A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  Giles had glimpsed Julia on his way in but had not greeted her. They had established long ago that the best way of avoiding any awkwardness in his being at once her lover and her boss’ client was for her to ignore him when she was working. She would be going out soon, to grab a sandwich in Marylebone.

  In much the same spirit they had both learnt never to refer to Selina’s girlfriend during working hours. It was nothing to do with lesbianism, simply that, when she was working, Selina regarded any allusion to her domestic life as undermining and the air would crackle with unvoiced displeasure for half an hour afterwards.

  ‘So, sweetness.’ She was all attention now. She swept her long, dry hair back off her face. Giles always expected to see sparks in it. ‘First you need to sign these. There, there and there.’ As he signed each form, she slung it in the out-tray by her door. From time to time during any meeting with Selina, the door would open slightly without anyone knocking and a hand would reach in to whisk away whatever papers lay in the tray. ‘Bad news and good news. And possibly excellent news. Depending.’

  ‘Bad first?’ Giles suggested.

  ‘Sure? Okay. Nothing at ENO in next year’s season. Nada. I’d hoped they were reviving Ariodante but they’re not. Not yet, because Georgia isn’t free for it and they want you both. But what really pisses me off is that they’re reviving JC without you.’

  He shrugged, wounded, as she knew he would be. Worse than wounded. He immediately wondered who they had hired for the revival of what he had come to think of as his production, an old hand or a threatening new talent? A pit seemed to open in his stomach and the room felt far too small and everything too close for comfort. Selina included. ‘Good news?’ he prompted her.

  ‘Good for you, this is. It makes me next to nothing, of course, but no ENO season leaves you free to tour the lute songs with Douglas, which’ll tie in with the CD’s release. It’s looking quite good, actually. Aix is a definite date and Edinburgh and some festival in Leiden. We’ll see. Early days.’

  Selina hated him doing anything like chamber music because it didn’t tally with her view of who he should be. Secretly Giles was quite pleased to have a chance to establish a different, quieter side to his career. He had no illusions about the brutal shortness of many counter-tenors’ operatic shelf lives. He might be lucky and stay the course as long as Bowman but as insurance he needed to keep other avenues open, especially on the Continent, where the baroque music scene remained in robust good health.

  ‘Now,’ Selina went on. ‘The possibly excellent news is that you did a better job last night than you realised.’

  ‘I didn’t know I was doing any job last night.’

  She dismissed his disingenuity like so much smoke from in front of her face. She never lit up when her singers were present (unless drunk) but there was always a clean Hermes ashtray on her desk, always with one of the little gold devices in it she liked for easing stubbing out when one had nails to think of. She tapped the ashtray now, nail tips tinkling softly against the porcelain until it was neatly squared off with the desk’s corner. One half expected the hand of another spectral minion to fly out of one of the drawers to replace it with a fresher one.

  ‘Grover didn’t say a word about it last night but he has a Midsummer Night’s Dream crisis.’

  Giles’ mind darted back to the previous evening and the few things he remembered Grover saying. A film director who had only recently broken into opera production in his native Sydney, Grover was about to make his London debut in the field with a production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Giles had registered this much, but only enough to feel piqued at not being considered for the lead role, one of the few such for counter-tenors in the twentieth century repertoire.

  ‘But he said they were about to start rehearsing!’ he said.

  ‘They are. And Robby’s dropped out at the last minute.’

  Robby Wilson was Giles’ principal rival, of the same vintage and training but Robby had recently found a truly international audience with an extraordinarily bold CD on which he sang romantic mezzo soprano songs by Schubert, Chausson, Faure and Brahms which underwent a subtle chemical change when sung at pitch by a man. The CD was still riding high in the classical charts and Giles was beginning to worry that Selina felt she had backed the wrong man. Bookings for counter-tenors were so rare compared to ones for tenors and baritones that there was only room for one on her books. The only advantage Giles had was castability; Robby Wilson was chubby, pasty, short and not even an artfully trained beard could conjure planes from a face of lard. He looked, as Selina once pointed out, like the screechy eunuch of Handel’s nightmares.

