A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  She had left everything to Dido. She had even slipped in a little pointed reference to ‘my granddaughter, who has no father to support her.’ She was not a rich woman and had long made a habit of giving much of what she possessed to charity. There was the house, however, whose deeds were in her name, not her husband’s.

  If they decided it was best, the solicitor murmured, they might sell the house and invest the funds in a trust he could administer on Dido’s behalf, paying out a monthly allowance until she was eighteen.

  Knowing nothing of the letter, apparently, Kitty was mildly indignant on Eliza’s behalf. It was some relief to learn that the surviving daughter had been cast off in respectable privacy; Eliza had occasionally pictured a ritual anathema being pronounced on her by the assembled congregation. She had even fed the fancy by looking up the Service of Commination in the Prayer Book. For now is the axe put unto the root of the trees, so that every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire…His fan is in his hand, and he will purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the barn; but he will burn the chaff with unquenchable fire.

  ‘She can’t have been thinking straight,’ Kitty said, when they rejoined her downstairs and Eliza told her the news.

  ‘I can assure you she was quite cogent,’ the solicitor insisted. ‘I went over the implications of this with her several times.’

  Eliza was relieved. For Dido to have her own allowance, a blessed pool that could not be dipped into for electricity bills or trips to the supermarket, but which could cover the cost of her clothes and shoes, music or driving lessons, all the things Eliza could not always afford, was far more reassuring than a sudden legacy of her own would have been. As was having that pool administered by a professional.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she interrupted Kitty’s insistence that she contest the will as unfair. ‘It lets me off the hook.’ She spoke without thinking and Kitty and the solicitor both looked so appalled that she backed off and let them argue themselves out.

  ‘There’s just one thing I don’t understand,’ the solicitor said, ‘and as her daughter you might be able to shed some light on it so we can speed up probate. I’ve got the details of the house and her building society account – which has six thousand in it we can transfer into Dido’s name immediately – but I can find no trace of a bank account.’

  ‘She didn’t like banks,’ Eliza said simply. ‘She thought they charged too much.’ She remembered her mother’s fury, her shame as she put it, that Hannah died leaving behind a small overdraft.

  ‘So the building society was all she had, so far as you know?’

  ‘That and her pension, yes. That’s right, isn’t it, Kitty?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kitty said sadly. ‘She was always a very careful woman.’

  Eliza’s mother had evidently been careful enough not to tell her best friend about her running away fund. This stash of money she held back from both bank and building society, along with a handful of family jewels she was too quiet to wear and too sentimental to sell, she kept tucked in the lining and pinned inside the sleeves of her second best dressing gown. The first thing I’d throw on in a fire. The last thing a burglar would think of touching. Eliza had instinctively checked on it the night her mother died. Naturally, because it was the second best dressing gown, Kitty had not dreamed of packing it to take to her friend in hospital.

  That night, when everyone had gone at last, Eliza slipped into Dido’s room to make sure she stopped reading and got some sleep, although she knew the bedside light would be turned on again and the novel retrieved the moment she had closed the door behind her. She sat on the edge of the bed and, while they brushed each other’s hair, she explained about the legacy.

  Dido was a fiercely pragmatic girl but poverty had not made her remotely acquisitive. Where other children in her position fantasized about new trainers or clothes, the latest technology or holiday destination, she carried no mental shopping list and found the need to come up with suggestions at Christmas and birthdays stressful.

  ‘Does that mean I’m rich?’ she asked as the news sank in.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Eliza told her. ‘I mean, it’s relative. You couldn’t buy a damp bedsit in London for what this place is probably worth. I suppose it means you’re middle class though, property-owning.’

  Dido smiled faintly at this. ‘Like a landlord?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. In a way. But you’re not to worry about it. The solicitor can look after everything and nothing in our life has to change unless you want it to. Okay? Lights out when you finish that chapter.’

