Rough Music (43 page)

“Does he know where he is?”

“Probably. He cried when I went this afternoon. Said ‘Don’t leave me don’t leave me!’ I felt I was leaving him in boarding school. But there was nothing for it. I have to get my life back. For both our sakes. And now that I’m not mopping him up all the time, carting him in and out of the bath, it’s easier. I can just visit him and be nice, you know? He’s become a patient. A sick friend.”

“What’s the ward like?”

“Don’t ask,” she laughed. “Funny really. You spend all this time worrying about them ending up in an old folks’ home before their time, sitting in some sun lounge with a load of dribblers and bleaters twenty years older, and instead he ends up with a bunch of psychos and depressives. But he’s not mad. He’s just … not
there
. Telly on full blast. All the time. In that respect it’s
just
like a home. No one watching it but the cleaners. They showed me the scan, you know?”

“My son-in-law’s booked Frances in for one.”

“Yeah, well, prepare yourself. I had no idea. I mean … there were holes. Actual holes. Sorry. I’m going on. I’ve been holding back with Teresa so I don’t drive her mad and now I’m dumping. Go on. Dump back. Why was the holiday bad?”

“Oh, it wasn’t bad really. More sad. But she enjoyed herself.”

He had never intended to tell her of the drama of Sandy and Will, still feeling that the fewer people knew about it the sooner its ripples would subside. But he found he could not tell her about Frances either. Not only did it not seem fair, but her story of Steve and his sudden deterioration had frightened him and he felt the need for comforting half-truths.

For the first time, she let him drive her home. Intending to drink, she had come in a taxi. As they drove, talking of neutral subjects, things they saw outside the car, new restaurants, posters, children up to no good, she made a brave attempt to reassemble her old self. Repairing her lipstick, she caught sight of the bloodstained plaster and quickly replaced it with a clean one, tutting that he had not remarked on it. She even applied a fresh squirt of scent from the tiny silver spray she carried in her bag. Who was this for, he wondered, as she pecked his cheek and he smelled the gin fumes beneath the jasmine. Surely not for him?

They had arrived at a house whose exterior, standard rose bushes and newly washed car, betrayed nothing of the recent turmoil within. She asked him in for another drink. He knew this was no more than politeness on her part, or loneliness, or a fear of entering alone a house crowded with accusations, and gently declined. He said they must meet again soon but, as he waited, like a good taxi driver, to watch her unlock her door and let herself safely in, he reflected sadly that now that she lived alone, their meetings would assume a new ambiguous tenor and would have to cease.

Frances was playing the piano when he came home. Apparently specialist skills, like specialist vocabulary, could be among the last areas of conscious thought to be damaged by the disease. Rocket scientists rendered incapable of holding a toothbrush or using a telephone could converse with their research students better than with their relatives. There was some hope, too, that so long as the impulse to continue was there, regular piano practice and the intense stimulus and evident pleasure it involved, might hold the disease at bay longer than if her only hobby had been thimble collecting or painting by numbers.

Apparently she had missed her piano in Cornwall for she had taken to practicing with a vengeance since their return. Now, more than ever in their life together, he felt the music spoke of things she could not divulge. Depending on her mood, she filled the house with its anger, charm or sensuality. One Debussy prelude, apparently depicting footsteps in the snow, had become a recurring motif in the past few days. He found its blank soundscape, too chilly even for despair, unbearable and would retreat to the garden or his study on hearing the opening bars.

Poppy was sitting in a pool of light where one normally sat to watch television. The television was off and she was reading, reflected in its dead screen. He kissed the top of her head. She mumbled in reply and turned a page.

She only set foot in her house to retrieve clothes or to drop off the children, whom she collected from school every day, brought to their grandparents for high tea, and dropped off when Sandy returned from surgery. She had not left him, not officially, hence the lopsided arrangement whereby Sandy had the children most of the time. At first she had been too angry to deal with him, then she had needed
space to think in
and now she was here to help John care for Frances.

Had the offense been more ordinary, involving, say, someone both female and not a relative, the obvious course of action and reaction might have been clearer. The ambivalence, the sheer bloody awkwardness of it all, however, which everyone seemed too uncomfortable to discuss, had left her marooned. Poppy had always been quick to take action and quick to speak her mind. Her anger, so dramatically and swiftly demonstrated in Cornwall, had dissipated, leaving her in a curious, regressive limbo. Quite unexpectedly in so disarmingly literal a child, fiction had become her refuge and, for all John could tell, principal resource for advice and comfort. The first day she had woken in the spare room, still sentimentally furnished with things from her and Will’s childhoods, she had begun to read her way through bookshelves she had so long overlooked. She began rereading novels from her girlhood,
Little Women, What Katy Did
, in a self-conscious effort to find solace in their familiar, premarital sphere. But now she had read her way through the spare room and begun asking John what she should devour next. This morning, a little mischievously, he had passed her his much-thumbed Penguin of
Anna Karenina
. Glancing down to her lap, he saw she was more than halfway through already.

“Making sterling progress,” he said.

“It’s good,” she said, not looking up. “She’s just given up Seriosha. Mum’s fine. How was your drive?”

“Fine. Wet.”

“And the pub?”

He hesitated.

“I’ve got a nose, Dad.”

“It was fine. Coffee?”

“No. There’s a parcel for you.”

“Really?”

“Next-door’s nanny took it in by mistake. It’s in the hall.”

He made himself a coffee and went to investigate. It was a largish, rectangular parcel, thickly padded. The stamps were foreign but without his glasses he could not see where from. He tucked it under his arm and pushed into the drawing room. Frances stopped playing.

