Rough Music (15 page)

At first she assumed that Skip dressed like a boy because it was safer on a motorbike and made it easier to disguise her age. Then it became clear from her manners, lack of them rather, that she felt more comfortable that way. She was a tomboy; scowling, monosyllabic, freckle-faced. Her actual, feminine name sat awkwardly on her slouching persona so it came as small surprise that her nickname had supplanted it entirely. Junior, Chuck or Beaver would have suited her equally. Frances did her best to draw her out, asking her about her trip and school and California but it proved such an uphill struggle she decided the girl was shy and that it would be kinder to leave her to scowl in peace.

Meanwhile something odd was happening to John. Talking to Bill, he was putting on a joshing, even loud, manner. He talked about distances and miles per gallon, things in which he never showed the least interest, became suddenly keen that everyone drink as much as possible and, she noticed, persisted in standing when the rest of them were sitting down, as though he needed to assert himself. What surprised her most, however, was the knowledge he revealed about all things California, not just history and geography but recent politics, student movements and what he called
counter-culture
. He had been researching. Not for this visit, naturally, which had taken him by surprise, but for the vaguer purpose of keeping abreast since Becky’s death so that when fate brought him together with his niece he should not be found wanting.

Bill was handsome. Why should she deny it? He looked less like an academic than a farmer or cowhand, which would surely have pleased him greatly. He was shorter than John but thicker set, stronger-looking. He was the younger by several years but so tanned and weather-beaten that his face had more lines. Somehow the creases around his eyes and mouth and the lines etched in his brow contrived to look like signs of health whereas John’s furrows spoke only of anxiety. But even as she compared them, perched on a creaking bench beside the sullen child and looking discreetly from one to the other, she despised herself for even seeking comparisons. Bill was handsome, certainly, but his awareness of the fact undercut its impact, on second and third examination. As did the arrogant fullness of his voice, his assurance of attention. He had brown eyes, good white teeth, a firm jaw and, if his daughter’s bragging about his surfing prowess were to be believed, would have muscles to match. John was the better bred, however. She abhorred such terminology but there was no more effective way of distinguishing him. In purely veterinary terms, John plainly came of closer-matched bloodstock. His nose was longer, his cheekbones were more pronounced, his hands not flattened and spread as if by generations of labor. John was a gazelle hound to his brother-in-law’s mastiff.

Supper was not a great success. On a whim, partly because it was a favorite of John’s, she bought some local sausages and made toad-in-the-hole. But the oven was not hot enough so the batter failed to rise properly and remained unappetizingly flabby in the middle. Although it doubtless confirmed all the worst things Becky had told him about British cooking, Bill at least ate the sausages. Skip, whose eyes had already widened with disgust at the dish’s name, announced that she was vegetarian and not hungry in any case. Although she was actually angry that no one had thought to warn her of this, Frances tried to cajole her into eating some vegetables instead but Skip only stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses. Julian took this as his cue to show off and try to eat more sausage than was good for him, whereupon John ticked him off rather sharply and a mildly drunken gloom descended, unrelieved by Frances’s production—what had possessed her?—of an unseasonably hot rice pudding. The business of sending the children to bathe and settling them into bed provided a much-needed diversion.

Frances returned from tucking Julian in—Skip, quite properly, had refused any such childish intimacy—to find the men smoking duty-free cigarettes and tucking into a second bottle of Wine Society claret. Succumbing to the urge to retire early with a novel, she bade them both good night. She felt Bill’s eyes on her as she crossed the room to take refuge in a bath and knew she was being chilly and rude but she was too tired to care. In any case, to announce that she had changed her mind and was going to sit up with them and prove the life and soul after all would have appeared odd even had she possessed the confidence required to reverse her decision.

Had John not been drunk when he eventually came to bed, he would have been angry with her. As it was he merely expressed concern that she had
not been very nice
to Skip.

“But I’ve tried,” she protested. “I talked to her. I helped her get ready for bed. I tried to make her eat.”

