Rough Music (22 page)

“Is something wrong with her foot?” Will asked.

“No. She picks up thorns from the gorse when she’s after rabbits. They don’t seem to bother her but they can work their way right under her skin and could cause an infection.” He had the faintest trace of a Scottish accent. Care seemed etched on his brow and around his eyes and was further suggested by the traces of gray at his temples Will had not seen before. Grief, depression; some trauma had marked him as surely as a knife.

“You said her
other
home just now,” Will said.

“Her main home’s here.”

“Of course,” Will said, baffled. “Oh I see,” he added as the penny dropped. “How crass of me.”

“We live out there in the holiday season while I let this to pay the bills for the year.”

“It’s beautiful. It … It doesn’t feel like a house a dog lives in.”

“It does once you take the covers off the sofas.”

Will pictured the place with rougher edges, threadbare cushions, without all the bright colors and surface styling so carefully calculated to appeal to townies, and thought how much better it must look.

“Is everything OK, though? You’ve got all you need?”

“It’s fine. Better than fine.”

“I’d normally have called round on your first day but I felt a bit stupid after that business with your mother …”

“Christ, I’m so sorry. She’s … She’s not very well.”

“Oh. Forgive me. She seemed incredibly fit,” he added with feeling.

“In her head, I mean. She’s got Alzheimer’s.”

“She’s not that old, is she?”

“It’s the early onset kind. She’s fine most of the time but … Well …” Will felt a shiver of sorrow pass through him, so intense he had to make a conscious effort to pull the corners of his mouth out of a droop.

“How do you
do
that?” the man asked.

“Do what?”

“You were getting depressed and—”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were. I saw. You were on the point of crying and you sort of snapped out of it. I saw you. It was like a gear change inside your face!”

“Really? Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry. Forget it. I shouldn’t have …” He seemed touchingly worried by the curiosity he had shown. He tapped the dog lightly with a bare foot and she jumped up. “Come on, you. No more rain.” He drained the coffee cup at one go and handed it back. “Tell that mother of yours, when she gets back, that I can deliver her sculpture whenever she wants it.”

“You’re the sculptor?”

“I’m full of surprises today.” He turned to go, Fay launching herself off ahead of him, clearing the fence again rather than wait for the gate to open.

“Well, I could come and get it now. Couldn’t I?” Will asked, head reeling.

“You could.” He walked on as if it were all one to him whether Will came or no.

Having locked the house behind him, Will had to run to catch up. “I’m Will, by the way,” he said. “Will Pagett.”

“I know.”

“And you must be Roly Maguire.”

“Yup.”

They followed the dog along the top of the beach and under some barbed wire into the field behind the house.

“Your Jetstream’s brilliant. So much better than those fat beige things you see holding the traffic up.”

“Want to buy it? It’s a nightmare. Leaks when it rains. Roasts when it’s hot.”

“Oh.”

“Days like this, a
fat beige thing
would be a godsend.” Fay waited hopefully by the trailer door but Roly took her by the collar and tied her outside under a canvas awning, where she had a bed and a water bowl. “She’s not really a pet,” he said defensively. “She earns her keep catching us rabbits.”

“Us?”

“She gets all the bits I don’t eat.”

The sight of the dog tied up, curling herself into the bed in a sad, reproachful circle, reminded Will of what the woman in the gallery had said about a dead wife. How could he have forgotten something so crucial, so instantly disabling to his trite romantic projections? The entire adventure, the whole day home and parentless was fatuous. His ruder impulse was to save himself mortification, grab the stupid sculpture, which would no doubt fall apart after one winter and prove a useless waste of money, and go. He had no sooner entertained such low thoughts, however, than he felt the need to be sociable to compensate for them.

“Pretty idyllic,” he said, taking in the scene around him. Closer to, the encampment was far less slipshod than it appeared from a distance. Three brown bantams scratched for grubs inside a wooden run, tomato and courgette plants were thriving in a grow-bag and strawberry plants cascaded from a filled-in car tire. Driftwood was stacked in one pile, pebbles and shells in another and what had appeared from the house as a mound of litter was revealed as a heaped hoard of beachcombed miscellanea awaiting recycling into sculpture. Because of the intervening gorse and sand dune, the site enjoyed a view of the sea without sight of the beach. During a crowded summer, the views from here would be better than those from the house. “So how long have you lived here?” he asked but Roly had already gone inside.

