A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  Once again Eliza found herself unintentionally an adoptive parent.

  10

  Sleep eluded him. Anxious for his voice, Giles had long since got out of the habit of drinking much. While the rest of the party had got ever merrier and less and less discreet, he had become more and more buttoned up, aware of being the only sober one at the table. He had consoled himself with coffee and several pieces of ginger in bitter chocolate and now his head was buzzing with the early warning signs of a migraine and his heart was on fire.

  Alcohol made Julia very sweet and clumsy. It gave him a glimpse of the bolshie student she must once have been, or typist, or whatever. It made it easy to imagine her a ball of bad-tempered envy with no manners at all. Powerfully amorous when he came to bed, she had fallen asleep mid-kiss as suddenly as if he had pulled out her plug. Her hair flopped, cool across his chest, one of her thighs was flung across his.

  It saddened him that something in his personality, his need to control, or whatever, usually inhibited what might have proved a counterbalancing exuberance in hers. It saddened him too that it took wine to bring out this less guarded side of her nature because he found it immensely attractive. Familiar with alcohol’s dangers, he knew better than to make her aware that he liked what it did to her.

  She had been unconscious for nearly forty minutes while he lay there ever more alert and uncomfortable. As always she radiated heat in her sleep. He slid out from under her in careful stages, anxious not to wake her but when he was sitting on the edge of the bed fumbling in the dark for his dressing gown she said very clearly, ‘What?’

  ‘Headache,’ he muttered but perhaps she had only been dreaming for she did not stir but carried on breathing into her pillow as deeply as she had been breathing into his shoulder minutes before.

  Down in the kitchen, surrounded by the dirty plates she insisted on leaving for the cleaning lady, overriding his protestant guilt as pathetically middle class, he drank a pint of tepid water and knocked back a mega dose of feverfew, which usually did the trick. The air down there remained sour from Selina’s and Villiers’ cigarettes. (‘You don’t mind, do you, darling?’ ‘Don’t ask, Selina. Light up, then we all can!’) Because they were now the only people in his circle who smoked, the smell conjured up their personalities in a single inhalation.

  He retreated upstairs to his study. They called it his study but the only work he ever seemed to do in there was write cheques to pay bills. It was actually what an American might have called a den, a snug room with a desk and filing cabinet, certainly, but also a messy leather sofa and an ancient carpet. This was the one room spared Julia’s retouching and into which the possessions had retreated which she scorned but would never be allowed to throw out. The threadbare carpet, long since stained and chewed by Carlo, dated from the first weeks of his marriage and the sofa was even older. They had travelled with him from address to address like old retainers.

  Not bothering to turn on the light, he flopped onto the sofa and stared out at a lime tree lit up, by happy accident, by the street lamp its foliage had grown to cloak. Sometimes he could sleep here when sleep eluded him in bed. He moved down here if Julia or he had a cold. What Julia could not know was that this room had been Eliza’s study, where she failed to write her thesis.

  What had possessed him to become so heated tonight and sound off so foolishly? Villiers knew which buttons to press to get a rise out of him. He should never come to the house again. Never. Luckily Julia had said nothing so perhaps they were all too drunk or failed to notice Giles was not drinking with them and put his little outburst down to alcohol.

  He swung off the sofa, clicked on the desk lamp and looked in the hiding place between his old school Bible and a 1972 Roy of the Rovers annual. The prints of Dido were still there. Presumably Dido stumbled on them when her pulling out one of the photo albums caused the other books to tumble sideways.

  It was a wonder she had not found them before. Perhaps because Eliza and he had granted her so sketchy a background, the few old photographs that confirmed the little she knew had never lost their fascination for her. Occasionally she would startle him with a question like, ‘So Joyce and Nigel…are they still together?’ or ‘Why did your mother suddenly change her hair?’ and he would know she had again been poring over these colourful, patchily annotated records that left out as much as they appeared to chronicle.

  So now she had chanced on a less edited record of family life.

  He imagined Julia’s reaction if she came across the prints too, during one of her outbreaks of efficiency. He thought about giving one to Eliza who, being an innocent herself, would surely see it as nothing worse than sweet. But no, it was impossible. He took a pair of scissors and sliced them up like a fraudster destroying evidence.

  So now, naturally, he really felt smutty.

  He flicked off the light again and flopped back on the sofa, defensively facing the half-lit stairs this time.

  The cruel joke was that, if he was honest, Dido had always had a hold over him. But not in that way. At least, not directly. Not at first.

  When they first met to sing together, he had pursued Eliza automatically because her apparent nonchalance piqued his vanity; she seemed immune to the looks that worked so easily on other women. But it was only when he saw her with Dido, so miraculously turned into a cross, slovenly, impatient mother, that he fell in love with her.

  Eliza was always so hopeless, ill-equipped for interacting with the world of things, defeated by the cellophane on a CD box or the padlock on her bicycle, but Giles might have dismissed this as a pose; plenty of academics affected unworldliness and it usually irritated him. But somehow she woke in him a wish to protect and guide her which was only intensified by there suddenly being a defenceless baby thrust into her unsuitable care.

