by Patrick Gale
“You have Hell’s Angels here?” Skip asked.
“Of course.” Julian was defending the honor of the country, apparently. “We have everything.”
But his show of nonchalance crumbled as the bikers drew nearer, passed only feet away from where he was watching and headed up the cove toward Beachcomber. There was a girl on the back of one bike, long hair blowing in the wind, bare feet shockingly dirty. When they stopped below the veranda, she jumped off and called out something to Bill who, to Frances’s amazement, came out to greet her. He shook hands with the girl and reached into his pocket for some money, which he gave her in exchange for something she unbuttoned from a little pouch around her neck. He sniffed it before handing over the money. They continued to stand there a few moments, apparently just passing the time of day, then hands were raised in laconic greeting, engines revved unnecessarily loud, the girl jumped back on behind the same man, the biggest of the three, with the thickest beard, and the bikes swung away from the bungalow. Rather than take the track, they returned the way they had come, cutting a swath through the sunbathers once more. The bike with the girl on showily struck out into the surf to raise a spray.
“Does your father know them?” Julian asked aghast.
“Sure,” Skip said, blasé in her turn. “He knows lots of people.”
The children returned to their building and Frances rolled on to her front and tried to return to her novel but something like indignation was welling up and stopping her. She ran her eyes over the same paragraph repeatedly but the words acquired no meaning because her mind was too occupied with him reaching for money, the girl’s billowing hair and filthy bare feet and the casual way he had accepted her ostentatious arrival.
Behind her his typewriter began to clatter again. More romantic, moneymaking lies about his marriage. Her neck grew stiff from holding her head sufficiently far above the book to focus. She flopped over on to her side instead but could not rest her head on her elbow without crushing her sunglasses against her temple. So she rolled back on to her spine and raised the book on weary arms, shielding her face from the broiling sun even as she tried to read. The book grew impossibly heavy however and sweat mixed with sun lotion kept trickling into her eyes and stinging them.
To the insistent chatter of the typewriter she walked down a corridor. She knew that her baby, her new daughter, was behind one of the doors but found only useless things, dried roses, a mound of sand, a great pool of suntan oil, a circle of prisoners playing Totopoly. The last door took her to a snugly furnished room with a view of a river. A man was lying on a sofa looking at the ceiling but talking to her, talking and talking, all about himself.
“Julian grown up,” she said aloud but somebody shushed her so she strained to make out what he was so relentlessly telling her. She could not make out his words however, any more than she could bring his big adult face into focus.
She awoke to music. Bill was standing, shading her from the sun. He had her radio in his hand. It was tuned to a pop channel. “Listen,” he said and smirked.
“Ssh,” she said. She despised people who played radios in public places, even had they played real music, which they never seemed to. He stared at her and turned the volume up.
“It’s your song,” he said.
“What is it?” she asked, cross and sleep-soured, sitting up.
“Aretha Franklin. Listen.”
“I hate this sort of music.”
“Listen.”
It was a big, harsh voice. She could tell the singer was black. No white woman dared voice that sort of abandon. There was no melody as such, only rhythm and a sense of a repetitive framework over which the singer could wind herself up. Oh when me and that man get to lovin’, she sang. It was mortifying, like someone undressing in the middle of a church. It sounded so real, not faked at all. No one could conjure up this sort of frankness to order. The song must come out differently every time. Watching her, he grinned. He tapped a foot, actually swayed his hips a little as he continued to hold out the radio between them like a kind of offering. He nodded his head, as if at the truth of the singer’s words.
“Ssh,” she hissed. “Turn it down!”
People were staring. Julian was staring. Bill carried on playing it regardless. At last she could stand it no longer. She jumped up, snatched the radio and turned it off.
“What?” he said.
“That’s not music,” she told him. “That’s just noise.”
“Of course it’s music!” He laughed.
“I’d find you real music only the powers that be have made the signal too weak to reach us down here.”
“You mean spineless stuff. Polite string quartets.”
“They’re not polite. Not all of them.”
“What are you so scared of, Frances?”
“I’m not scared.” She sat down again, brushed some sand off the radio’s blue housing with a clean corner of her towel. It was a good one. It had been a wedding present. “I just don’t think everyone else should have to listen to what you want to play. It’s inconsiderate.”
“No,” he said, crouching before her. “That’s just an excuse. You’re scared.”
“You think I’m a prude, don’t you?” she said. “You think I’m some kind of dried-up, middle-class, inhibited bitch of a prude who can’t let go and so has to hide behind her respectable good behavior to protect herself from the things she daren’t surrender to.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it. You said that trashy thing was my song. You think you can understand me and save me from myself.”
“No I don’t.”
“I hate being patronized.”
“I just wanted you to hear the song. It’s got funny words.”
But anger had taken hold of her. She had to show him. She grabbed the radio and turned it back on. The song had finished and a new, rougher sound had replaced it, throbbing electric guitars and some man with a voice like a yowling tomcat. But there was a rhythm there, lax and smoky perhaps yet something to hold on to. She turned the volume as high as it would go so that the voice began to be distorted even further than the singer intended, jumped up and began to dance. She clapped her hands, rocked her hips, stamped her feet. Laughing, Skip jumped up and joined in. Julian was shocked. For a moment he stared at her with his father’s eyes so that she laughed at him and beckoned. Then he giggled and jumped up too, shaking his limbs with no sense of rhythm, the way little boys did playing musical statues. The music was wild, demonic.
