by Patrick Gale
‘This shirt’s soaked,’ Holly said. ‘I’m going to change.’
Before Andrew had time to control his expression or at least pretend to look elsewhere, she had tugged her rugger shirt over her head and walked, pertly topless, to the door, tossing the shirt onto a heap by the washing machine on her way. In her absence, Clifford asked after ‘Margery’, Andrew’s mother. This conversation, in Holly’s absence, made the evening feel slightly more ordinary and yet even now, something in the way the men discussed his mother made her sound perturbingly not herself. She was a dry-humoured chatterbox, a frustrated writer, yet on Clifford’s tongue she became someone slightly wild and unpredictable, a creature dignified by strong emotion, a character in an unwritten novel. This new evocation was so strong that, when Holly returned, in dark blue leggings and a teal–blue man’s jersey that hung just below her bum, it was briefly as though there were two women in the room.
‘Put this on, Kenneth. You’re still soaked,’ she said and held out a dry shirt. This time Clifford as well as Andrew seemed momentarily abstracted from bibulous chatter as Andrew’s father stood to pull off his wet things, revealing an expanse of hairy chest that was broader and more muscular than in Andrew’s seaside holiday recollections.
The meal — chicken roast in a crust of herbs, salt and garlic, then salad, cheese and fruit — was one of the best Andrew had eaten in months. Holly sat at one end of the table, between him and his father. She smelled faintly of turpentine and white spirit and sometimes, when she leaned forward to laugh, he could feel her breath warm on his cheek. She had slipped on long earrings which ended in large balls of some dark wood which kept bouncing softly against her neck. Once or twice, emphasizing a point, she laid a hand on his forearm but then she did the same to his father, so he knew it signified nothing. Slightly giddy with the insinuating comfort of it all, Andrew drank more glasses of wine than he could count. When Holly produced dope from a small Elastoplast tin and rolled an expertly tidy joint, he waited, astonished, to see his father take three deep lungfuls of it then felt honour-bound to do the same. The drug, as always, made Andrew talk, recounting minutely various strands of village gossip which seemed to amuse the others, who encouraged him. He chattered all the more wildly when his father laid one of his huge hands over Holly’s and squeezed it and he was plunged into sudden, stunned silence when, on the way to make coffee, she no less unmistakably caressed the back of his father’s neck. If these were unguarded indiscretions, his father showed no panic, flashed no warning message across the table. All was easy. All was warm. His father’s smiles to him were warm. Clifford’s passing touch to his shoulder was warm. At one point, Holly actually picked up Andrew’s hand and gave it a warm kiss; he forgot exactly why. Candles were produced when the electric light grew too hard to bear. Coffee was drunk, another joint smoked. Clifford lit a candelabra and drifted into a room across the way where he began to play Chopin preludes rather well. For the crazy symmetry of the evening to be complete, Andrew should have followed him; he was so stoned, he would have been putty in anyone’s hands, man or woman. He stayed obstinately put, however, fiddling with candle wax and singeing pieces of orange peel.
‘Do you want us to go?’ his father asked at last.
Andrew could not believe his ears. The night had been allowed to progress this far and now his father seemed to be asking his permission to let it continue.
‘Would you mind?’ Andrew asked Holly and she merely smiled. ‘I’m not sure I’m in any state to drive,’ he added.
His father asked the same question three times in the woozy, elastic hours which followed. Nothing had been clearly spoken. His father and Holly were, by now, sitting on opposite sides of a fireplace, yards apart, and yet with each reiteration of Andrew’s consent, he felt himself implicated more deeply in whatever was afoot. One moment they made him feel an innocent child, the next, a paterfamilias, whose permission must be sought at every stage.
At last, driven by a mounting tension between the two of them and dimly aware that Clifford had stopped playing the piano and slipped upstairs, Andrew rose uncertainly to his feet and asked where he should sleep.
‘Well if, like me, you hate to sleep alone, Clifford’s in the blue room — third on the left.’ Holly came forward from the fireplace and stood on tiptoe to kiss his forehead.
‘I…er…I don’t think so,’ he stammered.
