by Patrick Gale
‘Charming,’ she said, then bluffed frantically. ‘A little group I sing with sometimes tried it out for me.’
‘Why’ve you only got the bass part?’
She was hardly going to tell him the rest was still glued in a family Bible. ‘I didn’t need the rest. Not yet. So you think East?’
‘My dear, I know it. Don’t run away.’
He crossed the room and approached a small woman in an unseasonably chunky jersey who was hunched over a laptop. They murmured together and Villiers returned with a blue box the woman had relinquished.
‘Petra Huston,’ he hissed to Eliza. ‘Spotted her booking it out earlier. Wretched woman. No life. No colour sense. But obsessed with Tallis to the point of psychosis.’
Eliza glanced nervously across at Petra Huston. Professor Huston glowered back, watching jealously for the safe return of her loan from rival hands, emblematic as a warning sign with her bottle-bottom glasses and unloved hair.
Villiers had opened the box and was flicking through the contents. ‘1618,’ he said. ‘I stand corrected,’ and he handed a kid-bound volume over for Eliza to inspect.
It was the bass part from The Fourth Set of Books by Michael East. She turned gently to the back of the last madrigal. It was a perfect match with Pearce’s fragment and there were two blank pages following, inviting enough for any talented vandal wishing to pen in an extra song.
She tried to slip away while he was returning the books to Petra Huston, sensing he would sniff out her disappointment but Villiers was hard on her heels as she stepped off the escalator into the foyer.
‘So this friend of yours, Eliza. Sorry. I didn’t catch his name.’
There was something repellent in his unlooked for warmth, however, and something chilling in the hungry glances he repeatedly cast at her bag. When he said, ‘I had lunch with poor dear Julia the other day,’ waiting for her to ask him more, it made it all the easier to be rude to him.
She had let him keep her company as far as the Tube but now gave him the slip, darting across from the Southbound to the Northbound platform just as a train was about to close its doors. Safe behind glass, she dared to wave at him and even mimed holding a telephone to her ear.
The train was stifling and the station where she got out was little cooler. It was one of those balmy summer evenings when even London’s grimmer corners were lent a kind of honeyed softness. People leant on balconies and walkways chatting and drinking. Children played on the pavements. Music and food smells were everywhere. But still, returning to the estate was a shock.
A few days at St Just and already she was taking full horizons for granted, and green, well-fed grass and clean air. Here the grass was yellowed by drought and dogs and there was a sense of being hemmed in on every side. Except for days of especially bad pollution, she had never noticed the city’s air before any more than she noticed herself breathing it. Passing swiftly from the train to museum to air-conditioned library, she had paid it little attention but now she was aware that she could taste it at the back of her tongue and imagined it leaving a sticky residue on her skin as she passed.
She must have swiftly become accustomed to silence too. Or, if not to silence, for the countryside was full of noises, then to a lack of background noise. Sitting beside Kitty’s caravan or waking in Pearce’s farmhouse, she found noises seemed to come singly and identifiably against a silent background. A pigeon’s murmur, a tractor’s ignition, the sudden, passing whizz and laughter of two cyclists, a pig, a helicopter, a cow; the sounds came as distinctly and definably as the consecutive images in a child’s alphabet book. Here it was all blurred; bus into taxi into motorbike, car horn into dog bark into clattering shop front shutter. And behind it all lay traffic roar so constant as to be less sound than scenery.
She was shocked at the enforced intimacy. People’s smells and conversation and music spilled over and spilled again for lack of space. This was the buzz of the city, of course, a kind of obligatory communality true urbanites were expected to relish but riding the lift to the thirteenth floor and pushing back the door against the bunch of free papers and junk mail, she was as oppressed by it as any rustic newcomer.
She looked around her with cold eyes, listening to the insistent hum of the fridge and the competing television channels from the flats above her and below and smelling the ghosts of old, sick dog and her own depressed inactivity.
