Rough Music (12 page)

He had probed their unease with questions. How long were they staying? Where would they sleep? What did Americans eat? Until something in his father’s vexatious, “You’ll find out soon enough,” told him they knew little more than he and were afraid of what lay beyond their ken.

Until now he had always been glad his cousin was a girl. She would prove a more interesting playmate, should they ever meet. This was his first thought when he heard she was coming. A girl would enjoy his quiet sandy pastimes, making seaweed gardens, collecting shells, exploring rock pools for shrimp and baby crab, poking sea anemones with shells to make them close. A girl would prove no threat and would not expose his male deficiencies the way another boy might. Then a chance remark of his mother’s—“I suppose the poor thing will be glad of some female company for a change”—undermined this fragile certainty. He pictured the doll-like perfection of the creature bearing down on them—even her name suggested Shirley Temple bounce—her poise, her wit, her feminine guile, and he saw how, by polarizing their little household with her mere presence, she would expose his corresponding lack of brutish capability.

“You must be especially kind to Skip when she comes because she doesn’t have a mummy.”

“But she’s older than me.”

“You must still be kind to her. She’s only got her father and this’ll be her first time in a foreign country.”

“We’re not foreign. We’re Great Britain.”

“You know what I mean. Foreign to her. Apart from your Uncle Bill, we’re all the family she’s got.”

“Doesn’t he have any relatives, then?”

He saw that this thought had not occurred to her but that she masked her ignorance with her usual retort when he had her cornered. “You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself.”

He resolved that his only recourse would be extreme politeness. It was plainly impossible to be
kind
to someone you didn’t know but he could be polite, studiously polite, so as to highlight her American not-quite-rightness even as she exposed him. Meanwhile he resolved to preempt the effects of her arrival by striving to be all his parents could wish for in a son. He embarked on the expected holiday diary without prompting, sticking in postcards of the churches and villages they visited along with pieces of dried seaweed, lolly sticks and museum tickets and writing a drowsily dutiful report at each day’s end. He swam when his mother told him to swim, although the brine stung his eyes and made him retch when he swallowed it, although he stubbed his toes on unexpected pebbles and had a horror of Moray eels. This morning he had agreed to play cricket with his father for the same reason.

Last year, one of their overnight camping trips had unluckily coincided with his short-lived devotion to the novels of William Mayne and he had expressed a wish to remain in the Height of Extravagance reading the last chapters of
A Swarm in May
rather than walk through the drizzle-sodden field where they had spent the night to peer down some ancient well.

“God, you’re so
boring
,” his mother had shouted.

She had probably forgotten saying this—it had goaded him into action and so served a temporary purpose—but it wounded him deeply. Wounded and warned him. For it made him aware of the terrible possibility that her love and loyalty were not automatic, that she or his father might look at him with coldly assessing eyes and find him not the boy for whom they had hoped. They might reject him as they threw out cakes that were stale or returned clothes that had revealed signs of shoddy tailoring. He knew they could not send him back to some factory or abandon him in a wood, like the parents in a fairy tale. Or rather, they could—he knew about child-killers, Henry had told him—but he knew this was not their style. He knew they could not put him into Borstal or approved school unless he broke the law, but he knew they could send him away. Boys were sent away all the time, sometimes to the other side of the world, so far that they could only go home in the longest holidays and sad, unsatisfactory arrangements had to be made for the shorter ones. He had read of such things in several books.

They did not truly play cricket, of course, because there were only two of them, but his father produced bat, ball and a set of stumps. Pa had played cricket up at Rexbridge, played in the university team at Lord’s, and Julian sensed without anyone saying as much, that it would please him immoderately if Julian turned out to excel at the game too. He had tried. Elements of cricket appealed—like its relative stillness, the bulky pads, the linseed oil, the arcane method of writing down scores, the words
silly mid-off
—but he had an unshakable horror of the rock-hard ball and the damage it could do. He had been shown a horrible photograph of a bird killed by a flying ball at Lord’s and subsequently stuffed. He fumbled even the easiest catches because at the last minute his concentration was thrown by the memory of the bird or an image of broken fingers or pulped brain. Why should the ball be stained bloodred if not, like the floors of the
Victory
, to disguise the marks of carnage?

They tried bowling and catching practice first. The idea was for him to attempt to bowl his father out. Failing that, Pa would endeavor to hit the ball so as to grant him an easy catch. Occasionally he would grow impatient and whack the ball far over toward the cliffs so that Julian had to run for it. His mother clapped when this happened and called out
bravo
from behind her novel in a voice not her own.

Julian had always bowled daisy-cutters, not daring to attempt an overarm bowl lest it betray his lack of coordination and send the ball off at a dangerous or merely ludicrous angle.

“At least have a go,” Pa insisted. So he did and the ball flew wildly off course. “If you learn one thing this week,” Pa said, “it’ll be this.”

“It’s a holiday, darling,” his mother murmured. “Not a boot camp.”

“Well we wouldn’t expect you to understand,” Pa said. And he winked at Julian.

He had never winked before. It was extraordinary; like hearing him swear. And his use of
we
, admitting Julian to the select circle from which as a mere girl his mother was excluded, was briefly thrilling. In fiction and the playground, Julian much preferred the company of girls since most traditionally male interests bored him and girls were better at make-believe, relying less slavishly than boys on the previous afternoon’s television. Now, however, he wondered if his boredom were not a worldly mask for fear of failure. If he could kick a football without people laughing or bowl a respectable overarm that even stood a fighting chance of dislodging the bails it might change his whole view of things.

