by Patrick Gale
‘Whoever comes next.’
When Dido had fearlessly pointed out that he had no children, he had laughed shyly to himself and looked away to pour more wine by way of changing the subject.
There was a harmonium at the foot of the stairs. The Oxford Madrigal Book lay on top of a heap of music that included Hymns Ancient and Modern, The Methodist Hymnal and a dusty volume that was surely the same age as the harmonium called Songs That Will Live Forever.
Eliza pulled up a chair, opened the keyboard and began to pump the pedals. She started to play one of the few Bach preludes she had from heart, a slow, minor key one. But the technique of pumping the pedals regardless of the beat, to keep the bellows full, while producing a legato action with her fingers was beyond her and she broke off.
‘Don’t stop,’ he said. He was leaning in the front doorway.
‘I’m hopeless,’ she said. ‘It needs the coordination of a chimp.’
‘You’re better than me.’
‘Don’t you play it then?’
‘Only with one finger. I pick out the bass lines on it when Molly wants us to sing something new. Mum played. She was deputy organist up in St Just. That’s where Molly got her music from. She taught us our letters with one hand and how to read music with the other. Sleep all right?’
‘Yes. Fine, thanks.’ Suddenly the embarrassment of the previous night loomed up but Pearce seemed cheerfully oblivious.
‘Hope you didn’t mind me taking the little one off like that but she was determined. Wouldn’t let me wake you, either.’
‘No. That was fine. Is it legal, though?’
‘Doesn’t matter if it isn’t. Lucy’s form teacher’s a sort of cousin. She won’t mind one extra. It’ll make up for all the truants she gets among the farm kids at this time of year. Do you want to see that song, then? Seeing as Dido says you’re an expert.’
‘Oh, Dido’ll say anything.’
‘Well you know more about it than anyone else round here.’
‘All right then.’
‘You’d better take it down. My hands are a bit dirty. It’s up there. In the Bible.’ He indicated a large Bible with a handsome leather and gilt binding, much eaten by time and worms.
Eliza set it down at one end of the dining table and opened it at random. It was a handsome thing, eighteenth-century, to judge from the typesetting. She looked up, frowning.
‘It’s at the back,’ he explained, going into the kitchen to wash the grime off his hands.
The weight of the pages was such that turning the entire text over at once threatened to tear the binding even further. She fetched a cushion from the sofa and set the book’s spine on that before opening it out again, turning to the back more gently.
There were several unprinted pages at either end of this edition, possibly placed there at the request of whoever first had the Bible bound as a wedding or baptism gift. Eliza was so shocked by what she saw there that she had to sit down. There were five sheets of paper pasted onto five consecutive blank pages. This was much older paper than that in the Bible, thick and yellowed. She swiftly recognised the five handwritten voice parts of the untitled, anonymous madrigal Molly’s group called Country Goodness. The notes and text were minute but electrifying.
There were only two surviving documents in Trevescan’s hand that Eliza knew of. One, in Trinity College, Dublin, was a lute song setting, As Night from Daye, As Moonlight from the Sunne. The other, in the Bodleian, was a letter written from court to his brother. Everything else, all the other music, was known only in published form. Along with his rumoured homosexuality, one of the reasons for the assumption that Trevescan had been trained up as one of Walsingham’s spies was his habit of destroying evidence. In the first year of her research, Eliza had flown to Dublin and studied the lute song manuscript at length. (Although she was too poverty-stricken at the time to stay overnight in Dublin and had dozed in airports in either direction.) She had pored over the letter in the Bodleian times without number. There was so little to them that it was easy to know both intimately. The provenance of each was both credible and minutely detailed. Trevescan’s handwriting had few tics but he favoured a Greek E, which was rare enough at the time, and wrote his Qs in a unique fashion, like an astrologer’s Venus symbol without its horizontal line. The two tics together were as clamorous as any signature and even more trustworthy. And here they were, combined in a single word, quieter, towards the end of the second verse whose text, as was customary, was written at the bottom of the page, without notes, as in a hymn book or Psalter. A second, quieter love.
