Rough Music

by Patrick Gale

  “And don’t you?”

  There was a pause.

  “What?” Will asked.

  “Don’t you want me full-time?”

  “Have I ever said I did?”

  “No, but that’s because you’ve always been so brilliant about it. You could have made my life hell but you never made any demands. But it must have crossed your mind.”

  “I never dared let it. Oh Sandy, please! I didn’t even want us to have this conversation. Please. Just let me go.”

  “You’ve met someone else, haven’t you?”

  “Since when did you have rights in me? You’ve got Poppy. You’ve always had someone else!”

  “I sensed it the moment we got here.”

  “Sandy?”

  “Oh Jesus! God! You have!”

  “I have not.”

  “You’ve no idea how I feel. None at all. You think it’s just sex, don’t you?”

  “And isn’t it?”

  “Only because that’s all we ever seem to have time for. I’ve been dreaming about this holiday. About just spending time with you. As a couple.”

  “With my parents and your children. Oh yes. Just like a couple. Get real, Sandy.”

  Then Sandy broke down and wept. It was not loud but even where she sat Frances could feel the force of it, the great hiss of pent-up emotion escaping.

  “Stop it,” Will said. “Oh. Please, I had no … Sandy? Ssh. You’ll set me off.” He laughed. “Sandy, please! Here. Ssh.”

  Gradually Sandy’s sobs were replaced by other sounds, kisses, a muffled groan, and Frances was freed by disgust from feeling pinned to the bench, and not caring now if they heard her, she jumped up and ran in her slippered feet.

  The telephone box was where she remembered it, and not even replaced with one of the drafty modern ones. The only change was that it was scrawled over with magic marker like everything now. The ugly look-at-me signatures of the young. It even smelled the same; sugar and sand, melted ice cream and sickly suntan oil.

  “Operator services. This is Polly speaking. How can I help you?”

  The woman sounded so wide awake, she lent Frances courage as though people did this all the time. “I want to place a reverse charge call, Polly. To Barrowcester.” She dictated Poppy’s number. They were the only telephone numbers she invariably remembered; her son’s and her daughter’s. Her own she forgot so routinely, she had it written in the front of her diary along with her address, on the Personal Details page most people scorned to complete.

  There was the sound of a familiar, trusted voice, confident even when half-asleep, and then an instant of fear that she might reject the call. But of course Poppy accepted it because she was a mother and a mother’s panic about her children functioned on a hair-trigger reflex, summon-able at a moment’s notice.

  “No, no. It’s not the boys,” Frances assured her. “They’re fine. I just checked on them and they’re sound asleep.”

  “Mum, it’s the middle of the night. It’s one thirty. Does Dad know where you are? Couldn’t this have waited?”

  “Darling, it’s Sandy.”

  Fresh panic, of a different kind but no less sharp. “What’s happened? Oh Christ, not a car crash! Please not that! Mum? Tell me? What?”

  But now that she was on the verge, Frances had no idea what to say. She had seen no further than making the call. “You must come at once. We all need you,” she said, picking her way through words as through thistles. “Sandy especially.”

  “But what’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing. Come, darling. Say you’ll come.”

  “But my squash course is … You’ll be back on Saturday. Oh, Mum. Have you been having a bad day?”

  The abrupt change in her voice, from keen-edged fear to patronizing, practiced concern, infuriated Frances. “Just get your fucking ass down here and ask your dirty little brother what he’s been up to,” she said and slammed the receiver down in its cradle.

  As she walked away across the car park, aware now that she was in her night things, she shivered less from cold than from hunter’s adrenaline. The phone rang behind her, a piteous, unimportant chirruping which she ignored. She was implacable. She was powerful. She, Frances Pagett, could straighten the twisted path and free the imprisoned.

  A cat froze in her path, saw the wildness in her eyes, and fled.

