by Patrick Gale
In a sense, though, yesterday’s disappointment had invoked a curse only to break it and now she was at last free to begin any life she chose. Only now could she see just how oppressively guilt-inducing the incomplete thesis had been. And how entirely irrelevant to the wider scheme of things.
For years, she now saw, she had been drip-feeding a poisonous fantasy wherein her happy fulfilment rested solely on her being called Doctor and on her being quietly esteemed in a set of quiet university rooms by a succession of quiet people. Daring to step aside from all that was giddying. Dido was so simply happy talking with her new friend, muddied, tired and happy. Molly had her job in the library at a community’s heart, her daughter, her funny madrigal group, her semi-detached marriage and the freedom to spend her paid leave getting filthy on her brother’s farm. She radiated a quality that had nothing to do with status and everything to do with the uncomplicated acceptance of how life was. Giles and Paul were unhappy, unquiet souls it seemed to her because they would always be striving. They raised that strife into a kind of creed, mistaking it for the very sensation of life when its effect on their lives was the opposite of vivifying. Pearce, on the other hand, had perhaps learned not to strive. He had an inner life – one glance at his bookshelves told her that – but he was not forever troubled to change or improve his outer one.
Purely as an exercise in time-passing fantasy, Eliza tried on lives for size, lives that would enable her to stay in St Just rather than return to London. Piano teacher. History teacher. Singing teacher. Librarian. Sales assistant in a bookshop. Child minder. Village schoolmistress. None of the images she conjured up – with herself in settings and clothes to match – caused any revulsion.
‘Do you ever need help in the library?’ she asked Molly while they were discarding empty trays and taking on new ones from the vast crates she had learned to call stills.
‘Sometimes,’ Molly said. ‘Especially when we have schools in. Why? Are you volunteering?’
Eliza only laughed by way of answer and carried on fantasising. She pictured a house, a modest cross between Pearce’s farmhouse and Molly’s cottage, a small garden, Dido leaving it for school, Dido leaving it on dates with nice, gruff local boys in borrowed cars.
As the afternoon drew on and several hundred cauliflower seedlings passed in and out of her grasp, the labour lost its novelty and charm and began to make her lower back ache. Molly showed her how to stretch backwards over a rounded rock in the hedge to relieve it between rows. But Eliza remained detached from both ache and labour in her private revelation. Her eyelids as well as her lips began to burn gently where she had unthinkingly wiped them with rabbit repellent but the sensation was cooler than that of the kindling possibility inside her.
The nameless man continued to dole out toffees but was never introduced.
She ended the day as she began it, swept along by others. When she refused payment, after Pearce had paid Dido, saying she owed him for the childminding, Molly in turn refused to let them go home to the caravan. Insisting Eliza stay, bathe, dress in clean, borrowed clothes, she softened her into staying for dinner.
Molly cooked while Pearce entered figures in the computer before joining her. Eliza lay in the bath amazed at the filth that floated off her and listening to the low buzz of brother and sister chatting in the room below her and the music and laughter from the television the girls were glued to elsewhere. Once again this house was claiming her – with food and clothes and comforts.
She had barely seen Dido that morning and enjoyed hearing her tales, how she had taken part in the last day of term activities and had helped Pearce round up cattle and helped Molly with a glitch in her e-mailing system.
‘I really like it here,’ Dido said artlessly as she finished. ‘I think we should move.’
Lucy added her noisy support to this idea but Molly silenced them, saying, ‘Yes, but Eliza needs to be in town for the libraries and concerts and, well, for her work.’
‘Oh, I’m not so sure that any of that matters, really,’ Eliza heard herself say. She had gorged herself on Molly’s rabbit casserole and was finally understanding the sense of virtuous exhaustion Kitty had always referred to as a good ache. ’We could probably live here as easily as anywhere else.’
Perhaps she had imagined it but she thought she detected a distinct change in the atmosphere when she said this, a kind of realigning of attitudes. ‘What?’ she asked. ‘What did I say?’ and everybody laughed.
When Molly stood to go, Eliza did not stand to go with her but Dido did, saying she wanted to help Lucy to the next level of Queen of the Dead.
‘I’ll drop her off tomorrow,’ Molly said and suddenly they were gone and Eliza was alone on a sofa with Pearce.
‘Tell me about your parents,’ she said, suddenly curious.
‘She had a heart attack when she was, ooh, what, sixty-five and Dad died in an accident a little over a year ago,’ Pearce said. ‘Silly idiot fell off a barn roof.’ He cleared his throat.
Then they both laughed because she had not meant how did they die but what were they like and quite suddenly Pearce was holding her hand, enveloping it in his which felt twice the size and very hot and dry and she could do nothing but stare at their interlocking fingers.
‘They were lovely people,’ she said, ‘judging from you two.’
As answer he only squeezed her hand.
‘I’m terribly drunk, Pearce. Drinking when you’re tired’s never a good idea.’
‘Want me to drive you home?’ he asked.
‘Would you mind?’
‘Come on, then.’ He stood and held out a hand to pull her onto her feet. She noticed he had not had a chance to wash yet and realised this was because she had taken all the hot water.
