Rough Music

by Patrick Gale

  Everyone he told was appalled that he was taking his parents on holiday. Holidays, apparently, were all about sex or adventure and the presence of elderly parents was assumed to stifle either. He could hardly explain that on the contrary they were, in this case, to provide the perfect mask for both. Sandy astonished him by accepting as his due that his wife should be offering him illicit romance on a plate. Not for the first time, Will felt a pang of envious irritation at the confidence with which he seemed to accept the gifts of fortune as being his by right.

  Deep down he was appalled too. At first. He had not spent so much time with his parents since leaving home. Christmas rarely lasted longer than a long weekend and by the end of that he was usually climbing the wall with vexation and a desire for less innocent conversation. Even with a sunny beach attached—and this was Cornwall, not Tenerife, so the sun was not guaranteed—and the promise of a visit from Sandy, the arrangement loomed with every passing day ever more like a sentence in an open prison to which he had needlessly committed himself. However, the more he was called upon to defend his decision, the more convinced he became that doing the right thing might turn out to be enjoyable for once. He amassed a heap of novels to read, optimistically bought new sunglasses and the best suntan lotion he could find. At least until Sandy and the boys arrived, he would see that the experience was quite unlike a traditional family holiday. They would dine on crab and lobster, drink good wine, maybe even go out to one of the Cornish restaurants one read so much about these days. No one would be forced to do anything so there would be no silly arguments. Even if the weather turned nasty—which it showed no sign of doing yet—they could enjoy the independent pursuit of adult pleasures. They might even have grown-up excursions to St. Ives or the Scillies. Now that he was taking a holiday at last, he began to feel the need to indulge himself in compensation for all the summers he had stayed put.

  The drive from Barrowcester to Cornwall lay entirely on motorways and dual carriageways. Will was determined they should go to their destination by the most direct route possible with none of the cultural stoppings-off at castles, cathedrals and burial mounds that had made the long drives of his youth so interminable. He feared some opposition on this. His mother found it extremely hard to sit still for long and his father regarded motorways as an immoral waste of countryside. However, after talking incessantly through various domestic worries—Had they watered the flowerbeds enough? Was the garden door locked when they left? Was the milk bill paid? Had they packed Pevsner as well as Ronnie Barclay? Was Will truly insured to drive their car because honestly they wouldn’t mind squeezing into the back of his?—they both fell into deep and apparently relieved slumber within minutes of joining the southbound M5. He was able to listen to a taped reading of The Woman in White in peace as far as Somerset, where he left the motorway to stop off for lunch in a village pub that was not as excellent as he remembered but was at least less soul-destroying than a service area. They woke as he drove into the village, sensing the slackening of speed perhaps, and both apologized as though sleeping were bad form in a passenger rather than an ideal.

  Dad insisted on paying which made asking for anything more than a half and a Stilton ploughman’s awkward. In the sly hope of fueling further sleep so that he could hear the rest of the Wilkie Collins uninterrupted, Will bought everyone another half and a helping of treacle tart richly crested with clotted cream.

  “The holiday starts here,” he said when Ma made her customary protest about the state of her still excellent waistline. He allowed half an hour for pottering in the village’s overpriced antique shops and over-restored church and felt a treacherous glow as first one then the other let the motorway’s monotony lull them back into a doze. Dad stayed awake just long enough to observe, “Your ma’s not used to beer really,” in a touching we’re-all-men-together tone.

  Will woke them as the A30 crossed the Cornish border, releasing a trickle of confused reminiscence. They showed no great excitement until the first glimpse of the sea, which Mum claimed proudly as though demanding a boiled sweet by way of a prize. As the car rounded the curve in the estuary road and the view of the open sea and the Camel opened before them, she let out a gasp.

  “You do remember it, then?” Dad said, for she had been protesting since Bodmin that nothing looked even faintly familiar.

  “It’s all changed so,” Mum said, then turned, uncertain. “It has, hasn’t it? I don’t really remember but …”

  “It’s more built-up,” Dad confirmed. “None of those bungalows were there. Or the camp sites. And Surf Shack Pizzas,” he pronounced the name with an audible curl to his lip, “certainly wasn’t.”

  “It’s rather fun, though,” she added mischievously, as a tanned youth with a pierced navel and wetsuit unpeeled to his thighs somehow contrived to cross the road looking like a sexy panther rather than a person ridiculously skirted in wet rubber. “All these young things with nothing on. I like it. Much more fun.”

  Unlike most villages in North Cornwall, with roots in fish, mines or cattle, Polcamel had no history beyond the dawn of bucket-and-spade tourism. A vast sandy beach, the Strand, just far enough past the point where estuary met open sea to allay one’s darker fears of sewage, panoramic cliff-top walks without the punishing valley climbs for which most of that stretch of coastline was notorious, and an easy supply of cheap seafood attracted the first holidaymakers in the nineteen-hundreds. The resulting straggle of villas and nostalgic ex-Raj bungalows only became a fully-fledged resort complete with post office, butcher and general stores, in the thirties, when a young Rexbridge poet laureate-to-be, Ronald Barclay, inherited a house there, invited his friends and made it fashionable among the intelligentsia too impoverished and/or child-laden to afford places in the South of France. It had grown steadily until the fifties, when its floating population reached critical mass.

