by Patrick Gale
‘Stop it!’ she laughed. ‘We should order. It’s late.’
‘Shall I order for you?’ he asked.
‘Why?’
‘I want the lobster and it’s for two.’
‘But it’s so…oh okay. Why not?’
‘Yes, we’d like to order please,’ Giles said. The passing waitress, who had not even been looking their way was immediately all attention. It was an old trick of his, a trick of the voice or merely the self-belief of good looks, which always got him served as soon as he stepped up to a bar or looked for a waiter.
‘We’ll drink a bottle of number twenty-seven, the Pouilly Fuissé. And we’ll have the lobster Thermidor.’
He wasn’t paying for this, Selina was, but he made it feel as though the money were his and she liked that; travelling for work tended to be so unsexy. She was naturally so much more controlling than he was that she loved it when he took the whip hand for a change.
‘So tell me your plans,’ he said. ‘What happens tomorrow?’
‘Jemima’s rehearsing with the orchestra late in the morning,’ she said, ‘so I ought to sit in on that. Give me a chance to say hello. Then Selina told me to take her and Peter Grenfell and his wife out for lunch if they’re free. They’ve got nothing on until the concert. You could come.’
He pulled a face, reminding her that his experience of the festival had not left a happy taste.
‘Or you could take yourself off to be a tourist,’ she suggested. ‘Just hook up with me in the evening.’
‘Would you mind?’
‘Not at all.’
‘It’s only I really should head over to Camborne to see how Annie’s doing.’
‘Who?’
‘Eliza’s mum. I thought I told you.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Why should I? No. I mean I really don’t. I won’t need the car again if you drop me at the church on your way. There’ll be plenty of other drivers.’
This was true. Whatever the busman’s holiday ethos of the festival, she preferred to keep business and home life separate and she knew she could not pay Jemima her full attention if Giles – a client too – was fretting about issues of his own. It would be a relief not to have to split herself in two.
‘We should do this more often,’ he said a little later, watching her eat the meat he had retrieved for her from one of the lobster’s last unplundered crevices. ‘I love coming away with you. Hotels get me horny.’
‘What, again?’
‘Especially when I can look around and know we’re the only ones here who are getting it. And you know how seafood affects me.’
‘Giles…’
‘Oh please, Babe.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You could just lie there. You could pretend to be asleep. You could slip upstairs first and leave the door on the latch and then I could come up in half an hour or so and pretend to break into your room. You pretend to be asleep and I’ll be a complete stranger.’
‘What if I want crème brulée?’
He knew calling her Babe always weakened her. Under cover of the layers of heavy red tablecloth he had slipped off one of his deck shoes and now slid his foot between her legs, resting his heel on the front of her chair and flexing his toes where it mattered. Playfully and no less surreptitiously, she closed her thighs, trapping his foot there as their waitress returned to the table.
‘Would you like any coffee, at all?’ she asked with the upward inflexion Giles found so maddening when Dido used it. ‘Or a brandy perhaps?’
Watching Giles’ face, Julia clutched and relaxed her thighs then clutched again.
‘Yes, please,’ Giles said. ‘I’ll have both. But my wife’s a little tired so…’
‘I’m a little tired,’ she told the waitress.
‘I’ll take them in the bar,’ Giles said and the waitress left them.
‘What’ll it be?’ Julia asked, tweaking down her skirt as she stood. A few of the other diners had fallen to playing bridge at their cleared tables, she noticed. ‘Nightdress, dressing gown, towel or nothing?’
‘Surprise me,’ he told her. ‘You’re not expecting me, remember?’
She returned to their room. A chambermaid had been in to remake the disordered bed and had closed the window and drawn the curtains. The room felt stifling again so Julia opened both.
