A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  ‘What about Dido?’

  ‘Like me she probably has the gene and could pass it on. But there’s a chance she won’t develop it and I…I wanted to protect her.’

  ‘She didn’t know any of this?’

  Eliza realised she was weeping, the taste of her tears sharp on cracked lips. ‘Where did she get this picture? Could she have downloaded it from the charity’s website?’

  ‘It’s a scan. Not a download. You can tell from the heading.’

  Eliza looked deep into her sister’s face, reminding herself of every detail as she spoke ‘I wanted Dido to have as normal a childhood as possible for as long as possible in case she did develop it. I didn’t want her to feel shadowed by it the way I had, having Hannah for a sister. Giles always agreed with me.’

  ‘Giles?’

  ‘My husband. Giles Easton.’

  Saying his name was like releasing the catch on a door deep within herself. Anger had been admitted. Eliza forgot all about the scanner, the Bible, Trevescan, and thought only of Dido discovering all this alone and unprotected and the swift, careless ruination of one of the few well-laid plans in a haphazard life. Giles had the only surviving pictures of Hannah as an adult. Early in their marriage they had agreed to hide them away in an envelope in a locked drawer in his desk. In the rushed drama of leaving him, she had not thought to retrieve them. It had occurred to her since to ask for them but she had decided, fool that she was, that Dido was far less likely to stumble on them in his more regimented household than in her own chaotic one.

  ‘I need to use your phone, Molly.’

  ‘Sure,’ Molly said. ‘Shall I, er…?’

  Wipe this off, she meant but could not say.

  ‘Yes.’ Eliza watched as Molly clicked delete repeatedly, removing Hannah, Moominmama, Dido and the picture hybrid labelled Moomindido. There was a fifth picture file. Molly highlighted it, prepared to delete. ‘Wait,’ Eliza said.

  ‘You don’t want to see that,’ Molly said, ‘Trust me,’ and deleted it but not before Eliza read the title, Handido Hobbyanrr, and had started picturing its contents: Dido’s laughing eyes and button nose above her mother’s slightly spotty lantern jaw and carefully, vivaciously made-up lips.

  She hurried downstairs to Molly’s kitchen, riffled through the yellow pages to the hotel section, found the number, grabbed the phone. Molly came in after her and stopped in the doorway, held back by the force of unfamiliar anger which was causing Eliza’s hand to shake as she gripped the receiver.

  ‘Oh. Yes. Hello. I wonder if I’m still in time to catch Giles Easton?’

  ‘Yes, you are. That’s his friend, isn’t it? You were in for dinner on Saturday.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m Janet. I brought your drinks in. Their flight isn’t until one. He’s in the garden. Who shall I say is calling?’

  ‘No. I don’t want to speak to him. Just tell him his wife is on her way over.’

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘On second thoughts no. Don’t tell him anything.’

  52

  At nine and three-quarters, the age when all her friends started to grow, Hannah grew too, but not just in the legs and spine. Her jawbone and chin also grew, did not stop growing. At first it made her look merely obstinate, then the area below her mouth grew to the point where people pointed her out to one another and women murmured sympathetically in bus queues. She was nicknamed Desperate Dan. Her friends began to shun her. To make matters worse, her warm brown eyes, which had been one of her best features, became enlarged and protuberant. By eleven, she had become a grotesque, an infamous local freak. But only when the family dentist, alarmed at the malformation of her teeth, insisted she was not simply ugly but suffering from a bone disorder, were specialists consulted.

  No one in the family had looked like this and her mother assumed this was some correctable hormonal imbalance. The verdict was crueller: a disorder on a cellular level, genetic, inherited. The bony swelling grew progressively worse so long as the patient was growing then halted leaving them with benign bone tumours that displaced their teeth and gave them a look as inbred as any renaissance prince. Boys could at least mask the worst effects by growing a beard. In the past there had been little option left to girls beyond joining a circus.

