A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  ‘I know I’m too old for it,’ she said, ‘but Ron prefers me this way so what can I do?’

  Last night she had worn a white off-the-shoulder thing, far too dressy considering they were en famille, and far too revealing. This morning she had gone to the other extreme and pulled on jaunty white shorts, a tee shirt and white strappy sandals. She changed two or more times a day, ostensibly because it was hard to wear white and not be forever soiling it but secretly, Giles liked to imagine, so she could snatch a few minutes in which to howl into her pillow or bounce naked off the bathroom walls to release her tension.

  He wondered if he was alone in finding that, in his mid-thirties, he regarded his mother with the same unsparing revulsion he had as a teenager. He had only to glance at her to relive his shock at discovering how boys at school rated her a kind of pin-up, to hear again husky voices singing Mrs Robinson as she collected him on Sundays.

  Dido was dutifully playing Swingball with his stepfather. The game had been bought for her just as the piano had been tuned for Giles. She would far rather be flopped in the distant hammock with a book.

  Puffing, dangerously red, Ron was trying not to win but his competitive instincts were too deeply instilled. Dido’s clumsiness and lack of interest offered too great a challenge to even his sense of fair play. Once more he could not resist thwacking the ball, once more it flew off the spring and once more Trudy, who failed to understand the game, gave a sort of cheer as Dido gamely ran off to fetch the thing. She hooked it back onto the spring, politely assisting in her own torment.

  ‘All joy and bliss surround me, My—’ he sang out at her through the glass. He had meant to sing the entire phrase through to love but something in the flourish on surround snagged like a hangnail and he was compelled to go back and repeat the flourish in isolation, smoothing it out, folding it up again, faster, slower, and again in context. ‘All joy and bliss surround.’ Again the snag. He frowned, turned from the window absorbed again. He had been practising for so long, it seemed, that sometimes he felt the process engaged his intellect no more than was a bird’s on grooming its plumage.

  Ignorance occasionally led people to assume that his high voice was artificial, and thus especially strenuous to maintain. It was true that his range, which unusually could tackle roles written for soprano as well as alto castrati, shrank on the occasions when sickness or a bad cold prevented his keeping his voice muscles limber. But then all full-voice, operatic singing, all produced singing as his first teacher had called it, was artificial. As with most counter-tenors, his natural, non-falsetto voice was fairly deep, a lightish baritone, but his high voice felt the more comfortable of the two. On his rare visits to church, for funerals or weddings, it amused him to startle friends by singing hymns at an ordinary blokeish pitch and timbre.

  The English choral tradition, based on a network of cathedral and college choir schools, produced many counter-tenors. Most of them, though, however agile their technique, had essentially domestic voices which could no more carry in an opera house than exquisite real jewellery could compete with fat and gaudy paste when it came to being seen from the back of the upper circle. Giles was lucky. His counter-tenor was big, making up for what it lacked in nuance with its ability to cut through an orchestra of scrubbing strings like any trumpet or triangle.

  Giles had found his gift by accident. When his nice enough treble voice broke he had not minded, looking forward to singing less and playing football more. As in most all-boy schools, however, altos were needed to balance the choir and likely candidates would be press-ganged into squawking a falsetto line whenever possible. There was no option. A choir audition was a compulsory start to each school year until one was fifteen, no more avoidable than vaccinations or Latin. It was no use fluffing the required scales on purpose; the choirmaster was an old hand, adept at telling faked tone-deafness from the real thing.

  Giles remembered the fateful audition vividly. A football game had overrun so he had come straight from the pitch without changing. He remembered the sacrilegious sensation of walking up the chapel aisle in studded boots and his self-consciousness at singing out in an apparently empty space while the choirmaster shouted down instructions from the organ loft. When he asked Giles, after an initial gruff phrase or two, to try a few falsetto notes, he had to explain.

  ‘Pretend you’re imitating a woman singing. Just see what happens…’

  Even then Giles’ falsetto sound was big, but it was like a powerful car in the hands of a non-driver and he began a lifetime’s practice of being entirely dependent on others to show him what to do with it.

