Rough Music

by Patrick Gale

  She knew this might be true but that it was also a kinder way of suggesting John might profit by a break from her.

  The most likely pub to satisfy her yen for crab and chips was barely twenty minutes’ drive in the direction John had set out to walk, overlooking the harbor at Saint Jacobs, a few bays around to the north from Polcamel. As with so many of the places they visited, Frances experienced an initial sense of having seen it before which was gradually muffled by a snowfall of unfamiliar details. She had a recollection of a rough-hewn fishing village winding steeply up two narrow lanes from a natural harbor formed by a dramatic fissure in the line of granite cliffs. She remembered, or thought she did, a working village with real fishermen mending nets and lobster pots while their wives sold the morning’s catch or boxed it up for sending to London by train. Now there were more dinghies and yachts in the harbor than fishing boats. The uncompromisingly ugly ice works and pilchard cannery at the harbor’s edge had become a gallery and a seafood restaurant respectively. The dirty beach where nets had once been hauled up for mending was now a low-tide car park where the vehicles were surely too new and German to come from so poor an area. Less Cornwall than Cornwall World.

  The whole place was still pretty, prettier indeed than she remembered, for in making the painful transition from working community to holiday resort, it had taken on the look town-dwellers thought a fishing village should sport. Walls were newly whitewashed, their slates rehung. Window frames and doors were picked out in the Mediterranean blues and greens so common now as to have lost all boldness. Pelargoniums glowed on every narrow windowsill and the cats that still sunned themselves on the low, higgledy-piggledy roofs and garden walls were too sleek to be scraping a living off nothing but fish heads and discarded dogfish.

  The pub had no music, at least, but was noisy with the booming bonhomie of visitors. By some miracle, Will found a freshly abandoned table on the harborside balcony and left her there while he fetched drinks. For a few minutes she nibbled at a packet of balsamic vinegar crisps and sipped her half-pint of local bitter, which smelled deliciously of elderflowers, and feigned contentment so he would not be disappointed. She pored with him over the menu which, far from the longed-for, unadorned crab and chips, offered only a lobster bisque, which she saw from a neighbor’s bowlful was unpromisingly watery, and something rather complicated called a Medley de Mer. Will raised his eyebrows pointedly as the woman on the other side of Frances was joined by a family in identical fisherman’s smocks.

  “We’re tourists too,” she reminded him gently.

  “Could we try to remember that we’re hardly commercial tourists,” he said, imitating a cruel old woman’s voice. “It’s bad enough to have to associate with tourists on board …”

  She laughed, remembering another film she loved. “In This Our Life!” she exclaimed.

  “Now Voyager,” he corrected her.

  “Bet you can’t remember her name, though,” she said.

  “What, Bette Davis?”

  “No. Gladys Cooper. She played the mother.”

  “Where did you dredge that up?” he asked, astonished.

  “God knows.”

  The sailor-smocked children all clamored their lunch orders at once.

  “This is hell,” he said.

  “It is, rather.”

  “Shall we have something in our fingers on the harbor wall instead?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He fulfillled her yen to the letter, with a bag of vinegary chips from the fish and chip shop—a relic of the village she thought she remembered—and a couple of dressed crabs, which they picked from the shells with little wooden forks while sitting on the harbor wall.

  “This is such fun,” she said, meaning it. “You never tell me about your love life,” she added because she was happy so did not care what prohibitions she flouted. “How do you manage?”

  “Oh. I get by.” He looked away, eating a chip. When he looked back and smiled his face had shaken off the look of pain she had surprised there.

  “Don’t you want a family?”

  “Not really, Ma,” he said. He mustered no smile for that.

  “Are we so very off-putting an example?” she asked.

  “Not at all.” But his tone was too roundly affirmative to convince her. “Anyway,” he added, deflecting her inquiry, “if there’s any justice in heaven, I should probably end up with a gang of little thugs who preferred football to books and war games to either.”

  “Yes, but they’d be happy. You’d be a good father. When are the babies coming?”

