A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  As he climbed the hill on the other side, another child came flying down towards him, a girl in a baseball cap and spotty pink dress. She was going faster than she should, using one hand to smack her dress down as the wind lifted it over her knees, and was swaying wildly out into the road’s middle. He kept well to one side to make room and so as not to frighten her. It was only as she whizzed up to his open window that she glanced up at the boy in trouble ahead and he recognised her.

  All he said was a fairly quiet, ‘Dido?’ but it was enough to make her glance sharply round at him then lose control of the bike. She let out a yelp and there was a clatter as the bike crashed into something.

  Giles stopped the car where it was and ran back down the hill. The bike was half in a ditch, upended against the low stone hedge. Dido was sprawled in the road. He swore under his breath as he ran up to her. She had no helmet on, no visibility strap and the bike’s brakes were probably as old and worn as the bike itself.

  ‘Dido?’

  She was crying.

  ‘Dido, it’s Giles.’

  ‘I know!’ she said furiously. She tried to move and cried out.

  ‘Stay put,’ he said, crouching beside her. ‘What happened?’

  ‘What do you – Ow!’

  She was trying to lift herself onto all fours. Her hands were fine; grazed from hitting the road but fine. She had a nasty little cut on her chin. Blood dripped crimson on the hot tarmac and down her front. She tried again and again cried out, keening from the pain. Then he saw how one of her ankles was at a sickeningly wrong angle.

  ‘Don’t!’ he shouted. ‘It’s your foot. I’ll have to lift you.’ He crouched down beside her. ‘Put your arm over my shoulder.’

  ‘No. Ow!’

  ‘Dido, do it. I’ve got to lift you. There’s no other way.’

  Whimpering, she locked an arm around his neck.

  ‘This is going to hurt,’ he said, ‘But we’ve got to get you off the road and onto the car seat. Hold tight. Both arms. That’s it.’

  Slowly he stood, half-suffocated by her furious grasp, and as soon as he could he scooped his arms underneath her to prevent any pressure on the fracture.

  It must have been agony because she fainted. He hurried back to the car with her and had to lie her briefly on the verge while he opened the back door. Then he lifted her inside and arranged her across the rear seat. He held her in place as best he could with a seat belt so that she was sitting upright, her back against the farther door. Gingerly, holding it by the shoe, he straightened the broken leg before her. There was nothing he could use as a splint. He might have crippled her already. She moaned softly, coming round. He drew out the other seat belt and secured it around her thighs so she wouldn’t slide off the seat if he had to brake suddenly. Then he leapt back into the driver’s seat, swung the car around and headed back the way he had come, remembering seeing a turning for Penzance and praying it was a more direct route than the coastal one.

  The red-faced boy was staring and Giles saw it was a girl. ‘Where’s the hospital?’ he shouted to her.

  ‘Penzance,’ she stammered gruffly. ‘The West Cornwall. But for emergency you’d better go to Treliske. That’s Truro. Is she okay?’

  ‘She’ll be fine.’

  He drove like a maniac at first then got a grip on himself, remembering she was not about to die unless he tried to kill them both. He glanced regularly over his shoulder at her. She was still propped up in the opposite corner to him and, soon after they hit the Penzance by-pass, he saw she had opened her eyes. The blood was drying on her chin and chest. She was not looking anywhere in particular, just whimpering softly and occasionally crossly scrubbing the tears from her eyes with the back of one grubby fist.

  ‘Dido?’

  She looked at him.

  ‘Soon be there,’ he told her, although the last signpost gave the distance to Truro as twenty miles.

  ‘Good,’ she managed.

  ‘How’s the chin?’

  ‘Sore,’ she said. ‘I…I lost a couple of teeth.’

  ‘Jesus! Where? At the front?’

  ‘Back,’ she mumbled and he realised she was turning the bloodied molars over in her hand.

  ‘Where’s Eliza?’ he asked.

  ‘Pearce’s.’

