Rough Music (7 page)

The coffee and sandwich started to work and she found she was wide awake. She enjoyed driving. Taught by her father, it was one of the things she knew she did well—unlike cookery or dressmaking. She had even taken her advanced test but had long since abandoned her girlhood fantasies of becoming a racing driver or stuntwoman. Motherhood had made her sharply aware of risk. Where she would once have relished the thrill of speeding in her Triumph Vitesse with the roof down, she now appreciated this great bus of a vehicle, more house than car, for the unathletic virtues of security and bulk.

Her mother disliked her driving such a thing. She said it was unfeminine. But then her mother had long since despaired of Frances blossoming into the feminine paragon she felt she deserved in a daughter. The late, last child of a tribe of six, Frances had felt all the pressures of being an only and overdue daughter in a rowdy nursery. She had tried to answer the needs of either parent but found her father’s easier to satisfy. At once their mascot and arch competitor, she aimed to outshine her brothers in his eyes. She could hit a tin can with the nursery air gun, drive his car, name the principal towns, rivers and mountains of the world and even set a school speed record in the swimming team.

Her only remotely feminine skill was playing the piano. She might have tried to become a professional, had she not come from such a stultifyingly correct background. As it was her gift soon became an awkward accomplishment, since she favored not the
nice
pieces her mother wanted, but dark, brooding Liszt, Brahms and Scriabin.

Fearless on a diving board or lacrosse pitch, she was ambushed by shyness when thrust into parties. She had no facility when clasped by a sweaty-palmed stranger on a dance floor and no small talk to hold his attention once off it. An older sister might have shown her how things were done. Older brothers merely daunted and oppressed her with their easy expectations. As the social torments of adolescence overcame her and she realized too late that paying more heed to her mother’s lessons rather than her swimming practice might have prepared her better for coping with dances and her brothers’ army of friends, the piano became her wordless escape route, a safety valve for her frustration with herself and her surroundings.

John came to her rescue. Her father’s newly appointed deputy, he had two left feet and an endearing way of bypassing all small talk—of which he had even less than she—to plunge directly into conversations of high seriousness about subjects that mattered. She liked him because she perceived from the way her brothers and father teased him, that he was a fellow sufferer. He asked her out to a concert—a very bad and over-long
Messiah
given by an Isle of Wight choral society, offered her a maladroit embrace beneath an oak tree as they were walking home and asked her to marry him ten minutes later. She accepted with all the alacrity of relief but had the sense to make him promise to say nothing to her parents until he had taken her on three more evenings out.

A kind of triumph ensued, a vindication; she was a girl after all. Her mother was satisfied, her father pleased. Her mother made inquiries of
Burke’s Landed Gentry
, her preferred afternoon reading, and it emerged that John came of a stable, old, West Country family, landless and relatively poor now but gratifying to her unquiet snobbery nonetheless. Frances declared herself in love because that was what she assumed herself to be. She was an old woman of eighteen. John was the first and only man to have kissed her. She assumed that he had enjoyed more experience because he was twelve years older and a man. She was mistaken. Theirs was not a whirlwind romance. As virginal as she was and even more inhibited, he labored under the illusion that she would know what to do because she was a girl and her mother would therefore have told her. On their brief honeymoon in Normandy, they kissed and talked of many serious things until their lips were pink and their voices hoarse but it was several weeks later, after a hot-cheeked perusal of a dog-eared book from the library called
Things a Man Should Know
, that their marriage was finally, clumsily consummated. The pain of losing her virginity was such that it was weeks more before a repeat attempt was made.

