by Patrick Gale
While she was sleeping Dido had cycled to St Just’s chemist shop and returned with fancy shampoo. She had also bought some cunning tape which one pressed to one’s dampened nose and forehead for a few minutes then peeled off to find it peppered with tiny stalagmites of gunk from every dirt-clogged pore. Eliza stated once more that this was simple socialising, not a romantic fixture, then gave in and allowed Dido to fuss and minister like an ambitious duenna, washing her hair at the sink and peeling off the blackhead tape with little squeals of disgusted delight.
Dido made her dress as soberly as a governess, in a not very crisp white blouse and a navy blue, ankle length skirt. The strict effect was softened by the skirt being light and swishy and having tiny mirrors sewn into the embroidery around its hem.
‘I don’t remember this,’ Eliza said. ‘I haven’t worn skirts for years. When did I buy this?’
‘Kitty and I did. We found it in a hippy shop in Camborne while you were sorting the house out. Put it on. It’ll suit you. You wear jeans too often. Men don’t like it.’
‘How do you know what men don’t like? And who says I have to please them?’
‘Just try it on.’
‘And I haven’t shaved my legs in ages.’
‘Why not?’
Freshly aware of them, Eliza rubbed a big toe on the fine blonde hairs that she wore like a pair of footless tights. Dido giggled.
‘Well…I dunno. I didn’t see the need.’
‘There’s no time for that now. Or is there?’
‘No!’
‘The skirt’s long anyway so it doesn’t matter.’
Eliza obliged her. She felt naked with the sudden draughtiness about her legs but Dido was right. The skirt did suit her. She had always thought long skirts made her look like a pepper pot but this one seemed to make her tall and slim.
‘Are you sure, though?’ she asked, craning her neck in a clumsy effort to see the effect reflected in the soap-spattered fragment of mirror.
But then there was the sudden booming of a Land Rover turning off onto their track and it was too late to change again.
He was taller and broader than Eliza had remembered and his accent more bluntly Cornish. His hair, which she remembered as Byronically dark, was shot through with reassuring silver. His eyes wrinkled as he said hello and she saw the way they quickly took in her clean but still damp hair and the unfamiliar line of her skirt.
She had read once that it was important to keep one’s appearance consistent when getting to know someone new and not to bewilder them with shifting colour schemes, worrying variations of heel height or changing perfume, as though blurred early impressions could never coalesce into a unified and adorable whole. If that were so then they had both flouted the advice.
He seemed wonderfully clean. His thick hair, which he had evidently tried to tame with a comb, was still damp at the ends, like hers. His nails had been clipped almost to the quick. A few tiny drops of blood in his beard-line betrayed the thoroughness with which he had just shaved. As they shook hands, it was not the subtle stink of some aftershave Eliza breathed off him but the sinless white tang of soap.
‘It’s bigger than it looks from the outside,’ he said, looking about him at Kitty’s den.
‘Did you come up here in your misspent teens?’
He stared a moment then caught her meaning and smiled to himself. ‘Molly was the wild one,’ he admitted. ‘Not me. But I had mates who came here sometimes.’
They fell silent and Eliza watched as he stooped to shyly read the titles on the bookshelf. It was left to Dido to chip in. ‘Shall we go, then?’
They climbed into the Land Rover. (Perhaps reassuringly, this had not been cleaned.) Dido, who had clambered into the rear, immediately hung forward between the adults to ask questions. Having her daughter along on a date was an entirely new experience for Eliza. If asked cold, she would have said it was a lousy idea, bound to cause everyone involved discomfort. Something about him made her shy, however. The scent of soap, maybe. Soap seemed to suggest a hope of getting close, which in turn made her conscious that she rather liked the idea, which in turn froze her with self-consciousness. Did she smell funny? Were her fuzzy legs showing? She felt her skin had a Londoner’s sickly pallor, that her voice, if she spoke, would sound over-cultured and silly. So she was grateful for Dido’s inquisitive chatter.