  ‘Who?!’

  ‘Just for the night. I was staying with friends. Ow!’

  ‘Sorry. Roundabout. Can’t be helped. There. Sorry. Dido?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look I really know this isn’t the right time but I wanted to see you, to talk to you. That’s why I’m down here. Well. Partly. I’m on a sort of holiday with Julia. We’re in Penzance for the weekend. But I heard about your Gran from Mrs Barnicoat.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The lady next door. The big lady in Camborne.’

  ‘Kitty.’

  ‘Yes? And…sorry. This is all coming out wrong.’

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It really hurts.’

  ‘We’re nearly there, Dido. I promise. Soon be there and the doctors and nurses will make it all okay again. I just…I really wanted to say, to explain really, about that photo you saw in my office. I didn’t want you to take it the wrong way or think I’m some kind of creepy perv.’

  Briefly cleared of all whimpering and pain, Dido’s voice was bright steel. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Well…I thought you’d be upset. Which, naturally, you were.’

  ‘I had a right to know.’

  ‘It was just a picture. Yes, though. Yes. You’re right. You had a perfect right. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I took it,’ she said. ‘If you were wondering.’

  How many were there? He thought it was just the two. ‘I got rid of the others,’ he said.

  ‘Bit late for that, isn’t it? Now that I’ve seen.’

  ‘Yes but I…’

  ‘Just hurry. Please?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’

  He put his foot down and shut up. What right had he to ask her forgiveness? He had no rights in the matter at all.

  ‘Look,’ he said a few minutes later. ‘Truro. We’re there. Hospital. See?’

  ‘Great.’ Her bravery astonished him. At her age he’d have been wetting himself with the pain. But then at her age…He tried to distract her. ‘Guess what? Julia’s going to have a baby. She’s just heard. So early next year you’ll have a little brother or sister. Stepbrother. Dido?’

  ‘I won’t. I won’t have anything. Look. Hospital. Next left.’

  Leaving her in the car, he ran after signs for A & E and at last found some paramedics who could fetch her on a trolley. They gave her a shot for the pain then manoeuvred her onto the stretcher as though she were made of glass.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ one of them told her as they started to wheel her away towards the casualty department’s entrance. ‘Your dad’s still here.’

  ‘He’s not my dad,’ she said, fighting the sedative. ‘He’s just a family friend.’

  Giles followed them inside. While she was borne away for X-rays and to have the leg set and plastered, he gave her details for registration and also filled out the necessary forms for any further procedures to be seen to on his private health insurance. Unbeknownst to Eliza, he had been paying premiums to keep Dido covered ever since Eliza left him. When the nurse passed him the consent forms for the X-rays he explained that no, he wasn’t Dido’s father but only her mother’s husband. He did not go into detail; her aunt’s estranged husband with occasional, unratified visiting rights sounded too suspicious for words, private health policy or no.

  ‘So,’ the nurse said, pen hovering, ‘stepfather.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said then settled down to wait.

  He was startled when Eliza appeared with a girlfriend in tow. He had not seen her for months. He realised the second she walked up to him how he had fantasised her into something she wasn’t. In his head she had become either the mad destroyer or a helpless, depressive
scatterbrain, the sort of woman who forgot to buy food for her own child. The Eliza before him was focused, trim, suntanned and really rather formidable. He saw at once how she, too, had developed a distorted view of him as the enemy.

  He thought she would berate him, shout, ask him what the fuck he was doing in Cornwall but all she did was put her arms about him, kiss his cheek. He began to explain, very clumsily, that Dido had broken her leg falling off her bike, that he was on a short break with Julia, that it was probably his fault for startling her, when Eliza stopped him to say simply, ‘Thank God you were there,’ before hurrying off in search of her daughter.

  The friend introduced herself as Molly and said how her daughter had rung her brother from a callbox in Zennor, who had then left a message on her mobile which was how they had got there so quickly.

