by Patrick Gale
Will would have been checked only if the liaison had begun to steal obviously from the marriage, if Poppy had begun discreetly to complain of neglect. But on the contrary, Sandy seemed to thrive on having two outlets and Poppy actually glowed when she spoke of the attentions he paid her. Her eagerness that they should become close did not help either. As far as she could perceive, Will and Sandy had started to make an effort for her sake, and she was touched. The occasional brotherly drink together, the occasional manly bike ride … “What do you find to talk about?” she asked, fascinated, and Will would quite truthfully answer, “God knows. Not much. You mainly. And, well, you know, guy stuff.”
Sandy taught him to drive and called around occasionally for long afternoons to help fix problems with the third-hand Mini Cooper he helped him choose. When Will took the plunge of leaving the children’s library to buy a place with a shop on the ground floor so that he could open a bookshop and café, it was Sandy who donned overalls to help him decorate and rewire the place. With the arrival of the boys, Will proved a devoted uncle and babysitter. And if Sandy took time to stay for a quick drink when picking the babies up, that was only to be expected.
As a busy man, Sandy made full use of those adulterer’s toys, the mobile telephone and the pager, although this meant that a quickie snatched with Will on the pretext of visiting a patient was made very quick indeed when a call came from a genuine patient whose need was more painful, if no more urgent, than his.
Habit, and the illusion of a balanced domestic arrangement between the three of them, dulled Will’s guilt but it was inevitable that such constancy in betrayal should drive a wedge between the siblings. Poppy wanted him to be happy and now that she was married could not imagine anyone being happily unattached. She became an inveterate matchmaker, often crudely assuming that any two single gay men had only to be introduced for gratitude to blossom into love. Will would be invited to dinner parties where he was pointedly placed opposite her latest find—Fergus, her sad pet decorator, was the example that sprang most painfully to mind—while Sandy masked his jealous anxiety in a show of blokish insensitivity, breaking into any conversation that might well up between his lover and the latest candidate or even insisting on swapping places with Will on the pretext that some female guest had an urgent need to discuss something with him. Happily, the arrival of children and the consequent erosion of Poppy’s energy and free time prevented her from wondering if there were any other reason for Will and her spending less time together. When she complained of it, she did so in a spirit of shoulder-shrugging apology rather than any tone more accusatory. If she felt sorrow at the distancing of a friend, he convinced himself, it was swept aside by the compensations of motherhood and a life apparently fulfilled.
“So were you serious about asking us to join you in Cornwall?” Sandy called out from the shower.
Lolling across the rumpled quilt, Will thought a moment. “I never asked you. You invited yourself,” he pointed out.
“So?”
“What about Poppy?”
“She’s been angling to sign up for some intensive squash course at the sports center. If I took the boys, it would set her free to go.” Sandy emerged, toweling himself. He had perfected the art of showering without suspiciously wetting his hair.
“Well, sure,” Will said. “Come. The Aged Ps would love having Oz and Hugo around and I’m sure we could come to some arrangement as to who gets which bed.”
“Great.” Dressed in practiced seconds, Sandy kissed him quickly on the lips. “Got to go. I’ll ring you.”
Will heard the crinkling of wet plastic as the paddling pool was grabbed up, then the opening and closing of the door, hasty feet on the steps and the gunning of Sandy’s car engine. He reached for another Tia Maria truffle and suffered a brief twinge of what Harriet called Other Woman Syndrome.
BEACHCOMBER
“Frances? Frances?”
Frances emerged from a deep sleep to find John crouching beside her in the dark. Reassembling her mental self, she became aware of the strangeness of their surroundings, the car around her, Julian’s rasping, childish snores on his bed behind her head, the rodent scuttlings of the guinea pig, the stiffness of her legs where they had been scrunched up on the seat beside her.
“Where are we?”
“Somewhere between Stonehenge and Dorchester. Sorry darling, I hated waking you but I was nodding off at the wheel and I—”
“It’s fine. You’ve done more than your share. Come on. Swap.”
Alert to the thick country night beyond the open door and to the fact that he had woken her in the middle of one of what she privately classified as her bad dreams—bad as in wicked, not unpleasant—she slipped out from under the car blanket and offered it to her husband.
“Promise you’ll wake me,” he said urgently. “I only need two or three hours.”
“You look shattered,” she said. “We’re mad. Go to sleep.” She leaned past him to tuck Julian’s leg back under his hopelessly disordered bedding. He had a tendency to windmill in his sleep.
“There’s still coffee in the Thermos.”
“Oh good. Sleep.”
John first insisted on unscrewing the table to make up the bed properly then, satisfied, he lay back with a yawn, stretching long legs across hidden grocery boxes and on to the seat opposite. He pulled the rug up about him, relishing, perhaps, the residual warmth she had left in it. Looking down at them, man and boy, she had one of those unsettling moments in which she felt more the child’s age than the parent’s, or at best like an older sister to the one and a responsible daughter to the other. Shuddering, she slid the door closed on them as quietly as she could.