With no understanding of what she was doing beyond satisfying her own curiosity, Dido played the role of a mother with daughters of marriageable age, asking the questions that might have seemed too forward in Eliza’s mouth. Thus on the short drive down the hill to his farm Eliza was able passively to learn that he was younger than his weather-beaten face – forty-two – that the farm had two hundred and fifty acres, which was just small enough for him to manage with only seasonal assistance and that it had been in his family for at least two centuries. And no, his herd had suffered no foot and mouth or BSE.
They turned off sharply at Kelynack down Cot Valley along a lane which, like the one to Vingoe, seemed to enjoy a microclimate. Sheltered, sycamore and Cornish elm thrived on either side and the few cottages they passed had gardens lush with tender foliage. Then the road became a dirt track which crossed a stream, affording a brief glimpse of the sea before crossing a cattle grid and climbing the valley to a point where it levelled out into a farmyard.
The house, whose walls were thickly carpeted with some creeper that fluttered in the breeze, was long and low, as though the builder were used to the idiom of stables and sties and saw no reason to adapt his style for humans. The only unbarnlike detail was the way one end turned a sharp corner so as to capture enough shelter and warmth for a small, low-walled garden.
‘How old is it?’ Dido asked.
‘Two or three hundred probably,’ Pearce said. ‘Before that the house was over there, where I store the corn.’ He gestured across the yard to a small, two storey building with a flight of stone steps up its outside, dwarfed by the grain silo which was linked to it by a length of pipe.
‘It’s so quiet,’ Eliza said.
‘Except when the auger’s going,’ he said. ‘Or one of the tractors. Or the planes to the Scillies…And on sunny days all the amateurs are up there too in their microlites and what have yous.’
But it was quiet now. Despite the proximity of the sea, the air seemed still and expectant and the only sounds were the urgent conversation of swallows on a telephone wire that crossed the yard and the confidential murmurs of two brown hens scratching in the grass beneath a laden apple tree. The tree dominated one side of the little garden, which was otherwise given over to unkempt and sprawling lavender bushes.
Dido was wary of the hens until Pearce showed her how to lure them up the ramp into their little hutch for the night with a handful of corn.
The interior of the house was dark after the dazzle of outside. As her eyes adjusted, Eliza made out quantities of heavy mahogany furniture, which were surely inherited rather than chosen, and a scattering of watercolours in chipped gilt frames. Rather than fight the shadiness, he had perversely courted it with rich dark colours on the walls, a tobaccoey red, olive green.
‘Typical farmers,’ he said, seeing her eyes trailing round. ‘They only thought of how it would be when they came in after dark. No thought for the poor souls stuck inside in the gloom all day.’
‘So do hens lay eggs out of their backsides or where?’ Dido asked. She had never been brought to make the connection between egg and chicken before and Eliza foresaw months of squeamish abstinence from one of their cheaper staples.
‘Not exactly,’ Pearce told her, grinning. ‘I’ll find you a book.’ And he left Dido poring over a fowl husbandry manual while he went to open a bottle of wine.
They ate almost immediately. He clearly was unused to entertaining and gave Eliza the impression that it was something he wanted out of the way as soon as possible. In his apprehension that they might run out of food, he had cooked far too much. Everything had been made in advance
and left in the warming oven of the range so that it might be served with bewildering speed. It was good food – carrot soup, a simply roast chicken with salad and potatoes, a cherry crumble with clotted cream – but his nervousness left little room to enjoy it. Eliza was aghast that he had unwittingly cooked two of the things – carrots and cherries – that Dido could not abide and was amazed to see her eat both without demur and even politely accept his offer of seconds. But perhaps she was helped in her politeness by his failure to provide anything softer than watered red wine for her to drink.
The night was still young and the sky not quite dark when they left the table for coffee in the ochre-coloured sitting room but Dido was soon fast asleep on a little sofa below the open window. For a few minutes a pregnant silence descended on them. Without Dido single-handedly keeping the conversation going, the two adults became painfully shy. But then a huge, white cat came through the open window and settled on Dido’s stomach, purring loudly.
