Rough Music

by Patrick Gale

  There was no letter. Nothing betrayed the sender. On his way over to interrupt Frances to show her, John glanced at the back. Following re-framing, the rear had been taped and papered up, for all the world like a painting finished yesterday. On the paper was scrawled, From one old boar to another. Ta for the loan of this. Having my lad send it back while he stops off to do some banking for us. Sorry I won’t be seeing you soon. No hard feelings! Your old guest, H. Farmer.

  Even were it still a Morland, in today’s skewed marketplace, he supposed, the message and signature would probably have swollen the painting’s value as an authenticated but minor artist’s imprimatur could never have done.

  Frances had stopped playing and was looking up expectantly.

  “Look,” he told her. “Remember this?”

  “Pretty,” she said, remembering nothing. “The boys’ll like that. They like pigs.”

  BEACHCOMBER

  When the first Friday came, he waited in the playground with the day boys, assuming Ma would be there to collect him. Boy after boy was collected and still she never came until at last a master found him, Mr. Thomas, and said why was he not in tea with the other boarders and was he lost. And there was an embarrassing scene in which he explained and Mr. Thomas took him to Matron in front of all the other boys in the dining room and asked her. She turned to him quite kindly, although she was still in her starchy uniform so he knew it did not count.

  “Oh no, Pagett,” she said. “You’re not a weekly boarder. Whatever gave you that idea? You’re a full boarder like everyone else. We don’t have any weekly boarders. Now sit by me and have your tea. Look. Doughnuts for when you’ve had your bread and butter and sandwiches! You can see Mummy and Daddy in three weeks, when they take you for a Sunday out.”

  He had not cried then but he had cried at night, when several other new boys were crying and some boys were kind and said everyone cried at first but that it got easier. And some boys were harsh and told him to be quiet. Only it did not get easier and it seemed to him that the smell and taste of tears was in his nose and on his tongue ready to surprise him and at a moment’s notice he would start to cry again.

  It was a choir school attached to Tatham’s, the college where the much bigger boys went, and it was very old and very beautiful. He had almost forgotten he would have to sing. Twenty-four boys in the school were choristers, which meant that their parents paid no fees, or hardly any, but they had to sing hours and hours every day, in the chantry or the chapel, after breakfast, before lunch, after tea and on Sunday mornings. Music was a mystery to him. He had learned to read it at his other school. That and some perceived beauty in his singing voice had won him a place, apparently, although the voice trials had taken place so long ago he scarcely remembered them. Faced with new music to learn every day, however, most of it in Latin, which he would not start learning until next year, he found the notes melted under his hot scrutiny and meant nothing. And if that and the feeling apparently called homesickness were not reason enough to weep openly in choir practice, the beauty of the music was. There was one particular anthem all about the lame man leaping as a hart and the tongues of the dumb shall sing which they rehearsed all week and which he had to mime to for fear that his voice would crack with emotion.

  It was a punishment, of course. He realized that by the middle of the second week when the initial shock of being abandoned, hastily and without proper good-byes, had begun to wear off sufficiently for him to look around him and take in the strangeness of his surroundings.

  There was absolutely no contact with the outside world. There was no privacy. They slept in big dormitories, twenty or thirty to a room, brushed their teeth in communal washrooms with more washbasins than he could count and even bathed in communal bathrooms where there were six baths plumbed in around the walls instead of just one. Only in the lavatory was there freedom and even there the walls stopped short enough from the ceiling for boys to peer over and high enough off the floor for messages, and worse, to be passed. The lavatory paper was hard, scratchy and unabsorbent which was almost as much of a shock as only being allowed to bathe twice a week and there being no armchairs or carpets or curtains in the entire place.

  Then one of the boys ran away, or tried to. He got no further than the railway station because he was still in uniform and someone recognized him and handed him in. It was then that the truth dawned on Julian; Barrowcester Choir School was a prison. Not like a reform school or a Borstal, because nobody smoked and the boys spoke nicely and were not obviously criminal or far too polite to talk about it if they were. But a prison for boys whose parents needed to have them out of the way for some reason. This did not upset Julian as it might have done a few months ago, when the idea of being sent away first entered his consciousness. In fact it reassured him and was the start of the infinitely slow process by which he did what Matron called settling in.

  Boarding school was a place of menace. But prison, so dire to others, was a thing he understood. He knew its smells and rules, its beehive divisions of labor and control. He knew how to behave and had a fair idea how best to survive it.

  In the first weeks he had several discreetly arranged meetings with a man who pretended to be a friend but who was plainly both a stranger and some kind of doctor. He asked Julian lots of questions, about home and the prison and how much he loved his parents and missed them. He also asked about Henry, which was difficult because Julian found he remembered very little about him, and about his uncle, which was frankly embarrassing because the man wanted to know if his uncle had touched him and, because he didn’t explain properly first of all, got very interested when Julian, quite truthfully, answered yes, meaning piggybacks and so forth.

  In particular the man wanted to know why he wanted to be called Bill. The truth was he had no idea. He was mainly called by his surname and number in any case, so it didn’t often come up. But the nice choirmaster called him Julian when he cried during choir practice on his first full day and something had made him say, “No, sir. It’s not Julian. It’s Bill.”

