A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  ‘I’ll cope,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘because I’m glad you’re here. Truly I am.’ But she had underestimated how absent and abstracted he meant.

  Rehearsing the play was more than a nine-to-five job. Routinely rehearsals spilled over into trips to the pub or on to a restaurant. The actors and playwright, he explained, were like insecure teenagers needing constant reassurance. He had to be there for them and it was vital to the production’s cogency that he forge a temporary sense of family with them. She wondered how many social groups Paul thought of as children besides opera singers, actors and playwrights. Ex-wives? Mistresses? All women? But this was a passing cynicism only.

  With Dido away at playgroup Eliza drifted around his big house, not snooping exactly but piecing together pieces of his life from photographs, postcards, carelessly discarded letters. When Dido was there, Eliza worked hard at making the strange house feel like a home for them both.

  Paul had lived there for years – before, during and after his failed marriage – and seemed oddly oblivious to his surroundings. Occasionally seeing it all through her eyes, he would say,

  ‘It’s terrible. We should get someone in. What do you think? Move the kitchen? Make this an upstairs sitting room?’

  But he would soon lose interest and nothing would be done.

  There were stacks of ill-assorted paintings against walls, unhung because he had not got around to changing their frames or could not muster the focus to decide where to hang them. Everywhere were the traces of things his wife had taken when she set up home elsewhere – the ghost of a picture in a square of less faded paintwork, the memory of a chest of drawers in a quartet of compressions on a carpet, even, in one room, light fittings she had removed leaving naked bulbs on dangerous-looking naked wires. He saw no reason to hide these traces. Dusty shelves were crammed with books in so little order that browsing for even a novel was oddly dispiriting and finding anything as useful as a map or a dictionary a near impossibility.

  He had never learned to cook, so the kitchen cupboards were haunted by ancient rice and time-faded spices; gestural offerings left by long departed guests. He was a hypochondriac so the bathroom cabinet spewed patent medicines. Marie, a young woman from an estate near Giles’ house, came twice a week to swab hard surfaces with bleach and walk the Hoover around but Paul did not like her to dust because it made him sneeze and aerosol propellant gave him sore eyelids.

  There was the sense, the smell, of neglect everywhere, particularly as one sank into a chair or lay on a bed. Had Eliza been a different kind of woman, she would have taken advantage of Paul’s long absences to make improvements, replace dead light bulbs and moribund houseplants, hang some pictures, rearrange some furniture. She did try, if only to help Dido settle in, but the effort overwhelmed her and invoked a lingering sense that she lacked sufficient influence to impose herself.

  She had a dream in which she showed her father around the place and he turned to her in the last room, astonished, and exclaimed,

  ‘But this is a house of death!’

  At last a letter arrived from Giles in response to her departing note.

  He did not rage. There were no exclamation marks, not even trails of angry dots. He was fairness itself. Her letter came as a surprise, he said, although he was aware things had not been brilliant between them lately. He did love her, he said, whatever she might think, but perhaps he could never love her enough or in the way she needed. He was happy she had found happiness. He would not stand in her way if she wanted a divorce. He was sure Paul would make a great father figure to Dido. To help him adjust, he had accepted an invitation to sing in Lyon and Paris but would be back in six weeks if she needed to discuss anything.

  His failure to send love to Dido wounded Eliza more than the passionless ease with which he gave her up. She lied. She had to. Giles sends you his love. It helped that he had gone away, however. It gave a ready answer if Dido asked to see him, and would ease her through the domestic upheaval. After the first night’s tearfulness, Dido had showed remarkably little upset over the change in her life; she was already a level-headed child.

  Eliza did her best. She reassured Paul by setting up an office in the room he suggested, arranged her files and took on some CD booklet commissions. Reviving her Trevescan research was unthinkable however, in a house of unexecuted plans and neglected wishes. She took Carlo to the Heath less and less, not because it had associations with her meeting Paul but because it now reminded her of Giles. Instead they made do with a toxic little park beside the defunct neighbourhood church.