  It was never, strictly speaking, a community. There was a post office, certainly, and one could buy basic food and a newspaper, the newest paperbacks and suntan oil, but there was no school, no medical center, no policeman or midwife. Off-season the population shrank and aged dramatically, since the year-round residents were chiefly people who had chosen to retire to holiday houses their youthful selves had merely visited. In the eighties, an unscrupulous district council had conspired with desperate farmers to encourage development around the village’s outskirts. On what had been a majestic green headland sporting three or four spacious thirties houses, mean pebble-dash homes now huddled around a campsite that was gaudy with caravans in summer and a sea of scarred mud in winter. The Strand remained, huge and fairly golden and, thanks to the arrival of a self-consciously macho surfing culture, wetsuit hirer, surfboard shop and chippy were kept open all year long.

  The greatest change, however, was not immediately discernible. It lay in the curious process by which Polcamel had evolved from being the half-humorous playground of Ronnie Barclay, Jacoby Tate, founder of the nearby music festival at Trenellion, and their circle of artistic Fabians and pacifists, into the jealously guarded territory of their golf-playing, cheerfully philistine successors. In high season one could close one’s eyes in the post office queue and, but for the powerful scents of Ambre Solaire and Cornish pasties, think oneself in Fulham.

  Will soon gathered that the house was not, after all, the one where Mum and Dad had brought them as children. At least Mum was confused and Dad was uncertain. It was blue—a deep, electric blue the color of Greek fishing boats—with blue-green shutters and veranda. Pa recalled the other place had a more fanciful name than Blue House, like Spindrift or Bladderwrack. The other place had belonged to a landowning family who lived in an altogether grander place at the far end of the same drive whereas Blue House’s steep drive led nowhere else. A high hedge of sea buckthorn now displayed its silver leaves and orange berries. Like the earlier cottage, it was set in sand dunes in a little bay but this had a fenced off garden where the other had only veranda blurring into drifting sands. Within a picket
fence, the owner had persuaded hedges of lavender, tamarisk and rosemary to grow as well as sea buckthorn and to the rear of the house, where two stunted Monterey pines afforded shelter from the salt-laden winds, planting was lush, even subtropical, with yuccas and cabbage palms, their huge summer flower-heads still on show as they dried out, two great agaves and a multicolored raft of phormiums. They grew in raised beds formed from railway sleepers and attractively bleached driftwood, discreetly watered by a pipe from the bungalow’s gutter and fertilized by a colorful and rather smelly mulch of seaweed.

  The only blot on the horizon, apart from the people on the little beach, lay to the rear. The unnatural green of a golf course had taken over from farmland and in a scrubby field between that and the beach lay some sort of New Age encampment. There was an L-shaped tent, an ancient caravan, a great heap of what looked like wooden salvage from ruined houses and was probably fuel, a couple of hens scratching about and a pitiful dog tethered in the shade of a gorse bush. Two dustbins, a cascade of vivid plastic rubbish and a laden washing line completed the scruffy picture.

  “Never mind,” Mum sniffed. “At least there aren’t dozens of caravans. It might have backed on to that pass we placed earlier. I mean—”

  “Judging from the deeply trendy crowd hanging around as we drove through,” Will said, “we’ll probably be subjected to a rave before the fortnight’s out.”

  “What fun!”

  “She has no idea,” Dad sighed, sniffing his hand after rubbing it on the lavender. “There’d be used syringes in the sand and coupling couples in the garden. Where are the keys?”

  “Hang on.” Will dug in his back pocket to retrieve the directions. They were creased with sweat from the long drive. He reread the last paragraph. “It says under the Welcome mat.”

  “Huh,” Dad snorted, stooping to retrieve them. “Very trusting.”

  Mum was dreamily absorbed in the view of the sea. Suddenly she roused herself. “God I need to pee. Urgent woman coming through!” She hurried inside in Dad’s wake.

  Will’s hopes of being spared the worst of a family seaside holiday showed every sign of being met. Modishly furnished, decorated in bold, fresh colors with sanded floors, a well-equipped kitchen and some abstracts and sculpture to which he would happily have given house-room, the cottage’s interior was almost unnervingly fashionable, only a few years old.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?” he asked, fingering a smooth, spotty pebble on a windowsill.

  “It was blue and the key was under the mat,” Mum said. “Can we have this room, please?”

  “Have whichever room you like. Oh.” Will tried to open a small room on the end which he had guessed would have views in two directions from its turret-shaped bay window, but found it locked. He rattled the knob then gave up. Presumably it was where the owners kept their private possessions. It was surprising, all the same, to find anything locked away in a holiday house so unlike the meanly-furnished norm. He chose instead the other double room, intending to make the most of it before the arrival of Sandy and the children forced him to give it up.

