A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Sorry, Grover. Sorry guys. Miles away. Sorry. Can we start again?’

  20

  Julia had barely hung up the phone from talking to a flautist about a problem with the VAT on some session work he had been doing when it rang again on the internal system.

  ‘Are you busy?’ Selina asked.

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘Good. Pour us both coffee and come in for a chat.’

  Selina’s office looked out over the street. She had chosen it over the calmer room at the back because she liked to look out and see people busy. It spurred her on, she claimed, as a quiet view of rooftops or a little garden could never do. Julia had never witnessed the trick but it was said that Selina also made a habit of thrusting open the windows when she wanted to pretend she was calling someone on her mobile from outside; a useful ploy when dealing with clients who felt she should be wearing out more shoe leather on their behalf.

  The windows were open now, filling the small room with sounds of hectic activity and making it feel strangely public.

  ‘Bless you.’ Selina took a cup of coffee and closed the door behind them. ‘Sit,’ she said.

  Julia sat on the little sofa. Being on the short side Selina preferred to lean on the front of her desk when addressing staff.

  ‘So how are things?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You get on top of that Decca nonsense all right?’

  ‘Yup. Contracts came back signed this morning. Dieter’s stopped worrying.’

  ‘Good.’

  Things were not fine at all. In a week Julia had said nothing to Giles beyond making small talk and administrative chitchat. She was throwing up every morning and felt sure she must be losing weight rather than gaining any. It was a wonder Giles had not noticed but then he had never said anything about her ambivalent relationship with food; too well-bred or self-occupied to take her slimness as anything but a natural blessing.

  She had been to see a clinic about an abortion. They had offered to book her in the next day but she had panicked, truthfully claiming pressures at work, and made a reservation for Friday week. The receptionist had been very kind and understanding; she must see indecisive, hormonally addled women all the time.

  Selina’s little sofa was unexpectedly comfortable, like a capacious armchair. Julia had to resist the impulse to slide her legs up onto it. If Selina, bathed in dusty sunlight, said anything sisterly, she would dissolve. Luckily Selina was reliably not the type.

  ‘How are things with Giles?’ Selina asked.

  ‘Great,’ Julia said.

  ‘How long has it been now? Two years?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘He really ought to divorce Eliza.’

  ‘Oh well. It couldn’t matter less to me, you know.’

  Selina played her trick of leaving a comment hanging until its coating of deceit withered and fell off under her scrutiny.

  ‘How are his rehearsals going?’

  Caution aside, Julia was finding it hard to bring up the subject of her pregnancy with Giles because they had argued. It was a pointless argument really and Giles had probably forgiven her but there was still a fallout from it between them, a kind of static which was stopping her from revealing her defenceless state.

  ‘All right. Fine, apparently.’

  ‘They’ll appreciate his coming to the rescue. I appreciate it. But you would say, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘What? You mean if –’

  ‘If things weren’t okay. The point is, Julia, I value Giles but to be brutally frank he’s not first flight and if he were going to be, he’d be there by now. I mean Grover could do it for him. Possibly. He could do for him too, though, if the production’s a stinker. But in many ways I value you more. In the long term.’

  ‘Don’t!’ Julia wanted to tell her. ‘I’m only fit for breeding now. I’m a fraud.’

  Giles was worrying about Dido. She had not appeared for her usual weekend visit and nobody was answering Eliza’s phone. She had been strange when he last saw her, he said. Then he had asked if Julia had argued with her about something or upset her in some way. Defensively Julia had said no. They never argued. She liked Dido. But she had reminded him the girl was growing up and had a choice about what she did. He was not actually her father and perhaps he should start to let go of her a little. After all he hadn’t lived with Eliza for years now. Perhaps Eliza was asserting herself. Perhaps she had taken her away for once. And quite right too.

  ‘You’re both always so discreet about each other when you’re dealing with me,’ Selina went on, ‘and I understand that but I just wanted you to know that if something went wrong, there’d still be a job for you. Just because he’s a client, I wouldn’t…He’s only a client. I think that’s what I mean.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Good.’

