A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  Warmed by admiration, he reached for the phone again and his credit card and ordered a generous bouquet she would probably think immoral as well as vulgar. It was easier this way, saving him the awkwardness of a conversation with Eliza. His Christmas and birthday cards normally restrained themselves to with all good wishes, Giles but, dictating the florist’s greetings card, he signed off with much love, as ever, Giles. He imagined the small blush the words might rouse on her cheeks before she set the card aside and dutifully decried his extravagance.

  24

  Of all Julia’s clients, Alexy was the most demanding. But he was also the most prestigious and the least reliable so she had learned to keep her diary free on his visit to London so as to shadow his every move and see his every whim catered to. He was a bass, a fabulously Slavic bass who actually looked like the noble warriors he played whereas most of the competition resembled defrocked priests or upturned turtles, and accepted any number of free flights, penthouse hotel suites and tremulously accommodating mezzos as his due. One went along with him because Alexy was deservedly a star but also because he accepted all these blessings not with a star’s arrogance but with the sweet, comfortable nature of an adored youngest son. Julia went along with him because he had only to smile, dimpling his chin, and rumble, ‘Zzank you, Yoolia,’ to fill her with a desire to cook him dumplings and make his bed.

  Which was how she came to find herself skipping after-work drinks for the receptionist’s birthday to accompany him to a psychic’s house in World’s End.

  ‘It always leave me so very tender, Yoolia,’ he explained. ‘I need you there afterwards.’

  He swore by Barney Swift and consulted him whenever work brought him to England. Julia had been a little nervy when she first accompanied him but now knew what to expect. It was a perfectly nice house and one could have taken Barney for a friendly wine merchant or estate agent. It was no seedier or stranger than a visit to a dentist or chiropractor.

  Barney ushered them into his tiny house and, avoiding shaking hands, led them upstairs and told Alexy to make himself comfortable in the sitting room, ‘In any chair but the blue one.’ He then took Julia to sit in the kitchen where he made her a cup of tea and offered the day’s papers and some excellent shortbread on a rather pretty plate.

  He did not go into a trance. There was nothing embarrassing or untoward. He simply faced the kitchen window in silence for a few minutes, hands on the edge of the sink, and breathed deeply. Then he walked into the sitting room and shut the door. Through the wall she heard him start to talk almost at once and keep up a stream of words for nearly twenty minutes.

  Apparently this was why consultations with him were so exciting; there were none of the tell-tale am-I-on-the-right-track questions, just a confident unburdening of thoughts, much of it disturbingly to the point. Alexy had once refused to sign a contract when warned off by something Barney had said, which maddened Selina until the opera production he had thus avoided turned out to be notoriously unlucky, plagued by ill health, bad reviews, union action and the violent, onstage death of a scene shifter. Intrigued, forgiving, Selina made an appointment for herself, from which she returned grey-faced and refusing all questions.

  When it was over, Barney usually returned to the kitchen looking impressively tired. He would merely nod at Julia with a little smile then take himself off to another room leaving her to retrieve Alexy, who was usually left wildly keyed up by the experience.

  Today’s consultation took a little longer than usual. As she sat at the table drinking her tea, she heard more questions and answers than usual as it neared its end and sensed all had not gone quite smoothly. Then Barney came in, looked at her and said, ‘Of course! Stupid of me. It’s you they were talking about. I know you’re worried but don’t be. It’s going to be fine. There’s a cross and a star, a beautiful healthy child and a handsome man. It’s all going to be fine. They say you’re not to worry.’ And he slipped out as suddenly as he had come in.

  She was astonished for only a moment, then angry that he should stoop to trying to recruit her so crudely. It could not have taken him much research – a phone call to one of the office gossips perhaps – to find that she lived with Giles on Starcross Road. The rest was just guesswork and intuition.

  She fetched Alexy with some impatience, to find him similarly displeased.

  ‘It not go so well, Yoolia. He think I get married soon.’

  Which at least meant that he was not so excited as usual and could be dropped at his hotel without a lengthy winding down drink.

  Julia and Giles had a routine when he was rehearsing an opera. They went overnight from gadding about to living with the single-minded simplicity of a farmer and his wife. All socialising stopped. They ate well but carefully, at home, and were early to bed every night. Julia enjoyed the change. It was like visiting a health farm each evening only without the tedious exercising. In bed she would massage his back and shoulders to relieve the tension that built up there and, as often as not, he would then fall asleep and she would slip downstairs to watch television quietly until she felt tired too. He had no footballers’ superstitions about sex having a malign effect on performance but if they made love during a rehearsal period it tended to be without ingenuity or great enthusiasm, a physical release rather than an emotional outpouring.

  Tonight Giles was already home when she let herself in. He was in a good mood, full of gossip about Dewi Evans but also relieved because he had solved the mystery of Dido’s non-appearance at the weekend. Hearing they had simply gone to visit her sick grandmother, Julia too was relieved. Despite her realism, she must have borne the psychic’s words home with her because she sensed Giles’ improved mood and the house’s warmer atmosphere with a kind of recognition.

