by Patrick Gale
‘Yes, you did. You sat there being pert and polite all through breakfast because I hadn’t said anything.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘And you wondered where all the mail had gone.’ He brought one hand from behind his back to reveal a fat clutch of thick envelopes, which he tossed onto the table before her.
‘Well … I …’
‘Happy birthday, darling.’
He brought out the other hand and dropped a large cardboard carton in her lap.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Oh, what is it?’ She tore off the sellotape, half guessing, and opened the box. There were layers of tissue paper and some wonderful black silk. She gasped, took the silk and lifted it, standing as she did so. The box fell, the paper slid away, and she found herself holding a perfect black dress. Not too long, not too short, and simplicity itself. She held it against herself to feel its sensuous slipperiness.
‘Like it?’ he asked.
‘Peter, it’s perfect.’ She kissed him. He tried to kiss her back. ‘Don’t crumple it,’ she said.
‘Silk doesn’t crumple.’
‘Nor it does,’ she said and let him kiss her.
‘Aren’t they on yet?’ he asked.
‘No. There’s some delay. It’ll be after the news now, I expect. Darling, thank you for this. Can I wear it tonight?’
‘Of course. That’s the whole idea. You said you’d always wanted the sort of thing you’d only wear once a year.’
‘I did and this is it exactly.’ Her mother had worn one just like it. It was too small, she could see that at a glance. He found it as hard as she did to accept the relaxation in her measurements. Andrea was fifty. Worse still, she was in her fifty-first year.
‘And that’s not all.’
‘Not another present.’
‘Sort of. Wait there.’
‘Not a cake?’
‘That’s for later. Wait there.’
She waited on the landing, keeping half an eye on the cartoon. He had run up to their bedroom.
She heard a preparatory note or two on his clarinet then he launched into the slow movement of the Mozart quintet. He used to play it to her when they were first married. She had been so proud and had asked him, in ignorance, why he couldn’t play it with an orchestra somewhere. Still clutching the dress she walked slowly upstairs. The music’s sinuous melancholy drawing her on. She sat on the stairs outside their room, leaning her head against the banisters to listen.
I’m fifty, she thought, and he can play this again. He’ll join another orchestra soon. He’ll get bored. I’ll get old and grey. I’ll find another choir. I’ll enrol myself for evening classes. My nectarine breasts will sag into unrecognisable overripeness. Why is it all so cruel and unrelenting?
Unwatched downstairs, Candida Thackeray was introducing Iras Washington and her father, the rising painter, to the breakfasting nation.
‘Iras’s first novel, called – simply – Touch, has just found a sympathetic publisher with Brian Delaney of Pharos Company, who’s with us too this morning,’ Candida explained. ‘Brian, perhaps you’d like to tell us first what makes Touch so special.’
‘Well,’ said Brian, ‘Quite apart from Iras’s extreme youth and the fact that she’s precocious by the standards of her age-group, let alone by those of blind children, she tells an extraordinary story. Given that everyone demands a pigeon-hole nowadays, I suppose one would have to call it a piece of science fiction but it ends up being more than that. To simplify things grossly, it’s about a young girl who is taken away from her rather blandly happy family by friendly aliens who want her to visit their planet to teach them Latin so they can decipher a copy of the Aeneid they’ve stolen from an astronaut. Their sun had been blotted out by a nuclear winter and over the years they’ve evolved a new environment beneath the ground and a new way of life. They’ve managed without light so long that the planet is effectively blind and run entirely by voice and touch. This is what Iras does so well, she succeeds in conveying everything so vividly that by the end of the book one no longer notices the absence of visual imagery. When the girl returns to earth she has an accident. A blow to her head deprives her of sight and, to the scandalised dismay of her family, she welcomes what they see as a disability as a privilege. Touch is quite simply very funny, moving and, well, proud.’
‘And I’m sure Iras is thrilled to have found such a committed publisher,’ Candida cut in. ‘How does it feel to be getting published so soon, Iras? Iras?’
The camera cut across to show Iras who was responding in fluent sign language.
‘She has several deaf friends at school,’ Faber explained.
‘Ah,’ said Candida. ‘How nice.’ She was evidently discomforted at the loss of sound and at being unable to know where she could interrupt. ‘And, er, Iras,’ she ventured to cut in at last, ‘perhaps you’d like to tell our studio audience how long you’ve been writing.’
Iras turned politely to the studio audience and went on to tell them how long she’d been writing. She told them in sign language. There were chuckles, perhaps from the cameramen, perhaps from the audience, then laughter. Things broke down. Candida announced a break for advertisements but the advertisements evidently weren’t ready yet and the cameras merely showed the audiences standing up to stretch its legs and Candida trying in vain to control them. A few pictures flashed up with distorted sound then died and across the nation the viewers were handed back to the studio. Faber had beckoned Robin out of the audience and, holding Iras by one hand, was hugging him with his free arm.
At last the latest in a much discussed line of advertisements for Capital took over the airspace. Just before it did however, several million schoolchildren dawdling over their cereal, their fathers fretting over their unironed shirts and their mothers calmly buttering toast, were treated to a lingering close-up of a mixed-race, single-sex kiss.
About the Author
Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight. He spent his infancy at Wandsworth Prison, which his father governed, then grew up in Winchester, before attending Oxford University. He now lives on a farm near Land’s End. One of the United Kingdom’s best-loved novelists, his most recent works include A Perfectly Good Man, The Whole Day Through, and the Richard & Judy Book Club bestseller Notes from an Exhibition.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1989 by Patrick Gale
Cover design by Mimi Bark
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3862-1
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
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