Rough Music

by Patrick Gale

  BEACHCOMBER

  Frances would never have believed herself capable of such heedless selfishness. It was not that she specifically did anything—like neglecting the children for hours on end for the pursuit of her own pleasure, or not very often, not unless she was sure they were amusing themselves. It was rather that, while continuing to do everything a mother on holiday should, she allowed herself to become entirely self-absorbed.

  She had always feared her piano-playing was a self-indulgence because of the romantic and rebellious notions it fed within her, but now she saw that it was still largely about the entertainment or impressing of other people. This was selfishness, this impatience to be alone with her thoughts, this intense awareness of how she looked and felt from hour to somnolent hour, this ridiculous, she knew it, mad hunger to feel his body against hers however fleetingly, above all, this sense of being what the French called well in one’s skin.

  The danger, of course, was that for all that she was treading a tightrope, risking love, marriage, motherhood, those gimcrack medals of social standing and parental approval, because of Bill and what she was doing with him, most of these feelings and changes were not about him at all. The sensation of herself was as novel as the first pangs of childbirth had been. That experience, at once terrifying and fascinating, had felt so far removed from the father of her child, without whom et cetera, that it had been something of a shock to emerge from her etherized labors to find him holding her hand and looking pleased with himself. Similarly she now had to remind herself afresh whenever she felt Bill’s touch under cover of lunch table, crowded wave or merciful darkness, to make an effort to focus on this clever, dangerous man whose first laughable declaration of love had begotten this upheaval she was riding so casually.

  Part of the trouble was the lack of a courtship. By the time she married John, by the time he first kissed her even, she had known his life story, the names of all his significant relatives, alive or dead, and even his taste in cake and thoughts on God. Bill, by contrast, was still a stranger in many ways. She would have liked to think the daily small surprises about him were a part of falling in love only her rational self knew they were a symptom of her having met him mere days ago. He, however, knew her too well, read her like a text and could predict her every move. It was a text that inexplicably fascinated him. He wanted to save her and Julian, apparently, from the dead hand of respectability. So far, so patronizing. And goaded by thoughts of Becky, she dealt with that by laughing demonstrations of just how capable of unrespectability she was.

  More touchingly, he looked to her to save him from what he had thought an inability to love again, a lingering mistrust of women indeed. Even when the children were in earshot, so that he was reduced to encoded declarations or mere speaking glances, he laid delicious siege to her. He had somehow seen, that day in Trenellion, how restless she was, how ready to be set free and by saying the words aloud and encouraging her, fool that she was, to admit the truth of them, he had made mere thoughts a fact and now built each hour on that crumbly foundation of dissatisfaction so that it was becoming a thing apart from her she could assess and fear.

  She wanted to argue, to defend John and their marriage against criticism she knew to be unjust, but was only ever in a position to do so when they were alone together. And at such times she found herself a mere groping animal in her desire for his rival.

  They lay together now on the sand, hidden by a clouded moon, spent and therefore briefly in a position to hold a sensible conversation but instead she seized his hand and tugged him into the icy water where they washed the sand and lovemaking from each other’s bodies and shouted aloud because, after all, they were now only swimming and swimming, even by moonlight, was allowed. They ran back to their heap of ripped-off clothes and she snatched a towel and, rubbing herself, shivering, moved apart from him. As if to assist her, the moon emerged again and they seemed suddenly floodlit, forced into decorum on a sandy stage.

  “Julie’s a little fruit,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “He is sweet,” she agreed. “He’s really blossomed out here. We’ve brought out the savage in him.”

  “No. I mean he’s a fruit. A fag. A queer.”

  She was shocked, repelled. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “He’s only a baby still. He’s only eight. He doesn’t even know what it’s for yet.”

  “So? He’s still … I can tell. He tried to pull my shorts down.”

  “He showed remarkably good taste.”

  “He was looking at me, Frances.”

  “Oh, Bill.” She was impatient now. This was not what she had wanted to discuss. “The whole world is not fixated with your … thing.”

  “Say it.”

  “Penis. Penispenispenis.” She laughed. “Just me. Come here. I’m cold.”

  “No.” He sat on a rock, threw her clothes across, quite roughly, and began to dress himself. “We need to talk,” he said.

  “You’re right,” she agreed, trying to seize control as well as the moment. “We must stop. It’s been lovely, amazing, but enough’s enough. I’m sure Skip suspects something and I don’t want it going any further. I have to go back to John next week and get on with our life and you have a new job to start in Norwich and—”

  “No, Frances.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve asked her already.”

  “Who?” For an absurd moment she thought he was going to say Becky and, in her shock, she took a second or two to focus on what he was telling her.

  “I took her aside after dinner tonight and asked her how she’d feel having you for a new mother.”

  “But that’s … You shouldn’t have! Not without asking me.”

  “She was so happy, Frances. She loves you. You can be more mother to her than Becky ever could. To Becky she was just a hindrance, a sort of ironic accessory at best: My Child.” He mimicked Becky’s icy accent.

