Rough Music (14 page)

Mum appeared to have brought most of the contents of her larder, which she was stashing away in the kitchen cupboards. She had on a toweling robe, through which he glimpsed her swimming costume. “You should be lying down,” she said. “Don’t mind us. You must be shattered from the drive.”

“I don’t need to sleep,” Will said, the truth of it dawning on him. “I’m on holiday.” Some of the herbs she was unloading looked older than he felt. In particular there was a pot of gray, dried tarragon that was on its way to becoming something else entirely. “Are you both going swimming?” Through their half-open bedroom door, he had caught an off-white glimpse of Dad in the throes of changing.

“It’ll probably be freezing but I was feeling all hot and sticky anyway,” Mum said. “Come too.”

“Of course. I’ll just change. I thought we’d agreed on no cooking.”

“Oh well. You know how it is.” She shrugged and continued stacking jars.

Pa stopped changing and seized the opportunity, declaring a wish to walk while there was still light along to the spectacularly bumpy headland he remembered known as the Rumps. The implication was that Mum was not safe to swim alone but now that Will had volunteered to mind her, he was free to play.

The tide had risen so far since their arrival that the small bay the house overlooked was now cut off from the main beach. Most swimmers and surfers had retreated toward Polcamel so as to be spared the arduous walk up the cliff and over the headland to their cars. Mum and Will thus had most of the remaining expanse of scuffed-up, sun-warmed sand to themselves. He felt self-conscious, nevertheless, because his skin was so pale and the new trunks, bought in a sale on a burst of shortlived fitness enthusiasm, had more orange stripes than he remembered. So, gasping against the Atlantic cold, he ran through the surf and dived into a wave. He swam a few strokes in an effort to acclimatize his body then turned to look for Mum.

She had always been a strong swimmer and continued to swim regularly in the city baths. It was highly unlikely she would get into trouble. Will was by far the likelier candidate for drowning. His body, it seemed to him, had always been too bony to be usefully buoyant. Where more rounded boys floated naturally and so could use all their strength for flying through the school pool, he had to use all his churning efforts just to stay above water. He had developed an inefficient, overly splashy technique at an early age and never managed to unlearn it. Although he lived as far from the sea as one could in England, a miraculous improvement in his crawl and backstroke remained his impulsive desire whenever birthday cake candles, Christmas puddings or roast chickens granted him a wish.

Mum was still standing on the line where surf melted into sand, apparently hypnotized by the bubbles breaking over her feet. When he called out to her, she looked up and took a moment or two to find his face before she could focus a smile on him. “Well come on, then,” he urged. “It’s fine.” Which it was, in a bracing fashion.

She slipped off her toweling robe, tossed it on to the sand behind her and he was startled at how good her body still was, a testament to a lifetime of weekly swims. She had the broken veins and ravaged skin of her generation, but her figure was not the kind that ballooned with age and her long legs and broad shoulders gave her an advantage. She was undoubtedly flattered by the dazzle of low sun on water and by a structured black swimming costume but as she strode toward him through the surf and expertly dived to avoid a buffeting, he imagined a glimpse of her younger, unconfused self.

She laughed, “Fuck, it’s cold!” then laughed again, seeing the surprise on his face. She dived again and emerged a few yards away on her back, toes pointing to the cloudless blue, silver hair fanning out around her face. “Do I look hideously witchy?” she asked. “Should I wear a rubber cap with flowers on?”

“You look like a mermaid,” he told her.

“Mermaid’s mother, maybe. Aging thingy. Tritoness. Look. There’s your daddy.” She waved to a tiny figure on the cliff path to their left, who might have been anybody, and called out, “Hello, darling!” far too loudly. The figure waved back and walked on. “This is wonderful. No water! I mean, no stuff.”

“Chlorine.”

“Yes. Let’s swim round to Polcamel.”

“You’re joking of course. Those rocks look lethal.”

“Well I’ll race you to that Lilo someone’s lost out there.”

“But—”

“See it? OK. Go!”

