Rough Music (18 page)

“She’s so like Becky,” John said. “It was quite startling when you arrived.”

“Well, Becks was a tad more feminine.”

“You didn’t know her at this age.”

“She was a tomboy?”

“Never that exactly,” John conceded. “But she was formidable.”

“You weren’t close, though?”

“Not by the time you met her. She’d left me behind long before.”

“And at this age?” Bill gestured to where Skip was falling off her surfboard in a valley of foam.

“I worshiped her. I’d have done whatever she told me.” Saying this, John received a pin-sharp recollection of the taste of tears and the brutal finality of his sister’s locked door. He snorted. “An abject slave.”

“You going to have more?” Bill indicated Julian. John was taken aback at the baldness of the question.

“Possibly,” he said, opting for bravado. Then heard himself add, “It’s not easy.”

Aware, perhaps, that the boy was listening, Bill rose and hunkered down beside Julian’s castle. “How’s it coming, buddy?”

“All right,” Julian said, mortified at an adult entering into so childish a pastime.

“Maybe you can come for a ride on the bike later on.”

“Yes please!” Instant enthusiasm. John thought of cricket and felt a twinge of envy.

“Well, I’m not sure …” he began.

“Aw, come on,” Bill overrode him. “We wouldn’t go far. It’d be fun for him. Eh, Julie? You ready for water in that moat yet?”

“It won’t stay in. The sand’s too fine,” Julian said and continued arranging a neat border of mussel shells. Bill stood.

“Well try lining it with seaweed. I’ll go fill the jug.” He snatched the beer jug and headed over to the water’s edge.

Watching him go, watching him pause to call out to the girls in the surf, John felt angry phrases surge up in his throat like bile. But there was nothing he could say without appearing a middle-aged killjoy. He pictured skidding tires, childish flesh flayed by hot tarmac. As if illustrating his thoughts, a motorbike engine gunned somewhere in the car park above.

“Julian?” Julian looked up. “How’s the eye?”

“Bit sore. It’s OK, though. I quite like it. I’m going to use crayons to sketch the colors in my diary as the bruise comes out. Do you think I could bring Lady Percy on to the beach and put her in the sand castle garden?”

“What if she got lost?”

“But she wouldn’t.”

“But she digs, doesn’t she? Imagine if she dug herself down in the sand and you couldn’t find her. She could suffocate.”

Why do we do this?
he wondered.
Why are we so ready to fill their heads with fears?

“Gerbils dig, not guinea pigs,” Julian said. “Not much, I don’t think.”

“All the same.”

Bill was returning, the cut glass jug slopping seawater. Behind him, Frances thrashed out through the waves, surfboard under arm, tugging off her bathing cap as she came.

“There’s another motorbike,” Julian said. “Coming down to Beachcomber.”

John turned and saw a post office bike gingerly maneuvering a passage down the stony slope to the bungalow. “Hell’s teeth!” he said.

He intercepted the telegram boy, who was indeed looking for him, and identified himself. It was from his deputy, Mervyn McMaster, demanding he call the office p.d.q. He tipped the boy, fetched change from his trousers and climbed the drive. The call box in the car park was stiflingly hot. Where city ones invariably stank of a mixture of urine and ear wax, this smelled of sugar and seaweed. Every surface felt sticky, from ice-creamy fingers, perhaps, or dried brine. Mervyn told him nothing at first.

“Give me your number and I’ll call you back,” he said.

Sweat beaded on John’s lip and ran down his temples as he waited for the telephone to ring. A couple came to wait outside. They stared and he felt absurd for calling one of Her Majesty’s prisons in swimming trunks and faintly criminal for using a call box for a long-distance call without spending cash. At the muffled ring, he answered with something like relief and turned his back on the couple. Mervyn wasted no time on courtesies.

“Farmer’s gone,” he said. “It was an outside job during exercise this morning. They used a ladder from a lorry. Dobey was overpowered with a garden spade. All over in minutes. Then all hell broke loose. I mean, Farmer, for God’s sake! He didn’t have long to go anyway. Sorry, John. You’d better come back. It’ll be in the evening editions and the men knowing you’re not here doesn’t help much.”

