by Patrick Gale
‘No. It’s fine. We’re on the same network. Free local call.’
‘Oh. Great.’
‘So…d’you want to meet or what?’
‘Sure.’ His blood raced. He quietly closed the kitchen door. ‘Where are you?’
‘Hayle. 34 Portreath Way.’
‘That’s easy.’
‘Yeah. Er. Can you come over now?’
‘I’m looking after my sister’s kid.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘Tomorrow?’ he suggested.
‘No,’ she said. ‘How about Tuesday?’
‘Tuesday’d be fine. What time shall I pick you up.’
‘How’d you mean?’
‘To go out.’
‘Oh…’
‘Or we could stay in.’
‘Yeah. Er. Eight? Give the kids time to get off.’
‘Okay. 34 Pentreath Way.’
‘Portreath. Yeah.’
‘See you there, Janet.’
‘Yeah. Great. Bye.’
He hung up and remained leaning on the cluttered dresser as he took it in. From what he could tell from her whisper, her voice had been rough, as if she had just woken up, but warm, definitely warm. Hot, as she would have put it. 34 Portreath Way. Not Street or Road. A modern house, therefore. As different from his as could be imagined. He could bring her into Penzance, perhaps, to the tapas bar or the fish place. Or a film, maybe? No. Eight was too late for a film. Perhaps she’d have eaten already. A drink, then. Could he take wine? What was the form for a date with a woman you had never met and didn’t know? And what should he wear?
He had a fleeting vision of turning up in oily overalls with nothing underneath to find her sleepily welcoming in a black negligee and not much else then realised he was getting crazily horny which felt dreadful in Molly’s kitchen with Lucy next door. So he made them a pot of tea and took it through with a packet of fig rolls to watch the rest of the Western with her. Happily it was an Alan Ladd one; scarcely a lily white breast or pouting squaw in sight, just the relative innocence of men, guns and horseflesh.
5
Eliza woke to find Dido standing by the bed with a cup of tea.
‘You’re not due back until tomorrow.’
‘It is tomorrow,’ Dido said. ‘I made you tea. Sit up or you’ll go to sleep again.’ Her brow furrowed. ‘Where’s Carlo?’
‘Oh. Oh, Dido.’ Eliza sat up. She worried she was going to cry again.
‘It’s okay. I know he’s dead. I cleared up the mess. I just wondered where you put his body.’
‘Giles’ garden. Under the copper cherry. He’ll be happy there.’ With dim gratitude Eliza registered that Julia had not broken the news herself.
‘Oh.’ Dido shrugged. ‘So you can pay that bill.’
‘Yes.’ Eliza felt herself blush. She sat up and obediently sipped her tea. ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ Dido was eyeing her sceptically in the way that always made Eliza think caught red-handed. ‘I must get up,’ she added. ‘This is awful. I was going to buy food.’
‘I bought food.’
‘How?’
Dido spoke over her shoulder as she returned to the kitchen. ‘Granny gave me money.’
‘She’s not your granny.’
‘I know, I know. She’s just Giles’ mother but I don’t mind calling her that. She’s nice. And she gives me money.’
‘Yes but it’s your money, to spend on things you want.’
‘I wanted food. I bought bacon and bread and bananas and beans.’
‘B food.’
‘And milk and tea and sugar. Giles gave me money as well. Twenty pounds. I think that was supposed to come to you. And She gave me money, too.’
‘Why?’ Eliza knew Dido was shrugging.
‘To shut me up? Buy me off? I dunno. Money’s money.’
Eliza heard cupboards open and close, the frying pan clunk onto the stove, the menacing, electric click-click of the gas lighter.
She must have fallen asleep again, for the next moment Dido was holding out a bacon sandwich and a glass of orange juice. Breakfast was one of the things they did together, as a rule, Dido sitting at the opposite end of the bed while they chewed over toast and the day’s prospects. This morning, however, Dido must have eaten already.
‘Are you ill?’ she asked as Eliza sipped her juice. ‘Or just sad?’
