The Facts of Life (44 page)

Jamie traced with a finger the outline of a tendon in Sam’s neck to a small, semi-circular scar below his left ear.

‘How d’you get this?’ he asked.

Sam met his gaze.

‘Fight,’ he said simply. ‘They had a broken glass.’

‘You’re lucky it wasn’t worse.’

‘It was bad enough.’

Jamie leaned over to brush his lips on the piece of puckered skin but Sam pushed him gently away. Then, as if to soften the discomfort he had caused, he asked, ‘Well how d’you get that, then?’ pointing, in turn, to the thin red scar some four inches long on Jamie’s right calf.

‘Skiing accident,’ Jamie told him with a trace of pride. ‘Eight years ago. In Germany. I swerved to avoid some idiot who was messing around, showing off to his children, and I left the run and hit some rocks. I came around just long enough to see the bone sticking out of my skin. Then I passed out again.’

He grinned, but Sam winced. Jamie reached to smooth his brow, brushing away this sympathetic memory of pain. Gently Sam took away his hand, kissing it briefly as he did so. Once again, he fell to examining Jamie.

‘Tell me things,’ Jamie said at last, growing restless, however flattered, at being treated like a work of not entirely accredited art.

‘What like?’ Sam gave a faint snort of derision.

‘About your family.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

Sam shrugged.

‘Boring,’ he said. ‘They don’t matter anyway.’

‘How about Plymouth? Do you miss it?’

‘Sometimes. I never go back though.’

A cloud passed across his expression warning Jamie not to pursue the matter.

‘Your turn,’ Sam said.

‘Ali’s told you everything.’

‘She’s told me fuck all. I don’t pry. Unlike some.’

‘Well, I left home when I was little, in a way, because I went to boarding school. I wanted to be a singer. I was quite good, and kept it up until I was about sixteen. Used to live in a commune, but it all fell to pieces when we were teenagers and my mother married a jerk. Well, he’s not so bad but he’s wrong for her.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘I just know. She should have married a painter or a potter, but she chose an accountant. So I don’t see much of her. Ali’s all the family I care about really. And my grandfather. The composer.’

‘I’d like to meet him.’

Jamie frowned, then stroked Sam’s arm-hairs thoughtfully.

‘You’ll have to go gently with me,’ he warned. ‘I’m not very good at this.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘I just … I can tell. I’m … I suppose I’m too used to being on my own. I’m very … private. Anyway, you’re not exactly a nest-maker.’

‘Just because I pulled up my roots,’ Sam teased him, ‘doesn’t mean I’m not looking to put them down again somewhere.’

‘Oh God,’ Jamie groaned. ‘Kiss me.’ Sam thrust a quick, slovenly kiss onto his lips. ‘Properly,’ Jamie told him.

Sam kissed him again, lingering. They rolled together, dragging stubbled jaw across stubbled jaw, groping with weary, restless hands. Jamie felt his dick swell again as he grasped Sam’s leg between his thighs and rubbed himself slowly against his bony flank. Sleepily he pushed Sam’s arm up across the pillow so that he could slide his nose into its hot, furred cavity. He breathed in deeply, then turned his face to Sam’s, who bent down to meet him, lower lip loose, expectant. They kissed, chewed, kissed again then Sam pulled away, crouching over Jamie, and began to trace a hungry trail down the side of his tensed neck, across collarbones and down his torso towards his straining cock. Jamie was shocked that movements so timeworn could feel so new.

‘Just …’ he began, chuckling. ‘Just …’

‘What?’ Sam looked up, eyes bright, a trail of spittle falling from his chin.

‘Just don’t go expecting me to have your babies right away, okay?’

