by Patrick Gale
She was miming now, opening and shutting her mouth, laughing at jokes, looking intelligent, making all the right noises when she was actually on the other side of the room or somewhere up by the light fittings, watching the dinner party go down in slow motion flames like the amaretto wrappers Grover’s wretched boyfriend kept igniting on the candles.
She had been like this all day. It was not just the wine. She had been late for work. She was never late. She had fluffed her French idioms when speaking to someone at the Aix Festival office. She had spent the day muddling the Czech clients’ names, misdialling numbers, slopping coffee. Normally any one of these would have jolted her back into awareness and efficiency, been no more than a momentary glitch but what was so frightening was that today she could not seem to care.
It was as though someone had pumped her full of tranquillisers. She felt well – really, deliciously, toe-flexingly well. Perhaps she was going down with some benign virus, hence the sensation of unworldliness? She had been sick again this morning but then she was sick so often, usually when she felt she had eaten too much, that it was hard to gauge its significance.
‘Darling?’ Villiers brushed the back of her hand with a celery leaf.
‘What?’
‘Is Giles angry with me about something? He hasn’t said a word all evening.’
‘Oh you know Giles. He’s hopeless. He’s probably exhausted because of the recording.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Positive. He came straight from Kilburn to this without drawing breath.’
‘He turned his back on me.’
‘Villiers, he’s fine. He’d have said. I love that shirt on you. Brings out your eyes.’
She cursed Liana Barton for bringing him. Villiers was such a gossip. It was amusing when one was safely alone with him, on neutral territory, but to bring him into one’s house and set him loose on friends and colleagues was to court trouble. He missed nothing. It was exhausting merely shielding oneself let alone protecting guests.
Liana was sleeping with him presumably, or fixated and hoping to. Julia had slept with him. Just once. Years ago, when she had only recently arrived in London and was too inexperienced not to realise he was basically gay. Publicly Villiers slept with women. Privately he only slept with women when he wanted something, and got his real pleasure in some unobserved elsewhere. The astonishing part was that he could still find women who were grateful. He had slept with her because she was working for Selina and he wanted Selina to hear the vocal consort he had been trying to launch beyond the amateur circuit. She had felt such a fool when she had realised the truth about him. Soon after she moved in with Giles she had discovered Villiers was an old friend of his so, on the principle that a snake in the hand was dangerous but at least you knew what it was up to, she had swallowed her pride and went through the motions of befriending him too. She guessed he had always fancied Giles so gained a measure of satisfaction in confronting him regularly with the fact that she had something he wanted.
She forced herself to tune back into the conversation and found they were discussing a court case in the day’s news. The headmaster of a prominent boarding school was on trial for sexual offences against the boys in his care. His accusers were now grown men and had found one another on the Internet and managed to pool their similarly damaging experiences.
‘It’s all very well, all this guff about outraged innocence,’ Villiers said, ‘but I was a filthy little boy at nine or ten and gagging for it.’
‘Perhaps these little boys weren’t,’ Selina suggested, stubbing out a cigarette and taking a fresh one from the packet her well-trained partner passed her.
‘Oh of course they were, Selina,’ Villiers said. ‘Only they’re married with children and Retrievers now and can’t square that with their sexy memories of fun and games with Sir.’
‘You weren’t abused, were you Villiers?’ Giles had been so quiet for a while, content, apparently, to rest his voice and listen, that Julia was startled.
‘No,’ Villiers admitted. ‘Unless you count genteel neglect.’ He was playing to the gallery but nobody laughed.
‘Nobody held you down and raped you?’
Selina’s girlfriend tutted. Uneasiness fluttered around the table.
‘No one took your little hand and rubbed it inside their knickers?’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Selina said. ‘We’re eating cheese here.’
‘No,’ Villiers said again. ‘They didn’t.’
‘Fine,’ Giles said. ‘I just wanted to establish that, as usual, you’re talking for effect and have no idea of the facts of the matter. As usual your attitudinising is puerile and offensive.’
