Rough Music (30 page)

For Sandy, as ever, the pleasure was entirely physical. As Will had feared, the risk of exposure made him doubly randy. He was growing bolder each day and was no longer confining fun and games to the bedroom but had taken to pursuing Will when he went swimming so as to grope him under cover of water. For Will, the pleasure was entirely domestic; the waking up together, in contrast to their habitually snatched encounters, the shared preparation of meals, even the illusion wrought by the presence of the children that they were an acknowledged family unit. Sandy’s single-minded priapism brutally emphasized this disparity in their feelings. And yet Will knew now that this pleasure he felt in seeming innocence and naturalness was about the situation and not about the man. Could he, as in a boyhood fantasy, have recast the scenario with the mere squeezing shut of eyes, so that its focus was another man, not Poppy’s husband, he would have done so the moment Sandy arrived.

Ever since their breaking into the fourth room and his discovery of what it held, he had been itching to see Roly again to find out why he had felt the need to lie. He had been married, of course, for fifteen years, but to the man in the painting and photographs. Whenever he saw signs of life at Roly’s trailer, it was when he was surrounded by family. Whenever he was free to get away, he found the place deserted or unapproachably in darkness. His hunger for the truth frustrated, he returned repeatedly to the fourth room, feeling less guilt on each visit, and with tidy rapaciousness combed it for clues. He found a big album of cuttings and photographs, and more photographs, maddeningly jumbled, in a shoebox. There were some tapes of concerts which he could hardly play in the house without arousing suspicion but, such was his fascination, he snatched solitary drives in the car so he could play them in there.

The dead lover was a professional violinist called Seth Peake, several years younger, Will guessed, and they had become involved when Seth was still a music student. There was a small family: a stern-faced mother and a poised sister who looked just like him but rarely figured in the pictures. Possibly she lived in America, for in several photographs she posed with the couple by palm trees, a convertible or a swimming pool. The mother usually appeared with a spaniel, looking slightly pained. They lived in London, in a flat with a balcony over a shop, on to which they occasionally squeezed friends for dinner. Roly sculpted, exhibited to some good reviews, Seth studied and performed, gaining far less press coverage. In the early pictures they glittered.

Then Seth changed. Either aging had stolen his glow or he suffered some disappointment. And then there were different pictures, fewer dinner parties and dressing rooms, more crowded gatherings and demonstrations. And suddenly the flood of pictures petered out. There were just two more. In one, taken on an excursion to the seaside, to Brighton perhaps, somewhere with a pier, Roly was looking away, stony-faced, and Seth, pointing at the photographer, was barely recognizable. Wearing huge dark glasses like an opera diva’s and wrapped against the cold despite the evident sunshine, he was laughing but his face and hands were impossibly thin, a death’s head on a day trip. The other picture, which lay on the very top of the jumble in the box and so gave away the ending as it were, showed a fresh grave. A heap of flowers and wreaths and fluttering cellophane and cards could not quite conceal the deep brown of freshly turned clay. There were wheel marks visible on the grass, left by a mechanical digger presumably. Roly had written a bald caption on the back:
Highgate
and a date. The rest of the album was empty except for the order of service for the funeral. Seth Felix Peake and his dates. He was thirty-one when he died. There had been readings from Auden and Ben Jonson and string quartet movements by Ravel and Britten. How could one possibly stick in nephews and nieces and birthday celebrations and trips to Ibiza after such an event? Undeterred, Will looked on the shelves and searched through the shoebox again, but found no hint of a sequel. Every family had its archivist and storyteller. In this one Seth, not Roly evidently had been the albumkeeper.

Lying in bed listening to seagulls, he heard Dad get up and take his and Mum’s tea and biscuits back to bed. Sandy stirred as he lifted the sheet, and threw out an arm to catch his thigh. Eyes still glued shut, he mumbled sexily, a faint smile on his lips. Will gently prized himself free. The two of them had ended up on one bed, impossibly cramped in their movements and he ached all over. Sandy mumbled again as Will pushed the second bed chastely away.

