Rough Music (24 page)

He was already stubbing out his cigarette on the sole of his boot, however. He looked at her wryly, reading her mind. It made her want to tug his stupid mustache till he yelped. Instead she carried on playing guide because the role came more easily than honest irritation. “It’s used by a local music festival,” she said. “Rather a good one apparently. Has been for some time now. It fell into disuse and was deconsecrated a while back. At least they stopped holding services here.”

“Good,” Skip said and pushed open the door.

“Look,” said Bill, stopping in the porch to point up at a carved face on the wooden beams. The children had already gone inside. Frances looked where he was pointing. “Jack-in-the-Green,” he said. The face leered from a wrapping of leaves. It had leaves for hair and a ruff of leaves about its throat. It was disquieting. “Pure paganism. And see this one?” He pointed to another face, which was tugging its mouth wide with bony fingers. “The mouth represents female privates. They thought they would scare the devil away. In some churches the carvers didn’t even bother with symbolism; they carved the real thing. Lips, hair and all.”

“Goodness.” Frances felt herself redden. She passed swiftly on into the church, or ex-church, whatever one called it.

The central roof was held up by ancient carved angels, most of them crumbling into dust, some so severely that they had been swathed in sacking. But their vigorous beauty shone through, more than answer to whatever question his smutty faces posed. Light flooded the place—untouched by meddling Revivalists, the glass was nearly all clear—and caught on rhythmic lines of arches and stout white pillars. Every capital was carved with writhing berries and vines. It was far larger than it seemed from outside, with north and south aisles as generous as its nave, and a broad, flagstoned space where the altar once stood. One could see why it had appealed to musicians.

A noticeboard gave details of the coming fortnight of concerts. She went to see if there was anything that tempted her but would not bore the children. Vivaldi, perhaps, or a mixed evening of songs and poetry.

Julian and Skip had found the piano, a concert grand, and were lifting up its padded cover for a better look. Skip began to play
Chopsticks
. Frances frowned. It was something she never let Julian do; a musical equivalent of swearing. She shushed but the sound would not carry. There had been signs of life in the old vicarage—voices in the garden, sheets drying on the line. The owner of the piano, a festival administrator presumably, would be angry if they heard. She waited for Bill to complain but he said nothing. The wretched girl thumped out the crude tune again and again, faster and faster, complete with a teeth-filing figure played with rocking fists on the black notes. Frances glanced round, angry now, unable to concentrate on the poster details, and saw him blithely reading the inscription on a wall tablet. Her patience snapped. “Stop that!” she shouted. Skip continued thumping. “Skip!”

Julian stepped away from the piano, dissociating himself from the crime. As Frances walked over, Skip finally stopped, turned and stared.

“What’s the big deal?” Bill asked. “She was only playing.”

“It’s bad for the felts,” Frances said with authority. She knew that any number of Brahms or Rachmaninov pieces would place far more wear on a piano’s workings but saying it was bad for her nerves would hardly have sufficed. “And it’s a horrible noise,” she added lamely.

“So why don’t you play?” Skip asked. “Julie says you’re really good.”

“Well hardly. And it’s not our piano.”

“They won’t mind,” Julian said. “Not with you playing it. Oh, go on.”

He looked so pleading that it dawned on her there was a contest of sorts in progress and the home team was falling behind on points. She tossed back the front of the cover, raised the lid, adjusted the stool and thought a moment. There were not many pieces she had reliably memorized. She flexed her fingers and launched into a Scarlatti sonata. This was a cheat, really, since the piece was all show and dynamism and sounded far harder than it was. The piano was a Steinway and far too good to be left unlocked in an unlocked church, but perhaps most visitors would lack the nerve to sit down and start letting rip like this. She rocked as she played, unable to help herself, letting each phrase scour her out. It was a good sonata, one of the angry, arrogant ones, imperious as a long car or an asymmetrical hat. She let it express her several angers, at John for leaving and spoiling the holiday, at this vulgar American brat for calling her son by a girl’s name, at this man for inviting himself and making her feel insular and fixed.