“Who is this?” she shouted down at Bill, who was still only watching. He murmured something. “Who?” she yelled.
He jumped up, took her hands, danced too.
“The Doors,” he shouted in her ear so that it half-hurt, half-tickled.
They only danced for a few seconds, barely a minute, feet going everywhere, treading on each other’s toes, kicking sand over the towels, over the radio. Then a man came up, scarlet in the face from heat and anger.
“Will you turn this down?” he barked.
Frances let go of Bill’s hands, stopped dancing. She was breathless. The man was ridiculous. He wore a loose white hat and voluminous off-white shorts and black ankle socks above tennis shoes. She wanted to tweak his nose or laugh in his face or simply push him hard so that he fell over. Instead she turned down the music and faced him again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”
“That’s not music,” he said, slightly taken aback, she fancied, by her politeness and accent.
“No,” she said. “Not really. But I suppose it’s sex, isn’t it?”
The man actually opened and shut his mouth like a fish. Julian laughed, the only one dancing now. As the man turned away, Skip laughed too and both children continued to laugh immoderately, falsely, forcing the sound out.
Frances picked up the radio and handed it back to Bill. “Don’t get this sandy,” she said. “These ones last forever if you treat them well. Tea anyone
? Julian, you’ve had too much sun. Take a swim to wash the sand off then come and sit in the shade for a bit to cool off. Just look at that rampart! You’ve done brilliantly! When’s the tide coming in again?” She heard herself chattering like a mad thing and broke off to walk back to the house. She filled the kettle and turned it on for tea then went to her room and lay on cool sheets, tasting salt on her lips and panic in her chest.
Desire for him had sprung on her and for a few seconds on the beach she had failed to recognize its hot, unfamiliar breath at her ear. Had the ridiculous man not intervened, she would have held Bill close, rested her head on his shoulder, kissed him even. Once recognized as the thing that had lurked behind all her discomfort, her combativeness and mistrust, desire suffused her being like a crimson blush. It was so entirely strange, as unlike the steady love and respect she felt for John as sunstroke after warmth and just as unpleasant. She looked the same—she checked in the looking-glass as soon as her bedroom door was shut—but she continued to feel that the disorder must be painted bright on her face like a high temperature on a child’s hectic cheeks.
She ought to ask him to leave, only he had done nothing wrong and she could not ask him to go without telling him why. And she could not bear to have him laugh at her. The alternative was to leave herself, concoct some story, pack Julian into the Volkswagen and go. There was no reason why Bill and Skip should not enjoy the remainder of a holiday already paid for. She went so far as to pull out her suitcase and open it on the bed. Somehow that brought home the ridiculousness of her behavior. She shut the thing away again, sat at the dressing table and brushed the sand from her hair. Hairbrushing was always immensely soothing. Perhaps her mother had brushed her hair when she was fractious as a child. Frances had certainly done it to Julian when he couldn’t stop crying and it worked like a dream. Forty tugging strokes one side and forty the other and she felt her equilibrium restored. Or almost. By the time Bill led the children in for tea, she was cutting banana sandwiches as though nothing had happened.
She fancied he looked at her inquiringly but deflected his glances with redoubled brightness. They could both stay. She could act like an adult instead of a frightened child, recognize her desire as the impossible thing it was and enjoy his presence like good weather. She might even flirt a little. There could be no harm in it. Beverly, her friend at the kindergarten, maintained that flirting was a kind of knife-sharpening for marriage. It kept one all the more desirable to and desirous of one’s husband. Only Beverly was not married, so what could she know? And Frances, she realized now, had never thought of desire and John in the same context, only of John and babies, which was not the same thing at all.
They took back sandwiches and milk to the beach on a tray to watch the tide reach the children’s pebble-built house on the sand. One small section of the wall collapsed but the rest withstood the snaking carpets of foam and she found herself caught up in their jubilation. She remembered she had packed a camera and took a series of silly, laughing pictures of them posing with Bill in the water beside their structure, sandwiches held aloft in a kind of salute.
She ordered hot baths all round then drove them to the cinema in Wadebridge—Skip actually wearing the new dress—to see Oliver!, which was very sweet. It made her feel tearful and nostalgic, which was preposterous since it was set long before even her grandparents’ era. They ate fish and chips afterward, on the old bridge over the Camel so that the car would not stink of fish. Julian was delighted to find his father’s photograph on the newspaper wrapping his chips. They unfurled it in the light of a street-lamp. It was a piece on Farmer’s breakout. There was a photograph of John, looking tense and handsome at his desk, and an equally large one of Henry, dating, presumably, from the time of his admission.
“Can we ring Pa?” Julian asked.
“Of course,” she said. “I was going to anyway.”
They found a call box and rang him and she let Julian and Skip do most of the talking. When she came on she barely had time for a hello darling no I’m fine before the pips went.
