A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

‘It’s silly,’ he whispered. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘But what?’

  He was handsome, she saw. She had not noticed at first because of his messy hair, which seemed to be stiff with sea salt, the subtly wrong shirt and tie combination, bought as a pair for him by his wife she reckoned, and not least by the toddler. She had never understood the syndrome of going gooey over lone men with children – papoose fever, Shawna called it – but here she was harmlessly flirting with someone else’s husband and loving it.

  ‘You suddenly reminded me of a girl I had a hopeless crush on in the fifth form. Sorry. You’re nothing like her really.’

  He had stopped whispering and his voice carried dreadfully in the quietened crowd but she did not care. She pictured him a strapping sixteen-year-old in a uniform a year too small for him. She remembered such boys and how she had desired them even as she affected to despise them for desiring her so obviously. At that age Giles would have been too ethereal to have survived long in her school, unless he somehow won the protection of a beefy Colin Thomas.

  His wife did not come back to relieve him of the toddler, who slept on as Peter Grenfell made his imposing entrance and conducted the first item.

  As the variations reached their climax a trumpet blare woke the toddler who did not cry but became restless and threatened to start whining. Colin Thomas made to rise as the applause was dying down.

  ‘Better find his mum,’ he muttered. ‘Lovely meeting you.’

  But instead of rising, he crumpled across her feet and into the aisle. By some miraculous reflex, she reached out and grabbed the child on its way down, saving it from crunching its head on the tiles.

  There was a fuss, inevitably.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she told a man who had darted over. ‘I think he just fainted. It’s the heat.’

  A cellist who doubled as a doctor loosened his tie and collar, granting Julia a glimpse of unschoolboyish chest hair, felt his pulse and concurred. More men got involved and bore him out to the church’s lovely porch where the cellist-doctor bent Colin’s knees slightly and slipped an old cushion under his head.

  Duty done, the first-aiders returned to their seats and the concert continued, floating on a gentle tide of gossip. Julia could not very well leave him on his own out there. Besides, she was clutching his little boy. The boy had threatened to cry at first at being so jolted awake but had dozed off again now that Julia had sat on one of the porch benches. The acoustic was better in this spot than in the main body of the building, where too much exposed wood deadened all reverberation, so as the applause announced Peter Grenfell’s reappearance with Jemima at his side, she sat on quite happily to enjoy the concerto in cool comfort.

  It was a lovely, unsettling piece, full of youthful passion and restlessness and she was not surprised to read in the programme note that Walton had confessed it was almost indecently autobiographical in its depiction of an illicit love affair. It set Julia’s mind racing, the way some music could, flickering through real and imagined scenes in her life as through publicity stills for a film.

  The woman selling programmes and souvenirs from a card table on the porch’s other side regarded Julia quite calmly.

  She thinks I’m his wife, Julia thought with amusement. The mother of his child. Then she saw that her supposed husband had come round and that instead of giving the game away by sitting up, he continued to lie still, watching her from his slate bed as she cradled his child in her arms and listened dreamily to Jemima’s hot-voiced swansong. He smiled when she saw him looking and watched her for a few seconds longer before he began to sit up.

  Just then his wife came in at the churchyard gate, walking on the grass so as to avoid making noise on the gravel. She read the situation at once.

  ‘He never eats enough and then he faints,’ she whispered, taking the waking child from Julia’s arms and shushing it.

  Her husband stood and presented her to Julia.

  ‘My sister, Sal,’ he whispered. ‘Julie Dixon.’

  The programme-seller put a finger to her lips.

  ‘You’re a hopeless uncle and a worse babysitter,’ Sal hissed, ignoring her. ‘Thanks,’ she mouthed at Julia with a grin and they left.

  Julia sat on in the porch until the concerto finished, admiring the carved green man in its ceiling and enjoying the sense that the programme-seller was rapidly revising her assumptions about what she had just witnessed, failing to come up with a solution not suggestive of impropriety.

