by Patrick Gale
“I don’t understand,” said Frances.
“I do,” John said. “It’s from Farmer. It’s from bloody Farmer. The nerve of the man!” Anger made his hand shake and he pretended he needed a sip of wine to give it something to do. “It’s from your friend Henry,” he told Julian. “Isn’t it?”
“How should I know?” Julian asked. He made a silly face, a sort of grin which looked even stupider with his black eye and for a second John despised him.
“What services, Julian? What did you do for him?”
“Darling, I really don’t think that—” Frances started but John cut her off.
“Tell me!” he said and grabbed Julian’s wrists. “What services?”
“Ow!” Julian said.
“You told him. Trailing after him in the bloody garden, you told him.”
“You swore!”
“He could have killed me,” John said and slapped him.
The blow was hard enough to make the boy stumble back against a chair.
“Beef curtains,” Julian said, beginning to cry. Frances reached out for him but he smacked away her hand, hard enough to whiten the skin through her tan. “Fucking chutney ferret,” he said. “Buggery fuck arsehole.”
John slapped him again. He did not want to hurt him, just to silence him, silence this filth that was like Farmer jeering out at him like a devil in the child’s body. Julian fell over. Frances screamed. Skip giggled nervously.
“Hey, steady!” Bill shouted.
The second slap made things worse. Julian did not cry out but as he got back to his feet he continued to mumble a litany of obscenities, words he could not possibly understand, words he could only have learned from the prisoners. The rest of them just stood and watched and listened as though, John thought, he were not a child at all but the mouthpiece of some brutal oracle. Then he started to make sentences.
“They’ve been like dogs in a car park,” he said. “At it like dogs in a car park. Round and round. Bum to bum. And we’re not meant to look but we do and it’s filthy. Filthy. He squeezes her between his legs on the floor and gives it to her and she loves it. He sticks his thing in her beef curtains.”
Now Frances slapped him. As soon as she did it she cried out, a terrible, wounded, “Oh I’m so sorry!” that could have been meant for any of them but Julian just spat back, “That’s right. Break my cunting face open.” Then he ran.
For a second, as the boy’s slapping steps ran over the veranda, the house felt impossibly small and hot. John looked at his wife and saw a stricken, white-faced stranger, then he pushed past the others and raced across the darkening beach.
Julian was up ahead, already churning out through the waves. John followed and, startled by the mineral chill of the water, realized that he might be about to have to swim and would need to discard his shoes. By the time he had pulled them off and hurled them to the shore, Julian was executing a furious crawl.
“Julian!” he called after him. “Wait. For God’s sake. Bloody hell.” And he threw himself after him.
Water was not his natural element—faced with a beach holiday he would walk while Frances swam—but he had been efficiently taught in the freezing, river-fed pool at his school. He had no practice at swimming in sodden clothes, however, and Julian had anger on his side as well as a head start. It was getting dark so fast he was guided more by sound than sight, following the splashing of reliably inefficient technique. Julian never swam for long unless forced to. He would tire soon and give up. But the tide was pulling out and they were in quite the worst part of the bay for being seized by a rip current and pulled farther out than their feeble strokes alone would carry them.
“Julian, stop!” He tried to yell over the waves. “The tide’s too strong. Julian!” But the child was like a clockwork thing, churning on regardless, his arm strokes regular for all their wildness. It was so cold John had lost all feeling in his lower body so God alone knew what a mere boy in shorts and tee shirt was suffering.
When, after what seemed an eternity, John realized he was in grabbing distance and managed to seize his shirt and then his chest, there was little fight in him. Julian kicked once or twice, from rage or automatic desire to keep swimming John could not say, then went quite limp. It was impossible to fight the tide back into their little cove. Instead, lungs burning from the effort, John swam parallel to the shore past the rocky headland and into the wider, more welcoming space of the main beach. It was only when they flopped on to the sand, thrown by one wave and smacked on the backs by a second, that it occurred to him to check whether Julian was still alive.
