The Whole Day Through (19 page)

Even though you often present unusual family set-ups in your novels, and show the power of overwhelming sexual desire, you seem to uphold marriage and commitment too. Do you have a strong conventional side?

Oh heavens, yes. Like a lot of keen gardeners, I suspect that I’m a spiritual Tory, for all that I’ve read the
Guardian
all my life. I come from an immensely rooted and conventional background. My father’s family lived in the house they built for five hundred years and the three generations ending in my grandfather were priests. My father could so nearly have been one too. Both my parents were deeply, privately Christian and had a daunting sense of duty. I rebelled against all this for all of five years in my late teens and early twenties but deep down all I ever wanted to do was move to the country, marry a good upstanding chap and create a garden…

Who is your favourite character in the book?

I’m pretty fond of Ben, actually. I started out worrying he was just going to irritate me by being so hopeless and damaging people by trying to be good. But then precisely that hopelessness of his made me love him. I particularly loved the way his relationship with Bobby developed and the way he’d unwittingly become a way for his brother to discover the pleasure he took in living with another bloke. I suspect at least one of his male nurses is deeply devoted to him and he has no idea…

But I suspect that Laura’s worldview and experience is closest to my own. I’m not an accountant – although I do my own book-keeping and VAT returns – but I do have something of her way of standing back from life and, dare I admit, sometimes forgetting to live it.

The depiction of Professor Jellicoe is strong and complex and far from the usual image of a disabled old lady. Who or what inspired you to write about old age and disability in this way?

I’ve always been impatient with the idea that old age confers sweetness and, thanks to numerous colourful examples in the family when I was growing up, I’ve always been rather in love with old women so I think it was only a matter of time before I placed one so centrally in a novel. In some ways she’s inspired by my mother, who is still alive but maddeningly confined to an old people’s home now because of
osteoporosis. It has been so infuriating seeing her life curtailed through something as basic as not being able to climb stairs or step in and out of a shower unassisted when I can feel her mind still surging away. In a way Harriet Jellicoe is an extreme version of something most adult children of ageing parents experience – that sense of a lively mind trapped in a failing body. In Harriet’s case I wanted to convey the sense that her mind has always been the most important thing, to the point where she’s been prepared to sacrifice everything to it.

Both Ben and Laura look after members of their family in different ways. What is your view on the position of carers in our society today?

Without unpaid carers, Western society would implode within a week. I’m not just thinking of all the adults who care for their parents but of all the children who do so too, often when they’re still at school age, and of all the grandparents without whom so many mothers couldn’t work to support their families. My mother was ill a lot when we were growing up so I had an early education in the unfair way these situations can arise and take over a family. I was adamant, though, that I wanted to show love, not resentment – or not
just
resentment – in Laura and Ben’s caring. It is wonderful to be given the chance to care for a loved one. What’s awful is having that caring taken for granted and given no outside support or relief.

The power of nature is an important theme in this novel. Do you enjoy gardening?

How I love gardening. I can read seed catalogues in bed and give a plain man a second glance if he knows his botanical Latin. It’s one of the few things I resent about having to travel to promote my work at book festivals – knowing how my garden in Cornwall may be neglected in my absence, how the salad seedlings will have no one to protect them. I’m a great one for smuggling home seeds in my socks from faraway lands to see if I can make them grow.

If I weren’t a novelist and couldn’t be a psychotherapist (the job I’d do if I had to stop writing), I can imagine being very happy as a jobbing gardener. Nothing fancy, just mowing lawns and pruning rose bushes. Farmer’s spouse is a pretty wonderful position too, though. We have a herd of beef cattle and I love working with them.

When and where do you write?

I’m a daylight writer and tend to keep the same writing hours as my husband does farming ones. We get up early and, if I’ve a book on the go, I’ll start writing as soon as I’ve walked the dogs. In good weather the dog walk often becomes the writing session as I like writing outside and we have a lot of inspiring corners where I can settle, looking out to sea or hunkered in the long grass. We have very patient dogs…

It is less common now to find a contemporary novel with a character dying from an AIDS-related illness. Did you have any political agenda in depicting Shirley’s death and funeral?

Not really, but I wanted to remind people gently that HIV hasn’t gone away and suddenly become this third-world disease. There are a lot of HIV-positive people passing you on the street every day. Most of them are now able to live with HIV, thanks to amazing advances in drug development, but there are still the less fortunate ones and surging STD figures in the under-twenty-fives illustrate that we can’t afford to be complacent.

I am interested by the fact that it comes across as less significant that Bobby is gay than that he has Down’s Syndrome and a sex life. Why do you think there is a taboo around this issue?

As I have Ben observe in the book, people whose children have Down’s Syndrome are often reluctant to admit that their children are growing up and developing sexualities. I think we’re really queasy about exploring the issues this raises, partly because adults of limited intelligence could so easily fall victim to abusive relationships but also, I suspect, from a deepset reluctance to see them become something other than an object of pity who will make us feel better for pitying them. People with Down’s Syndrome are all too often described as sweet in just the same patronising way the old can be. I had to dig pretty deep in my
research but there are gay and lesbian people out there with Down’s Syndrome, of course there are, and they’re as out and proud as the rest of us.

I love the structure of the book as it moves through the different stages of one day. Why did you use this form?