“I think she’s terribly unhappy,” he said. “He can’t see it, of course, and she makes a big effort to hide it from him. She doesn’t want him to think it’s his fault. And it isn’t. I mean he didn’t
kill
Becky. But she’s just terribly unhappy.”

She was astonished to hear him talk this way. She had no idea he thought in even this depth about any of them and actually felt a small pang of jealousy that he should wax sentimental about an ill-mannered brat he had barely met, even as she agreed and promised to make a special effort tomorrow. But then, even less characteristically, he started to make love to her without even waiting for her to turn off her reading lamp.

“Ssh,” she managed. “He’ll hear!”

He stifled her, however, with a not unpleasant, winey kiss, put out the light himself, knocking it over noisily in the process, and made love to her. It hurt, probably because she was so tense at the thought of a strange man and child lying and listening on the other side of the thin bedroom wall, and took longer than usual because of the alcohol.

As though she were drunk too, however, she drifted off in the middle of it, away from the discomfort of mind and body, to a small, imaginary room where her new daughter was waiting for her, a perfect, pretty, entirely loving, meat-eating little girl. She barely noticed when he was through with thudding into her and was subsiding without his customary apologies into leaden slumbers, rapt as she was with every perfect detail of the baby and the extraordinarily acute sensation of her milky-breathing presence.

When she returned, as it were, to the room and pulled her sweat-soaked nightdress back around her legs and prepared to sleep, she found herself breathing in time with the sea and feeling the house gathered about her as a creaking wooden shell, aware of husband, son and other sleepers as so many small animal presences she could bear effortlessly along on its frame.

The following morning, because the sea was uncomfortably rough for swimming, she had hoped to organize a trip inland to a church with famously beautiful pew ends. However, Bill returned with Skip from a reckless pre-breakfast dip wildly excited. Nobody had told him there was surfing in Cornwall and he wanted to go in search of surfboards immediately. Something about him, his unbounded enthusiasm perhaps, had reduced John to a state of clannish adolescence. He tossed aside his C. P. Snow, declaring this a marvelous idea, and claiming he had always wanted to learn, which was news to her. Skip insisted that even though Julian wasn’t a strong swimmer he could still enjoy body surfing or they could find him something cheap and polystyrene. Julian, Frances could see, was torn between mistrust of this bolshy girl and puppyish awe of her father. At last he checked an impulse to linger mousily and tailed along.

“You don’t want to come, do you?” John asked her in a fleeting way that made her feel he would have been disappointed had she surprised him and come too, so she smiled and shook her head, remembering last night.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “Just promise me a go on your board if you find one.”

Left alone, she washed up breakfast, irritated afresh that her radio picked up nothing but pop music down here. She sat on the veranda with more coffee, anointed herself liberally with sun cream, and finished rereading
The Grand Sophy
in an unsatisfactory rush. Then, bored and feeling greasy, she went inside again to tidy up. She made her bed, scooped dirty clothes into a bag, did the same in Julian’s little room then paused on the threshold of the room Skip had insisted on sharing with her father. It was odd how twenty-four hours could turn a neutral space, a spare room, into somewhere so intensely private. They had only swimming things and the clothes they traveled in. In an arrangement that had already struck her as both spendthrift and characteristically selfish, the belongings they could not fit on the motorbike were coming separately by train so would have to be collected. Despite this, father and daughter had managed to create a mess in the room. The bedding was all over the floor, an ashtray was overflowing on the chest of drawers and their wet swimming things were staining the bedside rug. The room had already acquired an alien scent; not just cigarettes, but something sweet and nutty she could not place.

She hesitated a moment, familiar with the bossy disapproval that could be implicit in a room tidied in one’s absence. Then a breeze from the open window caught the cigarette ash and she felt compelled into action. She swept the ashtray off to the kitchen, wrung the bathing costumes out of the window before slinging them up on the washing line then made the bed. She realized, as she plumped up the pillows, that they must have slept in their underwear. Far from thinking the image sordid, she found it to be oddly touching.

