Rough Music (48 page)

“But they’re incredible!” Poppy smiled, lifted them out so that the light set off the fires within them. “Very Anna Karenina.”

“They’re yours. I should have given them to you before, on your wedding or something, but … well … something stopped me. Caution of some kind. I didn’t want you feeling you had to sell them for school fees or sofas. But now that … Well, I thought … you could sell just a few. Have the others made into a bracelet maybe.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” She did not try them on, merely held them up so that he glimpsed how well they went with her hair, then laid them carefully back on the still bright green velvet in their box. She kept a finger resting on them.

“No,” he said. “Maybe not. I just thought you’d like to know, you know, that they’re yours to do with as you like. Not Sandy’s. Not the boys’. You know?”

“A running-away fund,” she said calmly.

“An independence,” he suggested.

“Thanks,” she said. “I don’t know what to say. I’m touched.” She glanced at her watch. “Dad, we should get on. The boys finish school in twenty minutes.”

“Hang on,” he said. “That wasn’t really why I got you in here. I had to come up with something that I could say in front of Frances and she knows about the necklace. She wore it herself, once or twice. But she thinks I burned this long ago.”

He reached into the back of the deposit box and drew out the manuscript. It was a little dog-eared, stained with a streak of coal dust on the front, held together with two ancient rubber bands tied on in a cross.

“What is it?” she asked as he passed it over.

“Your dad’s novel. It’s the one he was working on. When he went. It’s not publishable. It’s not finished and, frankly, it’s not very good. I think he was writing out ghosts. It tells you a bit about Becky, though. But more importantly, it’ll tell you a bit about his affair with Frances.”

She looked up as though he had slapped her. Had she forgotten, perhaps, that he knew? That he had, eventually, been there? For all her rage earlier in the week that it was a
non-subject
, she could hardly expect him to have spoken of it lightly and often. She sat staring at it. He helped her, pulling off the rubber bands, one of which was so fatigued that it broke, thwacking his hand.

“Look,” he said. “You should read the whole thing obviously, when you’ve got more time, but if you turn to the last pages he worked on … Look.” He turned the pages for her. Some were stained into orange translucence by suntan oil. “Here,” he said. “This is the passage where she’s wondering whether to leave her husband for the hero, her lover. And in his first version she was going to. See? She packs her bags and goes to join him and his daughter at the airport. The daughter’s you, of course. But she had second thoughts. Look at these notes he scribbled.” He turned a page and read the notes out to her. “You see? Something she did or said was forcing him to change the story to match the truth, the emotional truth she was showing him. She had too much respect for you to come between you. She was going to leave both of us, him and me, rather than try to be your stepmother, which she knew you wouldn’t have wanted. But he left before she could, and I kept her and got you too.”

“But how could you know that and forgive her?”

“I love her.” He shrugged. Looking back, it seemed so simple. “I never stopped loving her. How could I not forgive? I was just overjoyed that she chose to stay. For days after he disappeared I kept thinking he’d be found or reappear and she’d go off with him and take you and maybe even Juli—sorry, Will. And having you to care about was a sort of blessing, do you see? Because we could love each other through you and gradually feel our way back into …” He faltered.

“Trust?”

“Lack of fear. I was so afraid. I was like a condemned man, even after the police gave up and we had the memorial service and set about adopting you officially. Everyone thought I was tense about Henry Farmer, waiting for someone to turn him in, but it was your father I feared.”

“I can’t forgive him,” she said. “Sandy, I mean. How
can
I? It’s all a mockery.”

“He was a good husband. You were happy.”

“Yes, yes. And he loved me and we even had a good sex life.” She saw him blanch. “Sorry. But we did and that’s important. But now all that seems like a sham, if he was … doing what he was doing.”

“Your happiness is still real. And his love.”

“But he hurt me.”

“Yes. Of course he did. Like Frances hurt me.”

“That was only a holiday fling, Dad.”

He thought about this a second. “No,” he said. “It took place on a holiday, that was all. You don’t plan to leave your husband after a fling. She was in love. It was a … a real thing. What hurts isn’t the length of the affair, it’s the moment you find out about it and
how
you find out. You might fool Sandy and your Mum but you don’t fool me. I’ve seen you on the phone to him. I
know
.”

“Yes but—”

“And he still loves you. He’s not in love with Will.”

“But he’s gay.”

“I …” He stopped, seeking the right words. “I don’t find these things easy to talk about. Sorry. But I just think he’s a bit lost. Like Frances was lost. And if you don’t get back in there, somebody else will, man, or woman; it probably doesn’t matter.”

“We must go.” she said. “Shit!” She jumped up, grabbed the intercom and apparently ended the discussion. She left the rubies where they were but took the manuscript, borrowing a plastic bag from the clerk to hide it in. They collected the boys from school and he drove them, at her request, to Sandy’s house, her and Sandy’s house. She made an excuse about clothes and needing to check on the boys’ sports gear, but when Hugo and Oscar had raced ahead up the drive, she turned back to John’s open window.

“I’ll call you later,” she said. “I might just hang on a bit. Have a talk with him or something. You know?”

“I know,” he said. “Don’t be too easy on him.”

She prepared a retort then saw he was joking and scowled good-naturedly. They were neither of them much given to hugs or tearfulness so she merely turned after the boys and he drove home feeling lightheaded. He and Frances loved her dearly but she was a powerful, thundery presence, always had been, and it would be a relief to have the house to themselves once again.