Nobody said anything. Julia had thought someone would drunkenly lurch to Villiers’ defence but perhaps they all agreed with Giles. Even Liana was pushing her wineglass around, not meeting his eye. Villiers had two little heat spots in his cheeks and was plainly mortified.
‘You like chocolate ginger, don’t you?’ Julia told him softly.
‘I love it,’ he said.
‘Thought so.’ She opened the box and pushed it towards him. ‘Does anyone not want coffee?’
He looked almost sweet now the wind was out of his conversational sails but all she could think was how glad she was that he would never be returning there and how brave Giles was to face up to him. She never wanted Villiers in the house again and keenly wanted Giles to make love to her the moment everyone could be persuaded to leave. Perhaps even down here, with her perched on the sideboard or stretched across the half-cleared dining table where splashes of gravy and hot wax and wine would be ground into her hair.
But that was out of the question naturally. That wasn’t the Julia Giles had chosen to live with. He was drawn to a high maintenance, rather cool version of herself she had originally projected out of nerves and now struggled to keep in the foreground of her personality so as not to unnerve him.
Her feelings were beyond control today, her carapace thin. If somebody said something tender to her she might break down and cry just for the sensation of it.
She brought in coffee and fresh ashtrays and a plate of Medjool dates and walnuts and touched Giles’ shoulder reassuringly as she set a fresh bottle of water at his elbow. Giles apart, nobody was sober and no one could even remember what the little outburst had been about. Despite Liana’s protests, Selina had put on her new CD of the Strauss concerto. With the bubbling phrases to inspire them, conversation welled up again, about recording studios, and session musicians and why so many of the best acoustics were in places like Enfield and Kilburn, never anywhere one wanted to shop or do lunch.
And, with the conversation, welled up the possibility that Julia might be pregnant.
8
Pearce knew beef cattle pretty well. He had grown up around them, as had generations of the family’s men before him. But for all his expertise, his father had always relied on Billy Pender for advice and so did he. Nearly eighty now, with a shock of white hair and matching tufts at either ear, Billy was an old purist with a herd of pedigree South Devons on his farm near Helston. He rarely saw anything he wanted himself at the auctions but he enjoyed the chance to gossip with other farmers and displayed a touching loyalty to Pearce since Pearce’s father’s death. He also made most of his money not from his herd but from running a livestock haulage business. It was part of the unspoken deal that any animals Pearce bought at auction or sent to the abattoir would travel in one of Billy’s three lorries.
The auctions used to happen in Camelford, where the banks and lawyers were, but the noise and the lorries became too much for the locals, and with buyers and sellers coming from all over Devon and Cornwall there was too little space. So the cattle market had moved to Hallworthy, near a crossroads where there was little more than a pub, a letter box, a branch of the NFU Mutual and a handful of bungalows on the edge of a gloomy plantation of pines. There was a big car park, a steamy cafeteria, then yard upon yard of covered pens and walkways wher
e animals could be viewed and talked over before being herded into the ring. When not in use, the ring must have looked like the dank arena for some particularly brutal gladiatorial sport. Surprisingly intimate, it was surrounded by a tiered, seatless concrete viewing area where the buyers stood about or leant on the railings in guarded conference. The auctioneer looked down on the ring from a kind of pulpit, close enough to exchange friendly words and glances with buyers between lots.
Pearce met Billy in the car park and took him for a bacon sandwich washed down by a cup of strong tea. Billy had already walked round the pens exchanging greetings and news while eyeing up stock and advised Pearce to reject two of the five lots he was considering as being too small in the face.
They crossed to the ring in good time for the remaining ones because it was always amusing and informative simply to watch.
For all the joshing that went on in between lots, bidding and selling was serious business. Breeders often drove their own animals about the ring rather than trust them to an auctioneer’s handler, tapping them this way and that, keeping them in constant, nervous motion while the auctioneer kept up his burbled numbers and bidders variously raised their catalogues, tapped their noses or nodded to him to commit to a price. It was rare he had to ask for a buyer’s name when the gavel came down on a deal.