  Carlo disliked the new house. He would not settle in his bed but would follow Eliza around the house, flopping on the floor when she sat at last and watching her reproachfully until she moved again. He irritated Paul by demanding to sleep in their bedroom, where he had so often lain panting and muddy while they made love, then punished them for his banishment by repeatedly shitting on the already murky bathroom carpet.

  With astonishing confidence and no warning, Paul returned the dog to Giles after a man to man chat and bought Dido a teddy as replacement.

  ‘The dog’ll be happier there,’ he said, ‘And he’ll cheer Giles up.’

  She could not rid herself of the sense that she had made a huge mistake and that her presence in this great, dusty house was only provisional, like the placing of the unhung paintings. This was confirmed, it seemed, by the people – many of them glamorous, household names – who rang for him when he was out and showed neither surprise nor curiosity at her answering the phone. When an especially famous actress did pause to ask, in her famously smoky tones, ‘So who are you, dear?’, Eliza found she could only say, ‘I’m Eliza. I…I live here.’

  To which the actress said, ‘Oh. I see,’ in a bored way, evidently taking her for some sort of pushy lodger, a poor relation, perhaps, or impoverished drama student.

  Paul’s excited talk of working trips to Sydney and New York did not become a reality any more than his initial suggestion she research play texts for him or meet his host of famous friends. Some of the famous friends came back with him one night, an unheard of event, after an awards ceremony. Eliza was upstairs spooning Tixylix into Dido – they both had streaming colds – and felt obliged to stay upstairs in hiding until there were loud farewells and the front door thudded an all-clear.

  Every third weekend the ex-wife, who was an Antonia, called round to drop off Paul’s son, Simon. Having looked her fill the once, she showed no more curiosity than the actresses. The son was sweet enough to Dido but relapsed into adolescent silence if Eliza tried to draw him out. Still, she came to look forward to his visits since they were a guarantee that Paul would be present and keen for them all to do things ‘as a family’.

  As the day for the play’s opening drew near, she began to worry that she had nothing good enough to wear. She went to the hairdresser, at least, and fixed up a babysitter for Dido. Then it became plain that he had no more thought of involving her in the first night than he would an au pair.

  ‘We’ll all be talking shop,’ he told her. ‘And everyone will be neurotic as hell. You know what actors are like. But no, of course you must come. I’ll have them leave you a ticket with front of house. Do you want to bring a friend?’

  She cried off at the last minute, nerves failing her, blaming a no-show from the babysitter. He came home rather drunk, for him. His snoring woke her soon after dawn and she lay there in the grey light and it was as though a cruel fairy, or Selina Bryant no less, had waved her blighting wand. Instead of her beautiful, gold haired prince, she was in bed with an old man who smelled of red wine, was balding, not in a good way, and had patches of grey fur on his shoulder blades.

  From there it got rapidly worse. She began to dwell obsessively on unflattering details. He began each day by pissing with the door open and invariably produced a sad little mew of a fart halfway through. He never used soap in the shower, either, but seemed to think it enough that he let the foam from hi
s (hair-thickening formula) shampoo trickle over the rest of him.

  Heart racing, she rang Giles when she knew he’d be in. But a woman answered and said he was practising and should she fetch him. Not recognising the voice – his mother stayed very occasionally but this certainly was not her – Eliza echoed the famous actress. She forced a little woman of the world chuckle that actually came out rather squeakily and piped,

  ‘Sorry, but who are you?’

  ‘I’m his girlfriend,’ the woman said sharply. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Oh…’ Eliza crumbled. ‘It was just Eliza, tell him,’ and she left a number.

  Giles never rang, so perhaps she had caused a row.