When she first moved into the flat it was in the full acknowledgement that she had made mistakes, both of them men. The price she had paid was the loss of a shallow toehold on the climb to an academic security. Relative security. Her independence now would have to be bravely willed where before it had come naturally. But she was determined and would survive. She wrote notes to her handful of contacts for freelance work, giving them her new number and address. She paid humiliating calls on the district’s Citizens’ Advice Bureau and the benefit office and claimed the financial help she was due by virtue of being both a mother and poor and effectively unemployed. Then, having received reassurance from Dr Goldhammer that she was not entirely written off her records and that, miraculously, she still had faith in her, she brought Roger Trevescan back into the centre of her desk and worked relentlessly towards finishing her long neglected thesis.
For a few months she rediscovered the rigorous pleasures of study and application. In the precious hours when Dido was at school or the unlooked for ones when schoolfriends’ mothers took her off her hands, she made guerrilla raids on the British Library and Royal College reading rooms. She briefly acquired a bicycle and got used to lugging it in and out of the lift. She slipped back into the subculture of the industrious poor and became adept at feeding Dido and herself on economy brands, food just past its sell-by date and the produce discarded at a nearby street market. For a while a second-hand copy of a shameless paperback called Poor Cook became her Bible.
Then, playing with a friend one day, Dido found her way back to Giles’ house. She burst into the flat, full of artless, unedited excitement. She and her friend had spotted a woman walking Carlo, followed her home and been asked in for tea by Giles.
Instinctively Eliza asked about the woman and had been at once reassured and unsettled to discover she was a paid dog walker who did not come inside.
‘So it was just you and Savannah and Giles?’
‘Yes,’ Dido said. ‘Julia works during the day.’
‘What does she do?’ Eliza tried to keep the squeak out of her voice.
‘Dunno. Didn’t ask. And Carlo was really good. The walker lady’s been teaching him things. Can I go again, d’you think?’
‘Well…’ Eliza was at a loss. She was in no position to impose a ban but suddenly it was the last thing she wanted. She had a sudden fear that Giles and the mysterious Julia had the power to take Dido from her. ‘We’d have to ask Giles,’ she said, honourably.
‘He said it was fine with him but I’d have to ask you. So can I go again? Can I? Carlo’s so sweet now he’s good!’
‘We’ll see. I…I don’t see why not. But Giles is busy. Nearly as busy as Paul. He’s often away. He won’t always be there when you want to – oh all right.’
So Dido started to visit Giles at random but usually on weekday afternoons, when the mysterious Julia was at work.
There was no direct contact between the adults because there seemed to be no need. It was not as though Dido was staying the night or required maintenance. That is, she did require maintenance – it repeatedly shocked Eliza how much a child cost – but Eliza was determined to get by on her slender earnings and the assistance she had from the state.
At first the reason Dido gave for her visits was her desire to play with Carlo. But then she returned to the flat with the dog in tow, announcing that Julia was allergic to him so Giles had given him to her. Eliza had swallowed her outcry at the extra expense. She was pleased to see the dog. He was an old friend. And to take in any refugee from Julia gave satisfaction.
The visits continued, how
ever, until Julia, not Giles, telephoned to say how very much they’d enjoy having Dido for the weekend occasionally, since Giles was a kind of father to her. Dido had been in the room at the time, filling in the blanks, so it had been impossible to resist the suggestion without seeming a monster.
The visits were never ratified, no more set out by law than was Giles and Eliza’s separation. Extrapolating, perhaps, from the routines of schoolfriends, most of whom, it seemed, lived with only one parent at a time, Dido began to share herself out, edging both households into a routine whereby she alternated weekends with each – unless Giles was on tour – and spent Wednesday nights with him. Julia gradually assumed the characteristics of an edgy and then unpredictably nice stepmother. Giles and Eliza continued not to speak.
