Rough Music (10 page)

For several minutes she read her Georgette Heyer Regency romance, probably full of tight-trousered heroes behaving precisely as he could not, he the latest, rather unpromising novel from C. P. Snow. She made attempts at conversation but when steeling himself he found light conversation as impossible as heavy petting.

“We should have brought our own bedding,” she began. “These are the sort of sheets that catch on your toenails. I can tell. Who’d have thought she’d be such a cheapskate!”

“Hmm,” he said and there was a pause while they both read.

“Isn’t it heavenly to be able to lie here and listen to the sea!”

“Hmm,” he said. “Yes.” And there was a longer pause.

“Are you sleepy, darling? Shall I put the light out?”

“All right,” he said and found himself yawning in earnest. She turned out the light. “Sea air,” he added, by way of explanation. “And a jug of Doom Bar.”

“Night darling,” she said.

“Night.”

And she leaned over to kiss him, once, lightly, on the lips. As ever, he found the scent of the cream she rubbed in at bedtime powerfully erotic. “Listen to the sea,” she murmured. “Isn’t it wonderful! It sounds so close. Listen!”

For what felt like five minutes but was probably only seconds, he lay there dutifully listening to the sea but really only aware of her regular shallow breaths against his neck, where she lay curled against him. Then he could bear it no longer and he reached out to feel her thigh through her nightdress, then ran his hand up to cup one of her breasts through the lacy material that hid it. Then he rolled over and began to kiss her in earnest.

By his standards, he considered his lovemaking was remarkably expert for once. He did not drag it out for too long—it was over in five minutes (he glanced at the alarm clock)—and she didn’t cry out or anything so presumably he had managed not to hurt her. Afterward, as they lay side by side, hot beneath the prickly nylon sheets, he dared to mutter, “It
would
be good to have another. I mean, if we could,” and she reached for his hand and squeezed it and said:

“Darling.” Then suddenly she was startled awake by something. “Oh my God! I completely forgot!”

“What?”

She turned the light on. “Post. You got an exciting-looking letter from abroad this morning and I packed it so I’d remember to give it to you and—”

“Well, can’t it wait?”

“Hang on.” She slipped across the room to where the empty suitcases were stacked beside the wardrobe. She opened the larger one, hers, and took out an envelope from the frilled pocket that lined its lid. “Here,” she said and glanced at its stamp. “From America.”

He saw no reason why he should read it now but she seemed excited so he glanced at the unfamiliar handwriting then tore the thing open.
“Dear John,”
he began and glanced over at the signature. “It’s from Bill Palmer,” he said, surprised.

“Becky’s Bill?”

“Who else?”

“But he
never
writes.”

“I know.
Dear John
,” he read again aloud.
“Haven’t heard from you since Christmas but I hope all is well. Our little lives are in upheaval—or are about to be—since I’ve accepted a teaching post at your new university in Norwich. I was getting very aware that Skip was growing up a little too all-American and I’d always promised Becky I’d stop that happening. So when I failed to get tenure here and the offer came up, I jumped at it. So much to pack and ship over, even after we’ve given half away and sold the bulky furniture we can replace. Don’t worry, John. No heirlooms! Anyway, as it’s Skip’s first time out of the States, I’m taking her on a whirlwind tour of various friends in Europe before we turn up in England and I wondered if we could come visit during the summer holidays given that she’s never met her young cousin and London is such a key historic center etc., etc. But also, of course, because I would like to meet the three of you properly. Don’t worry if you consider this would be an imposition or inconvenient. I’m sure we can arrange something else in the course of the year. But I suggest you leave a message care of my secretary at VEA who I’ll be phoning at regular intervals. All good wishes. Bill.
Good Lord, I suppose I’d better ring the woman and suggest they join us down here.”

“But it’s the other end of the country!”

“Well I can’t very well entertain them in Wandsworth without you.”

“I don’t see why not. You’re the relation.”

“Julian too. Anyway, I’m curious. And I feel a certain responsibility toward Skip.”

“That’s not really her name?”

“Course not. She was christened Petra Louise or something but they never used it. Well, they never actually christened her. And if she’s going to be living in England now … She is my niece after all …” His words petered out, then Frances seemed to realize she was scowling.

“You’re quite right. It was only that, well, I’d so looked forward to having you all to myself. Just you and Julian.”

“Funny.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he sighed but it had occurred to him that she was looking on the holiday as a time for spending more time with her husband so as to get pregnant and he was looking on it as a time for getting to know his son better and his son was looking forward to a fortnight of blissfully Oedipal access to his swimsuited mother. The three of them were locked in a circle of unrequited need and probably required some healthy interruption from outside. “I’ll go up to that telephone box in the car park on the cliff and call his secretary tomorrow,” he said. “Suggest they might like to join us before I have to go back to work. They probably won’t be able to make it—we don’t know for sure when they get here from Europe anyway—but at least we’ll have done our bit. Happy?”

“Of course,” she said and turned the light out again.

But then she had to get up to pee and, as always, the sound of distant flushing got him going so he had to pee too. By the time he slipped back into bed, Frances was fast asleep and he was wide awake. He lay there listening to the sea and her touchingly adenoidal breathing which was never quite a snore, more a series of clicks and halting sighs. And he thought about Becky.

