A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  Eliza suddenly lost all appetite and retreated to her darkened room leaving Dido to fend for herself. She heard Dido emerge from her bath and deal with the potatoes, heard her boil the kettle for tea. When Dido appeared in the doorway to ask if she was hungry still, Eliza pretended to be asleep but then she lay awake for hours worrying.

  With no Carlo there to wake her at intervals through the night, she slept deeply when she finally lost consciousness and must have slept through her alarm. (Keeping the alarm set was one of her last concessions to leading a responsible life, even though she usually woke only to turn it off again before rolling over.)

  In the morning she woke instead to the telephone and heard Dido answer it and say,

  ‘She’s still asleep. Who’s that?’

  The conversation continued but Eliza could make out no more because Dido had closed a door between them. Then Dido slipped out and Eliza fell back into merciful senselessness.

  Dido woke her later with tea and toast. Far from climbing into bed to breakfast with her, she was busy packing two large nylon laundry bags.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’ Eliza asked, peering at the clock.

  ‘Not going,’ Dido said, holding up a frock for closely critical inspection. ‘You just sent them a letter to explain. I checked and there’s a coach to Redruth at eleven. Auntie Kitty says she’ll meet us off that and drive us the rest of the way. She sounds nice. You never said you had an aunt.’

  Eliza sat up to take this in.

  ‘Because I don’t,’ she said at last. ‘She just calls herself that because she’s a meddlesome old cow with no children. We can’t go, Dido. We can’t afford it. Most of my benefit went on the phone bill.’

  ‘Giles is paying. I just went round there and told him.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have to pay.’

  ‘He doesn’t have to. He wanted to. He’s sad about Granny. If there’s going to be a funeral, shouldn’t we have black?’

  ‘Who said anything about funerals?’ Eliza retrieved a fallen pillow to prop herself up better. She took a piece of toast.

  ‘No one, but Auntie Kitty dropped hints so I guessed.’

  ‘Where did you learn how to fold dresses like that?’

  ‘I watched Julia once, when they were getting ready to go on tour. And if you fold shirts and blouses like this and then roll them up really tight, you don’t have to iron them again at the other end.’

  ‘Sounds most unlikely. Julia never looks as though she rolls anything.’

  ‘Drink your tea. We have to leave in half an hour. We can get a train straight through to Victoria but the man said the bus station’s quite a walk beyond that.’

  The journey across London then along two motorways and a chain of increasingly empty dual carriageways took six hours but seemed to take twice that time. Eliza found it impossible to stay awake for long. The sun in her eyes as they headed west, alternately frazzled by the greenhouse effect of unopenable windows and blasted by ache-inducing jets of cold, stale air when Dido fiddled with the overhead ‘air conditioning’ system, Eliza found herself lulled into a state beyond speech in which she lolled, stared, slept, woke or obediently ate whatever fruit or homemade sandwich Dido passed her.

  Dido, by contrast, was all attention, feasting her eyes on the unaccustomed sights, enjoying the novelty of the on-board lavatory and taking in the other passengers and the professional insincerities of the two uniformed attendants. Eliza felt guilty that she was not turning this into an educational opportunity, not explaining things, which in turn made her all the sleepier. Dido didn’t care. She was enjoying herself. Apparently she was on holiday.

  Invariably, when Eliza mentioned that she came from Cornwall, people responded with fatuous cries of how lovely that must be, how romantic. What lovely holidays they had spent there, they would say, and how could she bear to leave it?

  Eliza’s roots in stony-faced Camborne, however, lay in the other Cornwall, some might argue the real one. An industrialised heartland of miners and quarrying, devastated by the twin forces of recession and market pressure. In the eyes of the all-important tourism operators, Camborne was best airbrushed out of the olde worlde picture. Ironically it retained the Royal School of Mines, the distant outpost of Prince Albert’s Imperial College, which continued to attract student engineers from those counties for whom mining remained a viable industry.

  Eliza and Hannah’s father had been a lecturer there, specialising in seismology or, as their mother liked to put it sourly, the detection of shocks. The assumption had always been that he had left the country. Eliza had taken to imagining that he was not driven away by the trauma caused by Hannah but that he had fallen helplessly in love with one of the rare female students, from Cape Town or Buenos Aires perhaps, and had followed her home, a helpless slave to passion. Seeing the area again now she wondered if it had simply been an attack of geographical abhorrence.