Alison was sitting in a deck chair in The Roundel’s garden, rereading a young author’s first novel. She had bought it because it was funny and clever and beguilingly out of love with youth, but it needed work and would probably never repay in sales the labour she was putting into helping the woman tidy it. She smiled to herself at a passage then frowned and drove a pencil line through the sentence where the author had tried to stretch a joke out too far. This was the work she enjoyed most, not the endless meetings, not the intimate, therapeutic telephone calls from household names –
My husband’s left me. My cat’s sick. My computer’s gone down
– nor the launch parties which, after all, were work and not parties at all. What she enjoyed was helping to bring a new novel to its best bloom, dissecting its filaments, tentatively suggesting subtle rearrangements, then quietly stepping back to let the author take all the praise, and sometimes blame, for what she had done. She was not a writer, had no desire to be, but she knew that her delight in the total transformation that could be made to a paragraph by a simple excision or realignment bore more than a touch of a true artist’s pride. When she had been interviewed by a magazine as part of a last ditch campaign to find a way of devoting some column inches to an esteemed but notoriously unpublicisable authoress, she had compared her own work to that of a gardener whose judicious pruning and training showed the work of God the Mother off to best advantage. Invariably, as writers grew more successful, most became less and less willing to have their work properly edited, only to round on her in indignation when reviewers gleefully singled out an increasingly baggy style or sloppiness of grammar.

A breeze ruffled the papers in her lap. A cloud slid off the sun. She flexed her bare feet in the wet grass and lay back in her chair to enjoy the renewed warmth on her face and the dewy, early morning scents carried on the air. She had always loved The Roundel, but had come to appreciate it far more since moving to London and gathering points of comparison after a parochial youth. Miriam had seemed eager to dissociate herself entirely from the place once she had married.

‘Too many memories, Angel,’ she explained. ‘And the damp is dreadful for poor Frank’s back.’

Alison had insisted Jamie enjoy an equal share in the old house, urging him to come down at weekends, bring friends, throw parties. He did few of these, however, and a part of his sister’s refreshed pleasure in the quirky building was proprietorial, based on her deeply cherished knowledge that, legally, the place was now hers until such time as her claim should be supplanted by her marriage or production of a female heir. She had quietly taken financial responsibility – paying council tax, fuel bills, having loose tiles replaced – and it was with considerable satisfaction that she whitewashed out the inept and gaudy murals that the Beards had perpetrated in the bathrooms. She had thrown out her mother’s legacy of swivelling leatherette chairs, macramé pot-holders, orange lampshades and grungy sagbags – keeping just one of the latter for use by visiting dogs – and replaced it with the clutch of post-war Utility furniture with which her great grandparents had sparsely furnished the place. It was all stained by floodwater and her grandfather had long since relegated it to a store room in the cellar, blind to its enchantment in the minds of those too young to remember rationing or air raids.

Alison had raced around a supermarket then driven up late on Friday as she often did, preferring to go to bed exhausted and wake to a clear weekend in the fens, rather than spend half of Saturday queuing in traffic just to reach the motorway. The lights were already off in her grandfather’s studio when she swung her car up the drive so she went to bed without greeting him. One of the charms of having him live on the doorstep was the ease with which he could be prevailed upon to slip in and turn on the boiler for her, so it was rare that she arrived to a house that was truly cold, for all Miriam’s aspersions about damp. He was up now, though. He had been up long before her, as usual. Lying in a delicious weekend doze, too awake to dream again, too sleepy yet to move, she had pressed her cheek deep into her pile of lumpy old pillows and listened to the familiar, welcoming sounds of his piano-playing coming from the studio across the garden. This was always the time when she bizarrely found herself envying him his solitary, industrious life – bizarrely, because she knew the terrible cost at which that solitude and industry had been purchased.

She had tried to persuade Jamie to come down too and bring Sam with him, but he was still umming and erring about introducing Sam to their grandfather. She pointed out that nothing need be said about their relationship, that Sam could simply be introduced as a mutual friend, but Jamie was evasive and she knew better than to push it.

