The Facts of Life (73 page)
Authors: Patrick Gale
‘Says who?’
‘Your authorised biography for one.’
‘It just said I grew up in Bethnal Green, it said nothing about religion. Unlike you, I wasn’t prepared to tell Ms Peake everything.’
‘Why not?’
‘I have a career to think of. What remains of it. Let them know you’re Jewish at my age and there are even fewer parts left for you. Bang go the gracious old lady roles.’ She sipped her tea. ‘I told your granddaughter I could come to this party of hers at the weekend. Do you mind?’
‘Why should I mind?’ he asked. Alison was following up the première with a fund-raising barn dance at The Roundel.
‘Oh,’ Myra fiddled with her dark glasses, eyes downcast. ‘You know. Having me trespass on your private space finally.’
‘You’ve never been there?’
‘You
know
I never went there!’ Her flare of anger was only partly playful. ‘I only ever came to that damned flat behind the Albert bloody Hall.’
He smiled.
‘Of course I don’t mind you coming. You could stay the weekend, enjoy some peace and quiet after everybody’s gone. I don’t live in the main house any more. I moved out long ago, when Miriam grew up.’
‘Ah yes. Miriam. What a lot we have to discuss. I must be going now, though. And so must you, Teddy. Weren’t you due back at two-thirty? It’s nearly that now.’
‘I was enjoying myself.’
‘Me too.’
She allowed him another little narrowing of the eyes, her smile for intimates.
As she stood he took her furs from the waiter who had sprung forward, and helped her on with them. They were so heavy he was sure they were not truly fake. Once again there was a flurry in her wake. By the time they had reached the street she had once more assumed her wafer-thin public disguise of headscarf and dark glasses. She lifted a palm and a choice of taxis squealed to a halt. Resting a little hand on his shoulder she kissed him, on the lips this time.
‘
Hasta la vista
, Teddy,’ she said and, for all the glamour of her gestures and her perfume that lingered about him, there was something small and vulnerable about the sight of her stooping into a taxi and raising fingers in farewell through the back window, and it made his heart lurch in its moorings.
Sandy and the press officer were waiting for him in the foyer with a list of last-minute arrangements to discuss on their way up to the dress rehearsal.
‘My granddaughter and Miss Toye will be sitting by me,’ he told the press officer, ‘and I think Sandy should be placed on the other side of Miss Toye. Would that be all right, Sandy?’
Sandy’s gasp and swift acceptance allowed him to believe that the pleasure in the arrangement was entirely hers.
Notes From An Exhibition
Patrick Gale
When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies painting obsessively in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. She leaves behind an extraordinary and acclaimed body of work – but she also leaves a legacy of secrets and emotional damage it will take months to unravel.
A wondrous, monstrous creature, she exerts a power that outlives her. To her children she is both curse and blessing, though they all in one way or another reap her whirlwind, inheriting her waywardness, her power of loving – and her demons…Only their father’s Quaker gifts of stillness and resilience give them any chance of withstanding her destructive influence and the suspicion that they came a poor second to the creation of her art.
The reader becomes a detective, piecing together the clues of a life – as artist, lover, mother, wife and patient – which takes them from contemporary Penzance to 1960s Toronto to St Ives in the 1970s. What emerges is a story of enduring love, and of a family which weathers tragedy, mental illness and the intolerable strain of living with genius.
Patrick Gale’s latest novel shines with intelligence, humour and tenderness.
A Perfectly Good Man
Patrick Gale
‘Do you need me to pray for you now for a specific reason?’
‘I’m going to die.’
We’re all going to die. Does dying frighten you?’
‘I mean I’m going to kill myself.
When 20–year–old Lenny Barnes, paralysed in a rugby accident, commits suicide in the presence of Barnaby Johnson, the much–loved priest of a West Cornwall parish, the tragedy’s reverberations open up the fault–lines between Barnaby and his nearest and dearest. The personal stories of his wife, children and lover illuminate Barnaby’s ostensibly happy life, and the gulfs of unspoken sadness that separate them all. Across this web of relations scuttles Barnaby’s repellent nemesis – a man as wicked as his prey is virtuous.
Returning us to the rugged Cornish landscape of Notes from an Exhibition, Patrick Gale lays bare the lives and the thoughts of a whole community and asks us: what does it mean to be good?
The Whole Day Through
Patrick Gale
When forty–something Laura Lewis is obliged to abandon a life of stylish independence in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester, it seems all romantic opportunities have gone up in smoke. Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days – and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional touchstone against which she has judged every man since. She’s cautious – and he’s married – but they can’t deny that feelings still exist between them.
Are they brave enough to take the second chance at the lasting happiness that fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the need to do what seems to be the right thing?
Taking its structure from the events of a single summer’s day, The Whole Day Through is a bittersweet love story, shot through with an understanding of mortality, memory and the difficulty of being good. In it, Patrick Gale writes with scrupulous candour about the tests of love: the regrets and the triumphs, and the melancholy of failing.
The Whole Day Through is vintage Gale, displaying the same combination of wit, tenderness and acute psychological observation as his Richard & Judy bestseller Notes From an Exhibition.
Tree Surgery For Beginners
Patrick Gale
Lawrence Frost has neither father nor siblings, and fits so awkwardly into his worldly mother’s life he might have dropped from the sky. Like many such heroes, he grows up happier with plants than people. While he is straightforward, honest, and a doting dad, he can be a difficult, taciturn husband – but he’s the last person one would suspect of being a killer.
Waking one morning to find himself branded a wife–beater and under suspicion of murder, his small world falls apart as he loses wife, daughter, liberty, livelihood and, almost, his mind.
