Rough Music (41 page)

“I … No,” she admitted. “But it’s all right. I came in a taxi. You’re busy, aren’t you?”

“Not anymore. Come backstairs and we can have peace, otherwise people’ll start asking me things.”

He led her up past a series of posters advertising new books and through a door to a warm, chaotic room where two ancient sofas faced one another across a filthy coffee table. “Well. What a surprise,” he said again. “Sit.”

“Do you want to sell?” she asked, peering into a mug, amazed that there was actually blue fur growing in there.

He sighed heavily and sat himself. “Oh, I don’t know. They’re from a big American chain that’s moving over here.” He jumped up again. “I’ll just ring Dad. OK? In case he’s worried.” He darted through another door. She heard him dial. “Dad? Yes, she’s here…. Don’t worry…. Just got here … Do you want me to run her back later? … Oh, yes. Of course. OK. Whenever you like … Bye. What? Well, yes. That would be good.”

The little room, its mess, the dirty crockery, the jumble of papers and faxes, the heaps of damaged books, the gutted sofas with their greasy arms brought a fit of desolation on her and she started to cry. She heard him apologize to John and break off from arranging a drink. He ran back to her.

“Mum? Mum, don’t worry. I’m here.”

“Don’t leave me,” she wailed. “I don’t want to be left.”

“No one’s leaving you.” He hugged her then gave her a great roll of paper towel. She tore a square off and blew her nose on it.

“Ruined everything,” she muttered.

“What? Look, Mum, I’m sorry about the things I said.”

“No,” she said firmly and blew her nose again to shut him up. “Let me. I need to tell you.”

“What?”

“I need to tell you and it isn’t easy nowadays, so please
please
don’t fucking interrupt.”

“OK.” She saw him stifle a smile. She sat. “Sit over there,” she told him. “Where I can see you.”

“All right.” He sat on the other sofa, over the tide of filth.

“I swore I wasn’t going to apologize to you ever,” she said. “Because that would make it all less important and it couldn’t be, shouldn’t be, apologized away.”

“What shouldn’t?”

“But you shouldn’t have seen. I had no idea you’d seen us. When two people love each other, or think they love each other …”

“Yes?”

“No. That’s not right. Deep breath. Julian, listen.”

“No one calls me that anymore, Mum. I’m Will.”

He looked thinner than she remembered. Much better without the mustache. “Of course,” she said, then frowned. “No, you’re not. Don’t be silly. Listen to me, please.”

“I’m listening.”

“People make wrong choices. Terrible choices. I could so easily have gone. I wanted what was best for you.”

“I know, I know.” He came over to hug her again. “And you were shocked and rightly so and you didn’t think properly.”

She did not want her truth stifled with a hug. She pushed him back. “No! Whatever gave you that idea? I wasn’t shocked. But I … I was very young. Desperately young. Even forty is still young, believe me, however it feels at the time. I didn’t want you trapped.”

“And I’m not.”

“Of course you were furious, because you wanted him too. Deep down I understood at the time but I couldn’t face it and then it was too late.”

“Ma, it’s OK. Honestly.”

“Honestly?” She searched his face for kind lies.

“You’ve done me a favor. Probably them too. I’m sure Sandy will end up—”

“You’re not
listening
!” she shouted.

“I am, I am,” he assured her. “Tell me again if you like.”

She snorted with impatience. Brother and sister, both alike, always thinking they knew what she was going to say next.

“I didn’t realize Poppy would move in with you,” he said. “I thought maybe she’d kick him out.”

Lucidity dawned on her mind, only it was much quicker than dawn, more like a light switched on. “She’s with us to look after me,” she said.

“You don’t need looking after.”

“Thanks,” she said wryly. “I think it’s an excuse. She needs time.”

“Does she hate me?”

Frances shrugged. “You’re her brother. She has to deal with you. Give her time.”

“He’s been trying to speak to me,” he said. “I won’t see him. He’s too confused. It wouldn’t be fair. Or right.”

“Good. Do you mind if we change the subject?”

“Not at all.”

He started to speak about the business, the people who wanted to buy it, the opinions of employees whose names and faces were a blur to her and she felt weary and began to long for her bed. Why had she come here? All the way into town for what? She had a dim memory of a tremendous, urgent sense of mission but now found herself bored and tired on an ugly sofa with no sense of having accomplished anything.

“Oh,” he said suddenly. “I forgot. Roly sent your sculpture back.”

“Roly?”

“You know. Your sad young man.” She must have looked blank. “Hang on,” he said and banged through the door and up the stairs to his flat.

A girl, a complete stranger, shuffled in without saying hello, dumped a bag on the floor, repaired her makeup in the cracked looking glass over the sink and went out again. The encounter made Frances feel invisible but she was used to this; she had become invisible to young people, male and female, twenty years ago. Now they only noticed her to offer her seats, drinks, open doors, in a brisk effort to neutralize her disconcerting presence with good form.

Will came back in with some pieces of old wood with a plastic sandal attached and a wind vane. “Look,” he said. “All in one piece still despite Sandy’s best efforts to demolish it.”

“It’s rubbish,” she said. “A child could do better. Can I leave it behind?”

“Oh. Of course. Er, listen, Mum. Dad’s here. He can’t come in because he’s on a double yellow. I’ll walk you down.”

“I’m not a cripple.”

“I know. But you’re my mother and I’ve missed you.”

“Shut up.”

She walked downstairs with him at her elbow like some kind of flunkey. This was not what she had hoped for. Her anger could sweep these stupid books off the walls, could wilt lilies, scratch girls’ insincere faces and send scalding coffee into laps. She stopped abruptly at the foot of the stairs, needing breath. She saw John in the doorway to the street. He waved, smiled, pointed along the pavement and walked out of sight.