I hoped to achieve a sense of gentle inevitability, with the progression of a long soft June day from dawn to nightfall. Once the reader realises, ‘Ah, so that’s why it’s called that and that’s the way the story is going,’ I could then surprise them with how much I can pack into that day. And, of course, one way of packing it in is with memories. I’m fascinated by the way memories work and in several of my recent novels, notably
Rough Music
and
Notes from an Exhibition
, I’ve been trying different methods of suggesting the way just thinking about one memory can release another, and even seeing if it’s possible to let that memory-darting dictate the structure of an emerging novel.

I found the book to have a very moving, almost elegiac tone at times – perhaps because there is so much loss in the novel: lost love, lost health and lost opportunity. Did you find it an emotional book to write? Did you enjoy writing it?

I loved writing it. I was startled at how short it ended up being but then I realised that some of my favourite books about relationships are short, so I relaxed and set about polishing and polishing the little
thing I’d made rather than fretting it wasn’t some
magnum opus
. I was terribly upset when I realised how sad it was going to become – not just about love but ageing and death and, well, human fragility – as I hadn’t planned that. I hadn’t really mapped how Ben and Laura’s story was going to end, but I didn’t think it would be quite so tear-jerking! I simply
had
to give Bobby a boyfriend, if only to cheer myself up.

Isle of Wight, 1962

Winchester College; New College, Oxford

After brief periods as a singing waiter, a typist and an encyclopedia ghostwriter, among other jobs, Gale published his first two novels,
Ease
and
The Aerodynamics of Pork
, simultaneously in 1986. He has since written eleven novels, including
Notes from an Exhibition
,
Rough Music
and
A Sweet Obscurity
;
Caesar’s Wife
, a novella; and
Dangerous Pleasures
, a book of short stories.

Cornwall

1.
Persuasion
Jane Austen

2.
Middlemarch
George Eliot

3.
Tales of the City
Armistead Maupin

4.
The Bell
Iris Murdoch

5.
Collected Stories
Mavis Gallant

6.
The Wings of the Dove
Henry James

7.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler

8.
Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel Proust

9.
The Flint Anchor
Sylvia Townsend Warner

10.
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins

11.
Collected Stories
Saki

THIS IS THE
first novel of mine set in Winchester, but anyone who knows my work and knows Winchester will have recognised a thinly veiled version of King Alfred’s ancient capital in my previous novels,
Facing the Tank
,
Tree Surgery for Beginners
and
Friendly Fire
. Although I now live in deepest Cornwall, I’m a Hampshire Hog, born on the Isle of Wight and raised in Winchester. I left for university in 1980 but still think of Winchester as my home town. A short train ride from London Waterloo, Winchester makes for an excellent day out and the following route from the station will let you take in many of the locations drawn on in
The Whole Day Through
while enjoying the historic beauties of the city.

Emerging from the station, turn right, following the footpath along the top of the railway embankment and right again over the dizzyingly high railway bridge. Turn left at the other side and cross the road. You’re now at the foot of Oram’s Arbour, the site of an ancient encampment and where Ben takes the phone call from Chloë and, later, dawdles to watch children playing rounders. His and Bobby’s house is down in Fulflood, across the Arbour to your right. Cross the grass on the diagonal path – you’ll find a splendid view of the city spread out below you as you climb. Face away from the view and continue to the left at the top of the Arbour. Number 5 Clifton Road, the first of
the two houses with very steep gables, was our first house in Winchester, where we lived when I was a choirboy. Walk past the front of the house and down Clifton Road to the junction with Romsey Road. Up the hill to your right lies the hospital where Ben works – worth a detour if you’re a fan of the polychrome buildings of Butterworth – and the prison where Hardy’s Tess was hanged.

If these don’t tempt you, cross the road and continue along the pedestrianised delights of St James Terrace, where our lovers each walk in the book’s final chapters. Across the railway cutting to your left is what was the Royal Green Jackets’ barracks.

At the end of St James Terrace turn left down the hill and almost immediately on your right you’ll see the corner house that was the model for Professor Jellicoe’s naturist hideaway in the novel. As you can see I took tremendous liberties with the truth, but I hope you can see why the original house has always intrigued me. Carry on down St James Lane. You’re now entering the area of the city dominated by my old school, Winchester College. You can see the magnificent bell tower rising out of the oldest part of the College straight ahead of you, but the school has grown so since its original foundation that many of the houses in this part of town are now part of it.

Cross Southgate Street, then continue directly down the hill by Canon Street. At the end of the street turn left then immediately right and continue along College Street, pausing, naturally, to browse in P. & G. Wells the Bookseller. A little way past Wells you’ll find a pink house on your right where Jane Austen breathed her last. Her grave in the nearby cathedral mentions her Christian virtues and ‘the extraordinary endowment of her mind’ but avoids that tainted word
novelist…

A minute’s more walking brings you to the College’s gatehouse and it’s well worth taking one of the guided tours here. If you
have an hour to spare, you can now visit the watermeadows and St Cross by carrying on along College Street, following the old red-brick wall that encloses the warden’s garden. Where the wall turns sharply to the right you’ll have a view to your left of elegant Wolvesey Palace, home of the bishop, and the vast ruins – now enclosing choir school playing fields – of the medieval palace it replaced. A part of the ruins is usually open to the public. Continue along the warden’s wall, turning right and right again, to where the pavement brings you alongside the College’s 1960s concert hall. The way into the College from this side is barred to you but you take a footpath to your left, alongside the river.