  Word passed round and Miss Fermity, his form mistress, and beautiful Mrs. Smith, who was to teach him piano, and several of the boys all began to call him Bill. He told the doctor man it was because he liked the name and, to his surprise, the name was allowed to stay. It also helped him to settle in. He could think of Julian as a rather weak little boy, a girlface who made sand castles and cried, while Bill was braver and stronger and sang and slept in a big dormitory and only occasionally had bad dreams, which he had more sense than to share. As in any prison, nicknames were essential. Even the seniors with flawless singing voices and frighteningly correct posture had friendly nicknames which even juniors could use, like Spud or Baby or Goliath. The story of his assumption that he was to go home every Friday for a whole weekend soon spread, probably via Matron who was given to gossip as she dispensed plasters and cough sweets, so he was christened Weekly or Weeks, which evolved to Weekly Bill and so to Will. Which was not a nickname at all but just another name, but he did not greatly mind as it was better than teasing.

  Some boys were teased so relentlessly they screamed and threw sort of angry fits, which everyone gathered to watch as it was as good as television which, unlike adult prisoners, they were not allowed. Well trained by Skip’s example, Will began to suspect he would make a good teaser when his turn came.

  His mother wrote every day for the first few days then Matron had a word with her about how it was not helping him settle in and they changed to weekly letters like everyone else’s. She did not say much. She just chatted on paper, about the garden and what his father was doing and the possibility of their moving from Wandsworth soon to take on HM Prison Barrowcester and be closer to the school. She sent things too, almost, he felt, as a substitute for saying anything. Not cakes with files in, of course, since she put him here and hardly wanted him to escape, but books and easy piano music for him to learn and photographs in case he forgot what everyone looked like. She sent the new
Parker pen set they had bought him to replace Henry’s watch. There was money left over from the sale, she told him, which had been used to buy him Premium Bonds.

  Boys were expected to write back but only on Sunday mornings, between breakfast and choir practice. They had to write two sides, very neatly with no blotches or crossings-out. When they finished they had to show the duty master before it went in the envelope, which they also had to show him. Officially this was to check for spelling mistakes and messy writing but Will knew it was actually to make sure they weren’t writing help me please take me away I’m so unhappy people are horrid to me take me away please.

  Dear Mum and Dad, he wrote. Only girlfaced Julian called them Ma and Pa. Matron says I am settling in at last so it must be true! My bed has a nice view of the cathedral and a big old cedar tree. Some of the corridors, and especially the ones in Tatham’s, where we sing mainly, are meant to be haunted so I go along them quickly. But I’m not scared really. I have made some new friends. Hodges 3 who comes all the way from Africa (but isn’t black!!), Schoenveldt, who plays the oboe and Honey, who is Cornish and has the other bit of my bunk. The upper bit. Next term I get an upper bit too. New boys go on the bottom. Matron says in case they fall out! I hope you are both well, I am well but a bit horse from all the singing. We are singing Vittoria, Missa O Quam Gloriosum Est, this morning which Honey says is dreary but I really like it. Aren’t I queer? This comes with lots of love, Will. (a.k.a. Bill)

  P.S. Julian sends his love too!!

  He knew better than to write the truth. He knew how untrustworthy adults could be and how sad. Sometimes you had to help them. Children were stronger, perhaps, because they had lived less long so had suffered less and not started to wear out like old cars did. Funnily enough, although the letter was happier than he felt, by the time it had been inspected by Dr. Feltram and he had converted horse to hoarse and was sealing it in an envelope, the happiness felt real.

  Perhaps, like Latin and unspeakable thoughts (which worked even better in a dormitory for some reason), happiness was something one could learn.

  BLUE HOUSE

  A Saturday lunch at Harriet’s was a rare pleasure. They were a regular feature but Will had always found it too hard to turn his back on the shop to attend one. The holiday had proved, however, how much Kristin, his assistant manager, had been hankering after a taste of autonomy and what good use she had made of it. He had resolved therefore always to take Saturdays off as well as his usual Wednesdays. He had also rewarded his third-in-command by creating the post of events manager for her, which would preclude the need for him to fret any more over the meet-the-author lunches.

  Like many commuters, Harriet was obsessed with wringing every hour of pleasure and profit from her weekends. She had friends to stay, she threw long Saturday lunch parties, she slaved in her garden and, now that Vera was old enough to appreciate such things, took the child on excursions.

  “Look at you, so brown and beautiful still!” she said, opening the door and kissing him stealthily. He pressed a bottle of wine on her. “You shouldn’t.”

  There was laughter from the kitchen. He felt a pang of regret. It would be Harriet’s idea of self-indulgence; two of her similarly driven women friends talking him into a drunken haze. His day off shrank before him, wasted on people he did not care about who would require him to perform when he would rather just be talking to their host. “Who else is here?” he asked brightly.

  “No one. I wanted you to myself. Anya’s taking Vera to some cartoon.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t look so relieved. When I die—”

  “She’s all mine. Don’t remind me.”

