A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  He had a gift for entertaining Dido, who was transfixed and lulled by his singing, and he encouraged Eliza to leave her in his care while she spent the morning in the library or worked in her room. When he had an evening in, he would bring back booty salvaged from the covered market at closing time and conjure up elaborate meals. When he entertained, Eliza was simply there too, one of the party, less as consort than sister.

  Apparently he was oblivious to how she felt for him. Whatever interest he might once have had in her had been dispelled by familiarity, and perhaps by seeing her as a mother, so he paraded his beauty before her with heedless cruelty. Padding around the flat making phone calls in nothing but a towel, lolling on her bed to gossip when he came in after she had retired for the night, even on several occasions asking her to rub painkilling gel into one of his shoulder blades.

  Daily proximity only stoked her desire for him however. She did all she could to feel for him as a sister might and made herself dwell on his least pleasing aspects – his fastidiousness, his vanity, a vein that pulsed disturbingly on his temple when he was agitated – only to turn them into the flaws that heightened his attractiveness. She even tried to find something creepily effeminate in the eagerness with which he took on the burden of babysitting Dido but could muster only gratitude.

  If only the rumours which so often irrationally arose about counter-tenors were true, if only he had been gay or sexually incapable, but he regularly negated both possibilities by bringing home women. He bedded them with as little noise or drama as if he had been sleeping alone, and despatched them so promptly that Eliza only once encountered one at breakfast. When she tentatively suggested that there was no need to dismiss them quite so cavalierly, he shrugged and changed the subject as though dwelling on the idea were distasteful.

  She tried in vain to find another man to focus on but they all seemed less evolved creatures beside him, with larger helpings of testosterone perhaps, but not in a good way. More than ever she threw herself on the dusty mercies of study. Her doctorate grew and, as the year wore on, she found herself entirely consumed by the romance of two men, one oblivious, the other long dead. A confidante would have helped, some feminine voice of sound and mocking reason, but her long habit of secrecy had hobbled her capacity for making friends.

  Then her mother announced she was coming on a visit. Eliza had been careful to take regular trips home to Cornwall since Dido came to live with her, to give her a grandmother’s due and forestall such a crisis but her mother had suddenly got it into her head that it was time to repay the compliment. Nothing Eliza said would forestall her, no number of spontaneous lies about having a cold or a heavy burden of teaching.

  ‘I’ll treat myself,’ her mother calmly insisted. ‘I’ll stay in the Randolph. I’ll be no bother. I’ll go shopping and visit the museums and take Dido out in her pram. You won’t even have to come to church with me. Don’t fret so. It would be reassuring for me to see where you’re living.’

  So that was it. Perhaps a spy had told her. Some friend of a friend’s envious daughter? Either that or maternal curiosity simply could not be baffled indefinitely. And here was an end of Eliza’s painstakingly constructed normality. She was not worried about protecting her mother – any assumption that Eliza was living in sin would be inaccurate after all; it was Giles she wanted to shield. If only he had been due to spend time out of town all might have stayed as it was but a meeting was inevitable, if not between Giles and her mother then between her mother and someone else who knew him, and with Dido an ever present prompt. The ugly truth was bound to come slithering out.

  The least she could do, she reasoned, was forestall a wounding revelation. So she told Giles everything: about Hannah and her problem and her death and Eliza’s fear of the repercussions for both Dido and herself, the blight it cast on their futures.

  He was startled and appalled, but compassionately so. He actually came around the table and put an arm across her shoulder, and at his unexpected kindness she broke down. It was as though only now, with someone to bear her up, could she admit how unbearably heavy a burden she had been carrying. Voicing it all at last, she saw with stark clarity how cruel a sentence she and Dido lived under, what careful pariahs fate had made them.

  ‘You mustn’t tell her. Not till you have to,’ he said. ‘She must have as normal and happy a childhood as possible. We’ll tell nobody. When did Hannah first…?’

  ‘Oh.’ She thought back. It was so strange to be talking about this that she shuddered. ‘I don’t know for certain. Nine or ten? Unusually late, apparently.’

  ‘Do you have pictures of her?’

  Of course she had. As though to balance out her daily disloyalty, she kept a small stash of photographs hidden behind ones of Hannah as a child in a folding leather frame. She showed them to him with a kind of pride. Hannah as a teenager, as a young woman, in mountaineering gear. She watched his lovely face as he pored over them and saw not the slightest flicker of feeling. He showed only curiosity so that she half-expected his next words to be she looked like you.

  ‘Could she sing too?’ was all he asked and she found herself describing Hannah in detail – her extraordinary courage, her anarchic sense of humour and terrible instinct for justice. She felt grief afresh and with it a keen sense of how profoundly she had missed her and missed her still.

  As she talked she gradually became aware that he was looking at her, watching her talk rather than listening to her words. He was sitting close, unbearably close. She broke off, tried to break the moment’s intensity with a joke, and he kissed her. When he asked her to marry him she thought she had misheard and he had to repeat the question.

