by Patrick Gale
The piano, which was the one object in the house for which she had felt any affection, was long since gone. She remembered afresh the shock of coming home during the weeks before starting university to find only four indentations in the carpet where the instrument had stood.
‘Well you’ll not need it where you’re going and I certainly won’t need it here now you’re gone,’ her mother had said.
Looking around now, taking in the lack of television or radio, it occurred to her that her mother might have hated music. Eliza’s conscientious hours of practice on the woolly-toned Bosendorfer might have been torture to her. Eliza had always felt bad counting off the weeks until her escape but perhaps, all along, her mother had been counting off the years to be shot of those hesitant clunkings and fumbled chords.
‘It’s funny,’ Dido said as they drank their tea at the kitchen table and ate their way through a saffron cake Kitty had baked for them. ‘I can’t imagine you here.’
‘Neither can I,’ Eliza told her.
‘Were you happy?’
‘Not very,’ Eliza said after thinking a moment. ‘I mean, I wasn’t miserable. Granny didn’t abuse us or anything nasty. And she must have earned a bit as a teacher because we were never hungry. It’s just I was always wanting to be older than I was. I always wanted to grow up and leave. Some people seem to have these amazing childhoods and they spend their life comparing backwards. And for some people childhood’s just a stage to get through, like having chicken pox or…or being a sort of larva. And Granny wasn’t very happy most of the time so…she wasn’t very good at making life fun. But she wanted you very much, you know. When your mum died I think she sort of hoped she’d get to keep you. To bring you up.’
‘What? Granny did?’ Dido pulled a face, the very idea of her being raised here comical to her.
‘Maybe,’ Eliza said, ‘she thought she could make a better job of it second time around. But I wasn’t going to leave you behind. Not my precious bundle. You were so sweet!’
‘Eli-za!’
‘Sorry. More cake?’
‘No thanks. It tastes too yellow.’
‘You know, don’t you, Granny’s probably going to die. She’s very ill.’
‘I know,’ Dido said, fingering the buttery crumbs on her plate. Then a thought occurred to her. ‘Would we have to live here then?’
‘You must be joking!’
‘Oh. So Granny rents all this house from the council?’
‘No,’ Eliza told her. ‘She owns it. If she died it would become ours and we could sell it and buy somewhere else.’ But this thought was novel and disturbing so she put it from her. Dido sensed her discomfort and lapsed into thoughtfulness.
They walked into town after their tea and cake, Dido having expressed a wish to see Camborne before night fell and Eliza itching to escape the house’s oppressive atmosphere. The place had altered little apart from the inevitable supermarket or two in optimistically large car parks.
‘Everything’s closed,’ Dido said.
‘It tends to be in the country,’ Eliza told her.
‘But this isn’t country. It’s a town, isn’t it?’
‘I think it counts as country if you can see fields in the distance. There are fewer people so the shops can’t afford to stay open so late and everyone goes home instead.’
Merely saying this conjured up the deserts of aimless bike rides and uniformly uneventful evenings that were Eliza’s school holidays.
‘I thought Cornwall was on the sea.’
‘Most of it is. Just this bit isn’t. Look! Seagulls. The sea isn’t so far.’
‘Could we go? Giles’ mum said the beaches are much better here than in Kent.’
‘Maybe. Let’s see,’ Eliza said, cursing her mother-in-law.
They paused to examine a war memorial and made a detour into the churchyard so that Dido could see a handful of plain ancestral gravestones. She found Hannah’s grave without being shown. Its marble was still shockingly pale amid all the polished granite. They looked at it in silence for a minute or so. It was Dido who led them away. As they continued their walk, past more sad shop windows and secretive pubs, Eliza wondered if it disturbed Dido to remember so little of her mother. Had she stared at the grave and felt nothing?
‘Everybody’s white here,’ Dido said.
‘That’s another way of telling you’re in the country.’
The walk into town was further than Eliza had remembered so they treated themselves to fish and chips by way of compensation for Camborne not having a beach.
While Dido was enjoying a long soak in Granny’s peculiarly deep and narrow bath there was a knock on the front door.
‘Oh dear,’ Kitty said, her big face so awash with tears it seemed to be melting.
Eliza found herself staring, unable to say more than, ‘When?’
‘Just now. They just rang. Oh dear. You must be brave, Eliza. I…I’ll call round in the morning.’
Eliza knew she ought to have offered some comfort. As an old and dear friend, Kitty’s grief was so plainly going to be deeper than her own. She could feel the strange coolness in her repelling the older woman but could make no move towards her. She was still unsettled by the sudden confrontation with Hannah’s gravestone. Had they touched, she might have caught Kitty’s grief and been unable to check it. She could not face telling Dido right away. Her reaction was likely to be strong. This was, after all, the death of one of only two blood relatives. Eliza would need all her strength to sustain them both.
It did not occur to her until Kitty had left to ask her for a lift to the hospital. Not that she felt any great desire to look upon so pitiful a body but she knew Kitty might have liked to pay her last respects and would not have felt able to go on her own, being a non-relative. For a few minutes Eliza was frozen in indecision and when she did decide to go round to ask, she opened the front door only to see Kitty’s house and path in uninviting darkness.
