Rough Music (6 page)

“Yes. Only …”

“Only not as much.”

“Mmm.”

“And you want to be a grown-up married person.”

“Fuck off.”

“Just checking. You know, I could stand up in church tomorrow and call the whole thing off, bring down the whole tidily bourgeois edifice? I mean I won’t, but I’ll still be tempted.”

“For her sake?”

Will thought a moment. “No. Probably for mine. We’ve got to stop this now, Sandy. You’re going to sleep on the sofa. I’m going to sleep in my room behind a locked door. We’ll sort out your suit and things in the morning, you’ll get happily married and none of this ever happened. OK?”

“OK.”

They were kissing on a more equal footing now. They slid to the landing carpet and rolled around, bruising chins and hip bones. For a beginner, Sandy showed remarkably good instincts and for a man who had drunk such incapacitating quantities, he regained his vigor with impressive speed. One thing had led most of the way to the inexcusable other when Will remembered he was desperate to piss and stumbled off to the bathroom, where he caught his reflection’s accusing eye and, unabashed, found a condom that was only slightly past its use-by date. Returning to the landing, he found Sandy deep in a sleep from which it would seem like rape to wake him. With the inward sigh of one saved from damnation at the eleventh hour and not entirely grateful for the favor, he refastened Sandy’s shirt buttons and trouser fly, tucked a pillow under his head and furled him in a quilt. Then he took several deep breaths before ringing Poppy, who had not yet fallen asleep at their parents’ house, to reassure her that her
caro sposo
was safe and virtuous but in need of her spare key.

The next morning it was impossible to judge whether Sandy’s verbal paralysis was due to guilt, panic, alcohol poisoning or stiff bones. Dispatched by the bride, the best man fetched his wordless charge before Will had a chance to find out and the wedding passed off with no conscience-struck confessions or altar-side pleas for psychosexual understanding. Will was kept too busy by relatives and the need to stop Harriet (who was not yet in her capable, Dame-ward phase) cheapening herself too publicly, to lend the matter much thought. He fancied he detected an edge of desperation to Sandy’s manly handshake and muttered thanks for
saving his bacon
but assumed that the laughing couple on a tandem they waved off to a honeymoon in the Western Isles would be sufficient unto themselves for at least a month or two.

A series of circumspect postcards arrived, some of them penned by groom alone, then Sandy appeared on Will’s doorstep the day after their return to Barrowcester, expecting, no, demanding conclusion of the business deferred on his stag night. Will shut the door on him and ignored the telephone all evening. In the weeks that followed, during which Sandy repeatedly called up or round, he tried to be a responsible adult. He tried in all honesty to be a loyal brother and a trustworthy friend, but Sandy was not a man to be denied. He also had a Tweedside accent, cyclist’s legs and red-gold hair in his favor. If only the sex had been perfunctory or Sandy’s bedside manner odious or his nature as harsh and judgmental as Will had always assumed it to be, their crime against the family would have gone no further than this one outrage. The chemistry between them was all too effective, however.

As though viewing the experience through Sandy’s eyes, Will found it was like making love for the first time. His experiences with the drama student, fourth-year linguist and, even, Finn paled by comparison. He was disturbed at the depth of reaction it drew from him and at the brutal demand that there be a second and a third time regardless of guilt and danger. Rattled too, lowering his defenses at last, Sandy revealed a vulnerable, even sweet side to his personality and was as tenderly solicitous after the act as he was impatient before it. He refused, often angrily, to lay plans or to analyze the situation into which they had stumbled. He was married to a woman he loved, but regularly bedded her brother, whom he loved no less but differently.

Thus two marriages grew where only one was visible. Confided in by the sister as regularly as he had knowledge of the husband, Will was made an intimate party to their relationship and tasted their joys and apprehension as keenly as if their various house moves, job changes and children had been his own. Poppy had demanded a lunch with him the morning after he and Sandy first slept together and Will attended dread-heavy, expecting guilt to garble his wit or cause him to blurt out a confession. Life would have proved simpler if it had. Instead he found he could greet her and receive her happy confidences as easily as if it were not a husband she spoke of but a mutual relative. Which, of course, Sandy had become.

