54

As the recuperative fortnight at The Roundel turned into three weeks, then four, Jamie abandoned any pretence of an intention to return to London. After the crowded uneventfulness of his time in hospital, his days and nights in the old house were of a meditative monotony that soon became sweet to him. He rose when he felt ready – often not before mid-morning – took a long bath, went for a walk, lunched with his grandfather, slept again, read a book, ate supper with his grandfather and retired early. He spent hours just sitting. In his overcrowded childhood he had not appreciated how full the house was of good places to sit. He would begin to read or listen to a programme on the radio, find his attention drawn to the nearest window, and become peaceably transfixed by the unpeopled, unchanging view across ploughed fields silvered with frost, the river steaming slightly, or into the smaller landscape of the garden. Alone, or almost alone, for the first time in his life, he came to appreciate stillness and the space it gave for thought. Sitting in silence, he found that thoughts came to feel as distinct as speech so that sometimes, after sitting for a long while, he was not sure whether he had merely thought something or spoken it aloud to the empty room.

He did not spend hours with his grandfather. The knowledge that he was working in a room nearby was often company enough. The distant sounds of his synthesiser and sequencer, producing now the noise of a full symphony orchestra, now the intimate tones of a madrigal ensemble, was the aural equivalent of a comforting nightlight. When they were together, his grandfather often played them music rather than risk tiring Jamie with conversation. Jamie had not heard so much music since he was a teenager. They listened to whole operas at a sitting, whole cycles of string quartets. As in his childhood, music became their safe lingua franca.

Sam, Alison and Miriam paid visits. When Sam came, Jamie’s grandfather acquired an unforeseen engagement in London and left the two of them to spend the weekend in bed and luxuriate in one another’s company. When Alison came, she interrupted Jamie’s routine with the brief imposition of her own habitual weekend behaviour – quantities of newsprint, coffee, convenience food, fitful attempts to tame the garden. Miriam worked in the garden too. She no sooner laid eyes on Jamie than emotions welled up in her she had to channel into practical action rather than give them voice. She would barely be through with hugging him in greeting before she was reaching for the gardening gloves or moaning that Alison had lost the secateurs again. Jamie was almost hurt by this. She did much the same on the telephone. She had no sooner got through and asked how he was before she started saying things like, ‘Well, darling, I better go and feed Frank. You know how he is. I just wanted to hear your news …’

Worried, on her second visit, that Jamie was still not gaining weight, she began by riling his grandfather with an inquisition as to what the two of them had been eating. Then, seized by a sudden inspiration, she pulled on some gloves and marched with a hefty fork to the ruined greenhouse that leant against the wall in the most sheltered corner of the garden. She returned a while later with a big plant in her hand, its glossy leaves drooping and browned slightly with the effects of frost. It was a lone, self-sown survivor of the commune’s long-lost marijuana crop, unspotted by the local constabulary, and spared Alison’s occasional weeding forays, first by her ignorance and then by its authoritative size. Confident yet righteous, as though she were arranging flowers, Miriam dried its leaves off in a low oven, then donned an apron to bake the unappetising results into a double batch of gingerbread which had an aftertaste of bonfires. Packing half the batch into the deep freeze, she explained that her latest watercolouring pupil at the hospital had assured her the herb did wonders for suppressed appetites, while ginger counteracted nausea.

‘It’s not for fun,’ she assured Jamie. ‘It’s strictly medicinal. Your sister’s not to have any and you’re to eat one a day. And you’re not to tell your grandfather. He’d only be shocked.’

Jamie couldn’t help noticing that his mother had slipped a handful of the leaves into her handbag and wondered if she were regressing or merely pursuing a small nostalgic indulgence. The gingerbread worked, up to a point, and he began to put on a little weight. Sometimes it made him so stoned that, far from giving him a hunger rush, he just sat for hours feeling other-worldly and forgot to eat altogether. Once he fed Sam a slice, thinking it might be fun to stay in control while Sam relaxed beside him, but Sam relaxed to the point where he started crying and couldn’t stop.

When Sam’s job on the Wandsworth site came to an end, he brought the Volkswagen down, filled with extra clothes and possessions from the flat.

‘You don’t want to go back there,’ he asked. ‘Do you?’

‘Not much,’ Jamie admitted. ‘Do you mind?’

‘I can’t live there without you, that’s all,’ Sam said and it was understood that a new phase in their life together was beginning. After trying out various beds, they moved to a larger room that faced south. Jamie’s old room, with its narrow bed and small, barred window, now had all the monastic connotations of a sick room, and he would only return there occasionally to lie alone when he was sleeping badly or wanted to nap in the daytime. He refused to let the flat. It was important to him to keep the possibility open that they could always jump in the car and drive up for a wild weekend if they felt like it. But they never did.

