Rough Music (49 page)
He drew nearer and smelled woodsmoke. There was no music. Somehow he would have expected music, but perhaps that was crass. It was a subject that had never arisen in their letters, he realized. He remembered no music in the fourth bedroom beyond the handful of homemade concert recordings. Perhaps since Seth’s death Roly had preferred to live in silence? Will wondered if he could cope with this, he for whom turning on the radio was the first thing he did on returning home, after flicking on lights. Could this house become home?
He let himself in at the garden gate and peered through the French windows.
A fire was burning in the stove, the little door at the front left open to create the sense, more comforting perhaps, of a normal hearth and grate. Roly was sprawled on the sofa, his back to the door, the dog asleep between his legs, her head lolling over one of his thighs. There was a deep, white plastic collar about her neck to prevent her chewing the stitches in her shoulder. It lent her a quaintly Elizabethan air.
What right had he to disturb them? The scene was one of total, independent peace.
Will raised a hand and knocked twice.
She walked across the sand not caring if her shoes became wet, drawn forward as much by the great blue moon up ahead as by the sound of the breaking waves. The moon had a ring around it which promised or threatened something, she forgot what exactly.
The chill of the foam shocked her skin. She stood still and felt the delicious tug beneath her as the water sucked away sand. The water was as cold as death.
If I stood here long enough
, she thought,
just stood, the sea would draw out more and more sand from under me and bring more and more back in. Little by little I’d sink, ankles already, knees soon, then waist, then belly.
She imagined standing up to her tingling breasts in sucking, salty sand. When the first, disarmingly little wave struck her in the face, would she panic? Would she, instead, laugh, as they said,
inappropriately
?
She dared herself not to move.
The moon was nearly full. She could see the headland on the far side of the estuary mouth and its stumpy, striped lighthouse. She could see the foam flung and drawn, flung and drawn about her. He was striding across the little beach behind her; she could tell without turning. Would his hands touch her first or would she merely feel the rough tweed jacket he draped about her? Would he call out from yards away or would she hear his voice soft and sudden when his lips were only inches from her neck?
I love you.
She felt the words well up.
I love you more than words can say.
“Darling?” he said. “Shall I help you back up? You’re getting mud all over yourself. Here. Take my hand.”
She let him take her weight as she lunged back on to the landing stage. The river mud sucked one of her shoes off but it did not matter greatly. She stopped, turned and kicked the second one after it then let him lead her, barefoot, across the garden to the house.
He was rather old for a nurse, much older than her, in fact. But he was tall. Tall was good. She liked that in a man, being so tall herself, and she liked the way he did not seem to mind her walking smelly river mud across his kitchen. She smiled at him as he lowered first a towel then a basin of warm soapy water to the floor before her, because it was all rather funny.
Then she asked him his name.
In the mid-sixties, when Ronnie Biggs the train robber made his successful escape from Wandsworth Prison only months into his thirty-year sentence, my father was that prison’s governor. My mother had spent much of her life to date on the periphery of prisons since her father was also a prison governor. As children we interacted with some of the prisoners, and my sister and brothers risked life and limb playing in the house’s rambling attics and on its roof. There begins and ends any resemblance between my own family and the wretched one just depicted.
Henry Farmer is entirely ficitious.
Ronnie Biggs is still at large having, like Farmer, avoided extradition on the grounds that under Brazilian law, his crime was committed too long ago to be prosecutable.
I am indebted to my father for providing salient details of 1960s prison routine, to Podge and Meg Brodhurst for that first, life-changing invitation to pass a school holiday at Wavecrest, and to the Civitella Ranieri Foundation for their extraordinarily generous hospitality which allowed me to finish this novel in such inspiring, peaceful surroundings.
The Alzheimer Association’s helpline number is 800-272-3900.
A Conversation with Patrick Gale
Lillian Dean
lives in Los Angeles and has written two screenplays and a whole bunch of book reviews.
I got to know English novelist Patrick Gale in that ineffably modern way: via e-mail. After I reviewed
Rough Music
for
Hero
magazine, I was assigned to interview Patrick for the next issue. I sent him a series of e-mails introducing myself and trying to set up a time for a telephone interview. I knew I had found a friend when I asked him if he knew the time difference between California and Cornwall and he responded that he didn’t, but he could draw me a map detailing the route between ancient Rome and Carthage. I then confessed that my classical education had left me able to conjugate Latin verbs in the pluperfect tense, but I had a hard time getting around Los Angeles. Julian’s education in
Rough Music
leaves him equally erudite in arcane facts but adrift when it comes to understanding his own heart.