  By the time he had driven back to Penzance he was working himself into a state about not having told Julia what was going on but he need not have worried. Julia’s slumber deficit had caught up with her and she had spent half the afternoon asleep.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she murmured sleepily to his hasty apology. ‘I went out too for a bit. So sleepy though.’

  He half-stripped and got into bed and snuggled into her back. But she was soon asleep again while he was left alert to his desolation. Nuzzling her hair, failing even to distract himself with its scented warmth, he wept in silence.

  Waking, appalled because she had never seen him cry, she asked him what was wrong. He told a version of the facts, that Dido had broken her leg, that by some amazing chance he had been there to drive her to hospital and that she had seemed so brave and independent.

  Hushing him, growing tearful herself, she assured him that just because they were having a baby of their own, he wasn’t to worry that Dido would be any less welcome.

  He thanked her, mastered himself, kissed her, braced by the sense that this was the moment where he ought to say he loved her but he couldn’t lie to her. How could he tell her it was not a question of their excluding Dido but of Dido’s excluding them?

  41

  Yes, Julia had been sick again but it was quite different now the reason was no secret. Giles might not have said he loved her but he was solicitude itself, almost oppressively so and she was happy to show apparent generosity in letting him off for a few hours in the hire car.

  She enjoyed her breakfast in bed, and was sunning herself on the pretty daybed in the window, half listening to Alexy being interviewed on the radio, half reading a review of a client’s recent recital when her mobile rang. She turned down the radio, picked up the phone and glanced at the display to see who was calling her. Villiers it said. She was tempted to press ignore and fob him off with her voicemail but she knew he was likely to punish her by calling the agency instead to leave a suggestively compromising message with Shawna. She had once told him, in a weak moment, she suspected Shawna of being jealous and of doing anything she could to undermine her. Resolving to have fewer weak moments now she was to become a mother, she answered.

  ‘Villiers. How lovely.’

  ‘Can you talk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are you? I hear seagulls.’

  ‘A ravishingly pretty hotel in Penzance.’

  ‘So you told him.’

  ‘I did. I chanced my arm and told him and he’s thrilled so we’re keeping it.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yes, darling. We’re going to be a family.’

  ‘Oh. I’m so glad. I really am. Is it for public consumption yet?’ He sounded uncannily sincere.

  ‘No. It’s far too early. I might lose it or something,’ she said, stretching out her toes against a silky cushion. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Why does everyone always assume I want something when I ring?’

  Because they’re too scared of the alternatives?

  ‘Because we know what you’re like. But you’ve caught me in a good mood so take advantage.’

  ‘It’s nothing, really.’

  ‘Oh well, in that case…’ she teased.

  ‘Have you got a spare morning?’

  ‘Funnily enough.’

  ‘It’s just that when Selina told me where you were, I thought it was too good an opportunity to miss. I want you to go and look at a house for me. And if possible get a peek at the owner. There’d be a lunch in it for you. It’s perfectly legit but they’ve got something Mr Mister wants to buy and I need to know how badly they need to sell. Do they need a new roof? Are they loaded or nouveau-pauvre? What do they drive and how many? I’d feel I was imposing only I know how you love a good snoop.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I know you, Girl, like you know me.’

  She checked out the distance on the framed map on the bathroom wall. She could be there and back within the hour. And Villiers was right. It was the sort of mission that piqued her interest. She called a taxi, stubbed the driver’s curiosity with a flat, ‘I’m here on business,’ and had him drive her out beyond the Land’s End airfield then down a pretty lane. ‘Wait here,’ she told him ‘I won’t be long,’ and got him to park in a shady passing place while she walked on down the lane, over a little bridge and up to the house.

