Rough Music (35 page)

Far from arousing a low desire for vengeance or even an obsession with wanting to see Farmer caught and humiliated, these thoughts and visions only induced an unprofessional euphoria. Spared, not nearly as badly robbed as he might have been, John found it hard to concentrate on the business in hand and the questions of the police. He was consumed by an intense sense of his own luck and healthiness. The only area in which his life was lacking was his apparent inability to father further children, and in this mood there was no problem he was not prepared to tackle head-on. No sooner was his morning “surgery” over than he tracked down this clinic in the Yellow Pages and, reminding himself he had been cheated of holiday, made a lunchtime appointment. Taking a leaf out of Malone’s book, he told his deputy it was for some urgent work on a filling that had worked loose.

The usual suspects had been checked and relatives’ houses were being watched, but Malone and Farmer had vanished with an efficiency that spoke of months, if not years of planning. Farmer’s hours in the prison library, a fact of which John had only recently bragged to visiting inspectors, had clearly not been wasted in reading poetry but devoted to poring over Ordnance Survey maps. For all he knew the bastard had taught himself to fly from manuals.

Someone had helped him, however, someone with intimate knowledge of the prison’s less obvious geography, which ruled out Malone who was too new on the job. Someone had shown Farmer the link with the Governor’s House and the ease with which a man could pass from one to the other via the attics. By the time John returned after his lunchtime appointment, spikes and razor wire had been erected to separate one roof from the other and bars had been bolted across both skylight and offending window, but the helper went undetected. Mrs. Coley, the cleaner, was eliminated from the inquiry, though not before her glowing references were found to be bogus. Her duties never took her above the first-floor rooms and her bad knee—authenticated by a police-approved doctor—would surely have prevented her climbing the steep wooden stairs to the area of attic in question. She had been sacked over the reference business amid gaudy imprecations and threats to
take her story to the papers
.

It came as a shock to discover that Dr. Alberti was a woman. The hunting prints and leather, not to mention the ingenious library of pornography, had led him to imagine a clubbable man of the world, the type who would display a photograph of wife and children on his desk by way of male qualifications. Instead Dr. Alberti displayed only a small bowl of roses, whose full-blown pinkness was in contrast to her iron-gray hair and chainsmoker’s complexion. She had on the female equivalent of a charcoal lounge suit and as she shook him by the hand and waved him to a chair with a brisk motion of her free arm, he caught a distinct whiff of roast lamb and cigars.

His deputy had a sister in the profession and John recalled Mervyn saying how women doctors were tiring of being corralled toward pediatrics and, like homosexuals, were swallowing their pride to colonize the specialities at the dirty end of the field—gynecology, venereology and sexual dysfunction.

“Well, Mr. Pagett,” Dr. Alberti said. “You have nothing to fret over. Your sperm count is normal. Now, I need to ask you more questions, I’m afraid, of an intensely impudent nature. You’ll think me eccentric but I like to borrow a technique from the Viennese and have you face away from me by lying over there.” She indicated a leather couch identical to the one in the sample-room. “You’ll find it makes it far easier to answer, almost without thinking.” A small smile lit up her bullfrog face and John was touched to see that she was as bashful as he. A lack of eye contact would spare them both.

He lay down and began to answer questions. Her technique was to fire them off so fast that one felt obliged to answer just as quickly. How often did he and his wife have sex? Why so rarely? What were these pamphlets he had read? What did they advise? He told her everything, unburdening himself of years of secrets in light-headed minutes. Whereas merely making the appointment had left his cheeks aflame, he found himself talking from the couch dispassionately and as unabashed as if he had been describing his breakfasting habits or the prison menus for the coming week.

“You and your wife are Catholic?”

“No.”

“And you’re sure—forgive me for asking this—she isn’t taking birth control pills in secret?”

“Quite sure.”

“It does happen. They come in thin foil packets. Not bottles.”

“I’m quite sure.”

“And forgive me if I’m underestimating the breadth of your education, but what do you know about a woman’s ovulation cycle?”

“Erm …” John was so relaxed he actually laughed. “Apart from her monthly headaches bugger all, I’m afraid. They taught us about frogs and mice but I didn’t really concentrate.”

“You see, you’re not firing blanks. Far from it. But it sounds as though you’re firing when the target isn’t in place. And if you were to persist in following the, forgive me, misguided advice of your pamphlets, you could continue
missing
one another indefinitely. If you want another child, Mr. Pagett, holding back is the last thing you should be doing.” So saying, Dr. Alberti walked back into his field of view in order to open the consulting-room door. “Don’t hesitate to come back if the problem continues but I think the prognosis is excellent!”

Now it was John’s turn to shake her hand warmly. As he signed his check at the hall table, the unlikely receptionist standing by, his signature emerged larger and bolder than usual and he bade her good evening with a kind of hilarity. His euphoria of the morning was as nothing compared to this. Riding the train home, he fantasized recklessly about having a huge family. Why stop at one more baby when they could produce four or five? Governors’ houses were large enough to accommodate them all. Frances and he should found a tribe. The house would ring to the noise of a crowded nursery. Mealtimes would be deafening with competing voices, Christmas an orgy of present-giving. He thought of Julian, on his own all his short life, and realized how dreadfully lonely he must have been. No wonder the poor boy was forever reading; books were his brothers.

John hurried through his evening business at the prison. He wished he could ring Frances to tell her the good news and resented more than ever being held a prisoner by his work when he wanted to be with her. He fried himself a celebratory steak and was just pouring a second glass of wine when she rang from a call box in Wadebridge.

