Rough Music (2 page)

“Shouldn’t we start with my childhood?” he said. “Isn’t that the usual thing?”

“If you like.”

“I warn you. I wasn’t abused. I wasn’t neglected. I love my parents and I loved my childhood. It was very, very happy.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You can’t possibly go to bed yet. It’s only four,” Ma sighed. She was packing food, most of it tinned, into a big box. He saw corned beef, grapefruit segments, fruit salad, rice pudding, baked beans, yellow pie filling, red pie filling and the detested steak-in-gravy. She had on his favorite of her summer dresses, very short and covered with enormous daisies, and the white Dr. Scholl sandals he liked to try to walk in sometimes. She looked up from her labors and saw his face. She smiled. “You’re so excited you’re not going to sleep for hours in any case. Have you finished packing?”

“Yes.”

“Teddy packed?”

“Yes, and books and crayons and everything.”

“Monopoly.”

“And Totopoly and Scrabble. They’re all in the hall where you told me. But Pa said there’ll be games in the house.”

“Well, you can never be sure. That dreadful place he rented in Northumberland only had Spin Quiz. Remember how boring that got? Oh, but you’re too young to remember, I suppose. Now …” She sighed and carried on packing things from the larder. “Have an apple to clean your teeth.”

“No, thank you.”

“Well how about getting your bed all ready, then go and play in the garden for a bit so I can get finished in here?”

“All right.”

Secretly delighted, he left the room slowly, pretending she had set him a chore. She called after him.

“How about Lady Percy?”

“She’s already in.”

As he ran up the huge spiral of stairs, the hall clock struck four. First he moved the lunar module model, finished that morning, off his bed to the relative obscurity of a bookshelf. It had bored him really. The kit was a present from the same godfather who religiously sent him baffling first-day covers for his nonexistent stamp collection. Julian had only made it up out of politeness and now it felt as out of place in his bedroom as a football or cap-gun would have done. He snatched the pillow off his bed and the sheets and blanket, then, doing his best not to trip, carried the boulder of bedding back downstairs, out of the open front door and across the drive to the car. He laid it carefully on the gravel, which was fairly dry, then opened the hatch at the back with a grunt of effort, standing on the bumper for a better reach. Whistling to himself, he began to make his bed for the journey on the short mattress that lined the shelf at the vehicle’s rear.

Referred to by Mrs. Coley, the awestruck cleaning lady, as a
dormobile
it was, strictly speaking, a Volkswagen Devon Caravette. Julian always thought of it as the
Height of Extravagance
, however, because that was how his father referred to it whenever the subject arose. Ma had bought the gleaming red and white thing on impulse with some money a dead person left her. Ma’s theory was that they could save money by going on camping holidays instead of renting or that they could, at least, spend the occasional night in it instead of stopping at a bed and breakfast. It was beautifully equipped. There was a little gas cooker that smelled funny and a fridge and even a sink with a dribble of running water, which all disappeared into cupboards when you didn’t need them. There was a table with sofas on either side so Julian could do drawings and play games and face forward or backward as they drove and never commit that cardinal childish sin of getting bored. And at bedtime the table sort of dismantled and combined with the sofa cushions into a grown-up bed for Ma and Pa while Julian slept on the shelf behind them. This seemed incredibly intimate, as though they had stopped being people and had become furry nesting animals, like foxes or badgers. The pleasure it gave him was so intense that he could not understand why they did not sleep in it at least one night of every week. They had only once gone camping as a family, for a disastrously wet weekend on the Isle of Wight, when tempers had run high and Pa had said
Bloody Hell Frances
a lot and had insisted on frying breakfast on the little stove with the door shut against the wind and rain. When Julian pressed his nose to the curtains or itchy upholstery he could still detect traces of the smell of burning bacon.

Since then, the Height of Extravagance had rarely served her purpose, although she made Ma popular on the school run. On a few bewitching occasions, Ma had
kidnapped
Julian, as she put it, bundling him back in as soon as he was changed after school and running away with him for spontaneous nights in a field somewhere without Pa, on the educational pretext of showing him a castle or a battlefield. Otherwise she was merely a car, only bigger; a room on wheels. Her chief justification was on occasions like this one, where Julian could be put to bed in her in Wandsworth and wake up halfway across the country after Ma and Pa had taken turns driving through the night or dozing. He loved the idea that his holidays thus started several hours before theirs. Ma had rightly guessed that a destination was immaterial to him; he would be perfectly happy if they tucked him into bed then merely drove in a large, all-night circle. Woken at regular intervals through the night by the gunning of the throaty engine beneath him or by a food cupboard door which occasionally came loose and struck him on the head, he loved to lie watching the lights flash by overhead and hear his parents talking in low murmurs from the front. Even though the house was protected by dogs and guards and high barbed wire, he never felt so entirely secure in his bedroom as during these nights on the road.

Bed made after a fashion, Julian checked on Lady Percy, his Abyssinian guinea pig, whose hutch he had stowed beneath the table. He had actually wanted a dog called Shadow, a large black dog that frightened other people, but Pa had said he would have to wait until he was old enough to walk it himself, and how about a guinea pig? Lady Percy was a lush bronze color with exotic whirls in her fur, a pink nose and sharp, pink feet which tickled if you lay on your back, lifted your shirt and put her on your stomach. She would sit quite happily on your lap munching a carrot and did not mind being groomed with a powder-blue baby’s hairbrush and Julian loved her language of squeaks which
Caring for your Cavy
said was called
pinking
. But she didn’t do a great deal beyond run in a straight line when one set her on the lawn or run in manic circles when placed inside an old car tire. He had overheard Pa say that the whole point of small pets was to teach children about reproduction and death but Lady Percy remained in robust good health, a resolute spinster, so seemed as wayward of purpose as the Height of Extravagance.

