by Patrick Gale
John was still in the throes of incongruously boyish excitement and announced, in tones that implied he would brook no alternative, that they had bought the entire small stock of basic but serviceable surfboards in a sports shop in Wadebridge and were going to try them out immediately.
“I hung your swimming things out to dry,” she told Bill.
“You didn’t have to,” he said, “but thanks,” and went to retrieve them. Julian insisted on showing her his bladeless, polystyrene board. He seemed unconvinced. She knew he would rather the money had been spent on a book.
“Very grown-up,” she told him. “I’m glad they didn’t make you get one with those nasty fins.”
“Got us crab for lunch,” John said, crossing to the kitchen with a large cardboard box, and he actually kissed her in passing.
“They’re called Malibu boards,” Julian told her precisely. “Bill knows how to use one. He said he’ll show me how to do it standing up. But I’m not worried.”
“Good,” she said and ruffled his hair so that he looked less neat and vulnerable.
Skip stamped through in her swimsuit and grabbed him quite roughly by the arm. “Come on,” she said. “That’s only a baby’s board but you can still go fast on it.”
John ran after them without a backward glance.
“You coming?”
She turned and found Bill standing in his bedroom doorway, wearing the mustard-yellow shorts. They were still damp, she saw. They clung. “I’d better get lunch ready,” she told him. “The sea’ll make you all ravenous. I’ll have a go later.”
“OK.”
“I started reading your book,” she said. “Sorry.”
“That’s OK.”
“The Updike one I mean. Not one by you. I’d finished mine and …”
“It’s OK,” he said again, grinning, and she saw she was being odd. As he pushed open the door to the veranda, she saw there was a still-livid scar across one of his shoulder blades.
They had bought live crabs. Expecting neat parcels of cooked flesh redistributed into cleaned-up shells, she opened the cardboard box and gasped absurdly to find rubber-banded claws and four pairs of stalky eyes. She slammed the lid back down in a kind of rage. She had never cooked crab before. John knew this. How dare he assume she could? It was so typical, so maddeningly typical that in his sweet, unworldly way he assumed it to be yet another standard part of feminine capability. And to think her capable of such cruelty. She had a good mind to carry them down to the shoreline and toss them one by one over the heads of the startled swimmers.
She had bought cheap Cyprus sherry to make a syllabub for supper one night. Seething, she sloshed some into a mug and sat heavily on a kitchen chair. She drank and felt better but she sat on, listening to the sounds of distant pleasure from the beach and the closer, secretive stirrings of the crabs in the box.
A pair of brown, sandy feet stomped into her field of vision.
“I’m hungry,” Skip said flatly. “What are you doing?”
“Drinking cooking sherry and failing to make lunch. Oh hell. You don’t eat meat.”
There was a pause.
“Fish doesn’t count. The water has to be at a rolling boil,” Skip said. There was a clatter as she opened and slammed a series of cupboard doors and found a high-sided pan, filled it at the sink and slapped it on to a gas ring. “There isn’t a lid but I guess we could use this baking tray thing.”
Frances sat up and in her surprise drained the last of the sherry, which really was not at all bad. “I thought you were surfing.”
“Yeah, well …” Skip began and she sat at the other chair and peered into the box at the crabs. “Julian needs to learn.” Frances heard the echo of a jeer in the way she said her son’s name.
“All boys together, then?” she asked. Skip merely nodded, stroking a crab’s impotent claw with a finger. “They’ll be tired after lunch,” Frances told her, “and we can make the fathers even sleepier with beer. Then you can teach me. How’s that?”
“OK,” Skip said. She still did not smile but the atmosphere between them discernibly lightened.
“Tell me about your mother. I only met her once.”
“She died. She fell out of a window.”
“I know but … before that.”
Skip met her gaze a moment then shrugged. “I was small,” she said. “I don’t remember much. If you’re scared of dropping the crabs in when it boils, I could do that for you and you can butter some bread. Do we have mayo?”
“Mayonnaise? Er. No. There’s salad cream. Would that do? It’s Heinz.” Frances stood. “And there are tomatoes and lettuce and, let’s see …” She opened the cupboard where she had unloaded cans and jars. “… and there’s a big can of Russian salad.”
BLUE HOUSE
As a child, she recalled quite clearly, there had been few things so stressful as being expected to enjoy oneself. Birthdays, theater trips, even food could be ruined by the oppressive weight of others’ hopes, by raised faces around a room requiring joy. There was something of that now. She felt them looking to her to enjoy herself, watching her for reactions. Men were like that, always needing to know they had pleased one. It made them so much easier to offend than women. She was enjoying herself. It was a lovely cottage, a beautiful beach, but she would soon stop enjoying it if they did not stop watching her.
“You don’t have to watch me,” she told John. “I won’t fall to pieces just because you go off and enjoy a walk on your own.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Was I staring?”
“Sorry,” she echoed. “That was rude of me.”
And they both smiled and he took a Thermos and went for one of his long walks, with a little book on bird identification she had given him apparently.
