The Facts of Life (75 page)

Iris Murdoch

Collected Stories

Mavis Gallant

The Wings of the Dove

Henry James

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Anne Tyler

Remembrance of Things Past

Marcel Proust

The Flint Anchor

Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins

Collected Stories

Saki

If you weren’t a writer what job would you do?

If I weren’t a novelist and couldn’t be a psychotherapist, I can imagine being very happy as a jobbing gardener. Nothing fancy, just mowing lawns and pruning rose bushes. Farmer’s spouse is a pretty wonderful position too, though. We have a herd of beef cattle and I love working with them.

by Patrick Gale

MY PREVIOUS TWO
novels,
Little Bits of Baby
and
The Cat Sanctuary
, had been published by Chatto&Windus, which was then ruled by publishing doyenne Carmen Callil. In her characteristically outspoken way Carmen let it be known that my writing was never going to amount to anything unless I wrote something big, preferably a family saga, since family dynamics clearly interested me and big novels were then going through something of a renaissance.

The book that resulted,
The Facts of Life
, was originally to have been three books. (Novel sequences were then also going through a, rather briefer, renaissance …) I had wanted for a long time to write a novel that dealt with the AIDS epidemic then threatening to engulf so many of my friends but I had repeatedly put it off. I didn’t want to write something crassly exploitative and I was also wary of writing something that would end up being read only by a handful of gay readers. I wanted straight readers to understand and I wanted to offer gay readers and readers who felt they were most at risk from the virus some crumb of fictional comfort. My idea was to ground my AIDS narrative in a historical context by making it just one part of a trilogy of interlinked novels about ‘dirty’ diseases. The first volume was to have focused on Edward and TB, the second on Miriam and the cluster of venereal infections to which the Pill exposed women of her generation, and only the third on Miriam’s two children and AIDS. In practice Miriam’s story threatened to become a comedy, which didn’t feel comfortable. For several years I had been volunteering first on a London AIDS ward and then at the extraordinary Bethany respite centre for AIDS patients and their families in Cornwall and I found I was increasingly taken up by the parallels I could see emerging between Edward’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and my own as a survivor of AIDS, both of us besieged by similar irrational guilt. So I ended up ditching the three-novel idea and – bearing in mind Carmen’s suggestion of a big fat book-combined their material in a single two-part narrative structure.

‘I found I was increasingly taken up by the parallels I could see emerging between Edward’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and my own as a survivor of AIDS, both of us besieged by similar irrational guilt’

Looking at it now, I can see that it remains, basically, two novels in one set of covers. I took a long time to write it and I was not a happy person at the time, with my private life in turmoil, my finances in a parlous state and my professional and emotional security at an all-time low. Years later, writing
Rough Music
, I was so much happier that I found the confidence to take narrative risks, weaving two narratives together where
The Facts of Life
left them entirely separate. (I also had a much tougher editor by then, which helped.) But I stand by it, for all that bits of the second half have – thanks to the wonders of the antiretroviral drug treatments developed since publication – come to seem as much like scenes from a period drama as the whole of the first half.

I like the way the first half is melodramatically cinematic and the second, soapily televisual. And I like, even love, the fenland setting. One of the several sorrows that formed a background to the novel’s genesis was a relationship I attempted with a chap who divided his time between the East End and a beautiful, unheated cottage near Wisbech. For months it seemed I was either waiting miserably by a phone that never rang or shivering around his cottage, feeling badly in the way. If anything convinced me to prolong my humiliation as long as I did, it was the landscape out there, that weird, haunted landscape, with its vast horizons, sinisterly imprisoned waterways and extraordinarily grand churches.

The Roundel was an exercise in pure wish fulfilment on my part. It does exist, in a way, though with a different name and in a completely different landscape. A La Ronde lies on the outskirts of Exmouth and is now in the care of the National Trust, but it is very much the Georgian house that I describe, complete with its labour- and heat-saving circular structure, and its odd history of having been designed by spinsters for the use of spinsters. I had the great good luck to be shown round it, months before the National Trust subjected it to the inevitable tidying away of all the ugly but fascinating accretions of its history, by the last of these indomitable Parminter women. I’ve never forgotten the way she turned from showing me the pictures her bored, respectable ancestors had made with their own hair to proudly displaying the practical jerkin she had made from rabbits she had shot and skinned herself. I suspect elements of her crept into my portrayal of Dr Pertwee …

Other titles by Patrick Gale

The Whole Day Through

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 yardstick by which she has judged every man since.

Are they brave enough to take this second chance at the lasting happiness which fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the need, instilled in childhood, to do the right thing?

Notes from an Exhibition

Gifted artist Rachel Kelly is a whirlwind of creative highs and anguished, crippling lows. She’s also something of an enigma to her husband and four children. So when she is found dead in her Penzance studio, leaving behind some extraordinary new paintings, there’s a painful need for answers. Her Quaker husband appeals for information on the internet. The fragments of a shattered life slowly come to light, and it becomes clear that bohemian Rachel has left her children not only a gift for art – but also her haunting demons.

‘Thought-provoking, sensitive, humane … by the end I had laughed and cried and put all his other books on my wish list’

Daily Telegraph

Rough Music

As a small boy, Julian is taken on what seems to be the perfect Cornish summer holiday. It is only when he becomes a man – seemingly at ease with love, with his sexuality, with his ghosts – that the traumatic effects of that distant summer rise up to challenge his defiant assertion that he is happy and always has been.

‘Hugely compelling …
Rough Music
is an astute, sensitive and at times tragically uncomfortable meditation on sex, lies and family … a fabulously unnerving book’

Independent on Sunday

Tree Surgery for Beginners

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. 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. A darkly comic fairy tale for grown-ups.

‘The book is one of [Gale’s] best: a fluently constructed narrative underpinned by excellent characterisation. Running through it all is the theme of redemption; and the hero’s journey from despair to hope makes a stirring odyssey for the reader’

Sunday Telegraph

A Sweet Obscurity

At nine years old, Dido has never known what it is like to be part of a proper family. Eliza, the clever but hopeless aunt who has brought her up, can’t give her the normal childhood she craves. Eliza’s ex, Giles, wants Dido back in his life, but his girlfriend has other ideas. Then an unexpected new love interest for Eliza causes all four to re-evaluate everything and sets in motion a chain of events which threatens to change all their lives.

‘Gale’s most questioning, ambitious work. It amuses and startles.
A Sweet Obscurity
is worth every minute of your time’

Independent

The Cat Sanctuary

Torn apart by a traumatic childhood, sisters Deborah and Judith are thrown back together again when Deborah’s diplomat husband is accidentally assassinated. Judith’s lover, Joanna, the instigator of this awkward reunion, finds that as the sisters’ murky past is raked up, so too is her own, and the three women become embroiled in a tangle of passion and recrimination.

‘
The Cat Sanctuary
is a book with claws. It has a soft surface – a story set in sloping Cornish countryside, touching on love, families and forgiveness, delivered in a gentle, straightforward prose-but from time to time it catches you unawares. Scratch the surface, suggests Gale, and you draw blood’

The Times

Other fiction touching on AIDS and bereavement, suggested by Patrick Gale:

A Home at the End of the World

Michael Cunningham

A three-edged love affair between boyhood friends Jonathan and Bobby and Jonathan’s eccentric New York roommate, Clare, spirals off in a direction none of them could have predicted.

The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket

John Weir