A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  Lucy was in a terrible state, having convinced herself it was her fault somehow. She was already fiercely protective of Dido. Pearce soothed her as best he could as he drove her home, but when Molly rang him from the casualty department, Pearce agreed that she should come back to take Lucy off his hands. He could then drive up with the Land Rover, better equipped than her little car to deal with a passenger who could not bend her leg.

  His first reaction when he realised Dido would be fine but temporarily lame was guilty pleasure; he had been dreading them leaving Cornwall and it was now out of the question for them to travel. Dido was woozy with painkillers, all cheek and bravado gone. Eliza was worn and worried. The sight of them lent him the strength of mind to take control.

  He drove them back to Kitty’s caravan but only so that Eliza could help him pack their things to bring back to the farm. She made a token show of resistance but he could tell there was no fight in her. Besides, she knew a cramped caravan with no television was no place to be confined with a reluctantly grounded nine-year-old.

  He carried Dido in and enthroned her on a sofa with extra cushions, a rug, a jug of juice and the TV’s remote control. Dido was waking up and beginning to enjoy the drama. He was about to start fixing them supper when Eliza surprised him by saying she wanted to cook, that she had not cooked anything proper for ages.

  ‘Because you can’t,’ Dido shouted from next door.

  ‘I’ll make us all a pizza,’ she told him. ‘It’ll be fun.’

  He was actually relieved because the next two stills of broccoli plants had been dropped off in the yard that afternoon while he was off at the hospital and needed attending to. He spread them out, tray by tray in long lines across the yard and mixed up some rabbit repellent in the knapsack sprayer. By the time he had sprayed all two hundred trays then stacked them back in the stills, the sun was sinking and smells of garlic, tomato and roasting cheese were coming out of the kitchen windows.

  He came back inside to find Eliza playing a prom concert loudly on the kitchen radio in competition with Dido watching a game show on the television and a crackly atmosphere as though angry words had been exchanged while he was out. Or perhaps the anger had boiled up at the hospital and his absence had seen them spending time in adjoining rooms, not talking.

  Eliza was hot and bothered. Now that he was inside, he could smell burning beneath the Italian richness but he did not feel he should comment on it.

  ‘Smells good,’ he said. ‘I was longer than I thought. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s okay. Where do you eat when you’re not entertaining?’

  ‘Standing up, quite often. No. In here, anyway. But we can eat next door. Keep the young one company.’

  He washed the repellent off his hands, scrubbing at his nails with a brush.

  ‘What’s in that stuff?’ she asked.

  ‘Dunno. Chilli, maybe. But it smells better than what Dad liked.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Renardine.’

  ‘Fox juice?’

  ‘Something like. Made your clothes reek for days if you splashed it.’ He came near where she was slicing the pizza on a bread board. ‘Did I do the right thing, bringing you both back here?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Yes.’ Her tone was brisk. ‘Of course. Why?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just that I thought…nothing. I’m glad you’re here. Are you hungry in there?’

  ‘No,’ Dido shouted back.

  ‘Of course she is,’ Eliza said. ‘She loves pizza.’

  He opened them a bottle of wine and they sat down to a rather spread-out meal, with he and Eliza at table and Dido several feet away on her sofa.

  The pizza was not a success. Lacking yeast, Eliza had fallen back on something she dimly remembered reading in a newspaper recipe and made a base using a floury scone mixture which managed to be burnt around the edges and gassily undercooked in the middle.

  Pearce was hungry and would have eaten anything, so polished off his helping with ease but when he answered Eliza’s apologies with, ‘No. It’s good,’ Dido said,

  ‘It’s disgusting.’

  ‘At least eat the topping,’ Eliza suggested but Dido slid her plate to the floor with a clatter.

  ‘Giles’ pizzas are much better,’ she said rebelliously.

  ‘If you can’t be polite,’ Pearce said, ‘you’d better go to bed.’

  ‘Can’t make me.’

  ‘Dido…’ Eliza began.

  ‘Oh I think I can,’ Pearce said and, advancing on the sofa, slid his arms underneath Dido and picked her up.

