by Patrick Gale
Surprised by hunger, Dido insisted they visit one of the bakeries to buy pasties and was presented with a free piece of heavy cake by the sales assistant when she heard it was her first time west of Penzance.
‘Well, you’re in proper Cornwall now,’ the woman told her. ‘The rest don’t count. Not really.’
‘I like it here,’ Dido declared as they walked into an unexpected grassy arena surrounded by cottages and sat on a bank to eat.
‘The sun’s shining,’ Eliza reminded her. ‘And everyone’s being nice. Wait for an off day. I bet it drizzles here even more than in Camborne or Islington.’ Drizzle was one of Dido’s reliable hates.
‘Why do we live in London?’
‘It’s where everything happens. Work and things. And Giles has to live there.’
‘But he’s not my father.’
‘No, but…’
‘And you don’t work. You haven’t worked for ages.’
‘I try. My contacts sort of dried up.’
‘You could not work here much more cheaply than you don’t work in London.’
‘Dido I –’
‘And I could go to school down the road there. They’ve got council flats. We could do a swap with someone. There’s a list you can go on – that’s how Nitin’s family moved to Brighton. Or we could buy somewhere now. Property’s cheap here. Kitty said so.’
‘Hold your…Your money’s to be held in that trust until you’re eighteen.’
‘The solicitor’d let me buy a house. It’s an investment. Kitty said I could buy a cottage. You could grow vegetables instead of just sitting around.’
‘I don’t just sit around!’
‘But you do. It’s all you’ve done for years. And now you’re scared of change. So we’re just going to be stuck in that stinky flat till we rot. I really like it here. You could be happy here only you’re scared.’
‘No I’m not.’ Eliza realised she was shouting now.
‘You didn’t even want to come here for a holiday.’ Suddenly Dido was on her feet.
‘Where are you going?’
‘For a walk. I can find my own way home.’
‘Don’t be cross. Dido. Please?’
‘Oh piss off. Just piss off! And leave me alone or I’ll tell Social Services you’re unfit.’
Eliza sat, helpless, as Dido stamped off.
They had argued furiously before and often. Dido displayed more of Hannah’s strength of will every week. But this was new. It had felt like a full-blown teenage strop. As always the thought of Dido in relation to the looming storm clouds of puberty was unsettling.
Eliza followed at a cautious distance and watched in admiration as Dido crossed to the main car park, approached a gang of boys who were gathered around the recycling bins and traded her slice of heavy cake for a turn on a skateboard.
Eliza became aware that the whole little scene had been witnessed by a big boned, black-haired woman eating her lunch in the sunshine on the low wall just outside the library. Ashamed, she began to come closer, thinking to call Dido back, but halted near the woman, excluded by youth and still weakened by the guilty vision of academic independence that had troubled her earlier and now lingered like the troubling puzzle of a dream.
‘Difficult age,’ the woman sympathised and Eliza noticed once again how it was the teasing, ironic Cornish accent as much as the scenery, that made her feel she had come home.
‘She’s only nine. Ten in a couple of months.’
‘Yeah…like mine, though. Ten going on forty seems to be the norm these days.’
‘I should get her back. They’ll be wanting that skateboard. She can be awfully bossy.’
‘She’ll be fine. See that tough-looking lad in the red baseball cap? That’s my Lucy. She’ll look after her.’
‘Oh. Thanks,’ said Eliza, bewildered.
‘Library’s officially shut for lunch but you’re welcome to look around. But I can’t make you out a card if you’re only visiting.’
‘Oh. Are you the…?’
‘That’s right. My little empire. Help yourself.’
It was a featureless single storey modern building, little lifted by a brave school of Hepworth sculpture beside the wheelchair ramp. It was comfortably cool and shady inside after the outdoors glare, however, and Eliza had always found libraries soothing, even their hectic, underfunded local on the Holloway Road.