  The air was loud with rooks, not the gulls that haunted Penzance, and swallows kept up their manic twittering on the wires overhead. It was a farmhouse, on a working farm judging from all the cattle shit. Not the wealthy manor she had expected, but old. One could guess that from the thick granite walls. Like a lot of women she had devoured Rebecca and I Capture the Castle in her early, dreamy teens but she had never fantasized about being mistress of a grand house. Dinner parties for six were frightening enough. The thought of having to cope with house parties and intimidating old retainers was horrific. From her time as a nanny she knew that such households still existed all over the country, less poetic than Manderley and whatever the Dodie Smith house had been called, but equally daunting to manage. She knew that their owners occasionally married wrong girls, girls like Julia, girls not raised to cope.

  This house, however, had all the charm of a Manderley – surrounded by empty land, the sea nearby, a powerful sense of family history – without the unfeasible size. She walked closer. There was a footpath across the farmyard towards the sea, she had noticed, so she had a perfect excuse to be there. The paintwork was flaking here and there, she saw, and some guttering drooped. A rusted drainpipe had been replaced with a cheap plastic one. One of the chimney stacks leaned alarmingly inwards. A household, she gauged, that was patching and making do rather than thriving. The little garden seemed neglected, but then most farm gardens would be. She saw no car at first – and there was no garage – then she spotted a filthy and very basic green Land Rover, parked in one of the barns.

  She walked on along the footpath to the back of the house where some horned cattle eyed her suspiciously from behind a barbed wire fence. The paintwork was worse here, where the weather hit it from off the sea. She knew she should be looking for signs of dereliction but found herself charmed. The floral curtains were old and not to her taste but she could see at once the place’s potential and how simply someone like her could realise it.

  There was a churning of gears and diesel engine. She turned to see a yellow tractor approaching from one of the seaward fields, every bit as old as the Land Rover. She began to walk on then realised how odd that would look when she stopped and came back the same way. So she turned at once and started back towards the taxi, needlessly nervous as the tractor approached her. The driver pulled past her and swung into the barn beside the Land Rover. She walked on but then the driver jumped down and called out to her, ‘Lost your way? The path goes straight on the way you were headed. It’s not very clear at the moment since it all got churned up down there.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s fine. I was…I was looking for a friend, in fact. A friend of the family. She’s staying in a caravan near here I thought. Eliza Hosken and her daughter.’

  As he
emerged from the shadows he smiled broadly, his teeth white in his filthy face. ‘They’re up on the hill.’

  ‘You know them?’ she asked, startled at being caught out.

  ‘Getting to,’ he said. ‘Eliza’s been around here a few times. You’ve just missed her, in fact. She should be back up at Kitty’s caravan by now. I’ll run you up if you like.’

  ‘No thanks. I’ve…I’ve got a taxi waiting in the lane. It’s up the hill a bit, then?’

  Why did she ask? Because he had such a glorious voice, like the rich, brown voices of her childhood. And his eyes were a brown to match. And he made her feel at once delicately feminine and entirely safe. Fool that she was. He would be bound to remember her and mention her visit to Eliza now.

  ‘That’s right. Up Bosavern to the T-junction, left towards St Just then immediately right down a – oh. Sorry. Hang on.’

  His mobile was ringing. She thought to slip away while he answered it but found herself rooted to the spot.

  ‘Luce? Where are you?’ There was a lengthy explanation. He frowned. ‘Bloody hell. Where’s your mum? Oh. Well don’t worry. Stay put and I’ll be right up there. Stay put.’ He hung up then ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Bit of a crisis. Sorry. Got to go.’

  He ran over to a tap where he quickly washed his face and hands then ran on to the Land Rover and drove out up the lane as fast as its labouring engine would carry him.

  ‘Not rich, I’d say,’ she told Villiers when she called him from back at the hotel. ‘But not hungry either. And not an idiot. And he knows Eliza.’

  ‘I know,’ Villiers said, enjoying capping her surprise with a bigger one. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I suspect he’s her new squeeze. Thanks, darling. I knew I could count on you. Hang on to the cab receipt and I’ll claim it off my expenses from Mr Mister. And we’ll do lunch once you’re back. Gotta run. Byee.’

  42