Rough Music

by Patrick Gale

  Will smiled and hugged her. “It’s very, very kind,” he said. She did not flinch exactly but she was stiff in his embrace, like a reluctant boy hugged by an unappealing relation and he found himself wondering, as he often did, what she was like in bed. “I’ll take the Aged Ps,” he told her. “They’ll love it. Sandy?” he shouted. Sandy looked round at last. “Thank you!” Will called out. Harriet excused herself from an animated argument with the girls from the shop and ran up the fire escape to join them.

  “You’re not to take your parents,” she said.

  “It’s too late,” his sister sighed. “He’s already decided.”

  “But that’s so sad. It sounds incredibly romantic. It’s bang on a little cove with a veranda and I want you curled up with Master Mystery watching sunsets and sipping Nuits-Saint-Georges, not playing whist and having early nights. You can’t ask them.”

  “They might not want to come,” he suggested.

  “Of course they’ll come,” Poppy said lightly. “They haven’t been to Cornwall for years. I found it through an advert in the paper and rang up and it sounded perfect so I booked it for you. But the photo only came yesterday. Look.”

  She was the kind of mother who was never without a capacious bag. At a moment’s notice she could produce tissues for a child’s tears, plasters for its wounded knee, Wet Wipes for its sticky fingers and a sugarfree pastille to reward its bravery. One sensed she could always find passport and driving license, always had pen and paper handy before picking up the telephone and maintained a small notebook of important birthdays and anniversaries as well as a tidy diary. Will knew all this was in reaction to their mother who had always found affectionate gestures easier to summon up than stamps or car keys. Now, in seconds, she produced a small color photograph of a bright-blue bungalow with a green picket fence and veranda. “Blue House,” she said. “That’s what it’s called.”

  “It’s amazing,” Will said. It struck him as faintly familiar. “Haven’t we been there before? When I was tiny?”

  “You don’t remember, do you?” She sounded disappointed. “Maybe it isn’t the same place. You weren’t that little.”

  He stared at the picture, searching for clues, but even as he stared any familiarity faded. “This is the place we went to? I don’t remember it at all.”

  “Maybe they’ve changed the color,” Harriet suggested. “And places you saw as a child you remember as twice the size.”

  Will continued to stare at the picture but it gave up no secrets and set off no more resonances in his memory. It might have been anywhere at all. “No,” he said. “Sorry. I don’t just remember it wrongly. I don’t seem to remember it at all. Not just the house, the entire holiday. I remember bits I suppose; the drive down there mainly, and trying to surf and the smell of the place but, well …” He shrugged. “I must have blanked it out.”

  “Scary,” said Harriet. “Christ knows what staying there is going to dredge up from your unconscious. Maybe you should book somewhere else?”

  “Oh no,” he insisted. “I want to go. I’m curious. And it’ll be good for Mum. Old familiar places seem to stimulate her.”

  “But you can’t take her,” Harriet wailed.

  “It’s no good,” Poppy told her. “His mind’s made up. He’s already planning which books to take and what goodies to pack for picnics.”

  Curious, some of the others had gathered. Freed at last from their sons, Sandy had slipped an arm around his wife’s neck.

  “Well if he’s not taking a significant other after all,” he said, “maybe some of us should invite ourselves.”

  “Taking the Aged Ps is bad enough,” Poppy said firmly. “He doesn’t want whole tribes tagging along.”

  “Oh, I dunno,” Will told her. “It might be fun and whoever came could take the Aged Ps off my hands now and then.”

  There was a quick flurry of present opening, during which Will became mildly hysterical because three people had given him vases, then gradually the party dissolved. The girls from the shop and Harriet buried their differences by loading the dishwasher and the solicitors tidied away leftovers. The younger and poorer of Will’s employees gleefully accepted his offer of doggy bags. Children were borne away, fractious from sunshine and social competition. Cheeks were kissed, promises made to stay more closely in touch. The groomless reception was done.