Some things were the same the country over, it seemed; a bank of computers and shelves of videos and CDs took up yards of space where bookshelves might have been and the children’s library sprawled to take over a third of what was left. There was a bay titled Novels Of Particular Interest to Women, however, a magnificent collection of dictionaries, including the longer Oxford, and a well-endowed local studies section.
From idle force of habit, Eliza scoured the local studies and the music shelves but saw nothing on Trevescan so was dimly reassured that no one else, not even a local historian, had ploughed her particular furrow ahead of her. In a display devoted to farming and farmhouse bed and breakfast accommodation in the area, there was a well-indexed map of Cornwall’s tip. Every farmstead was listed by name. She scanned past the mass of names beginning with Tre to find Vingoe, Trevescan’s family farm, and was amazed. Not only was it still in existence – she had assumed that the name, if not the farm, would have been long lost since he left no heirs – but it was not far from Kitty’s caravan. Because of it having been famously raided and torched by the Spanish, she had always assumed it must lie nearer Mousehole, on the more accessible southerly side, yet here it was, in all probability visible from the hill she and Dido had just walked from. There again, names changed and moved and the romantic house names in Cornwall were as frequently copied and repeated as the Dunroamins and Hillcrests of elsewhere. But she looked again at the map and saw how this Vingoe had a sheltered cove below it where a Spanish boat might well have been forced ashore, driven by fierce winds.
She was just turning from the noticeboards, distracted by the librarian who had come back in and was fiddling with the cash register behind her desk, when she spotted a small sign among the merry posters for amateur shows, open gardens and charity sales.
FANCY SINGING SOMETHING QUIET FOR ONCE?
MADRIGAL GROUP MEETS WEDNESDAY AT
MUST READ MUSIC – NOT SOL-FA
TENORS ESPECIALLY WELCOME.
RING MOLLY ON 788669
‘Tempted? We could do with another soprano.’
‘You’re Molly?’
‘I am. Well?’ From her speaking voice, the librarian was plainly a contralto.
Eliza smiled wistfully. ‘I haven’t sung in years. Not since I was a student. There are probably crows nesting in there.’ She rubbed her throat instinctively.
‘Naa. You can still talk, you can still sing.’
‘I’m only on holiday.’
‘So? Come just the once. Where are you staying?’
‘A friend’s caravan. Up on the hill.’
‘Oh. Kitty’s place.’
‘You know it?’
‘Everyone knows Kitty’s place. Before she bought it it was very popular with courting couples on colder nights. Probably still is. Does she still keep the key behind St Francis?’
Eliza nodded and felt herself grin. This woman’s warmth was infectious. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t come. I’ve got Dido and I can hardly leave her up there on her own.’
‘Your kid?’
‘Sort of. My niece, actually.’
‘Oh. That’s nice. Well bring her. If she hasn’t had a strop with Lucy by then, they can hang out upstairs and kill things on the computer.’
Eliza pulled a face. ‘I don’t know. I’m so rusty.’
‘It’s my cottage in St Just we’re talking about, not the Wigmore Hall…Look. Here’s the address. Just follow the signs to Cape Cornwall and you can’t miss it. A long terrace with front gardens gone mad. Just round the corner from here.’
‘Oh God. It’s tonight, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Go on. Come. Lots of sexy men.’
‘Really? Singing madrigals?’ It sounded most unlikely.
Molly shrugged, stifling a mischievous smile. ‘Sure. If you go for camel coloured cardies and beige socks…’
19
Caught on his way to the shower, Giles stumbled through the house cursing because the bedroom phone was not on its base unit. He lunged for the kitchen one just as the answering machine was cutting in, then took refuge in the hall where his nakedness felt less vulnerable.
‘Mr Easton?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Sue Stokes. Secretary at St Saviour’s.’
‘Ah. Hello.’ Giles instinctively fastened the towel more securely at his waist then sat down on the stairs. ‘What can I do for you?’
The unmistakable sawdusty smell of vomit drifted from the downstairs lavatory unmasked by orange and cinnamon room spray. Giles frowned and went to shut the lavatory door. A bad smell was as unexpected in Julia as a loud colour.