The road was deserted, the landscape almost featureless. With the small stretch of road and verge picked out and lent color by the lights around it, the dormobile might have been an island. She looked up. No wonder it was so cold. There were no clouds. Stars seemed flung like a falling hunter’s net overhead, their blue-white brilliance only adding to the chill. Opening the driver’s door, she reached across for her sheepskin car-coat and pulled it on. Then she stepped out of her shoes and pulled on the old suede moccasins she retained for driving. The shoes with heels, the last vestige of her smarter London self, she tucked into a bag and slipped behind the seat. With luck, she would not need them again for a fortnight. The house gave directly on to a beach, if the letting agency was to be believed. She intended to go barefoot as much as possible, although she suspected that John found this flower-child tendency in her distressing. His own feet were crumpled and gnarled by years of army boots and constricting brogues. She guarded Julian’s feet like soft treasures, encouraging him to go barefoot or wear sandals whenever the weather was warm enough, so that his toes should grow as straight and long as a Botticelli angel’s.
In an effort to rouse herself by rousing her stomach, she ate a corned beef and tomato sandwich and poured herself a plastic beaker of tepid coffee from the Thermos, making a mental note to replace the latter with one of the new models that fastened with a screw-on lid rather than a leaky cork. Then, munching an apple to clean her teeth, she slid up behind the steering wheel and drove off, adjusting the mirror angle as she went.
The dream John had interrupted was the same uneventful one she had been having for fifteen years or so, since she was thirteen. She was in the prison garden, wearing a sort of muslin shift so diaphanous she felt more exposed than if she had been stark naked. And she knew there were prisoners, hundreds of prisoners, watching her from behind hundreds of broken windows. John was at her side, talking and talking to her in a tone that was just beginning to shade into anger. He wore a dark suit and was tapping a stick against the side of his leg to emphasize the points he was driving home. Governors were moved on every five years to prevent compromising familiarity breaking out between governor and officers or indeed governor and prisoners. She had experienced the same dream against the background of Her Majesty’s prisons at Liverpool and Durham and, before
that, with her father replacing John in the lead role, at Portland and Camp Hill. She had told no one of the dream, still less of the guilty excitement it continued to cause her, but at Wandsworth fantasy threatened to become a reality when she realized, through Julian’s idle chatter, that prisoners in the mail-bag factory were indeed watching her as she went about the garden or lay in her deckchair reading. Her first intervention into prison management had therefore been to ask John to have the lower panes of the factory windows whited out with greenhouse paint. She had worried that he might demur or even suggest that she venture into the garden less often if she did not like being watched, but he was courteous discretion itself and had the panes painted by a work party the next afternoon. His only concern was that she had not told him sooner.
The coffee and sandwich started to work and she found she was wide awake. She enjoyed driving. Taught by her father, it was one of the things she knew she did well—unlike cookery or dressmaking. She had even taken her advanced test but had long since abandoned her girlhood fantasies of becoming a racing driver or stuntwoman. Motherhood had made her sharply aware of risk. Where she would once have relished the thrill of speeding in her Triumph Vitesse with the roof down, she now appreciated this great bus of a vehicle, more house than car, for the unathletic virtues of security and bulk.
Her mother disliked her driving such a thing. She said it was unfeminine. But then her mother had long since despaired of Frances blossoming into the feminine paragon she felt she deserved in a daughter. The late, last child of a tribe of six, Frances had felt all the pressures of being an only and overdue daughter in a rowdy nursery. She had tried to answer the needs of either parent but found her father’s easier to satisfy. At once their mascot and arch competitor, she aimed to outshine her brothers in his eyes. She could hit a tin can with the nursery air gun, drive his car, name the principal towns, rivers and mountains of the world and even set a school speed record in the swimming team.
Her only remotely feminine skill was playing the piano. She might have tried to become a professional, had she not come from such a stultifyingly correct background. As it was her gift soon became an awkward accomplishment, since she favored not the nice pieces her mother wanted, but dark, brooding Liszt, Brahms and Scriabin.
Fearless on a diving board or lacrosse pitch, she was ambushed by shyness when thrust into parties. She had no facility when clasped by a sweaty-palmed stranger on a dance floor and no small talk to hold his attention once off it. An older sister might have shown her how things were done. Older brothers merely daunted and oppressed her with their easy expectations. As the social torments of adolescence overcame her and she realized too late that paying more heed to her mother’s lessons rather than her swimming practice might have prepared her better for coping with dances and her brothers’ army of friends, the piano became her wordless escape route, a safety valve for her frustration with herself and her surroundings.
John came to her rescue. Her father’s newly appointed deputy, he had two left feet and an endearing way of bypassing all small talk—of which he had even less than she—to plunge directly into conversations of high seriousness about subjects that mattered. She liked him because she perceived from the way her brothers and father teased him, that he was a fellow sufferer. He asked her out to a concert—a very bad and over-long Messiah given by an Isle of Wight choral society, offered her a maladroit embrace beneath an oak tree as they were walking home and asked her to marry him ten minutes later. She accepted with all the alacrity of relief but had the sense to make him promise to say nothing to her parents until he had taken her on three more evenings out.
