Rough Music

by Patrick Gale

  “Oh fuck,” she said but she was too slow for Poppy was already bringing out armfuls of dust-furred junk and stacking things on the carpet. Dust soon filled the air and made them both sneeze, but Poppy proceeded with a relish bordering on mania.

  “The first thing,” she declared, “is to get everything out in the open.”

  “Everything?”

  “Absolutely everything, and give the cupboard a damned good clean. I bet Joyce never cleans in there, does she?”

  “Why should she? It’s a cupboard.”

  “Then we can decide what to throw out.”

  Frances came over from the piano and Poppy immediately handed her a large box silver with dust.

  “They’ll all need wiping down just so we can see what they are.”

  Frances ran a finger through the grime. “Totopoly,” she read aloud. The mysterious name recalled a long evening and the scents of wine and seaweed.

  “You may as well throw all the games out,” Poppy said. “Hugo and Oscar won’t play anything unless it has batteries.”

  “I think Oscar prefers books to games. Like Will,” Frances said quietly.

  “I hope not,” said Poppy. “Games teach them how to behave. Where does Joyce keep your dusters?”

  “She brings her own. She finds mine too venomous.”

  Poppy sighed. “Venerable. I’ll try the cupboard under the stairs,” she said and marched off.

  Frances looked around her at the contents of her memory hole spilled across the carpet. A toasting fork. A pot of hand salve someone had given her, called Farmer’s Friend. The Christmas tree lights which had to be mended afresh every year although they saw less use than any other bulbs in the house. A set of placemats with parrots on them. When Poppy returned, with the Hoover and dusters, she found Frances exactly where she had left her. She plugged in the Hoover and scoured out the cupboard, leaving Frances to begin dusting off the boxes. Frances sneezed again and had to use a duster as a handkerchief. She stuffed it up her sleeve so Poppy would not try to use it and smear something and be cross. Then Poppy came to dust too, or rather took over the dusting while Frances watched. She began to make a heap of things to take to an Alzheimer’s Society jumble sale.

  “The Chinese believe that clutter makes you ill,” she said. “Now where did I read that? They think it causes problems in all sorts of areas of your life. You don’t want this anymore, surely? You always hated it. Apparently you draw a floor plan of your house then draw an outline of a person on top of it, with their head at the door and the rest sort of laid out as it comes and then you walk around and mark all the parts of the house where clutter builds up and that tells you the areas of your life and health that will give you trouble until you tidy things up. I wonder where this glory hole would be.”

  Frances thought a moment. She imagined herself Wonderland large, her head squeezing up against the front door and her limbs snaking through the rooms, forcing nervous occupants to flatten themselves against walls and windows to avoid them. “Bowels,” she said decisively. But Poppy was already, reluctantly, stacking things back on the emptied shelves.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing.

  Frances looked down at the box in her hands. Basildon Bond it told her. Wedgwood Blue. “Photographs,” she said.

  “Do you want them still?”

  “Of course.”

  “So why aren’t they in an album like the others?”

  “It’s my horror box; they’re the silly ones. They’re the ones that didn’t come out right or weren’t flattering. Things like that. I should have thrown them away only it didn’t seem right. They’re you and John and Julian. They’re people.” She broke off, hearing herself plead. “You’re right. Let’s chuck them out.”

  “No. Let me see.” Poppy made a grab for the box.

  “They’re only silly. We’ve got so much to do.” Frances resisted her. “There’s the roof space next.”

  “But I want to see. It’d be fun. Come on.”

  “No!”

  Trying to tug the box back from Poppy’s grasp, Frances succeeded only in bursting its fragile seams. Photographs and old negatives littered the hearthrug. They were mainly black and white but a few were color, with that intensity photographs seemed to lose once color became the norm and not an extravagance reserved for weddings and guaranteed sunshine. “Sorry,” she said but Poppy was already on her hands and knees, picking the pictures over with gleeful nostalgia.

