Rough Music (42 page)

“What do you mean?” Her voice was tight. “Damn!” She had spilled a great blob of hundreds and thousands on to the cream and crossly stirred them in with a finger.

“Have you had a row?”

“No.” She laughed, turned, licked her finger. “Don’t be daft. Why?”

“Well, you’re not talking to him and his feelings seem to be hurt. Be a little nicer. It’s only for a few days.”

“Did he say something?” she asked. “About them leaving?”

“Not exactly.” Skip came into the room, stole a handful of crisps for her and Julian then hurried out again laughing wildly. “He just said what a wonderful time he’d had and something regretful in his tone made me think—”

“Oh. I see. So he didn’t say when they were leaving?”

“No.”

“Oh.” She smiled brightly. “Don’t look so worried. You’re on holiday again.” She topped up his wine. “Gosh, that meat smells good. Don’t know about you but we’re all famished. Did you bring any post?”

“Not much. I left the bills. There’s a letter from your mother.”

“Oh God.”

“Oh, and a parcel for Julian. It’s not his birthday?”

“You know it isn’t. Where’s it from?”

“Well I don’t know. London postmark.”

“Julian?” she called out. “Pa’s got a parcel for you.”

Julian came running, closely followed by Skip. John was glad to see that at least these two had bonded. He had worried the age difference would be just too wide.

“I’ll get it,” he said and opened his briefcase. “Letters for you,” he said, handing Frances a small handful, “and a small and mystifying package for you, my boy.”

Grinning, Julian took it. “Can I open it now?” he asked.

“Of course,” Frances said. “We all want to know what’s in it.” She gave Skip a hug to show she included her, worried perhaps that she would be jealous.

Julian tore at the packaging.

Bill appeared in the doorway. “Meat’s almost ready,” he said. “What’s all this?”

“Mystery parcel,” Frances told him. “Isn’t it exciting!”

She was making the poor child self-conscious and he was struggling with the thick brown string that held the package closed.

“Here. Let me,” John said and gave the string a slash with his penknife to get it started.

There was a small box, from a jeweler’s in Hatton Garden, and inside, a gold watch, a real gold watch, far too expensive and heavy for a child. Skip gasped. Julian picked it out uncertainly.

“Is this for me?” he asked. “Who’s it from?”

Frances had found a note in the outer packing. “Well it’s come direct from the jeweler’s and it’s definitely addressed to you, not me or Pa.”

“Maybe there’s an inscription,” Bill said.

Julian turned it over in his hands. “It’s really heavy,” he said. He had no idea of the value of the thing. It was just a watch and he had a Timex already. John could see he was trying not to look disappointed. “It says
A token of esteem for my young friend
…” he began.

John started to understand. He took the watch.
“A token of esteem for my young friend for services rendered. HF,”
he read then looked hard at his son.

“I don’t understand,” said Frances.

“I do,” John said. “It’s from Farmer. It’s from bloody Farmer. The nerve of the man!” Anger made his hand shake and he pretended he needed a sip of wine to give it something to do. “It’s from your friend Henry,” he told Julian. “Isn’t it?”

“How should I know?” Julian asked. He made a silly face, a sort of grin which looked even stupider with his black eye and for a second John despised him.

“What services, Julian? What did you do for him?”

“Darling, I really don’t think that—” Frances started but John cut her off.

“Tell me!” he said and grabbed Julian’s wrists. “What services?”

“Ow!” Julian said.

“You told him. Trailing after him in the bloody garden, you
told
him.”

“You swore!”

“He could have killed me,” John said and slapped him.

The blow was hard enough to make the boy stumble back against a chair.

“Beef curtains,” Julian said, beginning to cry. Frances reached out for him but he smacked away her hand, hard enough to whiten the skin through her tan. “Fucking chutney ferret,” he said. “Buggery fuck arsehole.”

John slapped him again. He did not want to hurt him, just to silence him, silence this filth that was like Farmer jeering out at him like a devil in the child’s body. Julian fell over. Frances screamed. Skip giggled nervously.

“Hey, steady!” Bill shouted.

The second slap made things worse. Julian did not cry out but as he got back to his feet he continued to mumble a litany of obscenities, words he could not possibly understand, words he could only have learned from the prisoners. The rest of them just stood and watched and listened as though, John thought, he were not a child at all but the mouthpiece of some brutal oracle. Then he started to make sentences.

“They’ve been like dogs in a car park,” he said. “At it like dogs in a car park. Round and round. Bum to bum. And we’re not meant to look but we do and it’s filthy. Filthy. He squeezes her between his legs on the floor and gives it to her and she loves it. He sticks his thing in her beef curtains.”

Now Frances slapped him. As soon as she did it she cried out, a terrible, wounded, “Oh I’m so sorry!” that could have been meant for any of them but Julian just spat back, “That’s right. Break my cunting face open.” Then he ran.

For a second, as the boy’s slapping steps ran over the veranda, the house felt impossibly small and hot. John looked at his wife and saw a stricken, white-faced stranger, then he pushed past the others and raced across the darkening beach.

Julian was up ahead, already churning out through the waves. John followed and, startled by the mineral chill of the water, realized that he might be about to have to swim and would need to discard his shoes. By the time he had pulled them off and hurled them to the shore, Julian was executing a furious crawl.

“Julian!” he called after him. “Wait. For God’s sake. Bloody hell.” And he threw himself after him.

Water was not his natural element—faced with a beach holiday he would walk while Frances swam—but he had been efficiently taught in the freezing, river-fed pool at his school. He had no practice at swimming in sodden clothes, however, and Julian had anger on his side as well as a head start. It was getting dark so fast he was guided more by sound than sight, following the splashing of reliably inefficient technique. Julian never swam for long unless forced to. He would tire soon and give up. But the tide was pulling out and they were in quite the worst part of the bay for being seized by a rip current and pulled farther out than their feeble strokes alone would carry them.