The boy was breathing still, but clearly near-catatonic with cold and exhaustion. John held him tight against his chest, thinking to share what little warmth was left him, and lurched up the beach to the steps to the car park. His mind was empty of everything but the need to run a hot bath and get the child in it, closely followed by the desirability of a shot of whiskey. The sound of the motorbike engine therefore came like clamor from a room he had thought empty. Its headlamp swung on to the drive and he had to jump aside as the machine roared up the track. He felt the wind it made on his chilled limbs as it passed.
In the cruelty of the hour, he had quite forgotten Skip. He merely assumed, too weary even to do more than register the fact, that Frances and Bill had left together. She’s gone, he thought, staring after the motorbike’s receding lights. She’s left me. But he said aloud, “Nearly there, boy. Nearly there. Hot bath and cocoa and bed. Nearly there.”
Julian had been keeping up a regular if exhausted lament since they left the sea, a faintly feral keening, turned to an involuntary sobbing by the pressure on his lungs as John jolted him up and down as he hurried homeward. So it was a moment before he made out a second voice, also sobbing. Skip was standing at the base of the track. In the light from the house he could see the tears that washed her cheeks. “Skip? Skip, we’re OK. He’s OK. What is it?” he asked, stupidly, thinking of nothing else to say.
She had lost all her swagger and was a child again, a little girl, weak and frightened. “He left me behind,” she said. “He’s never coming back.”
“Come,” was all he could say. He wanted to hug her but Julian was already a dead, shivering weight in his arms.
“He took his typewriter,” she wailed. “He took his typewriter instead of me.”
BLUE HOUSE
John had been trained by first his sister then his wife always to find at least one thing on which to compliment a woman. “If all else fails,” Frances used to say, “tell her how well she’s looking. Her nerves may be in shreds and hearing that could be her first step to recovery.”
“My God,” he told Sylvia. “What happened to you?”
It was hard to believe that a few weeks could have wrought such alteration. She wore no jewelry. In place of her usual tailored jacket and skirt she had on a navy-blue shift affair which, because he had never seen her in anything so loose, struck him, for one absurd moment, as a nightdress. Her hair, normally so shaped and finished, had somehow become limp, as though wilted in damp heat. Perhaps most disturbing of all were the dark glasses failing to conceal a bruised cheek, and a sticking plaster over one ear lobe, through which blood had seeped and dried.
“Get me another of these first?” she asked.
“Of course.” He fetched her a gin and tonic. That at least had not changed; her quaintly feminine short beside his overbearing pint.
“How was your holiday?” she asked as he sat down.
“Good,” he said. “Then bad.”
“And Frances?”
“Not so good. Sylvia, tell me!”
“I’ve put him into care,” she said swiftly and immediately glanced across at another table of drinkers, facing down fancied disapproval. She gulped at her drink, which visibly relaxed her. “I’ve stopped recycling,” she said, seeing him notice. “Glass, that is. I’m too ashamed. Isn’t that stupid? I stick the bottles in the dustbin.”
“Your face … Did
you fall?”
“I’m not drinking that much,” she snorted.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean …”
“He hit me. He’d been doing it for a bit. Usually in the bathroom, because it’s worst in there. But you wouldn’t know about that yet.”
“Frances wet the bed the other night.”
“Oh Christ. Me and my big—”
“That’s all right. We managed to see the funny side. She’d been dreaming about the sea. But …” He stopped short of mentioning the ear, not wanting to make her feel awkward about the state of her sticking plaster.
“He’d slap me when I was wiping him clean. That sort of thing. A bit like a toddler only it hurt because he was bigger. At first I used to make a joke of it, even smack him back. But then he started to scare me. I mean, he was always quite a strong man. He used to lift weights. And he’d start doing this thing where he’d grip my wrists suddenly and not let go. Just grip until he started bruising me. ‘What is it?’ I’d ask him. ‘What do you want? Please stop that, you’re hurting me.’ And sometimes he’d stop and even say sorry and sometimes he’d cry. But then these last times it got worse. He punched me, really punched me, so I fell over. And then he …” She touched a hand to the sticking plaster. “My fault for wearing the things,” she said, shortly. “Anyway, I had to see the GP for this, to get it stitched and it all came out. I wouldn’t have gone along with it only I … I was starting to hate him and I was scared of what I might do. He wet himself just after I’d cleaned him up. Just stood there and peed and I was so fucking angry I let him just stay like that for a whole hour. That’s not good. That’s not right. So …”
“Where is he?”