  She stood, pulled on her jersey because her teeth were chattering with cold as well as adrenaline. “But I’m not free to become her mother,” she insisted.

  “I know. And you’re scared and I understand that. But listen. I’ll tell him for you. You never need see him again. I’ve thought it all out. I’ll leave Skip here with you and I’ll go to the prison and see him and tell him everything. He won’t put up a fight. He’s way too well brought up to stand in your way.”

  “But I love him.” She walked away, as though she could walk away from the problem, but the house was before her, with Skip inside it, Skip who now knew and was unlikely to keep silent. How could he force her hand like this? How could he say he loved her and be so calculatingly vicious? “I love him, don’t you see?” And she heard doubt in her voice, in her need to repeat the declaration and she sank on to another rock, her back to him, watching the house as though for answers. His voice stung her like salt in a cut.

  “You’re still so fucking respectable. It’s making you paranoid.”

  “It’s Skip I’m thinking of,” she said. “Not what you call my respectability. Really, Bill,” she sought refuge in snobbery, “if you’re to survive in your new job, you really must lose this touching American belief that all the English are in thrall to the Royal Family and good manners.” But anger made her stammer and she knew he was unconvinced. “It’s her I’m thinking of,” she reiterated. “You can’t just play around with a child’s feelings like that. What’s she going to think when I don’t become her mother? Think of the rejection that represents!”

  He came up behind her, kissed her neck, kissed her shoulders through her jersey. “Stop fighting it,” he begged. “Just let go. Let me worry for us both. Let me make up to you for the lost years. Let me give you the self-willed life you should have been having by now.”

  His hands were around her now, skating under the cotton and across her belly. She felt hot again, constricted by clothes. How could she feel hot? “I’m not a caged songbird,” she said.

  “Frances, please.” He pressed against
her and somehow she found herself sliding backward on to his lap and then they were both where they started, back on the sand, kissing lips already sore with kissing, cheeks already sore with sun.

  “Don’t make me choose,” she pleaded. “Not yet. I can’t. Please?”

  For all her resolve, the next morning saw no change. The weather was still glorious. She still sat before her looking-glass and was amazed at how full and ripe she was looking, lambent with preposterous desire as much for herself as for him. She cleared the breakfast things in a coffee-scented daze, even singing along to the cheaply repetitive songs on the radio and swaying her hips as she wiped down the table. Then the news came on, the little news that such stations allowed one, committed as they seemed to be to keeping the listener anesthetized and happy, and she heard the bare facts. A six-million-pound train robbery had taken place, one guard was now in a coma from a blow to his head. It was thought to be the work of the man who had recently escaped from Wandsworth jail, possibly working with outsiders. Ports and airports being watched. She grabbed the radio and tried to find other stations but there was only pop music, interference and gobbledegook. Shouting a mere, “Back soon!” to the others, she raced to the car and thundered up the lane.

  The Polcamel Stores still had a copy of yesterday’s Times in a back room. She bought it as well as that day’s because it had John’s face on the front next to Henry Farmer and another, younger man she did not recognize. She read, astonished, how Farmer had been in the house with John. He could have ended up in a coma like the guard. Or dead. She thought of the hours she had left Julian free to chat to Farmer in the garden. He might have been taken hostage, raped. Anything could have happened. Why had John not told her when they rang? He could have at least sent a telegram. Cursing her slovenliness in not ringing him more often, not wanting to bother him in a “little woman” way, she gunned the engine and raced back up to the car park and the telephone kiosk. She rang the direct line but his deputy answered.

  “Mervyn, it’s Frances. I’ve just heard. My God! Is John there?”

  “Frances, don’t worry. He’s on his way down. He said to tell you if you rang.”

  “What train? I could meet him.”

  “He didn’t say. Actually. I think he half-hoped you wouldn’t ring so he could surprise you.”

  “Surprise us,” she thought as she returned down the hill, and flinched at her instinctive assumption that you had referred to her and Bill and not to her alone. Should she tell him before Skip did? Or Bill? She could tell him and thus preclude any grand destructive gestures on Bill’s part.

  I did this. We did this. But I love you and I want to stay. Or I did this. I love him.

  Did she love him? Did she love either of them? She was racing around the house with these questions in her mind, tidying and dusting as though her guilt had left sandy trails about the place that he would see on arrival. She checked herself. This was preposterous. She would say nothing. Not because there was nothing to say but because she no longer knew what she wanted.

  A weariness assailed her. They had not come to bed much before three and even then Bill had pursued her to her room and seemed to have held her all night, pawing her, murmuring in her ear until she pawed back as much in a desperate desire to push him away to let her sleep as from the need to feel any reassurance his warm flesh could offer in return.

  She sat on the veranda with a cup of cold coffee from the jug he liked to keep in the fridge. They could decide it for themselves. The men. She knew the decision to be ignoble but she began to feel she no longer cared. They could fight it out and then she would decide, when the bloodshed was done, then she would go with one or the other.

