Rough Music

by Patrick Gale

  “So, Frances? Kiss me,” he laughed softly.

  “But I can’t possibly.”

  “Well I can’t kiss you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re a respectable married lady. And my sister-in-law.”

  “Only very distantly.”

  His eyes were sparkling. He was laughing at her. His neck was warm and hard beneath her hand. It was the easiest thing in the world to pull him toward her. And then she felt his lips on hers and, oh Lord, his tongue in her mouth and his alien mustache against her cheek and nose. And she knew no kiss would be deep enough. She kissed him furiously, as though his mouth withheld a secret. She fed on his face, rammed her fingers through his absurdly long hair, pulled him down against her. “No,” she said. “Stop. We must stop.”

  “OK.” He kissed her once more, chastely, with closed lips, then sat back and looked at her sprawled over the back of the bench against cushions of thrift. But the space between them ached.

  “Come back,” she said. “I can’t bear it.”

  So he stood now and lifted her up and back so that she was squarely before him and he leaned over her and kissed her anywhere but on the lips. On her cheeks. Her neck. The opening of her blouse. Then he held her more tightly and crushed her against the carpet of plants so that she felt all his weight safely holding her there.

  “It hurts,” she said.

  “Sorry.” He began to pull back.

  “No. I mean normally. Normally it hurts. I’ve never told anyone. When we … you know … it hurts me.”

  “Have you told him?”

  “Of course not. The very idea.” She began to laugh. “Where are you? Shouldn’t we …? Oh Lord.”

  He had reached up under her flimsy skirt. She felt herself with his hands and knew she was rough with gooseflesh. She ached for his weight on her again and he was sliding her pants down so presumably he’d soon be on top of her again and she did not care if it hurt she wanted him so. But instead he disappeared from view and began to kiss her in places only the midwife and obstetrician had seen and then, to her amazement, began to lick her in great, long strokes that seemed to run from the base of her spine right around to her belly button, and with a hot tongue that felt as huge and broad as a bullock’s.

  I’m melting, she thought. He’s melting me in half.

  He cradled her thighs on his arms so that he could drive his face deeper and deeper into her. A part of her thought how comical she must look and what would people say if they came along the coast path and saw her, but she was beyond caring, and the quiet, satirical, respectable voice was silenced by the shock of small explosions he seemed to be detonating deep within her. She heard a seagull crying and thought how peculiar this was because seagulls never cried out at night. And then she realized it was her and began to laugh until tears wet her cheeks. He stopped then and kissed his way up her front, nuzzling through her blouse then lay on top of her, squeezing her thighs together inside his so that her groin seemed to be on fire and pressing her head against the flowers with the flat of his hand on her forehead. Had he not pinned her down like that she might have flown clear off the bench, over the cliff’s edge and out to sea. He lay quite still and when he spoke at last it was a shock to hear his voice so close in her ear.

  “That hurt much?”

  “No,” she said. “Not a bit. Oh God.”

  “Leave God out of it. You mention him way too often.”

  “Do you think he was watching?”

  “I think he has better manners. I think he wreathed us in our own private cloud for as long as it took. Kiss me.” She kissed him, realizing only as she did so that she was tasting herself on his lips. Then her straying hand felt him pulsing hard against her thigh. “Nothing that won’t keep,” he said. There was a pause before he added, “Come away with me?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not. You and Julie. We could all live together in Norwich. There’s room; they’ve found me a house.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “OK. You’re right.” He kissed her again, then sat on the bench beside her. He kept a hand spread on her belly as though he sensed her light-headed need to remain anchored. “Come away with me,” he said again. “I think I love you.”

  “You think no such thing.”

  “And you love me.”

  “I hardly know you. I cordially disliked you when you first got here, in fact.”

  “And in the sort of books you read that always means love. Love denied. Come away. Let me save you.”

  “So I can wash your socks. I love John. I’m married to John. This is absurd. It never happened and we must get back to the children.” She tried to sit up but his hand felt as heavy as lead and she had no strength to lift it off her. “I was going to run away,” she confessed. “This afternoon. After … You know. On the beach. I was going to take Julian and leave you both here.”

  “But you chose to stay. And aren’t you glad you did?”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  Now she found the strength to sit up. He helped her off the bench and, once she was on the path again, held her in his arms from behind and rubbed some of his warmth back through her cardiganed arms. “Oh Frances, Frances!”

  “Stop it,” she said, feeling suddenly wretched. “It doesn’t help. Nothing helps.”

  “Can I come to your room?”

  “You’d wake the children.”

  “I could be quiet as death.”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure I could. Stay here a bit. I … I need to go back on my own and think.”

  “OK.”

  She left him smoking a normal cigarette this time, sitting on the back of the bench. She went directly to bed, avoiding all looking-glasses. She did not brush her teeth or bathe and the sheets felt sticky on her salty skin but she needed to feel the events of the day were still about her. She strained to think of John at his desk or reading in his armchair or asleep in bed but all she could conjure was Bill’s eyes and the way they pinioned her and the way the smell of him mounted in her head like smoke. So she cried herself to sleep. They were not wild tears of grief. She was not racked with painful sobs. They were rather tears of a kind of homesickness; tears for the loss of a safe place she now knew she had outgrown forever. There was a shade of fear, too, at the complete uncertainty of what lay before her.