  Giles’ heart was light again. ‘Is he sick?’

  Selina fell back to tapping the ashtray. ‘Let’s just say there were personal differences. Anyway, Giles, it’s you Grover would like to see for a director’s meeting this afternoon.’

  ‘But I –’

  She held up a hand. ‘It’s not an audition. He knows your voice, as does Simon.’

  ‘Simon’s conducting?’

  ‘Sure. Besides, we all know you’d be doing them a favour this close to rehearsals starting. But Grover wants to try you out alongside his Puck and he has, well, certain physical priorities.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Grover’s not a musician, sweetness. We both know that. He made his name in rock videos and multiplex-packers. His values are a bit leftfield. This will be a wild production.’

  ‘He’s kept it very quiet.’

  ‘Hasn’t he. Because it’s going to be huge. Well. As huge as Britten’s managed to be for a few decades. And it would be your Garden debut, my darling, and there’s an extremely lucky precedent for last minute replacements there.’

  ‘Who else is he seeing?’

  ‘He plays a tidy game but as far as I can make out, just you. Do you need a score? We could pick yours up on the way.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said, tapping his head. ‘That’s one of the few that went in here and stuck.’

  As the cab drove them along Marylebone High Street, Giles spotted Julia. As he thought, she was doing a sandwich lunch. The surprise was that Villiers Yates was doing it with her.

  ‘Is everything okay between you and her?’ Selina never missed a thing.

  ‘Yes. Everything’s fine,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason, really. She’s a special girl.’

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘It’s just that, if ever there were difficulties between you for some reason…’ Her voice trailed off suggestively. ‘I mean, these things happen in this business, especially if you have to travel a lot. If there were difficulties, I’d hate you, either of you, to feel you had to stick together simply because of the agency. It wouldn’t be the first time. We could weather it.’

  ‘Everything’s fine, Selina.’

  But she was suddenly calling out to the cabbie. ‘You’ll need to take the next right or we’ll get snarled up in the roadworks on the next block. Please don’t argue with me. I’ve been taking this route all week. Thank you.’ She shut the window between them and the cabbie then grinned at Giles. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘because I love you both.’

  There was a growing crowd outside the stage door; girls mainly, who should have been in school, and a sprinkling of adult men perhaps unwittingly dressed like teenagers.

  ‘What the hell?’ Giles wondered aloud as they pushed through. There was much withering talk about classical artists crossing over into more popular forms but this was ridiculous. ‘Who’s this in aid of?’

  ‘Not an opera singer.’ Selina cast a faintly hungry eye over the eager crowd. ‘Grover’s Puck. There must have been a leak.’ She had a quick word with the men on the reception desk. ‘I’ll wait for you here afterwards,’ she told Giles. ‘I won’t cramp your style. You’ll be swell. He’ll be through for you in a second. Just remember he’s a wild child and go with whatever he suggests, okay?’

  She kissed him dryly for
luck then slipped outside for a smoke and another analytical look at the fans.

  Giles sat on a sofa, watching men and women, impossibly thin dancers, beer-bellied stage crew passing in and out of some swing doors kept in near constant motion. The old backstage sensation took hold of him, half-thrill, half-nausea. His teeth chattered slightly as adrenalin began to course through his system and he forced himself to yawn then repeated the movement a few times with his mouth shut, feeling the muscles in his throat stretch and relax as his soft palate shifted. Luckily he had fitted in at least forty minutes’ warm-up and practice before leaving the house for the agency.

  Suddenly Grover was there, big-pawed, stubbled, his shaven head and leather jacket less startling in this setting than he might have hoped. ‘Hey! My fucking saviour!’ He kissed Giles’ cheek and pulled him into an entirely unaffectionate hug before leading him through a warren of corridors and steps to the rehearsal space. ‘This is so great of you. I didn’t like to say anything last night. Didn’t want to put you on the spot. I mean, you have your pride, yeah?’

  Giles simply smiled.

  Grover froze a moment, examining his face closely. ‘Fuck,’ he muttered. ‘I wish we were filming this. Hey! Maybe we can! You’re gonna be perfect. It’s that…that chilly Pom thing. Fucking A. Sorry. Okay, Giles. Have you warmed up?’

