A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  At first she thought Pearce was painfully shy. Having seen him filthily relaxed in his work things, she was startled to see him clean and assumed he felt restrained by smarter clothes. She was used to Giles and men like him, who always spoke first and were never short of something to say. Finding herself thrown together with this big, tongue-tied stranger made her shy too, and not herself at all. Not what she had come to think of as herself, anyway. Then she realised he was not shy at all, but attentive and uncompetitive. Before long he was drawing her out, topping up her wine, passing her vegetables, asking gentle questions.

  ‘It can’t have been easy for you,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘What can’t?’

  ‘All the…the mess. You must have been very young when you two met.’

  ‘Quite young,’ she said, flattered.

  ‘Didn’t you hope for something straightforward? Just a bloke and no baggage?’

  ‘Oh I don’t think there’s any such thing. I bet you come with baggage.’

  His eyes glittered with something. ‘I’ve never been married.’

  ‘No? But you’ll still have baggage. Parents. Family. Even no emotional history – no relationships – is baggage of a kind after a while.’ She summoned up a laugh she intended to sound carefree but it came out as a kind of bitter croak, so much so that Giles looked across at her and she had to reassure him with a quick, private smile.

  ‘Shall we have coffee upstairs?’ she suggested. She hoped that a move back to the sofas would shake up their configuration as two reunited exes and two spare wheels.

  Eliza slipped away to ring the babysitter to check Dido had gone to bed. Pearce shambled off in search of the gents. Briefly alone in the sitting room, therefore, Julia drew Giles down on the sofa beside her.

  ‘He’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Gentle giant. She’s very happy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about the baby? Have you told her?’

  ‘Course not.’ He seemed almost shocked. ‘Did you tell him?’

  ‘No. But why should it –?’

  ‘It…it just seems an odd way of going about it. And…it wouldn’t be very fair. She can’t have them, remember.’

  ‘You never said.’

  ‘I must have done.’

  ‘You never told me.’

  ‘She might not have told him yet.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Of course. I won’t say a word. Our happy secret.’ She smiled and touched his arm, hoping to draw him into a warm moment in which they might be discovered. But the coffee came in, borne by Pearce, who had relieved his schoolfriend of the tray. And Giles jumped up to take it off him and pour and Pearce plonked himself down where Giles had been sitting.

  When Eliza came back in she had done something to her hair. Julia suspected she had washed it just before leaving and come out with it wet. It had spent most of the evening hanging rather limp, looking clean but gratifyingly lifeless. Evidently she had brushed it and now it stood out around her face and glittered. Spun gold Julia thought, picturing fairytale heroines. Hair as yellow as corn. She had also been playing with the bottles of scent in the ladies. As she kicked off her shoes and settled herself into a corner of the opposite sofa, Julia caught a little erotic message of stephanotis.

  Naturally when Giles took her a cup of coffee and a little saucer of chocolates, he settled down beside her and the tête-à-tête resumed.

  ‘Lovely room,’ Pearce said. ‘My mum used to come here for toasted cheese sandwiches in the Fifties. It wasn’t so posh then, I expect. Is this your first time in Penzance, Julia?’

  ‘We’re all snowballs,’ she told him, unable to match his small talk.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s all a con, isn’t it? This business of starting afresh. Start a new life somewhere else. Start a new relationship with a clean slate. We’re snowballs. We don’t start afresh, we just pick up more stuff as we go along. I was so nervous about tonight but the moment you two walked in I thought, “Marvellous! Look at them! Crisp and clean and in love. A new start. So we’ll all get a new start now.” But it’s not true.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Well look.’ She waved her coffee cup towards the other sofa, not caring that coffee slopped into the saucer. ‘He still loves her. He probably always will. If I’m to make it work with him, I have to accept that as part of his baggage. You too.’

  ‘You…you think she…?’

  Something in his manner made her need to hurt him, just for a moment. Perhaps because she could see so completely the nice, steady appeal he had for Eliza and was envious that she should be in a position of such manly plenty. ‘Oh just look at the body language,’ she told him impatiently.

  At that moment Eliza smiled at something Giles told her and, twining some golden hair in her fingers, wriggled herself deeper into the sofa cushions in a way that seemed to lay herself wide open to him.

  ‘Of course she’s still in love with him. You may be her new Good Thing but he’ll always be her old favourite, always at the back of her head when she’s with you, and there’s no competing with that.’

  Villiers could not have done it better. Her observation killed their conversation, left him looking so miserable she wanted to take his big hands in hers and kiss their scarred knuckles.

  ‘Don’t listen to me, Pearce. I’m just bitter and twisted.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ he said kindly.

  Damn it! She had kicked him when he was down and yet he could find it in himself to be kind to her.

  He was still watching the others and when Eliza suddenly said, ‘Is that the time? I’ve got an early train tomorrow. Take me home at once, Pearce,’ his grateful smile was heartbreaking.

  46

  Pearce had approached the evening in such high spirits. In the light of their conversation the previous night, Eliza taking him to meet Giles and his girlfriend felt like a public declaration of which he could be justifiably proud. He knew that he should not overinterpret her actions and that there was probably an element of aggression, of getting back at her ex involved.

