by Patrick Gale
The heron turned to look at Pearce and did himself credit by holding out a hand to shake despite the state of Pearce’s.
‘Pearce Polglaze, isn’t it?’
‘And I owe you an apology. I should have rung you back weeks ago.’ Pearce raised a hand to wave at Joe and Lucy who were just leaving together, then turned back to him.
‘You haven’t sold it to someone else?’ Villiers asked.
‘No, no. The thing is. It’s…it’s not really accessible at the moment.’
Eliza was aghast. ‘Villiers, you haven’t come all the way from London just on the off chance of seeing the rest of the manuscript?’
Villiers looked deeply embarrassed and blushed so hotly Pearce revised the opinion he had formed from the phone message and warmed to him instinctively. ‘Mr Byatt got awfully keen,’ Villiers explained. ‘His wife has Cornish connections – she was a Rod? A Rudd?’
‘A Rodda,’ Pearce supplied.
‘That’s it. How clever of you. So the second she heard the name Trevescan she was on at him to buy.’
‘It’s not for sale, Villiers.’ Eliza said. ‘Not at all.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that. Blast. Well at least I can tell him I tried. They’d have paid far more than the going market rate, you know. I even came with a blank cheque.’ He patted his breast pocket causing Pearce a twinge.
New rotovator, Pearce told himself wistfully. New diesel tank. New combine.
‘You must stay the night,’ he said out loud. ‘That’s the least we can offer you.’
‘I’m booked on the sleeper.’
‘Ten o’clock. So you can stay for supper, then,’ Pearce said. ‘We’ll drive you back in.’
‘Would you really?’
‘Of course,’ Eliza agreed. ‘Come in and have a glass of something while we get cleaned up.’
As Pearce climbed back into the tractor to drive it into the barn for the night, he heard Villiers say, ‘Wonderful. In every way. I understand completely,’ and heard Eliza giggle in response.
When he came in he found Villiers already settled in the garden with a glass of wine chatting with Dido and obliging her by putting much thought into composing a limerick to write on her plaster cast. Through an open window he could hear Eliza singing upstairs as she took a shower.
‘I feel bad you came all this way,’ he told him. ‘If I’d rung, you wouldn’t have come. At least let me give you something towards your train fare.’
But Villiers waved the offer away saying it was good to get out of London and that everything could be claimed back off his American’s expense account.
‘You’ll stay to supper, though. I’m afraid it’s only cold meat and salad. But there are raspberries too.’
‘That sounds lovely.’
‘Do you think it’s warm enough to eat outside?’
‘What do you think, Dido?’ Villiers asked.
‘Outside,’ Dido said. ‘No question. Do you have to go back tonight? You’ve only just got here.’
‘Work,’ Villiers told her. ‘London. Bills to pay.’ And, for a bald heron, he looked crestfallen.
‘How do you make your head so shiny?’
‘I polish it,’ Villiers told her gravely, concentrating on a penultimate line for his limerick. ‘Every morning. With a square of antique silk.’
Pearce fetched potatoes, herbs and salad from the vegetable patch, set the potatoes to boil then went to shower. As he came back down he heard someone playing Country Goodness on the harmonium. It was Villiers. Eliza was busy in the kitchen and talking to Dido though the open door. Pearce went to stand at Villiers’ elbow. Nobody had played it this well in years.
‘Extraordinary,’ Villiers said when he had finished. ‘I can see why she’s so sure. That last cadence especially. And you copied this out?’
‘After a fashion, yes.’
‘So you’re a musician as well as everything else?’
Pearce shuffled his feet. ‘Not remotely.’
Villiers had swung his stool round and was looking at him, fascinated. ‘Eliza told me,’ he whispered. ‘How she tore it up and burnt it so it wouldn’t come between you.’
‘She said that?’ Pearce asked, glancing up to see Eliza carrying a platter of ham and chicken out to the table.
‘It’s funny. I’d never realised she was so passionate. Of course there are still the scans she took. And your sister’s madrigal group. If they’ve really got it memorised Eliza could sit there like Mozart hearing the Allegri Miserere and write it down note for note. She must be crazy about you, though. She’s happier than I’ve seen her in years.’
‘Have you known her a long time?’
‘Oh, I’ve known her so long I’m to blame for everything. I introduced her to Giles.’
‘So he’s your fault…’
‘He is rather. I was very, very in love with him when we were students and since I couldn’t have him I decided the least I could do was to throw him together with the sweetest girl I knew. A bit like flower arranging, really.’
Eliza called them out to eat.
Over supper Villiers asked all the questions Pearce had not yet mustered the courage to pose. So by the time they were racing their guest into Penzance to catch the sleeper, Pearce was a happy man. Eliza had thought long and hard about completing her thesis, apparently, and had decided she would, if not for the sake of a further degree, then simply to prove to herself, and to Dido, that she was capable of it. But she was adamant that this was where she wanted to remain. This valley, above this rocky cove with this farmer.
