Rough Music (31 page)

“Why did you pretend to be straight?”

“Did I?” Roly opened the back doors of his old van and started nestling sculptures on a heap of blankets in there.

“Well, you let me believe it.”

“You assumed it. I only let you think I’d been married.”

“And you had.”

“In a way, yes.”

“But why?” Will pursued. “I feel so stupid.”

“I didn’t think I’d see you again, so what was the point? I won’t see you again. You’re only here for another week.”

“Who says? I might decide to stay.”

“The house is let all month,” Roly said, not missing a beat to consider what he had just heard. “What makes this place so attractive suddenly?”

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

“You make it sound as though that makes a change.”

“It does. I mean the kind of thinking I’ve been doing does. Roly, I think I love you.”

Roly merely looked at him then looked away and carried on loading sculptures into the back of his van. “That’s very sweet, William. Sweet William. You must get that joke all the time.”

“I don’t, actually. Everyone calls me Will.”

“Oh. Well that’s very sweet of you but you have a life elsewhere, with your shop and your café and your family and friends and I have a life. A precarious life. And an even more precarious kind of … I was going to say happiness. Christ! What I mean is—”

“It’s okay,” Will butted in, catching Roly’s upper arm to stop his restless pacing to and fro. “I wasn’t proposing marriage. I’m not a complete fool. I know these things can’t be rushed. I was just … I just felt good about how I was feeling and wanted to let you know.”

“Oh. Well, good.” He looked down at Will’s restraining hand, took it in both of his, seemed to read its palm a moment then pressed it to his lips. He raised an eyebrow. “Shall we go to bed straight away or would you really like to see Fowey?”

“Would you be very hurt if … I’d love to go out, for once.”

“For
once
?”

“I mean,” Will hastily covered his tracks, “people are always so keen to leap into bed and it would be really good just to spend time with you, watching what you do. You know?”

“I know.”

“And then maybe …”

“Hmm?”

“Maybe later.”

They kissed against the side of the van. In his excitement, Will had quite forgotten where they were standing. If his mother had taken her usual cool seat at Blue House’s rear, she would be enjoying quite an eyeful.

“Tell me about Seth,” he said.

Roly broke away. “We should go if we’re going.” He opened the passenger door and carried on talking as he walked around to the driver’s side. “He was a violinist. One of the many prodigies who don’t make it. Or not as big as he’d hoped. He taught and he played in a string quartet that now has a new first violin.”

“But you were happy together.”

“Oh, as happy as two difficult, creative people can ever be. First he was disappointed. Then he was ill. And that became what he did. And gay politics for a bit. Now, do you mind if we don’t talk about him any more?”

“Sure.”

“I mean, not for a while.” He gave one of his snatched, nervous smiles and clicked the ignition key, waiting for the diesel light to go off. “Still a bit raw.”

“I shouldn’t have asked.”

“You’re not to be polite. It’s one of the things I hate. Which reminds me …” He fumbled in the welter of old toffee papers, parking tickets, seashells and nails and found something. “Fay!” he yelled. Fay startled Will by leaping in at his open window, crashing across his lap and taking up, as to the manner born, an alert sitting position between them. She was still chewing some rabbit organ. “Her breath stinks, I warn you,” Roly said. “I tried chicken toothpaste but it felt sort of demeaning. For both of us. Here. While I remember.”

He reached across and Will thought he was going to run a hand through his hair but instead he only tapped a finger to the middle of Will’s forehead as if to admonish wrong thinking. Then he started the engine and, smiling to himself, lurched them off up a track along the valley, skirting the golf course and the old manor that was now its clubhouse.

“That’s where my cousins used to live,” he muttered. “Smug bastards.”

A minute or two had passed before Will caught sight of himself in the wing mirror and spotted the small, yellow star on his brow.

The sun was so warm Frances felt she was melting, drop by waxy drop, into the sand. Skip was helping Julian build a castle from pebbles. They were being supremely methodical, sorting stones by size and color so they could start with the largest and build up to the small ones while executing patterns in the masonry. The challenge, inspired by the day’s lesson in church, which she had demanded, to Bill’s amusement, they all attend, was to build a house on sand that could withstand the tide and thereby the ordinances of God.

Julian was as brown as his cousin now, his hair stiff with salt and his legs streaked with mud and sand. He looked good enough to eat, especially the back of his neck and the vulnerable backs of his knees. “Little savage,” she murmured when he caught her eye and smiled again at that day’s Psalm line,
Neither delighteth he in any man’s legs.
Across the beach she could hear the insistent clacking of Bill’s typewriter where he worked at the veranda table.

She had been deeply touched to wake from desolate dreams to find Skip in the bed beside her. Sleep rumpled, the girl was warmly childish and confiding, offering her trust in a way that penetrated Frances’s guard. Perhaps John had been right and her surliness was simply muffled sorrow. She certainly responded to attention and, once Frances set her talking, fairly bubbled over. It was mainly questions about
girl stuff
, as Bill would term it. The poor thing was fearful about having her first period. Half the reason she favored loose-fitting dungarees was her terror that it would start without warning and show through her clothes. She wanted to discuss the various merits of Tampax and Dr. White’s towels, which Frances assured her were more suitable for a young girl. She was also terribly worried about breasts. Would they hurt? How could you tell when they’d stopped growing? How did you measure them? How many bras did you need?