“Julian, stop!” He tried to yell over the waves. “The tide’s too strong. Julian!” But the child was like a clockwork thing, churning on regardless, his arm strokes regular for all their wildness. It was so cold John had lost all feeling in his lower body so God alone knew what a mere boy in shorts and tee shirt was suffering.

When, after what seemed an eternity, John realized he was in grabbing distance and managed to seize his shirt and then his chest, there was little fight in him. Julian kicked once or twice, from rage or automatic desire to keep swimming John could not say, then went quite limp. It was impossible to fight the tide back into their little cove. Instead, lungs burning from the effort, John swam parallel to the shore past the rocky headland and into the wider, more welcoming space of the main beach. It was only when they flopped on to the sand, thrown by one wave and smacked on the backs by a second, that it occurred to him to check whether Julian was still alive.

The boy was breathing still, but clearly near-catatonic with cold and exhaustion. John held him tight against his chest, thinking to share what little warmth was left him, and lurched up the beach to the steps to the car park. His mind was empty of everything but the need to run a hot bath and get the child in it, closely followed by the desirability of a shot of whiskey. The sound of the motorbike engine therefore came like clamor from a room he had thought empty. Its headlamp swung on to the drive and he had to jump aside as the machine roared up the track. He felt the wind it made on his chilled limbs as it passed.

In the cruelty of the hour, he had quite forgotten Skip. He merely assumed, too weary even to do more than register the fact, that Frances and Bill had left together.
She’s gone
, he thought, staring after the motorbike’s receding lights.
She’s left me.
But he said aloud, “Nearly there, boy. Nearly there. Hot bath and cocoa and bed. Nearly there.”

Julian had been keeping up a regular if exhausted lament since they left the sea, a faintly feral keening, turned to an involuntary sobbing by the pressure on his lungs as John jolted him up and down as he hurried homeward. So it was a moment before he made out a second voice, also sobbing. Skip was standing at the base of the track. In the light from the house he could see the tears that washed her cheeks. “Skip? Skip, we’re OK. He’s OK. What is it?” he asked, stupidly, thinking of nothing else to say.

She had lost all her swagger and was a child again, a little girl, weak and frightened. “He left me behind,” she said. “He’s never coming back.”

“Come,” was all he could say. He wanted to hug her but Julian was already a dead, shivering weight in his arms.

“He took his typewriter,” she wailed. “He took his typewriter instead of me.”

John had been trained by first his sister then his wife always to find at least one thing on which to compliment a woman. “If all else fails,” Frances used to say, “tell her how well she’s looking. Her nerves may be in shreds and hearing that could be her first step to recovery.”

“My God,” he told Sylvia. “What happened to you?”

It was hard to believe that a few weeks could have wrought such alteration. She wore no jewelry. In place of her usual tailored jacket and skirt she had on a navy-blue shift affair which, because he had never seen her in anything so loose, struck him, for one absurd moment, as a nightdress. Her hair, normally so shaped and finished, had somehow become limp, as though wilted in damp heat. Perhaps most disturbing of all were the dark glasses failing to conceal a bruised cheek, and a sticking plaster over one ear lobe, through which blood had seeped and dried.

“Get me another of these first?” she asked.

“Of course.” He fetched her a gin and tonic. That at least had not changed; her quaintly feminine short beside his overbearing pint.

“How was your holiday?” she asked as he sat down.

“Good,” he said. “Then bad.”

“And Frances?”

“Not so good. Sylvia, tell me!”

“I’ve put him into care,” she said swiftly and immediately glanced across at another table of drinkers, facing down fancied disapproval. She gulped at her drink, which visibly relaxed her. “I’ve stopped recycling,” she said, seeing him notice. “Glass, that is. I’m too ashamed. Isn’t that stupid? I stick the bottles in the dustbin.”

“Your face … Did you fall?”

“I’m not drinking
that
much,” she snorted.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean …”

“He hit me. He’d been doing it for a bit. Usually in the bathroom, because it’s worst in there. But you wouldn’t know about that yet.”

“Frances wet the bed the other night.”

“Oh Christ. Me and my big—”

“That’s all right. We managed to see the funny side. She’d been dreaming about the sea. But …” He stopped short of mentioning the ear, not wanting to make her feel awkward about the state of her sticking plaster.

“He’d slap me when I was wiping him clean. That sort of thing. A bit like a toddler only it hurt because he was bigger. At first I used to make a joke of it, even smack him back. But then he started to scare me. I mean, he was always quite a strong man. He used to lift weights. And he’d start doing this thing where he’d grip my wrists suddenly and not let go. Just grip until he started bruising me. ‘What is it?’ I’d ask him. ‘What do you want? Please stop that, you’re hurting me.’ And sometimes he’d stop and even say sorry and sometimes he’d cry. But then these last times it got worse. He punched me, really punched me, so I fell over. And then he …” She touched a hand to the sticking plaster. “My fault for wearing the things,” she said, shortly. “Anyway, I had to see the GP for this, to get it stitched and it all came out. I wouldn’t have gone along with it only I … I was starting to hate him and I was scared of what I might do. He wet himself just after I’d cleaned him up. Just stood there and peed and I was so fucking angry I let him just stay like that for a whole hour. That’s not good. That’s not right. So …”

“Where is he?”

She sighed and began scratching the label off her tonic bottle. “The nursing home I had him down for wouldn’t take him,” she said. “Maybe earlier but not now, not with a record of violence. And after I’d saved all this bloody money to pay fees. He’s in the psychiatric ward.”

“God.”

She shook her head. “Of course he’s quiet as a lamb now because he’s rattling with pills. He can hardly walk he’s so stoned.”