‘Country goodness and a sweet obscurity,’ Villiers quoted at her, singing the line in a scholastic tenor that went perfectly with his heronish thinness.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Exactly.’ She explained that she had come back from talking to the school about enrolling Dido for the autumn (which Pearce knew about), full of the possibility of becoming the new music teacher there (which was news to him). He knew she had explained Dido’s condition to the head teacher and been heartened by his attitude.
As Villiers gave his name to the night guard and climbed into the sleeper carriage, Pearce pressed an opened bottle of wine onto him along with some cheese, two peaches and a photocopy of Country Goodness. Villiers startled him by kissing him warmly on the lips then hung out the carriage’s window and waved to them as the train pulled out around the bay, much as if they had been old and cherished friends. Which left Pearce feeling oddly as though they were.
‘What a nice bloke,’ he said, as they walked back to the Land Rover.
‘Villiers? Nice?’
‘Yes. Strange but nice. You can ask him to stay anytime.’
She was quiet on the drive home, exhausted from planting broccoli probably. In any case the Land Rover was so noisy when in motion that it did not lend itself to the sort of sentimental murmurings Pearce felt welling up inside him. He contented himself with holding her hand in between gear changes.
Describing why she and Dido were staying put she had twice used the word safe. ‘It’s so safe here,’ she had said.
Pearce let go of her hand suddenly, needing both hands on the wheel to swing around a badly parked lorry.
Fear had never been a common emotion of his; boredom had, often, and irritation. Very occasionally a mild anxiety had penetrated the continuum of his quiet resignation, his sort of contentment. But now that he had a chance to be truly happy he found he was frightened every day. It was as though by giving shelter to Dido and her mother he had taken on their fears as one might take wet coats from visitors, without much thought about where to hang them. He lay awake and worried on their behalf. When Eliza made a first attempt at learning to drive he felt a stab of fear, as he did when Dido announced that she wanted to take rock-climbing classes once her plaster cast was off. But it was a good fear, he realised, a proof that his life had acquired ramifications and significance. These were coats he would gladly hold all evening.
Have You Read...?
&nb
sp; Notes From An Exhibition
Patrick Gale
When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies painting obsessively in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. She leaves behind an extraordinary and acclaimed body of work – but she also leaves a legacy of secrets and emotional damage it will take months to unravel.
A wondrous, monstrous creature, she exerts a power that outlives her. To her children she is both curse and blessing, though they all in one way or another reap her whirlwind, inheriting her waywardness, her power of loving – and her demons…Only their father’s Quaker gifts of stillness and resilience give them any chance of withstanding her destructive influence and the suspicion that they came a poor second to the creation of her art.
The reader becomes a detective, piecing together the clues of a life – as artist, lover, mother, wife and patient – which takes them from contemporary Penzance to 1960s Toronto to St Ives in the 1970s. What emerges is a story of enduring love, and of a family which weathers tragedy, mental illness and the intolerable strain of living with genius.
Patrick Gale’s latest novel shines with intelligence, humour and tenderness.
Buy the ebook here
A Perfectly Good Man
Patrick Gale
‘Do you need me to pray for you now for a specific reason?’
‘I’m going to die.’
We’re all going to die. Does dying frighten you?’
‘I mean I’m going to kill myself.
When 20–year–old Lenny Barnes, paralysed in a rugby accident, commits suicide in the presence of Barnaby Johnson, the much–loved priest of a West Cornwall parish, the tragedy’s reverberations open up the fault–lines between Barnaby and his nearest and dearest. The personal stories of his wife, children and lover illuminate Barnaby’s ostensibly happy life, and the gulfs of unspoken sadness that separate them all. Across this web of relations scuttles Barnaby’s repellent nemesis – a man as wicked as his prey is virtuous.
Returning us to the rugged Cornish landscape of Notes from an Exhibition, Patrick Gale lays bare the lives and the thoughts of a whole community and asks us: what does it mean to be good?
Buy the ebook here
The Whole Day Through
Patrick Gale
When forty–something Laura Lewis is obliged to abandon a life of stylish independence in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester, it seems all romantic opportunities have gone up in smoke. Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days – and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional touchstone against which she has judged every man since. She’s cautious – and he’s married – but they can’t deny that feelings still exist between them.
Are they brave enough to take the second chance at the lasting happiness that fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the need to do what seems to be the right thing?
Taking its structure from the events of a single summer’s day, The Whole Day Through is a bittersweet love story, shot through with an understanding of mortality, memory and the difficulty of being good. In it, Patrick Gale writes with scrupulous candour about the tests of love: the regrets and the triumphs, and the melancholy of failing.
The Whole Day Through is vintage Gale, displaying the same combination of wit, tenderness and acute psychological observation as his Richard & Judy bestseller Notes From an Exhibition.
Buy the ebook here
Tree Surgery For Beginners
Patrick Gale
Lawrence Frost has neither father nor siblings, and fits so awkwardly into his worldly mother’s life he might have dropped from the sky. Like many such heroes, he grows up happier with plants than people. While he is straightforward, honest, and a doting dad, he can be a difficult, taciturn husband – but he’s the last person one would suspect of being a killer.