The drive, which had seemed so merciful in the summer, had taken hours longer than Will had expected. Traffic had not been especially heavy but it had begun to rain soon after he reached the motorway south of Barrowcester. Sheets of water lay across the tarmac so that every lorry sent up waves of blinding, muddy soup. Having once seen such an accident happen at high speed, Will went in dread of aquaplaning across the lanes, and cut his speed drastically, thinking to crawl in relative safety and listen to a talking book until the rain blew over. He could not turn off the wipers until Okehampton, however, hours later. Where the dual carriageway crossed Bodmin Moor, loose curtains of fog, that seemed to twitch away then envelop the car again with no warning, delayed him still further. By the time he was pulling through Polcamel, one talking book, two quartet recitals and an orchestral concert later, his eyes were sore from squinting and his mouth raw from the succession of searingly salty and cloyingly sweet snacks whose wrappers now littered the passenger footwell as their crumbs littered his lap.

The place was almost deserted. Most of the houses lay dark, as did the little complex of shops and bars beside the beach that had been so lively every night in late summer. He imagined the landlords of the rambling B & Bs confining their quiet winter lives to a few, cheaply heatable rooms at the backs of their establishments, turning their gaze from the churning sea that brought them their livelihood in high season but now brought only mists and brine-laden winds. He could not possibly run a profitable bookshop in such a place. Not even a café. Confining her life to the unseasonal wealth of Barrowcester and central London, Harriet had no idea of the economic realities of truly provincial life.

And neither did Lindsay, as Dr. Chadwick had asked to be known. She, of course, had offered no advice at all, but merely repeated his comments back at him in a mildly interrogatory fashion, for him to confirm or qualify until, like an intimate conjuror, she had been able to stand back with a quiet flourish, as if to say
“You see? This is how you truly feel and this is what you fear and this is what you want to happen.

“If you come to me anymore,” she said, “this will stop being therapy and become full-blown analysis.”

“Which you know I think is self-indulgent.”

“So?” she asked.

“I know, I know,” he said. “Be happy. Don’t be happy. It’s my choice.”

She only smiled. “You have my number,” she said at last. “You can call it whenever you like. If it’s not convenient, I’ll tell you.”

Naïvely he had expected a more rousing finish, perhaps even a little human warmth now that the boil on his psyche had been lanced. A hug, a good motherly urging to get out there and chase his personal rainbow. Even a smile that showed her teeth for once. But no. A handshake and her habitually cool air of what he had first read as secret amusement, but which was more probably a stifled yawn, were all she offered by way of parting blessing. The bill came later. He had overrun the six sessions paid for by Harriet, surprising no one but himself.

He wound down a window to clear the hours of fug he felt were clinging about him like a dank second skin. The smell of the sea not only roused him but awoke his sense that, for all that he had a small suitcase on the back seat and the biggest deposit he had ever seen nestling in his private account, and for all that he had just driven five hours without a proper break, he was effectively here to go on a date.

Washing, shaving, changing, changing again was out of the question but still he felt it was impossible to plunge directly down the drive to the house without some preparation. He parked in the utterly empty car park, turned off the headlamps and radio and breathed sea air for a minute or two. There was an apple on the passenger seat, bought in a service station, in the trust implanted in boyhood that apples, so fresh and green, cleaned one’s teeth, or at least imparted a cleaned-teeth sort of freshness. He ate it, although nerves, now that he was finally here again, had replaced hunger with a certain queasiness.

Eating, he unzipped the side of his case and took out the last letter. It had arrived only this morning. He had read it, called the shop and jumped in the car. He could not ring ahead; there was no telephone and he cringed at the thought of acting on Roly’s suggestion of ringing Bronwen’s gallery in Saint Jacobs to leave a detailed message.

What can I say after such a letter that will not seem banal or, worse, polite? Now that the enigmatic Dr. Chadwick can spare you and now that you’ve succumbed to the overtures of Texans bearing gifts, I think you should come down here. Obviously I haven’t done a nearly good enough job of putting you off me and, strange as it may seem all these pages of yours—yes, they’re in a rather handsome, marbled-paper file now and yes, I’ve been rereading them—they make quite a novella—where was this sentence going anyway? (The beach-bum reads but he never claimed he wrote.) Strange as it may seem, these letters of yours haven’t managed to put me off you. Quite the contrary, I fear. So come back and remind me how twitchily, prissily urban you can be. I also need to show you just how depressing and vile it is here mid-winter. And let you hear me snore. Et cetera.

Fay is mightly pissed off. She tore her shoulder on some barbed wire and is confined to walks on a lead until the stitches come out. We’ll have to walk her extra far, I warn you, to give her the mileage she’s accustomed to clocking up on her speedy own.

Yours with something worryingly close to ardent, R.

Will locked the car and pulling his coat and scarf about him, walked between the single row of houses to the path above Polcamel Strand. It was low tide, far lower than he remembered it ever getting in summer. There was no street-lamp, only the dim glow from a few upstairs windows and the regular, swinging beam from the lighthouse at the estuary mouth, and yet the beach was not quite dark. The waves had a kind of brightness in them and moonlight spilled through a note in the clouds further out to sea.

He made his way down the brown granite steps he remembered being bright with holiday litter, and walked out across the sand. He came as close to the thundering surf as foolish suede shoes allowed then walked to the right, away from the Strand and black-eyed bungalows and past the headland at the point cut off at high tide. When he could walk no further, he stopped and looked up to the dark mouth of the little cove.

Blue House was ablaze with light, even its forbidden fourth bedroom. The shutters were snugly shut against the cold and damp, but light spilled through their cracks and picked out a rim of green paint about each window. In the darkness it was not blue, of course, so he could see Beachcomber before him as well. So many memories, shocking memories, had been stirred up in his sessions with Dr. Chadwick that for a minute or two he was obliged to do no more than stand and stare while past and present intermeshed.