by Patrick Gale
He continued to like coming around to sit in Eustace’s room to read while Eustace practised and, as the weather improved, they also took to spending time up in the Fort, a hilltop Iron Age encampment site beyond where the houses gave out. This had long since become so overgrown as to be more woodland than archeological site. People exercised their dogs, teenagers went there to smoke and drink cider but Eustace suspected it was the Fort’s popularity as a lovers’ meeting place that drew the increasingly hormonal Vernon to want to linger among the ivy, discarded crisp packets and used condoms.
But one day after school when they seemed once again to be drifting towards the steps that led up there, he dared to challenge his friend. ‘Why do we never go to your house?’ he asked.
Vernon shrugged. ‘It’s really not very interesting. And with no mother it’s not terribly homely. Are you so very keen?’
He said this in a way that usually would have obliged Eustace to deny any interest and to change the subject out of politeness. But it had been a bad day at school with both boys and teachers sneering and Eustace was feeling uncomfortable in his skin and bloody-minded.
‘I am, really,’ he admitted. ‘But only because you’re a friend so, naturally, I want to see where you come from. I’m curious.’
Vernon shrugged again, so that Eustace worried that, for the first time in a friendship without arguments, he might have offended him. Vernon led the way back down to the water and along the front, past Knightstone Island, Eustace’s house and the pier and the worst gathering point of the Rougher Element and then turned sharp left, off the front. Naturally Eustace was agog, because in all their years of friendship he had only very roughly narrowed down Vernon’s address to a handful of streets off the prom the other side of the Winter Gardens.
He turned out to live in one of the handsome houses on Ellenborough Crescent, whose once-private garden square had long since become a rather feral public park, but whose houses had never lost their air of remaining elegantly set apart from the hurly-burly and chip fat. They reminded Eustace of the houses near Louis and Ebrahim’s place in Clifton and several were similarly now under hippyish multiple occupancy or even harbouring squatters. A big Atomkraft Nein Danke sun dangled across the upper window of one while another had a Union Jack in a window and stars and daisies painted across its crumbling stucco. Vernon’s house, though, was in fairly good repair. His father was evidently a keen gardener as the neat gravel path led through a pretty succession of rose arches to a recently repainted front door with close-clipped bushes to either side.
‘My father’s an artist,’ said Vernon as they walked up the path. ‘He mainly paints naked women, so don’t be shocked. And . . .’ He broke off for a moment and looked at Eustace as though gauging his reaction. ‘He’s not at all well.’
‘Well I can come back another time. When he’s better,’ Eustace offered, feeling bad now.
‘No, I mean he’s really ill. He won’t get better. It’s Parkinson’s. He can still walk and talk but he’s a bit wobbly. Just so you don’t think he’s drunk.’
‘God. Of course not. But are you . . . ?’
Ignoring his little show of decent dithering, punishing his curiosity perhaps, Vernon strode ahead. He unlocked the front door then held it wide so that Eustace had to follow.
Houses like this, older houses, tended to look a certain way, Eustace thought. He had pored over plenty of magazines so had a good idea of what was tasteful or usual. This house broke all the rules. There was no wallpaper for a start, just really bold blocks of colour. At some point even the floors had been painted and then rugs thrown on top. There were books everywhere. Rooms full of books. And, indeed, many, many paintings of naked ladies, all in white or silver frames so that they stood out from whatever bright colour the wall was painted behind them. And yet it also looked like a house in an advertisement, because it was very clean and neat, except it was far more interesting, full of antiques and strange or beautiful objects.
‘Where’s your room?’ Eustace asked.
‘Upstairs,’ Vernon said. ‘But it’s just a room. Pretty boring really. Come and meet my father. I never bring anyone back so he’ll be interested.’
He led the way along the hall and through a big kitchen where gleaming pans hung from a rail and knife handles protruded from a block. There was a huge, full wine rack. When Eustace’s father produced a bottle of wine it was usually singly and to mark a special occasion, with much examination of the label and a big fuss made about decanting. Vernon’s kitchen felt more like the Italian restaurant he had been taken to in Clifton that time.
