Rough Music (23 page)

“And it works? It sounds a bit like counting your blessings.”

Roly shrugged and looked away at where sunlight was now falling in an intense band through the open door. “It helps. I think about good things more often than I did. And I left London—which took courage—and made the move back down here.”

“I thought you came from Scotland. Your accent—”

“I did. Originally. My other half had inherited a place here and left it to me. I sold it to my sister-in-law. I couldn’t stand living there with all those useless memories but I loved the area and the sea and I was known here by a few people so that made it easier. And it’s cheap. Very, very cheap. Which helps.”

“The lady in the gallery—Bronwen—said you’d changed your working methods too.”

“Yes, well, Bronwen’s spiteful and disappointed and she says a lot, most of it opinionated, ignorant and harmful.” His tone changed so abruptly it pulled Will up short. The temperature was rising fast. In so confined a space, humid after rain, his aggression was a bulky third presence.

Will stood. “I should go.”

Roly did not move or look up. “Maybe you should.”

Will gathered up the two parts of the sculpture. “This is great. She’ll be so pleased. There’s nothing more to pay you, is there?”

“No,” Roly said, suddenly weary. “Nothing more to pay.”

Will could not fit the two pieces through the door at once so he carried the main part down the rickety steps first, then turned to reach in for the wind vane. But suddenly Roly was there, on his feet, holding on to it. “Look,” he said. “What exactly do you want?”

“I’m sorry,” Will said.

“You’ve been hanging around like a puppy.”

“You asked me to stay.”

“I mean generally. You’ve been watching me. I’ve seen you watching me, hanging around, pretending to swim.”

“I
was
swimming!”

Roly jumped out of the caravan so fast that Will flinched, thinking he was going to hit him, but Roly just stood there, so close Will could feel his angry breath on his face. The dog barked, sensing excitement.

“What?” Will said.

Sandy would arrive tomorrow and they would have to find ways of dodging both parents and children. The last thing he needed was a further complication. And he was too old for this. He might be sleeping with a married man on a regular basis but forty was too old to go fluffing up straight men’s egos. Roly was standing so close their knees were brushing, however, close enough for Will to see the few tips of stubble his razor had missed. Some were pure white. There was a trace of a smirk on his lips.

“This is such a tired routine,” Will said. “Making the fairy do all the work so you have someone to blame afterward. I have my pride. And incidentally I think this apology for a sculpture is a piece of tourist-rip-off tat.”

Or he would have said it had he not been kissing so hard that Roly stumbled back against the steps. His body was not as godlike as novelty and mystery had at first made it seem. For all his swimming and nouveau-feral lifestyle, there was a slight thickness about his waist and softness to his ass that was both reassuring and exciting. But he was unyielding in Will’s embrace. “You’re not kissing back,” Will muttered, sniffing the bonfire odors of his hair and neck.

“Sorry,” Roly said. “I’m not very … Maybe if we went back inside?”

This really was an old routine. Harriet was mistaken in her too-pat analysis. This was not like Finn at all. Instead, it was taking Will straight back to the frantic, joyless encounters between boys at school. Roly would put on a coy, undone footman act, the better to distance his manly pride afterward from what had passed between them. Will would have to make all the moves. It would all be over in a clumsy rush, leaving unspeakable awkwardness in its wake and they would have to spend the next week avoiding one another on the beach. And Sandy was coming tomorrow. Will could save this pressure-cooked horniness for the devil he knew.

“Look, I don’t want you to do anything you might regret,” he said. “We could just pretend this never happened.”

Two hours later, the trailer had not exactly rocked but one of the piles of
Art Forum International
supporting the bed had given way, and he was sitting up in a sea of none-too-clean bedding feeling stretched and nicely bruised and tasted all over. He knew his hair was standing on end and he didn’t care. Still naked, a smear of butter on his upper thigh, Roly handed him a plate of marigold-yellow, scrambled bantam eggs with a piece of sliced buttered bread and a fork. He fetched his share then clambered in at the opposite end of the lopsided bed so that his legs slid up on either side of Will’s.

He grinned, immediately wiped the grin off his face and fell to eating but Will scratched at him with a big toe. “You’re good at that,” he said. “Considering.”

“The plumbing’s the same,” Roly said with his mouth full, then swallowed. “It’s just pointing in different directions most of the time. You want more pepper?”

“No, no. This is great.”

They ate on in ravenous silence, communicating only through occasional movements of their feet. Then Roly slung his plate on the draining board behind him and the movements of his feet became more specifically intimate. “I have to go to Saint Just in half an hour,” he said.

“Where’s that?”

“Other end of the county, near Land’s End. I’ve got to deliver some pieces to a gallery there. There’s an opening tonight. Drinks and stuff. You could come too. It might be fun.”

Will gave it serious thought. Possibly Harriet’s analysis had not been mistaken. Now that the mystery was dispelled, however, and the stranger known, Roly was nothing like Finn. The similarities had been superficial and this coming together was all too reminiscent of the numerous, depressing, pointless encounters that had spotted his years since Finn left. Will imagined the teasing hours of wanting to get each other’s clothes off again without being able to, the clumsy, standardized, this-isn’t-really-my-thing brush-off at the evening’s end. “My parents get back in a bit. I ought to be here for them. And my brother-in-law and his kids arrive tomorrow. We have to get beds made and so on. Sorry.”

Roly had the good grace to make a convincing display of disappointment but there was a give-away air of relief about the way he jumped up and started to dress that made Will wish he had agreed after all, with galling eagerness, and played a lovesick dead-weight for the rest of the day for the simple pleasure of punishing him.

“So do you
live
with your parents still?”

“Certainly not! A fortnight’s holiday is quite long enough. No. They live on the other side of town. We’re from Barrowcester.”