  She slept before he re-entered the house. She woke with him in the bed beside her and pulled his arms about her and breathed him in as though she had known him years not days. They made love quietly, deliberately. It hurt at first, as it always did, but he saw her wince, because he had refused to let her turn out the light, and he slipped out to the kitchen and came back with a pot of yogurt which he encouraged her to spread over him before he pushed into her again. And it felt better, much better, and he actually cried when it was over for him so that she had to hold him and rock him as though it was something bad and wounding she had done to him, something of his she had stolen. And she saw that it was not only for her that the process was irreversible. He must have held her until she slept for she had no memory of his leaving her and when the sun woke her through curtains left carelessly undrawn, she experienced a short-lived, sleepy innocence of all that had passed.

  BLUE HOUSE

  Apparently she had been going through a bad patch, but she had no memory of it other than feeling apprehensive. This was a new development. They were still watching her, even the children, prepared for her to do something unexpected.

  “I don’t know what I was frightened of,” she told John as Sandy drove them all to the theme park. “Probably you lot bloody gawping at me.”

  Hugo and Oscar laughed at this so she laughed back.

  The theme park was not at all the feast of sickening aerial rides and finely tuned technological nightmares the children had been expecting. Instead there were lots of men and women in period costume in a recreated nineteenth-century mining community demonstrating traditional activities, like churning
butter, splitting slates and spinning wool. Once one got over the shock of the costumes, it was rather charming and Frances enjoyed herself, happily sampling fudge and clotted-cream ice cream and scrumpy when they were offered. The boys were in a deep sulk, however, which only two trips on the mineshaft railway, once with John, once with Sandy, would alleviate.

  As they were queuing to visit a pilchard cannery, an old man, apparently on a day out with his daughter, suddenly unzipped his trouser fly, thrust in his hand and started to rub himself with evident relish. The children laughed, naturally, but other people’s reactions were astonishing. John looked politely away but, like a lot of the men around them, Sandy became aggressive. “Can’t you control him?” he shouted at the daughter, who had given up remonstrating with her father. “There are children here, you know.” As if she could have failed to notice. One man pushed the old man quite roughly then another joined in and they tried to bundle him into a corner, like a naughty child, still playing with himself.

  “Leave him alone,” Frances pleaded. “Can’t you see he’s ill? He’s very ill.” And she smiled at the poor daughter to show she sympathized and understood. But the daughter only scowled at her then started shouting at her father too, as if she hated him.

  “Put it away, you disgusting old man,” she said. “I’m never bringing you out again. That’s it! Never again. You hear?” And she pushed between the bullying men to slap her father hard on the top of the head, so that his sun hat fell off.

  “If she did that to a child,” Frances said to anyone who would listen, “the police would be involved. Stop her, someone. John? Why’s everyone so stupidly puritanical?”

  But no one wanted to listen. Sandy was hurrying the boys ahead and John took her arm and only steered her out of the way, saying, “I know. Awful woman,” but in a way that showed he was thinking of his own discomfort.

  They ate a pub lunch, then Sandy placated the boys by stopping off at something called a water park where children, and quite a few adults, flew again and again down slides and convoluted tubes, all of them filled with water, all of them ending in a deep pool where the riders were discharged, sank and re-emerged like creatures reborn only to climb the stairways to ride down again. It was futile and nightmarish, like the worst kind of public baths, with a stench of chlorine and overheated air. Screams and laughter bounced off the tiled walls and huge expanses of smoked plate glass. Heads aching, waving to Sandy and the children when required, Frances and John drank not very nice tea out of polystyrene cups at a sort of café beneath an artificial palm tree. They seemed to be the only people wearing clothes so they felt like visiting dignitaries among a newer, simpler race.

  “Nobody’s swimming,” she said. “Isn’t that odd? They’re just splashing about. Do people not swim anymore?”

  “Of course they do,” he said, but he had escaped into a long Russian novel so his thoughts were not with her.

  “Where’s Will?”

  “With a new friend,” he said wearily.

  “Oh yes,” she said, remembering, “the sad young man.” Twice that day she had asked where Will was and had been patiently reminded. Why could she not remember? Did she, unconsciously, find the facts unpalatable? “Don’t worry. I remember all the facts,” she told John as the water tubes thundered about them and calypso music wailed through loudspeakers in the palm trunk. “It’s only the irritating details that elude me.” He looked at her oddly and offered her another polystyrene tea. “No thanks,” she said. “It was bloody awful.” And he retreated back inside his novel.

  She was tired when they arrived home, too tired to talk, although she was truly curious to hear about Will’s day out with their melancholy neighbor. She drank a glass of wine, to be sociable, then excused herself and went to bed. She did not sleep immediately. It was a pleasure simply to be horizontal between cool sheets and to admire the pattern made on the wall by the dipping sun through the slats of the shutters. She heard the boys having their baths, chattering, arguing because they were tired, and sighed, content that they were not her responsibility. She smelled sausages and chops sizzling on the barbecue and imagined how good they would taste with the salad of brown lentils and vivid herbs Will had been dressing as she kissed him good night.