There was rock music playing in the conservatory beyond. The intervening windows and the one in the door had been painted out with whitewash, like those of a closed-down shop. Vernon tapped smartly on the door but didn’t wait for anyone to speak before opening it. A big woman with dyed blonde hair Eustace was fairly sure worked on the cold meats counter in the Wavy Line was sprawled on a rumpled daybed stark naked. Vernon didn’t flinch, and neither did she but simply said, ‘Hello boys,’ maintaining her pose.
A man was perched on a stool, drawing rapidly with what looked like stubby crayons made of lipstick. An older, more handsome version of Vernon, he was in pyjamas and a dressing gown and smoked as he worked. His right hand and the cigarette were bright with pigment smears. He glanced their way.
‘Oh good,’ he said. ‘Put the kettle on, Vernon. There’s a love.’
‘Of course,’ Vernon said, and ducked back to fill the kettle.
‘Lovely afternoon,’ said the naked lady.
‘Yes,’ Eustace said, only glancing her way momentarily because of bosoms.
‘Are you nearly done, Viv?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got to get the girls their tea.’
‘Just finishing your foot,’ Vernon’s father mumbled. ‘So you must be the famous Eustace,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Eustace said.
‘So are you going to sort Vernon out for me?’
He glanced at Eustace over his sketch pad. His eyes were an icy blue where Vernon’s were cattle brown. His speech was halting and slurred, as though he had been drinking but his keen gaze was intelligent and full of irony.
‘I wasn’t aware he needed it.’
‘I’m done with you now, Jen. Thanks.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ the model said. ‘My neck was seizing up.’ She sprang up with surprising agility, giving Eustace a flash of white thigh and dimpled bottom as she disappeared behind an old-fashioned screen to dress.
‘She’s modest once she’s in motion,’ Vernon’s father said.
‘Oi! I heard that.’
He tore out the sketch he had been working on and laid it alongside several others already ranged along a paint-spattered table, then he carefully draped a sheet of tissue paper over them all.
‘My late wife,’ he told Eustace, ‘used to say that all boys needed sorting out. Some of us repeatedly.’ His slow laugh gave way to a nasty smoker’s cough. ‘Filthy habit,’ he added, emptying his ashtray into a dustbin under the table. ‘I never bring it into the house because of the boy. Come on. Tea.’ He drew a few pound notes from his wallet, called out to Jen that he’d left them on the table for her then led Eustace back to the kitchen.
Unexpectedly domestic, Vernon had not only boiled the kettle and made a pot of tea but laid the kitchen table with proper cups and saucers, a milk jug and a plate of neatly sliced Battenberg and chocolate finger biscuits. There was even a tea strainer. There was no place laid for Jen, who let herself out through the conservatory.
Vernon’s father was extremely tired after his exertions and yawned repeatedly, apologizing every time he did so. It was fascinating catching traces of Vernon’s wit and politeness in him, even with the slurring. Vernon unfussily served them all, and the way he put cake and biscuits on his father’s plate for him made Eustace wonder what other assistance he gave him. His father’s movement was clearly impaired as well as his speech. Eustace noted how Vernon was carefu
l not to fill his cup too full so his wobbling hand didn’t spill it. Did he help him dress and undress, he wondered. Did he help him in and out of the bath? He could not imagine helping his own father to undress but presumably situations like that arose slowly, eroding inhibition by degrees.
Vernon’s father quizzed him much as his own father had Vernon, asking him about his parents and what he liked and disliked about school, but what really seemed to interest him was Eustace’s cello-playing.
‘It’s good you take it seriously,’ he said. ‘This place is basically a dump, so it’s important to have a window in your life. Like all those novels Vernon reads. You must play to me one day, like you play to this cloth-eared boy. Thanks, I will,’ he said as Vernon offered him more tea. ‘And someone pointed out that teacher of yours to me the other day. She’s a serious babe, isn’t she?’