It would have been melodramatic to suggest that the failure of Eliza’s resolve and her slow decline into what Dido called just sitting around all day dated from the afternoon Dido rediscovered Giles’ house. Eliza only went to the British Library a few more times after that, however, and she wrote her last sleeve note two months later. She read less and less source material and more and more novels. She borrowed them by the greasy armful from the local library, often forgetting to return them on time and trusting Dido to slip them back for her with some winning childish fib. She ate less and less, saved on heating by staying in bed. It was hard to say whether she coped less and less because Dido coped more and more or vice versa but she fell out with one of her few remaining friends when he said nothing in her defence while his boyfriend accused her of punishing Dido for not having found one parent’s love sufficient.
There was nothing to eat. Tea bags. A tin of pineapple rings. A bag of rice. The thought of going out again into the broiling blare of the street to buy overpriced food in a corner shop simply to bring it back and eat it in solitude galvanised her. She picked up the mound of papers and letters and sorted swiftly through them, throwing most back on the floor. What was left she thrust into a holdall, then carried the holdall with her round the flat adding things at random, a half-empty box of tampons, shampoo, clothes for them both, books. She also packed her Trevescan files.
She took one last look around. She could not answer for Dido, who was something of a hoarder, but there was nothing of hers left behind which she would not happily consign to oblivion. The flat, once a haven, no longer felt remotely safe. Even with the front door shut behind her she felt no more in a private space than she had in the lift.
She could not afford a berth on the sleeper but she was content to spend the night dozing on a seat. She would still sleep better than she could in her old rumpled bed.
Ravenous suddenly, she bought herself a portable supper in the station’s supermarket. Sitting by a window munching grapes, listening to wealthier travellers chatter as they settled into their ingenious bedrooms off the corridor behind her, she felt again the unfamiliar stirrings of something like happiness.
She took out the sheet of music – she, too, was starting to think of the mystery madrigal as Country Goodness – and stared at its inky markings in minute detail. She felt a ghost of the pride she had felt when Villiers showed an unfeigned interest in what she was doing. When she held up her ticket for inspection, it was with a similar sense of vindication, of being, once again, a member of the world.
35
Giles had expected Julia to put up some resistance to his idea that they change hotels and move further west for a few days. She had once let slip something about the north coast of the county being the only bearable bit not spoiled by tourism. She was equable, however, even keen, and hurried to make their reservation in a good, small hotel in Penzance she had read about. She had not been remotely cross at his no-show at the church the night before, although she plainly saw through his lame excuse.
Her eagerness to move on and a briskness in her manner when she answered his enquiries with, ‘Oh, fine. She played beautifully. It was great,’ suggested that all had not gone according to her plans. Perhaps she had been a little too forward and been snubbed for it. Perhaps another of her players had been there and paid her no attention. He knew better than to pry.
‘I don’t know why Selina was so insistent on my being there, really,’ she said as their car climbed the downs above Wadebridge and made for the faster road west.
‘I’m sure Jemima was pleased someone from the agency was there,’ he said.
‘She was a bit embarrassed, actually. Oh well,’ she sighed, kicked off her shoes and turned on the radio. ‘Did my bit.’
He thought she had dozed off because she became so quiet and said nothing when he later changed stations but when they were passing the turn-offs for Redruth and Camborne he noticed she was both awake and tense, warily watching the housing estates and disused engine houses as they passed.
‘So how did you get on yesterday?’ she asked.
‘Oh. Okay,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I should have told you earlier. I didn’t think.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘It’s rather sad actually. Eliza’s mother died. It was a stroke that sent her to hospital, then she had another one the night they got down here. She wasn’t particularly old.’
‘How are they?’
‘Well I don’t know. That’s the thing. It was a neighbour I spoke to. Eliza’s taken Dido off to the neighbour’s caravan near St Just somewhere.’ He heard how phoney his deliberate vagueness sounded.
‘That’s a bit off. I mean of her not to tell you.’
‘You know what Eliza’s like. Scatty at the best of times.’
‘And why a caravan, for pity’s sake?’
‘I don’t think she could afford much more,’ he said gently.
‘She could if she bothered to get a job,’ Julia snorted. ‘Shouldn’t you tell St Saviour’s? I bet she hasn’t thought to.’