John was changing when Frances found him. There was no point packing. He had only holiday clothes here and a weekend suit. Nothing he would need. “But why?” she asked. “What can you do? The police will catch him.”

“I have to be there. The men are upset. There’s been trouble. Not a riot exactly but … I have to be there. Sorry. Can you drive me to Bodmin Road?”

“Of course. We can pick up their luggage while we’re there. Oh, darling. We’d been looking forward to this for such ages. Can you come back?”

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Come on, then. We’d better hurry.”

She was still in her bathing costume.

“You’re not driving like that?” he asked, only he was telling her.

Impatiently she pulled a blouse and skirt on top and stepped into her white, wooden-soled sandals. While John was turning the Volkswagen around, she hurried on to the beach to explain to Bill what was going on and to ask him to mind Julian for her. Only she came back with all three of them.

John checked his impatience as people raced around locking doors and stacking away lunch things. After all, he might have hours to wait for a train. He had forgotten his Tolstoy. He wondered for a moment whether he could risk losing face and further time fetching it then decided he should read some newspapers instead, to help him wind back up from this lazy, holiday mode. Then everyone piled in at last and they were off. John drove. Frances was faster, he knew, but he needed to exert a measure of control. Bill apologized for holding things up but implied there might be money to pay for his luggage. Skip sulked. She had not wanted to leave the beach.

The road between Polcamel and Bodmin might have been hosting a rally for slow-moving caravans and tractors towing trailers of straw. Frances suggested a shortcut, which led to roadworks and a further delay.

“Why did Henry escape?” Julian asked as they waited for an impassive workman to show a
Go
sign.

John glanced at Frances.

“He’d have found out sooner or later,” she explained, adding less forcefully, “it just came out.”

“He won’t be on the run for long,” John told Julian. “They never are.”

“Will he be punished?”

“Of course. His sentence will be extended. There may be a charge brought against him for assaulting an officer, though I don’t know the details of that yet. He certainly won’t be working in the rose beds for a while.” He rarely discussed the prison with his son. It felt strange.

Frances waxed conversational, perhaps out of nerves. “The escapee was a pal of Julian’s,” she explained to Bill. “
Such
an old character. Raped a postmistress.”

“He wasn’t a pal,” Julian exclaimed hotly. “I hardly know him. And he smells funny. They all do. They stink.”

“Don’t show off,” Frances told him mildly. “It’s all right to have been his friend. Pa’s explained to you before about debts to society. But he’s done wrong again and he’ll have to be punished. You can make friends with someone else. Maybe you can write him a note when he gets back.”

“He most certainly can’t!” John snapped. “Now could we please change the subject? I’m going to be hearing about nothing else for the next week.”

“Yeah. You poor bastard,” Bill said. “Oh. Sorry.”

“Bill said a rude word,” Julian crowed.

“It’s a character in
King John
,” Bill told him. “By Shakespeare. Gets all the best speeches.”

“Look, children,” Frances called out. “There’s Bodmin jail!”

“Why can’t you live here?” Skip asked. “Then you’d be near the beach.”

“Closed down long ago,” John told her. “More’s the pity. Something tells me we’re going to need more prisons, not fewer.”

The children were left firmly in the car while Bill went in search of his luggage, which apparently included his precious typewriter so he was planning on working. John bought his ticket and newspapers and snatched the quiet moment with Frances they had been deprived of by acquiring passengers. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Leaving you so soon. And with all this.”

“I’m sorry I snapped,” she said, and fastened a button on his shirt which had worked loose. “It’s not your fault after all. Bloody bastard Farmer.”

“Frances!”

“Well he is. Spoiling our holiday. Most inconsiderate.”

“While Bill’s here, you won’t …” he began.

“What?”

“You won’t let him take Julian on his motorbike, will you? He’s got some damned fool idea of a jaunt and even if they stay off the road, that track’s lethal. It’s illegal anyway. I’m sure it is.”

“Of course I won’t.”

“Promise?”

She frowned. He too was unsure why this was suddenly so important to him. Perhaps he was still a little drunk from lunch. He wanted to kiss her. Properly. With hands. Right here.

“I promise,” she said. “And I’ll make sure he writes his diary and does one culturally enriching activity per day. At least. There’s that music festival. Maybe we can all go to a concert.”