‘Then I should go right to the end of the upstairs corridor. That one’s got a nice bathroom and a heavenly view when you wake up.’
‘Night, Dad.’
‘Sleep well, Andy.’
As he mounted the long stairs, Fingal skittering protectively upwards ahead of him, he could hear their low voices and his father’s chuckle. He used the loo, splashed water on his face then found his bed in the darkness. The sheets were chilly and slightly damp, which sobered him briefly. For a few minutes he lay, the bed seeming to float beneath him, trying to make sense of the evening, but found that the sentences of his logic crumbled at their beginnings before he succeeded in forming their ends. Then a quilt of sleep enveloped him.
He dreamed he was alone on a huge, palm-fringed beach with Holly. He dreamed she was utterly available to him. She held him firmly by the wrists and rubbed a cut lemon over each of his arms in turn then encouraged him to taste his own, freshly citric skin. For some reason this was intensely exciting, like discovering one had a spectacular hidden talent. Then she held out the other half of the lemon to him and threw back her head while he squeezed the fruit’s juice over her deeply tanned breasts. He lowered his mouth to lick then suckle at one of her sun-warmed nipples. It was slightly crunchy with sand and tasted, not of lemon, but sea water. Once he had tasted her nipple he was afraid to meet her gaze. He dreamed she sensed this and, lying back on the baking sand, pushed his face further down, so that his nose nestled by her belly button, where a lemon pip had stuck. She stroked his hair and encouraged him to sleep. Which he dreamed that he did.
He woke when Fingal, whom he had unwittingly shut in the room with him, pushed his muzzle across the pillows, eager to be let out. The sun was up and dazzled his sleep-sore eyes. He was momentarily disorientated by the huge, unfamiliar room with its ornate, canopied bed and (indeed astonishing) view across treetops to the sea. Moving slowly, because he found that as well as having a furry mouth, his head was beginning to throb, he let the dog out, wandered into the bathroom to pee copiously then pulled on the rest of his clothes. (He appeared to have fallen into bed while still half-dressed.) He walked to the bay window. Fingal had evidently found an open door or window downstairs for Andrew saw him racing away across the garden like a thin, black shadow, a long, pink tongue trailing back from the comer of his jaws. Overcome with a wave of exhaustion, he sank onto the window seat and closed his eyes.
Now the night before began to make perfect sense. With a spasm of remorse, he saw that his nocturnal suspicions were foolish paranoia. Swayed by dope, wine, his attraction to his hostess and the pathetic sexual envy of an overgrown adolescent, he had imagined the unimaginable. Evidently he had been single too long.
He pulled open the window and, closing his eyes once more, took deep breaths of cool morning air. The threat of a headache receded a fraction. He wished that his mortification might follow it. Suppressing the ignoble impulse to slip down to the Land Rover and beat a shy retreat, leaving his father to cadge a lift, he forced himself to retrace the events of the night in humiliating search of any behaviour on his part, any words, that might have betrayed the teenage imaginings that had so tormented him. He remembered pieces of gaucherie, bumpkin cack-handedness, but nothing worse than his perfectly innocent blunder in assuming brother and sister to be husband and wife. Perhaps, after all, he could face them without alarm. Fantasy followed hard on the heels of this comforting discovery. He reminded himself that Holly and Clifford would be working down here long after his father’s departure. Andrew would invite them over for supper. Perhaps Holly might even visit on her own. He migh
t even, in the subtlest way possible, and only on a third or fourth encounter, trail beneath her prettily uptilted nose the possibility of her using his second ticket to San Francisco. Just to see what she said, of course; it was most unlikely that she would accept.
He shivered, closed the window and went to find his shoes. Halfway through tying the second lace, he heard a strange thumping noise. Thinking it might be Fingal, returned and pushing at the door, he stood and walked out onto the landing. There was no dog and the noise stopped before he could trace it. A delicious smell of fresh coffee and toast was curling up from below. He remembered it was a Sunday. Perhaps there would be papers, a rare luxury in which he could lose himself. He started along the corridor for the stairs then froze. The thumping had begun again and with it, voices, coming from behind a door to his right. The door had been left open a little and the few inches of darkness it revealed were dense at once with privacy and suggestion. The thumping, as was clear from the faint squeaking of springs which provided its rhythmical underlay, was the headboard of a bed knocking against the other side of the wall. Someone was gasping, sucking in thin breaths after each thump of oak on plaster. Louder than them, his voice distorted with painful urgency, his father was keeping up a stream of forbidden words.