  She protested, astonished, but now it was his turn to talk and it emerged that he had wanted her ever since they first sang together, could not believe his luck in persuading her to move in but had despaired of ever winning her interest.

  ‘I couldn’t even make you jealous,’ he said. ‘I’ve been steeling myself to accept you as a sort of sister but if you’d met someone else I think I’d have had to ask you to move out. It’s been torture. I was beginning to tell myself you must be gay.’

  Even as the vanity of this piqued her, she accepted. Just as she had first held back the truth about Hannah, so now she held back the truth that their passion was mutual. He was so very good-looking, made her feel so very mousy by comparison, that she felt a need to retain at least a tactical upper hand.

  She was still a virgin when they married, with her delighted mother a witness and Dido a bridesmaid-in-arms, at the Oxford Register Office.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he had asked after a clamorous pause on the night she accepted him. ‘But I’d rather wait. I don’t want you to be just another, you know.’

  To her surprise she had not minded in the least. Why not? Why not wait, withhold herself and be special?

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ he asked.

  ‘My mother would be so proud of us,’ she explained.

  Her mother moved from her hotel to their flat so as to babysit while they took a short honeymoon in Paris.

  Sex was at once startling and a disappointment. After such a wait and months of hunger for him, the intimacy of the act was so extreme she was shocked not to feel more altered by it. As he explored her and ploughed into her she felt none of the pain she had read about and feared, only a scorching heat as though she were burning from the inside. Amazed at finally finding his smooth, hard body next to hers, she wanted to explore it in turn but he was quite firm. Using no words, only gestures and a repeated pressure on her wrists, he made it plain that he preferred her to do nothing, not to speak, not to cry out, not even to laugh. Apparently he liked her as a sort of statue, or rather a doll, for he would move her about into different positions but it was always he that did the moving and if she showed initiative and moved an arm or a leg he might frown slightly and rearrange her as before.

  Though inexperienced, she was not ignorant. She went to films and read books. She knew his tas
tes were not normal and that the impulse behind them was repressive and should fill her with womanly indignation. But just as some music and poetry were the more intensely emotional for being formally rigid, so she found her pleasure in his lovemaking wound up in pitch by being constrained to so narrow an outlet.

  ‘You’re happy,’ her mother said when they returned to England. She had seemed worried before they left, Eliza felt, concerned perhaps at the disparity in their looks and worldly ability. Now she examined Eliza almost with satisfaction, as she might the crust of a baking pie. ‘You’ve got that – what do they call it? – that certain glow.’ She returned to Cornwall with the hurtful air of a woman whose account was settled in full.

  And they were happy, both of them, intensely so. Giles pressed her to continue with her doctorate. Her room became Dido’s room. They sang together. They entertained. They acquired a local standing as a couple, he for being beautiful, she for being enigmatic, to the point where his beauty spilled over onto her a little and her air of mystery onto him, so that each was enhanced by the other.

  The early music group he sang with made some recordings for which she was asked to write the sleeve notes. She acquired enough teaching in the music faculty to feel she was paying her way. Dido grew and blossomed into bumptious infancy. They made initial enquiries of a solicitor friend as to what steps they might take for Giles to become Dido’s father officially but took the matter no further because there seemed no point and, as with the drawing up of wills, neither felt ready yet to deal with the possibility of the other’s dying. Although Eliza had explained, and he had accepted, that there was no question of her having children of her own, they felt the need to spread their happiness over a larger area, to have a garden, a spare room, a study. They began to look at larger houses, in cheaper parts of town where married people lived and pushchairs outnumbered student bicycles. They even, once or twice, discussed adopting a child as company for Dido.

  Then he was signed up by an agent and everything changed. Selina Bryant met him by chance at a BBC broadcast of Judith from one of the college chapels and locked onto him with the quiet efficiency of a virus so that Eliza came to doubt that chance had played any part in the process. Eliza found her terrifying. A white Zimbabwean with long, very dry, grey hair that always shadowed two thirds of her face, she was so soft spoken that one was forced to lean close enough to feel the little explosions of her consonants against one’s cheek and was then surprised at the ruthlessness of whatever she was saying. Selina Bryant seemed too mundane a name for her so Eliza used to madden Giles by calling her Carabosse. Behind her back, of course. In her expensive, black-draped presence, Eliza barely dared speak. When she once leant over Dido’s cot so that the shadow of her hair fell across the child sleeping within, Eliza was tempted to wake Dido at once to make sure she was unharmed.

  Convincing Giles his future lay as a soloist and that his looks were wasted in a nerdishly authentic consort, Selina paid for some glamorous photographs, sent him to auditions and landed him a supporting role in a modish revival of Giulio Cesare in a disused London church. He commuted, spending occasional nights in town, which made them both wretched. He was singled out in reviews. He was approached by ENO, offered a contract for more Handel and the Voice of Apollo in Death in Venice. He needed a voice coach now to help him increase his volume and cope with the added strain and the best coaches were all in London. So they moved and, as he earned more money, moved again.