  Only he wasn’t her ex, of course, but still her husband and Pearce, in his cautious optimism, was quite unprepared for the shock of seeing how physically suited they were. With the same hair and eye colour and the physical ease between them, they might have been brother and sister.

  He had thought he would at least have some advantage by being on home ground but the hotel was far smarter than he remembered it being and Giles somehow contrived to make it feel like his private house. Giles gave him the conversational upper hand by opening with some ignorant, third-hand assumptions about farming but, to his irritation, Pearce found himself cowed into politeness and came across as the quiet, dim country boy for which they took him. But it was the physical contrast between them he found most demoralising. Giles was film-star handsome, the sort of man who would welcome a camera from any angle. Pearce felt himself a great, hulking blob beside him.

  He tried in vain to coax Julia into talking about herself, her house, her work but found to his dismay that everything led back to Giles; Giles’ work was her work, Giles’ house, her house. He was trying to ignore the way Eliza and Giles were getting on but Julia could talk about nothing else. She was frightening company. She might lose control at any moment and start shouting.

  Then there was the horrible surprise when a voice behind him said, ‘Can I take your orders for drinks?’ and he realised that Janet worked there. He could not keep his back turned indefinitely so made a big show of asking her how she was, how Lance and the girls were and so on. But he saw how she read the situation and despised him even as he clumsily introduced her, because in his nervousness he said she had been to school with him and she did not bother to correct him. Luckily someone else served them during dinner. Coming upstairs again afterwards, he managed to catch Janet on her own as she brought coffee up. He took the tray off her, which made matters worse because it seemed like the equivalent of telling a servant they could ta
ke the rest of the night off.

  ‘Old friends,’ he told her. ‘Haven’t seen them in ages.’

  ‘Better get back to them quick, then,’ she said. ‘If they want liqueurs, they’re inside the desk with the honesty book.’

  Worst of all, however, was the way Eliza talked to Giles about Country Goodness. She talked about music more generally too but in specialised language that excluded Pearce as completely as if they had been speaking a foreign tongue. She talked about recognising its style and handwriting, about her trip to the British Library and her breakthrough in the Truro archive as though all that mattered was Giles’ approval. To Pearce’s ears – straining to pick up sentences even as he pretended to listen to Julia – she made her trip to Cornwall sound like no more than a research visit, a brief, lucky diversion from her career elsewhere. She touched Giles on the elbow, the hand, even the knee. She did not touch Pearce once all evening. When he turned back to Julia, hoping for relief, she merely held up a mirror to his jealousy, being similarly tormented, so that they ended up less as fellow performers than as spectators to the main event.

  ‘What an ordeal,’ Eliza said as soon as they were alone in the Land Rover again. ‘Sorry to put you through that. They’re desperately unhappy, of course. It comes off them in little waves.’

  ‘Do you think?’ he gently encouraged her and she spent the drive home pinpointing the ways in which Giles had been rude or Julia catty, analysing how badly they were suited.

  ‘He’s scarred emotionally,’ she said. ‘I never really noticed before, as if he had one skin too few.’ As they stopped for the traffic lights at some roadworks she said, ‘I ought to divorce him properly. Cut loose from the whole tangle. Would you mind very much if we never saw them again?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Whatever makes you happy.’ He glanced across and saw her abandon herself to a great, hands-free yawn. She had never looked so lovely to him.

  47

  It was the first time Eliza had been back to Oxford since she and Giles moved to London. Her initial impression was that nothing had changed. The old buildings were as arrogantly lovely, the lawns as immaculate. There were the same impossible tangles of locked or dismembered bicycles at college entrances, the same sense of lofty removal from the encroaching commercial world, the same sensation that, even in summer, the air was several degrees colder.

  Most of the buildings had been cleaned, however, Italian-American coffee bars had proliferated and the shops along the High Street were far smarter than she remembered them being. Most startling was how very young the students seemed. It being the long vacation, undergraduates had vanished but the summer influx of overseas language and culture students milled about lodges and sprawled, Mediterranean fashion, on lawns and steps where the locals never sat.

  Entering her old college and telling the porters who she was there to see, Eliza felt more like a parent on Open Day than a returning scholar. One of them remembered her. Half-remembered her. He called her Lisa.

  As College Organist, Dr Goldhammer occupied a set of rooms at right angles to the chapel, enjoying views of the stained glass on one side and a secret, ferny garden on the other. She shook Eliza’s hand and ushered her in, typically behaving as though this were just another weekly tutorial, not a reunion after an eight-year absence. She pointed Eliza to an armchair, poured her strong tea from a pot she had already started then sat behind her desk. Eliza noticed at once a print-out of the fistful of pages she had sent ahead of her by e-mail.

  Dr Goldhammer picked the first page up, glanced at it then set it back on the pile.

  ‘This is all rather extraordinary,’ she said coolly. ‘You’re an extremely lucky woman.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Nine-tenths of doctoral research in this period is merely rearranging known material. The challenge is usually to make the old seem fresh. By presenting us with entirely fresh material you steal a considerable march. But then you know that. Is it any good?’

  ‘The madrigal? I only heard it sung very badly, but yes.’

