by Patrick Gale
“Of course. We can pick up their luggage while we’re there. Oh, darling. We’d been looking forward to this for such ages. Can you come back?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
“Come on, then. We’d better hurry.”
She was still in her bathing costume.
“You’re not driving like that?” he asked, only he was telling her.
Impatiently she pulled a blouse and skirt on top and stepped into her white, wooden-soled sandals. While John was turning the Volkswagen around, she hurried on to the beach to explain to Bill what was going on and to ask him to mind Julian for her. Only she came back with all three of them.
John checked his impatience as people raced around locking doors and stacking away lunch things. After all, he might have hours to wait for a train. He had forgotten his Tolstoy. He wondered for a moment whether he could risk losing face and further time fetching it then decided he should read some newspapers instead, to help him wind back up from this lazy, holiday mode. Then everyone piled in at last and they were off. John drove. Frances was faster, he knew, but he needed to exert a measure of control. Bill apologized for holding things up but implied there might be money to pay for his luggage. Skip sulked. She had not wanted to leave the beach.
The road between Polcamel and Bodmin might have been hosting a rally for slow-moving caravans and tractors towing trailers of straw. Frances suggested a shortcut, which led to roadworks and a further delay.
“Why did Henry escape?” Julian asked as they waited for an impassive workman to show a Go sign.
John glanced at Frances.
“He’d have found out sooner or later,” she explained, adding less forcefully, “it just came out.”
“He won’t be on the run for long,” John told Julian. “They never are.”
“Will he be punished?”
“Of course. His sentence will be extended. There may be a charge brought against him for assaulting an officer, though I don’t know the details of that yet. He certainly won’t be working in the rose beds for a while.” He rarely discussed the prison with his son. It felt strange.
Frances waxed conversational, perhaps out of nerves. “The escapee was a pal of Julian’s,” she explained to Bill. “Such an old character. Raped a postmistress.”
“He wasn’t a pal,” Julian exclaimed hotly. “I hardly know him. And he smells funny. They all do. They stink.”
“Don’t show off,” Frances told him mildly. “It’s all right to have been his friend. Pa’s explained to you before about debts to society. But he’s done wrong again and he’ll have to be punished. You can make friends with someone else. Maybe you can write him a note when he gets back.”
“He most certainly can’t!” John snapped. “Now could we please change the subject? I’m going to be hearing about nothing else for the next week.”
“Yeah. You poor bastard,” Bill said. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Bill said a rude word,” Julian crowed.
“It’s a character in King John,” Bill told him. “By Shakespeare. Gets all the best speeches.”
“Look, children,” Frances called out. “There’s Bodmin jail!”
“Why can’t you live here?” Skip asked. “Then you’d be near the beach.”
“Closed down long ago,” John told her. “More’s the pity. Something tells me we’re going to need more prisons, not fewer.”
The children were left firmly in the car while Bill went in search of his luggage, which apparently included his precious typewriter so he was planning on working. John bought his ticket and newspapers and snatched the quiet moment with Frances they had been deprived of by acquiring passengers. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Leaving you so soon. And with all this.”
“I’m sorry I snapped,” she said, and fastened a button on his shirt which had worked loose. “It’s not your fault after all. Bloody bastard Farmer.”
“Frances!”
“Well he is. Spoiling our holiday. Most inconsiderate.”
“While Bill’s here, you won’t …” he began.
“What?”
“You won’t let him take Julian on his motorbike, will you? He’s got some damned fool idea of a jaunt and even if they stay off the road, that track’s lethal. It’s illegal anyway. I’m sure it is.”
“Of course I won’t.”
“Promise?”
She frowned. He too was unsure why this was suddenly so important to him. Perhaps he was still a little drunk from lunch. He wanted to kiss her. Properly. With hands. Right here.
“I promise,” she said. “And I’ll make sure he writes his diary and does one culturally enriching activity per day. At least. There’s that music festival. Maybe we can all go to a concert.”
“You think that’s Bill’s thing?”
“Probably not. But he’s a guest so he’ll do as he’s told. Is this your train?”
It was only a clumsy, fumbled, off-to-work sort of kiss. He remembered too late that he had forgotten to say goodbye to Julian or the others. As the train snaked out along the wooded valley, he tugged down the window and leaned out. He saw the Volkswagen pulling out of the car park and waved furiously in case the children were looking but its steeply angled windows were catching the afternoon sun so he could not see if they were waving back or had failed to notice him.
He found an empty compartment, began to read a paper and fell heavily asleep as the lunchtime beer triumphed at last. He woke briefly at Liskeard and Plymouth then woke in earnest at Newton Abbot where the rails followed a long stretch beside the sea and dived in and out of crimson South Devon cliffs. Reading his clutch of newspapers from cover to cover, downing a pork pie, a Bar Six and a cup of stewed tea from the buffet car, he felt a lessening of pressure. Whatever the trials of his working life, there remained a masculine predictability to it, a quality of the known beside which family life was fraught with ambiguities and scrambled attempts at communication.