Patrick and I scheduled our interview for 11
A.M.
on September 11, 2002. And, of course, the world changed forever earlier that morning. We postponed our interview and a few weeks later,
Hero
magazine went out of business. I contacted Patrick to let him know and we kept chatting—this time about the confusing state of the world and our own sense of loss. When Ballantine Reader’s Circle contacted Patrick about being interviewed for their trade edition of
Rough Music
, he suggested me for the job. I’m so glad he did.
LD:
What was the original topic you intended to explore in
Rough Music?
PG:
I had originally planned to write about my parents’ marriage. They’ve been together over fifty years and the dynamics of their relationship and story fascinates me. So I thought I could pay them a sort of homage in fiction. Naturally once I started writing I realized I couldn’t possibly tell the unvarnished truth as it would have been a gross crime against their privacy and feelings. So instead of writing a family’s historical biography, I aimed at telling its emotional one.
LD:
Did the story surprise you as it evolved?
PG:
I rarely keep to the story I set out with and in this case I was deeply surprised. I found myself identifying more and more closely with Julian/Will until it reached a point where I was revealing very private things about myself even as I was shielding my parents’ privacy with fictive devices. It’s a truism that first novels are the most autobiographical ones. There’s been a lot of me in all my novels but
Rough Music
is by far the most personal.
LD:
What inspired you to write two parallel stories?
PG:
Most of my novels have fairly complex structures because I mistrust narratives told from a single character’s viewpoint. To get to the emotional truth of a situation, I need two or three angles on it, which means two or three narrative threads. The big inspiration here was my editor at HarperCollins in London. She’s a real toughie of the old school and when I ran the initial ideas past her and asked, “Should I do it this way or should I do it that way?” she snapped, “Do it the hardest way, darling. That’s usually best.” So instead of telling first the past narrative then the present one, as I’d done in
The Facts of Life
, I set out to interweave them.
LD:
Did you ever feel as if you were writing two different novels with two separate casts of characters?
PG:
The beauty of interweaving the time frames was that it hugely enriched the initial idea. What began as a story about a marriage soon turned into a study of memory and our relationship with our personal histories. I didn’t need to spell out the fact that here was a group of people (Will especially) who would never cope with the present so long as they deny the past they’re dragging around—because the structure was doing that for me. But to answer your question, no. I wasn’t writing two novels, I was writing six. In order to ensure that each character in a book has a narrative that hangs together, I tend to write “their” chapters consecutively. This causes terrible headaches when I come to weave the different strands together.
LD:
Your title comes from the old-fashioned practice of a community making a ruckus near the homes of people whom they found sexually offensive. Can you talk about the title and how it relates to Will’s and Frances’s emotional journeys?
PG:
Rough Music
is about transgressive sex and its consequences. In both sections of the story a character commits incestuous adultery and gets caught. Rough music was a time-honored way in which a community expressed its disapproval of sexual misconduct. In England there are recorded instances of this in rural communities as recently as the 1960s. More recently we have witnessed bloodcurdling scenes in which communities mobilize against suspected pedophiles exposed by the tabloids as living quietly in their midst. In the novel I play around with the resonances of the title too, so that there’s the soul music young Frances dances to on the beach and the clattering of Roly’s sound sculptures as well as the social clamor that erupts when the two adulterous liaisons are exposed. I wanted, too, to show how that exposure might set one character (Will) free to love more openly, but for another (Frances) only emphasize the extent to which she is socially trapped.
LD:
Memory plays an important role in this story. How has memory figured in your own life and in the writing of
Rough Music?
PG:
The novel was full of things I thought I’d made up and when my mother read them she’d say, “How did you remember that? That’s exactly how it was!” She was a very keen photographer. Every moment of her marriage and our childhoods was photographed and stuck into a series of meticulously kept albums. So I think I not only went to those albums to research, but—by looking at them all during my childhood and teens—swiftly reached a point where I couldn’t tell my actual memories from the memories my mother had recorded. It was amazing, too, how cathartic writing this story became. When I wrote the chapter where Julian’s parents leave him at the choir school without saying good-bye, I felt this volcanic anger boil up in me because I remembered how my mother had done that to me when she left me at my choir school. So after all these years of never discussing it, I had to ring her up and yell “How could you have been so cruel?” And she got all teary and said she’d cried and cried for days afterwards but had thought it was all for the best. We both felt so much better after that. I didn’t realize until I got so angry that I’d never really forgiven her for abandoning my eight-year-old self to a bunch of schoolmasters.
LD:
You relate the Greek myth of “Pandora’s Box” to the secret lives of the characters in
Rough Music
. Can you comment on that?
