Rough Music (19 page)

Will was being scrupulous in observing their timetables. He ate when they normally ate, left time for little lie-downs and postprandial dozes. There was a weighty sense of a son doing his duty. John tried to imagine himself at that age, however, and found another early-middle-aged man wed as much to duty and job as to his family. The only real difference was children. He had never appreciated until now how much emotional clamor, interference almost, the presence of children set up, saving a relationship from listening to itself. One often heard comments made in envy of childless couples, of the money they saved, the selfish freedoms they retained, knew indeed this lay behind much of the mistrust that greeted couples of the same sex, but in truth the ability of such couples to endure the total, unimpaired scrutiny they could train on their relationship year in year out, meant they were owed more awe than envy. He wrote this in a long letter he composed in his head, a letter to Sylvia, then remembered how many same-sex couples were famous for their surrogate families of dogs and cats.

Dear Sylvia
, he wrote instead on a postcard of the mouth of the Camel estuary,
we can see this view from our veranda, when the beach isn’t packed. V. hot but doing a lot of walking. Stay sane.
He made to cross out the last comment then realized that would lend a sinister weight to it so let it stand.
All good wishes, John.
He addressed it, stamped it and added it to the combined heap he and Will were building on the veranda table. A walk to the village letter box would fill nicely the interval between tea and the evening’s first, welcome drink.

Will was being extremely efficient. He had a list of names and addresses he had run off from his computer’s database and was striking them out as he wrote to them. Their eyes met briefly as Will tossed a card on to the heap.

“Ridiculous exercise really,” Will said. “Like Christmas cards.”

“Only less depressing.”

“How so?”

“You aren’t crossing off the ones who’ve died since last year. And you can still remember who they all are.”

Frances emerged in her toweling robe, refreshed from her sleep and keen for a swim now that the crowds were draining away. John would have liked to go with her for once but Will was up and offering before he could say anything. If all three of them had gone it would have entailed a tedious delay while the house was locked up. So he pretended to be tired and contented himself with watching their tall figures cast even taller shadows as, changed, Will ran out to join her crossing the sands. He was touched at the way she took Will’s arm as they went and felt a sweet, familiar ripple of jealousy at her ease of confidence in the boy. Since Will was five or six, it seemed, John had been coming into rooms or round corners and surprising them deep in conversation. It amazed him that they had spent most of the day together yet could still find things to discuss. Challenged once, she had said, “Oh, you know. We talk about people.”

It would have aroused his jealousy less had she said they discussed the deepest secrets of her heart. He knew
people
to be her favorite subject, the life-as-novel at which she excelled, a topic at which John, being too scrupulous for idle supposition, remained a pious dunce.

They began to swim and were lost to sight. He stopped watching and began another postcard. It was the same view as Sylvia would get. He had bought the same view fifteen times. Frances had teased him for showing so little imagination. His correspondents could hardly be expected to compare cards and what if they did? It was a good view, the view from the veranda, photographed with some accuracy.

It was odd writing to Poppy knowing that Sandy and the children would be at his side by the time she read it, as it meant he could write to her as his daughter, as a beloved child even, rather than address her as a careworn wife and mother.
Poppy darling. We can see this view from the veranda
, he wrote.
When the beach isn’t too packed …

Then a telephone started to ring and broke his concentration. It took him a while to realize it was Will’s mobile and he hesitated before answering. Only the awful thought that Sandy and the children might be about to cancel made him snatch it up. “Hello?”

“Darling,” a woman said. “How’s the Sunset Home for the Young at Heart?”

“Er. Hello?” he said again. “Will Pagett’s telephone?”

“Oh. Oh God. Sorry. Is that John?”

“Yes.”

“Just the man I was after, actually.” She coughed nervously, plainly mortified. John thought it was rather funny and admired her for not simply hanging up.

“That’s Harriet, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes. And how
is
the bloody Sunset Home?”

“It’s fine. Young at heart. We’ve got a wonderful view. Beach on the doorstep. Literally. You should come down.”

“I wish.”

He liked Harriet best of all Will’s women friends. She was sexy and he liked the way she swung nervously between flirtation and trying to talk like a man. She had always shown him a refreshing lack of respect, which was flattering to his age and amusing, given that she had ended up working for the prison service too. Frances had nursed fond hopes of Will marrying her one day. John had been treacherously gleeful when the idea was categorically rejected. “Will’s swimming,” he told her. “Shall I get him to call you back?”

“No. Well, if you like. But listen, John, I was serious. It
was
you I wanted to speak to.”

“You don’t have to be polite, Harriet.” He paced the room as he talked and caught sight of himself; sun-tanned old man with incongruously young communication device pressed to his ear.

“I know. I’m calling unofficially, John, but I’m calling from work on work business.”

“Yes?”

“It’s our mutual friend in Rio. I thought it only fair to warn you.”

“Oh God,” he sighed. “Another bloody color supplement feature! It’s such an old story. You’d have thought that by now—”

“No, John. Listen, will you. They’re going to extradite him. At long last.”

“But he’s an old man. Well. Not
so
old. My age. He must be, what, seventy-five?”

“And obscenely rich and on his third marriage. But not beyond the reach of the law, apparently. Not anymore. It’s not definite yet but he’s even been teasing us, talking about making his peace with the old country and coming back to face the music.”

“Secure in the knowledge that he’s become such a media favorite most juries would be rejected by the prosecution or would acquit him. Why?” John sat on the sofa. He felt faint.