“We’re both going to Cornwall,” Julian told her. “But you must be very patient. Here.” And he jiggled an old piece of cabbage leaf under her nose. Lady Percy sniffed the offering disdainfully, pinked a few times then retreated into her bedding. Julian climbed into the big front seat which stretched the width of the vehicle, tried on Ma’s driving gloves and driving shoes and helped himself to a sugar-dusted barley sugar from the tin she kept hidden there. Then he let himself out and obediently went to the garden to play.

An only child, he saw nothing strange in being told to play when there was no one to play with. In fact he much preferred playing alone to playing with other children since other children invariably imposed rules and systems and overruled his suggestions—mildly posed through lack of aggressive group practice—as to what they should make-believe.

The Governor’s House had always seemed to him to be enormous and now that he was going to school and gathering points of comparison, he was coming to see that the home he had taken for granted was undeniably strange. Nobody else he knew—he knew at least four other people well enough to visit and he had been to eight birthday parties—lived in a place with so many rooms that several of them were left empty. Pa told him it only seemed big because he was small and Ma said he was never to forget that the place didn’t belong to them but merely came with his father’s job. Neither could deny, however, that with its blackened masonry and louring tower and numberless windows, the place was a far cry from the stylized two-up-two-down pictured on
Play School
. The house had a vast basement, reached by a rickety set of steps through a trap door in the wooden floor of his father’s downstairs lavatory. In this sinister series of musty rooms, moldy wooden chairs were stacked and tattered posters about the Home Guard and First Aid Procedures curled away from yellowed walls. The Guides and Brownies used to meet down there but apparently they had stopped coming because they had found somewhere more congenial.

At the top of the house, sunnier and drier, but no less dusty, there was an answering sequence of attics where ancient leather trunks and broken furniture were stored. There were moldering dresses and hats to try on, even a long black veil which scared Julian so much he had only tried it on once, and a First World War gas mask like a skull with a metal box on a long caterpillarish tube. Julian knew that bats nested here, although no one would believe him. He had also found, in strictest secrecy, that he could climb through one of the attic windows and explore the valleys, chimney stacks and unexpected skylight views of the roof. (Another great advantage of being single, he had discovered, was that one could stray into the more dangerous side of play with no risk of talebearing betrayal to grown-ups.) From up on the tiles he could see all Wandsworth, from Trinity Road and the gloomy church to the Common, and the railway cutting spanned by multiple bridges. Closer to, he could see the extent of the prison walls, see the uniformed officers coming and going through the door where Pa went to work and even see down into the yard where the prisoners exercised.

Most secret of all, he could venture past the point where the internal dividing wall marked house from prison so that he was over the prison itself and could lie flat on the roof and peer gingerly down through one of the skylights that gave on to the nearest wing of cells. It was like a view into a strange kind of monkey house, where all the monkeys wore ties; a vista of cages and walkways full of harsh shouts and laughter and the clatter of heels on metal. He would watch for hours. It was as fascinating as watching an ants’ nest or the glass-sided beehive in the Horniman Museum. He knew that the men in tight uniform with hats on and truncheons were officers, controlled by Pa—who, like the queen, was so powerful he was never seen—and that the men in baggy blue suits, without hats or ties, were prisoners controlled by the officers. He also knew that the prisoners were said to be doing
stir
or
porridge
and that they called the officers
screws
and that he was never to say this word in front of his parents.

The garden was bounded by high walls on three sides. Two, shaded by sticky-scented limes, had pavement and road beyond them. The third, unshaded for security reasons, divided Governor’s House from prison territory and was overlooked, for most of its length, by the prison factory where the inmates worked up hessian sacks for use by the Royal Mail and potato farmers. The humming of sewing machines and shouts and chatter from the workers so struck Julian that the word
factory
would never acquire quite the grim connotation for him that it had for others. From the sounds, at least, it seemed to him a place of release and even joy.

“Men need to work,” Pa explained when questioned on the matter. (He always called them
men
, never
prisoners
or
convicts
.) “Without work, they become demoralized, which can lead to all kinds of trouble. Never underrate the dignity of labor, Julian.”

It was through one of the factory windows that Julian had his first encounter with one of the men, apparently. He was too young to remember it but it was a story his mother liked to repeat in his hearing so that it had become a memory of sorts.

“I opened the drawing-room window and I could hear him burbling away. Well naturally at first I assumed he was talking to himself, the way they do at that age. Then I realized there were gaps and I was hearing one half of a conversation. I looked out and there he was, all of four, chatting to one of the men through the factory window. Another man must have joined in as I looked out because I heard someone call out, ‘Wotcha Ginger!’ and this one got quite shirty and said, ‘I’m not ginger, I’m a nice little boy!’ I had no idea they could see out. I mean, I knew they could see the sky and the trees but nothing more. I put a blind in the downstairs loo the same week …”

There was no other story about such conversations, so Julian assumed it was either an isolated incident or that he had been discouraged in some way. He could not remember her ever trying to stop him talking to the men and, so far as the trusties were concerned, she
actively encouraged
him. He knew this from an argument he had overheard between her and Pa when they were all sitting out in deckchairs after Sunday lunch once.