A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  What did she want out of this? Could she really see herself as a Dr Goldhammer? Dr Eliza Hosken, immured in a set of rooms with a clavichord, two hundred books and a regular misericord in the college chapel?

  But of course she could never be like that, because she had Dido. Dido could go to a good school here and have suitable friends and they could live in careful, colourful economy in a cosy cottage on the cheaper side of the station and canal. She would ride a bike again to get fit, ride a bike on her way to give surprisingly popular lectures.

  But something was missing from the fantasy and she suspected she knew what. Who, rather.

  She bought herself a half-bottle of nasty, brackish wine from the buffet car and found a window seat where she was soon hemmed in by a large man with a suit carrier and a laptop. He had run for the train and sweated profusely as he made a series of extraordinarily tedious phone calls to colleagues and friends.

  At the bookstall she had bought a bargain copy of Jane Eyre to help pass the journey but her eyes soon slid from the cramped text to staring out of the window at passing fields. She watched a Sunday farmer using his tractor to pull some device across the side of a grassy hill and felt hemmed in suddenly by daunting possibility.

  48

  Julia was left so restless and edgy by the little dinner party that Giles fully expected her to wake demanding they fly home a day early. She slept badly. He knew this because he had twice woken as she slipped out of bed and padded to the bathroom. A third time, towards dawn, he’d rolled over meaning to slide a leg between hers for comfort and found the mattress coldly empty beside him. He’d turned to see her huddled on the daybed, wrapped in a blanket, staring out at the boats and dangerously pensive.

  Woken later when breakfast was brought to their room, he was ashamed that there was no sign of her, as though they had been caught rowing in public. She bustled in with a raft of Sunday papers half an hour later, however, and announced that she had reserved them two bicycles at a hire shop on the other side of the harbour.

  ‘It’s another lovely day,’ she said. ‘I thought we could ride along the cycle track around the bay to visit the Mount. They told me it’s one of the days when Lady St Levan opens her gardens for charity.’

  Giles, terrified of London traffic, had not ridden a bicycle since his student days, apart from when he played Apollo in a very childish production of Death in Venice. For much of its length the cycle path was far from the road and ran, carefully fenced, between railway lines and dog-haunted beach. The only danger was posed by other cyclists, many of them wobbly children, and the occasional bloody-minded cluster of pedestrians.

  It was low tide so when they reached Marazion they were able to lock their bikes to some railings and walk out to St Michael’s Mount on the rounded rocks of a still glistening causeway. Julia was in one of her brittle, glassy moods, furious about something it would be up to him to divine. She fell to sightseeing as though it were her last allotted earthly task. She marched up the vertiginous path that was dark with shrubbery, itchy with little flies, to the fort-turned-mansion.

  Only those parts of the house that must have been most expensive to keep up – the rooftop apartments and fanciful battlements – had been handed over to the National Trust. The St Levans still lived there in some style presumably, in rooms tantalisingly out of view. After sweeping through the public areas, peering through every window and reading every little card with a kind of thin-lipped piety, Julia slowed down a little when they descended to the gardens but even there she acted as though someone were taking notes on her cultural seriousness.

  Giles could not tell an asphodel from an allium but even he had to concede that the gardens were a triumph of ingenuity over nature. Where the house seemed to grow out of the rock, the gardens had been painstakingly carved out of shelves in the seaward cliffs below it. Steps in the rock and snaking paths led one through a sequence of rooms built of plants, many of them hot flowered exotics which drew precious comfort from the sun-warmed rock that they could not find in the sea winds and Cornish weather.

  But it was only a garden, not the Piero Flagellation.

  ‘It’s so clever,’ Julia said. ‘Do you see how none of the plants can grow very tall but you don’t notice because of the angles and the way the borders climb up above head height? And that’s pretty. Is it an abutilon or a…What is it, do you think?’

  ‘No one’s keeping score, Julia,’ he told her. It just came out and far more bitterly than he had intended.

  ‘What?’ she asked, perplexed.

  He thought it best not to repeat himself in case she really had not heard. ‘Is all this racing around good for the baby?’ he asked instead. ‘You had a rough night. Shouldn’t you be taking it easy?’

  ‘There is no baby,’ she told him.

  They were standing at the foot of a little flight of steps by a bank of some succulent that was evidently a feature of the place because passers-by stopped to caress and admire it. There was a clutch of older women discussing the plant now.

  ‘Is it a sedum?’ one was asking.

  ‘Or an echeveria?’ a companion said.

  ‘It’s an aeonium,’ said Giles, who had spotted the sign and hoped they would pass tactfully on their way. But they loitered, oblivious to the painful scene they had blundered into.

  ‘Oh yes,’ the first one said. ‘There’s a sign. Look. Aeonium Schwarztopf. I always thought it was kopf.’

  ‘That’s the soprano, dear.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  And on and on, so Giles tried to move on instead but Julia was rooted.

  ‘I lost it,’ she said.

  ‘When?’ he asked, appalled.