“I’m not sure,” he began but she had already launched off in a deceptively languid backstroke.

Swearing under his breath, conjuring up mental images of vodka and tonic, pistachio nuts and a grilled chicken salad, Will did his splashy best to follow in her wake. The waves were high. Even diving through them as she had taught him, he emerged to find himself drawn too fast for comfort into the trough before the next one. He was buffeted twice in a row, coughing on swallowed brine, then realized he was drifting dangerously close to the rip tide that was hauling out from the bay’s edges. Abandoning the race—he could see neither Lilo nor mother now for waves and, whatever the state of her spoken English, had no fear for her ability to find her way back to shore unassisted. Instead, he struggled away from the rocks, parallel to the shore, until he judged himself far enough from the tide to be able to strike out for the sand without the humiliation of being reduced to swimming on the spot.

Breathless, and bruised where his foot had struck unexpected stone, cursing at once his lack of assertiveness and ineffectual parenting of his parent, he staggered back on to the still dwindling beach just in time to rescue Mum’s robe from the greedy surf. Somehow the thing’s wet edges sapped his confidence in her.

“I won’t panic,” he thought, “because there’s nothing to panic about. I’m a weak swimmer, that’s all. She’s fine. She’s having a ball and she’s absolutely fine.” Wincing from the mussel shells under foot, he clambered on to a great rock so as to be able to see beyond the roiling waves and keep a protective, albeit impotent, eye on her. The sun was beginning a garish setting and was fast losing its warmth. Shivering, he absently pulled on the toweling robe and screwed up his eyes.

The Lilo was now much further out. Presumably the rip tide had caught it and the owner was resigned to its loss. It was one of the odd facts of beachcombing that one never came across the remains of Lilos lost at sea. Did they sink on bursting? Did wily fishermen pick them up to sell afresh or did they merely sail farther and farther out to sea to become floating nesting pads for seabirds? There was no sign of her. Will glanced over to the Strand and saw that the lifesavers’ flags planted there earlier had disappeared. Then he saw some late walkers on the cliff path pointing down to an inlet just out of his view. Then he made out Mum.

She was battling with the current, he assumed at first, then he saw a second head. It was another woman. Then he saw arm muscles and a flash of chest hair and realized she was struggling with a long-haired man. He appeared to be coughing and flailing and shouting all at once. Then, extraordinarily, she performed some maneuver whereby she seized him from behind, around his chin, and like an illustration on a lifesaving instruction notice, began towing him to shore. Will glanced desperately about him but the beach was now deserted except for children still absorbed in a huge sand castle they were defending against the encroaching tide. The cliff walkers had gone. From the houses on the Polcamel headland came the shouts and laughter of families uncorking wine and lighting barbecues. In the New Age encampment, the tethered dog set up a wretched howl.

Will leaped to the sand, ripping off the robe, and ran back into the sea, which now felt less cold. He had barely got in past his waist when she hove into view, still swimming strongly but with breath coming in great gasps. The man, who Will now saw was about his own age and had hair that hung in tight dreadlocks to his shoulders, was no longer shouting or flailing but floating quite limp in the water.

“If we can just …” Mum panted. “Get him on to the beach, he’ll be fine.”

“Here. I’ll take his feet.” Will took the man by the ankles, whereupon the man lashed out, kicking him in the chest and winding him before fighting clear of Mum’s grasp.

“Of course I’ll be fine. I was fucking fine to start with,” he said.

“You were drowning,” she said flatly.

“You brainless woman,” he muttered and made
woman
sound like an insult.

“Don’t you dare to talk to my mother like that,” Will began. “She was only—”

But his words died as the man whirled around, eyes full of red sun, and glared at him so close to that Will could smell the wine on his breath. His face was blank for a moment or two as he seemed to read Will like a poorly-worded notice, then he assumed an expression that mixed contempt with a wintry bitterness and walked away up the beach as though nothing had happened.

Will stared for a second, then was freshly aware of Mum’s heaving lungs. “Here,” he said and threw the robe about her, rubbing her shoulders. “Hot bath for you the moment we get in, my girl. You’re freezing.”

