Rough Music (34 page)

She was wide awake now. If she went back to bed she would only wake John with her restlessness and make him worry. She was also hungry. She went to the kitchen and grazed, standing up at the fridge door, on a lone cold sausage and a small bowl of surviving lentils. Then, needing to kill the garlic and chili now raging on her tongue, heated herself milk for cocoa. Will had packed her some marvelous stuff from an old Italian firm in San Francisco that was full and rich and intensely chocolatey. She crossed the house with her warm mugful carefully held so she would not wake to cocoa stains, and let herself out on to the veranda so she could sit on the teak bench out there and sip and let the repetitive sounds of the sea restore her sleepiness. What a shame, she thought, the family was not present here in its entirety so she could sit here and indulge in the sense of being its guardian.

Then, like a jolt through her spine, she felt that feeling again, of a child in pain, and became sharply aware of raised voices through the dark, open window behind her. “That cannot be true,” Will said and she knew at once this was an argument. She knew from the way the air went still, the way it used to when she sat on the landing with her brothers and listened to the awful clarity with which her mother harangued her father. Now as then it made her want to run between them pleading, “Stop, stop, stop!” Then as now, the enormity of eavesdropping, a servant’s sin, proved stronger than her need of harmony.

“Of course it is. It’s always been true,” Sandy said and his voice had a soft, wheedling quality she did not recognize. “I love you.”

“Oh, you just say that the way everyone says it. To control me. You’ve got it so easy. Wife. Kids. Good thing. If I stop this … this
arrangement
we have, it ruins the cozy set-up and you have to look outside and you daren’t do that because it’s far too risky, and it would mean taking that step and becoming a gay man, which you’re not.”

“Who says?”

“Oh Sandy, Sandy.” Will’s voice was soft again, even loving.

Frances felt sick. She spilled hot cocoa on her hand and tossed the mug violently from her over the veranda rail. There would be a mark on the sand tomorrow. They would know she had been here, know she had listened. Some instinct told her their silence was being filled with a kiss.

“You’re not gay,” Will went on at last. “You’re not even bisexual. These labels don’t figure with men like you. You’re just a married bloke, a happily married mensch who happens to have stumbled on an incredibly convenient way of getting his rocks off twice as often without really having to think of himself as an adulterer. And you run no risk of me ever making demands or insisting on having you full-time because you
know
how it would make me look and feel to the family.”

“And don’t you?”

There was a pause.

“What?” Will asked.

“Don’t you want me full-time?”

“Have I ever said I did?”

“No, but that’s because you’ve always been so brilliant about it. You could have made my life hell but you never made any demands. But it must have crossed your mind.”

“I never dared let it. Oh Sandy, please! I didn’t even want us to have this conversation. Please. Just let me go.”

“You’ve met someone else, haven’t you?”

“Since when did you have rights in me? You’ve got Poppy. You’ve
always
had someone else!”

“I sensed it the moment we got here.”

“Sandy?”

“Oh Jesus! God! You have!”

“I have not.”

“You’ve no idea how I feel. None at all. You think it’s just sex, don’t you?”

“And isn’t it?”

“Only because that’s all we ever seem to have time for. I’ve been dreaming about this holiday. About just spending time with you. As a couple.”

“With my parents and your children. Oh yes. Just like a couple. Get real, Sandy.”

Then Sandy broke down and wept. It was not loud but even where she sat Frances could feel the force of it, the great hiss of pent-up emotion escaping.

“Stop it,” Will said. “Oh. Please, I had no … Sandy? Ssh. You’ll set me off.” He laughed. “Sandy,
please!
Here. Ssh.”

Gradually Sandy’s sobs were replaced by other sounds, kisses, a muffled groan, and Frances was freed by disgust from feeling pinned to the bench, and not caring now if they heard her, she jumped up and ran in her slippered feet.

The telephone box was where she remembered it, and not even replaced with one of the drafty modern ones. The only change was that it was scrawled over with magic marker like everything now. The ugly look-at-me signatures of the young. It even smelled the same; sugar and sand, melted ice cream and sickly suntan oil.

“Operator services. This is Polly speaking. How can I help you?”

The woman sounded so wide awake, she lent Frances courage as though people did this all the time. “I want to place a reverse charge call, Polly. To Barrowcester.” She dictated Poppy’s number. They were the only telephone numbers she invariably remembered; her son’s and her daughter’s. Her own she forgot so routinely, she had it written in the front of her diary along with her address, on the Personal Details page most people scorned to complete.

There was the sound of a familiar, trusted voice, confident even when half-asleep, and then an instant of fear that she might reject the call. But of course Poppy accepted it because she was a mother and a mother’s panic about her children functioned on a hair-trigger reflex, summon-able at a moment’s notice.

“No, no. It’s not the boys,” Frances assured her. “They’re fine. I just checked on them and they’re sound asleep.”

“Mum, it’s the middle of the night. It’s one thirty. Does Dad know where you are? Couldn’t this have waited?”

“Darling, it’s Sandy.”

Fresh panic, of a different kind but no less sharp. “What’s happened? Oh Christ, not a car crash! Please not that! Mum? Tell me? What?”

But now that she was on the verge, Frances had no idea what to say. She had seen no further than making the call. “You must come at once. We all need you,” she said, picking her way through words as through thistles. “Sandy especially.”

“But what’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing. Come, darling. Say you’ll come.”

“But my squash course is … You’ll be back on Saturday. Oh, Mum. Have you been having a bad day?”

The abrupt change in her voice, from keen-edged fear to patronizing, practiced concern, infuriated Frances. “Just get your fucking ass down here and ask your dirty little brother what he’s been up to,” she said and slammed the receiver down in its cradle.