Unable to walk on, unable to return to his room, Andrew sank slowly to the top step, one hand fingering the banisters beside him. Long ago, as a boy, he had learned to listen for the sound of his parents making love — usually on a Sunday morning — learned to associate its rare occurrences with the ensuing twenty-four hours of unusual, secretive smiles on his mother’s face and uncharacteristic generosities practised by his father. His parents had made love in silence, however — doubtless unaware of the sympathetic squeaking their muffled exertions produced in the neighbouring bathroom. This new, graphic voicing of his father’s deepest appetite, which now pinned Andrew to the spot, laid waste whole decades of boyish certainty. For a few seconds Andrew entertained the repellently hopeful possibility that sweet, beguiling Holly was downstairs brewing coffee and that it was Clifford who was so efficiently lancing his father’s festered desire. Then the sighs swelled in volume and became unmistakably female and Andrew found himself watching tears splash off his cheeks onto the dusty step below his knees. He remained rooted to the spot until the yelps in the bedroom turned to laughter, then he wiped his eyes and carried on downstairs, heedless of whether the couple heard him blow his nose so close to its door.
Clifford had begun work in another room. He had washed a wall with a watery, terracotta paint and was rubbing it around with a rag, so that a paler colour below showed through here and there. Sensing that Andrew needed occupation, he brought him strong coffee then tied an apron round his waist, placed a brush in his hand and set him to washing colour over another section of wall. He was kind enough to sustain a pretence that nothing untoward had occurred overnight. At least, Andrew took it for kindness but on reflection it might have been a kind of moral delinquency in him. The work was calming, as, curiously, was Clifford’s rich supply of scandalous erotic anecdotes. At last, when Holly called from the kitchen that she was frying bacon and eggs, Andrew felt able to face her and his father with equanimity, if not insouciance.
Predictably his father was all joviality, full of enthusiasm for the effects of the country and a good night’s sleep. He gave even less sign than Clifford that anything out of the ordinary had happened, unless his cheerfully electing to wash up the remains of the previous night’s meal was symptomatic of a need for expiation, which Andrew doubted. Holly kissed Andrew’s cheek and earnestly asked him if he slept well.
‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ she went on before he could answer. ‘I came up long after everyone — even poor old Kenneth. I suddenly felt this desperate need to get on and paint.’
She was interrupted by a sudden commotion. Pursued by Clifford’s laughter, Fingal burst into the kitchen clutching a lifeless lamb in his jaws and evidently hugely pleased with himself. Andrew was horrified. He exclaimed that if a farmer caught him the dog would be shot. But Holly was utterly untroubled, as though this happened all the time.
‘But he wasn’t caught, was he?’ she said, easing the lamb from Fingal’s jaws and laying it on the Observer business section. ‘How delicious. Get busy, Clifford, and we can have it for lunch.’ She stooped to kiss Fingal. ‘Clever boy. Clever boy!’
‘Oh don’t be such a prig, Andy!’ his father exclaimed, seeing Andrew’s expression at her rank encouragement of crime. ‘Get her to show you the painting. She’s caught you exactly. Even that expression. Go on, Holly. I’ll watch the bacon.’
As Clifford began to sharpen a knife for skinning and butchering the lamb, Holly took Andrew’s hand. He was sweating and might have slipped from her grasp but her fingers were relentless. She pulled him back to the big, dust-sheeted saloon, pulled aside the ladder and pointed.
Andrew stared and could not restrain a guffaw of recognition. There he was, wreathed in golden laurels, peering through the parted branches of a peach tree. It was not mere imagination which made him see Holly in the girlish figure in the fountain — she had Holly’s hair and dark eyebrows. The broad-backed male figure, so keen to enjoy her, had his face turned away into the painting but his identity now seemed immaterial. It was Andrew she had recorded on plaster, pinned down, fingered, as the police would say.