“Once he realized extradition might finally be going to push through, despite his lawyers’ best defense, he probably thought he should save face. After all, if he comes back voluntarily, even after all this time, it goes in his favor. John?”

“Yes. I’m still here.”

“I just thought I should tell you. If it does happen, the press’ll have a feeding frenzy, it being the silly season. They’ll rake everything up. I thought you should be ready. But it’s not official yet and it may not even happen. If it does though, we can’t protect you like in the old days. The press isn’t what it was. They know everything now and what they don’t know, they’ll ring you up for. Or they’ll make something up. OK?”

“OK. Thanks, Harriet.”

“Not at all. Give my love to that handsome orderly.”

“I will.”

Another telephone rang in the background. She swore like a navvy as she hung up.

John went directly to the kitchen, poured himself a splash of Scotch and downed it in one needy swig. Then he poured himself a second, longer one, with some ice, and took it back to the sofa. All at once that other house, that other time, were here about him. For all the girl’s touching concern, this business scarcely stirred him now beyond a vague desire to grind his teeth when he saw their
mutual friend
’s bronzed, smug old face pressed up against some nymphet’s in a magazine. It stirred up much, however, that he would rather have left untroubled and unremembered. Ugly revelations. Unholiday violence. Bad words whose damage had never been healed but merely scabbed over. What misguided nostalgia had possessed Poppy to send them back here?

Hearing a motorbike engine nearby, he ran out, still clutching his drink, heart in his mouth. But it was nothing, of course, or not what he had irrationally feared, merely a groundsman speeding a quad bike about the golf course.

“John?”

He spun round at the veranda’s end to see Frances and Will returning through the gate from the beach. He waved, smiled, said he would fix them both drinks as well, but for a moment she had seen his face. For a moment, too, he had seen her younger self, ebullient on a young man’s arm, blithely unaware of the effect she was having.

While they warmed up in the shower and dressed, he snatched the pile of postcards, although both he and Will had several more to write, and took it up the track to the letter box. He hoped to still his thoughts with walking but the flood of poisoned memories was such that he had posted the cards in a clumsy fistful before he remembered that Poppy’s was still only half written. He imagined her concern as she turned it over in her hand, heard her sad assumption that such forgetfulness spelled the beginning of a senility so stoutly held off until now. He wondered again at her motives in booking this house and recognized the open-handed innocence of the gesture. He felt a glow of consolatory pride that there, at least, was someone they had always succeeded in protecting, someone undamaged, in her youth at least, by too much of the wrong sort of truth.

A gust of wind blew rain against the windows so abruptly that they both looked up. There was another gust and the door came open. Bill stopped typing and went to close it. Julian rearranged himself in the armchair, trying to be as much like a cat as possible while still reading
The Happy Prince and Other Stories
. He wanted Bill to notice but Bill merely strode back to the dining table and continued typing the moment he sat down, as though he had been mid-sentence when he broke off.

His words were an unstoppable flow apparently. Julian knew all about writers and painters having Muses—had recently learned all the Muses’ names and disciplines by heart to impress his father, who had not been impressed at all but had merely corrected his Greek pronunciation. He had always pictured a Muse as a lovely blonde lady in a white pleated dress and gold sandals who would sort of kiss the writer on the back of the neck and murmur ideas in their ear so they believed they were having the thoughts themselves. But now that he was seeing writing in progress, he realized that someone like the lady behind the library counter was more appropriate, someone with huge bosoms but no children and with two sets of spectacles, who knew where every book was shelved and could even summon up its Dewey decimal number, even though it was obvious she thought nine-tenths of the books published not worth reading.

The words came and came and if they stopped for a minute or two, Bill frowned and kept his hands ready at the keyboard. It reminded Julian of Ma’s relentless piano exercises and did not seem fun in the least. Julian had tried reading just one word to each click of the typewriter keyboard but it began to make him feel sick. He revised his ambition to become a writer and reinstated an earlier one of being merely very rich.

Overnight the weather had changed. Something called a
cyclonic gloom
had arrived bringing a thick lid of gray cloud and intermittent, stinging showers that soon emptied the beach. It was, Julian decided, rather pleasant. For once breakfast had brought no insistence on bracing outdoor activity or cultural expedition and, finding him guiltily curled up in an armchair with a book, Ma had merely stroked his hair and said what a relief it was that he knew how to entertain himself. A particular stress in her comment plainly indicated Skip, who had already complained loudly about the weather and how there was
nothing to do
and had twice been reprimanded for swearing. Ma was currently pacifying her with a shopping trip to Bodmin.

The prose drew him in again and he forgot to be a cat, forgot all about Bill in fact. It was a book he had read several times before and found himself rereading at least once a year. He felt compelled to do so only partly by the content of the stories, all of them sad and most of them unsettling. They were a little like Hans Christian Andersen’s tales of cold Kay with the shard of looking-glass in his heart and the mermaid prepared for love to feel as though she walked on knife blades. Wilde’s cruel Infanta and amoral Star-Child affected him in a similar way. He sensed there were darker truths, adult truths, behind the selfconsciously fairy-tale tone. These were stories adults never offered to read at bedtime. There was something fascinatingly sickly about them too, like the fluttering of wounded birds or the terrible wincing of salt-sprinkled slugs.
Life is savage
, the stories said.
People are vicious. But
there is love and there is a chill, unloving beauty in stars and flowers, and both can be admired.