‘They knew she was coming down. Schools must have broken up by now anyway, judging from this lot.’ He braked and they both stared at the line of caravans and holiday-laden cars blocking both lanes of the carriageway up ahead of them. ‘I’m just a bit worried about how Eliza takes it. Her relationship with her mother wasn’t good and if she’s going to slide into another depression…’
‘Another depression? Is she out of the first?’
‘You know what I mean. If she is, then a caravan at the back of beyond isn’t the safest place to do it. And Dido’s life’s grim enough as it is.’
‘So I suppose you’ll want to go over and see them.’ Julia was picking at some fluff on her toes.
‘Oh, I dunno. Maybe. But we’re on holiday. What do you fancy for lunch? Could we get lobster again, do you think? Is this hotel of yours up to it?’
It was a delightful hotel, perched above Penzance’s little harbour with views across a small boatyard to St Michael’s Mount. The owner, a legendary beauty, had furnished it like a private house so that each room had its own books, paintings and character.
They ordered two Newlyn crab for their supper then made do with a tapas and sherry lunch in a bar on the neighbouring street. For a moment Giles suspected that this admittedly pretty street was all that survived of old Penzance. German bombs had been discarded along the seafront, he had heard, by pilots turning round for home after raids along the South coast. The rest of the town, apart from a marvellously self-important domed bank, seemed to be bog-standard high street shops and substandard Victorian architecture.
But having strolled down Chapel Street, peering in at antique shop windows, passing a bizarre building in the ‘Egyptian’ style and the house where the Brontes’ mother was born, they found delights hidden on the other, genteel side from the harbour. From the commanding church, with its views across both sides of the bay and subtropical graveyard planted with palms, eucalyptus and yuccas they were led on by curiosity and chance through a succession of pretty alleys, past lush gardens and nicely under-renovated Georgian townhouses, all with the constant keening of seagulls and occasional dazzling glimpses of the bay. They sat and sunned themse
lves amidst the fantastically unEnglish planting of Morrab Gardens, then wound on through another park to a small museum of Cornish life and a gallery of Newlyn School paintings. After a few minutes of paintings detailing the pilchard industry or with titles like And Will He Ne’er Come Back To Me?, fatigue, heat and sherry overcame them and they succumbed to a cream tea on the museum’s little terrace.
‘Well this is nice,’ he said. And it was. He could not remember when he had last simply spent time with her for the fun of it. Apart from evenings, when they seemed to be either out, entertaining or exhausted or weekends, when time not dedicated to Dido would often be swallowed up in tedious domestic chores.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a pretty town.’
‘I can’t think why it’s less popular than St Ives.’
‘No beach,’ she said. ‘No surfing.’
They sat on in companionable silence while he ate her second scone. A gang of girls came by, hot-cheeked and short-skirted from a tennis match. Flushed faces aside, they had Julia’s rather Irish colouring.
‘You’d fit right in here,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should sell up and move to Penzance, buy one of those nice houses with a big garden. We could live off the interest from the difference in value. I could give singing lessons and you could teach deportment and elocution.’
‘Fuck off,’ she said, only half-laughing. ‘You’d die of boredom. No opera. No theatre. No halfway decent concerts. No Conran Shop. No Harvey Nicks. And half those little restaurants around Chapel Street will be closed out of season. And only one of those would be halfway decent. Fresh lobster for dinner’s a treat, but it’s not Granita.’ She paused as if still contemplating the life change he had suggested. ‘Shall we head back?’
‘If you like.’
He put an arm on her shoulder as they walked, smelling the tang of her fresh sweat, but she soon became too hot and adjusted her bag as a pretext for shrugging him off. He smiled to himself as they walked in silence. It was so true; things she rated as constituting quality of life were precisely the things dewy-eyed ex-Londoners gave up to pursue quality of life out of town. She had relaxed her look, at least, was wearing only lipstick and had her legs bare but he could be sure her bag contained mobile phone, address book, diary, vitamin tablets and Chanel lippy, that her tee shirt and linen trousers alone would have cost what most of the women they were passing spent on clothes in an entire year.