She sighed and began scratching the label off her tonic bottle. “The nursing home I had him down for wouldn’t take him,” she said. “Maybe earlier but not now, not with a record of violence. And after I’d saved all this bloody money to pay fees. He’s in the psychiatric ward.”
“God.”
She shook her head. “Of course he’s quiet as a lamb now because he’s rattling with pills. He can hardly walk he’s so stoned.”
“Does he know where he is?”
“Probably. He cried when I went this afternoon. Said ‘Don’t leave me don’t leave me!’ I felt I was leaving him in boarding school. But there was nothing for it. I have to get my life back. For both our sakes. And now that I’m not mopping him up all the time, carting him in and out of the bath, it’s easier. I can just visit him and be nice, you know? He’s become a patient. A sick friend.”
“What’s the ward like?”
“Don’t ask,” she laughed. “Funny really. You spend all this time worrying about them ending up in an old folks’ home before their time, sitting in some sun lounge with a load of dribblers and bleaters twenty years older, and instead he ends up with a bunch of psychos and depressives. But he’s not mad. He’s just … not there. Telly on full blast. All the time. In that respect it’s just like a home. No one watching it but the cleaners. They showed me the scan, you know?”
“My son-in-law’s booked Frances in for one.”
“Yeah, well, prepare yourself. I had no idea. I mean … there were holes. Actual holes. Sorry. I’m going on. I’ve been holding back with Teresa so I don’t drive her mad and now I’m dumping. Go on. Dump back. Why was the holiday bad?”
“Oh, it wasn’t bad really. More sad. But she enjoyed herself.”
He had never intended to tell her of the drama of Sandy and Will, still feeling that the fewer people knew about it the sooner its ripples would subside. But he found he could not tell her about Frances either. Not only did it not seem fair, but her story of Steve and his sudden deterioration had frightened him and he felt the need for comforting half-truths.
For the first time, she let him drive her home. Intending to drink, she had come in a taxi. As they drove, talking of neutral subjects, things they saw outside the car, new restaurants, posters, children up to no good, she made a brave attempt to reassemble her old self. Repairing her lipstick, she caught sight of the bloodstained plaster and quickly replaced it with a clean one, tutting that he had not remarked on it. She even applied a fresh squirt of scent from the tiny silver spray she carried in her bag. Who was this for, he wondered, as she pecked his cheek and he smelled the gin fumes beneath the jasmine. Surely not for him?
They had arrived at a house whose exterior, standard rose bushes and newly washed car, betrayed nothing of the recent turmoil within. She asked him in for another drink. He knew this was no more than politeness on her part, or loneliness, or a fear of entering alone a house crowded with accusations, and gently declined. He said they must meet again soon but, as he waited, like a good taxi driver, to watch her unlock her door and let herself safely in, he reflected sadly that now that she lived alone, their meetings would assume a new ambiguous tenor and would have to cease.
Frances was playing the piano when he came home. Apparently specialist skills, like specialist vocabulary, could be among the last areas of conscious thought to be damaged by the disease. Rocket scientists rendered incapable of holding a toothbrush or using a telephone could converse with their research students better than with their relatives. There was some hope, too, that so long as the impulse to continue was there, regular piano practice and the intense stimulus and evident pleasure it involved, might hold the disease at bay longer than if her only hobby had been thimble collecting or painting by numbers.
Apparently she had missed her piano in Cornwall for she had taken to practicing with a vengeance since their return. Now, more than ever in their life together, he felt the music spoke of things she could not divulge. Depending on her mood, she filled the house with its anger, charm or sensuality. One Debussy prelude, apparently depicting footsteps in the snow, had become a recurring motif in the past few days. He found its blank soundscape, too chilly even for despair, unbearable and would retreat to the garden or his study on hearing the opening bars.
