Rough Music (26 page)

Will was reaching up to slide a suitcase on top of the wardrobe and Sandy, sitting on one of the beds, placed his hands on Will’s backside. The gesture was unmistakable; he did it with the same slow, tender absorption with which a man would cup a woman’s breasts in his palms. She froze, staring, unseen.

“Oi!” Will said and shook him off, laughing, whereupon Sandy whacked his bottom instead. So it was only a joke.

Sandy saw her and grinned. “You have no idea, Frances, how long I have waited to share a room with your son.”

“Oh, behave,” Will told him, turning.

Frances did her best to laugh but this was not her kind of humor. Sandy was a rugger player, she reminded herself. He had a weakness for horseplay and the company of men. It was embarrassing but harmless. She went to soothe her startled nerves and indulge herself by tucking Oscar into bed.

He was already tucked in, tiny in the double bed, but the strange, new room had woken him up enough for a bedtime story. It was not really a little boy’s tale but she sat on the bed beside him and told him “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” because it seemed suitable for an encounter with an unfamiliar bedroom.

They ate early, almost immediately, so that Hugo would not feel left out but could be hustled off to bed too. Her cake was a success, especially with Sandy who flattered her by having three helpings. She liked a man who was unashamed to eat. Will was a good cook, of course, but both he and John had always had a way of eating so little or so slowly that they made a hungry woman feel she must be greedy. Sandy made her feel, as John and Will had not, that she was a lone woman in an allmale household. It felt good, rejuvenating.

Hugo ate his pudding sitting on her lap because he was at once determined to eat it now and heavy with a long day’s excitement. Despite being so exhausted, he continued to ask questions. Was that last piece for Oscar? When would Oscar eat it? How soon could they swim? Was it true that there were basking sharks here? If Oscar didn’t know the pudding existed, would he miss his helping if someone else ate it? Will parried each question with all seriousness, as though the child were a fellow adult, and she felt afresh her sorrow that he had no children of his own yet. Yet? Dared she still use that little word even to herself? Miracles happened. “Bedtime,” she murmured, kissing Hugo’s hair.

“But it’s still light,” he said and wriggled around on her lap to play with her pearls the way her own children had, clutching them in a small fist and counting them between his fingers like a rosary.

“Those come from deep in the sea,” she told him.

“I know,” he said. “In shellfish. Does it hurt when they take them out?”

“I don’t know,” she said in all honesty. “I hope not. I think it’s probably like having your wallet stolen; it doesn’t hurt, it just makes you cross until you get another one.” She looked up and saw Will watching them and smiling sadly.

“He must be the age I was when you sent me to boarding school.”

“Surely not,” John said. “Far too young.”

She had a bad feeling, the kind she got when her words were not going to come out right.

“Nine next birthday,” Sandy said.

“Exactly the same age, then,” Will said with a kind of triumph. “Just imagine.”

“It’s different,” she said, meaning now. “It’s all different. Come on. Bedtime for Julian.”

“I’m not called Julian.”

In her confusion she stood, easing Hugo off her lap too abruptly. Whining, fighting dismissal, he had not let go of her pearls. The rope snapped and suddenly they were everywhere. “Shit,” she shouted. “Shit!”

Hugo screamed with laughter. “Granny swore!” he gasped, but all the men were diving around, scrabbling after dancing pearls.

She had caught a fistful of them, still on their string, but watching the men on all fours, like pigs, was so odd that she let these fall as well so that John shouted “Careful” at her. “Bedtime,” she said again. “Jiggedy jig.” And she steered Hugo, who was already in pajamas, into the bathroom to brush his teeth.

“I’m sorry I broke your pearls,” he said, as she saw him into his side of the double bed.

“Ssh,” she whispered. “You’ll wake Oscar. Don’t worry. It happens all the time, Granny losing her marbles. Happens all the time. Kiss.” He kissed her and she kissed him back. “Now. Say prayers.
Gentle Jesus—
”

“We don’t do prayers. God’s a myth.”

“Oh yes.” She stood with a grunt. “Sorry. Sleep tight.”