Sam hated to be idle for long. It made him restive and short-tempered. Tidying out the mess of dried-up paint tins and rotting boxes of carefully stored newspapers and jam jars so as to make room in the garage for Jamie’s car alongside his grandfather’s, he unearthed an old black motorbike, complete with mildewed side-car. It looked like a museum piece.

‘It was Sally’s,’ Jamie’s grandfather told him. ‘My wife’s. I thought we got rid of that years ago.’ He touched the worn leather seat, ran a finger through the clogged cobwebs that had clouded the speedometer. ‘You can tinker with it if you like but I doubt it still goes after all this time.’

Challenged, and glad of a project, Sam took the thing apart, made a few trips into Rexbridge for spares and tools and began lovingly to reassemble it. One of the bedrooms became briefly toxic with paint fumes. One end of the kitchen table, covered in newspaper, became littered with filthy engine parts he was gradually wirebrushing back to an approximation of their old glory. With the first days of spring, his work was finished. Jamie was staring out of an upstairs window at the daffodils that seemed to have coloured the garden’s winter palette overnight, when he was startled by what sounded like a rook-scarer exploding followed by the revving of an engine. He came out of the front door just as his grandfather emerged from the studio, to find Sam performing a lap of honour around the house, grinning like a child with a new toy.

Touched at the trouble Sam had taken, Jamie’s grandfather dismissed his suggestion of selling it off to a collector and said his efforts had as good as purchased it. He declined Sam’s offer of a thank-you ride so Sam took Jamie out, covered in a rug and tucked down in the sidecar. Jamie would have felt safer riding pillion, wrapped around the driver, but the seat was far too small for two. Bouncing along, his head on a level with Sam’s waist, convinced they would be stopped any minute for not wearing helmets, he was terrified the sidecar would become detached somehow and hurtle off into a dyke or a field below the road. Here, he thought, was yet another reason for respecting his dead kinswoman. Relieved to be returned home in one piece, he was afraid to hurt Sam’s feelings by refusing to go out again. Sam divined his fear, however, and spared him, buzzing out on his own into Rexbridge or off around the fenland lanes whenever the unstirred atmosphere at The Roundel made him long for sensation or he felt himself beginning to brood.

‘It goes faster with no-one else on board,’ he enthused.

‘I don’t want to know,’ said Jamie, and bought him a magnetic St Christopher to stick on the petrol tank. He also bought him a helmet and, for further protection, gave him his big leather jacket, bought in an ultra-macho biker store in New York but never previously worn on anything faster than the 31 bus to Earl’s Court. Sam’s excursions brought Jamie relief too, used as he had begun to grow again to the pleasures of solitude, but he liked it when Sam returned, cheeks pink and cold. The feel of him bulked up by the jacket occasionally stoked up his testosterone levels so depleted by drugs and infection.

Sam made enquiries around local building contractors but there was far less building going on there than in the city, and firms were far stricter about who they employed and the terms on which they employed them. Jamie’s grandfather paid Sam to build him some new bookshelves then, satisfied with his handiwork, asked him to repair the studio’s guttering. Miriam found him work next, repointing the walls of the older house.

‘I know it’s Alison’s responsibility really,’ she apologised, ‘but poor Angel barely earns enough to buy clothes and food and it would be criminal to let the place fall apart.’

Sam was grateful for the money and happy to do work which didn’t take him away from Jamie. Jamie viewed their intervention ambivalently, however. He felt sure they were only paying up so they could somehow negate the problem of Sam being his lover by turning him into a kind of estate handyman. When he shared his doubts, Alison told him not to be so paranoid.

‘The work needs doing,’ she said reasonably. ‘It’s nicer to pay somebody we know and love than have your peace and quiet invaded by a load of strangers with noisy radios and friends in the villages they can gossip to.’

‘So you are embarrassed by us. You’re trying to keep us quiet now!’

‘Jamie. Think a little.’ Alison sat on the arm of Jamie’s chair and stroked his hair off his face. ‘Does that honestly seem likely?’

‘Suppose not,’ he conceded, after a moment, but his doubts remained.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she went on, ‘I’m not as poor as Ol’ Big Hair seems to think. When she’s paid for the repointing – which she should have paid for years ago in any case – I’ll see if I can get Sam to fix some of those rotten windows upstairs.’

