Rough Music (45 page)

“Perfect.”

“Because there aren’t any people. Not enough. Not book-buyers. I’ve asked the reps. Even before everything went online, most didn’t bother going west of Exeter because it wasn’t cost-effective.”

“So dare to be modern. Sell books over the Net.”

“Mail order?” Will pulled a face. “Where’s the poetry in that? And I’d need premises. A warehouse.”

Harriet stood, irritated, walked to the fridge and began grabbing packages. “You’re raising obstacles that aren’t there,” she said, in the tone that warned she was spoiling for a fight. “You could change direction. Run a café. Sell wetsuits. What does it matter, if you love him so much?” She turned on him, eyes narrowed. “You’re scared.”

“Am not.”

“You’re a typical mistress, that’s your trouble. A fence-sitter. Using someone else’s husband for years rather than committing to a man of your own. It’s so selfish!”

“Coming from the woman who conceived with a turkey-baster.”

“He wasn’t a turkey-baster. He was—” She snapped her mouth shut too late. This was the first admission that Vera had a flesh and blood father.

“Aha!” Will crowed.

“Not now,” she said, slamming plates on to the table and slapping down packages of cheese and pâté and deli delicacies as though leaving the food in its wrapping and treating it roughly could somehow lessen the meal’s extravagance. “Hang on a moment.”

She grabbed the telephone and her diary, checked a number and dialed. “There’s something I have to do … Dr. Chadwick? … It’s Harriet. Harriet Rowney. Have you got a moment? … Good. I wanted to book some sessions for a friend … That’s right. I know it’s a bit unorthodox but … Would it? Oh good. And you’d send the bill to me? … Fine. I think he’ll need at least six.” She caught Will’s eye and something mischievous in her expression made him understand which friend she was talking about.

“No,” he mouthed, shaking his head. He tried to wrestle the telephone from her but she skipped out of his reach.

“Yes. His name’s William Pagett. I’ll get him to call you to make the appointments. Thanks so much. Bye.” She hung up. “She’s very good,” she said. “The first six sessions are on me. It’s an extremely generous birthday present.”

“But—”

“You said you preferred things you could use up.”

“I meant a case of port.”

“This,” she said, cutting a slab of foie gras, immensely pleased with herself, “will have much better aftereffects. Now. Sit at the table like a Christian, eat the lovely food the nice lady brought you and stop looking like that. You can write me your thank you letter when the couch has done its work.”

It was a wretched, pointless occasion; a funeral for an atheist who had never lived in the parish. And with no coffin and no certainty that he was dead.

“We have to do it,” John insisted. “For her sake. Certainty, however grim, is easier than this not being sure. She needs to grieve. We all do.”

So kind of him, that
we
, when he could have said
you
.

There were several old women a few pews behind them. One of them coughed as the vicar finished the Sentences and announced the twenty-third psalm.

“No singing,” Frances had told him. “It’s too hard.” So they all stood now and recited it. There were so few of them that singing might almost have sounded less self-conscious; at least then they would have had an organ to back them up. Thank God for old women. Frances stole a glance at them. They were not regulars or she would have recognized them. They could not be friends of Bill’s. He had no friends here—their exhaustive searches and newspaper announcements had made that brutally clear. The new colleagues he had never got to know in Norwich had sent a wreath, as had his publisher in Boston and his old faculty in Berkeley. These were funeral
aficionadas
then, cemetery crones. To connoisseurs of last rites this event must be a novelty. Word must have spread. Perhaps such people had a newsletter produced on someone’s smelly Roneostat and discreetly circulated.
Odd one in Trinity Road today. No coffin. One twelve-year-old daughter now orphaned. Possibility of suicide following exposed adultery. Family small so support doubtless appreciated in their time of need.

They sat again and as the vicar began his useless address, groping after significance in a hopeless muddle, Frances reached for Skip’s hand and squeezed it. The poor child had been quite wild at first, to the point where they had to get a doctor to sedate her, the same one who had seen to Julian’s black eye. For two or three days she had been impossible, either weeping or angry and full of a terrible aggression toward Frances, dropping dark hints about what she knew and what had been promised her and what she expected.

It was Frances who dealt with the police. The afternoon after Bill left, any fantasies about completing their holiday shattered, she told John to drive the children back to Wandsworth. Polcamel was no place for them now and she was unfit company. Julian had to be made ready for starting at choir school and Skip enrolled in the junior year of Putney High School to give her some stability while her future was still uncertain.

“Good idea,” John had said, seizing the chance of activity, and packed their things.

She had never felt so alone as when watching them leave. John was civilized, of course, that was to be expected, but the children were utterly cold. Skip hurried to shut herself in the dormobile without saying goodbye or even glancing round. Julian, dwarfed in one of John’s jerseys as well as his own, because he was still chilled from his ordeal in the sea, stared at her curiously then kissed her, but it was a kiss of obedience with no hug to warm it.

She sat on the veranda for an hour after she had watched them drive away, then the sounds of happiness from the crowds on the beach became oppressive and she retreated indoors. Indoors was worse. His things were everywhere: ash in an ashtray, dirty clothes in a heap beside his bed, swimming trunks still on the line. She took refuge in blind housework. The model tenant, she cleaned, aired and dusted the house then squeezed his things and hers into a single case, hid the key of the bungalow as instructed and hauled her case up to the car park where she rang for a taxi to Wadebridge police station.