She knew that he liked to think himself smutty but that he was in practice quite fastidious. She had a hot shower, using no soap, then turned out the light and arranged herself on the bed on her front, covered only in a cold sheet. His rape fantasies were wholly unrealistic for he liked her as prone and unassertive as a corpse. It would have been quite wrong to have put up a fight. She pictured his face if he came in to find her sitting up in bed as she normally slept when staying in a hotel on her own, buttoned into her flannel nightie, face slicked with night cream, reading a trashy novel and enjoying a nightcap and a bar of Toblerone from the minibar. She pictured his face if she told him they were going to become parents.
She heard his nervous throat-clearing on the stairs and tweaked the sheet down off her buttocks then shut her eyes and pretended to sleep. She tried to still her thoughts but they kept rampaging off into anti-erotic territory. She tried to imagine herself as a lovely statue, marble cool, but all that came to mind was that Giles had never seen Eliza pregnant, never had her press his hand on her belly and whisper, ‘Feel! He’s kicking!’ For all she knew, Eliza had married him as a virgin mother.
The door opened, causing a rush of sea air through the window which made her shiver. The sheet sliding further off her thighs tickled and raised goose pimples. With no preamble he was pressing her face hard down into the pillows and thrusting into her from behind.
29
It was a disaster. Pearce had made her cry. Her child had done all the talking while she got drunk and now she was crying. The date could not have gone worse if she had turned out to be vegetarian or he had fed the child something that sent her into anaphylactic shock.
He glanced across nervously as Eliza blew her nose but was relieved to see the girl still sound asleep, gently kneaded by Simkin. No one should see their mother like this.
‘Don’t cry,’ he told her ineffectually. He held out her wine glass. ‘Have something to drink.’
She took it with a little, absent-minded moan, handing back his sodden handkerchief, and gulped the wine as if it were water. Then she covered her face with one hand and looked as though she were about to drop the empty glass with the other, so he took it from her. Both hands covered her face now and she took deep, slow breaths. The storm of tears had subsided.
He had seen the moment he stopped off to collect them that this evening meant something to her because she had made an effort. Compared to how it had been the night before, her hair was brushed into sleekness and tied back with a rag of blue velvet that matched her long, witchy skirt with the glittery hem. Then, by the time they reached the house, he had realised she wasn’t interested in him at all but was merely being polite. She came from another world, a clever, bookish one, and he was a sort of anthropological specimen, nothing more. She had listened as she might to a garrulous Greek fisherman or a Big Issue seller or a mad old lady on a bus. The child had picked up on this clearly, which was why she kept up her nervous patter of questions.
And he had cooked too much. Far too much. Cooked enough to feed four hungry labourers, not a skinny woman and child. And seeing the groaning table, the child had politely accepted second helpings she must have had to force down. And he had forgotten to buy anything non-alcoholic for her so had probably made her sick with unaccustomed wine.
But then Eliza had quite unexpectedly come out with all this…this stuff about her dead mother and her wayward sister and her marriage and her infidelity; a dreadful story. It horrified him that she should come out with it in front of the child who, thank God, was asleep. It disturbed him even more than Janet smoking all over her little boy the other night. And the rest.
But worse was his anticipation of how much she would regret telling him all this, undoing in minutes her careful show of distant poise. He had thought she was a sort of nymph, a lovely, clever alien when in fact she was a mess, what Molly would call a human bomb.
So now he felt protective towards her, not that he would ever have a chance to tell her, as well as embarrassed at how he had misread her, and angry too. Not that he could tell her that either.
Before she started crying, she had spoken casually about how she had come to be raising her sister’s child and made it sound like a burden rather than a blessing and he wanted to say, ‘Careful! She might be listening.’
The angle of her head changed, slumping forward slightly.
‘Eliza?’ he said. ‘Hello?’
She was asleep.
‘Eliza?’ he said a little louder. She breathed deeply then made a comfortable, settling sound, like Simkin when stroked in his sleep. ‘Dido?’ The child did not stir either. Only the cat looked up, with a startled chirrup, and ever hopeful of food, dashed, purring, to the kitchen. Pearce remembered they had been for a bike ride. Sea air and exercise then food and red wine was a powerfully narcotic combination.
