by Patrick Gale
He held the picture out. She looked. It was delightful. A bright blue wooden bungalow, like a proper Indian one so it was probably quite old, with a green veranda and deep purply-red geraniums in pots and what looked like lavender hedges, or was it just tamarisk, behind a green picket fence.
“Lovely,” she said. It made her think of bucket-and-spade afternoons on the Island when she was a girl. But John was grimacing, a rare look of real thunder on his face.
“Poppy thinks we’ve been there before,” Will went on, not noticing. “But I don’t remember. She didn’t realize until they sent her the picture and by then it was a firm booking. I mean, of course I remember that holiday. Well. Bits of it. But not the house. Dad? What’s up?”
“It’s only that—” John began, staring at Frances in a way that unnerved her. “You don’t remember it either, do you?” She shook her head obediently and saw he was reassured. “Well, in that case I don’t see why it should matter.” She saw the effort it cost him to lighten his expression. Extraordinary man. “But are you sure there’s no one else you’d rather …?”
“No one. Honestly.” Will grinned. “I just thought it would be fun.”
“Well in that case … Darling?”
“I can’t wait,” she said.
“That’s settled then. Thank you, Will. That’s very kind. I’ll see you both later.”
“Have a good walk.”
“Bye Dad.”
“Bye.”
And he was gone. They heard him lock the front door behind him out of force of habit then unlock it again, realizing he was shutting them in.
“Doesn’t want us to escape,” Will joked. “Shall I get us a drink?”
“Why not?” She sat back in her customary chair in the conservatory—it seemed she had sat nowhere else for months—and shuffled the cards out of habit.
“Do you mind if we eat early?” he called out from the kitchen. “I’m starving.”
She smiled at his customary tact, knowing he must be aware from the fumes that their dinner was already on its way to spoiling. She would make an effort to play cards with him after all. She hated to see him worry.
BEACHCOMBER
They stopped in Exeter to stretch their legs in the cathedral and ate an indifferent lunch in a restaurant on the edge of the Close, then stopped again in Okehampton for an ill-advised but celebratory clotted-cream tea and a walk around the castle. So, by the time they had crossed both Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor and cut up through Wadebridge to the north coast, the sun was low in the sky and Julian had passed from boredom to a premature fever pitch of anticipation and back to slackjawed dissatisfaction. One of the many disadvantages of the dormobile was that Julian ended up seated so far away that he had every excuse to shout over the thunder of the engine.
“I think Lady Percy’s dead.”
“She can’t be,” John sighed. “She’ll just be asleep.”
“She never sleeps. She’s far too quiet. I’m going to let her out.”
“No,” Frances stated. Spoil him as she might, Frances never shied away, as John did, from the full force of a blunt prohibition. “We’re nearly there. Ten more minutes. Look. There’s the sea!” She unfurled the smartly-headed letter from the house’s owners, which could now safely take over from the AA’s instructions fluttering on the dashboard. “So,” she read, “Follow road out of Wadebridge (do not cross bridge!) then left at top of hill, following signs to Rock then signs to Polcamel.” She wound down her window and the car filled with hot sea scents—pine needles, seaweed, salt. Ten minutes later, when they had passed a sequence of perfect beaches grouped at an estuary mouth, she read on, “Leave Polcamel, take second turning on left, skirt car park in a clockwise direction—I say, aren’t they bossy!—and take the gated track now directly ahead of you. Julian! Gate to open!”
Excited again, Julian unfastened the gate, then they followed a track so steep it must have become unusable in icy conditions. At some stage gravel had been spread, but heavy rains and traffic had carried most of it downhill. But they must have taken a wrong turning because they found themselves carried away from the promised sea, along a gorse-lined valley to a rugged manorial farmhouse John judged as Jacobean with the inevitable Victorian extensions.
“Well this isn’t it,” he said, preparing to turn round.
“I know, but isn’t it lovely,” said Frances, who had proved herself utterly fearless in the past of exploring the drives of grand country houses out of curiosity. “We can always say we’re lost.”