  ‘But things are okay, you said.’

  ‘Yes. Things are fine.’

  ‘Good. Now. Business. I’ve got an almighty fucking favour to ask you.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Jemima’s playing her swansong at the Trenellion Festival. The Walton. And I can’t possibly go because it clashes with Kimiko’s Barbican gig.’

  ‘But we never bother with Trenellion. It’s hardly Aldeburgh. I thought there was an understanding about no agents going there.’

  ‘Yes but this is different. It’s Jemima. My oldest client, for God’s sake. She’s being all very stiff upper lip about it but I know she’s pissed off and if I sent someone down there it would avoid leaving bad blood between us. And since you’d be doing me such a favour, you could fly to Newquay and charge it.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘And I already took the precaution of booking a room down there for you because it’s high season.’

  Giles had been furious. Julia had no right, he had said. This was not her affair. ‘And you’re always trying to change the way Dido looks,’ he had said. ‘Trying to make her prettier. She doesn’t like it. It makes her self-conscious.’

  And so on, in yes she does no she doesn’t mode. Until, as usual, Julia apologized, although it was he who had given offence.

  ‘When is it?’ Julia opened her diary. Apart from steering Alexy, her Georgian bass around, and a couple of tricky phone calls to slippery promoters, the week was fairly empty. Once he had gone, there was nothing she could not cancel, but a trip to Cornwall was the last thing she felt like. ‘Do me good to get out of town.’

  ‘I knew I could count on you.’

  A pneumatic drill started up. Selina shut the windows.

  21

  In a spirit of atonement, Pearce spent Monday on tasks he had been avoiding. The first of these was waking the combine harvester from its long winter slumber. Farmer’s Weekly always advised servicing a combine before putting it away at the end of the harvest each autumn. The harvest tended to overlap with other equally urgent jobs however, especially if there was any hint that the grain was not quite dry enough to store yet. So invariably the combine went into its shed still hot from its last day’s work and did not emerge until days before it would be needed. This year, he thought, he would at least service it a few weeks in advance and save himself the usual last minute panics and delays involving journeys across the county in search of drive belts to replace the ones time or field mice had gnawed through.

  It was a fairly old machine, having seen some twenty summers. He was debating whether it would be better economics to replace it when it finally gave up the ghost or to take to using a contractor. The problem with contractors was that every farmer tended to need them at the same time so they could charge through the nose, but new combines were becoming insanely expensive. Perhaps he would have to hold out for the grim chance of picking up a used one at auction when yet another of the region’s farmers went out of business. Or killed himself.

  Naturally it did not start first time. First the battery was flat, so he switched it with one from the tractor and put the combine’s one on to recharge. Now when he turned the key the starte
r motor groaned into life but the engine failed to fire. Cursing his slackness at not servicing the thing when he had the chance before last year’s broccoli harvest started, Pearce set about taking out the fuel filter.

  Like most farm machinery, the combine was beautifully designed for doing its job and hopelessly designed when anything needed fixing on it. Few parts that needed regular access were easily accessible and could only be reached by loosening or removing other parts, all of which would then need precise readjustment afterwards. While removing the fuel filter, he noticed that the hydraulic pump’s drive belt was about to break. None of the belts was a joy to replace but this was his bête noire because so much fine tuning was needed to see that the new one was correctly aligned for the system to work properly afterwards.

  Then he banged his skull painfully on a piece of jagged metal where the access had rusted through and been crudely repaired in a hurry. Then he rounded off the perfect morning by placing his hand squarely on a mound of fresh shit Simkin had daintily tucked beneath a thin thatch of barley straw.

  In the spirit of doing all his least favourite jobs in one grim batch, he did not head off to buy spares as he was but cleaned himself up and changed into more presentable clothes. His maternal grandfather was in a home at Gulval – he could stop off on the way. Molly was forever on at him to visit more. ‘He always asks after you,’ she would say. ‘It’s so awkward. I have to explain that you’re still alive.’