It was over too soon. Rather than wait for a response, she threw off something contrasting, a Debussy prelude,
Danseurs de Delphe
, all subtly melting rhythms and smoky chords, a tango almost had the title not denied it. The chordal writing suited the piano and acoustic better than the Scarlatti had; it made the space feel small and the piano vast where the other had seemed to shrink the piano. The sonata had drawn Julian and Skip to stand where they could watch her fingers let loose on the keyboard. Now she noticed they shifted and Skip in particular was watching her face instead, so that Frances became self-conscious and it was a struggle to keep her expression the elegant blank she would have liked.

She stood as soon as the second piece was over, closing the lid and feeling a need to break whatever spell she might have cast. “There’s a dairy next door that makes ice cream,” she said. “Any takers?”

The children were easily diverted by the prospect but Bill could not be bought. As they returned, feasting, along the footpath down to the sea, she caught him staring at her, refusing to be swayed by her nervous talk of how good real ice cream was and how hard it was to find. He was going to compliment her playing. She knew the signs of old.

“That was really good,” he said.

“Oh, I should practice much, much more,” she said. “But you know how it is. Marriage. Children. The Enemies of Promise. It’s hard to keep up.”

“But you should. I mean, I know nothing about classical music but I could tell you’re good.”

She made a noise of dismissal. “Maybe once, I might have been. But the world is full of wives who play the piano fairly well, who like to imply they could have gone professional if they hadn’t, you know …”

“I know.” She suspected he was mocking her. His eyes wrinkled. The mustache made it hard to tell. They walked on in silence, then he added, “To be frank, I’d never have guessed you had all that inside you.”

“All what?”

“That passion.”

“I don’t. It’s just notes. I just follow a series of musical instructions.”

“You don’t fool me,” he said. “That was memorized so there were no notes to follow. That was
you
back there. Hey, Junior?” Skip turned. Frances saw the game she played, her eagerness to be all her father wanted. It was heartbreaking. “Race you to the stile!”

He ran after the laughing children, leaving Frances to finish her cornet feeling wide and womanly and cross. She was getting a sunburned neck. She missed John keenly, not just his physical presence but—there was no other word for it—his courtesy. She often thought honesty about emotional states was overrated. All it did was stir one up to no purpose, creating directionless discomfort. All too often, it seemed to her, it was mere bad-mannered intrusiveness dressing itself up as some brave new virtue.

On the first night without John she had been able to use the children as chaperons, effortlessly persuading them that it was a treat to stay up later than usual, then using their presence as an excuse for playing one of Julian’s supremely tedious and time-consuming board games, one about horse racing and stud management. Totopoly was a particularly cruel game, since just when one believed it to be over at last, the board was flipped to reveal a whole new system of dice, cards and arbitrary misfortune to be labored through. By the time Skip was deemed the Pyrrhic victor, gray-faced adults were quite prepared to retire to bed leaving children to play something else. Tonight she had no such luck. Bill had been giving Julian surfing lessons and by sundown the child was too tired even to eat. Even Skip waited no more than the quarter-hour pride required before she followed him to bed.

Frances could not pretend to be tired too. She had slept on the beach while he entertained the children. As they took their coffee to opposing armchairs, it felt like the resumption of business deferred. Dreading fresh, unwelcome analysis of her supposedly repressed character, she went on the offensive, asking questions of him. She imagined all novelists were flattered by discussion of their work so asked him what he had been typing all morning.

“You really want to know?”

“Of course.”

“Because I never can tell with you when it’s just politeness or when you mean it.”

She smiled despite herself. “Isn’t that what politeness is for? No. I mean it. Tell me. Is it a new novel? I’m afraid I still haven’t read your earlier ones.”

“Why should you? They’re not even published over here and they probably never will be. Sure. It’s another novel.” He grinned down at his empty coffee mug. “I’m writing about Becky’s death and my reaction to it.”

“That must be hard.”

“Not really. It’s a shameless attempt to make some money finally. It’s a big love story.”

“About you and Becky?”