“Mum?”

“I hated you, you know,” she began. “I blamed you. I think I still do. It was all your fault. Which made me guilty, so I hated you more. Then you came home on Sundays and I loved you again. So it was all right really. Wasn’t it? Were you terribly unhappy?”

“When?”

“In thingy. Prison.”

He grinned. “Happiest years of my life,” he said, understanding apparently, and kissed her cheek. He brushed off the makeup girl, who wanted to know something, and steered Frances out of the shop and into the waiting car.

He spoke to John briefly. Perhaps
that
was the point of this excursion? To make son and father speak again. Not that they were speaking any more than they ever did or any more deeply. As ever, they were like fellow pupils in boarding school, or submariners obliged to take shares in a hammock with the minimum of social intercourse. If anything, the great filthiness each was strenuously overlooking made them even more polite. She yawned loudly. John apologized and drove off, winding up the window.

“Did you worry?” she asked after a while of their driving in silence.

“I was glued to the cricket,” he said, “And Poppy was deep in
Dead Souls
. Neither of us had any idea you were gone.”

“Oh. Good,” she said and she saw amusement crinkle the edge of his eye.

Bodmin Road station was strangely placed, deep in a thickly wooded valley at least a mile outside the town. Possibly local landowners had funded this stretch of the Great Western line and had insisted on a convenient stop where houseguests could be met—John had noticed the discreet drive that curled away from the car park among rhododendrons. Only a few years ago, locals could have changed to a branch line train not only into town but all the way along the Camel and its estuary to Padstow. Now, thanks to Beeching’s swingeing economies, they were reliant on sporadic buses and the occasional mercies of a taxi service. John saw other passengers, luggage-laden, being met at the ticket barrier and half-expected Frances to be there peering effortlessly over the heads in the crowd as she searched for his face. He was glad that she was not. She would surely have brought the children and Bill and the barrage of questions and anecdote would have frayed his nerves. This way, climbing out of the valley in a taxi and winding through the fields to the sea, he could readjust gradually back into a holiday frame of mind. With no luggage and wearing his work suit, he felt he must look like a commuter or bringer of bad news, queer among the silly hats and sun-pinked legs.

In fact his news was good. The papers did not know it yet but Malone had been recognized and caught boarding a plane to Chicago under an assumed identity and a bad wig. In exchange for a lighter sentence he had already begun to spill beans. Farmer had left the country and, unless he had deliberately misinformed Malone as insurance, would be in Cuba by now where he would lie low before heading on to Brazil. There was no extradition treaty with either country but preliminary inquiries were being made. Most of Malone’s share of the haul had already been traced to his sister’s house in Plaistow where it was hidden, with laughable innocence, in a trunk on top of her wardrobe. The sister, like the two other accomplices, had vanished, tipped off about Malone’s arrest. Either she had no idea of the worth of the certificates she had hidden for him or had not dared return to a house under observation. Inevitably he would have salted the rest away somewhere else, passed it to a contact for laundering. Whatever, it was not John’s affair. Farmer’s share, the lion’s share, had yet to be traced. Malone suspected it was traveling to Brazil or Switzerland under separate cover by some hired hand or other. It was as good as spent. Lloyd’s underwriters could foot the bill. Already detectives were trawling through records of previously unsolved heists on the basis that they had underestimated both their man and his past record. Podgy, underachieving Farmer was well on his way, John wryly saw, to being reinvented as an ice-cool master criminal.

What Malone had been unable to tell them was how Farmer knew to hide in the Governor’s House. Farmer had refused to tell him every detail of the escape plan, arranging only how they could make contact a few days later. John felt reprieved, exonerated from all blame. Only the niggling suspicion that someone on his own staff besides Malone had betrayed him, had put his and possibly his young family’s lives at risk, checked his satisfaction.

Frances heard the taxi and met it at the foot of the drive. Her face was clouded with concern and for a foolish moment he thought she was going to tell him bad news—an adder bite, a drowning, that wretched motorbike—but then Julian ran out to join her and they were both smiling so he knew all was well.

A large family
, he thought.
Five children? Six?

“You’re not meant to be here. Julian and I met two earlier trains just in case,” she said. “Then they said not to bother until eight.”

“Well it’s half past that now.”

“Is it? Oh blast!” She slapped her watch, then rewound it. “I’m having a useless day.”

“She’s been forgetting
everything
,” Julian said and shyly took his father’s hand. John had to drop the hand to hug Frances and when he looked down again, the moment had passed and Julian’s hands were in the pockets of his shorts.

The little party had made a touching effort at a feast of welcome. Frances had tracked down a bottle of his favorite claret, Bill had improvised a barbecue on the sand dune and was cooking chicken legs and sausages and Julian and Skip had written
WELCOME BACK
in shells and seaweed on the ground before the veranda. John shook hands all round, said, “Well this is nice,” several times, was persuaded by Frances to change out of his suit then, changed and washed, sat on the veranda with a glass of the wine. And it was good. The heavens were laying on a spectacular sunset, swallows were swooping across the fields behind the house and his nearest and dearest had missed him. He was back in the charmingly extended family he felt he had only just left. What could be sweeter?

And yet something was wrong. The children were overexcited and on the verge of turning fractious, tired perhaps after a long day of sun, play and anticipation. Frances was almost manic in her insistence that he relax, put his feet up, have another drink and in her exhortations to the children and Bill to confirm just how good it was to have him back again, to ask him about the escape and robbery now that he could talk freely. Bill was unmistakably muted, almost sullen. Definitely not the brash, oddly likable man John had left behind.

“What’s going on between you two?” he asked Frances, snatching a moment alone with her as she finished decorating a trifle in the kitchen.