She edited the facts for the police, confining her report to what was necessary for them to make out a missing persons registration. Her brother-in-law had driven off after a family argument, she said, which was true after a fashion. She had reason to fear he would
do something foolish
, she said, because he had not taken his daughter or belongings with him, nor even his passport. When she said he was a novelist, she saw how the word was taken almost as a synonym for psychological instability. The policeman she dealt with was wonderful; avuncular yet unintrusive. He took details of Bill, of the motorbike, of anyone he might be likely to contact—the new university, for instance—and even recommended a small hotel for her to check into while she waited for news.

She rang the prison at once and gave Mervyn the hotel’s number then she lay on her bed hugging herself and waited. Had one of John’s thick jerseys or Bill’s old leather jacket been to hand she would have pulled it on for comfort; either would have done since it was the comfort she required, not the man. Instead, she lay on the bed, pulled up the quilt and hugged herself, taking in the pictures of fishing boats, the pastel-dyed dried flower arrangement, the skimpy nylon curtains, the powerful scent of flykiller. The hotel was as oppressive as the bungalow in its way; very much a family establishment and not a place designed for romantic afternoon liaisons nor, for that matter, distraught adulteresses. The excitement when she arrived by police car was palpable.

John rang her that evening to say they had got home safely and to see how she was. She snapped at him, “How do you think I am?” and he rang off soon afterward.

She slipped out to an off-license and bought a large bar of chocolate and a bottle of wine which she smuggled back to her room. She wolfed the chocolate then drank herself to sleep. The police rang in the early evening to say there was no news then called again, halfway through the next morning, to say they were sending a car for her.

His motorbike was not found at once because he had hidden it. He had driven half an hour’s distance up the coast to Trebarwith where a long beach bounded by high granite cliffs and a grim quarry faced the open sea. It was chosen, the police imagined, because it was the first beach to the north from Polcamel Strand that was accessible by road and was well away from the complex currents of the Camel estuary mouth. The motorbike lay at the very back of the largest of several caves that plunged up into the cliff face. Had he wished to retrieve it later, he had fatally misjudged the hiding place. At low tide, when he would have arrived there had he come directly from Polcamel, by police reckoning, a broad expanse of golden sand would have been presented in the moonlight. At high tide, however, a few hours later, the entire beach vanished and the caves were scoured out by booming surf. Its engine sluiced with salt water and sand-clogged, its bodywork brutally dented by the repeated battering it had taken against the rocks, the motorbike had finally become wedged on its side behind a boulder and left half-buried in sand by the receding tide. Children had found it and played on it for hours before an adult had come across them and alerted the police.

The registration number would be checked for confirmation in a day or two. Meanwhile Frances made her identification in a corner of the station car park where the motorbike lay on a trailer. There was dried seaweed caked on the handlebars and twined about the cables. No other trace of Bill had been found, the policeman told her, or of his typewriter. The poetic explanation was made that he had picked a beach facing the open Atlantic to reduce the risk of being washed up then used the typewriter to weight his body before swimming out and drowning himself.

Returning to Wandsworth with the news rather than merely passing it on by telephone, Frances found that John and poor Skip chose to interpret the evidence as charitably as the police had done. Skip had to, of course, since the alternative, that he had abandoned her, was more than a child could comprehend. Frances could not, however, would not let the matter rest. She spent a great chunk of her savings placing announcements in Cornwall, in Norwich, in Berkeley, and nationally, in
The Times
and
Telegraph
. She asked for news and reported sightings and received only a steady stream of crank notes and shocked letters from friends and colleagues of his. She fantasized about placing a final notice addressed to him in person, saying
call me
and giving her number. Common sense held her back, but also anger. Just as it was disgust and anger that prevented her shedding a single tear.

It was John who visited school outfitters and packed Julian’s trunk. It was John who took Julian away to Barrowcester to start at his new school. Frances watched it all as in a dream, unable to participate as she knew she should. Since her return the children had played without her, avoided her even. The house was so big it was quite possible to meet only at mealtimes. She tried to rouse herself to see Julian off at least—he was excited in the way she knew masked terror—but she was checked halfway down the stairs by something she overheard.

“Why isn’t she coming too?” Julian had asked.

“Your mother isn’t very well,” John said.

As for Skip, since the news of the motorbike a change had come over her and she became a model of good behavior that was almost more aggressive than the wildness that preceded it. She was quiet and studious, eager to begin at her new school and, as she put it,
get on with life.
Her anger now only surfaced when, seeking a companion in confusion, Frances tried to make her talk about her feelings or hopes. After a few attempts, Frances gave up trying.

The school uniform, a really rather pretty dress in a mauve and white stripe, was donned without fuss as was the name her mother gave her; not Petra Louise, as John had misremembered, but Poppy Louise. She returned from her first day at Putney High announcing that she wanted to grow her hair and, with astonishing ease, she began to drop her accent. This morning she had said
fortnight
. She was becoming English. She was also coming to seem less and less like Bill and more and more like Becky.

“This will be my punishment,” Frances thought. “To acquire a daughter after such longing only to find her grow into the sister-in-law who despised me.” For she felt she must be punished. Even if Bill had not committed suicide but merely elected to abandon his daughter and
lose
himself somehow. Even if he had simply hit his head and lost his memory. She blamed herself and the stupid inhibitions she was so keen to deny she possessed. John, after all, would not have killed himself had she left him but would by now have been well supported by cohorts of adoring women from the officers’ wives’ club. In time he would have married another as easily as he married her, because men like him had to be married.