Rough Music (3 page)

“It’s not right to use him like that,” he had said. “You actively encourage him to talk to them.”

“It does him no harm, John. He likes them,” she replied. “They’re harmless lifers rotting away in there. He’s like a grandson to them.”

“Two wife-killers and a robber who raped his hostage. Quite harmless. Frances—”

“They
love
him.”

“Just be careful.”

And she was.

“You would tell me, darling, wouldn’t you, if any of the trusties—Bert, say, or Henry—ever said anything that was, well, not quite nice?”

“Of course,” Julian assured her, very much the nice little boy. But his curiosity was piqued. Which were the wife-killers? How could one tell? How had they done it? And what was a rapist? Judging from the only picture he could find,
The Rape of the Sabine Women
, a rapist made ladies cross by picking them up in the air and tickling them with his beard when they had nothing on.

The trusties said plenty of things that were not quite nice. Trailing around after them as they painted rooms, pruned the roses, mowed the lawns or forked out horse poo donated by the rag and bone man and the coal merchant, he had compiled a rich vocabulary of forbidden words. Unrepeatable and broadly incomprehensible, they were none the less precious for being useless.

Rounding the corner from the drive, he found the trusties at work. They were also known as red bands because of the armbands they wore that showed they could be trusted. Friday was their gardening day. Joe was riding the lawn mower up and down, creating stripes and obviously enjoying himself. (The trusties took it in turns to mow the lawn, officially because it was considered a
cushy number
but actually, Julian believed, because the old machine was fun to ride and, as with a prize toy, they each wanted a go.) George and Bert were weeding. Henry was working his way around the edges of the grass, chopping off the straggly bits the lawnmower only squashed, using a pair of long-handled edging shears. As always, the screw in charge was sitting on the steps of the Wendy House looking bored. Today it was Mr. Prescott, who always looked as though someone had stolen his Easter egg. Ma said everyone had to overlook this and be extra nice to him because his wife had died or left him or something, so Julian threw him a cheery, “Hello Mr. Prescott!” which met with the usual resentful stare.

Meanwhile Henry looked up from his trimming, said, “Afternoon young Ginger,” and carried on. (He persisted in calling Julian Ginger despite the fact that his hair was brown and would only offer the maddening explanation—“You’ll find out soon enough.”) Judging by appearances, Mr. Prescott seemed a far more believable cutter-up-of-wives than the men he guarded and Julian was surprised this possibility had occurred to no one when Mrs. Prescott went missing. But then perhaps Henry was only a rapist and a bank robber. Bank robbers were often the heroes in cowboy films, unless they had Alan Ladd in them, who was always the sheriff. Perhaps you had to be a rapist too for it to count as a serious offense. It was all very confusing.

Julian walked along behind Henry, picking up handfuls of the turf he had been shaving off the lawn’s edge and adding them to the heap in a wheelbarrow.

“That’s very kind,” Henry said. “See that funny car of yours is all packed up, then.”

“We’re going to Cornwall. All of us.”

“Very nice. I was in Delabole during the war. Evacuee. Nothing sweeter than Cornish flowers. How long you going for?”

“Two weeks.” Julian stared at the mermaid tattooed on Henry’s forearm. Once, when he was a bit younger, Henry had let him touch it, running his fingers through the hair to trace the voluptuous design. He wanted to touch it again but it was difficult to know how to ask and he feared the request would be viewed as not quite nice. He had a brief vision of Henry on the beach with him, wearing trunks for once instead of his oddly respectable prison uniform. He imagined his father telling him to guard Henry closely the way Mr. Prescott had to, imagined Henry’s grinning obedience as Julian buried his big legs in the sand for his own good.

“Dad going too?”

“Of course. He has to share the driving. Can I help you make a roll-up?”

“Best not. Him Indoors is watching.”

Julian glanced back and turned on Mr. Prescott a smile of such cloying sweetness that the officer turned away. “Not anymore,” he said.