  BEACHCOMBER

  Like most clinics in or around Harley Street, this one was designed to overcome fear and disgust. Just as lawyers’ and accountants’ businesses were founded on no nobler motive than profit and therefore strove to muster a compensatory air of respectability so, John imagined, the more intimate the ailment, the less mentionable the organ, the more a clinic called on hunting prints, brass and chintz to evoke a saving gentility.

  The word fertility appeared nowhere, any more than did egg or sperm; there was only the doctor’s name and flourish of abbreviated qualifications on a brass plate. The waiting room was a drawing room, complete with standard lamps and piano and the thin, middle-aged receptionist who opened the door and showed him to a sofa was dressed not in nursing uniform but like any hostess at a smart but informal lunch. The domestic effect was heightened by its being early evening. Waiting amid soft pools of welcoming light, John half-expected her to return with cocktails and a bowl of nuts.

  He had first called in at lunchtime, little expecting to be summoned back so soon. Speedy results as much as discretion and superior knowledge were what one paid for, presumably. He had not met the doctor earlier. The twin-setted receptionist had instead brought him a questionnaire to fill out, an intimate document reassuringly masked by a thick leather folder, like the kind in which the better restaurants delivered one’s bill. This completed, she led him upstairs to another chamber, a former bedroom presumably, and left him with the request, murmured with lowered eyes, that he prepare a sample and take as long as he liked.

  Suffering a torment of inhibition he might, ironically, have been spared had she only worn a nurse’s uniform after all, he turned to find the room furnished with not only a buttoned leather couch and prints of peachily naked nymphs, but an array of leather-bound continental pornography catering to every conceivable taste. Aghast at the thought of fleeing the room empty-handed, as it were—in fact there was a dumbwaiter in which the sample jar was to be tucked from view—he was startled by the pornography’s efficacy.

  The afternoon was spent in conference with police and senior officers, piecing together what the investigations had so far established. As soon after his escape as unrest among the men allowed, Farmer’s cell had been searched and the men known to be his friends or confederates questioned in the hope of some clue as to where he had gone. Allies or thieves had already cleared his cell however and nothing was left but a few tatty pin-ups and a Gideon Bible. There was also a thick railway timetable. It was unmarked, which was strange given that Farmer had been a keen member of the prison trainspotters’ club which recorded train numbers as they passed through a cutting clearly visible from a C-block washroom. As a rule it was depressingly easy to persuade men to betray one another. The offer of perks or even a sentence review was all that was required. Their loyalty this time was such that John could only imagine their discretion had been purchased already with promises of jobs, preferment or cash once they rejoined Farmer on the outside. Friendship was never reason enough. How a robber whose pre-criminal status had never amounted to anything more powerful than post office worker could muster any credible inducements lay beyond John’s reckoning. Unless Farmer had some kind of heist planned, but this seemed unlikely in a felon whose only known robbery was executed alone. And so the line of inquiry had gone round in circles and threatened to eat itself.

  That morning, however, a link was found that made the situation more humiliating than John had imagined. A newish recruit among the officers who had called in sick ever since the break-out was found to have disappeared. Then an officer overseeing a maintenance work party found bolts missing on a C-win
g skylight. The escape now revealed an ingenuity that was surely not Farmer’s own, or not his alone. It had in fact been a kind of double break-out only the man over the wall was not an inmate at all but the missing officer.

  Malone, who looked far older than he was and had Farmer’s build, had taken his clothes and place in the exercise yard while Farmer concealed himself in a lavatory. At a preordained hour, a removal lorry, already parked a few yards down the street, pulled up outside the prison wall and a rope ladder was thrown over, weighted by a crow bar. It was this, not a garden implement, that Malone, posing as Farmer, had seized to strike down the warders on duty before climbing out. The ruckus that followed was not entirely planned, John suspected, but had grown in part from a fight between other prisoners trying to use the ladder while another inside accomplice fought them back so that the ladder could be safely withdrawn to the lorry once Malone was over the wall and away. Aided by the disorder that followed, in which all officers not pursuing Malone and raising the alarm were occupied in driving the men back to their cells, Farmer had succeeded in climbing up the caging that enclosed C-wing’s stairwell and out through the skylight to the prison roof. From there he had made his way across the landscape of gully and chimneys to the adjacent roof of the Governor’s House and come via a small window into one of the many unused attic rooms. There he had concealed himself until the fuss had died down and the van’s driver had successfully led the police on a wild goose chase to Dover before eluding them in a lorry park at the port, where the removal van, stolen of course, was found abandoned.