  Disturbed at the pin-sharp image that came to her suddenly of Dido demanding rent, Eliza retrieved the jewellery-studded dressing gown from the back of her mother’s bedroom door and took it into her own room. Either the old woman had been buying lottery tickets on the sly or become more than usually distrustful of the building society in her last years. Eliza counted out enough to keep her and Dido fed and amused for three months. She counted and recounted it as she drank from the bottle of wine she had bought in the Co-op and smuggled upstairs. She wore no jewellery and had a horror of pierced ears, but the brooches, clips and rings she retrieved from inside the dressing gown’s sleeves spoke to her directly in a way no words in the funeral service had done and aroused a feral instinct to hoard up and survive.

  For two whole days Kitty drove them onwards, helping Eliza sort out the contents of every cupboard and drawer. While Eliza sorted and folded, bagging the wearable and burning the stained or overly private, Dido helped Kitty ferry sacks of clothing to the numerous charity shops in the town.

  Then there was all the junk. Lamps made from converted rose bottles. A whole cupboard of cleaned and delabelled jam jars. A drawer of string. Another of carefully folded brown paper. Another of plastic carrier bags. A terrible, greasy drawer of skewers, knives, old corks and mysterious, rusting utensils.

  ‘I had no idea about all this,’ Kitty said. ‘She let me into the house but she never let me help.’

  The solicitor sent several estate agents round to value the house and Kitty called in an auctioneer from the congregation, who specialised in house clearances to set a price on the moveable furniture. She could no more understand that Eliza had no use for any of it than she could conceive that the two laundry bags they had brought on the coach from London contained most of their wearable clothes. So the better bits of furniture went, most of it hideous, heavy 1930s stuff with a walnut veneer. A dining table and chairs which, in Eliza’s memory, had only ever been used at Christmas. A sideboard. The suite (what else could one call it?) of furniture from the master bedroom. A nest of tables. A melancholy spinney of standard lamps. The Art Deco piano stool, which had outlived the piano because her mother kept knitting needles in it. The sight of her mother’s huge bed being borne out into the full gaze of the sunshiny street was as startling as her tiny coffin’s progress down the aisle of St Dunstan’s, if not more so, coffins maintaining, after all, a rigorous privacy.

  Eliza had made no plans. She assumed that, once probate released it, the house would be put on the market and she and Dido would return to London. Kitty had something else in mind, however.

  ‘Now you need a holiday.’

  ‘We can’t possibly afford it,’ Eliza said automatically.

  ‘You can if you don’t mind staying in Cornwall. There’s my caravan in St Just. It’s all fitted out for the summer because I was down there birding only the weekend before your mother’s fall. You’ll have to catch the train, I suppose, then another bus but once you’re there you can get about easily enough on the two bikes.’

  ‘Kitty, that’s very kind but we ought to get home.’

  ‘Dodie needs a holiday.’

  ‘Dido.’

  ‘Needs a holiday. When did you last take her anywhere?’

  Eliza thought and pictured only occasional excursions within London, usually inspired by school projects. She had come to rely on the weekends Dido spent with Giles to prov
ide anything in the way of actual trips.

  ‘I dunno,’ she admitted.

  ‘Exactly. Anyone can see it, poor mite. She’s been excited about just being here, and this is Camborne, for pity’s sake.’

  ‘But don’t you let the caravan out?’

  ‘Not any more. No point. It’s too basic – I couldn’t compete with the proper sites at Kelynack and Sennen. They lay on pools and shops and all I provided was a field, a view and a chemical lavvy.’

  ‘Kitty I –’

  ‘Just think about it, okay?’

  But Kitty slyly worked on Dido, telling her all about it and all the things they could do there and Dido was able to point out that term time was about to finish in any case. So the laundry bags were packed again, slightly plumper this time because Dido had been coming back from the charity shops with whatever clothes caught her eye.

  At the last minute, Kitty spared them the train and bus ride by electing to drop them off herself. Eliza suspected this was because Kitty had noticed how little interest she took in shopping for proper food or even cooking, and wanted to be sure they stopped off at a supermarket to load up with supplies on the way. Food shopping, with money, ample money, was an unfamiliar pleasure. While Kitty waited in the car reading a paper, Eliza enjoyed going around the supermarket saying yes to Dido’s every suggestion for once, so that they ended up with a trolley-load that was not entirely nutritious and certainly made little economic sense.