Eliza shook her head. ‘Sad, mainly.’
‘He was a good age.’
‘I know.’
‘And he was costing a lot.’
Eliza smiled at this frank assessment. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’
‘School. I’m late. Sign this. It’s to say you can’t come to the Parents’ Evening tonight. I’ve got to go because Meera and I are helping with coffees but there’s food so…oh. Sticky fingers. Don’t worry. I’ll do it.’ Eliza watched Dido execute a perfect copy of her signature after only a moment’s thought. ‘Bye.’ Dido kissed her shortly. ‘Don’t forget to eat again later. You’re getting too thin.’
Eliza lay listening to Dido brushing her teeth, washing up breakfast then letting herself out. It was monstrous to let the child mother her, she knew this, but Dido’s capability was hard to withstand. Increasingly the little girl – not so little, she was ten next birthday – was coming not only to display traces of her grandmother’s bracing lack of humour but to resemble Hannah too, neither greatly comforting.
Dido was not really Eliza’s daughter but her niece, her sister Hannah’s unplanned daughter. Her senior by two years, Hannah was everything Eliza was not: sporty, rebellious, popular, courageous, startlingly plain. Until she was seven or eight, she was a nice enough looking, chubby-cheeked child who more than made up for her failure to turn heads with her dynamic ability to make friends. Then she began to grow and her troubles started. The strain of coping with what came next drove her father to walk out on them. Eliza would have walked out too, only she was still a child and knew of nowhere better to walk to.
So she ran away into study. Encouraged by her mother, who taught Latin to ever dwindling classes, she concentrated on work as Hannah had done on sport, and found that she was good at it. She discovered a technique for assimilating, mentally filing, then reproducing information that could be applied equally well to physics or history. But these were cold, unstirring successes quite unlike Hannah’s sweaty triumphs on the sports track.
It was only in music that she found any real delight. Musicians were famously unconscious of fashion and accommodating of outcasts. She was quiet and had no dress sense beyond aspiring to invisibility. She fitted right in. She was not a star but she played the piano well enough to accompany those who thought they might be, and she sang soprano in a clear tone with barely a hint of vibrato, so was a natural for close harmony and madrigal groups. She was not particularly popular but she went unnoticed, which was the best she could hope for.
The real escape came at university. The family had no money but she won a music scholarship to Oxford and, for the first time in her life, found herself hundreds of miles from home, among people who knew nothing of Hannah or her problem. Impulsively, when first asked, she said that, no she had no brothers or sisters, and the lie brought a heady buzz that outweighed any dull pang of guilt. So she repeated it until it became a kind of truth. Hannah was far away, studying sociology on a sports scholarship in America, so there was no risk she would visit.
Having avoided involvements with boys throughout her teens, it became ever easier to do so; resistance rather than exposure, it seemed, was the surest inoculation. By her second year of studies, she was comfortably established as the girl to whom men brought their confidences and girls their complaints. Merely by withholding herself and standing back to observe, she found she had acquired a wholly unfounded reputation for wisdom. Whereas virginity in her teens had been a mark of ridiculous shame, in her twenties it was so unimaginable a state that her friends assumed she had lost it long ago and decided men were not worth the emotional e
xpense.
So, while her friends’ second and third year rooms acquired the appurtenances of sin – ashtrays, joss stick holders, wine racks, cunningly concealed extra mattresses – and while many of them opted to move out to sordid, mixed-gender house shares, Eliza’s room in the weeks of her Finals remained as studious and tidy as in her first week. Fruit bowl, music stand and a second-hand Grove Encyclopaedia of Music were totemic of her withheld state.
She graduated with a first-class degree and calmly accepted the research place her tutor had already hinted would be offered her. The thought of going back into the world after these three years of self-regarding peace left her queasy with fear.
Her doctoral research was to be on the Elizabethan madrigal, focussing on the two surviving works of a young Cornish courtier, Roger Trevescan (Ave Verum and Go, Dissembler, I Care Not). She believed she could furnish a case for his being the hand behind The Revels of Cybele, an unfinished cycle of madrigals in praise of the monarch.