Waking one morning to find himself branded a wife–beater and under suspicion of murder, his small world falls apart as he loses wife, daughter, liberty, livelihood and, almost, his mind.
Buy the ebook here
Dangerous Pleasures
Patrick Gale
The subjects are wide–ranging and various – curious childhood loyalties, long–hidden memories, newly discovered joys, startling secrets, dislocated relationships, overwhelming, thrilling passions.
In prose which is vivid and fresh, Patrick Gale explores the subtle boundaries that shift between the fantastic and shockingly real. With characteristic insight and wit and with consummate ease, he draws the reader into lives both familiar and strange, revealing a world that shines with possibilities and will never fail to delight.
Buy the ebook here
Author’s Note
Apologetic thanks to Ken Northey and Sue Visick whose lovely madrigal evenings in Goldsithney gave rise to the dream that gave rise to this novel. The conservatory and repertoire are similar but there the similarities end.
Heartfelt thanks, too, to Sally Donegani, for letting me steal her job, to Fanny Cooke, for letting me crib her A-level Music notes, to Doctors Celia Hicks, Catharine Gale and Jonathan Gale for their medical input, to Nicola Barr and Rupert Adley for their sharp eyes and wits and to Caradoc King for his powers of persuasion.
My deepest debt, however, is to my editor Patricia Parkin who deserves a medal for inimitable grace under extraordinary pressure.
Lastly I must acknowledge the profound, all unwitting contribution of Vicky Lucas, a young woman with cherubism to whose wit and defiant courage this novel remains an inadequate tribute.
P.S.
Ideas, interviews & features…
About the Author
Q & A with Patrick Gale
What inspired you to start writing?
Reading, undoubtedly. I was blessed in coming from the sort of family where everyone read at meals and nobody ever told you off for preferring reading to being sociable. Writing emerged quite naturally from all the reading when I was still quite small, and again I was lucky in that I was encouraged but not too much so that I didn’t get self-conscious about it. I never thought it would become a career, though. I was trying to become an actor and writing was just something I did, a sort of itch to self-express…
When and where do you write?
I’m a daylight writer and tend to keep the same writing hours as my husband does farming ones. We get up early and, if I’ve a book on the go, I’ll start writing as soon as I’ve walked the dogs. In good weather the dog walk often becomes the writing session as I like writing outside and we have a lot of inspiring corners where I can settle, looking out to sea or hunkered in the long grass. We have very patient dogs…
Your novels are often set in places you know very well. What significance does the setting have for you in this novel?
In my Cornish novels, I’ve noticed, Cornwall is almost like an extra character, and functions to expose character flaws and then to start a healing process. It’s tempting to make special claims for Cornwall as I love it so but I suspect I could end up feeling just the same about Pembrokeshire or the Lincolnshire fens. What matters with a landscape in fiction is what it draws from the characters. One of the delightful ironies in life is that we take ourselves off to different places thinking it will help us and, hey presto, all the same problems – only probably more so – in a prettier setting!
‘Cornwall is almost like an extra character, and functions to expose character flaws and then to start a healing process.’
There are many dramatic – often traumatic – twists and turns throughout this novel. Have you experienced life-changing events which have led you to write fiction with such intensity?
My life hasn’t been without its traumas but I think it’s more that I’m drawn to trauma in plots because I like the way it peels back the layers on a character. Whether my plots are serious or comic I suspect they all involve the central characters being tested or tried to some extent. I think there’s something fundamental about the experience of
reading fiction that makes the vicarious enduring of a trial and an eventual sense of a healing resolution deeply satisfying. But yes, I confess I have a weakness for old film melodramas and they have a way of influencing some of my plot twists.
And yet the books almost always end happily. Do you feel pulled towards writing a happy ending?
I don’t think endings need to be happy so much as right and satisfying. In a curious way I experience in writing a novel all the things I hope my reader will experience in reading it. I usually begin with a problem or a trauma and a clutch of characters, and the plot that grows from those characters will usually involve a working out and a resolution that may or may not be happy but will often feel healing. Reader and writer together need to feel they’ve emerged on the other side of the novel’s events with a broader sympathy or a better understanding. Without that a book just doesn’t feel like a full meal …
‘Reader and writer together need to feel they’ve emerged on the other side of the novel’s events with a broader sympathy or a better understanding.’
Would you categorise yourself as a romantic novelist?
If I hesitate to, it’s only because romantic fiction isn’t a genre where my work comfortably sits. But I am an incurable romantic, if that means believing in the power of love to heal and transform, and my novels are, repeatedly, about love and its effects, and love gone wrong and the effects of that. Perhaps I’m a love novelist. I think romantic novelists tend to focus on the getting of love – following the Austen pattern of plots that end in marriage – whereas I’m just as interested in the losing of love and in its rediscovery, late in marriage, in unromantic middle age or whatever.