  Back on the road, as they rounded a bend and the magnificent sweep of Mount’s Bay opened before them, Eliza exclaimed as loudly as Dido. She was on holiday too, now. She must have been this far west at least once on a school trip but it seemed familiar only from pictures. They skirted Penzance – Eliza having promised Dido that yes, they would come back to see the Egyptian House and St Michael’s Mount and to swim in the salt water lido – then climbed high, away from the bay, over Mount Misery, where fishwives used to watch in dread after a storm and onto the St Just road.

  ‘Not long now,’ Kitty told Dido as they passed through Newbridge, ‘and you’ll see the sea again but this time it’ll be the North coast, just above Land’s End. We’re on the toe of England now.’ She pointed out unchanged views of fields and farmsteads they could see in the Newlyn School paintings in a Penzance gallery. She slowed to let them admire a buzzard watching from a gatepost then speeded up again as Dido spotted the remains of a run-over badger. ‘Any minute now. There it is!’

  They passed a water-filled quarry and gravel pit and quite suddenly the land fell steeply away before them down to St Just – a huddle of houses around a pretty church and a looming chapel – and the Atlantic beyond it.

  ‘The end of the world,’ Kitty announced cheerfully and Eliza became aware that Dido was singing to herself; Dido who never sang unless she thought no one could hear her. ‘And down here,’ Kitty swung off the road and onto a dirt track, ‘your palace awaits.’

  The mobile home had not been mobile for years. It was already on this site, resting on breeze blocks, when Kitty bought it off a woman in her bird-watching club. Painted dark green by its former owner and camouflaged still further by Kitty, who had encouraged ivy, clematis and rambling courgette and squash plants to smother it, it could not have looked less like the glaringly white caravans they had passed in a campsite near Penzance. Tucked into a tiny parcel of land on the edge of a farm, it was all but invisible until the car drew close.

  ‘Wow, Kitty!’ Dido breathed.

  ‘It’s very basic, as I said,’ Kitty explained as she panted across the grass. ‘It’s a hide, really, with some plumbing and a bed.’ A hose ran from a sacking-lagged standpipe to somewhere on the leafy roof. Kitty turned on the tap and there was a distant gurgling which disturbed some chattering squabbling sparrows. ‘That’ll feed the shower and the sink,’ she explained. ‘Turn it off again when you leave. The waste water runs into a tank on the other side I use to water the plants. There’s no WC, as such, just a chemical lavvy in that garden shed, and that’s where the bikes are too. They’ll need pumping up and oiling probably, ’cause my nieces haven’t been down for a year.’

  She unlocked the door and showed them how the key was concealed behind a ceramic tile of St Francis and the birds. There were two low-ceilinged rooms, one with a bed and a chest of drawers, one with a sofa, table and chairs and what Kitty called a kitchenette. There was also a gas cooker and a fridge.

  ‘How does a fridge run on gas?’ Dido asked.

  ‘Search me,’ Kitty said, opening the valve on a gas canister and clicking an ignition button to set the fridge cooling. ‘Just praise the Lord for Science. Bedding’s in the chest of drawers and St Just’s down the hill. Well, you saw it, didn’t you? Buses to Penzance go by the top of the lane every two hours just about – you can flag them down. There’s a baker and a bank and a library in the town. Everything, really, but it’s more fun if I leave you to find out for yourselves.’ She paused. No one said anything. They were too dazed taking it all in. ‘So I’ll be off and leave you to unpack, then,’ Kitty added.

  ‘Don’t go,’ Dido said. ‘Stay too.’

  ‘I wouldn’t fit, poppet. Have fun, now, Dodie. Stay as long as you like. You’ve got my phone number, haven’t you? Just in case.’

  ‘Right here.’ Dido patted her pocket.