“Because we are!” shouted Julian. “There’s a lady coming and she looks cross.”
A middle-aged woman in summer tweeds had emerged from a walled garden. There were dachshunds yapping at her heels. She eyed the dormobile without amusement. John leaned out of his window.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “We were looking for the holiday cottage.”
“Beachcomber. It’s called Beachcomber,” Frances hissed.
“I guessed,” said the woman, still not cracking a smile and raising her voice above the yapping of the dogs. “I’m your landlady and it’s back the way you came and first on the right before the lane starts to climb. My fault really. The tamarisk needs pruning. If you need anything, don’t just turn up. There’s a telephone in the car park.” She turned on her heel but John saw her in the side mirror, standing in the garden door to watch them leave. He hoped she did not hear Julian’s flawless imitation of her accent as they pulled away.
Like most of the houses they had passed to this side of the small resort, Beachcomber dated from the early twenties. Nestling in a patch of reclaimed sand dune, it was a dark-stained clapboard bungalow effectively doubled in size by the addition of a deep wooden veranda on its three seaward sides. In contrast to most such places in the area, which were white and blue or white and black, its bargeboarding, window frames and veranda railings were a startling canary yellow.
Only one other house was visible from down here, a sprawling place on the headland. Their landlady’s lair was tucked into a fold in the valley and quite invisible. The view behind the bungalow was across steeply climbing fields of sheep—hers presumably. Ahead lay uninterrupted sand and sea. The bungalow nestled at the top of a cove at the less populous end of the broad expanse of Polcamel Strand. When, as now, the tide was high, it effectively boasted a private beach.
“I wonder if she used to entertain her lovers down here, like Rebecca,” said Frances.
“She probably still does.”
“Who does?” Julian asked. “Are we there?”
“Heaven. It’s heaven,” Frances exclaimed and impulsively kissed John’s cheek. Julian had already jumped down from the dormobile, taking his cue from the silenced engine, and run up on to the veranda. “Let’s explore before we unpack. Her letter says the cleaner will have been and left the key under the mat. Do you suppose she’s always so unwelcoming?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Isn’t it more fun this way? Like breaking in? God I’m tired.” He rubbed his eyes.
“Me too,” she said. “There was a fish and chips in Polcamel and that pub up the road would probably let you get beer by the jug.”
“Mind reader.”
Exhausted, they sat on, watching Julian scamper around the veranda, peering in at each window in turn. Frances sighed. “Look at him. Do you think he’s happy?”
“Of course. Why ever shouldn’t he be? A whole fortnight by the sea. I’m quite envious. All we got at that age was my purse-lipped aunt in Lowestoft.”
“Being on his own, I mean.”
“You think we should have asked one of his little pals from school?”
“No. I meant generally.”
Before John could answer, however, Julian came racing back and tugged open his door. “Come and see. It’s lovely!” he exclaimed. “I’ve already chosen my room. It’s the little one on the end with windows on both sides like a sort of lookout tower. You wouldn’t want it anyway ’cause it’s got a single bed. Oh do come on!”
John slid down from behind the wheel into the relative cool of outside. Touched that Julian had appealed to him for once rather than his mother, he let the boy tug him by the hand across the springy, sandy turf to the bungalow.
“Steady on,” he said. “The key’s under the mat. You can let us in.”
“OK.” Julian ran ahead. Watching him scrabble for the key and fit it into the lock, he marveled at the boy’s stout self-sufficiency, the speed with which he was becoming less child than person. He was glad they had resisted asking some sort-of friend from Julian’s school. He remembered from his own boyhood how such arrangements had a way of turning sourly awry in the course of a long holiday. Besides, with no other company the boy would spend time with his father. John saw him so little in the course of a working week that this, he considered, was half the value of the seven days he had agreed to spend with them. Then, just as she came in behind him, he saw what Frances had actually been driving at. She wanted, or felt she should have, another child.
