A Sweet Obscurity

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Yes. I’ll tell her, if you like.’

  ‘We’ll see. Come on. Belt up, now.’

  But Eliza did not need telling. She ran out to meet them as they drove into the yard and she seized Dido in a passionate hug as soon as she could tear the door open and everything came spilling out on either side; a great store of fear and bitterness mixed with love and reproach.

  ‘I want to see her grave again,’ Dido said, after Pearce had made them eat some lunch.

  ‘She’s not there,’ Eliza said. ‘Not really. She was cremated in Nepal.’

  ‘Yes but still…couldn’t I see it again?’

  ‘Of course,’ Eliza said, wearily. ‘I expect we can catch a train this afternoon, get a bus into town then catch a train to Camborne.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ Pearce said. ‘I’ll drive you. I’d already given up doing the planting today. I’ve nothing on till tomorrow. I want to see too. I want to see Dido’s house.’

  So they had a strange excursion to grim old Camborne, their spirits faintly hilarious, giddy from news and a sense of tumultuous change. They saw the graves first, Eliza’s mother’s, which still had no stone, and beside it a small granite slab that read,

  SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF

  HANNAH HOSKEN

  1967-1993

  BELOVED SISTER, DAUGHTER & MOTHER

  Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

  It transpired that Dido had looked up the quotation on her first visit and she persisted in reciting the Dirge from Cymbeline over the grave until Eliza told her to stop it or she’d make them all cry.

  They left flowers for mother and daughter then went to admire Dido’s still unsold house from the outside. They were excitedly invited for tea by an enormous woman in the bungalow next door so Pearce was at last able to put a face to Kitty Barnicoat. As she poured tea and buttered slabs of saffron cake and fired off salvos of questions, Pearce felt all sorts of gaps in his understanding of Eliza filling in, and began to see how she came to be who she was.

  He woke in the night smelling burning and hurried to the window. He had a farmer’s horror of fire, having seen first-hand the ease with which damp straw or oily rags could heat up and spontaneously combust. At this time of year, only weeks before the barley harvest, there was little straw left in storage but his first instinct was still to glance that way. Seeing no flames in the barn he pulled on a dressing gown and crossed the landing to look out at the tinder dry barley fields. No fires there. He headed downstairs. The oil-fired boiler was an ancient, untrustworthy one with a time clock made the more erratic by frequent power cuts. Possibly the smell which woke him had been the boiler firing up to heat the water hours too early. But the boiler was silent. Then he heard a ripping sound and turned back towards the sitting room.

  Dido was sitting by the fireplace, lit in the sudden flare of burning paper. The family Bible lay on the rug between her stretched out legs. Pearce watched as she tore the last glued-on page of the madrigal from its binding and threw it into the flames.

  She did not jump when he spoke. She must have heard him come downstairs.

  ‘I’d been offered serious money for that,’ he told her. ‘A lot of money. It would have paid for your operations.’

  ‘I don’t want any operations,’ she said as the last page flared up and died down. ‘I’ve decided that. I think Mum was right. Hannah-Mum. It’ll still be my face. Why should I change it just to suit other people?’

  ‘See how you feel about that when you’re a boy-mad teenager,’ he said, picking up her crutches in the moonlight and helping her to her feet.’

  ‘I’m never going to be boy-mad. I’m going to work with animals.’

  ‘Oh yes? It’s very hard to be a vet, you know.’

  ‘Then I’ll be a farmer,’ she said. ‘Or a kennel-maid. And I’m staying here. We both are. I’ve fixed it. She’ll have nothing to leave for now.’

  ‘Will you promise me something, Dido Hosken?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never tell your Mum you did this.’

  ‘Why not? She’ll find out. She has to.’

  ‘No she doesn’t. Never tell her. Okay?’

  56

  Eliza had on their mother’s old wedding dress, a close-cut oyster silk bodice, hard with stiffening panels and seed pearl embroidery, over a full, New Look skirt. They were of a size so it had needed no adjustment. Hannah was putting up Eliza’s hair, which had grown magnificently, rolling it around little pads and pinning it up. She was dressed in Nepalese national dress.