  ‘This morning. Last night.’ She shrugged, sapped of all energy now she had spoken up and he saw her manic tourism for what it was, a wild attempt at diversion. She was beautiful to him now, so defenceless, all elbows and proudly jutting chin.

  Heedless of their audience, who at last had sensed they were overhearing what they should not and begun a pantomimic retreat, their exaggerated discretion only drawing attention to their presence, he drew her to him and kissed her hair.

  ‘You should have said,’ he sighed. ‘You should have woken me. Babe. I’m so sorry. Jesus. And we were so excited.’

  ‘Were we?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Of course we were. I’ve been walking on air since you told me. I mean I had been. Jesus.’

  He noticed she was not holding him in return. He stood back a little, still holding her. She looked aside, avoiding his gaze as though ashamed.

  ‘Maybe I didn’t lose it. Maybe I was just late. It happens, especially if I’ve been skipping meals. Maybe my last one was early.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Have I what?’

  ‘Been skipping meals?’

  She smiled at him now but in a way that chilled him. ‘I eat about one to your every three,’ she said.

  He was going to ask her why or apologise or say something crass, which she anticipated and prevented with another shrug. She turned aside and continued through the gardens. He noticed she was looking at nothing now, merely walking. He caught her hand to slow then stop her.

  ‘Listen,’ he said.

  Her expression was a silent, uninviting what?

  ‘I was going to ask you to marry me,’ he said. They had witnesses again, a young couple coming the other way, each with a baby in harness, a matching set. ‘I mean I am asking. Will you? Please?’

  49

  ‘I was going to ask you to marry me,’ Giles said.

  He was holding her hand, admittedly only to stop her walking away and to grab her attention but in this setting it felt as public as a passionate kiss would have done. Julia found herself transfixed by the faces of two wet-lipped, passing babies. Strapped to their parents’ backs they performed a simultaneous eyes right, as though sensing not an irrelevant argument but a great, milky pap.

  Giles squeezed her hands. She looked at him instead.
/>   ‘I mean I am asking,’ he said. ‘Will you? Please?’

  She pulled her hands away as gently as she could and continued walking, drawing him with her. They attracted too much notice standing still against the flow of visitors. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean? I know I don’t have to. Will you?’

  ‘You’re a bit late,’ she said as they stepped under the trees and began their descent down the rocky path to the harbour. ‘If you’d asked me when I first said I was pregnant, at least that would have made sense. There are advantages to a baby having married parents. But now?’

  ‘I thought you’d be angry if I’d asked you then, as if that was the only reason.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been? And a good practical reason. But asking me now is…’ She was so angry that her voice shook and for a few paces she had to avoid looking at him. People passing them in the other direction would be carrying away two hot, cross faces and enigmatic conversational morsels. Asked her what? If she wanted the dining room painted blue? If she wanted friends to join them on holiday? If she wanted a threesome with him and a best mate?

  ‘Your trouble is you’re too sentimental. You’re a pathos-junkie,’ she said. ‘Eliza. What could be more pathetic? The unworldly, donnish Eliza with a baby in tow. And Dido. Christ, she’s practically a foundling! That’s pathetic. That really gets to you. And now me. Who’d have thought it? Now that I lose a baby I stop being just good old dependable Julia, always good for a shag or a flower arrangement and turn into poor Julia-who-lost-her-baby.’

  ‘Is that really how you think I think of you?’

  ‘But most of all it’s you, isn’t it? The pathos of you that really gets your juices flowing. Christ, your alky mother did a thorough job on you! You’re probably creaming yourself already at the thought of jilted Giles.’

  ‘Shall I take that as a no, then?’

  ‘Giles please listen.’ She stopped. Spoken, her anger had evaporated as swiftly as it had come to the boil. The tide was in now so there was a stream of people around the harbour wall to catch boats back to Marazion. She sat on an isolated bench rather than join the queue while it was so long. Giles sat beside her. Now she took his hand.

  That distant wooden creaking you hear, she told herself, is the turning of tables.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you love me?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘What? Why are you –? Yes of course I do.’

  He was not smiling, she noticed. There was no surprised laughter, no honest relief that the question required only a simple answer.

  ‘Say it then.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Say I love you, Julia.’

  ‘This is stupid. You know I do.’ He sighed then said, ‘I love you, Julia,’ with as much sincerity as a small boy prompted to say thank you for a dull weekend.

  Still holding his hand, she made sure she took a good look at him saying it. The hair was still blond but its curls would look less angelic as they turned grey. She suspected he had not yet noticed it was thinning at his crown. The worry lines in his face were winning out over the laughter ones – frowning was his habitual expression when singing florid passages – and would soon set the mood of his face at rest. After a succession of hairy lovers, she had been charmed at his smoothness, at the cradle-snatching comfort of kissing someone whose jaw was never significantly bristled. But as he aged was there not something of the old child about it? Something unpleasantly immature? She withdrew her hand.

  ‘That took about twenty seconds too long,’ she said. ‘Or should that be four years and three months?’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Babe.’

  ‘Don’t apologize. It was a kind lie. It’s my fault for forcing it out of you. Shit.’