The sun was coming out at last and making the long silver trailer dazzle. Will wondered whether seabirds high overhead ever mistook it for water and dived to sudden deaths. A thick crusting of guano gave evidence of their visits. He came inside just as Roly was pulling a paint-spattered rugger shirt over his head, and glimpsed the discreet zip mark of an appendectomy scar before looking modestly away.

“Sorry,” Roly said, “it isn’t designed for visitors and I live like a pig.”

True, there was clutter everywhere, discarded clothes, paint, glue, woodshavings, an unmade bed spilling on to the floor. Smells of man and cooked breakfasts mingled with heady scents of adhesive and acetone. Mum’s sculpture stood in pride of place. He must have been working on it this morning or late last night. Where the drive of a small electric motor once turned its mechanism, a belt now hung loose for connection to a small wind vane made of beautifully planed and sanded wood, a work of art itself. “I tried it out earlier to test the balance but I can show you again, if you like,” Roly said, picking the two components up.

“No, that’s fine. I’m sure it’s all perfect. Just show me how it joins up.”

Roly pointed with a much-scarred finger and Will smelled that his breath was sour from coffee and lack of recent toothpaste. “That belt stretches over that drive bar and you leave the nut on the end of the bar to stop the belt working itself off.”

“And she can put it outside all right?”

“Of course. That’s what it’s for. It’s all treated with ten-year preservative. Just give the moving parts a squirt of oil now and then but use a light one. I guarantee it for five years, too, because I can never be sure of the materials seeing as it’s all recycled stuff.”

“Right.” Will took the sculpture and wind vane from him. “Thanks. And, er,” he paused, “does it have a name? In case she asks. Rook-Scarer 56 or whatever,” he added.

Roly scratched his head and frowned, staring at the mechanism. “Not really,” he said. “I just make them. I used to give things names when I was younger and ambitious. Galleries expected it. Now I mainly sell through Bronwen and, well, I just make them and she sells them. But no. Not a rook-scarer. I call them Skimmington pieces.”

“As in
The Mayor of Casterbridge
?” Will could see this had pleased him; nobody normally got this allusion. No doubt he rarely dared make it. Roly smiled fleetingly.

“That’s right. You read.”

“I run a bookshop. I do little else. Tell me more.”

“Country people used to put on protests outside the houses of people whose sex lives displeased them. Not just adulterers and seducers but dirty old men who’d taken girl brides or men who beat their wives. Gay people too, probably, though the books are too coy to say. Sometimes they’d make puppets of the people, like they do in Hardy for the Skimmington ride, but they always made a big noise, not just with instruments but pots and pans, stones, spades, buckets of horseshoes. The noisier the better. The weird thing is it’s a phenomenon you find all over Europe and America, only with different names. Charivari. Rough music. Loo-belling. Riding the Stang. Sorry.” He scowled again, looked down at his hands. “You’re getting me all enthusiastic. I don’t talk about it much. Art critics don’t exactly fight for Bronwen’s invitations. And now you
are
surprised.”

“How so?”

“Not only is the drop-out your landlord and a sculptor manqué but he’s pretentious with it.”

“Well don’t take it out on me. You do
cultivate
that look.”

“Only because it’s cheaper this way,” Roly said, pushing dreadlocks out of his face.

“Don’t you get into trouble? Putting shampoo in the sea, I mean.”

“It’s eco soap.” Roly grinned. “They make it with seaweed and sea salt. It stinks but it works and one bar lasts all summer. Razor blades are my only real expense.”

“You could grow a beard.”

“I could wear sandals with camel-colored socks …” Again that tic of wiping away his smile as soon as it surfaced. But they seemed to have passed some barrier because he was loosening up, becoming nervous if anything, restless where he had been stiffly aloof. “Look. Do you want a drink? Not a drink drink but I’ve got milk and mint tea and elderflower cordial.”