  This probably took hold so completely because it was utterly out of character for him. His mother’s toxic combination of dependency and predatoriness had left him able only to think of women in a limited and sexual light. The sexual feeling for Eliza had always been there, ever since Villiers had invited her to share the solos with him in that candlelit concert. She was a wafty blonde with absolutely no idea of how attractive she was. This was a potent combination even before her baby broke through his cynical defences.

  When they lived together merely as unmarried friends, he had been wooed by baby Dido as efficiently as he had first planned on wooing her mother. Solely for the baby’s benefit he had turned on the full panoply of his impressive bachelor tactics – cooking, cleaning, vivacity – with no calculation at all as to their wider effect. By the time he had asked Eliza to marry him – he who had never given marriage a second thought – he was already vowing that protecting and nurturing and entertaining Dido would be his One Good Thing in life. Hearing the full horrific story of Hannah only made him the more determined that helping to raise this child should be the one entry in his spiritual ledger over which he need feel nothing but pride.

  He would surely have fallen in love with Eliza anyway – she was so unlike the others, so not set on pleasing – but it was Dido who saved him from himself. Whenever he felt tempted to sneer at his mother’s talk of how little things set her on the slow path to recovery from alcoholism, he remembered that and was chastened.

  And how had he repaid Dido? By failing to love Eliza as he ought, by fantasising, even, about wresting the child from her protection and now by betraying Dido’s trust.

  For some time he had been tormented by erotic dreams about her; purely symbolic ones at first and then ever more appalling in their physical frankness. He tried to ignore them as meaningless. People dreamed about sex with the Queen. That did not mean they wanted it any more than dreams about talking cats, flying or being able to breathe underwater were meaningful reflections of waking life. But the dreams about Dido took hold. They were affecting his relationship with Julia because he felt he must keep them secret from her and they affected his relationship with Dido because he remembered them
whenever she was near him. And now, of course, she would tell Eliza about the photograph and…and sitting on his lap and that would be that. Eliza was unlikely to take any direct action – nothing had really happened, after all, and aggression, legal or otherwise, was not in her armoury – but he had given her the little reason she would need to call a halt to the precious, pseudo-parental visits.

  This would set Eliza free. She could divorce him, at long last, take a proper share of his house and his money and move far away, taking Dido with her. Then he would be honour bound to marry Julia. And then what?

  Unbidden, the perky refrain of an especially cruel Sondheim song popped into his head: Love will see us through till something better comes along!

  He lost consciousness at last only to dream of Dido. Dido crouched in his lap, arms round his neck. Dido breathing, ‘I was a bit scared at first, but it’s nice really.’ Then she started to take long, slow licks across his impassive face until he melted like a human lolly. He woke to find the street lamp off and the room monochrome with pre-dawn light. He forced himself off the sofa and walked upstairs, feet aching from cold, to slide back into bed with Julia.

  She barely stirred but he clung to her as to a life raft.

  11

  Apart from Selina, who had her suspicions, and Villiers, who trusted nobody entirely, everyone at the dinner party assumed Julia had an upper-middle-class background. Her slightly imperious manner and hints of a childhood in the west country overrun with animals, her knowledge of the better ski resorts, wine, and flower-arranging, her accent, her reluctance to smile, all pointed to it. She never mentioned a university and often referred to herself as thick but she had the social and cultural confidence of someone sent to a good all-girl boarding school, Cheltenham Ladies, say, or Wycombe Abbey, followed by a little polish acquired at a Swiss cookery school or Florentine academy.

  The truth was more interesting. Her father was a laid-off miner scraping a living through odd-jobs and she went to the state school where her mother was a part-time dinner lady. They lived in a shoddily built 1960s house where there was barely room for a family of five (she had two older brothers from her father’s first marriage), still less for the animal waifs and strays her mother was forever taking in. Julia was not maltreated but she spent most of her childhood fantasising that she had only been placed with this family to learn humility. It showed and, chilled, her family stopped a little short of cherishing her.

  She left school at sixteen and escaped, mapping her path steadily away from home in a series of jobs and addresses. She was a waitress, a live-in child minder, a department store demonstrator of little kitchen devices, a caterer’s skivvy, a secretary. She had no firm ambition beyond attaining financial independence and social liberty; if she had done she would have stayed in school longer. She was not academic but she was far from stupid and approached each job hungry for whatever she could learn from it. Employers liked her because her curiosity flattered them but she was always restless to move on once she had taken in whatever they had to teach.

  None of this was conscious, none of it calculated. She could not help it if even as she was told how to make a sponge without burning its edges or how to answer a certain type of letter she was also learning how to wear make-up without it showing or how to pronounce really.

  She learned from boys too, and men, but resisted the easy temptation of using sex as a means to an end and tended only to become involved with men who were not strictly available. Her parents had so clearly made a mistake picking one another that she was determined not to settle for anything permanent until she could be sure it was right.

  On a succession of depressing Christmas trips home it dawned on her how much she had changed and how little she now had in common with her parents and stepbrothers. When her older stepbrother moved to Malaga and persuaded her parents to follow him, Julia took it as a convenient pretext for letting her family ties shrivel and now barely kept in touch. Perhaps the reaction was mutual for there was a similar lack of overtures on their side.