  ‘There!’ Hannah said. ‘Exquisite. Who’d have thought the old bird would ever have bought something so sexy for herself! And now…Oh this is such fun! I’ve always wanted to be a Matron of Honour. It sounds so butch.’ Biting her lip with excitement, she turned aside to pick up a long length of antique lace, worn by three generations of Hosken brides before this. Spreading it out with her fingers, she prepared to lower it over Eliza’s hair and face but smiled at her in the mirror before she did so, smiled a goodbye.

  ‘Oh no. This is only a dream, isn’t it?’ Eliza said.

  ‘Fraid so. But you still look lovely. Fear no more, darling.’

  Eliza felt a tremendous wish to cry but woke instead.

  There was a faint light coming in at the window and she had not yet adjusted sufficiently to country living to tell if it was moonlight or the first, colourless glimmer of dawn.

  Pearce startled her. He was sitting up, in his father’s silk dressing gown, leaning against the brass bedstead by her feet. She realised he must have woken her by touching her feet or murmuring her name.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Pearce? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Ssh. Nothing. Sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep. I shouldn’t have woken you.’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘I…You. You took the Bible to Molly’s this morning, didn’t you, to scan it?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘And the scans came out okay?’

  ‘Well I didn’t see them, because I had to rush off. But Molly finished them for me later. She dropped the disk off with the Bible while we were in Camborne. Why?’

  ‘Eliza do you love me back? Even a bit?’

  ‘Yes. Yes I think I do. I realised it today. I started to suspect it in the hotel this morning when Julia said I could run after Giles and he’d take me back. And I knew it was so completely what I didn’t want. The rest fell into place this afternoon when we were saying goodbye to Kitty. She sort of patted your arm and it made me think, He’s it. He’s the one.’

  ‘Oh. Oh good.’ He crawled up the bed to her end and kissed her. She ran a hand through his hair. He smelled of bonfires for some reason. And brandy.

  ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘Yes. A bit. I started then I couldn’t stop. I…Eliza, I love you.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘I love you so much. And I did it because I don’t want it to take you away. I burnt it. Not the whole book but I burnt the manuscript. It’s gone. Completely gone. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I thought it would stop you going but of course it won’t because you’ve got the scans and you’ve got the transcript and…’ He started to laugh nervously then stopped, unable to read her reaction.

  Eliza felt as she had when told of Hannah’s death, or her mother’s; acutely aware suddenly that she was a person who had lost something of immense importance and that a strong reaction was expected of her but unable to register anything in the immediacy of shock. In all three cases she knew blankness was inappropriate. A reaction was called for. She ought to feel outrage at loss. But the blankness was a kind of safety curtain, dropped at the first guilty, flickering sense of a burden lifted.

  57

  Giles had already received his final call for his Act One entrance and was on his way to the stage when another bout seized him and he had to rush into the nearest gents to throw up, taking practised care to get nothing on his dressing gown. Inured to this grim routine he
flushed to clear the smell as soon as possible but continued to crouch, still clutching the sides of the bowl, braced, gulping. The spasm had passed. He stood then, breathing deeply, walked to the sinks to rinse his mouth and gargle. He drank fresh water to kill the acrid taste then reached into his dressing gown pocket for a breath freshener.

  Listening to the audience buzz over the monitors, he breathed deeply, drawing the chemical mint scent into his system. He had been suffering from stage fright for years and knew this brand would not affect his voice the way some could. A dancer came in to piss. Giles said a quick hello but slid out to avoid any camaraderie.

  The costume calls had fallen a few days ago, on the afternoon he returned from Cornwall. Several times since then he had heartily wished Selina dead for the slyness with which she had trapped him into this but he was powerless. To drop out now, even with a genuine tragedy or illness as excuse, was to lose face and risk blackballing. He was not the star, after all, but the star’s last minute stand-in.