She still played the piano, still sang, but had no illusions about pursuing either as a career. She would finish her doctorate, become a lecturer, carve herself out a quietly comfortable niche which would change nothing in the world and where the world would leave her alone. Not for her Hannah’s climbing of mountains and battling with prejudice.
Then she was pressed to sing the soprano solos in a small performance of the Pergolesi Stabat Mater. Her fellow soloist was Giles, a choral scholar at one of the grander colleges and quite unreasonably beautiful. Almost bloodlessly Aryan, he looked barely eighteen, although he was actually twenty. His voice was that rare thing, a counter tenor which did not immediately make her want to laugh, perhaps because, for once, its high, bright tone was emerging from a face that matched it.
She was embarrassed to be singing with him, not being in his league, but he softened his tone to complement hers, followed her lead in the way she sang the ornaments (sensing that, unlike him, she had researched them) and congratulated her afterwards without so much warmth as to sound patronising. When he insisted she join him for dinner afterwards, it was a perilous moment. Assailed by his beauty and charm, she accepted but insisted no less vehemently on bringing along two friends from the orchestra, both of them plainly smitten with him, one of them exceedingly pretty. She was thus able to spend the meal feasting on his looks with impunity and at a safe distance while he basked in the adoration of the others. He left with the pretty one, with whom he had an affair for the rest of that term.
Believing herself proof against further meetings with him, she thought no more about it. Two weeks later, in the summer holidays, Hannah was reported dead and Eliza had to rush home.
Not long before, Hannah had amazed everyone by returning from America with a baby girl in tow and joking that she had no idea who the father was because there were so many candidates. Thinking back, Eliza realised her mother and her friends were too startled to remember to be scandalized. Undaunted by everyone’s assumption that raising the little girl, Dido, would now be her occupation, Hannah settled in London and threw herself into fundraising work for a charity that provided support for people with facial disfigurement. Dido slept peacefully in her carrycot in a corner of an office plastered with images of burn victims, Paget’s disease, leontism and cherubism. Months later Dido was still only a babe in arms, barely weaned, sleeping peacefully on the veranda of a boarding house in Kathmandu when Hannah fell to her death off a mountain. She had left Dido in the care of an amah while she led an all-woman team on a sponsored hike up Sharpu 1. Characteristically she died saving the life of a team member, a guilt-wracked cartographer who escorted Hannah’s ashes, along with Dido, back to England.
It was Hannah’s fourth such expedition but her first as a mother. Under the terms of the will she had drawn up before setting out, she gave Eliza sole guardianship of the baby, to raise her as her own. Informed by fleeting postcard, Eliza had not for one moment thought of the document as anything but a superstitious formality, like taking out holiday insurance.
Tucked in Dido’s carrycot, Eliza found a guidebook which she pored over obsessively in her shock. From the campsite Sharpul looks awesome but behind the well-named facade lies an easier but still intimidating route to a tiny summit perch over 4000 ft above the valley floor. Around 2 weeks walk from Kathmandu via the airstrip at Taplejung, it is reached after a fitness-testing hike over three mountain passes. She found the spot on the book’s fold-out map and showed it to her mother but what her reeling mind needed was a chart of the mountain seen from the side, with drops and distances; she needed to be able to say here’s where she fell and there’s where she landed.
Her sorrow at losing Hannah was heightened by her guilty sense of relief that her troublesome sister was gone. And the gift of Dido, the entrusting of a baby to her, brought a confusion of joy and dismay. Befuddled by grief, and by antidepressants pressed on them by a kind GP, she and her mother were thrust into a world of potty training and Ready Brek. Robbed of a funeral, cheated of goodbyes, they grew briefly close again as they had not been since Hannah blew the family apart. The merciful tedium of child-rearing enfolded them even as they were ostracised in the way the bereaved are when everyone considers the death a blessing. Despite the announcement in the papers, Eliza’s father did not use the occasion to resume contact, which was also a cause for relief.