  Left alone at last, Will noticed that he had been left with the paddling pool. Barefoot—he had kicked off his new shoes as soon as the last guest was gone—he trod down one side of it to let the water spill out and soak away into the grass. Then he folded the incongruous object away into a large carrier bag and left it by the front door to await collection. He did not have to wait long. He had barely had time to flop on to his bed and close his eyes when the doorbell rang.

  “Hi,” Sandy said, slipping in and kicking the door shut behind him. “Managed to forget the paddling pool. I’ve got half an hour,” he added, taking Will in his arms and kissing him. “Happy birthday. I’ve been wanting to do this all afternoon.”

  “But …”

  “Trust me. I’m a doctor.”

  Will had been his brother-in-law’s lover since the week after Sandy and Poppy returned from their honeymoon. If heavy petting counted as commitment then the relationship actually predated the marriage. Will had suffered from a weakness for Scottish accents, red hair, muscular legs or any combination of the above since developing a doomed but loyal crush on an ex-policeman who gave gym classes at his school. When Poppy announced she had fallen in love with a young general practitioner who mended her puncture on a cycling holiday in the Borders, he was as glad for her as he was jealous. When he was allowed to meet the happy couple, it became rapidly evident that Sandy was one of those men who had a problem with their girlfriend’s gay playmates. In Will’s company, he became surly, either unforthcoming or aggressively male.

  “He thinks I’m hopelessly effete,” Will told her. “But that’s fine. He may be a jerk but he’s a sexy one. You love him and I’m very happy for you. After all, you’re the one that’s got to sustain a relationship with the bastard.”

  “But I want you two to be friends.”

  “Poppy, let me break it to you gently: it’s not going to happen.”

  “But I think I want to marry him.”

  “Oh. Well it’s still not going to happen. No cozy drinks with the brother-in-law. Don’t look like that. We’ll survive!”

  “I don’t understand it. Normally he’s so sensitive. Maybe it’s because I told him you had a thing about Scotsmen …”

  “Well reassure him, for God’s sake! Tell him he’s not my type. Tell him I only go for swarthy Celts.”

  The happy couple became engaged. Relations between Will and Sandy did not improve. Sorrowing, he resigned himself to seeing less of Poppy and more of Harriet, who did her best not to let her triumph show. Then came an invitation to the stag party. Appalled, Will trusted that Sandy was offering an olive branch, not planning to humiliate him. He accepted to avoid family ructions, also because his spiteful side sensed that Sandy had counted on a cowardly refusal.

  “I could no more deal with a lap dancer than I could drink hog’s blood,” he told Poppy. “I hope you appreciate what I’m going through for you.”

  “It’ll be fine,” she insisted. “There aren’t going to be strippers or anything stupid. I’ve made his best man promise. It’s just going to be dinner and a load of booze in some dining club in Birmingham with a bunch of his medical school pals.”

  If that sounded bad, the reality was far worse. Will had spent a lousy morning protecting the library from an invasion of destructive schoolchildren and a draining afternoon trying without success to plead with the finance committee to raise his budget to allow for visits by celebrity children’s authors. He arrived in Birmingham late and fractious to find everyone drunk already so he spent the whole evening being always that crucial bit nearer sobriety than anyone else. The conversation consisted of medical sc
hool gossip, anecdotes that meant nothing to him and smutty jokes whose misogyny and racism made him blanch. The waitresses were molested, the (admittedly filthy) food insulted, bread was thrown, napkins set on fire. At the far end of the table from Sandy, who appeared to be enjoying himself immensely, Will guessed he was seeing a side to his brother-in-law elect which his sister willfully ignored or innocently assumed to have been outgrown. There were no strippers or lap dancers. There was, however, pudding and no spoons. And pudding consisted of a young woman borne in on a large catering tray, naked except for a liberal coating of raspberries, whipped cream and little meringues.

  “Tuck in, boys,” she invited as the tray was set down amongst them. As luck would have it, Will found himself sitting by the pudding’s head so, while the others ate with slavering gusto, he could at least make conversation to take her mind off her ordeal. Did she do this on a nightly basis, he asked her. Was she trying to earn her Equity card? No? And she also danced with a python. Oh, how interesting.