  She protested and swore shockingly, angry because she was half-amused. All the way up the stairs she smacked at his face and pulled his hair but he was relentless and deposited her on the bathroom stool to brush her teeth while he fetched her crutches from beside the sofa.

  He turned down the bed in her little room, switched on the bedside light and drew the curtains. Soon she was banging along the corridor to join him. ‘Careful,’ he told her, ‘or you’ll break the other one.’

  She had changed into her nightdress, a long tee shirt with breakfast stains on the front. The fresh plaster cast looked doubly incongruous beside her other skinny leg. ‘I feel like an elephant,’ she said as she swung it onto the bed and pulled the duvet over herself. ‘Or a hippo.’

  ‘You’ll soon get used to it.’

  ‘Have you ever broken anything?’

  ‘No. But you’ll soon get used to it.’

  ‘It was disgusting, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. But when people apologize for bad food they don’t really want you to agree with them. Your mum tried.’

  ‘Huh. Suppose. I couldn’t eat it, anyway. I was too sore.’

  ‘In your leg?’

  ‘In my mouth.’

  ‘Where you cut yourself?’

  ‘Inside.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Can you keep a secret?’ she asked him solemnly.

  ‘Depends who from.’

  ‘If you tell her, she’ll be really upset and we’ll have to go back to London right away.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said dubiously. ‘I can keep a secret.’

  ‘Hold out your hand.’

  When he did so, she reached out a hot little fist and slipped something into his palm. It was two teeth. Two large ones. Molars. Nothing apparently wrong with them.

  He was shocked. ‘Did these come out today?’ he asked. ‘When you fell?’

  ‘If she notices, then they did. They got knocked out on the ground when I fell, okay? But she won’t notice. She never notices stuff like that.’

  ‘But I don’t understand. Why don’t you want her to see? These are big teeth, not baby ones. We should get you to a dentist. You could have them put back in somehow.’

  She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But we’ve got to go back to see the specialist after the weekend because he wasn’t there today. I’ll need you to drive me. We can say it’s just X-rays and stuff. She won’t care.’

  ‘She cares very much.’

  ‘Yeah yeah but…you’re not to tell her. Not yet. It’s really important.’

  ‘Okay. I won’t. D’you want them back?’

  She held out her hand for the teeth then pocketed them. ‘I’ll need to show the orthodontist,’ she said and her quiet self-importance charmed him so much he had to make an effort not to enrage her by smiling. ‘Can you tell her I’m sorry I was rude,’ she said. ‘It’s just she really pisses me off sometimes.’

  ‘You can tell her yourself. I’m sure she’ll look in on you before you go to sleep.’

  She opened her book. She had started Finn Family Midwinter. ‘You do promise, don’t you?’ she said as he stood to leave her in peace.

  ‘I promise,’ he said.

  ‘It’s really important.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He joined Eliza on the sofa. He passed on Dido’s apology but kept her secret, for now, not seeing what harm it could do.

  ‘You we
re very strong-minded,’ she told him. ‘I just give in most of the time. She’s so like Hannah in that way.’ She slid her feet into his lap. ‘I’d make a lousy farmer’s wife, wouldn’t I? Can’t even make a pizza.’

  ‘Most of the farmer’s wives round here buy their pizzas in multipacks at Iceland. I think I love you.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything back,’ he said, anticipating her silence. ‘Just thought you should know.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked after a moment of absentmindedly rubbing her feet against his belt buckle.

  ‘Well…I…it seemed the sort of thing one should –’

  ‘No, I mean why me?’ she laughed. ‘Why us? We are an us, you know. We’re a package deal.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So it would have to be all right by her as well as by me.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Just so long as you know.’