His elder sister by four years, Becky was cleverer, funnier, prettier than he was. Trailing, unwanted, in her wake, he had idolized and tried in vain to despise her. Once she deemed him old enough to notice, she judged him stuffy and conventional. Their mother died when he was nine and Becky had fought against the obligation to mother him and his father in turn. She escaped at the first opportunity to Rexbridge, then on to Berkeley where, in one of her rare, maddeningly sketchy letters, she informed him that she had fallen in love and married. The husband was studying for an English doctorate, like her. She expressed no qualms about turning her back on England. She wrote to John to announce the birth of his niece. The alienation between brother and sister reached rapid completion. He had no interest in visiting America and, after her one visit to Wandsworth to meet his young wife, found he could not miss a woman who had made herself so unlike the golden girl he remembered. This made the reality of her sudden death all the harder to accept.

The husband, Bill, by then a writer who did some teaching or a teacher who wrote on the side—the emphasis varied from year to year—sent two newspaper clippings in an envelope. To be accurate, one was from a newspaper and reported how Dr. Palmer died when she danced out of a tenth story window during a faculty party. It went on to state that she left behind husband, daughter and an unfinished book on Blake. She died instantly and her blood was found to contain high levels of alcohol and a homemade hallucinogen derived from a certain cactus. Her husband was being questioned in relation to the drug but was distraught and no foul play was suspected, since Dr. Palmer had been a known experimenter in mind-altering substances privately, justifying it as part of her research into Blake’s visions. The second clipping was from some counterculture journal, apparently printed on home-made paper which caused the ink to spread as on a blotter. By way of an obituary it said that Becky had a big soul and had expressed her wish to be reincarnated as a seagull. Bill attached a note, scribbled on the back of a crude drawing of a frowning flower—presumably by poor Skip.
So sorry, John
, it read.
I know you’ll miss her as much as we do. Bill.

There was no funeral, just a party. John felt no compulsion to attend, especially when he learned that there would be no grave to visit. Becky was swiftly cremated and her ashes taken to India for scattering on the Ganges by some devoted pupils.

It was only in the weeks that followed, during which the numbness of shock gave way to the relentless workings of memory, that it struck him that his sister had affected his choice of wife. In many ways, Frances resembled the pre-American Becky; restless, rebellious even but still rooted. He wondered now whether his brother-in-law would notice or whether, like Becky in her catty letter of “congratulation” after her visit, he would merely see her as a wife in John’s own image; inhibited, conventional and quiet.

John strolled by the Bross then went to his usual pub—not quite his local. A residual Puritanism made him slightly ashamed of drinking in public and he fancied that a greater distance from home lent him a measure of anonymity. However, contrary to what he had told Frances, the walk was short and the drink was anything but quick.

Sylvia was at their usual corner table. She had none of his wife’s inhibitions about entering a pub on her own. She gave him a little wave as he entered. He smiled at her on his way to the bar and pointed at her gin glass but she covered it with a small hand to show that she was all right for the moment. Joining her, he marveled afresh at how very neat she was. White hair, discreetly assisted so that one could tell she had once been a blonde, curled neatly about small ears. Her pink blouse was creaseless. Her thin legs were tucked neatly away into the recess beneath her settle. The only untidy touch was her jewelry, of which she wore a profusion, but even then she favored gold over gems; the glitter combined with the sharply pressed outlines of her clothes to lend her appearance a hint of the military. They did not kiss.

“How are you doing?” he began instead, their customary greeting.

Sylvia spoke lightly, raising her glass. “If Teresa hadn’t arrived when she did, I think I’d have pushed him under a bus.”

“Not good then.”

She drank then laughed bitterly. “Funny, isn’t it? Good used to mean a sunny holiday, a comfortable retirement or, what was it you called it that time?
The tenuous possibility of very cautious sex.
Now it’s what? A smile that might be meant for you or might just be wind. A morning when he hasn’t pulled his nappy off in the night. A day when he’s calm, even nice. I tell you, I used to want him to be aware so badly. I wanted him to recognize who he was. Now I want his brain to hurry up and fry itself. When that look comes into his eyes and I know he’s aware and he’s like ‘what’s happening to me?’ I can’t stand it.” She drank again, lit a cigarette, hand shaking slightly with need as she inhaled. “Listen to me,” she said and restored neatness with a smile. “I’m fine, John.
I’m
fine. How are you?”

“Fine,” he said, smiling. “I’m fine and Frances is fine too. I mean, relatively. A bit forgetful. A bit … But compared to what Steve’s going through …”

“I know,” she said quietly, adding words that were both reassurance and threat. “Early days yet, John. Early days.”

Given the way they had found each other and the clandestine manner of their meetings, they ought to be having an affair. In a woman’s sense, he supposed, in an emotional sense, they already were. Certainly Frances would be as wounded and jealous if she knew of the depth of their shared confidences as if he had set Sylvia up in a love-nest. Generous colleagues had bought him a personal computer as a retirement present over ten years ago. He had found little serious use for it at first, merely using it to play chess, to keep the household accounts and to write the occasional formal letter. When Will bought him a modem and organized Internet access, he had made an effort to use the thing, out of politeness at first, but had swiftly become hooked. A lifetime’s user of any local reference library, a lover of facts and arcane information, he now found that the Internet was like having the great libraries of the world and an unlimited newsagent accessible, Narnia-fashion, from one small corner of his study. Now if he had any query, about the safety of a rose spray or the timetable for trains to Haverfordwest, he switched on his computer. Not only were there documents out there, but people, helpful if opinionated people. An intensely private man, moved on repeatedly through most of his working life, John had never been a great one for chatting over the garden fence but the Internet was like having neighbors one could switch off.

The family nettle-grasper, Poppy, had taken action after her shock at bringing the grandsons to a long-arranged birthday lunch only to find that Frances had laid in preposterous quantities of knock-down Rioja and nothing else.