Rough Music (39 page)

“Then it was probably long overdue. Would a hug help?”

Will nodded.

Roly took him in his arms and held him tight so that he could smell the faint tang of glue and sweat on his shirt. “I was an orphan, which is a bit of a cheat,” he said. “But I know what families can do. When I met Seth he was sixteen to my twenty-one, which is nothing if you’re a girl but if you’re both male …” He squeezed Will again, remembering. “His mother had him feeling guilty even when he was
dying
, which is quite an achievement. Sorry. This probably isn’t helping. I’m in a good mood because Bron’s just sold the lot and the tourist season’s nearly over and I’m about to get my house back. And that was insensitive.”

“Very.”

“Give me another slice of that outstanding fishy thing and I’ll take you on a trip. And stop looking so glum. It’s lost on me.”

It was a pagan site. No signpost marked its whereabouts but there was a well-beaten path through shoulder-high gorse and bracken that buzzed with insect life. Quite suddenly the path opened out into a clearing where, on a plot of land raised above the scrub, twelve ancient stones stood in a perfect circle about a thirteenth. The central one was twice the height, an unashamed skyward phallus. At its base, offerings and spells were heaped. Scraps of bright cloth, rain-sodden messages, bundles of flowers and a limb wrenched from a doll.

“So,” Roly said. “We should do this properly. You need some ragwort. There’s some. No, you have to pick it or it won’t work. And some red campion. That’s it. And some honeysuckle and a spring of gorse.”

“Ow,” Will said, cutting his fingers as he wrenched the gorse off a bush.

“Perfect. Now let a drop of your blood fall on the flowers. That’s it. Now … a hair off your head.” He tweaked out a hair.

“You are in a good mood.”

“Ssh. Concentrate. Now. Wrap it all up in one of those dock leaves, like a
dolma
. That’s it. Now you put one hand on the center stone.”

Will did as he was told. “Now what?”

“Now squeeze the bundle as hard as you can and make your wish.”

Will wished with all his might.

“Now you lay the bundle with the others.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it. The gods will listen.”

“And this works?”

Roly shrugged. “It was fun making it up, though.”

Will made to chase him but stopped dead in his tracks. In a clearing beyond the first, on higher ground still, stood a great roundel of stone on its side, a hole through its center. “What is it?” he asked.

“The pagans claim it lines up with the others at the summer solstice and the rising sun shines clean through the circle and makes the inner stone in the ring light up. It’s also used to heal things. Children with rickets used to be made to crawl through it and people with arthritis and stiff joints still swear by it.”

Will crouched for a closer look. The inside was worn smooth by the constant passage of bodies. He shut his eyes and thrust his head into the middle.

“Got a headache?”

He opened his eyes to look up at Roly. “No,” he told him. “I’m just confused.”

Back on the coast the weather had finally changed to accord with the events of the morning. Thick banks of fog were rolling in off the sea, blotting out the light and chilling the air.

“Fay, listen,” Roly commanded. The dog put her head on one side. Out of the mists came the mournful wail of the foghorn on the lighthouse across the bay. Fay whined. “She hates that noise,” Roly said and ruffled her ears.

Will gazed at where the sea had been and breathed salt and bladder-wrack. He saw the darker, introspective appeal the place must acquire off-season.

They went to bed less from lust than because it was a comforting place to be. But for Will the bungalow was permeated with conflict and unpleasant reminders of a family he felt sure must be standing in judgment, so they retreated to the trailer and spent the rest of the evening there. Roly made occasional forays back to Blue House for more wine for Will or to raid the fridge.

Will did not dare speak as he was thinking, of dreams and futures. They both observed the correct form for concluding a holiday romance. The mobile phone was kept turned off so that any callers, plaintive or otherwise, would have to make do with the answering service. For a few hours at least, Roly saw to it that the world could not find them. Then he packed Will’s suitcase and books and bin-liners of damp laundry into the van and drove him to the station. They sat together until the eleventh hour, talking inconsequentially. Then Will broke the rules.

“I don’t want to go,” he said.

“Needs must.”

“Yes,” Will sighed. “Bookshop to open, garden to water, family feud to heal.”

“Why should
you
have to deal with it? With the right therapist, you could come to see yourself as the injured party.” They chuckled sadly. A bell rang on the platform. “That means your train’s coming,” Roly said.

“I know,” said Will, not moving. “Our timing was so lousy. If only I’d sorted all this out first; come on holiday on my own
then
met you.”

“I think our timing was pretty good,” Roly said and ruffled Will’s hair, making him feel about eight. “Be brave, you.”

“Needs must.”

“Yes.”

They raced madly for the luggage and, chased by Fay, ran over the footbridge just as the train was pulling in. The carriages were already heaving with holidaymakers returning from the far west, so full that there were already people standing in the corridors.

“Oh God,” Will said.

“Get on and don’t be such a sensitive flower. Read a book. Time’ll fly.”

“Yes.”

He pecked Will’s cheek and pushed him toward an open carriage door.

“Can I write to you?” Will asked. “Maybe?”

Roly smiled, properly, without wiping it away again. “Of course,” he said. “If you like.”

“But I don’t have your address.”

“You’ve been staying at it for twelve days.”

“Oh yes.”

“Go.”

“Yes.” Will threw in the bags, jumped in after them and shut the door. He flung down the window as the train started to move. “I forgot the sculpture!”

“I’ll post it on to you.”

“You don’t have my address.”

“So write to me, then.”

“I should have a hat for this.”

“That was the ugliest hat in cinema history.”

He liked
Brief Encounter
! There was so much they had failed to discuss. Improvising a seat out of his suitcase and the laundry bags, Will took out a novel but failed to read it immediately.

