Rough Music (27 page)

John was not good at running the house on his own. Not that it took much running, and a cleaner came twice a week. The plumbing and heating system was shared with the prison, so was maintained by prison work parties, and he ate all his meals with the men, supper included, if there was no family at home to dine with him. Frances teased him that he had always been looked after by institutions and could not fend for himself. This was not strictly true. Had he remained a bachelor, he would have spent the money he saved thereby on laundry bills and membership of a club.

The things he was hopeless at were the small touches that made this barracks of a house feel intimate. Frances effected them without thinking, much as she ate or breathed, drawing curtains, turning on table lamps, bringing in flowers from the garden, playing soft music. He had watched her often enough, these were all things he could do, but it took a certain confidence to do them on one’s own. Besides, it would have felt self-indulgent and he had far more important business on his mind. As a result, he would suddenly become aware that he was sitting at night with the windows still naked, in a room rendered flat and harsh by a single overhead light source. Or rather he would notice the phenomena and be dimly aware of the cause but preferred to view the physical discomfort as a symptom of Frances’s absence rather than as a sign of any dereliction on his part.

When she said how smelly and cold the telephone box was, he could truthfully say, “It’s pretty wretched here, too,” and felt closer to her. In much the same way, when she asked how things were at his end, he slightly exaggerated their badness. He did not mention that it had been gloriously sunny or that one of the officers’ wives had brought him round a remarkably good Lancashire hotpot which he had heated up with some beans from the garden that he had gathered himself. Instead, he spoke of how the search for Farmer was now concentrated on the seaports and airports and was drawing humiliating blanks. He spoke of the restlessness of the prisoners, made worse by the heat and their being confined as punishment for the disturbance on the night Farmer broke out.

“Well come back,” she said. “You’re still on holiday. What more can you do there?”

“I have to be here until they catch him,” he sighed, trying to be patient. “Or at least draw some concrete leads as to his whereabouts.”

“He’s hardly dangerous.”

“He robbed a post office, darling, and raped the postmistress.”

“She was probably some puritanical busybody.”

“Frances!”

“I was joking. But it doesn’t mean he’ll do it again.”

“Since when were you a criminologist?”

“The pips …”

“Give me the number.”

“Penfasser 452.”

He started to call her back then froze, finger on the dial. There had been a noise on the stairs.

It was an old house, hatchet-faced mid-Victorian with fanciful castellations, and was full of old timbers so that it creaked like a ship. In the summer however, with no heating on, the noises were rarer and more particular. There was one board on the curving staircase that squawked like a hen when trodden on. It was unmistakable.

He went to his study door. Night had fallen since he came in and the rest of the house was in darkness. To reach the staircase light switch he had to leave the carpet of light spilling out from the study and grope by memory across three yards of pitch black. He thought of Julian and his way of diving on to his mattress from several feet away so as to avoid the grasp of the blue-handed troll who lurked under the bed.

“Hello?” he said foolishly as he went. It was always a mistake to talk aloud in an empty house; the silence that followed invariably had the effect of making the emptiness close in around one. He flicked all the switches on the panel for good measure, causing the familiar hall and stairs to spring back into place. There was nobody, of course. Perhaps it was the heat after all, but the heat of the day rather than the heat of the water pipes. As if to prove this, a staircase floorboard squawked again, with no one on it. He turned back to the study, thinking again of Julian and of how he relished the sinister little poem about reluctantly climbing the stair to meet a man who wasn’t there. He hastily rang Frances back.

He fibbed to her, explaining the delay as being caused by a routine call on the internal telephone. It would not do for her to think he suffered night fears as much as their child. “Tell me about you,” he pleaded. “Take my mind off all this.”

But she was on holiday so had nothing much to tell; an old church, more surfing, fish and chips again. “And how about our visitors? Have you warmed to them?”

“They’re fine,” she said, then talked for five minutes about Skip, how funny she was once you dug through her defenses, not bright but funny and original, and how she was teasing Julian a little, which was probably good for him, and how good it was for both of them not to be only children for a change.

“And Bill?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said. “He’s all right. He’s working on his novel so we haven’t talked much.”

The front door closed. He had not heard it open.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Bartlett, probably. Coming in to check on me.”

“Why didn’t he ring the bell?”

“Oh. They’re all jumpy as hell after all this excitement,” John said, relieved now that he was telling her. “Me too, for that matter. I’d better go and see what he wanted.”

“I’d better go too,” she said. “It’s rude to stay away like this too long and Julian will worry if he wakes up again and I’m not there. He had another of those wretched dreams tonight.”

He told her they would speak tomorrow or the next day and not to worry about ringing to check up on him. He would be fine.

“Bye, darling,” she said.

No sooner had Frances hung up than he used the internal line to ring the gatehouse where Bartlett should have been on night duty. There was no reply so he let himself out and walked down the drive and around to the gatehouse where he met Bartlett returning from replacing a broken light bulb.

“Something wrong, Bartlett? You might have rung the bell first. That was a private call I was taking.”

“I don’t understand, sir,” Bartlett said, visibly shocked. “I haven’t been near the house. I saw you go out five minutes ago.”

“How could you have?” John snapped. “I’ve been in the study on the phone to my wife.”

“Well obviously I only
thought
I did. A cab arrived, which we reckoned a bit odd at this hour but, well, you know … Then you came out of the house, well the person I thought was you. You had your hat and coat on. But you said good evening and not to wait up and you got into the cab and—”

“Quickly man! Which cab? Which firm?”

“A Luxicab, sir. Black one.”

“Did you hear where he asked to go?”