The possibility that Dido would take after her mother was discussed even less than the identity of her mystery father. Just once, when they were bathing her, Eliza asked,
‘So do you think she’s going to…?’
And her mother replied, ‘No, of course she’s isn’t. Just look at her. She’s a little angel!’ with a religious certainty that silenced fear.
Her mother was startled and upset when Eliza began preparing to return to her studies and to take Dido with her.
‘I thought you weren’t going back,’ she said. ‘Not now. I thought you’d both stay here. How will you manage? University’s no place for a baby!’
‘We’ll be fine,’ Eliza assured her. ‘She’s so good. She’ll be no bother.’ Though in truth she was giving little thought to how they would manage, such was her growing desperation to escape the desolation of her mother’s house.
At first Dido was, indeed, little more trouble than a cat. Other students managed to keep far more problematic pets. It was simply a matter of anticipating when Dido was going to fall asleep and seizing that moment to leave her in her pushchair while Eliza raced to the library and found what she needed. Even wide awake she was an affable baby, easily placated. When people asked, Eliza told them half the truth, that she had adopted Dido, that she had known Dido’s mother all her life, that Dido’s mother had died in a mountaineering accident. Friends were charmed at the idea. Married ones, with children of their own, welcomed her into their unofficial club with something like relief, recommended babysitters and made offers of outgrown clothing. Eliza had always found that work expanded to fill the time you gave it and now her research actually benefited from the disruption the baby represented, obliged as she was to channel her efforts into increasingly concentrated intervals of peace and clear thinking.
Such a chasm of years seemed to yawn between the gurgler in the pushchair and the dear, severe, forgiving person who had just washed up breakfast. Her manner was so much older than was fair, a consequence of Eliza’s failure to protect her. Eliza had no camera but there was a recent snap of Dido, taken by Giles, tucked into her wallet. Head thick with the past, she made herself sit up and lunge over the side of the bed to retrieve it.
Dido was in a dressing room at the Coliseum, playing at actresses and surprised by the camera. She had on a crazy feathered headdress and had frozen in the act of lifting a powder puff to her nose. Eliza stared at the picture hard, fighting to see truth beneath familiarity. Yes, the features were quite large and her teeth weren’t entirely straight, but then whose teeth were at that age? It was more comforting, Eliza decided, to hope that the stranger slowly emerging f
rom the child’s soft beginnings was not Hannah at all, but the unnamed, unaware father.
6
Giles got up at the same time as Julia because it was a working morning and his voice would need time to warm up and settle. His first thought was of Dido but she had got up even earlier and already left the house.
‘Don’t worry,’ Julia told him. ‘She’ll be cooking breakfast for Eliza before school. It’s one of their things together. At least I had a chance to clean her uniform. It was filthy. And I slipped in some money for food. God knows what they eat half the time.’
‘You are good. You think of everything.’
‘I know.’
He lifted her hair and kissed the back of her neck as she pored over the day’s paper. (She rarely had time to read more than the arts pages and a headline or two.) For a moment she softened under his touch, remembering him with her last night, then he felt her pull herself together. She sighed.
‘I must go.’
‘Russians at the airport?’
‘Czechs this week,’ she said. ‘And Alexy.’ She stood, folding the paper in the neat way he had never mastered.
She had been up no longer than him but managed to look amazingly groomed. Her dark hair was glossy smooth, her make-up perfect. An American client, a tenor they both knew, called her awesome.
‘How do you do that?’ Giles asked, admiring her as she picked up the leather document case he had bought her back from his trip to the Maggio Musicale. He noticed she had managed to find shoes which subtly echoed it.
‘Do what?’ she said, worried.
‘You look wonderful.’
‘Thanks,’ she said but her smile was warmer than her words.
‘Wish me luck.’
‘Why? Shit. I forgot. Of course! Your cab’s booked for nine but I was going to put your music out.’
‘It’s okay.’ He opened the paper, saw the word paedophile in a headline and immediately closed it. ‘I can find it myself. Bye.’