poppy became indignant when she voiced her fears. “You’re far too young yet. Dad’s much older than you and he’s fine.”

  “But all the women in our family go doolally. Granny did.”

  “That was drink.”

  “It wasn’t. Then her mother went when she was only sixty-five. They shut her away in that place in Esher.”

  “Listen. I’ll get you a test you can do. I saw it in Sandy’s waiting room. If you’re so worried.”

  Poppy reappeared days later with a small booklet entitled Senility, Memory Loss and Alzheimer’s and made her complete the questionnaire at the back. Ever cautious, she did not hand over the whole booklet, which might have proved alarming, she merely tore out the questionnaire. Striving to be as honest as she could, Frances pored over such questions as “How often do you forget close relatives’ names? Often. Sometimes. Never.” and “Do you find it hard to concentrate throughout a television program? Often. Sometimes. Never.” Promising to look up and grade the answers when she had time, Poppy had taken the questionnaire away. The result could not have been to her liking because she had yet to make a report. Or perhaps she had forgotten? As she never tired of saying, brains began to die off at seventeen and everyone suffered memory loss with time. This was unconvincing in the mouth of someone who not only remembered everybody’s birthdays and their children’s names but even what she gave them to eat when they last came to dinner and who they sat by. Poppy kept lists in a small leather book in her desk.

  “Here.” John held out a tray.

  “Thanks.” She helped herself. He set the tray on the nearby bench and came to stand beside her, munching. Two rowing eights sped by toward Barrowcester, barked at through a megaphone by a cyclist on the farther towpath. A red dog was with the cyclist. It stopped to sniff something and lift its leg, then raced to catch up. A barge piled with compacted rubbish glided past the other way. The tide was high. Brown water swirled around the posts of the landing stage making small sucking noises. “Would you be all right on your own?” she asked.

  “What? Don’t be silly.”

  “No, but would you? Well of course you would.”

  “There’s no need—”

  “Don’t pretend there’s nothing wrong.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I can’t bear it.”

  “I said I won’t. Drink your tea.”

  She sipped. His voice was always so equable now, never seemed to lose its equilibrium. When did he get to be so calm? Had he always been like this? Suddenly her biscuit seemed huge and impossibly dry. She tossed it to some ducks who fell on it with such savagery it barely had time to get wet. “Promise me something,” she said, staring at the thumping wings and lashing bills.

  “What?”

  “You won’t try to be noble when it gets bad.”

  “It’s not going to.”

  “Now you’re being silly. Promise you’ll put me in a home when I get really doolally.”

  “If you’re truly doolally you won’t know if I have or not.”

  “So promise.”

  “You won’t know if I’ve kept my word.” He was actually smiling. A dry smile over the last of his tea.

  “Don’t tease me,” she snapped.

  He stopped smiling. “I promise.”

  “Thank you. It’s just that—”

  “Please don’t let’s talk about it anymore,” he said, turning to deadhead a late rose. “I find it quite extraordinarily depressing.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Will should be here soon. What are you giving him to eat?”

  “The house is already full of it.”

  “Of course. I forgot. All right, all right. So I’m not the only one.” He smiled again, more warmly this time.

  “You don’t have to go out, you know,” she said.

  They turned as one away from the river and started to walk back up the garden’s shallow slope.

  “I know. But aren’t you going to play gin rummy?”

  “I doubt it. Aren’t those lovely this year! Such a success.”

  “Schizophrenics.”

  “Even I know they’re not called that. They’re Schizostylis. Schizostylis Jennifer. Lovely.” She smiled with private triumph. “I thought that pink would be too hot but I only seem to notice it at this time of day, when they’re in the shade.”

  “I’ll still go,” he said, ignoring her feat
of memory. “It’s nice for you to have him to yourself.”

  “And it’s nice for you to get out. You didn’t say it. Didn’t need to. I know.”

  He refused to rise to this. “I’ll probably go for a walk along the towpath to Arkfield and back then have a quick drink.”

  “You needn’t make it quick. Enjoy yourself.”

  There was a “hallo” from inside the house and Will appeared bearing a bottle of wine and a large pot of basil he had promised her from the pannier market. It struck her afresh how the young man she had always thought looked so like her was maturing into the very image of his father. Look! she wanted to say. Can’t you see?

  But John was not the sort of man to notice a thing like a family resemblance. Having thanked them again for the birthday present, which she had again forgotten giving him, Will poured himself a cup of tea and walked around the garden with them both, stopping regularly to admire or be introduced to this plant or that and asking for a cutting of an interesting curvy-leafed sage they had found in an open day somewhere recently. John then muttered about getting off for his walk before the best of the light had gone.

  “Before you go,” Will said. “What would you think of a holiday in Cornwall?”

  “Lovely, but we’ve paid to have the house repainted so we couldn’t really think of—”

  “No, no. It would be my treat. Well, Sandy’s treat really. Didn’t they tell you?” John looked at her. She shook her head. Will went on. “They booked me a seaside cottage for a whole fortnight. But it’s really soon. Week after next. We’d just have to drop everything and go. Please say yes. I’ll drive and cook. Ma can just put her feet up and go for swims and Dad can walk himself silly on the coast path. It’s literally right on the beach so we can hear the sea from our beds. And Sandy says he’ll come and bring the boys during the second week to give Poppy time off to go and learn squash. Look. I’ve got a picture somewhere.” He burrowed in his rucksack and proudly produced a photograph. “They found it in the Observer apparently.”