  “Your hair! I remember that day. And look at this! My God, you and Dad look so young!”

  “We were.”

  “The holiday house. Look. And … Oh … I’ve never seen this.”

  “Show me.”

  “It’s great.”

  The picture an early color one, showed Julian and Skip grinning from inside a rampart of pebbles on a beach. They clutched sandwiches above the water as a wave broke around them. Behind them, mugging, dangling a stalk of seaweed over Julian’s head like a wig, stood Bill.

  “He looks so young too.” Poppy was staring hard at the image, as if willing it to give up more information than it showed. “This must be the last picture taken of him,” she murmured. “Why haven’t I seen this ever?”

  Frances remembered finding the camera, film still in it, months after the memorial service. It was nearly a year later. There had been no reason for pictures before, no celebrations. But they were about to set out on their next summer holiday, their first one as a family of four. They were going to Wales, to a cottage near Llangollen, and she had sent the film in for developing before they left and hidden the pictures away like a dirty secret amid the flurry of their return home. The memory returned to her in such immediate detail that the panic and guilt of then were briefly more real than the dust and daughter of now.

  Carpet, she thought. Curtains. Clutter. And the past became like music from another room again.

  “I didn’t want to upset you,” she said. “By the time I had it developed you’d become so happy and settled.”

  “Well you were wrong. I’d have liked it. I’d like it now. Can I take it?”

  “Of course you can.”

  Poppy raked through the pile. “Are there any others?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “How about you? Pictures of him and you?”

  Frances forced a smile and shook her head. “You were too young to use the camera.”

  Poppy was sagging over her knees. It took Frances a while to realize she was crying. “Stop it,” she told her. “Please don’t cry. Darling, it was so long ago. So much has changed.”

  “Nothing changed!” Poppy gasped. “You just moved on. Dusted yourself down and moved on.”

  “I took you with me, though.”

  “You didn’t take me anywhere. You just stuffed me in that school to make me English so I could fit in and be tidy.”

  Frances felt faint. She sat on the sofa. She reached out an arm to stroke Poppy’s shoulder but she had sat too far away and her fingers fell short.

  “I feel such a blithering idiot,” Poppy said. “I had no idea about Sandy and …” She made a face as though she had found her brother’s name too bitter on her tongue to pronounce. “It was you I wanted to … I couldn’t believe it when I saw that place advertised. I even checked when I rang up, to make sure it was the same. I knew he’d ask you two. Especially if we all urged him not to. Ever the dutiful little boy. I wanted you to remember. I wanted to bring it all back. How you killed him.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “You know what I mean.” Poppy was shouting now. Curiously, it was only when she was angry that she sounded American again.

  “We were never sure he died. He could still be alive somewhere. He might have … what I have.”

  “Oh don’t give me all that old crap again.”

  “Frances? What’s going on?” Hearing raised voices, John had run in from the garden. There was a golden leaf caught in his hair. Frances looked at it, then back at Po
ppy.

  “He became a non-subject with you two, didn’t he?” Poppy was saying. “That was how you coped. His death was never remembered. It never occurred to you how that must have made me feel. You never observed an anniversary for it, never talked about him.”

  “You only had to ask,” Frances managed. “You never asked so I thought—”

  “Huh!” Poppy shouted and started stuffing photographs into a carrier bag, heedless of damaging them, then actually scrunching them up in her hands. “Putney High made me too fucking polite. Of course I never asked!” She stood and added quietly, “I’ll take this lot out to the bin.”

  She left with the bag of photographs and a bin liner full of old wrapping paper and other rubbish. Frances sat on the sofa. She could hear John’s voice in the hall calming Poppy as it had always done, talking soothing sense.