It was the house. The same house. Beneath the tarted-up paintwork and pretty fabrics lurked the grim, brown bungalow scorched so deeply on her memory by events that no disease could quite obliterate. She recognized it at once, from the car, and foolishly began to say so. Realizing then that neither John nor, thank God, Will had recognized it too, she fogged her recollection in a nice show of elderly confusion. Still, she was watching them now. Not as the men watched her, for gratifying signs of pleasure, but for tokens that they were remembering and pretending as well.
She swam before the beach filled up, which was delightful. The water’s iodine iciness smacking over her seemed to return her to herself so that she knew entirely who she was and felt everything about her, toes, fingers, scalp, as if it were brand-new, not old and wrinkly. The public pool never did this; warmth and chlorine and the faint suggestion of amniotic fluid prompted by the urinous presence of so many small children, some of them not even walking yet, dulled one’s bravest efforts to strike out alone and one emerged without renewal or refreshment.
After that it was good to sit on the veranda. She was not supposed to sunbathe any more, since an outcrop of bad moles they cut off her a few years ago, and since her mid-fifties and the onset of what Poppy coyly called The Change, had found she overheated easily. It was as though menstruation had been a discharge of heat as well as blood and now the slightest thing, a polo neck, sunshine through double glazing, a department store scent section, could leave her feeling steam was about to burst through her eyes.
“My thermostat’s gone,” she would joke as she tugged off a layer of clothes or fought to open a window, and people would look the other way because aging woman and hot flesh in the same thought process was not quite nice. So; no more sunbathing. But she could toast her legs a little while the rest of her sat in shadow. That felt good. And Will erected a sunshade beside the veranda so it was shadier still. But once the car park at the top of the drive began to fill and the sands became congested, even sitting on the veranda was oppressive. It was not just the noise. People stared with envious curiosity because they wanted a house in such a place and wondered how such a woman, an overheating old woman, came to be there on her own. Even with the sunshade in place, Fran
ces felt too much on display. She retreated to the patch of garden at the rear with its spiky plants, glimpses of gaudy golfers and view of the curious encampment.
She made an effort to read one of the novels John had borrowed from the library for her.
“Found you a new one by her. You said you liked her.”
She had resisted asking do I because yes, it was by a novelist she enjoyed. She knew that as she knew her own name and that these were her pearls. But he need not have troubled to find her a new one because any of the old ones would have done. Their plots all seemed unfamiliar now and would probably have been jumbled in any case.
It was amusing enough, a waspish tale of a young urban widow forced to move to an insufferably cozy village she would doubtless come to love, but Frances soon tossed it aside, impatient at her inability to concentrate even long enough to remember the heroine’s name. She made herself a cup of coffee and settled instead with one of the magazines Will had brought from the selection he sold at the shop. It was largely pictures. Pretty girls and pretty men, clothes nobody wore and houses where nobody normal could live. She flicked and stared, flicked and stared and found a kind of consolation in the thought that even to her son, who had all his faculties intact, the world these pages presented must seem like science fiction.
Will came around the side of the house. He had been swimming and had a towel slung over one shoulder. “There you are,” he said.
“Here I am.”
“Are you OK here? It’s not very sunny.”
“I don’t really do sun anymore.”
“Oh yes. But you’re OK?”
“I’m fine.”
“We can go out in a bit. If you like.”
“I’m fine here. Honestly,” she said and wished he did not look so disappointed. Like his father, he wanted her happy and amused. If only Poppy were here. Poppy could always be relied upon to make a woman feel useful. There would be little faces to wipe, little drinks to be made and messes to tidy away. “Crab,” she added. “Crab and chips. Do you think we could find it anywhere?”
“I’m sure we could. Dad walking already?”
“Yes. He said he was doing a circular walk to Pentire Head and back. He said he’d be back in time for lunch but not to wait for him if it would cramp our style.” She remembered this intelligence with a small sense of triumph, which in turn depressed her. “You’ve got a hairy chest,” she said.
Will looked down and rubbed the mat of hair, abashed. “Yes,” he said, as a complimented woman might say this old thing.
“You never used to have,” she said, puzzled.
“I was probably younger then,” he said, smiling. “You never used to read glossy magazines in Italian.”
She looked down at the magazine. “Just one of my new talents,” she said.
“I’ll go and get dressed,” he told her, patting her shoulder as he went in. “Then perhaps we can have an excursion. Go round a garden or something. Do you want an iced coffee?” he called from the kitchen. “I put a jug in to chill last night.”
“Where did you learn to do that?”
He laughed. “I’ve always done it. Every summer. I think you taught me.”
“Oh.”
She flopped the magazine on to the gravel because it was making her hands sticky, then looked out at the scrubby field. The dog in the encampment there was tethered again, probably on account of the sheep beyond the golf course, but she had seen it playing in the waves this morning so there was no need to feel sorry for it. The young man with the suicidal urges emerged from his caravan, fed the chickens, stroked the dog then began to pick through the heap of driftwood and rubbish there. Finding what he needed, he went back inside. Above the noise from the beach, which she realized now was like the buzz from a huge party only with waves and seagulls among the guests, she heard the brief whirring of an electric drill.
