The Facts of Life (76 page)

One of the first and best American novels to come out of the gay community’s AIDS crisis.

The Magician’s Assistant

Ann Patchett

When her gay best friend-cum-magician-employer and his adorable lover die, Sabine is left with no job, a spookily well-trained rabbit and a lot of questions about the past he always kept secret from her. The tough answers lie in a journey to Nebraska, unexpected love and a lot of snow …

Was

Geoff Ryman

Ryman weaves together the stories of the young Judy Garland, the wretchedly abused girl who is the unwitting inspiration for Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
, and Jonathan, a young gay man dying from AIDS and convinced that the film he has watched every Christmas holds the answers he needs … Extraordinary stuff.

Night Swimmer

Joseph Olshan

Olshan’s elliptical response to the AIDS crisis was this elegiac novel about a man obsessively haunted by memories of a lover who drowned during one of their regular moonlit swims together. Ten years later, is he man enough to take a second chance on happiness?

USEFUL WEBSITES

www.galewarning.org

Patrick Gale’s own website in which you can find out about his other books, read review coverage, post your own reviews, leave messages and contact other readers. There are also diary listings to alert you to Patrick’s broadcasts or appearances and a mailing list you can join.

www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-alaronde

The National Trust’s webpage devoted to A La Ronde, the model for The Roundel.

www.tht.org.uk and www.crusaid.org.uk

The websites of the Terence Higgins Trust and Crusaid, the UK’s two chief AIDS charities, where you can both learn more about AIDS and HIV, support the charities and even find out how to become a volunteer like Belgian Agnes!

Myra had learned relatively early in life that it was a delusion to believe that age was entirely chronological. Stasis was ageing, as was too much belief in duty or one’s own importance to others. Having children was ageing also, presumably because it demanded all three. After her years in California, the English felt old to her. This was not just because they put less faith than Angelenos in plastic surgery. There was a certain immobility about them, and a horror of change. She disliked the phrase ‘You’re as old as you feel’ – which seemed bossy and judgemental – but she had long since bitten through to its kernel of truth. She had stayed young because she had never held on to anything, not even to her nationality. With each divorce she had lost friends. With each marriage she had found new ones. She had been burgled times without number. Jewellery, jobs, religions, houses, men and telephone numbers; they all slipped through her fingers with time. She enjoyed what she had when she had it, but she would no more try to keep it by her side than she would think to live on only one lungful of air. She had never sunbathed, she drank at least a litre of water a day, she had never given birth and she always slept eight hours in every twenty-four, without a pillow. The only plastic surgery she had purchased, beyond a few little tucks around the eyes that she regarded as no more than routine maintenance, had been breast implants after the humiliation of her third divorce, and these had caused such an uplift in her popularity among casting directors and public alike that she had never regretted them.

Myra took upheaval as the opening, not the slamming shut, of a cosmic door. Her last-minute excision from the series had been a shock, a horrendous betrayal, but where some of her contemporary rivals might have let it drive them into a downward spiral to the detox clinic, here she was forming her own production company. She had recently camped her way through new recordings of
Peter and the Wolf
and
Façade
. Now she was negotiating with a sweet pair of pop musicians, young enough to be her grandchildren, to perform a sultry speaking role on their new hit single and appear in its promotional video.

Seeing Edward again, however, had proved a rudely chronological jolt to her survivalist philosophy. For a start, his participation in the research for her biography had surprised her. She had given him little thought over the years beyond what was required to remember his birthdays. She had always recalled their affair with a vague fondness as she imagined he did. She assumed that he, too, would have passed on to pastures new by now. She had no idea that he would still feel rancour towards her, much less that he would have hoarded her every scribbled
billet doux
to keep the emotion alive. The revelation of the affair had brought her a new distinction. The other members of what she privately referred to as The Dino Club – as in Palaeontology, not Dean Martin – had only affairs with athletes and other actors to boast of, or the occasional president or minor royal. Composers, like painters, were in a different league. To be an acknowledged muse was to gain a more exalted immortality than that of the commonplace, celluloid variety. Her agent had been extremely impressed by the new angle, and had been all for hiring a publicist to hatch up stories of a romantic rekindling of the now prestigious flame. She had scotched that idea, of course, and coolly defused any rumours she found circulating among her neighbours up on Mulholland Drive. But her surprise at the importance with which Teddy still invested her, albeit as a monster in his past, made her newly interested in him. She listened to the discs of his new music, not always with understanding, but not without pleasure either. She read profiles of him. She tried, without success, to catch him on the telephone and found that her failures – polite conversations with his granddaughter and the tantalisingly brief sound of his voice on his answering machine – only fed her curiosity. Several months after her return to London, she was shyly approached by his obviously pregnant granddaughter at an AIDS benefit in a West End theatre, any hesitancy she displayed about the honorary chairwomanship was feigned with difficulty.