The girl had no bedside reading, which was surely a shameful lack in a writer’s daughter. He had brought a new copy of a novel,
Couples
, by someone called John Updike, and a dog-eared hardback of metaphysical poetry. She began reading the Updike where she stood then, turning a page, sank to the newly made bed. She was still reading, despite a certain impatience with the tone, when she heard the Volkswagen changing gear as it came down the track. She left the book as she had found it, open face-down on a folded-over page, tidied the bed again and hurried out. She was overcome by a surge of silly, hot-cheeked guilt, became panicked that she could not immediately settle convincingly to some other activity than snooping, so was discovered wandering the corridor like an inexperienced shade.

John was still in the throes of incongruously boyish excitement and announced, in tones that implied he would brook no alternative, that they had bought the entire small stock of basic but serviceable surfboards in a sports shop in Wadebridge and were going to try them out immediately.

“I hung your swimming things out to dry,” she told Bill.

“You didn’t have to,” he said, “but thanks,” and went to retrieve them. Julian insisted on showing her his bladeless, polystyrene board. He seemed unconvinced. She knew he would rather the money had been spent on a book.

“Very grown-up,” she told him. “I’m glad they didn’t make you get one with those nasty fins.”

“Got us crab for lunch,” John said, crossing to the kitchen with a large cardboard box, and he actually kissed her in passing.

“They’re called Malibu boards,” Julian told her precisely. “Bill knows how to use one. He said he’ll show me how to do it standing up. But I’m not worried.”

“Good,” she said and ruffled his hair so that he looked less neat and vulnerable.

Skip stamped through in her swimsuit and grabbed him quite roughly by the arm. “Come on,” she said. “That’s only a baby’s board but you can still go fast on it.”

John ran after them without a backward glance.

“You coming?”

She turned and found Bill standing in his bedroom doorway, wearing the mustard-yellow shorts. They were still damp, she saw. They clung. “I’d better get lunch ready,” she told him. “The sea’ll make you all ravenous. I’ll have a go later.”

“OK.”

“I started reading your book,” she said. “Sorry.”

“That’s OK.”

“The Updike one I mean. Not one by you. I’d finished mine and …”

“It’s OK,” he said again, grinning, and she saw she was being odd. As he pushed open the door to the veranda, she saw there was a still-livid scar across one of his shoulder blades.

They had bought live crabs. Expecting neat parcels of cooked flesh redistributed into cleaned-up shells, she opened the cardboard box and gasped absurdly to find rubber-banded claws and four pairs of stalky eyes. She slammed the lid back down in a kind of rage. She had never cooked crab before. John
knew
this. How dare he assume she could? It was so typical, so maddeningly typical that in his sweet, unworldly way he assumed it to be yet another standard part of feminine capability. And to think her capable of such cruelty. She had a good mind to carry them down to the shoreline and toss them one by one over the heads of the startled swimmers.

She had bought cheap Cyprus sherry to make a syllabub for supper one night. Seething, she sloshed some into a mug and sat heavily on a kitchen chair. She drank and felt better but she sat on, listening to the sounds of distant pleasure from the beach and the closer, secretive stirrings of the crabs in the box.

A pair of brown, sandy feet stomped into her field of vision.

“I’m hungry,” Skip said flatly. “What are you doing?”

“Drinking cooking sherry and failing to make lunch. Oh hell. You don’t eat meat.”

There was a pause.

“Fish doesn’t count. The water has to be at a rolling boil,” Skip said. There was a clatter as she opened and slammed a series of cupboard doors and found a high-sided pan, filled it at the sink and slapped it on to a gas ring. “There isn’t a lid but I guess we could use this baking tray thing.”

Frances sat up and in her surprise drained the last of the sherry, which really was not at all bad. “I thought you were surfing.”

“Yeah, well …” Skip began and she sat at the other chair and peered into the box at the crabs. “Julian needs to learn.” Frances heard the echo of a jeer in the way she said her son’s name.

“All boys together, then?” she asked. Skip merely nodded, stroking a crab’s impotent claw with a finger. “They’ll be tired after lunch,” Frances told her, “and we can make the fathers even sleepier with beer. Then you can teach me. How’s that?”