“Never mind the run-up for now,” Pa said. “Just whirl the ball round and round.” Julian did as he was told. How could this ever feel natural? It seemed as effortful as doing the crawl. “Now let go.” Julian let go and watched the ball fly high in the air and land uselessly between them. “Don’t worry. At least it was in the right direction. Now. Try again.” Amazing himself with his own eagerness, Julian ran for the ball and tried again. He began to whirl it over and over. “Just let go,” Pa said, an edge of impatience entering his voice.

“What if I hit you?” Julian asked, chastened.

“No chance.”

Julian let fly the ball, causing his father to lunge aside in a way that made his mother laugh.

“See?” he said, laughing too, but Pa was unswervable.

“Well try it again but without me there. See if you can just hit the wicket without me getting in the way and worrying you.”

Julian tried it again, with a run-up this time, and somehow sent the ball yards wide of the mark. His father caught it and shouted
Owzat
. It must have stung his palms, Julian knew it must, but he caught it without a flicker of pain. Manhood was astonishing. Maybe he enjoyed the pain? Maybe that was what men did? Like pulling off sticking plasters without crying and shaving and boxing and putting wounded rabbits out of their misery with walking sticks.

“I’ll never get it,” he said, taking refuge in a risky show of sulkiness.

“Of course you will.”

“Show me.”

“All right. Good move.” Pa seemed pleased. “Your turn to bat.”

“Not too fast, darling,” his mother murmured and turned a page.

“I won’t,” Pa said and, catching Julian’s eye, winked again.

He must have misjudged the distance or had the sun in his eyes. Julian had expected it to bounce a yard or two in front of him. Instead it seemed to come so fast that he lost sight of it entirely. Then something struck him so hard in the face it seemed best to fall down. He was briefly aware of the sudden chill of damp sand on his cheek, then everything went blank.

He heard crying in the distance, recognized his own voice and fled back into the darkness to hide. When he came to his senses, he was lying on his bed under a quilt and a strange boy was staring at him from near his feet, frowning. He had short reddish hair, freckles, a stripy T-shirt and he was chewing gum.

“Did they rub it with steak?” he asked. His voice was gruff and he talked American. Like Samantha in
Bewitched
only not so sweetly.

“I beg your pardon?” Julian asked back.

“They should’ve held a piece of steak to it, right after it happened, all raw and bloody. It stops it going black. You’re going to have a real shiner if they didn’t. You’ll look stupid.”

“Who are you, please?” Julian demanded.

The boy gave no reply but merely hollered over his shoulder through the half-open door, “He’s awake!” As adult voices drew nearer, he turned to go, pausing only to say, “Don’t let it get to you. Cricket’s only for sissies anyway. Tomorrow I can teach you baseball.”

“Is the ball soft?” Julian asked.

The boy gave a sullen grin that made him look much nicer but also rather frightening. “Not when I hit it.”

He was replaced by Ma, who kissed him and rubbed his head, and by a doctor, who examined his swelling eye with fingers that smelled of fish, asked him a few silly questions, like who he was and where did he live and how many fish-smelly fingers was he holding up before making up a cool, witchhazelly wad of cotton wool for Julian to press on his bad eye and declaring him as right as rain.

The doctor left but the voices continued, those of his parents and somebody else. There was laughter—the kind Pa only produced when he was with other men—and the unmistakable sound of ice in glasses. The strange boy was talking too, though not much. Julian began to feel slightly silly. The doctor had said he was as right as rain but Ma had not said he could get up. He did not feel ill and there were few things Pa despised more than malingerers, so he sat up. The soggy bandage slipped. Julian retrieved it and held it back against his eye, although it no longer felt so deliciously cool. He walked to the looking glass and peered at the damage. Reassured that he was indeed wounded, and quite dramatically, he padded out toward the voices.

His parents were in chairs on the veranda with a man in a black leather jacket and jeans. Not like Darrin in
Bewitched
, more like someone in
The Virginian
only less reassuring; a cattle rustler, maybe. A bad man. He had very thick black hair, much thicker and longer than Pa’s, and a mustache like Lord Kitchener’s on the England Needs YOU poster Ma had stuck up in the upstairs lavatory as a joke. Incongruously, the boy was sitting on his lap, swinging his legs. The grown-ups were all drinking. The boy appeared to have a whole bowl of Cheese Footballs to himself. The man looked up expectantly and said, “Hi there,” in a voice that was nicer than he looked.

The boy just stared.

“Oh darling. You’re up,” said Ma. “I didn’t think we should bother you till you felt ready. This is your Uncle William. Bill. Sorry. And this is Skip, your cousin. And guess what? They came all the way from Sussex on a motorbike like Steve McQueen’s.”

Julian remembered his resolution to be polite. “How do you do?” he said.

As he extended his palm to shake hands, the unsupported bandage fell from his eye and plopped wetly to the floorboards. Everybody laughed so he did too. He pretended he had done it on purpose and did it again. But nobody laughed the second time and he could tell from the way Skip looked at him that she was not deceived.

Taking time off did not come easily. Will was not one of nature’s travelers and was never happier than when doing what he usually did, holding the fort for others. He had been to Paris and Florence as a hostelling student and been inspired by Finn’s example to go backpacking across England in a last mad bid for freedom before sitting his Finals but in the twenty years since had only traveled alone once. After his first year in the children’s library, he took a cheap flight to Naples, spent a week in the second-best hotel he could find, sight-saw until his feet bled and was so wretchedly homesick and unhappy with no one to talk to that he finally swallowed his pride and came home a day early. Holidays might not have been the preserve of the married but they were, he decided, group activities. Since then he had confined himself to spending weekends away, visiting friends, sometimes even visiting friends in the middle of their holidays abroad. He always took a make-me-welcome present, entertained difficult children and aunts, left while he was still wanted, wrote a witty thank-you letter and was inordinately pleased to return home.