Barely interrupting his work to do so, Henry tossed a matchbox on to the grass. Well trained, Julian snatched it up and sat with his back to the Wendy House. There were some matches inside, a tiny foil packet of tobacco and some Rizla papers. Julian sprinkled a very little tobacco on to the paper as he had been taught, licked one side and rolled it up neatly. Small fingers, Henry said, did this job so well that in some countries children rolled up cigarettes in a factory instead of going to school. Julian had a small puff of one once, behind the Wendy House, when Henry let him. It made him feel sick and the taste was bad. He liked the smell, however. It was part of the smell the men gave off even out here in the open, with all the roses scenting the air about them, a good, brown, male smell, like the man who came to mend a window once or the car when you opened the bonnet when the engine was still hot or Pa when he came back from playing rugger with the prison officers’ club. It was a smell that once breathed in seemed to curl like a snake around Julian’s stomach so that he felt excited and rather queasy at the same time. He had the same feeling when he got close to Tom Sherry at school when they played Lions during break, only Antonia Pauffley kept joining in and spoiling everything.

“So how do you get up on the roof, then?” Henry’s question was casual enough but he saw Julian flinch. “It’s all right. I won’t tell. I don’t want to spoil your fun. I know you’re safe enough. Not like some nippers.”

Julian glanced toward the house. Ma was wedging a box of groceries under the dormobile table. Turning, she waved to him and headed back inside.

“When did you see me?” he asked.

“Yesterday afternoon. Must have been around three ’cause I was coming off my shift. My cell’s in that block. I just happened to glance up as we was coming up the stairs and I sees you peering down through the skylight like a bleeding pigeon. Pardon my French.”

“That’s all right.”

“So how’d you get up there, then?”

“Easy. Through our attic. There’s a window with a broken catch at the far end and you go through on to a sort of valley in the roof. Then there’s a little wall at the far end, between the chimney stacks, and on the other side is the prison roof. I’ve been all over it. But …”

“What?”

“I’ve never told anyone.”

“Don’t worry. It’s our secret. You don’t tell anyone you told me and I won’t tell anyone I asked. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“So how do you get to your attic, then?”

“Up the stairs, silly.”

“Course you do. Now listen. You know how to use the jelly bone, don’t you?”

“Course.”

“Do you want to make a call for me?” Henry quite often asked him to make calls, usually about things that meant so little they might as well have been in code. Henry said they were about bets and dogs but Julian had his doubts.

“Only if you tell me, you know. Another word.”

Henry glanced over at his mates who were still working but out of earshot.

“You’re on. When your mum’s not looking, I want you to ask the operator for Plaistow 9595.”

“Plar’s Toe 9595.”

“That’s it, and a nice lady’ll answer and you’re to tell her, ‘Henry says his mum’s birthday’s on Tuesday.’”

“Is it really, Henry?”

“Course.”

“So what’s my word?”

Henry looked about him, then whispered, “Beef curtains.” Julian was thunderstruck and delighted. “Look, your mum’s waving again. Reckon she wants you.”

Julian scowled toward his mother, affecting manly reluctance. “Suppose so.”

“Have a good holiday.”

Julian got back on his feet, noting how the grass and daisies had left indentations all over his hot knees, and went to rejoin Ma. Soon she would let him call Pa on the internal telephone to ask how much longer he’d be, which is when he could make Henry’s call to Plar’s Toe. Then there’d be supper and a bath and then, still in broad summer light, he’d be allowed to cross the drive in his pajamas and dressing gown and go to bed in the car. He turned back to Henry, who looked up from the wheelbarrow and dismissed him with a wink of his startlingly blue eyes. The realization that Henry would never go on holiday, at least not until he was even older than he was now, however sad, somehow made the anticipation of pleasure all the sweeter.

When he asked for Plar’s Toe 9595 a woman sounding like Mrs. Coley, only younger, answered. She was not very nice at all.

“Hello,” Julian said politely. “Henry says to tell you his mother’s birthday is on Tuesday.”

“Right you are, love,” she said. “And what’s your name?” He told her. “And where do you live?” When he told her Governor’s House, HM Prison, Wandsworth, London, she couldn’t speak for a while because she was laughing so much.