  Dido’s imagination was untroubled by pictures of kindly farmers’ wives and stout-hearted fishermen, of rugged coastline and golden beaches. She had never been further afield than Kent. All of Cornwall might have been like this for all she knew. Perhaps she even found the mixture of gaunt, shabby and bleak reassuringly like home.

  ‘There are no tower blocks,’ she said as they pulled into the bus station at Redruth.

  ‘No need,’ Eliza sighed. ‘Not enough people. Look. There’s Auntie Kitty. See? In the yellow fleece. Remember, she’s very religious so you mustn’t swear.’

  The childish naming was automatic. She could not think of the woman who had been Auntie Kitty for so long as Mrs Barnicoat. Even without the canary yellow fleece, Kitty was easily spotted in a crowd for she was spectacularly fat.

  As a child, Eliza had longed to take a tape measure to her, convinced she would turn out to be basically spherical, as wide as she was squat as she was deep. In most of her memories, Auntie Kitty and her mother were only a kitchen table top apart, anchored by a teapot and open biscuit tin. A true Cornishwoman, Kitty excelled at the various combinations of flour, lard and sugar that were the cornerstones of Cornish baking; heavy cake, saffron buns and pasties.

  Disappointed in her husband, who was long gone and had left no traces, she disapproved of most things except the consolations of her particularly judicial brand of Christianity, and wild birds, either of which she would have died defending. Her garden was a welcoming thicket entirely given over to her feathered friends – bird baths, bird tables, bird nesting boxes – and the ferocious exclusion of cats.

  Their father’s side of the bed was barely cool from his defection when Kitty homed in on their mother with her cake and homilies. They were all girls together now. Men were not to be trusted and boys, being only men in the making, were bad until proved otherwise by good works or an ability to hold down a steady job. Girls were weak by nature, prone to sin and, as likely as not, to being corrupted by the wrong sort of boy. You were better off with Jesus and a slab of cake and the simple delights of watching pied wagtails on the fence and wrens in the hedge. Most offensively, Kitty had always implied that Hannah was a stigma inflicted to save the family from sin. The arrival of cheerfully fatherless Dido had silenced her on that score, her only revenge a flat refusal ever to remember the child’s name.

  ‘Well look who it isn’t!’ Kitty exclaimed, firmly holding Dido before her as she planted a kiss on her cheek. ‘Last time I saw you, Dodie, you were a miserable babe in arms.’ She was so short they were nearly eye to eye.

  ‘My name’s Dido,’ said Dido. ‘She was Queen of Carthage but she died.’

  ‘Because of a man who abandoned her. Mind you remember that,’ Kitty told her sharply. ‘And Eliza.’

  ‘Hello, Kitty.’

  Surprised by warmth, it was Eliza who did the kissing. Kitty smelled just as she had always done, of lily of the valley soap and an essential sugariness that might have been a lifetime of sweet things seeping through her pores.

  ‘I expect you’ll be wanting to unwind a little bef
ore going to the hospital,’ Kitty said.

  There was nothing Eliza would have liked more but she feared she might crawl into bed and not be able to leave it.

  ‘Oh, I think we’d rather go straight there,’ she said. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, Kitty. Before we collapse for the evening.’

  The hospital was barely half an hour’s distance, on the outskirts of Truro. On the way, Kitty filled them in. The doctors now believed Eliza’s mother had lost her balance and fallen on the kerbstones of Wesley Street because of a stroke. She had suffered a second stroke since, which had all but paralysed her. The prognosis was not good.

  Eliza glanced across at Dido as they took the lift up to the ward, recalling her own dread of hospitals at that age, but Dido seemed fearless, covertly examining a young, scantily gowned man attached to a mobile drip.

  Perhaps because of the way the woman loomed in her conscience and dreams, Eliza had forgotten how small her mother was; not a towering witch but a little old lady. She looked lost in the bed, barely disturbing the sheets and baby blue blanket that covered her skinny frame. Her fine hair was brushed off her face in a style not quite her own. Her mouth was slightly open. She did not stir against her bank of pillows as they approached. All her strength, all her character, had retreated into her dark-brown eyes, which stared as unreadably as ever, and into her fingers, which twitched and skittered on the blanket counting invisible banknotes or feeling some unseen stuff for quality.