‘We had no idea it was there.’
She was so absorbed, she had not sensed his approach. ‘Where…’ She was threatening to squeak in her excitement. She swallowed, controlled herself, withdrew her hands in case they left sweat stains on the precious pages. ‘Where did they come from?’
Pearce shrugged. ‘Lord knows. It’s full of stuff people used to stick in there. Locks of baby’s hair. Pressed flowers. Birth certificates. Even a recipe or two. But not glued in like those. I suppose whoever put those in didn’t want to lose them.’
Glue. She had not thought. She looked back at the precious pages. Sure enough, each was firmly glued in place. Depending on how long ago the pages were fixed in, this might be anything from flour and water to boiled cow hoof. She ran her fingertips round the rough, torn edge of the cantus part. Glue was so useful and so swiftly destructive.
‘How did you know how to transcribe it all?’ she asked Pearce. ‘If you can only play one-fingered? I mean these are alto and tenor clefs! Many professionals can’t read these without some practice.’
‘Neither could I,’ he said. ‘I just used trial and error, kept shifting it up and down a tone or two until I found a good fit. It’s over here, look.’
He went to the pile of music on the harmonium and retrieved a clutch of manuscript paper on which he had laboriously made out a fair copy, five parts joined together in miraculous harmony by as blunt a process as experiment.
‘You can borrow that if you like.’
She was going to ask if she could borrow the original for photocopying but shame silenced her. No reputable library, she knew, would subject such valuable manuscript to the glare of some high street photocopier and even photographers would need a licence.
‘The book can’t leave the house,’ he added, and she blushed as though he had read her thoughts.
‘Why not?’ she asked nonetheless.
‘Superstition, really. It’s never left here, you see. It’s part of the farm.’
‘How come?’
‘It’s a family Bible. See?’ He reached across her to turn to the front of the volume. Again, the binder had left several blank pages. And there, as if echoing the solemnity of the genealogies at the start of the Book of Matthew, was a sort of family tree. Generation upon generation of Polglazes had signed the book, with their wives, on returning from church on their wedding days and recorded the safe delivery of each union’s children. She saw the latest entries – first Molly, then her younger brother Pearce, then Molly’s husband Morris and their Lucy.
‘I don’t think I met him the other night,’ Eliza said.
‘No,’ Pearce said. ‘They get on well enough but not when they’re under the same roof. Molly’s got a temper on her and Morris is, well…he hasn’t had much luck. Lost his farm.’
‘But that’s awful!’
‘A lot of it about. He still farms but for other people. Bit of this, bit of that. You know. I get him in when I can. He’ll be helping with the broccoli planting tomorrow. Sad, though. The little house is all Molly’s. She said she couldn’t face living somewhere thinking she might lose it any day. Said it wasn’t fair on Lucy.’
His expression clouded so Eliza did not like to ask further. She turned back to the list, where suddenly Pearce’s isolation, his lack of comforting additions seemed glaring. Her eye drifted up the page, marvelling at the repeated homages to ancestors in the naming of babies so that Johns and M
ichaels, as well as Pearces, abounded. There had once been a Raleigh, however and there was a cluster of magnificently biblical women – Micahs, Rebeccas, Keziahs and Sarahs. She turned back a page to where the ink browned with age and the lettering became smaller and less confident. When the Bible was first purchased or given, some Polglaze had written back the family line as far as anyone living could remember so that the list began with several generations in the same handwriting and with few dates.
The name jumped out at her. In circa 1615 a Michael Polglaze married a Rose Trevescan who bore him an astonishing eight children, John, Michael, Robert, Pearce, Lucy, Mary, Rebekkah and Shem before dying, presumably of exhaustion.
‘Are there many Trevescans around here?’ she asked.
‘No. Used to be. Used to still be a whole clutch of them around Sennen in my grandparents’ time but not now. Why?’
She turned back to the madrigal. All her training taught her to accept only the facts and not to twist the evidence to suit subjective hopes, but it was hard to resist. As she turned the pages back and forth, taking in every detail of the familiar script, comparing sheet with sheet, she noticed that one of them had worked looser than the rest. There was printing on the other side.