A bored little girl was leaning against the wall opposite him. She stared at him and played with the lock on the lavatory door, opening and shutting it repeatedly. Will listened to the sound, thought of a child’s plastic sandal thwacking on a piece of driftwood and carefully wiped the smile off his face.

Frances would never have believed herself capable of such heedless selfishness. It was not that she specifically did anything—like neglecting the children for hours on end for the pursuit of her own pleasure, or not very often, not unless she was sure they were amusing themselves. It was rather that, while continuing to do everything a mother on holiday should, she allowed herself to become entirely self-absorbed.

She had always feared her piano-playing was a self-indulgence because of the romantic and rebellious notions it fed within her, but now she saw that it was still largely about the entertainment or impressing of other people.
This
was selfishness, this impatience to be alone with her thoughts, this intense awareness of how she looked and felt from hour to somnolent hour, this ridiculous, she knew it, mad hunger to feel his body against hers however fleetingly, above all, this sense of being what the French called
well in one’s skin
.

The danger, of course, was that for all that she was treading a tightrope, risking love, marriage, motherhood, those gimcrack medals of social standing and parental approval, because of Bill and what she was doing with him, most of these feelings and changes were not about him at all. The sensation of herself was as novel as the first pangs of childbirth had been. That experience, at once terrifying and fascinating, had felt so far removed from the father of her child, without whom et cetera, that it had been something of a shock to emerge from her etherized labors to find him holding her hand and looking pleased with himself. Similarly she now had to remind herself afresh whenever she felt Bill’s touch under cover of lunch table, crowded wave or merciful darkness, to make an effort to focus on this clever, dangerous man whose first laughable declaration of love had begotten this upheaval she was riding so casually.

Part of the trouble was the lack of a courtship. By the time she married John, by the time he first kissed her even, she had known his life story, the names of all his significant relatives, alive or dead, and even his taste in cake and thoughts on God. Bill, by contrast, was still a stranger in many ways. She would have liked to think the daily small surprises about him were a part of falling in love only her rational self knew they were a symptom of her having met him mere days ago. He, however, knew her too well, read her like a text and could predict her every move. It was a text that inexplicably fascinated him. He wanted to save her and Julian, apparently, from the dead hand of respectability. So far, so patronizing. And goaded by thoughts of Becky, she dealt with
that
by laughing demonstrations of just how capable of unrespectability she was.

More touchingly, he looked to her to save him from what he had thought an inability to love again, a lingering mistrust of women indeed. Even when the children were in earshot, so that he was reduced to encoded declarations or mere speaking glances, he laid delicious siege to her. He had somehow seen, that day in Trenellion, how restless she was, how ready to be set free and by saying the words aloud and encouraging her, fool that she was, to admit the truth of them, he had made mere thoughts a fact and now built each hour on that crumbly foundation of dissatisfaction so that it was becoming a thing apart from her she could assess and fear.

She wanted to argue, to defend John and their marriage against criticism she knew to be unjust, but was only ever in a position to do so when they were alone together. And at such times she found herself a mere groping animal in her desire for his rival.

They lay together now on the sand, hidden by a clouded moon, spent and therefore briefly in a position to hold a sensible conversation but instead she seized his hand and tugged him into the icy water where they washed the sand and lovemaking from each other’s bodies and shouted aloud because, after all, they were now only swimming and swimming, even by moonlight, was allowed. They ran back to their heap of ripped-off clothes and she snatched a towel and, rubbing herself, shivering, moved apart from him. As if to assist her, the moon emerged again and they seemed suddenly floodlit, forced into decorum on a sandy stage.

“Julie’s a little fruit,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“He is sweet,” she agreed. “He’s really blossomed out here. We’ve brought out the savage in him.”

“No. I mean he’s a
fruit
. A fag. A queer.”

She was shocked, repelled. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “He’s only a baby still. He’s only eight. He doesn’t even know what it’s for yet.”

“So? He’s still … I can tell. He tried to pull my shorts down.”

“He showed remarkably good taste.”

“He was
looking
at me, Frances.”

“Oh, Bill.” She was impatient now. This was not what she had wanted to discuss. “The whole world is not fixated with your … thing.”

“Say it.”

“Penis. Penispenispenis.” She laughed. “Just me. Come here. I’m cold.”

“No.” He sat on a rock, threw her clothes across, quite roughly, and began to dress himself. “We need to talk,” he said.

“You’re right,” she agreed, trying to seize control as well as the moment. “We must stop. It’s been lovely, amazing, but enough’s enough. I’m sure Skip suspects something and I don’t want it going any further. I have to go back to John next week and get on with our life and you have a new job to start in Norwich and—”

“No, Frances.”

“What?”

“I’ve asked her already.”

“Who?” For an absurd moment she thought he was going to say Becky and, in her shock, she took a second or two to focus on what he was telling her.

“I took her aside after dinner tonight and asked her how she’d feel having you for a new mother.”

“But that’s … You shouldn’t have! Not without asking me.”

“She was so happy, Frances. She loves you. You can be more mother to her than Becky ever could. To Becky she was just a hindrance, a sort of ironic accessory at best:
My Child.
” He mimicked Becky’s icy accent.

She stood, pulled on her jersey because her teeth were chattering with cold as well as adrenaline. “But I’m not free to
become
her mother,” she insisted.

“I know. And you’re scared and I understand that. But listen. I’ll tell him for you. You never need see him again. I’ve thought it all out. I’ll leave Skip here with you and I’ll go to the prison and see him and tell him everything. He won’t put up a fight. He’s way too well brought up to stand in your way.”