There was no alcohol in the place. Her mother was strictly teetotal. By investigating the old hiding places, however, the mending box, the plate warmer, Eliza found the remains of a small box of Old Master chocolate liqueurs. There was still a ticket number stuck to the lid from a tombola stall. They were so old it was quite feasible that her mother had not eaten one of them but had been solemnly offering the box to her rare, less principled visitors over the years.
‘I’m going to bed,’ she called through the bathroom door and retreated with the chocolates to her room.
Bundled into bed, horizontal at long last, she lay trying not to choke on the unpleasantly sweetened gush of Drambuie as she munched, waiting for emotion to steal up on her. She felt nothing. Blood singing from sugar, she leaned from the bed to tug her wallet from the back pocket of her discarded jeans.
There was a photo pocket filled with the roughly trimmed shot of Dido powdering her nose in Giles’ dressing room. Behind it was a letter, much read and refolded so often it had the practised creases of a map. There was a date, of several years ago.
Dear Eliza, she read, I continue well and hope you do too. I tried to ring you just now and poor Giles told me what you have done. I don’t know what to say beyond expressing shock that a child of mine should fall so low. How can you face yourself? How can you face Dido? Her mother was so strong and principled; why can’t you be more like her?
I know you are not (no longer, that is) a Christian and probably never were in your heart; but you have to accept that I am. And for that reason I can no longer have anything to do with you. A relief for you, perhaps. An ageing mother is hardly a joy forever.
Being outside time, God knows us instantly at every stage of our lives, so he knows that I shall always love you as you were and that I shall continue to pray for you, as I do for Dido and that I shall always be
Your Mother.
14
At first Carlo could not believe his luck in being given the whole of Hampstead Heath to run around on and each time Eliza let him off the lead he w
ould vanish in search of rabbits, squirrels and other dogs to chase. She routinely lost entire mornings wandering around in search of him until she learnt that he was more likely to find her if she remained in one place. So she would let him off near the cafe in Parliament Hill Fields then sit at a table in the warmth, completing a crossword or reading a novel until he came back.
It was while sitting there on one particularly protracted morning that she met Paul. She had met him before, apparently, at one of Giles’ first nights but she had forgotten that and had just decided she must recognise him from the television when he walked over from buying his coffee, sat at her table and said hello.
He saw at once how she failed to remember him and was hugely amused. He took further pleasure in discomforting her with a precise recollection of what she had been wearing the night they met and what she had said.
‘It was Agrippina,’ he said. ‘The first night, October before last and you were all in brown with a sort of furry collar and gold shoes, like a rather glamorous mouse.’
‘Paul,’ she said at once. ‘You’re Paul Lessing the director. This is so embarrassing. Giles would kill me.’
‘I’ve got one of those faces,’ he said. ‘Instantly forgettable.’
But he didn’t at all. His features were rugged, ravaged even. He had smoker’s skin and an unruly shock of greying brown hair. He must have been in his fifties. He was a mess. However, he wore a faintly theatrical leather coat with a purple velvet collar and carried himself and his plainness with a beguilingly misplaced swagger, as though he were an ex-beauty, at least, or an ageing rock star who could afford not to care.
He was waiting for his ex-wife to drop off their boy for half term. The news that he was a veteran of a marriage war lent him extra interest, like a scar on a face with no other suggestion of violence.
He complimented her on an essay on seventeenth century performing practice that she had written for a recent King Arthur programme and was just starting to quiz her on the topic of Trevescan when his wife and child arrived.
The wife peered at Eliza through the steamed up windows with sharp eyes then vanished. The child was a sullen, hulking fourteen-year-old who said nothing to her beyond hi and answered his father’s eager questions with short answers that had to be prised from him. He was at once aggressively shy and oppressively the centre of attention and it was with relief that she saw Carlo loitering sheepishly by the litter bin and was able to make her farewells.
‘I ran into Paul Lessing on the Heath today,’ she told Giles and thought nothing more of it.
But then Paul invited them out to dinner, a small, intense dinner party in a restaurant, at which Giles was the only singer and was conversationally out of his depth. Paul contrived to be on the Heath the next day and walked with her. He took to ringing when she was alone in the house.
Had she told Giles about every walk and conversation, the relationship might have developed into that chimaera, the sexless friendship of man and woman. Something silenced her however and her silence lent their encounters a charge of riskily transgressive excitement. Giles had secrets after all, she assured herself. There were many things in his working day – conversations, flirtations, interests – that he told her nothing about. She was sure of it.
Once she admitted to herself that she wanted more than a passing liaison from Paul, there was no reversing the thought, no unfeeling the feeling. He made her feel special, like more than a mother, true, but also like more than an unfinished thesis. Had she enjoyed a confidante, someone to grill her about what she was embarking on and why, she might have come to her senses. She might however have admitted aloud that she was drawn to Paul because, unlike Giles, he did not handle her with care. He was frank, impolite and gave the impression that any woman throwing in her lot with him would be living on her wits and risking everything for…for what?
