A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  ‘I remember her. Big hair.’

  ‘Very big. Hannah was amazing, Eliza. We all looked up to her. She was a kind of hero, in spite of how she looked. You should have been proud of her not hidden her away like a dirty secret.’

  ‘Yes, well, that was for me to decide, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry. It was. I should have talked to you, not Dido. But we don’t really talk, do we?’

  ‘Shit,’ Giles said softly. ‘The time. I hate to do this but we’ve got that plane to catch. I’ve got a costume call this afternoon. We should go.’

  ‘You go,’ Julia said, still watching Eliza. ‘I’ll come on the train later.’

  ‘But why? That’s silly. The tickets are all booked and we’ve got the –’

  ‘Leave my bag in the hall. I’ll come on the train.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I should go,’ Eliza said, sensing trouble.

  ‘No,’ Julia told her. ‘Sit. Stay. Giles, I’m leaving you. I’ll drop by to pick up my stuff during the week.’

  Eliza was frantic, ‘I really should go.’

  Julia held her arm this time. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you. Go, Giles. Quick. You’ll miss your plane. We can talk later.’

  He went surprisingly quickly, defeated by timetable and career, not looking at either woman.

  ‘Poor Giles,’ Eliza said when the door had shut again. ‘That was cruel.’

  ‘At least I told him to his face,’ Julia reminded her. ‘Because he never heard it from your lips it took him weeks to accept that you’d gone. He won’t have the same trouble with me. It’s far crueller to be nice, sometimes, and let things drag on. He’s been trying to leave me for years but he hates to be in the wrong. I just made it easier for him.’

  ‘Why did you make me stay? That was awful.’

  ‘What is it the self-help books call it? Closure. You needed closure.’

  ‘But you seemed so happy together. A good fit, I mean.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Weren’t you?’

  ‘He still loves you. I never stood a chance.’

  ‘But…’ Eliza glanced towards the door and Julia knew she was wondering whether to run after him and flag down his car. ‘I’m not available.’

  Julia laughed. ‘Since when did that make a difference?’

  ‘Poor Giles.’

  ‘Oh he’ll be fine. He’s beautiful.’ She looked at Eliza’s golden hair and shining blue eyes. She was wearing crazy clothes but she could wear a bin liner with holes cut in it and still look innocent and clean. ‘Beautiful people aren’t necessarily happier but they get more opportunities than the rest of us.’

  ‘You’re beautiful.’

  ‘Gee. Really? No, I’m not, Leeza. I just dress with tremendous care.’

  ‘You called me Leeza.’

  ‘Sorry. Eliza.’

  ‘I don’t understand. You’re so posh.’

  ‘I’m not. I never lied. I never pretended to be what I wasn’t. Except for, maybe, changing Dixon to Forbes Dixon, but Forbes was my mother’s name so…I just left things unsaid, let people join the dots with their own conclusions. I can still talk Camborne.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You made a proper job of that, me handsome.’

  Eliza grinned. ‘Julie Dixon.’ She relaxed her own accent to match. ‘As I live and breathe.’

  55

  ‘I hated doing that,’ Pearce told Dido as they drove out of St Just. ‘Do you lie to Eliza often?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Only sometimes. To save her feelings or stop her worrying.’

  ‘Does she worry much?’

  ‘She’s seeming very selfish at the moment but that’s just because of work. Trevescan. But sometimes she…’ Dido dried up.

  ‘Well?’ Pearce asked.

  ‘Sometimes she gets depressed.’

  ‘We all have bad days.’

  ‘No, I mean really depressed. She just goes to bed and stays there. She’ll pretend to have got up and done things while I was in school but I can tell when she’s lying and I know she hasn’t moved because everything will look just the way it did when I left the house.’

  ‘And that’s when you might lie to her.’

  ‘Yes. Or before. When she’s okay, to stop her getting like that, you know, depressed.’