  Not bothering to unpack yet, he eased up the window, whose sashes were sticky with salt, then flopped on to the bed where he shut his eyes with a contented sigh and listened to the sounds of sea and swimmers, relishing complete inactivity after hours of driving. For a few minutes he drifted pleasantly on the edge of a doze then became aware of the sound of his parents murmuring and walking about but doing so with exaggerated attempts at restraint. They should have been exhausted. They were the old ones, after all. They were the ones who would have been up since six A.M. fretting about preparations and the survival of tomato plants. Then he remembered that they had slept for most of the journey and forced himself to get up to join them.

  Mum appeared to have brought most of the contents of her larder, which she was stashing away in the kitchen cupboards. She had on a toweling robe, through which he glimpsed her swimming costume. “You should be lying down,” she said. “Don’t mind us. You must be shattered from the drive.”

  “I don’t need to sleep,” Will said, the truth of it dawning on him. “I’m on holiday.” Some of the herbs she was unloading looked older than he felt. In particular there was a pot of gray, dried tarragon that was on its way to becoming something else entirely. “Are you both going swimming?” Through their half-open bedroom door, he had caught an off-white glimpse of Dad in the throes of changing.

  “It’ll probably be freezing but I was feeling all hot and sticky anyway,” Mum said. “Come too.”

  “Of course. I’ll just change. I thought we’d agreed on no cooking.”

  “Oh well. You know how it is.” She shrugged and continued stacking jars.

  Pa stopped changing and seized the opportunity, declaring a wish to walk while there was still light along to the spectacularly bumpy headland he remembered known as the Rumps. The implication was that Mum was not safe to swim alone but now that Will had volunteered to mind her, he was free to play.

  The tide had risen so far since their arrival that the small bay the house overlooked was now cut off from the main beach. Most swimmers and surfers had retreated toward Polcamel so as to be spared the arduous walk up the cliff and over the headland to their cars. Mum and Will thus had most of the remaining expanse of scuffed-up, sun-warmed sand to themselves. He felt self-conscious, nevertheless, because his skin was so pale and the new trunks, bought in a sale on a burst of shortlived fitness enthusiasm, had more orange stripes than he remembered. So, gasping against the Atlantic cold, he ran through the surf and dived into a wave. He swam a few strokes in an effort to acclimatize his body then turned to look for Mum.

  She had always been a strong swimmer and continued to swim regularly in the city baths. It was highly unlikely she would get into trouble. Will was by far the likelier candidate for drowning. His body, it seemed to him, had always been too bony to be usefully buoyant. Where more rounded boys floated naturally and so could use all their strength for flying through the school pool, he had to use all his churning efforts just to stay above water. He had developed an inefficient, overly splashy technique at an early age and never managed to unlearn it. Although he lived as far from the sea as one could in England, a miraculous improvement in his crawl and backstroke remained his impulsive desire whenever birthday cake candles, Christmas puddings or roast chickens granted him a wish.

  Mum was still standing on the line where surf melted into sand, apparently hypnotized by the bubbles breaking over her feet. When he called out to her, she looked up and took a moment or two to find his face before she could focus a smile on him. “Well come on, then,” he urged. “It’s fine.” Which it was, in a bracing fashion.

  She slipped off her toweling robe, tossed it on to the sand behind her and he was startled at how good her body still was, a testament to a lifetime of weekly swims. She had the broken veins and ravaged skin of her generation, but her figure was not the kind that ballooned with age and her long legs and broad shoulders gave her an advantage. She was undoubtedly flattered by the dazzle of low sun on water and by a structured black swimming costume but as she strode toward him through the surf and expertly dived to avoid a buffeting, he imagined a glimpse of her younger, unconfused self.

  She laughed, “Fuck, it’s cold!” then laughed again, seeing the surprise on his face. She dived again and emerged a few yards away on her back, toes pointing to the cloudless blue, silver hair fanning out around her face. “Do I look hideously witchy?” she asked. “Should I wear a rubber cap with flowers on?”

  “You look like a mermaid,” he told her.

  “Mermaid’s mother, maybe. Aging thingy. Tritoness. Look. There’s your daddy.” She waved to a tiny figure on the cliff path to their left, who might have been anybody, and called out, “Hello, darling!” far too loudly. The figure waved back and walked on. “This is wonderful. No water! I mean, no stuff.”

  “Chlorine.”

  “Yes. Let’s swim round to Polcamel.
”

  “You’re joking of course. Those rocks look lethal.”

  “Well I’ll race you to that Lilo someone’s lost out there.”

  “But—”

  “See it? OK. Go!”

  “I’m not sure,” he began but she had already launched off in a deceptively languid backstroke.

  Swearing under his breath, conjuring up mental images of vodka and tonic, pistachio nuts and a grilled chicken salad, Will did his splashy best to follow in her wake. The waves were high. Even diving through them as she had taught him, he emerged to find himself drawn too fast for comfort into the trough before the next one. He was buffeted twice in a row, coughing on swallowed brine, then realized he was drifting dangerously close to the rip tide that was hauling out from the bay’s edges. Abandoning the race—he could see neither Lilo nor mother now for waves and, whatever the state of her spoken English, had no fear for her ability to find her way back to shore unassisted. Instead, he struggled away from the rocks, parallel to the shore, until he judged himself far enough from the tide to be able to strike out for the sand without the humiliation of being reduced to swimming on the spot.