  He found this hard to believe since, whenever he visited, his grandfather barely spoke. He was ninety-six and had relieved everyone by taking himself into a home when his wife died. He was not particularly confused but he was physically frail, plagued by arthritic knees and, like many men of his generation, incapable of looking after himself. At first his time in the home had been like a return to childhood in the best sense, reunited as he was with people he had not spent time with since they were in Gulval’s village school together. But he had outlived nearly all of them then been all but silenced by a stroke. Now he was one of those vacant old men who haunted such places, gravitating away from the sun room to a sunless brown area beneath the staircase, where lay the unofficial ‘boys’ bit’, less chatty and optimistic, where the long pauses in conversation were filled by the jabber of the sports channel or the gurgle of someone’s restless gut.

  Pearce hated going there with a passion, hated the brisk niceness of the staff which seemed designed to make visitors feel even guiltier for not taking family burdens on themselves, hated the way it made him long for his grandfather’s death. The men on both sides of the family seemed cursed with confused longevity. It remained the one consolation of his parents’ early deaths that at least this was a fate they had been spared.

  Today Pearce caught Grandpa in the sun room, by arriving soon enough after lunch to find the residents still trapped in their chairs by their tray tables. As always everyone except his grandfather gave him a lovely welcome.

  ‘Well look who it isn’t!’ one of the old ladies said. ‘A nice young man to see you, Tommy. You missed lunch, Percy.’

  ‘Had a pasty in the car,’ Pearce told her and pulled up a stool. ‘Hello Grandpa.’ Grandpa stared at him a moment, then went back to chasing crumbs on his tray with skeletal fingers.

  ‘You found a wife yet?’ one of the other women asked, a bold-faced old thing given to conducting one-way flirtations with the old men.

  ‘Er, no. Not yet,’ he told her, smiling gamely. ‘No time.’

  The women laughed.

  ‘Hear that, Joyce?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He says he’s no time. No time to find a wife.’

  ‘We’ll have to see who we can find you here. Bessie’s available, aren’t you, Bess?’

  Bessie, a sweet orderly, blushed deeply and hurried away with an armful of tray tables.

  ‘Anyway,’ he told the bold-faced one, ‘I thought I was going steady with you.’

  They cracked up at that. They always did. Grandpa swatted another crumb. Bessie came back in and handed Pearce a cup of tea and some biscuits.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘See?’ someone else said. ‘She’s available!’

  As Bessie left in confusion, Pearce caught his grandfather watching him and nodding. Perhaps this was how he had found his grandmother, by doing nothing while the women around him arranged things to their romantic and practical satisfaction. His father had always joked about finding a wife at the one and only hunt ball he had ever attended.

  ‘So I said to myself, No need to go to one of those again.’

  But what if his image of himself as a marital Viking carrying off a prize woman on one shoulder and her dowry of conveniently placed fields on the other was one carefully engendered by a team of skilful women? Adept at the handling of male vanity, aunts, neighbours and mothers might have placed Pearce’s mother just so, knowing his father would catch sight of her just so. Cattle tracks. The men of the family had all been on cattle tracks, their belief in their freedom of direction a kind illusion. Was that so very bad if the end result was a kind of happiness? Pearce was not given to nostalgia but the thought of having his future sort of happiness lined up for him in the next room by a troupe of benevolent busybodies all at once seemed quite appealing. He never went to church or chapel however, fete or village disco.

  He smiled back at his nodding grandfather and dutifully munched one of the pink wafers Bessie had given him with his tea. Even when he was a boy their papery texture and rosy taste had seemed to him desolation in biscuit form.