“I can’t call you back,” he said. “There’s been a development and—” Then he was cut off so her good-bye went unsaid.
She took a wrong turning when they drove over the bridge and they were on the outskirts of Bodmin before she saw her mistake. The children fell asleep in the back, each lying full length on a seat with their feet against a window. Bill found a music channel on the radio and played it softly and she tried to guess whether each singer was black or white. She got it right every time except for someone called Dusty Springfield.
“What’s it short for, Dusty?” she asked. “Dorothy?”
“Or Drusilla?”
“Probably Janet. It sounds like a group of Wiltshire villages; Higher Springfield, Nether Springfield, Springfield Monachorum, Dusty Springfield.” She heard herself trying too hard to amuse him and fell silent, letting the song fill the space between them.
The children barely stirred as she bumped them down the drive to Beachcomber. They carried them inside, one apiece. Julian woke up as she was unbuttoning his shirt. “Is Pa famous now?”
“No,” she assured him. “Hundreds of people are in the papers and on the radio every day, most of them only once. Every day hundreds more. By the time you start your new school in the autumn, no one will remember him.”
“Oh,” he said and yawned so she could not tell if he was relieved or disappointed. “Does Henry know I’m here?” he added suddenly.
“Of course not. Not unless you told him. Skin a rabbit.”
“I didn’t tell him anything,” he insisted. “He did all the talking.” He was suddenly troubled, his brow creased, almost tearful. Perhaps he was worried about starting at choir school. She brushed his hair, tickling him and laughing at how it was rebelliously standing up at his crown.
“Will you lie down!” she told it, mock-indignant and tapping it with the brush. “Lie down at once!” By the time she had soothed him and had him say his prayers and played the game where he pretended to blow out the light, Bill had long since finished settling Skip. When she emerged, the house was silent and she thought for a thankful moment that he had gone to bed too. Then she heard him cough out on the veranda and saw the glow of his cigarette.
“Come for a walk,” he said softly. “There’s a moon. Come see.”
The tide had filled the bay and was beginning to recede. The moon seemed huge and yellowish as though swathed in muslin. She fetched a cardigan and walked with him up the track away from Polcamel to the clifftops. From up there they could see not only the sprinkling of lights around the bay and the estuary mouth and the lighthouse on the headland beyond but also the occasional boat far out on the water. There was a well-placed bench, nestling against an outcrop of rocks so it was sheltered. She was breathless from the climb so sat there. He stood smoking and looking out to sea awhile, then came back to join her.
“Listen,” she said.
“What?”
“You can hear sheep munching. In the field behind us.” He listened, laughed and she smelled the odd, nutty smell she had smelled in his room. “Is that cigarette herbal or something?”
“Nope,” he said. “Try some?” He held it out to her.
She shook her head. “I don’t smoke. I tried it once, at school, and the tobacco made me sick.”
“It’s not just tobacco. Go on. Try it.”
“It’s drugs!” she exclaimed, remembering the girl on the motorbike. “You bought drugs!”
“You make it sound like capital letters,” he laughed. “How do you people do that? No, it’s not Drugs. It’s pot. I scored some off those bikers. I’d run into the girl at the post office and smelled it on her.”
“Fancy.”
“So try it.” She shook her head. “You’ll never know until you’ve tried.”
“I don’t want to get addicted.”
“One puff will hardly make you an addict. You don’t even smoke!”
“No. Thanks. Ho
nestly.”
He inhaled again and his voice was momentarily tight, as if the smoke were strangling him. “Becky was so right about you,” he said. “Uptight. Completely, certifiably uptight. Even when you danced on the beach you managed to look respectable, like some mum at a kid’s groovy party.”
“Oh give me that!” She grabbed the cigarette, or roach or whatever one called it, dropped it, swore and stuck it between her lips, feeling with a shock the moisture of his own lips on its paper. She inhaled, fought the impulse to cough, then let the smoke out. The moon caught it so that it momentarily obscured his face. “Nothing,” she said. “Tastes of dusty corners. What book was that in?” She held the cigarette out to him but he left her holding it.
“Have some more,” he said. “You need to catch up.” Humoring him, she inhaled again. “Hold it in this time,” he said. “Don’t let it out so fast.”
She breathed out more slowly, imagining the smoke streaking through her hair and leaving mossy trails. “Nothing,” she said and passed him back what was left of the cigarette.
He dragged on it again, watching her, then grinned and it seemed to her that he had the most perfect teeth she had ever seen. It felt, all at once, as if her skull had opened to the night sky and the stars were shedding chilly light on her glistening brain. The night felt huge and velvety about them, the cliff higher, the bench more exposed. Her nose was suddenly full of the smell of him, which somehow was never going to be enough. “Oh God,” she croaked. “Is it always like this?”
“Like what? I’m feeling nothing at all.”
“I … I can’t really say.”
“You can let go of the bench. You won’t float away.” She watched him prize her hand off the bench and warm it in his. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Trust me. I’m a novelist.”
She pulled away her hand sharply. “Can’t,” she said but instead of clutching back at the bench for the anchorage it gave her, she flung her arm around the back of his neck. “Oh God,” she said, “I think I have to kiss you.”