As she busied herself opening windows to dilute the paraffin smell of furniture polish, he hid his confusion as best he might. Unable to answer in even her elliptical terms, he tried to express his agreement in a show of pleasure at the truly very charming house her skill had tracked down for them. There were two good-sized bedrooms with bay windows, smaller ones to either end, a large central sitting-cum-dining room with views in two directions which had a door on to the veranda.
“Darling, it’s great. How did you tell it was this good from just a little advertisement?”
“I didn’t,” she said, evidently pleased all the same. “I got her to talk me through it room by room. Isn’t it sweet? I’ll get the bags.”
“This is my room,” Julian announced proudly, bouncing on a bed. “But if I don’t like it, can I try one of the others?”
“I don’t see why not,” John told him. “Come and help your mother. That Shakespearean guinea pig of yours is probably dying of heat.”
“Really?” The child was alarmed and John cursed his failure to gauge childish conversation properly.
“Figure of speech.”
“Oh. Well can I let her run about?”
“Don’t for God’s sake lose her.”
“I won’t.” Julian ran out to the car. John turned to watch him go and found Frances standing in the sitting room with a small case in either hand. She was grinning.
“Which shall we have?” she said. “He’s still left us with a choice.” He followed her into the nearest of the two double bedrooms. As she slung a case down on the candlewick coverlet, the bed springs twanged alarmingly. She chuckled then blushed.
“Maybe not,” he said and carried the cases across to the parallel room to their right, which had an identical view but a newer, more discreet mattress.
“Maybe that’s why she didn’t advertise it as having two doubles,” she said, shaking the folds from a dress as she hung it in the wardrobe.
I agree. I so agree, he wanted to tell her. I want another child too. But all he could muster was, “I’ll get those boxes of food in.”
She had become pregnant with Julian so swiftly that in the first months of their marriage he had worried, ironically enough, at how he was going to support the tribe he thought would inevitably follow. When no further children made their presence felt, John had guessed that, since she had managed to conceive, any problem probably lay with him.
He secretly took pills bought by mail order and read cloudily-printed pamphlets found through small announcements in the back of the Sunday papers. He tried everything from red meat and teetotalism to limiting lovemaking to a fortnightly outlet. Unable as he found himself to tell her his worries or explain any of these activities, he became stern and even withdrawn from Frances as the time for lovemaking approached. His fear that she would discover the truth and find him wanting as a husband appalled him and left him the more inhibited. He almost laughed aloud in desperation when one pamphlet suggested he persuade his wife to sit astride him, the better to spare his energies for the exertion of an efficient ejaculation. The idea of being able to hold a conversation with someone as pure as Frances about sex, still less to ask her to adopt a position anything but submissive and long-suffering, was alien to the point of the ludicrous. Now that she finally had raised the subject, however indirectly, he dared not reveal what he had known for six years lest she feel he had practiced a deceit on her, like a seller of shoddy goods.
After unpacking the dormobile, they celebrated their arrival with a swim so icy John was sure it would undo any potency the last week’s painful abstinence had stored up. Then, in the fading light, Julian yawning fiercely between them but insisting he would be up for hours yet, they walked around the headland to fetch fish and chips, a jug of powerful local ale and a bottle of lemonade. Ever the romantic, Frances found and lit hurricane lamps and they dined on the veranda, greasily fragrant newspaper spread across their laps. Shandy-drugged, Julian fell asleep on his rocking chair and barely murmured as John carried him to his elected bed and tucked him in.
In films couples always began the amorous part of the evening with prolonged and increasingly passionate kissing and John could quite see how this could stoke a woman’s amatory fire. But what had been possible, just, when they were still courting and thus barely known to one another, became less and less so as marriage deepened familiarity. Under cover of darkness and bedding, he could be a creature of urgent need and rough-mannered desires but so long as Frances could meet his eye in the seconds before his approach, he felt too much himself, too much the stiffly polite ex-army governor of HM Prison Wandsworth to do more than peck her cheek. The evening, the lit part of the evening that was, thus ended with the two of them queuing to use the bathroom and change in it—there were no dressing rooms as at home—before climbing into the unfamiliar bed, each with the sure armor of a book.