  The poor wardrobe mistress had been through many awkwardnesses in her time from unexpected pregnancies to wigs and colostomy bags. She had dealt tactfully with hand-me-down Salome body stockings distended from use and a Swedish Octavian who had calmly removed every stitch for her fitting. But nothing had prepared her for this production.

  ‘That’s it, I’m afraid,’ she said, handing Giles his costume, ‘And then this for the second act.’ She had tried to hang them on coat hangers to make them look more substantial and he felt deeply sorry for her. ‘You’ll be decent from the front, at least,’ she said, looking at his face rather than the things on the hangers, ‘Sort of. There was talk of a silver cape when it was for Mr Wilson but I’m afraid it was decided no in your case. You should be flattered, I suppose. It means you’ve got nothing to hide. Oh dear. Just call me when you’re ready and I’ll pop back in to check the fit.’

  And now they were about to start the final dress rehearsal – hence the audience. Friends of the Opera House could buy tickets to dresses, and contacts and relatives of performers could usually be found seats too. His mother and Ron were out there in the middle of the dress circle. He wondered if they would walk out. It was more than likely. The removal of alcohol from their lives seemed to have created more energy for disapproval.

  He slid up in the wings to join the others. The stage manager saw him and glared. He mouthed sorry at her. The French Titania took his hand.

  ‘Courage, mon beau,’ she whispered gutturally before remembering that she was on the wrong side of the stage. She giggled and slipped off in the semi-darkness, her silvery cape flickering green in the emergency exit lights.

  The house lights dimmed. There was a wave of shushing from the auditorium, broken by a brief chorus of We love you Dewi! from some schoolgirls in the gods, then more, louder shushing. The stage manager began her quiet murmuring of technical cues into her headset, eyes glued to the computer screen and monitor before her. Then the applause came for the conductor. Then silence. Then the characteristic growlings of bass and cello glissandi which always seemed to Giles like emanations from the darkness itself, mysterious stirrings in Britten’s fairy forest.

  The curtain was up already. The set was an anti-set, cunningly designed to look like only darkness except for the floor which was a vast array of mirror, painstakingly polished for the last time only minutes ago.

  ‘You are the scenery!’ Grover had explained to his assembled cast at the first technical run-through.

  The glittery fairy music began and on trooped the fairies. There were audible gasps from the audience. Not even the leaked news of Dewi playing Puck had prepared them for this.

  Grover’s production was all about sex. The Dream, as he saw it, was just that and thus all about the unleashing of our forbidden sexual urges. He had toyed, apparently, with the idea of naked boys, ones as near the illegal age as possible but abandoned that since none could be found who were both willing to strip and able to sing treble. Instead he had gone to the other extreme and hired an adult chorus of women and treble-pitched counter-tenors, padded out with several miming performers selected for their extra fatness, thinness or want of inhibition. They were all naked except for silver afro wigs and silver body paint. Instead of the boisterous gang of chirping schoolboys in gauze and chaplets envisaged by Britten and Pears, the first tableau was thus one of the more extreme illustrations by Beardsley.

  A world famous Welsh voice murmured a sexy, ‘How now, fairies?’ through the sound system and Puck emerged through a trap door in the chorus’ midst, scattering them. With no reluctance at all, it was said, Dewi Evans wore simply his own furry skin, discreetly bronzed, with his muscular legs tightly wrapped in something remarkably like the back half of a zebra. The wardrobe mistress had even conjured up footwear which looked and sounded like little clopping hooves, possibly recycled from the rear end of a pantomime horse.

  Due to Grover and Dewi’s recent absence, rehearsals had been frantic and virtually non-stop all week which had proved a mercy. Giles had been eating in the opera house canteen then going home like an automaton merely to shower, sleep and shave. He was ignoring mail, ignoring the answering machine, ignoring everything. Only last night, when he could not avoid ringing up his mother to tell her there were tickets for her and Ron if they wanted them, had his sense of crisis been allowed to well up and then it took the unexpected form of a sudden need to confront her and make her admit, as she had never done and he had never tried to make her, the damage she had done him as a child.