When she returned, John was back at the dining table, trying to thread pearls on a length of cotton from a small mending kit retained from some hotel visit. Will and Sandy were still on the floor, looking under furniture.

“How many should there be?” John asked. “Any idea?”

“Forty?” she suggested. “Fifty? I’ve never counted them.”

“The insurance probably says,” Will told them, standing up. “Now. Who wants a coffee and who wants mint tea? I’m sure this is the lot.”

“Tea, please,” she said and sat on the sofa thinking,
Magic pearls. My magic pearls. No more magic.

Sandy was still on the floor, only now he had moved on to the door of the fourth bedroom, the locked one. “There are several more under here,” he said, maneuvering for a better view like a terrier at a rabbit hole. “If I could just see better …” He grabbed a table lamp, causing the room’s calm lighting to sway wildly askew, and pointed it under the door.

“Fifty-three,” John said. “That does sound like a curious number. Were there sixty, perhaps? Or seventy, even? How many times did they go round your neck?”

“Well if you can’t remember!” she snapped.

“Twice,” Will called out from the kitchen. “They went round twice but they didn’t hang lower than her second button and there wasn’t a clasp.”

Sandy tugged a sheet of paper from the children’s coloring pad. He slid it slowly under the door. “I think I can catch them,” he said. “Shit!” He jumped up. “Isn’t there a key for this?” He rattled the door.

“No,” John said.

“What’s in there anyway?”

“Bluebeard’s wives,” Frances murmured.

“All the landlord’s stuff presumably. Private things.”

Sandy rattled the door again and bumped the lock. “It would give easily,” he said. “It’s not bolted.”

“Do you think we should?” John asked. “How could we lock it again?”

“We shouldn’t,” Will said, rather vehemently, coming back. “We can get the landlord to open it for us.”

“But we don’t know who they are,” Frances said. “Didn’t it come through an agency, Sandy?”

“No. Yes.”

Will came to stand protectively beside the locked door. “That’s right. But we can ring the agents in the morning and get it fixed. Much the simplest way.”

“I haven’t been without them longer than a night since I had them restrung in 1970,” Frances said, remembering. “They get so personal. Maybe because they absorb your skin oils. Apparently they never look their best until they’ve been polished with weaning. I mean—”

“Tribal, really,” John said, not waiting for her correction. “Like decking your weddable daughters out in animal tusks to increase their value on the marriage market. Shame you’ve no granddaughter to leave them to. But the way society’s changing, it’ll probably be perfectly acceptable for Oscar to wear them by the time he’s twenty-one.”

“Why Oscar?” Will asked. “Why not Hugo?”

“He gets my gold cufflinks and signet ring, of course.”

“Far too much bother,” Sandy muttered, apparently uncomfortable with such chat, and he thudded harder on the door. With a slight complaint of splintering wood it flew open and the fourth bedroom was laid bare like a darkened stage set. Everyone fell silent and looked in.

The remaining pearls were on the floorboards where they had rolled up against the edge of a rug. Will crouched and quickly gathered them up. He made to shut the door again but Sandy stopped him. “Hang on,” he said. “We might as well have a look while it’s open.” He strode in and tugged back the shutters, letting in the garish light of the setting sun.

“Don’t,” Will said. “Someone might see.”

“Not at this hour,” Sandy said. “And they’re hardly likely to be passing anyway.”

“I like that.” Frances admired a pale stone sculpture. It appeared to be of a face pressing through a veil. “And those. Look!” There were other sculptures, huddling together on a table in the shadows. There were books, stacked two deep on the shelves, and a colorful, Hockneyish painting of two young men on a sofa, one dark, one fair, the dark one holding a chisel and hammer, the fair one a violin. There were framed photographs propped here and there on the shelves. Two of them showed the same dark-haired young man. In one he was still a teenager, posed and composed. In the other he was older, laughing, at a wedding apparently, with another slightly older man who looked familiar. “I know him,” she said, pointing at the familiar one.

“How could you possibly?” John said. “Don’t touch anything, for God’s sake.”