  33

  Parched from all the dust he had been breathing in while sweeping out the empty silo, Pearce came in for a glass of water and was startled to find Dido sitting expectantly at the kitchen table reading.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘How was the last day of school?’

  ‘Oh. Okay. We had a quiz and Lucy and her mates took me to the chip shop for lunch. I messed around with Molly’s computer for a bit then I thought I should come back so I rode my bike here. Where’s Eliza?’

  ‘She went to London for the night to look up some stuff in the library. That’s my fault. Damn.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was meant to tell Molly. Sorry. So you could spend the night with Luce.’

  ‘Couldn’t I stay here?’

  ‘Well…yes. Sure. If you like. You bored of playing with Luce already?’

  ‘No. It’s just…I didn’t want to crowd her out. She didn’t ask me to stay, after all. I can see her tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, sure. You can help us plant broccoli. I’d pay you. Cash in hand.’

  Her face lit up. ‘Cool!’

  ‘I didn’t tell you that. It’s completely illegal because you’re a kid. But it’s quite fun. They’re cauliflower really. We just call them broccoli when we grow them in the winter.’ He was getting better at anticipating her hunger for facts.

  ‘Ah. What are you doing now?’

  ‘You bored?’

  ‘No. I’m reading.’ She showed him. Done with Tove Jansson, she had found his old book of English fairytales in her room. ‘I thought they’d be babyish,’ she said, ‘but some of them are really nasty.’

  ‘Do you like scary stories, then?’

  She nodded gravely. ‘Usually.’

  ‘Read this one, then, while I make us a cup of tea.’ He found the place for her, with its picture of a little dog barking at an advancing shadow. ‘But don’t blame me if it gives you a sleepless night.’

  ‘Huh,’ she said scornfully then read while he put on the kettle, rinsed the barley dust out of his eyes under the tap and washed his hands. He took her a mug of tea and the last of the rock buns. She was a quick reader. Clever, he guessed. Like her aunt.

  He sat sipping and watching her. He was so used to Lucy dressing like a boy that he tended to forget she was a girl underneath. It was novel to have a proper little girl about the place, with her hair in bunches and a cluster of rings and coloured bracelets on one hand.

  ‘Oh!’ she said as she finished.

  He grinned, happy the story had hit its mark.

  She looked at him in amazement. ‘She doesn’t get rescued or anything,’ she said, then turned back to the first page, munching her bun. ‘It’s really nasty!’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What are Hobbyars?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think that’s why it’s so scary. They just come at night and carry people off but it never says.’

  ‘And poor Dog Turpie, having his legs chopped off just for being brave!’ She laughed. ‘It’s really nasty! Are there any more like that?’

  ‘Don’t know. I don’t remember. But that’s the one that always got me. Molly used to scratch on the bedroom door like this.’ He scratched his nails slowly on the rough underside of the table. ‘Until I couldn’t stand it anymore and said, ‘Who is it?’ Then she’d just scratch again and I’d say, ‘Who is it?’ again and there’d be a pause.’ He dropped his voice for effect. ‘And then she’d say ‘HOBBYARRR!!’ and rattle the doorknob and I’d scream the house down.’

 
; She didn’t laugh. ‘But you knew it was her.’

  ‘Yes. But no too. If she kept it up long enough, I’d forget.’ He remembered she was an only child. The idea of having a big sister to wind you up was completely alien to her. He scratched his nails on the underneath of the table again and looked totally serious suddenly. ‘What was that?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  He scratched again.

  ‘Stop it,’ he told her.

  ‘I’m not doing anything,’ she laughed. ‘You stop it.’

  He scratched with both nails. ‘No. Come on now. What is that?’ He jumped up and ran to the door to peer out into the hall.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘All right? Stop it!’

  The sun was low over the sea as they crossed the yard and walked out to the upper fields. The steers needed moving again. Dido was a game little thing and enjoyed scrambling over hedges and vaulting gates. He could see how she might get on well with Lucy. She was fascinated when he explained how every field had a name, some of them recording owners from hundreds of years ago. Gabriel’s Piece. Lean Downs. Wedding Bells.