PG:
As part of my research for getting inside Julian’s head, I reread the books I was reading at his age, and among my favorites was a well-thumbed book of Greek myths. I’ve always found the myth of Pandora far more effective than the story of Eve as an explanation of how so much sorrow and sickness got into the world. Like the story of Eve, it begins with a woman being categorically forbidden to do something, which of course she goes straight ahead and does. What right-thinking woman wouldn’t? It stands to reason that you should have whatever it is they least want you to have, because that must be the thing they value most. But unlike Eve’s story, “Pandora’s Box” has a touch of humanity to it, because although her curiosity lets out all the bad things from the box, she shuts the lid in time to keep hope. Many of my novels have grim events in them—violent deaths, suicides, madness—but I like to think that I make these bearable for the reader by giving the characters reasons to hope. In
Rough Music
there was no arguing with the terrible fate that Alzheimer’s has in store for Will’s parents, but I was able to end the novel with Will on the verge of what might turn out to be real happiness.
LD:
Like Julian, you grew up in the shadow of an English prison. Aside from growing up in a governor’s house, have you taken other facts from your own life and family to tell this story?
PG:
Oh yes, and most of them will remain closely guarded secrets. Julian is emotionally me, that much is true, but his life in the prison is an amalgam of the things my older brothers and sisters got up to. I did have an affair with a married man. And in the middle of an unhappy time in my childhood, a kind schoolteacher and his wife invited me to stay with them in their house above a glorious beach in North Cornwall so that we could all take part in a music festival. This has far reaching consequences, not least my moving to Cornwall when I grew up and writing a series of novels set down there, including
Rough Music
. As for the music festival, I’m now on the committee!
LD:
Do you have personal experience with Alzheimer’s? You write about Frances’s affliction so compassionately.
PG:
My mother always tended to have friends much older than she and, inevitably, I watched several of them become very strange.
Also my grandmother, whom I adored, became horribly confused and had to be put into a nursing home before she died. But a lot of Frances’s experience of Alzheimer’s is based upon my mother’s experience of having several strokes in her life. She was in a car crash about thirty years ago, which caused her such severe brain damage she lost the ability to speak, write, walk, anything. She made an almost full recovery, apart, tragically, from her ability to play the piano. As a result, I’ve always been haunted by the way in which our personalities, our public personalities at least, are so rooted in our use of language. When Alzheimer’s destroys that language, or when a stroke does, it’s as though the personality is being torn apart like a cobweb.
LD:
One of the themes you explore throughout
Rough Music
is forgiveness. Each member of the Pagett family seriously betrays another at some point during the story, but is subsequently pardoned. Do you think the Pagett family is unusual in their capacity for forgiveness?
PG:
I hope not. I think the rise of a therapy culture may be creating a climate in which we’re too ready to blame rather than to forgive. I worry sometimes that we’re apt to confuse forgiveness with forgetfulness. The potency of forgiveness comes precisely from the fact that it must be done while being goaded by an unhappy memory. Especially in the context of relationships and marriage, I fear we’re coming to have crazily high expectations of each other. I’m not saying unhappy wives and miserable husbands should stay together at all costs, but I do think a lot more could fashion something lasting, maybe even, ultimately wonderful from their relationships if they could stop expecting those relationships to be perfect.
LD:
Will is a happy man, despite his loneliness. And Roly has taught himself techniques to stay focused on the positive. Do you believe that happiness can be learned? Do you think of yourself as a happy person?
PG:
One of my inspirations for Will and Roly was a documentary I saw about an Oxford University clinic where it has been proven that happiness consists largely of learnable techniques. The idea is basically “Count Your Blessings.” Some of us are lucky in that we develop that habit of stressing the positive from an early age; others go the other way. But the bad habit can be unlearned, using much the simple techniques Roly uses. Before beginning the novel, I was talking with some friends about my childhood and they asked me how someone with such a miserable start in life could be so positive. This made me realize that I did think of my childhood as basically happy, even though the actual facts of the case don’t tally with my attitude. So I set out, in Will, to explore someone facing up to just that challenge, someone whose idea of themselves as basically happy could be shown to be based largely on self-delusion.
LD:
What are you writing now?
PG:
I’m working on a novel with an even more complex structure, effectively four novels in one. It’s set in the present in the far west of Cornwall. It’s about two men, two women and the child who holds them all together. In some ways it’s pretty grim—much as
Rough Music
is—but it’s a hopeful book too. Having given my childhood a good digging over, I now seem to be rooting through the murkier corners of my relationship history.