He had to hear the children’s news first, which married nicely with his earlier fantasies, but when Frances’s low, calm voice replaced their chatter, he became tongue-tied. He could not tell her, when she was squeezed into a kiosk with his brother-in-law and two children. He could not tell her, in any case, when the fears just dispelled had never been discussed between them. When the pips cut her off, all too soon, he was left with unspoken happiness caught in his throat, an eye-watering obstruction no amount of wine could rinse away.

The third glass raised his mood, however. Whatever the ingenuity of his escape, Farmer could not be on the run indefinitely. He would make a mistake soon or be betrayed to the police. One or the other usually happened within days of a break-out, most prisoners rarely planning beyond their initial flight over the wall. Then John would seize the remains of his holiday and return to Cornwall. Frances would learn everything. Dr. Alberti’s cunning blend of frankness and discretion had shown him how it could be done, under cover of darkness, perhaps, or while one of them was driving the car. He would tell her of his foolish fears, the pamphlets, the agonies of abstinence, the curiosity of being instructed in the mysteries of human reproduction by a suited woman who smelled of Sunday roast and cigarillos. They would laugh and they would begin again.

The night was oppressively hot and John slept with both windows open and no more than a sheet to cover him. It had taken him hours to lose consciousness and the jangling telephone rang in his confused dreams before it woke him. He answered still in a fog of sleep. A mail train had been halted by a sabotaged electric signal and robbed at gunpoint. The thieves knocked their victims unconscious before making off with six million pounds in cash, bonds and share certificates. Only men with an intimate knowledge both of railway timetables and the arcane nocturnal workings of the post office could have known which train to rob and where on the network to do it.

During a brief struggle, the driver had unmasked his assailant sufficiently to give a description that matched Farmer’s. A second felon, with a younger voice, had a near-identical build and wielded a prison officer’s truncheon.

Unable to sleep again, unable to read, John shaved, dressed and crossed to his office past startled guards. There were still two hours to go before dawn. There was nothing further he could do and little routine business he could attend to while the prison was still asleep. The robbery had pushed the matter of the escape squarely into the hands of Scotland Yard. However, an overwhelming sense of duty required him to be at his post, albeit uselessly, and seen to be putting obligation before family. Amid the nausea caused by being up before his stomach had woken, he saw the dreams of hurrying back to Cornwall for the irresponsible fantasies they were.

Frances would ring soon. She would hear the news on the radio. She would ring to let him know she understood.

Wife and daughter were forever accusing him of not noticing such things but John found the holiday household full of strange energies. Frances was herself again, thank God, but had woken edgy, would not sit still and seemed to do most of her talking to and through the children. This did not worry him unduly; she was like a child herself in her ability to tire the mood out of her by keeping them entertained on the beach. Perhaps because she had kept her figure and was still a good swimmer, they were not embarrassed by her in the way little boys would normally be by a woman her age wearing anything less than a knee-length dress. Where her unpredictability made adults nervous, it delighted them. They were especially keen on her new habit of swearing and, despite Sandy’s best efforts, were starting to emulate it.

More disturbing were Will and Sandy, who seemed to have stopped talking to each other. Rather, they talked but without their customary liveliness and each kept starving the dialogue with monosyllables. No doubt the strain of two men sharing a room was beginning to tell. Ordinarily John would have escaped the unhappy atmosphere by strapping on his walking boots and binoculars and taking himself off on a hike sufficiently punitive to deter the others from accompanying him. Today of all days, however, he had agreed to stay in so that a journalist who had been pestering Harriet could interview him on Will’s mobile. They were not due to call until noon, a time he had stipulated so as to give himself a free morning, but now he found himself poleaxed by the past and unaccountably nervous that his memory might play him false under questioning. Will had thrown himself into preparing a needlessly complex lunch dish and Sandy was prowling around like a man under a death threat, clutching some medical journals he kept announcing he was going to
catch up on
.

John had taken refuge on the veranda. There he could keep half an eye on Frances and the boys, who were building something with pebbles and sand. Both children wore brightly colored wetsuits, which seemed to him the worst kind of mollycoddling. “The sea’s not
that
cold,” he had exclaimed when they first produced the things. “Granny doesn’t wear one! You just have to keep moving.” Apparently this was a faux pas however, since the ulterior purpose of the suits, while pandering to the boys’ enslavement to the vagaries of fashion, was to protect their white, Scottish skin from the effects of the sun.

He had helped himself to one of Sandy’s drug company pads and was noting down the facts of the prison breakout as he remembered them. Of course they had wanted to talk to his old deputy, Mervyn Mc-Master, who after all had been acting governor when Malone helped Farmer escape, but Mervyn was dead long since. He noted dates and the few facts he could recall about the subsequent inquiry. Then he felt a kind of despair. The journalist would already have the facts in all their dryness at her disposal. What she wanted were the personal details that passed for journalism now. What had Farmer been like? Was it true that he was a family favorite among Wandsworth’s red band work parties? Had John feared for his life or his family’s lives at any stage? How did John
feel
now that Farmer was immensely rich and about to be returned to justice? He had no training in how to field such questions. In his day, governors had never had to face the press.

“I’m retired,” he thought. “I can say what I bloody like. That I don’t care if Farmer’s now an old man and a regular donor to Brazilian charities and a pillar of his adopted community. I want him to rot. I want him to die behind bars. Why? Because I blame him for …” For what? Blame him, quite unjustly, for personal events that just happened to coincide with the breakout? Well why not? Those events still caused pain, long after the victims of the robbery had died, in the case of a railway guard brain-damaged by bludgeoning, or recovered, in the case of several wealthy institutions.