  ‘But if she thinks we’re buying tractor spares, shouldn’t I at least stop by Leedstown on the way back to buy some in case she asks?’

  ‘She won’t ask. She won’t be interested. She only notices what interests her. You’ve seen the way she dresses.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘I mean, you can if you like. But I wouldn’t bother.’

  ‘Okay. So how did you get to see the orthodontist so fast? Since it’s not an emergency.’

  ‘We’re going private.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Giles is paying,’ she said airily. ‘He felt guilty so he’d have said yes to anything. But I’m on his insurance plan in any case. Mum doesn’t know.’

  ‘You mean you lied to her.’

  ‘No. She just doesn’t know. She wouldn’t approve. Politics.’

  ‘And the fact that it’s Giles.’

  ‘Yeah. But it’s okay. I mean, he made me fall off so he can pay. There’s just one thing.’

  ‘What? No more lies.’

  ‘No but…well. They’ll probably think you’re him or my dad or, yes. They’ll probably think you’re my dad and it’d be easier if you let them think that.’

  ‘I can’t do that!’

  ‘You’ve got to.’

  ‘Dido, it’d be against the law. Look, this is ridiculous. I’m sorry. I should never have – I’m turning round at the next roundabout, okay? We’ve still got time. We can whizz back, pick up Eliza then come here again with her. We can ring the hospital and say we’re running late.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll have to. I can’t lie.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Dido, I know you’re used to getting your own way but that’s going to have to change if you want to live with me.’

  ‘I don’t want to live with you!’ she shouted, on the edge of tearfulness.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, wounded and getting angry despite his better judgement. He had always despised parents who let their children manipulate them into spoiling them. ‘Fine. No problem in us going home, then.’

  Dido did not throw a tantrum or scream or lay it on thick to beat him into submission. If she had, resisting her would have been easy. Instead she cried in a terrible, quiet, dry way, more like a terrified child than a frustrated one. Rather than double back at the roundabout, he found himself driving on towards Truro. He stopped, however, in the first lay-by they came to, cut the engine and turned around on his seat to confront her.

  She twisted her face away from him, trying to hide her tears. He saw how the hand nearest him was crushing the seat cushion, clawing into the harsh material in her effort to regain control.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. I haven’t turned back, all right? Dido? Here. Stop. I haven’t got a handkerchief. Have you? You should blow your nose. You don’t want the doctor to see you like that or he’ll think you’re not brave, eh?’

  She muttered something incomprehensible.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not brave,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’

  ‘I hate crying.’

  ‘Another thing you’ve got in common with Luce. So stop. Breathe. Take deep breaths. You’ll soon stop. That’s it. So. What time’s your appointment?’

  ‘Ten thirty.’

  ‘We better get going then. But let’s strike a bargain before we do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll only pretend to be your dad if you treat me like one and tell me what’s going on. I hate secrets. Always have. Can’t be doing with them. My parents always hid things from us and I hated it.’

  Dido
blew her nose, tidied her handkerchief away again and took a few breaths. ‘Teeth,’ she said at last.

  ‘Your teeth. The ones you knocked out?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t knock them out. I told you. It’s something else.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. No. Not really but I think so. That’s why I lied. I knew if I said the teeth had been knocked out they’d be more likely to do X-rays of my jaw as well as my leg and let me see an orthodontist. Especially if Giles was paying.’

  There was something so touching about the way she had mastered the word orthodontist but he suppressed the impulse to touch her, even to pat her arm, because a small part of him suspected he was still being manipulated.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Speaking as your fake father. If it turns out there’s nothing wrong and they were knocked out or fell out naturally, do you promise we can make a clean breast of this and tell your mum everything? Only I haven’t known her long and me telling her lies isn’t a very good footing to get off on.’

  ‘No. I mean it isn’t. So okay.’

  ‘Good.’

  He never had to lie. The nurse who dealt with the insurance details was confused at first because she had called Giles first thing for confirmation that his daughter was coming in and assumed this was Giles before her now.