“Don’t stop,” he said. “It’s lovely.”

She turned back a page or two and began the piece again. He recognized an old staple of hers, Schumann’s
Prophet Bird
. It was a strange piece; a pretty enough evocation of fluttering flight, it became neurotic and unsettling if one listened too closely, full as it was of perverse accents and unexpected turns.

He sat and pulled out his glasses, leaning into the light thrown by a standard lamp. A mountain and a lake; Switzerland. He disliked customs declarations forms because they lessened any element of surprise.
Reproduction
, someone had written carefully.
Sans valeur commerciale. Cadeau.
Mystified, he tore it open. Paper gave way to bubblewrap, so tightly wound round and sealed that he had to use both hands to wrench it open. This, of course, was how letter bombs worked, he reflected seconds too late; they were not letters at all but parcels, playing on the recipient’s residual childish greed for presents.

It was not a reproduction at all but a painting. It took him a moment or two to recognize it because the surface had been cleaned so thoroughly and what had once seemed a farmyard scene at sunset or dusk, a sow and her piglets enjoying the last of the day’s warmth, now lay in dazzling, almost too colorful daylight. So many details had emerged from beneath two centuries of cigar smoke, fireplace fumes and household dirt that a whole new picture was revealed. A blossoming rose grew up one side of the sty, wild flowers glowed in tufts across the farmyard and, most unexpectedly, where the murk had been deepest, a small girl, dressed in artless country style, leaned on the sty wall to admire the basking family of swine. Always assured by his father that it was a Morland, or as near as damn it, the painting was now revealed as something altogether less distinguished and more sentimental; an image of the sunnily innocent kind one might pick as a greetings card for an unmarried female relative. The cruelest transformation had been to the fine, eighteenth-century frame. Once plainly of greater value than the painting, it had been coated with yellow gilt paint so shiny that an ignorant customs officer might have read the declaration, glanced at the contents and assumed the whole to be fresh from Woolworth’s.

There was no letter. Nothing betrayed the sender. On his way over to interrupt Frances to show her, John glanced at the back. Following re-framing, the rear had been taped and papered up, for all the world like a painting finished yesterday. On the paper was scrawled,
From one old boar to another. Ta for the loan of this. Having my lad send it back while he stops off to do some banking for us. Sorry I won’t be seeing you soon. No hard feelings! Your old guest, H. Farmer.

Even were it still a Morland, in today’s skewed marketplace, he supposed, the message and signature would probably have swollen the painting’s value as an authenticated but minor artist’s imprimatur could never have done.

Frances had stopped playing and was looking up expectantly.

“Look,” he told her. “Remember this?”

“Pretty,” she said, remembering nothing. “The boys’ll like that. They like pigs.”

When the first Friday came, he waited in the playground with the day boys, assuming Ma would be there to collect him. Boy after boy was collected and still she never came until at last a master found him, Mr. Thomas, and said why was he not in tea with the other boarders and was he lost. And there was an embarrassing scene in which he explained and Mr. Thomas took him to Matron in front of all the other boys in the dining room and asked her. She turned to him quite kindly, although she was still in her starchy uniform so he knew it did not count.

“Oh no, Pagett,” she said. “You’re not a weekly boarder. Whatever gave you that idea? You’re a
full
boarder like everyone else. We don’t have any weekly boarders. Now sit by me and have your tea. Look. Doughnuts for when you’ve had your bread and butter and sandwiches! You can see Mummy and Daddy in three weeks, when they take you for a Sunday out.”

He had not cried then but he had cried at night, when several other new boys were crying and some boys were kind and said everyone cried at first but that it got easier. And some boys were harsh and told him to be quiet. Only it did not get easier and it seemed to him that the smell and taste of tears was in his nose and on his tongue ready to surprise him and at a moment’s notice he would start to cry again.

It was a choir school attached to Tatham’s, the college where the much bigger boys went, and it was very old and very beautiful. He had almost forgotten he would have to sing. Twenty-four boys in the school were choristers, which meant that their parents paid no fees, or hardly any, but they had to sing hours and hours every day, in the chantry or the chapel, after breakfast, before lunch, after tea and on Sunday mornings. Music was a mystery to him. He had learned to read it at his other school. That and some perceived beauty in his singing voice had won him a place, apparently, although the voice trials had taken place so long ago he scarcely remembered them. Faced with new music to learn every day, however, most of it in Latin, which he would not start learning until next year, he found the notes melted under his hot scrutiny and meant nothing. And if that and the feeling apparently called homesickness were not reason enough to weep openly in choir practice, the beauty of the music was. There was one particular anthem all about the lame man leaping as a hart and the tongues of the dumb shall sing which they rehearsed all week and which he had to mime to for fear that his voice would crack with emotion.

It was a punishment, of course. He realized that by the middle of the second week when the initial shock of being abandoned, hastily and without proper good-byes, had begun to wear off sufficiently for him to look around him and take in the strangeness of his surroundings.

There was absolutely no contact with the outside world. There was no privacy. They slept in big dormitories, twenty or thirty to a room, brushed their teeth in communal washrooms with more washbasins than he could count and even bathed in communal bathrooms where there were six baths plumbed in around the walls instead of just one. Only in the lavatory was there freedom and even there the walls stopped short enough from the ceiling for boys to peer over and high enough off the floor for messages, and worse, to be passed. The lavatory paper was hard, scratchy and unabsorbent which was almost as much of a shock as only being allowed to bathe twice a week and there being no armchairs or carpets or curtains in the entire place.