Eustace wasn’t sure how to answer but guessed the question was rhetorical. He hedged his bets by simply saying, ‘She’s pretty amazing.’
‘She was walking along the high street and I swear that, just for that moment, she was head and shoulders taller than anyone else in view, like a Masai among the pygmies. Incredible. I’d love to paint her.’
‘Like Madame Suggia?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The Augustus John portrait. Of the cellist in the red dress.’
‘Oh. Yes. I didn’t know what she was called. Yes. You know your art, then?’
‘Not really,’ Eustace admitted. ‘Just that one. Perhaps she’d sit for you?’ He had been going to add something about Carla keeping her clothes on but decided it would have been presumptuous.
‘Dad doesn’t really paint any more,’ Vernon explained quietly. His manner since they arrived had been subdued, respectful even, and Eustace decided he wouldn’t press to visit again but would wait for an invitation.
‘No really about it,’ his father added. ‘Can’t hold the brushes and I refuse to do fucking finger-painting. Pastels are a compromise.’
Soon after that he announced he was tired.
‘I should go,’ Eustace said. ‘Thank you for having me. It was lovely to meet you, sir.’
Vernon’s father’s hand was rough and dry to the touch. He laughed at being called ‘sir’. As Eustace left, he was already climbing the stairs, leaning as heavily on Vernon as on the banister.
Eustace became aware of what Granny called an atmosphere between his parents. Quite suddenly he found he was no longer being sent to bed at a certain time but left more to his own devices after supper, which meant he picked up on more snatches of conversation he was not meant to hear. There was a heated discussion about St Chad’s latest bill – a document rather cruelly delivered in the same envelope as his end of term reports. He overheard discussions of scholarships and bursaries, and his mother referring to him as ‘really a thoroughly ordinary child’. His father, who had never passed any comment on his school reports suddenly observed, ‘Your maths is still excellent. That’s good. But perhaps you could try a bit harder in the sciences? Is it so hard? Isn’t maths the hard bit?’
Eustace said he would try. The trouble was that his relationship with maths was entirely instinctive and nothing much to do with teaching. He had always felt at ease with numbers and their patterns. Maths, like music, existed in a pure atmosphere whereas science seemed to consist of inelegant attempts to make sense of the world, attempts that formed no pattern but only clumsy lists peculiarly hard to memorize. History was no better. Having always been a muddling through in the lower middle sort of boy, he had drifted to the bottom of A2 class, suddenly sharply attuned to the future and the need for competitive achievement.
Miss Gold had held off from entering him for any Associated Board exams apart from Grade 5, which she said was useful for the scales and theory. But now she announced that she had been talking things through with his mother and he was to be entered for the music scholarships at Clifton. Most music scholars had two instruments or offered an extra skill like composition or harmony, none of which Eustace had, ‘So we have to get your playing pretty spectacular,’ she said. With this in mind she began to push him harder. He had to work at a different Duport study each week as well as his scales, and he was to learn and perfect a whole sonata of Grade 8 standard – she suggested Beethoven or Brahms and, to show off his tone and sense of line, the slow movement to the Rachmaninov sonata. ‘Quite achievable,’ she said. ‘I was playing all those at your age and nobody has to lean on you to put in the hours, which is a good sign as it means you’re self-sustaining.’
Suddenly the pressure was turned up in music room and classroom alike. And, of the two, music always won out over schoolwork. It wasn’t that he was stupid but he needed to be set tasks. A list of quadrilateral equations or a story from the English Civil War would hold his attention but if Mr Payton rambled on about the ablative absolute or Mr Jordan banged on about Milton, Eustace soon found he was staring at the way a tree was moving outside the window or the curious pattern some boy’s hair formed on his neck. But with his cello and bow in hand and faced with a high Brahms phrase not yet quite in tune, he could play the same fifteen or twenty notes over and over for an hour and be surprised by the passage of time. When he was practising he felt himself utterly present, not least because of Carla’s insistence that he play with his whole body.