  ‘No,’ Dido said. ‘This is Mr Polglaze. He’s with my foster mother. She and Giles are separated.’

  ‘Ah. Fine. Sorry,’ said the nurse.

  ‘But I’ve got a parental consent letter,’ she went on.

  ‘No. That’s fine,’ the nurse said. ‘You’re not down for any treatment this morning and we already took the X-rays on Friday, didn’t we? Yes. With your father’s consent. So that’s fine. Wait here please.’

  ‘What letter?’ Pearce muttered as the nurse retreated and he helped Dido into a chair.

  ‘I typed it up on the computer in case,’ she said, patting her pocket. ‘I’ve been doing her signature since I was eight.’

  When the specialist came out and everyone introduced themselves, he was all set to take Dido in on her own but she turned and said, ‘Could he come too, in case there’s anything I don’t understand?’

  ‘Yes. Certainly,’ the orthodontist said, so Pearce followed them in and sat to one side of the consulting room. It looked like any dentist’s surgery, only larger and with more machinery.

  ‘So,’ the orthodontist began. ‘We’ve got your X-rays up here on the screen, Dido. That was quite a bump you had.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No concussion, though.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You told the radiology nurses you lost two teeth.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got them here,’ she reached eagerly into her pocket and produced the same molars she had shown Pearce. If the orthodontist was taken aback, he was too professional to let it show.

  ‘Ah. Excellent,’ he said and made a show of examining them and their roots. ‘Nice healthy teeth. Good girl. Now. If you’d lie back on the chair here while I tip you back and take a closer look. Open wide. That’s it. Good. Goodness yes. Now the other side? Hmm. Yes. Thank you, Dido. Let’s get you back up again. No drilling. Nothing nasty. Now. Those teeth of yours. They didn’t fall out when you came off your bike, now did they?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought not. When did they come out?’

  ‘Two weeks ago now. About. In London. Just before we came away. It didn’t really hurt or anything. They just sort of came loose.’

  ‘And are any of the others loose?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Front or back teeth?’

  ‘Back. At the bottom. Next door to where the others were.’

  ‘That must make it hard to chew.’

  ‘It does a bit. Hard things are hard to chew, like pizza crust.’ She glanced at Pearce.

  ‘And you’re Dido’s stepfather?’ the orthodontist asked him.

  ‘Er, no.’ Pearce said.

  ‘He lives with my mother,’ Dido chipped in. ‘My foster mother. My real mother died when I was a baby so I live with my aunt. No one knows who my father was.’

  ‘Ah. Well. Look over here at the X-rays. Now. This one’s you. See? D Hosken.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this one,’ he hooked up a second one, its name covered over with tape. ‘This one is of another girl your age. And so is this.’ He hooked up a third. ‘Do you see any difference? Particularly in this area.’ He pointed at the jaw bone.

  ‘My one’s thicker.’

  ‘Yes. The thing is your teeth shouldn’t have come out. Unless you were rotting them with sugar, which you plainly weren’t, they should have stayed put for years, maybe all your life. What happened was that your jaw pushed them out by doing some extra growing here and here.’

  Dido reached into her pocket where the teeth had been and produced a small, crumpled colour photograph. ‘Am I going to look like this?’ she asked, very calmly but with real curiosity and passed the picture over.

  Pearce strained to see but caught no more than a flash of colour and skin tone before the orthodontist turned it over to look more closely. He was obviously unnerved. Pearce saw the colour actually drain from his face. This was, he realised, a terrible ordeal for the man, an interview he had been dreading, for all his smooth chairside manner.

  Instead of answering her directly, he asked a quiet question of his own. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘From home. It’s my mother. The dead one. She had cherubism.’

  ‘Yes. Yes she did. She lived near here, didn’t she?’

  ‘When she was young.’

  ‘I thought so. She was quite famous. I met her when I was training, met her as a doctor.’