Months passed before Frances realized that John too had married to escape. His only family was Becky, an academic sister who had moved to California after receiving her literature doctorate up at Rexbridge. Their mother had died when he was a child and since their father’s death in the war when an incendiary bomb caught their house, he had lived in a sequence of all-male environments; university, the army, the prison service. By the time he met her, his private life had dwindled to a wretched set of rented rooms where he read his way through the scant shelves of the local library when not being served prompt breakfasts and suppers by a lugubriously respectful landlady. From the eagerness with which he seized on the chance of marriage and the wider domestic scene and broader social acceptance entailed upon it, she guessed that he had given up hope and begun to fear that his future would consist only of more of the dutiful same. Sure enough, now that he was married, he seemed to win new respect in the eyes of the prison service. Just as priests and army officers required wives for promotion beyond a certain level, so there was an unwritten rule that prison governors, like housemasters, should be family men, as though convicts, like small boys at boarding school, would benefit from the overspill of mother love from a woman installed on the premises, however remotely.

After some months of living in cramped, married officer’s quarters, John was promoted and the new couple moved to the gaunt, turreted Governor’s House at Wandsworth. Frances was gleeful. She had escaped her parents, escaped the provincial restraints of the Island. She had a big house to redecorate and furnish, a drawing room large enough for a grand piano which she could play as loud and as long and as ungirlishly as she pleased.

John encouraged her playing. He had high-minded ideals about the salvation and rehabilitation of the prisoners and had her play to a group of them occasionally on the battered Blüthner upright in the boomy acoustic of the prison chapel. He also began discreetly to make up the shortfalls in the education her mother had so studiously circumscribed. He put books her way and indicated newspaper articles for her to read.

Then their sporadic attempts at a love life paid off and she became pregnant, an event she fancied John welcomed with a certain relief, as though it represented a temporary suspension of duties. It was only once the pregnancy and the early years of motherhood curtailed her culture-hungry movement about London that she realized they had no friends. Forming lasting friendships had never been easy for her with her father’s frequent changes of post but her parents maintained a social bustle of sorts and she had fondly assumed that marriage would do the same for her and John. John would bring in people, she thought. He had been in the army and up to Rexbridge; he would have friends and by now his friends would have wives. But John, it transpired, had been too conscientious a student and soldier to have much time left for socializing and had long since cultivated a monastic self-reliance. Happy enough to go out and meet people, he was just as happy to stay in with his wife, baby and a good book. Her parents came to stay from time to time—chiefly to shop—and just once the elusive Becky visited in a self-dramatizing flurry, but for day-to-day society she had to make do with the prison chaplain and his wife, the local rector and his wife, the headmaster of the local boys’ school and his wife and a succession of stilted evenings with various senior prison officers and their families. They were none of them friends. It was all duty. For the first time in her life, Frances was lonely and mildly bored.

John worked long hours. He insisted on tasting every meal the prisoners ate, which meant being on the other side of the wall early as well as late. He held daily “surgeries” at which he would hear the prisoners’ grievances or punish their misdemeanors. He was the perfect father to them, albeit along distinctly nineteenth-century lines, which meant being a less than present husband. By the time he passed back through the succession of gates between prison and Governor’s House after he had returned to work following a brief supper with her, he was drained of energy and character. She learned to fight down her need to tax him for entertainment, seeing what it cost him to be lively.

When Julian was younger, the boy was her near-constant companion. She played with him, read to him, encouraged him to draw pictures and make things. As he grew older, she took him on excursions around London and further afield. They had recently discovered the delights of watching old films together in the afternoons or snatching guilty matinées in the cinema on Lavender Hill. He would sit miraculously quiet beside her, never fidgeting even though the larger part of the storylines must have been far beyond his comprehension. But once he was enrolled in primary school, term-times presented her with crises of empty days. When he began boarding at choir school that autumn, a prospect she could hardly bear to face still less discuss, she would find herself with empty evenings and weekends too. She threw herself back into practicing properly at her piano, for two hours a day. This, she began to perceive, was dangerous for as her old agility and speed returned so did the old fantasies of professional performance, fantasies that could only feed her restlessness.

This holiday had been her idea. Inspired by an advertisement in the Sunday newspaper, goaded by a particularly maddening combination of glorious weather and no social prospects, she made her demand over supper and was astonished to hear John accept with the sole proviso that they could not travel before the last days of August and she and Julian would have to cope on their own for the second week. She had spent the intervening weeks in a fever of anticipation. A whole fortnight in a house by the sea, a house without guards, prisoners, the unremitting male gaze! A whole fortnight away from Wandsworth’s dull routine! But now that the adventure was upon her she found herself oddly shy at the thought of having John around her day after day, at the novelty of seeing him in something other than a suit. She knew Julian would let them have lie-ins. She hoped. She hoped for many things.