  ‘Annie? Annie? Look who I’ve brought to see you! I said they’d come if we prayed hard enough.’

  Holding Dido for security, Eliza had positioned herself in what seemed to be her mother’s line of vision, but her mother’s dark eyes appeared to strain away to look at Kitty.

  ‘You see? She’s so glad!’ Kitty said. ‘I told you, Annie. I said they’d come.’

  It seemed to Eliza, though, that the eyes were demanding Why have you brought them here? Take them away at once!

  ‘I’ll leave you three in peace,’ Kitty murmured to Eliza. ‘It’s been so long since you saw each other. I’ll be out in the corridor by the drinks machines.’ She all but tiptoed away.

  Stranded, Eliza stared. Her mother stared back.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ Eliza said at last then fell silent, oppressed by her mother’s stare and the triteness of everything it occurred to her to say next. The hands continued to twitch and fumble. Eliza thought of frogs’ legs attached to batteries.

  Dido came to the rescue, breaking free of Eliza’s nervous grip and, entirely unprompted, moving forward to give her grandmother’s cheek a fulsome kiss.

  ‘Hello, Granny,’ she said. ‘Can you hear me? It’s Dido. We took hours to get here. We left after breakfast and crossed London on the Tube. Then we got a coach and then Auntie Kitty brought us here in her car. We’re going to stay in your house, I think. I hope that’s okay. I should call her Great Auntie Kitty really, shouldn’t I?’ She took one of the twitching hands and held it in hers. ‘Take the other,’ she told Eliza. ‘I don’t think she can see us but she knows we’re here.’

  Eliza pulled up a chair on the other side of the bed. Her mother’s bony hand was surprisingly hot. Feeling it twitch between her palms then lie still, she thought of wounded birds and their unfeasibly rapid heartbeats.

  ‘Here I am, Mum,’ she said and gave the hand a little experimental squeeze. No squeeze came in return. She looked inside the bedside locker and found a wash bag. She took out the hairbrush and gently brushed her mother’s hair back into an approximation of what she remembered as her unvarying style.

  ‘How about lipstick?’ Dido asked.

  Along with a cracked tortoiseshell powder compact, there was a stick of her mother’s trademark dusty pink, adopted when an article in Good Housekeeping assured her that red lips made pale faces look ill.

  ‘Her mouth’s too slack,’ Eliza said. ‘I’d only make a mess.’

  ‘Here. Let me.’ Dido took it from her and rubbed some of the colour onto a fingertip before gently transferring it to her grandmother’s lips where it looked like the last molten traces of a strawberry ice cream.

  ‘Come on,’ Eliza said at last. ‘I think she’s asleep. We should let her rest.’

  ‘Ohh!’ Dido whined, like a child with someone else’s puppy. ‘But she looks so sweet now!’

  Sweet was the last thing this woman had ever been.

  ‘Come on, Dido. We can see her again tomorrow.’

  As they crossed the ward, Eliza glanced back. The dark eyes were still staring, wide in horror or judgement. It struck her that Dido was almost entirely untouched by her blood family. Setting aside herself and some early photographs of Hannah, she had little idea who they were or what they were like.

  ‘Now,’ Kitty said as they walked the short distance from her house to Eliza’s childhood home next door. ‘I made up beds for you both and there’s some food in the fridge and the larder.’

  ‘Oh, Kitty, you shouldn’t have.’

  ‘It’s all right, dear. Your mother had only just collected her pension so I used that. Here we are. That’s your mother’s key. I’d better hang on to the spare in case of emergencies. Shall we go and see her again tomorrow morning? Say at about ten?’

  ‘Yes,’ Eliza said, suddenly weary. ‘Thanks Kitty. Thanks for everything.’ She unlocked the front door, letting an eager Dido in and releasing a smell – furniture polish, full Hoover bags and an undertone of kipper – that returned her to childhood so sharply she fought for a reason, any reason at all, to delay stepping across the threshold. ‘Kitty?’ she called out sharply.