  “Tomorrow. And they’re not babies anymore. Hugo’s eight and Oz is reading already. They’d be livid to be thought of as babies. Hugo’s starting to look so like me at that age it’s unnerving.”

  “At that age you were good enough to eat.”

  “Was I?”

  “You know you were.” She smiled, remembering, then said, “Do you think Sandy’s a good father?”

  “Excellent, I suppose. Now how about an ice cream? We could drive home via the dairy at Trenellion. Buy some concert tickets while we’re at it.”

  On their way back to the car she was drawn to the Ice Works Gallery. There was a gust of clattering sounds from inside the wide-open glass doors as of countless tiny hammers tapping.

  “That noise,” she said. “I’m sure that’s the noise I’ve been hearing in the night.” Other noises were added, cow bells, a football rattle, something like handclaps, then they all stopped. “Shall we go in?” she said.

  It was a sculpture show. Roly Maguire: Pieces for Wind a colorful poster announced. A big-boned, mannish woman was reading a newspaper behind a slate-topped table, a cigarette on her lips despite the “No Smoking” sign. Frances judged her to be seventy at least, or older. Her white hair, cropped in the French manner, was offset by a voluminous blouse in tangerine silk. She grunted hello without the cigarette leaving her lips. Everything about her said I am a member of the local artistic community and I only work here as a favor.

  “You just missed them,” she said shortly. “No wind in here obviously, so they’re on a motor. Comes on every five minutes. Drove me mad at first but now I don’t notice. Ha!” Her nervous laugh was like a bark. “Stay to look. It’s worth the wait.”

  The sculptures were made from a variety of objects the artist seemed to have found. Driftwood predominated, much of it very rough still and unplaned by the tides, but there were also pebbles, fishermen’s orange floats, green net, blue nylon rope and the strange, melancholy detritus left behind at the end of the beach season; dolls’ limbs, a bereaved plastic sandal, a dog’s studded collar, bouncy balls, water wings. Each piece was mounted on a pole or plank and formed an apparently accidental cluster of stuff. There were pleasing textures, the occasional splash of sun-bleached color, but no particular beauty and no meaning that Frances could discern. Then the woman turned a page in her paper and murmured, “Here goes,” and one by one each sculpture was flung into motion by an electric motor. Some whirled like mad things, others turned slow circles like drunken beetles and some merely flapped back and forth like machines deprived of purpose. The common element was noise. Pebble clacked on pebble. A child’s scarlet bucket jiggled up and down rattling a fistful of shells within. A sandal smacked repeatedly on the broken-off nose of a surfboard. Frances laughed. It was like being in a toyshop and having the displays about you spring to life. And some of the sculptures were surely intended to be funny. Then it all struck her as infinitely sad and she stopped laughing.

  “It’s wasted time, do you think?” she asked Will. “People thrashing away and getting nowhere for all their effort. Why not stand still?”

  As if in answer to her question the power clicked off, and with one last click or whirr each sculpture flopped back into stillness. The mannish woman sighed in relief as she solved another crossword clue.

  “Wonderful,” Frances said.

  “Good,” said the woman.

  “I mean I’ll buy on
e.”

  “Mum, are you sure?”

  “Of course. I want that one.” She pointed at one in which a broken paddle was dragged over a series of pebbles set into a length of driftwood. “No. I’ll have that. The one with the child’s shoe. So funny! Don’t fuss, Will. I’ve got some money put by. It can be a late childbirth present to myself,” she told the woman, beginning to write a check. “It’ll fit in the back of the car perfectly well.”

  “Ah, now you can’t take these specific models,” the woman said. “The motors are only for demonstration. He has to fit them out with the wind vane for you. Allow him a couple of days. I’ll need your address for delivery.”

  “We’re at Polcamel for another week,” Frances told her. “It’s called Blue House.”

  “I know the one. Very handy. He can drop it off in person and show you how to put it up.”

  Impulse purchases needed to be carried home at once, while the madness was on one. Already the sculpture was threatening to lose its fragile charm. Frances wanted to cancel the sale now, tear up her check, but felt borne along by the older woman’s imperiousness, which was winning the day over Will’s ineffectual caution.