  The discovery that he could sing changed his life. It paid his school fees. It landed him a place at a university he could never have entered on academic ability alone. It gave a boy with no particular ambitions a career.

  His darkest professional secret remained that he was gifted with a voice but not naturally musical. He had a horror of sight-reading in public. Every inflexion in every role he sang was taught by a precious teacher and memorised. Directors liked him because he was entirely reliable but he knew that, for all the size of his voice, he would never attract the adulation of a Kowalski or a Scholl because his performance of a piece was the same night after night, too perfectly controlled to admit the risks of genius.

  ‘All joy and bliss surround me,/My soul is tun’d to love.’

  Dido heard him and smiled, completely missing her chance to hit the ball back in a different direction, so that Ron won again. Trudy came to the rescue, patting the cushions on the bench beside her and continuing to chatter as Dido went to sit there and flick through a magazine too. Freed from his killer instincts, Ron took down the Swingball and prepared to mow the lawn.

  Weekends with his mother and stepfather were fragile affairs, painstaking constructions of good manners and enthusiasm forever tearing at their papery edges. By weekend at home, most sons would mean two or even three nights. For Giles that would have proved unsustainable. His practice was to arrive at teatime on Saturday then leave precisely twenty-four hours later. His mother always baked a cake, slices of which framed the visit like sticky bookends.

  He often had performances or concerts to sing on Saturday nights, so visits like this were not a regular thing. Neither side could have borne them if they were. But he felt they were good for Dido, as she saw so little of her maternal grandmother and had so little family life. He worried she was being dragged down and limited by her mother’s straitened style of living and he was not above entertaining wicked fantasies in which, through timely interventions of Justice or Death, he became sole parent.

  On the weekends when Dido was with him, he tried to fill her time with things he felt it might lack when she was with her mother: beauty, sophistication, above all a sense of possibilities, a sense of all the places she might go and all the things she might become. In the event, she often simply watched television or spent an evening in one of the opera houses before he took her out to dinner. She did not like music much, not real music, but she enjoyed the opera because of the costumes and drama and in spite of any sounds the singers made. This had taken time. When she first saw The Magic Flute, in a fluffy, witty production which he had thought the ideal introduction, she kept covering her ears and complained of the singers afterwards, ‘It’s as if they’re putting their insides outside. They’re showing too much!’

  Showing too much was something Giles keenly understood and feared in himself. His father died when he was eight, which sent his mother spiralling into lost years of alcoholism. Boarding school was a kind of prison for other boys; for him it brought blessed release from a mother’s incoherent moods and unwanted confidences, a place of orderly restraint as respite from a damaging lack of boundaries. She saw the light only when, old enough at seventeen to stand up to her, he flatly refused to come home one summer holiday and instead spent two months visiting friends and working on farms. At the end of the summer, realising he had survived and would survive without her dubious protection
, he wrote a short, brutal letter telling her so and telling her why. In an effort to make her just another adult, he addressed the letter to Dear Trudy rather than Dear Mum and had called her nothing else since.

  Stung (she later brightly admitted to having attempted suicide), she took herself off to the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous where she began carefully to rebuild herself and where she met Ron.

  He was an insurance salesman. The kind of man she had raised Giles to ignore. But he worshipped her, in his bluff way, and seemed content never to find out who she really was. They shared a life of unimpeachable normality, in a household shorn of stimulants, took bird-watching holidays, played golf and continued to attend AA together as other couples attended church.

  Oddly she was no longer contrite as she had frequently been when drunk. Instead sobriety made her honest.

  ‘Oh no,’ she blurted out once. ‘I’m not happy. You can’t be happy when you’re always being careful. But I’m calm and I’ve stopped being frightened all the time.’

  Built over an abyss, her life with Ron was a neatly hedged Hell but looked happy and ordinary enough in twenty-four-hour doses.