Jamie was loath to admit it, but he was jealous sometimes of the place Sam had begun to carve, in his own right, in his family’s heart. If he was dozing upstairs and Miriam or Alison rang, he would lie there listening to the bluff ease with which Sam now took their calls and chatted with them, resenting it and not knowing why. Now that his grandfather could no longer avoid Sam indefinitely, the two of them had begun to talk as well, sporadically. Their relations were not helped, however, by Sam reasserting his rights to much of Jamie’s time his grandfather had been enjoying alone. Jamie’s grandfather plainly resented the change, but could not voice his resentment without openly recognising the reason why Sam had a prior claim on Jamie’s time. They were stiff with one another and uncomprehending. His grandfather affected to find Sam’s Plymouth accent impenetrable, while Sam claimed the other’s ‘German’ manner was forbidding.

‘It’s like being back in school,’ he protested. ‘I look at him and I don’t know what to say.’

Sam’s loving restoration of the motorbike, however, and the older man’s subsequent gift of it, marked a turning-point between them. At first they had called each other nothing at all, contenting themselves with ‘you’ to one another’s faces and with Grumps and Your Associate respectively behind one another’s backs, but Jamie knew that he could not in all honesty continue to claim that his grandfather treated his lover as an employee once they were on first name terms. Sam was the only one of Jamie’s friends ever to be allowed to refer to the great man as anything other than Mr Pepper. It happened quite suddenly. ‘What’s this then, Edward?’ Sam asked one evening, when a piece of music had caught his attention. Jamie looked up, surprised, thinking a fourth person had walked into the room.

Sam would gaily broach the unbroachable subjects too: ‘So you were too young to know any Nazis personally?’ he asked, and, ‘If you’re Jewish, how come Jamie isn’t?’ and, another time which had really made Jamie cringe, ‘So what did you do in the war, then, Edward?’

Sam and Edward talked as equals in a way that Jamie and his grandfather could never begin to do. Sam began to go over to the studio on his own and borrowed discs and tapes to play, listening to them with a perseverance that made Jamie suspect his grandfather of seriously undertaking his lover’s musical education.

‘Just don’t start taking piano lessons from him,’ he warned.

As well as telling him what to listen to or how to listen to it, his grandfather began to tell Sam things about Jamie. Jamie was, after all, their most solid common ground, however much the older man fought shy of understanding the younger ones’ relations.

‘You never said you sang,’ Sam confronted Jamie after supper one evening.

‘I don’t.’

‘But you did.’

‘It’s not important.’

‘Sing for me, then.’ Sam grinned, as though expecting tricks from a dog.

‘I can’t. Not any more. It would be embarrassing.’

‘Edward thinks it would help strengthen your lungs again. He says he used to sing when he was getting over TB.’ Jamie threw a glance across the hall to his grandfather who was frowning beneath a standard lamp over one of the glossy magazines Jamie was addicted to and which he found so shockingly superficial.

‘Oh does he now?’

His grandfather nodded without looking up from his article.

‘I was talking to Dr Marshall about it,’ he said, turning a page. ‘I think the regular breathing and controlled exhalation might help you overcome your shortness of breath.’

‘I can do breathing exercises without singing,’ Jamie snorted. ‘I do them when I go for my walks.’

His grandfather and Sam exchanged a glance that spoke of private understanding and his grandfather shrugged patiently.

‘As you see fit,’ he sighed.

Jamie understood, then, what it was he so resented in Sam’s slowly developing intimacy with his relatives. It was nothing as ordinary as jealousy – it had been in his power, after all, to keep Sam away from them and he had chosen not to. Rather, what upset him was that their behaviour implied that Sam was now easier to talk to than he was; he had become the sick person over whose bed and head and wheelchair people talked, and Sam had become the cheery nurse to whom visitors at the bedside preferred to direct their conversation.

This realisation was all it took to bring Jamie to a decision regarding his future, or lack of it. Without telling Sam, he contacted Geraint, the facilitator at the HIV support group he had been to in London, and asked to be sent the relevant forms for making both his will and his living will. In the one he left everything to Sam; car, flat, contents, everything, with the exception of some money and the idol, which he left to Alison. In the other, he made it quite clear that, in the event of his next life-threatening illness, he had no desire to receive treatment or medication beyond what was needed to make him comfortable. He still lacked the courage to stop taking the experimental drug he was currently prescribed, fearful of the mysterious symptoms that might replace side-effects which, however unpleasant, were at least a known and predictable evil. He intended to take the forms to a solicitor in Rexbridge and have his signatures witnessed by strangers. There was no need to trouble Sam with the matter before the relevant emergency arose.