  Suddenly the childhood photographs of Hannah, pudgy cheeks puffed as if to blow out non-existent cake candles, gappy teeth bravely displayed, were revealed as sinister warnings her parents had ignored in ignorance.

  Their father finally made a show of remembering that he had a great uncle who was similarly afflicted. He produced a photograph of a young man whose best tweed suit, snappy tie and slicked down hair only emphasized his inflated jaw and gobstopper eyes. Their mother was appalled then furious at what she saw as a deliberate deceit. There were no grand rows, because of the embarrassment both essentially kind-hearted parties felt at appearing in any way to devalue Hannah’s looks merely muttered, encoded skirmishes. The marriage never recovered and, when Eliza was just ten, her father went to a conference on mining technology and never returned. He vanished without trace and was not greatly missed. There was no divorce. No maintenance payments. No parental visits.

  Hannah was prodigious. She shrugged off her old friendships as evidently valueless and made new ones through sport. Sport became her passion. She fenced, she swam, she ran, she cycled. It was as though she wanted to compensate for the dereliction of her face by pushing the rest of her body to the limits of endurance. She avoided team games, where her outlandish appearance could too easily give rise to humiliations, and concentrated on sports based on personal bests. She made new friends among her fellow athletes – less pretty, less clever, less cultured than her old cronies but more trustworthy in their clannish dullness. Many of them, she realised, were also proving themselves in the face of academic failure, criticism from teachers or simply chronic shyness. Compared to most of them, she was sharper, more resilient and certainly more courageous. By the time she was finishing her A-levels, Hannah had been adopted by the school as a kind of mascot, a demeaning process she merrily subverted by refusing to appear either grateful or meek.

  She had difficulty finding a good university place. She was no academic, certainly, but she gained respectable grades. Confronted with her huge face in the interviews, however, numerous admissions staff assumed she was retarded. Then a cunning teacher put her forward for a sports scholarship in America, a land where physical perfection was God, certainly, but also a country where the empowerment of minorities was fast becoming a kind of religion.

  And somewhere between the sunny campus that welcomed her and the Himalayan mountain that destroyed her, Hannah conceived a child.

  53

  When Giles rang he found the last remaining Sunday flight from Newquay was already fully booked. There was such demand at that time of year that he found he could not even move them to an earlier flight on Monday morning or squeeze them onto flights to Stansted instead of Gatwick. They could have damned the expense and driven the hire car all the way back to London but close confinement for six hours or more seemed worse than staying put. So they were faced with no option but to spend another night in Penzance.

  Curiously they fought no further. The loss of the baby and Julia’s refusal of his proposal were a shared burden. Like fellow flu sufferers, they were hopelessly, wretchedly solicitous of one another’s comfort. How can I make myself least repugnant to you? was implicit in all their actions.

  Another dinner in the hotel’s small, pretty dining room was out of the question; their pained lack of conversation would have been too exposed there. So they went, impulsively, to the cinema, thinking that two hours not talking in a darkened room would at least eat away a good chunk of the evening.

  There was a small cinema on Causewayhead, divided into three even smaller ones. One of the oldest cinemas in constant use in the country, apparently. The choice was a cartoon about beetles, a horror film called Cleaver and In Health, a romantic comedy. Th
ey opted for the comedy as the lesser of three evils. But far from clearing the air, the film weighed down on them both and they returned to the hotel in stony silence. There was a bar and honesty book hidden in a writing desk in one corner of the sitting room. Without needing to ask, Giles poured them both big slugs of brandy. Taken on an empty stomach it ensured that Julia, at least, was deep in corpse-like slumbers within minutes of lying down.

  Giles lay beside her until the need to wrap her in his arms drove him to run a deep, hot bath and soak in that instead. He lay with foam tickling his chin, feeling a distinct draught on his toes through the overflow holes and trying not to think of their unborn child tumbling helplessly into the restored Victorian lavatory across the room from him.