During the last foot and mouth crisis, which by some miracle had not crossed the Tamar, rumour had been rife because some of the first infected cattle had been traced to a farmer who regularly sold stock through this ring. With cattle movement strictly limited to those under specially issued licences, the auctioneers had visited individual farms with a camera then mounted a sale by video. The effect had been sad and surreal. No lorries in the car park, only eerily clean cars, the pens empty, buyers and sellers wading through disinfectant to stand around the ring to bid on the basis of what was shown on a screen. The camera angles had rarely been steady and there was an abiding suspicion that the inevitable dodgy animals in each lot were being kept conveniently out of focus.
Many farmers desperate to sell young steers and heifers or to restock had fallen back on their grandfathers’ techniques; calling up old friends or acquaintances, passing the time of day on one another’s farms and occasionally rounding off the visit with a gentlemanly bargain or two.
This was the first auction since movement restrictions were lifted and there was a powerful sense of the auctioneers re-establishing their position in the chain of commerce after a period in which they risked being cut out of countless deals and thousands of pounds worth of commission. There was a sense too of a community relieved at a return to what felt like normality. There was much back-slapping and there-but-for-the-grace relating of terrible news from Dartmoor, where so many animals had been culled and cremated. There was envious, silly talk too of timely compensation payments, early retirements and wilful cross-infecting of herds and flocks.
It always surprised Pearce how few women were here. Women served you in the cafeteria or took your cheques in the offices in return for cattle passports if you made a purchase but, considering how many women were directly involved in farming, there were few ever present at the ringside. It was as though bartering beasts was still man’s business. When there were women, he had noticed they often brought along a man – husband, son or brother – to do any bidding on their behalf.
In today’s sale there was just one woman who appeared as a breeder. He had spotted her before. She was unmistakable. A moorland farmer with a brood of burly sons who were as cowed and twitchy before her muttered instruction as the shaggy-coated steers she drove around the ring with her stick. The sight of her, something in her impatience perhaps, and refusal to waste money on her hair, filled him with a powerful nostalgia for his mother.
‘How’s Molly?’ Billy asked, reading his mind. Molly had become engaged to Morris largely to gratify their mother and had married him in a spirit of desperation after her death.
‘She’s fine, thanks. Still at the library.’
‘And Morris?’
Pearce pulled a face. Little needed saying on this subject because so much went understood. ‘Surviving,’ he said.
‘Sad business,’ Billy said, scribbling on his catalogue with a stub of pencil. ‘Very sad.’
Molly had met Morris on this very spot. When she had moaned once too often that it was impossible to meet anyone new, Pearce and his father brought her along, largely as a sort of joke to cheer her up. Morris had been bidding against their father for the same lot, then, having outbid him, offered to go halves, four heifers each. The cheek of it amused Pearce’s father and a conversation began and a deal was struck, although such behaviour was strictly against his father’s code of practice.
Nobody could recall Molly saying anything so it came as a shock when Morris appeared the next night to take her out.
‘I take it back,’ Billy muttered quickly as a lot he had rejected, Belgian Blue cross, were herded in. ‘They’re okay. Thought one had a bad leg but he’s fine, look.’
Pearce duly bid for and bought them for slightly more than his budget allowed. He wished he could consult Billy’s instincts about Janet.
‘I’m taking a complete stranger on a date tomorrow night,’ he wanted to say to him. ‘I know she’s got a thing about men with dirty hands but…is she all right? Is she the one? How will I know?’
Or the moorland farmwoman, who was back in the ring, smacking at the rump of a frisky heifer with a cut above its eye; he was sure she’d be a quick and trustworthy judge of character. There again, perhaps it was fear of that judgement that kept her lumpen sons single and at her oily apron strings.