Pearce slipped upstairs to check on the bedrooms. Three were chaotic with displaced furniture but his old bedroom and the spare room he still thought of as his grandmother’s room were usable and had been aired last month after he repainted them. He quickly made up the beds, cursing Simkin for having slept in the airing cupboard at some stage leaving white hair all over one of the sheets.
When he came down, Eliza had drawn her feet up onto her chair so it was easy to slip his arms around her back and under her knees to lift her. She was not heavy but she flopped disconcertingly with the total relaxation of a sleeping child and he worried she was going to bang her head on something. It was like carrying a dead person. His grandmother’s bedsprings twanged as he lowered her onto the mattress and Eliza murmured peacefully. He slid off her shoes then pulled the sheet and blanket over her, adding the quilt as an afterthought because she was not used to the country and it might feel cold after London. Then he could not resist untying the velvet that held her hair back. He held the fabric to his face but it smelled of nothing. Nothing human. Shampoo perhaps. The temptation to kiss her was intense so he pulled her curtains, backed out and quietly shut the door.
Dido was not where he left her. He found her in the kitchen, watching Simkin drink a saucer of cream. ‘Where’s Eliza?’ she asked.
‘I put her to bed. She’s a bit tired.’
‘Oh. Are we staying here, then?’
‘Looks like it. For tonight. I didn’t like to drive her home like that.’
‘Was she drunk?’
‘No. Not really. Tired.’
‘Was she sad?’
‘A bit.’
Dido yawned, leaning against a table leg. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘She’ll be fine in the morning.’
‘Oh. Good. Time you were in bed too.’
‘Suppose so.’
‘Come on.’ He held out a hand to heave herself up on.
‘Your hands are huge,’ she said.
He laughed. ‘That’s just farming. The more heavy things you lift, the bigger they get. They sort of flatten out, like pastry.’ He looked at them.
Unabashed, she took one and spread her own palm against it to compare. Her hand was hot and damp. ‘If I farmed, would mine get like yours?’
‘Maybe. Come on. Bedtime.’
‘Can Simkin come too?’
‘Oh, he goes where he likes. He’s in and out most of the night hunting but leave your door ajar and he’ll probably find you before morning. He’s a bit heavy on a single bed though.’
‘I don’t mind. Do you mind us staying?’
‘No.’
‘But you weren’t expecting it.’
He smiled. ‘No. But it’s a nice surprise.’
‘Good. Do I have to brush my teeth?’
‘Have you got a brush?’
‘Course not.’
‘No, then.’
She went to the bathroom then he showed her to her room. His old room. He offered her his one-eared rabbit to sleep with until Simkin appeared but she shamed him by asking if she could borrow a book instead and read for a bit. So he left her reading Finn Family Moomintroll.
Putting away uneaten food, turning out lights and locking front and back doors, he was startled to find that it felt entirely normal. This was a house that required more than one person in it. He never had people to stay. Now that he had, he found he was already dreading having the house to himself again.
30
Eliza woke with a start to find herself lying on a strange bed. She was still dressed but someone had slipped off her sandals and drawn a soft old patchwork quilt over her. Morning sun shone through the thin floral curtains revealing the shadow of the cat, who was chattering through his teeth in impotent rage as he watched swallows on the wire outside.
She dimly recalled Pearce’s blunt words of comfort but nothing of him putting her to bed. Had he carried her? She pictured his tender concentration as he manoeuvred her snoring body through doorways and staircase, careful not to bump her head or bark her knuckles. Was this his mother’s room?
She took in the faded chintz armchair, the dressing table mirror speckled with age, the pair of green glass candlesticks, the framed sampler carefully hung where the hot morning sun could not fade it. Tell me where I can find a friend both good and true, who tastes my joys but shares my burdens too. Ruth Dorcas Pender. 10 yrs. 1949.