‘Could I?’ she asked Pearce.
He shrugged, caring only about the Bible, perhaps. ‘If you can do it without tearing.’
She used an old trick, lifting the page as far as she dared then leaning in close to breathe slowly and warmly into the weakening join, keeping up a gentle pressure with her fingertip. In lucky cases it worked the same way as a steaming kettle, only without the excessive moisture and heat. And she was lucky. The old adhesive gave out with only a slight furring of fibres drawn from the newer paper below. Flour and water paste, perhaps, not cow hoof…
She turned the page and stared. Printed music. Another madrigal. Another unhelpful bass line. It showed the last few lines of music. Fie no, no, no, no, no!
‘Shall I a virgin die?’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
‘How the line starts. Damn! That’s all I can remember. Can’t think who wrote it, either. Brains are so weird and stupid. Damn! Pearce, could I take this to the library? Just this sheet? If I guard it with my life.’
He smiled. ‘Sure. Want me to run you into St Just now? Molly will have opened up.’
‘No, I mean to London. The British Library. I’d have to go up overnight. Do you think Molly could put Dido up?’
‘Course she could. Or I could. Lucy was going to help with the broccoli tomorrow. Maybe Dido could join in too? Earn some pocket money.’
‘Are you sure?’ Eliza’s mind raced. She had money up at the caravan. She could call at the flat to pick up more clothes and her files. The thought of the long, tedious coach trip gave her pause.
‘Run you to the station if you like,’ Pearce said. He was smiling slyly.
‘You’re laughing at me.’
‘No no,’ he said. ‘I’m not. Sorry.’ And he stopped smiling. ‘It’s just that you were so limp and sad earlier and it’s like someone just gave you fresh batteries.’
31
Camborne was a dreadful place. Giles was startled. Despite the mixture of duty and love that had brought him over there from the north coast, he found himself resenting the incursion of such ugliness into his little holiday. It was grim in the way some parts of Wales or the Midlands could be. There seemed to be no planning, just sprawl, mess and a sense of a community without purpose.
He rebuked himself for such a patronising attitude as he drove into town, balancing a small red book of Cornish town plans open on his lap. Quite possibly Camborne kept its charms hidden and was wonderful in ways that could not strike one on first encounter.
He found himself thinking of Eliza as powerfully as he had done in her poky flat, imagining her in such a dispiriting context and wondering how she had survived. When he first met her at university, surrounded by fine trees and ancient buildings, immersed in studious stillness and the incense of high culture, he had invested her with some of the spirit of the place. Had he first encountered her on a cramped Camborne pavement, pushing Dido past rows of wretched shops, would she even have caught his eye?
Mrs Hosken might despise this place but she had stayed here long after she might have moved away and she belonged here absolutely. But Eliza? Even without what he knew about Hannah and the long shadow she cast, he realised Eliza’s youth must have been one long bitter straining at the leash.
He found the street. It was leafier and less grim than the industrial side of the town through which he had just driven. He found a parking space and left the car, wrinkling his eyes behind his sunglasses to read house numbers in the glaring sunlight.
He passed number eight at first because he thought it was derelict. The number was obscured, as was much of the house, by a stand of sycamore trees. The paintwork was flaking. A piece of gutter had come adrift. There was also a For Sale sign stuck through the moss of what had once been a flowerbed.
He let himself in at the rusting sunrise gate and approached the door, mentally preparing a greeting for Eliza, in case she should be the one to open.
He knocked. There was no sound of life from inside. He tried peering through a window but the glass was too grimy to make much out. This did not tally at all with his image of Mrs Hosken, always neat, handbag always to hand. Perhaps, left alone, she was closer in spirit to poor Eliza and spent her days not polishing church brass and regimenting her jam cupboard but mired in slovenly listlessness.
‘Hello?’
He turned round. The voice seemed to have come from behind one of the thorny shrubs that swamped the neighbouring garden.