The cold night air and the smells in the Land Rover sobered her quickly. She said nothing as he drove her up the lane and over the hill and neither did he. But he got out to see her to the caravan door and, when he stooped to kiss her goodnight, she found she could not let go. She fumbled behind her for the hidden key and, loath to stop kissing, they staggered into the tiny space and fell onto the bed.
They made love quickly, tearing at each other’s clothes, barely undressing. She felt the grit between them, the earth thickening his hair, the druggy buzz of rabbit repellent as she kissed his face clean. When she began to come she felt tears on her cheeks and when he did, he swore, furiously and repeatedly, as though things had not gone at all according to plan. But then he mastered himself and laughed and wrapped his long legs tight about hers and she sensed that, if only she could see, he might have tears in his eyes too.
‘Sorry,’ he said at last. ‘I was meant to drive you home.’
‘I think you just did,’ she said and they chuckled.
‘This bed’s a bit small,’ he said.
‘It’s bloody tiny. I don’t know how Kitty manages on it.’
‘Where d’you want to wake up? Here or there?’
‘Here,’ she said without thinking. ‘It’s not that…oh God. Pearce, it’s only because of Dido.’
He kissed her. ‘I know.’ He hugged her again and yawned deeply into her hair. ‘I’d best go or I’ll fall asleep on you,’ he muttered. ‘Can I…can I see you tomorrow, Eliza?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes please.’
When he extricated himself from around her, pulled his clothes back together in the darkness and stumbled out she felt suddenly cold and wretched so ran out after him.
‘Pearce?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Just hang on, would you, while I grab some clothes.’
38
She was the first woman to sleep in this bed since his mother died. Pearce did not tell her that, naturally. He knew it would have disturbed her on several counts, not least the suggestion that he was a romantic failure.
Suddenly shy, because of the wash of light from the bedside lamp, she undressed quickly then slipped under the duvet with a giggle. And there she was, peeping up at him, a new
woman in his parents’ bed, tee shirt kept on for warmth and/or modesty.
He sat on the bed and touched her hair, amazed. She kissed his wrist then pulled him towards her so she could kiss him properly. But because she was still a new woman in his mother’s bed, he felt unable to respond in kind and lay there for a while, making a play of being trapped on the wrong side of the duvet.
‘Your hair’s all earthy still,’ she murmured.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, getting up, grateful. ‘I’ll take a shower. Can I get you anything?’
She merely looked and shook her head happily. Her eyes were heavy. He turned out the light. ‘Won’t be long,’ he said.
But the shower and his excitement left him far too wakeful for sleep so he wandered into the office, wrapped in a couple of towels, and began sorting out paperwork into heaps. He wrote cheques for the most urgent bills then forced himself to go through the latest bank statement, ticking it off against cheque stubs, making sure there had been no mistakes.
The outlook was not dire but neither was it brilliant. The farm was standing still, financially. He flicked through leaflets and circulars he did not have the energy or will to deal with as he ought. There was a pot of Objective One funding earmarked for Cornwall by the EEC because it was so poor and many farmers were finding ways of tapping into it by diversifying, creating employment, opening farm shops, B&Bs, quad bike tracks and angling lakes, but none of it appealed. Pearce felt that if he wasn’t to stay a farmer he had no business sitting on the farm.
He found a little drawing Dido had left him when she and Lucy were playing in here that afternoon, a surprisingly deft cartoon of the two of them swallowed up in a herd of steers, Dido visible only as a pair of legs. He smiled over it then pinned it on his board. There he found a circular from the Rural Payments Agency. He had pinned it up to keep it free of the mess as a reminder but had still taken no action on it. He knew he was eligible for more subsidies than he claimed. There was an Extensification Premium which required some complex calculations to compute but which certainly was not beyond him and would bring in several more thousand a year, as would his co-operating with the scheme hatched by a cunning neighbour and some local birding enthusiasts to half-flood some of their least productive inland acres to create a nesting and feeding site for waders near the existing footpath.
Even more than his father before him, who at least was old enough to remember the post-war conditions that brought them in, Pearce felt uncomfortable claiming subsidies when other farmers were so badly off. He was stung into doing so only by the knowledge that his under-claiming would make no difference and that there were corporate farms now who could afford to employ accountants to pursue such unearned income five days a week instead of on the odd rainy day reserved for paperwork. He suspected that the days of small family farms were numbered and felt that farming should not be kept alive artificially, any more than other industries had been. There was an irrefutable law of natural economics at work. More and more food was imported and less and less homegrown stuff required. He had stopped growing new potatoes because the supermarkets had created an expectation for year-round, washed ones, killing off the market for seasonal earthy ones. Farmers like him would soon have to retrain, become contract workers for corporate farms as Morris was trying to do, or expect to lose more and more money with less and less public sympathy.
As he reached to turn off the desk light and stop depressing himself, Pearce saw the answering machine was flashing at him.
He pressed play then hastily turned down the volume as the machine beeped, so as not to wake Eliza.