“It’s early still,” he said. “Save your strength. You promised them a theme park today, remember.” He planted a kiss on his stubbled chin. Sandy groaned and rolled away from the light. Will pulled on his trunks and retrieved a dryish towel. Standing near the gap in the shutters, he looked back at the man sprawled so greedily across the bed, at Sandy’s heap of clothes neatly folded the night before, at the glass of water he religiously brought to bed to drink when he woke, the book about the SAS he was reading. This was a glimpse, he realized, of the husband rather than the lover. A man for whom he felt tremendous affection but whom he could never love. “Sandy?” he said softly.

“What?”

“This has got to stop, you know. All this.”

The noise Sandy made was more like a child deprived of pudding than a man facing the end of a relationship. But that was surely the whole problem; it was no relationship, to his thinking, but something stickily addictive, no less desirable for being contrary to doctor’s orders.

“Why?”

“She’s my sister, for fuck’s sake, and I don’t want to hurt her. What more reason do you need?”

“So?” He did not even look at Will to speak, head still half-buried in pillow. “We’re
both
mad about her.”

“And I want my life back. It’s gone on too long. It’s not healthy.” He bent over Sandy’s bed again, pressed a hand to where his ass was clearly outlined through the twisted sheet and kissed his shoulder. “We can talk later on. Tonight sometime. But I wanted to tell you now. So you can think about it.”

Sandy made the small boy wants pudding noise again so Will pulled back hastily and left him to sleep. He regretted telling him to think about it and promising a discussion since it sounded as though he required a decision when what he needed was a handshake. They had held versions of this conversation before so Sandy probably interpreted that morning’s announcement as nothing more serious than one of Will’s periodic fits of conscience. And perhaps it was. Perhaps they would still be sleeping together when he was fifty.

As Will walked down the deserted beach, however, the dazzling sun, cold sand and colder water strengthened his resolve and the exhilaration that went with it. “This is real,” they said. After the rain in the night everything looked freshly made and it was easy to imagine it the dawn of a new era in his life, a new, healthier period of truth and accountability and commitment. He was still a lousy swimmer but even that could change. The time he had formerly devoted to seeing Sandy, and waiting for Sandy and mentally recovering from seeing Sandy, he could devote to swimming lessons. He might start singing again, join the Barrowcester Glee Club, which was famously a second-chance marriage market. He trod in a tangle of seaweed and recoiled, having to kick to break free of it. He might, he reflected sadly, merely give up more time to helping his troubled parents.

There was a bark and Fay came racing down the beach and into the sea to cool down. Rather than swim, she ran through the surf parallel to the beach, raising spray like a small horse cantering. Roly came behind her from the cliff path, a brace of large rabbits slung over his shoulder like a scarf. He called Fay to follow him then saw Will, who raised a hand from the water. Without even a glance to see if they were overlooked, Roly slung down the rabbits, stripped off and swam out to join him. “Should have brought my soap,” he said.

Will took him in afresh. Despite all the photographs, he had forgotten how he looked and had rebuilt him in his mind, larger and less vulnerable than he was in the flesh. “I’ve been wanting to see you,” he said.

“Should have come over, then.” Roly swam in a circle around him.

“I couldn’t get away. My family.”

“Ah.”

“No. I mean it.”

“So come today. Run away. I’ve got to go over to Fowey. You could come too.”

“When?”

“Whenever you’re ready. Just turn up and we’ll go.”

“I need to dress and grab some breakfast.”

Roly smiled. “Me too. You could help me choose what to wear.”

“Will!”

Will turned at the squeaky voice. Oscar, the youngest, was racing across the beach in his pajama bottoms, his red hair like a flash of flame. He backed off as Fay bounced over to inspect him then saw she was friendly and laughed as she licked his face. Then he was transfixed by the dead rabbits.

“A nephew,” Will said. “Better go. I … I’ll see you, then.”

Roly swam back faster than him and dried himself on his shirt. Oscar was fascinated.

“He’s naked,” he pointed out.

“Yes,” Will said. “He was in a hurry.” He winked over at Roly as they turned away. “How about breakfast? I bet you haven’t even washed your face yet; you’ve got sleepy-dirt in your eyes.”

As they walked back up to the house, Oscar recounting at length a marvelously egocentric dream he had just enjoyed, it struck Will there was now nothing to stop him being entirely open. He had met someone, the sad young man in fact, and was going on a trip with him. He could do as he pleased. They were all adults. They would survive without him.