Poppy was sitting in a pool of light where one normally sat to watch television. The television was off and she was reading, reflected in its dead screen. He kissed the top of her head. She mumbled in reply and turned a page.
She only set foot in her house to retrieve clothes or to drop off the children, whom she collected from school every day, brought to their grandparents for high tea, and dropped off when Sandy returned from surgery. She had not left him, not officially, hence the lopsided arrangement whereby Sandy had the children most of the time. At first she had been too angry to deal with him, then she had needed space to think in and now she was here to help John care for Frances.
Had the offense been more ordinary, involving, say, someone both female and not a relative, the obvious course of action and reaction might have been clearer. The ambivalence, the sheer bloody awkwardness of it all, however, which everyone seemed too uncomfortable to discuss, had left her marooned. Poppy had always been quick to take action and quick to speak her mind. Her anger, so dramatically and swiftly demonstrated in Cornwall, had dissipated, leaving her in a curious, regressive limbo. Quite unexpectedly in so disarmingly literal a child, fiction had become her refuge and, for all John could tell, principal resource for advice and comfort. The first day she had woken in the spare room, still sentimentally furnished with things from her and Will’s childhoods, she had begun to read her way through bookshelves she had so long overlooked. She began rereading novels from her girlhood, Little Women, What Katy Did, in a self-conscious effort to find solace in their familiar, premarital sphere. But now she had read her way through the spare room and begun asking John what she should devour next. This morning, a little mischievously, he had passed her his much-thumbed Penguin of Anna Karenina. Glancing down to her lap, he saw she was more than halfway through already.
“Making sterling progress,” he said.
“It’s good,” she said, not looking up. “She’s just given up Seriosha. Mum’s fine. How was your drive?”
“Fine. Wet.”
“And the pub?”
He hesitated.
“I’ve got a nose, Dad.”
“It was fine. Coffee?”
“No. There’s a parcel for you.”
“Really?”
“Next-door’s nanny took it in by mistake. It’s in the hall.”
He made himself a coffee and went to investigate. It was a largish, rectangular parcel, thickly padded. The stamps were foreign but without his glasses he could not see where from. He tucked it under his arm and pushed into the drawing room. Frances stopped playing.
“Don’t stop,” he said. “It’s lovely.”
She turned back a page or two and began the piece again. He recognized an old staple of hers, Schumann’s Prophet Bird. It was a strange piece; a pretty enough evocation of fluttering flight, it became neurotic and unsettling if one listened too closely, full as it was of perverse accents and unexpected turns.
He sat and pulled out his glasses, leaning into the light thrown by a standard lamp. A mountain and a lake; Switzerland. He disliked customs declarations forms because they lessened any element of surprise. Reproduction, someone had written carefully. Sans valeur commerciale. Cadeau. Mystified, he tore it open. Paper gave way to bubblewrap, so tightly wound round and sealed that he had to use both hands to wrench it open. This, of course, was how letter bombs worked, he reflected seconds too late; they were not letters at all but parcels, playing on the recipient’s residual childish greed for presents.
It was not a reproduction at all but a painting. It took him a moment or two to recognize it because the surface had been cleaned so thoroughly and what had once seemed a farmyard scene at sunset or dusk, a sow and her piglets enjoying the last of the day’s warmth, now lay in dazzling, almost too colorful daylight. So many details had emerged from beneath two centuries of cigar smoke, fireplace fumes and household dirt that a whole new picture was revealed. A blossoming rose grew up one side of the sty, wild flowers glowed in tufts across the farmyard and, most unexpectedly, where the murk had been deepest, a small girl, dressed in artless country style, leaned on the sty wall to admire the basking family of swine. Always assured by his father that it was a Morland, or as near as damn it, the painting was now revealed as something altogether less distinguished and more sentimental; an image of the sunnily innocent kind one might pick as a greetings card for an unmarried female relative. The cruelest transformation had been to the fine, eighteenth-century frame. Once plainly of greater value than the painting, it had been coated with yellow gilt paint so shiny that an ignorant customs officer might have read the declaration, glanced at the contents and assumed the whole to be fresh from Woolworth’s.