Frances did her best to comfort and advise and was surprised to find that talking like this made her feel her age as giving birth or getting married had never done. Skip let her brush her hair, which was really a very pretty color if only she would let it grow again, then trim and file her nails, which scrabbling on the rocks had battered, and give them a coat of clear nail varnish to protect them. In the hours since, Skip had assumed her defiant, faintly bossy manner and given no sign to betray what had passed between them but now that Frances knew the manner for what it was, it touched rather than offended her. She was startled to realize how much of what she took for her own attitudes had in fact been formed by John. This must have been the case, since now that he was not here to keep tabs on her reactions, she felt less and less obliged to voice a high-minded indignation.

She was about to turn on to her belly to roast the other side while she read some more of the John Updike book she had borrowed off Bill, when she heard motorbikes and twisted her neck to see three of them being ridden along the beach. They were monstrous things of black and chrome and as they drew nearer, causing people to jump indignantly out of the way, snatching back towels, children, dogs, she saw the riders, long-haired, unshaven, leather-jacketed, sunglasses lending their faces impassivity. The children had stopped their building work to stare.

“You have Hell’s Angels here?” Skip asked.

“Of course.” Julian was defending the honor of the country, apparently. “We have everything.”

But his show of nonchalance crumbled as the bikers drew nearer, passed only feet away from where he was watching and headed up the cove toward Beachcomber. There was a girl on the back of one bike, long hair blowing in the wind, bare feet shockingly dirty. When they stopped below the veranda, she jumped off and called out something to Bill who, to Frances’s amazement, came out to greet her. He shook hands with the girl and reached into his pocket for some money, which he gave her in exchange for something she unbuttoned from a little pouch around her neck. He sniffed it before handing over the money. They continued to stand there a few moments, apparently just passing the time of day, then hands were raised in laconic greeting, engines revved unnecessarily loud, the girl jumped back on behind the same man, the biggest of the three, with the thickest beard, and the bikes swung away from the bungalow. Rather than take the track, they returned the way they had come, cutting a swath through the sunbathers once more. The bike with the girl on showily struck out into the surf to raise a spray.

“Does your father
know
them?” Julian asked aghast.

“Sure,” Skip said, blasé in her turn. “He knows lots of people.”

The children returned to their building and Frances rolled on to her front and tried to return to her novel but something like indignation was welling up and stopping her. She ran her eyes over the same paragraph repeatedly but the words acquired no meaning because her mind was too occupied with him reaching for money, the girl’s billowing hair and filthy bare feet and the casual way he had accepted her ostentatious arrival.

Behind her his typewriter began to clatter again. More romantic, moneymaking lies about his marriage. Her neck grew stiff from holding her head sufficiently far above the book to focus. She flopped over on to her side instead but could not rest her head on her elbow without crushing her sunglasses against her temple. So she rolled back on to her spine and raised the book on weary arms, shielding her face from the broiling sun even as she tried to read. The book grew impossibly heavy however and sweat mixed with sun lotion kept trickling into her eyes and stinging them.

To the insistent chatter of the typewriter she walked down a corridor. She knew that her baby, her new daughter, was behind one of the doors but found only useless things, dried roses, a mound of sand, a great pool of suntan oil, a circle of prisoners playing Totopoly. The last door took her to a snugly furnished room with a view of a river. A man was lying on a sofa looking at the ceiling but talking to her, talking and talking, all about himself.

“Julian grown up,” she said aloud but somebody shushed her so she strained to make out what he was so relentlessly telling her. She could not make out his words however, any more than she could bring his big adult face into focus.

She awoke to music. Bill was standing, shading her from the sun. He had her radio in his hand. It was tuned to a pop channel. “Listen,” he said and smirked.

“Ssh,” she said. She despised people who played radios in public places, even had they played real music, which they never seemed to. He stared at her and turned the volume up.

“It’s your song,” he said.

“What is it?” she asked, cross and sleep-soured, sitting up.

“Aretha Franklin. Listen.”

“I hate this sort of music.”

“Listen.”

It was a big, harsh voice. She could tell the singer was black. No white woman dared voice that sort of abandon. There was no melody as such, only rhythm and a sense of a repetitive framework over which the singer could wind herself up.
Oh when me and that man get to lovin’
, she sang. It was mortifying, like someone undressing in the middle of a church. It sounded so real, not faked at all. No one could conjure up this sort of frankness to order. The song must come out differently every time. Watching her, he grinned. He tapped a foot, actually swayed his hips a little as he continued to hold out the radio between them like a kind of offering. He nodded his head, as if at the truth of the singer’s words.

“Ssh,” she hissed. “Turn it down!”

People were staring. Julian was staring. Bill carried on playing it regardless. At last she could stand it no longer. She jumped up, snatched the radio and turned it off.

“What?” he said.

“That’s not music,” she told him. “That’s just noise.”

“Of course it’s music!” He laughed.

“I’d find you real music only the powers that be have made the signal too weak to reach us down here.”

“You mean spineless stuff. Polite string quartets.”

“They’re not polite. Not all of them.”

“What are you so
scared
of, Frances?”

“I’m not scared.” She sat down again, brushed some sand off the radio’s blue housing with a clean corner of her towel. It was a good one. It had been a wedding present. “I just don’t think everyone else should have to listen to what you want to play. It’s inconsiderate.”

“No,” he said, crouching before her. “That’s just an excuse. You’re scared.”

“You think I’m a prude, don’t you?” she said. “You think I’m some kind of dried-up, middle-class, inhibited bitch of a prude who can’t let go and so has to hide behind her respectable good behavior to protect herself from the things she daren’t surrender to.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You implied it. You said that trashy
thing
was my song. You think you can understand me and save me from myself.”