“Are you coming to the theme park with us?” Oscar asked.

“No, Oz. I’m going on a trip with my friend.”

“Who?”

“Roly. The naked man back there.”

“With the rabbits?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. OK. Can I have mashed banana on my toast?”

“Of course.” Will ruffled his hair, smiled at the matter-of-fact tolerance of early childhood and thought what a pity it was that the crowd politics of school would soon educate it out of him.

Hugo was already breakfasting while browsing the Internet. “It’s all right,” he said, catching Will’s anxious glance. “I’m using Dad’s mobile, not yours.”

“You’ll be giving him an almighty bill, won’t you?”

Hugo tapped on his mouse. “He doesn’t mind. Mum says it keeps me quiet.” He giggled. “Look what I found.”

Oh God
, Will thought.
Porn.
But Hugo had found Henry Farmer’s home page.

“This is the robber Grandpa let out of prison,” Hugo told Oscar. “He’s so old! He was a rapist too.”

“Yes,” Will said, leaving Hugo to answer Oscar’s inquiry as to what a rapist did exactly. “Eat your breakfasts both of you while I have a look.”

There was a beaming photograph, a lengthy diatribe against the injustice of trying to extradite Farmer and an extract from his forthcoming life story. There was also a special offer: one-pound notes, signed by the old rogue himself and purporting to be a share of his original haul.
All major cards accepted
it announced and proceeded to ask for a disturbing number of personal details.

Will stared hard at the sun-lined face, its heavy white eyebrows, a gold tooth, gold dog tags on a neck chain, but felt no glimmer of recognition. There was an e-mail option. Perhaps he could send him an e-mail asking, “Remember me? Because I don’t.”

“Don’t let Grandpa see this,” he said, turning back to his toast. “It would only make him cross.”

Sandy was in the shower so he could dress quickly and excuse himself.

“I seem to have hooked up with your sad young man,” he told Mum, who was discreetly queuing for the bathroom, reading spines on a bookshelf. “I never told you, did I? He’s the sculptor.”

“No! So that’s what all the driftwood’s for.”

“And it wasn’t a wife who died. It was a boyfriend.”

“Ah.”

“I said I’d help him drop something off. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Of course not. We’ll see you when we see you.”

“Thanks, Mum.” He kissed her cheek, guilty that he had just dumped a pile of information on the person in the household least able to process it, and hurried off before Sandy could come out and start asking questions.

Roly was butchering the rabbits as Will arrived. As he peeled the fur away from the pale, fatty flesh beneath, Will remembered childhood bathtimes and the instant of delicious confusion as his father peeled a turtlenecked jersey over his head and crooned, “Skin a rabbit,” while Will’s face was held tight in woolly darkness. He saw how apposite the phrase was. The carcass did indeed have a look of naked child about it and the limp jacket of fat-lined fur looked indeed like a garment that might as easily be slid on again.

“Sorry about this,” Roly said, tossing the parts he did not want to his feet where Fay fell on them, fur, fat and all. “If I don’t do them straight away, they start going off.”

“How did you learn to do this?” Will asked. It seemed a far cry from dinners on a Notting Hill balcony.

“From a very old American cookery manual. There were also instructions for dealing with bear and ground squirrel.”

“Bear?”

“That was a bit wasteful. You only took the paws. For stewing.”

Out with it. Out with it
, Will thought.
The longer you leave it the harder it’ll—

“I’ve got a confession,” he blurted.

Roly looked up from washing his hands under the rain butt tap. He let Will suffer a few moments before saying, “You broke into the fourth bedroom. It’s a bit
Bloody Chamber
isn’t it? Impossible to resist once you’ve taken a first peek.”

“How did you know?”

“Persons who look at other persons’ photograph albums after dark should close the shutters first, then read by torchlight.”

“There’s a good explanation.”

“I’m sure.”

“One of the boys broke Mum’s pearls. They rolled under the door and before I could stop him Sandy, that’s my brother-in-law, just bashed it open. So I couldn’t help seeing. I saw everything.”

“Even the everything in the bookcase. Night after night.”