  She thought of the blessing and the curse of children and mulled over the words labor of love. The novels she liked to read, when she still read novels, tended to end with a couple declaring their love for each other. As though that constituted all that was needful for a happy future. Few romantic novels began at that point, then proceeded, because romance was all about overcoming obstacles not hard work, but the truth of the matter was that love was a burden and from the moment someone said they loved you, they were under an obligation constantly to prove the truth of what they had said, and you were under the possibly greater one of proving worthy of so much ardent demonstration. The love of children was burdensome in a different way, of course, because you had no choice in the matter, especially not nowadays when the ordinary accident of loving one child more than another had been worked up into a kind of crime against nature and the state. Nuns had it very easy, she considered, loving only the world in general and God in particular. Small wonder that their faces in repose wore that look of unstrained complacency.

  She awoke with a start, convinced she heard a child weeping. One of the boys must be having a nightmare. She had been so profoundly asleep that it took her a while to reorient herself. It was quite dark. There was no moon. She heard heavy breathing and realized her husband was asleep beside her. She had been caught before, losing her way when getting out of bed in the dark and waking John by making a dreadful crash or falling on top of him. She had learned to use the glowing digits on her alarm clock to piece together her relation to remembered furniture around her before she tried to get up. This room was easier than the one at home because it was so uncluttered. She swung her feet out, found her slippers and dressing gown, took a moment to let any dizziness recede, then stood and, taking steps to avoid stubbing a toe, found her way out. The doorway was easily reached because it glowed slightly, backlit by the boys’ little nightlight Sandy had plugged in outside.

  That noise again. Or was it not a noise but a feeling? The memory of the feeling she felt when she heard that noise in the night and Will or Poppy needed her? Magic pearls.

  She had said that to Oscar the other night. Tucking him into bed—although one did not really tuck now because children had duvets—her temporarily restrung necklace had dangled in his face and he said it smelled of perfume. “Magic pearls,” she said and he threw her a look of sobering disdain. Abashed, she had launched into an involved description of the bedtime rituals of his uncle and mother’s childhoods and he had merely looked blank and said oh. It was hard to believe such worldly, scientific children ever had nightmares. She found the presence of their nightlight reassuring, not for dispelling any fears of the dark—she had always loved the dark—but for suggesting a continuity in some things, at least.

  She turned right, to the boys’ door, to check on them. One of them might have had a dream because their reading lamp was on but both were now fast asleep. She allowed herself the merest breath of a kiss on each dreaming head. They had lost the tiring odor of cross little boy, all potato crisps and sugary heat, and had drawn about them the temporary innocence of apple shampoo. She turned out the lamp and left them to sleep.

  She was wide awake now. If she went back to bed she would only wake John with her restlessness and make him worry. She was also hungry. She went to the kitchen and grazed, standing up at the fridge door, on a lone cold sausage and a small bowl of surviving lentils. Then, needing to kill the garlic and chili now raging on her tongue, heated herself milk for cocoa. Will had packed her some marvelous stuff from an old Italian firm in San Francisco that was full and rich and intensely chocolatey. She crossed the house with her warm mugful carefully held so she would not wake to cocoa stains, and let herself out on to the veranda so she could sit on the teak ben
ch out there and sip and let the repetitive sounds of the sea restore her sleepiness. What a shame, she thought, the family was not present here in its entirety so she could sit here and indulge in the sense of being its guardian.

  Then, like a jolt through her spine, she felt that feeling again, of a child in pain, and became sharply aware of raised voices through the dark, open window behind her. “That cannot be true,” Will said and she knew at once this was an argument. She knew from the way the air went still, the way it used to when she sat on the landing with her brothers and listened to the awful clarity with which her mother harangued her father. Now as then it made her want to run between them pleading, “Stop, stop, stop!” Then as now, the enormity of eavesdropping, a servant’s sin, proved stronger than her need of harmony.

  “Of course it is. It’s always been true,” Sandy said and his voice had a soft, wheedling quality she did not recognize. “I love you.”

  “Oh, you just say that the way everyone says it. To control me. You’ve got it so easy. Wife. Kids. Good thing. If I stop this … this arrangement we have, it ruins the cozy set-up and you have to look outside and you daren’t do that because it’s far too risky, and it would mean taking that step and becoming a gay man, which you’re not.”

  “Who says?”

  “Oh Sandy, Sandy.” Will’s voice was soft again, even loving.

  Frances felt sick. She spilled hot cocoa on her hand and tossed the mug violently from her over the veranda rail. There would be a mark on the sand tomorrow. They would know she had been here, know she had listened. Some instinct told her their silence was being filled with a kiss.

  “You’re not gay,” Will went on at last. “You’re not even bisexual. These labels don’t figure with men like you. You’re just a married bloke, a happily married mensch who happens to have stumbled on an incredibly convenient way of getting his rocks off twice as often without really having to think of himself as an adulterer. And you run no risk of me ever making demands or insisting on having you full-time because you know how it would make me look and feel to the family.”