The only active deceit Will had to practice was in making his revision of his judgment of Sandy’s character seem more gradual than it was. He was aided in this by the fact that merely because he had started to sleep with the man and found he could not stop, he did not find his friends any more acceptable or sympathize with his love of football, find his politics any less reactionary or his jokes any funnier. Qualities that were galling in a brother-in-law, however, became piquant in a lover, a peppery substitute for a gender difference.

Will would have been checked only if the liaison had begun to steal obviously from the marriage, if Poppy had begun discreetly to complain of neglect. But on the contrary, Sandy seemed to thrive on having two outlets and Poppy actually glowed when she spoke of the attentions he paid her. Her eagerness that they should become close did not help either. As far as she could perceive, Will and Sandy had started to make an effort for her sake, and she was touched. The occasional brotherly drink together, the occasional manly bike ride … “What do you find to talk about?” she asked, fascinated, and Will would quite truthfully answer, “God knows. Not much. You mainly. And, well, you know, guy stuff.”

Sandy taught him to drive and called around occasionally for long afternoons to help fix problems with the third-hand Mini Cooper he helped him choose. When Will took the plunge of leaving the children’s library to buy a place with a shop on the ground floor so that he could open a bookshop and café, it was Sandy who donned overalls to help him decorate and rewire the place. With the arrival of the boys, Will proved a devoted uncle and babysitter. And if Sandy took time to stay for a quick drink when picking the babies up, that was only to be expected.

As a busy man, Sandy made full use of those adulterer’s toys, the mobile telephone and the pager, although this meant that a quickie snatched with Will on the pretext of visiting a patient was made very quick indeed when a call came from a genuine patient whose need was more painful, if no more urgent, than his.

Habit, and the illusion of a balanced domestic arrangement between the three of them, dulled Will’s guilt but it was inevitable that such constancy in betrayal should drive a wedge between the siblings. Poppy wanted him to be happy and now that she was married could not imagine anyone being happily unattached. She became an inveterate matchmaker, often crudely assuming that any two single gay men had only to be introduced for gratitude to blossom into love. Will would be invited to dinner parties where he was pointedly placed opposite her latest find—Fergus, her sad pet decorator, was the example that sprang most painfully to mind—while Sandy masked his jealous anxiety in a show of blokish insensitivity, breaking into any conversation that might well up between his lover and the latest candidate or even insisting on swapping places with Will on the pretext that some female guest had an urgent need to discuss something with him. Happily, the arrival of children and the consequent erosion of Poppy’s energy and free time prevented her from wondering if there were any
other
reason for Will and her spending less time together. When she complained of it, she did so in a spirit of shoulder-shrugging apology rather than any tone more accusatory. If she felt sorrow at the distancing of a friend, he convinced himself, it was swept aside by the compensations of motherhood and a life apparently fulfilled.

“So were you serious about asking us to join you in Cornwall?” Sandy called out from the shower.

Lolling across the rumpled quilt, Will thought a moment. “I never asked you. You invited yourself,” he pointed out.

“So?”

“What about Poppy?”

“She’s been angling to sign up for some intensive squash course at the sports center. If I took the boys, it would set her free to go.” Sandy emerged, toweling himself. He had perfected the art of showering without suspiciously wetting his hair.

“Well, sure,” Will said. “Come. The Aged Ps would love having Oz and Hugo around and I’m sure we could come to some arrangement as to who gets which bed.”

“Great.” Dressed in practiced seconds, Sandy kissed him quickly on the lips. “Got to go. I’ll ring you.”

Will heard the crinkling of wet plastic as the paddling pool was grabbed up, then the opening and closing of the door, hasty feet on the steps and the gunning of Sandy’s car engine. He reached for another Tia Maria truffle and suffered a brief twinge of what Harriet called
Other Woman Syndrome
.

“Frances? Frances?”

Frances emerged from a deep sleep to find John crouching beside her in the dark. Reassembling her mental self, she became aware of the strangeness of their surroundings, the car around her, Julian’s rasping, childish snores on his bed behind her head, the rodent scuttlings of the guinea pig, the stiffness of her legs where they had been scrunched up on the seat beside her.