BLUE HOUSE
On one level John judged the holiday a success. The weather was glorious and the house charming. Frances was swimming every day and resting and enjoying having twenty-four-hour access to Will again. When they first came down the drive, despite the new tarmac and the drastic metamorphosis of the grand landlady’s manor to a golf club, he had recognized the house and setting with a horrible shock, bad memories reaching out at him like so many pungent smells. But Frances appeared to remember little, certainly none of the bad things, and the house had been so altered as to conspire in her merciful amnesia.
If the holiday was a disappointment for him, it was so only because he had unwittingly subscribed to the false hope that the sunny break would beget change and renewal. Instead, naturally, it shed bolder light on unchanging problems. She was as ill here as she was at home, just as his joints ached as much, he still had to pee twice a night and he slept every bit as fitfully. Frances slept like a baby, curled rather heavily against him and not even waking when cramp forced him to kick a leg out from under the covers or to jump from the bed to pace about.
When the second day began with him taking a second long walk alone, he realized he had been cherishing naïve dreams of her reaching out to him in daylight as she did in sleep. But they were a long-retired pair, not some hardworking young couple eager to rediscover each other. In retirement, he perceived, they had carefully carved out a simulacrum of the parallel lives their marriage had presented during his life as a governor. They did not, like vivacious grayheads in advertisements, celebrate joint old age with cruises and birdwatching and shared hobbies, but continued to respect one another’s privacy to the point of leading nearly separate lives under one roof. Only the garden united them, and grandchildren.
He longed for Sandy’s arrival with the boys. Their way of eliding grannyandgrandpa gently pressed a coupledom on to him and Frances he had scarcely felt since the first years of marriage. Hugo and Oscar reminded them to be husband and wife rather than mere considerate companions, or to play, at least, the sentimen
tal, Ribena-mixing, toffeeoffering roles expected of them.
Meanwhile it was not entirely without relief that he accepted the opportunities Will created for him with such clamorous tact to go off and explore on his own. It was not, as Will thought, to escape Frances, however, and the constant, depressing responsibility she presented, but to escape from Will. He found himself unexpectedly shy of his son. The formalized stages of a birthday supper or Sunday lunch—arrival, drinks, meal, exchange of news, walk around garden, small piece of symbolic home improvement involving one of Will’s power tools, departure—could hardly be practiced over a fortnight’s holiday. Had his son been married or had a boyfriend or whatever, the problem would not have arisen since there would have been other people filling the conversational void and the well-established pavane for cohabiting couples to be paced through. As it was, the desire to ask unaskable questions was almost intolerable. The sense of what they were not discussing, of who Will might otherwise have asked on holiday, was a constant irritant beneath the idle chit-chat and self-indulgent small excursions to galleries, gardens and restaurants. Time was, John thought, when someone could be introduced as a maiden lady or confirmed bachelor and the mind accepted it without this restless searching after other, juicier explanations. It was not that earlier times were more innocent, but that they were more respectful of privacy, even to the restraining of thoughts. Now where lenses and biographers pried, one’s curiosity felt compelled to follow.
Will was being scrupulous in observing their timetables. He ate when they normally ate, left time for little lie-downs and postprandial dozes. There was a weighty sense of a son doing his duty. John tried to imagine himself at that age, however, and found another early-middle-aged man wed as much to duty and job as to his family. The only real difference was children. He had never appreciated until now how much emotional clamor, interference almost, the presence of children set up, saving a relationship from listening to itself. One often heard comments made in envy of childless couples, of the money they saved, the selfish freedoms they retained, knew indeed this lay behind much of the mistrust that greeted couples of the same sex, but in truth the ability of such couples to endure the total, unimpaired scrutiny they could train on their relationship year in year out, meant they were owed more awe than envy. He wrote this in a long letter he composed in his head, a letter to Sylvia, then remembered how many same-sex couples were famous for their surrogate families of dogs and cats.
Dear Sylvia, he wrote instead on a postcard of the mouth of the Camel estuary, we can see this view from our veranda, when the beach isn’t packed. V. hot but doing a lot of walking. Stay sane. He made to cross out the last comment then realized that would lend a sinister weight to it so let it stand. All good wishes, John. He addressed it, stamped it and added it to the combined heap he and Will were building on the veranda table. A walk to the village letter box would fill nicely the interval between tea and the evening’s first, welcome drink.
Will was being extremely efficient. He had a list of names and addresses he had run off from his computer’s database and was striking them out as he wrote to them. Their eyes met briefly as Will tossed a card on to the heap.
“Ridiculous exercise really,” Will said. “Like Christmas cards.”
“Only less depressing.”
“How so?”
“You aren’t crossing off the ones who’ve died since last year. And you can still remember who they all are.”
Frances emerged in her toweling robe, refreshed from her sleep and keen for a swim now that the crowds were draining away. John would have liked to go with her for once but Will was up and offering before he could say anything. If all three of them had gone it would have entailed a tedious delay while the house was locked up. So he pretended to be tired and contented himself with watching their tall figures cast even taller shadows as, changed, Will ran out to join her crossing the sands. He was touched at the way she took Will’s arm as they went and felt a sweet, familiar ripple of jealousy at her ease of confidence in the boy. Since Will was five or six, it seemed, John had been coming into rooms or round corners and surprising them deep in conversation. It amazed him that they had spent most of the day together yet could still find things to discuss. Challenged once, she had said, “Oh, you know. We talk about people.”