  Typically Giles did not apologize in so many words for his accusation that she had driven Dido away but he did so in gestures, cooking her favourite supper – pasta with lemon and chicken – complimenting her on her hair, which had been trimmed in her lunch hour, and being generally charming. Chattering about the afternoon’s rehearsal he told her he now had a few days off. ‘Dewi’s shooting his new video and Grover’s directing it. We’ve done my first and last duets to death and the two dances, which leaves all the scenes with just me and Dewi. Shame you can’t take time off midweek. We could have a little jaunt somewhere.’

  ‘Damn,’ she said, remembering.

  ‘Tell.’

  ‘Lousy timing. Selina’s sending me down to your favourite Cornish music festival tomorrow to fly the flag for her at Jemima Beale’s farewell concerto there.’

  ‘So? I could come too. Take Friday off and we could make a little holiday of it and come back on Monday morning.’

  She pulled a face.

  ‘But Cornwall,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit…It’ll be heaving.’

  ‘It’s different if you don’t have children in tow. No buckets and spades and crowded beaches. We could stay somewhere nice, eat in some of those famously good restaurants they have down there now, unwind.’

  ‘Selina’s already booked me in at the Porth Keverne.’

  ‘Great. I’ll just call ahead and make sure it’s a double.’

  ‘Oh it’s a double. Selina doesn’t believe in singles. And I’m flying. You might not get a seat at short notice.’

  He grinned. ‘Don’t you want me to come?’

  ‘Of course, but –’

  ‘You think I’ll cramp your style!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. I’m coming. More pasta?’

  ‘I’m not hungry any more.’

  ‘So now you can eat for pure pleasure.’

  ‘Oh go on, then. Giles?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Did you have a spat with Villiers the other night? Apart from the paedophile thing?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Nothing really.’

  ‘Oh god. Has he taken umbrage at something? I probably forgot to admire his shoes or pat his bum. He’s so fucking thin-skinne
d. I just wish he’d relax and admit he’s gay; go the whole hog and stop being so prickly and sour.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s not as though anyone would be remotely surprised.’

  ‘He’s probably a perfectly nice person underneath.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Possibly. For a snake.’

  As the evening wound on she felt a great weight of worry lifting. Of course Villiers was against her having a baby. Villiers was against anyone having babies, against happiness, against family, against anything that did not involve subterfuge and pain and Villiers.

  But now it did not matter. She could tell Giles this evening. She could tell him in Cornwall. It no longer bothered her. Whenever she told him, Giles would be happy. He was so much simpler than her, emotionally. So lacking in Villiers’ deviousness. When he was hungry he reached for a skillet and cooked a steak. When he was happy, he said so. Perhaps Barney Swift was right after all.

  I’m happy, she thought. Here. Now. Stars and crosses. A healthy, beautiful baby. A handsome man. It’ll be all right.

  25

  It was one of those occasions when Pearce wished he had a dog. If a dog had come bounding up to greet him as he came in at the back door or lay, sleepily tail-wagging on the kitchen sofa, he could have shared his excitement with it by taking it for a moonlit walk to hunt rabbits or at least rolled and played with it on the hall rug. As it was, Simkin being out mousing, he had to content himself with a glass of Scotch and a Women’s Institute rock bun.

  He had so nearly not gone this evening. Molly’s madrigal evenings had been born when she hectored a group of them into coming carol singing with her to raise money for a campaign to save West Cornwall Hospital. It had been unexpectedly enjoyable rehearsing so she then had the idea of a repeat performance the following summer, only singing madrigals instead of carols. They began to rehearse but could never agree on which to perform or when to walk around local pubs and houses performing them, so rehearsing was established as an end in itself.

  Pearce had begun to tire of the group however. He liked the fact that they never performed but they were pretty awful and it depressed him that, despite all the practice, they never seemed to get any better.

  He knew Molly had a sentimental attachment to music-making of this particularly Cornish kind. It reminded her of their mother, who had always an alarming ability to pressgang the most unlikely gathering into clustering about the harmonium to sing Goliath of Gath, Trelawney or The Hymn of Saint Buriana or something raucous and thigh-slapping by Merritt, and maintained a small sheet music library for no other purpose.

  Whenever he had gently tried to hint to Molly that he might not always be relied on to turn up, she would either make him feel he was hurtfully reneging on some long established family tradition or go for his sensitive spot in turn by saying he was never going to meet anyone if he never came out. She never specified a gender, never said girlfriend or wife, but he knew what she was getting at. In any case there was never anyone new in her conservatory, despite the little notes she kept pinned up in the library and the more musical of St Just’s pubs.

  The men who came were regulars from any number of local choirs or euchre drives and tended to greet him with wearisome jokes about cauliflowers and potatoes, even when neither was in season.

  The few women not married or old enough to have played hopscotch with his aunts, were made as unromantic for him by familiarity and too much of the wrong sort of knowledge, as he felt sure he must be for them. Pauline was embittered from living with her sick mother. Ruth was perfectly nice but seemed the last person in St Just to have realised that she was a lesbian, which left Bet. Bet was actually very pretty and, unlike him, had completed her veterinary training and specialised in small animals at the Penzance firm which looked after the livestock on the farm. He had occasionally caught her looking at him with something like wistfulness when he went in to pay a bill or pick up an antibiotic injection for one of the steers. But he had never asked her out because he had never been able to forget the rumour, probably quite untrue, which had circulated at school to the effect that, when aroused, she smelt like a swamp.