9
When Dido began to walk, everything changed. She could no longer be fitted in around the interstices of a fragile academic life but burst demandingly into its centre. Forced to move out to a bedsit in Oxney, desperate for time alone to read in silence, fighting the impulse to let everything slide, Eliza leaned more and more heavily on the good nature of friends, librarians and her landlady until she could sense cracks of strain appearing in her every relationship.
Then came a day of unseasonal warmth. She had escaped the claustrophobia and sweet, nappyish fug of her bedsit and staked out a pleasant territory in Christchurch Meadow with rug, books and a large bag of fruit. Dido was at the stage of hating to have her hand held and battling confinement in her pushchair unless she was ready for sleep. She would consent, however, to wear a harness and reins and if Eliza fixed the reins to the ground with a meat skewer, she could read in peace while Dido played with her toys and whatever beetlish delights she found in the grass.
Eliza was so deep in thought, struggling to bring her tourist’s Italian to bear on a new article on Monteverdi, that she did not hear his approach. Books had always offered her a refuge as deep and rapidly accessed as sleep and she emerged from them as reluctantly and in a similar fog. Still reading, she became distantly aware that Dido was being very easy and affable, then that someone had crouched down to play with her. The soft shaking of a tambourine finally drew her full attention.
‘Giles?’
A severe haircut had diminished the halo effect of his golden hair. He looked up briefly to smile then fell back to shaking his tambourine for Dido who laughed in her efforts to seize it from him.
‘She’s so sweet,’ he said. ‘Very funny. What a funny girl!’
Eliza registered a momentary chill that after such an interval he should prove less interested in her than in a toddler. The moment had an odd flavour, intriguing, unplaceable.
But then he looked up again and held her gaze and every thought went out of her mind but how to keep him near her. When she felt he was growing tired of sitting, she suggested a walk and when Dido grew fractious after dozing in her pushchair, she suggested tea and cake. And when Dido’s nappy needed changing, he suggested they go back to his flat because it was closer than her place.
Eliza could not help exclaiming at the flat’s size. Compared to her bedsit, any
thing with a sitting room and a spare room felt palatial. He had no sooner heard her description of where they were living than he insisted they move in.
‘But we…I couldn’t possibly,’ she said, thinking suddenly that she barely knew him, knew nothing about him.
‘Why on earth not?’ he asked. ‘There’s bags of room and I’ve been looking for lodgers in any case. Don’t be silly. I can help you move with my car.’
She hated feeling coerced and this and a crying jag from Dido, who was tired of socialising, brought on a wave of panic. But he calmed Dido so expertly that she fell asleep in his arms after eating half a mashed banana and Eliza accepted his offer. She stilled any qualms that she might be taking advantage by agreeing not to let her bedsit go just yet and to treat the change of address as a trial period, a sort of sabbatical from squalor. Similarly she insisted on paying him a fair rent, although it would cut deep into her scant finances.
He was comparatively rich, however, having come into a trust fund and waved aside her rent cheques. He told her to buy food occasionally instead, something she did less and less because he was such a good cook and she always seemed to buy the wrong things, things he put on one side to gather dust or mould.
She only kept on the bedsit for a month. She revisited it a few times to collect post or clothes or books they were missing, until she had effectively moved out anyway and it seemed both sad and profligate to continue paying rent on a dank, uninhabited space from which someone else would profit.
People assumed they were lovers. Even her tutor, Dr Goldhammer, who was rectitude personified, implied in an offhand remark that she had fallen on her feet. But the situation was stranger than that and it embarrassed Eliza so much to discuss it that she preferred to let people continue in their misconstruction. The truth was that she and Dido were Giles’ pets. He housed and fed them, was solicitous of their welfare and sought them out whenever his mood needed lifting. Eliza had never in her life felt so cherished. He was intensely methodical, exercising his voice and rehearsing on his own every morning, singing Evensong with his college choir every afternoon and rehearsing or performing with various early music or opera groups on perhaps three evenings out of seven.