Love had crept up on them and taken them captive while they were too busy enjoying one another to notice its approach. She noticed however, unlove – as she liked to think of her single state – lending her the acuity of vision that pleasure had snatched from them. She could tell it was love and not infatuation. She had tasted infatuation’s fizzy, egomaniacal savour often enough, knew it was marked by an excess of talk, the brain using verbal gush to paper over the cracks left by romance’s shortcomings. Jamie and Sam never gushed, even by their repressed standards. Often they did not even talk. Jamie would meet her for their lunches as usual, and it was all she could do to get him to mention Sam by name. When he did, usually at her curious prompting, he became halting, inarticulate and would end by changing the subject with a shrug. The shrug, a gesture he had caught off Sam, was usually betrayed by a beatific smile.

Sam remained her lodger in name at least although, ironically, now that he spent fewer and fewer nights under her roof, he insisted on paying her proper rent. Guilt money, perhaps. He had left his hostel bedsit for good. Her spare room, in which he usually left no trace, began to bear signs of his continued tenancy. For Sam, monastic Sam of all people, began to
acquire
things – pieces of pottery, stones, bottles, a new shirt, a pair of soft suede boots – things stumbled on during his weekends with Jamie. Alison rarely saw them together. Jamie insisted on seeing her at lunchtime, so as to ‘have her to himself, and Sam resisted her ever so slightly mocking suggestion that he might care to ‘bring a friend back’ to their sporadic, midweek suppers-in together.

On a few occasions, she had been insistent, and found herself going to a concert or a film with the two of them. Their combined good looks, their radiating sexiness, were as powerful about her as a sweet, head-turning perfume, and she enjoyed a certain reflected glamour in their company. She realised, however, that she still found it a bit overwhelming to see the happy pair together. Sam was becoming more desirable rather than less since he had passed so entirely out of reach. Any sensitivity he might have felt for her physical presence was eclipsed utterly now that he was fixed in a sentimental orbit around her brother. After too long in their company, she was left an envious, darkened star. They clearly had to make a painful effort not to lapse into mutual face-gazing, and she saw no reason wilfully to bring such suffering on herself. She preferred to infer the absent one’s influence when alone with either, noting Sam’s subtly improved, though no less brutal, haircut, or Jamie’s suddenly ceasing to wear the cologne she had once given him. Despite the pain it caused her, such was her ability to live vicariously that she was able at times to register an intense pleasure at her brother’s pairing-off. Wilfully unromantic though she strove to keep her outlook, she liked to feel she might one day have the option of romance laid before her. With so terminal a bachelor as he happily betrothed, the odds of such a thing occurring to her had surely improved.

During their lunches together, Jamie said nothing about Sam’s past. Either he knew and was keeping it secret from her or he had not guessed. Or, indeed, her fearful suspicions were groundless and his criminal record consisted of nothing more sinister than a speeding ticket. After wrestling with her conscience on seeing how happy Jamie was, she decided to say nothing. If Sam
had
done time, he was making a spectacular new start, if not, speaking out would only make a fool of herself and an enemy of both of them.

She looked towards the studio, suddenly aware that the piano had stopped playing. Then she frowned, angry that thoughts of her brother’s love-life should so distract her from her manuscript. Her grandfather was either rewriting what he had written or, as she suspected, had spotted her outside and had broken off to brew coffee. He persisted in a fantasy that his grandchildren’s generation’s ills all stemmed from neglecting to breakfast. It pleased her to sustain his delusion while she was down there, she who fuelled her office mornings with so many doughnuts, biscuits and cups of stewed coffee that some days she actually
needed
wine at lunchtime to slow herself down.

‘You none of you eat breakfast any more,’ he would exclaim. ‘Cigarettes. A cup of tea.
This
is not breakfast. Forgive me if I sound like my mother but if you eat no breakfast, how can you get anything
done
in the mornings? Tea and cigarettes – ha! You, will amount to nothing and probably die young.’

Sure enough, the studio door opened and he appeared in weekend clothes – baggy, threadbare cords and an equally ancient polo shirt – bearing a coffee jug, mugs and a sheaf of virgin newspapers. She made as if to rise but he flapped her back down with a brusque gesture at her manuscript.

‘Work,’ he said, and kissed the top of her head in welcome.