  This time she did not leave in an impulsive hurry. For Dido’s sake she planned the move with military precision and forethought. She presented herself at the council housing offices, explaining that it was impossible for her and her daughter to remain with her husband, that they had a temporary arrangement but that it wasn’t clean and it couldn’t last. A flat was found on the same estate as Marie, Paul’s cleaner. (When they passed on the stairs, Marie looked straight through her, not recognising her so violently torn from context.)

  Eliza took possession of the keys and, for the next fortnight, after dropping Dido off, spent the morning decorating. She had next to no money but she wanted it to be perfect. She had seen enough of dinginess. She was quite new to decorating but found the most cheerful colours on the reduced price shelf and slapped them up with grim determination. She made Dido a proper bedroom – a little girl’s room – with matching (slightly short) curtains and bedspread. She shopped with Paul’s occasional handouts then squirrelled food away in the fridge and cupboards. She would have felt like a murderer if only he had cared but he blithely set off for a working weekend in Paris leaving her free to move out as openly as she chose.

  Dido liked her new bedroom and, with a child’s wisdom, edited out the social disadvantages of their new address and saw only that it meant they had a balcony and lived higher than the birds. She enjoyed riding in the lift.

  ‘Paul was only temporary, wasn’t he?’ she said with devastating accuracy. The only reassurance she required was that they would not be moving again, for it transpired she had a box containing a complicated arrangement of things she called her treasures which she did not care to unpack lightly and which had remained packed up all their time at Paul’s house.

  Eliza had intended to leave Paul a note or write him a letter after the move but when she sat down with pen and paper she found there was nothing to say beyond what he could see for himself, that they had gone. She did not feel sorry for him since she could not see how he would miss her presence. Short of hiring a private detective, he had no way of tracing her. Her new phone number was ex-directory and, for all that he occasionally directed plays that were strenuously grim in their social outlook, his colonial childhood had left him with a cheerful trust in a constant supply of people to service his needs and a complacent mental ability to edit out vast sections of society about which he had no curiosity. He would assume she had left him for another man’s protection. A lone mother’s bolt-hole in a council estate was the last place he would think of looking for her.

  15

  Giles was doing sit-ups. The house had a couple of fairly dingy basement rooms whose barred windows afforded a squint at the paved area on either side of the steps to the front door. One housed Giles’ music library and an old upright on which he could stab out notes where necessary. The other was a utility room to which Julia had banished the rowing machine and abdominal board which had once cluttered a spare bedroom.

  Time was when Giles had quite unfairly managed to maintain a flat, even washboardish stomach simply by leaning back from the knees for two minutes whenever he used his electric toothbrush.

  Loading the washing machine that morning, however, he had noticed a slackness in the waistbands of his underwear that spoke of strain on the elastic as much as age of material. He had observed, too, a worrying tendency Julia and others had developed of letting a hand linger above his hips when they hugged him, as though comforted by a cosy sleekness there.

  So he was resolved on performing a hundred sit-ups before breakfast. He had found that these were most effective inflicted on an empty stomach. Legs locked around the abdominal board’s cushioned supports, he had done fifty straightforward ones and was just starting fifty twisty ones, touching, or aiming to touch, alternate elbows to their opposite knees.

  He recognised Dido’s legs, black socks beneath the navy-blue skirt of her uniform, and broke off, hurrying upstairs. Julia was still preparing to leave for work and he wanted to intercept Dido before she did.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ he shouted up the stairs as the doorbell jangled. He heard the hairdryer switch off.

  ‘What?’ Julia called.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m there.’

  The hairdryer started again. Giles opened the door.

  ‘Hi. This is a nice surprise.’

  ‘Yeah, well, sorry to bother you,’ Dido said. She headed past him into the kitchen where she finally met his eye. ‘I need some money.’ Her expression was deadly serious.

  ‘Sure.’ He had reached for his wallet before he started wondering why. He imagined playground protection rackets, alcopops, drugs.

  ‘Are you in trouble?’ he asked.

  ‘No!’ she said indignantly. ‘It’s…’ She paused and he saw that whatever came next was a lie. ‘It’s the phone bill again. We’ve been cut off.’