“No, sir. He didn’t say, sir. But he had a big briefcase under his arm.”

“Very well. Thank you, Bartlett. I’ll deal with this now. Not a word to anyone else just yet. Stay where you are for now but the police will want a statement from you later.”

Bartlett paused in the gatehouse doorway, dull face bright with expectation. “Was it Farmer, sir?”

“Of course not, Bartlett. If he’s got any sense he’ll be on a banana boat by now.”

“Yes sir. Night sir.”

John alerted Scotland Yard, because of the remote possibility that Bartlett was right and it had been Farmer. Then he discovered how much the intruder had taken and had to call in the local police, as the victim of what looked like a routine burglary. Not only had the intruder helped himself to an overcoat and hat but to John’s second-best tweed suit, shirts, socks, underwear and razor. He had also snatched John’s wallet, which had still contained a wad of cash taken out for holiday expenses which he had meant to leave for Frances and had forgotten, some silver, a painting and, to stuff in what he could not wear, a briefcase consigned to Frances’s jumble sale heap on account of a broken handle. The silver was nothing special. Neither was the painting hugely valuable—the old gilt frame was worth more than the picture—but it was a cherished one. A study of a sow and piglets, school of Morland, in need of a good clean. His father had given it to him to take to university. It had gone on to travel with him in the war and therefore been one of his few remaining links with his dead family to have escaped the incendiary bomb that destroyed the other heirlooms.

“Could have been worse,” the police constable said who took his statement. “He could have done for you, sir, on the phone like that with your back turned.”

“Oh no, I don’t think so,” John said but he thought about the possibility when they finally left him in the small hours and he promised never to leave the downstairs lavatory window open again.

The birds were already beginning to sing. He drew the bedroom curtains to block out the dawn but could not sleep. He lay on the bed, favoring Frances’s side as he always did when she was away, breathing the ghost of her scent from the pillows. He thanked God she and the boy were so far away and safe from harm and as he did so was unable to prevent terrible scenarios playing out in his mind. Their rape and torture, with him a powerless gagged witness, were all the more hideous for being enacted among familiar furnishings.

“Just give me the sow and piglets,” their American tormentor kept asking in reasonable tones, “and I’ll stop.”

John was not a concert-going animal. He liked music well enough, although a teacher in his nursery school had told him to mime rather than attempt to sing because he
had no ear
and he had taken her word for it. He preferred music with English words attached, like hymns,
Dream of Gerontius
or
Judas Maccabeus
; music with a story to give him something to follow and some idea of how near a piece was to finishing. He could not abide opera in any form, finding it dramatically inefficient. Ideally music should be domestic, as when Frances played the piano after dinner or found something on the radio. Then he could read a book or beaver at a crossword and be occasionally surprised and distracted by some passing beauty in what he was hearing. The enforced listening provided in concert halls could be like drip-fed torture.

Frances had chosen a
lieder
concert because she knew he preferred words, but the program was of Schubert and Wolf with only a thin, unpromising English-language filling of Britten folksong settings. The sketchy program, all too swiftly read, gave no translations. One had to rely on explanations from the girl at the piano, who was pretty but largely inaudible.

Will had been going to come—he was as passionate about music as his mother—but he dropped out unexpectedly, insisting on staying at home to babysit so Sandy could spend time alone with his in-laws. John could never think of much to say to Sandy once the initial family questioning was out of the way. The man was amiable enough but almost proud of his complete lack of culture; the most worrying kind of scientist, in John’s opinion. And Frances was having one of her bad days, after a sleepless night, so they were not a merry party and John keenly envied Will who was probably playing Cheat with the boys or enjoying a good book, having put them both to bed.

It was a long-standing music festival, performed and attended largely by outsiders who owned or rented holiday houses in the area. Despite the high reputation and ticket prices, a self-consciously informal air prevailed. Seats were unnumbered so had to be reserved with cushions beforehand, a process involving a heartily Dunkirk spirit in the queue outside and Byzantine ruthlessness in the barely restrained rush once the queue was admitted to the church. The idea, part of the fun apparently, was to fill the interval between pew-claiming and concert with a picnic. Will had thrown together delicious sandwiches, fruit salad and cake for them but they had forgotten in their rush to bring a rug so ate in the car, all facing the same way. With Frances in so flat a mood, one realized how great a contribution her chatter normally made. The atmosphere was strained, and made less comfortable still by thick, prickly weather heralding thunder. They talked exclusively of absent family.

John had queued alone for their seats, leaving the others to talk. As they filed inside for the concert, spirits improved by a bottle of buttery Chablis, Frances remarked on the changes to the building. She had been here before, apparently, before the bold decision was made to replace much of the old slate roof with glass. A tall, masculine creature in a peacock-blue tent dress that looked as old as herself, was handing out programs as they came in. She knew Frances, it seemed.

“Happy with your clacker, then?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” Frances said. “Although I’m a bit embarrassed to leave it going all the time as it’s been so noisy.”

“Look up when you get inside and take a look at what he
used
to do. Coffee in the rehearsal hall during the interval. You’ll see more art there.”

They dutifully looked up as they took their seats. The new glass roof was supported by a phalanx of carved wooden angels, replacements perhaps for old ones decayed past repair. Reminiscent of something by Epstein or Eric Gill, they were more muscular than spiritual and would not have looked out of place on some Olympic stadium of the thirties. Their faces were expressionless, their long hair streamed back and their robes were swept tight against their bodies to suggest a mighty wind bearing them up. They were not beautiful and John questioned their suitability for such a fine old building, albeit one already deconsecrated and buggered about, but there was no mistaking the skill and confidence in their execution.