One night he was sitting up in bed rereading the papers to make sure he had mentioned everything that was necessary. Sam was downstairs with his grandfather. The telephone rang. Sam answered and talked for a while, indistinctly, then hung up. Insidious as an outbreak of fire on a hearthside rug, an argument developed between the two men. Their words were indecipherable at first, with only a new aggressive punchiness in their phrasing betraying a change in mood, then their voices were raised and Jamie began to hear more clearly.

‘Well what would you fucking call it?!’ Sam suddenly shouted.

‘Horror. Tragedy, by all means,’ his grandfather shouted back. ‘But only that.’

‘Only that?’

‘No-one is being murdered. A disease is not a murder.’

‘It is when they sit on their arses and watch it spreading.’

‘They? Always this mythical They.’

Jamie sat bolt upright, straining his ears and pushing the papers beneath a magazine. Even at this distance he could feel their anger as an electric stiffening of the air, and was relieved once he heard the front door slam. Even when he had tried to make him leave, all those months before, Sam had been angered but not this furious. Jamie had no doubt that if his grandfather had stayed in the house, Sam would have lashed out at him with something harder than words. In confirmation of his fears, he heard Sam kicking out at furniture, shouting to the empty hall.

‘Fuck!’ he yelled and Jamie heard something fly across the floor with a splintering sound. ‘Fuck!’ Glass smashed.

‘Sam?’ Jamie called out. ‘Sam?’

Gone were the days when Jamie could spring out of bed. He set his feet carefully on the floor, shuffling them into the slippers Miriam had insisted he start wearing about the house, pulled his towelling gown about him and rolled forward into an uneasy standing position. Hardly waiting for the dizziness to pass, he made for the landing and, clutching the banister, headed downstairs.

It was only a bottle and the coffee table. Just as Jamie rounded the foot of the stairs, Sam muttered under his breath, lashing out at a big chunk of glass with his toe, sending it skittering across the floor through the puddle of red wine.

‘Stupid old git,’ he spat.

‘Sam?’

‘Fuck!’ Sam kicked at the armchair, though less vigorously.

‘What the hell happened? What did he say?’ Jamie had to sit down. He sank on to the sofa, pulling his feet up out of the draught. Sam was muttering to himself, pacing. He began to clear up the glass.

‘Leave that for a bit,’ Jamie told him. ‘The floor’s stained already. It won’t show.’

‘Someone’ll cut themselves,’ Sam insisted crossly, then swore again, dropping a chunk of glass as he cut his finger.

‘Leave it. Here. Come and tell me.’

The pain cut through Sam’s temper. He stared down as blood oozed from his finger tip and splashed into the wine. He put his finger in his mouth and sucked.

‘I nearly punched him,’ he mumbled, his mouth full, finally making eye contact.

‘I’m glad you didn’t.’ Jamie patted the sofa beside him. Shamed now, Sam came to sit.

‘Hug,’ Jamie told him. Sam hugged him.

‘You’ll get cold,’ he said.

‘No I won’t. What happened?’

Sam sighed, exasperated at the memory.

‘Well that was Alison who rang earlier. I thought you were asleep. Sorry.’

‘That’s okay.’

Sam pulled Jamie to lean against his chest, hugging him with his legs for warmth as he talked.

‘She was in a right state. She’s just had Sandy on the phone. The lease is up for renewal on the helpline office and the rent’s going up by nearly double. They’re forcing them out on the street.’

‘Shit. But they knew that was going to happen.’

‘Yeah but they’ve just heard their local authority grant’s been cut to about two hundred quid, haven’t they?’

‘What?’ Jamie was incredulous. ‘Why?’

‘There’s been some fucking report wheeling out a load of statistics that say there’s never going to be a hetero epidemic.’

‘So? There’s no need for a helpline? Other lives don’t count? What about the worried well? What about rape victims?’

‘That’s what I said. When I hung up I explained to that old git and I said it was a fucking holocaust.’

‘Ah.’

‘And he flew off the handle then. I didn’t understand at first. Thought he was agreeing with me and was just pissed off about the grant. Then I realised he was saying there was no comparison. I said … You don’t want to hear this.’ He ruffled Jamie’s hair.

‘Sam! Tell me.’

‘I said that cutting the grant was no different to sending Jews to ovens. It was discarding a whole bunch of innocent people who just happened to be in the minority. Then that … that stupid old wanker –’

‘Steady.’

‘Well he is.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said,’ Sam assumed a parodic German accent. ‘“Zere is a vorld of difference between a religious culture and vhere deviants like you choose to put your dicks.”’