‘Well Dido hasn’t been in to school for a week. We haven’t registered her since last Monday, a whole week ago. And since I haven’t been able to get hold of her mum, and she hasn’t responded to my letter, I wondered if you could explain.’
Giles stopped himself saying that Eliza’s phone had been disconnected, tempting though such disloyalty might be. ‘I last saw Dido on Tuesday morning,’ he said. ‘I’ve not heard from either her or her mother since.’
‘It’s only it’s most unlike Mrs Easton. She’s normally very efficient about sending sick notes or getting permission in advance but an unexplained absence of this length would normally get Dido on the truancy register and I wouldn’t have bothered you but you are down here as the number two contact for Dido and –’
‘Don’t worry,’ Giles said affecting calm. ‘Mrs Easton hasn’t been very well, that’s all. It’s probably nothing to fuss about but I’ll call round there this morning, if you like. To check?’
Bemused at the thought of Eliza as a paragon of efficiency, worried at the trouble in which she was landing Dido he showered quickly, dressed and skipped his morning exercises. He registered a grim amusement too that Eliza should see fit to have the school call her by her married name when in all correspondence she remained Ms Eliza Hosken.
He had time on his hands. The Mechanicals were rehearsing all morning. He was not called until after lunch, for what was ominously billed as a movement session, with Titania, Puck, Fairies and non-singing extras.
He kept a key in his sock drawer, copied from Dido’s without her mother’s knowledge, for just such an emergency. He had never used it. He had never called at the flat before. The rule seemed to be that he stayed in his world, Eliza stayed in hers and Dido shuttled at will between them.
There were three towers, Shakespeare, Jonson and Dekker, placed with a view to their forming a pleasing sculptural whole rather than with any thought of how their proximity would affect their tenants. They shaded one another and set up tremendous eddies of dusty air in the intervening space. Sometimes one would see a discarded carrier bag whirling twenty or so floors high.
If Dido were playing truant, she would not be alone. Seven or eight children were clustered, arguing, around a bench near the entrance to Dekker and ignored him as he passed. The towers had been improved in recent years, with security coded entrances and a new playground. Giles had the security code written on the key’s paper label but had no need of it because the postman held the door open for him as he approached. He summoned the lift but its interior – stainless steel virtually obliterated by layer upon layer of dazzlingly sprayed on tags – sapped his confidence in the thing and he took the stairs by way of an exercise substitute. He knew himself for a lily-livered, middle-class snob. There was no more to be scared of in the lift than there was in the shouting children outside but still he felt marked as an intruder and at risk.
It was not so bad as he imagined. Yes, the tags and graffitti continued up the stairs like crazed wallpaper but the stairwell smelled of toast and bacon, not piss, and he heard cultured snatches of Radio 4 as he climbed, not the territorial blast of hip-hop he had expected. The people he passed as he climbed – a Sikh in an old brown suit, a pink-faced young father and matching baby, a woman with clanking bags of recycling – shamed him by greeting him when he had not considered speaking to them.
Eliza’s door was no different from the others on her floor. Its cheerful paintwork was undamaged, its number was not missing, but it felt weak, somehow, provisional compared to his own. He pressed the doorbell but heard nothing so knocked on the door rather feebly then flapped the letter box a few times.
Silence.
He crouched to call through the slot, ‘Eliza? Dido? It’s me,’ doing this as much to reassure anyone who heard him letting himself in as from any hope they were there. ‘It’s okay,’ he added. ‘I’ve got my key.’
He felt relief at closing the door behind him, then shame at feeling relief.
‘Hello?’
Even before he called out there was a stillness to the flat that told him it was empty. People changed an atmosphere by their presence. Dido had let slip how often Eliza slept during the day and he had half-expected to find her sleeping now, but he knew at once she was out. Then he noticed a handful of letters and the free paper which must have skittered across the floor when slung through the letter box. He was about to pick them up, tidy them into a heap, when a burglarish impulse stayed his hand and he let them lie. He walked around the place.