  She looked at the photograph which she had managed to snatch in the confusion of their tumbling, her old hand as swift and undetectable as a lizard’s darting tongue. It showed a young, hairy-chested man with a mustache. A young woman was lying on her stomach, trying to read and he was rubbing oil on her back. Interrupted, sensing the photographer perhaps, he had glanced up and was looking straight into the lens. His expression was somehow naked, too surprised to have mustered a suitable smile. The picture must have been taken by a child. It was low down and hopelessly lopsided and there was a veranda post in the way.

  Staring at it horrified, on the pavement outside the photography shop, she had assumed it was taken by Poppy, who she had already discovered to be capable of slyness. It was, she had always assumed, Poppy’s way of saying Don’t pretend. This is something I saw and I know.

  Now she imagined Julian instead who even as a child, had been uncomfortable and clumsy with mechanical things. She saw him in the afternoon shadows on the veranda, in his blue shorts and snake belt and bottle-green Aertex shirt, feet bare and muddy like a little savage’s. She saw him frown as he unbuttoned the leather case and struggled not to drop the camera, saw him peer through the viewfinder and twiddle the focus the way he had seen grown-ups do, saw him click the shutter then stare at Bill with the cold eye of childhood.

  BEACHCOMBER

  She hesitated a second or two, darted back to her bureau and grabbed two pairs of new stockings from a drawer and a favorite lipstick from the cute china bowl his mother had given her. They lent her courage somehow and, as she took one last look about the house she had failed to make a home, a half-smile was born on her lips. She was afraid, yes, but excited, precisely because each step toward the front door was a step nearer an irreversible decision. She forgot her keys until they jingled against the lipstick in her bag. She kept only the one to her car and the smaller one to the safe-deposit box. The rest she stuffed into the mailbox. “There,” they seemed to say. “Done.” But what of the

  The manuscript stopped there and, despite himself, despite his impatience with the breathless, trashy style not to mention the crudely autobiographical subject matter, John found himself tantalized, wanting to read on. But what of the what? The qualms? The second thoughts? The ice in her pumping heart? The dagger in her glove compartment?

  The furnace fired up suddenly, startling him and bringing him back to his senses and his reason for being down in this hellish room. He slapped the folder shut, stood up from where he had been sitting on the old table where he had seen the trusties playing cards and drinking tea and strode over to open the thick steel door so he could throw the manuscript on to the flames beyond. Then something stayed his hand until the handle grew too hot and he backed off.

  He questioned his motives. He had told himself it was an unfinished, therefore unpublishable novel by an author of little distinction and that burning it was a kindness to his niece as well as to Bill’s memory. Was there an element of cheap revenge in the gesture? And embarrassment too, given that such text as there was gave what appeared to be graphically accurate descriptions of an adulterous affair enjoyed with his own wife? But what if there were? Why should he not be embarrassed and avenged? He had behaved with every restraint so far. Every bloody restraint.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs. It was too late for it to be one of the officers. “Poppy?” he called. “In here.”

  But it was Frances. He had thought her in bed long ago. Soon after they returned from the memorial service, she had excused herself from the dinner she had prepared, saying she felt a little ill, and had spent an eternity in the bathroom. All was quiet when he came down here and started reading so he had assumed her in bed. She might have been for she had on her night things. Finding him, she stopped short, pulling her dressing gown about her although the room was unpleasantly hot. The orange light from the window in the boiler door showed a tanned ankle above the slippers.

  “No,” she said. “It’s me.”

  “Frances.” He slid the folder on to a chair and sat on it. Burning it would be burning a piece of her, however that piece pained him, and he could not let her see what he was about.

  “Sorry. What are you doing down here? It’s so late.”

  “I … The furnace was making an odd noise,” he said. “Thought I should check.”

  “Oh.” She absorbed that then began in a rush. “John I … I’m so sorry. I hate this and I wanted you to know I never …” She looked up and briefly met his eye.

  He was as tongue-tied as she was. He longed to say the right thing but she had been so tight-lipped, so forbidding, these past weeks that he was afraid of saying anything to make matters worse.