  There was a lunch of roast chicken and a trifle unredeemed by sherry, then a short walk with binoculars and bird books before yesterday’s cake made a second appearance and set them free. Giles indulged Dido on the train ride home, letting her listen to the radio on his personal stereo and sit with her shoeless feet on the seat opposite. The wind blowing across her from an open window set her uneven pigtails flapping and brought him the tart, nutty scent of hot little girl. It was time she started using a deodorant perhaps. Rather than embarrass her by mentioning this, he had a quiet word with Julia when they arrived.

  Bath times overseen by Julia were a Sunday evening ritual on her precious weekends with them. The general idea was an indulgent fix of girlydom, a scented bath, the run of Julia’s beauty tools and pampering products. As often as not she would come down to supper spangled, painted and crudely curled, smelling like an overheated flower shop. She glowed in Julia’s full attention, however, enjoying the brief sense of sisterly conspiracy and the moment of revelation before the household’s man.

  Julia enjoyed these sessions too. She said it was like having a baby sister to play with, but hearing their laughter from another room gave him a pang of regret; it made him imagine Julia as a mother, a subject he knew better than to pursue.

  Dido had chosen pizza for supper, her side of the bargain being to let him make it from scratch, yeast dough and all, and to eat whatever grown up or healthy toppings he chose to use. While the dough was rising and the girls had fun in the bathroom with crimping tongs, he flopped onto the small kitchen sofa to watch whatever banalities the television could offer. Visits to his mother left him fit for nothing more.

  There were footsteps overhead, the tell-tale thump of Dido’s trainers into his study. The phone rang and he heard Julia answer it at the other side of the house and laugh at something. After a while the footsteps left his study more slowly then came downstairs. He smelt Julia’s crazily expensive bath essence and turned down the noise on the television.

  Seeing Dido pink from her bath, in a cast-off tee shirt of Julia’s, hair crazily crimped, lips glossed, he felt his habitual Sunday night remorse at having wasted so much of the weekend. He felt he had barely seen her, had barely spoken with her. They had not talked about school or her friendships or her dreams and not even her mother – none of the things a father should discuss – and now she had almost left him again.

  ‘Who can that be?’ he asked. ‘Who let a princess in?’

  Once she would have wriggled at this and smiled but tonight she gave only a half-smile, almost a shrug. She was getting too old for such daddy’s-girlisms. She came solemnly over to his chair and leant against his knees, picking at the seams of his chinos with a blue-painted fingernail.

  ‘What is it, kitten?’ he asked.

  She bumped against his knees. ‘Nothing,’ she said and climbed onto his lap, reaching for the remote control and flicking channels idly. She had not done this since she was very small. Perhaps she regretted Sunday nights too. Touched, he put an arm around her and held her close. ‘I saw the photos you’d hidden,’ she mumbled into his shoulder. ‘I went to look for something else and they sort of fell out.’

  Julia had finished her phone call and he heard her sandals clacking across the landing and entering the study overhead. He suffered a convulsion of guilty panic.

  ‘Where did you leave them?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I slipped them back between the books. Why did you hide them?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think you’d like them.’

  If she could see his face, she would know this for a lie; he had hidden the things out of shame.

  Trudy and Ron had given him a digital camera for his birthday and he had surprised himself by spending a whole weekend snapping this and that, enjoying the near silent zoom and intelligent flash, the small, steely neatness of the new toy.

  He had few pictures of Dido and she was changing so fast. He stole into her room, hoping to surprise her deep in her bedtime reading and found her asleep. She had borrowed an unsuitably adult magazine of Julia’s, all blow-job techniques and saucy pictures of half-naked hunks and, reassuringly bored, had fallen asleep over it.

  It was a hot night and she had pushed the bedding down to her waist. Her tee shirt had ridden up so that the golden light from her bedside lamp fell on the scrawny line of her stretched out belly. One nipple was laid bare, puppy fat giving the illusion of an incipient breast.