“Not really. More about the girl the boy meets afterward, the girl who helps him love again. It’s all very simple, very heart on sleeve, exaggerated almost. I’m doing Becky as an out-and-out bitch so that when she dies—sleeping tablets, nothing messy—he and his little daughter feel this tremendous guilt at their sense of relief.”

“But you—you didn’t feel that about Becky, did you?” She smiled again. “I’m sorry. I just realized how little I know you.”

But he had turned serious, wrapped in his memories. He had shifted on his chair to stare out to where the house lights spilled across the sand. “No. She wasn’t a bitch,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “But she was impossible. An impossible woman. It’s hard to believe John’s her brother. He’s so reliable and
grounded
. Becky was a fantasist. Always living in the next day, the next week, spending money before she had it, running up credit on the slightest prospect of income. And so insecure you would not believe. She had enemies everywhere. Not real enemies, not really, just people she’d fallen out with, people she believed had slighted her or stood in her way. There were streets she wouldn’t even
drive
down in case we ran into one of these people. Then there were forbidden subjects. Her eating habits. Motherhood. Her failure to gain tenure yet.
Not
to be discussed on pain of a week-long sulk. Her work.”

“Her work?”

“We couldn’t discuss it without her losing her temper. Either I didn’t understand it or I was patronizing her, apparently. So I learned to stay clear. And ex-girlfriends. Another no-no. Even if they’d gotten married or fat. Not to be mentioned.” He laughed, lit a cigarette, offered her one. For the umpteenth time that day she shook her head. “Becky was the first person I knew who could create a thundercloud on a phone line. You’d be chatting away with her from a call box or wherever, then fleetingly mention one of the forbidden subjects and it was incredible! You’d feel this thick black thundercloud of disapproval filling the ether between you. She’d carry on talking but something in her manner would go dead.”

“But you loved her.”

“I loved her.” He seemed to try the words on for size. “Yes. I loved her,” he agreed. “Because when she approved, when she loved back, it was like someone just turned the sun back on. Tina, this really smart friend of hers, anthropologist, totally hippie … When I broke the news to Tina, rang her from the hospital, she just laughed and said, ‘But of course!’ She’d never been able to picture Becky grown-up, Becky old, Becky a middle-aged mom. Hearing about her dying, in such a crazy,
stupid
way, in the middle of a drunken argument too, naturally, which she was losing big-time, was like finding the last piece of the jigsaw. Of
course
a woman like that would have to go that way. She cried afterward, actually. Tina. Cried and wouldn’t stop. So I had to hang up on her. But when I first told her she laughed.”

He broke off, stood to walk over and top up Frances’s wine glass without asking then topped up his own and slumped back into his chair so heavily its springs squeaked. Frances did not know what to say. The house suddenly felt very small around them, the night very black and the idea of his dead wife very large and threatening. Less thundercloud, though, than the charged minutes before thunder.

He’s telling the truth
, she told herself,
so I might as well too.

“I didn’t like her,” she said. “You were right. I only met her that once, when we’d just got married and moved to Wandsworth and she came to stay. I was very young and silly. Not that I’m sensible now, but you know what I mean. A newlywed. And she went out of her way to make me feel uncomfortable, as though I’d failed some test. She talked incessantly to John of people I didn’t know, cutting me out of the conversation entirely, and when John had to go in to work, she made me feel as though I was a visitor in her house, not the other way around.”

“You probably mentioned motherhood.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I probably gave her homemade jam or let her see me stitching lavender bags for the linen chest. Whatever it was, she struck me as unpleasant and rude and yes, quite unlike John, and I was very glad when she went back to America and left us alone.” She laughed, amazed at herself. “And I’ve never told that to anyone and now I’m telling you. Of all people. I’m so sorry.”

He was just smiling at her. From under that mustache. She leaned to scoop up her wine glass. She had intended to drink no more but it was there and she was thirsty and he’d laugh at her if she went to the kitchen for a glass of water. “Was she not a good mother?” she asked. “Why was she so sensitive about it?”

“I dunno.” He shrugged and watched a moth that was crashing around the lampshade. “She was probably hopeless. It was probably amazing she was ever focused for long enough to give birth. She did a lot of acid, you know.”