Vernon still enjoyed sitting in on the occasional practice session, saying he liked the constant repetition and the infinitesimal changes of detail. Interestingly the steady exposure to classical music he was gaining at one remove this way was making him appreciate his father’s rock music more, even though he still couldn’t have told Mendelssohn from Martinu˚. He said he found it ‘very Zen’ and inexpressibly soothing to sit reading in the presence of Eustace’s intense concentration and that he was starting to appreciate his cello-playing the way he did the persistence of boys repeatedly tapping a ball in nets or heading a football in a corner of the playground.
Actually Eustace did make an effort in class now. He knew it mattered. It had often been impressed on him that all subjects mattered equally and would continue to do so until he was sixteen and could finally give up all but three of them. Now that his teachers were regularly springing sample Common Entrance papers on the class, it was having the intended effect of making him panic at intervals that he seemed as far behind the herd as if he had lost two terms to sickness or tragedy. Did he remember how to form the subjunctive in either Latin or Greek? Did he remember the difference between a sepal and a stamen or what were the primary causes, detriments and benefits of Henry VIII’s break with Rome? He tried taking Kennedy’s Primer to bed with him and relearning one lesson each bedtime, he took to revising French verbs at breakfast but found that, for all that the stabs of terror his apparent failure to absorb learning caused him, he still couldn’t care about exams the way he cared about strengthening the fourth finger of his left hand so that his A flats and C sharps were not foggy. When he heard himself produce a sourly tuned note due to weak finger placing or over-hasty inaccuracy, he felt a kind of deep-seated shame he never felt on the sports field or standing to read aloud in a Greek class. But he breathed not a word of this to Vernon or his parents. He confided only, and only slightly, in Carla. When she once interrupted her flow of talk during a lesson on the Brahms sonata he was learning to ask offhandedly, ‘But school’s all right, isn’t it? You’re not harming your chances of anything, are you, with all this playing?’ he admitted that, no, school wasn’t brilliant, that he had fallen behind in every subject but maths because music was now all that really mattered to him. She broke off writing notes in his little notebook to look at him solemnly a moment and said, ‘OK. So this scholarship really matters.’
Soon after that his mother made the surprise announcement that, at least until the day of his music scholarship exam, Miss Gold was to give him an extra lesson a week. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, parrying the objection she could tell his father was about to make in the name of economy. ‘She’s not charg
ing. She insists. But the only time she can fit you in is early on Saturday mornings in Clifton before the first sensible train would get you there. So we’ve agreed that I’ll start taking you there on Friday nights and staying over.’ She glanced at his father in a way that betrayed a conversation to which Eustace had not been a party. ‘So that, well, so that you have someone else in the house with you and those chaps . . .’
He had not stopped thinking about their night in Clifton since his mother had driven him home with the new cello. From the beauty of the house and contents, the sense it was a place in which the arts came before everything, including the obligation to be normal, the paintings everywhere, a tiny bedroom off what was in effect a temple to music, the homemade granola and yoghurt at breakfast, to the giddy good mood into which the visit had spun his mother, and the glorious weather they had for the drive home: the memory had become a glittering toy for him, a thing he took out in private to wonder at afresh. And a part of that had been the way his mother casually said, in the course of the drive home, that it was probably best if he tried not to go into too much detail about their overnight stay as his father could be old-fashioned and there were things about it he might not like or even understand. ‘He’s a dear, dear man,’ she said, ‘but he’s often not as sophisticated as we are.’
Eustace had nodded uncertain agreement but sensed she was paying him a compliment. An intrinsic part of the thrill of the visit had been that their hosts were both men, who shared a bedroom as though that were perfectly unremarkable; it was an experience he assumed would never be repeated.
But it turned out Carla stayed there quite often because most of her pupils were in Bristol and she saw them on Fridays and Saturdays. Louis and Ebrahim were trying to persuade her to stop renting in Weston and become their full time lodger. She often called on Ebrahim’s services as accompanist to her more advanced students and Eustace was now among their number as he was to accompany him for his scholarship exam.