“Where are we?”

“Somewhere between Stonehenge and Dorchester. Sorry darling, I hated waking you but I was nodding off at the wheel and I—”

“It’s fine. You’ve done more than your share. Come on. Swap.”

Alert to the thick country night beyond the open door and to the fact that he had woken her in the middle of one of what she privately classified as her
bad
dreams—bad as in wicked, not unpleasant—she slipped out from under the car blanket and offered it to her husband.

“Promise you’ll wake me,” he said urgently. “I only need two or three hours.”

“You look shattered,” she said. “We’re mad. Go to sleep.” She leaned past him to tuck Julian’s leg back under his hopelessly disordered bedding. He had a tendency to windmill in his sleep.

“There’s still coffee in the Thermos.”

“Oh good. Sleep.”

John first insisted on unscrewing the table to make up the bed properly then, satisfied, he lay back with a yawn, stretching long legs across hidden grocery boxes and on to the seat opposite. He pulled the rug up about him, relishing, perhaps, the residual warmth she had left in it. Looking down at them, man and boy, she had one of those unsettling moments in which she felt more the child’s age than the parent’s, or at best like an older sister to the one and a responsible daughter to the other. Shuddering, she slid the door closed on them as quietly as she could.

The road was deserted, the landscape almost featureless. With the small stretch of road and verge picked out and lent color by the lights around it, the dormobile might have been an island. She looked up. No wonder it was so cold. There were no clouds. Stars seemed flung like a falling hunter’s net overhead, their blue-white brilliance only adding to the chill. Opening the driver’s door, she reached across for her sheepskin car-coat and pulled it on. Then she stepped out of her shoes and pulled on the old suede moccasins she retained for driving. The shoes with heels, the last vestige of her smarter London self, she tucked into a bag and slipped behind the seat. With luck, she would not need them again for a fortnight. The house gave directly on to a beach, if the letting agency was to be believed. She intended to go barefoot as much as possible, although she suspected that John found this flower-child tendency in her distressing. His own feet were crumpled and gnarled by years of army boots and constricting brogues. She guarded Julian’s feet like soft treasures, encouraging him to go barefoot or wear sandals whenever the weather was warm enough, so that his toes should grow as straight and long as a Botticelli angel’s.

In an effort to rouse herself by rousing her stomach, she ate a corned beef and tomato sandwich and poured herself a plastic beaker of tepid coffee from the Thermos, making a mental note to replace the latter with one of the new models that fastened with a screw-on lid rather than a leaky cork. Then, munching an apple to clean her teeth, she slid up behind the steering wheel and drove off, adjusting the mirror angle as she went.

The dream John had interrupted was the same uneventful one she had been having for fifteen years or so, since she was thirteen. She was in the prison garden, wearing a sort of muslin shift so diaphanous she felt more exposed than if she had been stark naked. And she knew there were prisoners, hundreds of prisoners, watching her from behind hundreds of broken windows. John was at her side, talking and talking to her in a tone that was just beginning to shade into anger. He wore a dark suit and was tapping a stick against the side of his leg to emphasize the points he was driving home. Governors were moved on every five years to prevent compromising familiarity breaking out between governor and officers or indeed governor and prisoners. She had experienced the same dream against the background of Her Majesty’s prisons at Liverpool and Durham and, before that, with her father replacing John in the lead role, at Portland and Camp Hill. She had told no one of the dream, still less of the guilty excitement it continued to cause her, but at Wandsworth fantasy threatened to become a reality when she realized, through Julian’s idle chatter, that prisoners in the mail-bag factory were indeed watching her as she went about the garden or lay in her deckchair reading. Her first intervention into prison management had therefore been to ask John to have the lower panes of the factory windows whited out with greenhouse paint. She had worried that he might demur or even suggest that she venture into the garden less often if she did not like being watched, but he was courteous discretion itself and had the panes painted by a work party the next afternoon. His only concern was that she had not told him sooner.