  He had set up his Olivetti and begun typing but the children or good weather must have proved too great a distraction and the three had gone off somewhere. Idly, she read the paragraph or two he had tapped out. A description of a woman packing in a hurry, including typically male assumptions of the things a woman in such a position would think to take with her: silk stockings and lipstick rather than pearls, a good book and a stash of housekeeping money. She smiled to herself. He would learn. Perhaps it would fall to her to teach him? The rest of the novel in progress, or such of it as he had worked on since arriving, lay in a ring binder under the chair. She marveled at his lack of fear. What if rain came suddenly and soaked the pages, or someone upturned a cup of coffee, just as she so easily might have done before she noticed the binder was there? He used no carbon paper.

  She picked up the file, opened it and flicked to the back, wanting to read the page that would give more context to the one still in the machine. He had barely touched these pages, just fed them in and out of the machine, and yet they were, she felt sure, more imbued with his essence than any discarded shirt. She read, frowned, flicked back a further page and read again.

  Stop fighting it, the hero, she assumed he was the hero, breathed, his mouth hot against the woman’s collar bone. Just let go. Let me worry for us both. Let me make up to you for the lost years. Let me give you the self-willed life he never let you have.

  She grimly noted the subtle improvement he had made to the rhythm of last night’s text then shut the folder and put it back beneath the seat.

  She no longer felt wearily passive but energized to the point where angry static might have crackled off her fingertips and hair. She could not resist. She grabbed the folder and read more, amazed she had forborne to do so all this time. John Updike was nothing compared to this.

  Having grown up in her father’s prison and moved to her husband’s she was caught between her ache for freedom and open spaces and her terror of the world outside the perimeter fence.

  Furious, she snatched a pencil and underlined the last sentence jaggedly before scribbling in the margin,

  “But English prisons have walls not fences. Try ‘guarded walls.’ Better rhythm?” She flicked on, making other suggestions. When she reached the climactic discussion about leaving the heroine’s husband for her love and his motherless daughter, she scribbled, “No. Absolutely not. She loves the daughter and respects her far too much to endanger the exclusive relationship the girl has established with him. She only lets him think she’s coming to him to shut him up and satisfy his ego. In fact she’s going off on her own. ALONE!”

  She heard Skip’s raucous laugh and threw the folder down. They were coming down the cliff path to the right of the cove. She waved. They waved back, all three, so neatly. But he was just a man. A rather ordinary-looking man with a droopy mustache. Not a great love. Certainly not a god of any kind. How could she have risked so much for so little? And unless she worked fast, all was still to risk. She felt like a sleepwalker awaking on a quarry’s edge, stones already slipping beneath her dirty, bloodied toes.

  “Guess what!” she shouted, jumping up to greet them. “John’s coming back. Isn’t that great? Crisis over and he’ll still be in time for some holiday.”

  She saw the pain in his eyes, real pain that startled her and brought fear up in her throat. She would keep him at arm’s length with brittle, excited chatter. She would use the children as a buffer zone, talking through them if necessary. She would cleave to her little boy’s side, even to ridiculous lengths, take him to meet a succession of trains if necessary, until John was safely back to protect her.

  There would be no further discussion. Words were dangerous and entirely untrustworthy.

  BLUE HOUSE

  She had to be very careful. They pretended not to guard her but they did and venturing out alone like this would not be approved of. They were right to worry. She worried too. To venture out alone was to walk across a thawing lake on bobbing floes which shrank even as one paused to recollect the route. As well as her home address, firmly in the front of her diary for showing the taxi driver, she had a bag from his shop, carefully smoothed away in her jersey drawer, which had the shop’s address on it. She counted out her money twice and tied the purse on a piece of tapestry wool, fastening the other to a butto
n on her coat so there should be no chance of losing it. She did not even have to read. When the taxi driver asked, “Where to?” all she had to do was hold out the bag and say, “Here, please.”

  He gave her a funny look but he drove off without fuss. She had made a logical request and spoken no gibberish. She shut the little window between them in case the driver tried to make conversation. She could no longer trust her mouth with strangers. She used what the therapist girl called inappropriate language sometimes. Swore, in other words. And she tended to forget who knew what or whom and baffle them with talk of friends and family members they could not possibly know.

  She had come in the afternoon because that was the only time she could slip away, stepping out through the window while they thought she was having her afternoon nap. But she also recalled him saying this was his least busy time. The taxi cost so much she was not sure she could afford a tip, so she said an extra special thank you then wrinkled her nose and apologized that she was so poor. The driver used inappropriate language, which made her laugh.

  Of course she remembered his shop! She recognized it as soon as she turned on the curb. The vivid orange and yellow awnings. The café tables where pretty, summery people were eating cake and late salad lunches. The window display where new books hung on fishing lines so they seemed to be floating.

  She let herself in and breathed that lovely, glossy bookshop smell, so unlike the sad, stale fetor of libraries. Only this was even better because there was coffee too and Casablanca lilies in a big vase. Piano music floated, sad and beseeching, which it took her a moment to place.

  “Fauré,” she said to a tall girl who had approached wearing a how-can-I-help-you face.