They ate the lamb for lunch, with rosemary and new potatoes purloined from the owner’s garden. It was quite delicious. Andrew’s father was forced to catch a slightly later train than planned because they did not start eating until mid afternoon.
‘Come again,’ Holly called, waving as Andrew drove back up the drive. ‘Now that you’ve found us, come again.’
He wound down the window but did not know what to say so merely smiled and pressed on the accelerator. While they drove to the station, his father’s one-sided conversation began to assume a London gravity as his thoughts returned to the heavy load of long-winded commercial briefs and the tedious day of interviewing candidates for pupillage which awaited him. Having made no mention of the strangeness of arranging to make a long-postponed visit to one’s son, only to use him as a pretext for receiving the hospitality of another, his parting words were a casual request that Andrew ring his mother to warn of his later arrival.
‘Andrew?’ Her voice was rich with the evening’s first drink. ‘How lovely. How did it go?’
‘Fine,’ he told her. ‘Thanks for the geranium. Dad seems very well.’
‘He is.’
‘And we visited some friends of yours. Those decorators.’
‘Holly and Clifford? What fun. They’re so nice.’
‘Yes. Er. Mum?’ Dialling her number, Andrew had steeled himself to risk sounding prudish. She ought to know. He was sure of it. But first he found himself picturing the needless pain he might cause her, then he felt obscurely guilty for the passive role he had just played in his father’s off-hand infidelity. Mouthing silently into the mouthpiece, aware afresh of the tickets to California winking at him from their hiding place on the dresser, he found he could go no further. ‘How was your weekend?’ he asked instead.
‘Fine. You know I’d have loved to have come too — Cornwall’s such heaven at this time of year — but I did think it was important for Dad to spend a little time alone with you for once. Anyway, I had a friend of my own visiting. James Bedford.’
‘Who?’
‘Oh you know. That nice academic I met when poor Kate and I went to Florence last year. He’s so nice. He’s still here in fact, so I better let you go. I promised to let him cast an eye over some of my silly bits and pieces before he goes.’ She giggled. ‘Bye darling. Don’t work too hard. Bye.’
As he soaked in the bath, preparing for an early night, it struck him that his mother’s nice academic might be her lover. She might be well aware of his father’s involvement, or whatever one called it, with Holly. It was his mother, after all, who had first so unexpectedly posited the idea of
his father’s coming to stay. If the business of his coming were no more than an elaborate charade for the adulterer, forcing his son to play alibi, then might it not also have proved an erotic convenience for the adulterer’s wife?
Andrew reached out a soapy arm to turn up the volume on the radio, resolving to push the matter from his mind by an effort to focus on a laconic discussion of the Islamic Question. He must learn to avoid fantasizing. That way, as his mother was always saying, lay madness. He wiped away a tear and returned to scrubbing at the terracotta paint which clung so persistently to his fingernails.
OTHER MEN’S SWEETNESS
for Tom Wakefield
‘SARAH-JANE? Sarah-Jane? Wake up. We’re nearly there!’
Jane opened her small, green eyes, yawned and focused on her mother from the back of the overloaded car. From as early as she could remember, she had loathed the name Sarah and the hyphen that accompanied it. People who really loved her, like her dolls and the sweetshop lady, called her Jane. Her mother smiled and turned back to face the road. Jane shifted and winced crossly. The rear of the car was hot and stuffy and she had outgrown her safety seat.
‘I’m too big for it now,’ she had complained as her father strapped her in.
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘It’s meant for ages three to five. You can have a new one on your birthday.’
She looked down at Jones, the only doll she had been allowed to bring. (‘Quickly, Sarah-Jane! Choose one quickly! We don’t have all day.’) Jones’s eyes clicked open to reveal a baby-blue stare. Jane tugged Jones’s red nylon hair and felt a little more cheerful. Then she looked out of the window. They were in the flattest place she had ever seen. On either side of the slightly raised road, fields flat as carpets stretched out as far as the eye could see. Here and there was a line of sickly trees or a sinister stream straight as a ruler. The road was straight too and seemed to stretch as far as the horizon.