Rough Music (46 page)

And Bill and she? They would have managed. Passion would probably have been checked by the grim process of the Law and the replacement of holiday fling with domestic regularity but perhaps something good might have grown in its place, something difficult but interesting and vital, like a marriage in a book. Perhaps she would have left Bill too and ended up an impoverished piano teacher with an aura of fading disgrace about her under-furnished apartments. Even that would have been better than this.

The service was over now. John stood and she thought he was offering his arm to her but of course it was to Poppy Louise, who looked so sweet and shattered in her new black coat and school uniform. Frances walked behind them, smiled dutifully at the old ladies, waited in the porch for the inevitable word or two with the vicar and his wife and lamented again the lack of a coffin so that they could follow due process and proceed to a graveyard or crematorium and so to a funeral tea and a neatly prescribed period of mourning. Instead they were cut adrift, left to walk alone to the ridiculous, brightly colored Volkswagen, which spoke, as always, of escape and giddy irresponsibility.

“Home for tea?” she said. “The Stibsons aren’t joining us although I offered. I baked a seed cake.” Poppy Louise and John’s silence felt like disapproval so she shut up, unlocked the car and elected to drive while John sat in the back with Poppy Louise, who at last could relax sufficiently to cry and was holding on to him so tight that Frances envied her and felt disloyal.

Words had got her into trouble so she used them less and less but she still dreamed of a phrase that might work like a charm and make everything all right. But John had been distant ever since her return from Cornwall, presenting a united front to help Julian cope with leaving home but otherwise talking to Poppy Louise rather than to her and using the demands of work, wherever possible, to avoid her. He came in to eat and to sleep, otherwise the prison absorbed him utterly, which left her feeling imprisoned too. Occasionally, as now, when she pulled up in the drive and waited for everyone to get out before she parked in the garage, she caught him watching her and the mute reproachfulness in his gaze enraged her. In a book they would have argued but he wanted to know nothing. There had been no cross-questioning, no grand scene. Only mute bloody reproachfulness.

She watched him cross the drive and climb the steps to the great, smoke-blackened porch, a protective hand steering Poppy Louise by the small of her back. She started the engine again and drove into the garage.

“What if I just sat here in the darkness?” she wondered. “What if I didn’t go in? How long would it be before one of them came out to find me?”

If only John had come back to Beachcomber ten minutes earlier than he had, shoeless, soaked to the skin and carrying what had first struck her as her son’s dripping corpse. He would have seen her and Skip and Bill frozen in a tableau as on a stage, heard Bill saying
Come
and her saying
I love John too much
. Always so reliable, he had missed his cue however and had entered only to tears and hysteria.

Frances took a barley sugar from the tin she kept to hand in there, sucked it for a minute then crunched it carelessly, violently, imagining she was crunching up her own teeth and not sugar.

She let herself out and prepared to enter the louring house. She became aware of a party of red bands piling lawn mowings into the compost heap. They were watching her dither on the gravel. She stared back at them, briefly defiant, then made herself go in.

Poppy was restless and Frances knew why. It was Sandy’s birthday and she was wanting to be with him but feeling she had to stifle that thought along with any curiosity about where he had taken the boys for the weekend. The tension was exhausting to behold. She had read for a while then abandoned the attempt. She had taken Frances on a riverside walk so brisk that it left Frances breathless and sweaty. She had cleaned the kitchen so thoroughly that even the jam pots and sauce bottles had been washed and the cupboard shelves left spotless. Frances had tried playing the piano but that only made Poppy worse, as though each successive key change of scale or study were winding up her internal spring. The sound of John’s rake as it scraped dead leaves along the lawn could not have helped matters either. Frances had always hated that noise, which seemed the very sound effect for mortality. She preferred even the drone of the lawnmower or the strimmer’s bluebottle whine.

“The state of this cupboard!”

There was a very useful cupboard, a walk-in one, constructed across what had been a deep alcove beside the sitting room chimney breast. It contained shelves of old board games, matches and firelighters, wrapping paper old and new, newspapers awaiting recycling, unfinished tapestries, the sewing machine and great bales of assorted fabric from when Frances had been inspired by some Canadian novel to begin stitching Poppy a patchwork quilt as a feminist heirloom. Though to the untrained eye the cupboard’s state appeared chaotic, Frances had a rough idea of what was in there and on which shelf to find it. Privately she thought of it as her
memory hole
; if she could not remember where she had put something, the chance was it would turn up in there. It had taken a while for her to discover that the reason for this was that the cleaning lady had long since seized on the cupboard as a convenient door behind which to toss anything that impeded her dusting.

“Oh fuck,” she said but she was too slow for Poppy was already bringing out armfuls of dust-furred junk and stacking things on the carpet. Dust soon filled the air and made them both sneeze, but Poppy proceeded with a relish bordering on mania.

“The first thing,” she declared, “is to get everything out in the open.”

“Everything?”

“Absolutely everything, and give the cupboard a damned good clean. I bet Joyce never cleans in there, does she?”

“Why should she? It’s a cupboard.”

“Then we can decide what to throw out.”

Frances came over from the piano and Poppy immediately handed her a large box silver with dust.

“They’ll all need wiping down just so we can see what they are.”

Frances ran a finger through the grime. “Totopoly,” she read aloud. The mysterious name recalled a long evening and the scents of wine and seaweed.

“You may as well throw all the games out,” Poppy said. “Hugo and Oscar won’t play anything unless it has batteries.”

“I think Oscar prefers books to games. Like Will,” Frances said quietly.