  Malone, like the driver, was still at large, having stepped from the van on some street corner in South London and blended into the crowds, an unsuspected prison officer laid up with toothache. He had phoned in sick daily until that morning, when questions started being asked when his flat was found to be empty. Ferries’ passengers and freight were still being checked devoutly. Farmer meanwhile had dined on John’s food and left in a taxi wearing his clothes and holding his silver and his painting and his freshly plumped wallet. With insouciance calculated to insult, he had left fingerprints all over the Governor’s House.

  Uncleaned, soured by the cigarettes of investigating officers, the kitchen stacked with washing-up, the house was beginning to feel as male as the prison it abutted. However, it was Farmer’s concealed presence about the place John could not stop imagining. Going about his morning’s work, he pictured precisely how Farmer or any other intruder using the same route might have killed him, stifled him in his sleep, drowned him in the bath. Then he thought of Farmer listening in as he made phone calls. He thought of Farmer touching Frances’s things with meaty hands.

  Far from arousing a low desire for vengeance or even an obsession with wanting to see Farmer caught and humiliated, these thoughts and visions only induced an unprofessional euphoria. Spared, not nearly as badly robbed as he might have been, John found it hard to concentrate on the business in hand and the questions of the police. He was consumed by an intense sense of his own luck and healthiness. The only area in which his life was lacking was his apparent inability to father further children, and in this mood there was no problem he was not prepared to tackle head-on. No sooner was his morning “surgery” over than he tracked down this clinic in the Yellow Pages and, reminding himself he had been cheated of holiday, made a lunchtime appointment. Taking a leaf out of Malone’s book, he told his deputy it was for some urgent work on a filling that had worked loose.

  The usual suspects had been checked and relatives’ houses were being watched, but Malone and Farmer had vanished with an efficiency that spoke of months, if not years of planning. Farmer’s hours in the prison library, a fact of which John had only recently bragged to visiting inspectors, had clearly not been wasted in reading poetry but devoted to poring over Ordnance Survey maps. For all he knew the bastard had taught himself to fly from manuals.

  Someone had helped him, however, someone with intimate knowledge of the prison’s less obvious geography, which ruled out Malone who was too new on the job. Someone had shown Farmer the link with the Governor’s House and the ease with which a man could pass from one to the other via the attics. By the time John returned after his lunchtime appointment, spikes and razor wire had been erected to separate one roof from the other and bars had been bolted across both skylight and offending window, but the helper went undetected. Mrs. Coley, the cleaner, was eliminated from the inquiry, though not before her glowing references were found to be bogus. Her duties never took her above the first-floor rooms and her bad knee—authenticated by a police-approved doctor—would surely have prevented her climbing the steep wooden stairs to the area of attic in question. She had been sacked over the reference business amid gaudy imprecations and threats to take her story to the papers.

  It came as a shock to discover that Dr. Alberti was a woman. The hunting prints and leather, not to mention the ingenious library of pornography, had led him to imagine a clubbable man of the world, the type who would display a photograph of wife and children on his desk by way of male qualifications. Instead Dr. Alberti displayed only a small bowl of roses, whose full-blown pinkness was in contrast to her iron-gray hair and chainsmoker’s complexion. She had on the female equivalent of a charcoal lounge suit and as she shook him by the hand and waved him to a chair with a brisk motion of her free arm, he caught a distinct whiff of roast lamb and cigars.

  His deputy had a sister in the profession and John recalled Mervyn saying how women doctors were tiring of being corralled toward pediatrics and, like homosexuals, were swallowing their pride to colonize the specialities at the dirty end of the field—gynecology, venereology and sexual dysfunction.

