Rough Music by Patrick Gale

Author:Patrick Gale [Gale, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: UK
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-01-17T13:00:00+00:00

BEACHCOMBER

John was not good at running the house on his own. Not that it took much running, and a cleaner came twice a week. The plumbing and heating system was shared with the prison, so was maintained by prison work parties, and he ate all his meals with the men, supper included, if there was no family at home to dine with him. Frances teased him that he had always been looked after by institutions and could not fend for himself. This was not strictly true. Had he remained a bachelor, he would have spent the money he saved thereby on laundry bills and membership of a club.

The things he was hopeless at were the small touches that made this barracks of a house feel intimate. Frances effected them without thinking, much as she ate or breathed, drawing curtains, turning on table lamps, bringing in flowers from the garden, playing soft music. He had watched her often enough, these were all things he could do, but it took a certain confidence to do them on one’s own. Besides, it would have felt self-indulgent and he had far more important business on his mind. As a result, he would suddenly become aware that he was sitting at night with the windows still naked, in a room rendered flat and harsh by a single overhead light source. Or rather he would notice the phenomena and be dimly aware of the cause but preferred to view the physical discomfort as a symptom of Frances’s absence rather than as a sign of any dereliction on his part.

When she said how smelly and cold the telephone box was, he could truthfully say, “It’s pretty wretched here, too,” and felt closer to her. In much the same way, when she asked how things were at his end, he slightly exaggerated their badness. He did not mention that it had been gloriously sunny or that one of the officers’ wives had brought him round a remarkably good Lancashire hotpot which he had heated up with some beans from the garden that he had gathered himself. Instead, he spoke of how the search for Farmer was now concentrated on the seaports and airports and was drawing humiliating blanks. He spoke of the restlessness of the prisoners, made worse by the heat and their being confined as punishment for the disturbance on the night Farmer broke out.

“Well come back,” she said. “You’re still on holiday. What more can you do there?”

“I have to be here until they catch him,” he sighed, trying to be patient. “Or at least draw some concrete leads as to his whereabouts.”

“He’s hardly dangerous.”

“He robbed a post office, darling, and raped the postmistress.”

“She was probably some puritanical busybody.”

“Frances!”

“I was joking. But it doesn’t mean he’ll do it again.”

“Since when were you a criminologist?”

“The pips …”

“Give me the number.”

“Penfasser 452.”

He started to call her back then froze, finger on the dial. There had been a noise on the stairs.

It was an old house, hatchet-faced mid-Victorian with fanciful castellations, and was full of old timbers so that it creaked like a ship.

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