For several minutes she read her Georgette Heyer Regency romance, probably full of tight-trousered heroes behaving precisely as he could not, he the latest, rather unpromising novel from C. P. Snow. She made attempts at conversation but when steeling himself he found light conversation as impossible as heavy petting.
“We should have brought our own bedding,” she began. “These are the sort of sheets that catch on your toenails. I can tell. Who’d have thought she’d be such a cheapskate!”
“Hmm,” he said and there was a pause while they both read.
“Isn’t it heavenly to be able to lie here and listen to the sea!”
“Hmm,” he said. “Yes.” And there was a longer pause.
“Are you sleepy, darling? Shall I put the light out?”
“All right,” he said and found himself yawning in earnest. She turned out the light. “Sea air,” he added, by way of explanation. “And a jug of Doom Bar.”
“Night darling,” she said.
“Night.”
And she leaned over to kiss him, once, lightly, on the lips. As ever, he found the scent of the cream she rubbed in at bedtime powerfully erotic. “Listen to the sea,” she murmured. “Isn’t it wonderful! It sounds so close. Listen!”
For what felt like five minutes but was probably only seconds, he lay there dutifully listening to the sea but really only aware of her regular shallow breaths against his neck, where she lay curled against him. Then he could bear it no longer and he reached out to feel her thigh through her nightdress, then ran his hand up to cup one of her breasts through the lacy material that hid it. Then he rolled over and began to kiss her in earnest.
By his standards, he considered his lovemaking was remarkably expert for once. He did not drag it out for too long—it was over in five minutes (he glanced at the alarm clock)—and she didn’t cry out or anything so presumably he had managed not to hurt her. Afterward, as they lay side by side, hot beneath the prickly nylon sheets, he dared to mutter, “It would be good to have another. I mean, if we could,” and she reached for his hand and squeezed it and said:
“Darling.�
�� Then suddenly she was startled awake by something. “Oh my God! I completely forgot!”
“What?”
She turned the light on. “Post. You got an exciting-looking letter from abroad this morning and I packed it so I’d remember to give it to you and—”
“Well, can’t it wait?”
“Hang on.” She slipped across the room to where the empty suitcases were stacked beside the wardrobe. She opened the larger one, hers, and took out an envelope from the frilled pocket that lined its lid. “Here,” she said and glanced at its stamp. “From America.”
He saw no reason why he should read it now but she seemed excited so he glanced at the unfamiliar handwriting then tore the thing open. “Dear John,” he began and glanced over at the signature. “It’s from Bill Palmer,” he said, surprised.
“Becky’s Bill?”
“Who else?”
“But he never writes.”
“I know. Dear John,” he read again aloud. “Haven’t heard from you since Christmas but I hope all is well. Our little lives are in upheaval—or are about to be—since I’ve accepted a teaching post at your new university in Norwich. I was getting very aware that Skip was growing up a little too all-American and I’d always promised Becky I’d stop that happening. So when I failed to get tenure here and the offer came up, I jumped at it. So much to pack and ship over, even after we’ve given half away and sold the bulky furniture we can replace. Don’t worry, John. No heirlooms! Anyway, as it’s Skip’s first time out of the States, I’m taking her on a whirlwind tour of various friends in Europe before we turn up in England and I wondered if we could come visit during the summer holidays given that she’s never met her young cousin and London is such a key historic center etc., etc. But also, of course, because I would like to meet the three of you properly. Don’t worry if you consider this would be an imposition or inconvenient. I’m sure we can arrange something else in the course of the year. But I suggest you leave a message care of my secretary at VEA who I’ll be phoning at regular intervals. All good wishes. Bill. Good Lord, I suppose I’d better ring the woman and suggest they join us down here.”