  They had not discussed the future at all. She had said she was no longer pregnant or never had been. He had asked her to marry him. She had said no. Or rather, she had pointed out some brutally good reasons not to say yes. And there the subject had closed. Was she leaving him? There was no reason why she should, necessarily. They had lived together for several years without marriage being an issue. But to do so after her rejection of him seemed forced.

  She had hit home. He did ask her because he felt he should. In part. First he’d felt he should ask her because she was pregnant with his child, then because she no longer was and he did not want her despising him for only asking her out of duty. For a second, when it had become clear she was turning him down – it took a moment or two for his brain to catch up with her sharp speech – he felt something approaching euphoria, a mad, bad stab of born-again bachelor wey-hey.

  But that response was no sooner registered than swept aside by regret that was more than wounded pride. He was desolate at the thought of being alone again, of rattling around in the house. He pictured a descent into squalor or taking in lodgers or a now inevitable divorce from Eliza and a move into somewhere small and cheap and unpleasant ungraced by either woman’s influence.

  Perhaps Julia was not leaving him though? Perhaps she merely needed time to adjust? Rebuked by her, he could see now that it would be only decent to put things in more honourable order, to divorce Eliza then propose to Julia again.

  But now he lay in the cooling water feeling his fingertips turn pruny and remembering how transfigured the world had seemed to him when she said she was expecting. Now he knew it was fatherhood he most regretted. The prospect of a child had shed a new light on their relationship as much as on the world beyond, changing emphases and priorities, freeing them from the tyranny of choice by a removal of options. And the closing off of that prospect brought, oddly, less a return to former freedom than a dulling to dimness of what had formerly seemed bright. What had been just a relationship was now a childless relationship. They had gone overnight from being a couple who chose not to have children to one that failed to keep them.

  He woke with a jolt at the gunning of a boat’s outboard motor, jumped out of cold water, dried himself and hurried to bed. Perhaps sleep had made Julia forget their situation for she shuddered in her slumbers and, half waking to the coldness of his limbs, drew him against her so they fell asleep in tandem normality.

  Normality still reigned when they woke, ravenous, breakfasted, packed, settled the bill and started to load the car to drive to the airport. But then one of the waitresses, Pearce’s slightly flustered school chum, slipped out to warn them that Giles’ wife had just telephoned and was coming over to speak to them before they left.

  ‘She didn’t want me to tell you,’ she said, ‘But Hell, you’re the guests, not her…If you like I’ll say you’d gone before I could stop you.’

  Horrified at the thought of missing their precious flight, Julia was all for this but they still had plenty of time and Giles was worried it might be a message about Dido. So they waited, rather formally, on the sofas to either side of the sitting room fireplace while the waitress followed them back in and hurried apologetically through her dusting.

  Giles began reading the morning’s paper and was soon drawn into an article previewing A Midsummer Night’s Dream which hinted darkly at the sensations promised by the director’s past record and unconventional casting of Dewi Evans as Puck. There was also a rather good photograph of himself in rehearsal, dancing palm to palm with his luscious Titania, and he was about to show Julia this when Eliza burst in like the wrath of God, startling them both and sending Pearce’s friend scurrying from the room.

  ‘Who the fuck gave you permission to fuck up my daughter’s life?’ she shouted. Eliza never swore and never shouted. The effect of her doing both was electric. She ignored Julia entirely.

  ‘Sorry?’ he said, stalling.

  ‘I’ve seen the photograph,’ she told him witheringly. ‘She’s been copying it all over her friend’s computer and scanning it and e-mailing it for all I know. It’s probably posted on some website by now.’

  ‘Jesus!’ he said. Eliza seemed angry enough to call the police. He had woken daring to entertain a careful fantasy of a future in which Julia and he grew old together as a sophisticatedly childless, unmarried couple while Dido visited them for a week at each school holiday, giving Eliza time off for lecture tours or driving combine harvesters or what-have-you. In an instant his future shrank to a stark cell on a nonce wing. ‘It’s not what you think,’ he began.