  Vera thumped up the stairs to meet him.

  “And you have to take Anya too,” Harriet said. “They come as a package.”

  Vera grabbed his wrists and stamped hard on each of his feet in turn. Even through thick brogues, she made a lasting impression. “Hello fatty,” she said.

  “Princess pig.” He gently tugged her pigtails. “How do?”

  “Come, Vera. Coat on.” Vera went obediently to Anya who wrapped her up and led her away. Anya’s patience was unshakable. Harriet claimed her life as a refugee had been so grim that she would have submitted to the torments of three Veras if it meant she could continue to live in comfort and relative safety. To be on the safe side, she was paying for Anya’s evening classes in English and computer skills so that she could retain her as a nanny but find her day work once Vera started school full-time. Such obliging treasures were harder to find in a provincial city than the proverbial good man.

  They ignored Harriet’s elegant sitting room, where she would have steered him were they not alone, and went immediately downstairs to her kitchen, with its cozy fug, dog-eared sofa and view of her sloping garden. The autumn sun shone sharply through dripping beech trees. Smoke drifted across the lawn from a neighbor’s bonfire. They kicked off their shoes and lolled on the sofa with a bottle of Pinot Grigio and a dish of fierily spiced olives. The fridge so thickly pasted with Vera’s artwork would, he knew, be full of good things from Hart’s, the high-street delicatessen. One of Harriet’s principles was never to cook when someone else could do it better. The Aga was purely for toast, comfort and for heating things through.

  “So, tell Mother,” she said. “You’re in love.”

  “Looks like it,” he told her.

  “With someone you’ve spent, what, ten hours with?”

  “Longer than that.” He dug her in the ribs with a toe. “And we’ve been writing. Proper love letters. Well, I write him love letters. He writes me letter letters. We write about all sorts of things. Probably stuff we wouldn’t talk about face to face. Not easily.”

  “And he’s encouraging you?” Expertly she fired an olive pit into her palm.

  “He’s got more sense.” Will sighed. “He has no television or telephone and what you’d call no social life at all, so I think I’m his amusement.”

  “But what about Sandy?” Harriet had heard all about Master Mystery’s rude unveiling and had recovered both from her pique at not being confided in earlier and her horror at so incestuous a coupling. “Having wrecked his home, shouldn’t you do the decent thing and offer him a new one? You’d be a brilliant stepdad, the children already love you, Sandy loves you … She can have half his pension and his house. Your family—”

  “I don’t want to be a stepdad. I don’t want Sandy. This is stupid. I split up with him, remember? Anyway, I wrecked nothing.”

  “He hardly did it on his own. Those poor boys,” she sighed wickedly.

  “Shut it.”

  “And poor Poppy.”

  “Well, that you don’t mean. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else.”

  “I’m sure that comforts her no end.”

  “She’ll go back to him. She just hasn’t found a way of doing it yet that won’t damage her pride.”

  “You don’t take straight couples very seriously, do you?”

  “Well, do you?”

  She shrugged. Point taken. “Are you hungry?”

  “Not yet,” he said and grasped a cushion. “Oh, Hats. I don’t know what to do. I’m single again. Properly single for the first time in years. And I ought to be out there enjoying myself.”

  “It’s cold out there,” she said with feeling.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I don’t go out. Give me a free evening and all I’ll do with it is sit at the kitchen table writing Roly another sermon-length letter. I’ve never felt like this about anyone.”

  “So you said.”

  “All the books say not to put things into writing. But I don’t care how much of a fool I seem or how deeply I commit myself. It’s probably just the fact that it’s so romantic and he’s so inaccessible.”

  “Nowhere’s inaccessible anymore. Not if you’ve a phone line and a computer.”

  “And what about the shop? And Mum, for God’s sake.”

  “You cannot let her be an
issue. Let someone else take a turn. Leave her to Poppy. If you sold your place here the money you made would pay for weekly train trips home, if you felt that strongly. Why do you think Frances ratted on you both, anyway? Does she envy what she never had?”

  “I think she … she tried to tell me the other day, only her wires were so crossed I couldn’t make much sense of it. I think it was drastic measures.”

  “She was setting Sandy free? But he’s the father of her grandchildren.”

  “Not Sandy. Me.”

  She took this in, interrupted with an olive in her cheek. “In that case it’s easy,” she said at last. “Take the Americans’ offer on the shop.”

  “But it’s my life!”

  “Take the offer. They can only retain you as a manager so long. If you don’t sell to them, they’ll only open yet another rival store and drive you under. It’s a miracle you held out against one chain. Two would sink you.”

  “So I sell. What then?”

  “Move to Cornwall. Start again.”

  “I don’t want to move to Cornwall. I … I want Cornwall to move here.”

  “That’s not an excuse. It’s a whine.”

  “And there aren’t any bookshops there,” he pursued.

  “Perfect.”

  “Because there aren’t any people. Not enough. Not book-buyers. I’ve asked the reps. Even before everything went online, most didn’t bother going west of Exeter because it wasn’t cost-effective.”