  She had been living in London for a few years, temping, sharing a flat with people she could rub along with but did not particularly know or like, when her agency sent her for a week to Selina Bryant Management.

  Selina liked her and offered to hire her permanently as her assistant, on the understanding that she was being trained and might eventually acquire clients of her own. Julia had been made such offers before but she sensed Selina would never make the mistake of trying to mother or control her. And she was growing tired of constantly changing jobs and being unable to answer simply when people asked her what she did.

  ‘We’re not just a booking service,’ Selina would say. ‘We mould and nurture careers here, yadda yadda yadda, but at rock bottom we’re not about art. We provide the same management and support that other firms might to ventriloquists and dancing poodles but the bottom line, as far as you and I are concerned, is the deal and the commission.’ Selina did not care that Julia was unmusical. ‘I like it that you don’t know anything. Nerves’ll make you learn the faster.’

  And they did. Julia became an adept at bluffing, at peppering her dialogue with just the right phraseology, much of it picked up from reading concert and record reviews every morning. She was good at telling people they were wonderful. She was even better at telling would-be clients they weren’t quite up to Selina’s mark. With clients performing all over London every night in the opera houses, in churches and concert halls, even in rich people’s houses, there was no lack of complimentary tickets and these and programme notes became Julia’s musical education. She learnt music the way one best learns any language, by total immersion. And she began to specialize in singers. Selina’s dark secret was that she hated opera. Julia had seen her sleep through entire performances. The CDs in Selina’s Mercedes tended to be middle-of-the-road rock. She kept a radio button tuned to Radio 3 in case a client ever needed a lift.

  Julia’s early bad experiences in the school choir made her especially good at describing the niceties of a technique she would never master. Like a blind woman mastering ways of describing the visual arts she absorbed the full vocabulary of singing. Where her colleagues spent as long as possible gossiping in the Floral Hall and as little as possible in their seats, Julia would always find time to read her programme notes. A second-hand Kobbé’s Opera Guide became her bedtime reading. The convoluted opera plots of Handel and Verdi’s librettists soon made up for the fairytales her mother had never found time to tell her. She still mimed to the hymns at weddings and funerals but now she was as fluent in facher as a football nerd in league tables. She only had to hear a few bars of a demo disc to know a hochdramatische Sopran from a Zwischenfachsangerin and needed minimal research to remind herself whether a role being cast required a tenore di grazia or a tenore robusto. That these terms were increasingly regarded as quaint and old-fashioned by people who had never grasped their nice distinctions only made her use them with greater confidence.

  The job kept her so busy and fulfilled that it came as a shock to realise she had been in it a year and not developed her usual restlessness. Here at last was a subject she could never know entirely. By degrees music had become her life.

  Most music lovers could pinpoint a breakthrough moment when a Stravinsky ballet made the hair on their neck prickle or a particular violinist brought tears to their eyes. Julia’s was hearing her first counter-tenor. She had heard sniggers about them, heard that – as if castration were still practised on promising choirboys – they were less than virile. Selina confessed it was a sound that invariably made her want to giggle. Julia heard David Daniels as Rinaldo, however, and was captivated.

  Ordinary male voices, tenor, baritone and bass, rarely moved her. Tenors were so often short and/or unprepossessing, putting so much obvious effort into the production of their sound. The bass voice, she feared to admit, registered in her ears as a sort of tuneless growl.

  The only Lawrence novel she had read, as a set text at schoo
l, was The Rainbow and she had never understood the heroine’s subversive delight at taking her beau to church and hearing him sing higher and louder than anyone else. She had always projected onto the passage the squally high tenor Cs of the male voice choir her father sang with. Now she understood. Here was a sound that was heroic, entirely and athletically male and yet with all the clarity of a soprano spinto.

  When Giles was taken on by Selina, Julia became an ardent, secret fan, attending his performances wherever possible. By the time she was asked to look after him for a few days, she had done all her homework thoroughly.

  12

  Pearce had never intended to be a farmer. Or rather, he had done when he was small, trailing around after his father or grandfather at every opportunity, riding on trailers, adopting calves, wearing outsize gauntlets obediently to heave on one end of some barbed wire while his father nailed it tight to a fence post. But as soon as he was old enough to pick up even an inkling of farm economics he saw that the real money and comfortable living earned around farms was made by vets.

  He made a pact with Molly, who was clever enough but hopeless at science, that when they grew up he would be a vet and she could marry a neighbouring farmer and thus double the size of the family’s holding.

  ‘You can’t be a vet,’ people told him. ‘It’s twice as hard as being a doctor even. The training’s years longer so it costs more and there’s even more competition for fewer places.’

  Which naturally made him all the more determined. He loved the farm, land as well as house, loved it more each day and even longed for a brother so there might be less expectation that he would take it on. He became genealogically territorial, hating the thought of anyone living there who wasn’t a relative. But he saw how his father worried, especially once Pearce’s paternal grandfather died, how the rules and regulations hemmed him in, how the paperwork mounted in his office until his mother was forced to learn how to deal with it herself rather than face an inspection by Customs and Excise or the Inland Revenue.