  43

  Working in Pearce’s small office would have been impossible. Eliza liked the idea of sitting at his desk, deep in his father’s blue leather chair, but a rising tide of farm paperwork spilled over from the filing cabinets on one side of the small room to the computer and desk on the other. Eliza sensed he was one of those people who chose to work in a chaos only they understood but she needed room to spread out her notes and feared that by making space amidst the cattle passports, subsidy forms and muddy receipts for fertiliser and cattle, she would throw a delicate system into disarray. So she had colonised the dining room table instead. Her Trevescan thesis was spread out around her, removed from its files the better to rearrange it. While Dido watched videos, she was forcing herself to reread both the chapters drafted in prose and the pages and pages of notes, and as she read each sheet she sorted it according to whether or not it could still form part of the thesis realigning itself around what she now knew.

  ‘Here on Magellan 16 our ways are different,’ a woman said suddenly. ‘We have only one child to every three of your generations. We live longer, see further.’

  ‘Could you turn it down a bit?’ Eliza asked.

  Dido scowled to herself, rapt in the cultural exchange between a woman with three eyes and another with a trunk like an elephant’s.

  ‘Dido!’

  Dido fired the remote control and killed the television’s sound altogether.

  ‘I only meant turn it down.’

  ‘It’s okay. I can still follow the story.’ Dido watched the alien women talk on. Her plaster cast was thrust out on a footstool before her, five filthy little toes peeking out at the end of it. The cat lay on her belly, one paw stretched up towards Dido’s bandaged chin. Dido wore shorts and a baggy Eat British Beef tee shirt Pearce had given her. Since the accident, she had been in a stormy mood, casting baleful glances at anyone who tried to lift it by bringing peace offerings. The nurses had sent her home with a little compressed air canister connected to a thin pipe. If she used this to fire down the side of the plaster cast, it lessened the intolerable itching. Dido hotly denied the itching was bothering her at all but could be heard firing off the canister when she thought herself unobserved.

  She had been so happy before her accident, blossoming into a new friendship, spending hours at a time out of doors, it was small wonder she felt a need to punish them for her confinement. Her pleasure when Lucy turned up with several taped episodes of her favourite sci-fi series was undercut when she realised Lucy would be spending the day outside, working for Pearce again.

  Eliza found herself drawn in. There was an attack of some kind. Crushed by a fallen girder, the elephant woman entrusted a sort of pod, the slow-gestating future of her race evidently, to the three-eyed one, who wept in triplicate before fleeing to her space shuttle. Eliza was reaching the point of asking Dido to turn the volume back up when the telephone called her away.

  She let the answering machine screen the call in case it was for Pearce. A couple of times she had answered without thinking and found herself faced with some agricultural query in impenetrable Penwith Cornish from a caller who plainly thought her simple-minded.

  Pearce had given Dido her choice of bedrooms. She had chosen to stay in the little yellow one with a view into the branches of a battered pine tree. Eliza slept with Pearce at the other end of the long landing. He had put drawers and wardrobes at their disposal but was touchingly anxious lest she feel trapped.

  ‘I can drive you to the bus station whenever you like,’ he assured her. ‘But until she’s allowed to put any weight on her foot, Doe’s better off here than high up in some tower block.’

  That was her name now, apparently. Doe. The girls had cemented their friendship with a faintly defeminising name change. Lucy was Cee, which she elected to write as merely C. Eliza remembered the years at school when, seeking only anonymity, she was actually content to have people call her Leeza.

  Pearce’s gruff voice came from the machine. He gave his mobile number then said, ‘Or you can leave a message for Eliza, Pearce or Doe after the tone.’

  ‘Erm. This is a message for Eliza. From Anne Perry.’

  Eliza grabbed the phone. ‘Anne, hi. It’s me.’

  Anne was an eminently sensible university contemporary who had stayed put and carved a niche for herself in the English faculty. In an inspired moment, Eliza had remembered that Anne was partly involved in the setting up of a vast online poetry and song database which would eventually be accessible and searchable online. A mammoth work, it would contain every line of every English poem, prayer, hymn, song, folksong even pop lyric ever in the public domain. Heavily reliant on volunteer data entry, it currently stretched from The Wanderer to Dryden and from Hardy to the Lost Preachers, with substantial gaps. Eliza’s hope was that, if the words of the mystery madrigal had been used elsewhere, even in a slightly altered version, Anne could tell her.