Jamie was silenced a moment, shocked.

‘He doesn’t talk like that,’ he said at last. ‘You know he doesn’t.’

‘I know,’ Sam admitted. ‘But that’s the way I heard it. Fucking Kraut.’

‘He’s as English as you or me.’

‘Yeah, but –’

‘Yeah but nothing. He was upset, Sam.’

‘So was I upset.’

‘He lost his parents in a death camp, for God’s sake. His only sister –’

‘You’re joking.’

‘Hardly. She was experimented on.’

‘You never told me.’

‘It’s not the kind of thing that naturally comes up in a conversation. Anyway, I assumed Alison had told you.’

‘She hadn’t. Christ.’

Jamie hugged Sam’s legs, twisted his head back against Sam’s chest to reassure him. ‘You needed to get angry and so did he,’ he said softly. ‘Come on. Let’s get to bed.’

But Sam insisted on mopping up the spilled wine and sweeping away the glass first. Jamie sat on the sofa, yawning, hugging a cushion to himself for warmth and watching. Sam worked in silence but the argument was evidently still repeating itself in his head because he abruptly stood up, clutching the dust pan and the brush, which was now stained red with wine, and said, ‘It wasn’t just Jews they sent to the ovens, you know. It was people like us, too.’

‘I know. I’m sure he does too.’

Sam was about to reply but he paused a moment. He looked down at the panful of green, jagged edges.

‘Only … I’m not really like that. You know that, don’t you?’ he said, almost apologetically.

‘I know.’

‘I’m … I am with you but I’m not interested in other blokes.’

‘I know, Sam. It’s all right. I’m honoured.’

Sam walked away to the kitchen.

‘Just thought you should know, that’s all,’ he said softly.

The following day, while Sam was at work on the repointing, Jamie walked over with a jug of coffee to find his grandfather in the studio. An old acquaintance, guilty at not visiting the hospital, had sent him a packet of Blue Mountain beans, so the luxurious brew was by way of a peace offering.

‘Made us some special coffee,’ he said. ‘Sorry. Are you working?’

‘No.’ His grandfather swung around on the piano stool. ‘Not really.’ He carefully set a pencil back in the jam jar to the left of his keyboard while Jamie poured them each a cupful.

‘I’ve been invited to stand in as conductor for some concerts in Stuttgart,’ his grandfather announced. ‘I think I’ll go. I’ll have to leave in a couple of days, so I’ll probably go up to London tomorrow to sort a few things out with the record company. But I think you two can manage now.’ He paused. ‘If I made a reservation for dinner in Rexbridge tonight, would your appetite be up to it? My treat. A reservation for the three of us, that is?’

‘Yes,’ Jamie smiled. ‘That would be great. Thank you. Er. Grandpa?’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t expect Sam to apologise for what he said last night. He won’t. Because he meant it. And, well, you know, he’s hurting quite badly right now.’

‘That makes two of us,’ his grandfather observed quietly. He was wearing a green suede waistcoat Jamie had always liked.

‘I like that,’ Jamie pointed. ‘Very smart. Will you leave it to me in your will?’

‘Of course.’ Feeling unable to reach out to his grandson, Edward touched the waistcoat instead, smoothing the nap of the suede.

‘So,’ Jamie said. ‘Since you’re about to disappear again, what about my therapeutic singing lesson?’

‘Are you quite sure?’ His grandfather frowned. Jamie nodded, going to lean on the piano’s flank.

‘But there are probably spiders down there it’s been so long,’ he said.

‘Well in that case … I think something simple, in the middle of the voice but,’ his grandfather stretched up to take a book from the shelf beside him, ‘We need something with long phrases to stretch you nicely. Fauré?’

‘Fine,’ Jamie shrugged. ‘My French is terrible, though.’

‘Yes.’ The old man raised an eyebrow. ‘I remember. Après un Rêve. I’ll take it quite slowly. Stand up straight. Shoulders back. Legs apart.’

‘I remember.’

It was only later, when they were dressing up for dinner and Sam confessed to having heard his singing from the top of a ladder, that Jamie realised his grandfather had taken care to choose a song he had already heard his lover admire.

‘Well that’s as near to an understanding as I think we’ll get,’ he said wistfully.

‘How do you mean?’ Sam asked, abandoning the tie he had been struggling with. ‘Do I really have to wear this fucking thing? It’s like a noose.’

‘No.’ Jamie shook his head, smiling.

‘So how do you mean, “understanding”?’

‘Oh. Nothing,’ Jamie answered briskly. ‘Just being sentimental. Shall I wear the red shirt or the green?’