“You think that’s Bill’s thing?”

“Probably not. But he’s a guest so he’ll do as he’s told. Is this your train?”

It was only a clumsy, fumbled, off-to-work sort of kiss. He remembered too late that he had forgotten to say goodbye to Julian or the others. As the train snaked out along the wooded valley, he tugged down the window and leaned out. He saw the Volkswagen pulling out of the car park and waved furiously in case the children were looking but its steeply angled windows were catching the afternoon sun so he could not see if they were waving back or had failed to notice him.

He found an empty compartment, began to read a paper and fell heavily asleep as the lunchtime beer triumphed at last. He woke briefly at Liskeard and Plymouth then woke in earnest at Newton Abbot where the rails followed a long stretch beside the sea and dived in and out of crimson South Devon cliffs. Reading his clutch of newspapers from cover to cover, downing a pork pie, a Bar Six and a cup of stewed tea from the buffet car, he felt a lessening of pressure. Whatever the trials of his working life, there remained a masculine predictability to it, a quality of the known beside which family life was fraught with ambiguities and scrambled attempts at communication.

On one level John judged the holiday a success. The weather was glorious and the house charming. Frances was swimming every day and resting and enjoying having twenty-four-hour access to Will again. When they first came down the drive, despite the new tarmac and the drastic metamorphosis of the grand landlady’s manor to a golf club, he had recognized the house and setting with a horrible shock, bad memories reaching out at him like so many pungent smells. But Frances appeared to remember little, certainly none of the bad things, and the house had been so altered as to conspire in her merciful amnesia.

If the holiday was a disappointment for him, it was so only because he had unwittingly subscribed to the false hope that the sunny break would beget change and renewal. Instead, naturally, it shed bolder light on unchanging problems. She was as ill here as she was at home, just as his joints ached as much, he still had to pee twice a night and he slept every bit as fitfully. Frances slept like a baby, curled rather heavily against him and not even waking when cramp forced him to kick a leg out from under the covers or to jump from the bed to pace about.

When the second day began with him taking a second long walk alone, he realized he had been cherishing naïve dreams of her reaching out to him in daylight as she did in sleep. But they were a long-retired pair, not some hardworking young couple eager to rediscover each other. In retirement, he perceived, they had carefully carved out a simulacrum of the parallel lives their marriage had presented during his life as a governor. They did not, like vivacious grayheads in advertisements, celebrate joint old age with cruises and birdwatching and shared hobbies, but continued to respect one another’s privacy to the point of leading nearly separate lives under one roof. Only the garden united them, and grandchildren.

He longed for Sandy’s arrival with the boys. Their way of eliding
grannyandgrandpa
gently pressed a coupledom on to him and Frances he had scarcely felt since the first years of marriage. Hugo and Oscar reminded them to be husband and wife rather than mere considerate companions, or to play, at least, the sentimental, Ribena-mixing, toffeeoffering roles expected of them.

Meanwhile it was not entirely without relief that he accepted the opportunities Will created for him with such clamorous tact to go off and explore on his own. It was not, as Will thought, to escape Frances, however, and the constant, depressing responsibility she presented, but to escape from Will. He found himself unexpectedly shy of his son. The formalized stages of a birthday supper or Sunday lunch—arrival, drinks, meal, exchange of news, walk around garden, small piece of symbolic home improvement involving one of Will’s power tools, departure—could hardly be practiced over a fortnight’s holiday. Had his son been married or had a boyfriend or whatever, the problem would not have arisen since there would have been other people filling the conversational void and the well-established pavane for cohabiting couples to be paced through. As it was, the desire to ask unaskable questions was almost intolerable. The sense of what they were not discussing, of who Will might otherwise have asked on holiday, was a constant irritant beneath the idle chit-chat and self-indulgent small excursions to galleries, gardens and restaurants. Time was, John thought, when someone could be introduced as a maiden lady or confirmed bachelor and the mind accepted it without this restless searching after other, juicier explanations. It was not that earlier times were more innocent, but that they were more respectful of privacy, even to the restraining of thoughts. Now where lenses and biographers pried, one’s curiosity felt compelled to follow.