Julian was rather cross. “Why are you laughing and why did you want my address?” he asked.

“Nothing, darling. He’s got a nerve, that’s all. Keep your mouth shut and a token of our esteem will be coming your way.”

She hung up first.

Token of Esteem
was almost as good as
Height of Extravagance
but both paled by comparison with the sinisterly suggestive
Beef Curtains
. Curled in the hall armchair, waiting for Pa to answer the internal telephone, he imagined the not quite nice woman in her palatial bedroom in Plar’s Toe drawing magnificent drapes made of dripping steak.

In his more vulnerable hours, throwing a fortieth-birthday lunchparty for himself, however casually, even dismissively he did it, struck Will as akin to inviting people to a wedding with no spouse to parade. It was obscurely a failure, like buying your own scent or recognizing the family hand behind a Valentine’s card.

A late starter in the relationships race, by virtue of virtue and confusion, he had not acquired a lover until he left home and went to university. Like many who choose to save themselves, he had perhaps dangerously high expectations: a great student love affair, too passionate not to go up in glorious, mildly tragic flames and then, later, a marriage of sorts, with dogs and artworks in lieu of children, in which the growing beauty of house and garden would lay out public evidence of a rare-field meeting of minds as of bodies.

His fantasies fueled by Waugh and Forster, he found university life overpoweringly heterosexual after ten years of protective schooling. At party after sordid party he found himself leaning against the fridge lugubriously watching the Noah’s Ark proceedings with variations on the same waspish huddle of more-or-less gay onlookers. In so overlooked, overcritical and confined an environment, the great love failed to materialize. There were, however, three encounters repeated often enough to be hungrily counted as boyfriends. After two and two-thirds terms of reluctant chastity, he met a geologist from New Zealand, a comparative ancient of twenty-one. Then there was a period of horny mourning followed by liaisons with an impossibly sensitive drama student from the nearby polytechnic, so convinced everyone despised him that they came to, and with a depressive fourth-year linguist with no friends.

Finn the geologist might have become the great love or even the exemplary marriage, but he was a light-headed finalist when they met and had no sooner turned Will’s life and heart upside-down than he headed back to Christchurch and a summer job on a sheep farm followed by a lengthy seismology doctorate. In the years that followed he kept sporadically in touch, just enough to fuel the embers of a fantasy from which Will would unwittingly forge a romantic template. Finn remained more or less single. He pursued his rugged research unencumbered by any company but a dog. And despite the fact that in their one fortnight together they had never spoken of love, their involvement had clearly meant something to him because he seemed keen to keep in touch.

Will should, perhaps, have put his life on hold and saved for a ticket to New Zealand when he graduated or even flown out earlier. Every holiday seemed to be spent in grinding poverty, however, slaving to pay off the debts run up the previous term and, once he graduated, times were frighteningly hard so he felt compelled to accept a librarian post in Barrowcester when it was offered him. Besides, much of Finn’s attraction lay in his self-sufficiency and, in his early twenties at least, it was hard for Will to see how he could fit in to a life as ingeniously self-contained as its owner’s camping equipment. In time Finn’s letters had petered out. He had either met someone, found Jesus or gone potholing once too often.

The great marriage had failed to materialize for several reasons but the chief of these was Barrowcester. A ravishingly pretty provincial cathedral town in the country’s middle, it called itself a city but offered none of the risky subcultures implicit in the title. Perhaps the fact that its name was not pronounced as it was spelled—the correct pronunciation rhyming with
rooster
—should have been chintziness enough to warn him off. But he was lulled into passivity by the relative cheapness of the attractive housing, the security of his job—managing a well-financed children’s department in the city library—and the fact of its being the nearest he had to a hometown in a rootless youth. His parents had moved on every five years because of his father’s work as a prison governor but he had been a choirboy at the cathedral choir school, then a music scholar at Tatham’s, the city’s ancient college, and boarded throughout so that the place was full of youthful associations.