  “Of course, some of us preferred his earlier work,” she was saying now. “He used to work in stone and proper wood. But it costs so much and then his other half died and he moved back here and started doing these. We all thought it would be a phase but he hasn’t stopped yet.”

  The sculpture was growing in significance as she spoke.

  “Well I love it,” Frances said protectively. “There’s a windy bit of our garden, on the river. It can go there and startle birds off the seedlings.”

  As planned, they stopped off at Trenellion on their way home to treat themselves to ice cream at the dairy and bought concert tickets as well as cornets. Frances wanted to see inside the former church but a rehearsal was in progress and a notice on the door barred their entry. As they drove back to Blue House the sun was on her face and she slipped in and out of an old-lady doze, starting awake when Will braked at junctions, mumbling an apology, then sliding helplessly back to sleep moments later. When they arrived, she felt sick and disorientated and went to her room to lie down in earnest, leaving Will to write postcards in peace. But she was no sooner on her back, shoes and skirt off and a nicely cool sheet pulled up to her shoulders than all sleepiness left her and her mind began to race in a kind of panic.

  She had forgotten something dreadfully important—keys, a birthday, an appointment, a gas burner—and her thoughts were like a pair of hands feverishly opening a series of locker doors, opening and slamming each in mounting frustration as they found nothing within. And the longer their search was fruitless, the more she found she dreaded them finding something.

  BEACHCOMBER

  “Are you kidding?” Bill grinned across at John, who saw himself doubly reflected in his sunglasses. “After all that beer? I’m not even sure you should go in yet.”

  “It’s been half an hour,” Skip said. “I won’t get cramp. I never get cramp.”

  “I’ll take her,” said Frances, folding down a page in the new novel she had started. “Julian?” But Julian was quite happy making a garden on the roof of his sand castle, a sun hat pulled down rakishly over his black eye. “Darling?” Frances turned to John but he raised hands in surrender.

  “Too much crab,” he said. “But it was delicious. You go. I’ll guard your things.”

  She narrowed her eyes in what might have been irritation or an expression of complicity, picked up one of the new surfboards and followed Skip across the tide-ridged sand to the surf. John reached for the beer jug but found it empty. His tongue felt salty and he longed for water but could not muster the energy to go to the house. A variety of insects had emerged from the clumps of dried seaweed to feast on the fragments of crab and bread and butter that remained. He reached for his novel. He had abandoned the unsatisfactory C. P. Snow to reread War and Peace.

  “You don’t mind just being here?” he asked Bill. “I feel we should be showing you sights.”

  “After that ride yesterday I’d happily stay put for weeks,” Bill said.

  His torso was firm and tanned and covered in short black hair. Beside him John felt like a pale, newly-evolved creature lamenting its loss of coat and shell. His skin prickled in the sun. He knew he would regret not retreating to the shade of the veranda—he lacked Frances’ enviable ability to turn brown without an intervening phase of lobster pink—but he was enjoying too much this unusual sense of having a proper family about him. “Three is such a vulnerable number,” he said, surprising himself.

  Bill started. He must have nodded off. “Pardon me?”

  “You were dozing. I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. You were saying?”

  “Three. It’s a vulnerable number. I mean, it’s good to have you with us.”

  “Oh. Good. Well it’s good to be here, John.”

  They turned simultaneously as Skip and Frances shouted from the cold as a wave smacked their shoulders.

  “She’s so like Becky,” John said. “It was quite startling when you arrived.”

  “Well, Becks was a tad more feminine.”

  “You didn’t know her at this age.”

  “She was a tomboy?”

  “Never that exactly,” John conceded. “But she was formidable.”

  “You weren’t close, though?”

  “Not by the time you met her. She’d left me behind long before.”

  “And at this age?” Bill gestured to where Skip was falling off her surfboard in a valley of foam.