  The cash would go on food, probably. He knew that, with a child’s acuity to the niceties of poverty, Dido sensed there was bravado in a cut-off phone but shame in an empty fridge. Giles sighed and counted out the notes for her quickly, grateful he had been to the cashpoint recently and happy Julia was not there to witness the quick transaction. His maintaining an estranged wife’s chaotic household was a bone of contention between them. She did not care that it was cheaper this way than involving lawyers and being saddled with an officially fixed maintenance level. Julia only saw the galling, continuing link between them and wanted it severed. She could not begin to believe that someone could be so unworldly, so unaware of her legal due as Eliza was and so looked for darker motives.

  ‘Thanks.’ Dido stuffed the notes in her breast pocket.

  Julia came swiftly through the hall, picking up her bag and the newspaper she would glance over on the train into town. ‘Hi,’ she said, seeing who it was. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ Dido told her.

  ‘We missed seeing you yesterday morning.’

  ‘Sorry. I had stuff to do at the flat before school.’

  ‘Thought you might.’

  He noticed how diplomatically Dido never used the word home.

  Julia’s perfume reached him – Arpège. He loved those old-fashioned touches in her. She would never have worn a scent one saw advertised. And Arpège was unofficey. It spoke of indolence and mistresses which, had she more sense of humour, he might have taken as a witticism on her part. Addicted to heels, she was clutching her shoes in one hand to save damaging their floors.

  ‘I’m late,’ she said. ‘Bye both. Walk you to school, Dido?’

  ‘Er. No thanks,’ Dido said, so untactfully that Julia smiled.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Giles. Don’t forget.’

  ‘I know. Selina at eleven.’

  They listened as Julia opened the front door, paused to step into her shoes on the doorstep then closed it behind her.

  ‘Is everything okay really?’ Giles asked.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Breakfast?’

  ‘No thanks. Better go. I’ll take a banana. Look.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I won’t be round next weekend.’

  ‘Oh.’ He knew better than to show he was hurt. ‘Okay.’

  She said nothing further but went out to the hall where Livia had just let herself in to start the washing up. Dido took advantage of this to sl
ip away. ‘Hi. Bye,’ she called, and was gone.

  ‘Morning, Giles,’ said Livia, her Bajan combination of lilt and dignity making him think of church and all the things he had left undone.

  He realised he had given Dido only what she had asked for and thought of running after her with another twenty pounds, then realised he now had too little cash to pay Livia so would have to go to the cashpoint anyway.

  ‘Sorry about the mess, Livia,’ he said. ‘But you know how it is. I’ll get out of your way.’

  It was only as the cashpoint at Highbury Corner drooled out notes into his hand that it occurred to him that the sudden, almost defiant demand for money might have no bearing on Eliza’s hopelessness at budgeting and everything to do with the photographs he had cut up last night.

  ‘Giles, come in. Sit down. That was such a ball last night. So sweet of you both. I won’t be a second. Sorry. Sit.’

  Selina waved him over to her little leather sofa and indicated the jug of coffee, bottle of chilled water and plate of buttery cookies. Selina never smelled of anything, unless steel or paper had a smell. Hot contracts, perhaps, or a whiff of boot leather. She sat back behind her desk and clicked a call she was taking back off the mute setting.

  ‘Jemima? What can I say, darling? I don’t believe it. You can’t be that old! Good grief! But look, I can’t be there. It’s crazy and my values are fucked but there it is. I can’t. Forgive me? You’d better, but we’ll talk soon, sweetness and I’ll see what I can do about Nimbus and bloody Rita…You think? Hmm. Okay. I love you. Bye.’

  Selina always said she loved you at the end of her calls but in a completely flat, nearly ferocious way. It was one of the few times her Zimbabwean heritage showed beneath its London overlay. That, and the way she pronounced okay. And her manner when placing any kind of order anywhere.