  ‘Yup. Earlier on. I’m fine.’

  ‘Okay. So what I want is for you just to sing yourself into it a bit. Lose Giles, right, and get into fairy mode. And look, this isn’t pretty. No gossamer. These guys are primal; our fears and cravings, okay? Sing whatever bit you like. Charlie Boy there’s got the score. Whenever you’re ready, okay?’

  He took a few bounding steps to the back of the rehearsal space and threw himself into a chair which skidded slightly.

  Giles approached the répétiteur at the piano. ‘What do you think?’ he murmured.

  ‘Let’s be obvious,’ the répétiteur suggested.

  ‘Wild thyme?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Giles walked to the middle of the taped-out stage area, nodded to the répétiteur who played the few transitional bars before Oberon’s one big solo. Taking his cue from what Grover had hinted at, Giles thought Englishness, thought frost, thought C S Lewis’ Snow Queen. ‘I know a bank,’ he sang, ‘Where the wild thyme grows.’

  Grover jumped up, running forward, interrupting. ‘Look!’ he shouted, holding out his beefy forearm. ‘Gooseflesh. I’ve got gooseflesh already! This is gonna be great. Now Giles, are you feeling brave?’

  ‘Er. Fairly,’ Giles said uncertainly.

  ‘Okay. Shirt off, shoes off, everything off and sing it again. Only kidding. The shirt’ll do. Everyone! Shirts off. Keep the poor guy company!’ He tore off his shirt and rubbed his hairy chest with relish. The répétiteur muttered mutinously but carefully unbuttoned to reveal monastically pale flesh. Giles peeled off his shirt and tossed it to one side. Luckily the room was warmed by the summer sun burning in at high windows or he might have felt shivery to the point of throwing up. Unasked, he kicked off his shoes and socks.

  He felt surprisingly good. Like many singers, he had always relished the chance to perform in bare feet; a sense of being rooted, earthed, was always inexplicably helpful.

  ‘Thank you,’ Grover said, staring. ‘Thanks very much. Now. Take it from the top again and Giles?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Remember how pissed off you got last night when we got talking about paedophiles. Think of yourself not as you – nice, normal, beautiful Giles – but as a guy whose idea of love is to control and whose idea of sex is being allowed to watch. Now go.’

  Giles began to sing again. Outside there was a sudden burst of cheering and screaming. A few minutes later the rehearsal room door opened and Giles saw who all the fuss was over. Dewi Evans.

  Once the self-consciously ‘bad’ member of a million-selling, all-Welsh boy band, Dewi was now a ridiculously popular solo artist. He made a great play of flirting aggressively with his gay following while Grover was one of those gay men who assumed that all men were vain enough to be persuadable; they were made for each other. This was casting genius.

  ‘Keep going keep going!’ Grover shouted as the répétiteur broke off at the piano.

  ‘There sleeps Titania,’ Giles sang on as the piano came in again, ‘Sometime in the night, lulled in her dreams with dances and delight.’

  Grinning from ear to ear, Dewi Evans tore off most of his clothes too and sank to the floor at Giles’ feet. He was as dark and ferally hairy as Giles was pale and smooth. He winked broadly as he put a tattooed hand on Giles’ calf and stared up in obedient adoration. He held the pose as Giles sang to the end of the aria. Then they looked expectantly out to Grover, who was staring from his perch on a seat back. Slowly a smile broke over Grover’s craggy face.

  ‘This turns out better than I could devise.’ he said. ‘Dewi, Giles. Giles, Dewi.’

  Dewi took his grasp off Giles’ leg to jump up and shake hands. Even standing, he barely reached Giles’ shoulder. ‘Wish I could sing like that,’ he said in his lilting Rhonda accent.

  ‘Wish I had your sales figures,’ Giles said.

  ‘I won’t mess with the music,’ Grover assured Giles as he saw him back to the stage door area while Dewi slipped out another way, ‘but visually this is not going to be Britten as you lot are used to it. Are you in?’

  ‘I’m in.’