  As if this experience were not sufficiently excruciating, the management then asked them to leave when the partying grew too rowdy and, in the ensuing kerfuffle, the friends proved less than loyal, scampering off to some nightclub leaving the bridegroom behind in their drunken haste.

  “It’s OK,” Sandy assured Will. “Didn’t want to go there anyway. Look. Come back to my place for a nightcap.”

  All Will really wanted was an early night with a good book but he was fairly sober still and owed it to his sister to see her intended safely home. Sandy had lost his keys, however, and his wallet—or they had been snatched by one of his friends in lieu of chaining him naked to a lamppost. With deep reluctance, sensing it would involve him in all manner of complications as the wedding day dawned with Sandy cashless, keyless, suitless and in the wrong place, Will helped Sandy fall into a taxi and gave the driver his own address in Barrowcester.

  Sandy leaned heavily against him all the way home, sustaining a monologue along the lines of, “That was so disgusting I can’t believe they sprang that on me that poor kid you won’t tell her will you God that was so disgusting …” He continued to lean heavily on Will as they lurched up the stairs to his flat, a heavy arm clamped across his shoulder, only now the monologue changed into a less chest-beating, more hesitant mode, full of false starts and pauses which seemed to spell out volumes Will would much rather not read.

  “It’s not as if—” he now began. “I mean I don’t even—I mean I do but, well, not always and not even then. Do you see what I’m saying? I didn’t actually enjoy it back there any more than you. Not that I’m, well, you know.”

  “I know, Sandy,” Will said briskly. “Believe me, I know.” He unlocked the door, swung Sandy inside and lurched him in the general direction of the sofa. But Sandy became suddenly immobile and was holding him even more tightly.

  “Could I just …?” he began.

  “What?”

  “Could I just kiss you?”

  “Sandy, you’re drunk. Very, very drunk.”

  “So? I still want to kiss you.”

  “Is this some stag-night thing? Like paying a last visit to a tart or getting a tattoo somewhere silly because if so then—”

  Sandy’s embrace was a kind of ravenous assault, a feeding frenzy of boxed-up desire. He had the strength of drunken impulse as well as surprise on his side and several seconds passed before Will could fight him off and back away, eyeing him warily.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he stammered.

  “This is what I want,” Sandy said, with sudden, horrified certainty. “It’s what I’ve wanted all along if only I’d—”

  “You’re just saying that. You’re scared. It’s understandable. She’s a strong character and tomorrow’s a big day. A Huge Commitment. Think of Poppy. You love her.”

  “Yes. Oh God. Yes, I do. But I want you. Come here.”

  “No!”

  “Come here. Please?”

  Will was aghast. But he was also excited and, cheaply, flattered. He stepped over to where Sandy was slumped against the wall, took his trembling hands in his and kissed their palms then raised his head and kissed his frightened eyes closed then wrapped his arms about him and held him tight, so that they could talk without having to meet each other’s eyes.

  “Why did you have to leave it so late?” he asked.

  “I suppose I was scared,” Sandy said and Will felt him shudder at the admission.

  “Has Poppy got any idea?”

  “What do you think? She’d die if she knew!”

  “It’s not too late, you know. You can still back out.”

  “No!”

  “You may think she’d die now but she’d die a whole lot more and a whole lot more expensively if you marry her, start a family and then let her find out. For all you know she’ll still want to marry you. I mean, you do love her?”

  “Yes. Oh yes.”

  “And you fancy her.”

  “Yes. Only …”

  “Only not as much.”

  “Mmm.”

  “And you want to be a grown-up married person.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Just checking. You know, I could stand up in church tomorrow and call the whole thing off, bring down the whole tidily bourgeois edifice? I mean I won’t, but I’ll still be tempted.”

  “For her sake?”

  Will thought a moment. “No. Probably for mine. We’ve got to stop this now, Sandy. You’re going to sleep on the sofa. I’m going to sleep in my room behind a locked door. We’ll sort out your suit and things in the morning, you’ll get happily married and none of this ever happened. OK?”