‘Viewing’s by appointment only. You’ll have to call at the agents on Fore Street.’
‘I’m looking for Mrs Hosken, actually,’ he told the bush. ‘Or her daughter Eliza. Eliza Easton…Hosken? I’m Giles. Giles Easton. Her son-in-law.’
‘Of course you are. I should have recognised you from the photograph. Hang on.’
There was a rustling, then one of the roundest women he had ever seen – and opera companies offered a generous selection – appeared at the gate and waved him over.
‘I’m afraid she died,’ she said and for a moment he thought she meant Eliza. ‘But it was very quick and peaceful. In her sleep, they said. And Eliza and Dodie have gone for a little holiday to my caravan.’
‘Oh,’ he said, his mental scenery readjusting around him. ‘Oh! I see. Well…’ and he must have looked even more pathetic than he felt because she introduced herself as Mrs Barnicoat and led him next door for a restorative coffee and slice of heavy cake. It was the sort of confection – all weight and sugar crystals – he had not eaten since the days when fellow students would produce slabs of cold, parsimonious pudding made from stale bread and raisins.
‘That better?’ she asked and he nodded, licking sugar from the corners of his lips and tempted to accept a second slice. ‘The secret’s in the lard,’ she said. ‘That and keeping a vanilla pod in the sugar jar. We’re no different from birds, really. We all need a bit of fat from time to time. You need a bit of feeding, Giles Easton. Does that girlfriend of yours not bake?’ She must have seen surprise on his face. ‘Mrs Hosken never knew,’ she assured him. ‘She died not knowing. It was Dodie told me.’
‘Dido?’
‘That’s right. I don’t disapprove. Not really. A man has to live and Eliza’s a sweet thing but she’s no sense. No sense at all, really. I made them buy plenty of food in Penzance so the child won’t go hungry up there at least.’
His eyes were caught by an enormous display of white lilies and baby’s breath studied with carnations the exact shade of apricot lavatory paper.
‘They were lovely flowers,’ she said. ‘I’m sure even where she is Mrs Hosken is most appreciative. I thought about taking them to her grave but flowers get stolen if you leave them there. People have no shame.’
‘I’m glad they’re not going to was
te,’ he said and they sat in silence for a while, except for the ticking of a dripping tap in the steel sink and Mrs Barnicoat’s great wheezy sighs.
The clock struck twelve. It did not strike, precisely, but released a burst of recorded bird song.
‘Thrush,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘One o’clock’s a wren and two’s a blackbird.’
‘A different bird for every hour? How clever!’
Julia had gleefully pointed the thing out to him in a catalogue once and they had laughed, imagining the daunting bird cries one could use for a true country flavour. Buzzard. Seagull. Bittern. Crow.
He could not have failed to notice the collection of bird baths, feeders and nesting boxes as they came through the jungly garden but now he saw how the house’s interior was devoted to birds too. Savage beaks and sharp little eyes were everywhere, on calendars, tea towels, wall-mounted plates. He recognised the syndrome from his mother and stepfather. Bird love was the refuge of people for whom intimacy was perilous and personal loss too traumatic to be risked. Reptiles in feathered disguise, birds would never come close enough to break a person’s heart or upset their equilibrium the way a dog or daughter might. Unless collecting porcelain thimbles illustrating Finches of the World constituted a loss of equilibrium…
‘That girl needs a father’s love,’ Mrs Barnicoat said abruptly and he felt rebuked for his secret sneer.
‘I love her as well as I can,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy only seeing her every other weekend and the odd weekday, though.’
‘And your girlfriend –’
‘Julia.’
‘Yes. She can’t find that easy either. She’ll be wanting children of her own.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so. Not really her style. But she loves Dido. She’s like a big sister to her. I think sometimes a stepmother can help a girl in ways a mother never can.’
Mrs Barnicoat cut another wodge of heavy cake for him and waved this aside as so much sophistry.
‘The thing you young people don’t realise, because you don’t want to, is that sometimes when you have no choice, when you have to make do with something, you end up making a better job of it. Would you have her back?’