  “I worshiped her. I’d have done whatever she told me.” Saying this, John received a pin-sharp recollection of the taste of tears and the brutal finality of his sister’s locked door. He snorted. “An abject slave.”

  “You going to have more?” Bill indicated Julian. John was taken aback at the baldness of the question.

  “Possibly,” he said, opting for bravado. Then heard himself add, “It’s not easy.”

  Aware, perhaps, that the boy was listening, Bill rose and hunkered down beside Julian’s castle. “How’s it coming, buddy?”

  “All right,” Julian said, mortified at an adult entering into so childish a pastime.

  “Maybe you can come for a ride on the bike later on.”

  “Yes please!” Instant enthusiasm. John thought of cricket and felt a twinge of envy.

  “Well, I’m not sure …” he began.

  “Aw, come on,” Bill overrode him. “We wouldn’t go far. It’d be fun for him. Eh, Julie? You ready for water in that moat yet?”

  “It won’t stay in. The sand’s too fine,” Julian said and continued arranging a neat border of mussel shells. Bill stood.

  “Well try lining it with seaweed. I’ll go fill the jug.” He snatched the beer jug and headed over to the water’s edge.

  Watching him go, watching him pause to call out to the girls in the surf, John felt angry phrases surge up in his throat like bile. But there was nothing he could say without appearing a middle-aged killjoy. He pictured skidding tires, childish flesh flayed by hot tarmac. As if illustrating his thoughts, a motorbike engine gunned somewhere in the car park above.

  “Julian?” Julian looked up. “How’s the eye?”

  “Bit sore. It’s OK, though. I quite like it. I’m going to use crayons to sketch the colors in my diary as the bruise comes out. Do you think I could bring Lady Percy on to the beach and put her in the sand castle garden?”

  “What if she got lost?”

  “But she wouldn’t.”

  “But she digs, doesn’t she? Imagine if she dug herself down in the sand and you couldn’t find her. She could suffocate.”

  Why do we do this? he wondered. Why are we so ready to fill their heads with fears?

  “Gerbils dig, not guinea pigs,” Julian said. “Not much, I don’t think.”

  “All the same.”

  Bill was returning, the cut glass jug slopping seawater. Behind h
im, Frances thrashed out through the waves, surfboard under arm, tugging off her bathing cap as she came.

  “There’s another motorbike,” Julian said. “Coming down to Beachcomber.”

  John turned and saw a post office bike gingerly maneuvering a passage down the stony slope to the bungalow. “Hell’s teeth!” he said.

  He intercepted the telegram boy, who was indeed looking for him, and identified himself. It was from his deputy, Mervyn McMaster, demanding he call the office p.d.q. He tipped the boy, fetched change from his trousers and climbed the drive. The call box in the car park was stiflingly hot. Where city ones invariably stank of a mixture of urine and ear wax, this smelled of sugar and seaweed. Every surface felt sticky, from ice-creamy fingers, perhaps, or dried brine. Mervyn told him nothing at first.

  “Give me your number and I’ll call you back,” he said.

  Sweat beaded on John’s lip and ran down his temples as he waited for the telephone to ring. A couple came to wait outside. They stared and he felt absurd for calling one of Her Majesty’s prisons in swimming trunks and faintly criminal for using a call box for a long-distance call without spending cash. At the muffled ring, he answered with something like relief and turned his back on the couple. Mervyn wasted no time on courtesies.

  “Farmer’s gone,” he said. “It was an outside job during exercise this morning. They used a ladder from a lorry. Dobey was overpowered with a garden spade. All over in minutes. Then all hell broke loose. I mean, Farmer, for God’s sake! He didn’t have long to go anyway. Sorry, John. You’d better come back. It’ll be in the evening editions and the men knowing you’re not here doesn’t help much.”

  John was changing when Frances found him. There was no point packing. He had only holiday clothes here and a weekend suit. Nothing he would need. “But why?” she asked. “What can you do? The police will catch him.”

  “I have to be there. The men are upset. There’s been trouble. Not a riot exactly but … I have to be there. Sorry. Can you drive me to Bodmin Road?”