  “Well, Mr. Pagett,” Dr. Alberti said. “You have nothing to fret over. Your sperm count is normal. Now, I need to ask you more questions, I’m afraid, of an intensely impudent nature. You’ll think me eccentric but I like to borrow a technique from the Viennese and have you face away from me by lying over there.” She indicated a leather couch identical to the one in the sample-room. “You’ll find it makes it far easier to answer, almost without thinking.” A small smile lit up her bullfrog face and John was touched to see that she was as bashful as he. A lack of eye contact would spare them both.

  He lay down and began to answer questions. Her technique was to fire them off so fast that one felt obliged to answer just as quickly. How often did he and his wife have sex? Why so rarely? What were these pamphlets he had read? What did they advise? He told her everything, unburdening himself of years of secrets in light-headed minutes. Whereas merely making the appointment had left his cheeks aflame, he found himself talking from the couch dispassionately and as unabashed as if he had been describing his breakfasting habits or the prison menus for the coming week.

  “You and your wife are Catholic?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re sure—forgive me for asking this—she isn’t taking birth control pills in secret?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “It does happen. They come in thin foil packets. Not bottles.”

  “I’m quite sure.”

  “And forgive me if I’m underestimating the breadth of your education, but what do you know about a woman’s ovulation cycle?”

  “Erm …” John was so relaxed he actually laughed. “Apart from her monthly headaches bugger all, I’m afraid. They taught us about frogs and mice but I didn’t really concentrate.”

  “You see, you’re not firing blanks. Far from it. But it sounds as though you’re firing when the target isn’t in place. And if you were to persist in following the, forgive me, misguided advice of your pamphlets, you could continue missing one another indefinitely. If you want another child, Mr. Pagett, holding back is the last thing you should be doing.” So saying, Dr. Alberti walked back into his field of view in order to open the consulting-room door. “Don’t hesitate to come back if the problem continues but I think the prognosis is excellent!”

  Now it was John’s turn to shake her h
and warmly. As he signed his check at the hall table, the unlikely receptionist standing by, his signature emerged larger and bolder than usual and he bade her good evening with a kind of hilarity. His euphoria of the morning was as nothing compared to this. Riding the train home, he fantasized recklessly about having a huge family. Why stop at one more baby when they could produce four or five? Governors’ houses were large enough to accommodate them all. Frances and he should found a tribe. The house would ring to the noise of a crowded nursery. Mealtimes would be deafening with competing voices, Christmas an orgy of present-giving. He thought of Julian, on his own all his short life, and realized how dreadfully lonely he must have been. No wonder the poor boy was forever reading; books were his brothers.

  John hurried through his evening business at the prison. He wished he could ring Frances to tell her the good news and resented more than ever being held a prisoner by his work when he wanted to be with her. He fried himself a celebratory steak and was just pouring a second glass of wine when she rang from a call box in Wadebridge.

  He had to hear the children’s news first, which married nicely with his earlier fantasies, but when Frances’s low, calm voice replaced their chatter, he became tongue-tied. He could not tell her, when she was squeezed into a kiosk with his brother-in-law and two children. He could not tell her, in any case, when the fears just dispelled had never been discussed between them. When the pips cut her off, all too soon, he was left with unspoken happiness caught in his throat, an eye-watering obstruction no amount of wine could rinse away.

  The third glass raised his mood, however. Whatever the ingenuity of his escape, Farmer could not be on the run indefinitely. He would make a mistake soon or be betrayed to the police. One or the other usually happened within days of a break-out, most prisoners rarely planning beyond their initial flight over the wall. Then John would seize the remains of his holiday and return to Cornwall. Frances would learn everything. Dr. Alberti’s cunning blend of frankness and discretion had shown him how it could be done, under cover of darkness, perhaps, or while one of them was driving the car. He would tell her of his foolish fears, the pamphlets, the agonies of abstinence, the curiosity of being instructed in the mysteries of human reproduction by a suited woman who smelled of Sunday roast and cigarillos. They would laugh and they would begin again.