  ‘Did you really?’ Dido had briefly forgotten her first question. ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Formidable. Very brave and rather frightening. You see, doctors are used to being able to hide things from young patients but there was no hiding anything from her because she’d done her homework. A bit like you.’

  ‘So I do have it?’

  The doctor handed her back the picture, took off his glasses and rubbed his hand across his eyes.

  ‘Christ,’ he whispered, quite audibly, a prayer as much as a curse. For a moment Pearce thought he might start crying. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If she was your mother, and given these X-rays, and your age, then yes. It’s very probable that you do.’

  ‘What will happen to me?’ For the first time since leaving the Land Rover her voice showed signs of strain and wavered slightly.

  ‘Your lower jaw, your maxilla it’s called, will continue growing to an abnormal size. Perhaps to double what it should be. You’ll probably lose some more teeth in the process but it won’t hurt. The rest of you will be growing anyway as you reach your early teens, your legs, and arms, all of you. So you’ll be a bit tired but no more than any other teenager. Your skull may grow a bit too. In a way it shouldn’t, which might push your eyes outward slightly but mainly, as in your mother’s case, it’ll be the lower half of your face.’

  ‘Is there nothing you can do?’ Pearce asked, unable to keep quiet. The orthodontist seemed grateful to be reminded there was another adult present, not just this curious, severe little girl with the pocketful of horrors.

  ‘Yes there is,’ he said, addressing them both. ‘And obviously this is something we’ll need to discuss with you and your parents, all your parents, later on. Your mother refused all treatment,’ he said. ‘I remember. She was known for that. But things are far less crude than they were twenty years ago. Plastic surgery is a real art now. Thanks to the techniques we’ve developed for people hurt in car crashes or by bone cancer we can operate on the bone, on the jaw bone that is, and reduce its size and bring your face size more or less back to normal. I can show you some pictures if you like.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Dido said.

  ‘Maybe later.’

  ‘When would you do this?’ Pearce asked, feeling as he spoke that hi
s voice was choked up with swallowed tears.

  ‘Not for a while,’ the orthodontist sighed. ‘It’s a genetic disorder so we’d have to let it run its course at first, let the jaw grow and finish growing, before we could interfere surgically, otherwise more distortion could follow.’

  They walked back to the Land Rover in silence, except for the rhythmic thud-thudding of the wooden block in the base of the plaster cast. Pearce opened the rear door and passed in the crutches first then lifted Dido up onto the back seat. ‘Can I see?’ he asked. ‘The picture of your mum?’

  ‘Sure.’ Dido took it out and passed it to him. He climbed into the front seat then made himself look hard at the little picture. It was bad but not as bad as he expected and he realised this was because he could see Eliza in the leonine hair and clever eyes and because he was able to read in elements of Dido and Eliza’s characters, to humanise what he saw. He handed it back to her. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thank you. Jesus, Dido. It’s going to be so hard for you.’

  ‘I know.’ Her voice sounded tiny. She was looking at her mother again.

  ‘I don’t want you to leave. I think you should stay with me. I think you’ll do better down here with –’

  ‘Yes,’ she interrupted him.

  ‘But if your mum goes to be a lecturer or whatever –’

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘She might have to.’

  ‘Can’t you tell her you love her?’

  He smiled, patted her plaster cast as that was all that lay to hand. ‘I wish it was that simple.’

  ‘I think I know a way.’

  ‘No, Dido. No more scheming or lying.’

  ‘I won’t have to lie.’

  ‘And when we get back we have to tell her. Tell her everything.’

  ‘She never told me.’

  ‘You got the photo, though.’

  ‘Not from her. I nicked it from Giles’ house. I think she’s scared.’

  ‘No. She can’t be scared of her own flesh and blood. If she didn’t tell you it was because she was hoping it wouldn’t happen.’

  ‘She was scared, then.’

  ‘Oh all right. So she was scared. Do you blame her? She loves you. She doesn’t want bad things to happen to you. She probably hopes they’ll go away. We tell her when we get back.’