She had to know. So one day, as they finished walking Carlo – who Paul had trained to stay in close calling distance, apparently by simple alpha male presence and an ability to whistle – she said, ‘Show me where you live. I don’t have to pick Dido up for two hours yet.’
Sex with Paul was like conversation with him; no artifice, no leaving off of lights or drawing of merciful curtains. He was entirely without shame. It didn’t seem to be about emotions at all but entirely about sex; a sort of athletic contest as to which of them could get the most out of it. It was dirty and untender and utterly addictive. Far from making Eliza feel bad or guilty, it left her whole and healthy. And hungry for more.
For two weeks Carlo’s walks all ended at the foot of Paul’s huge bed. The fact that they were now having sex went undiscussed. The fizzing, stimulating conversations – about music, art, politics, people, history – bubbled up within minutes of sex being over. The combination of words and bodies was intoxicating.
It need have gone no further. She had heard how such affairs had a way of burning out in their own heat.
Paul began to voice regrets, however, not that he had slept with her but that he had slept with her first.
‘How do you mean first?’ she asked.
‘There are so many people I wanted you to meet,’ he said. ‘Places I could take you. New York. Santa Fe. Sydney. Buenos Aires.’
‘And now you can’t?’ she began.
‘I can’t get involved. You have Giles. You have a life already. I swore I wouldn’t do this.’
‘Are you saying you can’t respect me because I slept with you too easily?’
‘I’m saying I want you here, in my life, want you even more than before, and I know it’s not fair to ask that of you.’
He showed her the room she could have as a study and the room Dido could have as a bedroom. Warming to his theme, he painted a picture of their life together. Giles was a lovely man, a superb singer, but like so many performers he was, Paul implied, a kind of child, trapped in a kind of distorting immaturity by the necessity of putting his technique and welfare and career before anything else. She could never reach her full potential with him because his childlike demands would always be holding her back. With Paul, by implication, she would blossom.
She had never thought of Giles in this way before. Perhaps because she saw him in the dim light of her truncated career and uncompleted doctorate, he had always seemed the dauntingly capable one, the more adult of the pair, the achiever, the star. This new image of him as the infant destroyer checking her growth took root. Before long she had convinced herself that she would be Dr Hosken by now if Giles had not lured her from her chosen path. Most insidiously, Giles had convinced her she was weaker than she was. She did not need his protection. Quite the reverse!
As soon as she dared entertain the possibility of leaving him it became a reality she could plot. She gave him no inkling of what was in her mind but regularly caught herself setting him tests. If he comes home from rehearsals and asks how my work’s going before he tells me about his, then he loves me and I won’t leave him. If he stays facing me as we fall asleep, I won’t leave him. Test after test was failed in all innocence.
He took her to a party to celebrate the anniversary of Selina Bryant Management. It was a typical agency gathering – the agents and their staff infinitely spanglier and wittier than the talent they represented, Russian tenors with little English and no manners, quiet pianists eaten up by insecurity, wind players painfully aware the agency could not afford to represent more than one exponent on each instrument so might drop them at any moment. On the Tube over she listened to Giles chatter about the new production of Edward Pepper’s Job, noticed the irrational distaste she had developed for his extremely clean and tidy fingernails and told herself that if he took the trouble to introduce her to five or more people, she would break off with Paul and make an effort to save their marriage.
He left her side as they were handing in their coats and introduced her to nobody. She spent the evening walled in by people’s backs in a quiet corner with a viol player with no dress sense and smelly hair.
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br /> She walked out on the marriage the next day. She was conscious of leaving in a hurry, of wilfully simplifying her thoughts to block out reasoning. She left him a letter, which was cowardly, but she took pains to write the truth.
Your love was based on pity, she wrote. Paul has shown me that I’m worth a little more than that.
She gave Carlo one last rampage on the Heath, for old time’s sake, but felt she must leave him behind. He was Giles’ dog and it would be too cruel for Giles to come back to an empty house. Then she imagined how traumatised Dido might be to lose him without warning so took him too. She settled the latest phone bill, which she could ill afford, crammed her belongings into one case, Dido’s into another and picked Dido up from playgroup on the way. She rang Paul moments before leaving saying merely, ‘It’s me. I’m coming.’
It only occurred to her as she was hastily giving Dido a simplified version of events in the taxi that he might have misinterpreted this and greet them naked and, as he liked to put it, with a full head of steam.
If he was expecting merely another assignation, Paul hid his surprise masterfully. He laughed. He kissed her. Then he kissed Dido, kissed Carlo, lugged their cases inside and whirled them out for a celebration meal.
Dido had no idea who he was but was charmed and christened him The Party Man. She cried that night, however, as it dawned on her that Giles was not joining them and they were not returning home. She decided Paul’s bathroom was frightening and would not sleep in her new bed unless Eliza lay down beside her. Unerring instinct told her to exploit Eliza’s guilt as fully as she could. Lulling her to fretful sleep then curling up with Paul on the Chesterfield at one end of his huge, barely furnished sitting room, Eliza was on edge for a phone call that never came.
All that first weekend Paul was charm personified, considerate, playful, supportive. On the Sunday night he warned her he was about to start a rehearsal period on a new play and so would be absent a lot and abstracted when he was around.