While Sandy looked at the book titles and Will looked at the photographs, she sat on the bed and chuckled. “Sandy could sleep in here,” she said. “Now that we’ve got the door open. They’d never know.”

“Oh no. I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Sandy said quickly.

“Why not?” she asked. “You’re the one that broke in.”

“It’s private,” he said. “This is obviously a very private room. All his life is tucked away in here. It wouldn’t feel right.”

“My God!” Will exclaimed so suddenly that she was startled. “This was my room!”

“What?” Sandy asked.

“It was, wasn’t it?” He turned to Frances, turned
on
her rather. “This
is
the house we came to before and this was my room. I didn’t get it in the other room because the windows are the wrong way round and it confused me. But here, with the one window out to sea and one looking up at the cliff path … I remember sleeping in here.” Uncertainty clouded his expression. “I’m sure I do.”

“It could have been any number of houses,” John said quietly. “The whole bay was practically built in this period and in this style.”

“No, but on the beach like this!” Will laughed. “My God. This was it!”

Frances stood and left the room. “You can’t possibly remember,” she said. “You were much too little. Sandy’s right. It’s private. We should shut it up again. And where’s my tea?”

She felt better once the shutters were drawn again and the door closed, but Will’s sudden enthusiasm had started a process in her memory she could not interrupt. This had been the house. She knew he was right. The changed name, the tarmac on the drive, the golf course, the new colors and garden, the French windows where there used to be a door, the shutters where curtains had hung, together had composed smokescreen enough for her to ignore what she knew. But Will’s insistence and awful enthusiasm were a merciless current clearing the air. The events were still not there, not entirely, but every room in the building, and the view from every window, now glittered with an unwelcome familiarity and she was living in a near-constant state of déjà vu that was almost nauseating in its refusal to resolve into clear understanding and unbroken recollection.

John sensed her discomfort as they were going to bed. He thought it was about the pearls, of course, and she played up to that to reassure him, fretting about the cost of having them restrung and her stupidity in allowing the boy to break them. He held her in the crook of his arm, like a child, and ran his fingers in slow repeated strokes through her hair, which he knew always soothed her. He fell asleep first. He had walked miles that morning, apparently, and been on the edge of a nap all afternoon. Before he slept, however, he mumbled, “It’s not the house. He’s quite wrong.”

She could not sleep, and his body gave off the heat it had absorbed all day and became uncomfortable to lie against. She extricated herself as gently as stiffness would allow and went to the kitchen for a glass of milk. She knew the way well enough now to get there without lights and once there the fridge gave illumination enough. She could see light coming from under the fourth bedroom’s door. She poured her milk, shut the fridge and stood there sipping, feeling the cool air about her hot legs. In a while Will emerged. She opened the fridge again to let him see she was there and he came across.

“I’d left something in there,” he said guiltily. He had shorts on and nothing else. “Can’t you sleep either?”

“No,” she said. “Have milk. It helps.”

He pulled a funny face. “I’m going out for some air,” he said. “Maybe Sandy will have stopped snoring when I get back. Night.”

“Night.”

He kissed her cheek sweetly enough but there was a tension between them that smelled sourly of deceit. She waited until his bare feet had padded the length of the veranda. She heard the click of the latch as he passed through the gate to the beach then she went forward to watch through the French windows, keeping back so the moonlight would not catch on her nightdress to betray her.

There he was, quite clearly, walking along the top of the beach, oddly purposeful for a man wearing nothing but shorts. Then she saw to her astonishment that he was making toward the encampment and the home of the sad young man. There were no lights on there. It was far too late. The dog barked once, startled awake perhaps, and he froze like a burglar. It barked again and he turned and was walking, running almost, back to the beach. He did not see a light come on in the trailer.

Frances hurried back to her room. John was still sound asleep. She sat in the armchair, watching him. Sometimes now sleep came more easily when she was not lying flat on her back. She heard Will come in, heard him pad across to the bathroom and then back to his bed. She heard, quite distinctly, a burst of Sandy’s snoring as their bedroom door opened and closed. She sat on, and felt haunted by truths whose significance danced beyond her grasp.