There was a sudden thundering sound and the cat jumped off the windowsill and hurried through the open door with a mew. Eliza peered through the crack in the curtains to see the yard briefly fill with creamy coloured cattle. Pearce was walking behind them, driving them placidly out the other side with low murmurs and an occasional hissing between his teeth. He looked up as he passed but she stood back from the window, forgetting she was dressed.
She followed the cat out onto a long, sunny landing that ran the length of the house, lit by a double height window on the stairs. In search of the bathroom and Dido, she found three cluttered spare bedrooms, their striped mattresses bare, their air so undisturbed that entering felt intrusive. Then she found his room, its window open to birdsong and the rustling of creeper leaves.
The first impression was of tidiness but there was a reassuring heap of discarded clothes – the clean ones he had on last night – flung across a chair and the toe of a boot protruded from a walk-in cupboard in the corner in a way that suggested disorder hastily contained. He had somehow made the bed look like a single, perhaps by having only one bedside table. There was no looking glass, either here or in the bathroom, where she washed her face awake and attempted to brush her teeth with borrowed toothpaste and a finger.
There was a note for her on the kitchen table, propped up between bread and butter dish. The handwriting was cramped and forward sloping.
Dido said she wanted to go to the last day of school with Lucy so I dropped her off. She said you could amuse yourself. Didn’t wake you – thought a lie in might do you good! Will be in and out of the yard all morning for when you want a lift back up the hill. Pearce.
Amused at Dido’s electing to return to school, any school, rather than prolong her unofficial holiday a day further, Eliza buttered a thick slice of floury white bread and poured herself a mug of the stewed tea from the pot. Glancing around the kitchen, she wondered for a moment what it reminded her of, then realised it was Mrs Tiggywinkle’s house, complete with range, cluttered mantelshelf and dresser that came so close to the ceiling it might have been built in situ. Mrs Tiggywinkle, however, did not have old copies of CLA newsletters and Farmer’s Weekly displacing her tea service or a filthy Ivomec wormer-dispenser rubbing shoulders with her cereal packets.
Eliza relaxed back on her chair, chewing, as she flicked through a copy of Farmer’s Weekly. As in any specialist magazine there were countless niche-market
advertisements, these ones being astonishingly crude and to the point. There was an amazing number of photographs of people crouching on grass or among plants, awkwardly posed with one arm gesturing towards an offending weed or prized new crop. The pictures varied little when an animal not a plant was included. Even in a picture of a farmer who had taken to breeding alpacas the pose was the same. She wondered if perhaps the same busy photographer took all the pictures and gave out the same patient instructions. Yes. That’s it. On one knee. Now one arm out, please. Just the job!
The vast majority of the pictures were of men although, judging from the letters page, many of the readers were women. Was this, perhaps, an unofficial way of finding wives? She looked more closely and, sure enough, the farmers described as farming with his parents or farming in partnership with his brother and making no mention of wives or children were often in cleaner clothes than the rest or had taken obvious pains with their hair or backdrop. Some pictures carried a subtle subtext; fond of small animals, likes flowers or simply has a good head of hair like his father. Read in this light, what had seemed dry became strangely moving.
She stood and walked around the ground floor trying to work out why this house felt so different from other men’s houses she had known, most obviously Giles’ slightly controlling elegance and Paul’s no less contrived intellectual shabbiness. Unlike them, she realised, Pearce had not felt the need to leave his mark or erase those of predecessors. It was a family home in the truest sense. He had not even spoken of it with any great sense of ownership. When, in the course of her interrogation, Dido had asked him the farm’s precise acreage he humoured her, giving a precise answer broken down into pasture, rough and cultivated hectares.
‘And you own all that?’ she had asked. ‘Does that make you rich?’
‘Not really,’ he had said. ‘It’s not as though I paid for it. I certainly couldn’t afford it if I had to. It’s more that I’m holding it in trust. Looking after it.’
‘Who for?’