A kind of triumph ensued, a vindication; she was a girl after all. Her mother was satisfied, her father pleased. Her mother made inquiries of Burke’s Landed Gentry, her preferred afternoon reading, and it emerged that John came of a stable, old, West Country family, landless and relatively poor now but gratifying to her unquiet snobbery nonetheless. Frances declared herself in love because that was what she assumed herself to be. She was an old woman of eighteen. John was the first and only man to have kissed her. She assumed that he had enjoyed more experience because he was twelve years older and a man. She was mistaken. Theirs was not a whirlwind romance. As virginal as she was and even more inhibited, he labored under the illusion that she would know what to do because she was a girl and her mother would therefore have told her. On their brief honeymoon in Normandy, they kissed and talked of many serious things until their lips were pink and their voices hoarse but it was several weeks later, after a hot-cheeked perusal of a dog-eared book from the library called Things a Man Should Know, that their marriage was finally, clumsily consummated. The pain of losing her virginity was such that it was weeks more before a repeat attempt was made.
Months passed before Frances realized that John too had married to escape. His only family was Becky, an academic sister who had moved to California after receiving her literature doctorate up at Rexbridge. Their mother had died when he was a child and since their father’s death in the war when an incendiary bomb caught their house, he had lived in a sequence of all-male environments; university, the army, the prison service. By the time he met her, his private life had dwindled to a wretched set of rented rooms where he read his way through the scant shelves of the local library when not being served prompt breakfasts and suppers by a lugubriously respectful landlady. From the eagerness with which he seized on the chance of marriage and the wider domestic scene and broader social acceptance entailed upon it, she guessed that he had given up hope and begun to fear that his future would consist only of more of the dutiful same. Sure enough, now that he was married, he seemed to win new respect in the eyes of the prison service. Just as priests and army officers required wives for promotion beyond a certain level, so there was an unwritten rule that prison governors, like housemasters, should be family men, as though convicts, like small boys at boarding school, would benefit from the overspill of mother love from a woman installed on the premises, however remotely.
After some months of living in cramped, married officer’s quarters, John was promoted and the new couple moved to the gaunt, turreted Governor’s House at Wandsworth. Frances was gleeful. She had escaped her parents, escaped the provincial restraints of the Island. She had a big house to redecorate and furnish, a drawing room large enough for a grand piano which she could play as loud and as long and as ungirlishly as she pleased.
John encouraged her playing. He had high-minded ideals about the salvation and rehabilitation of the prisoners and had her play to a group of them occasionally on the battered Blüthner upright in the boomy acoustic of the prison chapel. He also began discreetly to make up the shortfalls in the education her mother had so studiously circumscribed. He put books her way and indicated newspaper articles for her to read.
Then their sporadic attempts at a love life paid off and she became pregnant, an event she fancied John welcomed with a certain relief, as though it represented a temporary suspension of duties. It was only once the pregnancy and the early years of motherhood curtailed her culture-hungry movement about London that she realized they had no friends. Forming lasting friendships had never been easy for her with her father’s frequent changes of post but her parents maintained a social bustle of sorts and she had fondly assumed that marriage would do the same for her and John. John would bring in people, she thought. He had been in the army and up to Rexbridge; he would have friends and by now his friends would have wives. But John, it transpired, had been too conscientious a student and soldier to have much time left for socializing and had long since cultivated a monastic self-reliance. Happy enough to go out and meet people, he was just as happy to stay in with his wife, baby and a good book. Her parents came to stay from time to time—chiefly to shop—and just once the elusive Becky visited in a self-dramatizing flurry, but for day-to-day society she had to make do with the prison chaplain and his wife, the local rector and his wife, the headmaster of the local boys’ school and hi
s wife and a succession of stilted evenings with various senior prison officers and their families. They were none of them friends. It was all duty. For the first time in her life, Frances was lonely and mildly bored.
John worked long hours. He insisted on tasting every meal the prisoners ate, which meant being on the other side of the wall early as well as late. He held daily “surgeries” at which he would hear the prisoners’ grievances or punish their misdemeanors. He was the perfect father to them, albeit along distinctly nineteenth-century lines, which meant being a less than present husband. By the time he passed back through the succession of gates between prison and Governor’s House after he had returned to work following a brief supper with her, he was drained of energy and character. She learned to fight down her need to tax him for entertainment, seeing what it cost him to be lively.
When Julian was younger, the boy was her near-constant companion. She played with him, read to him, encouraged him to draw pictures and make things. As he grew older, she took him on excursions around London and further afield. They had recently discovered the delights of watching old films together in the afternoons or snatching guilty matinées in the cinema on Lavender Hill. He would sit miraculously quiet beside her, never fidgeting even though the larger part of the storylines must have been far beyond his comprehension. But once he was enrolled in primary school, term-times presented her with crises of empty days. When he began boarding at choir school that autumn, a prospect she could hardly bear to face still less discuss, she would find herself with empty evenings and weekends too. She threw herself back into practicing properly at her piano, for two hours a day. This, she began to perceive, was dangerous for as her old agility and speed returned so did the old fantasies of professional performance, fantasies that could only feed her restlessness.