  ‘So do you like Eliza?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘Course,’ he said. ‘She’s lovely. Why?’

  ‘No reason. What if the Hobbyars are really beautiful?’

  ‘It doesn’t say they are.’

  ‘No. But they could be. Just because they kill the grandparents and pull down the house and carry off the little girl in a bag we assume they’re monsters but they might be beautiful.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pearce?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you think it matters? Being beautiful?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’ He tried to think of a more helpful answer. He was unused to this. ‘I suppose it helps.’

  ‘Because it makes people like you?’

  ‘Suppose. But they’d find out pretty fast if you weren’t worth liking. Handsome is as handsome does.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘You’ve got to be beautiful on the inside too. There are plenty of pretty people who are Hobbyars on the inside.’

  ‘Hobbyar. It would be a good name for your next cat.’

  ‘Old Simkin’s got a while to go yet.’

  ‘Well yes. But after that. Why don’t you have a dog?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Okay. Here we are. See them?’

  ‘Yes. Hobbyars.’

  ‘Steers.’

  He called out to them and the herd started towards him in dribs and drabs. Dido held out her hand to the first ones who arrived at their side, and laughed when they sniffed and snorted and ducked away from her advances. She was not remotely nervous of them.

  ‘I can see you’re a natural,’ he teased her. ‘Now you want to open that gate for me and we can lead them into the next field.’

  ‘Can’t we chase them?’

  ‘You could try but they’re a darned sight easier to lead. Chase them and they go all over the shop.’

  She grunted as she freed the bolt on the gate, then heaved it open so that it clanged against the stones on the hedge.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Now sit on the hedge there out of the way till I say,’ and he called the cattle again and walked through the gateway, encouraging them to follow him.

  Without being asked she shut the gate behind the last one but had difficulty shooting its bolt. ‘Seventy-two,’ she said as he helped her. ‘They’re hard to count when they’re moving aren’t they? How’d you get to be a farmer?’

  ‘Luck of the draw usually,’ he said. ‘Why? You after my job?’

  ‘It looks fun.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you can help plant broccoli for a morning then see how you feel about it.’

  ‘What’s for supper?’ She jumped off a hedge then ran alongside him to catch up.

  ‘Same as last night,’ he told her. ‘Only older.’

  34

  She was so out of touch. She had quite forgotten that the British Library had moved so she came as far as her first glimpse of the graceful new glass ceiling arching over the museum’s freed-up inner courtyard before she remembered and had to walk up to St Pancras.

  The new building seemed to have shed every vestige of the old one’s ultra traditional inefficiency. Catalogues used to be cut and pasted into huge, unwieldy alphabetical albums and spread over yards of shelving around which readers jockeyed for space. Now they were entirely computerised and even available online.

  Eliza knew her texts well enough to dismiss the most familiar composers. Not Byrd. Not Morley. Not Weelkes. Not Tallis. She scrolled down and up lists until she found a handful of lesser collections she thought might contain the crucial one while also matching Trevescan’s dates. She bagged her seat and placed her order.

  She had assumed she would have to call back for them in the afternoon and was astonished to hear she could be reading within the hour. She whiled away the interval in a stylish cafeteria tucked in beside a towering glass wall with shelf upon shelf of books backing onto it.

  Returning to her seat with the day’s paper, she revelled in the soothing, familiar sounds of rustling paper, closing books, soft studious throat clearings. Scholars now took notes on laptops or electronic notebooks instead of dog-eared pads but still she did not need to look for long before spotting someone pretending to cough so as to slip in a forbidden toffee or surreptitiously gouging out ear-wax with a sharpened pencil.

  Suddenly the little light on her desk lit up summoning her to the collection point. And there they were: eight first edition volumes of madrigals whisked across the centuries to her desk in less time than it took to get a cut and blow dry.