“Talk to me while I shave,” Will called from the open bathroom window.
“Shaving too, now,” she murmured, joking. “Whatever next?” Then she added aloud, “I saw him when I was swimming. Our sad young man from the sea.”
“Who?”
“Our sad young man.”
“He wasn’t so young. He was my age.”
“You’ll see. It’s young. He was swimming too, with his dog, and he washed his hair then he shaved in a rock pool. Like a nymph.”
“Nymphs don’t shave.”
“You know what I mean. Merman. Selkie.”
“Did you talk?”
“No. I was swimming. Anyway I think he’s decided it’s politest to ignore us. Since we’re so on top of each other.”
“How do you mean?”
“He lives in the caravan over there. Hence the lovely long hair. He’s a piecrust.” There was a pause and she realized this was the wrong word.
“You mean crusty. A traveler.”
“That’s it. And the dog and everything. I talked to the woman in the stores yesterday and apparently there are lots down here. They don’t really travel any more because the police were so beastly when they did and they like it here. They like the stone circles on the moor and hold ceremonies. Naked, she said. Bollock-naked ceremonies. She looked envious, if you ask me, silly cow. And she said the hospital down here is the first in the country to provide a white witch as one of its, you know, ministering people. Because of the heathens.”
“Pagans.”
“Yes. Look, there he is again.” The young man re-emerged, wearing a shirt now and with something under his arm, a big wooden object. He untethered the dog, which jumped up to paw him in its excitement, then led it off along the track up the valley beside the golf course. The encampment looked vulnerable now that he had gone. He had not locked the caravan, if one could lock caravans, and anyone could have gone inside and helped themselves to whatever was there. She wondered what she would do if she saw an intruder go in. With sudden clarity, she remembered James Stewart desperate to warn Grace Kelly of the killer’s return and powerless. She remembered the hot, unshifting feel of the film. The comic couple sleeping on their fire escape. The astonishing sexiness of Grace Kelly, provoking her crippled lover in a series of beautiful gowns. People always spoke of it as a murder film but it had always seemed to her that the murder was a red herring and it was all—murder and all—about relationships and commitment and the terror of getting involved with another life.
“What do you do for a love life?” she asked aloud. She should not have asked. He’d be cross. And she realized she had emphasized the you as though saying as opposed to Grace Kelly. But the shower was going so perhaps he had not heard. She wanted to know. She worried. It was not like men uselessly wanting women to be happy. Mothers were allowed to worry about sons. She knew it was forbidden territory however, because she had quizzed his sister about it often enough and been warned off.
“It’s not our business,” Poppy had said last time. “He’ll tell us when he’s ready. When he meets someone he’d like us to meet.”
“But he’s nearly forty. He might be lonely. I don’t want him to be lonely.”
“Well neither do I but asking him if he’s got a boyfriend or a girlfriend or whatever is hardly going to make him happy if he hasn’t, now, is it? And if he has, well then he has and presumably they make him happy enough. He doesn’t ever seem lonely.”
No. Will never seemed lonely, any more than he ever seemed unhappy. There were always friends and his friends seemed to overlap nicely with his job. But John had always been so controlled and aloof, at least until he retired, and she had always thought herself so restless and prickly and difficult. It never ceased to surprise her that such a pair should have raised such a son. Blithe, as the birthday rhyme had it. Bonny and blithe and good and the other thing. Poppy was much more the child they deserved. No, that was harsh and she did not intend that. Poppy was more the child that truly reflected them, bound their oddly allied natures in herself and reflected them back at themselves. Respectable and restless. Fixed, settled so
young, and yet always obscurely riled. Whereas Will was so easily sunny.
So of course she worried about him. She worried he was lonely, but she worried too that he was pretending. His schooling, the harsh schooling she had acquiesced in but which she now bitterly regretted, had taught him perhaps to dissemble content in the name of good behavior and to choke back pain because that was the proper, manly way. Perhaps he placed advertisements and met people that way, which she gathered no longer bore the stigma it once had. Or perhaps he used the computer, an idea she did not understand but was afraid to have explained to her. She thought of the pain of girlhood Christmas lists, of laboring as hard over a letter to Father Christmas as one did over prayers, struggling for the just balance between tactful self-denial and naked greed, weighing up the image of one deeply desired thing against another, couching the whole, as her mother insisted, in a letter that had charm as well as a shopping list, gave news of home and family, asked kindly after the elves; only to thrust this labor of hours into the fireplace for a few seconds’ brilliance. She remembered the panic if some fragment of charring paper failed to catch the updraft and fly up the chimney, the awful sense of failed ritual. Were these modern ways of finding love like that? Wish lists entrusted to the ether? She had no idea what Will wished for. Women tended to marry men who sooner or later revealed elements of their fathers and vice versa, but what of men who sought other men? Would Will end by pairing off with an approximation of her or of his father?
“Let’s not wait for Dad,” he said when he’d emerged, showered and dressed. “I want you to myself for a bit.”