by Patrick Gale
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘Well what?’ Shirley asked her back.
Angela languidly gestured towards the heap of notes. ‘What did he leave you?’
Shirley counted the notes and was astounded. ‘But…’ she stuttered. ‘He must have made a mistake!’
‘No mistake, darling,’ Angela said, eyeing the money. ‘You must have been good. Now listen. I’m sorry I was short with you earlier but his need was pressing and —’
‘How did you know I was in that —’
‘Mind if I smoke?’ Angela cut in.
‘Not at all.’
‘Shuna smoked all the time. Even on the job. Sorry.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘Anyway. The choice is yours.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The choice. You have a choice. Either you take that suitcase, leave the suit of course, and disappear off to the remainder of your quiet little life and are never heard of again, or…or you take that suitcase — if the suit fitted you, her other things will — and you take the suit then you come with me and start your new life. Either way, you get to keep the money. You earned it, after all.’
‘I don’t quite —’
Angela seemed oblivious to Shirley’s confusion, holding her cigarette between the long, wonderfully manicured fingers of one hand and patting at her chic blonde chignon with the others. The woman was a mistress of disguise.
‘You’ll have to leave the flat, of course,’ Angela went on. ‘I’ll have one of the girls torch it, make it look like a dreadful accident, to cover your traces. You’ll get a new place, somewhere a little more gracious than this for you, I think, lovey. And a new ID. Car, too, if you want one. I could tell you’d be good the moment I laid eyes on you. Just like her. A natural. Have you ever worn riding stuff? Jodhpurs and so on? The strict, tight-little-hacking jacket look?’
‘I’m fifty-five, for God’s sake.’
‘Age, as you’ve just so admirably demonstrated, is no bar to a perfect technique and a satisfied clientele. Did you enjoy it? Just a little bit towards the end maybe?’
Shirley froze for a moment then nodded, purse-lipped. Angela smiled lazily.
‘Thought so,’ she said. ‘Easiest money in the world in that case. And they never even touch you. Whatever, darling, I don’t have much time so what’s it to be? Suburban Slavery, Arthur and Gardeners’ Question Time or power, liberty and danger?’
Angela stood, towering over Shirley, and seemed to be waiting. She batted her thick eyelids slowly and it struck Shirley that she might not be altogether female.
Shirley felt she was standing on the brink of a precipice but had just been told she was free to fly if she wanted to.
‘The other?’ she whispered, and bit her lower lip.
‘Sorry?’ Angela asked.
‘The other. The…The second thing you said.’
Angela smiled a huge, generous smile. ‘Good,’ she said and reached into her crocodile clutch bag for a gold fountain pen and what looked like a piece of parchment. ‘I sign here.’ She scrawled a large A with a flourish and a little x. ‘And you,’ she placed the pen in Shirley’s trembling fingers. It was heavy, good quality. ‘You sign there.’
Shirley scanned the old-fashioned manuscript. The words swam. They might as well have been Latin. Perhaps they were.
‘Shouldn’t I sign this in blood?’ she asked.
Angela playfully slapped the back of her wrist.
‘Naughty!’ she said. ‘I can see you’re going to be fun.’
Have you read…?
Notes From An Exhibition
Patrick Gale
When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies painting obsessively in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. She leaves behind an extraordinary and acclaimed body of work – but she also leaves a legacy of secrets and emotional damage it will take months to unravel.
A wondrous, monstrous creature, she exerts a power that outlives her. To her children she is both curse and blessing, though they all in one way or another reap her whirlwind, inheriting her waywardness, her power of loving – and her demons…Only their father’s Quaker gifts of stillness and resilience give them any chance of withstanding her destructive influence and the suspicion that they came a poor second to the creation of her art.
The reader becomes a detective, piecing together the clues of a life – as artist, lover, mother, wife and patient – which takes them from contemporary Penzance to 1960s Toronto to St Ives in the 1970s. What emerges is a story of enduring love, and of a family which weathers tragedy, mental illness and the intolerable strain of living with genius.
Patrick Gale’s latest novel shines with intelligence, humour and tenderness.
Buy the ebook here
A Perfectly Good Man
Patrick Gale
‘Do you need me to pray for you now for a specific reason?’
‘I’m going to die.’
We’re all going to die. Does dying frighten you?’
‘I mean I’m going to kill myself.