  “Really?” This was signally inadequate since he only hoped, but was not entirely sure, how her sentence had been going to end. He said it anyway.

  “Yes,” she said with a ghost of a smile. “Really.” She came further into the room. “God, this bulb’s bright. Do you mind if I …?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Thanks.” She turned off the overhead light so they were lit only by the dancing glow from the furnace and the thin light off the stairs beyond. “I’d begun to think I was pregnant again,” she said. “But I wasn’t. If I had been … it would have been yours, you know.”

  “You really needn’t …” he began, appalled by the details she might be about to share, which would horrify him and make him hate her.

  She persisted, however, telling him nothing about Bill at all but instead an incoherent description of some dream she had experienced the night before John was called back to London by the breakout. “It sounds childish,” she said, “but I knew it was yours and I think it would have been a girl. I’m … John, I’m sorry. But listen—No. Let me say this. It’s not easy and I’ve … Just listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Now that … there’s nothing to make you stay by me, you can divorce me. If you want. I’ll quite understand.”

  He could not believe they were having this conversation. How had they come from silence to such extremity in a few sentences? “Is that what you want?” he asked, finding he could not look at her, so little did he want to see her tentative nod. “I don’t want to keep you against your will. And now that this particular chapter seems closed …” He despised the pomposity in his voice, the well-schooled phrase, the Latinate syntax. Caesar, however, having subjugated the troops of the heretofore triumphant Vercingetorix and his slaves and his wives … He needed to talk as freely, as sloppily as his rival had written. His feelings were bound round with grammar that he longed to shrug off. He wanted to tell her about Dr. Alberti’s prognosis, about his dreams of a huge family, how they would try again.

  But then, quite as if she were not listening, she began to say that they could file to adopt Poppy Louise formally. “She’s so happy in that school. Well, I think she’ll be happy. She seems calm there. And it’s the least we owe him and …” She began to cry. She slumped into the other chair and wept, grinding her knuckles against the tattered Fablontopped table as if that could check her grief. “Skip can fill the space,” she howled, then could make no more words.r />
  He could not reach her from his chair so he had to push it back and come around the table and stand behind her. At first he only dared put a hand on her shoulder but when she snatched at it and held it that gave him the impetus to crouch down and hug her properly. He was too low now, of course, so that he was almost pulling her forward off her chair. He held her up. The strain was agony on his calves and he couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. It was probably the least comforting hug man had ever offered wife.

  He opened his mouth to speak but could only talk to her as he had talked to Poppy in the car earlier, shushing her grief rather than finding words to console her. He wondered if he would ever be able to tell her how much he loved her or whether, as now, it would always have to be done as clumsy demonstration. Perhaps, eventually, if she would grant him the time, he could accumulate enough small, loving gestures to make something big enough for her to notice.

  BLUE HOUSE

  Beneath the standardized posters and racks of leaflets nudging one toward debt, it was a bank of the old school, with yards of mahogany paneling, brass chandeliers, a high, paneled wall between cashiers and public that still had brass spikes along its top. There were broad mahogany desks around the parquet floor with deep leather armchairs beside them, as though clients might need rest from the emotional strain of writing checks.

  While they waited to be dealt with, John went to withdraw some cash and Poppy sank into one of the armchairs. He admired her discreetly, the thick chestnut hair, the long legs, the lap left capacious from childbirth. He could not be sure, because she was always well turned out, but he had a suspicion she had succumbed to some marvelously old-fashioned instinct and dressed up for the occasion. She wore her gold earrings, instead of her more usual colored glass ones, and some heels that made her even more imposing. There was an ancient studio photograph of his mother looking severe with one elbow on a black marble pedestal. He had never known if the picture was a good likeness, having little physical memory of her, but repeatedly now Poppy’s stances, reading or merely waiting, brought it to mind and so gave him an idea of the kind of woman his mother might have been.