  Anne gave her an address to e-mail the words to and asked the inevitable questions about whether she was working again and who was Pearce and so on. When she asked if she should update her address book, Eliza said, ‘No, no. It’s just a…well, a prolonged holiday, really. Just until Dido’s leg’s stronger,’ and felt treacherous and confused.

  She hurried upstairs, turned on Pearce’s computer and opened the word processing program in which she had already made an initial stab at summarising her findings. The words to Country Goodness were already typed out. She copied them into an e-mail. The layout went wrong as she pasted it, however, running on lines which should be separate. Cursing softly, she ran through the text inserting line breaks. Thinking to make it prettier, she selected the text then centred it. Then she thought that looked precious so she selected the text again. By a slip of the mouse however she realigned it to the right margin instead of the left. She was about to correct this when she saw a new pattern.

  By aligning the lines to the right, she found the last letters of each line in the second verse spelled out Rosy. She laughed. It was a happy accident, of course. The kind of coincidence that drove over-researched academics insane the donnish equivalent of searching for hidden messages in the rustling of leaves or the arrangement of paving stones.

  Elizabethan versifiers, like those in other ages, would occasionally play such games, of course, building a sonnet from the letters of a beloved’s name or some coded reference. There. The first verse line-endings spelled out nothing. YBOT.

  She corrected the alignment to the left again and, out of idle curiosity, read off the first letters of each line. AMOE in the first verse and OEGE in the second. Amo, I love, but Amoe? An alternative spelling of amow perhaps, as in amow amass I love a lass? As for OEGE, it meant nothing that she knew of.

  To waste no more time, she e-mailed off the text to Anne, who had promised that the department computer would take only seconds to search the database, then, ashamed of her rusty Latin, went on a browse through Pearce’s bookshelves. He had thrown out nothing he had ever owned, from Caesar’s Gallic Wars Book II to The Five Children and It and a Blue Pe
ter album so it was a fair bet that he still had a schoolboy dictionary or two somewhere. He did not believe in alphabetic or thematic order so it took her a while to find an English dictionary, which offered nothing between amniotic and amoeba or Oedipus and oeil de boeuf. After another search, trying not to be distracted by other books along the way, she tracked down an ink-spotted Latin dictionary. This offered her amo, to love and amoene, meaning pleasantly.

  It could not be Italian or Spanish because they tended to turn Oe words, imported from Greek, into E words. Old Norse? Anglo-Saxon?

  This was ridiculous. She turned off the computer and was about to return downstairs to her notes and/or the further adventures of Elephant Woman’s slow-gestating baby when she saw the doodles on one of the endless free pads Pearce seemed to be given by agrichemical sales reps. The girls must have been up here surfing the Net and Dido had covered the top sheet with Moomin figures. (She had discovered the books in Pearce’s bookshelves and been copying the pictures from them ever since.) Eliza had always found the hippo-faced creatures sinister rather than lovable and hoped this was a phase that would soon pass. There were things in the books which had given her nightmares as a girl; the unfamiliar tall, thin Nordic stoves, the evocations of endless wintry darkness and the Hattifatteners, a band of malevolent little creatures like wandering condoms which were conjured up by electrical storms. She feared they might be making Dido dream too. But perhaps children saw so many strange things on television now that it took more than a whimsical novel to disturb their sleep.

  Nonetheless she tore the page off, meaning to throw it away. On the next sheet down the girls had been having fun with their names. Entwining them as Didolucy, hybridising them into Dicy, Dolu, Ludi and so on. Eliza remembered their shouts of laughter when they found an online anagram engine which turned Dido Hosken into Die, Honk-Sod and Lucy Martin into Amy Run-Clit.

  In one corner of the page Dido had drawn another Moomin, a kind of Moomin-girl with a gingham dress, a personal stereo, a handbag and a lipstick. She was peering at a mirror, refreshing the make-up on her hippo face and saying I Dido in a speech bubble. Her reflection, cleverly drawn, had a speech bubble to match and was saying O did I? Eliza smiled at Dido’s ingeniousness. Then the girlish wordplay suggested something to her.