When 20–year–old Lenny Barnes, paralysed in a rugby accident, commits suicide in the presence of Barnaby Johnson, the much–loved priest of a West Cornwall parish, the tragedy’s reverberations open up the fault–lines between Barnaby and his nearest and dearest. The personal stories of his wife, children and lover illuminate Barnaby’s ostensibly happy life, and the gulfs of unspoken sadness that separate them all. Across this web of relations scuttles Barnaby’s repellent nemesis – a man as wicked as his prey is virtuous.
Returning us to the rugged Cornish landscape of Notes from an Exhibition, Patrick Gale lays bare the lives and the thoughts of a whole community and asks us: what does it mean to be good?
Buy the ebook here
The Whole Day Through
Patrick Gale
When forty–something Laura Lewis is obliged to abandon a life of stylish independence in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester, it seems all romantic opportunities have gone up in smoke. Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days – and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional touchstone against which she has judged every man since. She’s cautious – and he’s married – but they can’t deny that feelings still exist between them.
Are they brave enough to take the second chance at the lasting happiness that fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the need to do what seems to be the right thing?
Taking its structure from the events of a single summer’s day, The Whole Day Through is a bittersweet love story, shot through with an understanding of mortality, memory and the difficulty of being good. In it, Patrick Gale writes with scrupulous candour about the tests of love: the regrets and the triumphs, and the melancholy of failing.
The Whole Day Through is vintage Gale, displaying the same combination of wit, tenderness and acute psychological observation as his Richard & Judy bestseller Notes From an Exhibition.
Buy the ebook here
Facts of Life
Patrick Gale
A young composer, Edward Pepper, is exiled from his native Germany by the war, struck down with TB, and left to languish in an isolation hospital. But then he falls in love with his doctor, Sally Banks, and his world is transformed. They set up home in a bizarre dodecahedral folly, The Roundel – a potent place, which grows in significance as it bears witness to their family’s tragedies and joys. The years pass, and Edward watches from this sanctuary as both his grandchildren, Jamie and Alison, fall prey to the charms of Sam, an enigmatic builder, and have to come to terms with some of the tougher facts of life.
Buy the ebook here
Rough Music
Patrick Gale
Julian is enjoying the perfect childhood holiday on a Cornish beach when glamorous American cousins arrive unexpectedly to swell the party. Emotions soon run high and events spiral out of control, with tragic consequences. Though he has been
brought up in the forbidding shadow of the prison his father runs, and though his parents are neither as normal nor as happy as he supposes, Julian’s world view is the sunnily selfish, accepting one of boyhood. It is only when he becomes a man – seemingly at ease with love, with his sexuality, with his ghosts – that the traumatic effects of that distant summer rise up to challenge his defiant assertion that he is happy and always has been.
This is a remarkable, wholly recognizable story of the lies which adults tell, and of the little acts of treason which a child can commit, a compassionate portrayal of the merciful tricks of memory and the courage with which we continue to assert our belief in love and happiness.
Buy the ebook here
About the Author
Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962. He spent his infancy in Wandsworth Prison which his father governed, then grew up in Winchester. He now lives on a farm near Land’s End.
Praise for Dangerous Pleasures
‘Nattily subversive, sexually ambiguous, intelligent and disturbing. The prose sizzles with acidic observation’
Sunday Times
‘Not one of these eleven stories is a dud. All of them are concerned with the fallout that occurs when soft-focusing fantasy collides with hard-nosed reality. The lingering after-effects “lie on the sweeter side of bleak”. Witty, moving and very much alive’
Time Out
‘Patrick Gale revels in absurd risks. It’s the promise of an unexpected, and potentially implausible outcome that entices you into his stories’
Independent on Sunday
‘Gale is a master of character, and he slips under the skins of his women protagonists with such wit that it’s often hard to believe he’s a man. From the misplaced passions of a jilted writer these fresh, clear-headed stories are reminiscent of Gale’s back catalogue of acclaimed novels’
Elle
‘Gale pins down the pain of love and leaving and the no-man’s-land between the apparently real and the illusory. He writes of uncertain memories and threatened loyalties and, in ‘Dressing Up In Voices’, of a couple whose passionate, inevitable break-up is traced with unrelenting accuracy’
Scotland on Sunday
Also by the Author
THE AERODYNAMICS OF PORK
KANSAS IN AUGUST
EASE
FACING THE TANK
LITTLE BITS OF BABY
THE CAT SANCTUARY
CAESAR’S WIFE (NOVELLA)
THE FACTS OF LIFE
TREE SURGERY FOR BEGINNERS
ROUGH MUSIC
A SWEET OBSCURITY
FRIENDLY FIRE
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