As she walked away across the car park, aware now that she was in her night things, she shivered less from cold than from hunter’s adrenaline. The phone rang behind her, a piteous, unimportant chirruping which she ignored. She was implacable. She was powerful. She, Frances Pagett, could straighten the twisted path and free the imprisoned.

A cat froze in her path, saw the wildness in her eyes, and fled.

Like most clinics in or around Harley Street, this one was designed to overcome fear and disgust. Just as lawyers’ and accountants’ businesses were founded on no nobler motive than profit and therefore strove to muster a compensatory air of respectability so, John imagined, the more intimate the ailment, the less mentionable the organ, the more a clinic called on hunting prints, brass and chintz to evoke a saving gentility.

The word
fertility
appeared nowhere, any more than did
egg
or
sperm
; there was only the doctor’s name and flourish of abbreviated qualifications on a brass plate. The waiting room was a drawing room, complete with standard lamps and piano and the thin, middle-aged receptionist who opened the door and showed him to a sofa was dressed not in nursing uniform but like any hostess at a smart but informal lunch. The domestic effect was heightened by its being early evening. Waiting amid soft pools of welcoming light, John half-expected her to return with cocktails and a bowl of nuts.

He had first called in at lunchtime, little expecting to be summoned back so soon. Speedy results as much as discretion and superior knowledge were what one paid for, presumably. He had not met the doctor earlier. The twin-setted receptionist had instead brought him a questionnaire to fill out, an intimate document reassuringly masked by a thick leather folder, like the kind in which the better restaurants delivered one’s bill. This completed, she led him upstairs to another chamber, a former bedroom presumably, and left him with the request, murmured with lowered eyes, that he
prepare a sample
and
take as long as he liked
.

Suffering a torment of inhibition he might, ironically, have been spared had she only worn a nurse’s uniform after all, he turned to find the room furnished with not only a buttoned leather couch and prints of peachily naked nymphs, but an array of leather-bound continental pornography catering to every conceivable taste. Aghast at the thought of fleeing the room empty-handed, as it were—in fact there was a dumbwaiter in which the sample jar was to be tucked from view—he was startled by the pornography’s efficacy.

The afternoon was spent in conference with police and senior officers, piecing together what the investigations had so far established. As soon after his escape as unrest among the men allowed, Farmer’s cell had been searched and the men known to be his friends or confederates questioned in the hope of some clue as to where he had gone. Allies or thieves had already cleared his cell however and nothing was left but a few tatty pin-ups and a Gideon Bible. There was also a thick railway timetable. It was unmarked, which was strange given that Farmer had been a keen member of the prison trainspotters’ club which recorded train numbers as they passed through a cutting clearly visible from a C-block washroom. As a rule it was depressingly easy to persuade men to betray one another. The offer of perks or even a sentence review was all that was required. Their loyalty this time was such that John could only imagine their discretion had been purchased already with promises of jobs, preferment or cash once they rejoined Farmer on the outside. Friendship was never reason enough. How a robber whose pre-criminal status had never amounted to anything more powerful than post office worker could muster any credible inducements lay beyond John’s reckoning. Unless Farmer had some kind of heist planned, but this seemed unlikely in a felon whose only known robbery was executed alone. And so the line of inquiry had gone round in circles and threatened to eat itself.

That morning, however, a link was found that made the situation more humiliating than John had imagined. A newish recruit among the officers who had called in sick ever since the break-out was found to have disappeared. Then an officer overseeing a maintenance work party found bolts missing on a C-wing skylight. The escape now revealed an ingenuity that was surely not Farmer’s own, or not his alone. It had in fact been a kind of double break-out only the man over the wall was not an inmate at all but the missing officer.

Malone, who looked far older than he was and had Farmer’s build, had taken his clothes and place in the exercise yard while Farmer concealed himself in a lavatory. At a preordained hour, a removal lorry, already parked a few yards down the street, pulled up outside the prison wall and a rope ladder was thrown over, weighted by a crow bar. It was this, not a garden implement, that Malone, posing as Farmer, had seized to strike down the warders on duty before climbing out. The ruckus that followed was not entirely planned, John suspected, but had grown in part from a fight between other prisoners trying to use the ladder while another inside accomplice fought them back so that the ladder could be safely withdrawn to the lorry once Malone was over the wall and away. Aided by the disorder that followed, in which all officers not pursuing Malone and raising the alarm were occupied in driving the men back to their cells, Farmer had succeeded in climbing up the caging that enclosed C-wing’s stairwell and out through the skylight to the prison roof. From there he had made his way across the landscape of gully and chimneys to the adjacent roof of the Governor’s House and come via a small window into one of the many unused attic rooms. There he had concealed himself until the fuss had died down and the van’s driver had successfully led the police on a wild goose chase to Dover before eluding them in a lorry park at the port, where the removal van, stolen of course, was found abandoned.

Malone, like the driver, was still at large, having stepped from the van on some street corner in South London and blended into the crowds, an unsuspected prison officer laid up with toothache. He had phoned in sick daily until that morning, when questions started being asked when his flat was found to be empty. Ferries’ passengers and freight were still being checked devoutly. Farmer meanwhile had dined on John’s food and left in a taxi wearing his clothes and holding his silver and his painting and his freshly plumped wallet. With insouciance calculated to insult, he had left fingerprints all over the Governor’s House.

Uncleaned, soured by the cigarettes of investigating officers, the kitchen stacked with washing-up, the house was beginning to feel as male as the prison it abutted. However, it was Farmer’s concealed presence about the place John could not stop imagining. Going about his morning’s work, he pictured precisely how Farmer or any other intruder using the same route might have killed him, stifled him in his sleep, drowned him in the bath. Then he thought of Farmer listening in as he made phone calls. He thought of Farmer touching Frances’s things with meaty hands.