‘Sorry. Is she allergic?’ Pearce asked.
‘No. I don’t think so, anyway.’
‘She’s an amazing kid. Is she ever short of something to say?’
‘Only when reading or asleep. Or sulking.’
‘Could I ask…’ he asked then. ‘Does she take after her mother or her father?’
‘Oh, well, we never knew who her father was,’ Eliza began then found she could not check herself. His face was so wholesome and unjudging and the wine had so relaxed her that she began to tell him about Hannah’s death and that somehow flowed quite naturally into a description of Giles and her marriage. The only thing she held back was any real depiction of Hannah; with the natural egotism of the drunk, she made a narrative entirely about herself.
Pearce kept her wine topped up and said nothing beyond the occasional, encouraging, ‘What was he thinking of?’ or ‘How did you manage?’ And his eyes were so very kind and his tone of voice so very comfortable and his accent so like the best sort of homecoming that she found herself leading the way to the other sofa where she was so relaxed, so utterly herself, that not content with telling him about the affair with Paul and the better, sadder, more sorry part of her life’s story, she started to cry.
27
The timing could not have been better. Giles had one more morning of rehearsal then the répétiteur and choreographer were to be forced to work for a week only on the scenes for the Mechanicals and the lovers, giving the three principal fairies a week off while Dewi Evans and Grover flew to Jamaica to shoot a video for Dewi’s new single. Being freed for this was a condition of Grover’s accepting the commission. Plainly his ability to make Dewi part of the production was what induced the opera management to accept what would normally have been unacceptable.
It was an oddly placid opera for Giles to work on. While the lovers scurried about and fought and wept he had little to do but glide in and out and look powerful. Even when enraged, Oberon was essentially static. Compared to the spite, heroics and vocal acrobatics of so many baroque roles, it was a breeze to sing. He had a superb Titania – a voluptuous young Frenchwoman whom he suspected was out of his league or would be within a couple of seasons. He had become used to Dewi’s omnivorous flirtatiousness and the conductor was entirely trustworthy.
He was trying not to think about the costumes, or lack of them, and suspected the clamorous rumours were planted by Grover’s team to whip up a frenzy of anticipation among jaded punters for whom a glimpse of a pop star’s buttocks was more exciting than one of musical paradise. As insurance, however, he had doubled his daily abdominal workout to the point where it sometimes hurt when he breathed.
Selina was beside herself with pleasure, apparently, though being Selina her pleasure manifested itself as a kind of threat. ‘This is going to be huge, Giles,’ she kept saying. ‘Huge. Up there with Miller’s Rigoletto and Hockney’s Rake. Just so long as nobody loses their nerve again and buggers it up.’
He did not like to point out that the productions she cited were all about a certain look or a certain director and that nobody now could name their original casts.
Julia put in a morning’s work too then he picked her up in a taxi with their bags. They had not taken a holiday in months. They both worked hard, certainly, and then there was Dido to consider, since he did not feel he could whisk her away from Eliza for longer than a weekend. But he worried sometimes that their official line, that they much preferred a pampering long weekend here and there to a prolonged stay in one place masked their fear at what fault-lines a longer holiday without company might expose. Even this trip was not truly a holiday, of course, but work for her and duty for him with a pampering weekend attached.
Subsidised by the agency, they were able to fly most of the way on the little plane that shuttled a day long triangle between Gatwick, Plymouth and Newquay. Their fellow passengers seemed to be a strange mixture of business people calling on concerns in the south-west and south-westerners wealthy enough to use a plane service for an indulgent trip to the capital. At Newquay they hired a car and were skirting the beach at Polteath and heading up the north coast to Trenellion within the hour.