  ‘Better than just interesting.’

  ‘Yes. Publishable. Good enough for me to feel sure it was by him the moment I heard it. And then of course there’s the personal significance.’

  The glasses went back on. More pages were turned back and forth.

  ‘Well…your evidence for that is pretty scanty still. I mean, you make it fit but I can unmake just as easily. A literate man, an adept amateur poet of the period would hardly have left half his hidden rhyme in English, half in Latin, surely? Amo Rosam et Tobiam egeo would have convinced me more than your, what was it, Amo Rosy e(t) egeo Toby.’

  ‘Yes, but that would have given him two verses of five lines instead of two of four,’ Eliza began warily.

  ‘Or two of four followed by a couplet. A sonnet, in other words. A versifier of any skill, as we know Trevescan was, if only on the basis of his words to Go Dissembler, would surely have taken the letters of his hidden message as his starting point then built the verse from them. An extra line per verse would have been neither here nor there. You need more examples to back up your case. Look at some Sydney. Read Shawcross on riddles and perhaps work up a reference or two to Mary Trelford’s work on Elizabethan code systems…’

  Eliza made notes in her pocket diary and wished she had thought to bring along something more convincing, like a file or a box of index cards.

  ‘Your bibliography’s a bit scant, too. I know I’ve always admired a lack of padding but it won’t be me who does the assessing. Your examiner will almost certainly be Joe Rhodes or Anthony Trickett and they’re both, well…Just pad out your secondary sources a bit. They’ll appreciate that.’ She pushed the pages aside. End of subject. Eliza sipped the tea although it was tongue-curlingly bitter.

  ‘Tell me about the manuscript,’ Dr Goldhammer went on. ‘You say that it’s glued in the back of a Family Bible?’

  ‘Yes. Torn from four original copies of East.’

  ‘The Fourth Set of Books?’

  ‘Yes. 1618. Obviously a next step will be to put out a search for the set with end pages torn out then research its provenance…’

  ‘Will your Cornish friend release his pages?’

  ‘No. They’re of family significance.’

  ‘Pity. When you’ve published, he could sell them for a fair price, you know.’

  ‘Would the college be interested?’ Eliza had a bright image of Pearce with a shiny new tractor until Dr Goldhammer made a face.

  ‘The old story,’ she said. ‘Rich on paper but not in practice. I had to go cap in hand even to persuade them to buy us the New Grove. They wanted us to make do with the online version. Villiers Yates, however, would almost certainly be prepared to spirit the manuscript off to that Texan collector he buys for. Byatt.’

  ‘Has Villiers spoken to you?’ Eliza asked defensively.

  ‘He put out feelers. In the meantime I suggest you persuade your friend to let you have the four pages scanned onto disc. If you could then get someone in Computer Sciences to compare them with scans of the Dublin and Bodleian manuscripts you’d have expert verification for joint penmanship at least. Yale – was it? – came up with a program for sourcing typeface in the Gutenberg Bible years ago, we must have something similar by now.’

  ‘Right,’ said Eliza, thinking at once of Anne Perry, her friend in the English Department. ‘I think I’ve got a good contact for that. So…you think it’s worth pursuing.’

  Dr Goldhammer cast another critical eye over Eliza’s inexcusably scanty bibliography. ‘If you don’t, I can think of at least three keen young things I could put onto it.’

  ‘Oh no. I mean I do want to follow it through it’s just, well, I’ve been out of harness for so long I was worried I’d started to lose my sense of perspective. And I…’

  ‘Can you imagine pursuing further research when this is done? Or lecturing and teaching?’

  ‘Well…’ Eliza tried hard.

  ‘Not that we co
uld make any promises of offering you a post. The competition is fiercer than ever but…If you were prepared to travel to wherever the offer came from, I’ve no doubt this could prove a useful calling card for you. A conference or two, always assuming you find a publisher for your research…’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps. I think I should take it one stage at a time.’

  ‘Very good. But I’m still nominally your supervisor and I think we should agree a provisional delivery date, don’t you? Since it’s been so very long in coming. How does November strike you? November 1st. Then we can have another meeting to discuss any tidying up before you submit the thesis officially before, say, the end of January.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Good.’

  Dr Goldhammer stood and saw her out. As dryly matter-of-fact as ever, she closed her outer door firmly before Eliza had even left the landing.

  Uncertain whether her train from Penzance would be delayed or how long the meeting would last, she had kept her options open, vaguely thinking she might turn up on Anne Perry’s doorstep to beg a sofa for the night. But the lanes seemed full of pretty things in summery dresses and, with only her battered shoulder bag and pocket diary as defence, she felt neither sufficiently lightweight nor scholastic enough to linger. Dismissed from Dr Goldhammer’s presence when she had expected – what? Some kind of donnish celebration? A judiciously small glass of sherry? – she felt dismissed by the town, lacking in youth and application. She would return when she was better prepared and fully armed. For now, she returned to the station and began the long journey home.

  Whereas the trip here had been swift and fairly direct, she was going to have to change repeatedly on the way back, which seemed to heighten her folly in coming all this way for half an hour with a dried-up, passed-over sourpuss.