  22

  Molly’s house was at one end of an isolated terrace on the edge of St Just. Perhaps if the mines at Pendeen, Truthwall and Geevor had continued to thrive, the town would have continued to expand towards them along the coast and grown to the size of Penzance. As it was, this terrace faced only open fields and the distant sea. A donkey watched Eliza and Dido cycle up but slipped off to stand with a pair of fat ponies before Dido could stroke its nose. The front gardens were as eccentric as Molly had suggested, and seemed to be egging one another on. So where one contented itself with a cottagey look, all tumbling herbs and soft colours, its neighbour strove to suggest the subtropics with a spiky flourish of cabbage palms, yuccas and phormiums. One house might have belonged to a sculptor, for its garden was littered with lumps of stone and twists of metal all in the process of becoming something else while another was merely piled high with junk on which a pack of Jack Russells were basking in the last of the sun. Molly’s garden spoke of good intentions and strong impulses, for its balding grass and concrete path were littered with plants still in their plastic pots. Where most of the row contented themselves with ramshackle porches, one improvised from an old dinghy, Molly’s sported a spanking new plastic conservatory, its windows open to the evening air.

  Eliza arrived on time but the conservatory was already crowded with people greeting one another and choosing their seats from the broken-down assortment on offer. Eliza noticed the piano to one side of the front door and was startled to realise they were going to sing out there, effectively in the lane.

  Lucy was lying in wait for Dido, red cap still firmly on head. She claimed her at once and the two of them stomped upstairs.

  There were ten singers, including Eliza, four men and six women, aged between Molly’s mid-thirties to a quaking old man with dazzlingly false teeth. Assuming that new members were unusual in such a society and transient ones even more so, Eliza had been fearing Molly would make a performance of introducing her to the group. Molly was either careless or the soul of tact however, for she merely said a kind but entirely unsurprised hello, handed Eliza a glass of chilled plonk and found her a copy of the standard madrigal collection Eliza’s first tutor had edited.

  Then Molly closed the door into the house – the one from conservatory into garden was left wide because the space was still quite warm – and sat at the sun-bleached old upright. After some muttering it was agreed that it was Toby’s turn that week.


  Toby, the old man with the shaking hands and the teeth, reached for a list tucked into the back of his book, and announced with a smile, ‘April is in my Mistress’ Face.’ Evidently they took turns to select the week’s songs. Molly thumped out a split chord, raised a hand to bring them in and seconds later they were singing.

  Eliza need not have feared the rustiness of her voice. The sound the choir made was full-throated and often wayward. Welcomed rather than auditioned, the singers were ill-matched, the men far louder than the women, the altos beefier than the sopranos. The woman beside Eliza was moving her lips and following the notes in the top line with a sharpened pencil but making no discernible sound at all.

  It was probably more authentic than the politely bloodless sounds produced by more gifted groups in her student days, an approximation of the noise heard around many a Tudor table of an evening. Hearing it in such close confinement put Eliza in mind of a Sacred Harp choir she had once heard on tour from Pennsylvania. Sacred Harp singers were proud of an uninterrupted tradition reaching back to early English polyphony and regarded full-throated song as an act of both divine worship and neighbourly friendship.

  Merely to be singing again, after more years than she cared to count, felt extraordinary. For all that her muscles were out of condition, her voice was still there enough to gain her glances from Molly and the silent one. But she was so out of practice she had forgotten how to breathe or support her breathing with her diaphragm and so the euphoria induced by music-making was compounded with dizziness and a pleasurable sense of her blood buzzing.

  The group had no thought of public performance. Unlike most such amateur gatherings, it had the admirably modest purpose of meeting solely for the pleasure of singing. The session was more observance than rehearsal. Only if a madrigal broke down entirely – as did some of the less familiar or florid ones Toby had chosen, such as Sweet Suffolk Owl – would a passage be taken apart or Molly called upon to thump out some notes on the piano. Usually when a piece finished it would be agreed at once to sing it a second time. Always there would be a comment. Well, that was good or Lovely cadence. Very occasionally a piece would fail to impress, the comments would be polite but lukewarm and the madrigal would go unrepeated.