  ‘Oh I think it is.’

  Julia slipped out of the room. Giles could not tell if she went to fetch help or to stop them being interrupted. Or perhaps she was going to jump into the car and catch the plane without him?

  ‘It was just a photo. She looked so sweet and I thought I’d just –’

  Eliza cut him short with an acid laugh. ‘Hannah was called a lot of things in her time but sweet?’

  ‘Hannah?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re talking about Hannah?’

  ‘Of course I am. Who the –?’

  ‘I thought you…Sorry.’ He sat and only just stopped himself from laughing with relief.

  ‘No,’ Eliza pursued him. ‘What did you mean? You said it was a photo.’

  Shit. Mentally he took a deep breath. He became aware that Julia had turned back in the doorway and was listening intently.

  ‘I took a picture of Dido while she was asleep,’ he said. ‘It was silly of me really but she looked incredibly sweet and young and I thought you’d like a copy. But then I printed it out a few times and realised her shirt had ridden up and it looked like kiddie porn so I…Well I thought I’d destroyed it. I had. But. Oh shit.’

  At last he realised what a fool he had been, and which photo Dido had been talking about in the car to the hospital. Slower to change gear once her speed was up, Eliza was still angry with him.

  ‘I thought we’d agreed. I even remember you saying “We must give her as normal a childhood as possible for as long as possible.” And now you go and screw it up just when she’s the worst possible age to –’ She broke off, aware now of Julia who had stepped back into the room and closed the door behind her.

  ‘I showed her,’ Julia said. ‘He didn’t know a thing about it. I knew where the picture was hidden and I told her where to look for it.’

  A waiter appeared to take their orders for coffee but was warned off by a glare from Eliza.

  54

  Giles jumped up and they both looked at her so sharply that for a second Julia thought they might turn on her like dogs interrupted mid-fight.

  ‘I told her,’ she repeated. ‘At the time I honestly thought I was doing it for her own good. I felt she had a right to know and was old enough to deal with it.’

  ‘What the fuck made you think it was any of your business?’ Eliza was incredulous.

  ‘I’m very fond of Dido,’ Julia told her. ‘No. I love her. But…I wasn’t supposed to tell you, Eliza, but it can’t do any harm now. I was pregnant when I found out. And I think it was making me a bit mad. I think I was trying to protect the baby.’

  ‘It’s not catching,’ Giles said.

  ‘I know t
hat. I’m not a fool,’ she told him then turned back to Eliza. ‘I think I was unconsciously clearing the nest a little,’ she said. ‘They were too close. He wasn’t even her father. I…I’m sorry. It was a horrible thing to do.’

  ‘But it worked.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry, Giles.’

  Giles said nothing to her. He had slumped into a chair by the desk.

  ‘None of this would have happened,’ Eliza told him, ‘If you hadn’t told her.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he began.

  ‘I found the picture,’ Julia confirmed. ‘I recognised her. Hannah.’

  ‘But how…?’

  ‘When I first met you I thought you seemed familiar but then I thought, ‘No. It can’t be.’ I only knew you by your maiden name, of course. And when you were a kid you had short hair and everyone called you Leeza, didn’t they? Leeza or Diz.’

  ‘Yes,’ Eliza said, frowning, no longer angry but wary now. ‘Yes they did. I hated it. But –’

  ‘But then I found the photo a couple of weeks ago. And I realised who you were.’

  ‘But who are you?’

  ‘Julie Dixon. You won’t remember me. I wasn’t very memorable. I was in the year below you, besides, so you’d have no reason to. We lived at Illogan, in one of the new houses above the sea. But you lived in Furnival Road, Camborne. I remember because I followed you both home from school once, all the way along Trelowarren Street. I used to watch out for Hannah. My dad was the groundsman at a campsite at Hayle Towans. My granddad had one of those beach cabins there. My mum ran a kennels from home. Dogs and cats. And she was a dinner lady at school. She always did the potato. Smiled a lot.’