Poor Julia had been sick while they were waiting and again during the flight. She said nothing of it and insisted she was fine when he asked, although he could tell she was anything but. The effort of appearing fine left her tense. It was so like her. Whereas he knew he made heavy weather of even the lightest cold, she could not bear to be ill and treated even food poisoning or travel sickness as admissions of weakness. He took the sharp corners more slowly than if driving alone. When he pressed the button to wind down her window a little, he saw how she drew in lungfuls of sea air.
On the recommendation of Jemima Beale, the violist Julia was looking after, they had reservations in a small, isolated hotel one bay around from St Jacobs at Porth Keverne. It must once have been a tiny inn for fishermen but had grown a room or two at a time up the hillside and back towards the valley behind it. In place of fishermen the bar was hearty with people in fishermen’s jerseys, naval blazers or quaintly nautical smocks. A late cancellation meant that they had a perfect room, up a narrow flight of stairs off the bar, lined with grisly photographs of shipwrecks. The bed was soft and squeaky and sounds of merriment would certainly rise through the floor at night, but there was a wide open window with a window seat and the walls were dazzling with light off the sand and water.
Julia emerged from the bathroom smelling freshly of Arpège and collapsed onto the bed, an arm across her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m never normally sick. I think it’s because it was so small. The plane. I’ll be fine in a while. Don’t mind me. Go for a walk on the coast path or something.’
‘Ssh,’ he told her. He lifted her feet onto his lap and slipped off her shoes.
‘I should unpack,’ she said. ‘My dress’ll get crumpled.’
‘Ssh. It’s not a remotely dressy festival.’ He began to rub her feet slowly between the palms of his hands.
He kissed them one at a time. They were warm but dry. She moaned faintly. She had an unvoiced passion for having her toes very gently parted and sucked. She was still in her work clothes. He reached up and began to slide off her tights as the room filled with an outburst of gull cries.
The forty-seven women he had slept with – and he prided himself on knowing precisely how many of them there were, if not on recalling all their names or faces – fell into two camps. One lot had not been able to arouse him immediately. Not that drunkenly snogging Villiers Yates once made him remotely gay but he had needed some trigger, their kiss, their tears, or merely, reprehensively, the thought of himself having sex with them. The second, much smaller group was his proof that there was such a thing as body chemistry, for he had only to be near them, close enough to breathe the warm air off their skin, to be aroused beyond recall.
Eliza, whom he had loved deeply and felt as protective towards as of his own flesh and blood, was in the crowded first group. Julia was in the exclusive second. He felt li
ttle emotional engagement with her when he was elsewhere but he had only to be sitting like this, her bare feet in his lap, her dress sliding back off her crazily smooth legs, to be her single-minded slave.
28
The restaurant at The Porth Keverne Hotel prided itself on an immunity to fashion. Wood-fired ovens, cuisine minceur, nouvelle cuisine, Pacific Rim, coriander, lemon grass, even the sun-dried tomato went unmentioned on its menu. Brandy and cream were much in evidence as were flambéed dishes, Cona coffee machines and red napkins. Loyal diners could rest assured they would be offered favourites long lost elsewhere; Steak Diane, Beef Stroganoff and Sole Veronique were served unseasoned by irony.
The local resorts, like Polteath, were intimidatingly youthful these days, slick with twenty-something surfers whose idea of dining was a tortilla wrap and a fruit smoothie in the beach car park. But here, Julia saw as soon as they came in, she and Giles were the youngest in the room by at least a decade.
They were nearly late for last orders so she had no time for more than a quick wash before they dressed and hurried down. She had dabbed on some scent but felt the whole room could tell they had just made love.
‘Everyone’s staring,’ she murmured to Giles, scanning the menu in vain for a simple piece of grilled fish.
‘That’s because you’re better than TV,’ he said, tapping his knee between hers. ‘You’ve got a glow.’
She touched her cheeks. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘You’ll make it worse. It’s a vampire’s ball.’
‘Vee can’t help it,’ he murmured, ‘if you taste zo gut.’ And he discreetly sniffed two of his fingers then slid them into his mouth.