  The dreams about Dido had redoubled in intensity, dreams in which he watched in mute horror as he did to her the things his mother used to do to him. And they leached out ever more into his waking moments, blurring with his memories so that he would become distracted during a rehearsal and miss an entry because he was picturing his nine-year-old self frantically scrubbing at his penis till it bled in an effort to remove the oily traces of his mother’s slobbered lipstick.

  He might be neglecting to eat properly or do his exercises or read mail but he had one thing all planned out and went over it repeatedly like a murderer rehearsing his moves. He did this even while Grover was rehearsing for the lighting technician’s blocking of each scene. If they had taken up his offer of tickets and were there at the stage door afterwards, he would steer them out to a smart restaurant and do it there. If not, he would catch a train down to Winchelsea and do it to her in her lair. With Ron in attendance.

  And here our mistress. Would that he were gone.

  His cue. As a pair of hands twitched the dressing gown off his nakedness and he stepped out of the wings, there was a momentary chill of air hitting the patches where the gold body paint was not quite dry or where nervous sweat had pooled, then the great heat of lights and full auditorium swept over him. He felt more acutely than when in a less minimal costume, the presence of hundreds of people, their breath, their eyes, the glitter of countless pairs of opera glasses.

  There was no comfortable recitative to warm one up. Britten gave Titania and Oberon some of their hardest, most florid music the second they first appeared. Elena was striding across the stage towards him to deliver the smart smack on the cheek off which Grover wanted their argument to launch. There were audible titters and even a distinct, disgusted oh no! as her cloak fluttered back to reveal her magnificent silvered breasts, bright blue, tassled nipples and outsize, strap-on scarlet phallus.

  Giles would wear his own copy of the phallus later, once the gender balance between them had been symbolically restored. For now he wore engorged labia that would have raised a blush in Georgia O’Keefe. The thong which held them in place was intolerably itchy and he was acutely aware of the line it cut between his naked buttocks.

  He hoped his mother was watching. He hoped she and Ron were trapped in the middle of a long row, unable to escape without fighting.

  He was feeling sick again. He wanted to scratch. He wanted to hide. Then Elena slapped him savagely and, like a newborn, he began to sing. />
  58

  Now that she was gathering her things together, it surprised Julia to discover how little she possessed. Unlike Giles, she was not a great reader of novels, preferring newspapers and magazines that she could throw away. She had always been rigorous about giving to charity shops each Spring any clothes or shoes she had not worn within the last year, and maintaining a highly adaptable capsule wardrobe. She owned no art and no ornaments. She had always relied on whoever she lived with having a television and stereo system. Her only recordings featured clients, so she kept them at the office for ready reference. The clothes fitted into two suitcases (a present from Giles), her few bits of jewellery and the contents of her dressing table into a ludicrous matching vanity case (ditto). That left Jane Grigson’s fruit and vegetable books, a wide blue glass ashtray Selina had given her when she first noticed neither of them smoked and a teak steamer chair she had bought for the garden and was damned if she would leave behind. She made one last, painstaking tour of the house, starting in Dido’s funny little room in the attic and working her way down. She noted the contents of each room with a mournful attentiveness but found nothing else she wished to take.

  It was a beautiful house and she had helped it become so but she had done it with things paid for by Giles and, in any case, they were chosen for just this setting and might be less beautiful elsewhere.

  She had bought a car, small, sweet and Italian, on an interest-free credit scheme. The trip to Cornwall had awakened a yen to leave town more often and she would be living now in a much cheaper district where one did not need an expensive permit to park. By the time she had heaved in the three cases, the teak chair and a bag of small miscellanea gathered on her rounds of the house, the front and back seats were crammed.

  It was not that she had been a kept woman. She had always paid her way. But the things she paid for from her own purse tended to be expendable and practical, like food or housekeeping, or else for the garden. She had loved the garden and would miss it.