  “OK.”

  They were kissing on a more equal footing now. They slid to the landing carpet and rolled around, bruising chins and hip bones. For a beginner, Sandy showed remarkably good instincts and for a man who had drunk such incapacitating quantities, he regained his vigor with impressive speed. One thing had led most of the way to the inexcusable other when Will remembered he was desperate to piss and stumbled off to the bathroom, where he caught his reflection’s accusing eye and, unabashed, found a condom that was only slightly past its use-by date. Returning to the landing, he found Sandy deep in a sleep from which it would seem like rape to wake him. With the inward sigh of one saved from damnation at the eleventh hour and not entirely grateful for the favor, he refastened Sandy’s shirt buttons and trouser fly, tucked a pillow under his head and furled him in a quilt. Then he took several deep breaths before ringing Poppy, who had not yet fallen asleep at their parents’ house, to reassure her that her caro sposo was safe and virtuous but in need of her spare key.

  The next morning it was impossible to judge whether Sandy’s verbal paralysis was due to guilt, panic, alcohol poisoning or stiff bones. Dispatched by the bride, the best man fetched his wordless charge before Will had a chance to find out and the wedding passed off with no conscience-struck confessions or altar-side pleas for psychosexual understanding. Will was kept too busy by relatives and the need to stop Harriet (who was not yet in her capable, Dame-ward phase) cheapening herself too publicly, to lend the matter much thought. He fancied he detected an edge of desperation to Sandy’s manly handshake and muttered thanks for saving his bacon but assumed that the laughing couple on a tandem they waved off to a honeymoon in the Western Isles would be sufficient unto themselves for at least a month or two.

  A series of circumspect postcards arrived, some of them penned by groom alone, then Sandy appeared on Will’s doorstep the day after their return to Barrowcester, expecting, no, demanding conclusion of the business deferred on his stag night. Will shut the door on him and ignored the telephone all evening. In the weeks that followed, during which Sandy repeatedly called up or round, he tried to be a responsible adult. He tried in all honesty to be a loyal brother and a trustworthy friend, but Sandy was not a man to be denied. He also had a Tweedside accent, cyclist’s legs and red-gold hair in his favor. If only the sex had been perfunctory o
r Sandy’s bedside manner odious or his nature as harsh and judgmental as Will had always assumed it to be, their crime against the family would have gone no further than this one outrage. The chemistry between them was all too effective, however.

  As though viewing the experience through Sandy’s eyes, Will found it was like making love for the first time. His experiences with the drama student, fourth-year linguist and, even, Finn paled by comparison. He was disturbed at the depth of reaction it drew from him and at the brutal demand that there be a second and a third time regardless of guilt and danger. Rattled too, lowering his defenses at last, Sandy revealed a vulnerable, even sweet side to his personality and was as tenderly solicitous after the act as he was impatient before it. He refused, often angrily, to lay plans or to analyze the situation into which they had stumbled. He was married to a woman he loved, but regularly bedded her brother, whom he loved no less but differently.

  Thus two marriages grew where only one was visible. Confided in by the sister as regularly as he had knowledge of the husband, Will was made an intimate party to their relationship and tasted their joys and apprehension as keenly as if their various house moves, job changes and children had been his own. Poppy had demanded a lunch with him the morning after he and Sandy first slept together and Will attended dread-heavy, expecting guilt to garble his wit or cause him to blurt out a confession. Life would have proved simpler if it had. Instead he found he could greet her and receive her happy confidences as easily as if it were not a husband she spoke of but a mutual relative. Which, of course, Sandy had become.

  The only active deceit Will had to practice was in making his revision of his judgment of Sandy’s character seem more gradual than it was. He was aided in this by the fact that merely because he had started to sleep with the man and found he could not stop, he did not find his friends any more acceptable or sympathize with his love of football, find his politics any less reactionary or his jokes any funnier. Qualities that were galling in a brother-in-law, however, became piquant in a lover, a peppery substitute for a gender difference.