“I hope not,” said Poppy. “Games teach them how to behave. Where does Joyce keep your dusters?”

“She brings her own. She finds mine too venomous.”

Poppy sighed. “Venerable. I’ll try the cupboard under the stairs,” she said and marched off.

Frances looked around her at the contents of her memory hole spilled across the carpet. A toasting fork. A pot of hand salve someone had given her, called Farmer’s Friend. The Christmas tree lights which had to be mended afresh every year although they saw less use than any other bulbs in the house. A set of placemats with parrots on them. When Poppy returned, with the Hoover and dusters, she found Frances exactly where she had left her. She plugged in the Hoover and scoured out the cupboard, leaving Frances to begin dusting off the boxes. Frances sneezed again and had to use a duster as a handkerchief. She stuffed it up her sleeve so Poppy would not try to use it and smear something and be cross. Then Poppy came to dust too, or rather took over the dusting while Frances watched. She began to make a heap of things to take to an Alzheimer’s Society jumble sale.

“The Chinese believe that clutter makes you ill,” she said. “Now where did I read that? They think it causes problems in all sorts of areas of your life. You don’t want this anymore, surely? You always hated it. Apparently you draw a floor plan of your house then draw an outline of a person on top of it, with their head at the door and the rest sort of laid out as it comes and then you walk around and mark all the parts of the house where clutter builds up and that tells you the areas of your life and health that will give you trouble until you tidy things up. I wonder where this glory hole would be.”

Frances thought a moment. She imagined herself Wonderland large, her head squeezing up against the front door and her limbs snaking through the rooms, forcing nervous occupants to flatten themselves against walls and windows to avoid them. “Bowels,” she said decisively. But Poppy was already, reluctantly, stacking things back on the emptied shelves.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.

Frances looked down at the box in her hands.
Basildon Bond
it told her.
Wedgwood Blue.
“Photographs,” she said.

“Do you want them still?”

“Of course.”

“So why aren’t they in an album like the others?”

“It’s my horror box; they’re the silly ones. They’re the ones that didn’t come out right or weren’t flattering. Things like that. I should have thrown them away only it didn’t seem right. They’re you and John and Julian. They’re people.” She broke off, hearing herself plead. “You’re right. Let’s chuck them out.”

“No. Let me see.” Poppy made a grab for the box.

“They’re only silly. We’ve got so much to do.” Frances resisted her. “There’s the roof space next.”

“But I want to see. It’d be fun. Come on.”

“No!”

Trying to tug the box back from Poppy’s grasp, Frances succeeded only in bursting its fragile seams. Photographs and old negatives littered the hearthrug. They were mainly black and white but a few were color, with that intensity photographs seemed to lose once color became the norm and not an extravagance reserved for weddings and guaranteed sunshine. “Sorry,” she said but Poppy was already on her hands and knees, picking the pictures over with gleeful nostalgia.

“Your hair! I remember that day. And look at this! My God, you and Dad look so young!”

“We were.”

“The holiday house. Look. And … Oh … I’ve never seen this.”

“Show me.”

“It’s great.”

The picture an early color one, showed Julian and Skip grinning from inside a rampart of pebbles on a beach. They clutched sandwiches above the water as a wave broke around them. Behind them, mugging, dangling a stalk of seaweed over Julian’s head like a wig, stood Bill.

“He looks so young too.” Poppy was staring hard at the image, as if willing it to give up more information than it showed. “This must be the last picture taken of him,” she murmured. “Why haven’t I seen this ever?”

Frances remembered finding the camera, film still in it, months after the memorial service. It was nearly a year later. There had been no reason for pictures before, no celebrations. But they were about to set out on their next summer holiday, their first one as a family of four. They were going to Wales, to a cottage near Llangollen, and she had sent the film in for developing before they left and hidden the pictures away like a dirty secret amid the flurry of their return home. The memory returned to her in such immediate detail that the panic and guilt of then were briefly more real than the dust and daughter of now.

Carpet
, she thought.
Curtains. Clutter.
And the past became like music from another room again.

“I didn’t want to upset you,” she said. “By the time I had it developed you’d become so happy and settled.”

“Well you were wrong. I’d have liked it. I’d like it now. Can I take it?”

“Of course you can.”

Poppy raked through the pile. “Are there any others?”

“I don’t remember.”

“How about you? Pictures of him and you?”

Frances forced a smile and shook her head. “You were too young to use the camera.”

Poppy was sagging over her knees. It took Frances a while to realize she was crying. “Stop it,” she told her. “Please don’t cry. Darling, it was so long ago. So much has changed.”

“Nothing
changed
!” Poppy gasped. “You just moved on. Dusted yourself down and moved on.”

“I took you with me, though.”

“You didn’t
take
me anywhere. You just stuffed me in that school to make me English so I could fit in and be tidy.”

Frances felt faint. She sat on the sofa. She reached out an arm to stroke Poppy’s shoulder but she had sat too far away and her fingers fell short.

“I feel such a blithering idiot,” Poppy said. “I had no idea about Sandy and …” She made a face as though she had found her brother’s name too bitter on her tongue to pronounce. “It was you I wanted to … I couldn’t believe it when I saw that place advertised. I even checked when I rang up, to make sure it was the same. I knew he’d ask you two. Especially if we all urged him not to. Ever the dutiful little boy. I wanted you to remember. I wanted to bring it all back. How you killed him.”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“You know what I mean.” Poppy was shouting now. Curiously, it was only when she was angry that she sounded American again.

“We were never sure he died. He could still be alive somewhere. He might have … what I have.”