The value of marrying young—she could see this now—was that one had few if any points of comparison with which to gauge the success of one’s marriage. But the problem with marrying young was the same. Married at eighteen, a mother at nineteen, Frances was beginning, at twenty-eight, to mistrust what she had taken for an approximation of perfect happiness. During the summer term just past, as well as taking up the piano with a vengeance, she had been filling her sonless hours by helping out at a church kindergarten three days a week for pin money. Her colleague there, and the first friend she had made in Wandsworth independently of John, was Beverly Thomas. Beverly affected astonishment that Frances had married so young. She was not sure, she claimed, that she wanted to marry at all. She was pretty and had boyfriends she liked to discuss in suggestive detail while supervising the paddling pool or sandpit but she claimed to relish her freedom too much to settle down just yet. She was eased in this by a trust fund as well as the Pill and John had suggested, rather cattily, that Beverly’s boyfriends remained keen precisely because there was little threat of her demanding any formal proposals from them. Bravado or no, Beverly’s accounts of her love life inevitably made Frances examine her own, as did the crude magazines she insisted on passing on to her like so many evangelical tracts for a brash new faith.
Things Every Man Should Know
notwithstanding, Frances had thought she and John were fairly normal. Now she began to realize that something must be wrong.

Lovemaking seemed to be painful, brief and even frightening. Naturally modest, she had never seen him naked or paraded herself naked before him. She was sure he would be deeply shocked if she once suggested he leave off his pajamas. John always turned the lights out first then stole upon her like a silent assassin. It happened about once a week, with no preamble and no discussion afterward. He usually muttered an apology when he was through, which was nice, and kissed her tenderly. Her mother had warned her that men were beasts and this painful sating of themselves, presumably, was what she had meant. It was not so bad once she got used to it, indeed she would probably have missed it if he stopped. Nonverbal communication was honest because beyond cleverness or guile and in nonverbal terms, he plainly needed her, as a hungry boy needed bread.

But now, through Beverly and her wretched magazines, Frances discovered that she was meant to be enjoying lovemaking as much as him. She did not betray her simplicity, for she felt far too stupid, as though she had been caught out in ignorance of the proper use of a knife and fork. She listened, however, imbibed, and did her best to practice what she learned. To no avail. She was coming to accept that she was what the magazines called frigid, one of those benighted females who could not enjoy sex. For the next week, however, she would persevere. At the risk of shocking him, she would encourage him to approach her night after night. For she wanted another child desperately, and not merely to please her mother. (Her brothers had sired a bounty of grandchildren.) Purely, selfishly, she wanted a daughter. In the kindergarten she had caught herself favoring the girls over the boys, caressing this one’s ringlets as she beavered over a toy oven, encouraging that one to sit on her lap for a story. If her need could only be assuaged by answering his, then so be it.

The long journey to Cornwall was mapped out in old market towns. Dorchester, Ilminster, Exeter, Okehampton. Ever cautious and mistrustful of her (actually splendid) map-reading prowess, John always used the AA’s route-charting service. A small sheet of paper duly sent by the organization was now clamped in the ashtray lid. Frances ticked off the still sleeping towns with a pencil as they passed through each. She drove fast, far faster and more surely than John, who had learned to drive on a tank and taken no lessons since. Childishly, she wanted to surprise him with how far they had traveled while he slept. But it was Julian who woke first, mumbling soon after dawn that he needed to spend a penny. Shushing him, she pulled into a field entrance and walked round to release him from the back. As he stood, shivering in his pajamas, to water some cow parsley, at once hunched and self-important, his father’s soft-eyed miniature, she felt her eyes grow heavy. She tucked Julian back into bed, stilling the excitement that threatened to bubble up, so that he might sleep again, then slipped the side door open. John was still sound asleep.