  The heat in the old people’s home in Gulval had left him drained of energy, then he had spent an extremely bad-tempered afternoon fitting the new fuel filter and hydraulic pump belt on the combine. And once he had finally sprung the engine into life at about six, he felt ready for nothing but a long hot soak followed by a drive down to Sennen Cove for a pasty and a pint of Doom Bar.

  He had just decided to pretend to have forgotten what night of the week it was when Lucy rang to say she didn’t understand algebra and Mum didn’t understand it either and he was coming tonight wasn’t he. So, guiltily, he had said yes, of course he was and had grabbed a pasty and pint on his way through the town and arrived early enough to help her with her homework and to put up a shelf of Molly’s which kept falling down because she was too proud to ask Morris to rehang it.

  So he was sitting in the conservatory with the others, already well into a second pint, thanks to Mervyn the tenor, who always brought a couple of jugfuls down from The Star, when she walked in with her funny little girl and sat shyly among the sopranos directly across from him. She sat by Bet, in fact, which meant he couldn’t look at her as much as he liked because every time he did, Bet intercepted his gaze and looked wistfully back.

  Eliza. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. In the flesh, at least. Like a girl in a shampoo advert, only serious, tremendously serious, like a small girl having to read the lesson or recite something from memory. Above her rather worn moleskin jeans she had on a funny, floaty top that didn’t really match, which he liked, as though she had her mind on other things when dressing. And when she sang she took on a faraway look so that she reminded him of the dreamy, rather hippyish girls he had seen on the arms of artists when Molly dragged him along to private views at local galleries.

  He had never studied music. His mother had taught him to read it at the same time as she taught him to read words, sitting on her lap at the harmonium while she played and sang to nursery rhymes and folk songs in an old book with illustrations by Walter Crane. Or was it Kate Greenaway? Pretty girls in bonnets with watering cans or baskets of cherries. There was a lady loved a swine. ‘Honey,’ said she. There was a lady loved a swine. ‘Oink!’ said he. To read the words now was to hear his mother’s voice, cushioned on the supportive swaying of her bosom and feel again her bony arms safely pinning him from either side as she played the simple harmonies.

  He sang bass because that was what Molly told him his voice was. Beyond that he understood little. He had a good memory for notes, however, and knew chunks at a time of the bass lines off by heart because they had sung them so often. So he was able to look up occasionally as he sang, unlike the others, unlike poor, swampy Bet. So he saw, as they did not, that Eliza sang every madrigal from memory. She kept the book politely opened at whatever page old Toby had them turn to, but once she had seen the title, she read no further, merely sang.

  He loved Molly with a strong, true, brotherly love which he never questioned or doubted. But he felt a new, warm surge of affection for her when she insisted he run Eliza and the girl back to the caravan. He knew as she waved them off she was mischievously trying to catch his eye but he dared not look back for fear of laughing then having to explain himself.

  Where had he found the courage to ask her out? Perhaps it was because he knew she was not staying long and knew no one. Nobody would hear about her refusal or make a fool of him. It was not like asking out Bet or sad, frowning Pauline. But perhaps his encounter with Janet had something to do with it? Perhaps she had made some kind of adjustment in him, tightened a drive belt or whatever, and now he knew such things were possible he knew no restraint.

  Driving home down Carn Bosavern towards Kelynack, he had counted the sequence of distant lighthouse flashes and felt a rush of feeling so intense that he swung the Land Rover drunkenly from side to side in a way that al
ways made Lucy scream and Molly furious.

  He took a second rock bun to bed with him, and a recipe book.

  26

  ‘So what do you feel like doing?’ Dido asked after their holiday breakfast of muffins, coffee, strawberries and chocolate. For the first time in weeks, Eliza felt entirely rested, despite the damp, the lumpiness of the bed and a dawn chorus in which the honks and screams of pigs had joined with birds.

  ‘You’re on holiday too,’ she told Dido. ‘You decide. Beach? Penzance? St Ives? Coast path?’

  Dido glanced out of the creeper-framed window; the day was cloudlessly sunny but with a crisp breeze.

  ‘Bike ride?’ she suggested.

  ‘Okay. But not too far. It’s hilly around here and I just sit around all day, remember?’

  Dido scowled at this reference to yesterday’s row. They pored over the battered map left with the bird and flower guides and well-thumbed paperbacks on the mobile home’s solitary bookshelf.

  Dido had recently been studying how to read Ordnance Survey symbols so Eliza encouraged her to plot them a circular route. Dido’s initial circuit – taking in both Penzance and St Ives – would have challenged a professional racer. They opted instead for a round trip to Land’s End, returning around Chapel Carn Brea, the country’s westernmost hill. Eliza was fairly sure that this was too ambitious as well but she held her peace. She had resolved, in light of yesterday’s altercation, to be more venturesome.