  The idea, supported by Dr Goldhammer, was that she should complete her doctorate long distance. The university, Royal College of Music and British libraries would answer most of her needs and it was easy enough to slip up to Oxford for the odd consultation. London was vibrant compared to Oxford, full of cultural distractions; and Trevescan, the composer who for so long had been the only man in her life, came to resemble a discarded lover, inspiring guilt and therefore irritation by his long-faced persistence.

  She maintained a study, but her Trevescan files slowly slid round from the shelf above her desk to an unregarded dusty corner. Uprooted from the world where her research was valid currency, she dared to wonder aloud what possible use it could be, a blasphemy which proved devastating. She took on more entertaining work that bore more immediate fruit. Through Giles’ widening circle of contacts she met someone who asked her to write more sleeve notes for recordings, someone else who asked her to write short essays for opera programmes. Detective work into the finer points of Elizabethan polyphony gave way to accessible pieces on the sexiness of Monteverdi or self-borrowings in Handel. She was called onto the radio a few times, though never asked back for a live broadcast because her nerves made the experience a torture for everyone involved.

  Dido was growing into more of a person which made Eliza feel more of a mother. It was a short step to relaxing into becoming nothing more than a wife.

  She could date the start of this process to a Sunday lunch party. Up to this point most of his friends had treated her well, been friendly enough. On this day however so little of the conversation was directed towards her that she found herself enumerating it obsessively, counting off the gobbets of small talk afterwards.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, er…’

  ‘Do you sing too, Eliza? Oh.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘See you.’

  ‘Bye!’

  She could perhaps have survived the experience had she not been cooking for once, or had Giles noticed, but his saying what an enjoyable party it had been stunned her into wounded silence. Stripped of status, she yielded. As when answering, ‘Do you sing too, Eliza?’ with ‘No. Actually I’m a…no. I don’t.’ She consciously abandoned Trevescan, abandoned writing even sleeve notes, and tried instead becoming nothing in particular.

  Innocent of or oblivious to its cause, Giles was disconcerted at the alteration in her. Many opera singers had partners in the business, rarely of equal stature, whose relationships were slowly embalmed if not entirely poisoned by a drip feed of resentment and insecurity. He liked the idea, he often said, that they had broken that pattern, and that, as an academic Eliza belonged to a kinder, cooler world than the performing seals of opera. As Dr Eliza Hosken, she could have been a status symbol. As a mere wife and mother she was rather less. He had fallen in love with her as one thing and now she was turning into something else, princess into frog, self-contained, mysterious bookworm into sprawling, lazy, needy wife. On his days off he would cook, clean, take Dido to and from school, all in a not so very discreet effort to leave Eliza free to study. When he found her filling out a crossword, watching an old film or curled up with an undemanding novel, he would make some light comment and she would hear the strain in his voice.

  Ostensibly he bought the dog because Dido wanted one and because he worried that he was putting on weight and would benefit from walks. The covert purpose, she sensed, was to jolt her out of the despondent slough into which she was sliding. It was a chocolate brown standard poodle, big, athletic, intelligent to the brink of neurosis, in desperate need of occupation. Fastidious and principled, Giles persuaded Dido it was better to rescue an adult dog than go to a breeder.

  Curly’s owner had bought him out of sentimentality, but was far too old to give him the exercise he needed, and had driven the dog half-mad by confining him to a small back garden of an even smaller terraced cottage. His liberation came when his mistress was confined to a nursing home after a bad fall – a fall he had surely caused in his bumptiousness.

  He was Curly for only a week, then Giles took Dido to an organ recital by Carlo Curley and the dog promptly became Carlo.

  He was an impossible animal. Relentless. Asleep or exhausted he was docile, healthy and beautiful. The rest of the time he was a constant source of stress. For some reason Venetian blinds drove him into a tail-chasing, cushion-shredding frenzy, as
did the doorbell. Anything that came through the letter box was eaten, any food left within reach – and Carlo’s reach was long – was stolen. If he heard Giles pissing standing up, he had a tendency to piss in sympathy wherever he was, so Giles had to learn to sit down like the women of the household. He barked at cats on the television, and birds, and one particular newscaster. He dug up flower beds then made gritty, muddy nests for himself by jumping on one of the beds and turning in circles until sheets and duvets were wound comfortably to his satisfaction. He hated to be left, so babysitters had to be found who were not afraid of him.

  Worst of all, there was something about the pitch of a counter-tenor voice that made him throw back his head and howl, which Giles couldn’t help but find wounding, try as he might to laugh at the dog’s lack of tact.

  Dido had only ever really wanted a puppy, for all her polite acceptance of the rescue dog option, and soon began regarding Carlo less as a pet than as an irritating brother, best ignored. Giles, for all his protestations of wanting to get fit, was rarely available at the appropriate times. Eliza knew she was being manipulated, that this was a clumsy attempt at a cure, but found she had no choice in the matter. She dealt with the mess, the chewed shoes, the shredded cheques, the unexpected puddles because she was most often the one to find them. Carlo learned to come to her with his lead in his mouth because he knew she was the one most likely to take him out.