Teddy had aged far more obviously than she, but she expected this, indeed welcomed it, in a man. When she had first known him, she had felt very much the older, more sophisticated lover, at pains to hide her vulnerability to the casual promptness of his lust. Even had her career not demanded it, she would have had to make the break with him sooner or later; if she had waited for him to tire of her, it would have left the kind of wound that never would have healed. Now, curiously, she knew the situation to be reversed, now that they had sat face to face across a restaurant table, now that she had felt him hand her, once again, into a London taxi. He was spry, dapper even, but it was obvious he felt himself the older of the two, and she was attracted by her power to enchant, indeed to wound him.

But wounding was the last thing on her mind. What had bothered her throughout her fitting, her second meeting with her agent and the young pop stars, and an incognito visit to her parents’ graves in North London, and what had struck her afresh as she had made her entrance into the Opera House foyer and let him lead her to sit beside him, was that he made her
want
to age at last. He made her want to let go, stop making the effort, put down roots. He made her want to become an Englishwoman again.

‘I wonder,’ she found herself saying aloud, as the hairdresser worked on her in her hotel room in preparation for the fundraising party at The Roundel, ‘should I let the blonde go finally? Let the white come through? What do you think?’

‘If we did it very, very gradually,’ he said judiciously, standing behind her shoulder to look at her face in the looking glass, ‘it could be very stylish, even flattering. We could leave the cut exactly as it is, but just let in a long streak, like so.’

‘Not just yet, though,’ she added hastily. ‘Maybe next month.’

She had pulled herself back, but the brink was closer now, she had peered over the edge and she suspected that the fall would be sweet and relaxing, like the long silent falling that recurred in her dreams.

Ordinarily she would have used her driver for the evening, maybe even paid her dresser to travel with her, but Teddy had suggested she stay beyond the party, for the whole weekend, and she wanted to keep her options open. She was late leaving London. The only half-way decent car available had a stick-shift gearbox and she had some difficulty remembering how to drive with such a thing. Alison’s invitation gave crystal clear directions for finding the house, however, and a little map, so at least Myra was spared the indignity of having to stop to ask for directions and end up autographing road atlases.

She left the motorway at the first exit after Rexbridge, and soon found herself out in the eerie fenland landscape driving along a thin road perched high on a bank with a dark waterway lying to the right and a system of huge fields just as deep to the left. She shivered, thinking, for the first time in years, of his wife’s hideous death. It was early evening and the sun was low over the horizon behind her so that shadows of the sparse trees, the car and the telegraph poles were stretched out for yards and yards across the chill, ploughed earth. She passed a clutch of houses, the village. She passed the quaint old church, whose tower had been visible for miles. She thought of his wife and grandson mouldering in its shadow. She remembered reading how severe floods caused newly dug graves to give up their dead. She shivered again, turned up the heating and cursed the self-consciously eccentric English habit of throwing outdoor parties in mid-winter.

Then she saw what could only be The Roundel, perched on a slight rise above the harsh landscape, pretty and incongruous as a single, perfect breast. All its windows were brightly lit and long strings of coloured lights looped through the trees marked a path from the house to a big barn a couple of hundred yards away across the road. Even through the closed car windows, Myra could hear loud cries and rough fiddle playing. She drove on a little way to where several rows of cars were already neatly arranged in a field. A tall man in a hat and scarf waved her in. She parked, checked her make-up, then stepped out into the cold evening air. The tall man was walking over to meet her.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘is this the right place for the barn dance?’

‘Yes,’ he said, pulling off his hat. ‘Miss Toye?’

He towered over her. The last of the sun caught the side of his face and hat-messed hair, glinting in his earring, and she saw that he was beautiful.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I’m Sam,’ he said.

‘I’d guessed,’ she told him. He shook her hand with a big man’s gentleness. ‘They’ve all talked about you so much,’ she said. ‘I reckon I could have drawn your picture. I gather you’re the one that holds this place together.’

‘Well,’ he looked down at his feet. ‘I wouldn’t say that. Erm. I came out to wait for you in case you got here after dark. The ground’s a bit rough and it’s easy to trip up on the ridges. They’ll be glad you’re here. I think Alison was afraid you weren’t coming.’

‘I thought she said it was informal.’

‘It is,’ he said, leading the way, ‘but you’re still the guest of honour.’ He grinned a bashful fan’s smile and she knew him for an ally. She slipped a hand through his arm, pretending to be colder than she was.

‘She expects us to spend the whole night in that barn?’ she asked. ‘We’ll
die
of cold.’

‘It’s only for the dancing,’ he explained. ‘Once all the food’s out and ready, we’ll all go up to the house to eat. Then we can come back and dance some more after supper.’

‘Oh yes?’ she said, uncertainly.

‘It’s American. You’ll love it.’

‘But I’m not American!’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Do I sound it?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ he hesitated and she knew she would have to work on her accent some more. ‘You do a bit.’

‘I was born in Bethnal Green,’ she told him. ‘But you’re probably far too young to remember any of my British films, the black and white ones.’

‘I’ve watched some of them,’ he confessed shyly. ‘They show them in the afternoons sometimes.’

‘How very good of them,’ she sighed. They were nearing the barn. She heard hand-claps, stamping feet, whoops of excitement and the frantic sawing of a fiddle player. There seemed to be a caller too, just like in America, his voice booming out over a rudimentary PA system.