The voice was cultivated, plausible and made him immediately suspicious. ‘Oh hello. My name is Villiers Yates. You don’t know me but I’m an old friend of Eliza Easton. Eliza Hosken as was. Whom I believe knows you. Eliza led me to believe you have a music manuscript thought to be in the hand of Roger Trevescan. I don’t know if she told you but I represent the Byatt Foundation in Texas, who are building up a valuable collection for the museum and university they expect to open in two or three years from now. I had an unofficial word with my contact there and, subject to its being at least reasonably authenticated by the British Library, for instance, they’d be extremely interested in making you an offer. I can’t come up with anything off the top of my head but, to give you a rough idea, they’ve just acquired an incomplete and frankly I think rather dubious manuscript of a Morley part-song.’
He named a sum so startling, Pearce found himself writing it down on the top of a bank statement.
‘Anyway. Enough of my waffle. You probably aren’t remotely interested in selling but, given the cost of insuring things like that these days, I thought it only neighbourly to let you know. As I said, my name is Villiers Yates.’
Villiers yates, Pearce wrote along with the sequence of phone numbers, home, work and mobile. This was not a casual enquiry, plainly. Nor a neighbourly one. He wiped off the message, stuck the details behind a corner of his noticeboard, then switched off the light. As he shut the office door, the draught knocked the bank statement down behind his desk but the smooth, suggestive voice and its message was wedged firmly in his mind.
Had Eliza been awake when he threw off the damp towels and slid in behind her, he would have asked her about it. But she wasn’t. She stirred just sufficiently to take his arm and pull it around her as she nestled against him, with one of her small, feline noises, and the delicious smell of her and the novelty of climbing exhausted into a warmed bed and finding her in it drove all other cares from his mind.
39
Repeatedly through the night Eliza suffered variations on the same dream in which Dido was taken from her – by Kitty, by her mother, by the police, by Julia once and, most alarmingly, by her long dead sister – and she was given only the terse explanation: it’s because you’re not fit.
In each instance she woke doubly disoriented, slowly reassembling herself in an unfamiliar bed with an unfamiliar man. While she untensed, remembering where she was, he mumbled something, held her more tightly and fell asleep again. And the pressure of his arm and the faint, dog-beddish smell of the sheets (he clearly had not anticipated this visit) soothed her with their reality.
There was moonlight – he had no curtains in this room – and a spectral glow from an old electric clock-radio which softly creaked as it revolved its numerals. The house made sounds around them. A window thumped softly in its sashes rocked by a night breeze, boards creaked, mice – she hoped they were only mice – scuttled in the attic. The night was marked out for her in a series of these strange, wakeful interludes in each of which the room, the bed, the man, the house and its sounds grew less of a shock.
At last, when the boiler rumbled into early morning action and set the plumbing sighing and burbling to itself, she emerged from the dream without stirring, without causing him to wake too. She lay there, entirely awake. He was pressed in close behind her, his arm about her. She could feel his breath in her hair and, when she moved her head slightly, his stubbled chin pressed into the back of her neck. His knees had drawn up, following hers, so that she was effectively sitting on his lap. If she had woken with Giles or Paul this close, her instinct would have been to feel smothered and to roll free. Why, then, did she not feel trapped now?
Why not? she thought. Dare to think it!
The radio alarm clicked into life and Pearce stiffened against her, his morning glory nudging by degrees between her thighs while cultured voices urgently discussed terrible events in the other, larger world. A suicide bomb in Israel. An outrage against an Ulster school. He took advantage of a yawn and a stretch to press himself more completely against her and she slid a hand between her legs to guide him in. They made sleepy love during a heated discussion of the illegality of the continuing French boycott on British beef. It was all about him; Eliza felt herself watchful and unengaged. But she liked that occasionally. Controlling and giving pleasure could be as rewarding as abandonment to one’s own.
Perhaps the th
in sunlight made him shy, for he did not cry out or swear this time but only gasped and held her more tightly. Shameless because she could not see his face, she brought his hand down between her legs as he slipped out of her and, pressing down with both of hers, rubbed herself against his hot, hard palm until she reached what was at once a climax and a delicious return to sleep.
She opened her eyes at the soft chink of cup against saucer as he set some tea on the bedside table, then drifted off to sleep again. She woke once more as he started a tractor out in the yard. She sat up to drink cold tea and munch the buttered toast he must have brought up.
There was a deep recess in the wall behind the bed. An assortment of books was lined up there alongside a dented brass candlestick, a handful of rifle cartridges, a saucer spilling over with loose coppers and a very pretty Staffordshire greyhound. There was a photograph, too, in a cracked leather frame. She took it to peer more closely.
It was colour but only just. 1968? 1966? A version of Pearce but in a tweed suit and without the laughter lines, leaning against a granite stile. Two children, boy and girl, identically dressed in navy-blue Ladybird jerseys and camel-coloured cords perched on either side of him. His face was pained, hard even, but the way he had an arm wrapped round each child’s legs and the way they were leaning into him spoke of kindness and protection. In the recess with candle and money offering, it looked like the icon in some informal country shrine. She replaced it carefully, recognising a precious, private relic.