  His initial reaction was that she looked sweet, enchanting precisely because of the lack of innocence in the discarded magazine crumpled beside her. The act of taking her photograph laid another layer of meaning on the scene, however; when he had fed it into his computer and printed it out a few times, he realised it looked like kiddie porn.

  He had meant to throw the prints away and wipe away all computerised traces, but it was a beautiful picture. A sweet picture. And throwing it away was like throwing her away. He kept every picture anyone had ever taken of her, failed ones included. He had wiped it off the computer memory but could not bring himself to destroy the prints. He had thought, however, that he had hidden them better. Now she had seen, of course, it was too late.

  ‘What did you think?’ he asked her cautiously.

  ‘Dunno,’ she mumbled, face still pressed into his shoulder. He could feel her hand on the back of his head. The curliness of his hair had always fascinated her because hers was flat and needed the electricity of brushing to give it body. When she was little, she never tired of pulling a curl straight then watching it spring back into place. ‘I was a bit scared at first but it’s nice really. I’m glad you kept them for me to see.’

  ‘Oh, darling.’ He held her to him more tightly and pressed his lips into her shampooey hair to kiss her. Her hair smelt intensely clean and disconcertingly like Julia’s. He felt crazily moved, as though she had forgiven him and declared love to him simultaneously. He kissed her again, moving his hand down her back and suddenly she was pulling away from him.

  ‘What?’ he asked but she climbed down and backed away from him, dropping the remote.

  ‘Creep,’ she said. ‘Fucking creep.’

  ‘Dido!’

  She had never sworn at him before. He made to follow her and realised that, thanks to her sitting on his lap, he had a hard-on. He stumbled to a halt, awkwardly rearranging himself, and of course that made it worse. Her eyes narrowed briefly in disgust then she hurried out.

  Giles sank defeated in his chair and listened to her telling Julia that no thanks, she wasn’t hungry and thought she’d go to bed now.

  ‘What was that all about?’ Julia asked, bringing him a glass of wine. She sat on the sofa arm and reached for the TV remote almost exactly as Dido had. ‘Have you had a row?’

  ‘No,’ he said in all honesty.

  ‘She was fi
ne earlier. Very giggly.’ She sighed. ‘Must be reaching that difficult age.’

  ‘She’s not yet ten.’

  ‘Well don’t bite my head off.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s been a long weekend. Trudy was a bit full-on for her, I think. She’s probably just tired.’

  Somehow he got through the evening, ate his share of pizza, drank his wine, made self-exonerating love to his girlfriend. But through it all he was aware of the shut door into the attic bedroom, which was quite possibly locked against him, and the seeming impossibility of saying anything that would not make a terrible situation worse. Most fathers would have knocked on the door, demanded a talk, cleared the air with a joke. They would certainly have brought their partner onside by explaining the situation. But his relationship to Dido was far more delicate and vulnerable than ordinary fatherhood and he was paralysed by guilt that, in misreading a particular situation, she had stumbled onto a general damning truth.

  3

  Julia had grown up in an atmosphere of physical and legal disorder among undisciplined people so had naturally developed an instinct that control was all-important. If a bill was paid on receipt there would be no shaming final demand. If food was eaten carefully there would be no stains. If one thought a sentence through before beginning to speak it there was less risk of ill effect. If a room was kept tidy, if everything was returned to its proper place after use, if no unpleasant task was ever deferred, life became less nebulous, its unavoidable problems uncluttered by needless ones.

  She had never understood girls who complained that their mothers were always on at them to tidy their rooms, since her room had always been the only tidy one in the house, a small, still refuge of neatly labelled shoeboxes and underfilled, orderly drawers. Now that most households had nobody keeping house full time, a new career had arisen which would have suited her perfectly. She could have been a clutter counsellor, paid to show people how to remove every possession from a room, put only one fifth of them back and survive the trauma. Julia knew better than to say so aloud but she intuitively understood the appeal of little clips to keep socks in pairs through the wash, of drawer dividers to keep bras and knickers untangled, of electronic diaries that reminded one when to post a birthday card.