  Another kiss. Another unaffectionate hug.

  16

  The agency occupied the first floor of a house off Marylebone High Street. The building belonged to Selina’s girlfriend, Peggy, who was said also to own several former slums in areas like Southwark and Clerkenwell. She let out the ground floor to Tobit Hart, the couturier. The upper floors of the house were her and Selina’s home. Early arrivals at work would occasionally catch whiffs of their mysterious domesticity, grinding coffee beans, a cat’s paws scrabbling in a litter tray, a simmering tiff, before Peggy left for the City and Selina came down and closed the door to their realm firmly behind her.

  The site was cleverly chosen. With good shops and restaurants on the doorstep, plentiful taxis and the Tube an easy walk away, it ensured a happy workforce who were thus less likely to demand unfeasible pay rises.

  Trainees who proved their mettle and were made associates of the firm were then placed on a performance-related bonus system; the better and more numerous the deals they brokered for their clients, the better their annual bonus.

  Julia loved her work. When Selina first took her on she used to dawdle on her way from the Tube, ogling shop windows and estate agents’ details, fantasising about living in the area like Selina, but in a tiny attic flat. Now she was comfortably established elsewhere, she still felt a buzz of pleasure that she was working in this street and not somewhere noisier like Hammersmith or Holborn. Pausing to buy a bunch of flowers for her desk, exchanging a smile with Tobit Hart on the doorstep or overhearing colleagues’ Russian or German phone calls, she would see herself vividly, as in the film of her life, and be gratifyingly reminded of how far she had progressed.

  Like any nunnery or girls’ boarding school, the agency soon drew new arrivals into the same ovular cycle. Julia had never stayed long enough in any other office to experience this. Intensely private, she had been aghast at first but she soon came to see it as a relief. There was no overt discussion, nothing tasteless, but as the cramped little bathroom beside the stationery cupboard took on a distinctive mineral tang and the communal jar of painkillers was set out beside the kettle there was a comforting sense that one had companions in indignity and did not need to explain oneself.

  The painkillers were out that morning, and the air was lightly coloured by one of Selina’s Canovas scented candles and there was a certain amount of unnecessary crossness. All of which made Julia keenly aware that for once she was excluded from the monthly ritual. She tried to feel uncomfortable about this, even guilty, but had difficulty in repressing her sense of well-b
eing. The secret kept bubbling up within her. Only Selina’s grouchily accusing, ‘You look well,’ and the superstitious fear of premature disclosure kept her from confessing. Her sense of smell, too, had become unusually sharp so that the smell of Selina’s candle brought on sudden waves of nausea, so she did not look or act well for long.

  She had a full day but behind all the talk and negotiations lay a quivering anticipation that tonight she would tell Giles. All that remained was to confirm her suspicions with a pregnancy testing kit. With everyone spending longer than usual in the bathroom, it would be easy enough to smuggle one back to the office and use it before going home. She bought one in her lunch hour.

  She had meant to buy some sandwiches to eat at her desk because the problem with the Israeli Philharmonic remained unsolved and she had little time left to fit everything in. Villiers was in the sandwich bar too – he had been examining something in a Wigmore Street violin dealer’s for Mr Mister, apparently – and insisted she join him for a post-mortem of the dinner party. She tried to plead work pressures but he was adamant and she knew it was safer to placate him. So she sat at his table. She could eat as swiftly there as at her desk, after all.

  Again he grilled her about Giles. What had Giles said about him? What had he done to offend him? Giles was such an old friend and so on. She did not like to say that the cruel fact was that Giles never spoke of Villiers from one week to the next and that last night he had said no more about him behind his back than he had to his face. As a diversionary tactic, she left the table to buy them each an espresso.

  When she came back Villiers was looking more than usually mischievous and she saw that the pregnancy testing kit was visible at the top of her bag.

  ‘There’s something you’re not telling me, Girl,’ he teased.

  ‘Oh don’t be silly,’ she laughed, pushing it back out of sight. ‘I bought it for Shawna, at work. She’s on reception and couldn’t get out.’

  ‘Balls. No one buys these for other people, any more than blokes buy each other condoms.’