“He was drowning,” she said as they walked up the beach arm in arm. “I was heading for the whatsit. The Lulu.”

“Lilo.”

“Yes. And I suddenly saw him.” Her teeth chattered. “He was already about two feet under. I saw his hair fanning out in the water.”

“You saved the rude bastard’s life.”

“Judging from his reaction, I’m not so sure. Oh dear. Poor man. How ghastly. He’d probably waited all day for the beach to empty.”

Her teeth were chattering so hard now she could barely form sentences. Shock was setting in. When they were back in Blue House and her bath was running, he poured them each a medicinal brandy from the selection of drinks Dad had thoughtfully packed along with the contents of her herb rack. He found that his teeth were chattering too and clunked against the rim of his glass. He pulled on a thick cotton jersey and took his drink out to the veranda while the place filled with the urbane fumes of her bath essence.

The few playground fights he had ever got into as a boy were set off by someone insulting her and this persisted into adulthood. By some piece of old-fashioned chivalric programming, he only lost his temper in the defense of women. Had the man not strode away as he did, Will might have hit him. He re-ran the odd scene in his head, adding in a Galahadish punch and confecting the exchange of manly indignation which followed, but the projector in his head kept jamming at the point where his knuckles brushed the man’s lips.

The hazy sunset filled all the bay’s small slice of horizon. Will heard whistling and looked up to see Dad descending the footpath from the cliffs. They would turn the evening’s near-crisis into an amusing anecdote for him. He could already hear how it would be done, with exaggeration of his own feeble swimming, of Mum’s derring-do, of her refusal to let a handsome suicide drown on a perfectly nice evening. He thanked God Poppy was not there to spoil the fun with her dogged insistence on the truth and responsible behavior. By now she’d have called in some defenseless local GP to check Mum over and contacted social services and the Samaritans about the presence of a man in need of psychiatric help. Handsome or no.

Will raised his drink in greeting. With his walking stick, Dad pointed at the stumpy, red-striped lighthouse on the far side of the bay and shouted something like “Fog!”

Will smiled in reply, uncomprehending but eager. “The very image of our relationship,” he thought.

Everything about them was too loud—clothes, voices, manners, tans. And that motorbike was the last thing one expected which was, of course, precisely why he liked it. Frances could see at once that he was one of those people who would sooner die young and unappreciated than be found predictable. Something about his mustache confirmed this for her. What such people never seemed to realize was that in their pains to evade the norm, they became as fixed, as much creatures of habit, as the most staid conservative. The new university was the perfect nemesis for him. He would take drugs, sleep with his students, take sides with youth against age then wake up one day to find himself fossilized into a harmless campus
character
, no more scandalous than Gilbert and Sullivan.

The strength of her reaction startled her. She was not a snob and would always spring to check snobbery in Julian, but these self-invited guests made her feel like a curtain-twitcher of the worst kind and she resented them for it. When they arrived she was talking to the doctor who had been called in to deal with the pocket drama of Julian’s being knocked out. The child had not been out cold for long. He came round as poor John was carrying him into the bungalow. He wept briefly with the pain then slid into a deep sleep. Worried about the wisdom of allowing this in case he had concussion, uncertain if she could safely give him painkillers, she had tracked down Dr. Hengist, interrupting his late lunch. The intrusive din of the motorbike angered her. Knowing it could have nothing to do with their landlords, she assumed it was some lout come to fool around on the sand. When John ran out and she heard him laughing and saw Bill and Skip coming in with him, she found the anger she had prepared for unruly strangers transferred to them. She smiled, laughed as she explained the drama, shook Bill’s hand, but she felt the anger hot behind her brow and in the hours that followed it had not lifted. She was sure it was illegal for a mere child, even this self-assured eleven-year-old, to ride pillion like that even for short distances, and they had come miles. Bill assured her they had spent a night in Salisbury to allow for an excursion to Stonehenge as though he thought that made such irresponsibility forgivable.