  ‘Good. There are phones down the hill. Are you all right, Eliza? You’ve been ever so quiet.’

  ‘I’m fine, Kitty. This is so kind of you. I don’t know what to say.’ As when they first arrived at the bus station, Eliza felt a keen need to hug Kitty but this time she held back.

  ‘Best say nothing, then,’ Kitty said. ‘Bye all.’

  Dido ran out to wave her off. Eliza made an effort to be less dreamily passive and stayed inside to unpack their shopping onto one end of the kitchen table. The table was topped with shiny red melamine, worn through to the wood in patches. Very Festival of Britain. And when she opened the cupboard over the tiny sink, she found black and white plates and cups of the same vintage. Three of everything. Like a doll’s house. She made a mental note not to break anything; things like the plates would be impossible to replace. She loaded bacon, pizzas, eggs, milk and toffee yoghurts into the fridge which, mysteriously, was already getting cold. Obediently she praised the Lord for Science.

  Dido wanted them to ride into the town but both bikes had flat tyres and there was no sign of a pump so they walked in, trusting in the hardware store to sell them one. The sky was blue and cloudless, the distant sea millpond smooth and a fresh breeze was sending waves through fields of some green crop. Dido was in high spirits, even without a bicycle. She continued to sing under her breath, timing her strides to the rhythm of a song playing in her head.

  ‘Someone’s happy,’ Eliza said then wished she hadn’t because Dido immediately stopped singing.

  ‘What’s that then?’ Dido asked, pointing at the waving green crop. ‘It’s not just grass, is it?’

  ‘No. Barley maybe? Or wheat? It’s hard to tell when it’s so young and the ears are only just showing through.’

  ‘I thought you grew up in the country.’

  ‘You saw what Camborne’s like. Not proper country.’

  They arrived at a field of pigs. Delighted, because she had never encountered them in the flesh before, Dido stood on a gate to watch. A vast sow nosed for roots, oblivious to the piglets which clustered, squeaking, around her trailing dugs. When a younger female came over to the gate, Eliza won back a few country wisdom points by showing Dido how to scratch its back with a stick. Dido laughed as the beast grunted with pleasure.

  ‘Eliza?’ she asked cautiously.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When were you last happy?’

  ‘Ooh…’ Eliza pretended to think. ‘You mean apart from now?’

  ‘Yes. When were you last really, truly happy?’

  It was a challenge.

  ‘About ten minutes ago, when Kitty finally left and I had you all to myself again.’

 
Dido looked at her, assessing this for a moment then said with devastating simplicity, ‘Huh,’ then jumped off the gate to keep walking into St Just.

  Eliza was deeply unsettled. Dido’s simple question had summoned up a university room, open books in a pool of sunlight on an uncluttered desk and no trace of a baby or its plastic paraphernalia. It was a scene she had not thought about for years but it sprang into her mind with such immediate clarity she knew it for a truthful answer.

  She had last been really, truly happy before Hannah’s death had thrust motherhood upon her or vanity and weakness had led her to muddle her life with any men other than long dead composers. Try as she might to believe otherwise, her life had been a falling-off from there onwards and, as they continued down the hill, she let Dido lead the way, feeling unable to meet her eye and feeling the guilt burn scarlet on her face.

  The unfamiliar little town soon provided distraction enough for them to talk of other things. Lanes radiated out from the church and main square with its memorial clock tower, its rival bakeries, fish and chip shop and newsagents. There were the inevitable galleries, with a few surprisingly good paintings whose prices seemed at odds with the humble housing surrounding them. There was a shop – or a party headquarters, it could have been either – devoted to all things Cornish and the promulgation of the Cornish language.

  This was a small victory for Eliza because Dido had thought she and Kitty were fibbing when they talked of Cornish nationalism as they passed huge graffiti on the road bridges near Hayle which declared You Are No Longer In England! and Kernow Bys Vykken!

  They found an Aladdin’s cave of a hardware store, whose owner was proud to produce a rather dusty bicycle pump and assured them that his son could mend punctures if they got home to find the pump did not solve the problem.