“That sounds great.” Will was about to avoid sitting on the unmade bed then remembered this man was straight so it didn’t matter. Then he sat and heard Harriet saying
that was never a problem before
. But by then it was too late. He carefully put the sculpture on the sandy floor. “So these are people-scarers,” he said.

“I think of them as early warning devices. To stop you getting complacent. To remember how illiberal people are. I mean not … It’s just a joke, really.” He sounded deadly serious. “Most people will use them as bird-scarers,” he mumbled, in verbal retreat.

Will watched him splashing cloudy liquid into two glasses from an old milk container then topping them up from a water drum that took up half the fridge. Roly passed a glass over and flopped on the chair opposite that was actually just a half-inflated beach Lilo bent in two. Will sipped dubiously; there were actually some old, discolored elderflower petals floating in it. But it was delicious, like tasting a summer evening, heady and sweet. “Mmm,” he said. “Good. What are the stars in aid of?”

There were small, yellow, star-shaped stickers dotted around the narrow space. He had not seen them at first but once he spotted one, on the kettle, he began to see them all over the place. By the light switch. On the tabletop. On the grimy windowpane above the bed. Even stenciled on the battered surfboard.

“You ask a lot of questions for a stranger.”

“Sorry. Don’t answer. But actually it’s easier asking questions with strangers. Haven’t you noticed that? When you get to know someone better you suddenly go beyond a question-asking stage. They tell you things or you tell them stuff but you stop, you know,
digging
because if you know them well then you’re meant to know all about them and understand them already.” He ran out of words.

Roly had fixed him with eyes all the icier for his face being so weathered. “But that’s crap,” he said gently.

“Is it? Maybe.”

“You’ve never been married, have you? I mean, never lived with someone, even?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Apart from the fact that you come on holiday with your mother at, what, thirty-five?”

“Thereabouts.” How had they got this earnest this quickly? Which of them had performed the necessary sleight of hand?

“Yes,” Roly said with another fleeting smile. “It is obvious. But in a nice way.”

“Oh. Well. Sorry. It’s all crap then, what I said. And I ask too many questions. But tell me anyway.”

“I did a course. On happiness. I went through a bad patch. I was drinking, I wasn’t getting any work done, I was obsessed with money worries.” He paused. “I had depression, I suppose. I still do. It’s like being alcoholic. Once you’ve been there, felt it in you, it’s never safe to turn your back.” He stopped again.

Will thought of the evening they had pulled him from the sea and the unmistakable smell, then, of wine about him.

“The lady in the gallery told me about your wife dying,” Will said, thinking this might make it easier for him to talk.

Roly laughed grimly. “Was that how she put it?”

“Well, she called her your
other half
.”

“My
other half
. How quaint. I like that.” He stared down at his untouched glass of cordial then put it on the floor as if suddenly thinking better of drinking it.

“Look, you don’t have to talk about this, you know,” Will began nervously.

“I know,” Roly said, “But I want to tell you.” And he pinned him in place with those eyes again.

Oh Christ
, Will thought.
Now I’m stuck in a lonely caravan with a psycho.

“So I went on this course someone in my therapy group had talked about. She was sneering at it but I thought it sounded interesting so I went. And it was very simple. This man believes that happiness and unhappiness are only superficially to do with outside phenomena. Obviously you get cancer or your child dies, you’re sad, you win the lottery, you’re happy. But on a day-to-day level he believes that people who are basically happy have simply learned to think in a different way from people who are basically depressed. And he aims to undo the damaging way of thinking. It takes months, sometimes years, but the basic system is so simple that it’s easy to keep up. You make a list of the things that make you happy. Sunlight. The smell of jasmine. Your father’s smile. The thumping of your lover’s heart.”

Against all logic, Will felt his own heart knock against his ribs.

“Then you go over that list, refining it, questioning everything on it until you’re absolutely sure of the things and can remember each of them. Really remember them, though, recall the smell or sight and that sensation of happiness that goes with it, not just remember the words describing it. And then the stars. Well, they don’t have to be stars. That’s just me. You put them on things you see or use every day, in your house and wherever you work, in your car. Then whenever your eyes catch sight of one you have to pause and summon up one of the things on your list. And that’s it.”