It was so untidy it would have been hard to tell if there had just been a police raid, still less if any tell-tale thing were missing. There were small piles of things everywhere, evidence, he imagined, of Dido’s spasmodic efforts to impose some kind of order, but there was no guiding principle beyond clearing a space on which to sit or eat. Unopened letters, many of them official, old newspapers, library books, photocopied articles and, perhaps most poignant in a household without a cook, recipes torn from magazines, littered every surface. The only spots of order were the untouched spice rack and the small collection of CDs for which Eliza must have written sleeve notes but which she could not play, having no CD player.
Then there was Dido’s bedroom, of course, her other bedroom, just as small and orderly as the one he already knew. He opened the wardrobe. It was half-empty but then she possessed so few clothes that maybe it was never full. He crossed to Eliza’s room but was driven back by the intimacy of its tumbled, unmade bed and sweet, hairbrushy smell which brought her back to him as shockingly as if he had suddenly heard her voice at his elbow.
He was a feeble detective. What would Julia have done? Look in the bathroom. He looked and saw at once the lack of toothbrushes. And Carlo had gone. Of course he had. He was dense not to have noticed at once. Typically disorganised, Eliza had taken the dog but forgotten his lead, so would be having to improvise with a belt or a piece of rope. He paced from room to cramped room once more and saw that other things were missing – the novel Dido was currently devouring, the denim jacket she all but slept in.
Hands shaking, he pulled out his diary and rang the school. ‘There’s no sign of them here,’ he told the secretary, ‘but please don’t worry. I’d have heard if there was anything seriously wrong. They may be visiting family or…or Mrs Easton may be attending a conference.’
Where did that unlikelihood spring from? The secretary accepted it, so perhaps it was of a piece with her version of a highly efficient, note-sending Eliza.
‘I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as I hear anything,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry you weren’t warned. As you say, entirely out of character.’
He hung up before he blurted out any other craziness then slumped on the nearest piece of furniture, a cheap and nasty sofa so down-in-the-mouth it might have spent time in a skip before being dragged up here. It reeked of Carlo however which was more comforting than repellent.
He had been bluffing on the telephone. He had no idea where they mig
ht have gone. Eliza had no relatives beyond her mother with whom she might have contact. As for friends, one of his abiding memories of the sad, last months of their living together was of his helplessness at watching her slide into depression while realising she had no close friend he could call to her aid.
It came home to him how little he knew about her now. Everything – messages, complaints, requests – was filtered through Dido. He never saw Eliza because there was no need; Dido handled everything, controlled it even. Quite possibly Dido had been feeding him and Julia a pack of lies for months. And not just them but the school, even social workers. Eliza might be insane, dangerous even, and he would be none the wiser. It would take very little to push her over the edge. Dido would certainly underestimate the strength of the emotions she stirred up.
He looked about him at the terrible little flat, where the attempts at cheerfulness – a bright, too short curtain, a dog-eared Italian film poster, one wall painted an uneven yellow – only emphasized how low Eliza had sunk. She was still his wife. Whatever his resentment, whatever Julia said, he should never have let this happen. In her absence from his daily existence he had, for ease of mind, turned her into a kind of destroyer but this was no monster’s lair, merely the hiding place of a woman who was failing to cope.
Giles was not a religious man but, like many performers and public men, he was a superstitious believer in pacts and promises. There was no Jesus in his private pantheon but there were fates and furies. Things could be bargained for and bad omens diverted. So he did not pray now but he made a pledge that if he found out where Dido was, where they both were, he would make restitution. He would restore the child’s faith in him and, if she would let him, set her aunt free of him with her dignity and independence restored.
All afternoon his concentration was shot and he drew sighs of vexation from his colleagues as he repeatedly forgot the blockings and choreography even as they walked him through them. Again and again he thought of Dido’s bald demand for money, which he had so crudely read as blackmail. It was not for herself at all but for train money or, God help him, plane money. They might not even be in England any more.