  ‘Yes, dear?’ Kitty turned on the weedy gravel.

  ‘She didn’t actually say she wanted me here. Did she?’

  Kitty dithered. Eliza had remembered and gambled on her inability to lie out loud even when it would certainly be kinder to do so.

  ‘I…I knew she’d want you,’ Kitty said. ‘Especially when Dr Pengelly said how poorly she was.’

  ‘Yes, but she didn’t actually say, did she?’

  Kitty glanced away at some teenage boys mooching noisily by, eating from paper bags. When she looked back it was with an aggrieved, you-made-me-do-this air.

  ‘No, Eliza,’ she said. ‘No. She didn’t. I’ll call round for you tomorrow at ten.’

  Eliza followed Dido into the house. Dido had already put the kettle on and found a packet of chocolate biscuits and now was exploring.

  ‘Which was your room when you were little?’ she called out.

  ‘Up the stairs and turn left,’ Eliza called back without needing a moment’s thought.

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘I was a baby,’ Dido reminded her. ‘Granny’s always come to us. I don’t remember any of this. It’s scary.’

  ‘It isn’t really. It’s just dark. We always told Mum to cut down those sycamores but she wouldn’t and now they take all the light.’

  It was a gaunt Victorian villa in a once pretentious district left behind by even Camborne’s fashions and now marooned on the wrong end of town for shops, buses, everything. It was far too large a house for an old woman on her own, had been on the large side for a middle-aged one with two children. Once it was clear their father was not coming back they had begged her to move to somewhere more practical, nearer the centre of things, but their mother had held out for the same reason she had stayed on all these years without them, because hers was a life in need of a grudge.

  Cursed with excellent health, she had to look to external causes for a source of regular complaint and this dingy house with its stained-glass panels that rattled as they let in draughts, its superfluity of awkward sized rooms, its dank, red-tiled kitchen, cavernous bathroom and increasing lack of neighbourhood proved a reliable supply. The garden was a jungle of bindweed and bramble, a haven for the cats that made war on Kitty. A host of sycamore saplings, spawn of the larger ones, thickened the unhealthy, fly-dirtied shade.

  With no lodgers and no other visitors
to displace things, Hannah and Eliza’s rooms had been preserved as if in aspic. Fading teenage posters hung on the walls. Sinister dolls watched from the corners where each girl had banished them. In either room a pitifully inadequate bookcase stood crammed with every book the girl had owned from birth to university.

  While Dido fell gleefully on the stack of laughably antiquated Bunty annuals, Eliza moved on, opening cupboard doors, appalled at the clothes hoarded there, musty dresses, long contorted by wire hangers, lank shades of social failure. Hoarded to what end? To prove that she loved her daughters more than they loved her and continued to care once they had moved on? Or to stoke the fire of condemnation when it threatened to die down into forgiveness?

  Leaving Dido to ‘The Four Marys’, she pushed open the door to her mother’s room. The big, ugly bed had been a wedding present and must have been of the highest quality for it barely sagged to this day. There was a hideous wardrobe to match, and a dressing table at which the girls had once sat to preen and play at princesses. A wedding photograph was still defiantly displayed. Eliza saw for the first time that her mother had married late and been considerably older than her dapper father. A small triple frame showed Hannah, Eliza and Dido, each of them pictured in blameless babyhood. She took the pictures to show Dido – for the image of her grandpa and the proof that Granny loved them all. Then she showed her the bathroom and the spare room whose window looked directly onto a brick wall and which had a vast mahogany wardrobe stretched across the wall at the foot of the twin beds. She did not confess that she had always thought the room haunted; the house was forbidding enough as it was.

  Kitty had tactfully made up the two daughters’ beds and draped antique, sandpapery towels across each of them.

  ‘You can sleep in Hannah’s old room,’ Eliza said. ‘See the view your mum used to wake up to. Now let’s have that cup of tea.’

  The shade cast across the ground floor windows was so deep and so green that returning downstairs was like descending into a basement or a sunless tarn. Most childhood homes surely threw up one or two things the returning prodigal would clasp to their heart. Eliza could find nothing in hers to please or charm her. She would have happily seen everything consigned to a skip; most of it was too tatty for charity shops.