  Nothing. She found nothing. The fragment was printed on a right-hand page, plainly the last in a collection because its reverse side had been blank until Trevescan, or, okay, yes, whoever, had scribbled in his neat addendum. So she turned to the last pages of each book in turn, doing her best not to be sidetracked by cherubs, prefaces and forgotten felicities of text.

  A man might saile from Trent unto Danuby and yet not find so strange a peece as you be.

  Were I a flea, in bed, I would not bite you but search some other way for to delight you.

  Much delighted but nothing matched. Cursing her faulty memory, she turned to the last she had called up, Farnaby’s Canzonets. She was sure the text she was hunting was not a Farnaby one but he was from Truro so it seemed possible his music would have found a favoured home in a Cornish manor of the time.

  But no. Not Farnaby. And now it was too late to call up anything for consulting before the next day.

  Cursing her giddy spontaneity too, she carefully slid the pack of slim Farnaby volumes back in their box. Then she looked up the catalogue numbers for several much later volumes, by Thomas Vautor, Michael East and John Ward. She wanted it to be none of them, of course, because Trevescan had died by the time their collections were published so could not have penned the mystery madrigal in the back of any of them. She knew she must remain dispassionate. To identify the fragment would give her a clear date on which to base her investigation. And merely because it was not the work of her pet composer did not make a previously unpublished madrigal by one of his near-contemporaries any less desirable a find.

  ‘Mrs Easton!’ someone whispered, tapping on her elbow as she waited in line. It was Villiers Yates. A contemporary of hers in the music department and very much part of Giles’ coterie when she had first moved in with him.

  ‘Villiers?’

  ‘How stunning! How are you? You look so well.’

  Disciplined and rigorous, he had received his second degree long ago. She had heard he was now attached to the Royal College in some honorary capacity while earning his money elsewhere. His sharp eyes looked her over with a critical disdain that gave the lie to his murmured speech. Villiers, as always, was as immaculate as any courtier.

  He steered her to a corner where their whispers would disturb nobody. ‘I thought you’d given all this up,�
�� he hissed as though the library were some low haunt.

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘But you know how it is; painfully slow.’

  ‘And that bouncing baby of yours…’

  ‘She’s a galumphing nine-year-old!’

  ‘Good lord. Is she really?’

  ‘How’s your book coming on, Villiers?’

  ‘Which one?’ he asked, quick as a blade.

  ‘Last time I saw you it was the Gibbons thing.’

  ‘Oh that. Well I did it but…you know what publishing’s like now. So depressing. It came out in America. In a small, academic way.’

  ‘And you’re teaching now.’

  ‘Only a bit. And a bit of consultancy for…for someone’s collection. I seem to be doing more and more in America now.’

  Somebody shushed them and got one of Villiers’ lethal glares for their temerity. ‘So what are you up to?’ His gooseberry green eyes bored a hole in Eliza’s bag.

  ‘Oh. Still plugging on with Trevescan. A bit of consultancy too, actually. Villiers, you know the later stuff better than I do. I wonder if you’d recognise this.’

  She took out the page Pearce had entrusted to her, which she had protected with a Ziploc sandwich bag as that was all she could find in his kitchen. Villiers’ answers in seminars had always been demoralisingly swift and incisive. He did not disappoint her now.

  ‘May I?’ he asked, taking it from her, undoing the bag and sliding out the torn page. He handed back the bag off-handedly, as though she were some skivvy. ‘East,’ he said almost at once. ‘The Fourth Set of Books. Printed by John Browne? No. Thomas Snodham. That’s Snodham’s decoration at the end. Sixteen-ten. Sixteen-nineteen or so. See The Declining Sun. Where did you get this?’

  ‘Oh…Cornwall. A friend’s collection.’ Even in her disappointment she noted Villiers’ raised eyebrow.

  He looked back at the page and flicked it over in his neat, white grasp. ‘And what’s this?’

  ‘That’s what I’m really interested in.’

  ‘Yes. I can see why. One might take it for Trevescan, of course, with those Qs and the way he’s drawn the clef but the dates are wrong, aren’t they? Of course, it could always be a copy of a copy. Is it any good?’