It would have aroused his jealousy less had she said they discussed the deepest secrets of her heart. He knew people to be her favorite subject, the life-as-novel at which she excelled, a topic at which John, being too scrupulous for idle supposition, remained a pious dunce.
They began to swim and were lost to sight. He stopped watching and began another postcard. It was the same view as Sylvia would get. He had bought the same view fifteen times. Frances had teased him for showing so little imagination. His correspondents could hardly be expected to compare cards and what if they did? It was a good view, the view from the veranda, photographed with some accuracy.
It was odd writing to Poppy knowing that Sandy and the children would be at his side by the time she read it, as it meant he could write to her as his daughter, as a beloved child even, rather than address her as a careworn wife and mother. Poppy darling. We can see this view from the veranda, he wrote. When the beach isn’t too packed …
Then a telephone started to ring and broke his concentration. It took him a while to realize it was Will’s mobile and he hesitated before answering. Only the awful thought that Sandy and the children might be about to cancel made him snatch it up. “Hello?”
“Darling,” a woman said. “How’s the Sunset Home for the Young at Heart?”
“Er. Hello?” he said again. “Will Pagett’s telephone?”
“Oh. Oh God. Sorry. Is that John?”
“Yes.”
“Just the man I was after, actually.” She coughed nervously, plainly mortified. John thought it was rather funny and admired her for not simply hanging up.
“That’s Harriet, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes. And how is the bloody Sunset Home?”
“It’s fine. Young at heart. We’ve got a wonderful view. Beach on the doorstep. Literally. You should come down.”
“I wish.”
He liked Harriet best of all Will’s women friends. She was sexy and he liked the way she swung nervously between flirtation and trying to talk like a man. She had always shown him a refreshing lack of respect, which was flattering to his age and amusing, given that she had ended up working for the prison service too. Frances had nursed fond hopes of Will marrying her one day. John had been treacherously gleeful when the idea was categorically rejected. “Will’s swimming,” he told her. “Shall I get him to call you back?”
“No. Well, if you like. But listen, John, I was serious. It was you I wanted to speak to.”
“You don’t have to be polite, Harriet.” He paced the room as he talked and caught sight of himself; sun-tanned old man with incongruously young communication device pressed to his ear.
“I know. I’m calling unofficially, John, but I’m calling from work on work business.”
“Yes?”
“It’s our mutual friend in Rio. I thought it only fair to warn you.”
“Oh God,” he sighed. “Another bloody color supplement feature! It’s such an old story. You’d have thought that by now—”
“No, John. Listen, will you. They’re going to extradite him. At long last.”
“But he’s an old man. Well. Not so old. My age. He must be, what, seventy-five?”
“And obscenely rich and on his third marriage. But not beyond the reach of the law, apparently. Not anymore. It’s not definite yet but he’s even been teasing us, talking about making his peace with the old country and coming back to face the music.”
“Secure in the knowledge that he’s become such a media favorite most juries would be rejected by the prosecution or would acquit him. Why?” John sat on the sofa. He felt faint.
“Once he realized extradition might finally be going to push through, d
espite his lawyers’ best defense, he probably thought he should save face. After all, if he comes back voluntarily, even after all this time, it goes in his favor. John?”
“Yes. I’m still here.”
“I just thought I should tell you. If it does happen, the press’ll have a feeding frenzy, it being the silly season. They’ll rake everything up. I thought you should be ready. But it’s not official yet and it may not even happen. If it does though, we can’t protect you like in the old days. The press isn’t what it was. They know everything now and what they don’t know, they’ll ring you up for. Or they’ll make something up. OK?”
“OK. Thanks, Harriet.”
“Not at all. Give my love to that handsome orderly.”
“I will.”
Another telephone rang in the background. She swore like a navvy as she hung up.
John went directly to the kitchen, poured himself a splash of Scotch and downed it in one needy swig. Then he poured himself a second, longer one, with some ice, and took it back to the sofa. All at once that other house, that other time, were here about him. For all the girl’s touching concern, this business scarcely stirred him now beyond a vague desire to grind his teeth when he saw their mutual friend’s bronzed, smug old face pressed up against some nymphet’s in a magazine. It stirred up much, however, that he would rather have left untroubled and unremembered. Ugly revelations. Unholiday violence. Bad words whose damage had never been healed but merely scabbed over. What misguided nostalgia had possessed Poppy to send them back here?
Hearing a motorbike engine nearby, he ran out, still clutching his drink, heart in his mouth. But it was nothing, of course, or not what he had irrationally feared, merely a groundsman speeding a quad bike about the golf course.
“John?”
He spun round at the veranda’s end to see Frances and Will returning through the gate from the beach. He waved, smiled, said he would fix them both drinks as well, but for a moment she had seen his face. For a moment, too, he had seen her younger self, ebullient on a young man’s arm, blithely unaware of the effect she was having.