“Ah.”

“What do you mean,
Ah
?”

Roly shrugged. “Nothing. It’s pretty there, isn’t it?”

“So? It’s pretty here.”

“Not in the winter. In the winter it’s stunning. You should see it.”

“I’d love to.”

“Come and stay.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Will, charmed enough but not believing him for a moment.

“Shutters bolted against the howling wind. Fire roaring in the stove. The house feels like a log cabin. It’s great.”

“I’m tied to the bookshop.” Will explained about his business, the café, the readings and, modestly, the building success of the thing. He assumed he had sounded enthusiastic but when he was through Roly startled him by saying it sounded like a kind of imprisonment.

“You should be careful,” he said. “If your mum’s as sick as you think, you’ll get trapped.”

“But I like it there. It’s home.”

“Oh, well, in that case …” Roly shrugged again, finished tying his shoes. “Better head off,” he said. “Help yourself to whatever. The door doesn’t lock. Just slam it when you go.” And he ruffled Will’s hair and left.

With him no longer charging it with his presence, his trailer’s interior became a filthy, inhospitable mess once more. The bed was itchy. Lousy too, perhaps. The air was stale and unpleasantly musky. Will waited until he heard the dog jump into the van with her master and the van’s engine gun uncertainly then he hurried to dress again and be off. He slammed the door as instructed, picked up the two parts of the sculpture and helped himself to two lengths of blue nylon rope from the salvage pile.

Two hours of sunshine had been enough to draw out the holidaymakers who had been hiding from the rain and the beach had filled already. The tide was rising so he had to pick his way through family encampments as he crossed the dune to the house and imagined inquisitive stares upon him. As soon as he was back on the veranda, he secured the wind vane to a wooden upright and twisted it until it caught the breeze, then he used the other length of rope to fix up the sculpture beside it. He stretched the drive belt into place and waited.

Nothing happened at first and he realized the belt was so tight as to be acting as a brake. He fiddled with the knots and moved sculpture slightly nearer to power source. Still no movement. He nudged a blade on the wind vane. It began to move slowly then caught the breeze and threw the sculpture into clunking, slapping motion.

“Thwack,” went the sandal on the driftwood. “Thwack! Beware! They don’t like your sort. Move on. Thwack! Beware! Thwack!”

He grinned to himself as a child stopped her game to stare and heads turned among the nearer sunbathers. He went to his room, threw off his clothes and tugged on his trunks, not caring now if they were too tight or too orange. As he walked down the beach to the encroaching surf, he could hear the sculpture still laboring on behind him. Almost drowned out by the hubbub of ball games, barking dogs and shrieking children, it was unmistakable once your ear focused on it; a slow but insistent tattoo, stopping altogether when the breeze dropped then picking up again.

He walked out until he was waist-deep then plunged himself under and came up rubbing his face and shaking the water from his hair. He caught the eye of a woman dandling a solemn, water-winged baby in the brine.

“Sorry,” he told her and threw himself into a backstroke, recklessly splashing all around him.

“Is it much further?” Skip whined.

“Miles,” said Frances. “Your feet will be bleeding by the time we get there.”

It worked. Skip pulled a face, laughed and ran ahead to join Julian, who was petting some bullocks who were leaning over a hedge to inspect him. Frances had been thinking how much he had grown recently but now he looked tiny with the older girl beside him.

“I had a small breakthrough this morning,” she told Bill.

“You bought her a dress,” he said. “I’m not sure I approve of you corrupting her. I let her wear what she wants.”

“But she wears jeans like a kind of armor.”

“Are you saying you think she’s afraid?”

“No, no. Of course not.” His tone had warned her off. “She’s been through a lot. If she’s happy in school here I think the change might do her good. No one knows her here. She can reinvent herself.”

“She won’t wear it, you know. The dress.”

“Don’t be so sure. She chose it. Not me. She has very good taste.”

Bill snorted, picked a fistful of flowers in passing. The rabbit-eared tower of Trenellion appeared above a curve of field before them. “John said she reminds him of Becky when she was that age.”

Frances was uncertain what to say. She had not liked Becky, had been relieved, after meeting her, that she lived in California. “Really?” she said.

“You didn’t like her much, did you?” he said.

“What gives you that idea? Did she say something?”

“She didn’t need to. You didn’t come to the funeral.”

Frances stopped short at this, shocked. “John said there wasn’t one!”

“There was a funeral,” he said, walking past her. “Not what
he’d
call a funeral perhaps, but we praised and burned her. I think that counts.”

“I’m so sorry.” She hurried to catch him up. “As John didn’t come though, I could hardly have … I hardly knew her.”

“That’s all right.” He smiled, hearing how worried he had made her and she felt he had somehow scored a point. “What’s this flower?” He held up the bunch of pink blossoms. She stared a moment, racking her brains.

“Campion? Bladder campion? Ragwort? I really have no idea.”

He tossed the flowers aside. “I thought all Englishwomen love flowers.”

“And ride horses and make jam and breed dogs and stitch their own wounds without wincing. Did Becky tell you that?”

“No. I think it was in some book. Lawrence probably.”

“Isn’t it stunning!” She meant the church. He looked up at it as blankly as she had looked at the flowers. “I was reading about it this morning,” she went on. “Julian, you see this tower? It was made in Heaven.”

“There’s no such place,” Skip said, at which Julian looked gratifyingly shocked.

“It’s a granite quarry on Lundy, a tiny island out there. They shipped the stone over and dragged it up the cliffs. Odd really because there’s masses of perfectly good granite all around here.”

“They wanted to give you guides a good story,” Bill said. “Can we go in?”

“Of course. But I think you’d better …”