  She wanted to stand and hurry to one of the little boats which was now awobble with boarding passengers but found herself sapped of strength and sat on, feeling her face grow stony as the full boat chugged away and another came to take its place.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked at last.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, feeling close to tears and driving her nails into her palms to save herself. ‘We’ve lived together all this time without it being an issue but…I don’t know.’

  ‘No,’ he checked her with a touch to her forearm before she should say too much. ‘I mean, what do you want to do right now?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said and laughed. ‘Sorry. Erm. God. Shall we go back to London?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think I can stand another night here.’

  ‘No. Of course you can’t. You poor thing.’

  ‘Don’t, Giles.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He touched her elbow as they rose and the small contact was trigger enough for them to fall into each other’s arms for a brief, desperate hug then they went on their way to the boat.

  The business of travel would absorb them as tourism could not. Packing, driving to the airport, waiting for a plane, flying home, catching a taxi, unpacking, opening mail, concocting some kind of Sunday supper.

  Who was to say that these activities would not let them slip back into their quiet routines just as before? As they shuffled down the wet steps and were handed into a bobbing boat by its walnut-faced pilot they were just another pair of summer trippers and for all she knew Giles was now as placid as he seemed.

  Her mind, however, was tangling itself in knotted possibilities. He had not repeated his proposal but she could still accept it. And perhaps she could not? Perhaps he had only asked her on a charitable impulse and now considered himself reprieved? Ridiculous! Of course they could not live on together as though nothing had happened; the assumption that he loved her or was on the point of discovering he did was quite different from the unadorned knowledge that he didn’t. Being ruled by fear, her instinct had always been to cling to security rather than dare to entertain alternatives. For days she had been wavering between embracing motherhood and continuing childless and either option had seemed tumultuous at best. But that was nothing compared to suddenly imagining life without Giles. Unprotected by his money, house and status, obliged to rely on her own income, to find somewhere of her own to live, she would have to fall back on her own friends and she had few who predated Giles and thus were not shared territory.

  Unable to imagine a future without him, she cast her mind back to her life before they met. She had shared a small flat in Hackney with a young man and woman who had advertised for a flatmate. They had little in common. They maintained closely guarded, separate shelves in fridge and larder. Quarterly bills had been a source of strife and acute anxiety. Not a happy time.

  Repelled, she made a conscious effort to be calm. Hundreds of couples did not love each other yet stayed together. But presumably they had loved each other once and the feeling had decayed. Or did they merely stay together from fear of the alternative?

  One day at a time, she told herself as they cycled glumly back around the bay. We’ll do nothing hasty and take this one day at a time. There could be no thought of domestic upheaval with Giles’ first night only days away or of her making decisions with her hormones still out of kilter.

  The man at the cycle hire shop was greeting the returning couple in front of them with mockery at their failure to fulfil their plan of riding to Land’s End and back. But turning to Giles and Julia he read the grimness in their faces and his banter dried up.

  They climbed in silence the little hill from the harbour’s edge and re-entered the hotel.

  ‘If you can face dealing with the airline,’ she told him as she picked up their key, ‘I’ll go upstairs and do the packing.’

  ‘Okay, darling,’ he said with a cautious little smile.

  He never called her darling. It made her feel like his old boot of a wife, which was either sweet or cunning of him. It also made them sound like a couple that had just suffered a tragic loss, which in a sense they were. As she zipped up their wa
sh things and gathered books and belongings onto the bed then folded away the few clothes she had unpacked, it was with a bereaved woman’s sense of the cruel persistence of ordinary things in the face of savage change. Here was a bottle of eye drops bought before her first bout of morning sickness, which was still safe to use for another two weeks. Here was the silver bangle he had bought for her last birthday, before she had realised he did not love her, before she noticed that he had always signed his notes or cards to her Giles XXXX rather than Love, Giles. She had always taken those Xs at face value, as a row of kisses, as a reticent mark of feelings he was simply too restrained to discuss. Now she saw they had always been merely the algebra of a misunderstanding. Maths had never been her strong point.

  50

  Molly and Pearce sat at the kitchen table outside the back door of the farmhouse, enjoying the afternoon sun and desultorily picking over the Sunday papers she had brought with her.

  Instead of the usual Sunday lunch at her place, to which Morris was always invited too to coerce him into spending time with Lucy, the three of them had come to the farm. It was easier to accommodate Dido’s broken leg that way. Besides, St Just was noisy with an open-air Cornish mystery play in the Plan an Gwarry and they wanted to escape the crowds.

  It was the first meal Pearce had taken outside that year, not counting sandwich lunches in the tractor. They had eaten roast pork, through force of habit, but with salads and lemony roast vegetables instead of the usual Sunday roast padding.

  As well as the sleepy cooing of the collar doves on the nearest barn, regular thunks and clatters reached them from the far end of the yard where Morris had been persuaded to teach Lucy how to shoot beer cans with Pearce’s boyhood air gun. She had expressed a wish to shoot for a while and he had hopes she would take after Morris, proving a better shot than Pearce was, and so be able to do something about the farm’s perennial rabbit plague. And the collar doves.